From Narcissist's Abuses to Time's Uses (With Curt Jaimungal, Theories of Everything)

Just to interrupt, I apologize. Would an example be, I heard Steve Jobs would hear other people's ideas say no, but then one week later he would go to that person and recite the ideas if he came up with it and he would also believe he came up with it.

Yes, that's an example. I'm not saying Steve Jobs is a narcissist. I'm saying, would that be an example of the behavior?

I think you could safely say that he was. Yeah, that's an example because as far as the narcissist is concerned, there are no external objects. Objects in psychology means people. There are no external people. Everyone is an internalized object in his mind, known as introject. Everyone is an introject. Everyone is an avatar, a representation in his mind known as introject. Everyone is an introject. Everyone is an avatar, a representation in his mind.

And external versus internal, is that also to be thought of as subject versus object?

No, because the experience of the internal objects is subjective, even though the narcissist misidentifies the internal objects as external.

So this is not the same as someone who does meditation and then they dissolve the boundary between subject and object?

No.

Another thing is that the narcissist does not possess an ego.

Ironically, the narcissist is selfless.

Narcissism is a disruption in the formation of the self. It starts very early in life, and it has to do with the fact that the parent was unable to mirror the child appropriately.

There was no maternal gaze which allowed the child to differentiate himself or herself from the mother and create boundaries.

So consequently, the child does not evolve a functioning ego or a self or what have you.

So there's an emptiness there. There's a void.

Kernberg described it in borderline and narcissistic disorders that there's a void there.

And so the narcissist is incapable of perceiving external and differentiating it from internal, because there is what I call an othering failure.

How do you know that other people exist?

When you were a small, small, small baby, mother looked at you. There was a maternal gaze and you saw yourself in mother's eyes. You were able to identify yourself in mother's eyes. And then mother left the room. She frustrated you as a baby, as an infant. She left the room and her gaze left with her.

Gradually you began to grasp as an infant that there is mommy and there is you. It's her gaze that defines you.

And her gaze is the first catastrophic, cataclysmic trauma in life. It's very traumatic to realize that you and mother are not one, are not unitary. The world breaks apart. There is a chasm suddenly that opens up because mother represents the world.

And now it's you against the whole world and you're not one. So you can't control the world, etc. It's a major trauma.

But it endows you with the ability to tell apart external and internal. It gives rise to what later becomes the constellated self. It allows you to develop boundaries.

So you know, I stop here and the world begins here. Or the world stops here and I begin.

All this is absent in narcissism, in pathological narcissism. The child never goes through these stages. He never separates, individuates. He is never allowed to separate from the parent, usually the mother, and to become an individual.

And so narcissists spend an eternity trying to recreate the early childhood conflict, trying to separate, individuate.

So they go around and they find maternal substitutes. They find intimate partners, friends, and they convert them into mothers, substitute mothers.

And then they try to separate from them and become individuals because they failed originally.

And this is known in psychology as a repetition compulsion.

That's in a nutshell. I mean, it's a lot more complicated, but in a nutshell.

So let's say we have an extreme narcissist. Let's call them Carl.

And you ask Carl, Carl, does Alex exist? You point to Alex. Would Carl say, no, Alex does Alex exist? You point to Alex. Would Carl say, no, Alex does not exist?

Or maybe they would appease you and say yes, but inside they would feel as an Alex. No, no, they miss, as I said, they misapprehend internal objects. They think they're external.

This is why narcissism is a kind of psychosis.

They first deprive you of your externality and your separateness.

Because narcissists never succeeded to separate from the maternal figure, they don't know what it means to be separate. They've never had an experience of separateness.

So whenever they come across someone, they immediately merge, fuse. They go into what is called a symbiotic phase.

So they can't tell that you are separate, that you're external, they regard you as an extension of themselves, or internal object, or avatar or icon or whatever you want to call it.

But they mislabel this internal object and they say that it's external.

In other words, they have what we call impaired reality testing. They don't grasp reality appropriately. They get reality wrong. They misread reality and mislabel everything. They mislabel their own emotions. They mislabel internal objects.

It's a total case of extreme attribution errors.

So they are very, very confused.

Narcissism, I think, the core of narcissism is an enormous confusion. An enormous confusion.

Because you don't have guidance from inside because you don't have insides. You're hollow. Hollow, you're a void.

Do they lack a conscience?

No, no. There's nothing there. It's total emptiness.

So they do lack a conscience?

Conscience is a group of introjects that are embedded in you, installed in your mind, if you wish, during a process known as socialization.

Conscience reflects societies, values, and mores, communicated to you via socialization agents, such as mother and father.

You imitate mother and father. This is known as social learning, social learning theory. You imitate, emulate, mother and father, they become role models. And later you have teachers and peers, influences even, they become role models.

So, conscience is simply a name given to a voice or a group of voices that reflect society in you. Society reaches into your mind. There's a long arm of society and installs an app and this app is conscience.

Now, this is, of course, not the case with narcissists, do not possess a conscience.

Because to possess a conscience you must, number one, realize that there are people out there, external people. Number two, you need to have a functioning ego. Ego is a word used by Freud. I'm not saying that ego is a real thing, it's a metaphor. Ego simply means that you grasp reality properly, you realize the consequences of your actions, you can tell right from wrong, and you orient your behavior according to this information.

So ego is like the interface with reality. And that's one of the functions of ego. It has many other functions. But one most important ones is to put you in touch with reality, when you want to do something, to tell you, wait a minute, hold it. It's going to have dire consequences. Don't do it. This is conscience. Or what you're doing is wrong. You're hurting people. And it's wrong to hurt people. This is conscience.

Malcissus doesn't have any of this because he doesn't perceive that other people exist, because he doesn't have an ego, because he has no interface or exchange or intercourse with reality. He lives in a fantastic bubble.

Narcissism is a fantasy defense writ large. Even the opening text in the DSM uses the word fantasy. It's a fantasy.

The narcissist lives in what is known as a paracosm, a virtual reality. It's the first visual reality long before computers.

Can you disentangle this usage of the word narcissism from our colloquial one, where we say that someone who's self-involved and egotistical is narcissistic?

First of all, we make a distinction, clinical distinction, between narcissistic disorders, for example, narcissistic personality disorder, which is an extreme form of mental illness, and narcissistic style.

Narcissistic style is narcissism light. It simply means that you behave in a way that is reminiscent of a narcissist, but you don't have the psychological background, the motivations, the dynamics that are typical of a narcissist. It's just behaving ways that remind people of narcissism.

So, narcissism, there are three types of narcissism. There is the clinical entity, the pathology, the sickness. That's one thing.

And they should be diagnosed only by qualified diagnostician. You can't fling this word about and attribute narcissism to people. They need to be diagnosed.

Only 1% of the population have narcissistic personality disorder. Another 5% to 6% have narcissistic style.

And that's global or is that a US-based statistic?

No, it's a global statistic.

Another 5 to 6% have narcissistic style.

Just a moment. To linger on that 1% that's interesting to me.

Because earlier it seemed like narcissists or people who have narcissistic personality disorder were made from trauma.

And to me it would seem like that's extremely social.

So the trauma in Japan would be of a different sort or less or more than the trauma of Canada.

But you're saying, no, no, no, it occurs approximately 1%.

Yeah, because it's globally.

The prevalence is identical in the 40 or 50 societies we have studied.

Maybe we'll find different if we were to study another 100. But I think 40 to 50 is a representative sample.

And that includes Japan and Africa, countries in Africa, in Egypt, and Israel, and so.

Interesting.

The reason is that narcissism is a reaction to trauma regardless of the nature of the trauma, and it is channeled via social mores and conventions and so on.

Let me explain what I just said.

If you're a Japanese kid and you're exposed to trauma, you are likely to develop narcissistic defenses.

As one option, there are other options. You could become coare likely to develop narcissistic defenses.

As one option, there are other options. You could become co-dependent. You could develop borderline.

I mean, there are other options, but one of the options is that you become a narcissist.

So you're likely to develop narcissistic defenses.

However, the way these defenses manifest would be socially preordained. Society will dictate to you how to express your narcissism.

So in Japan, for example, we have collective narcissism. The Japanese narcissist would brag about belonging, belonging to Toyota, belonging to a club, belonging to a socioeconomic stratum.

So the Japanese narcissist expresses his narcissism, his grandiosity, via his affiliation, via his belonging to a collective or social group, while in the United States, which is highly individualistic, the narcissist would emphasize his own accomplishments, his own standing and status and relative positioning and possessions and wealth, and mate or intimate partner and so on.

So it's still narcissism, regardless of how it's expressed.

And it's important to understand that narcissism is multifarious, has many guises and disguises, and it's wrong to say that all narcissists behave the same, they all have the same constitution, composure, and comportment and so on.

No, it's not true. It's highly... Interesting. It's highly culture-bound. It is so culture-bound.

In other words, it so depends on culture and society that they are very serious scholars that contest the clinical meaningfulness of narcissistic personalities.

They say it's not a mental illness. It's a form of social dysfunction or social problem, more. It's not a mental illness.

Definitely, anti-social personality disorder, also known as psychopathy, strikes me at least, in many other scholars, is totally not a mental illness. It's not a mental illness. It's comprised of behaviors that society finds detestable, unacceptable, objectionable, obnoxious.

