https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Gydbp9F780
Now notice what insight is. Insight is a dialogical process between the hemispheres that you participate in. You don’t do it. It’s not an action. Time for insight. You know, it doesn’t just happen to you like a feeling, a perception. You participate in it the way you participate in a conversation. Welcome back to After Socrates, episode 7. Last time we explored how to turn the theory of the forms into a living way of practicing dialectic. And we looked at the reciprocal relationship between idetic deduction and dialectic into dia logos. We also noted how this connects well with the work we did about no-thingness, non-propositional knowing, and logos and recursive relevance realization. Now I would like to turn to one more aspect dimension of Socrates’ dialogues needed for the reverse engineering. And this has to do with the way in which he practiced an inner form of dialogue and dialectic. Socrates seems to practice together both outer dialogue, dialectic with other people, and an inner dialectic. He has developed a virtue, in fact, for inner dialectic. I would say that. He probably doesn’t. But what I mean by virtue is the ancient meaning of a power for excellence. That’s where we get virtuosity from. And in that, I mean an integration of a skill, a sensibility, receptivity, a state of mind, and traits of character. What is more, he seems to find the inner and outer dialectic completely incoherent consonants with each other. So let’s note, first of all, the preponderance of connections that are displayed in the dialogues between Socrates and the inner life. Socrates repeatedly reports that he is guided by his dreams. There’s one dialogue in which I believe it’s De Feto. We come upon Socrates at the beginning, and he’s had a dream that has led him to composing poetry. We, of course, have already talked about his capacity for profound absorption and trance. I just want to read a quote from Hussainich, from this excellent, excellent companion to Socrates. And it’s edited by Sarah Abel-Rappé and Rakhina Kamatekar. But I just wanted to make something very clear, because I think he does a very good job of it. Okay, so. What he wants to do is emphasize that this capacity for absorption was really profound. He talks about reviewing sort of alternative explanations for it. And then he says, the fact that Socrates stood motionless in the snow for 24 hours without suffering any harm is a clear signal that Socrates’ mind and his body were in an altered state. It is more reasonable to think that Socrates had entered a meditative trance of complete detachment from normal sensory awareness and indeed the normal self. So it’s not just that he has sort of rational self-control, or he’s telling himself what to do, or he can steal himself. Hussainich is making a very clear case after reviewing the evidence. No, no, he has a capacity to enter into a profound altered state of consciousness. Very analogous to what many people can get into as the result of significant meditative practice. Before I go on, I’d like to emphasize that if you read this article, Socrates and religious experience in this companion to Socrates, I would also recommend reading his article in the Bloomsbury companion to Socrates, which is also excellent. And that article is entitled Socrates’ religious experiences, but they go together very well. I’m going to focus on the more recent one, but I recommend looking at both of them. So what we see here is that Socrates is capable of entering into a state I would call supra-sophroson. So what’s sophroson? Well, there’s two Greek words for self-control, if you remember, and kratia is controlling yourself, resisting temptation. Sophroson is being tempted by the good. We’ve talked about this. And Socrates has a capacity to be totally absorbed in this temptation by the good. And this connection between sophroson and mindfulness is not only being made by Boussinesq. It’s also been made by McGee in his book, Philosophy as Spiritual Practice. He argues at length that the best translation of sophroson, which is often translated by something that sounds just sort of like rational self-control, sound-mindedness, is much better translated by our current notions of mindfulness and the kinds of virtues that people can acquire. Remember, virtue is a power for excellence through extended mindfulness practice. So we see that Socrates has this intense inner life and that he enters into a profound connection to it. But perhaps the most important dimension of his inner life for our purposes about the notion of inner dialectic is what he calls, and what’s called in this in the Socratic scholastic philosophy, the daemonium. I’ll spell it for you. So how do we translate that Greek word? Well, that’s part of the issue because it can be translated in different ways. And Plato often has Socrates give slightly different characterizations. But the way that Socrates is translated is that he’s translated in a different way. So he’s translated in a different way. So he’s translated in a different characterizations. But the ones that are most prominent are that it is a divine sign or a divine voice within him. He hears a voice or he hears something that is like a sign to him that has significance that alters his course of action and how he is engaging in perspectival, knowing what he is noticing in his salience landscaping. Now, how do we deal with this? We got this sort of sign and voice. I recommend that we think of it something like a perspectival presence. There’s a perspective other than his current one that makes itself present to him in a way that he finds analogous to seeing a sign of something and remember tracking seeing signs finding significant and hearing a voice. Now, he says that this sign is very familiar to him. He and it’s when he says it, it’s familiar. He indicates it’s familiar to all of his companions and he’s had it since childhood, which is really interesting because it doesn’t therefore really jive well with, you know, he built up sort of rational self-control. He says in many places that this sign allows him to practice divination, which sounds, oh no, that’s already sort of spooky, and be a seer. Now, remember that the word seer means to be able to see into things. I want to read you a quote again in that excellent article, but it is actually a direct quote from the Phaedrus. This is Socrates speaking. It’s an instance of him hearing, feeling, it’s sort of between hearing and feeling, sensing is the best word, his daemonium. Just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar divine sign came to me, which whenever it occurs holds me back from something I’m about to do. Now see, first he calls it a sign. I thought I heard a voice. Notice he doesn’t say I heard a voice. It’s got this interesting phenomenology. