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Welcome everyone to Voices with Burvecky. I’m joined once again by my good friend and I don’t know my co-wayfarer on this path that we’re all treading during the meeting crisis and the meta crisis and many of you have already seen him in a couple of previous Voices with Burvecky and his eloquence and his insight, his dexterity of mind and his quick and wonderful good humor are always welcome on Voices with Burvecky. Welcome, Laman Pascal. Hi John, that’s a lovely introduction. Thank you. Here’s where I thought we could start because what’s been on my mind this morning is kind of the interface between subjective and objective in terms of contemplating beauty. What’s the role of projection in there because when we make a mental image of the philosopher or practitioner contemplating the beautiful and all of the positive effects that might have on a person, we tend to think of the contemplator and the beautiful or the good, right? But a lot of it’s got to be like a jet fighter pilot that the targeting indicators are on the screen of his mask. So to what degree is the beauty something that we’re sending around and putting on top of the perceptual target and to what degree is it better or even more practical to think of it as being out there? That’s a really, really good question. I don’t know if you’ve seen the dialogos I had with Andrew Sweeney and with Chris from the Master Piatro. Oh, before I forget, you and Chris have to talk at some point. That would be, I think, a wonderful conversation. Yeah, I told Chris that but we just haven’t got it set up yet. Okay, great. Great. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about this because it’s more and more at the core of the whole dialogos dialectic project because there’s something about the beautification of logos and the beautification of a way of life therein that is central to dialectical practice. And so, yeah, this has been a really important concern for me. So I want to, maybe let’s take a couple steps, initial steps, and thinking about this question. And the two people that have recently had a huge influence on my thinking about beauty are Ellen Scarry’s book, Beauty and Why it Prepares Us for Truth and Justice, and then the work by Han, his book Saving Beauty. Let’s start with Han because that to me, that was really interesting because it resonated with his work on time and his work on eros, also big platonic themes that really, really are, he’s really, really talking to me a lot right now. So he talked about, he talked about the, how we, why we need, let’s put it this way, why do we need to save beauty? He thinks beauty is being lost, which already means he’s thinking there’s something objective to beauty, right? He thinks the beauty is being lost because we are reducing it to what he calls the aesthetics of the smooth, that we, we’re assimilating beauty to what is, you know, what is smooth. And he talks about all these works of art. Now, I think he gets a little bit too extreme, but that’s his want and his style because I do think there’s an element of genuine aesthetics to smooth things. Like when I’m doing the form, I want the form to be smooth, right? But I take his point to be this. What he dislikes about the aesthetics of the smooth is it removes what he seems to, what he argues is a central feature of beauty, which points directly to your question, which, and the central feature of beauty that he is pointing to is the degree to which it transcends our capacity for assimilation, the degree to which we are struck by beauty, as we used to say a while ago. And he brings out, that connects up with his idea that genuine eros is, right, is to confront something other than oneself, to be drawn to. And if you’re only, if you’re only doing eros in an assimilation fashion, you’ve reduced eros to consumption. And, you know, Plato talks about the correct response to beauty is generative, not consumptive. You want to, as Plato said, you want to, in the symposium, you want to generate beautiful things in beauty. Like the response to beauty is you want to, it’s, he directly, you know, analogizes it to sexual reproduction. You want to reproduce beauty. You want to be this generative thing. You want, you feel impregnated by it. You want to conceive and give birth to it. And so I think that that’s one thing I’d want to throw out there, that we might be able to look not in the content of beauty for the objective, but the degree to which we are struck by what we cannot assimilate. And that therefore beauty would be on a continuum with wonder and awe, but also with horror. And we might want to explore the strange family relationship between horror and beauty, and why there’s an aesthetic of horror for people that’s, which has always been deeply perplexing to me, sort of philosophically. So that’s one. And then this I find very convergent, also platonically with Ellen Scarer’s argument, that what beauty does for us, if you’ll allow me, I’ll use a little bit of the language I’ve been trying to coin, the phenomenological language, but I think this is very consonant with it. So she talks about when you see, you see a beautiful tree, this is your example, right? And you’re struck by it. First of all, she has what Han is talking about, you’re struck by it. And then she points out two things which are really interesting. There’s what I would call, there’s an experience of the moreness. That’s the part that, I didn’t know trees could be like this, right? There’s the ah, right? So there’s the moreness. And then, but there’s also, there’s the unique unrepeatability of this tree. Like you get how it’s, it’s unlike all the other, right? It shows you what any tree could be, but it’s also unlike any tree you’ve seen before. It has its own particular section. It’s non-categorical, unique presencing. And so, right, and she argues that beauty therefore is training. And she means this, I think, in a deep sense like your dojo, eschisis, spiritual practices, is training for truth. Because if we can’t, if we don’t have a capacity to be struck by what is more, right, the mystery of participation, and also, you know, that sensibility transcendence, picking up on what is unique and unrepeatable here now, right, which is the Sophia, I would argue the Sophia and the promiscuous