So, that's society's problem.

We are medicalizing and we are pathologizing too many things, way too many things.

The DSM started off with 100 pages in 1952. Today, 60 years later or 70 years later, there's a thousand pages. Thousand, tenfold.

Have we become ten times more crazy? Or maybe we are over-pathologizing and over-medicalizing behaviors which shouldn't be?

Maybe narcissism is nothing but being an a-hole and a jerk.

I happen to think so.

Of course, all behaviors are determined by internal dynamics, specific constellations, certain constructs that operate or don't operate, and so on and so forth.

You can't say, just because the narcissist has a special constellation or complexion or combination of constructs and psychological processes and dynamics, that means he is mentally ill.

You can't say that.

So I had interjected when you were describing the differences between the three types of narcissists.

Did it?

I already forgot. Can you please continue?

So we were just on narcissistic personality disorder, and then you were saying there were two other kinds.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's a clinical thing.

Then the second layer or second type of narcissism, if you wish, is the narcissism of ostentation.

It's the need to be seen, the need to be noticed.

The need to be seen is primordial. It's a survival strategy.

Babies who are not seen are dead babies. They die.

You need to attract attention from day one. The minute you're born, you need to attract attention. You start to smile. You start to smile. You start to cry.

These are all behavioral cues intended to manipulate the adults around you to keep you safe and give you food and keep you warm and dry as a baby. Two-day-old baby, one-week-old baby.

So the need to be seen is embedded. It's biological.

And the population nowadays has exploded. So now we are coping with 8.2 billion people.

It's very difficult to be seen. It's very difficult to be noticed.

We used to live in villages where everyone knew everyone and everyone made everyone's business, their own business. So everyone was getting a lot of attention. A lot. Sometimes this attention was annoying, a nuisance, intrusive.

Yeah, I agree.

But you got attention all the time.

So now we live in anonymous warehouses known as cities. These cities are also virtual environments because they are not linked to any manufacturing, anything tangible, they're not linked to the soil or to nature. This is a virtual environment which functions as a warehouse, human warehouse.

And it's difficult to garner attention. It's difficult to be seen and to be noticed.

And this gives rise to narcissistic behaviors which are not necessarily clinically pathological but they are highly narcissistic all the same.

Attention-seeking, addiction to narcissistic supply, escalation of behavior, very similar addiction to narcissistic supply.

Yeah, narcissistic supply is a general term for attention, adulation, admiration, affirmation, being feared, being noticed, and so. It's addictive, so you need to escalate your behavior all the time in order to obtain the same impact or outcome.

Understood.

And this is a second layer of narcissism. And it's much more common, of course, in the clinical manifestation.

And there's a third layer of narcissism, and that is a societal, cultural layer.

Narcissism is hard-baked, built into many of the tenets and the percepts of civilization, modern civilization, postmodern civilization.

It started with Protestantism, the highly narcissistic version of Christianity, and it progressed from there, and it merged and coalesced with narcissistic elements in other religions, other ideologies, other creeds and so on and so forth.

And today we have a narcissistic civilization.

And yes, it's a universal civilization. Of course, China is totally indistinguishable from the United States in every way that matters.

And so is Japan, and so is Israel, and so is Egypt. Wherever I go, I feel at home. I feel at home because it's a universal civilization, you know.

And so this civilization is highly narcissistic. It rewards narcissism. It incentivizes narcissism.

In July 2016, the magazine, New Scientist, came up with a cover story. Parents, help your children be narcissists. It's as simple as that. It's a positive adaptation. It's adaptive.

If you are a narcissist, you end up in the White House. If you are narcissists, you end up in the White House. If you are narcissists, you end up being the richest men on earth. If you are narcissists, you end up being an influencer.

Narcissism pays. Narcissism is a coping strategy, but also enhances self-efficacy, the ability to extract favorable outcomes from changing environments.

So people adopt narcissism as a shortcut to success, and they're right to do so. They're absolutely right to do so.

And so you have a confluence of these three types of narcissism. The clinical, the ostentatious behavioral one, and the societal and the societal efficacious one.

This creates what I would call a narcissistic sphere or narcissistic bubble. You have no incentive to exit narcissism.

Imagine that Donald Trump comes to me as a patient. And I tell him, you know, Donald, you're highly narcissistic. It's really horrible. We need to treat it.

And he would say, why? Why do we need to treat it?

I'm having gorgeous girls. I'm a multi-billionaire and I'm the ex and future president of the United States. Give me one good reason to not be a narcissist.

What would you say to that?

You're right. It's a positive adaptation.

You see, the mistake in psychology, definitely in psychotherapy, is to impose your values.

To impose values. I call it axiological practice.

When you impose values, you're getting it wrong. When you start to use words like good and bad, evil, wrong, you're getting things wrong. You're getting things wrong. Absolutely.

The only two questions when someone comes to you or when you come across someone is, are, is this person functional and is this person egosyntonic?

In other words, content. I wouldn't say happy, but content. Okay with himself. Feels comfortable with it.

Egosentonic.

Egosyntonic means you feel comfortable with yourself.

So regardless of your diagnosis and your anything else, if you are fully functional in all fields of life and if you're happy with who you are, why would I interfere? Why would I intervene?

Even if you diagnose with a psychotic disorder, why would I intervene?

It's illegitimate to intervene by imposing my values.

Then you're not. Narcissism is bad. I don't care that you're happy. I don't care that you're functioning. You're narcissists and I should cure you.

That's wrong. It's absolutely wrong.

It also denies the autonomy, personal autonomy of the other. It's dictatorial. It's authoritarian. It's not okay.

And large part of psychology and psychiatry is being abused for social control and not only in dictatorships.

We use or abuse psychology and psychiatry to impose specific social ethos, specific values, specific conventions and norms, specific behavioral scripts.

We recruit psychology and psychiatry and psychotherapy to exert an influence which is illegitimate, undue, wrong. It's wrong to do this. It compromises the alleged scientific nature of psychology and psychiatry.

They are not sciences. They're pseudo-sciences. But still, they have a claim to science.

So it compromises it. And it causes people to lose trust in the profession.

Because when you dictate to people how they should be, it means you are assuming a grandiose position of supremacy.

I will tell you what is healthy. I will tell you how you should be. I will tell you whether the way you are now is okay or not, because I have the absolute God-given yardstick and benchmark as to how you should be.

And I'm going to shape and mold you, shrink, you know, these words and these phrases indicate the fear, the fear of this imposition.

You say a head shrink, not a positive view of psychiatry.

Is some of this not already taken care of, at least in cluster A and cluster C as far as I know that if you look up any of those disorders and they'll say, okay, here's an outline, here's a checklist for them.

And then number nine would be, does this interfere with your work life and personal life? And if it doesn't, that's a major marker against you having a disorder.

That's the way it should have been. That's the way it should have been.

But it's not the way it is.

This is known as the polythetic problem.

You have nine criteria in, for example, narcissism, the DSM4, the fourth edition, and it has been carried over to the fifth edition, shockingly, because it's like 25 years old, and it reflects knowledge that is long ago debunked.

But okay, to diagnose the narcissist, I would need to identify five out of nine diagnostic criteria, according to the DSM 4 and 5.

That is if I'm not using the alternative model of the DSM 5, which was relegated to the appendix.

If you qualify, if you meet five of the diagnostic criteria, you're diagnosed.

And that has nothing to do with whether you're functioning or not functioning well, how you feel about yourself, and even has nothing to do with whether your behavior conforms to your particular idiosyncratic culture and society.

Because some cultures and societies encourage behaviors that other cultures and societies pathologize.

And we need to be culturally sensitive.

That is absent in the DSM.

Because the DSM is a list. And if you satisfy a portion of that list, you're diagnosed. End of story. Nothing you can do about you. You can't protest.

You can say, yes, I meet eight of the nine diagnostic criteria, but in my country, this is normal behavior.

You can't say this. I meet nine out of the nine diagnostic criteria, but I'm very happy with who I am. And my functioning is perfect. I'm president of the United States, I'm multi-billionaire, and I bed every beautiful woman around. I'm perfectly happy. You can't say this. You just can't say this. There's not acceptable arguments if you meet the diagnostic criteria, which is wrong.

So what would be those criteria so that someone, I know that you mentioned that you shouldn't self-diagnosed, you need to be clinically diagnosed?

They include, for example, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, envy, and so and so forth. They're widely available only.

Currently on screen is the DSM criteria and you can pause it.

In the DSM-5, in the appendix, and the text revision was published two years ago as well, there is something called the alternative model.

Alternative model sounds a lot like a text lifted from Dostoevsky. It's literature. It's written like literature. It's beautiful.

And it describes the life and the internal process of the narcissist.

And I'm kidding you or not. It reads like Dostoevsky.

So I would much rather adhere to the alternative text than to the DSM's list, bullet list of nine diagnostic criteria.

Because I think the alternative model captures the essence of narcissism, not the behaviors, not the way other people react to the narcissist, not the way the narcissists feels about other people, it captures what and who, what it is to be a narcissist and who is a narcissist.

That's the alternative model, not the diagnostic criteria.

