https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yM3PNYeC0ck
Welcome to Voices with Reveki. I’m very excited about today. Today is the fourth in a series that I’ve been doing with Zevi Slavin from Seekers of Unity. And I’ve got one of the great pleasures of this has been getting to know Zevi and swim around in his thoughts and his thinking. It’s just been really wonderful. And we’ve been going back and forth. We did the round one on his channel, Seekers of Unity, and I’ll put links to all of that in this video. Then we did round two on Voices with Reveki here. Then we did round three back on his channel, and then this is round four. And this will be the completion of it. But since there’s agreement, I can now also advertise that Zevi and myself and Guy Sandstock are going to also do a series about the relationship between mystical experience, dia logos, and the voice of reason or the call of reason. And a pivotal figure around that is going to be the work of Martin Buber. But of course, there’ll be related figures no doubt coming in like Spinoza. He’s always there lurking. And so I’m very excited. That’s gonna we’re gonna start filming that recording. I don’t know what the verb is very soon. So all of that preliminary aside, Zevi, it’s great to have you here again. And I’m really looking forward to our conversation today. It’s a pleasure, John, to be back. It’s really, really a pleasure. And it’s been so it’s been so great to be on just encountering your thought and your thinking in your series, which has been totally mind shattering. Also, the community surrounding you and the thinkers that you’ve managed to pull into your gravitational wave has been really excellent. I actually just got off talking about Guy Sandstock just got off with talking. We spoke for two hours today. And I’m still very much tingling with excitement from that conversation. And the things which are which are being thrown up from those is really is really great. And this, this sort of inter conversational dialogue, which is happening between thinkers in this space is really is really very fun. So thank you so much for having let me into this to this dialogue. Oh, you are you’re most welcome to being here. And I’m glad to hear that you’re finding it up a home because I think you belong here. And so you’re you are enlivening this community very much with your presence. Thank you. So I’ll just review where we’re at. I won’t review all three episodes, because like, that’ll be enough that would take us through the episode. I want to just what we’ve been doing. What we did in the last is that Zevi basically asked me to present my argument for I mean, all of this will be contentious, both in terms of whether it’s true and what it means. But basically, the argument was the rationality of mystical experience, especially a particular kind of mystical experience that I’m interested in, which are what are called higher states of consciousness that tend to bring about transport, deep transformative experience within individuals, they transform their identities, their lives. So what can we say about this from the standpoint of cognitive science? And again, I want to reiterate that I want that what’s called science says to enter into a dialogue with what other people from other kinds of traditions have to say about mystical experience. I’m not trying to monopolize the discourse around this at all. But I do think that what I have to say about this is enriching and can feed back in. So there was sort of two moves that needed to be made. And we got through most of the first, and we sort of set up for the second. So just to review quickly, what was the first there’s an account needs to be descriptively adequate, we need to give an account. First of all, we got to make sure we get the phenomenological description of these higher states of consciousness. I said last time, and I’ll repeat it again, I’m not claiming that all mystical experiences are higher states of consciousness. I’m talking about a particular kind of mystical experience, for which, you know, I have quite a bit of empirical evidence and psychological and cognitive scientific theory. And we know about how that it is predictive of people transforming their lives. So I’m very interested in this, because it overlaps with my concern with wisdom. My main concern is where and how does mystical experience overlap with the cultivation of wisdom. So again, I’m not claiming this is exhaustive, but I’m claiming it’s important, these higher states of consciousness. And so first of all, what’s the phenomenological description? And then what would descriptive adequacy be? Could we explain those phenomena, right, those phenomenological characteristics in terms of very well understood cognitive processes? And we made that argument around things like insight and flow and decentering and things like that. So we basically made and Zevi was, you know, excellent as, you know, as a skeptical and also supportive interlocutor. And he did this wonderful dance between them, which I thought was exemplary. So I’m going to take it that the case for the descriptive adequacy has been made plausible. And then what I want to do is, move into the prescript prescriptive adequacy. prescriptive adequacy is not to say, yes, it’s genuinely the case that these experiences occur, and we can explain how they occur. This is a different thing. That’s that’s descriptive adequacy. prescriptive adequacy is yet. Yeah, but should people pursue them? That’s a different thing. Is it justifiable to pursue them? Is it something that you would rationally recommend to another human being to do? That’s the prescriptive adequacy. And so I want to make an argument that that we can actually make a good prescriptive case for why people should and I want to qualify it later under the right context and the right way, etc. But right now, just more boldly that people should pursue seeking out these kinds of experiences. If you’ll allow me this, and this is a gesture towards my friend, I’m going to prescribe that people should be seekers of unity. And what that and why that is a justifiable or rationally justifiable recommendation. And so that’s basically what I want. I’m going to presume that the case for descriptive adequacy has been met. And today, I’m going to try with Zevi’s, you know, critical interaction to make the case for the prescriptive adequacy of these experiences. And then how what this has to say about wisdom, and what does it have to say about the connection to reason, etc. How’s that sounds? Yeah, I think that’s a great summary. And I think that’s a very important case to make, because I think that we’re beginning to see a Renaissance and resurgence in the importance of mysticism as a topic in popular culture. But I think a lot of the the thinking and the legwork to actually make a plausible case for it in a in a prescriptive way, as you’re saying, I think I think a lot of the work that we did last time was very helpful, but maybe in a place where people are already willing to accept, but the way we’re going now is actually quite a bit further, which is saying that we can all accept that it happens, we can even understand how it happens. Scientifically, here is the case why you should do this. And that’s and that’s a or at least the plausible case to do that. Yeah. And I’d like to I’d like to try and aim and in our interlocution to aim it as to aim it towards an intelligent, well read random person off the street. Yeah. So we’re not presupposing any metaphysics. We’re not presupposing any religious conviction. We’re not presupposing anything, just that you’re intelligent, curious, skeptical. And that’s and we’re pitching out you if that’s if that’s if you fit that description. Yeah, I totally agree with that. The one presumption I’m going to make is that the case for descriptive adequacy has been made. Yes. Because that video is there. It’s publicly available. There’ll be links to that because I can’t repeat all of that. Yes. I just want we won’t get it. We won’t get it underway. OK, so I’m going to this is the argument for a plausible, plausibly justified prescription or plausible prescription. And so I’m going to start first not talking about mystical experiences. I want to talk first about the notion of plausibility and why I’m invoking it and why it is justifiable to invoke it. So first of all, I want to get clear about how really important plausibility is. And I’m going to take something that most people would find very far from mystical experience and transformation and show you how much it depends on plausibility, namely scientific experimentation. OK, so most contemporary thinking and critical functioning. Yeah. So there is a problem that you face if you’re going to be a scientist. And this is a well-established thing. There’s lots of existing argument out here. I’ll just give it an intuitive. We always working with finite data sets. That, of course, is again, I think, non-controversial in science. And the point going back to Reichenbach is with any finite data set, there’s an indefinitely large number of equally logically good theories for explaining that. And this is, of course, one of the problems. It’s called the under-determination problem. Again, that’s non-controversial. And so what many people talk about is, well, you just gather more evidence. But all that does is just shift to a new finite data set with a new set of, right? And it actually kicks the can down the road for the issue which you have to address, which is you can’t test all of these theories. You can’t. A combinatorial explosive. And for those of you who have been following some of the other things, this is what has to do. This is yet another instance of the indispensable of relevance realization. So how do people do this? Lots of consensus around the idea that scientists do something like inference to the best explanation. They grasp the, they take a hold of sort of the best, and we’ll come back to that in a sec, the best theories that compete to explain the data. And then they put sort of tests on them for elegance and fruitfulness and clarity, etc. And they do inference to the best explanation. Now, the problem there is how do we select those theories if they all logically equally explain the data? Well, what generally goes in there are judgments of plausibility. Now, let’s be clear about what we mean by plausibility. There’s two meanings of plausibility, and we can confuse them, and then that will cause equivocation. One meaning, which I think people sort of think, although like I say, they’re often confused about these, one meaning is plausible is just a synonym for highly probable, and probability is something that you establish, right? You establish it either a priori mathematics or you establish it empirically. That’s not the meaning I make here, because that would require us already finding out the probability of our claims, and that’s what we do with science, with scientific experimentation. So that’s not the meaning of plausibility I mean. The other meaning, which by the way has a long-standing tradition, has been studied by people going back to Rusher, Rushler, and things like that, is where plausibility is a synonym for these things. It’s reasonable. It makes good sense. It should be taken seriously. It’s worthy of our attention, right? And so notice that that’s exactly, those are exactly the questions facing the person who wants to decide which theories they’re going to put into competition when they go into their experiment. And so what they have to do is they have to make plausibility judgments. What are the most reasonable theories? What are the ones I should take seriously? What are the ones that make good sense, etc.? So you have to make a plausibility judgment when you select what are the theories that you’re going to put into your inference to the best explanation. Now you’re running your experiment. Okay, so now you’re going to run your experiment. What’s the problem with running the experiment? Well, it’s kind of a species of something I’ve already said, but it repeats itself, right? So when I’m running an experiment, I’m trying to determine if there’s a relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable. The problem I have in an experiment is that there’s always what are called potential confounds, right? There might be an alternative explanation for the effect that is different from my proposed independent variable. So you have to do what’s called controlling for the confounds. You have to structure your experiment to rule out those alternative explanations. If you don’t, your results are inherently confounded, which means they’re deeply ambiguous. You cannot derive any clear conclusion from them. So what do we do? Well, why is that a problem? Well, here’s the problem. The alternative explanations again in number are, right? So you’re trying to see, you know, does water dissolve? No, it’s not water. Does salt dissolve in water? Well, of course it does. And then you go to somebody says, no, it doesn’t. And you go to pour in the salt. And just as they’re pouring in, they spray the salt with plastic so it doesn’t dissolve. They go, aha, salt does not dissolve in water. You go, no, no, I mean, I don’t mean salt that has just recently been covered with plastic. And then they go, okay, do it again. And then just as you’re about to, they flash freeze it and the salt stays on the surface. And you say, haha, it doesn’t dissolve in water. You say, no, no, I don’t mean salt in frozen water. I mean, in room temperature water. And just about before you’re going to pour your salt in, they pour in another chemical that prevents the salt from dissolving. And they go, aha, oh no, I mean, pure water. And they’re pure water. And you see where this goes, right? This is a problem brought up a long time ago by Hempel and Denshape published on it, which is the number of possible counterfactuals is indefinitely large. But we don’t rule them all out, right? We can’t because, so which ones do we control for? Well, we control for the ones that