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Ep. 5 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Plato and the Cave

Vervaeke's Episode 5 examines Plato's response to Socrates' death, framing Plato's psychology of inner conflict and self-deception as a foundation of cognitive science and Western spirituality.

Key Takeaways

  • Meaning and wisdom depend on keeping what is personally transformative and what is true tightly coupled.
  • Plato's psychology of multiple psychic centers explains why humans act against their own rational judgment.
  • Inner conflict and self-deception are central sources of existential distress and self-destructive behavior.
  • Integrating reason with emotion and desire, rather than suppressing them, is the path to inner peace and wisdom.
  • Plato's ideas remain a living source of insight that yields new understanding across time.

What the video covers

  • Recaps the Axial Revolution in Greece, covering Pythagoras and Socrates and their link between wisdom, meaning, and self-transcendence.
  • Explains Socrates' conviction that aligning what is transformative for us with what is true of the world is essential to a meaningful life, to the point of accepting death.
  • Presents Plato as deeply traumatized by Socrates' execution and driven to understand how Athens could kill a man he loved.
  • Argues that Plato, unlike the Hebrew tradition's historical account of the fall, offers a scientific and psychological explanation, creating the first psychological theory.
  • Describes Plato's model of the psyche as having multiple centers, each with distinct cognitive relations to the world and motivations.
  • Uses dieting and procrastination to illustrate inner conflict, where rational knowledge of what to do is overpowered by competing desires.
  • Connects Plato's insight that inner conflict and self-deception are linked to self-destructive behavior and loss of meaning.
  • Discusses the idea of a sacred text as an inexhaustible source of insight that reveals new meaning at different life stages.
  • Relates Plato's ideas to later Platonism and Neoplatonism as foundations of Western spirituality.
  • Introduces the Platonic metaphor of the charioteer and tamed monster, where reason must integrate the other drives toward inner peace and contact with reality.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Recap: The Axial Revolution and Socrates
  2. 03:25Socrates' Death and Plato's Trauma
  3. 06:58Plato as the Founder of Psychology
  4. 11:23Inner Conflict: The Diet and Procrastination Examples
  5. 18:15Plato's Psychic Centers and Self-Deception
  6. 26:40The Charioteer, the Monster, and the Lion
  7. 39:10The Cave, Ascent, and Real Patterns
  8. 51:40Logos, Form, and Understanding Reality

Answers

Questions about this video

Why was Plato so affected by Socrates' death?

According to the video, Plato was traumatized by the execution of Socrates, a man he admired and loved, and kept returning to the question of how his beloved Athens could have killed him. This drove him to develop a theory explaining human foolishness.

What is Plato's explanation for why people act against what they know is right?

Plato proposed that the psyche has different centers, each with its own cognitive relationship to the world and motivations. Inner conflict arises when these centers pull against each other, leading to self-deception and self-destructive behavior.

How does the video use dieting and procrastination to illustrate Plato's ideas?

The speaker describes knowing rationally that one should lose weight or start an essay early, yet being drawn toward cake or drinks instead. This gap between knowing and doing illustrates the inner conflict Plato analyzed.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00
Speaker A
[Music] you [Music] welcome to the fifth episode of awakening from the meeting crisis last time we talked about how the axial revolution came into greece we first reviewed Pythagoras and then we concentrated especially on the figure of Socrates and the Socratic revolution and
00:31
Speaker A
we saw again how issues of meaning wisdom self transcendence are so tightly bound up together we took a look at Socrates and we took a look at how he has a particular conception of wisdom in which what we find salient irrelevant is
00:49
Speaker A
closely closely coupled to what we find true or real and those two things those two concerns what is transformative of us and what is true of the world are meant to be held together and this was pivotal in Socrates's method of trying
01:06
Speaker A
to get people to realize how much they all of us are so prone to having those two come uncoupled from each other and we become subject to [ __ ] and to self-deception and that a life that is
01:19
Speaker A
beset by self deceptive self-destructive behavior is not a life that's worth living that way to afford human flourishing is by developing the skills the wisdom to keep those two tightly coupled together and Socrates was so convinced of how important this was in
01:37
Speaker A
fact to making a life meaningful that he was prepared to die for it and as I mentioned there was somebody who was a follower of him who was at his trial not present at his death but was deeply
01:50
Speaker A
traumatized and affected by his death and this is of course Plato now if Socrates was controversial Plato is beyond even that statement every year there are hundreds of books written about Plato this is why Plato is one of
02:11
Speaker A
the foundations not only because of his ideas but as we'll see there's an inexhaustible nurse to Plato and his writing we can come back to Plato as a culture we come back at different times and see things we did not see before
02:24
Speaker A
that are transformative and as individuals myself personally you can come back to Plato at different times of your life and Plato speaks to you in ways he did not speak before I want you to remember that because I'm gonna try
02:36
Speaker A
and suggest to you that that is a better model for what we mean by something being sacred than it being filled with some kind of supernatural presence that what makes something sacred is that it's an inexhaustible fount of insight and