Let's say that a woman is in a relationship with a man, and it's all splendid. She loves him and he loves her. At least that's what she perceives, but something's off and she can't put her finger on it. She suspects he may be a narcissistic abuser, this has happened to her in the past.

What would be some checklist that this woman can use as a heuristic?

And then I would like to ask you the same question, but from the male perspective.

Let's start with the fact that today, nowadays, half of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personalities or that are women. That did not use to be the case 40 years ago when about 75% of people diagnosed with NPD were men.

So the gender bias, either the gender bias is disappearing, I hate your earphones.

Sorry about that.

Either the gender bias is disappearing or women are becoming more narcissistic.

I believe it's the latter because women are also becoming more masculine.

According to studies by Lisa Wade and many others, women describe themselves now in strictly, exclusively, masculine terms. In 1988 out of nine adjectives that women used to describe themselves were identified as feminine, and today eight out of nine adjectives that women use to describe themselves are definitely masculine.

For example, competitive, ambitious, ruthless, and so on.

So women have become more male-like, more masculine.

And since narcissism has always been a men's problem, a men's mental illness, so it seems that masculine women are becoming more narcissistic.

Now, the first thing to understand is that your gut instinct and intuition are frequently wrong when it comes to circumstances and the external world and objects and even decision-making and so on. They are wrong about half the time.

Your intuition and gut instinct are rarely wrong when it comes to other people. We perceive other people correctly. We often perceive situations and decision trees and wrongly, but we perceive other people very correctly.

So the first tip is if something feels wrong, off-key, not put together, not well put together, something doesn't fit, walk away. You are likely right.

This, by the way, has a name. It's called the Uncanny Valley reaction.

In 1970, thereHis name was Masahiro Mori, of course. And he conducted a series of studies and he discovered that people react with growing discomfort, they become more ill at ease, the more a robot resembles a human being. Exactly the opposite of what we would intuitively think. It's counterintuitive. The more the robot resembles a human, the more uncomfortable we feel in the presence of the robot.

And this is known as uncanny valley.

When you're in the presence of a narcissist, a narcissist is an unfinished human, a work in progress that would never progress.

Narcissists lack critical elements that comprise human beings. Narcissists lack empathy. They have no access to positive emotions. They lack a functioning ego. They don't have a constellated self, etc.

In many respects, narcissists are therefore a kind of artificial intelligence, a kind of robot. But externally, they look like human beings. It's like a very good simulation of a human being but it's not a human being so you would have an uncanny valley reaction in the presence of a narcissist. A voice in your head or in your gut or wherever it is would tell you this thing looks like you a human, but it's not full-fledged. It's half-baked. Something is wrong. It's not fully put together or rightly put together. I mean, something's wrong there.

You should obey this uncanny valley reaction.

Second tip, do not pay any attention to the way the narcissist behaves with you.

Because the narcissist is trying to manipulate you, trying to charm you, trying to obtain outcomes. He's goal-oriented, like psychopaths, also goal-oriented.

Pay attention to how the narcissist treats other people, not you. How does he treat the waitress? How does he treat the cab driver? How does it treat, I don't know, the concierge? Pay attention, how does he treat his mother?

Pay attention to how the narcissist interacts with other people.

Because with you, it's an act. It's a show. It's a theater production. You can't trust it. You're not obtaining any reliable information from his interaction with you.

That's the second tip.

Third tip.

Alacrity. Speed.

The narcissist would offer you marriage on a second date, usually, if he is very slow. And he would suggest to have four children with you on the third date, and he would ask you to move into his place, or he would move into your place, on the fifth date.

That's too fast. The speed is alarming, indicative of something that is wrong.

He is not interacting with you. He's interacting with some figment in his fantasy and imagination. And because he's already intimate with his mind, this intimacy, ersatz intimacy, carries over to you.

So it's illegitimate request from the narcissist to the partner to say, hey, would you like to be married? I want to do this. It's a legitimate request after two years. It's not feigning something in order to be manipulative and...

Oh, you mean he means it.

Yeah, he means it. He means it.

That's why when you go online, we're 90, and again, I'm being charitable, 90% of the information is wrong.

They say narcissists gaslight, narcissists lie. No, narcissists are delusional. They fully believe everything they're telling you. That's a problem. The problem is they deceive you because they are authentic.

They're real. They're meaning.

This is a point of contention with people who dislike Trump. They'll say, versus the Trump supporters, the dislikers will say he's lying and the Trump supporters would say, I sense authenticity and honesty from them.

So do I. I think he's authentic in his insanity, in his delusionality, in his cruelty. Everything is authentic. The narcissist truly believes his stories, his promises, his intentions, the fantasies he imposes on you or introduces you into. The future as he delineates it, he doesn't future fake.

Narcissists don't future fake. They fully believe the future that they're selling you on.

So this is important to understand. This is a confusion between narcissists and psychopaths.

Psychopaths manipulate you knowingly. This is known as Machiavellianism.

Psychopaths, if they make a promise, they know they're going to break it. If they make an offer, it's goal-oriented.

They know the difference between fantasy and reality. They're selling the fantasy to you. They remain stuck in reality, the psychopaths. They are firmly embedded and grounded in reality, but they want you to lose your mind. They gaslight you. They falsify your reality. They induce, induct you into fantasy, and they do it intentionally in a premeditated manner. It's part of a plan.

The narcissist is not like that. Narcissist is highly automatic. Most of the processes are unconscious, and they believe everything they say they believe because they're grandiose. Everything they say is the word of god. How could you distract or doubt it? No way. It's a god speaking, you know.

So that's the second sign, the alacrity, the speed.

The fourth sign is control.

Narcissists have severe separation insecurity, which colloquially is known as abandonment anxiety. Exactly like borderlines.

But while a borderline clings like a codependent, a borderline would cling to you and would emotionally blackmail you in order to make sure that you don't abandon her and don't reject her, and she would become hysterical and emotionally dysregulated if there's even a hint or a whiff of abandonment and rejection.

The narcissist tries to control you. The narcissist's solution to the conundrum of abandonment is to control you.

So the narcissist from the get-go, from the first date, would be in control. He would take the keys from your hand and lock your door.

He would drive you to a restaurant of his choosing. He would order food and drinks for you without asking you. He would then interrogate you why it took you so long to be in the bathroom. And so on.

He's in control. You feel like an employee with a very strict boss. And that's from the first minute.

And finally, I mean, there are many more tips, but I'm giving five. Sure.

Finally, fantasy.

Incongruence. There are huge discrepancies in the autobiographical data provided by the narcissist and usually in the first few meetings or occasions, the narcissist would focus on you exclusively.

It's like a laser focus and you become the total center of attention, you're idealized and it's irresistible. You fall for it.

Yes, it sounds attractive. It's attractive. You fall for it. It's intoxicating. And you want more and more. And only the narcissists can give it to you. And so this way he gets you addicted.

But if he does provide, and when he does provide, autobiographical material, it's usually contradictory. Usually there are severe discrepancies. And usually they contain, the personal history of the narcissist contains a lot of evident fantasy, evident.

Examples.

The narcissist can tell you that his work is groundbreaking and he is about to win the Nobel Prize. I'm kidding you not. Sounds stupid, isn't it?

But then the contradiction would be, he may say this, but then... It's clear that it's fantasy.

He fantasizes it.

Oh, sorry.

What I meant to say was, can you please provide an example of something from their past that they would say at one instance and then they would contradict it later?

Well, on a first date, the narcissist would tell you that he was a member of the special forces or the SAS or depending on the country. And then on a second date, he would tell you that he never served in the army.

Okay, that's interesting, but I don't see how they believe that then.

At any given moment, at any given moment, they believe it.

That's the thing that's difficult. It's difficult to wrap your mind around this.

They are not committed to any single version of reality. They're committed to the contemporary fantasy, and the contemporary fantasy could last six months. It could last six hours. It could definitely last six minutes. But at any given moment, they're committed.

One of the reasons, now that you ask why, one of the reasons is dissociation.

Dissociation is a set of defenses, a group of defenses, the most famous of which is amnesia, forgetting things. But there are other types of dissociative defenses, which I will not go into because they're more typical of borderline. De-realization, depersonalization, and so on.

The narcissist dissociates a lot.

In other words, the narcissist has memory gaps. These memory gaps are substantial, not small.

I'll give you a personal example.

And these memory gaps pertain only to autobiographical personal history, not to other types of memory that involve executive memory, episodic memory, and so on. Not, for example, to professional knowledge, or to recognizing people that could be of use to you.

I'm not talking about this. I'm talking about your own life story.

Once I made an exercise, I sat down and I wrote every single thing I remembered from my eight years' first marriage. I was married for eight years to the same woman. It was a tumultuous period. I was at the time very rich and very famous and in my country and so on.

So you can imagine we traveled a lot. There were many things and so many things to remember. It wasn't like a humdrum pedestrian existence that it's difficult to forget.

Okay, so I made a list, a very exhaustive list of every single thing I remembered from my marriage, and then I assigned a time value to each of the memories.

So, for example, I remember having lunch, that would be one and a half hours.

Okay, it's like a time.

I see it.

Okay, a duration.

A duration.

When I summed up the durations, what I got was about one day, about 24 hours.

