Telos Initiative
Telos is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause or purpose of something. Our telos is to seek truth and cultivate wisdom using dialogue and rational discussion. The podcast will cover a wide range of topics in various genres and we hope to grow with our audience toward our ultimate purpose in this mystifying existence.
Telos Initiative
Episode 11 - Reality
Can you truly trust your senses, or are we all just players in a grand simulation? Join Angelo Cole, Chris Vigil, and Matt Maes on the Telos Initiative podcast as we challenge the boundaries of reality and uncover the layers that shape our world. From the tangible to the intangible, we dissect objective and subjective experiences, drawing parallels between the consistency of waking life and the unpredictability of dreams, which echo quantum-like realms. Our exploration includes the powerful influence of imagination, which acts as a bridge between mental manipulation and the profound, offering a unique lens through which we perceive reality.
As we journey through the intriguing interplay of mind and emotions, the metaphor of "mental hands" emerges to illustrate the dexterity of thought and perspective. The mind's ability to guide focus based on desires and goals is highlighted, as well as the significant role emotions play in crafting our personal realities. We address the collective aim toward truth, reflecting on societal progress through shared goals and the balance of tradition with new perspectives. The metaphor of clay captures the dual nature of reality—both solid and malleable—while acknowledging the existence of absolute truths, such as mathematical principles, which stand independent of human perception.
Finally, we venture into the realm of simulation theory, pondering whether our existence is part of a larger game. By referencing pop culture favorites like The Truman Show and The Matrix, we contemplate the philosophical implications of living in an artificial reality. Flow states and authenticity are discussed as we seek meaning beyond mere productivity, encouraging a harmonious blend of purpose and engagement. Through humor, insight, and a touch of whimsy inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we aim to connect listeners to the grand tapestry of existence and their unique place within it.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Telos Initiative podcast. I'm Angelo Cole.
Chris:I'm Chris Vigil.
Matt:And I'm Matt Mas.
Angelo:Today we are going to be talking about reality, ooh, objective reality, subjective reality. We might get a little bit into simulation theory. Who knows, who knows? So I guess, to kick us off, we always like to start with a general definition of what we mean by reality.
Chris:Ah jeez.
Angelo:So I know it's kind of tricky to define, but I think implicit in the definition is the idea that reality is what is real, what is the most objective level of being, ontologically or metaphysically.
Chris:Those are some big words.
Angelo:I think if you're talking about a dream, like some people like to compare reality to a dream and say what if reality is actually a dream, well, a dream, by definition, is not reality. It's an illusion, it's something that takes you outside of reality. You know you're dreaming because you wake up into reality and so if this level of reality is actually a dream, it by definition is not reality.
Matt:What if we thought of it in terms of density? Maybe a good word, I think, to think about it Like say, we've got the, you know well if we referred to them as different levels of reality, right?
Matt:Say like the dream, like there are things within dream, like you know, like dream symbolism. There are things that you know that have certain weight or certain symbolism. But when you're pulled out of the dream and you're in waking reality, then the dream itself that you just had doesn't itself, in your reality, affect your walking around in daily life. Like this is, you know, physical reality. Right, then you have your personal reality and this is something I you know, I would love to get into that, this, uh, this conversation too, like the relation between your you know, your personal feelings and the way that the world is, and reconciling the two.
Matt:You know like why, like why is it that there is a friction there? Why is there that that seems that we're so often out of sync in the way that we feel about the world, in the way that we are able to respond to the world and and cognizize our navigating around?
Angelo:I think. I think reality has something to do with consistency. So if you're able to wake up from a dream and you go and you're able to get into a routine, you go to the same place. Things are predictable. I can go to work, I can come home, I know where I put my jacket and if I go back, my jacket's still there. There's consistency there. And if I'm in a dream, a lot of consistency breaks down. I might put my jacket somewhere in my dream and then a bunch of random stuff happens and I come back to that same spot and I'm like wait, I thought I put something here. Maybe I didn't, I don't know. And so there's a level of inconsistency and mystery yeah, mystery.
Matt:I think mystery is a really great word for it.
Chris:I think what you just described is something like like the dream reality is like a quantum reality, because when you get down to things on a quantum level in terms of physics, probability starts to break down in a way that you can't predict things.
Chris:Okay, so it's like predictions, another um another tell along with consistency so we're already talking about like a physical reality that we live in, right, that's bound to laws of physics and mathematics to a point, and then, beyond that, I mean when we come down to ourselves, we have like a biological reality that we have to live by. Right, male, female, somewhere in between their veins, our central nervous systems operate in a certain way, they have certain potentials, capacities, and then, beyond that, we get into intellectual realities, right, like what is the way in which I can, cognizant about my salience landscape, right back to our consciousness episode, and and what we're coming to contact with the physical, the biological, and then our emotional reality, right, what's our emotional response to that? And then spiritual reality, somehow tying everything together in a mysterious, mystical manner okay, so how many levels was that?
Angelo:that was um one, two, three, four, five, okay just laying out again what was it physical, physical reality, or did you said quantum? Let's, let's forget about the quantum just because it's, so it's like it's tethered to like quantum where you use the word quantum, quantum physics, right, and I'm not sure if that's what you're trying to.
Chris:So we could. I would not call quantum reality dream reality. Like dream reality is something else, but I wanted to tether it to dream reality as opposed to waking life. But that's separate from the realities that I distinguished in the second part, which was the physical reality, the biological reality, intellectual, emotional and spiritual realities.
