00:00:00.000 What is the fun criterion? My question really is, whenever you give this advice of
00:00:06.280 oh what should I do, you should follow the fun. It seems like you're saying something
00:00:11.320 epistemological instead of just like this is David's life advice. Yes well
00:00:16.440 far away from me to give life advice that would be terrifying but the fun
00:00:21.960 criterion is epistemological, yes. We start out by recognizing that there are
00:00:29.120 many more kinds of ideas in the mind than sort of are recognized in every
00:00:37.960 day speech or were recognized by traditional philosophy. We don't just have
00:00:45.800 for example beliefs and emotions. We have a complex menagerie of ideas in our
00:00:56.920 mind which interact with each other and many of them are absolutely
00:01:02.680 necessary for thinking and for solving problems creating knowledge. In
00:01:08.520 particular the categories that are very important are the explicit ideas that
00:01:17.320 is the ones that can be expressed in a language, ordinary language like English
00:01:21.400 and then there are the in explicit ideas which can't be expressed in
00:01:26.760 language like for example when you're playing tennis and the ball is heading
00:01:33.040 towards you and you're thinking oh it's going to go out now no it isn't I
00:01:37.920 better run for it that kind of thing. The words it's going to go out now do
00:01:42.680 not appear anywhere in your mind while you're doing that and yet it is
00:01:47.080 knowledge that you're creating you're creating a theory about where the
00:01:50.720 balls can just strike then you're correcting the theory and you're doing all
00:01:54.240 the things that error correcting thinking does without expressing it in
00:02:00.360 sentences or words. So that's in explicit thinking and you're using in explicit
00:02:06.800 knowledge. There's also but it's conscious you are conscious that something is
00:02:12.560 happening there and and if you are asked afterwards what were you thinking
00:02:17.440 then you might say I thought it was going to land in this place but it
00:02:20.960 actually landed in that place. There's also unconscious where in no sense are
00:02:27.600 you aware of thinking or knowledge there but it's still going on but it's
00:02:35.240 still going on and it's necessary. These categories are approximate and one
00:02:42.400 important thing is that that explicit ideas always have a large in explicit
00:02:50.560 component. My favorite example is grammar so we speak according to the rules of
00:02:57.280 grammar but if you're asked what they are you either don't know them or you
00:03:01.840 think you know them and and then someone details your sentence which meets
00:03:05.600 your criteria you stated criterion and you know that it's wrong. So we have
00:03:10.200 in explicit ideas regulating our speech our explicit speech. If we want to
00:03:18.960 recognize that all these different kinds of ideas and that's just only three
00:03:24.240 of the three major ones I mentioned. If they all contribute to the growth of
00:03:35.800 popularians we have to apply the same theory of knowledge to all of them. For
00:03:41.400 example none of them are ever justified. All of them can be mistaken. All of them
00:03:48.240 we expect generically to be mistaken. All of them are corrected by a process of
00:03:54.920 problem-solving with with conjecture and criticism. All that that sort of
00:03:59.760 thing applies to all the different kinds of knowledge and as I just said they
00:04:06.960 are all needed they all participate actually in any significant kind of
00:04:13.560 thinking. When we have a problem when something goes wrong it may in general
00:04:22.280 be and we try to identify what the ideas are that are conflicting with
00:04:28.360 each other that constitute the problem. It may be that out the explicit
00:04:34.760 theory that that we recognize as part of the problem one of the explicit
00:04:40.240 theories actually false like we think you know how come it was so
00:04:46.160 tiring to to go to the post office well actually the post you think the post
00:04:51.480 office nearby but that's an illusion it's actually quite a long way away so
00:04:55.360 that would be example a rare example maybe unrealistically rare of of you
00:05:02.320 having an explicit theory the conflicted with another explicit theory and one of
00:05:07.680 them was false and the other one was true and you can realize that by
00:05:10.480 criticism but more often there are more theories than that involved more
00:05:16.280 ideas than that involved and some of them will be in explicit and some of them
00:05:20.720 will be unconscious. Now there are theories and then you corrected it to ideas
00:05:26.160 is that because people don't think of emotions as theories yes there is no
00:05:30.520 good terminology that expresses this unified concept of all the entities
00:05:36.480 that are interacting in a mind maybe because of the history of how I came to
00:05:40.240 these ideas I tend to call them theories in my own mind but I think ideas is
00:05:45.800 perhaps a more a broader category for most people it's more natural but
00:05:52.440 there's also desires and feelings so these ideas include desires and feelings
00:05:58.240 and all sorts of things that don't have names and so on it's just everything
00:06:03.160 that can affect one's thought processes whether you know about it or not
00:06:09.160 and so on so it could be that the reason that you have this problem is not
