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- [00:00]
Derek Barris
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [00:02]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [00:05]
Derek Barris
Was she brave?
- [00:05]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:12]
Derek Barris
Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [00:13]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [00:17]
Derek Barris
Was it scary?
- [00:18]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [00:20]
Derek Barris
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:22]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
It did, actually.
- [00:23]
Derek Barris
Okay, good story.
- [00:24]
Mom (Carvana Ad Narrator)
Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.
- [00:31]
Danny Gold
Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with Ms. 13 El Salvador. How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s?
- [00:37]
Derek Barris
What about that time I got lost
- [00:38]
Sean Williams
in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab?
- [00:41]
Derek Barris
I'm Sean Williams.
- [00:42]
Danny Gold
And I'm Danny Gold, and we're the hosts of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from
- [00:53]
Julian Walker
all over the world, available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:59]
Marc Andreessen
You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs think about, talk about. But I think it's super important that you don't have any levels of introspection.
- [01:06]
Yes.
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Derek Barris
Zero.
- [01:07]
Marc Andreessen
As little as possible.
- [01:08]
Why?
- [01:09]
Move forward. Go. Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I've just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's. It's just. It's a real problem, and it's a. It's a problem at work and it's a problem at home.
- [01:17]
So I've read, obviously, 400 and I think now, 10 biographies of 50 space entrepreneurs. And that was one of the most surprising things. Like, what's the most surprising thing that you've learned from this? They're like, oh, they have little or zero introspection. Like, Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up. He's like, I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And just kept doing it over and over again.
- [01:34]
And you probably know if you go back 400 years ago, it never. It never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it's the whole idea of. I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.
- [01:47]
Say more about that.
- [01:48]
Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right? It's all, it's, it's, it's, it's all a new construct.
- [01:54]
Derek Barris
You have been listening to Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as of 2024, advisor to Donald Trump. And I know it might shock you that someone advising the President doesn't believe in introspection. We covered him most recently on episode 178 when we discussed his Techno Optimist manifesto, which was a love letter to corporate deregulation and unfettered wealth. But this recent moment from David Senra's Founders podcast has been making the rounds. So I thought it would be a good time to discuss introsp morals and how much Andreessen does in fact, get wrong. I'm Derek Barris. I'm Julian Walker and you're listening to a Conspirituality brief. Is there a deep self? As always, you can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod. If you are able to support our work as independent media creators, you can do so@patreon.com conspirituality where for $5 a month you get access to all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episod. We also post our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. And one announcement off the top. I shared this in our social media feeds, but I found out this week that my investigative report with Alex Stockton over at the New York Times, which was a 16 minute video documentary on Maha radicalizing people into conspiratorial thinking, is nominated for an Emmy Award this September. So I was, I was actually in my new doctor's office when Alex texted me. It was fascinating timing, but I'm really proud of the work we did. We spent 10 months on that investigation and fingers crossed we're up against Sanjay Gupta and Al Jazeera and a couple other great reporting videos. So we'll see how it goes.
- [03:56]
Julian Walker
Wow. Congratulations. I mean, you're already a winner. Being nominated at that level is incredible.
- [04:02]
Derek Barris
Yeah, I'm still thinking about it. It's just cool to have some validation of the that we spent so long doing. I have a lot to unpack with Andreessen's podcast appearance. Julian. But just off the top, based on that one clip alone, what are your initial thoughts when you hear something like that?
- [04:23]
Julian Walker
Well, we're definitely like right in the, in the wheelhouse of pseudo Intellectual kind of podcast tech bro conversation. What he said sounds grossly anti psychological, anti self awareness, and by contrast, I guess, pro impulsive or intuitive. I noticed that he also references great men of history in a kind of throwaway comment. And that's telling because it's a 19th century concept that history is shaped by heroic figures possessed of special genius, courage, or maybe divine inspiration. And the idea comes from Thomas Carlile, who was this influential Scottish philosopher. He's well known for being anti democracy, for being racist and anti Semitic, which makes him a huge hero of Curtis Yarvin, who in turn has fans in Andreessen and elon Musk and J.D. vance. And we've talked about him on this podcast before. The way Andreessen replied in that clip totally undermines the idea of the philosopher king who rules via a kind of intellectual and introspective wisdom. And contrary to what he's saying, it dates back to Plato. It runs through Greek and Roman and Hebrew and Christian and Islamic and even Buddhist thought. So we're starting off very poorly in terms of his, you know, level of historical understanding.