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offence against the gods. In effect, you see, I am a seer and though I’m not particularly good at it, there’s Socrates through and through, still I am good enough for my own purposes. I recognize my offence clearly now. In fact, the soul too, my friend, notice this language here, the soul too, is itself a sort of seer and the Greek word here is manticon, which comes from mandyke, which is sort of more like the biblical sense of prophecy and we’ll come back to that. That’s why almost from the beginning of my speech I was disturbed by a very uneasy feeling. So sign, hearing, feeling, but nevertheless he can readily interpret what it’s supposed to mean to him. He can grasp its significance and understand it. So notice that part of what’s going on is some kind of communion with his own soul and of course the Greeks, especially Plato, probably following from Socrates but also probably influenced by Pythagoras, thought there was an aspect of the soul that was divine, but here’s the quandary. That was the part of the soul that was strongly associated with rationality in the sense of the ability to find the soul. So here’s the second part of the soul. So he was able to find the logos and to follow the logos. Now you’re starting to get a sense of why this might be problematic. So Velastos, who wrote seminal work on Socrates, he’s probably one of the most important figures in Socratic scholarship, said that Socrates’ daemonium is, quote, the gravest of the difficulties we have to face in our effort to make sense of Socrates. Look at the, listen to the language, the gravest of difficulties. So he’s, there’s an alarm here. Why such alarm? Well, when we look at these instances and we put the daemonium in the context of all these other things that Socrates is doing, right, this is what we have. Here is Socrates, the primordial hero of rationality, listening to voices, which for us is a prototypical instance of irrationality and insanity. And how can those two go together? And why is Plato and none of Socrates’ companions or his followers disturbed by this? They find it strange, but they don’t think it, at any point that Socrates is out of his mind. That’s repeatedly made clear. Now, as we, as I noted earlier, and I want to repeat again, all scholastic attempts to water this down to, Socrates is just talking about his conscience or his inner speech, they have not stood up to careful scholastic scrutiny. So the attempt to sort of explain it away has failed. Nor are these attempts consistent with his use of dreams, his trances, and his interaction with oracles, such as the famous oracle at Delphi that sent him on his mission of questioning and probing other people’s claims to wisdom. So, so, we have two different examples of this. And probing other people’s claims to wisdom. So once we acknowledge that we can’t explain it away, we might just be tempted to simply write him off as irrational. Well, he’s great in so many ways, but like other people of his time, he was just a victim to irrationality. Now, of course, that is the voice of modernity that was given to us in the 17th and 18th century by the advent of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, etc. I want to challenge that voice of modernity in order to preserve the voice within Socrates, his daemonian. I propose that Socrates is actually acting for us, he doesn’t intend to do so, but he’s acting for us to provoke a shift within it, within us. And I want to call this the Socratic shift. And I want to compare modern rationality with Socratic rationality. And we’ve already been doing this at great lengths. But I want to go through each one and show what the shift looks like. So the first, the modern notion of rationality is it’s monological. What rationality is, is something like the treatise. It’s a monologue of premises leading to a conclusion. What we’ve seen repeatedly, and I’ve argued for throughout, is that Socratic rationality is inherently dialogical. And I’m extending that now, not only dialogical without, but dialogical within. Next, modern rationality is monoepistemic. Oh, John, multi-syllabic words. Monoepistemic just is the idea that there’s just one kind of knowing. And we’ve already challenged that repeatedly by saying in addition to the propositional, there’s the non-propositional. So Socratic rationality is polyepistemic. There are many ways I’ve proposed for to you of knowing. Next, modern rationality is monophasic. What does that mean? Rationality is limited to one state of mind, one state of consciousness. All other altered, other things that is altered from that, all other altered states of consciousness take away from rationality and do not afford or serve rationality. As is already indicated by Socrates and his companions and Plato and those that came after him, this is not the case for Socratic rationality. Socratic rationality is polyphasic. His ability to go into altered states of consciousness seems to be required or at least it propels, it causes his capacity for rational self-control and mastery over his passions. Lastly, the modern notion of rationality is bound to a monadic self. What’s a monad? A monad is a completely self-enclosed unity. It is a one unto itself. It is seclosed, it is self-enclosed, I should say. It is autonomous. It is unified. That of course was classically given voice in the Cartesian notion of the mind. And as we’re going to see, and in a way that’s deeply prescient about some major things happening right now in psychology, psychotherapy, cognitive science, the Socratic self is a dialogical self. So let’s review again. The worry that Socrates is insane or irrational is coming from the standpoint of the modern notion of rationality which is monological, even computational, monoepistemic, monophasic, and monadic, the monadic self. But if we shift to the notion of Socratic rationality, which is dialogical, polyepistemic, polyphasic, and inheres, well sort of between, but inheres within a dialogical self, we’ll come to see that the demonian is not the hallmark of irrationality, but actually an intricate part of the kind of rationality that Socrates is proposing. Now in order to start this, I want to start from something we’re all familiar with, and then I want to carefully build an argument. I won’t be able to complete the argument in this episode. This episode will be part one, and episode eight will be part two of the entire argument. But I want to start with James Blackowitz’ article called The Dialogue of the Soul with Itself, and that’s a direct reference to Plato because Plato said that thinking was when one is dialoguing with one’s soul, which sounds just like a pretty metaphor for us, but there’s something deep going on here. The article by Blackowitz is from this excellent anthology from 