Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Slavoj Zizek: “Buddhism Can’t Explain This”

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

SPONSORS:- Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories- Go to https://shortform.com/toe for a free trial and an exclusive $50 OFF on your annual subscription- I subscribe to The Economist for their science and tech coverage. As a TOE listener, get 35% off! No other podcast has this: https://economist.com/TOESlavoj Žižek doesn't answer your question — he dismantles it, rebuilds it, and hands you something stranger and more useful than what you started with. Philosopher, provocateur, and self-described pessimist, he's spent decades insisting on something most thinkers shy away from: that freedom isn't the absence of necessity — it's the moment you choose what you fundamentally are. The fall comes first. Paradise was never real to begin with. Reality is the gap, not the thing on either side of it. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS:- 00:00:00 - Socrates and Radical Freedom- 00:05:02 - Quantum Indeterminacy vs. Freedom- 00:10:06 - Ontological Collapse Paradoxes- 00:15:07 - Adorno and Social Antinomies- 00:20:36 - Democritus: Less Than Nothing- 00:25:40 - Sartre and Existential Choice- 00:30:45 - Freudian Death Drive- 00:36:01 - Heidegger and Hysterical Awareness- 00:42:10 - Imp of Perversity- 00:48:07 - Einstein vs. Bohr- 00:53:15 - God’s Ontological Laziness- 00:58:17 - Hegel’s Retroactive Necessity- 01:03:41 - Digital Spirituality and AI- 01:09:18 - Stalin and Failed Projects- 01:14:41 - Hegel in a Wired Brain- 01:20:10 - Religious Convictions and Physics- 01:25:12 - Zen Buddhism and WarLINKS MENTIONED: - Slavoj's Books: https://amazon.com/stores/author/B000APK7P8- Philosophical Investigations into Human Freedom: https://amazon.com/dp/0791468747?tag=toe08-20- Freedom: A Disease Without Cure: https://amazon.com/dp/1350559164?tag=toe08-20- Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1785.pdf- Binding, Minds & the Platonic Realm [Lecture]: https://youtu.be/0BVM0UC28nY- Quantum Healing: https://amazon.com/dp/0553348698?tag=toe08-20- Republic of Silence: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/12/paris-alive-the-republic-of-silence/656012/- Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: https://amazon.com/dp/0486434141?tag=toe08-20- Beyond the Pleasure Principle: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Beyond_P_P.pdf- Philosophy of Spirit: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/jlindex.htm- Hegelian Reading of the New Science of Consciousness: https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2025-08-25/slavoj-zizek.pdf- The Mirror Stage: https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/LacanMirrorStageECRITS.pdf- Being and Time: https://amazon.com/dp/0061575593?tag=toe08-20- Less Than Nothing: https://amazon.com/dp/1781681279?tag=toe08-20- The Imp of the Perverse: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Poe_Imp.pdf- Einstein-Bohr Debate: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/bohr.htm- Ages of the World: https://amazon.com/dp/1438474059?tag=toe08-20- Quantum History: https://amazon.com/dp/135056642X?tag=toe08-20- Phenomenology of Spirit: https://amazon.com/dp/0198245971?tag=toe08-20- Philosophy of Right: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/preface.htm- White Holes: https://amazon.com/dp/B0BTKZVJJK?tag=toe08-20- Science of Logic: https://amazon.com/dp/1542519918?tag=toe08-20- End of History and the Last Man: https://amazon.com/dp/0743284550?tag=toe08-20More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I like you very much, you know why? Why? You did the first what I always, you did this that I'm doing all the time. What do you mean? This, scratch your nose for a second. Because I am the one people laugh at me all the time, like, he cannot go five minutes without scratching. So you began. Okay.

Okay. What would it mean for a stone to have freedom? To answer you properly, I would have to explain why for me, Socrates is the first philosopher for me, nonetheless. Because, you know, instead of going directly at the topic, no, probably not for freedom, you need awareness, and so on and so on, I would go back to what do you mean by freedom?

Because freedom is not simply opposed to necessity. It's even problematic if freedom needs really a free choice. Let's say you personally fall in love. Usually you don't make a choice. There is no moment when you tell yourself, look, if I'm heterosexual, there are nice ladies here and there, let me pick that one. No, all of a sudden you realize that you already were in love. That's for me freedom at its most radical.

And here we come back to Schelling. Schelling saw this clearly, that freedom in this sense is more radical. It's not free choice. Why? I can put it in more existentialist terms, although I'm not that, because for me, true act of freedom is not.

I go to a store and oh my God, should I pick, I don't know, chocolate cake or cheesecake and then I choose freely. No, true freedom is, as it were, when you choose yourself. When you decide not only what to have, what to use, but when you decide or choose what you. are. These are the true choices for me, the choices which affect your identity. In this sense, no. Stone, I think, definitely and doesn't have freedom. Do you think there is there a theory which claims that stone does have freedom? To go a step further, then you can immediately

interrupt me. I think that the quantum theory of indeterminacy and so on. I know it's not simply non-determinism, Schredinger equation and so on. There are rules. But within this scope, you cannot predict it. There are chances and so on. But this has nothing to do with freedom. freedom is a self-chosen form of necessity. If I throw something like a coin into the air and set on which side it will fall down, I decide this is not freedom. I just leave it to what appears to me as contingency, although probably it's not.

Freedom is a decision which establishes a new necessity. In this sense, now I can make a jump for which I will be hated by people who think I confuse anything, things. You know what? I had a debate, brief one with Carlo Rovelli. Yes. And very strangely, I tried to catch him on that. He used the term freedom. His idea is this one, precisely, to take, you can immediately.

counterattack that I simplify it or what I know. But let's say wave particle. Okay. What I will perceive as reality, and I will not go now into this, do my choice, does my choice, what to focus on, my observation. Does it create that or not? But the point is that this is for him the moment of freedom. freedom in the sense that when I do a quantum observation, I choose what aspect to measure. We are observed an entity as a particle or as a wave, and we know all the paradoxes and so on and so on.

I would even be afraid to use the term freedom here, because if we say this is freedom, I'm free to choose what I will measure in a quantum experiment. Isn't it that then, if I say only this, am I not caught into a very strong ontological duality? In the sense that we have the quantum domain, which is contingent but not in any minicuous sense free, and then it's me. But how do I fit the quantum domain? main. What am I? For example, most of the quantum physicists reject the notion of freedom of the will. You know? Yes. So I would say, you see, now I know you never will get this from me. I shouldn't talk too much.