strike us as the most reasonable, that make good sense, that should be taken seriously, that we should pay attention to. And that’s what we control for. So we have to do plausibility judgments when we’re running our experiment. Okay, now we’re done and we have our data. Okay, so now we have our data and we’re going to interpret the data. What is it to interpret the data? It’s to derive implications from the data. How many implications can you derive from any set of propositions? Oh, guess what? It’s combinatorially explosive. So well, which one should I derive? Well, you’re going to derive the ones that make the most sense, are reasonable, stand to good reason, right? Right? You know, should be taken seriously. You think people should pay attention to them. So notice what I’m showing you before, during, and after scientific experimentation, right? You have to rely on plausibility judgments. First of all, does that make sense as a case to you? Yeah, it makes sense because of the potential infinity and because of both the limited resources and the combinator explosive, you need to be making those judgments along the way to keep things running in normal fashion. I mean, could you just expand for a second more on the difference between the two uses of plausibility in terms of plausibility as probabilistic and why that’s not a good metric? Yeah, so let me put it this way. This came out with the discussion I’ve done with Leo Ferraro. Probability is our estimation of where we will find truth. So if we use plausibility to mean probability, all we’re doing is saying probability twice. We mean it’s just our estimation of where we’ll find truth. But there’s another meaning of plausibility, which is we should take it seriously, we should pay attention, all that, and that’s our estimation of where we expect to find probability. So plausibility is our best way of estimating where we’re going to turn up evidence that will give us clarity about the probability, and then we use probability because of the fallible nature of science to make estimations of where truth is to be found. So that saves us from doing the numbers on every single step of the process, but it allows us to be driving the right direction so that we can hope to find the truth at the end of the equation. That’s why, for example, there’s lots of other reasons for us, but one of the reasons we have peer review is because peer review is to make sure that the community of experts who have somehow trained their probability judgments will agree that the alternative theories we’re in competition with are the plausible ones, the confounds we controlled for are the plausible ones, and the implications we derived are the plausible ones. That’s the whole point of peer review. Is it perfect? No. It’s like democracy. It’s the best system next to all the rest. There’s nothing better to replace it with because peer review is our way of acknowledging the indispensability, the irremovability of plausibility judgments in the scientific process. I want to do away with one potential objection that could be posed at any point, but now is a good time as ever, which is an objection which I think has a lot of vogue in Purchase Today, where any sort of pursuit after the truth or the correct inference from the data is going to be fundamentally constructed by the socioeconomic or agendas or political whatever is going on. Even relying on something like plausibility through peer review is fundamentally flawed and there’s no access to the truth in that regard. I might be strawmining a little, but I think that’s fine. I think that’s fair. So I mean, first of all, I point people to Berman’s work on Platonism and the Objects of Science, where he basically argues that science depends on inferential generalization. I won’t repeat the argument in depth here, but the basic idea is if you take a nominalist stance, I’ll do both parts. There’s an epistemological point that you make and there’s sort of a sociopolitical critique. So I’m doing the epistemological point first. Nomalism is the idea that there’s no real patterns in the world. They’re just made by the mind. Everything is just constructed. There’s a deep problem with that. It actually can’t actually explain how we get universal generalization. It also is, and here’s an argument I would want to make, so it presupposes a profound kind of ontological dualism, because what you’re saying is there aren’t real patterns in the world, but there are real patterns in the mind, because the connections have to exist somewhere, so they exist here, which means the mind is somehow fundamentally different from reality. That gets you dualism and that gives you skepticism. It means that the only thing that’s actually intelligible to the mind is itself, which means my own mind, solipsism, and so this whole thing just collapses on its own. So if you do a reverse, what’s the best explanation for the existence of science? It’s that the world is actually intelligible, which means there are real patterns in it, which means I reject nominalism, because it commits me to a really deep kind of Cartesian dualism, a humane kind of skepticism, and then I can’t even listen to you, and it undermines the very claims about against science that you’re trying to make. So that kind of move I would make about the epistemic you mentioned. The sociopolitical one is, okay, sorry, I’ll- No, I think that’s helpful to make, because I think that people that may be feeling these objections rising, whether they’re trained enough or well-read enough to understand the metaphysics that are being used in the world, they’re the metaphysics that are relying upon, which those critiques are relying upon, can know that there’s a difference of camp, and you’re not going to accept a nonless opinion, and there’s room for a debate there, or even to provide language to someone who’s feeling those doubts from those errors come up. So I think it’s helpful as a case is made to say, well, we’re saying this because we don’t buy into this, we don’t buy into this. And even just, I mean, we don’t have time to fully sketch a rejection for every metaphysics and every pessimism that we’re rejecting, because that as well leads to a combinatorial explosion. But at least to point out in basic, where the boundaries of the thinking are. That’s right. And I mean, just I’ll do one more. Again, like you said, this is not meant to be exhaustive. The idea that it’s all just constructed, well, that requires that, is my knowledge about my mind being able to construct things, it’s self constructed? Well, oh, oh, no, that has to have real knowledge that that’s the way minds work, in order to claim that constructivism is true. How do I get this unmediated, non-constructed knowledge of my own mind? And tell me why that is any different than the knowledge I get from the world. And then you get an infinite regress, and then you ultimately have to defend it by a kind of normalism, and then you get the argument I’ve just made. The point is that these positions, which are largely taken for granted, are actually very, are subject to very powerful critiques. And for those of you who want to read it in more depth and great analytic rigor, read Berman’s book. So I’m just gonna, I gave you a gist of why I reject that. Now, the socio-political, are people directed by funding and kind of a Foucaultian thing? Yeah. Again, no denying that. But to say that they are influenced by that is not saying they are only influenced by that. And there is empirical evidence that, no, in addition to all of this, scientists do judge things in terms of the plausibility, independent of funding issues. And of course, they’re affected by my side bias, but you can show that there’s an independent thing at work in them. And this goes to something I want to talk about later, which is what is the call of reason? What’s the voice of reason as something that somehow cuts through all this bullshit? But that’s exactly something that I think you can make an increasingly good case for. Because what typically happens is people want to be skeptical about the stuff they don’t like and then not be skeptical. But the problem with these arguments is once you sort of let it go, they tend to consume everything. Because if the scientists are only motivated by money, then how is it that we make progress? How is it we discover things? If they didn’t do something that was valuable, why is money being given to them? You get into these weird circles and things like that. So again, not denying that. But if we undermine nominalism and constructivism and we say there has to be an independent faculty for assessing the plausibility in terms of the intelligibility of things, then I think we can at least discharge those criticisms enough to move on. Do you feel that’s fair? Yeah, I feel like there’s going to be a need for reliance upon a principle like plausibility itself. Yes, exactly. Which might be a bit tricky because it might be seen as begging the question. Well, I want to try and give a justification for plausibility. So I don’t want to treat it as a primitive. I want to try and explain why we need to trust in it. I think as well what I want to add is that there has to be, in order to function, there needs to be limits of skepticism. We can play the game of absolute skepticism that’s been done from the ancient Greeks to here, whenever and in between. But we’re living functioning human beings. And we sleep and we drink and we eat and we function. So I think there has to be a maturing in recognizing the mental arithmetic of skepticism. They can be done for sharpening and for good things and for fun. But if we want to, unless we want to embrace a real metaphysics of the skeptic and live that life, I mean have fun. But if we want to be in some sort of conventional way of living and thinking, there has to be also an understanding that there has to be a criteria which we can ride beyond that radical skepticism with, which I think is something what you’re proposing here. Yeah, that’s what I’m proposing. I think there is no good reason that the skeptic can give to me why I should take seriously propositional contradiction and not take seriously performative contradiction. Propositional contradiction is that there’s contradiction between two of my propositions. Performative contradiction is there’s a contradiction between my propositions that I assert and my behavior, whether it’s my reflective behavior or my practical behavior. And again, why do I privilege this and not pay attention to that? I think that Whitehead is right. We have to take performative contradiction as seriously as we do. And so James made that argument too, William James, as seriously as we do propositional contradiction. The burden of proof is on the skeptic, why I should care about the first and not the second. And it was pointed out that even Pyro couldn’t live out his kind of complete skepticism, even though he was an extremely virtuous man. Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. That’s a great point. And I hope one day we get to talk about Spinoza in that context as him performatively showing that atheism could be done virtuously. But that’s a very interesting point that that we if we’re going to reject propositional contradiction, we also have to reject performative contradiction. That’s well taken. Especially if you think, as I’ve argued elsewhere, even in this series, that there is more than just propositional knowing. Yes, of course. So relations between propositional knowing and procedural and perspectival and participatory should matter as well. Okay, so let’s say now we’ve established that there is that, and you’ve already made reference, we’ve made plausible that there is a real thing, a real normative standard called plausibility. So what is plausibility? Well, this goes to work I’m doing currently, work I’ve done with Leo Farah in the past and work I’m currently doing a book I’m writing with my son, Jason Brevecky. So let me just give the basic idea. And then I want to try and show you the instances where these judgments are being made, even within sort of hard nosed scientific journal articles. Okay, so and I’m going to be trying to give some credit. So an idea that comes from Reschler, but you can see it also in very current work in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, is the idea of convergence. So the idea is, when I have many independent lines of evidence or argument and they converge on the same conclusion, that conclusion, I want to use Reschler’s words here because I think it’s perfect, that conclusion becomes more trustworthy. I think that’s the right word. Now why? So let me explain it in the abstract and then I’ll give you a concrete example just to make it clear. So no matter what channel you’re in, and again I gave arguments about this last time, right, that channel is going to be subject to bias, distortion. But the chances that all of these different independent channels share the same bias are reduced precisely by the number of channels I bring in. So the more independent convergence I have, the more confidence I can have that I have significantly reduced the chance that my conclusion or my construct has been produced by bias. Let me give you an example and this goes to little kids. You and even small children prefer information that is multi-sensor, multi-sensile, like come through multiple senses rather than singular. So like before you get into philosophical criticism, which will you judge is more real? Something you can only see or something that you can see and touch or something you can see and hear or something you can see and hear and touch? And the answer will be, well I prefer what I can see and hear and touch. And that’s a preference above and beyond just seeing more, right. Now why? Well because the chances that distortions in your sight, your touch, and your hearing are all the same, right, is reduced again by the fact that they’re, it’s reduced precisely proportionally to the number of independent channels I bring to bear. That’s why you prefer