https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SQQaOMfGsu8
And think about it. If the true wasn’t good, why are you pursuing it? How could you justify pursuing it? It must be good. And how could you possibly pursue that good if it wasn’t attractive to you? If it didn’t motivate you? If it didn’t catch your attention? If it didn’t arouse you? If you couldn’t feel religio, ratio religio to it? If it wasn’t beautiful? And do you really want beautiful things that aren’t real? So when you start thinking about it, you realize, wait, these three things are deeply interdependent with each other. Welcome back to After Socrates, episode 5. Last time we were discussing how dialectic into dia logos would cultivate finite transcendence as our fundamental orientation. So just to remind you, we are engaged in this very careful and thorough and somewhat long reverse engineering of dialectic into dia logos. We were also moving towards the challenge of explaining what’s meant by the term logos, especially how we’re using it in dia logos. Let’s do both of these together. Let’s link these two projects. So let’s start with finite transcendence. Let’s start with the finite aspect of it. We are in what Czerniak in his famous book Minimal Rationality called the Finitary Predicament. What did he mean by that? Well, first of all, he was dealing with the fact that if we’re talking about rationality as he was, and that’s one of the translations of logos reason, we’re talking about rationality, then we need a normative theory. What do you mean by that, John? Well, a normative theory tells us how we ought to behave if we are going to reason well, to be rational. So normative theory tell you what you ought to do. The thing about terms such as rational is that they are what is called thick terms. What’s a thick term? Well, thin terms do one of two things. They may merely describe this as a cup or they may have a normative component to them like promise. But see, rational both describes what something is but also requires that it ought to behave a certain way. So that’s what it’s meant by saying it’s a thick term. So we have to have a theory of normativity whenever we are describing someone as rational because we mean they are correcting their behavior so that it is closer to how one ought to reason. Okay, so what’s Czerniak doing? I want to look at the core of Czerniak’s argument. I’m going to say right up front and I did this more in detail in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but a lot of this work of Czerniak converges with a lot of the work I do on relevance realization. You can check out episodes 27 to 33 in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis if you want that in more detail. You can take a look at my publications. I just got a new one literally this week in the journal Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. If you put in my name and the term relevance realization you’ll get a whole bunch of papers. If you want to go into the really you know nuts and bolts, fine grained argument and evidence for relevance realization theory. I’m just going to explain it to you here in concert with Czerniak’s work in a more intuitive fashion. Alright, so let’s start with something that should be fairly obvious. Being rational means paying attention to the right things at the right time. We carry this in the court of law for example, the reasonable person. Well you should have noticed that the little girl was next to the curbside. We say things like that. Now what are we requiring of people? And so Czerniak goes into this very carefully. Does that mean that we’re requiring of people to pay attention to everything in their environment? We can’t require that of people. The amount of things I can pay attention to in this environment is combinatorially explosive. The number is astronomically vast. I can’t do it. So do we just let people guess where they should pay attention? There. No, we don’t do that either. So Czerniak very quickly argues, well he argues very carefully but we can quickly make the point, that we can’t require people to do an exhaustive search of everything they want to pay attention to, or could pay attention to I should say, nor do we allow them to just arbitrarily guess where they should pay attention. So what do we require from them? What is the normative theory that’s also part of how we describe people as rational? We require of people that they pay attention to what’s relevant in the situation. Okay, what about memory? You should remember things in order to be rational. Well that seems pretty apparent. If you couldn’t remember things you couldn’t be rational. What should you remember? Well I won’t go into detail but you can see how the argument is going to run. Do I require of people that they check everything in their memory before they come to a particular conclusion or decision? Nope. The amount of information you have in memory and all the ways you can potentially combine it is combinatorially explosive. I can just say like Aardvark, Australian bauxite mining and the Khmer Rouge Empire. I’d say what? But there are contexts in which you might be able to find those as relevant to each other and relevant to what you’re doing at the time. By the way I just did it. So do we let people to just guess? Just randomly pick something out of memory? Aardvark! I just said it again. Was that relevant even though I just said it a few minutes ago? No. That’s just weird. What do we require from people? We require that people bring to bear the relevant information from their memory. What about when people are making inferences? Well here’s the problem and Cherniak does this really really carefully because we really tightly associate reason with inference and logic. I’m going to bring in a bit of Jerry Fodor here too to help this argument because he’s also done a lot of work on this. So take a look at a proposition. It’s going to be windy on Saturday. Now that implies a lot of things. It connects to a lot of other potential propositions and I don’t mean just strict deduction here. There could be inductive relationships etc. but there are implication relationships. Now what’s the number of those? Well the way to think about how many implications there are is to note two things. First, technically there’s all the possible logical permutations and connections with all the other propositions in your mind, your memory. That’s vast. Secondly, different implications are relevant to you under different contexts. It’s going to be windy on Saturday. Well what does that imply for your behavior if you’re staying indoors? Not much. What are you gonna fly a kite? It might have some implications. What are you going sailing? Oh then it has other implications. What if you’re planning to have an outdoor picnic? How windy? Where’s the wind? What part of the day? You see the point? The proposition doesn’t change its semantic meaning. It still means in all those contexts it’s going to be windy on Saturday. It has all the possible logical implications it could have but of all of the out of all of those you only select a subset depending on which ones are relevant to your context, your set of problems and goals that are at hand. So the relevance is not a property, it’s not a semantic or syntactic property of a proposition. It’s not in the proposition because the proposition stays the same and its relevance bounces around. And secondly that relevance is not equal to all of its implications which are combinatorially explosive but you selecting one that you make when you make an inference. What about you know trying to predict the environment? This goes to the most recent paper I did with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller integrating predictive processing theory and relevance realization theory. I won’t go into the technicalities but here’s the short of it. Well what should I predict? Everything in my environment, all of the patterns that are unfolding? Well no, they’re combinatorial explosions. Just randomly pick which you know pattern I’m gonna try and make a prediction on? No because very many of them are irrelevant to you. So once again what are we going to bind me to? You’re going to bind me to making the relevant predictions. Do you see this pattern happening over and over and over again? And that’s not a coincidence. We’re getting at something central to all of these cognitive processes. What about the sequence of actions I will perform right now? I could move this finger and this finger, I could move them together, I could move this finger then this finger then this finger, I could move these, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, my tongue, raise it. Oh wow! The number of sequences of operations I could perform is combinatorially explosive. So what are you doing right now? What am I doing right now? Out of all of them I’m selecting the subset that is relevant. What about the possibilities I’m going to consider? Well this overlaps a bit with prediction but let’s treat it as a separate in case it’s something so a little bit more distinct in your mind. How many possibilities can I consider? Should I just arbitrarily guess what possibility I should be thinking about right now? I wonder what would have happened if Julius