I didn't answer your question, but I confused it in the right way so that you see in more direction my mind works. It was a simple, precise question. and that's where I enjoy theory. Theory should in the first step bring out all the hidden presuppositions. Like, for example, I remember even in our ordinary reality, no, some cognitiveists go into, they claim even we humans, are we free or, not. They claim that usually me confuse different levels of freedom. What we spontaneously experience as freedom is, I do what I think, that it's the best for me or what I want and so on and so on. I'm not under external pressure. But this in no way excludes the option that what I will

choose in a way which I experience as free, that that will be strictly determined by my previous experience, neuronal processes, whatever you want, and so on and so on. So here I would be close to Kant. Kant has a very interesting notion. He says that when we think that we act freely, like, F off, I will just do this, do that, and so on, we are totally enslaved to our nature, psychic, biological, neural, whatever, and that the only way to be free is to obey the moral law. Because the moral law means we acquire a distance towards our spontaneous tendencies, you know. And this is what is very close to me, that freedom is, for example, what is for me freedom?

Let me give you, I'm sorry, then I will stop, a pathetic example. It's ridiculous. I walk along ashore and I see a child drowning there. No? I obviously have a choice. Here I oppose the standard stupid religious answer, which is only if you believe in some divine punishment after your life? No, that's not at all what goes on in you. You have to make a choice.

Will you do what you experience as your duty to help the child drowning, or will you follow a simple pleasure principle? You look around, nobody is there to see me so off. I leave the child to drown. This is for me, if you decide to jump in water, an authentic free decision. I stop. I talk too much. Okay. I'm going to resist the urge to correct any quantum mechanical misinterpretations when it comes to the math. But they don't want to resist the earth. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. I'm just referring to what Rovelli does. Rovali is using here the freedom. Freedom in the sense that we observers can decide, will we measure this aspect or that aspect. He uses the term freedom.

I want to avoid now, I'm well aware. I may be an idiot, but maybe not a totally idiot. So I'm well aware of the complexity. I mean, usually people say you philosophers are confused. If I approach quantum mechanics to get clear insights, I discovered that in quantum mechanics, the mess is something. terrifying today. Almost anything goes. There are people who claim this, but the key, what really

interests me, and here maybe we touch something that approaches freedom is the so-called collapse, no? So-called, let's not go into it. I decide to measure this and then I get a result, which is contingent, but and so on. For me, how do we read this? Do we read this? I see tendencies today to read this more in an epistemological way. Waves are out there. Freedom is just the choice which aspect of multiple superposed quantum reality I will approach. As if freedom means there are multiple possibilities out there in the world, I will choose on which aspect to focus. No, I think quantum mechanics is more radical. This so-called, I know all the problems, collapse is not just epistemological. It's ontological.

In other words, it affects the thing itself. I stop now and please counter-attack. You say, why? here you should be free. Don't resist the earth. Okay, so the concern is that sometimes people, for some reason, they absolutely love quantum mechanics and they want to take something that is one of their beliefs, whatever it may be, and then they see quantum mechanics if you water it down to something else,

it becomes compatible with whatever else they want it to say. And then so then they attach themselves to the quantum mechanics, but it would have actually been easier to say the more simplified version. and the quantum mechanics doesn't add anything. So I'll give you an example. Yeah. I was at this conference where Andreas Gomez-Emelson was talking to Mike 11, and he said to Mike 11th, something like this.

He said, look, our minds are wondering about A and then also wondering about B. It's like two options. And then he said, our minds are in a quantum superposition of A and B. And then I put up my hand and said, Andreas, so why can't you just say that as simply, like your mind is wondering about A and your mind is wondering about B. What does quantum superposition add to this? Where is the complete inner product space? Why is it complex, et cetera?

Or furthermore, why can't you say it's in a classical superposition? Like, what does quantum add to that? And then he paused and said, yes, it is just A or B or it could just be classical. That's true. So let me ask you a provocative question. Absolutely. What separates you, the recent Savoy-Jijsac, of the past decade, interested in quantum mechanics? from a Hegelian Deepak Chopra,

who also uses quantum mechanics that many would say is the incorrect usage of quantum mechanics. Deepak Chopra, you talk about the Epstein guy who should be in prison measured by my standards, that Deepak Chopra.

Yeah, I can answer you. And by the way, Sla, I mean with a complete respect. I'm just being overly provocative. Absolutely, you are correct, yes. You know what's the origin of it. It's not for me Hegel or quantum mechanics. Without having the time to go totally into it deeply,

I will just give you an example of what put me on the path towards quantum mechanics. I'm sure you will explode that it's a vague analogy just, but I will try to... You know, it all I can... even locate my nothing to do with quantum mechanics, my original experience, as it were. I read when I was a student still half a century ago, a text by Fred Jameson, where he debates Adorno, and he goes into this, for me a key insight, that we have vaguely, it's a generalization. It doesn't matter.

is just an example. We have on the one hand a liberal individualist view of reality where society is explained, accounted for in the terms of interaction or of individuals.

We interact, we discover gradually that in order to do it, it makes things easier if we codify it somehow to minimize, blah, blah, blah. So that what we experience as a social substance, the set of rules, written unwritten rules,

emerges out of the interaction of individuals. Then we have the opposite view, usually associated with another type of sociologists who are, they are all empirical. I'm not talking about speculative sociologists, who would say, no, society, social space comes first. Society were always here, but you can follow exactly through history

how when did the notion of individual in the modern sense emerge especially with individual rights and so on and so on. So then the naive question would be, okay, but in itself, what comes first? And Adorno's answer, where Lennon first to Adorno is no. the result should not be.

It could be this, it could be that, but we don't really know what society is in itself. What if we say the definition, the key determination of actual society is precisely this gap as such. And this fits quite nicely, I think, our today's global society. On the one hand, we are overdetermined, predetermined, not just in artificial intelligence,

but with collective forms of ideology, written and especially unwritten rules. So we are always embedded in a society. At the same time, we are addressed more than ever as individuals. Let's not go into details, but you see my point. What if? Now I will use a very precise. formulation. What if, what appeared to me as a problem, my God, is it this or that? What if this is the solution? The reality is this tension itself. And here I make now a mega jump.

What I like, but you will probably explode, is that what first my original experience, what first attracted me in quantum mechanics is precisely this idea that, okay, we can not use the term duality, but you have, let's say, two aspects. And then we should not get caught in this, that philosopher here for me would be Kant. This Kantian idea of antonymis of pure reason. Why? Reality is out there out of our reach. When I'm wrestling with a guest's argument about, say, the hard problem of consciousness or quantum foundations, I refuse to let even a scintilla of confusion remain unexamined. Claude is my thinking partner here.

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That's clod.a.i slash theories of everything and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Just for the people who are wondering, what are you referring to? Off-air we spoke about, or I said to you that the wave particle duality is not a formal duality. But that was not recorded. So that's just what you were referring to. Please continue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's say wave particle, no? I will not use the term duality. I think that I wonder if you would agree, but I warn you, I did debate with some quantum physicists who are more or less seriously taken. Lee Smolin, Rovelli, others know? And up to this point we agree, but then they go each their own way. This idea that now I'm using very problematic Hegelian terms because the term contradiction is another very problematic term, you know.