1999 called Models of the Self, edited by Sean Gallagher and Jonathan Scheer. So this whole article is around something that seems relatively trivial, which is inner speech, the way we are talking to ourselves sort of all day long. And of course there’s a lot of variation in the inner speech, and some of it can just be sort of monkey mind thoughts jumping around, but part of it can also be more dialogical, and we’ll get into that. When we say inner speech, we have to be cautious, and he goes over this. Often we don’t mean complete sentences, something a little bit more compressed, and we’ll see that Wiley picks up on this and develops it. So you think of an instance where you’re, I’ll modify an example from Ryle, you’re driving along and you look at the gauge and you realize you’re almost out of gas, and you might not say anything, but you notice you’re out of gas, and then you might say to yourself, stop at the next exit. But you may not even see that, you may say stop and picture the exit sign. So when we’re saying inner speech, you have to think about it as this combination of sort of a wordless noticing and realizing through attentional shifting and remembering inner speech, where you’re actually doing inner vocalization, it’s often paired with inner imagery. So we’re talking about a very multimodal experience. So what he does first, Blackowitz, is he challenges a very deflationary model of inner speech. This is called the reflection model. The reflection model is when I’m talking to myself, I’m just reflecting on myself, I’m just exercising metacognition, and all I’m doing is using that inner speech so I can reflect on what’s going on in my mind. And then this is a quote from him, conversational duality is more apparent than real. It is only the reflecting self that does the talking. Inner speech is monologue, not dialogue. So it’s just one way speech, and it’s just a way in which I, the unified self, focus my attention on the contents of my mind. Now, he doesn’t deny that this happens, right? He doesn’t deny that this happens, but by way of contrast, ask us to consider cases where we propose something to ourselves. We propose something to ourselves. We may ask a question, we may propose, make a proposal, and notice how I’m trying to shift from proposition to the act of proposing, which will be actually be central in the practice of dialectic into dialogos. I think it would be good if I married Susan. We say that, but if we say it, we’re in a state where we’re not quite convinced of it. Why do we do this? Like, why do that? He makes a very plausible, he gives the very plausible answer, quote, the party doing the proposing has information different from the party doing the disposing or the criticizing. So we do this because some other part of us will respond to it in some fashion with information that was not present to mind when we took the stance of the proposer. Now, note immediately how even at this very sort of everyday level of just inner speech, how challenging monologic, that all we’re doing is giving monologue, has us already challenging the monadic self. Because how can there be a monadic self when there are two parties that have different, have access to different sources of information? And what we can ask is, well, that’s a phenomenology, that’s what we experienced, but does it point to any underlying functionality? Well, here’s where cognitive science, especially the cognitive science since 1999, can come to his aid. So let’s go through a series of ideas that are becoming more prominent in current cognitive science and show how it buttresses his arguments about inner speech, challenging the monadic self and challenging the idea that inner speech is just monologue. So Reed Montague in a very good book called Your Brain is Almost Perfect talks about a consequence of something that is generally accepted within cognitive science, neuroscience, is the idea that areas of the brain specialize for different types of processing and problem solving. And we have to allow that a little bit of a wrinkle, which comes from the work of Michael Anderson, is which an area can specialize and then be accepted to do other things. So it’s not sort of one dimensional specialization, it can be multi-dimensional, and that actually makes things more powerful for this argument I’m making. But once we have that wrinkle, now let’s return to Montague’s argument. He proposes that once we accept the possibility of specialization of function, that we have what he calls the efficiency paradox. So here’s two, I think, non-controversial claims. We can increase efficiency by reducing working at cross purposes. If the areas of the brain are undermining and in conflict with each other, with each other, we’re getting a very inefficient form of processing. Again, that seems sort of undeniable. What’s the second claim? Another standard notion of efficiency is we can increase efficiency by reducing the metabolic costs of processing. If I can get more cognitive bang for my cognitive buck, which is part of a notion developed by Sperber and Wilson, this notion of cognitive profit, which they say is central to relevance, and I won’t get into that right now, that seems like how to make our cognition more efficient. Again, okay, both of those are true. Well, you get a paradox when you assert two things that are true that are in conflict, tension, or contradiction with each other. So notice number one, reducing working at cross purposes. Well, how do you reduce working at cross purposes? Well, think if you have a bunch of people and you want them to work together and you don’t want them to work at cross purposes, but to work as efficiently as possible, what do you need to have them do? They have to talk to each other. They have to communicate to coordinate. They have to communicate to coordinate. Now, the problem with communication is it increases your metabolic cost. So I’m increasing my metabolic cost because I’m communicating more and more and more. That takes energy, and your brain is an expensive organ. It’s 20% of all of your metabolism, but only 5% of your body. Okay, so then you might go to number two. Well, you say, well, I’ve got to reduce the metabolic costs, and the way I’ll do that is by reducing communication. But the problem is if I reduce communication, then inefficiency of being at cross purposes go up. But if I communicate more to reduce that, inefficiency because of extra metabolic cost goes up. So what’s the solution? Now, I want you to note right off the bat how the solution is a dialogical solution. So he first gives us an analogy. He says, imagine a happily married couple that have been married for a long time. And he said, have you ever noticed that they almost have telepathy? They really can read each other really well. They can communicate with very little. He says, how