Caesar had machine guns. Is that relevant? No. So what do I do? Out of all the possibilities I could be considering I select the ones, not by guessing, that are relevant to this context. Again and again and again and again, moment by moment by moment, out of all of these combinatorially explosive fields of information, attention, memory, inference, prediction, sequences of action, possibilities to consider, you are not and you are not capable of, this is what it means to be in the finitary predicament, of examining all of that. Neither is it sufficient, neither you will not meet your normative obligations to be rational if you merely guess. Somehow out of all of that you’re zeroing in on the relevant information from all of those domains and how they are relevant to each other. Boom! This is the ability we still don’t know how to give to artificial general intelligence. This is ability called, that I call, relevance realization. Now notice how this is adaptive for you. It’s kind of like, like I said, I like to say this, it’s kind of like almost like a Zen Koan. Relevance realization makes you intelligent, makes you capable of doing all those cognitive things in a highly coordinated manner so you can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains by getting you to ignore most of the information that’s available to you. Isn’t that astonishing how powerful ignorance is to our intelligence? Because this is not, this is what I cannot do. I cannot check every piece of information, decide it’s irrelevant, then move on. Should I be paying attention to this corner of the? No, that’s irrelevant. Should I be paying to that spot of white on the? No, that’s irrelevant. Should I be paying attention to the angle of that camera on the? No, that’s irrelevant. If I do that, that’s the last thing I do. So I have to ignore. You see, and think about what this might mean for learned ignorance. Okay, there is a price you pay. I think this is one of the deepest lessons of what you might call sapiential consequence from this work on relevance realization. The very processes that make us adaptively, powerfully, dynamically intelligent also make us perennially susceptible to self-deception. Why? Because we are ignoring information, vast amounts of it, and there is always the real possibility that the information we’re ignoring is actually the needed information for solving our problems. So the very act of framing, that’s what we’re doing here, we’re framing, we’re putting, I’m only looking at information inside this frame, I’m ignoring everything outside of it. That very act that makes us so adaptive also makes us perpetually susceptible to self-deception. So I’m gonna do a problem with you, and if you’ve seen Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, you know this problem. If you’ve seen a lot of my work, you’ve seen this problem, but pretend you haven’t seen it if you have, and if you haven’t, here we go. It’s called the nine dot problem. So here we go, you have nine dots, you have to join them with four straight lines, and the beginning of one line has to follow from the terminus of the previous line. So when you do this for people, they say that’s easy, oh here I go, oh I miss the center dot, oh oh oh oh. Oh this is a hard problem, and you’re right, it is a hard problem. The rate at which people solve this without being provided any aid is statistically indistinguishable from zero. That’s why we like using it in experiments. I want to tell you about one in such experiment. Weisberg and Alban, in 1981, they gave people this problem, and they, and like what’s probably happening for you, they couldn’t solve it. I’m now going to show you the solution. Here’s the solution, here’s my lines, one, two, three, four. What was so hard about that? What people almost always say is you went outside the square, you went outside the box. At no point when I gave you the problem, did I say square or box. What happened was your relevance realization machinery kicked in and said, oh that’s a square, squares are relevant, everything inside the square is relevant, everything outside is irrelevant. This is a connect the dot problem, and I know in connect the dot problems you only make a turn when you go in a dot. Look at your solution, you’re turning where there’s no dot. I never said you couldn’t turn where there’s no dot. You automatically and unconsciously framed the problem that way, and that makes it impossible for you to solve the problem. Now let’s go back to the experiment from 1981. They gave people this problem, they would impass, that means they couldn’t solve it, and then Weisberg and Alban would say to them, think outside the box, go beyond the square. By the way, that’s where think outside the box comes from. Here’s the really important thing. Saying to people think outside the box did not help them to solve the nine dot problem. Why not? You should be able to tell me now, think about it. Knowing that propositionally, knowing that I should go outside the box, is not the same as knowing how, procedural knowing. It’s not knowing what perspective I should take, what salience landscaping I’m doing, participatory knowing, and it’s not challenging which identity. I’m a dot connector, I need to challenge participatory knowing in order to solve that problem. A purely propositional cue is impotent. You give people more procedural and perspectival clues, they tend to do much better on the nine dot problem. Okay, what does this phenomena of insight? Because insight is when you realize that you’ve misframed something, you have that aha moment. As I mentioned it earlier, you might say, oh I was thinking she was angry but she’s afraid. I’ve misframed this. I blew that all, listen to the language, I blew that all out of proportion. That wasn’t important, what was important was this and I wasn’t paying attention to it. Yeah, you have an insight experience. So the finitary predicament, that’s how we’re finite, but our capacity for insight, that’s transcendence because in a moment of insight you actually transcend your framing. We’ve talked about this, you can even get into transframing. That’s the transcendence that goes with the finite. So we shouldn’t be talking just a relevance realization, we should be talking about recursive relevance realization, RRR. Relevance realization is not only occurring with the situation at hand, but it’s also recurring on itself, recursive, in order to afford it the possibility of self-correcting. But it should be, should it always be self-correcting at every, no, no, no. Should it never be self-correcting? No. When should it self-correct? When it’s relevant to do so. This is why it’s recursive relevance realization. Another way of thinking about it is with recursive relevance realization, we have self-transcendence but never out of recursive relevance realization and its attendant finitary predicament, finite transcendence. So Highland’s notion is actually deeply grounded in this fundamental process of our cognitive agency. So recursive relevance realization is primordial. I’ve been using that word a lot and we’ve got a sense of it, but now let’s make it much more specific and concrete now that we have this more sort of technically specific language that we’re using. So this goes to an argument made by John Searle. Whenever I’m representing something, I’m not actually grasping all of its properties. So here’s this thing. How many properties does it actually have? Well, it’s combinatorially explosive. What do you mean? How many true things can you say about this? You’re right. And notice you’ll gather different ones depending on what’s relevant to you. If I want to carry liquid, this is a bottle, but I may want to use this as a weapon, a throw. I may use it in a sentence in a work of art where this stands for the letter I. So whenever I’m representing it as a bottle, I’m ignoring a lot of other properties and identities it can have. This is a plastic thing. Maybe this was the 50 millionth bottle made by pure life, etc. You say, why is that relevant? So for every object, there’s a combinatorially explosive amount of properties that it has. When I form a representation, out of all those properties, I select a small subset that is relevant to me. So what do you need in order to create a representation? You need a capacity for recursive relevance realization, which means representation depends on recursive relevance realization. So recursive relevance realization is deeper, more fundamental than representation. As we’ve already seen, reason, the ability to make inferences, or the ability to pay attention to what I should be paying attention to, or what I should remember, etc. All of those things that go into reason depend on relevance realization. Relevance realization is more fundamental than reason. What about rules? Surely we can just rules and we just follow rules. Well, let’s take a rule. A rule you might want to follow. I mentioned this before. Let’s do it again. Be kind. That’s a really important rule. It’s really important. See, the problem with rules though is they can’t specify their conditions of application. What does that mean? Well, I’m gonna be kind to my romantic partner. Am I gonna take that form of behavior and be kind to a stranger? Kind