Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt9K6kmpx44
The jogan Experience if categories dis dis dissolve especially fundamental ones the culture is dissolving because the culture is a structure of category that's what it is right so and in fact culture is a culture is a structure of category that we all share so we see things the same way well that's why we can talk I mean not exactly the same way CU then we'd have nothing to talk about but rough ly speaking we have a Bedrock of agreement that's the Bible by the way so I just walked through the Museum of the Bible in Washington that was very cool it's a very cool Museum so the structure that's what the Bible what I figured out I've been I just figured this out this week so it was a cool it was a cool thing to walk through because it's it's chronological they have one floor which is the history of the Bible but it's not exactly that it's really what it is is the history of the book now in many ways the first book was the Bible I mean literally because at one point there was only one book like as far as our Western culture is concerned there was one book and for a while literally there was only one book and that book was the Bible and then before it was the Bible it was a you know it was Scrolls and it was writings on Papyrus and but it was we were starting to aggregate written text together and it went through all sorts of technological transformations and then it became books that everybody could buy the book everybody could buy and the first one of those was the Bible and then it became all sorts of books that everybody could buy but all those books in some sense emerged out of that underlying book and that book itself the Bible isn't a book it's a library it's a collection of books and so what I figured out was partly because I was talking to my brother-in-law Jim Keller who's the world's greatest chip designer and has now designed a chip that's as powerful as the human brain which is optimized for artificial intelligence learning by the way and so I talked to him about that he said you heard of the internet I said yeah Jim I've heard of the internet he said this is way more revolutionary than that so in any case we were talking about meaning in text because we were
talking about translation and the problem of understanding text and Jim said the meaning of words is coded in the relationship of the words to one another and the postmodernists make that case that all meaning is derived from the relationship between words that's wrong because well what about Rage that's not words and what about moving your hand that's not words so it's wrong but but part of it's right because the meaning we derive from the verbal domain is encoded in the relationship between words so so now then you think well let's think about the relationship between words well some words are dependent on other words some ideas are depend dependent on other ideas the more ideas are dependent on a given idea the more fundamental that idea is by that's a definition of fundamental so now imagine you have an aggregation of texts in a civilization you say which are the fundamental texts and the answer is the texts upon which most other texts Depend and so you'd put Shakespeare way in there in English because so many texts are dependent on Shakespeare's literary Revelations and Milton would be in that category and Dante would be in that category at least in Translation fundamental authors part of the western Canon not because of the arbitrary dictates of power but because those texts influenced more other texts and then you think about that as a hierarchy okay with a Bible at its base which is certainly the case now imagine that's the entire Corpus of L of linguistic production All Things Considered now how do you understand that like literally how do you understand that the answer is you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk you sample that whole domain you build a low resolution representation of that in your inside you and then you listen and see through that and so it isn't that the Bible is true it's that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of Truth which makes it way more true than just true it's a whole different kind of true and I think this is I think this is not only literally the case factually I think it can't be any other way it's the only way we can solve the problem of perception