parts of wisdom, right? She argues that we can’t genuinely pursue either truth as an epistemic value or justice as a social value. Because she sees truth as that which is trying to take us into the more, but also bring it into what is contextually most relevant now. And I think that’s very important. And she sees justice as always applying to, there’s much more to humanity, but there’s also something special and unique about this person right here, right now. And so she argues that beauty prepares us for true and justice. So what I’m arguing for, I guess, I guess I’m making an argument, is that I think there’s something, I don’t know if it’s quite objective, but at least transjective. Because I think she’s arguing that beauty, the degree to which we pick up on what Han talked about, about its capacity to strike us, beauty is an affordance, an ascetic, a training affordance for truth and justice. So that’s how I’m thinking of beauty a lot these days. So there’s a lot to give you, but I know you’ll do a lot with it. Sure. I mean, I agree very much with the sort of the need to think beauty as having an excessive dimension, both in its positive and its negative sense. I think the idea of dark beauty is an interesting one and the beauty of horror to pick up on. And it also reminds me of just the uncanny beautiful in general. What’s that quote from Andre Breton and the surrealists that I think Breton said, quoting someone else, that beauty had to be like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s to have an uncanny juxtaposition to give it the vividness they’re looking for to get a sense of hyperconscious beauty. So that element of excess vividness with it, I think is important. And I think we’ve traditionally used the idea that it’s out there beyond us as a way of conceptualizing that moreness. Yes. But I think we can probably get that moreness by looking at the way our parts come together to create something that’s greater than our current homeostatic self-experience. Sure. Right? Like, if I, if let’s imagine I have all these subjective intelligence systems that make me up, and if enough of them were to come together and be reflected back to me, it would be more than my current self-awareness and self-image. Doesn’t mean I didn’t produce it from the inside or put it on the screen. Now, we could still imagine that it’s out there. It may have real heuristic value to imagine that it’s beyond us. And there may be, I think, a number of things in the ontology of the computations that make up reality that predispose certain things to being easier to project beauty upon. But I don’t think that we lose the moreness and the sacred otherness and the training dimension that we get from beauty by imagining that a lot of the mechanism is generative from within us by creating a more than the sum of the parts effect of the systems that we have. Okay. So I like that. It sounds to me, and if this is wrong, interject, that you’re proposing, you know, dynamical complexification that produces an emergent function. So then my response to that would be, again, that sounds transjective rather than subjective to me, because a function only exists insofar as it can function. Right? So it has to couple to the environment in some way. Right? And because if it doesn’t couple to the environment, it may not function. In fact, I don’t know what it would mean to say that it’s a function. So let me make sure that I understand you. You don’t want to sit like, so I’ve been playing with this term a lot. Cary has it in his book on Augustine and what he calls the inventio of the inner self, because the Latin word means both discovery and invention, which really thwarts the dichotomy we’re addressing here right now. So I tend to think, and that’s come up in the discussion, of beauty as an inventio, right? That it’s both in the sense it’s something that our psyches are inventing, but that that invention genuinely discloses something real about the world to us. It’s also discovery. That’s what I get in story that there must be something in the functioning that is disclosing something now about the world such that it makes the training for truth and justice a real training, a real functionality. That’s what I would say. Yeah, I would assume that if we imagine a situation in which the majority of this effect is produced from in us, but it’s produced in relationship to the actual patterns of the actual universe, some of which make that more available to us than others, that we’ve developed this capacity because it’s a very general capacity, right? It’s one way of saying that is that it trains us for the other values. Yeah, yeah. We can say it’s among the other values. We could say it’s at the heart of cognition itself, because in some of the Eastern trainings, just to perceive anything has an element of perfection to it. Yes. So it’s an extremely general capacity that we’ve evolved, and if we’ve evolved it, we’ve evolved it in an adaptive fashion to environments. So that it’s one thing to think about what our role is in creating the effect, the aesthetic effect through a coordination of stimulations that feed back to us. But that process is embedded within a relationship to the rest of the universe’s patterns as well, and we’ve been predisposed to it over billions of years of training to be able to take advantage of that mechanism because it’s adaptive in an ongoing fashion. So that I think that’s yeah, I think that’s right. I think that some more speculatively now, we’re already being speculative, but even more so. I think beauty is the way in which we train relevance realization to be better honing in on what is just or what is good or what is true. I think it’s how we get it more normatively oriented and trained. And so I think it’s exacted out of our capacity for the sensory, motor, cognitive optimal gripping that we’re always doing. It’s why we generally will talk about dogs as opposed to cocker spaniels or mammals, right? Because that’s sort of an optimal grip for interacting with those animals, given our general context. It’s got enough differences, it’s got enough of the relevant differences, enough of the relevant similarities, right? And so I think of beauty as a re-realization, very much like insight. And that’s why we’re struck by beauty. I think of it as a restructuring, a