to one of my students? Uh-uh. Could I use the way I’m kind to a stranger with one of my students? Nope. Can I use the way I’m kind with my students, with my romantic partner? No. Should I use any of those when I’m trying to be kind to my son? Nope. Now it gets more complicated. I want to be kind to my partner at a funeral. That’s different than being kind to my partner at a party. Being kind to my partner in private. Right. Now here’s what you don’t want to do. What I’ll do is I’ll make rules for all of those contexts and all those situations. First of all, that number is already getting combinatorially explosive and then the problem is every new rule that I make that I have to then specify the conditions of the application for that rule. And so you get a combinatorial explosion of combinatorial explosions. This is an argument made, at least it’s inspired, I think it’s very close to an argument made by Wittgenstein and ultimately an argument made by Aristotle. See, rules are all ultimately propositional and they ultimately have to ground out in the relevance realization that’s taking place non-propositionally. So representations. All of our propositions, all of our pictures. Nope. Recursive relevance realization deeper. All of our reasoning, recursive relevance realization is deeper. All of our rules, recursive relevance realization is deeper. I make similar arguments for our ability to categorize, our ability to communicate. I won’t go over them. I’m asking you to trust me because you can check it out. Everything points to relevance realization and how primordial it is, how deeply below the propositional it is. Now think about that. This is central to all of our cognitive agency and it’s clearly primordial, non-propositional. Do you see why that might be so relevant to everything we’ve been saying about getting to the non-propositional within dialectic to dialogos? Recursive relevance realization is basically ratio religio. It’s the proper proportioning of your attention, your effort, your memory, etc. to how you are fitted to the situation. This is how I want you to think of recursive relevance realization. What it’s doing is shaping you so that you, your cognition fits the situation. It’s very strong analogy here going back to the original paper in 2012. Recursive relevance realization is to cognition what biological evolution is to species. So what evolution does, it’s a process that fits organisms to their environment, shapes them so they fit their environment, so they’re adapted to their environment. Relevance realization is doing the same thing. It’s fitting you to your environment. It’s binding you to environment. That’s what I mean by religio and it’s ratio religio. What’s evolving in relevance realization is not species. What’s evolving is the sensory motor loop. So instead of the reproductive loop between species, this is the sensory motor loop. It’s constantly running in your behavior. You sense in order to move and as you move it changes what you sense and as you change what you sense it changes how you can move and then as you change how you move it changes how you can sense. The sensory motor loop, this is how I’m religio bound to the world and what relevance realization is doing is evolving that loop so that I’m constantly adapting my cognitive fittedness to the environment. Let me give you some concrete examples of this. So one of the things I need to do is constantly adjust my level of arousal. I don’t mean sexual arousal, I mean metabolic arousal. So if I was like that, oh wow, what’s wrong with John? He’s really, he’s expending way too much energy. That, whoo, calm down John. Okay, calm down. Is that good? No, that’s too much. Well, what should I do? Should I always be sort of middling aroused, sort of like a Canadian at all times? Well then think about this, middling arousal. There’s a tiger, oh what shall I do? By middling aroused I can’t deal with threat and neither can I fall asleep when I need to. So that’s not the answer. So the answer is, and what you’re gonna say is, well you want the properly proportioned arousal to the situation. Right. How do you do that? So you have an autonomic nervous system and it’s made up of two subcomponents, the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system. The sympathetic system is biased to frame the world, to try and see as much of the world as opportunity and threat and say you should get, you know, get your metabolism going. That’s a sympathetic system. The parasympathetic system is biased, it frames the world the opposite way, which is it’s biased to see as much of the world as it can as an opportunity for rest and healing, a safe place at a safe time. And these two are not running independently. Here’s the sympathetic, here’s the parasympathetic. They’re locked into each other doing opponent processing. They’re constantly pulling and pushing on each other because there’s a trade-off relationship between them and so putting biases into trade-off relationships so they are constantly pulling and pushing on each other is how your arousal is constantly evolving to fit the world. There doesn’t have to be a little man inside, homunculus, that’s calculating it. Opponent processing. Ah, I wonder if we could think of opponent processing in dialectic into dialogos. Instead of adversarial processing where one side is trying to crush and destroy the other, what we could have is opponent processing where two people are servicing as self-correct, servicing as sources of self-correcting for each other and they’re both committed to coming up with something that fits the world. What about your attention? So we did arousal. Your attention. So this is what your attention is doing it right now. You’ve got these two systems. You see this theme. One of them is probably associated with what’s called the default mode network. Your attention is trying to drift away. You’re thinking you’re starting to maybe daydream or drift away and think about whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, I should be following John because you have another network, the task focus network, that is focusing you in. Now do you want to be absolutely rigid? No. Do you want to do daydream? No. You put them into opponent processing and look at how this is exactly like evolution. That mind wandering introduces variations, gives you possibilities for how you can shape your sensory motor loop with attention and then the selective network kills off most of those options but some of the possibilities survive and they go into shaping the sensory motor loop. Variation and selection, variation and selection. And so the loop is not just revolving, the loop is evolving and that’s how your attention works and it’s happening right now. What about your affect insofar as it’s motivating you? Well it’s like there’s a lot here. I’m just picking up one dimension of affect. Well what do I do? Well I mean I could go find a new, I could go find new opportunities, explore. That carries with it risk. I might not find what I need or I could stay here and exploit what’s in this place because I know there’s something here but if I just stay and exploit eventually there’s going to be diminishing returns and then I should explore and when should I explore or when should I exploit? There is no answer and again just middling won’t do so what you have is you have motivational machinery that is constantly getting you to introduce variation by motivating you to explore. Curiosity, what’s over that hill? Paired off against. Focus. I should stay here and exploit. Should I stay in this job? Exploit. Should I look for a new career? Explore. At all levels you’re constantly doing opponent processing and that’s how your affect is being shaped in the sensory motor loop with the environment. I can multiply these examples. Recursive relevance realization is the constant evolution throughout all of your embodied cognition, attention, arousal, affect. We saw many examples of cognitive processes. The constant evolution of your sensory motor fittedness and your capacity for finding and framing problems in a way that is solvable to you across a wide variety of domains and a wide variety of events because you live for a long time or at least you’re trying to. So notice how much relevance realization is depending on perspectival knowing because what it’s doing is it’s constantly creating a salience landscape of what’s getting my attention, what’s raising my arousal or like dampening it down and what’s motivating me to exploit or explore and other things. But all of that’s going in so the perspectival knowing is key because of the salience landscaping but that perspectival knowing depends on participatory knowing. It depends and relevance realization is also the key example of participatory knowing because it’s the shaping of the environment and me to each other to create affordances. Those affordances, there’s many of them for me right now. The participatory knowing, most of the unconscious relevance realization, it’s got that all ready to hand. I can turn and walk over and sit down on that couch if I need to but only that affordance only comes into action if that participatory knowing is taken up into my salience landscaping and I actually pay attention and find the