does that happen? Well, that happens because I’ll just use a straight couple just for ease of reference. I’m not making any kind of moral or political claim here. The husband has formed a model of his wife, and the wife has formed a model of her husband. Now, this is a particular kind of model. It’s called a generative model. A generative model isn’t just sort of a picture of something. A generative model generates what something would do. It makes predictions about what something would do. So it literally allows the man to ask, let’s say his wife’s name’s Agnes, he can ask, well, what would Agnes do? And when he confronts his model, the model generates a prediction of what Agnes would do that is often true of what the actual Agnes would do. This notion of generative model is very important. Okay, and of course, she forms a generative model of Steve, her husband. And what does that mean? It means for a lot of their behavior, they don’t have to talk to each other. But because they have these internal models, generative models, their behavior is highly coordinated. So they keep their communication costs low, but they get the benefit of coordination because they have mutual modeling going on. They’re mutually modeling each other. And then this is his proposal. His proposal is this is what areas of the brain do. They mutually model each other. So for one thing, you can see different sensory areas modeling each other. So they’re not only so like the area of the brain for sight, right? In the area of the brain for hearing, for example, right? They’re not only modeling the world, they’re modeling each other. And this is why you get some very interesting effects in human cognition. You have, for example, synesthesia, the fact that we get this bleed between one sense modality and another. And we’re all of us are to some degree synesthetic. So I’m going to show you a picture in a second. And when I do, I want you to point as rapidly as you can as I give names to the figure that corresponds to the name. Okay, so here’s the picture. Which one is Booba and which one is Kiki? Notice how you point. And you point that way as 95% of the population does. Because you’re doing something weird between sight, touch, and sound. They’re bleeding into each other in a way that seems completely natural and even automatic to you. Other evidence for these areas modeling each other is their capacity to replace each other. So there’s a person when he was a boy, he was blind, and so he actually taught himself echolocation. This is no longer a single case. There’s been over, I think, 127 documented cases of people who teach themselves to make sounds, teach themselves to make sounds, teach themselves to make sounds, and see the world the way bats do. Now he was called Bat Boy. He’s grown up, but for obvious reasons we don’t call him Batman. But he actually reports something not like an auditory experience, but something like a quasi visual experience being generated by his sense of hearing. Now if that seems bizarre for you, I can assure you that the following can be done with you. We can put it on your tongue because your tongue is very sensitive. It was also has been done on the back, but the back isn’t as sensitive. And what I can do is I can put a grid on your tongue that does electrical stimulation. And then what I can do is take a picture and stimulate your tongue. And initially all you’ll do is feel all the little sensations. You’ll go from sensing them to sensing through them. You’ll start to see with that stimulation on your tongue, believe it or not. You’ll say, wait, I can sort of see. There’s when ones where people have had a belt put on their abdomen, and it stimulates them according to the magnetic field of the earth. And at first all they feel is, right, stimulation. And then eventually they stop feeling it. They start feeling through it and they start to get a sense of how they should be oriented with respect to the magnetic pole of the earth. So all of that is very powerful evidence. And there’s also all the kinds of evidence about areas of the brain talking to each other. Notice the metaphor we use, by the way, talking to each other, supporting this idea of mutual modeling. Another one is gesture. I’m doing it right now and I’m doing something physical that pantomimes actions I might do in order that you can understand words that I’m speaking. And it again seems completely natural to you. In fact, Susan Golden Meadow has a body of evidence that gesturing helps your cognition. It’s not just an ornament added on, it adds cognitive power. I could go on and on about that, but I want to move to another kind of evidence that has become prominent. Again about this mutual modeling. And of course this is the work of Ian McGillchrist, the master and his emissary. Very powerful work organizing a whole bunch of material and evidence about the differences between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. Again we have to be very careful. That goes back to what I said about acceptation. For most people the functional difference I’m going to talk about, the specialization, corresponds to left and right. But that lateralization is less for women and there are people who are born without both hemispheres and they get both functions within the same hemisphere. So take that into account. Nevertheless, a way of thinking about this, and I’ve actually in discussion sort of proposed this to Ian, how his work and mine converge, is the left hemisphere evolved basically to deal with well-defined problems. These are problems in which your initial state, your goal state, the operations you should perform, the kind of feedback you’re getting, is very clear. So I propose that for most of you a good example of a well-defined problem is 23 times 4, in which you know what kind of problem it is. It’s a multiplication problem. You know the kinds of operations you’re supposed to do. You know what the result should look like, etc. Well-defined problems require, if you and I are both confronting a well-defined problem, your ability to make fine adjustments to your behavior and do things in a step-by-step fashion, moment by moment taking account of the detailed differences will allow you to outperform me. And of course there’s an important relationship between how well defined a problem is and how defined a problem is and how familiar it is to you. But there’s another kind of problem, and these are ill-defined problems. This is where your current state, the goal state, what you should do, what the constraints are, what kind of, if your feedback is clear or not, is not clear to you. Classic example of an ill-defined problem is go on a successful first date. What’s the initial state? You’re strangers, okay, but lots of people are strangers. What do I do? Well, you should talk. About what? Well, you know, look at her. I’m straight, so I’ll use that as my reference. Look at her. Not too much. You know, laugh at the jokes, but no, but not too much. Like be funny, but not too, oh my gosh, and what’s, what does it look like when I’m going, it’s going well and, okay. And when you think about it, many of life’s problems are actually ill-defined problems. What you want is you want a brain that can take an ill-defined problem and then translate it into a well-defined one. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a second. So the idea is the left hemisphere is, has evolved for dealing with very well-defined problems, step-by-step detailed clarity, certainty, right? Think about what you want when you’re eating your food. It’s a well-defined problem. What are you doing? I know exactly what I’m doing. I know what the goal state’s going to be like. It has to be clear to me what everything is, right? I have to get clear feedback, right? Step-by-step. The right hemisphere evolved for ill-defined problems, like predation. An animal swooping in on you, right? What is it? You want to grab it all at once as a gestalt. You don’t care about details. You want to act all at once. You’re, like, you don’t need that much clarity. Is it like, oh, well, I’m not going to do anything unless I’m absolutely clear that it’s an eagle and not a hawk, right? Or unexpected opportunity. What’s this? So, of course, Ian’s classic argument is the right hemisphere should be in charge, because as I said, most of the world is actually messy and ill-defined, and it should be served by the left hemisphere, but our culture has inverted those, and that, of course, has contributed to our current situation and contributed to the meaning crisis. This is a, this is very consonant with my proposal to you of we live in a period of propositional tyranny. Propositional step-by-step logical tyranny. In fact, computational tyranny might even be a better word. So, you might think, well, what’s the relationship between them then is opponent processing, because they move your attention in different ways, and they set your framing in a different way. So, when your processing is largely dominant by the left hemisphere, you’re very narrow-focused because you’re zooming in on the detail. You’re looking for clarity. You’re looking for certainty, and you’re doing things in this step-by-step sequential fashion. When your right hemisphere is dominant, you’re opening your attention up. You’re trying to grab the gestalt all at once, and you’re trying to do several things in a highly coordinated fashion together all at once, like running away from the swooping-in predator. Because there are two different types of problems, you need to move between them. Now, one important way in which we move between them that has so much to do, because we’re already talking about attention and opponent processing with recursive relevance realization, is that moment of insight, which we talked about before, that aha moment. I want to point out a book to you. You can consult. You can also take a look at episode nine of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis on insight, but this book is called The Eureka Factor on Insight. This is a book that’s called The Eureka Factor, Aha Moments, Creative Insights in the Brain by John Kunios and Mark Beeman, really important researchers in this whole area. So one of the main idea here is insight is when this thing occurs, you encounter a problem, remember the nine dot problem, and you think it is a familiar, familiar, familiar, not familial, you think it’s a familiar, well-defined problem. I know what this is, it’s a connect the dot problems, there’s a square, etc. And you try and do it and that doesn’t work, and then you impass, and that’s like a threat. And so activity shifts from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere as you’re searching not for a solution, you’re searching for a new way to frame the problem, and you’re doing this thing where you’re opening up attention and trying to see if anything becomes relevant for you. And when you get the alternative framing, you come back and reframe your problem, now turn it into appropriately framed, well-defined problem, and you can solve it. That’s a aha moment. Now notice what insight is. Insight is a dialogical process between the hemispheres that you participate in. You don’t do it, it’s not an action, time for insight, insight. You know, it doesn’t just happen to you like a feeling, a perception, you participate in it the way you participate in a conversation. And if you watch your phenomenology, you can actually feel yourself shifting, and this is part of what we’re going to get to. And at one point I’m here looking at it through this well-defined frame, mostly left hemispheric, and then I go here and I’m wide open attention and I’m exploring, and I’m in this other frame that’s looking for frames rather than looking for a solution within a framing. There’s something really interesting work done by Stefan and Dixon in 2009, a series of papers, is you can give people an insight problem and when they impass, if you put a bit of noise into their environment, so let’s say they’re looking at the problem on a computer screen and you dump some noise into it by making it staticky or you jiggle it, right, you’ll actually increase the chance of people having an insight. I say, what? Well, why? What’s this introduction of noise? When you frame and it’s wrong, you’re overfitted to the data. What that means is the following idea. There are patterns of information in your sampling that you think generalize to the entire population. You think the set of stimuli you have taken off as salient in the 9-dot problem are the ones you need, but if you are fitted to those, you actually cannot solve your problem. You have to throw noise in to break that up, to disrupt that, to break that frame, and then what that allows is it allows you to explore and find other important information that more correctly generalizes to the problem at hand. So you want to prevent that overfitting. So you want to prevent that overfitting. Now, Stephen and Dixon make use of a notion called self-organizing criticality. This is the idea from Prubach where there’s a column of sand falling and it self-organizes into a pile. The pile goes to a certain height and then it becomes unstable. It goes critical. The structure starts to degrade and it starts to fall apart at avalanches, but that avalanche actually spreads the base of the sand pile. So now there’s more friction and more places for it to catch grains of sand and now with that deeper, wider base, the sand pile reorganizes again and goes much higher than it can before and they were able to provide evidence that that’s actually happening when people solve an insight problem. They’re in this sort of ordered