multimodal, intersensory information and so do little kids, so do very small children, right, because it’s adaptive, it’s trustworthy. Now trustworthy doesn’t mean certain or conclusive, it just means it’s worthy of trust because the bias has been reduced. That by the way, it’s not because we’re all fascists, why scientists like numbers. We like numbers because they allow us, like I can see three, I can touch three, one, three, I can hear three. So three allows me to coordinate intersensory information and that’s why numbers tend to give a sense of realness. Okay, did that first of all make sense as an idea, that what I’m doing is I’m looking for convergence because it gives me trustworthiness? Yeah, I think that was very helpful and I think it’s helpful precisely because it elucidates the way that we think but we don’t necessarily know that we think that way. And I think what you’re saying is so intuitive, where it’s like, oh yeah, I’m looking for convergence and I’m looking for convergence precisely for that reason. So it’s persuasive precisely because it’s not novel but because it’s opening up the internal mechanisms of how we go about thinking well in general. Right, so thank you for saying that and like I said, there’s lots of good empirical evidence that this in fact is what people look for and this is why they look for it. Now again, let me be clear, we’re talking about, so again, we have to be very careful even when we’re talking about plausibility to keep the descriptive and the normative or the prescriptive separate. We’re talking about what the norm that people like seek, that doesn’t mean that people consistently seek this norm. People of course can deceive themselves by not looking for divert like independent sources. We’re talking about, we’re talking about it as a prescriptive strategy, so I want to be clear about that. But when people are at their, think they’re at their best and they’re doing their best, they tend to seek this out for the reasons I’ve given. Yeah. Okay, so next they converge on the construct. Well, what does the construct have to be? Well, the construct can’t just be a list of features and we talked about this before, right? Like the bird is not just its features, it has to have a structural functional organization. What does that structural functional organization have to afford you? Well, we talked about this last time, it has to give you an optimal grip on the phenomena, right? It has to give you a way of optimally gripping the world. So you need convergence to a structural functional organization that helps you get optimal grip on the world for solving your problems. Is that okay? Yeah, I’m following you. I think that the jargon may be less than someone who hasn’t been following all these conversations. Yeah, let me give another visual example like I did last time. Okay, so here’s this object, it’s my remote, right? So, and this is from Marla Ponte. Well, how do I want to look at it? Do I want it really close and get a lot of detail? I might, far away. Now I see the whole thing, but I’m losing detail. Do I want to look just at its face or its side or do I want to look at it? Like, and notice that as I look on its back, I lose its face and as I zoom in, I lose the gestalt and as I look at, right? So there’s all these trade-off relationships and the answer isn’t, oh, find the average between them and sit there because it depends on the task that I’m trying to perform, the problem I’m trying to solve. If the button is sticking, I want to zero in on the detail. If I’m trying to get the TV as a whole, I’m going to be more gestalt-y. If I want to throw it as an object, I actually care that it’s three-dimensional and deep and not like really flat and flimsy, right? And so that’s what optimal gripping is. And you’re doing this all the time. You’re doing it cognitively too. That’s why when you walk down a street, unless you’re like a particular expert in a particular expert context, you’ll point at an animal and say, that’s a dog, and this is Eleanor Rush, rather than saying that’s a Cocker Spaniel from North America or that’s a mammal. Why do you go there? Why do we sit at what’s called the basic level? Because it gives us the best trade-offs between the way it’s like other things and the way it’s different from other things between the detail and the gestalt. So we’re doing this all the time. We are trying to optimally grip all the time. Is that okay? Does that help? Finding that balance between the specificity and the generality. Also, the degree to which you’re looking at the object and the degree to which you’re perceiving through it. I’m perceiving through my glasses right now. I could be looking at them. And there’s a trade-off relationship there because when I’m looking at them, I’m looking through them. And when I’m looking through them, I can’t be looking at them. And so do I look at a pattern? Do I look through the pattern? And again, there isn’t an answer. That all goes back to the relevance realization machinery. So you want trustworthiness that comes to a construct that is fitting your relevance realization machinery as it’s trying to do things. Is that okay? Yes. Yes. Good. Okay. Now, what kind of things you want to do? Well, generally, this goes to another phenomena that people talk about in science, which is elegance. And I think scientists actually care a lot more about elegance than they do simplicity, even though Occam’s razor is invoked all the time, parsimony. That’s why they almost always pair simplicity and elegance together. So what is it for something to be elegant? For something to be elegant is for it to… Here’s my construct. So it’s been trustworthily formed. And then the form it has is optimally gripping. And then what? I can use it to find and formulate problems in many different domains. So it affords insight. It affords… And notice what I’m doing. I’m doing the opposite. Now, instead of converging, I want widely divergent insight. That’s why we like force equals mass times acceleration from Newton, because I can talk about planetary motion. I can talk about car collisions. I can talk about balloons rising in the air. Wow. All these things that are so disparate, I can talk about using force equals mass times acceleration. That’s why we consider it elegant. I can use this way of finding and formulating problems in many different domains. So it affords what’s called effectiveness or insight. It gets you to see the significance of the information in your construct. So we want it to afford us to be able to intervene in a systematic manner in reality, because we judge the realness of things, not only on their trustworthiness, not only on their optimal grippiness, but in the power they afford us to intervene in reality in reliable and systematic ways. Do you mean that in explanatory or predictive ways or neither? I mean it in… If you’re talking in science, I mean it both explanatory and predictive, right? Because predictive means that I can sort of predict how the world’s going to unfold. Explanatory means that I can give you the significance of those patterns. And then if I have prediction and explanation, then I have the possibility of actually creating interventions. So ultimately what we want to be able to do is to understand and we want to be able to intervene in the world with the deepest possible understanding, because that’s the opposite of bullshitting ourselves. Okay, so what you have is you have convergence for trustworthiness. It converges on optimal grip. And then you want divergence for elegance. Is that okay so far? Yeah. And I have to establish this because this is going to be germane to my argument for justifying mystical transformations. Okay, would I be mistaken in simplifying elegance as explanatory and predictive? It depends what you mean by that because I mean a lot of plausibility doesn’t have to be at the propositional level. Plausibility can also be the degree to which like a particular construct and you know Kuhn and others are pointing to this, that gives me sets of skills for the world so that I can do science like it opens up. So often things are, I want to be careful, they’re often believed not just because they explain but also because they train. They train particular sets of skills that allow the scientists to do the field work or make new kinds of observations. So if I give you not only rules but tools, you’ll like a construct, like you’ll like a construct if it gives you rules, you’ll like a construct if it gives you tools, but if it gives you tools and rules, well, like if I’ve got E equals MC squared, I’ve got this massive explanatory thing, relativity, but it also allows me to make atomic weapons. I’m not making an ethical claim here but that’s a very, very, very powerful tool. One of the reasons why we believe in relativity is precisely because, wow, if I do this really odd counter factual counterintuitive thing, I could take a paper clips worth of matter and I could smash a city to the ground. So I want to be clear, if you broaden it to me not only tools but rules, then yes, something like that. Not only tools. Yeah. Yeah, I get that expansion. I’m curious, and this is something that came up before when you mentioned progress, are we presupposing an ontology here of what is good that we’re progressing to? I mean, you just brought a counter example that a tool can be effective even if it’s detrimental. Is there a presupposition of what is of progress? So depends what we mean there. I mean, so, and again, it depends on our topic. I’m talking about plausibility in general. We move back to science. I think science presupposes epistemic progress. I don’t think science presupposes moral progress. That’s sort of a long discussion we could get into but I don’t think most scientists presuppose that they, what the way, what does epistemic progress mean? Epistemic progress means that it is, sorry, I’m going to invoke this but we’re trying to discharge it. It’s plausible that I can build on previous knowledge, right, and that there’s a general advance. So that cultural ratcheting is a real phenomena. Cultural ratcheting means that unlike most organisms, we don’t have to start from scratch. We have all of this knowledge from which we can build more knowledge kind of thing. Is it fallible that we discovered that we have to revise it? Yes, but nevertheless, we seem to be engaging in constant cultural ratcheting. Whether or not, and I’m not a Spencerian Darwinist or anything like that, social Darwinism, I don’t think there’s any necessary connection between cultural ratcheting and moral progress. They can become unglued from each other. Yeah, yeah, we have, I think we have good evidence of that. Yes, yes, very good. Okay, so, trustworthiness for, sorry, convergence for trustworthiness, optimal gripping, divergence for elegance, and then balance between them. This goes from work from Elijah Milgram but also empirical work. Namely, if you’re going to really apply your construct in many different areas, you want it to be extremely trustworthy, right. So what you can see, so you want to balance, if it’s not going to apply very much, I don’t require much trustworthiness. So you say, I really like vanilla ice cream. Okay, like that’s not going to open up the world in a profound way. So I don’t need a lot of trustworthy evidence for the deposit that you like vanilla ice cream, even like it a lot. But if you say instead to me, I think that reality is ultimately atemporal, it’s like, what? Okay, what does that mean? And like that would change how I think about so many things that approach so many problems. I’m going to need a lot, right. You know, and Sagan sort of invoked that people get it wrong. But he was trying to invoke extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He’s trying to say there’s a balancing process there. Is that okay? Yeah, what are you saying about Sagan in terms of his claim? So people invoke a claim, and it’s not a claim that comes from formal logic or mathematics. But Carl Sagan made a claim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which means if I’m going to, if I’m going to posit something that has a tremendous elegance in that it’s extraordinary, it’s going to cause me to reformulate how I solve so many problems or think about so many domains, I’m going to need and he doesn’t just mean quantity, I’m going to need a lot of convergent evidence to make that construct that I’m using trustworthy. Hmm. That’s you. You say that logically, epistemically, socially, what’s how can you make that claim? So how I’m making that claim is I’m making that claim epistemically. It’s the claim that and it’s basically a cognitive claim, because think about elegance as risk taking. So what you’re doing in elegance is you’re committing your limited attentional and other cognitive resources, right, to doing, to framing the world. This is how I’m going to do relevance realization. You’re committing to it. You’re caring about the world in a particular way. And so what that means is you’re taking a great, there’s a risk. There’s always a risk when you’re doing that. And to, the more you commit forward, the more you want to have seen, and Milgram puts it this way, the more your forward commitments are, the more your backward commitments have to be. And so the more I’m risking forward, right, the more I want to have a trustworthy thing to mitigate that risk. Yeah. Okay. I’m with you on that. I just want to say that in terms of vanilla ice cream, I think that the reason why we don’t need a lot of good supportive evidence for it is because it’s just so obvious that vanilla is better. I know everything’s chocolate is better. Okay. With all due respect. Okay. So let’s take it that Milgram is right. We have this balance. So we have three things, right? We, so we have basically, we have convergence, we have elegance and we have balance. And then the pivot they’re balancing on is sort of, you know, this optimal gripping kind of coherence. I don’t mean logical coherence. I mean, this optimally gripping kind of coherence. Okay. Now notice what