couch salient. But the perspectival knowing can’t make things salient that are not already prefigured to be affording my behavior. The perspectival and the participatory knowing are the guts of where relevance realization is taking place. That’s why we’ve been putting so much emphasis on them in dialectic into dialogos. That sense of being connected to myself, to the situation, to other people, that sense of connectedness, religio, when it’s properly proportioned, ratio religio, that gives you all of the relationships that are constitutive, causally powerful in giving you a sense that your life is meaningful. I don’t mean in the cosmic sense of there’s a grand plan. I mean in the sense that your life is worth living even given all the suffering, futility, disappointment, absurdity, and alienation that you experience. You have enough of this connectedness that your cognitive agency is supported in a way that you can solve enough problems so that you can achieve enough goals that you can say to yourself as you put your head on the pillow, life is worth living. That’s how relevance realization really matters. So if I have perspectival knowing and participatory knowing, what do I have? I have what I think Stegmeier calls orientation and I pointed that book out to you. I recommend that book. As he rightly argues, it’s probably the only book doing a philosophical reflection on the nature of orientation. Again, plausibly, and he says this by the way, he says that orientation is more primordial than, I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me, more primordial than propositional processing etc. because orientation is basically, here’s my perspectival knowing, grounded in the particular agent arena relationship that is now disclosed to me. That’s what orientation is using my language. He argues something remarkably convergent and then he argues very consistently that it’s primordial. And think about the relationship between orientation and aporia. Aporia means I’m disoriented, I don’t know which way to go. Before you can do anything else, and that’s his point, you have to be properly oriented. So there’s a deep connection between this orientation we have been talking about so much and relevance realization, the recursive relevance realization going on in perspectival, especially in perspectival and participatory knowing. What Stegmeier does though is he makes us, and this is how it’s a philosophical project, he makes us aware of orientation and then that brings up this normative issue. How should I orient? In one sense that’s practical, which is I should orient in the way that’s going to help me in this situation. But you can ask the question at a meta level. I won’t do too many metas but we have to do some. What do you mean by that? Well how should I be, and he talks about this, how should I be oriented to orientation? And think about how this is going to mix the perspectival and the participatory. For example, I can be very rigid in my orientation style. I stick with this orientation until I’m sort of bludgeoned out of it. I can be very laxadaisical. I could be flexible in a way that’s adaptive. So that’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at optimal meta-orientation as being very crucial for the wise person because the wise person is ultimately someone who can find the way, can orient, bring all that relevance realization machinery to bear, take up the right agent-re-renew relationship, sort very rapidly, zero in on the relevant information, connect to what really matters in the situation, and bring about the most meaningful consequences that are possible. That’s wisdom, at least a part of it. Okay so we’ve got meta-orientation but that’s not, I need one other meta for now. I want you to think about all of these trade-off relations, all the opponent processing, and remember how that’s gonna that’s going to be crucial in the practice of dialectic, all this opponent processing. What does it what does that actually look like? Okay so I’m going to talk about this book in a bit so I’m not going to use it, I’m not going to show you what it is later, I’ll do that. I’m just using it as an example here. This is an idea from Marlo Ponti. Okay so think about again those two dimensions, right, of attention, of focus and background, and think of also, right, approach avoid, exploit, explore dynamics. Where, like how should I look at this? Should I look at it really close up? Well I might need to. Should I look at it far away? Should I look on it face on? Should I look at it this way? Now notice, and please remember this word too, all these different aspects, right, there’s trade-off relationships between them. When I’m too close I lose the whole. If I get too far away I lose the details. When I do this I get a sense of the cover of the book but when I do this I can, oh it’s not a very thick book, it won’t take me too long. But I can’t have all the aspects at once. I’m always trading between all of them. I’m doing all kinds of opponent processing with attention and with movement, with affect and arousal. But what Marlo Ponti pointed out is that process is a self-correcting process, it doesn’t happen haphazardly. What it does, and I don’t think he would object to the language I’m going to use right now, is it evolves you towards an optimal trade-off between all of these different aspects. He called that optimal grip. So when I need to use the bottle, I’m punning here, because he didn’t mean physical grip, he meant that mental fittedness to the environment, but I’m gonna actually do a physical grip here. If I want to use the bottle as a container then there’s a kind of optimal grip. I need to be actually in contact with it, right, and I need to be looking at it in a certain way if I want to drink from it. Like I don’t want to get too close to the bottle, I can’t drink, I can’t write, blah blah blah. But if I want it for storing water, I have a different relationship to it and now it’s optimally gripped for water storage. So the optimal grip doesn’t mean some absolute point, it’s constantly evolving depending on the situation and the problems at hand within that situation. Okay, so that’s optimal grip. So when I’m solving problems, when I’m solving this problem, there’s an optimal grip particular to it. There’s an optimal grip for how far I should be standing from the lectern. This is too far, this is too close, right, but notice I’m never usually solving one problem at a time. So here’s where I need to stand, optimal grip on this, but I want to have an optimal grip on that book, that bottle, so I’m going to move around a bit. So I want you to think about, and this is the second meta, getting an optimal grip on your optimal grippings. So I’m doing all of this, all of these individual optimal grips, but what I need to do is I need to find sort of the best place that intersects between all of them. Let me give you an analogy which will make this, I hope, a lot clearer. Okay, when you’re grappling with someone, there’s, in fighting, sparring with them, there’s optimal grip, like, oh blow comes here, I’m going to get the wrist in the elbow and then I can pin you, right, right, there’s that. But before I start to fight, I do this. I never use that for anything. Like, I don’t hit people with that, I don’t block with that. It’s like, why are you doing that? Well, it’s called your stance, stance, orientation, stance, orientation. Why am I doing that? Because this is a posture that is the best, it’s like the nexus point, it’s sort of the optimal posture in case I want to strike, in case I want to block. It’s the, it’s sort of, of all of these optimal grippings, it’s sort of the best place to be if I need to get quickly and efficiently to any of them. That’s a meta-optimal grip. One thing your consciousness is constantly doing is trying to give you a meta- optimal grip in your perspectival knowing and then it’s trying to plug in to all of your agentic memory as to what sort of the meta-optimal, you know, identity I should be taking right now. So I want you to put these two together. You have meta-orientation, I think it’s a stance, meta-optimal grip. You see how they come together? That is your, what I call your fundamental framing. It’s your fundamental framing. It’s the most fundamental way in which your relevance realization is coordinating itself, trying to optimize itself, trying to give you what you need in this situation but that could be transferred to many other situations if needed. It’s an amazingly difficult problem. That’s why genuine autonomous AGI is so far away. Yes, we can make machines that are really good, better than us at playing Go, playing chess, maybe both playing Go and playing chess but not playing Go, playing chess and swimming. You don’t have a machine that comes anywhere near that, the way we are. So what we’re always trying to do is a fundamental framing so as to generate the recursive relevance realization needed for us being as rational as possible, having as much ratio religio as we possibly can. So we’re reducing self-deception, optimizing our ability to solve problems and having the most meaningful relationships we can have. When fundamental framing is working, it’s giving us our fundamental sense of realness and you can see