Angelo:Okay, it's interesting to me that you put emotional so high, because I would think of emotions as being tied to the physical, to the body. Okay, yeah, that's fine, Because emotions are chemically based right Adrenaline and epinephrine, not epinephrine, oxytocin Mm-hmm oxytocin and all those things are biological processes that kind of emerge out of the. Okay, sure, the physical plane is what I was thinking.
Chris:So I'm kind of curious about why you put it so high, so everything that's like well, I put it high because I I think it's it's less, ah, specific more abstract more abstract.
Angelo:Yeah, okay then okay, so you're, maybe you're going psychologically here you're, you're thinking of like external to the internal and we experience emotions closer to the internal. So this is like a phenomenological sort of scale.
Chris:I like that.
Matt:I think that's a good way to look at that yeah, you know, it's like it's our relative relationship to the world, or a lot of our relative relationship to the world, like if you think about our, our skin you know, like the largest organ on our body, and we can feel things with our, uh, with our skin, right, and so emotions allow us to sense from outside.
Matt:We can feel pleasure through our skin, we can feel pain through our physical bodies. Right, it's not necessarily telling us how to navigate around in the world, but it's giving us signals about how the world is, uh, the world is affecting us, how we, how we feel about reality around ourselves. It's, like, you know, we could say, like a thermometer. It's or maybe that's a good way to put it, maybe you know even broader than that, right, and we have different, different like flavors of emotions.
Matt:Right, I mean, you have sad, but then you have like something like you know, melancholy is almost like a beautiful sadness, but then you have depression and all of these different you know tints and shades of different emotions that give you, that give you different sense of how you're relating with the world, how you're relating with the world, how you're relating with yourself, and being able to give you kind of a starting point to begin to think about what to do about those things or how to think about them.
Chris:So because time, as we've discussed before, is acting on us in a forwardly manner, constantly, right, I think that these different stages of reality, especially like the emotional reality that we experience, informs the other aspects of our reality and vice versa. Right, like one minute I might feel really depressed and then I read a book that will change my intellectual reality and my salience landscape intellectually and that will inform my emotions, which might make me feel better, which will inform my physical, my biological reality, and those things are also in a confluence with each other.
Matt:Yeah, I think when we talk about the salience, the emotions are directly tied in there. It's a relationship between the mind and the emotions. I mean, what is it about? What's important to you, what we would like to think of it as you know, like mentally. We would like it to be, just like mentally, what's most important. I guess if we were just strictly thinking from the mind, you know, but what is it that captures your attention? What's most important? I guess if we were just strictly thinking from the mind, you know, but but what is it that? What is it that captures your attention? What is it that captures your interest in these?
Matt:different subjects I mean, here we are talking about reality. What is it about? What is it about talking about reality that so draws us in and makes it, you know, makes us feel like it's an important thing to talk about? And be able to throw our energy into it.
Angelo:That has to do with relevance right.
Matt:Yeah.
Angelo:There's a necessary component of identity here. So everything you experience through your salience, landscape, even through things as deep as your emotions, landscape through, even through, um, things as deep as your emotions or, um, things that you wouldn't consider, you know, mental processes so much as biological body processes all of these things have like a sort of focus and, um, an aim. So you, we we kind of talked about this a little bit before you sort of direct your attention based on relevance. You direct it to things that align with whatever your current goal happens to be. So you know a floor is a thing to walk on. You know, if you're hungry, your focus kind of aims towards how can I get food and you're looking at obstacles and tools around you and your body and your mind are kind of responding to these things. And there's like a periphery where there's things that you completely ignore, necessarily because you can't pay attention to all of the details in reality.
Chris:You just can't, especially if you're hungry, right?
Angelo:You get really hungry and you kind of zone in and you.
Chris:That's why hangry is the thing Like if I can't get food right now and I have to keep working and that emotion targets, things that you view as obstacles in that moment.
Angelo:So you know you've got a spouse or something and she's angry and you're trying to feed her and all of that attention is like you're in my way, why aren't you getting me food? True story.
Matt:Some experience. It's funny, there's this there's a relationship between the, between the emotions and your body, like what you can, like they can influence each other, like with happiness, like if you're like you can, you actually can smile, you actually can get into a different posture and actually get into a different state. I think you can do that with your mind and your emotions too, when you're focusing on certain things and then that thing becomes, you know, important through your focus, through through your attention, and then your emotions can follow that, follow what you're. You know where your mind is going and it's through your attention and then your emotions can follow that, follow where your mind is going. It's like it's fascinating to me I've been thinking about the mind's eye, but also the hands of the mind inside as well being able to turn something around in your hands or turn something around in your mind and seeing the different that's an interesting phrase.
Angelo:I've never heard that before.
Matt:Before the hands in the mind that one came to me pretty recently. Yeah, so being able to to look at something in different directions, in different, different, orientation your orientation, yeah, and then you know your emotions can sort of feel around what it is that you are turning around in your mind.
Chris:So so the the hands metaphor is about like trying to get a grip on an event or something, or is it like maybe I missed the?
Matt:point. Well, it's well, simply, the well simply the subject that you have in your mind. It could be an event, it could be a certain subject, something that you want to see, the I mean the way I interpreted, it was like you have the capacity in your mind to change perspective yes and so it's almost like you have some sort of hand.