- [05:41]
Derek Barris
Oh, absolutely. And we're gonna. I'm gonna get into some of those, some of those details that you picked out. I want to go back first and just explain. I mean, you and I are both fascinated with neuroscience and philosophy, and I think in this particular instance, the idea of a deep self is very, at. At root, is very part of yoga philosophy as well, and the wellness spaces that we covered. So there's a lot of intersections there. So although we're hearing a techno optimist bro talk about it, much intersect with our beats. So that's why I wanted to cover it as well. So we get to talk about some of those. But I. I want to give a little background for people who don't know about Andreessen. He co authored Mosaic, which was the first web browser to display inline Images back in 1993. He then co founded Netscape and a few other companies. But Andreessen Horowitz with. He co founded with Ben Horowitz, really made him his fortune. As of 2025, he's estimated to be worth 1.9 billion doll. Fair to him for a moment. He seems to have earned his money in the sense that he grew up the son of a customer service operator and sales manager of a seed producer. He started his career in computers, earning under $7 an hour. So his work on the early Internet really was revolutionary in terms of. The Internet exists in part because of him as we know it. Yeah, but as you can probably tell in the clip he thinks exceptionally highly of himself. It made me think about this long standing debate between new money and old money. Right? Old money. There's almost all these assumptions that come with it. New money. Sometimes when people come into it, they think even more of themselves because they'll not recognize, say, all of this sorts of infrastructure or the privileges that are associated with them getting there. And he is, he is definitely new money in the way that he presents himself politically. Andreessen previously endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
- [07:46]
Julian Walker
So basically a fascist.
- [07:49]
Derek Barris
Absolutely right in line with that. As you might have guessed, his moral foundation is rather thin. And in 2025, he donated $3 million to the Super PAC MAGA Inc. Oh, dear. He claims Joe Biden's anti crypto stance and desire to regulate AI is what pushed him. Right. You might be surprised to learn that Andreessen Horowitz is heavily invested in crypto and AI companies. Now, as for his interviewer in these clips, David Senra, he's not in the game of pushing back on founders. He seems to desire access more than anything. And he's built his podcast brand around interviewing successful entrepreneurs. So he's generally giddy while talking to Andreessen. You're not going to find any hard hitting journalism here. Now onto the claim about introspection. To flesh out this discussion we're going to have, we really need to hear what Andreessen said.
- [08:43]
Julian Walker
What?
- [08:44]
Derek Barris
Right after the opening clip, to provide a little bit more context, first, Western
- [08:48]
Marc Andreessen
civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right? Which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then, and then, you know, for a long time it was, all right, the individual runs, right, and like does. Does all these things and builds things and, you know, builds empires and builds companies and builds technology and does all these things. And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt based whammy, you know, kind of showed up from Europe. From Europe, a lot of it from Vienna, you know, 1910s, 1920s, Freud and that entire movement and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to, like, you basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. Right? The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look back, whereas needs to dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.
- [09:26]
Julian Walker
He does seem to be conflating the concept of the individual with the concept of the entrepreneur. Very odd. And yeah, this idea that I think I Get what he's referring to, but he's making it sound as if no one thought of there being such a thing as an individual before the Western Enlightenment. So no builders of Pyram, no creators of empires, no kings, no queens, no special savior figures. It was all just one big tribal communist collective. And then along came the. The bold entrepreneur. But then there was this reflexive whammy bar of. Of guilt where.
- [10:02]
Derek Barris
Where Freud, you might be surprised to learn, he's. He doesn't like communism. Ah, well, so.
- [10:08]
Julian Walker
And then somehow Freud, the. The takeaway from Freud is that he's calling the individual into question by saying that we should dwell on the past. Yeah. So I find myself really unclear about how psychoanalysis negates the individual by suggesting that our unresolved emotions about our past experiences and relationships might be unconsciously shaping our choices and actions in the present. Because really that's a way of moving forward, because that stuff might be holding you back. It actually sounds to me like he's saying having any kind of conscience or an inkling of doubt that you've always done the right thing with pure motives and never made any mistakes is somehow the key to doing great things.