00:06:17.400 any of the explicit theories that you think are part of it even if you were
00:06:25.120 perfectly accurate about what the explicit theories in conflict are the
00:06:30.000 problem may lie will in general include actually in explicit and unconscious
00:06:36.680 theories and there the tactic of trying to criticize one of them is not really
00:06:44.840 enough because you don't know what it is you you don't know what the
00:06:50.160 in explicit theory is and if you do have an idea of what it is you can't
00:06:54.240 express it in language therefore it's harder to criticize if it's unconscious
00:06:58.400 you definitely don't know what it is so for example take the tennis
00:07:04.400 example you you seem puzzled by that in where it's a matter of where would the
00:07:10.320 book will the ball land you can kind of synthesize the what that what your
00:07:16.720 theory must have been you know if you then hit it wrong and you're analyzing
00:07:22.040 afterwards why did I hit it wrong well because because I thought it wasn't
00:07:27.160 spinning and it was you know that so you've you've converted your in explicit
00:07:32.160 ideas into explicit one then you can criticize them but but you might not you
00:07:37.200 might be wrong about what it was you might be wrong about what your in explicit
00:07:41.240 theory was and even worse if it's unconscious then you can't even conjecture
00:07:46.240 like that if it's if it's an unconscious theory about things like what it
00:07:55.160 means to you to win and how important it is to look good and that kind of thing
00:08:00.880 which which are which are not you're not consciously aware of but they might
00:08:06.680 be affecting you they might be affecting your criteria then you don't know
00:08:12.320 what they are and that then it's absolutely impossible well you know it's
00:08:16.560 not absolutely impossible you can always think about it and work out what it
00:08:20.720 must have been just like with the in in explicit theories but it's much harder
00:08:24.560 shall we say and then you have to exposing your inner in a situation where you are
00:08:31.280 faced with the decision and you want to make a decision even if it's only a
00:08:35.800 temporary decision what what shall I do until I've solved this or whatever then
00:08:42.080 you have to find a way of a criterion for when there is a conflict when
00:08:51.640 when it's two explicit theories it's obvious or fairly obvious when there is
00:08:55.480 a conflict when it's when it's an in explicit theory it's harder when there's
00:08:59.600 an unconscious theory in conflict with explicit theories or two unconscious
00:09:04.000 theories or five of them all in conflict with each other then it affects you
00:09:11.160 by it via I don't think there's a satisfactory word for it but it affects you
00:09:22.560 via your feelings it affects you via your mood it affects you via things that
00:09:28.880 can't be easily stated in words but they can be felt so you you think you
00:09:36.360 want to to go down to the to the post office and and your unconscious theory
00:09:46.200 knows very well it's a long way away but your conscious theory thinks it's
00:09:50.720 just around the corner and you feel a reluctance to go and that reluctance is one
00:09:57.080 of these things it's it's a feeling it's it's a it's a mood it's it's now so
00:10:03.640 there's a conflict how do you know there's a conflict well you you have a
00:10:10.920 mood you but then like so if you've got a bunch of different unconscious
00:10:15.400 theories and in explicit theories and they also to do different things perhaps
00:10:19.840 yes what determines which one wins that's where the fun criterion comes in
00:10:25.280 because you can imagine several different kinds of criteria that one might
00:10:31.040 use and several very widespread criteria several criteria are in common
00:10:38.600 use and they are irrational or anti rational in in the poppers and my
00:10:47.840 sense respectively so a common criterion is to try to disregard everything but
00:10:58.680 your explicit theories you you say for example this is beginning to feel
00:11:05.480 bad but I have worked out or my my my self-help book says or my my
00:11:15.920 exercise guide says or my trainer says no pain no gain and so ignore the pain
00:11:23.240 of course I'm referring to psychological pain ignore the psychological pain
00:11:28.000 just do the thing do the which thing which always the thing designated by
00:11:35.200 your explicit theory according to that and that's just a mechanical criteria
00:11:41.880 and for choosing between theories and therefore is irrational theories have to
00:11:46.520 be judged by content not by where they came from or any attributes of theirs
00:11:52.080 that aren't content so another theory a kind of opposite of that theory is
00:11:58.640 what you might call the romantic stance which is to say explicit ideas are
00:12:08.280 just conventional decoration they're not really human they don't really mean
00:12:17.320 anything what's really important is feelings and so what you do if you adopt
00:12:23.680 that idea is is you try to reach into your feelings and follow them now this
00:12:33.280 course it's impossible I mean so first of all it's irrational because again it
00:12:39.560 just like the other theory of following your explicit theories it's just
00:12:45.440 choosing between theories according to an irrelevant criterion
00:12:48.840 compulsive because it's it doesn't look at the content it only looks at the