Angelo:It's, it's a, obviously it's a virtual, but you're the turning in there is the capacity to change your own view on an idea.
Chris:Yeah, that's my bad. I took that way too literally.
Matt:I was like okay, so I'm imagining a hand in my mind. But when you're doing any mental work of some kind too, like imagine the hands inside your mind actually working on that thing, actually doing, actually having a working capacity in that way.
Angelo:Yeah, which brings us to imagination, because on some level, imagination is a projection of reality. You could be imagining something that you perceive to be very real and it could be something in the present. It could be imagining something that you perceive to be very real and it could be something in the present. It could be some, a memory of something in the past, or it could be a projection of what you're trying to do in the future. So it goes across time.
Chris:So when I take this pen and imagine it to be a lightsaber, I'm trying to be a jedi that's your, I'm guessing future hope for your. Yes, it is, I'm gonna get the cloak and everything it's gonna be great sure, I mean obviously there's.
Angelo:There's a component to imagination that it can explore. Fantasy. Right, you can imagine yourself in something that you logically know isn't actually part of reality and you don't expect to actually participate in that, but you entertain the idea like being a jedi and living in the star wars world well, actually this gets into a really interesting thing.
Chris:Um, one of my favorite spiritual works is the imitation of christ by thomas akampis, and one of the opening you know things is that he says you need to detach yourself from the physical world and find your center in the invisible things. And I, I just the way I practice that right, is when I look at an icon of Jesus and I try to, I guess, transmute right that energy like his holiness, his everythingness, from that icon onto and into myself. Right, that takes my imagination, like what is it like to, you know, be jesus? Right, I mean, a lot of crazy people they end up in in places and they're like I'm jesus, because their imagination, you know, kind of overtakes them in a way. But I think there's there's a good idea there that we transfer these immaterial ideas from symbols onto ourselves so that they project through our minds back into reality.
Matt:Yes, and that's a really fun line to dance, I think. And speaking of imagination, I think a lot of that is in like a future tense and visionary capacity as well, being able to project something into the future, project, something that could be, and then in some way making that real.
Angelo:Right, I think that might be be. If you're a materialist, that might be a an idea of how imagination evolved, like the capacity to project the future and adapt to it. Like perhaps, uh, if you can imagine that there might be a predator in the bush, rather than actually testing it out physically, that gives you an advantage over a creature that just purely acts on and reacts to whatever is happening to right because, say, you haven't seen that saber-toothed tiger yet, so you have.
Matt:No, you might not have or you haven't encountered yet, but you've heard of people who have. And so then you can say, oh wait, that might happen in the future. That could be just a rustling in the bush over there or that could be a dangerous creature, I don't know. But I can mentally account for that, for for future action yeah right.
Chris:Well, you take those proverbial hands you have in your mind and you're like it could be a saber-toothed tiger. It might now let's find the middle ground here exactly be safe those good old mental hands.
Chris:Um, actually, I think, uh, like projecting right, like throwing a um, a javelin or something at a, at a, something we're hunting right, that was one of the key evolutionary steps that we had to take, um, because you had to imagine right, your time still acting forwardly. You have to imagine where is this animal going to be in 10 seconds so I can interesting project it or shoot it with an arrow that I made.
Angelo:Yeah, perhaps it's linked to aim. Yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Matt:It is fascinating how much comes back to aim, isn't it?
Angelo:Mm-hmm. It all comes back to focus as well, mm-hmm.
Chris:And narrowing the sight and the periphery focus as well and narrowing the site and the periphery. So so how do we take our minds in, in, in our, in our single, uh, egotistical reality that makes us who we are? How do we transfer our ego onto a greater context that also focuses on what's important?
Angelo:I think that's done collectively. You do that with other people. So you see, you see other people and what they're aiming at and, um, evolutionarily that would be why we have whites in our eyes, by the way is you're looking at other people and you're the the ability to be able to see what they're looking at, and we evolved together what yeah, think about it like oh the reason that eyes and faces are so important to you is because you want to know what other people are aiming at interesting.
Chris:So where did you read that?
Angelo:well, that was actually from, uh, jordan peterson, huh, and he probably got it from uh, an evolutionary biordan, peterson, huh, and he probably got it from uh, an evolutionary biologist, I assume yeah, and he probably got it from stone tablets in china.
Chris:Honestly, I have no idea.
Angelo:The specific source for it, but it makes sense interesting it's a theory, but yeah, it is. It goes back to aim right, but if we, if we evolve to understand how we, each other, is aiming, that's a positive thing.
Chris:It's, it's cooperative, it's not competitive that's actually exactly why we're here doing this right as the three of us came together right, had a, had a lunch together and we were like. You know what we're aiming for the truth here yeah, let's and collectively
Angelo:aim and and we sharpen each other's um ideas, we bounce them off of each other, we trim off the the bad ideas and together we we get closer to the truth that way, and that's how society does it. That's why it's so important for humans to connect we. We all are working together, aimed at something bigger, and we this is a idea that we brought up so many times in other discussions is what's the idea behind the religious impulse? We're all collectively aiming at something you know. To me, that's you can't do it alone. You just can't. You. You can. You would have to reinvent the wheel all the time and even if you're not a religious person, it's. The scientific endeavor is a collective thing, because you have to rely on what past scientists have done and you have to trust that what they're doing makes sense and you have to trust that there's a reality there that they're testing that's consistent, in order for anything to make sense.