What do you mean by contradiction? But what I want to say is that what if the question, but what reality is really? Is there some substance which, like in Spinoza, expresses itself either as wave or as particle? No? What if this gap, this duality, is part of reality itself. What if I want to resist this temptation to say, oh, there must be something deeper? What if there is nothing deeper? We have to accept that reality is crazy in this sense that things which are incompatible for us can exist out there.

And that's the second reason. I am absolutely, but not in a stupid way, a materialist. But here I agree with Rovelli with all of them that, you know, we have to get rid of this stupid notion that materialism means. Reality is one big void of space. And then some small balls, whatever we call them, atoms are floating there freely. And then they bounce into each other, blah, blah, blah. Even with Democritus, things are much nicer. You know what is Democritus terms for Atom?

Dan. Dan is shortened of Meden. Medan means non-being. N is being. Meth is negation. And he coined the artificial term then, which literally means. That's where I took the term less than nothing.

So what I'm trying to say, let's avoid details, is that for Democritus, it's not void and then small, balls jumping here and there. No, atom itself is a void in itself. We don't have atom and space in which atoms move. It gets complex. So I first let me complicate like this, but what was your question? Repeated. I want to be attacked. I subscribe to the economist. Their science and their AI coverage is among the best I've found anywhere. And I say that, as someone who reads plenty of it. I'll give you some examples. They just ran an analysis on how

attitudes towards science are changing in American politics and what this means for research and funding in scientific institutions moving forward. This sort of high quality reporting is fantastic. They even covered how dark energy may be weakening over time. Now, if that holds up, it completely changes our understanding of the universe's fate. If you watch this channel, those are exactly the kinds of questions that we explore every week. I subscribe to the economist because their science and their AI reporting regularly surprises me with how deep it goes. And they're also, of course, known for global affairs, both political and economic reporting. They are top tier. And interestingly, and flatteringly, Toa is one of the only podcasts that the economist

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what is it, more psychological, what is it earlier you said, but what do we mean by oh gosh, what was it? Was it freedom or what? Yes, right, right. Okay, exactly. Exactly. It's like, but what do we mean by freedom? That's super interesting. Okay, so I also talk like that

When people say some concepts, some so-and-so, I say, what do you mean by so-and-so? However, what I like to do is I say, here's what I mean by so-and-so, here's what I think you could mean by so-and-so. I think you're also similar. But then you also made an interesting turn where you said, true freedom is this and that. So I want to know, how is it that Slaboy? How is it that you get to the true freedom? What is it that you're analyzing about some concept?

How do you know what is it that's going on that's occurring to you inside? Maybe it's a resonance. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it comports with how the word is used in other pieces of literature. How is it that you know when you're getting to some core nugget that you would call the truth of freedom or the truth of whatever? It may be reality or what have you. This is more a question about you than it is about the concepts themselves. Perfect.

Perfect. I will try to answer it by some very contentious venture of the central argument of my book on freedom, which I have renounced today. If I were to be nominated a dictator of my own country, I would burn that book. I think it gets confused towards the end. But my basic point is that, and this is what fascinated me. You see, here it's my Hegelian side. You know what gave me the original impact here? I don't like him too much as a philosopher, but nonetheless, Sartre.

He wrote a text which I quote in 1935. 45 already for an American weekly journal where he said something which may appear shocking. He said, yes, German occupation was horrible, terror all the time. You never knew if you will be arrested. But in some sense, we were never more free than under German occupation. I don't think this was some key postmodern or whatever paradox. what he meant is that in a situation like under occupation, you are not making choices which move within a stable social order.

You are making much more radical decisions which concern your survival, in what form you will survive and so on and so on. So I here follow Hegel in what simple sense. sense. First, against liberals, I totally accept the standpoint by some even conservatives and by some marches that, and again, I'm here doing a simple Socrates analysis. My point is, let's imagine that you claim you are free in your society. What does this mean? It doesn't mean I can do whatever I want.

I walk out, I see you or you see me, you don't like my face, you kick me and so on. A whole set of written and unwritten rules must be operative so that we feel free. Here I still advocate the standpoint of conservatives who claim you can feel free, safely living, you can rely on it will be safe to go out. You can count on state institutions, court, education, and so on. I like this Hegelian insight into how many things must relatively effectively function so that you can feel free in this elementary sense. It's not the satrial sense, but it's this everyday sense.

I do what I want. yeah, sorry, many things like personal freedom, you have to be educated, health care, how many things have to be there as an institution so that you can be free? So this is for me the social notion of freedom. But then there are existential moments and I think, you know, I like to jump, people hate me for that, from the most abstract level metaphysical freedom, to concrete level. What are we, society are we approaching now?

Till now, isn't it's a beautiful irony that China now plays more fairly with market rules, fair competition and so on than United States. With all these tariffs and so on, this is contingency which introduces disorientation. But this will. compel us to redefine freedom, maybe to move to a higher level of freedom, not or maybe lower. All I want to say is that when people talk about the end of the world today, are we aware how many things that were automatically presumed to be impossible? Now we talk about them.

People didn't even notice how some 10 years ago it's publicly admitted that states are torturing political prisoners. Americans are doing it, Israelis are doing it, Arabs probably also and so on and so on. So something that at least you didn't talk publicly about it became possible. So so that I don't lose my threat. What I'm saying is that today we, it's not. Not only are we free or not, but the very space which still now, by space, I mean rule of law, rules of decency, politeness and so on, are being disregarded. They are falling apart. In such a situation, you have to be free in more radical sense. You have to redefine

basically the society in which you are free. So this is not just freedom in the sense of within existing circumstances I can act freely. It's to redefine, change these circumstances themselves. Then we have, ah, I go further. So now we have this everyday freedom. You have to follow rules, you know. You are scientist, Rovelli, whoever. But when you go out and ask your secretary for a coffee, which I'm enough of a pessimist,

sorry, feminist, I wouldn't do it. I would like have a secretary who would tell me, fuck off, why don't you go for your coffee? But what I'm saying is that you rely on a certain set of kindness, decency, and so on. A higher level of freedom is when you have to, as it were, to use Rousseau term, to reinvent social contract itself. And then even there is even a more radical level, freedom as madness in the sense of what Freud calls death drive. one has to be here very precise.

Freudian death drive is not, oh, I want to kill myself or nirvana obliterate. If you read Freud closely then when he talks about death drive, he really means immortality. He means some self-destructive tendency that persists at infinitum, as it were. You know, that freedom at its most radical is what Freud calls, beyond the pleasure principle. You do something terrifying for no positive reason, not because I will profit or not, but it's a kind of an empty suicidal choice.

This is part of most radical human freedom for me. And both Schelling and Hegel in their own way reach this point. Hegel calls it, following German mysticism, nach der Weld, the night of the world, this reduction to zero. In some sense, you have to choose, although we emerge out of society, but existentially at the deepest level, you have to freely choose to be part of a society. That would be the most radical freedom for me. So you see, I just complicate.