re-realization, a recognition of optimal gripping. So that it’s, oh wait, I’m optimally gripping better than I was before the world. And so when I’m thinking about it more in cognitive science, as opposed to existential phenomenological terms, that’s how I see it. And that’s, of course, it’s going to be tremendously adaptive and valuable to us. Does that resonate with what you’re saying? It does. And it leads me to a kind of question about what is the utility or significance of practices that lead people to have a very diverse experience of optimal gripping in a basic sense? And what I mean by that is, I suppose I underwent a quasi-Buddhist training, which allowed me to get better and better at seeing the beauty in any perceptual moment, in any act of cognition. I’m observing and reflecting upon the fact that any cognitive moment is successful. I’m accomplishing optimal gripping just by seeing something. So now, I’ve made it super normative, my experience of optimal gripping, because I’m doing it on everything that’s coming up. Is this a superior state in which I’m super adapted to be able to perform this function, or have I settled for the least possible value? Have I become hooked on the most basic form and I’ve gone into a cul-de-sac? Well, it seems to me that’s a bifurcation point in development. Because the Buddha definitely warns about the second. He warns the contentedness of a cabbage. It’s got the sense of, oh, you know. I think other traditions have recognized the possibility. But there’s also the opposite affordances there. Because I can see a capacity for deep learning. I can see by running, like really intensifying all the variations of the optimal gripping, diversifying it, differentiating it. But differentiating it in this, and this is not a contradiction, in a very integrated practice, could afford the opposite, where I get a very comprehensive and I grasp much deeper in variant principles that generalize much more powerfully. This is what you do in deep learning, right? You run the variations and then you do the compression and then you run the variation. And I can see that affording a deep learning that, again, recognizes, that provides not just an insight about this flower or this table, but an insight into being, right, a systematic insight into the optimal grip. And why I think that’s relevant is because I’ve argued in the series that I think one of the features of these higher states of consciousness are people are getting into a kind of flow state with this sort of meta-optimal gripping. Not an optimal grip on this and this, but optimal gripping per se. And they’re sort of, that’s what, because they get this intense, and this is where, this is again where Barry comes in. The beauty bleeds into an intense sense of realness at the same time. And so for me, the way I’ve tried to understand that is, and you can’t understand it in terms of the content they produce, the propositions, because they’re all over the place and they contradict each other. So I think that where that normative judgment of the beautiful realness is coming from is something like, you know, enhanced meta-optimal grip. So I think that what you propose could be training that affords that kind of satori, but it could also be abused. Why not? Everything can be abused. It could be abused for a kind of, like you said, a cul-de-sac. A kind of, like, just a general contentedness with the obviousness of everyday experience. Which is sometimes, I think, mistaken for an interpretation of that. While you were saying that, I thought about, because outside of the cul-de-sac interpretation, there is this sense that a higher, more abstracted, more generalized version of what the optimal grip move is, is experienced by people who practice that as being a superior level of development. Yep. Right? So that put me in mind of, you know, pre and trans and superior and inferior modes of development. Because one of the things you could say about people who undertake riskier self-destructive behavior is that they might be seeking a dark beauty effect because they aren’t succeeding at getting a higher optimal grip on things. The gnostic myth of you dive down into the reflected image and the depths, because you mistake it for the light from above. Sure. Have you seen, there’s a movie, 300, then there’s a sequel to it about the Athenians versus the Persians. Yeah. The Athenians go to the Spartans and try to enlist their aid. The Spartans turn them down. The general goes back to his men and they say, you know, are the Spartans with us? He says, no, the Persians offered them something they couldn’t refuse. What’s that? He says, a beautiful death. Right. Right. Right. So they’re going to, a regressive beauty was the best thing they could hope for, presumably because they weren’t confident in their ability to access a more complicated beauty. Yeah. Again, I think you’re speaking towards, you’re speaking towards something that I’ve seen discussed, mentioned in multiple wisdom traditions. So obviously the Gnostic tradition, right, talks about that. I just referenced that myth. Plotinus talks about it. He does a riff on Narcissus and his version of that is Narcissus falls in love with the reflection, rather, of beauty and then falls into the water and drowns. Right. And so, yeah, I think that’s a very real possibility. So that’s sort of two things and they feel like they want to come together because your HUD, your heads up display metaphor keeps coming back because I’ve also got this third idea of beauty and I think it connects to this, but I don’t know how, so I’m asking for your help. Right. And I think when we connect them, it will also be an answer to the question you pose or the problem you pose. So let’s see if my intuition bears up because I’m also thinking of beauty as, right, and this because, you know, we talked about the the often it’s associated with more realness, right, like what’s called, what’s nowadays called amplified reality, you know, and when you actually project an image, you project a virtual image onto the real image in order to actually disclose things that are otherwise visible. And, you know, you do this in video games. We also do it in real science. So the scientists using the rovers on Mars, you know, the completely very similitude images, the veridical images are kind of