Matt:As far as truth goes, yes, and you know you really inspired some idea I have to share. This, too, is in terms of the traditional or the, the generations that have built up that, that work and have done all that, you know, built up all those foundations, and then the ones who are trying to, you know, push into the future right, and that you know the growing pains and that that tension right, and I think a lot of what comes with religion and what comes with faith are things like meaning and purpose and things that are inherent are meaningful in our lives.
Matt:But then you have, you know, someone who comes after you and you can. That person can say well, I myself say, in the subjective sense, didn't have a hand in owning, creating any of this culture or creating any of this, any of this lore that's been built up. And I want to. You know, you want to forge your own thing and you want to. You know, you want to feel like you're building something on top of that. Right, but you know, but you can't, just, you can't just cut under what's been built up just in order to say like, well, it could just be anything, you know, it could just be any reality, and there's a lot of freedom and agency in that for sure.
Angelo:Well, it's a destructive impulse because you're saying everything that all these past people have built and worked together on. I'm going to scrap it and consider it fallible. But you know, there is something to the idea that humans are fallible and they can make mistakes and sometimes rigid structures need to be torn down. So there is a merit to skepticism. You should test things and you should recognize when certain institutional structures have become corrupt, and you should be willing to change your mind, even if it's difficult, if you come to a greater knowledge you know, I I feel like there's just so much corruption, right and darkness that's embedded in everything across the planet.
Angelo:It's perhaps pretty horrible um, perhaps that could be, that could be a fear based on past experience.
Chris:So one of my spiritual heroes right was when I was in high school. I read the Life of St Francis of Assisi and, as he was right, spending all of his time A like rejecting his monetary inheritance, rejecting his familial inheritance like he didn't want. Rejecting his familial inheritance Like he, you know, didn't want anything to do with his dad. His dad was super rich, but he was like you know what? I hear the poor just crying out to me. So he gave up all of his possessions, put on a brown like tunic, right, which is just what poor people wore.
Chris:And then God told him Francisis, I need you to go and rebuild my church. So he physically rebuilds three churches in italy I think they're still there and then, but he can still hear god in his mind saying like francis, rebuild my church. And he gets it. He goes oh, I need to go to rome, I need to go to the Vatican and show them what it actually means to be a Christian, which is to give up everything you have and decentralize your ego from yourself and let the Spirit of Christ act within me and he completely reformed the church by his example.
Chris:Wow, and that was at the same time with saint dominic too, who, according to legend, we got the rosary from. So we have the spirit of the poor and spirit of christ in francis and then the powerful prayer of the rosary in tandem. Interesting, I thought that was really cool yeah, that's.
Angelo:That's pretty incredible. Yeah, jesus, take the wheel.
Chris:I just think if our world needs a response to the meaning crisis and the corruption that the world offers, it's got to be something radical that does undercut some of what we've built, but to replace it with the eternal truth and the eternal goodness that will last let's walk back to reality a little bit more about reality and our salience landscapes so how about we talk about the idea of the difference between objective and subjective reality?
Angelo:is there such a thing as objective reality or are we all, subjectively, just projecting our own reality through our minds? Like you know, renee descartes, yeah, sort of way.
Matt:Here's the way I like to think about it. At least, to begin to think about it is say the objective world around us is very solid in the ways that it is like. Imagine a piece of clay or something like a clay pot or something like that it is. You know, we're not going to go and say that it isn't clay, right, but we can also shape that reality in different ways you know, we can.
Matt:We can move around and we can do different things. That that, while it's solid, it can change and it is changing all the time. Right, but the substance of that reality is still the same. Right, there's certain things that are baked into reality. That okay, that are not, that are not changing things that are that have inherently just been there since the beginning, right I think the key, the key thing here is you gotta try to understand things that you might take for granted.
Angelo:What gives you the capacity to call that clay in the first place? How are you identifying it? What is clay and not clay? Right yeah, you've got to draw a boundary around that thing yeah and give it an identity and name it right.
Matt:Yeah, oh, and let me round that out a bit too, there are things that also you can't shape, also things that are in fact around you. Maybe you are the piece of clay like, say, there are different levels again that that mirror each other. Right, so you, you can be a creative person in this world and in fact are right but, then there are also events around you and the, the thusness of reality that is affecting you and changing you know, fashioning you in different ways, and you are able to co-create with it.
Angelo:Maybe the key to the idea of how to talk about objective reality is this notion of discovery, because if everything comes from the self, there is no such thing as genuine discovery, because it's all coming from you already, right? If you can genuinely discover something, there's got to be something outside of you that can change you. What do you think of that?
Chris:I'm trying to think about it.
Angelo:See here, because is it really discovery if you knew everything the whole time? You know, I've been thinking, because if everything comes from you, then deep down you already knew it.
Matt:I've been thinking more and more recently about how much we can think about ties into a humanist perspective. We can think about ties into a humanist perspective right, like say that you know that really is kind of that mindset of everything is projected from the human mind, or all these things like you know language, we made up language and all this stuff, but there's a substance to it, you know there's like you go really down to it.
Matt:There's, there's a structure there that precedes our invention, that precedes our, our conceptions that we have otherwise, like you said, you know, discover, like it's. Like einstein didn't decide e equals mc squared. He discovered it right, you know, he found it out, and you'd have to say the same thing about all mathematics right, like one plus one equals two.