- [10:53]
Derek Barris
The whole thing reminds me of that Internet meme where they'll show guys doing ridiculously stupid things and saying guys will do anything except go to therapy. And I think Andres like the poster child of that meme. Let's backtrip to the first clip. Now that we've given Andreessen two minutes to blather, I've read a bunch of mocking feedback on the idea that introspection was invented a century ago, or the individual four centuries ago. People have pointed to one of my favorite extant texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the protagonist heavily introspects over death and morality during his epic voyage. A few other examples I saw with their comments on social media, people point to Chinese philosophy, which was exceptionally introspective. The Hebrew Psalms, which include tons of first person anguish and inner conflict. I saw Hamlet as a meditation of on over introspection. You have the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which, you know, all these tech bros are into stoicism, so it'd be surprising that he would over overlook that. And then of course you have Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, all of whom predate Freud by centuries or even millennia. And this leads to the question, does Andreessen even know, as you flag Julian, what introspection means? Because he's really seems to be talking about guilt here. Now why would he want to avoid discussions of guilt. One reason maybe because Andreessen Horowitz. Horowitz funds a lot of defensive tec companies, predominantly through its American Dynamism Fund, which has invested in Anderal Industries, which is a real time surveillance firm that also aids in unmanned combat missions. SHIELD AI, which builds military drones, including ones that helped level Gaza, and Flock Safety, which manufactures surveillance tech for law enforcement. Pretending introspection doesn't exist will surely help you sleep at night if that's how you make your billions. So of course Andreessen introspected on the criticism leveled at him. Now, obviously he doubled down. He tweeted, introspection equals neuroticism times narcissism times thumb sucking. And this is fun. He also posted multiple statements from, quote, my therapist Claude after on therapy during the podcast.
- [13:22]
Julian Walker
Oh, that's amazing. As long as it's an AI tool, cool. He's open to feedback and self reflection from the chatbot, right? I think you're right, Derek. Avoidance of guilt seems to be textbook here, even though he's disparaging Freud. Freud may well have his number guilt conscience. Considering the real world impact of your business model. All of that would get in the way of just moving fast and breaking things and leaving a big old footprint on the world when you die.
- [13:48]
Derek Barris
You know, my Callan and I, my wife and I, we went back to watch all of the Sopranos again last year, and then this year she wanted to do Mad Men. So that's what in season one, right now, Don Draper's wife Betty is going to therapy and Don's paying for it. And then also you find out that he's having private conversations with the psychiatrist to find out what Betty's saying during it, which of course breaks, you know, the Hippocratic oath. But it's just, it's hilarious seeing, you know, this show set in the late 50s. It could have been Andreessen's view on therapy, because anytime it comes up, Don is like, yeah, that, that's, that's just so from here, I want to note how absurd the idea that individual was invented a century ago is. And then we'll close with thoughts on a book Andreessen recommended during his whole tweet storm as proof that there is no self to introspect over. As I mentioned, one of the world's oldest extent texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is entirely invested with the concept of the individual. It's literally a meditation on morality and mortality, as Gilgamesh, the King of Urek, is forced to introspect over how he rules and the fact that he's going to die after he goes on this epic voyage to find and then pluck out from the bottom of the ocean the plant of immortality. You know, I mentioned the Hebrew Psalms, you have Greek lyric poetry. Socrates said to know thyself, not know we selves. There's even a term for this moment in history, which is the Axial Age. And that was coined by philosopher Carl Jaspers, who noticed that across Greece, China, India and the Middle east, thinkers began to turn attention inward. I found out about this because Karen Armstrong, the religious historian, wrote a entire book about the development of the major world of religions during that period. I highly recommend it. I'll drop it in the show notes. This is understood to be the first self conscious philosophical individualism in history. But of course we're relying on texts which were sparse at the time, so the concept could very well predate it. You know, all of these texts are coming from oral sources. So the idea that people weren't discussing it before that time is, you know, kind of thin. If you think about how history has developed and language has developed. Moving forward historically, the Stoics, you know, I mentioned Marcus Aurelius, you have Seneca as well. They developed highly sophisticated practices of self examination. Augustine's Confessions in 400 CE is an extended psychological autobiography. It's often considered the first in Western literature. Considering Andreessen is going always going on about how great the west is, you, you would think he would recognize this jump ahead of millennia. The Renaissance is considered the discovery of the individual because there were portraits and autobiographies of individuals dominating the public consciousness. The Reformation called for direct personal relationship with God, placing enormous weight on individual conscience and inner life. You have Locke, Rousseau and Kant, all articulating ideas about the auton anonymous individual as the fundamental unit of society, possessing natural rights capable of reason. And all of this is prior to the state, which Andreessen, you know, pins on part of individualism. And these thinkers are what led to modern democracy.