That's all I remember from eight years of marriage.

And I think I've been over-generous. I think it's closer to 10 hours.

That's all I remember.

So narcissists have tremendous dissociation, enormous. They needed to dissociate as children in order not to confront the full wrath and brunt of the abuse and the trauma and so on, of course.

The dissociation is a classic reaction to trauma, also in borderline. Actually, in borderline, dissociation is a diagnostic criterion.

But Kernberg already said that borderline and narcissism is the same thing.

Okay. How does the narcissist compensate for these memory gaps?

He invents stories. He says, let me think what could have happened. What's the most plausible thing to have happened? What probably had happened?

And this occurs at an unconscious level, so it's a confabulation.

It's a confabulation, it's largely unconscious, and then the narcissist believes it and is committed to it and would defend it to the death if you were to challenge it or undermine it or provide evidence to the contrary.

He would dispute the veracity and objectivity and the very existence of the evidence.

And I'm talking about tape recordings, video recordings, nothing. No way to shake the confabulation. No way to undermine it, to challenge it, period. That's reality, as far as he's concerned.

So if a narcissist finds himself earlier in the morning sleeping in his bed, and then at 4 o'clock in the afternoon in the country club. And he can't remember what had happened between point A and point B.

He would fabricate, he would confabulate the intervening period. He would say, probably I went to work. And at work, probably I met my boss. And then probably he gave me a project. And I was so immersed in the project that I forgot everything about it, about the environment.

And he would invent all this. And then the next day he would ask him, what did you do yesterday? Oh, I woke up in the morning. My boss gave me a project. I worked all day on the project. I needed to relax, and I went to the country club.

It sounds like being in a relationship with someone who has NPD would...

This is where the term gaslighting comes from, because they would make you feel as if you've lost your mind because you found camera evidence that suggests otherwise, but they're so confident with saying otherwise, with contradicting what you already consider to be reality, that you tend to actually lose your mind.

Yes, only it's not gaslighting. It's, in the case of narcissism, it's confabulation.

Gaslighting involves premeditation, intentional misleading regarding reality. So providing you with misleading information regarding reality, which would cast your own judgment of reality, your own...

I see, I see. So that's the subtle distinction is that most people believe that the narcissist is doing it purposefully.

It's effortful.

No.

Psychopaths do.

Psychopaths do, narcissists don't.

The famous movie, the famous two movies, Gaslight, they involve a psychopath, not a narcissist. The men there is a psychopath.

It seems far easier to emulate a psychopath than a narcissist.

Yes, and that's why...

For people who aren't narcissists.

And that's why I say that psychopaths are normal.

A psychopath is an exaggerated person. Okay?

You have goals, a psychopathist's goals. You're sometimes defined.

A psychopath is always defined.

I see.

So it's a spectrum and they're extreme. Yeah.

They're like an extreme human being, an exaggerated human being, a kind of caricatured human being. But they're human. They're identifiably human.

Psychopaths. They have a self. They recognize people as external. They have intact reality testing. They don't play by the social rules. End of story. Not nice. Many of them should end up in prison. Many of them do. But there's nothing to do with mental illness.

The narcissist isan entirely different ballgame. He can't help it. These dynamics are unconscious. It's doubtful whether he has an unconscious even.

Some scholars doubt it, like Lacan and myself.

It's a seriously disrupted, it's like, you know, the girl interrupted. It's like human interrupted. It's a seriously disrupted person who was in the making, raw material.

It's raw material, it's protoplasm.

It's not a psychopath. The psychopath is full-fledged. Maybe the psychopath is too full-fledged.

It's a kind of malignant individualism, you know, psychopathy, malignant individualism, which doesn't recognize the constraints of society and any, any, refuses to obey any expectations and so.

But the narcissist can't, even if he wants to, he wants to, he just can't do it.

It doesn't have the tools.

It doesn't have the, nothing is helping.

Narcissus.

So what hope is there then for the narcissist?

None and don't buy into all kinds of self-styled experts or self-enriching experts.

I regard this as an extreme form of shalotanism, and not to say con artistry, to claim that NPD can be healed.

I've seen this online.

What about coped with?

What about coped with?

You can definitely modify certain abrasive and antisocial behaviors of the narcissist.

Using modalities like schema therapy, even transactional analysis, some forms of CBT, yeah, there are some modalities that allow you to somehow reach into the narcissists and somehow convince the narcissists to modify behaviors in the short term, by the way.

There's always a relapse. It's like eternal maintenance. You have to do it again and again. Recurrence.

But behavior modification is where it stops. There's nothing else that can be done with or to the narcissist. None, nothing.

That's not Sam Vaknin only. There's Theodore Millon, there's Kernberg, they're big names.

We all think that...

It does seem like there's hope. The hope is to do something on a daily or weekly basis.

So, for instance, we shower, hopefully on a semi-daily basis, and we don't think, oh, I'm not cured of my uncleanliness. Shoot, I need to shower again. So in the same way, can not a narcissist just view what they have if they're self-aware enough and then also wanting to change?

You're talking now from society's point of view.

Yes, you can reduce, as I said, abrasive and antisocial behaviors of narcissism and render narcissism innocuous so that narcissism no longer, the narcissist no longer adversely impacts people around him.

But what about the narcissist? What about the internal experience of the narcissist? What about the depressive cycles the narcissists going through? What about the pain and the suffering?

This is what cannot be tackled, touched, healed, nothing. This is the hopeless part.

Yes, of course you can modify.

It's like a clockwork orange.

You know the movie, yeah?

I don't mean society to modify the narcissist. I'm saying if there's someone who's watching who has NPD and they think, man, I don't like my lifestyle. I have these depressive episodes like you mentioned. There are negative effects to me. I'm not trying.

You can modify behaviors, but behaviors are only external.

It's like domesticating a dog or taming a lion. You can modify behaviors, of course, but you cannot touch the inside of the narcissist because there's nothing there. There's nothing to do internally.

If you condition someone to mimic essentially certain behaviors, yes, it makes a narcissist life easier also. If he's less antisocial, less abrasive, less obnoxious, less coarse, life becomes more pleasant to him and to others. I agree.

But this is society's point of view.

I see.

They would still feel empty.

Yes, they would still feel empty, depressed and broken and suffering. Or they would feel ashamed.

The narcissist's biggest horror is to get in touch with his reservoir of shame.

They would still be mocked and ridiculed on multiple occasions because of their grandiosity and so and so forth, and they would spot it, the process known as mortification.

Mortification.

Yes.

They would still sometimes become emotionally dysregulated and suicidal if, for example, they've been shamed in public.

So they are still broken.

They're still broken.

In BPD, in borderline personality disorder, we have a better prognosis. But again, it's more or less the same. In BPD we have a very efficacious treatment modality. It's called dialectical behavior therapy, DBT. And DBT reverses, heals, you could say heals, borderlinesbecause they lose the diagnosis. They cannot longer be diagnosed with borderline in 50% of cases.

If you were to wait until you're 45, 81% of people with borderline personality disorder lose the diagnosis.

So the prognosis is excellent, you know, and yet, multiple studies have demonstrated that many of the internal dynamics are there, a feeling of brokenness, of emptiness, of, they're still there.

I see.

You know, medicine, classical medicine, has been going on for, at the very least 5,000 years.

Maybe if we run another interview, you and me, 5,000 years from now, would be a lot more optimistic.

Right, right.

So prior to dialectical behavioral therapy being invented, there was no hope or almost no hope for the person with borderline personality disorder. Now there's some hope.

And it's been invented by...

So we don't know, who knows, 100 years from now, 50 years, 10 years.

There'salso experience, listen, 5,000 years, we know a lot about the brain, the skull, experience.

Psychology started, if I'm very generous, started 150 years ago.

It's young.

Yes, it's young, not young.

It didn't start with Carl Jung, you mean literally young.

It's young, in German, it's jung.

Now from the man's perspective, a man is going out with a woman, okay?

Is it the same five signs?

Same.

It's a myth that male narcissists and female narcissists are not the same.

Absolutely the same.

The female narcissist is likely to be a bit more histrionic.

So she would be, there would be displays of hyper-emotionality, which are essentially fake.

And so she would pose as hyper-emotional. She would be seductive and flirtatious.

Toward you or toward other people in front of you?

You're talking about the date.

Ah, you mean, you know, with everyone, with everyone.

I see.

And she would emphasize external appearances, her looks, her clothing, her makeup.

But that's a throwback to the patriarchy.

It's a throwback to, otherwise, there's no psychological difference between men and women, nowadays. Maybe 40, 50 years ago, yes, but nowadays.

And for the people who scrubbed forward to this part of the interview, can you please quickly recapitulate the five factors that you outlined earlier?

The five tips, you mean?

So those five factors, the first one being that you want to observe how they treat other people, not just exclusively yourself, and then the second one slips my mind, the third one, Celerity, fourth, domineering. Fifth has to do with contravening information about their past?

Yes, so I said, if he moves too fast, first of all, if you feel uncomfortable, trust your feeling, walk away, if he moves too fast, but I mean, dramatically too fast, insanely too fast, insanely too fast.

Walk away.

If he misbehaves with other people, if he abuses other people, humiliates them, insults them and so and so forth, but is very nice to you and very kind with you.