happens when we, when we upset the balance. So what do we have, what happens when we get a lot of convergence and not much elegance? Well, and you’ll see people doing this in scientific articles all the time. That’s, that’s triviality. Insignificant. Insignificant is something, notice when you accuse somebody of saying something trivial, you’re not saying they’re saying something false. In fact, you’re saying there’s that they are saying that we often say that’s a truism as a way of indicating, of course that’s true. Who would doubt that? But the point you’re making is so what? That’s not, that’s not insightful. That’s not opening up anything for me. Right. So, and we, and so one of the ways we screen things off is we say, don’t take seriously things that are trivial. Yeah. Okay. What about the opposite? What do I, I have lots of elegance and very little convergence. Well, that’s when things are far-fetched. That’s when, that’s why people reject conspiracy theories. Right. Because the idea is if you would just accept that the English royal family are actually lizard beings from space, look at how you can explain all of their behavior. And you can, but like, is that a trustworthy proposal? No. So we also reject things because they’re far-fetched. Right. And you can see scientists doing that all the time. They’ll say, well, that’s too far-fetched. That’s, that’s beyond the pale. Again, now what you, well, you know, and, or if people are out there saying, but you know, they could be wrong. Of course I’m not denying that. That’s what the point of the previous argument was. Okay. We, but this is where we fall back on this. We also do things where we do a kind of bullshitting where we equivocate. So one of the things we can do is, so Daniel Dennett talks about this phenomenon called a deepity. A deepity is like this. A deepity is when people say things like love is just a four-letter word. And the idea is you’ve got convert, you’ve got massive convergence on the graphic reality that love is just a four-letter word. Right. And then you’ve got, right. This it, the claim, well, that love isn’t, you know, love isn’t anything important. And that would have huge implications, but those are not the same claim. The truth that it’s just a four-letter word is not the same as the truth that it is an unimportant thing in human life. And what we’re doing is we’re, we’re, we’re doing convergence to one meaning. And then we equivocate to the other meaning from which we get the elegance. And then we get the deepity. And a lot of bullshitting is that kind of deepity. The other, the reverse of that is called the Ma and Bailey strategy, which people do all the time. You say something that sounds so provocative and challenging. And then when people criticize you, you retreat to something that’s trivial and non controversial. And people, you can see people doing that all the, all the time. Right. I remember like I believe in ghosts and what you believe in ghosts and what do you mean? And what, what I mean is that sometimes when people are grieving, they hallucinate their loved ones. And I said, oh, okay. That’s a Ma and Bailey, right? Like the first one would be incredible. I have to change my whole ontology. The second one is trivial. Yeah, of course that makes sense that, that, that, that’s nothing. Okay. What I’m showing you is we make, and we frame all of our most rational evidence-based processing using these plausibility filters. And there’s lots of, like I say, evidence and argument around that. That’s, that’s sort of the, the, the, the first argument, the argument about the indispensable ability, irremovability of plausibility to rationality. Yeah. I think that’s very helpful. And I think it’s very well made. Thank you. And I think that the last thing that you pointed out was nice because it was able to show how these, what, what’s often used in rhetoric that, that can seem convincing when you actually just look at it based on this metric, you can see where it falls exactly short. And that’s, that’s, that’s very helpful to point out those, those fallacies as well. And the work that Jason and I are doing is to show that when we’re talking about understanding as different from knowledge. So what most people mean by understanding is something distinct from knowing. The difference is where I know something based on evidence, right? Whereas understanding is I grasp the significance or the relevance of what I know. And then, and then the best way to grasp significance is to use plausibility. So you try and grasp the relevance that is the most, that fits that plausibility matrix. I’m going to pay attention to what is trustworthy, optimally gripping and elegant and balanced. And when I have that, is it, is it an algorithm? Will it guarantee me the truth? No, but what it does is it gives you trustworthiness. It gives you elegance. It gives you a balance. It gives you optimal grip. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting because you are stretching the common sense usage of the word just a little, when you talk about plausibility as that, which also affords elegance. Because most people, I think when they think about the word plausibility, they’re thinking about it more from the first side, that it’s, it’s plausible in that it has a lot of good independent sources of evidence and that can discount for all kinds of things like that. But they don’t, I don’t know if people wouldn’t actually think in the second direction too, as falling under plausibility. They, they do. I mean, there’s a continuum. And so let’s do that because remember these things can, so there’s a technical sense of plausible, which is as long as there’s a balance. So notice your ice cream thing is actually plausible to me because there’s very little elegance. So I require very little trustworthiness. Now notice the phrase where we say it makes good sense. So there’s an act of making and what, so when people start to find a lot of plausibility, then they start to invoke another term, which I think is going to be relevant for our discussion. They start talking about profundity. It’s profound, which means it’s highly plausible. And that’s why I just made the previous point. It’s highly plausible and it is generating a lot of understanding to say that something is profound. Doesn’t mean it’s true. There’s no contradiction in saying that was so profound and it turned out to be false. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m with you on, on, on the extension of plausibility in that direction too. And I can, I can follow the logic. Great. Okay. So now we’ve established the idea of plausibility and profundity. And now what I want to argue is those processes we saw at work in higher states of consciousness actually make, will give us what we need in order to make a plausibility argument for those higher states of consciousness. A plausible, a plausibly, yeah, a plausibly prescriptive argument. So if you remember, I talked about how you can see these processes. Yeah, go ahead. Can I just say how much I appreciate like how much time and effort you’re putting into just establishing the term, which is so basic as, as plausibility, where, where, where so many could be like, okay, let’s just assume what we all know plausibility is and let’s move right to talk about mysticism. I think, I think the very care and diligence which you’re putting into it speaks, speaks volumes of your concern for the issue. So, so thank you for, for doing that. Thank you for saying that. I mean, I don’t want to be in a performative contradiction. I want to make the most plausible case for plausibility, if you’ll allow me. Right. So I want to be exemplifying the very thing I’m advocating for. So if you remember, I gave sort of the cognitive continuum thesis, Daniel Craig and I have done work on that. Other people, well, other people have converged on that hypothesis too, but the basic argument, and you know, there’s empirical evidence that the mystical experience part of the higher states of consciousness is something like, well, a profound insight. It’s an insight, not just about this, but an insight at a very basic level of your processing. We talked about this sort of meta optimal gripping. And so you’re getting into the flow state. And remember, I made a distinction between hot and cool flow. You can be in both, but you can be in the cool flow state about sort of meta your, your primordial skill of meta optimally gripping, getting an optimal grip on your capacity to take more specific optimal grips in the world. And that if you do that systemically and systematically, that can be very much like what a child goes through when they’re going through a developmental stage. And I made that argument last time. So what we’ve got is that mystical experiences are doing this, this enhancement of our insight capacity. Now, an argument I didn’t quite make, but it’s also part of the flow work that I did with Leo Ferraro and Ariane Harrabenet, which is the flow experience also is the enhancement of implicit learning. And I want to do a little bit more about that argument more explicitly right now. That’s okay. Yes. So the idea is that there’s, again, a lot of plausible evidence that we are capable of implicit learning, which is we can pick up on patterns, complex patterns that we couldn’t, we can’t hold in working memory. We can nevertheless pick up on them and track them. And again, this is a lot of experimental evidence for this over decades, well replicated. And, and, and, and, and, you know, it’s even starting to pervade the general sort of public awareness that we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re doing a lot of this implicit pattern detection. So Hogarth wrote a really important book called Educating Intuition. The title is really important. His main proposal about intuition is that intuition is what we get, what, what, what results from implicit learning. So when I, when I’m picking up on implicit patterns, I don’t know that I’m doing it. It’s, it’s not explicit, right? But I, nevertheless, I’m getting, I’m picking up on a pattern and people will start to make judgments about their patterns. They’ll have intuitions. So to, to just use a comp, you know, non-controversial examples, you’ll go into a particular context and you know how far to stand away from, how far or close to stand to various people in the room. Now you, you, you probably never went to explicit standing room school. Okay. If the person is two notches of status above you, and this is a funeral, you stand this distance away. But if they’re the same level of you, you stand here. If there are two notches about you and you’re at a backyard party, then you’re allowed to be like, nobody taught you that. And right. You probably can’t even remember, but you know it and you know it by, you feel wrong if you’re standing too far or close for somebody in a particular context, you get an intuition as we say. Now, when we like it, we call it intuition. When we don’t like it, we call it bias or prejudice, but it’s the same sort of thing. You’re implicit learning. Now here’s the problem. There’s two problems with implicit learning. So that’s why he called it educating intuition. The two problems are implicit learning only, it doesn’t distinguish, it just picks up on any complex patterns. So it doesn’t distinguish correlational patterns from actual causal patterns. And that’s why it can pick up on the patterns for like how far you should stand at a party, but it can also pick up on weird correlations, you know, that make might make you a racist or a bigot. Right. And so it doesn’t distinguish well correlation from causal patterns. And secondly, it can only be generated by patterns that you’ve experienced. It doesn’t consider possible patterns. Okay. Now, how do we improve implicit learning so that we get better intuitions? Because a lot of our behavior is driven by intuition. Well, what Hogar said is, well, what we want to do is we want to try and bring in something like the scientific method, because the scientific method is the method we use to distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns and make predictions and not just descriptions. Okay. Now, what does that mean? Well, it doesn’t mean I do my implicit learning scientifically, because that would be explicit and that would just be a contradiction. What he means is you try and set up the context within which you’re doing implicit learning so that it has the features of a scientific experiment. Okay. So what are those features? Well, you want there to be a tight feedback between your behavior and the environment. That’s like the type feedback between the independent and the dependent variable. You need clear. Remember, we talked about no confounds. You need clear feedback. You need, I need to know, be able to clearly measure what the dependent variable is doing. And error matters. I should be able to find out that my thesis is false. Error really matters. Okay. So clear, tightly coupled feedback in which error matters. Okay. So that’s here. That’s the context in which we’ll get the best intuitions we can get. Now, let’s go over here to Chik Szentmahai’s work on the flow experience. And we already talked about how that’s already bridging between insight and mystical experiences. What does he said are the characteristics you need? Not of the, like not like he said about skills, meaning demands and stuff like that. We said, what are the characteristics I need in terms of information flow? He said you need clear, tightly coupled feedback in which error matters. The exact same three. So the three things that will improve our chance of getting implicit learning that picks up causal patterns are the three things that also are likely to turn an experience into a flow experience. The proposal we made is what flow is doing is giving you feedback that you’re doing the best kind of implicit learning. Okay. So I’m doing the best kind of implicit learning, forming my best intuitions over here. What about the other problem of implicit learning? It only looks at the