- [17:18]
Julian Walker
Yeah. And then, you know, even, even more foundational than that. And we're going to get into some of these sorts of ideas coming up here. I would argue that subjectivity, self reflection, the ability to learn to remember and then to kind of time trav back and forth between remembering the past and imagining the future, to run internal simulations alongside our capacity for empathy and theory of mind, which allows us to imagine what's going on inside others. They're all very introspective. It's essential to what makes us as Humans, the dominant species on the planet, despite not being the, you know, the strongest and the fiercest, the fastest. It's not amoral sociopathy that negates any self doubt, which enables us to be
- [18:02]
Derek Barris
so dominant and just to go along with here running internal simulations. If you really get into neuroscience, there is a lot of debate around this. But there's an idea that the, the ability to remember the past comes from our ability to predict because we can predict what's going to happen in the future that runs in the same neural connections in our brain as the past. So that makes it very interesting in terms of ability to how we see reality happens because of the habits, because of what's happened to us. And we're constantly predicting and at the same time we're pulling from past experiences. And this is why, you know, the, the concept we're going to get into, the idea of an individual self or deep self is, is kind of an illusion because we're all going to predict what is going to happen next based on our own personal, individual experiences. But when you try to scale that up to a social level, we all have different experiences, or a lot of us do, especially if you come from different cultures. And then a lot of the conflicts that we see happen because of these different experiences, dictating what we see as representative of what we think will happen in the future. We'll get back into the deep self in a moment. Andreessen calling out Freud just feels like, like he has a gripe with therapy. So that, that feels like what's really going on here, that little brief neuroscience, you know, I'll find some books to drop in the show notes that you can explore that concept further. But I became enamored with science due to neuroscience. Back when I was a music journalist. I read Dan Leviton's book, this is your brain on music. Leviton is a neuroscientist and music producer and produced like Steely Dan, a lot of great albums. I got hooked on the brain probably because the brain creates my concept of me.
- [20:08]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, this is your brain on music. So fantastic. And I would say alongside that, musicophilia by Oliver Sacks is wonderful. But I'll add here too, that for ease of understanding and narrative engagement, Vs Ramachandran, who I often refer to as my personal Elvis, has a fascinating book called the Telltale Brain that is a really good entry point for anyone who wants to, you know, first get their feet wet in this area.
- [20:34]
Derek Barris
I love sax. I think Ramachandran is one of the those people who Talk about the neural circuits of memory and future prediction.
- [20:43]
Julian Walker
Oh, absolutely.
- [20:44]
Derek Barris
Yeah. So he would be a good reference. So we'll drop those. We'll drop all those books in the show notes. If you want to geek out on this stuff.
- [20:50]
Julian Walker
I'll just add, not only that, but Ramachandran, as his name suggests, is an Indian guy. And so he has all of this background in Indian culture and religion and spirituality and mythology that he often brings to bear. And he has some really interesting things to say about the self and about mirror neurons and. And empathy and compassion and how all of that stuff, kind of how he thinks of all of that through the lens of very sophisticated reasoning based on neuroscience.
- [21:17]
Derek Barris
And can write in prose.