Angelo:And if you wiped out the world and had to rebuild society from the ground up and reinvent math, they might have a different word for one and plus and two. But guess what? They can come to the same conclusions because there's consistency. Yes, there's consistency in this reality but, it's a discovered thing. There's genuinely something outside of yourself that you can learn and adapt to absolutely okay, the fact I love at least that's my position.
Matt:Actually, I want to highlight that, yeah, like if everything were wiped out, say there were no humans like any, anything like that then that reality would still be the same mm-hmm, and that's what we're trying to talk about when we're talking about objective reality.
Chris:Yeah I've heard the idea before that if humanity was wiped out, we had to some form of life had to evolve on the earth again. We would probably recreate science books almost exactly the same way. It would be in a different language, right.
Angelo:But they would be extremely similar. You know, it's been so long since we had our language talk. I wonder if we touched on this before, but I can't remember if we did. But I feel like, I feel like somewhere in there I might have mentioned the idea of umwelt umwelt is that?
Matt:definitely said that word yeah, so you may reiterate.
Angelo:To reiterate, I remember you said, like two episodes ago at least oh, okay, well to reiterate, for those of you, so you don't have to go digging for this word, it's a german, words of content, it's a german word that mean it's basically means a creature's entire subjective experience summed up, so your umwelt is all of your life, the all of the colors you see, all of the experiences you have um personally like for you and your umwelt can overlap with another human beings and there are shared experiences. Like you know what it's like to be human, you know what it's like to have skin and two eyes and, uh, what it's like to be this age and what it's like to have similar hair. But me and a frog might have some overlap as to what it means to be an animal, but that frog is going to have a completely different umwelt as far as the type of eyes that frog has and what it's able to see, and the type of sentience that that frog has and how things taste to that frog it.
Matt:It touches on this notion of the subjective experience and how we all have such radically different takes on reality I love that, that, that word I love, like words like this that we have yet to express or, you know, account for. In english, that means something we haven't quite put our finger on, but it's like your unique experience, your unique reality, but also that which can overlap and relate to another's reality who shares your same experience so what do you guys think about getting into simulation theory?
Chris:sounds good to me you know.
Matt:Here's the question I have is whether or not we live in a simulated reality. What are the implications, you think, of being in a simulation versus a, let's say, more real reality based?
Angelo:on all that we've, that we've talked about, you know I think most people are fascinated by simulation theory because it means that there's a secret, higher level of reality that could potentially be obtained, and it also kind of means that the in a sense that the consequences of this reality don't mean as much. So maybe there's a sort of like secret escape, like, oh well, none of this is actually real. If you think about it deep down, there's actually another level to reality so well, maybe, maybe it's some in our pop culture too.
Matt:They've presented this to us, like you know. Think about the truman show or the matrix, where you have this, this, you know, artificial reality around you right and if we look at culture, I mean I don't want to get into society's different things, but I mean if you look around, there's a lot of artificiality around us. There's a lot of things that are not um life-giving and sustaining and feel unnatural, you know and are very unnatural around us.
Matt:So I think it is important to be aware of those things, whether you believe that it's, you know, simulated, or whether we live in a more. What's a good word for it? Uh, organic reality, right?
Chris:the the only thing that's like really natural in this room, right? Our, our bodies, everything else that's surrounding us is something that we engineered to fit, you know, our needs or our wants. And I had that same thought, too, not too long ago, that like no wonder we think that we live in a simulation or some sort of simulated reality, because everything that surrounds us is invented, like cars, modern homes, computers. It's also.
Angelo:So in a sense, there's complete truth to that idea, just not on the grandiose level that we think it is. There's. Yeah, we do live in a simulated reality created by ourselves, if that to some extent.
Chris:I think that's very true. We're extremely removed from our primordial coming ups and beginnings.
Matt:I'd be curious about the psychology of different people who believe that too, because I think a lot of the way that your environment is the way that, like what it is about your personality, your psychology, that can lead you to come to certain conclusions. You know, like what is, or what is it, or here's here's a good question, like what's the payoff of thinking in that way? You know what's the payoff of thinking in that way that we live in a simulated reality?
Chris:for some reason it's always most philosophers when they write about this. It's always justice, like you, justice. They always bring up justice as an example. But because we have a concept like justice, like mercy, and we wonder where do these immaterial things come from?
Angelo:and because that idea is so far removed from physical reality, I think that leads us to wonder is there more to life? So why? Why justice? What? What makes you think it's about justice?
Chris:I didn't think it. I don't think it's about justice, and most people, when they offer an example to prove their points, just mention happen to mention that one. It's commonly referred to. That doesn't mean as in so?
Angelo:so you mean, like when someone brings up simulation theory, there there's a sort of moral responsibility element that they're shirking uh, so justice, I could have said any word.
Chris:Justice was just a placeholder for the idea of immaterial thoughts and immaterial values.
Angelo:Okay.
Angelo:So, you're just talking about like a value structure. Yes, okay, I do think. I mean, I do think that there is some sense of like shirking moral responsibility to an extent, because if all of this isn't real, then it's just some little game that we're playing Like. Think about the Matrix you brought it up earlier. All of those people living in the Matrix that are concerned with their lives and concerned about you, know what they're eating and their problems and and all of this stuff. Ultimately they're slaves to robots in the actual reality. None of that is real. They don't actually have problems in that world, in that body. If they were able to somehow escape from that reality, all of those problems would just be null, they would be nothing. So in a sense, it's kind of like a coping mechanism to take yourself outside of reality and to seek something else seek something else.