You ask me, what is freedom? I would tell you vaguely that I can distinguish these three levels. But what I like in Schelling is that he says that the truly free act, we experience them in our consciousness as necessity. If you really passionately, the example that I already use, fall in love. first, it never happens in the present. You cannot say, oh, now I will fall in love. No, all of a sudden you realize, my God, I was already in love. I am in love.

And from that point on, it's like fate. Your life changeless. This choice which you never made consciously determines your life. this is for me freedom at its most radical in our relatively normal daily life. So, let me express some of my freedom, but at the cost of restraining you by accident. This podcast, I keep it apolitical. So that is to say, you are right. This is needed today.

Okay, great, great. Wonderful. And that's super difficult, I imagine, for you, because everything's melded together. And so if I ask you a question about consciousness, it may lead to politics and it may lead to physics and it may lead somewhere else and it winds around. That's fine. I'm just asking you to skip the political part. I don't care about that for this sake of this. And I think new ground can be gotten to. I want to know your views on consciousness. I think that I follow guys like this may surprise you. Did you maybe do already something with like anil set? Yes, yes. A few times. I appreciate very much what he is doing.

I know you have your critiques of his work and you've even published them. Yeah, but it's benevolent. It's not a critique you go to Gulag. It's maybe a critique of one year of re-education camp. What I want to say is that I like very much his notion of consciousness as controlled hallucination. Why do you like it? Because it avoids this. First, I of course don't agree with this stupid subjectivism.

I hate, okay, sorry if it will sound political, but it's just my evil nature. It's not political. If I were to be a dictator, guys who immediately go to Gulag will be those who try to link quantum physics with some oriental wisdom, Bhagavad Gita, and so on, all that bullshit, you know. No, no, no. I remain a materialist not only in this sense of anti-subjectivism,

in this sense that we are not alone. But in another more refined sense, in the sense that how do we, I would have to go in detail here more deeply into psychoanalysis, but let me give you the basic insight. This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst.

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No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. We only become ourselves. This is for me the most convincing theory of awareness, which is incidentally always self-awareness. Awareness is always reflective. No? Let's say for me, I follow here Lacan,

you confront when you're learning, a small kid. You notice that people around you, father, mother, uncle, brothers, whoever, play certain games with you. They want something from you implicitly. But you discover that, not only that you don't know what this is, what do they want from me. Out of this questioning awareness arises. Here I even, now you will again accuse me of jumping here and there, but I like vague analogies. You know when Heidegger says that the key, when do you start to think about a hammer?

Not when it functions smoothly, but when it falls apart. My God, what went wrong and so on. So I think that awareness, the original side of awareness is the core. confrontation with this enigmatic other, not divine, but these people arrange to you, my God, what do they want from me? What am I for them? And this deep existential question is, here I agree with Freud and Lacone, is the basic hysterical question. The hysterical question is, why am I what you are saying that I am? You are calling me my master, my wife, whatever.

Why am I what you are saying? What do you really want from me? This basic doubt. And I think this is part of basic human communication so that I go here a step further. Our world is built as not just with, natural objects, but especially with others, we construct a world to answer these dilemmas. The ultimate answer is paranoia. Paranoia is basically something crazy, but at the same time, very

rational. Paranoia says, don't worry, I can tell you exactly what others want from you. That guy has a mega plot against you and so on and so on. Paranoia. Sorry, when you say that's the ultimate answer, do you mean that's the ultimate correct answer or do you mean to say that's the inevitable result of... No, no, no, no. It's a crazy answer. It's a crazy answer, but it clarifies things. Like today, conspiracy theorists, no? They, you know, what's so interesting with me and there for me. First, they say all these scientific knowledge is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then all of a sudden they come with an absolute answer, you know. I think the enigma of the other,

What does the other want from me? It's original. There is no individuality. There is no self-awareness without it. And ultimately, even there is no freedom. We are free. I will give you another crazy definition. Not all encompassing, but one possible approach.

We are free when the other remains non-transparent for us. If we were to know precisely what are we for the others, we would be reduced to an object. We wouldn't have this inner subjectivity, however, we experience it. I'm going very fast here, but I'm just giving you a hint. I remember the doubt before launching this podcast. What if no one listens? What if I'm wasting my time? If you've ever felt that way about starting a business, Shopify is the partner that turns uncertainty into momentum.

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trial at Shopify.com slash tow. That's Shopify.com slash T-O. That's Shopify.com slash T.O. This video is sponsored by Shortform. If you want a free trial and an exclusive $50 off their annual plan, then go to the link in my description, shortform.com slash TOE. If you're like me, you've encountered books that are so dense, finishing them is actually just the beginning. Short form helps with that. Their book guides go far beyond pastiche summaries.

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for a free trial and an exclusive $50 off your annual subscription. That's shortform.com slash T-O-E. Let me make a simple analogy. So let's imagine you have a flashlight and we're in the dark. Okay, so, We have this flashlight, but then we can't even know ourselves because in your model,

consciousness or awareness is self-reflexive until it bounces off of another object. Now, if that object is transparent, then it would just go through. We wouldn't see it, so we wouldn't even know ourselves, because in order to know ourselves, something is to hit us. Yeah. Okay. Reeducating Anil Seth, putting him in a camp for a year. I didn't hear that part.

I want to know, what would you say to him? Where is he missing the mark? Where is he on the mark? I think that what, that, I think. that, no, no, my point is much more precise. Here I agree with him. Also, I like very much that you introduced into this duality, me and another, something third is needed. And this is a very interesting question. I spoke with linguistic philosophers. I told them not just empirical, but theoretically.

Why in human exchange, even if we speak, dialogue is never just a dialogue. There are at some deeper level, always at least three. We have to refer to some third agency which can be super ego, some social fantasy,

whatever, no? So back to Anil said, you know, he has one a basic premise that what underlies is a desire to survive and reproduce itself, no? He takes this desire or will or tendency, drive. I don't know what term he uses, because he explains everything as a strategy for survival.

I think what makes us human, is precisely what I called death drive, a radical indecision. It's no, I can step out, I can kill myself, I can say I don't care. The drive to self-reproduction, to whatever, is not the ultimate horizon. You know who knew this in a literary way? You know, Edgar Allan Poe's wonderful story, The Imp of Perversity. where the idea is, it's a short story, to make something evil, but to take great care that you don't profit in any way from it. Also not morally, you know, can't say the moment you do something great, because, you know, somebody is observing it, it will bring your fame.

No, it's no longer. To do something evil, even suicidal, just for the sake of it, this is the zero level of freedom. end. Now I go very quickly through a speculation that you will not like, probably, but I have better foundation. I don't have time now. I would say that how does morality, social morality, emerge. Social morality in the sense precisely of there are things for which I am ready to sacrifice my life. I don't, I think that. this comes second. First come I am able to sacrifice my life to kill myself. Then, or at a second level, you say, but let's try to recuperate to re-include this tendency into something that can be of use to a society.