the opponent processing within it. You can see the finite transcendence. Do you now see that finite transcendence is also opponent processing? Here’s the finite part of realness. Real is that which, right, is in framed. It, right, finite, define, finite, define. When I’m defining something, I’m making it finite. I’m limited it. I’m doing all that ignoring and I’m zeroing in. So I can get, listen to the language, confirmation. That’s one sense of real. The real is that which most confirms. This bottle is real. Look, I can really grip it. It’s got all that bottleness I want. That’s one fundamental sense of realness. There’s the opposite. When you’re taking completely by surprise and you say things like, I just realized, listen to the language, I just realized, I didn’t, I always thought it was this way and I just realized it’s that way. We say things like when, you know, when the world kicks you in the butt or when reality slaps you in the face and wakes you up. That’s the other sense of realness and they sound like opposites. Framing, confirmation, surprise, reorientation. They’re opposites if you’re trying to think about this propositionally. They make perfect sense if you’re thinking about opponent processing and recursive relevance realization and fundamental framing and orientation, meta-optimal grip, meta-orientation, etc. It makes perfect sense. That’s why we are fundamentally finite transcendence and both senses of realness and we’re constantly playing them off against each other as we should. So we need to remember that when we’re engaged in any practice for cultivating wisdom. We can get a bunch of people to get into a shared flow state and that flow state can get them to toggle between those two senses of realness because other people are like that. If other people were just shocking you, that’s horror. If other people were just confirming everything you did, you are probably trapped inside a dream or a fantasy and it’s ultimately a nightmare. You need both and you need them to interpenetrate with each other but you could get into a flow state that will do that. So we want a very good relationship between our fundamental framing and the fact that we are finite transcendence. We need those two to really coordinate together and then we need that coordination to really fit the world well. I’m not going to make an argument that I made and remake that argument that I made in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis’s episode 12 and 13 about higher states of consciousness. I’ve given talks and presentations on it. I’m just going to give you the gist of it. When people are getting into that flow state at the level of their fundamental framing, the meta-orientation, the meta-optimal grip and they’re not flowing in a particular task like tennis or sparring but they’re flowing with that, they get into a higher state of consciousness. They do something very, very provocatively interesting. So normally when we alter our state of consciousness outside of the consensus intelligibility, what we all agree on, there’s a couch and there’s the floor, it’s Friday and Trudeau is the Prime Minister, all the stuff they ask you to make sure you’re not crazy. When we go away from that, like when we are drunk or when we were dreaming, we say that altered state of consciousness doesn’t fit this consensus framework, therefore it’s not real. So we say, you know, it wasn’t real you were drunk, wasn’t real you were dreaming, wasn’t real you’re just taking some drugs, it wasn’t real you were too tired, you were sort of half awake, blah blah blah. When people go into a higher state of consciousness and it’s often ineffable, they can’t articulate it but they do the opposite. They’ve never had this experience before, it’s unique and when they bring it back it doesn’t fit the consensus framework but instead of saying that was an illusion, they do the opposite. They say that was really real, this is less real and I’m gonna change my life and my identity to fit that. Now you can’t go by what they say with their propositions because they will say directly opposite things. Some of them will come out of these experiences and say, I now know there’s a God, I have to change my life. You get reports where people will come out of this and say, I now know there is no God, I need to change my life. So it’s not happening at the propositional level, it’s happening at this level I’ve been describing to you, the non-propositional, the perspectival, especially the perspectival and the participatory. They’re getting, somehow they’re getting a better stance, a better fundamental framing of reality. If you want to know the details of how that may be working psychologically, etc. take a look at Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, those two episodes. What I want to get to as we’re trying to work out all of this is this notion of onto normativity. We’ve been talking about normativity and onto means being. People treat the really real as normative. This is being, ultimate being, the really real, the most real, the one. We’ve talked about some of that language before. And I need to be in conformity with that, I want to be in close contact, I want to be ratio religio with that. So I’m going to change my life, I’m going to change some of my relationships, I’m going to change my identity. This can happen in something like a religious convergence, etc. conversion, metanoia. Remember what metanoia, there’s a meta, means beyond how you’re normally noticing. Onto normativity. Because I want to suggest something to you. This sense of the really real that transforms lives and identities, it doesn’t seem to fit cleanly into the categories that we’ve had since Kant for the normative. So since Kant, we’ve taken the three, what are called the three transcendentals. They’re sort of sources of normativity for us, the true, the good, and the beautiful. And we have argued for that most sought-after thing of the Enlightenment, autonomy. The true is autonomous from the good and the beautiful, the good is autonomous from the true and the beautiful, the beautiful, etc. Art for art’s sake. That’s not what people experience in auto normativity. They experience something that is deeper, the true, the good, and the beautiful. It’s the really real that shapes what they should consider to be true. What actions they pursue as good and how they are attracted to beautiful. Because they find the really real as somehow having all of those but being beyond all of them. And think about it. If the true wasn’t good, why are you pursuing it? How could you justify pursuing it? It must be good. And how could you possibly pursue that good if it wasn’t attractive to you? If it didn’t motivate you? If it didn’t catch your attention? If it didn’t arouse you? If you couldn’t feel religio, ratio religio to it? If it wasn’t beautiful? And do you really want beautiful things that aren’t real? So when you start thinking about it, you realize, wait, these three things are deeply interdependent with each other. There’s preliminary evidence that when you’re making these judgments about what’s true or what’s good or what’s beautiful, you’re using similar areas in the brain. The brain isn’t clearly distinguishing between them. And when it’s working at what it judges itself to be optimal in these higher states of consciousness, it’s pointing towards an onto-normativity that is deeper than the normativity of truth, goodness, and beauty and weaves them together. So we’ve got these notions of recursive relevance realization, fundamental framing, and non-to-normativity. I want to make a proposal now. I want to make a proposal that this relationship between recursive relevance realization and ultimately onto-normativity, the really real, and of course there’s gradations in there because that’s what I’ve been talking about, that’s logos. If you take a look at the word logos, the Greek word, there’s a huge semantic network around it, different historical periods. I’m not trying to make a historical point. I’m trying to capture this word and how it kept evolving its semantic network. According to a lot of etymologies, the original meaning of logos is to gather things together so that they belong together. That is clearly relevance realization. That’s clearly relevance realization. You’re gathering them together so they belong together, so they suit your needs, or they disclose something about reality. Logos can mean speech because of course speech is doing that kind of thing I’ve been talking about. Speech is based on relevance realization. Which implications and implicatures are you making and what are you remembering and what possibilities are you considering in order to understand me as I speak? Logos also means reason, and we’ve been talking about rationality throughout this in ratio, in ratio religio. It can also mean something like a formative principle, relevance realization bound to the world, fitting us to the world, especially possibly to onto normativity, the really real. That of course fits that meaning of logos and that notion of the really real, that primordial connection between how we make sense and how reality discloses itself. That’s the religious dimension of logos that you have both in paganism and of course especially