Matt:I think people can often throw the baby out with the bath water in some ways too, you know, like, like, for example, when we talk about, when we talk about flow state and we talk about how you can be in the zone and you can be, I mean that's a state where you can be super productive, like, let's say, that's the you know, one quality that you have.
Matt:You can be really optimized in putting your energy towards something right. But then, on the flip side, people who are stuck in a job that they have, a position that they have, and like I don't want to give my, my energy, all this energy, and towards this other thing that's not me, this other thing that is not genuine to who I am, all those things. So in their minds, that productivity becomes this thing towards this artificial thing that they don't want to support, when that's just, that's just a facility of using the energy. Like the flow is an organic thing, it's a thing that's actually natural and and good and in fact you know it's. It's. It's an amazing state to be in right, regardless of your position or whatever you're.
Chris:You know whatever you happen to be doing right, but it's you know, things like that that I think can can really often be mixed up and mistaken for the same thing you know, I've come into contact with a lot of people who feel like their jobs, like their nine to five, isn't real, like that's not who they are, that's not who they're meant to be, and so I don't know. I think you know people need to find a way to incorporate a higher reality into their lives.
Angelo:I mean it's, it's probably touching on a mechanism that's that has utility, right so?
Chris:okay, if you.
Angelo:If you are able to step outside of something and break your frame and look at it from a higher perspective, say, you know you are in some sort of monotonous job and you're, you're kind of caught up in the pattern and the ritual and and you need to break out of it because you've just you're bored to death or you just don't feel like you're headed in the right direction.
Angelo:If you're able to take a step outside of that and it goes back to the imaginal right and you're able to imagine this situation and and look at it and how you can change it, you're, you're sort of um, in a sense stepping outside of reality and taking a higher perspective. I think that simulation theory is that same mechanism in the brain. They're kind of trying to take everything we know about reality and step outside of it and try to look at it from a higher perspective. Because of that, there's this sense of like oh, I have better knowledge of what's going on, I have this better position that I can understand the world from. But it's almost a false sense of superiority.
Matt:Well, it's like you have to wash your mind too when you're in that perspective. Wash your mind too when you're in that perspective, like, say, you've been so in this, in this artificial reality, and so you can be so cynical and you can be so, you know, skeptical and skepticism, like doses of skepticism, are a good or a good thing for sure. But then you, when you get out of it and you can be so critical of that reality and you can be so like, oh, I'm a master of this route, but there's no heart to it you know, there's no, there's no soul, there's no redemptive quality in that perspective, right, like you just want to have the psychological feeling that you know the whole world and that you are superior in your knowledge capacity.
Matt:Right, and it's like you know. Going back to the archetypes, it's like the magician trying to be on the throne of the sovereign when it's really not its place right, it's.
Angelo:It's a power motivation, the, the will to power, as Nietzsche would say.
Chris:Did either of you guys read or watch?
Angelo:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've definitely watched the movie. I want to say I read the book, but I don't know if I finished it. Oh, it's so good, it's so good.
Matt:So if you don't remember, if you haven't watched the movie, it is really funny. The.
Chris:Earth is like a simulated, like a created thing by some alien race, because we're actually a supercomputer that is trying to compute the question. We already know the answer. Right, the answer, he's famous for it. The answer is 42. But we don't know what the question. We already know the answer, right, the answer he's famous for. The answer is 42, but we don't know what the question is. And then, later on in the series, we learn that the question and the answer cannot occupy the same reality at the same time. So right at the last minute, right when earth is about to compute its question, the grand question, it gets destroyed and made to make room for like a space super highway that they don't even really need.
Chris:And it's so stupid bureaucracy it's hilarious, oh man but, um, yeah, I mean, you know, created things and there was a point I was about to make and I lost it as I was telling the story. But what's the end of our? What's the telos of our simulated reality?
Angelo:I think we've kind of touched on this idea before, but I do think it has something to do with collective identity and the impulse to love, right, that's kind of what everyone secretly knows but doesn't say out loud. We're all motivated into a deeper form of connection, and when I use the word love, I don't mean sentimental, oh, oh. I just really really have a strong emotion for a person. Love is, uh is not an emotion in this context. Love is. Love is a word to describe the, the deepest connection. Um, it's, it's almost. It's interesting because it's almost the idea of, uh, unity and diversity coexisting at the same time. Wow, yeah, so you, in order to love someone, you have to be different from them, you have to be separated in order to have that bond. So there's a uniting principle between you, but there needs to be more than one. I like that idea.
Chris:I really do, that's great, that's brilliant.
Matt:Like you have to cross a distance in order to meet that person, otherwise it's otherwise. I mean, how easy is that for everybody? You just love everyone, that's just yeah.
Chris:Perfectly like you, otherwise we're just some weird hive mind and we all look and say I think and say the same thing, yeah then it's just, then it's just.
Angelo:Unity and separation is an illusion. But there's no love there, it's just. You just are. Love necessarily needs diversity.
Chris:That's powerful.
Angelo:I love it. Yeah, love it. I like this idea of insight. So we were talking about discovery before, and you kind of brought up the flow state even too, and we're kind of dancing around this topic of insight when it comes to reality. We're kind of dancing around this topic of insight with with when it comes to reality. I do think that insight is is a key component in understanding that you are not the center of the universe. There's something about this reality that you're part of, like a grand narrative, and when you and when you have an insight, it has something to do with relevance that I was talking about earlier, with this relevance realization where you let me think how to phrase it when, whenever you have an insight, it's aligning you closer to your telos in a sense.