Walk away means he's acting.

And if he's domineering, is immediately in control, walk away. Basically, these are the things.

And all these things happen on the first date.

Oh, and contradictory autobiographical information.

Contradictory, yes.

All these things happen on a first date.

It's a lie to say that he put on a mask. He was a wonderful actor. I didn't know any of this until, you know, two years later. It's nonsense. All of this happens on the first date.

You just have to pay attention and you have to prioritize your well-being over other needs.

Many, many people, they're so lonely, they overlook things. They say, okay, maybe he's obnoxious, but he is, I don't know, kind to me.

Don't deny. Don't repress. Don't sacrifice your future well-being just in order to be with someone because you're lonely right now.

The narcissist announces his or her narcissism loudly, ostentatiously, visibly, conspicuously, on a first date, on the first minute.

And above all, your body keeps the score. You feel queasy. You feel drowsy. You feel something's wrong when you're with the narcissist. And that happens in the first ten seconds.

Now, if you were abused as well as a child or teenager or whenever, does that dull your body's, earlier we referenced, you sense something's off, your gut instinct? Does that dull it and it leads victims to repeat a harmful pattern?

It actually sensitizes you to it.

In other words, if you grow up in a dysfunctional, abusive family and so on, you are likely to immediately identify an abuser and react.

Oh, it sensitizes you to it, I see.

Yes, not desensitized, sensitize. You are likely to react very powerfully to the presence of an abuser.

But you may find the abuser attractive because that's your comfort zone. That's what you're used to. That's where you grew up in. That was your upbringing.

You were a condition to love abusers.

You've learned as a child to associate love with pain, love with abuse.

So you're far more likely to identify an abuser, but you're also more likely to be attracted to an abuser.

Because it's like recreating your childhood, recreating the comfort zone, you know the ropes, you know the behaviors, you know how to manipulate, you believe, you know how to manipulate the abuser, and everything feels safe.

It's what we call a secure base.

I see.

Professor, can you please tell me your thoughts on the mind-body problem?

I think in most philosophical inquiries, the problem is always language, rather than essence.

The minute you say mind-body problem, you make certain assumptions about reality.

For example, you make assumptions about the separation between mind and body. You make assumptions about possible interactions between mind and body. You make assumptions about observer and observed Descartian assumptions.

So I don't think, I think that the question is phrased wrongly, not your question, the question, is phrased wrongly.

I don't think the question should be about mind and body. I think the question should be about external and internal.

Everything that we are is internal. Our body included.

We create a model of the world, which by the way in psychology is known as internal working model. We create a model of the world where we are the inner sanctum. We are the internal, and all the rest is external.

This raises very important questions about the concepts of background and the concepts of context and the concept of information.

The minute you phrase the question in these terms, there is no need anymore to make distinction between mind and body.

The experience of the internal cannot be divorced this way.

For example, take trauma. Trauma has a pronounced bodily dimension, but obviously trauma has a pronounced mind dimension.

Can you truly tell the difference?

I don't think so. I think if you were to define yourself as the internal, then the whole problem collapses.

I don't think the problem is the body mind issue. I think the problem is experiencing yourself, the experience of self, which partly is comprised of introspection, proprioception, and so on, the experience of the self.

We self-report, we say, I experience myself this way.

And that gives the impression that someone is providing the report.

Who is reporting?

But if you divide the world into internal and external, the reporting is an act of externality.

It has nothing to do with the internal.

When you report, you report to me. I'm always external to you. You could report to yourself, of course, but that would be within the internal. It would not exit the internal. And therefore, it would be meaningless in as far as the question of body mind.

If we reframe the question in terms of internal and external, we get rid of the dilemma and the conundrum completely.

Because any attempt to communicate the internal to the external, by definition, is exclusively external.

And so your experience of yourself is exclusively internal and has no external bearing or meaning. It's meaningless. Your experience of yourself is meaningless.

For example, can you truly communicate to me who you are and how you feel?

Of course not.

Ever, ever.

That's known in philosophy as the intersubjectivity problem.

And so if we accept that there is an internal realm and an external realm, and that acts of introspection are essentially external, not internal, because introspection is meaningless, without self-reporting, then no problem arises.

The problem arises the minute you say, both mind and body are in the world. They are both external.

And now how can we put them together? They're not. They don't have the same ontological status.

That's what I'm trying to see.

So does the problem of external versus internal have an analogy of self versus other?

Yes, it's a particular case, a private case.

It's not an equivalence though.

No, it's a private case. It's not an equivalence, though. No, it's a private case.

Private case of external versus internal.

Sorry, disembroil for me, self versus other and internal versus external. Is one an example of the other?

The other is external.

The other is external.

The self is internal.

So it's a private case of external versus internal.

But I can give you another case, for example.

Science is a case of internal versus external. Science is external, completely external. And the scientist is completely internal.

So can we, therefore, make any meaningful statement about the scientist in a way which would somehow create a connection with the science?

No.

I do not think that internal and external are, for example, two facets of one reality. I don't think that they are bridgeable. I don't think that they are communicable. I don't think the science is a reflection of the internal state of the scientists. I don't think the science is a reflection of the internal state of the scientist.

I don't think so.

Even if the internal science, even if a scientist reports his or her internal state and links it to the science, that would be a totally external act.

We have no access to the internal ever in any way, shape, or form, not via language, not via philosophy, not by way, simply not.

In this sense, my attitude is solipsistic.

And of course, if you're solipsist, the question of mind and body becomes meaningless, because you are the only object.

And so everything is you. It's like God. Would you ask about God if there is a mind-body problem with God?

No, because God is everything. God is being.

And I think the big mistake we are all committing as philosophers, physicists, psychologists, I mean, all of them, is this constant eternal confusion between internal and external.

It's the belief, the erroneous belief, that we can somehow communicate internal states that there is a language bridge which would allow us to convey unequivocal information about our internal landscape, about who we are, about what we think, about what we feel, and that's unmitigated nonsense.

There is no such breach. In principle, there can never be such breach.

And so why ask about mind and body?

None of them. None of them is external.

And the only meaningful questions are about the external world, because we cannot ask meaningful questions about the internal world.

Are you saying that there is an internal world? We just can't speak about it with language?

I don't know. I don't know if there is an eternal world.

I have to trust. I have to take your word for it.

I have to take your word for it.

I only know that if there is an internal world, it has no bearing on the external, in principle, can never impact the external, can never be interacted with the external. It's meaningless. And the external, it's nothing to do with the external world.

And the only meaningful questions are about the external world.

Because you can never talk, you can never speak meaningfully about the internal world.

Any statement you make about the internal world is the best case, doubtful.

There's no ontological bearing and status.

Cannot, in principle, have an ontological bearing and status.

It's like God, you know?

More or less.

It's like God.

This sounds different than the way that I hear some solipsists speak, where they're speaking as if everything is internalYes, and you're saying everything is external.

Yes.

Solipsists make the mistake that they endow an internal state with ontological status.

I'm saying, I don't know if there is an internal state.

I only know one thing.

If there is an internal state, we cannot discuss it in external terms. It has no bearing on the external world.

And because the only meaningful questions must somehow correspond to an external thing somehow. You cannot ask a meaningful question that does not correspond to something external to the question.

So what?

This is interesting. This sounds anti-soluipsistic.

It's not anti-soluipsistic. It's a solipsism that is skeptical. Skeptical solipsism, if you wish.

Okay, if you want to combine the skeptical solipsism.

The solipsist is like the atheist.

The atheist says there's no God.

I disagree with that. That is a religion.

There is God and there is no God. These are, they have ontological equivalency. These two sentences are equally, equal ontologically. There is God, there is no God.

It's like a counterfactual, yes?

But if I say I don't know if there is a God, that's a valid statement.

It's a valid statement about what? About the external world. Not about the internal world of God, not about God's composition, not about God's mind, not about God.

When I say, I don't know if there's a God. It's an ontological statement about the external world.

Similarly, I don't know if you have a mind. I don't know if anyone has a mind. I don't know anything about the internal world of anyone, ever.

I think I have an internal world.

I'm not quite sure of this either.

Could be an artifact.

I don't know.

An artifact of...

Artifact of my hardware, for example.

There's no ability to discuss the internal world in any meaningful way.

And since body, mind, are internal, definitely the mind, there's no reason or way to discuss this question meaningfully.

It's exactly as you ask me, do you think God exists? Why would I waste my time on this question?

Similarly, why would I waste my time on the body mind question? It has no bearing on the external world in principle.

And these are the only meaningful questions I'm willing to ask. I'm a scientist. I'm a physicist.

I didn't ask you if God exists.

No, I know. I'm comparing, I'm saying.

Oh, you're saying like if someone said.

If someone asked me, does God exist? I would give the same treatment. I would answer the same way.

It's a meaningless question. It's a meaningless question.

The mind-body problem is a meaningless question.

What's Wittgenstein's private language argument?

Wittgenstein argued that there is no possibility of a private language.

And I beg powerfully to disagree. I mean, I just did it. I just disagreed.

I actually think the only true languages, only pure languages, if you wish, echt in German, or real languages, are private.

I think public languages are desperate attempts to translate private languages to each other.