existing patterns. But remember what I argued last time that flow is also an insight cascade. What does insight do? It gets you to consider whole new ways of framing things. So flow is both an insight cascade that opens you up to things you haven’t thought of yet. And it’s the place where you’re getting the best intuitions about the complex patterns in your environment. So flow is something that really improves your performance, proves the right. So I’m going to use a general term for this. It’s de-automatizing your cognition in a very profound way. Yeah. Now let’s just note before we go back to some other points. Is that from Dankman? Yes. That ultimate. I think the ultimate origin of it. But there’s lots of evidence that mindfulness practices de-automatize cognition and thereby afford insight and afford flow, et cetera. Okay. Now what does de-automatization do? Well, it’s evidence that you are getting a radical reduction in the way in which the world can be deceiving you or misleading you. You’re getting the best intuitions, the best ins. You’re really improving your problem solving capacities. And if where you’re flowing is something that will transfer to many domains like meta-optimal grip, not only are you getting something that’s very trustworthy, because it’s really improving your processing, it’s going to apply to many different problem domains. Is that okay so far? Yes. Good. Okay. Next thing. We talked about this last time. In these higher states of consciousness. So the argument is that higher states of consciousness, you remember, are something like cool flow of meta-optimal gripping, which is basically oriented. The problem you’re solving is what is the world as a whole, right? Kind of thing. Okay. We also talked about how these things de-center you. What does de-centering do? Remember, it moves you off of egocentrism. Why do we want to reduce egocentrism? Because it reduces bias. So the automatization reduces bias, de-centering reduces bias. All this improvement in fluency and flow improves the functioning. No matter what I’m doing, I’m giving you lots of reasons why this experience is trustworthy. Lots of things are flowing into it telling you that you’re doing a lot in a highly convergent fashion that is reducing the biasing in your processing. Yeah. Is that okay? Yes. Okay. Now, let’s do the elegance. Well, if it’s right, notice what I’m going to get. Remember I said this is not going to give me like an insight here, right? Or here, it’s going to be something like the kind of insight children have when they go through a developmental stage. So that is massively elegant. It’s going to generalize, right? It’s going to, you’re finding a nexus insight, a kind of a meta-insight, an insight into many different ways in which you might have been mis-framing the world in a fundamental way. So that’s very elegant. Now, remember if I just did elegance without the other stuff, then that’s worry. But now I have elegance backed by significant trustworthiness. That’s very elegant. When the brain is doing this kind of processing, it’s engaging in complexification. It’s getting into a state called meta-stability. It is simultaneously integrating and differentiating information very, very powerfully. You say, what do you mean, John? Remember the optimal gripping. I’m trying to get the best relationship between integrating it into the forest and differentiating it into the different trees. When you’re getting both of those happening together, meta-stability, the system is complexifying. Why is that good? Well, to put it into a bit of a slogan, the best way of tracking a complex world is to get your cognition into a state of ongoing complexification that is reliably coupled to the world so that it complexifies, right, constrained by how the world complexifies. And those two are together. Is that going to happen here or here or here? No. That has the capacity to influence almost all of your problem solving because almost always you’re facing complex ill-defined problems in the real world. Is there a point where complexification becomes excessive and detrimental? Well, I mean, so yeah, general systems collapse. So the Roman Empire kept solving problems by complexifying. The problem was at one point, the Roman Empire becomes so complex that it becomes a problem as complex as any of the problems the Roman Empire was trying to solve. And then it collapses because all of its resources start to get directed towards trying to deal with it. And that’s why you get the endemic civil war, the inflation, blah, blah, blah. So a system can’t sort of complexify beyond its, that’s why I said it has to be coupled. That’s why the at one minute and the flow stuff is so important, right? It can’t complexify independent of its ability to solve problems in the environment. A coupled complexification. Yeah, I think that’s an important point because I think we all know sort of forms of that complexity or complexification either in our own lives or in people that we know that represent that, that are so lost in their complexification that they have no capacity to go and get a job and buy themselves groceries, which is… Exactly. So that’s exactly right. So if you’re losing the elegance, if you’re losing, if the complexity, that’s the structural functional organization, if the complexity of your state is not elegant, that it can’t apply to many different domains and find and formulate problems in many different domains, then it’s precisely you’re losing. So if your complexity is costing you elegance, then you, right? And that’s what I think Occam’s razor is, by the way, you simplify to the point where you’ve got sort of optimal elegance kind of thing, the elegance that maps onto your trustworthiness. So Occam’s razor is way more complex than people think it is. Okay. So what we’ve got is notice, and when you complexify, you get new functions. That’s the point. Like if the main relationship you have to reality is adaptivity, you have to be able to evolve, which means you have to introduce variation, difference, but you have to select it down and integrate it together. So complexification gives you new functions that continue your ability to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Yes. That goes in with the fact that if you remember, we talked about these higher states of consciousness, like insight are preceded often by disruptive strategies. This goes into machine learning. I talked about this last time. Like if you’re doing neural networks and you’re trying to get them to learn from the environment, you periodically throw in noise and disruptive strategies. Yeah. Because if you don’t, they’ll overfit to the data. They’ll lose the ability to generalize. Yes. Okay. So what are you trying to do? Go ahead. Go ahead. I think this is very interesting and I think it’s particularly interesting because as technical as you’re trying to lay it out, which is commendable and a great effort in itself, it’s not simple to break something down into its constituent point so finely, which is very commendable. There’s a spinozistic element to that as well. I think that together with that, there’s also a deep I keep repeating this because it keeps occurring to me. There’s a deep sense of the realness of what you’re talking about because we can all think of examples in our own lives, in the lives of others, where these things happen, either for the positive or negative. And we see how those things function. So we can all know what it means like to have something fitting too tightly to data and then being useless. So I think there’s a relationship here as well, which is an optimal grip between the specificity and technicality of this layout and also the relatability to real world applications. I’m glad. I’m glad. I’m hoping that’s the case. And then we talked about the fact that there’s a fundamental aspect to these experiences, the diminishment of the self, which is normally perceived negatively, but in these experiences, it’s perceived very positively. And I proposed to you the idea that the machinery of the self is being exacted, right? Instead of being what’s now called the glue of cognition and perception of memory, we use that to glue the world together better so that we can potentially into it, implicitly learn in an insightful manner, deeper patterns in reality that are otherwise inaccessible to us. So notice what I’ve given you. I’ve given you lots of convergence to this meta-optimal grip state, which is right. That’s what it is by the proposal of the construct. And then it’s highly elegant in terms of it’s improving your capacity as a cognitive agent. So there’s balance. So when that’s profound, the justification for it, the plausibility of it becomes profound. So if there’s lots of convergence and there’s tremendous elegance and there’s tremendous optimal gripping, then I’ve made it highly plausible, which means it’s profound, which means it’s a profound improvement in your cognitive agency. And that is the only justification we can ever give for claiming something is rational, that it is an improvement in your cognitive agency. That’s very beautiful. One objection which has come to mind is, you refer to that experience and the experience that you’re calling that experience is a higher state of consciousness, which affords real radical transformation, transformative higher states of consciousness. Might there be an objection that we’re selecting one very narrow form of what might fall under the umbrella of mystical experience? And therefore, we might be doing the fallacy, which we spoke about earlier, of making a good case for one thing and then switching it up, broadening it. Right. And so that’s why, first of all, I did delimit that I was trying to talk about a specific thing because, and I think we agreed that mystical, mysticism, mystical experience is a family resemblance theory. It’s got a lot of overlapping things running through it, like a game. But what I would want to say is that one way of arguing is, is it justifiable, methodologically, to limit it to that? And I have, because again, there’s lots of data. And secondly, I think that there’s a and secondly, these are the experiences that track in a way where people do two things that I need for prescriptive. They make significant changes in their identity and their life. Right. But you can say, right, other things, but they do so in a way that by sort of, at least interpersonal or intersubjective, or perhaps I’d be bolder to say objective measures, they are actually getting, they are actually making their lives and their selves better. I mean, that’s kind of the work that’s coming out of Yaden and a whole bunch of work that, no, these people are getting better. And now what you might be saying is, aren’t there things that are called mystical experiences? Will people come out of it and they’re kind of crazy? Well, that goes towards a point I want to, so I made a methodological argument. Now I want to make another argument, which is I, and you and I are already negotiating on this. So I’m going to say this in a slightly provocative way. And then I know that’ll call you out. Right. So I’ll present it how I presented in the past, which is what we’re talking about is something like the cultivation of wisdom, that what we’re talking about is something much more like rationality than a particular theoretical claim. We’re talking about the improvement of skills, obviously states of mind, and ultimately identity. So we’re talking about improving your procedural, your perspectival, and your participatory knowing. And those kinds of improvements are, is it plausible that those improvements will occur? I’ve made a case that it’s plausible that those improvements will occur. So that justifies cultivating them. Yeah. But, and here’s what I’d say is, when people come out of these experiences, they can derive all kinds of crazy propositional beliefs and claims. And they can, they will in fact say diametrically opposite things. People come, like I said, my favorite example, I was reading this and Taylor, you know, one person goes into this and comes out and reports, now I know there’s a God and they’re so relieved. Another person comes out and said, now I know there’s no God and they’re so relieved and they’re happy. Or if they get a mystical experience without psychedelics, they’re more likely to find it a personal God. Whereas if they had it with a psychedelic thing, they’re more likely to find it an impersonal thing like the universe or the one. Right? And so, right, here’s these big contrasts. You know, there is a God, there isn’t, the entity is personal, it’s an impersonal. And so the metaphysics go all over like this. Right? And so I tend to say, the justification of higher states of consciousness in terms of the plausibility of improvement in wisdom does not transfer to a justification for metaphysical claims that are made. And so if what’s happening in the critic that you’re giving voice to is, well, people come out of these and they say all kinds of crazy crap, it’s like, yeah, and I don’t try and put the justification for the higher states on propositional theory. I try to put it on, you know, again, the sapiential improvement of skills, states of consciousness and mind and identity. Yeah. So I just want to be clear. I just want to be clear with two things. One is that I do have some slight discriminants, as you know, and I think it’s good that there is some space of difference there between us. And I welcome that. Yes. And I respect your humility in welcoming difference from me. That’s, I think that in itself is tremendous. Before getting to that, I just want to circle back to clarify the previous point, which is that is it fair then to say that in this prescriptive case that we’re making, we’re not making the case for mystical experiences or everything that’s called mystical experiences as a whole, you’re making the case specifically for transformative higher states of consciousness. Yes. So to curtail that. If that’s the case, is there then, is there then again, begging the question where