00:13:01.720 choosing feelings over something else just says oh feelings are good and then
00:13:07.520 it doesn't look at what the feelings actually say yes so so that is irrational
00:13:16.080 for for I mean it's overtly irrational but there's also the problem just like
00:13:23.680 with explicit theories but more more intense that you cannot actually act on your
00:13:32.080 feelings and unless you have an idea of what they are and you may be mistaken
00:13:37.080 so you you need an explicit idea about what they are you do because because you
00:13:43.760 might have a feeling that that something is going wrong but that doesn't tell
00:13:50.360 you what to do it's me you don't even explicit theory of what to do you can
00:13:54.680 just kind of do without thinking in an explicit way you can just kind of follow
00:13:59.320 your intuitions you might need a conscious theory but you don't need an explicit
00:14:03.760 one well you need a conscious theory but but so supposing you you're you're
00:14:08.680 doing a thing you're going to the post office and suddenly a nameless dread
00:14:14.040 comes over you so you might say okay well in that case do whatever doesn't
00:14:19.920 cause them the nameless dread well you don't know you might turn around and
00:14:23.280 start going back home and the dread gets worse you need a theory as soon as you
00:14:29.200 are instructing your legs to move in one direction rather than another you
00:14:34.160 have well yes as soon as you've deliberated and caused your legs to do one
00:14:42.840 thing rather than other you have an explicit theory you can do the liberation
00:14:46.640 by intuition okay well at the very least it's very close to the borderline of
00:14:51.960 explicit because if someone asks you what have you decided to do you'll say
00:14:57.400 I've decided to turn around the point is you need some knowledge you it's not
00:15:05.960 enough to see that there's a problem because there's an infinite number of
00:15:10.440 things you might do when you feel the nameless dread going to the post office so
00:15:14.920 that means you've got to create new knowledge in an area where where in explicit
00:15:20.760 or unconscious theories are conflicting with explicit ones you have the all
00:15:25.640 sorts of theories are all sorts of ideas which are in conflict in your mind
00:15:39.400 error correction in order to solve the problem and in general you need to
00:15:44.120 create new knowledge and how do you do that if you can't translate the theories
00:15:51.960 into the same language into either the explicit the in explicit or the
00:15:57.320 unconscious language how do you do that and how do you know when you've done
00:16:04.840 it well you know when you've solved it because you no longer feel nameless
00:16:10.200 dread I mean you might not have solved it completely but at least you've
00:16:13.400 solved the immediate problem so you you would have to do some unconscious
00:16:17.880 conjecture and some in explicit conjecture as well as some explicit
00:16:22.120 conjecture and the same for criticism all of them
00:16:27.320 so how do you cross this this boundary line between these errors of knowledge
00:16:34.200 that it is difficult or perhaps in practice impossible at least in the time
00:16:41.880 to translate between well I think the answer is and this is going to be true
00:16:48.280 even if purely explicit the problems because they never are purely explicit
00:17:03.720 they they're all a bunch of ideas evolving in some environment and and like
00:17:12.120 in biology the environment consists largely of other ideas
00:17:17.160 but in the mind in in genes there is only one kind of idea
00:17:22.760 which is the gene and but within the human mind there are lots of
00:17:30.600 into translatable but they are all evolving in the environment of the others
00:17:37.480 and therefore what is happening when things are going well
00:17:42.360 is that there's conjecture and criticism but the conjecture and criticism
00:17:46.920 in each of these areas is taking account of what the others are doing
00:17:53.480 or at least what the others are so just a simple example
00:17:58.680 I'm not sure if I can think of all six possibilities but but if you
00:18:03.400 make explicit criticisms of your explicit ideas
00:18:09.720 you will have not only the usual explicit criteria of does this make sense does
00:18:14.840 it seem to solve the problem is it logically consistent is it consistent
00:18:18.120 with my other theories and so on you it'll have all those things
00:18:21.640 but you'll also have do I still feel the nameless dread
00:18:27.800 and so that's that's making explicit whether whether you think there's a
00:18:33.480 problem you you may be wrong as always the nameless dread may
00:18:37.320 may not be any of the things you're thinking but
00:18:41.080 and the same is true at the in explicit in the unconscious level that they
00:18:44.840 they can all take each other into account even if they can't be directly
00:18:50.200 criticized by each other or translated into each other or directly brought
00:18:55.000 into confrontation the explicit ideas can be directly brought into
00:19:01.800 confrontation by things like logic and and by experiment
00:19:06.440 but in general ideas are affect each other by evolution
00:19:14.360 so you want to get ideally you want to get into a state of mind where they're
00:19:19.240 all affecting each other and when they're all affecting each other