02:50
Speaker A
intelligibility that's transformative of us that's certainly the way many people in the ancient world read Plato they were deeply affected by him I would go so far as to say the platonism are Neoplatonism as verse lewis and others
03:04
Speaker A
argue is sort of the bedrock of Western spirituality and we'll come back to that now Plato was traumatized by the death of Socrates it's deeply I think disturbing to him why I think that is because he keeps coming back to it and
03:25
Speaker A
and trying to try and understand he wanted to understand how is it that the city he loved the city he belonged to Athens could have killed this man that he admired and loved so deeply how is it that his beloved Athens killed his
03:41
Speaker A
beloved Socrates so where where Socrates had this sort of dilemma given to him by the gods Plato has this dilemma given to him by the death of Socrates Plato wanted to understand how people could be so foolish and so what he's gonna do is
04:02
Speaker A
he's gonna take that two worlds mythology that we talked about the the lower less real world and remember it's myth mythological it's not meant to be literally two worlds but he's gonna take that two worlds mythology and he's going
04:15
Speaker A
to do something with it very different than what the Hebrews did remember the Hebrews turned it into this is where things are fallen now but we're moving towards the future we're progressing towards the future so they give a
04:28
Speaker A
historical answer to how we move from the world of illusion to the world of reality Plato is not going to give a historical answer he's he's to give a scientific answer because Plato is deeply influenced by the natural philosophers that we talked
04:45
Speaker A
about last time and what Plato is in fact going to do is he's going to create the first psychological theory in history with Plato you can really see the beginning not just of science but the beginning of cognitive science
04:58
Speaker A
psychology as a discipline begins in a very important sense and I don't mean this trivially like oh yeah it started with that Plato's psychology is still currently relevant right now in important ways which we'll talk about so let's get into
05:16
Speaker A
that because this is again going to take us into these interconnected issues of meaning wisdom self transcendence altered states of consciousness etc I'm gonna hope to show you how Plato in trying to answer the question of how Athens could have killed Socrates is
05:37
Speaker A
ultimately influenced not just by Socrates but also by Pythagoras we know that Plato spent some time with a Pythagorean community and he seems to have gone through something some kind of training in that community so Plato develops a particular theory about why
05:59
Speaker A
human beings do foolish things when there's different aspects of it but a good way to think about it is by relating it to something that we're all familiar with this is the experience of inner conflict and a conflict is when
06:20
Speaker A
you have two strong motives that seem to be working against each other and you can see how this is immediately going to be relevant to existential meaning - meaning in life because very often we feel most distraught most anxious or the
06:35
Speaker A
most sense of being stuck when we have such inner conflict when we're divided against ourselves in an important way so here's a classic example right so I like chocolate I'm more than like chocolate chocolate mmm has a kind of deep attraction for me
06:58
Speaker A
so now recently I lost about 20 pounds right so I went on a diet now dieting is one of the most unsuccessful thing that human beings can do the recidivism rate is 95% recidivism means that within a year 95% of people who are on a diet are
07:15
Speaker A
back to their pre diet weight so the diet industry has a five percent success rate even though it makes billions of dollars I mean I wish I had that success rate for my job I wish I only had to
07:28
Speaker A
succeed at 5% and I was given millions of dollars for that kind of work because and you have to ask yourself well why does that work well that works because of the problem it's such a pressing problem that people will grasp and pay
07:43
Speaker A
money and anything in the hopes that it might work because what's the problem well the problem is right it goes like this and we'll talk about the cognitive science about this I know I should lose weight like there's the evidence it's
07:56
Speaker A
clear makes rational sense to me I should lose weight yes yes okay I should lose weight and then I go home and they're sitting on the counter there's some chocolate cake right and and and that doesn't quite capture right it's
08:11
Speaker A
not just sitting there it's like it's a it's like how men with its chocolaty goodness right and it's drawing me in it's sort of and so you have to you end up sort of often just eating the chocolate cake or another example you
08:29
Speaker A
might be familiar with procrastination I know my students face this right yes yes I have an essay due in two weeks two weeks there it is I should work on my essay tonight because if I start now I
08:47
Speaker A
won't be rushed I know if I'm not rushed I'll do a great job I'll have more time to research I'll be able to change my mind I should start working on my essay tonight nobody calls up want to go up
08:58
Speaker A
for some drinks yeah and you're gone and you procrastinate so we are clearly beset by this inner conflict and Plato Plato gets this great insight he gets the insight that there seems to be a deep connection between inner conflict and self-deception
09:20
Speaker A
self-destructive self-deception so Plato posits an idea that has become again so natural to us that we just think oh yeah of course but again he comes up with it pedda comes up with the idea that we have different centers in the psyche and
09:41
Speaker A
each Center has a different cognitive relationship to the world and motivates us in different ways and he represented this mythologically right he said there's like a part of us that's like a man I want to say something here