useless. So what they do is they mark them all up and they color them and they put lines on them and they do all this stuff to manipulate their salience. And then what happens is they go, ah, they get a pop out experience and go, oh, right, this and then they get the topography, right. And so that’s what I mean by an app. So there’s a sense of projection, right, because they’re they’re doing what you said, they’re getting all their faculty and they’re sort of triggering their own cognition. But what it does is in fact, it actually discloses something that was otherwise invisible to them. And that’s, of course, what a heads up display is doing to write for the pilot, because it’s projecting everything onto the windshield, but it’s allowing them to track and see things that their unaided vision can’t track. Is that okay? Have I misappropriated your metaphor? So far so good. Okay, so is it possible that what we are being taught, that the metaphors, the myths, you know, you know, I use that term positively, not consortially, right, is that people are treating the images opaquely, right, right. They’re looking at them rather than looking through them. And that’s how they make the fundamental mistaken, right. Do you see what I’m trying to suggest to you that to use, to use, to use, to use Marion’s term, they, they treat it as an idol rather than an icon. And that picks up certainly on narcissism, because that’s what clitinus seems to be indicating. So there’s my first attempt at answering. Yeah, that’s interesting. And I think it’s a good approach because when we try to think the pattern of the encounter with the beautiful, the positive version of that is so close to the negative version of that. Yeah, yeah. That’s, I mean, the idea of a window with a pattern on it, right. And so it’s the same window in the same pattern, but you either see through it or just see it. And if you were to look at it, rather than through it, then you are kind of trapped in a smaller loop of cognition. Yes. Like revolve around the attractor state of a lower level of beautiful cognition rather than allowing you out into a higher level. Right. Yeah, yeah. We get you into kind, well, if you allow me my language, it would get you into kind of reciprocal narrowing rather than a reciprocal opening. And it would tend to that, you know, comport you towards more addictive ways of being and seeing and cognition rather than, you know, growth and transcendent, transcending forms of seeing and being. So that seems to me like, you know, it seems like I feel like we’re up to use Scarry’s term, like we’re beautifying our speech so that we’re on the track of the truth. That’s what it feels like to me. Yeah. It seems like it’s a more demanding function to get that transparency, that opaqueness, because it’s a bit like stereoscopic vision, right? Yeah. Two things at the same time, which is a more cognitively demanding task and therefore more likely to fail for a lot of people. That’s an excellent point. I hadn’t thought about that, but the demands. So it’s almost, yeah, there’s going to be, there’s going to be a lot of cognitive inertia because of the cognitive miser, but it’s going to resist that. And presumably, there has to be something, well, I think you and I talked about something like this before. There has to be something like a certain degree of arousal as activation energy that will afford the complexification to start taking place, because stereoscopic vision is a kind of cognitive complexification. Stereoscopic vision is actually an even better thing for what I’m talking about, because you know it’s how it brings together your earlier idea, because you’re actually complexifying two inner things, right? But it actually discloses something about reality that needs to be disclosed, which is the dimension of death. So I think that’s very, very good. So it’s something like the image we want is, right, somehow would integrate stereoscopic vision and then looking through the painted window rather than just looking at the painted window or something like that. It feels like it would combine those two together in some way. Yeah, for me, partly because I’m versed in a lot of these theories about layers of developmental complexity, that I start thinking about each more comprehensive and folding level as needing to synchronize the functions of a lot of different pieces. Seeing a thing and seeing through a thing, those are two functions that have to be really well synchronized and a host of other ones, right? Arousal in terms of energy production, which means your lifestyle and your physiology, all these things have to be on board to sustain that higher level. And if it starts to break down, it breaks down in the form of those functions, some of them coming offline or maybe they stop synchronizing, which leads me to think sociologically, because one of the things if you just stand back and look at the trash fire that appears to be the United States lately, one of the things you see there arguably is the functions of modernity not synchronizing. You see the modern police force running up against the freedom of the individual. You see corporate freedoms running up against freedoms of the press. You see all these different functions interfering with each other rather than synchronizing. Or also synchronizing in like what we talked about, the parasitic processing, reciprocal parrying, because everything has side effects other than the intended effects. And so a lot of the side effects I think are also starting to reinforce each other in negative patterns. If an orchestra started to fail, you still might get the drummer and the flutist circling each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if this leads back to the aesthetics of horror. I’m wondering if part of the attraction, I think that’s the right word, part of the attraction to the aesthetics of horror is because I mean horror puts you into a high level of arousal for sure. And horror also is really, it really challenges your sense that you actually have an optimal grip. It has a real potential to threaten you out of just looking at and say, no, no, you’re not seeing, you’re not seeing. And so you’ve got like it’s challenging you to like, that’s why it’s very close to awe. Because awe is like you’re, oh, I’m not seeing it, but I might actually