Angelo:That's what the insight is, is you feel like you're closer to a pattern of whatever that deeper motivation is, and that's genuine discovery. You're like, oh yeah, I'm on the right path or there's some truth here. That's that insight.
Matt:It's a compass and something lights up within you, and I've been thinking a lot recently about communication like wise communication, you know, and the speech as a junction between the mind and the heart. Even think about how your throat, your mouth, is equidistant from your heart and your mind.
Matt:You know it's like being able to go deep and think about wells within your mind and you're being able to go down. In that capacity, you're being able to dive deep down and that's where the insights are. Where the insights are, you know, the further down you're able to hold your breath and go down into the depths and find that insight, bring it up and bring it through you in your mind. You realize it and to be able to communication, to communicate it, but also it's salient, you're passionate about it. You can communicate it with gusto, you know, and that's what makes people feel it, you know, and it becomes reflected in the places that they come from. You can affect somebody in their mind, but also change their hearts at the same time I want to say we, if you know that insight.
Angelo:If you notice, we use higher and lower a lot in our analogies yeah, and I'm a lot of people do, like there's something to that. I almost want to do a whole episode like altitude or something oh, please, but yeah but think about it like when you say you're reaching down into something lower, what?
Angelo:what exactly are you talking about? Or when we say we're, we're getting higher consciousness, what's higher about it? Right, and because there's lower isn't necessarily negative, like sometimes we associate it with negative, but in the context that you used it there's a sense of I'm reaching down into. It's almost like some something primordial, right?
Angelo:yeah, oh, I was it's got to be I want to say there's, there's like it's tied to something, like um instinct or subconscious, like even calling it subconscious. It's beneath consciousness, it's something to do with, it's built into your body, almost, and that's why the heart is lower than the mind, metaphorically. The heart is tied closer to your primordial instincts. Your emotions, your, your connection to mother earth is down, yeah, and when you're talking about getting something higher, you're talking about like order, right, sacred order, something maybe epistemological, the knowledge or time or something above that gives you a higher perspective of what's going on. So the mind, necessarily, is higher.
Matt:Yeah.
Angelo:And they meet in the middle. There's this conjoining of the higher and the lower.
Matt:The confluence. Think about if we in ourselves are the confluence. Another example I think of is like the roots, you nailed it with the primordial, the earthiness, you know, like reaching your hand down into it and gripping something that you have to. You know you have to dig to get to it. You know it's in the soil, it's, you know it's like a thing that you unearth right and then the higher right, that's like what's another good word.
Matt:Like satori, you know, like that, you know that brilliant insight, that brilliant you know, those ideas, that kind of light you up, you know, and think about like the sun being above, right the sun, like the light coming above, yeah, that's, I think that's it like the like the lower is, like you're reaching down into the dark. You know, reaching down into the, into the darkness, where that's the void the void. Yeah, that's further away from the light, and then you have the light above and then, if you think about a tree.
Matt:The tree both reaches down into the ground with its roots, but it also reaches up for the sunlight yeah, that's why trees are absolutely great metaphors there's in.
Angelo:There's something to the structure of reality. When you talk about a tree like I don't know, insights pop off for some reason, but it's hard to like, really nail it down and get a grip because it's like the symbol is there. So I think what we're some we're dancing around.
Chris:A key piece that we're missing is that? Yeah, sure, if, if we are metaphorically right that the tree in this example, yeah, I think our roots are reaching down into the void, but it's not just the void that's down there. As we plunge down into the earth, we're unearthing some part of ourselves.
Chris:So it's not just like, oh, we're reaching into this dark void to pull something that's completely unknown we're discovering about ourselves because physically and literally, you are everything else so you have to have this like right right understanding of ourself and trying to grasp the higher values and the higher spiritual understandings into a middling reality, right that allows us to know ourselves and to reach up into the heavens at the same time and be grounded I rooted, I see this idea of a, the shape of a triangle, we, we, we touch on a lot of similar topics because we totally talked about the triangle before as well.
Angelo:But there's like, at the bottom, the base, there's separation, right, the two points at the bottom of the triangle, and as you move up there's unity and I like to think the up direction is moving towards something like gestalt, moving towards like common identity and form, and as you go down there's more idiosyncrasy and separation and subjective things and they can, they can work together, hand in hand, but when? But when you cut one off from the other. If you have gestalt without the I guess I'll just call them the idiosyncrasies, the specificities you've got a disembodied idea. It's worthless.
Matt:Oh yeah.
Angelo:And when you have all of these things without the gestalt, there's no unity amongst them.
Matt:You've just got dust you know, if there isn't already, I'm a thing called like the law of variance. Um, I think there should be, like, if you have a like whole body of, you know, fish like, say, fish are the summit of that triangle. But then, beneath all of that, and you know, going back to diversity of all these different types of fish, right with we got sharks, we got whales, we've got goldfish, we've got we've got all these different kinds of fish, and then we've got cephalopods, we've got, you know, octopus, we've got jellyfish, right, and then what are they like? How are they related, you know, are they within the same?