09:57
Speaker A
right now because although Athenian democracy is horribly sexist and treats women horribly and so remember that context because what's intriguing is how much Plato was able to rise above that Plato argues that women should rule as well as men that women should be in the
10:16
Speaker A
army as well as men now he doesn't perfectly free himself of course from sexism but given the context I think it's very admirable the degree to which he was able to do it nevertheless he does use this idea of a man that's in
10:31
Speaker A
your head and represents reasoned and that man is motivated by the true by truth what's true so he cares about truth and falsity that's what it cares about right and right scope right you can go into very long-term goals
10:59
Speaker A
and it can deal with very abstract entities like your health or a si all right very abstract entities so this is you know health and I should lose weight that's going to take me several months and I should do that because it's true
11:22
Speaker A
that if I lose weight my health will improve so why don't I just do it well because opposed to it there's a monster right and it's sort of in my stomach and genitals right and it represents appetite now it does not work in terms of truth
11:55
Speaker A
and falsity it works in terms of pleasure and pain very different set of norms now there's nothing wrong with operating in terms of pleasure and pain if you don't have a capacity to work in terms of pleasure and pain your dad so
12:15
Speaker A
Plato doesn't think the appetites are evil what he wants you to grasp is that they operate according to different principles than the man okay so they presume long-term goals no immediate when do you want the cake I want it now
12:32
Speaker A
now I'm going to the party now right works in vary it doesn't it works in terms of very superficial properties all I care about the cake is how it looks it looks yummy I don't have some in-depth analysis
12:51
Speaker A
right it's just ah chocolatey sweet umm so very superficial again that's not necessarily bad often in life and death situations a superficial appraisal is exactly what you need I don't need to know a great deal about the inner
13:12
Speaker A
workings of the tiger I just need to know oh crap deadly get out of here okay now notice how these are opposite to each other now I put a space between here obviously because I'm setting you up for a third thing that Plato talks
13:34
Speaker A
about but before I do I wanted you to notice what Plato's doing with Socrates here so Socrates didn't really have a theory he had a practice Socrates practice if you remember last time was to get people to realize how often what
13:49
Speaker A
they find salient is rushing ahead of what they find truthful do you remember that what Plato is saying is that's not a coincidence the reason why that happens is because we have different parts of the psyche that work this way
14:06
Speaker A
this makes things salient to you really catchy motivates you urgently right now this is the part that you use to understand and see here's what most of us face this monster is constantly racing ahead of what we understand do
14:25
Speaker A
you see what Plato is doing is it's explaining why we are so prone to [ __ ] why salience often exceeds understanding we are perpetually vulnerable and we'll talk about why we have this now let's go back to the dieting as an example what
14:43
Speaker A
what helps though there's certain strategies you can use of course to improve right how you frame things and we'll talk about that later but typically what's one of the things that improves people's chances of losing weight they join a group like Weight
15:00
Speaker A
Watchers right or they join a study group to avoid the procrastination why well here's an important thing you are not just a biological creature as I've been arguing throughout you're also cultural you have evolved across you are the result of evolution that has crossed
15:21
Speaker A
several species in which you come wired to learn about abstract symbol systems use technologies both physical and psychic knowledge ease so you have a lot of powerful cultural cultural socio-cultural motivations so he compared this to a lion because lions
15:47
Speaker A
are social animals quite sort of and lions have been associated with sort of honor because that's and right that's what this works in terms of it works in terms of honor and shame right honor is to be respected by those
16:09
Speaker A
you consider your peers to be shame is when you feel that you have failed to be gained respect from your peers we should not confuse shame and guilt they are not synonyms right guilt is when you feel that you have failed to meet your own
16:29
Speaker A
ideal of who you should be shame is when you have lost the capacity to get respect from your peers now what's interesting is that and this is Plato's point but this part of us can pursue sort of intermediate scope because we're
16:53
Speaker A
cooperating with other people it doesn't operate just a short term but it doesn't quite operate abstract theoretical it ought it works within the socio-cultural domain so it can pursue sort of midterm goals not just immediate goals but not
17:14
Speaker A
sort of abstract symbolic goals but socially agreed-upon shared goals and it works on sort of the cultural aspects of things not their abstract meaning or their superficial meaning but their cultural their shared meaning the way we can share it with other people notice
17:34
Speaker A
how much you want to share with other people your experience so I I see I've been saying this for years I still see people doing it even people that I've taught it to people will reliably do this they'll be eating something they'll
17:49
Speaker A
trying it for the first time and they'll go oh this tastes horrible have some they'll give it to somebody else because you want to have that in addition to whatever immediate response you're having you want there to be a shared
18:03
Speaker A