And it's not just individuals because people usually tell me, yeah, of course, it's biologically determined. Like ants who sacrifice a couple of them when they are attacked so that others survive. A computer scientist told me even artificial intelligence agents units, they already are developing this minimal collective spirit. One program can sacrifice himself, close down itself, it if somehow serves the others. and we but with humans it's more radical like sometimes a whole entity a nation is ready to say we rather die than to lose our freedom for example no and to account for this you need some zero level readiness to end your life which i call death drive i'm much more a pessimist here i think that our what may appear as our goodness is the result of successfully reintegrating some terrifying self-destructive dimension. But this is not quantum physics, I know.

Bernardo Castro, he's an idealist. Have you watched any of his material? No, should I? Is it worth? I have so little time and I try to, you know. Now I'm much more interesting, this influence. But what's his point? Tell me, okay? Well, he's an idealist. So he would say that we think there's the material or the physical, whatever we want to call it, whatever synonym.

But that comes from a base of consciousness. The base unit is consciousness. In fact, there's one cosmic mind, and then we are almost eddies or little whirlpools in it that come from some dissociation. Okay, but you know, you know, okay, but no, no, I am, now I remember. When I was covering this, how to call them, universal consciousness readings of quantum mechanics, I found you, you know, what's my idea? And it shocked some people that not only are theories of quantum mechanics, which interpret it in an idealist way. You know all that bullshit.

Awareness, consciousness creates reality. not only are there wrong, but the true opposition is for me Einstein versus Nils-Bor. Probably you know what's my point. For me, Einstein is way too idealist because he still is, as he says, Spinozian idealist. If you look at the universe as a totality, you discover inner beauty, harmony, and so on and so on. I think the ultimate lesson of quantum mechanics, when they repeat all the time, there is no totality. Every totality is rooted in a particular point of view and so on and so on. Why?

Not because we create the world, but it's like, I will put it like this. What I find so fascinating. And I've spoken with quantum physicists and with theologists even. Some of them accepted my idea crazy that, you know, the best, we have our ordinary reality. Are you going into the idea that they accepted? No, no, accepted in the sense that they see, they, no, they accepted just that. They see that if you fully accept what I see as an ontological implication of quantum mechanics, that our reality is not all there is, that quantum waves or superpositions and so on,

form a different, totally different reality of its own, which our, which do not fit our notion of reality. but I think that here I intrigue that what fascinates me in quantum reality and I don't think I'm just playing here with vague homologies is that reality is in itself not fully constituted. What means wave function? It means it's not fully. determined in advance.

Reality is in itself ontologically open. And now, maybe you know this example. I forgot in what book, Introduction to Philosophy. I saw this ingenious parallel where you must know it. This is, if you ask me, your favorite philosophical joke. It's not a joke, it's a parallel, it's this one. When a guy tries to explain quantum indeterminacy through video games, you know, he said the creator creates a video game. But he sets rules.

For example, you see in the background forest. But there is no program for how each tree looks in the inside. Because it's not part of the game that you will go there. You have to remain on the main street or whatever. So it's an incomplete reality. In the background you have a blurred reality. And his idea is this where things become charming for me. That what if you assume the same for our reality that God, if we imagine a creator, was too lazy

to create it to the end? He said, we go to the micro level neutrons and so on. then people will be too stupid to move beyond, so why should I lose time? Constituable to the end. So the idea is, I'll use consciously this obscene expression, that quantum mechanics caught God with his pants down, as it were. Ah, you were too lazy here. We went too far.

In other world, if you imagine a God who properly constitute creation, our reality, quantum physics hinks at a level of reality, which was, as it were, left behind, left indetermined by God. For because of this, I think that quantum waves and so on are true measure of materialism. In the sense that I use here the term God in a very specific way. Not just old uncle sitting up there, but a total rational intuitive what you want, view of reality. As if there is some mind in which reality is totally present. No, the lesson of quantum physics is no.

There is no higher mind like that. There are only particular standpoints. The paradox, why I like this solution of mind, is that I use, as an argument for materialism, precisely what is usually quoted as an argument for idealism. You see, quantum mechanics teaches us that only our awareness,

observation, creates reality. Yeah, but something comes before. And that's what in Lakenian terms, I would have called the real. Something outside our reality, but which is there at its presupposition. And now,

I return to your beginning. Schelling was here the true genius because in his wealth altar, ages of the world, he has a wonderful, it hit me immediately the beginning, not the interrupt of the text, where he says,

okay, at the beginning was logos, the world, divine logos. But what was there before the beginning? You see, that's. Quantum physics answers that question. What was there before Logos introduced order and so on and so on, you know? Things are feeling a little less human these days, aren't they? But isn't the whole point of progress to make things more human? That's why, at TD, when we design a product,

whether it's an app for making trading easier or monitoring your account for fraud, we ask one simple question. How does this help people? That's how we're making banking more simple, more seamless, and more intuitive. But most importantly, that's how TD is making banking more human. I talk too much, I'm sorry. You should be more aggressive. You know, you talk about aggressivity and so on.

But I suspect you that you are basically a kind man, you know. Very dangerous. I'm a huge softie. I want to allow you to explain yourself and I want to, ensure that I'm not mischaracterizing you, so I don't want to stop you prematurely. But then characterize me in a brutal way. Okay. Here we go. Here's what I see. Here's what I see a mistake that many who get popular accounts of quantum mechanics do. So for instance, even when people talk about wave particle duality,

that's introduced in lecture one of a quantum mechanics course by a professor who's almost mystifying it to an audience to get them to like linear algebra. And then all of a sudden and it's never brought up again, because there's no wave particle duality as a formal duality. And then if you look at the axioms of quantum mechanics, it doesn't say, here's the wave part, here's the particle part, and so on. So anyhow, here's what I see happening. It says, okay, I would more like call it a wave particle characteristic of a quantum

mechanical object. That's the way that I would say, but it's many more words. But what is quantum mechanical object? Define it. What other things do we know or presume about it? what other dimension than either particle or wave? Is there anything else? I don't think there's a simple way to state it

other than something that's mathematical. So the concern that I have is that there is some pattern, like let's say, I'll place the link on screen and in the description. Quantum history is a book of yours. Okay. And in it you mentioned how there's necessity, there's contingency. Yeah. Okay.

Look, let's imagine you take A and then you put comma and then a B and you put the brackets around so that. that you have some, the commutator, and you're saying that that doesn't equal zero, okay, but that quantum mechanical statement has specific observable consequences, and it even has an observational bound, that's a Heisenberg uncertainty bound.