see it. Right? Where horror is, I’m not seeing it, I’m not going to see it. And that’s really right. But I’m throwing that out as a suggestion that maybe part of why, because it would help to alleviate the paradox, because the content of horror should be deeply aversive to us. Right? Stuff is threatening us. Right? But maybe part of the attraction and that is when we get a sense, like I said, of a combination of two things that could potentially be beneficial if they were appropriately coordinated, which is a high level of arousal and a deep sense that we haven’t got an appropriate grip on things and we need to see more deeply than we’re currently seeing. That’s a suggestion. Yeah, there’s an element there of somebody who’s lost and wants to go back to the crossroads, right? Go back to the bifurcation point. Because then the bifurcation point could go either way. It’s like, what’s the attraction to standing at the edge of a cliff that’s really high up, right? For some people, it’s going to give them a little extra thrill and remind them that they want to live. And for other people, it’s risky because the idea that you might throw yourself off is gaining ground in your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I wonder then if, I wonder if awe is more towards that sweet point. I mean, I’m in discussion with Brian Haustafan. We’re running, Haustafan would run it, running, like he’s running experiments on awe and also with Jennifer Steller and Jensen Camp and Michelle Bray. We’re running experiments on awe and it’s interesting what awe seems to do in contrast to just the just experiences of beauty. Because awe has a huge impact on meaning in life. So people feel really connected to something that’s real. That’s that realness that they don’t necessarily have with at least our cultural understanding of beauty. So that contrast is clearly coming out. They don’t get an enhanced sense of purpose. So it’s not telec at all, right? So contrary to meaning of just having a purpose. No, it’s not. Awe shows it’s not. So no, no, no, no. What’s really interesting, it goes towards what we’re talking about here is you get, you get an appreciable increase in people’s ability to pick up on patterns, deeper, more complex patterns that they couldn’t pick up on before. There might be a way in which the meaningfulness of awe does have a telec component. Okay. That it makes you super aware of your capacity to produce that experience from out of your own machinery. In which case you’re reminded of that’s the purpose of life and it is possible for me to do this. I can see that. I can see that. I think it’s interesting that the way you did that because that reminds me again of what we were talking about when I mentioned the Plato, that what happens is you get a generative response. That’s what you just did. Your response is, oh, I want to generate. I want to generate, right? I want to be able to generate more and more of this. And there’s a sense in which you’re also affording reality, for lack of a better word, the world to be more generative in what it can dispose to people in terms of its potential for intelligibility. So I agree with that. I think that’s right. I think that’s a good point. I agree with that. I think that’s right. I don’t know if that’s telec or if that’s peritelec. And I don’t know if you’re stating a purpose as opposed to an ideal. It sounds more adverbial to me than adjectival, but that could be a quibble. Yeah. It’s a different kind of a purpose. It’s an er purpose or a meta purpose of some kind because it doesn’t super meaningful experience and awe doesn’t necessarily come along with or doesn’t have to come along with some kind of cognitive content about what the purpose might be. Yeah. If we think of self-aware content about purposes as secondary to what purpose really is, then we can argue that it’s a purpose, right? Like most purposes are animating rather than self-aware. Yeah, that’s fine. So why that won’t show up on the standard measures? Because the standard measures of purpose understand purpose as a future state of affair. So a purpose is kind of a, is your most important goal that you’re working towards. And so you’re not working towards a particular future state of affairs and what we’re talking about here. You’re working more for an ongoing constraint or virtue for all of your existence. You’re working for a qualitative subset of affairs to be privileged in your future outcomes. Yes, yes. That’s a better way of putting it. So Keeks makes a distinction then between goals and ideals along just that line. Where an ideal is, like the ideal of honesty is just like you said, in many different possible future states, I want to act in this manner as opposed to I want to be wealthy, which is, I, there’s this future state that I want to be definitively arrived at. That’s interesting in terms of what we were previously discussing about the possibility of expansive or regressive layers of this phenomenon. Because you might say I’ve got a lot of things going on. I’ve got a lot of purposes, not just one, but a bunch. And at some point, they converge at a principle, a virtue of some kind that I’m working towards. However, they might also converge to a lower set of those virtues, right? So the person who is moving through their behavior towards a self-destructive outcome, but is also moving towards a beautiful darkness, towards something they’re going to say, this is reality, man. So there’s a lot of virtues, although they’re in a more compressed form. That’s cool. Okay, so that room, this is what came up for me with that. So I talked about the problem of aspect disguise and therapeutic work. And you’ll see why that’s relevant to what you said in just a second. So somebody comes in and, well, what’s wrong? You know, I’m too stubborn. I just, I like, I got, everybody’s telling me I’m so confrontational and stubborn and I gotta let go. Oh, that’s interesting. And then you talk to them for a while and you get them off and you get them into sort of the monologue autobiography that can just spew out of human beings pretty naturally once you get past a few moments of, you know, politeness, right? And then, and then while they’re doing that, you ask, tell me something about yourself that you really like. And they’ll say, well, I persevere. I really keep going no matter what. And you say, ah, and so, so right. And then part of the therapy is to get them to see the non-logical identity, the aspectual identity, right? It’s the right between stubbornness and perseverance, right? And that’s a very difficult thing to do. So here’s a question, because it seems to me like that aspect shift is somehow aligned with what we were talking about earlier, the ability to see through rather than look at. Like the person who, right? The person, cause it’s like, it strikes me like the stereoscopic vision, right? Because the person in therapy needs to get a stereoscopic vision on stubbornness and perseverance in order to break through to the depths. Whereas the person who’s trapped is only looking at the stubbornness and looking at the perseverance. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Like if I imagine a kind of cartoonish image where we all come built in with these instincts and some of those instincts are virtue experiences. Yeah. And these can develop analogous to say Howard Gardner’s intelligences, something like that, right? The developmental phases of these virtues would involve a complexification, which has to involve a splitting and a synchronizing. So you’ve got, I really am pursuing a virtue here. I’m persevering and you need to then help that person grow to the next more complex, stable stage of that virtue, which involves teasing it apart from its reciprocal, but holding them in a synchronized way, a stereoscopic fashion so that you can operate at the next attractor level or whatever we want to call that. So this action sounds a lot like it’s what you just said was beautiful by the way, that really, yes, that’s great. And now what it sounds deeply analogous to is a dynamic interpretation of Aristotle’s golden mean, right? That what you’re always trying to do, right? And the courage is in between cowardice and cool heartiness, right? So you’re sort of doing almost a two-way stereoscopic thing, right? And you’re doing all of this complexification and virtual engineering. So that now, I’m going to do a move here. I’ll be kind of came up in the discussion. First of all, I want to flag something just as a general note. What’s happening here is interesting because for me, the process, I’m going to go meta just for a second and then I’ll return, right? We’re doing something, we’re doing a kind of argumentation in which instead of propositions, we’re making proposals. And then what we’re doing is the proposals are doing this gathering, right? So it’s not the logical progression of premises, although we’re not, I hope we’re not violating logical coherence, but there’s something much more. It’s much more that sense of the logos. We’re gathering things together and seeing so that they come to belong together and then afford another proposal that gathers things together. And this is what I think is something that I want to put more, I’m trying to explicate it to put the foreground and say, we need to be paying attention to this kind of argumentation as opposed to the strict logical progression of premises. This logos progression of proposals strikes me as much more important for what we need to do when we are trying to cultivate wisdom or virtue. So I just wanted to put that out there as something to flag and explicate because you’re helping me develop and explicate and understand what this is. I have a lot of training in formal argumentation and I’m not saying we should just get rid of that, get into willy nilly romanticism or something like that, but there’s something more going on here and I have a sense that you’re feeling it and experiencing it too. And I just wanted to note that with people because I think noting the process is relevant to what we’re actually talking about because we’re actually trying to beautify the discourse of the communication. So that being said, within that context of that framing of argumentation, I made an argument with two, because it’s a series of proposals, I made an argument to Chris and Andrew that there seems to be therefore a deep connection between virtue, beauty and wisdom, given what we just said about this complexification and then going back to the seeing through and also this meta-optimal gripping. And I proposed to them that wisdom also has, because I want to turn the stereoscopic vision sort of this way to link it into the reciprocal opening. So this is what I’m proposing, there’s a kind of stereoscopic vision that’s proposed in wisdom in Aristotle, namely like there’s Sophia which is out into the morness and then there’s Phonesis which is into the suctionist. I think that’s very, it’s clearly, I think that’s how those turn to be. And so there’s a stereoscopic vision to wisdom, if I can put it that way. And then I’ll throw in a Socratic idea. And the Socratic idea is that virtues are always just specific enactment of wisdom, that being courageous is how I’m wise in this situation and being kind is how I’m wise in this situation. But you’ve got to give me the stereoscopic sense of wisdom for that to really be I think a viable proposal. And then if you give me that and you give what we’ve said about beauty, here’s a proposal that I think is a very platonic proposal that virtue is the beauty of wisdom. That when I act courageously, I’ve got the stereoscopic optimal grip between the morness and the suctionist that needs to be realized in this situation. And it’s not just subjective and it’s not just objective, but I have coupled to the situation in the most appropriate fashion for that situation. And in that way, it’s beautiful. Because I’ve been trying to understand in the symposium, when Plato says something and everybody goes, yeah, I get that. When he goes, you know, you move from physical beauty, and then you move to the beauty of institutions and virtues, and everybody goes, yeah, yeah. And I go, what the hell are you talking about? Like how is a virtue beautiful? And that’s my proposal to you. But I think that virtue, I’m not saying virtue is beauty, I’m saying virtue is the beauty of wisdom. That’s what I’m proposing to you. Well, yeah, I think there’s a, I mean, if we define wisdom in a very general sense, I would call it a toroidal sense, because it, you know, it folds the out, the going out folds back into the coming in. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So you’ve got that. And now the very simplistic geometric structure of a pyramid, right? So if you had beauty and justice and truth and goodness, they have a convergence point of some kind at this simultaneously outgoing and ingoing wisdom function that overflows maybe back onto them. So that that’s a, that’s the transcendental notion of know how. So anything that works is know how and if know how is understood to be what wisdom is, that makes a lot of sense. So that anything that functions, any virtue is a form of know how. But virtue isn’t just when we look at a system and it functions well, so it’s expressing the virtue. It’s there’s also the interior recognition of that quality, which has a beauty to it. Yes. Attractiveness of some kind, right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that was well said. That’s exactly it. I’m trying to, yeah, I’m trying to, exactly. I’m trying to, yeah, that there seems to be this, because part of what I see Plato doing is he’s trying to, like, extend beauty. He’s trying to extend beauty into awe and this seems to have, sorry, he’s trying to extend wonder into awe and this seems to, like, correspond to some relationship between beauty and wisdom. And that’s what I’m trying to get at here, that we start to pick up on, right, the beauty of wisdom and it draws us in and then eventually we can be, we can come into reverence for it. And that’s what I think it is to be by Lea Sophia to fall in love with wisdom. It has to be in some deeply motivational and cognitive sense attractive to us. The other thing about that for me is that it’s so general that it’s potentially could be unpacked or deployed into all kinds of different affairs. Oh, yeah. Right? If you know it as personal cognition of beauty or as personal cognition of truth, then you might think, well, how could I get that same thing in politics? How could I get that same thing in my exercise routine? The more refined I make the notion, the more I’m liable to be able to find that experience within any set of functions that works, that expresses the wisdom of know-how. I think that’s good. I mean, I would also put in the perspectival and the participatory knowing in addition to the know-how, but I think you’re using know-how in a very comprehensive way, so that’s fine. And I think that goes towards, again, a kind of stereoscopic grasping or rocking the deep learning that you generate the variate, you project it even, let me use your language, into the variations, and then you recollect it into what’s what. As you get better at varying it, you get better at extracting more deeper invariance, what is much more general, which then allows you to vary it more, and then you get the cycle of deep learning, which I think is part of what we’re talking about as well here. Yeah, and that is, you know, I immediately thought of general relativity when you said that. Einstein wanted to call invariance theory, but we all have relativity theory, right? And we have this sense of the vast number of changing frames of reference that have to be taken into account in some kind of expanded geometrical hyperspace, so it seems very complex, but it’s also very simplifying because he’s looking for the non-varying qualities across all frames of reference. The increase, the evolution beyond Newtonian mechanics involved the simultaneous refining and simplifying and vast expanse. That’s right, that’s wonderful. That’s very good, I like that. I didn’t know that, that he actually wanted to call it the invariance theory. That’s really amazing. We already knew, like the argument is, we knew about the relativity thing already. Galileo had described the relativity of measurements in frames of references. The problem was, how do you overcome the relativity by finding what is invariant? And that the speed of light presented itself as a good option. That’s fantastic. Thank you, Raymond. Thank you for that education. That’s first of all just a good fact to know, both for physics and for cognitive science, because I’m interested in Einstein as an exemplar, kind of dialectical thinking, but also just as a pertinent metaphor for what we’re talking about here and now. I like the way you keep reminding me, because it is a lacuna, even a bias in my thinking, although I’ve been working really hard with the help of others to try to address it. I often don’t think, I do think about distributed cognition more and more, but I don’t give enough to sort of what you might call the socio-political aspect of this, just because I’m so critical of sort of ideological tyranny and the way it sort of, the way it tyrannizes discourse so much. But every time you’ve invoked it, I’ve found it to be, well, I’ll use Starry Storm, I found it to be a just invocation. So thank you for that. Yeah, it’s an interesting field and I, you know, people who are working on the arts, the sciences, the self-development practices, anything where it’s very much about human interiors or interpersonal relationships, can often have a gap when it comes to politics. And legitimately so, because it seems so flawed and trapped in its own category sets. Yeah. And the people you hear talk about it are very often either dismissive or zealous. Yes, yes. But when you start to think through, like if you’re working on a project and you think, how do we develop people? How do we make a civilization of higher practices? Well, you know, what kinds of operative social and economic systems would allow for that? And which ones start to interfere with that, right? So there’s a way of unpacking science and dharma into politics, I think in a fairly simple way that we often don’t do just because it seems like such a murky territory. Yeah, yeah. I think that was very well said. Well, at some point, we’re running out of time today, so I don’t want to shift on that. But I’d like to have a conversation with you about exactly that topic, because it is, I mean, I think I have legitimate criticisms for how we’ve descended into adversarial zero-sum game, and that we’re into the tyranny of the propositional and all kinds of things that I think should legitimately be criticized and how they contribute to and exacerbate the meeting crisis. But I want to acknowledge that there’s an area that I, well, that I’m not seeing through. These are, right? And I’d invite