in Christianity when St. John invokes it in the Gospel of John, in the beginning in Arche, but the primordial beginning at the foundational, the formative principles, there was the word, there was the logos is a much better translation. So we have all of these different things that are going on and more. Logos is the etymological origin of the word logic, which means the strictures by which we bring coherent intelligibility to our propositional processing. But Plotinus and other Neoplatonists use the word logic to mean a dynamical self-organizing system. You can see some of Kevin Corrigan’s work, especially in the Cambridge companion to Plotinus where he has a great article on that. And it’s on and on and on and it moves around and it shifts around. The word logos goes into study. Anthropology is the logos of the anthropos of human beings. Logos there means the study, the attempt to understand. It’s this multifaceted network, but it’s all about, I would argue, relevance realization trying to fit us to reality guided ultimately by the normativity of relevance realization to the point of onto normativity. We feel conformed, That means if dialectic into dialogos is ultimately about presencing the logos, anything which helps flow and evolve our relevance realization capacity will be central to dialogos, especially the logos that puts us on the path towards the really real. Why do we want to be on that path? Because that is the path that we see is deeply transformative of lives. So, Yaden did work on people who did have these higher states of consciousness and by many objective measures their lives get better. They improve their lives and their identities and their relationships and their careers etc. Their sense of well-being, reduction in anxiety etc. All kinds of things like that. I’m going to strengthen that argument by now talking about the relationship between relevance realization and the self. Now, if you want this in depth, take a look at the elusive eye with Greg Enriquez, myself and Christopher Master Pietro. It’s a video series on my channel. I’m not going to repeat all of that argument. What I can say is relevance realization, recursive relevance realization, can’t sort of hang free. It has to be ontologically grounded. It has to be grounded in real structures and real patterns, real functions. So, what relevance realization does, and I’m going to draw together so much of what I said about attention and arousal and affect and everything, is it makes you fundamentally different again from computers. Reed Montague said the difference between you and computers is computers don’t care about the information they’re processing and you do. Why do you care about the information you’re processing? Because you’re taking care of yourself. Why do you have to take care of yourself? Because you are an autopoetic being. You’re a being. You’re a living being, which means you are constantly making yourself from yourself and from your environment. You’re autopoetic. You’re also, as I’ve clearly argued, adaptive. You’re adaptive. That’s why you need relevance realization. Why does life have to adapt? Because the environment is dynamic and complex and shifting and changing. So, you’re trying to be autopoetic and make yourself, and this is a point made very well by DePaulo and some of his publications, if I’m making myself from myself and from my environment, and notice how that fits in with the sensory motor loop, that’s how you’re making your mind, but you’re also making your body and those two are bound together. Your ability to do that depends on you being able to shift as the environment shifts. So, you’re autopoetic and adaptive. You’re also an agent in that you can determine the consequences of your behavior and alter your behavior to change the consequences. So, you’re an agent. That requires relevance realization. You’re autopoetic. That requires, right? That’s where relevance realization is grounded. You’re adaptive. It requires relevance realization and you’re autonomous. Autonomous. This is what you do. You frame a situation. Remember the nine dot problem. These are the things that are important and then I will bind myself into that framing. I make a law unto myself. So, these four things are inter-defining of life. Autopoiesis, agency, adaptivity, and autonomy. Relevance realization only is needed by living things that have those four properties. So, in a very real way, living things, even a paramecium is doing this. So, paramecium has to, and I don’t mean conscious, it has to realize this chemical as food and that chemical as poison and change its behavior to move closer to that and farther away from that. Why? Because it’s going to make itself out of that and it’s going to be constantly evolving and shifting how it’s doing this so that as the environment shifts it can accommodate, or at least it’s descendants can accommodate those shifts in the environment. Why is it doing that? Is there anybody commanding the paramecium? The paramecium is giving itself those normative requirements. Okay, so the 4A, those 4A’s and cursive relevance realization are completely bound together. So, that means when we say relevant, we are always saying relevant to some living thing defined by those four interlocking A’s. You say, okay, so what? Okay, well, I want you to think about that self-relevance. So, this is work published by Sui and Humphreys in 2015. It’s titled, The Integrative Self, How Self- Reference Integrates Perception and Memory, and by the way, most of cognition. So, they gather together a whole bunch of research and there’s been a lot of research since, that if I take some information and then make it, I tie it to self-reference. So, if I have this bottle and you ask me to remember the bottle, okay, but if you say, John, that’s your bottle, I’m much more likely to remember it because you’ve connected that piece of information to self-reference. Why would self-reference be so powerful? Sui and Humphrey call it the glue of the mind, the glue of the self. It’s like the idea is everything attaches to this and that’s how everything is sort of held together. Why? Why is self-reference the glue? Because self-reference engages self-relevance. It engages how things are relevant to you as an autopoetic autonomous adaptive agent and that’s fundamentally who you are and how you are able to live and survive in the world. It’s the whole argument for self-relevance realization. To see the self is a way of finding that meta-optimal grip, that meta-orientation, that nexus point, that hub that integrates everything together. Now, the thing to note and this is based on work by somebody who used to be at the University of Toronto with me, Chris Honey, the brain is actually doing this at multiple spatiotemporal levels. I’m going to start with consciousness and if you want to go into consciousness and all the cognitive scientific work I’ve been doing on consciousness, please take a look at the video series, Untangling the World Not that I did with Greg Enriquez. I’m not going to repeat all those arguments now, I’m just going to go forward. Consciousness is basically doing recursive relevance realization for current situations that are high in novelty, high in complexity and high in being very ill-defined. That’s why when a situation in your environment becomes repeated, loses novelty, you are able to simplify it and you are able to give it a well-defined framing, you start doing it automatically. You start doing it without having to devote very much consciousness to it. This is how you can be driving down the highway in your car and realize, oh I haven’t been paying attention for the last ten minutes. Highway hypnotism, your driving zombie has been at work. Compare that to when you were first learning to drive and you were like, oh everything in consciousness. A little bit of a pun here, eventually your driving became more automatic. So consciousness is about this recursive relevance realization, self-relevance at a very current temporal spatial scale. Now you have cognition, this is your intelligent agency and as I already indicated with my example of highway hypnotism, a lot of what you do is being done without requiring consciousness. Your brain is taking noises from my face hole and making ideas in your mind and you have no idea how that works. If I ask you who was one of the greatest black guitarist for psychedelic music, Jimi Hendrix, how did you do that? What did your brain do to make that happen? You don’t know, it just happens. Now your intelligent agency is operating at a much larger scale. I can pursue goals depending on the scope of the problem I’m solving. So this is now bigger in temporal spatial scope. It’s obviously recursive relevance realization nevertheless. I’ve already made all this arguments earlier in this lecture and elsewhere. What about a deeper level of self-relevance and recursive relevance realization? This is your character, your personality traits, your character traits, your attachment styles. Gary Hovannessian and I have published a paper recently integrating relevance realization theory and the big five factors of personality. We have one integrating relevance realization theory and attachment style under review. So already making the case that we