cultural meaning to what's happening in your experience and there's good reason for that because as I've been arguing throughout your connection to distributed cognition is one of the most powerful ways you increase your cognitive power over the world
18:20
Speaker A
now he there he sort of represents this as being like in the chest and this has to do because we we feel mm-hm our social emotions and motivation in the chest you know your pride and honor and you know you know shame right things
18:40
Speaker A
like that now this is problematic for us what should go there because the Greek word doesn't have a direct English equivalent sometimes people put emotion there that's not quite right sometimes people put the word spirit there that's closer
19:01
Speaker A
but the problem with spirit is it has all kinds of spooky associations with it all right I'm not going to translate it I'm just going to leave it as is this is your Phi Moss this is the part of you
19:13
Speaker A
that is motivated socially so here's an interesting idea Plato has all right they there is a lot of potential conflict in this system it's a lot of potential conflict in this system what you want to do is get it properly
19:36
Speaker A
ordered now when you don't order it think about what this means salience and understanding and participation get out of sync with each other and then we're subject to bullshitting were subject to self-deception the more inner conflict we have the more likely we are to engage
20:02
Speaker A
in self-deception because these two are zinc and the more likely we will become very egocentric so when people are suffering especially inner conflict anxiety they tend to become more self-centered even selfish because when you're experiencing inner conflict you're getting sort of a threat signal
20:21
Speaker A
some things aren't right and when people are under threat they tend to become very egocentric again that's adaptive now we're gonna come back to this but we want to do a little bit of cognitive science well why do like why do we like
20:39
Speaker A
what why okay it makes sense that right we have this as a motivation because we're social creatures right one of our greatest adaptation is our ability to cooperate together so you know you throw me into the African savanna on my own
20:58
Speaker A
and I'm dead soon because like I don't have great claws I don't have great teeth I'm look at what is sillies structure right on teetering around on two feet almost always losing my balance I can't run quickly everybody can see me
21:10
Speaker A
from a long distance because I'm towering above the grass my throat and my vital organs are nicely exposed for any predator this is a bad okay but you know what I can do I can get together with a bunch of other human beings and
21:26
Speaker A
we can get some pointy sticks and some dogs and then we can kill everything on the planet our ability to work together has always been adaptive so we know why this is here why is but why does this
21:42
Speaker A
have so much more power than this well there's there's a there's an actually an important reason and this has to do with from work started by Ainsley and others on what's called hyperbolic discounting or temporal discounting and what Ainsley
22:04
Speaker A
and other people found is this pattern of behavior is exist across species it's not just something that human beings engage and you can find it across species it's even more Universal than something like flow it's not just Universal amongst human beings it's
22:21
Speaker A
Universal across many species so in this is a deeply adaptive mechanism what does this mechanism look like okay so this is called discounting and this is a little bit confusing discounting is how much you are reducing the salience of a
22:37
Speaker A
stimulus the more you discount the less salient something is the less it stands out for you the less it grabs your attention this axis is tying in a tenth sense this is the present and this is the future so what I'm showing you is
22:55
Speaker A
what's happening to discounting which means how much a stimulus is losing its salience and this is what it looks like is what the curve looks like okay so a present stimulus has a large degree of salience to it remember the monster
23:10
Speaker A
something that's in the future especially as it gets into the far future much less salience to it that's why the monster can override the man but why why don't we like why do we have this well this is actually very very
23:26
Speaker A
adaptive that's why it's a universal phenomenon how is it adaptive so I want you to think about doing your you're about to do something here I don't smoke I do diet but I don't smoke but let's suppose I was doing this here's right
23:48
Speaker A
now and I decide to smoke a cigarette right and that could have one of two options right you know I get a coffee roar I don't get a cough there or something like that right now notice and I'm doing this very simplistically I'm
24:06
Speaker A
not saying that whenever you do something there's only two effects from I'm just doing it simplistic in a very simple manner so you can understand the point okay now the probability of now happening is a hundred percent because it's happening
24:18
Speaker A
the probability of each one of these happening is 50% now when if I were if it goes this way and then there's two more effects the probability of each one of these is 25 right and so on so do you
24:31
Speaker A
see what's happening as you move into the future the probability of any one of these events occurring is going down very fast now here's the thing this is this is actually adaptive you should pay less attention to things that are less
24:51
Speaker A
probable than happening that actually makes good sense the less probable something and of tis the less attention you should give it imagine if you didn't have this imagine if you didn't screen off things that were low in probability think about
25:07
Speaker A
how you would be overwhelmed by all the possibilities so if I get out of bed I might twist my ankle slightly and that might slow me down getting to class and if I slow down getting to class that
25:20
Speaker A
might have an impact on my mark and that might cause me to fail my course and then if I fail my course that might disrupt my degree and that might cause me to failed in my career and and then