state, then they become more disordered, and then that allows them to go to an even better ordered state than they were before. And that’s kind of what’s happening in the aha moment. That’s happening when it’s shifting. So self-organizing criticality is this process by which we basically disrupt the system. So it goes critical but not too critical so that we can tap into the self-organizing dynamics of the dialectic, for example, the dialogue at least, between the hemispheres so a new problem formulation is evolved. Okay, now notice what that means. It means that there’s an important role for disruption in this process and think again of aporia within the Socratic process as where all of the participants are building a structure together and it goes critical and it can either just fall apart or it can fall apart in a way that stabilizes a more profound insight or realization. Okay, now let’s take that notion of self-organizing criticality and notice what it means. Our attention is, we talked about this before, with relevance realization it’s evolving, right? We’ve got selective attention building a structure and then it goes critical, it introduces variation and then it gets reselected and we’re constantly evolving our attentional fittedness. Now let’s go back to the mutual modeling. There is also opponent processing within the mutual modeling. Okay, so you’ve got these areas of the brain and they model each other and they trade back and forth. Now think about it. Think about the dialogical analogy. If the husband and the wife never talk to each other, their generative models are progressively going to become out of sync. If they always talk to each other, then their generative models are not needed. What do they need to do? This isn’t in Montague, this is an argument that I’ve made. They need to cycle between these two in an opponent processing fashion. They need to have time where they’re working independently, not talking to each other, they could even be different places in the house, and they’re relying on their generative models and their mutual modeling to coordinate their behavior. But they also need to have another phase where they come back, talk to each other, get in sync with each other and make sure their models are lining up with the reality. It looks like we actually do that. It looks like we toggle between task focused, in which we are focused on the world, and a state which is the default mode network in which we are mind-wandering and drifting away. Mind-wandering is almost always self-referential. What does self-reference do? It binds the parts together. We’re going into the default mode to make sure the two parts are actually modeling each other well. Then we go back to focused on the world and we alternate back and forth. As I said, we’re opening our attention with the mind-wandering, with variation, and then selecting it down. Another thing is evidence supporting the fact that when we are mildly distracted from a problem that we can’t solve and we come back to it, we get insight. So that moving out and doing this introduces variation. It also introduces some valuable noise that helps break up inappropriate framing and we come back and we select and we get the insight, etc. So notice what’s happening in this, and this isn’t a coincidence of course, what’s important about these situations is the opponent processing. Now, Blackowitz goes into a really interesting example where he talks about where we’re trying to articulate meaning. He doesn’t break it up this way, but I think it’s helpful to break up articulation into two different processes. One is expression. I’m trying to convey a meaning. I’m trying to convey or create a meaning. The other is structuring, where I’m trying to make a statement of meaning. So he gives the example of somebody trying to write a poem, and then what he has is he has you shifting between these two perspective presences. Why am I saying perspective presence? Because it’s a perspective, but you’re also present in it. You’ve activated, you’re from that perspective. So one perspective is the perspective that’s doing that first sense of articulation. It writes the first couple lines of poetry or the first couple lines of music, and it’s trying to be expressive and creative and put something, and you’re here and you do that, and then you go over here and you take up another perspective, which is the other side of the articulation of meaning, and you ask, but is it syntactic? Does it work? Am I violating the syntax too much? Am I bending the semantics too much? I don’t want to lose syntactic and semantic clarities. This has to be intelligible to people. So let’s modify it a little bit, and then you pass it back. Oh, I’ve got that. Okay, then the next line starts to come up, and by the way, I write poetry, and this is exactly how I experience it. It’s this constant dialogical movement between these two perspectives in which I find myself present. Notice there’s a trade-off relationship between trying to get the surprise, and notice the two senses of realness here, trying to get this the surprise of creating new meaning, conveying it to you, and the other of getting confirmation, getting it have enough coherent structure that it’s intelligible to you, and it doesn’t just sound like, that’s not a good poem. But chairs are furniture, also not a great poem, right? But to see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and spend eternity in an hour. Now that’s a good poem. Okay, so what you’ve got in his example is you’ve got this opponent processing, and that opponent processing is playing with and through a trade-off relationship in order to enhance the relevance realization, in order to afford insight, in order to implement self-organizing criticality. Now notice the phenomenology that I was doing. There’s one, and this is from the literature on the dialogical self which we will get to, there’s one I position, right? Remember the difference between the I and the me, but there’s one place in which I’m standing and I’m looking at the you, which is going to be a future version of me, and we do that all the time when we’re aspiring, I want to be this when I grow up, so that is not actually outside of your realm of self-organization, right? So that’s the actually outside of your realm of familiarity, but what I view is, okay, from this perspective, I basically am seeing things in a certain way, I’m present within this perspective, and my eye is shining towards the you, that is the future version of me, then I move and it becomes the present, and I take up this eye position and I’m shining my perspective from where I am present in this eye position, and I go back and forth and back and forth, and I’m constantly doing this aspectual and perspectival reversal, and that means I’m flipping between the left and the right