can understand this level in terms of recursive relevance realization and of course your character, very long-term, very long-term, very, it’s going to go wherever you go. Even deeper, community. You belong to a community, you belong to probably more than one community, but we’ll just speak in the singular because it’s easier. You have distributed cognition, a group of people that only together can solve problems. So being filmed here, there’s a bunch of people, I can’t do it on my own, there’s a bunch of equipment that has been made by people other than the people are here, there’s a building here, right, and there’s an economic system and there’s a currency system and all of that has to be in place in order to make this possible. No one person can do it on their own ever. Distributed cognition has a collective intelligence that solves problems that individuals can’t solve and most of our problems are actually solved by the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. Please look at, Dan Schiappi and I have published papers recently about this. There’s classic work by Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Chalmers and Clark on the notion of the extended mind, all the work that’s coming together recently in Mercer and Sperber’s book, The Enigma of Reason, they gather all the evidence together that we are much better even at reasoning in groups than we are as individuals. You take a standard problem that people are very poor at, the waste and selection task, highly intelligent, highly educated people, very simple problem, only 10% get it right when you give the problem to a group of four people and allow them to talk, not adversarially but in opponent processing with each other, the success rate goes from 10% to 80%. There’s all kinds of this evidence. Take a look at that book. This is a much wider temporal spatial scope. It’s even modal because with each one of these levels you can actually consider more possibilities as well. This level of community, this is recent work, so I just mentioned that Brett Anderson, Mark Miller and myself are getting a paper published in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, integrating predictive processing theory and relevance realization theory. Brett is also doing some really good work. He’s been publishing some essays on Medium. He’s working towards a paper integrating relevance realization theory with Jordan Peterson’s theory about how myth works. This argument, by the way, does not depend on any of Peterson’s sort of political argumentation. It’s a separate thing about his work on myth. As you know, Peterson has this idea about myth doing this constant dynamic between order and chaos. I hope you can see how that is deeply connected to the machinery of relevance realization and finite transcendence. Brett is proposing that myth is relevance realization that’s being done at the level of a community, distributed cognition, its collective intelligence over time. So that what myth does is it provides patterns by which distributed cognition, collective intelligence, can deal with either perennial problems or very pressing pertinent problems. What you see is relevance realization, the kind of self you are and the kind of world, the agent arena relationship is at all of these levels and they’re all interpenetrating. Your culture is affecting your consciousness and everything in between and vice versa. That whole thing, all those levels, vertical, right? Consciousness into cognition, into character, into community and culture, or if you want to go up, the metaphor isn’t important, but each one is also horizontal. How this particular type of recursive relevance realization is bound to its world, to its environment, during the agent arena evolution of cofittedness. Do you see this? These are the vertical and the horizontal dimensions we’ve talked about in dialectic. This whole thing, the vertical and the horizontal, that’s logos. Now I need to put an important modification into everything I’ve been saying up to now and this goes again to the influence of my friend and colleague and collaborator Greg Enriquez because Greg talks about the fact that we are mammals that are primate become persons. Give me a sec with this and you’ll see why I’m talking about this. Okay, so first as mammals we have to care for our young, which means it can’t be always how are things relevant to me. There’s time when the arrow has to turn around. How am I relevant to the young? My young. We’re primates, which means we’ve developed and there’s a theory that it’s not so much that chimps are super intelligent, they’re smart, but the idea is what makes you really smart is not only your individual relevance realization but your ability to plug into the collective intelligence of distributed cognitions and primates do that really well, chimps do that really really well, and in fact we do that really really well. We’re pretty pathetic as animals but because we can in such a sophisticated fashion coordinate our behavior, right, working together, making tools, sticks, domesticating dogs, and then we can kill anything on the planet. I mean that’s all it takes really and then we’re ahead totally forever. Okay, so this is at a capacity called mindset. This is your ability to pick up on other people’s mental states and primates have that very powerfully. That’s why they have a sense of self. If you put a mirror in front of a chimp and when they chomp and without the chimp knowing it, you put a red dot on its forehead, when the chimp looks at the mirror it will go like this, touch itself. Remember what I said about Vygotsky? You learn to become aware of yourself by internalizing other people’s perspective. I mind-sight the other so eventually I can mind-sight myself. Mind-sight, insight into mind. That’s the primate. Now when I add language to mind-sight, wow. Think of the access you have to my mind through language. This is why it’s so hard to know what’s going on in your child before they can speak. Sometimes you know I’ll look at my partner’s pets, cats, and I wish I could talk to you because I don’t know what’s going on right now. So it massively magnifies mind-sight and that’s a powerful thing and so we can actually work across much bigger distances and across culture, across generations because of language. Yes. But it also makes us extremely vulnerable to other people’s gaze. So what do we have to do? We have to build up another level. Greg calls it the justification network by which we can justify our actions to others and this of course gets us into all the kinds of normativity and that’s where we go from being primate selves like chimps to being cultured persons to being people. What’s happening in each one of these is that the arrow of relevance is turning from this way to this way. The mammal, not how are things relevant to me, how am I relevant to my offspring? The primate, how am I relevant to other people in the group? Of course the chimp isn’t talking but I’m just using language to express it and then once I have language I’m constantly concerned with how am I relevant to the group? How do I matter to the group? How do I make a difference to the group? Because if I don’t have that I feel alone, I feel isolated, I feel alienated and I feel like my life is not worth living. That’s how powerful it is. So we have to remember that the relevance realization machinery, the recursive relevance realization machinery and the arrow of self-relevance with our particular evolutionary heritage, it not only points this way, it points this way. So it’s constantly also toggling back and forth. So Logos is dealing with Eros, Phyla and Agape. How am I relevant to the other? So in Agape you try to make yourself completely relevant to the other. In Phyla you’re making, you’re right, you’re doing co-relevance. How am I relevant to you but also how are you relevant to me because we’re friends or at least in fellowship. Eros, I want to be one with it. How is it relevant to me? So Logos has to do with all of that. Logos also has to do, so Logos is dealing with Eros, Phyla and Agape but Logos is also dealing with the relationship between the agent and the arena. You’ve been seeing it all throughout. In fact what it’s doing is Logos goes to agent, it goes to Alathea, remember we talked about that kind of non-propositional truth, that connectedness, and to the arena. It’s binding the agent and Alathea and the arena all together. That’s Logos. Ultimately you can see in a lot of the literature, both pagan, this is we’re going to bring this up more when we do the Neoplatonic and the Christian Neoplatonic, this idea that there’s a Logos of my being and then there’s the Logos of being, capital B, and initially I can live this way, how are things relevant to the Logos of my being, but eventually I need to, oh wait, how am I relevant to the Logos of being? Why would I want to be relevant to the Logos of being? Because I crave and am profoundly satisfied and driven to transformation when I encounter antinormativity. And of course when you’re in that kind of profound flow state, the arrow is this way. So the Logos of your being to the Logos of being. Think about that again, how that resonates with everyone, the no-thingness of you to the no-thingness of