Adam finds Jonathan Pageau's Elephant to be Strange

Anyway, I wanted this to be a short one, and if less than an hour is short mission accomplished.

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[GingerGames]

One thing to realize (that helped me and might help Adam) is that ethical systems are down stream from metaphysical systems. Everyone's got one and it is how it shapes how we view the world and approach it. The question to ask is: why do you believe the metaphysical foundations that you have? A religion is an enacted metaphysic. It is very difficult (if not impossible) to critique a metaphysic with the epistemological systems and ethical systems that derive from it.

To use Haidt's language (which I know Adam loves), the rider has to sit on an elephant; if he doesn't, he's not a rider any more.

[davidMflores]

I felt like this conversation kind've pinned down a lot of what Jonathan's frame is. It is a testament to Adam's questions. I can understand if someone feels like Jonathan avoids answering questions, however it's not so much avoiding the question as it is not allowing such a high level conceptualization get caught up in a single particular manifestation. Context matters.

[Thomas...]

Have to say; this one of Paul's best thumbnails

[CharlieBoardman]

Every time Paul says “conver-zay-shun” I can’t unhear it 😂

I love accents!

[painandpyro]

About halfway through the video I noticed what seemed to be the light starting to drain from Pageau's face, and then at the end, he sort of confirmed this by remarking on how hopeless he was beginning realize trying to explain this was, to which - even more interestingly - Adam responded basically: "No! Don't give up hope! This is fun!" 😄😄😄 Which is sort of how I feel too. I want to understand what Jonathan is talking about (and this may be me just selfishly looking for the "cool, mystical" version of modern Christianity in America), and the glimpses of comprehension I get are sort of like having something at the tip of your tongue that can't really express, and as frustrating as it may be for him, I want him to keep revealing more of it until everything somehow "clicks"

[stephenlaswell]

10/10 video for bringing together Haidt and Vervaeke’s deeper ways of knowing, and showing how they are relevant to the conversation. You’ve made me wonder what I’ve been worshipping unwittingly, and how I might start being more intentional about it.

[nathanwoodsy]

The poet was Emily Dickinson. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant."

[kencardillo]

I was particularly struck, at the end of the video, where Adam references the van Tillian notion of presuppositional apologetics. Some of their conversation reminded me of the Hitchens/Wilson "debates". But after reading Matthieu Pageau's book, and hearing Jonathan articulate that cosmology, I find there is a deeper context that emerges that make these conversations much more interesting and even possible. Would love to hear your commentary on this some time, Paul.

[jo-ma]

I'll watch the video later. Just wanted to applaud the hilarious thumbnail!

[andrewlamson]

This just popped into my head and I thought I would share it. It seems to me that Adam, and most likely Stephen, are viewing Pageau's "Cosmic Frame" through backwards binoculars. The brand of the binoculars is Scientific Materialism. Everything that Jonathan is trying to reveal to them is being shrunk down instead of magnified. Jonathan is describing the infrastructure of the universe, the scaffolding that props everything up (material and immaterial alike), when he outlines his frame. This frame allows him to speak intelligently about something like evolution, even though he's not a scientist. Christianity, to Jonathan, offers the most high resolution image of that frame. Adam can see the frame, but he's looking through binoculars and they're backwards. This grand cosmological reality gets compressed down into a simple "ethical package" that, Stephen argues, needs improvement. The problem is not the frame the problem is the filter (the binoculars).

[edwinjacobellis]

Please keep making these! These video commentaries make the main conversations so much easier to process and develop out of

[KRGruner]

Pageau makes sense, even if he does not get everything right (in my opinion). I switched to watching his channel from this one, and I do not regret it. My only surprise is how difficult it seems for Adam to get what Pageau is saying. I guess he needs to mull it over a bit more. Maybe his devotion to Haidt's worldview is hurting him in that respect, I think.

[GrimGriz]

The blind elephant game metaphor just got significantly deeper.

[anthonyd]

To be fair, it would be a lot easier if Johnathan just started with Plato's allegory of the cave in these discussion. I love Johnathan, but it's so hard to understand him without that framework to start from. It covers everything: the symbolic world as being the frame through which we universally experience reality (whether materialist or spiritualist), and the world as a forum for action to uncover the true essence behind those symbols, symbols which we can only initially experience as the low-resolution reflections of something greater beyond.

I know Johnathan draws heavily from Gregory of Nyssa, but Gregory of Nyssa was just reading Platonism into Orthodox Christianity, and as good as the life of Moses is, its so much clearer and simpler to set aside all of the complexities of trying to reconcile Christianity with the Greeks (which the Scholastics spent centuries working on) and just start with the nice clean, circa 4 page allegory of the cave.

You need to establish the primacy of the symbolic world to even have the conversation, and its so much easier to just do this with Plato. If you have pushback against the idea of a symbolic world, you can always invoke contemporary phenomenology (Husseral/Heidegger etc.), and Jacque Derrida's idea of all meaning being linguistic. The conversation can't happen unless you first get rid of the idea of Cartesian Dualism, and establish that the world presents itself to us as low resolution symbols for us to understand and attempt to decipher.

[coren]

Religion is not an "Ethical System" it's an Existential Framework which people inhabit. Ethics are an emergent phenomenon that occur from the meeting between creation and eschaton.

[matthewwilkinson]

Cmon, Paul. Just convert to Orthodoxy already.

[SelfierX]

Memes are somewhat what Ebonics is to the English language for symbology

[acuerdox]

"that's the story of my channel" 43:46 XD LoL

[johnabney]

Paul, noted that your household is getting away from broadcast TV by watching old TV programming online. So in line with your title "...Pageau's Elephant to be Strange" here is a suggestion: find the best and most complete copy of Tim Conway's 'Elephant Story.'

[Joanna_]

There is a writing technique (I think first coined by John Updike) that seems relevant here. "Show don't tell". Cause every time I try to "tell" a person anything- it seems to backfire, so I have stopped doing it. No sense in trying to chip away at the tip of an iceberg or lead an elephant to where he doesn't wish to go. I'm more inclined to just move out of his way or just be happy in my own waterhole .