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In this episode of Solomon and Smith, Jack and Milo speak with Taylor Caron about the Gnostics: those strange, alluring, heretical early Christians who believed that the physical world was corrupt, that its creator was not the highest God, and that salvation came through secret knowledge of the divine world beyond this one.

This is the first part of a two-part conversation. In this episode, we begin with the original Gnostics: the lost gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Judas, Valentinus, the Gospel of Truth, Thunder, Perfect Mind, the Epistle to Flora, the Gospel of Philip, and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth. In the next part, we turn to American Gnosticism and the strange afterlife of these ideas in modern literature.

What is Gnosticism? Is the material world evil? Was Yahweh the demiurge? Who or what is Barbello? Why does Jesus keep appearing as a child, an old woman, a voice, a double, a robe, a cosmic emissary, or a being laughing from outside the crucifixion? And how did a collection of bizarre early Christian texts found in Egypt in 1945 come to haunt modern religion, literature, conspiracy, pop culture, Harold Bloom, The Da Vinci Code, and the idea of hidden knowledge itself?

Chapters:

00:00 Was Valentinus better than the Bible?

01:10 Introduction

05:47 Taylor enters

07:50 What is Gnosticism?

09:30 Nag Hammadi and the lost texts

11:01 The basic Gnostic worldview

15:18 I. The Gospel of Thomas

20:30 II. The Secret Book of John

23:18 Barbello, Sophia and the demiurge

29:42 III. The Hymn of the Pearl

34:15 IV. The Gospel of Judas

38:38 Crucifixion, flesh and anti-natalism

40:09 V. Valentinus' Fragments

45:24 VI. The Gospel of Truth

52:16 VII. Thunder Perfect Mind

56:20 VIII. The Epistle to Flora

1:01:18 Jesus and the Hebrew Bible

1:05:27 IX. The Gospel of Philip

1:10:46 X. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth

1:15:48 Orthodoxy, heresy and the stakes of the crucifixion

Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith

What is a view? What is attention? Does a number become more real if it is larger? Are advertisers being ushered into a hall of mirrors? And if every video, every creator, every athlete, every billionaire, and every man on earth can be given a bigger number, have we made the world better — or simply made value meaningless?

We discuss YouTube views, attention inflation, dead internet paradise, advertisers, Zimbabwean trillionaires, egalitarianism, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, cinema box office inflation, World of Warcraft stat squish, the psychological horror of decline, the impossibility of measuring attention, the parable of the workers in the vineyard, angelic value, Christianity, equality, and whether every mote of dust has infinite worth.

Chapters:

00:00 The number goes up

00:51 Introduction

04:45 YouTube changes the view count

08:02 Advertisers and the fantasy economy

12:40 Do labels change reality?

14:47 Egalitarianism, power and resentment

19:03 Do big numbers hide inequality?

22:35 Cinema, inflation and fake success

24:22 Stat squish and the horror of smaller numbers

27:14 What can value actually measure?

31:07 Can attention ever be quantified?

36:01 The workers in the vineyard

38:01 Earthly numbers and angelic value

42:36 YouTube views in heaven

43:38 Christianity, equality and infinite worth

Please help us continue having these discussions by supporting us over on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/SolomonSmith

Thinkers mentioned: Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Charles Darwin, Paul Grice, Fred Dretske, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke, Richard Montague, Iain McGilchrist, Alfred Tarski

00:00:00 Introduction

00:04:49 Knife Throwing, Other Athletic Activities

00:11:57 Poetic Epigraph

00:13:05 How to integrate Philosophy, Linguistics, and Biology? Should philosophers read Dawkins? Should biologists read Tarski?

00:20:15 Origins of language. Are any aspects of language as old as consciousness?

00:27:39 Can we only discuss language in language?

00:29:06 Are all philosophical problems linguistic? Analytic philosophy

00:32:45 Fodor and the Language of thought. Language without communication

00:34:50 Consciousness and the limits of knowing

00:39:38 Can something exist without you knowing it?

00:42:40 Can we understand/build a mind?

00:43:49 Links between Mysterianism and Apathatic theology?

00:48:13 Does McGinn's Mysterianism conflict with his Naturalism?

00:50:10 Why do we have introspection?

00:55:28 Do our brains see the world dualistically to support the existence of language?

01:01:35 Wittgenstein's Investigations. Split brains. McGilchrist.

01:03:43 The brain has over-invested in spatial reasoning.

01:06:16 Communication without symbols, without linguistic utterance.

01:11:38 Philosophers don't pay enough attention to animals. Darwin, etc.

01:14:35 Philosophers read too much psychology, and don't understand it.