I think we all have private languages and we are trying to translate them to each other using codified statements, strings, and codified statements, we call language.

So I believe that the only form of language is private language, is the internal dialogue, is the feeling of one perceiving oneself, feeling oneself, talking to oneself.

And that's why I think concepts such in psychology, such as introjection are very powerful concepts because they imply the internalization of voices from the outside, mother's voice, father's voice, teacher's voice, never mind, internalization of voices and appropriating them, making them your authentic voice.

Sort of coalescing.

Everything coalesces, all these interests coalesce and become you.

Lacan said that the unconscious, Jacques Lacan said the unconscious is the sum total of other people's speech.

He made the unconscious totally relational.

And I fully agree.

I think we create a private language by appropriating speech, by appropriating public language, and that is proof that the only true form of language is private.

Because what do we do? We take public language and we convert it to private language.

By the way, we do it all the time, even when you're an adult.

Why do we need to translate from public to private if there is no private language or if private language is useless or meaningless?

Because the only real language is private.

And of course, you know what? Forget Wittgenstein. Look at reality. I always prefer reality to Wittgenstein.

In reality, of course everything is filtered. When I talk to you, it's filtered through your memories and through your upbringing and through your knowledge and through your circumstances and through the fact that I didn't let you sleep well and, you know, a million things.

So this filtering converts my public speech into a private language.

Introspection is totally private language.

What did we say in the previous question? That the internal and the external. And the internal is managed via private language.

Actually, I have a theory that I'm working on. It's called Intracecic Activation Model. And there's a video on my website, on my channel, YouTube channel, that deals with IPAM, intracyclic activation model.

And there I deal with the issue of language, private languages, public languages, and so on and so forth, as a facilitator, mediator, and so and so forth.

So that's my view. I think the only language is actually private. I think we convert all public speech to private languages.

And because these languages are private, there's no meaning. It's meaningless to talk about the interface between internal and external. There's none.

Even as far as language is concerned, there's none. You cannot discuss the internal, you cannot communicate the internal. There's a firewall. It's not communicable.

So the private language is meaningless? Private language is meaningless to others. Absolutely. It's not communicable.

But at the same time is the only pure form of language? Yes.

Because the only dialogue we ever manage is with ourselves. I can never understand what it is to be Kurt, to be you. You can never communicate it to me. Never mind how hard you try.

And if you won six Nobel prizes in literature, you can never communicate it to me. You can hope to trigger in mereactions which you assume, God knows why, resemble your reactions.

And this is called empathy. You can hope that I will empathize with you.

And you could try to use language to make me empathize with you. You could say I'm sad. Or you can even use behavior. You can cry. And you could try to use language to make me empathize with you. You could say I'm sad. Or you can even use behavior. You can cry. And you could hope that I would empathize with you.

But do you have access to my internal worlds?

Of course not.

Is this a bridge? No.

Are you communicating? No.

You're not. You're not.

You're not because the reaction inside my head, in all probability, has nothing to do with the reaction inside your head.

Communication means monovalence. What you send is what you get.

If communication is changed on the way, it's not communication.

So when you broadcast to me, I'm sad, I'm crying, and so on, what you trigger in my brain, what you provoke in my brain, has nothing to do with what's going on in your mind.

Nothing.

Because I have my own memories and my own fears and my own recollections of crying and sadness.

It's nothing.

The way you love is not the way I love. The way you see red is not the way I see red. The color red.

Even objective, you know, frequencies. It's not the thing. We cannot communicate our internal experience. Therefore, it has no bearing on the external world.

And therefore, the only true language is a private language, not a public one.

Because a public one falsifies the meaning. Public one is a failure. Public languages are failures.

Why do you think there's so much conflict, so many wars, so many, because public language is a gigantic failure.

Because we pretend that a public language communicates internal states.

It does not.

And when we make this assumption, we end up fighting and killing each other.

Because, you know, how could you not empathize with me? How don't you understand me?

Probably you're a bad person. You're pretending not to understand me. Or you're goal oriented. You want something from me.

It immediately provoked, public language provokes paranoia. Provokes paranoid, persecutory ideation. Because it's such a failure.

And so we try, we attempt desperately to come up with monovalent, objective public languages.

For example, mathematics. Mathematics is a language that is monovalent.

Mathematician in Japan, in India, in Israel, and so on, we'll see the same thing, we'll think the same thing as any mathematician would tell you, it's rank nonsense.

I'ma mathematician also. It's rank nonsense. Yes, you see the same equation, of course, but what it conjures in your mind, for example, the images, the visuals, completely different for one person to another.

Otherwise, we will not have relativity theory. Completely different.

There is no possibility for an objective, neutral, value neutral, memory neutral, public language.

And so the only language possible is private.

Do I know that you have a mind? No. Do I know that you have internal states? No. Do I know that you're using a private language? No.

And so why discuss it? You know what I'm saying? Not why discuss it? Do I know that you're using a private language? No.

And so why discuss it? You know what I'm saying?

Not why discuss it with you? Why discuss it in philosophy?

I think it's a gigantic waste of time.

So the private language is associated with the internal and the public is associated with external?

Yes, you could put it this way. It's again a case of a private case of external versus internal.

The reason I say that is that earlier it sounded like you were saying all that we can meaningfully talk about is the external, and then it also sounds like you were saying all that ispure, as a language is the internal, to me the pure...

No, I didn't say, all you can discuss is a external.

I said, the only meaningful questions pertain to the external.

I did not say that you can answer these questions, which would then constitute language and communication.

I said the only meaningful questions you can pose would have to do with the external, because that is something that there's ontological status and the questions can be communicated.

Whether you can answer these questions, that's an entirely different story.

Wittgenstein suggested that the problem with private languages, the problem with private languages, if they were to ever exist, he claimed they don't exist.

But if they were to exist, they said private languages would be incoherent. They would not produce consistent statements when confronted with the same circumstances and so on.

And there I actually agree with him.

I think all languages, private and public, produce incoherent statements.

Why?

Because of Gödel.

Gödel.

Gödel suggested that you cannot have a system that is complete and consistent.

You have to choose.

If the system is complete, if it describes everything in your environment, in your life, it's likely to be inconsistent.

In other words, incoherent, in Wittgenstein's words, incoherent. And if it is coherent and consistent it's likely to be limited, very limited. That's Kurt Gödel.

So I think we can pose the right questions, I'm sorry, about the external world, never about the internal world, not meaningful questions.

But I think we will always fail in providing the answers.

That's why science is not about the truth.

It's asymptotic to the truth.

Science is the greatest failure in human history. Every scientific theory has failed. No exception.

In due time, all scientific theory fails.

And you have also the problem known as incommensurability of theories, theories that succeed each other, don't have anything in common, and so and so forth.

So science is the record of human failures at attempting to use external communication or public language.

That is science.

And there we are using a language, mathematics, which is supposed to be neutral and objective and not suffer from human foibles and limitations.

And yet we keep failing. Yet we keep failing all the time.

We are doomed to fail when we try to communicate externally with a public language. We are doomed definitely to fail when we try to ascertain whether we use private languages, because we have no access to anyone's mind.

And so we are doomed to fail.

The best we can hope for is to pose meaningful questions. The best we can hope for.

Scientific endeavor is about posing the right questions, not about giving the right answers because there are no right answers and never will be.

Two thousand years from now.

So for a scientist or a scientific theory to be proposed, it's usually done so provisionally saying that well, it's fallible, something else is likely to replace it.

That's the criterion, yeah, criterion of falsifiability.

If one is to say that it's asymptotic to the truth, how do you even declare that without presuming that there is some truth?

And then even to say that it's false assumes that there is a truth for you to say you've missed the mark.

How do you rectify that?

The very fact that we can falsify predictionsassumes that there is a truth for you to say you've missed the mark.

How do you rectify that? The very fact that we can falsify predictions is a strong indicator that in theory there could be a prediction that would never be falsified, which is what I call the truth.

That's my definition of the truth.

If you could falsify predictions means there could be a prediction you would not be able to falsify.

And at that point we would call it the truth.

However, what are the chances of this?

Zero, of course.

Just a moment.

Because string theory is by many accounts not falsifiable because they can always wiggle around and say that you've disproved a certain type of string theory.

There are some edges to that, but let's just presume that's correct.

Then would that mean by your account string theory is true? Because it's unfalsifiable.

No.

They don't make predictions that in principle are falsifiable.

You need to make a prediction that in principle could be falsifiable, but can never be falsified.

Oh, you mean, sorry, sorry, just to be specific, you mean will never be falsified or can never be falsified?

So you need to make a prediction that in principle can be falsified.

But all the attempts to falsify it have failed.

Even that, even that is deductive, even that is dubious.

But if you have been trying for, let's say, for discussion sake, you've been trying for a million years to falsify a prediction, and you fail for a million years, you cannot fault.

Then you could say that the probability that this is the truth is very high.

But you need to be able to falsify.

The problem with string theories and other nonsense such as many worlds theories is that they are in principle not falsifiable. There's no way to test them. You understand?

But of course you can imagine, and of course you know that if you can imagine something, it exists. You can imagine a theory in the future, okay, in the future, a theory, which would yield the prediction.