- [21:19]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [21:20]
Derek Barris
So a lot of neuroscience books could be very heavy on science, which he can be, but he can also write poetically. Out of all the neuroscientists, he's probably my favorite author in terms of writing abilities. The one that I referenced earlier that Andreessen used to argue that introspection is bullshit is Nick Chater's 2018 the Mind is Flat. The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain. I have a hardcover version of that because I read it shortly after it came out. So I want to do a quick rundown of this book because let's just say Andreessen is a bit off here. The central premise is that the idea of a hidden inner life is an illusion. So right away you might think, oh, Andreessen has a point. From a surface reading, sure. But here's what Chador means. Most people assume that our beliefs, desires, and motivations arise from these deep, murky layers of the unconscious mind. And Chador says that this entire framework is wrong. He argues that there are no hidden depths to plumb and that unconscious thought is a myth. Reflecting on neuroscience and behavioral sciences, which is his field, he says, we generate our ideas, motives, and thoughts. Thoughts in the moment as they're happening. And so thoughts are not reflections of a deeper self, but real time fabrications of the mind trying to be consistent with previous fabrications. This gets into the whole memory prediction idea that I just brought in. Now. Chor uses the analogy of a novelist. A writer invents story details on the fly while staying consistent with what has already been written, just as our mind improvises thoughts and beliefs in real time, rather than retrieving them from some inner, inner reservoir. Now, what does this mean? There are no preformed beliefs, desires, preferences, attitudes, or even memories hidden somewhere inside of us. It's all surface. The brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on past experiences, acting as a creative improviser rather than being driven by these deep unconscious motives. And I have to say, based on reading many other works on behavioral sciences, we're just never who we are all the time. We're not the same person from moment to moment. We code, switch and pantomime constantly based on who we're with and the vi and the environment that we're in at that moment. Other neuroscience research has shown that even our experiences are not cognitively continuous, but that our brains have this neat trick of stitching events together to make it seem like we're just partaking in this one unfolding narrative. Which is probably why we take to sort of Hollywood scripts, because it makes it seem like this or even novels. Right. It's written in such a way that feeds into that illusion that everything is continuous.
- [24:18]
Julian Walker
Yeah, it's all so fascinating. I mean, this makes me think about a lot of the debates that happen about free will and, and of course a lot of the debates that happen about mind body dualism, which is one of the, my deepest fascinations. I think what it, what it starts to expose is how we have these intuitions and these folk psychology concepts about how all of this functions. And if you scratch the surface and get deeper into it, as neuroscience has allowed us to do, you start to find that our, our ways of explaining and thinking about these things are deeply flawed. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that there's still not something going on there there, that that gives rise to that experience. Right. Like we have the experience of making choices. Is free will in the ultimate sense an illusion? Yeah, I would say so, yes. And it's, it's too much for us to get into right now. But, but I think the important thing here is not to over oversimplify this kind of stuff, which is what Andreessen is doing. I looked at Cheater's one hour talk about the book on Google. I have not read the book. I also found a detailed review by one of my favorite neuroscience and philosophy, Susan Blackmore. She made some observations that I also found myself wondering about while listening to that Google talk by Chador. He spends a good deal of time talking about the limitations of our perceptual systems and how our brains are actually doing a lot of prediction based on conditioned expectations to then fill in the gaps of what we can't actually perceive. So we think we're experiencing a straightforward picture of the world, but it's actually always partially being constructed by the brain. We're limited in what we can focus on and process. And so, you know, all of the examples that'll be familiar to anyone interested in cognitive psychology. You may remember this from, like, textbooks if you, if you studied any of this in school. There are things like optical illusions which plug directly into our perceptual heuristics. The shortcuts we make to just very quickly decide what we're seeing or that we're only able to see an ambiguous image in one form at a time. You know, like those necker cube line drawings where they keep flipping back and forth as you look at them. You can't see it both ways at once. Same with like the shape of two faces side by side. And then in the middle there's a, there's the outline of a chalice. We've all also likely marveled at videos like the one. Have you seen the steric? Where you're told, okay, count the numbers of passes of the basketball within this kind of quite small frame and a big group of people. And as you're doing it, you, you realize only afterwards, when it's pointed out that you completely miss the fact that there's a guy in a gorilla suit moving through the frame.
- [27:08]
Derek Barris
You only get fooled once. But I did get fooled that first time.
- [27:11]
Julian Walker
Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. Later afterwards, you're like, I can't believe I didn't see that. But it just shows how, how limited our capacity is to, to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. That's CH's kind of central premise related to this is change between two images. We might, very predictably, most people are going to miss small changes that have been made because we think we're seeing what we've been conditioned to expect. And actually all great magicians, illusionists, as I prefer to call them, are exploiting these cognitive and perceptual vulnerabilities that we have. So it's all good stuff. Although of course New Agers will try to use it to claim that reality is ultimately unknowable. And we, we're all just missing the supernatural stuff because we haven't woken up yet from the Matrix.