Angelo:I mean, then that's like, an even higher triangle, just all sea life but the fact that you're able to mentally link all of them together and call them fish, giving them a higher identity, that ties them all together. There's something to that notion. Yeah, I think that's what reality is about. Is this, this bringing together of of identities? I really do. I really think that's what we're aiming towards. I really think that our capacity to look at all of these separate things and and sort of unite them and recognize their distinct properties at the same time that's, that's the magic right there yep, what's like, what's common, and then then what's distinct, and loving through the distinction.
Angelo:Wow, god, you just made that make sense, wow wow, I mean I'm having the same insight on the spot as you and like this is I'm just in the flow state right now it's brilliant, it's absolutely brilliant I'm sure there's some people listening. It's like what the hell are you talking about? If you get it, you get it, man come on you gotta get a follow with it, you guys.
Angelo:Yeah, I, I'm definitely, I I come from like, uh, I have a love for the the empirical, uh, observation side of reality. Like I think there's no, there's no real way to get a truly objective perspective. You're always going to see it through a human lens, through your lens, through your umwelt, like there's no way for you to step outside of that. Even when you think that you're talking about something objective, it's only objectively human. Like the idea that the Earth goes around the sun, you might say, well, that might be like an objective fact that we can discover. But understanding around is a human thing, understanding around is a human thing. Understanding, like Earth as a planet. You're thinking of something moving in time, the fourth dimension, moving through three dimensional space. Like all of that has to be funneled through your empirical observation, through your phenomenological experience.
Matt:Yes, yes, and.
Angelo:There's no outside of it.
Matt:Like what you said about love too, and loving through diversity and loving through crossing that distance from where you are to the point of love, and there's a traveling, there's you moving towards it and say it moving towards you too? And say if you're doing that with objective reality, if you're doing that with truth, if you're doing that with objective reality, if you're doing that with truth, if you're doing that with the way that the world is and you all in the same place at this.
Chris:At the same time, you know that there's that there's like a distance to be crossed I think, in the similar way, that there's kind of like a perennial science, right, um, and perennial in you know, in case you don't know, like, like just kind of means something that keeps reappearing year after year.
Chris:Right, you have perennial flowers it's really just a different word for eternal but you have like a perennial science, but you also have like a perennial reality, a perennial spiritual reality that you can keep falling back to, right, something that's beyond language, something that's, um, beyond our, the paradigm through which we see the world. Like, like, ever since we discovered science, right, and we keep learning, particularly about astronomy. Like, we learned that the earth is round and not flat, and learned that we go around the sun, not vice versa. Those were paradigm breaking discoveries when they came around. Maybe we're kind of just waiting for the next one, but even if we do discover the next one, there's still going to be a value system that we can fall back on. Like, don't take things for granted. Love people, just like you would love yourself.
Angelo:It's funny because we discovered that you know the earth goes around the sun and that's why you see the sun move in the sky the way it does, but we still call it a sunrise. We still experience it as the sun going up, and it's hard, even knowing that we are actually the ones moving, relatively speaking. It's hard to break that frame. You still, in the back of your mind, view the sun is moving yeah, it's, and you're made that way and that that's more relevant to you almost than the idea that the earth moves around the sun.
Angelo:Because to what extent do you use that information? You pay attention to the seasons and they affect you personally in your life. You know you prepare for, um, the winter coming and and you almost have to treat reality on a local level as if the sun is rising, rather than treat reality as the earth going around the sun. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I get the idea, like you know, believing as the earth going around the sun.
Matt:Does that make sense? Yeah?
Angelo:And I get the idea, like you know, believing that the earth going around the sun is, there's a utility in it on a certain level. Right, if you're trying to make better scientific predictions on a grander scale, definitely go with heliocentrism what's relative to us, and like what we can, what we can measure, and you know it's.
Matt:It's funny. Um, there's this.
Matt:There's this clip from this show uh, young sheldon, like sheldon from the big bang theory right there's this one moment where he's talking with his, his mom, and she's, you know, kind of in this nihilistic type mindset, right, and you know he's very scientific, he's very, you know, very petty right. But what he says, did you did, you know? Um, basically something like if gravity was a little bit off either way, if it was a little bit stronger or just the tiniest fraction less powerful than the whole universe would fall apart. You know, it's exactly the degree that it needs to be. You know, we don't even think about this, we just we just wake up and it's, you know, the next right. But all of these things that have to go right, that go right like clockwork every single day, that you know we have miracles all around us, we're lucky.
Chris:We are lucky beyond imagination.
Matt:Stupendous.
Chris:Like how, Like what even because it's a simulation. Yeah, right, yeah.
Angelo:I mean.
Matt:I mean, it's all fake? Oh no, stupendously, stupendously well dialed into the fact that we can't even really comprehend how Our minds can go so far as what to a degree. I think Like trying to measure it right, but it's the how question that we can't wrap our minds around.
Chris:You know, yeah, I'm going to do the thing that I usually do, which is offer a definition for reality. Okay, all right, let's do it. Reality is a perennial pattern of the structural substrate, lending one a salient landscape to consciousness.
Matt:Wow.
Chris:Whoa, I don't know. I think it works.
Angelo:I might have to refine it a little bit Wow, wow, I don't know, I think it works. I might have to refine it a little bit, sure, but it sounded pretty good to me.
Angelo:Thanks, and on that note, I think let's wrap this one up All right. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, reality was probably one of our most in-depth discussions, yet we had a lot of fun doing it and if you stuck around this long, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Thank you, and we hope to see you next time.
Chris:It's been real, all right Peace.