hemispheres, it means all kinds of other things, by the way, it also means I’m moving between front and back of the brain, I won’t get into all the multi-dimensional opponent processing that’s helping us to do recursive relevance realization that we engage and enact by doing this internal dialogue. This cycling that I’m doing helps me, whoever we’re talking to now, and we’re going to come back to that, tap into the stored knowledge of mutual modeling, there’s no one model that has all the needed information, because we remember they go back to being specialists that largely can work independently from each other and gather information, and then they bring it, and then that needs to be brought into coordinated communication. Blackowitz calls this process reciprocal correction. This is in service of articulation of meaning, poetry, but poetry in the original sense of poesis, the making of new meaning that is nevertheless intelligible to others. Poetry is not just new word salad, aardvark, porcupine, south africa, sperm whales, daffodils, aardvark, porcupine, south africa, sperm whales, daffodils, that’s not a poem. Neither is it just coordinating things together, they’re into coherence. If you have four straight lines and they bound in inner space, you have a square. That’s not poetry either. It’s between them, betaxu, between them, and that dialogical activation of opponent processing drives recursive relevance realization and evolves meaning until it fits and we can see the world in a new way. We can see the world in a grain of sand. It should be really clear to you that this is a clear instance of finite transcendence through inner dialogic. We’re not transcending beyond ourselves, but we’re coming to something new. We transcend what we were before, but we’re still the nevertheless finite, but we do it because of a capacity for inner dialogic. Now, Blackowitz in a prescient manner in 1999, this is I think before Ian Wright’s The Master and his emissary, discusses though all the current evidence even at his time for brain lateralization in a way that foreshadows the work that McGilchrist brings, but there’s something else that he doesn’t talk about that we also need to note. We remember the Vygotskyian notion of internalization. We not only internalize other perspectives, we internalize dialogue and we internalize and we internalize dialogos when that dialogue becomes this evolution, this co-created emergence of the articulation of new meaning. Internalizing that dialogic is powerful because, and we have more and more evidence, again see Mercier and Sperber’s Enigma of Reason where they gather together all of the evidence that when we face reasoning tasks as a group, a small group usually, we significantly outperform how we do on those reasoning tasks when we are acting as individuals. Why? Because individuals are massively prey to the bias that comes out of recursive relevance realization, but having other people with other perspectives that they are presencing to us and challenging us allows us to afford each other to overcome bias. There is a collective intelligence in distributed cognition that supersedes just the aggregation or the summation of the intelligence of the individual people. When you start to move this way off the monologic onto the dialogical and off the monadic self into the dialogical self, then you start to see that the Socratic demonian is not necessarily as crazy or as irrational as we initially thought. Now we are not finished as I as I forewarned you, we are not finished this line of argument, line through line, and we will take it up in the next episode. I want to give you some points to ponder and then we’ll move to practice. Point to Ponder Number One. The inner dialogos of Socrates and his demonian are a challenge to make the Socratic shift from the inner dialogue of the Socratic. The Socratic shift is a challenge to make the Socratic shift rather than using it as evidence from our modernist framework to label him as irrational. Turn it the other way and use it as a way to challenge the modern framing of rationality, which we have already been doing so The Socratic shift I proposed to you then is central to dialectic into dialogos. We need to practice it and not just believe it, believe in it so that we can practice it and experience that transformation. We noticed that as we begin to challenge the monological mind, we are also challenging the monadic self and think of that what that means when I have been arguing both here but also outside of this series for an ecology of practices. There is no panacea practice because there isn’t a single self that you’re intervening in. Another thing we should note is that as we start talking about this inner dimension, we are extending the vertical dimension of dialectic. It’s not only above us contemplatively, it’s within us in how we are communing with our own souls. I want to note something. I said that episode eight would be the pedagogical program in which we do the reverse engineering from all of this argument, but that was a mistake because we need to complete this argument and do one other thing. So the reverse engineering and the taking you through the pedagogical program will come in episode 10. All right, we’ll now move to the practice. I’m going to describe a practice to you that is designed to get you into a dialogical framework with respect to your sense of self and your experience of self. Do not do this practice every day or regularly. You should be doing your centering and rooting and some of the other practices. When we draw together the reverse engineering, I’ll tell you what I think are sort of the core practices and then ones that you can use as variations or scaffolding practices. Maybe do this practice a few times so you can get a sense of a different way of being a self. Maybe the word ah is a little bit of a misnomer there. Let me describe the practice to you. It’s a meditative questioning practice. Some of you know I do something similar to this. I do a meditation practice. I do a meditation practice. I do a meditative questioning practice. Some of you know I do something similar to this when I teach the meditation, contemplation, and cultivation of wisdom. It has a similar function but it’s modified differently to try and be more specifically addressed towards this realization that we’ve been discussing in this episode. The Socratic shift. So normally when we ask a question, we ask it from a framework of curiosity and there’s a hole and we want to fill it in because we’ve discovered a gap in our knowledge and curiosity is a good thing and it’s a powerful motivator and filling in those holes improves our knowledge. So I’m not here to in any way disparage that. But sometimes we don’t ask a question from curiosity. We ask it from a framework of wonder, stance of wonder. I wonder