And then immediately all of us would try to falsify it, and we would be working for one million years to falsify it and not succeeding. And we tried like 20,000 methods and 400 million techniques and we fail. We cannot falsify it.

Well, at some point you have to say this must be the truth, you know.

Of course, this will never happen, but it can happen.

This is known as counterfactual philosophy. It's a counterfactual, but counterfactuals are very important in philosophy.

So we can say that there is a truth. You can say there is a truth. It's statistical, it's deductive or inductive inductiondeduction problem, and so and so forth. It's statistically deductive or inductive induction deduction problem and so and so forth. It's all true. I would agree with these criticisms.

But there comes a point where practically you must stop. Like what? Million years? Ten million. It's okay. 50 million years. How much? Where would you stop and say, this must be the truth?

The tricky part, though, and I know that we don't have much time, but the tricky part is even saying one million years, if one is to be this radical skeptic that would lead one to doubt the external or internal or what have you, why can't you be such a skeptic to even doubt the veracity of what probability means and also that a million years has occurred?

First of all, I don't doubt the external. I doubt the internal either. I'm saying I have no way to verify that it exists. I have no way to verify or to falsify it. I cannot tackle the internal deductively or inductively. There's no way for me to interact with the internal, to approach it, or describe it, or capture it with language. Simply, it's a supposition, it's a hypothesis. And that's it.

The external, no, external. I am firmly grounded in reality, yes, I believe in the external. I mean, the external exists as far as I'm concerned.

A million years is an example. If you have been trying to do something for a million years and you have failed, that is what we call the truth.

So the truth is probabilistic, of course.

So for example, the sun keeps rising. Now we have records of 10,000 years ago which described the sun as rising. And we personally have had 60 years of experience with the sun rising. My mother had 90 years of experience, her mother had, etc.

So at some point we say, you know what, for 10,000 years the sun has been rising. It is true that the sun is rising. I agree with you that tomorrow the sun may not rise. Absolutely can happen.

But how likely it is. Everything is probability. In the foundations of reality, there is probability.

When we discuss my chronon theory, my chronon theory makes probability even much more fundamental than quantum mechanics, even much more fundamental than quantum mechanics, because I don't believe there's any other way to tackle reality.

I'm not saying that reality is probabilistic. I'm saying that we, owing to our limitations, can tackle reality only probabilistically. All other ways are blocked. We have no access to all possible other ways.

Now, God's point of view, if there were such an entity, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist. But if there were such an entity, God, not limited in time, not limited in space, all encompassing, etc.,

maybe God doesn't need to use probability.

Probably God doesn't need to use probability.

But you know, the Kabbalah is the mystical tradition in Judaism. The Kabbalah said that for God to create the world, he needed to minimize himself.

This is called Tsimtsum, the minimization. He minimized himself.

And the act of creation was very traumatic.

Many vessels were broken.

And that the role of humanity is to heal God. To translate, God suffered trauma in the act of creation.

And our job is to heal God.

The implications are mind-boggling. And it's to me shocking that someone in the 13th century or 17th century could have said such things.

It's amazingly daring, you know, to say such things. Some of the texts date back to the 13th century, others to the 17th.

And so what does it mean to heal God?

Presumably, when God withdrew, when he made space for creation, he lost many of his capacities. He became mentally debilitated, mentally ill.

I think one of the capacities that God has lost, inevitably, is certainty.

God cannot be certain what would happen in his creation.

He set things in motion, but he no longer is in control. He cannot maintain certain. This is the uncertainty principle.

Yes?

This is why reality is constructed on probabilities.

Because God withdrew from the world.

Had God been imbued in the world, had he still been present in every molecule, everything would have been utterly deterministic. Everything would have been utterly deterministic.

And Einstein would have been right when he talked about God and dice.

But God doesn't play dice because God is no longer with us, according to Jewish mysticism. He withdrew.

We are a machine set in motion. This is the Newtonian view of reality. We are machines set in motion.

And it's utterly non-deterministic, indeterminate. It's uncertain, it's unpredictable even to God.

Why?

Because now that God has created the world, he is no longer everywhere. He is no longer the perfect, all-encompassing being that he used to be. He had to sacrifice his perfection to make us.

Now, this is very profound, and I'm actually talking to physics now, not mysticism. It's very profound, because it talks about the fabric of reality.

What is it?

Reality is probability. Reality is potential.

And again, this segues to my chronon field theory.

In my chronon field theory, I dispensed with all the certainties of physics.

In my chronon field theory there's no mass, no velocity, no momentum, no motion, no bodies, not nothing. All the language that you know from physics has no trace in my work.

And yet it yields all the equations and all the predictions of all the other theories, relativity, quantum mechanics, you name it.

And the philosophical foundation of chronon field theory is to say that potentials and events are one and the same.

Exactly like the wave particle duality, in my theory there's a potential event duality.

Events are potentials, reified. Everything is potential. Even you, you are potential.

The distinction between potential and reality is wrong. Reality is the potential.

The minute you accept this philosophical principle, you won't believe the mathematical and physical outcomes, I mean, in terms of physics and mathematics, this single simple principle, you can recreate all of physics, all I and people I work with, I mean, are not alone. We succeeded to derive both relativity theories, quantum field theory, but you name it.

We derived by now, after 10 years of work, we derived every non-theory in physics, I can say. Every non-theory.

Eventheory. Even Hawking's work on, and Beckenstein's work on entropy, the fine, you name it, we did everything.

And the whole theory is, events or reality is potential. Now that sounds very philosophical, but it's not philosophy. It's a theory in physics with very heavy mathematics and so and so forth. It's not just babbling, you know.

But this is the philosophical foundation.

Well, Professor, I would like to do another podcast with you just on chronon-field theory.

My pleasure. Any time.

So thank you just on chronon-field theory. My pleasure. Any time.

So thank you for spending so much time with me.

It's been a pleasure, truly.

If people have questions about chronon-field theory or they would like to learn more, I'll leave the link in the description and something will also be on screen here.

Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you for having. Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me. Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me. Take care.

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Good morning, everyone. What time is it? It's time to study the chronon-field theory.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm a father of the theory. I propose the theory in my PhD dissertation in 1984.

The thesis, the PhD thesis, is available via the Library of Congress and United Microfilm International, UMI, which I believe has been absorbed by ProQuest, but I'm not quite sure.

TheChronon Field theory went through two phases. Stage 1, my PhD, and then 30 years with no responses and no reactions and it just went dormant.

Then about 10 years ago, Aiton Sachs discovered my work and recast it in geometric terms. My original thesis was algebraic. And he of course developed it beyond recognition and the Chronon Field theory is as much his as mine and possibly more his than mine.

Today I would like to give you an overview of both my work and such as work.

Now, physicists would benefit from this video the most. Laymen would find it a lot more difficult, but it does contain philosophical nuggets. The philosophy of chronon field theory is very unusual.

I don't want to toot my horn, but I'm getting used to it, so I would say it's groundbreaking.

Okay, without further ado, to my coffee. And to the chronon field theory.

In my work, chronons are time quarks, the time elementary particles.

Now there's nothing new about this. This has been proposed 200, 250 years ago. And numerous physicists have worked along these lines. Some of them regarded chronons as durations. Some of them regarded chronons as real particles.

In my work, chronons are real particles. They are quarks.

The interactions of chronons yields what we know is time. Not time with a small T, which is the time measured by clocks, but time with a capital T, the concept of time, the dimension, if you wish.

It is yielded by chronons interacting, because there are various types of chronons in my work. They are like quarks, you know, up, down, etc.

The interactions between the various types also gives rise to the time arrow. There is a cancellation of kind going on, and what's left is the time asymmetry.

Hence the title of my work, Time Asymmetry Revisited.

What about space time? Space time exists where the chronon wave function collapses. The space time is an outcome of a collapse of a wave function.

And the whole theory rests on a duality. You know, the basic duality in quantum mechanics is the wave particle duality. The basic duality in chronon-chronon field theory is the potential- event duality.

Potentials and actual events or actualized events are facets of the same underlying unity, if not entity.

This duality is crucial to the development of the theory.

Now, because events and potentials are one and the same in the chronon field theory, there's no particles. Particles are replaced by strings of collapsed events. Particles actually are events in chronon field theory. That's why it's a time-oriented theory.

Its basic building blocks are events and potentials for events rather than particles. The quantum mechanics of the theory is a quantum mechanics of events as well, not of particles.

This is the introductory part. We'll go deeper in a bit.

Now the Chronon field is a field of events or perturbations, if you wish. It's a perturbative theory. The theory of perturbations.

Time with a small T, the time measured by clocks, is the outcome of interactions in the time field, in the field of time with the capital T.

And so chronons are both potentials and actualized events.

There is an open question, what causes the actualization? Do chronons self-actualize? Are they observer dependent?

In other words, is there a kind of Copenhagen interpretation of chronon field theory? Is there a need for an observer to collapse the wave function? Or is a collapse spontaneous, internally determined somehow?

Be that as it may, the theory does not require gauge fields, as physicists among you surely have understood by now.

And although gauge fields are not required, they emerge naturally in higher accelerations.

Now, space time, as I said, is the outcome of the collapse of a wave function.

I don't know. No one can answer whether there's a mediation of an observer, whether an observer collapses the wave function.