we’re making the case for that, which is transformative on the grounds that it is transformative and we’re excluding any variation of it, which is not transformative? Is there, is there a problem there? There might be a problem. I think I know what you’re saying. I just want to make clear that I’m not doing quite that circle. I’m trying to take seriously that people claim that these lead to transformation and, and sorry, I want to make some, they justify making the transformations they’ve made. So we have objective measures that they improve their lives, but, but, and they justify it by saying, I touch the really real and I want to touch it more. So they justify the transformations, undertaking the transformations in terms of the higher states of consciousness. And in many ways, you know, the actual religions have that kind of move at them, which is right, you know, what justifies you doing all this is you will, you will touch the really real in some fashion onto normativity. So that’s the thing that I’m, that’s the thing I’m specifically interested about. Do these experiences actually provide justification for the transformation? That’s a specific question, I think we’re asking. So I’m not quite, I don’t see myself as quite doing that circle. However, I think there’s a point you’re making, which is, well, aren’t you just excluding all the wacky things? I don’t know what adjective to use, right, that where they don’t afford transformation. And then part of what I want to say there is, then I have to make a different kind of argument, which is a historical argument, which is, you see, and it’s a plausibility argument, you see convergence across cultures and across time on the idea that there should be deep relationship between mystical experience and the cultivation of wisdom. So I’m not invoking something that’s sort of outside of historical convergence. It’s like, no, no, look at all the traditions, look at how the way they keep zeroing in on that the only thing that could justify these experience is that they afford the cultivation of wisdom. And so I’m actually invoking something that I think is, again, now this is a historical argument, but it’s a highly plausible argument. Look at all the convergence and look at the fact that that converges on, you know, the idea that in the end, what might justify most of our claims for transformation is, are they, can we make a case for them being able to reliably improve human lives? Yeah, I think the way you were that was very clever because you made a historical claim, you turn to a historical claim that was not a propositional claim because you phrase it as wisdom, where one could have for the same price gone for a claim that these transformations were coupled with a, I don’t know, encounter with the divine, which can be, you know, which is expel propositionally metaphysically. So well played there. Oh, now, however, I like, like I said, if all our, and in previous videos in the series, I’ve given ground and I thinking, no, and I, you know, I, I take it that there are certain propositional theoretical claims that should also be taken seriously from the trustworthy, from the plausible state, the plausibly sapiential state of the mystical experience and all this convergence, historical convergence towards the idea that the mystical experience presupposes the, it presupposes a deep, in fact, I’m going to now a profound intelligibility and that intelligibility and realness are bound together. I made this argument before that we have to then ask what must the world be like such that this intelligibility could exist. And I’m reading Gerson’s book on ancient epistemology and he says, you know, that’s sort of the primary question. The primary question isn’t how could I possibly know like Hume or Descartes? The question is, let’s, let’s, let’s presuppose that intelligibility exists because that’s presupposed by everything else. What must the world be like such that it’s intelligible? And I think there are propositions that are then derivable about what must the world be like in order to have the kind of intelligibility that is disclosed in mystical experiences and also what must cognition be like in order to be able to pick up on and pursue that kind of intelligibility. So I do think there are theoretical claims that come out that way. Yeah, I think that’s a fine point and I think that we’re going to see more of that in our upcoming conversations where we’re looking at that convergence between the rational and the real to phrases. What I might, that’s a point which is abstract, which is okay, but I might maybe, maybe just to try something a bit simpler, which is I think that just like there’s a convergence in the ways that you’re lining it up, I think there’s also a metaphysical or propositional convergence amongst the mystics, both ancient and contemporary and both in cultures that were co-influenced and as far as we understand not influenced by each other. And I think that metaphysical convergence, which also has plausibility because it also engages in affordances in the real world, even as far as a proposition goes, is something worth paying attention to. And I think that by focusing, I’m not sure who it was that you quoted, by focusing on the divergence of the proposition that, oh, I now know that there is a God, I now know that there is no God, I now know that Santa Claus is real, I now know that. And that’s simply, I think it’s a facile dismissal of metaphysical claims. And I think that what is better, what would be important to be done with the assumption of what the proposition might be, which I think and we think might be some sort of claim towards a unity or non-duality between subjects and objects, between knowing and known, however that’s going to be phased, it can be metaphysically might be put out into a more full-blown monism of some sort, but not even needing to go that far. I think that a better question would be to those participants, and I think this can be done contemporaneously and historically, that thing which you realize was not God, and that thing which you realize is God, what was your relationship with that thing? And if I had to put my money on it, it would be, oh, I felt really one with it, I felt really connected, I felt really unified with that thing, I felt really present in its presence and embraced by it. And I think that would be said of both the all and the none. That would be my counter argument for using the probabilistic argument for a metaphysical claim, not towards an entity or being or a deity, but simply what was the texture or the qualia of that relationship? And my bets are, and I think that the evidence points to this, that it’s towards unity. So I agree with that, and I was trying to point towards that with propositions ultimately about the intelligibility, because that’s what you were doing. Right, yes. And notice that the historical argument is convergent with this structural argument, the cognitive scientific argument, because already in flow states, people are talking about out one meant, and I’ve given a case that that’s not fluff or ephemeral, that points to real improvement in a real picking up on the real patterns in reality. So I think that’s right. I do think, I guess I disagree with you on that. I do think real questions, I think there are real debates between theism and non theism, for example, about mystical experiences. And John Hick talks about this in the interpretation of religion, and whether or not, right, and mystics themselves, of course, have gotten into hot water about this historically, cross culturally, cross historically, right? Whether or not the experience that of at one meant ultimately is best understood non theistically or theistically. And I think there is variation on that. And the reason why I say that is because I am worried about, I’m not accusing you of this, you’re sensitive and you’re careful, and I want to pay the compliment back to you that you paid to me. But, you know, there is, there is a pernicious kind of perennialism that is a kind of just an ethnocentrism, right, that all religions are somehow versions of or like the Abrahamic religions. And I think that’s something that I want to, I want to open up the possibility for, you know, for Buddhism and Taoism, for Shunyata and the Tao, as also ways of talking about this. And you were careful to bracket that off. You said, you know, they’re not making claims about a particular entity or being. And so I think that’s right. Here’s the problem I’m trying to, I’m kind of a counter problem, your problem, which is, but it’s not, it’s also not the case that the mystic just stays within the mystical experience. The mystic almost always, and this was Katz’s whole point, the mystic always also tries to weave it into, sometimes conforming, sometimes trying to transform, but tries to weave it into their religious framework and their religious heritage, and therefore makes a lot of claims that do, are sort of more specific claims about specific entities and specific, you know, obligations to those entities and things like that. And that’s where I see all that tremendous variation. I don’t, so I’m trying to acknowledge that too. Yeah, yeah. What I’m seeing is something different. I’m acknowledging that there is variation. I’m not trying to say that there’s a homogeneity of, of, of, of, of, of the mystical experience. What I’m trying to say is that, is that when we have both variation and we have both similarity, if there’s, that there might be a good case to make to, to discount the disinclitude and to, to focus on what is united in those claims. And I’m doing this explicitly in an attempt to include every form of, of Buddhism. I’m not, I’m not making a Abrahamic name here. I’m not making a name for a transcendental personal theistic object. I think, I think most mystics, even within those traditions end up sounding more like atheists than anything else. I agree. And I think Katz is wrong in, Katz is right on these points of, of, of that they’re going to be interpreted inevitably into their, into their frameworks. And Katz does, Katz’s article, he does this, you know, very clever erudite reading where it’s like, oh, well, the Kabbalist is talking about 10th Svirat and the Daoist is talking about these things. These have nothing to do with one another. How could there be anything? And what Katz is doing is, if I can give an analogy, let’s say, let’s say there’s, there’s 10 people walking down, down a road, right? And they all see a tree and, and one’s, and they come back to it to give their report of the tree. And one was like, oh, well, you know, the, the bark was really brown. The other one’s like, oh, the leaves were really green. The other one says, oh, the roots were really red. It’s like, oh my gosh, there’s, there’s redness, there’s greenness, there’s no congruency, there’s nothing here. There’s no core, there’s nothing which they experience. There’s nothing. Or if we, if we look at their, if we look at their narratives, right, if we, if we did the, the Katz, the Katz famous Katz article, where instead of listing out all of the differentiations between them, oh, look, there’s a God and God has a female partner. Oh, look, there’s no God at all. There’s nothing. Instead, let’s focus on the, the claim, which they all are making, which is that there’s a fundamental unity being which, which the individual unites with the real or, and, and David Loy makes this case very well for the Buddha to include the Buddhist that, that the, the implosion of the subject of the subject object distinction can either implode outwards or, sorry, explode outwards or implode inwards where, where all the self or no self David Loy in non-duality makes a really great case of that. And I think I think that by, I’m not trying to make any particularistic claim that’s that, that any one proposition towards one specific interpretive, you know, religious, those things that are inevitable, but I think that we can look beneath the surface of all of them and, and, and look for the tree beyond all of the, the, the differences seen. Great. So good. So that I could make a, I can, so you made a recommendation. I think it’s good. And then here’s the recommendation I’m going to make on the basis of your recommendations. So ultimately what we’re doing is we’re, I mean, this is John Hicks. We’re facing, we have finite ambiguous data, and then we’re making judgments about similarity or dissimilarity. And Nelson Goodman like showed there’s no algorithm for doing that. That’s ultimately based on, well, this is a relevant thing. This is not a relevant thing. Cause any two objects are large, are, are logically indefinitely large, like similar to each other and indefinitely large dissimilar to each other. And so what I would want to say is, okay, but what you’re doing is you’re pointing to universals, right? And then what I would say is what you can use is independent of the historical convergence argument, which is the traditional way it’s been done. Aldous Huxley perennialism, right? Is no, no, but what we can do is we can say there’s another way of looking for universals, which is science, cognitive science, and we can come up with, right? This argument that I’ve run and this argument that I’ve run can then constrain the kind of similarities we’re looking for in the historical record. We don’t just find any, oh, it happens that all, almost all these mystics were men. Ah, there’s something male about, well, no, that’s ridiculous. That’s, that’s an irrelevant similarity, right? So where do we look for the relevant similarities? Well, I’m saying it’s, you should do what you’re doing. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not trying to dismiss it. I’m saying, but you, you need to justify why you’re picking out this similarity as relevant or important. And what you can say is, well, because it lines up with another way in which we look for universals, which is what science is. And that descriptive discovery of universals also comes with a prescriptive argument as to how it improves people’s cognition in a universal manner. So that’s what I’m actually recommending. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so I think, I think then we’re in agreement here. I’m not, I’m not trying to make an exclusive claim that this is, that this is the only way to reach it. I think, I think that there’s, there’s many, but I, but I, but I do think that this is an important part of it. And I think discounting the metaphysics and the proposition simply because there’s incongruity would be, would be the same reason to discount everything else. And I think, I think it needs to be part of the rest of the, of the, of the, Yeah, I agree. So what, what I’m claiming is if you agree that there’s that intersection between the cognitive scientific argument and this cross historical argument, cross contextual argument, then it, it tells me, well, where should be, where’s the connection point? And I think it’s where we, we, so I’m trying to justify, why are we zeroing in on intelligibility, the intelligibility and the at one minute? Why are we zeroing in on that is a, that’s an important similarity. Well, again, you can, you can leap out of sort of a historical question begging by saying, but look, that at one minute and that intelligibility is, can be given a completely independent explanation from the con, from a cognitive scientific framework. And so that’s why I, I mean, I, I, I, you, you know, from awakening from the mini crisis, I’m always trying to get an intersection between historical arguments and structural arguments and try and thereby give sort of the, notice what I’m doing, a convergence argument. I’m trying to generate increased possibility. Absolutely. So I guess what I want to say though, is I wanted to, I guess, I want to be really, I want to be really respectful and sensitive to what you’ve said, but I, on the other hand, I want to, our culture is obsessed with propositions, right? It’s really obsessed with propositions and inference. And part of what I’m trying to argue for, let me try it this way. I’m trying to argue for the rationality of these experiences, but because what they do is reliably improve your ability to get into contact with what’s real, right? And be in right relationship. And I think that’s the ultimate obligation of rationality. That’s the ultimate obligation to the logos. And I tried to argue this before, right? That there are forms of rationality that go outside of propositional inferential rationality. And the reason why that’s central to our argument, and this goes, and I wanted to bring this up, is the work of LA Paul. She literally wrote the book on transformative experience. And the main argument she makes there is you cannot propositionally infer your way through a transformative experience. It doesn’t work. You can’t do that. And you have to drop out in, because it has to do with it has to do with perspectival and participatory knowing. She uses slightly different terms, but I have, I’ve mapped those onto her terms in her presence, and she was happy with that. So I’m not worried about that. And so I think that there, and Agnes Callard has talked about this as proleptic rationality, the idea that whenever we’re going through significant developmental transformation, we cannot infer our way through it. I mean, it goes back to an old argument by Fodor. You can’t infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic. You just can’t do it. So you need not, there has to be, if we’re trying to get people to go through the transformation, even if becoming more inferentially rational, there has to be a non-inferential way in which they go through that acquisition of rationality. Right. And so I think saying that because the mystic cannot give us any inferential content of any significant degree, it’s ineffable, right, in terms of, you know, in profound ways, that instead of making that a worrying thing that makes us say, oh, it’s probably not rational because of that, there’s a way of saying, no, no, if we’ve got all this other independent argument, that it’s really affording transformation in a way that’s rationally justifiable, then we should say, no, no, that’s a good thing because it points to the kind of proleptic rationality that is actually needed to undergo transformation. The kind of rationality you use to justify transformation is not inferential argumentative rationality. It’s proleptic aspirational rationality. Yeah, yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I get that and I appreciate that. I wonder if, I mean, I think you may yourself have employed this sort of the ancient analogy of gnosis, of knowing which is more than propositional. And I appreciate the desire to distance from the propositional in a day and age where we’ve become overly propositioned, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek expression. So you have me with that. Well, and the reason is because I want to have a response to a kind of knee-jerk reaction to, well, they don’t offer any arguments. They just point to their experience and therefore, it’s not rational. It’s like, no, no, no, you’ve misunderstood. I’ve given you how this is all taking place outside of the propositional. And then if you look at the very tight arguments of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard, Jerry Fodor even, who came out of computational cognitive science, right? Or think about, again, the neural networks throwing in the noise to overcome the overfitting. That’s a non-inferential non-propositional. We have to use these strategies in order to become more rational. The process of becoming more rational can’t itself be an irrational process. That makes no sense. That’s a deep performative contradiction. So the processes that make us more rational have to be included in our definition of rationality. And these are the processes I’ve been pointing to. Yeah. Would you say that outside of the propositional, there are other ways which the mystic tries to point to this transformation? And those may be performative, they may be evocative, maybe whether that’s in, I mean, you see it happening in poetry, you see it happening in art, you see it happening in the way which they live forth those things. Would you include those as well as part of? Very much. Very much. I mean, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. And there was a proverb growing up, I don’t know if it’s still around though, you know, children pay attention to what you do much more than what you say, right? And so they’re internalizing you as a comprehensive model of the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. They’re identifying with you. They’re getting their meta-perspectival ability, which is central to wisdom, from internalizing your perspective. They catch skills. They catch points of view from all of that. And that is going to be much more profound than your propositional admonitions. Not that those shouldn’t be spoken or they don’t matter, I’m not saying that, but we know that, you know, again, it’s much more what you do than what you say. And therefore, it’s much more likely that the mystic is going to convey by exemplification rather than just pure explanation. And in fact, they’re going to tailor their explanations to constantly be in service of provocative exemplification. They have to be, or again, they’re going to be engaging in a kind of performative contradiction. Yes. Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think it also stands historically as a true statement. So the thing about that then is, you know, then we’re into a really tricky question, which is the question of, yes, yes, but you know, you don’t have to choose your parents, and it’s largely a matter of luck. And, you know, and a lot of people suffer because they they have poor luck. Now the question comes about, you know, how to choose your sage. And that’s again where, again, that’s part of my caution around trying to get parochial about this and say there’s a particular, you know, metaphysical worldview for where I have to look for my sage. And so I take that question very seriously. That’s why I really, I really like the work you’re doing. Like isn’t the right word. I really appreciate the work you’re doing, because you’re doing this very careful reflection, so that you afford people the chance of making a choice. And let’s be clear, this is not the choice to just believe propositions. This is the choice to internalize somebody as an exemplar, in terms of which you’re going to aspire to greater wisdom and greater at one with reality. And so I think, and again, this sounds like, I know it’s self-promotional, but, you know, every everything’s self-promotional right now. The point I’m trying to make is these kinds of this kind of Deologos is really, really, really important. If choose, if everything we’ve said comes down to you got to choose the right sage, then the Deologos that trains us procedurally and prospectively and in a participatory fashion to get clear relationship, right relationship with these people, so that we can make and we have the best machinery at our disposal to choose the sages whom we’re going to internalize. That’s the pivotal question. And where else are we going to be find our school for that, other than this? This is, I’m sorry, I mean, I belong to university and I do science and it matters to me. But the most important school is this school right now, because the question that ultimately this is going to turn on is who is going to be, and I don’t mean just one, it could be more than one, but, you know, when you get more than one, then it gets problematic. But anyways, right, who’s going to be the exemplar for you? That’s to me, that’s almost like the Kierkegaardian existential choice. And like, you can’t make it just running off, like reading their propositions, you have to try and bring them to life, give them voice, welcome them into living Deologos. Sorry, I’m going off on something, but this is just a question. Yeah, I think it’s a great tangent. I want to really agree and disagree with you. I’ll begin by agreeing. So that if the disagreement is grievous enough, egregious enough, at least I’ll have the chance to agree. The point I’d like to agree with first, and to repay the compliment is that I think that more than any of the propositions which I received from you, John, and you’ve put out a lot of propositional work and a lot of good evidence, and you’re a man of science, and that’s really, really terrific. It’s been the experience of being in relation with you and experiencing the care and concern and generosity and humility and conversation that’s been most transformative for me and the thing which will last with me longer. So that’s the point of first of all agreement and returning compliments. So thank you for that. Now to disagree. I think that I’m wondering, it seems to me that you’ve made a bit of a leap here and you haven’t done the work to show the leap. Is that enough? No, no, no. I’m acknowledging the very real possibility that that has happened. Okay, okay, okay. So where I think that leap is, I think that there is a necessity for this, for the proleptic, for the participatory, for this more than propositional, for the experiencing and not just the healing, but I don’t know why necessarily, why biological necessity, it must be done through internalizing a teacher and through finding a guru, as you put it. I know in the history of mysticism that happens all the time in my own tradition. It’s something which was shoved down my throat that you must have a guru. I’m going to preempt something which you may answer, which is that I know that there’s good empirical evidence for the benefit of doing this transformational journey within a sapiential community and that’s I think very clear and plain and maybe even common sense at this point. What I want to perhaps rest the case to get it back to a fundamental level is that if you believe that reality is fundamentally intelligible and that we can come to an optimal grip of ultimate grips of reality, which can lead to our own transformative psychological experiences, which leads us to be a sage, that seems to me on a foundational level should be able to be achievable by anyone because it should be germane to the reality of existence and the reality of the human and the relationship between them and the fact that we need and other things may help. It may be great to have a guru, may be great to have a community, but the fact that we need any of that, I’m not seeing the work. That’s fair enough. So I mean the lesson I’m taking, that was good and I’m also going to hold open the possibility, as my friend Jordan Hall likes to say, that the next Buddha is the Sangha, that your exemplar might be a community rather than an individual. I should have been clear about that and there’s a sense in which within Christianity the distinction between Jesus as an individual and the church as the body of Christ was purposely blurred towards good end in a lot of cases. It’s something that’s happening in the mystical tradition where there’s been an intentional de-leadership to host the community to become the leader itself, which is good for another time. Okay, so good. So I want to be clear that it, yeah, there was an implicit bias that I want to sort of give up explicitly right now, which is that the sage doesn’t have to be an individual. The sage, the Buddha can be the Sangha, to use Jordan’s very perspicacious way of putting it. That’s a great phrase. Yeah, so first of all to acknowledge that. Secondly, so I could make an argument for this, but I think the core bias is what’s called the my side bias, sort of the egocentrism, and the problem with the perspective is when you’re in a perspective it is very hard for you to see how the perspective is biasing you and it’s very hard to acquire interests outside the proletic aspirational interests that exceed. So let me, that exceed your perspective. And then this member, we talked about the Solomon effect with de-centering, right? And people don’t spontaneously do that, but they’ve been trained to