So it seems to me that what you're describing is more of the sort of, of just saying that there are symbolic acts that matter, you can't undo these symbolic acts, and the order matters. So, yes, but that could also be just said of if one wants to make a physics analogy of just ordinary path dependence. So when someone says that this is like quantum mechanical non-commutation, well,

is it like quantum mechanical non-commutation or is it like non-commutation or is it just like saying the order matters because saying the order matters is something we can say ordinarily, but the ordinary is not something people like. So they dress it up and they decorate it with quantum mechanics. I will tell you what. It's precisely that quantum reality has a series of properties. It changes notion of space, time, and so on, which do not fit our ordinary reality. And those properties interest me.

But I will try to answer another thing when you mentioned contingency, necessity, and so on. Here, again, I in advance admit my guilt that I'm jumping up and down. Hegel is usually taken as this ultimate idealist. Everything is deduced logically and so on. I don't know a philosopher more open to contingency than Hegel. Why? You know what Hegel says in the famous, you must know this passage, introduction to his, or forward, I think, to his philosophy of right.

He says philosophy can only grasp a social order which is already in decay. It can grasp its inner logic. Philosophy always comes too late. And then, you know, he says philosophy paints gray on gray, gray, gray concepts on gray, gray, gray, reality decay. Then he is much more materialist here than Marx. Marx still believes in some kind of teleology. After capitalism, socialism, we can get the logic of history where it points and act accordingly. For Hegel, this is prohibited. Hegel says we cannot say anything about future. Future is radically open. So what Hegel knows is this.

And here I see a parallel which maybe you will disagree, I give you the right, with quantum mechanics, not even parallel, because I think Hegel is often confused here and only quantum mechanics allows us to see what Hegel was aiming. You know, this quantum mechanic rule Roveli repeats this all the time, that in his, in a chapter of his last book that didn't yet appear, just got a tractor. He links a little bit too quickly, I think, Kirkegaard and Bor. He says that both refer as the ultimate act in a subjective choice. What you will choose, belief, or which dimension you will measure against Hegel who, no, but Hegel has this point which is also in Kierkegaard in Rovalley that history is open, it becomes necessary retroactively. There is necessity, but this necessity itself is contingent, in the sense that once you establish a necessity, once you make a contingent decision, you structure in a new necessary way,

you see a new pattern in the entire past. It sounds very small. speculative, but it's as if, again, you will kill me because this is my quick jumps, you fall in love and then you read all your past life in view of this as everything was pointing towards this and so on and so on. So what I find in quantum mechanics, it's not just this particle, blah, blah, duality, but this basic idea, not just everything is contingent, But through this contingency itself, rules arise, loss, whatever you call them, in an antimately contingent way. You know that in some tendencies, recent readings of quantum physics, you must know this better than me. Are they to be taken seriously or not?

You even have now evolutionary quantum mechanics where they claim that what we consider, perceive as natural loss, No, that after Big Bang there were more options and it was like a struggle for survival and in a contingent way one version one. I like to save the notion of contingency, sorry, of necessity, but something that it's not eternally necessary. Something out of, in a contingent way, something retroactively emerges as necessity. Is it the case that you started to like quantum mechanics because of Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics is physics and it sounds like Hegelian ontology? So relational properties then maybe get mapped to incomplete reality.

But it's not that I want to reduce it to Hegel. I'm well aware of Hegel's limitations and so on and so on. It's just that not only Rovelli but also others allowed me to read in a radically new life Hegel. himself his work. It's no longer this pan-logical Hegel he deduced from his mind everything. It's Hegel of radical openness, not Hegel of necessity, but Hegel of how necessities arise in a contingent way. Something contingently erases and establishes itself as a necessity. So let me ask you this. Is there a reason that there's a particular type of openness there's a heat equation on a Hamiltonian flow, on a projective complex space.

Why is it structured to not just be this radical openness, but it's of a particular kind? That's a very good question, but I try not to bluff more than necessary. So my answer to you would have been that you are now entering a domain where are these different kinds of openness and so on and so on, which is not, I must admit, my domain. What I'm just saying is that when we talk about openness, I don't mean any kind of domain of pure contingency and so on. It's a very, it's a determined world, but which arose in a contingent way.

For example, today, don't be afraid, I will not go into politics, but almost everybody agrees, that we are approaching some kind of the end of the world, all the threats and so on and so on. And I think that there is some basic truth in it, that we are approaching zero point. And that we cannot think in the old teleological way, either liberal or Marxist or pseudo-hegelian, where you say, no, no, at the end, there is socialism

or as Fukuyama thought, worldwide liberal democracy or whatever. The way we, so I'm not claiming, I'm not articulating, proposing openness in the sense of you can do whatever you want, everything is open and so on and so on. No, our openness today coincides, week, never in our history, I think, were we so close to a global catastrophe, ecological, artificial intelligence, I'm not opposed to it. I'm just saying we don't know. I love these questions, but I find all the contradictory answers, you know.

Again, I will give you a Socratic answer. Does AI artificial intelligence agent can be. they think, if they can, in what sense can they think and so on? Again, my point would be, what do you mean by thinking? What interest in artificial intelligence is that it will demand of us to redefine what does being human mean? Because, I mean, I have no doubt that artificial intelligence has already. has already, you probably know this better than me,

incredible capacities to cheat, to lie, to cover up, and so on and so on. At this level, it's infinitely more intelligent. So is there anything that makes us uniquely human, but now it's the crucial point. My point is not so, ha-ha, let the digital space do its calculations, but we are still the top of creation. No, I think that we probably, who knows, maybe in the digital space,

another type of spirituality which will emerge, which will be totally different, incompatible with our spirituality. We are still too anthropocentric when you say, oh, maybe they already think, and so on, we still propose our measure as the general measure. I'm here more, not a pessimist even, but like something radically new may emerge. This is why, to conclude with, but it's not a joke, it's connected with our topic.

Did you see the series Pluribus? Yes, very much like it. You know what, for me, the most, yeah, not how this hysterical 13, 14, 14, humans arrive, but what you learn from it about this, we, or whatever, the singular humanity subject.

You see that they're not happy at all. You know, which is for me the most depressive scene. You remember when the Polish nice woman takes the heroine to spend a night where this, we, they spend. It's a very

miserable, a kind of a gigantic stadium where they just sleep down, there is no sets, then you learn that they have problems with food, that they themselves are traumatized by the fact that they are programmed to do something and they don't know why. Why do we have to just to put all energy into spreading around this virus to other civilization? You know, this enigma of the other, there may be something authentic will emerge. you discover what I was talking already of intersebrate.

Not only the other is non-transparent, but you learn that the other is non-transparent to itself. They are perplexed. They claim happy, happy, join us. They are very miserable. They are not really happy. So what's the point? So here I'm here, you see what's my point.

Hegel is just for me, somebody who, has two, three premises. One is when things can go wrong, they will for sure go wrong. Hegel is not, what is Hegel's typical procedure? A big event like French Revolution, okay, let's take a look at it and what happens? In a couple of years, you get terror. You want freedom, you get terror. That's why I think Hegel would have loved at least early 20th century.

