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00:00:00 Intro

00:07:38 Why Does Consciousness Break Science

00:10:40 Is Life Special? Biophychism: Is Life Consciousness?

00:14:40 Are Observations (Quantum Physics) Dependent on Consciousness?

00:18:10 A Unique Element of Consciousness, distinguishing it from Life

00:21:25 Why is Consciousness Not A Vague Concept?

00:26:40 Are Our Brains Lying to Us? Is Consciousness an Illusion

00:32:58 Is Artificial Intelligence Conscious?

00:35:00 Epiphenomenalism

00:39:25 The Matrix and Divorce of Mind and Reality

00:42:25 How Much of Our Awareness Relies on Sense Data?

00:48:40 Pure Being and Pure Consciousness

00:52:12 Panpsychism, and how it solves the problem of consciousness

00:56:45 Mysterianism and Colin McGinn

00:59:06 Is Panpsychism just sexed-up materialism?

01:03:17 Weak vs. Strong Emergence

01:07:25 Is Panpsychism an Imaginary Science?

01:10:45 Consciousness is Integrated Information

01:14:08 Cosmopsychism

01:20:13 Physical Reactivity is the Signature of Consciousness

01:23:39 Could dark matter or antimatter be without consciousness?

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Taylor returns to take Milo and Jack through ten great works of American "Gnostic" literature, beginning with Emerson’s Nature and ending, exactly a century later, with Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Along the way: Jones Very believes himself to be Christ, Hawthorne discovers the stain in creation, Ahab declares war on visible reality, Whitman meets the “real Me”, Dickinson confronts an inaccessible God, and Melville, Bierce, West, and Faulkner push the American suspicion of the world into ever darker territory.

Part two of our Gnostic Bonanza; the first part - on the original Gnostics - available here: https://youtu.be/brOyXDlaA-Y?si=DQGCLCq61lwZm4PG

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction

03:24 I. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836)

11:15 II. Jones Very – Essays and Poems (1839)

18:48 III. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

24:46 IV. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (1851)

34:55 V. Walt Whitman – Sea-Drift / “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” (1860)

41:21 VI. Emily Dickinson – Poems (1861–65)

50:53 VII. Herman Melville – Clarel (1876)

59:01 VIII. Ambrose Bierce – Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)

1:04:10 IX. Nathanael West – Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

1:07:38 X. William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

1:21:04 American Gnosticism – Final Thoughts

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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