25:33
Speaker A
I'm going to end up in Buffalo alone married to a lamp or something now that's ridiculous right now it's possible it's not impossible except the last part you can't really get married to a lamp but right in fact here's a
25:52
Speaker A
hypothesis I have no notice the word I used please I think one of the things that goes wrong in people who experience generalized anxiety disorder is that this is not working well enough it's not screening off and making low salient low
26:10
Speaker A
probability events so how the anxious people find things salient that they shouldn't they find low probability things too salient so this is really adaptive this is why you have it but there's a problem with it and this is a
26:27
Speaker A
problem with any adaptive machine and you're gonna see later why this is the case ok let's go back to the cigarette smoker I smoked and through a long chain this is me dying in Hamilton right this is the event of me dying in Hamilton
26:44
Speaker A
lung cancer in my left lung I'm not going to write these all out this is me dying in Hamilton of cancer and my right lung this is me dying in Toronto cancer left right this is me dying in
27:00
Speaker A
Burlington because and so on there's all these different deaths now here's the thing each one of those deaths has a low probability of occurring right you see that each one of those death has a low probability of occurring but
27:14
Speaker A
here's the thing about me and I bet you I share it with you I don't want to just avoid death in Hamilton oh that would although that would be a particularly about death I don't want to avoid just
27:23
Speaker A
dying in Hamilton I'm from Hamilton so I'm allowed to do that I want to avoid death I want to avoid all these deaths think carefully and I'm using this very technically but I'm speaking accurately I want to avoid
27:38
Speaker A
death in the abstract I don't want to avoid this death or this death or this death or this death I want to avoid all possible deaths I want to avoid death in the abstract now here's the thing the chance of dot
27:58
Speaker A
each one of these deaths is very low but if you pull them together the chance that cigarette smoking will lead to a premature death is very very high okay so what does that mean for me the hyperbolic discounting blinds me to this
28:16
Speaker A
because it's not very probable blinds me to this because it's not very probable blinds me to each one of these because each individually they're not very probable but in blinding me to each you know what it blinds me to what they
28:28
Speaker A
share in common it blinds me to what they all have in common and what they all have in common is a premature death by blinding me to what they have in common what they abstractly share this adaptive machine actually has me take
28:45
Speaker A
another puff on the cigarette and sets me on the course towards cancer or emphysema DC now please remember this this is going to be a theme we're going to be coming back to again and again and again I mentioned it before when I
29:01
Speaker A
talked about flow the very machinery that makes you adaptive is the machinery that makes you pray to self deceptive self-destructive behavior part of what meaning and wisdom have to do is they have to wrestle with that unavoidable reality the unavoidable reality is you
29:19
Speaker A
can't you can't throw this away you can't throw away this machinery because if you throw this adaptive machinery away your doomed you can't get out of bed because you're overwhelmed by crippling anxiety you can't throw it away but you can't
29:32
Speaker A
just let it run untutored because then you smoke the cigarette you eat the cake you go to the party and you harm yourself in a septa self-deceptive self-destructive fashion so what do you need to do here's the monster what you
29:51
Speaker A
need and what we developed is we developed an ability especially here frontal lobe area to form abstract thought to abstract what is in common in the distant future and symbolically represent it to ourselves that's what the man does the man can grasp the
30:18
Speaker A
abstract thought of avoiding the premature death but you say but but the man is so weak the man's weak because you don't want him to be able to shut this off you want him to be able to override it but in a very minimal sense
30:35
Speaker A
because that's so adaptive see so Plato is deeply right so in fact I think Plato is so deeply right that's what we keep discovering this division Freud divides the psyche into these three things a super-ego the ego the it'd you know
30:51
Speaker A
there's there's a movement in the 90s and neuroscience to talk about you know the reptilian brain the mammal brain and the Neo core we keep rediscovering this platonic division the Plato had an interesting idea [Music] he said you know what the man can learn
31:16
Speaker A
the man is capable of grasping theory abstract symbolic representation of the case now the lion really isn't capable of theory but what the lion can be do is the lion can be trained you can use your reason to train your lion how do you do
31:42
Speaker A
this well this is this is this is where Socrates is so relevant right and this is this is why Plato writes dialogues because what Socrates did was he took reason into the social arena Socrates goes into the marketplace and
32:01
Speaker A
dialogues with people there's this social interaction is happening and the social interaction is being read to rational reflection and to inspiring people to try and overcome self-deception and so using a Socratic method the man can train the lion and
32:27
Speaker A
then the man and the lion together can tame the monster not kill it but tame it and what you want is you want that keep that teaching of the man the training of the line and the taming of the monster so that something happens
32:49
Speaker A
you reduce as much as possible the inner conflict so this is like for Plato Plato describes wisdom as an internal justice within the psyche in which the man has been taught the line has been trained and that their monster has been tamed so