- [27:57]
Derek Barris
It's one reason I love Ramachandran's work so much, because there is a, you know, people who are anti materialist who don't believe that consciousness come from the physiological, biological substance of us as animals. They'll, they'll say there are these unknowable things. And then you'll be like, well, no, there's research on this. We, we actually do know this. And they don't. They don't. They. They're so invested in their, the illusion they've created of their self, the idea that they are the same person no matter what the situation is. There's, there's a new report I, I'm going to read, but my wife just shared it this morning, which is about what extreme wealth does to the brain. And it's this idea, if you don't have money and then you're given a lot of money, you know what I'll say about new money before you are a different person, like that is going to change the, the stuff of who you are. No matter, you know, if you give all the money away, what happens. There's some things that are going to happen to your biology that are going to change your relationship to other people and, and the environment that you live in. And I, I personally find this fascinating. I don't, I don't see it as any sort of slight to my concept of myself because I'm actually learning about myself and my own patterns and habits and I can actually, I think, be a little more flexible in situations, knowing that rather than being so hell bent on being like, no, this is who I am. It's like, no, probably, probably not.
- [29:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah. This goes to the whole mind, body dualism thing. Right. We have an intuitive way in which we, we think of, of minds as being somehow able to stand apart from biology. Right?
- [29:33]
Derek Barris
Yes.
- [29:33]
Julian Walker
And, and that somehow there's, there's this mind or this really this soul that is sort of has an essence to it and is always the same, regardless of what's happening. Right. And, and then ultimately will transcend death because it's not really dependent on the body or on social conditions or in how much money you have, et cetera.
- [29:51]
Derek Barris
Well, we know this from Phineas Gage. I mean, he was a ra. A railroad worker who had a spike that went through his head. And he was a very apparently kind man. And once he survived it, but it with his brain because it destroyed parts of it, he became a belligerent. He was a different person because his brain no longer functioned in the same way. There are many, many examples of this, but that one is sort of pointed to as being like, oh, oh, yeah. Brain does dictate consciousness.
- [30:20]
Julian Walker
Consciousness, yeah, it's foundational. It's like 1848 and it's the first time that people went, what? Maybe the brain has something to do with behavior and personality, really? Because, you know, I think Aristotle famously thought the brain was a radiator for cooling the blood because everything Came from the. Everything came from the heart. Was, Was the, The. The old school intuition.
- [30:39]
Derek Barris
Right.
- [30:39]
Julian Walker
Now, as an aside here, with all of this perceptual stuff there, there's an interesting bridging topic between sensory perception and consciousness, which I know you and I have a fascination with, which is the psych. And in his classic book the Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley famously posited our brains as having a kind of reducing valve and that drugs like LSD and Mescaline open that up. So normally we reduce the stream of impressions and information, free association, layers of meaning, all of that kind of stuff, so as to be able to focus on staying alive and getting shit done. The overwhelming intuition, though, for most people when they are in those expansive Technicolor psychedelic states, is that, wow, I feel like I'm experiencing reality as it always is, but I usually don't notice it. There's this intuitive sense of like, oh, it's actually always like this, but I'm blocking it out. That's really fascinating. And it sort of ties into what Chad was saying, but in a different way.
- [31:39]
Derek Barris
Well, if it was always that way, then it would just be the status quo.
- [31:43]
Julian Walker
Yes.
- [31:43]
Derek Barris
And then maybe being sober.
- [31:45]
Julian Walker
Yes.
- [31:45]
Derek Barris
Would actually be the psychedelic state, so. Totally. You know.
