✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #565: What Is, What Should Be, and the Space Between: A Conversation on Story and Consciousness

Episode #565 · July 27, 2026 · 52 min

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

Stewart Alsop sits down with Daniel Freed, forty thousand words deep into a book that ties together consciousness, totalitarianism, archetypes, and religion, and the two spend the conversation tracing how those threads connect. They work through Jungian archetypes as behavioral blueprints embedded in stories across generations, unpacking the father, mother, and son roles and what they reveal about tradition, potential, and the individual. From there they get into Jordan Peterson's model of storytelling as a defense against totalitarian thinking, detour through Buddhism, Taoism, and the idea of the absolute, and Daniel walks through his own attempt to prove the limits of representing consciousness using axioms borrowed from math and logic, including Cantor's diagonal argument. The back half moves into Daniel's math and computer science background, touching on David Hilbert, Von Neumann, combinatorics, and complexity theory, before wrapping up with a look at Stewart's hardware prototyping experiments.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to archetypes, Jung, and why psychologists write dense books
00:05 Mother, father, and son as story roles; tradition, potential, and the individual
00:10 Totalitarianism, narrative architecture, and Peterson’s four degrees of freedom in a story
00:15 Objects, relational properties, and why the thing-in-itself breaks down under scrutiny
00:20 The absolute, the Tao, and consciousness as a limit you can’t directly represent
00:25 A proof sketch against representing consciousness; diagonal arguments and formal limits
00:30 Relevance realization, Popper, and why consciousness may resist full scientific modeling
00:35 Applying the story model to groups: how collective narratives can become totalitarian
00:40 Egregores, faith vs belief, and how ideas spread through modern institutions
00:45 A turn into math: computer science, injury, Hilbert, and the power of axioms
00:50 Quantum math, Von Neumann, and complexity theory as problem reduction

Key Insights
  1. Archetypes work like compressed behavioral data. Daniel frames archetypes not as arbitrary symbols but as patterns tested across generations of storytelling — when a story trains believers to kill the father figure and chaos follows, more value gets placed on the father and tradition over time, and the same logic explains why the mother figure comes to represent potential and the son comes to represent the individual.
  2. The son-outranks-the-father pattern underwrites Western individualism. Daniel argues that across traditions, the hero figure eventually outranks the established order, and this is the root of ideas like free speech and presumption of innocence — a fundamentally anti-utilitarian stance since it values the single person over the group's interest.
  3. Jordan Peterson's four-part story architecture doubles as a defense against totalitarianism. What is, what should be, the path between them, and the unknown or chaos form the minimum structure needed for a conscious being to experience anything as new. Daniel took this framework and applied it to group narratives, showing how holding one element of a group's story fixed while individuals change creates the conditions for totalitarian control.
  4. Every property is relational, so there's no "thing in itself." Drawing on Nietzsche, Daniel walks through the idea that qualities like hardness or mass only exist as effects on other things, which means an object stripped of all its relations has nothing left to define it.
  5. Daniel built a formal argument for why consciousness can't be fully represented. Using three axioms about distinctions resting within "respects" and borrowing Cantor's diagonal argument, he shows that certain respects can't have a ceiling, meaning any total representation of consciousness runs into the same problem uncountable sets do.
  6. Faith and belief are distinct but feed each other. Stewart draws out the difference — belief as propositional, faith as more emotional and fundamental — and Daniel agrees that propositional belief tends to translate into faith once people start acting it out.
  7. Daniel's path ran from computer science to math because of a wrist injury. Unable to type, he shifted toward math and ended up carrying over proof techniques from complexity theory and combinatorics into his philosophical work, citing David Hilbert's method of reducing ideas to rigorous axioms as a direct influence on how he now approaches philosophy.
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts.

Stewart Alsop III00:37

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Daniel Fried here, and he is 40,000 words into writing a book on consciousness, totalitarianism, archetypes, and religion. Welcome to the show.

Daniel Fried00:48

Thank you. So glad to be here.

Stewart Alsop III00:51

So, archetypes have been coming up a lot for me recently, particularly the shadow archetype, that I think Jung invented, actually. Do you know? Do you know Jung invented it? Is that.

Daniel Fried01:02

Yeah, that is right.

Stewart Alsop III01:03

Yeah. So, what's going on with archetypes? You also told me, last time we talked, you told me about a book that Jordan Peterson wrote. and I asked if it was dense, and you were like, yep, it's pretty dense. yeah. Why do. Why do. Why do psychologists write dense, dense books, but then only. But also kind of leave that out of the public. YouTube media and other types of things.

Daniel Fried01:29

Yeah, I. I find it really weird that he doesn't go into the same amount of depth in his YouTube. he. He talks about a lot of really interesting topics in his book that he doesn't cover. It's, like, just covered on a surface level on YouTube. so as an example. So with the archetypes, I guess I like to think of them as behavioral algorithms encoded in narrative or, maybe like empirically tested and compressed data sets that you use to understand how society should act. So, I guess I could give some examples. So, a story. If you're, like, trying to analyze a story and what it means. A story means what it trains believers to do across generations. So, for example, like, if you were to. If you have the story that people believe and they kill the father. Father figure, right? And then havoc ensues. if they kill the father figure and then the havoc ensues, what happens is, Sorry, I got lost.

Your first full transcript is free. After that, an email opens every transcript in the index — a list of readers we can write to, not a guest book.

Subscribe