You know, you have October revolution, big freedom emancipation, wait for 10 years, Comrade Stalin is there. You know, this is Hegel. And another thing of Hegel is that big project always go wrong and necessarily go wrong and maybe something good emerges only in the second round after the failure. So it's a totally different Hegel from this official optimist and so on, you know. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time.

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This will maybe interest you. I even try to avoid Klett, but especially, maybe this is a mistake and I'm missing something. But I'm on. There are a couple of Instagram, X sites, which claim to be me. It's all done behind my back. I'm totally out of this. I have email and that's it. I am afraid of getting too attached to it.

I consciously try to remain old-fashioned in the sense of reading books, watching operas. People think I'm some kind of postmodern madmen. Sorry, I'm very conservative. I enjoy great operas. I enjoy... Wait just a moment. Are you saying that the penis pictures I get from your only fan's account aren't yours? There exists really?

No, are you joking? I'm making that up. Because I wouldn't be surprised. The only link I have with only fans is, you know, a friend of mine who still is a hero, Nadia Tolokonikova of Pussy Riot. He opened, I think, an only fan's account now, But I'm so surprised then when people try to pretend to be me, answer, imitate me, but they get it so wrong. But you know where is for me? I will tell you something.

Yeah. I checked at some of our departments. I don't know if with you it's the same. Isn't this a sad tragedy? What's the model in today's publishing in scientific journals? You have a QGBT, higher level, of course, right at a table. text. Then the journal said it is peer review. Fuck it. They use chat GBT to review it and then they publish it and at the end nobody really reads it because most that happens is that maybe some researcher ask its chat, GBT, go through that text and give me a resume and so on. You know, I'm not horrified by this, but I want to, I want to keep a,

a distance towards it. That's why, since I believe in the sense of humor, maybe you know more about it. How does it, how does it go with AI producing jokes? Can they do it? How good are the jokes? I don't think it's that great with jokes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other thing that I'm really afraid of is not, AI as such, but I wrote a book on it. This neural link, the idea of directly wiring our brain to a PC, to a digital network, no? It's no longer just a dream. Now I learned finally Elon Musk came. They will begin to sell them. First model, then, as always, Chinese already are commercializing it. And you know what I really hate?

You noticed it probably. They always introduce this as some kind of humanitarian measure. You know, like, oh, there was a crippled guy. Now we can communicate with him. He thought, okay, but what about the other aspect, which is we can potentially control even what you think. And this is, I'm not satisfied with my book, Hegel in a wired brain, but this is what really intrigues me.

If a neural link, that is to say, direct communication between our thoughts and digital space, if this will become a fact, how will this change our self-awareness if you know that you are open towards the machine, not only towards other beings. in what sense will we still be human and so on. I don't, I don't, I'm just asking people. Let me ask you this. Let me connect back to the beginning part of the conversation. When speaking about what was true, oh gosh, what was it?

Not meaning. Freedom, freedom. What was true freedom? Yeah. Okay, what is true humanity? Non-politically, I'm restraining you. Oh, no, don't be afraid. I will not go into communism.

We will be human. No, no. My standard joke of you should like this openness is, you know, Rosa Luxembourg, the great libertarian communist, said the future will be either socialism or barbarism, no? Well, you know what's her mistake? Stalin proved it can be both at the same time. It's not even the choice, you know. It's a quantum superposition, which was co-axed to a different basis.

Here I'm a little bit more careful, no. One should be, maybe I'm sometimes not careful enough by generally. too quickly the notion of superposition, but I nonetheless think that in a limited way, if one uses superposition in the sense that in a certain historical situation, it's not simply there is one option which would be the best and then will we catch it or not, that there are genuinely multiple options. And when one wins, it will. retroactively changes our perception of the past itself. For example, this is the Marx I like.

When he says communism offers the key to previous modes of production in the sense that Marx says anatomy of man is the key for the anatomy of the ape. He doesn't mean it teleologically. We are the crown of creation. But he is aware that humanity emerged out of apes, if it did by a pure coincidence chance, but once it's here it renders the past visible in this way. And till now it was. Fukuyama was right. Everybody mocked him. Liberal democratic welfare state was the highest standard because socialism, the way we had it failed.

And we are now at a total loss. We don't even have a standard, no? We are in a situation something like multiple, I use a metaphor, multiple superposition, but you know where I am not critical of you, but what are you then doing with quantum physicists? Don't you know how almost every imaginable theory you will find some idiot who advocates it? There is Big Bang, there is no Big Bang, there are multiple Big Bangs, universe is finite. This is a great point. So this is one of my concerns with some people who try to tie, much like you mentioned, the Vedic text, like ancient India.

Oh, quantum physics, the Vedic said this 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years. I get that comment plenty. I'm actually writing a substack post about that. But do you know that? Do you know that even Rovelli, he published in November, in that Noemma magazine, a text, his dialogue with some Veda guy, where they claim, yes, there is a deep spiritual similarity, between this Vedantic view of Anatman, Krishna, blah, blah, and quantum.

For me, you go to Gulak, if you claim this. A problem with that, there's two problems. One is that there's a similarity between almost anything. So I can find a similarity between my lip-bomb here and your life history. Okay, so you can abstract anything or generalize anything to find similarities with anything else, but then there's some harm that comes about from trying to harmonize. There are multiple ways of abstracting. In fact, if a mathematician or a physicist ever tells you

this object here is the generalization of another object, that's false. There's no such thing as the generalization. There's a generalization. If it was the generalization. I agree with it. And that's for me the lesson of quantum mechanics. And that's why I don't like this day themselves

sometimes fall into better. generalizations. Like in one of his texts the ultimate, whatever, about precisely your point, theory of everything, no? Roveli, I think, comes too close to this. He tries to discern some zero-level quantum oscillations outside time and space and says, this is it, the absolutely ultimate reality. But then when he tries to climb back into our reality, it does. It doesn't work, really. Remember, I said there were two problems. So one problem is the generalization

versus a generalization problem. Okay, another problem is that many people tie their religious beliefs to something about quantum mechanics or maybe something about the Big Bang. If you're a Christian, you say, oh, the Big Bang validates the beginning of the cosmos. But then the problem that I have is...

I know this is how the old Pope, John Paul II, shouted at Stephen Hawking. He said, Your domain is big bank. Beyond big bank, only we... Theolo can move. Yeah, sorry.