if my life has any deep meaning. We’re not asking a question because there’s we’ve discovered a gap in our knowledge we’re calling the self and its world into question and of course wonder can deepen into awe but of course awe can go too far and become horror and so there’s we want to get to an optimal gripping on our questioning. I want you to play with the connection between questioning and questing and in a quest what you’re doing is you’re trying to see what you have not yet seen in a way that will transform you. The original meaning of theoria was to go on a journey so that you would see something that you hadn’t seen before that would transform you see into things, theoria and we eventually turned that into a purely propositional thing. We replaced a vigilant envisioning with a propositional ordering. Of course that’s good in one sense because it gave us science and I believe in science, I practice science but we lost something in that bargain which we’re trying to recover here. We want to ask a question as a way of going on a quest. Other traditions of course have this. Zen has a koan in which you ask a question that’s specifically designed so that you cannot ask it from the framework of curiosity because it has it does not point to a gap it points to a destruction of the curiosity framework so that you are thrown into wonder. It’s sometimes described as swallowing the red hot ball of iron that burns its way through you and then drops out the bottom and so the questions are designed to trigger that curiosity to have an answer but they put you into a framework of becoming someone other than who you are. You can think of similar things convergent with this in the Sufi tradition. The teaching stories which look like stories and their narratives and then you read them through and then they undermine what you’re expecting at the end and you get a flip out of the narrative mode so you can drop into Socratic style wonder or and I mean this of course with respect Jesus of Nazareth doing the same thing with the parable. If you think if anybody tells you that this gives you an allegorical reading of a parable and says that’s what a parable is they don’t understand the kingdom of heaven. The point about the parable is just to get you into a place where you think you’re in a story and you know who to identify with and then it unwraps from you and you are put into a state of wonder and you are called into question and the kind of world that that self could see was called into question so you are opened up the world or is opened up you get that reciprocal opening. This is what this is designed to do it’s designed to put your yourself into question especially the set of presuppositions that we are have been given to us by modernity and therefore get you to wonder into the Socratic shift. So please make sure you’re very well centered you’re rooted you go through the humble wonder exercise to be properly prepared. Then when you’re ready you’re going to ask yourself a question. You’re going to ask who am I? You’re going to first ask it and these are all imaginal positions you’re going to ask it from your your like your mind your head space who am I and you’ll get answers you’ll get some answers and for a bit do a bit of movement within that any answer that comes up treat it with gratitude and appreciation thank you but who am I where did that answer come from what’s behind it what happens if I go through it use the you’re not throwing away the answer the answer is a doorway you pass through it affords you and you go you go a little bit deeper do a few rounds of the question and then you’re going to ask yourself a question and then you’re going to answer it. So remember do a few rounds of that maybe two three four and hold that for a moment savor it and come back now to your heart eye positioning here who am I when words come up just let them float away what what feelings what emotions what affect what motivation what in co-hate sensations come up and now instead try and this is where how it’s very much like ensign’s focusing try to propose you’re proposing to yourself is is what am I feeling is it this and it doesn’t know is it this no is it this yes and as Gendlin says in focusing there’s that felt shift that who I am keep that move into I needed another h-word from the the zen tradition comes to came to mind the the hara this part of you and for those of you know Plato here’s the man here’s the lion and here’s the beast from your hara from that part of you the visceral parts of you in your guts and you have lots of neurons there right in who am I and what’s the energy that comes up and now again doing that labeling that’s resonant propose is it this is it this is it this and now you have all three of these the deeper mental the heart the hara and like in lexio divina where you have the different texts talk to each other now let them do that reciprocal correction between each other until you let them play with each other how do they go together what’s the logos how can I follow the logos practice the logos until I see the through line until they all resolve until you get a gestalt of its own and then deeply appreciate this answer that’s who I am and then go through it like a portal and do the whole thing again anew start from where you had the mental answer but who am I even deeper do that move into the heart but who am I even deeper doing the focusing and then from the hara even deeper who am I get another answer let it gestalt together find the through line the through line find the through line appreciate it in the sense of understanding and gratitude but who am I go through this portal where did it come from where did these answers come from what will I see if I go through them what is behind them and do it one more time so even deeper and you might get to just emptiness within your mind the feeling you get here or maybe uncanny the emotions the energy felt them together and remember what you’ve already realized that this is no final answer either but appreciate but appreciate in the sense of understand and value both where you have arrived in your quest and the quest and then slowly come out of your practice trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition let it challenge the modern the modern framework let it provoke you to the real possibility of the Socratic shift thank you very much for your time and attention and commitment so this the self is basically wise attention it’s attention that’s what that wonders and is balanced and doesn’t get over involved or right has an optimal grip on all of the other parts to use our language it’s basically a ratio religio oriented listen to all the words that we’ve built up a ratio religio oriented to the whole of the psyche it seeks synoptic integration remember we talked about that of the whole of the psyche you