But of course you immediately begin, you can immediately see the religious implications.

Because if the entire universe, if space-time is a collapse of a wave function, and if the collapse is dependent upon an observer, that observer, universal observer, might as well be called God.

It is ironic that an agnostic like me has led to God in his work.

But as I said, there are no assurances that the whole process is observer mediated.

What is postulated in my thesis is that all chronons have been entangled at the moment of the big bang.

There is a kind of a universal, a universe-wide entanglement of all chronons.

In other words, all potentials and all actualized events are entangled ab initio, from the very beginning.

This has enormous implications because it implies that the entire universe is essentially a quantum machine or a quantum device.

And if it is, then our understanding of it currently is deeply flawed.

The theory gives rise to the equivalence of quantum field theories and so forth.

So the quantum field theory of chronon field theory is relativistic, actually in this sense, it's deterministic.

The chronons are the field quanta, the quanta of the field. They are the excited states of the field.

And the integration of everything is via quantum superpositions.

It's quite a mouthful, but physicists among you would surely understand.

I indicated that chronon field theory is perturbative, as perturbations.

So there is a perturbative quantum field theory.

Time from the Big Bang is mediated by chronons. There is an expansion, including an expansion of the metric.

You could even conceive of the whole thing as a phonon of the metric. Time is a phonon of the metric.

And there are many ways to look at time through the chronon field theory.

There are no bound states in any case.

The excitations that I've mentioned, the states of the chronons, they are stochastic perturbances, their kinds of vibrations, if you wish.

And in this sense, there's an affinity between super string theories and chronon field theory, but as distinct from super string theories, in chronon field theory, there's no need for extra dimensions, which renders chronon field theory a lot more grounded and a lot more easily falsifiable. It yields falsifiable predictions. While many super string theories are lacking when it comes to yielding falsifiable predictions.

Now the cumulative perturbances that I mentioned create a distortion of space time.

And this is what we know as curvature.

These are the basics, the philosophical basics of the theory.

And they've all been proposed in my PhD thesis in 1984 and then as I said there was a hiatus of about 30 years and then Aytan Sachs, who is nothing short of a genius in my view, came on the scene and his contributions have transformed chronon field theory.

First of all he afforded it a distinct geometric or visualization dynamic which was missing, totally abstract and algebraic, therefore very limited.

And the second thing he did, he added numerous insights and literally transformed it beyond recognition, I would say.

It's perhaps much more his work than mine.

Sachs suggested that there is a universal scalar field of time, but time is not a universal coordinate.

He says that particles interacting within non-gravitational fields are seen as clocks, whose trajectory is not Minkowski geodesic.

So in my work, chronons are ideal clocks, and they mediate time.

The relationship between chronons and time is like a relationship between the Higgs boson and mass.

That's in my work.

But in Sachs' work, he goes a lot deeper.

And he says that a field in which a small enough clock isnot geodesic can be described by a scalar field of time with non-zero curvature gradient.

Scalar field.

Scalar field is either real acceleration of charge matter, neutral clocks, or imaginary, acceleration of Majorana type matter clocks.

Be that as it may, it preserves the scalar nature of time.

Scalar field, the scalar field adds information to space-time.

This information is not anticipated by the metric tensor alone.

And the time in this case cannot be realized as a coordinate because it cannot be measured from a reference sub-manifold along different curves.

There's a lot of math in this. There's manifolds and lie algebras and so and so forth.

Those of you who would like to review the math, there's a link in the description, click on it, and you will be exposed to my math and Aton Sachs' math in various papers, published in various academic journals, and so on and so forth.

You're invited to download them, review the math, and please alert us to any errors, any mistakes in thinking, any mistakes in calculations, and so on so forth.

We are looking forward to input. We are hungry for input, actually.

So the non-geodesic alignment is attributed to electromagnetism, or electromagnetic phenomena.

Both the mass and the electric charge, in this case, generate gravity. I'll come to it in a minute. It's a very controversial aspect of Aton Sachs' work.

Charge, unlike inertial mass, is coupled to non-geodesic, to a non-geodesic vector field.

But they both yield gravity. Again, I will come to it in a minute.

So only the entire energy momentum tensor has vanishing divergence.

Misalignment of physically accessible events in an observer space-time plus gravity is a controlling response by volumetric contraction of the observer space-time in the direction where events bend or are accelerated put together, this gives the main pillar of Sucher's work.

Such a work yields literally all of known physics.

From these basic assumptions, mine and later is, in the entire field of physics can be derived and is derived.

Anything from particle mass ratios, fine structure constant, the physical meaning of three defoliations, Beckenstein hocking entropy to area constant, acceleration field strain, Q, I mean, quantum mechanics, everything comes, emerges naturally out of the theory, which is an excellent indication, I think.

It's an indication that the theory is onto something and touches upon some foundational basic facet of existence, of reality.

In Sucher's work, in Big Bang, in Big Bang manifold. The field is the upper limit on measurable time by interacting clocks.

And so he goes from each event to the singularity as a limit.

And that yields fascinating outcomes.

I again encourage you to go to the link in the description to download the papers and read them.

They are not only mathematically sophisticated but they are I think in all these papers there's a lot of philosophical, how to put it without sounding too grandiose, philosophical alternatives, shall we say, which are thought-provoking in my view.

And I'm not only referring to my work, I'm actually referring mostly to Sachs' work.

In the decider, anti-decider space time, the reference sub-manifolds from which time is measured along integral curves, they constitute all the events in which the scalar field is zero.

Matter in the Einstein-Grossmann equation is replaced by action of acceleration fields.

The action of the acceleration field.

So it's geometric action, not foreseen by the metric alone.

As I said, this is Aiton's major contribution, the geometrization of the whole thing.

It's a theory of causal sets in effect. Space time exists where the chronon wave function collapses particles are replaced by strings of collapse events and there's a quantum theory of events not of particles, again reverting to my original work in 1984.

I mentioned that there is a part of Aitans' work which is controversial, even in my eyes, and which is not mentioned in my original work, nor does it emerge from it.

But Aten's geometric development of the work, plus input from many other scientists and physicists around the world, led Aitan to the following.

This new formation of matter in Aitans' work replaces the stress energy momentum tensor.

Positive charge manifests attracting gravity and stronger repelling acceleration field, which repels even uncharged particles that measure proper time. In other words, particles that have a rest mass.

Negative charge manifests repelling anti-gravity and stronger acceleration field that attracts even uncharged particles.

Now this of course accounts for dark matter, dark energy and all, but it also yields a startling prediction about electrogravity, about the interchange between gravity and electric charge.

There's even a patent granted to Aten, such as based on this discovery.

It's very controversial and the interchange between electric charge and gravity is not entirely clear.

In my view, there's a lot more work to be done.

But it's more robust and rigorous than one would have assumed.

In other words, it breaks through the prejudices of previous mathematical theories and forces you, forces me, for example, as a physicist, to contemplate it, to think whether it's true.

If it is true, it's one of the greatest technological breakthroughs ever.

It means that we could convert gravity to electricity and vice versa. We could develop anti-gravity and so on and so forth.

I will not go into all this. It begins to sound a lot like science fiction.

Chronon field theory is a major theoretical reconception of physics as a way to understand reality.

It dispenses with secondary properties. Everything emerges from essentially a single basic underlying assumption.

Potentials are events. Everything is events. There are no particles, they're only events. Quantum theory of events. Space time has a collapse of a wave function, probability.

In other words, potentials. And space time as an event is also a potential, because it remains in a superposition state until an eventual collapse.

Collapse is mediated via an observer or is spontaneous and sub-generating.

That's besides the point and it's a lot more, I would say philosophical than, it's a lot more philosophy than physics, but everything is about possibilities, probabilities.

Even events which in classical quantum mechanics and so on so forth are distinguished from probabilities, even particles which in classical quantum mechanics and so on so forth are distinguished from probabilities.

Even particles which in classical quantum mechanics and so on so forth are distinguished from probabilities, in chronon field theory, they are probabilities.

Our existence, therefore, is a potential.

Now, the potential manifests becomes an actualized event, but the distinction is spurious and unnecessary in the chronon field theory.

This single basic assumption gives rise to all of physics as we know it.

While in other theories in physics, there are multiple suppositions and assumptions and entities, a multiplication of entities.

Even in the simplest theories, for example, special relativity, there's still half a dozen, if not a dozen entities.

It's a strong indicator that something is wrong with these theories. There's no parsimony. Occam's razor.

A theory of everything would be based on a single principle and perhaps a single entity.

For sure.

Simplicity, aesthetics, beauty, symmetry are built into reality.

And the chronon-filled theory, to the best of my knowledge, is the closest we've ever gotten to this.

Because it has a single assumption, not even an entity, just a single assumption.

And yet it yields all known physics and provides falsifiable predictions.

I hope it gets taken by the physics community, analyzed, possibly debunked and falsified, that's the way of science, but it deserves attention.

I'mbehalf of myself. I'm far removed. I contribute, my last contribution, my last contributions have to do mostly with the mathematics of the theory. But I'm saying this on behalf of science itself. I think there's a challenging idea here, and I think it should not be neglected. It should be looked into.

Thank you for listening.