being per se. Being is not a thing. Beings are things, but the being of everything is not anything. That’s just a category mistake. And when the Logos of your being tries to come into Ratio Religio with the Logos of being, with this profound fundamental framing in relationship to antinormativity, something can actually happen. So I’ll try, I’ll have to talk about this almost if it was a little homunculus, but that’s just because of the way language is working. Your relevance realization can decide that it is actually irrelevant to coming into Ratio Religio to being itself. Relevance realization can decide that all the process of doing all of this framing and zeroing in on that and ignoring that drops away because it’s not trying to deal with all of the things. It’s trying to put the no-thingness of myself into reciprocal opening, Ratio Religio, with being. And there is no need for relevance realization with respect to being. And so you can get this falling away. You can see very parallel descriptions, not identical, but parallel lines of converge. Similar and converging, that’s what I meant to say. Like in Zen, Neoplatonism, Taoism, Vedanta. Let’s remember that those profound realization, it’s again, there’s a kind of paradox and irony that the most profound realization of relevance realization is that relevance realization is irrelevant to what is most ultimate. Remember, onto normativity drives trans-framing. It drives us towards conforming more and more through deep transformation, transcendence, reciprocal opening, insight to the really real. So fundamental framing and being are in relationship. And of course, now I’m trying to get the mystical religious aspect of the logos. I propose to you that what we can see at that place is the optimal realization of finite transcendence. It’s the most finite thing relevance realization can do for the final act of transcending itself. It doesn’t escape. It doesn’t grasp the whole world. It doesn’t frame the whole world. That’s impossible. It steps back. Now let’s contrast finite transcendence with other opposite lived strategies. If I was merely identifying myself with my finitude, if we did that, we would just be simply submitting to circumstance and constraint. We would just be bowing our heads before a fate that we cannot challenge. We would be totally captive to a third person, impersonal perspective that is authoritarian, completely authoritarian over us. We would fall into authoritarian captivity. The tyranny of the third person perspective. What if I merely identified with transcendence? I can transcend, I can transcend, I can transcend, I can become a god. Well of course, I would be guilty of hubristic self-aggrandizement. That would lead to a first-person inflationary idolatry. Third person authoritarian captivity. First person inflationary idolatry. And notice something. Notice how our culture is violently vacillating between these two alternatives. This is again why what we’re talking about here is so deeply needed and so deeply relevant. Both of these poles are antithetical to the love of wisdom and the cultivation of virtue. This is why Plato and we are putting so much work into deeply understanding finite transcendence. What it means in detail and in depth so that we can practice it in detail and depth because it is deeply needed now. We need an orientation of ratio religio that properly connects us to the primordiality of recursive relevance realization, logos, and homes us to finite transcendence. Dialectic into dia logos must do all of these things. Here are some points to remember. The primordiality of recursive relevance realization. The proposal of recursive relevance realization of logos. The relationship of logos little l to logos capital L. The horizontal and vertical dimensions of logos. The ratio religio of logos that affords finite transcendence and how all of this needs to be realized in dialectic into the logos. I’ll now move to describing the practice that I want to teach you to go with this lecture. I’m going to describe this practice. It’s not a practice we can do here because the practice you should do when you’re walking. I recommend you should be doing a walk every day anyways. Walking is nutritious. See all the work that Rafe Kelly does on this. Your lymphatic system depends on you walking, bending your legs, and your heel striking the ground. If you’re not walking it’s like you’re not drinking enough. It’s like you’re not eating properly etc. So you should be walking just for health reasons. While you’re walking I want you to do this practice. You want to come into that awareness of awareness. We’ve already done that. You can’t do it as deeply when you’re walking because you’re walking and your eyes are aware but touch that center, that awareness of awareness. Trying to drop into the idea, right? Not the idea, that’s the wrong word. Try to drop into the experience that my awareness is just realizing. Oh and the environment around me is also realizing. So there’s relevance realization and reality realization and as I’ve argued throughout this whole lecture they’re bound together, they’re co-defining, they’re interdependent logos. As you’re walking get into that state. This one, how I’m going to describe this to you is deeply influenced by John Rusev. As you’re walking try to feel the rhythm of process, the rhythmic power of process. Moment by moment is passing but is it just passing out there? No it’s also passing in here because if there wasn’t process in here you wouldn’t pick up out there. So there’s this co-emergence. The world is emerging moment by moment, your awareness is emerging moment by moment and they’re doing it together in a coordinated fashion. You’re in process, the world is in process and you’re in process together. There’s a rhythm to that realization. That is a Greek word, souke, how things are springing up. Do that for a while, really feel that rhythm and then try to pick up on the melodic power of patterning. The world is in a homogeneous blob going from moment to moment. Everything is being patterned and then the patterns just aren’t there, they’re in here. There’s this co- patterning happening on, happening within and without equally. They’re bound together. Experience that, patterning within, patterning without and they’re patterning together. That’s souke, where we get our word psyche from, psychology. There’s that melody. Everything is co-determining. I’m determining what this bottle is but this bottle has a certain determination, a certain determinate being. I’m walking along, first I just do that centering into the awareness of awareness, pure realization, realization within and without. Then I do pousis, the rhythm of process. Then I do souke, the melody of patterning. Then I move to noesis. Wait, behind all these patterns there’s a principle, they’re not random, they’re principled. My mind has to be principled too and those two have to also be intertwined, interwoven. There’s the harmonic power of principle. There’s being and being and they’re going together and realize, wait, rhythm, melody, harmony, process, pattern, principle, they’re all interdependent and interdefining. How would I know there was a principle if I didn’t see patterns? How would I know there are patterns if they weren’t in process? How could I make sense of the process if there weren’t patterns? How could the patterns be ordered if there wasn’t an underlying principle? They’re all interdependent, they’re all interdefining, they are all one, not logically, they’re all one. This is called kenosis, oneness. Keep walking, living that. Then kenosis, emptying, wait, it’s not all centered on me, turn the arrow around. It’s not how it is all relevant to me, this oneness, it’s how I’m relevant to all of the oneness. Turn it around, don’t make it consumptive, make it agapic. There’s nowhere where this does not shine and withdraw, both within your mind. Your very act of thinking of yourself is a shining and withdraw. The world, you turn the corner and it comes to you, it’s a shining and a withdraw. It’s drawing you beyond yourself, that’s what withdraw means. Try to turn the arrow around and be as still in your center as you can and as open in wonder, because you’ve been doing the humble wonder practice for a while as you can. This is called theosis. It doesn’t mean you become a god, it means you’re profoundly participating in God. If you don’t like God, you’re probably participating in the ground of being, ultimate reality, you’re realizing onto normativity and how it can call upon you. But remember finite transcendence, any realization you have is not complete, is not total. Any realization you have is but a symbol participating in the inexhaustible fount of intelligibility and being that is constantly springing up in the world and in your mind and between them, moment by moment by moment. So once you have that sense of theosis, accept it in gratitude within the orientation of finite transcendence. As always, thank you very much for your time and attention. So dialectic into dialogos should give us that sense of what we get to the place where we being drawn into the really real, constantly tempted by the good onto normativity and how it will shape us to being wiser and hopefully more virtuous.