33:06
Speaker A
they can get along together as much as is possible since this is what's known as an optimization strategy right if I let the monster rule everything else shrinks to a minimum what you want is you want the coordination of the parts of the psyche
33:28
Speaker A
so that each can live as much as it possibly can without putting the other two in danger when you can get that inner harmony that optimal relation so each is living is that much as it can without putting the other ones in danger
33:42
Speaker A
this mutuality of the most existence this is for Plato this is to experience a fullness of being this is to be as fully alive as you possibly can be it is also to expend experience a kind of peace because your inner conflict has
33:58
Speaker A
dropped so this is this is very powerful one of one of your meta drives in addition to all the drives people have they want to have whatever they're having without inner conflict they want to be at peace with themselves now this
34:20
Speaker A
of course is a powerful meta Drive that you can tap into because if you have a strong drive within you to get this inner justice to realize wisdom to get this fullness of being then I can appeal to it I can appeal to it Socratic aliy
34:41
Speaker A
but notice that this has this has this has an important component to it because as I reduce inner conflict my self-deception goes down and as I reduce my inner conflict I'm less egocentric both of these things are making me more
34:58
Speaker A
in touch with reality so I'm reducing inner conflict but the effect that's having is right I'm getting a clearer vision of reality because my self-deception an egocentric egocentrism is going down now that matters because as we've seen before you
35:26
Speaker A
want to be in touch with reality you have a meta Drive philosophers have various thought experiments for talking about this no one else sometimes do with students is I'll say imagine the following right you go home one day and
35:42
Speaker A
your parents say I'll come won't come here I want to show you something when you say what and they take you to this hallway that you've walked out a thousand times before and they they press on a part on the wall
35:55
Speaker A
that for you is never meant anything and when they press a door opens and there's a room in there and there's TV screens and there's video tape and there's pictures of you at all stages of your life and then they say the following to
36:07
Speaker A
you just before you were born nine months before you were born we were hired by the government to have you this is part of an experiment the government gave us scripts to memorize and we did this as we write as a part of a
36:25
Speaker A
government experiment experiment we don't actually love you or care about you at all we've just been following the script doing what we've been doing because the government has hired us to do this and what but we're obligated now
36:38
Speaker A
that you've turned 21 or whatever to tell you the truth we don't care about you now we still have to keep doing this when we'll leave the room we can forget all about this if you want right and
36:52
Speaker A
we'll just say that we what we've always said we'll tell you how much we love you we'll make sure that your needs are met just know right now that none of that is how we truly feel okay now ask people
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Speaker A
how would you feel and they'd go well I'd be devastated but but I say but nothing's changed they're gonna still say all the same words to you they're still gonna treat you exactly the same way and what people say is well it's no
37:17
Speaker A
longer real here's another thing I'll deal with people I'll say how many of you are in satisfying personal relationships quite a few people put up their hands and then I'll say how many of you would want to know
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Speaker A
that your partner was cheating on you even if that meant the destruction of your relationship almost everybody puts their hand up they're willing to destroy this relationship that's giving them so much happiness because they don't want it to be fake they want it to be real
37:49
Speaker A
and we'll talk a lot we'll talk later about why this need to be real is so important but I want you to understand what Plato is talking about here notice that two of your most important meta drives are being met in the Platonic
38:10
Speaker A
model you're reducing inner conflict and you're becoming more in touch with reality now that that feeds on itself in an important way I get better on picking up on real patterns in the world my skill at picking up on real patterns is
38:34
Speaker A
improved because I get a clearer vision I get better at tracking real patterns right but what does that mean well as I start to get more inner peace I start to be able to pick up on real patterns I
38:54
Speaker A
get the skill the vision ability but of course what I can do is I can apply that to myself Socratic self-knowledge as I get better at picking up on real patterns I can apply that to myself I can get better
39:12
Speaker A
knowledge of myself as I get better knowledge of myself I can better teach the man when you to be a good teacher you have to know your student better as I get better knowledge of myself I can teach the man I can better train the
39:30
Speaker A
lion I can better tame the monster so notice what's happening here I improve a little bit my skill at picking up on real patterns I use that skill on myself to increase my self-knowledge and get better patterns which means I reduce my inner conflict
39:47
Speaker A
as my inner conflict goes down I get a clearer vision of reality as I get a clearer vision of reality I get better at picking up on real patterns which means I improve myself knowledge which means I reduce my inner conflict and you
40:02
Speaker A
see what happens this starts to spin like this these two sides feed into each other and reinforce each other and improve each other and this is wonderful for you because you're becoming less inner conflicted and you're coming more