Listen, slowly, slowly I'm losing my time. I'm sorry. Oh, of course. Basically, what I was going to say is that I'm old-fashioned and that I think that your faith and your values, much of it should come down to faith. One should be honest about that. If we're tying our religious convictions to quantum mechanics

to some indeterminacy in quantum mechanics, but then let's imagine it turns out, oh, no, no, no, it's not indeterminiscences. indeterministic. There's actually just, it's super deterministic. Maybe that's actually the case. What if the Big Bang isn't the Big Bang? What if there are eons like Penrose says? So are you going to then overturn your religious beliefs because they were tied to this? Or are you going to find some other way? And so that's the issue is that, look, you're trying to say, not you. Not you. But one, one tries to say that this modern perspective of quantum mechanics validates this Indian text, the Vedantas or

whatever, invent a Vedanta. Okay, and that also assumes that that's all what India is, and they don't talk about vita-Vinata, which is dualism. Okay, but then if the modern physics changes and turns out to not validate it, do you then say, okay, I'm going to put less credence now into my religious beliefs? Probably not, because one already had that, and then they're trying to say, look at this, this fanciness over here validates this. Yeah, but you know, I totally agree with your point,

but I think it gets even more complex what I, for a long time, time thought that we, not scientists, we, philosophers, theologists, that we are making this, trying to appropriate it. But what surprises me again and again is how many quantum physicists themselves are searching for some foundation. For example, you know that a German guy who got together with some others, Nobel Prize, Zylinger, I think it's his name. Yes.

But he, again, he's friends with Dalai Lama. Yeah, there is a deeper spiritual dimension and so on and so on. The big enigma is why they themselves are prone to this. They criticize philosophy very much, but then again and again they fall into it. It's a complex. So look, one line of thinking, and this comes from Ian McGilchrist, it's his perspective on this, is that we have two modes, broadly speaking, these are generalizations.

One of generalizations, that's one of the modes. Yeah, yeah. So abstraction, and then another of uniqueness. And interestingly, the abstract one is the one that has racism in it because it sees you as the same as someone else of your race

and it doesn't distinguish between, whereas the right mode, as he calls it, the right versus left. It doesn't morphologically matter. But the right mode is the one that sees distinctness and uniqueness and this situation is different. This one has context.

The left mode is the one that sees, abstractions and generalizations. Now this left mode is, again, broadly speaking, what the mathematicians and the physicists tend to be engaged in, the min-maxed towards, on the max end. You'll notice that the interpretations that, again, broadly speaking, this itself is its own generalization,

so that's why I even loathe to say it, but I'm giving an Ian McGilchrist perspective, is that what they resonate with, broadly speaking, are those bastardizations of the East that comes from the New Age. So they see that as a sort of true East, to go back to this true, but the true East is quite varied.

And the ideas of they have of the soul is sometimes they have ideas that there is a reality to the soul that doesn't just ultimately go to Brahmine where one is, or Ottman, where one is the same as it. And that there's a reality of the other, there's realness that's not just

coming down to nond distinctness. There's a genuine belief in, free will in many of these other interpretations. Yeah. There's also a genuine belief that you have to not consume psychedelics, for instance, or drugs in general, that you have to act right. And that acting right is even prior to the meditation. So many people think they meditate themselves to the insight, but in many of these other

sects or interpretations, you have to act right first, you have to meditate as well, yes, but it's both in conjunction that get... Anyhow, this all gets molded in the West into thinking. in the core of the East is some kind of single relativistic, non-dualisticness, what have you, but that's false. That's just one strain of it. I hear you touch, and so sorry we don't have time, here you touched a crucial point. Because although, except for my quantum Hegelian view, I have infinite respect for Buddhism,

you know. But first, all the ethical ambiguities of Buddhism. On the one hand, you have this, you know, bodhisattva, no suffering, blah, blah. At the same time, Buddhism excelled in justifying brutal war. There is a wonderful book called Buddhism at War, forgot the name of the author, which goes in detail how the entire Japanese Zen Buddhist community justified in Buddhist terms brutal killing, claiming if you remain caught in false

bodily humanity, like, let's say we are opposing sight on a battlefield. I have a knife. My duty is to stick my knife into your eye, mouth, whatever. Since I'm, I hope so, relatively decent men, I would find problems. Zen Buddhist solution, because you are still called into your false ego. If you go through Satori, Nivara experience, you see that there is no substantial reality, just phenomena freely floating. And in this free float, my knife somehow hits your eye. And I am absolved of all responsibility and so on.

You know, but nonetheless, in spite of all, this. My second choice is Buddhism. You know what's only the problem of Buddhism? It will sound horrible. Yes, nirvana is an authentic experience. But I never found in Buddhism a good explanation of why did we fall from nirvana into our vulgar reality? I think the fall comes first. That's my focus. So I spoke to Wolfgang Smith. I know we both have to get going. I spoke to Wolfgang Smith, who studied in India and actually then became a Catholic. And he said, we read Buddhist texts, and we are mind-blown about how interesting they are,

and so forth. And we wonder, do they ever read our texts and think that, oh, this is an interesting idea? And he said, there is one respect, that there's something in Christianity that's not captured in the East, and that is the idea of the fall. Yeah, yeah. They don't have an idea of the fall. And Hegel, I follow here. you know what Hegel says?

Hegel says paradise was nothing. It's a retroactive dream. Fall means humanity. And the specific idea of Christianity is for me that the fall itself creates retroactively what it is the fall from. Uh-huh. That's what I don't quite find. Sorry, I have to run, but listen, at some point in the future,

It would be wonderful to repeat it, not with politics, I agree with you. But maybe with all this theology, Buddhism and so on, because I agree with you, I do have an infinite respect for Buddhism, but there is nonetheless some kind of ambiguity in it, you know. You can push it in the direction of infinite respect for life, but you can also push it in the direction of this indifferent. in the sense of all is just appearance and so on. I know you have to get going, but I want to agree with you in less than a minute. Okay, so many people like Neil deGrasse Tyson will say that if you take a look at the moon

or from a perspective of the moon, you look at the earth, and you say, wasn't it so foolish that we wasted all that bloodshed on war and so forth? Okay. Yes, I could take that perspective. I could also take the perspective of the person from Jupiter looking at the person on the moon saying, isn't it so foolish that you care that we cared that we had bloodshed and so forth and that all of it doesn't matter? But this is for me, quantum view in a metaphorical sense, only if you add, there is no global divine view which sees it all, which can locate all these experiences into a kind of harmonious totality.

That is crucial for me, no? Listen, can I ask you a racist question? I like. Please, I only like racist questions. Kurt is German and what is that? Jaimungai. What are you? I'm now asking you a Nazi question, your racial identity.

Yes, yes. Okay, well, please. I am from Trinidad. So the Caribbean. Oh my God, you sing beautiful songs there and all that bullshit, you know. But where does the German name come? I don't know, actually. I don't know.

But it is spelled with a C. So if it were German, it would be spelled for the K. That's true. It's gay. It's gay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a real pleasure. You know why for me? Because it wasn't necessarily talk about all this boring bullshit, Trump, Iran and so on. I'm so tired of that, you know. Yes, yes. It's horror. I agree. It's horror. And what happens in Gaza and West Bank. But my God, let's keep our spirits open, you know. Yes, yes.

Listen, it was a pleasure. I'm always open to you. You have my email. We can do it. No? Yes, yes. Thanks very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. The economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how the impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science. They analyze culture. They analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me a front row access to the economist's

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