- [31:49]
Julian Walker
Yeah. Again, a lot of this is the faultiness of our intuitions about how we interpret what is actually real. And what then is the deviation from the real now in the text, and I'm getting this from Blake Moore to an extent, Chater leans into the realm of thought and emotions from perception, and her concern is that he assumes, without making a strong enough case, really, that the same lesson, lessons from sense perception, apply then to thought and emotions. He suggests that we are tricked by a grand illusion into thinking that our focus of attention is actually much wider than it is, and that there are these layers of thought, some of which is unconscious, but that really we can only think about one thing at a time. So that must just not be there. For Cheater, all thinking is an extension of perception, and all thinking is therefore interpretation. And Blackmore's problem with this is that he seems to therefore actually be negating abstract thought altogether, because he says thought has to come from some kind of sense impression. So without going too far down that philosophical rabbit hole, there seem to be some explanatory and definitional gaps in what is a very bold and interesting hypothesis in terms of psychology and psychotherapy or even meditation. I don't find that these ideas negate the phenomena most human beings experience. Right. Which. Which I think is Central to the psychotherapeutic project, we have to pretend not to have certain emotions or needs or desires because of either parental or familiar or social rules forbidding them. So we have an internal experience of certain things that we know we're not allowed to show on the outside. So there's a performative self that we construct, construct and present to the world so as to survive, to be accepted, to get ahead, while underneath that there does lie this more private, introspective self, so to speak, with insecurities, longings, secret thoughts that we really confess, except maybe to a therapist or in. In very intimate personal relationships. And I think that can all be explained without recourse to a soul or mind, body dualism, some kind of ghost in the machine, but rather through complex parallel processing. And that's. I'm still left with that impression even. Or having explored Cheater to the extent I have.
- [34:13]
Derek Barris
Yes, and I would agree with that. I mean, that's the thing about all these neuroscience books, is that they all tackle different angles and aspects. And, you know, that's why I like to read a lot of them, to put together some sort of coherent picture. And there's going always to be debates about what's going on with consciousness. But most neuroscientists will agree that, you know, it. It arises from the biological processes of, of us being animals. When you were mentioning even. Even how we interact with one the of another society and talking about the illusions. When I bring my puppy to the dog park, the first thing he does when he sees the other dogs is he sniffs at their ass. He sniffs everything. And that's information to him. Now, as he. As a different animal, you look at that, be like, ew, that's disgusting. But that is how he navigates reality. And you can see after that, they sniff each other's asses. They either walk away from each other, sometimes there's a little bit of tension, sometimes they start playing right away. Yeah, like there. So just because we don't understand that relationship doesn't mean that it's not part of their social construction, because it is. And we have our own ways of doing that.
- [35:20]
Julian Walker
Yep.
- [35:21]
Derek Barris
All this stuff getting back to Andreessen and closing out here, I mean, does this mean we can get rid of introspection and morals? And Chain never says that. He merely challenges where moral behaviors come from, saying it's not hidden in us. Moral judgments, he writes, are generated on the fly and shaped by context, habit, and prior behavior. Behavior. Getting back to those memories. Morals are in some special Category that we access with our deepest selves. No matter how much, you know, religious leaders want us to think they are, think there is, because they're invested in their own set of moral behaviors. All of these are improvised based on mood, who we're with and where we're at at that moment. I get why people will be mad at the implications of this, especially, as I said, if they hold themselves to some high, high moral standard. Again, behavioral research has continually shown that context matters. We find all sorts of tricks to excuse ourselves when the situation benefits us. And Chado writes that this is a good thing for us as individuals and for morality broadly. If there are no subconscious drives, you can't really blame a hidden bad self for your behavior, and you're certainly not trapped by one. That doesn't mean that breaking bad habits or patterns are easy, but it's also not an indictment on something fundamentally broken inside of you. You're the author of your moral character, just like other aspects of your being tethered to the people in your life and the environment that you live in.
- [36:52]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I like that interpretation. It's a very existentialist interpretation. Right. How. How are you going to move forward in your life, take responsibility for your. Your actions, and hopefully learn from your experiences in a way that I think actually does entail introspection so as to think about how have I behaved? How has it impacted others? What choices do I want to make in the future based on that self? Reflection of how effectively I'm acting in the world and maintaining my relationships because ultimately, ultimately, you know, I think that's what life's really about.
- [37:33]
Derek Barris
Yeah. So just one quote from Chador. We've been talking about him. I like this passage that kind of sums it up. Julian.
- [37:40]
Julian Walker
Introspection is a process not of perception, but of invention. The real time generation of interpretations and explanations to make sense of our own words and actions. The inner world is a mirage.
- [37:53]
Derek Barris
And I can't help but think that Andreessen seems to have only read those last six words and not understand them in the context of trader's larger argument. That's likely why the billionaire believes reflecting on your behavior is a pathology. Which again, probably makes sense for someone cashing in on the weapons, destroying nations and murdering innocent people. Right now,
- [38:33]
Sean Williams
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