40:18
Speaker A
in contact with reality now Plato has a famous story a parable a myth in the sense that I'm talking about in this court in this series it's called the parable or the myth of the cave and it's a way of talking about this the
40:42
Speaker A
relationship between these things notice two things here you need to remember this notice how much self transformation and getting more in contact with the world are interconnected this is participatory lower knowing I'm not over here as an impartial impassive sorry
41:04
Speaker A
impart impartial passive observer just forming true beliefs about this I have to change myself in order to see the world and then the world changes and then that puts a demand on me to change myself and as I change myself the world
41:19
Speaker A
discloses itself in a new way and so on and so forth this is participatory knowing I'm not just changing my mind this is not just knowing with my mind this is knowing with the very machinery of my self
41:33
Speaker A
now what's plato's myth so here's the surface right pathway going down all right that leads into this inner cavern right there's a fire here alright there's people chained to chairs so all they can do is look at the back of the
41:58
Speaker A
cave then there's other people walking in front of the fire and it's casting shadows onto the cave because of the firelight and they're hearing the echoes and what Plato says is people take the shadows and the echoes to be the real
42:21
Speaker A
things because they're chained they're caught up but what happens is an individual gets free and what does that individual do that individual turns and sees the fire and that allows them to realize that the shadows and the echoes
42:48
Speaker A
aren't the real things the shadows and echoes and what happens is the person's ability to notice the real patterns as opposed to the merely correlational patterns is changed remember we talked about that people start to see they start to realize oh these are what real
43:10
Speaker A
patterns feel like as opposed to what I thought was real you get the taste for reality development and that taste means they start to look around and explore and then they realize there's a path there's light coming through it and then
43:25
Speaker A
they start a journey upward now notice how this journey works when they take a step forward they're blinded by the light and they have to wait they have to wait for their eyes to adjust the self has to be transformed and then once the
43:39
Speaker A
eyes have adjusted they can see how to go and then they take another step and then they're blinded again and there's this slow process and Plato keep talking about at various stages they have to stop because they're blinded and then
43:51
Speaker A
they adjust and then they gain the ability to see where they couldn't see before it's this participatory transformation I talked about it and eventually you come up here and they look around right and what what are they looking for they
44:13
Speaker A
want to see the source of the real light the light that's making them allowing them to pick up on the real patterns where is this light that shows the reality of things coming from and not only is it showing the reality of things
44:26
Speaker A
this light is the source of the life of things where is this source of understanding and life and if they look around and of course they glimpse because I can't stare at it directly the Sun and it's overwhelming it's beyond
44:43
Speaker A
their comprehension but they see it and it that fills them or they're kind of off and of course what they do is they go back down into the tunnel rapidly right and they get here and they try to
44:59
Speaker A
tell their fellow prisoners what they saw but of course they're stumbling around because their eyes don't work anymore in that darkness and they're saying things that don't make absolutely no sense to these people and so they ridicule them and if they could they
45:15
Speaker A
would kill that individual and of course this is an allusion to Socrates now first of all notice that contrary to what people think enlightenment is not just an Eastern idea this is a myth of enlightenment of coming into the light
45:43
Speaker A
it's a myth of self transcendence and self transformation it's a myth of coming and I mean myth in the sense that we've been talking about it's a parable of coming in to greater and greater contact with reality to see notice the
45:58
Speaker A
story is right you pick up on real patterns that challenges you it sort of blinds you and then you transform to pick them up and then you're enabled to move forward then you confront those real patterns again and you're doing
46:11
Speaker A
that cycle that I talked about there's a Greek word for this ascent called an agog a and a GOG II this is the anagogical or the anagogical aspect of Plato's idea notice what he's doing he's taking the you know the movement between the
46:37
Speaker A
illusory world and the real world and he's turning it into this account of how you can make your lives rationally more meaningful you can become more fully alive and more at peace in conjunction in concert with you coming more and more
46:57
Speaker A
in contact with the real patterns that make sense of reality you can satisfy in a mutually supporting fashion your desire your Metta drive for inner peace and your Metta drive to be in contact with reality this is what Plato calls
47:13
Speaker A
wisdom a fullness of being we become more and more real or self ourselves as become more and more at peace so that we can more and more realize the real patterns we conform ourselves more and more to reality and you may say this is
47:33
Speaker A
kind of a crazy story is it is it because here's a story from 1999 there's all these people and they're trapped in a world of shadows and unreality it's called the matrix and they need to wake up and be welcomed to the real world and
47:52
Speaker A
the character that's in there is neo from Neoplatonism the new man people flock to that movie and all it is is this with some great martial arts and some interesting science-fiction special effects this parable this is what I mean