you to to talk more about that if you’d like, because I think that’d be very interesting. I have a good faith in you that you would be able to follow through on the framing you just posed, which is try and get this into a more helpful framing rather than, to be fair, what it’s prevalently sort of ossified into in a lot of ways. So I would like that very much. I would enjoy that very much. Yeah, I think that would be an interesting topic for us to go at. And for me, I come from the angle of my own understanding of what I mean by religion, which is the sort of social and interpersonal analog of this process of the production of an excess coherence within the individual subsystems. But that is immediately a political affair. Right. And so part of that, what you just said was beautiful. We’re going to get into this conversation, but we’ll have to be careful here because, like I said, we’re coming close. Because that’s exactly one of my criticisms that politics is, I’ll use Weber’s distinction of manifest and latent. It’s manifest and secular, but it’s latently deeply religious. And then it often comes off as something verging on a single religion, precisely because it won’t acknowledge the religiosity of what it’s doing. Because I think of a mistake that that will somehow violate the separation of church and state, which is a policy decision, which is very different from drawing theoretical connections. So, yes, I want more on that. Right. I’ll just use exactly that part of it, because that’s part of my critique. I don’t like the way, and I’m stating that almost, I’m not just making a criticism. There’s something about me that is put off by the way politics tries to take the place of religion, and that we’ve had disastrous consequences because of that in the 20th century. And so I want to know what it’s like to unpack politics the way you’re suggesting that accounts for its religiosity without falling into the titanic evils of the pseudo-religious ideologies that have drenched the world in blood. That’s for me the really difficult problem about extending this to the political domain, if I can put it that way. Sure. Well, I’m going to make sure not to say anything about that so that we can go in fresh next time and work on that. I’m going to bring us back around in a weird way by touching on your brief meta comment about how this is going. Yeah. Because I had two flashes while you said that. The first was that this process of bringing things together, which is ideally trans-rational rather than pre-rational. Yes. That’s the way you have to go at it if what you want to hear is the leading edge of someone’s insight into structures. Yes. That kind of falls out of them during that process, whereas a propositional debate is based on previously solidified assertions that you’re going to build up. That’s a very important process in our social evolution. However, it gets in the way of the immediacy of staying at our shared leading edge. Yeah, I like that. The other part of it is, not to go too far, is that’s how I see Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power. He’s trying to speak to a subjective analog of a basic process of energetics, but that process is the cloud and the lightning. It’s coming together of a bunch of charges into a combined discharge. That is the, at every level, more and more intensely, that’s where he sees the empowerment event occurring, I think. That’s good. Nietzsche is famously difficult to interpret because he’s so- My reading of him is extremely idiosyncratic. When everybody’s honest, it is. I think that’s right. I tend to think of dialectic as a type of technology for 40 DL logos, where you’re getting that coupled co-emergence, where I’m not trying to show that I’m right. I’m trying to get into right relationship with you and reality. It has gone well, if you and I get to a place collectively that we couldn’t get to individually. It’s the overflow that you talk about. I think that, for me, that’s the defining feature of this. Now, the Nietzsche quote puts me in mind of, he gave one clear example of the Unimetch in his writings, and it’s Goethe, which is not what most people think. What’s really interesting, I was just sitting in on somebody who was defending a thesis on Goethe and Barfield and Steiner and the whole new way of seeing, the whole way of doing science, which is all about participatory conformity and coupling to the phenomena, rather than just objectively representing and predicting about it. It’s about science practiced dialogically, right, rather than just predictably. I was thinking about what if Goethe is, if Nietzsche being honest, and it’s always hard to tell if he’s playing or if he’s saying, right, but let’s say he’s saying rather than just playing. If Goethe is the example of the Unimetch, then I think your interpretation that you just made there is actually a very good one, because, I mean, that’s exactly the kind of relationship I think Goethe, and Goethe, I was hoping that, you know, in this ongoing flow, you get, then you realize the earth form of the phenomena, like almost in the platonic sense. You have to go through this deep transformative, deep learning, all this stuff we’ve been talking about, and then the phenomena, right, actually discloses itself to you. Yeah, Goethe is a very good example of what I would call an authentic religious figure, whether they’re socially recognized as being that or not, but he’s science and art and poetry and ecology and botany and, like, down the line, he embodies an integration of the genres of social activity in a way that seems to manifest itself as some transcendental quality about his historical person. That’s well said. That’s very, very well said. Okay, well, I think that’s a good place to perhaps try to bring it to a close. We’ll let you make a concrete example. We’ll be here next time for politics. Yeah, that would be really wonderful. Thank you for this discussion. Well, this is a diologos for me, and I always find these, like you said, they co-create something emergent that I find very, very helpful. So thank you very much, and I look forward to our next time together when we could get into, hopefully, the wisdom within the political domain. That’s a very fun project. Yeah, always a pleasure, John. I look forward to the next one. Thank you very much.