48:21
Speaker A
about a myth this isn't a story from the past right the reason why you go to The Matrix and people still watch it and talk about it is because it's a myth it seems to you it speaks to you now
48:33
Speaker A
because it talks about perennial problems that you face problems of the psyche being in conflict with each other the problem of being caught up in illusion out of touch with reality and it presents the possibility of liberation and self transcendence and a
48:50
Speaker A
fullness an enhanced meaning in life it's a myth of wisdom that is perennial II relevant because it's not about the past it's about what's happening in you right here right now I want you to notice a couple things
49:16
Speaker A
about this I want you to notice first how reason and spirituality are not opposed to each other here there inseparably bound together I want you to notice how Plato is putting Socrates the Socratic project is Socrates is what how
49:36
Speaker A
you you know get the man to teach the lion how you get to realize your own foolishness with Pythagoras because here's right the self transcendence the rising above yourself the radical transformation of your consciousness and cognition that Pythagoras talks so much
50:02
Speaker A
about now this is such an entrancing and enriching and empowering myth a perennial parable that it's going to beat the constant refrain throughout the West people are going to be coming back to it again and again and again
50:31
Speaker A
and I want to talk now more about the Pythagorean side of Plato just to bring out a few things so Plato talks about like he uses a term I dass and that gets translated into the word form and when
50:58
Speaker A
people hear the word form their shape it also gets translated into the word idea when they hear idea they think of concept or an idea in your head that's not what Plato means the we need he's using that words it's much closer to our
51:15
Speaker A
word like a paradigm II he's using a word to talk about the real patterns that we're discovering in reality now there's an interesting thing about these real patterns they're both the access the pathway we have to understanding something the pathway we have for
51:36
Speaker A
getting at the reality of something because that's those are the real patterns but they're not just the affordance of our knowing the real patterns are also what makes something be what it is so this is work also from the psychology of
52:06
Speaker A
concepts and how people understand things well you ask people what a bird is they'll say the following oh yeah well I know what a bird is right it has wings feathers a beak and it flies there you go that's a bird they give you
52:27
Speaker A
what's called a feature list and then you think that and then you can get involved in a very long process which i think is largely been something of a mistake we'll come back to this no not code totally because it's important in
52:39
Speaker A
science but of thinking that the way I understand something is by having a definition of it in terms of the correct features now there's a problem with this although people believe that this is how they know what a bird is they're
52:55
Speaker A
mistaken in an important sense because I could satisfy this definition in the following way I could put a couple wings on this table a bunch of feathers a beak and then throw it all up in the air have
53:06
Speaker A
wings because in flight do I have a bird no I don't I have a bloody mess because what's missing is something more important what's missing is the structural functional organization the way all those things hang together the way they're structured together so that
53:27
Speaker A
the bird functions as a whole what's missing from this is the structural functional organization that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts the Germans have a great word for this Gestalt in English we don't the Greeks
53:54
Speaker A
have a good word for this is the word logos although a word that's being discussed a lot today I think it needs to be discussed a little bit more carefully now here's the thing I want you to realize member we talked about
54:11
Speaker A
how you pick up on real patterns and a lot of those patterns you're not picking up an explicit sense you know what a bird is you have some sense of the logos of it but if I ask you what is that
54:24
Speaker A
logos what is the structural functional organization and most of that most of what makes a bird a bird is found in that logos but if I ask you what is the locus of a bird how do these all
54:34
Speaker A
structure together so they function as a whole in which the whole transcends simply an accumulation of it you can't tell me that's what the research shows in fact you can't tell me your grasp is intuitive so notice something very
54:55
Speaker A
interesting here you often have an intuitive grasp of the logos of things and the logos is form what form doesn't mean shape form means something more like formula it means the structural functional organization and that form that logos is not only how the thing is
55:12
Speaker A
right integrated together it's how your mind can be integrated with it member this logos this real pattern is not only how you know something but it's also the pattern that makes it be what it is so this is a very different idea
55:32
Speaker A
of knowing you thought already in the myth of the cave but when I really know something I cut I come form to it I become like it in some important way I get in my mind the same real pattern
55:54
Speaker A
that's in the thing because that real pattern is what allows me to come to know the thing and to enter into that reciprocal realization with it now this is going to be an important idea this is an idea
56:11
Speaker A
that's going to be taken up by Plato's greatest disciple somebody we're going to talk about next time when we're together and that's Aristotle thank you very much for your time [Music] you you
Topics:PlatoSocratesAxial Revolutionmeaning crisiswisdomself-deceptioninner conflictPlatonic psychologycognitive scienceNeoplatonism

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