be able to take the perspective of others precisely because they’re cultural beings, not just autonomous beings. So let’s put all that as a background. Then I want to talk about an experiment, right? And it goes towards all of this. And so the experiment runs something like this. You bring in a chimp and in phase one of the experiment there’s a box and it’s completely opaque and there’s all these levers and buttons and you push them and flip them and then like a candy comes out the bottom like or a grape, something the chimp really likes. And what’s really cool is you watch this experiment and you only show the chimp the sequence like twice and then the chimp replicates it and it’s that that in itself is like really impressive. Wow. And then you take the chip out you bring in a four-year-old, like a four-year-old girl, right? And you sort of get out the human flag and go human, come on, right? And you do the same thing in the opaque box and you do all this stuff and you only have to show the girl twice and then she can replicate the sequence. You go, right? Oh, that’s good. Now you’re going to the second phase of the experiment. You bring the chimp back in and now the box is completely transparent. It’s a plastic and what the chimp sees is that all of the movements except the last one do absolutely nothing. It’s only the last movement that releases the grape and you do this twice and the chip sort of almost you can almost see them look right and they just do the last thing, right? When they’re given their chance to get the grape out because like why would none of that’s doing anything, right? Now you bring in the little girl. Now with the transparent you do all of this twice and what does the little girl do? She repeats everything that the adult does and you think, oh human beings are stupider than chimps and then you think, no, no, no. What is she doing? She is trusting that there’s a perspective that she doesn’t have that has purchase on reality that she doesn’t have and because of that long term she’s going to out compete the chimp because she’s going to be able to grow into a perspective. The chip is locked into the it’s a brilliant perspective. They’re smart animals and I’m not trying in fact that’s really impressive but the thing is that’s as far as it goes like where the little girl has access and so what I’m proposing to you is that other people are the indispensable way in which we acquire the capacity for self-transcendence. That without other perspectives we’re in the place of the chimp because what you’ll say is I’ll generate perspectives other than my own. That’s very hard for you to do from within your perspective. It’s an interesting idea. It’s an interesting idea to think about for many reasons. One is because it relies upon the real acknowledgement of their being a perspective of the other, of their being other minds. Which maybe just to think ahead here a little on positions that embrace forms of monistic idealism it may be hard to get out of your own mind if there only is mind at large. I would like to talk to Bernardo about that at some point. Yeah and although I think I can anticipate what he would say but then I know so now I’m already running the beautiful dance. Oh it’s so lovely like it is with you. It’s so lovely to just do that with him. So yeah I mean I’m sort of doing a burden of proof argument. I’m admitting that after you’ve done this a lot and if you’re in a community with other people so you can continue to do it you can then do it like on your own. That’s what internalization is but I don’t know other than internalization how you get a meta-perspectival ability. I don’t know any other proposed explanation of that that has any good plausibility to it. What’s interesting is that a lot of mysticism, you know there was an old tripod typology of mysticism which is not much used by scholars anymore which is god mysticism, soul mysticism, nature mysticism. I think it’s Zener or one of these earlier fellows. But what is interesting what remains true out of that and the reason what gave this tripod taxani was because of so much of mystical experience which is triggered specifically not in communion with other minds but in nature. I don’t know whether that points to evidence of this being able to be done individually or if there’s some sort of panpsychic attachment to mind nature but that seems to be a phenomena. I mean it’s obviously not in total isolation from community people that are in nature or so talking to people but there seems to be some sort of a hot box of mysticism that happens in nature. Yeah and I think that’s right. First of all, the idea that those people have not already internalized another capacity for perspectives. You’re not going to get a lot of nature mysticism for example with a four-year-old or something like that typically. So pretty universally in fact. The other thing is we have to remember that we didn’t evolve in a nature that we related to as if it was an impersonal order. We evolved in a nature that was actually filled with other minds, predators and prey and potentially other human beings. And so nature has the capacity, I mean and some people have even extended this within cognitive science to be to an overly reductive account of religion. Religion is just where we have a hyperactive agency detector machine and wherever there’s ambiguous information we project an agent there and that’s how we get God. Well I think that’s plausibly at work as a factor trying to reduce religion to that I think is really overly reductive. Nevertheless, the idea that nature if we I think have been socialized to a significant enough degree can powerfully like expose us to perspectives and here’s where what I want to add to it with other minds and other perspectives that are not human. I think that’s one of the ways in which Zevi are you there? Pause the recording and so there’s only a couple seconds there. No, no technology is the god that limps. So I was making the argument that nature precisely because it puts us in you know a plethora of minds, many of them non-human, actually has a tremendous capacity to decenter us and also to put us in the flow state and do all kinds of things and that we can internalize that in a way and that strikes me again as very plausible. You probably are going to need again some basic training in a meta-perspectival ability and you’re going to need some way of grokking your natural environment such that it’s internalizable to you rather not as just sort of chaotic you know other minds but as some sort of like an ecology basically there’s got to be something that ecologizes the world for you so it’s internalizable and so I think I could make a good case for that being incorporated in what I’m saying. Yeah I’m hearing the direction of plausibility argument but not necessarily an assessed the argument but. Well yeah I mean I’m not trying to preclude that there might be something more there. I do think that there are also mind-like things about the ecology like say of a forest that you know and Alicia Urraro makes the argument you got to sort of get your mind into like a dynamical system state itself through narrative or other such things in order to pick up on you know the implicit learning picking up on that complex dynamic patterns and you may use imaginal strategies to do that like children use imaginal strategies to develop the requisite identities and skills and states of mind and so I think like I doubt that if you just simply dropped somebody in some completely foreign environment of nature that would necessarily trigger a mystical experience I think they’d just probably be overwhelmed but if they had proper education about how to enter into it then it strikes me that that would be plausible it strikes me as plausible that they could get a mystical experience out of it. Yeah you know you know what’s interesting that’s coming up in this regard is there’s a tradition of Muslim philosophy and I think there’s two cases as one from Ibn Rushd I think it is who he has this thought experiment of the of the person just floating in the in the ether and there’s another one of there’s another one which is a philosophical novel of this fellow who’s dropped on an island and he comes to the same enlightenment that that Islam provides and then he comes back to civilization and there’s a sort of this whole dialogue between so there I mean the the motif of the philosopher slash mystic as the recluse as the alone to the alone as the as the one who who come to these realizations is it’s an interesting it’s interesting that you’re rejecting that and it’ll be interesting to to sort of to see the play between those sort of long-standing historical motifs and the space where they themselves are for affording the the capacity to to to get over one’s own self-biases with with with with contact with the with with external minds yeah yeah I mean it’s also the case that um and you know the tradition I’m familiar with of course is is the uh is the desert fathers within Christianity and of course they aren’t alone um they’re with another mind which namely the mind of god and you know we we do have good research that if you simply imagine another perspective especially one greater than your own that that can trigger the Solomon effect but again we also have good evidence that that capacity to imagine that isn’t something that you just sort of like have it has to be carefully cultivated uh in a lot of ways yes yeah yeah yeah yeah I was gonna ask if if the mind of god counts as another mind because that’s certainly since you present in many so there’s it’s I can’t remember the authors you get people to pray to santa claus and they know the value of santa claus but they don’t believe in santa claus and they’re believers and then you get them to pray to god and what you’ll notice is when they’re praying to god the machinery is very much the brain is operating very much like when it’s talking to another mind and and that’s not the case when they’re praying to santa claus so there’s something going on interesting there’s a functional difference at least again I’m not making any metaphysical claims about god or santa claus but that but that functional one is interesting in and of itself of of uh which which might which might there might be an interesting line of inquiry um in terms of the the functionality of that entity I mean so there’s a lot of like modern inter-medicis who want to say that the god idea is one which is employed by mystics to try and give a sense of what it was which they were in contact with and they’re with that functionality argument it might be interesting to think about what’s what what the the the concept of god provides as an affordance for one trying to make contact with an external mind yeah so I mean I talk about the imaginal as opposed to the imaginary the imaginary is the mental image the imaginal is like when you’re pretending and you’re acting and then we we can we can we can we can think about the idea of like virtual augmentation like a heads-up display and then we can put the two together we can get you know imaginably augmented reality and so you know we can use these imaginal we can do the serious play because we’re trying to develop and transform with imaginal augmentation that gets us into the right functionality to get into the right relationship which doesn’t mean that that particular pretense right is sort of the accurate picturing of the right of the the pole of the you know that the the thing that we are in relationship with very much yeah right right it’s it it’s interesting that that the path towards the real you made the case before that the path towards the rational must itself be rational but over here there’s an implication that the path towards the real can also employ things which which are not the real yeah so right and so I want to say that again that I think in the way I’ve done it very carefully at least according to you I guess also according to me you know argument for the proletic rationality of higher states of consciousness that precisely lack any content and therefore in some sense are the most impoverished I think I could make a similar case for the proleptic rationality of the imaginal I think in many ways that’s what Corban was trying to do in his work I think and that’s why his work is really pivotally important right now as he was trying to say no no there is a way there like because he unlike young Corban was much more willing and and repeatedly self-identified as a neoplatonist and there’s a way in which no no like I can ultimately justify the the right I can give you a prolet proleptic justification there’s a proleptic rationality to the serious play you can’t infer your way through it how do you overcome like how do you go through transformative experience I’ve got a lot of argument out there you do what children do you have to go through the serious play right you have to create that play space and and that is where you make those procedural and perspectival and participatory transformations that are necessary for you to come into right relationship with the real so if you can show that they’re systemic they’re systematic and they’re reliable for realizing that you can justify that practice as proleptically rational yes yes yes that that works that makes sense so I should I should start wrapping this up because if we keep going it’s going to be too long and I think I think you I’m exhausting you too and I it’s much later for you than it is for me so I don’t want to keep you too much longer I just wanted to thank you you did a great job at drawing me out and drawing me forth and challenging me and and pushing on me with affection and respect so I really appreciated that I think this is a great place to sort of finish our series and so I’m looking forward to our next one with you and I and Guy I think it’ll be really really wonderful but thank you for being such a such a powerfully present and participatory partner in what we’ve what we’ve done together so thank you very much thank you I really I really appreciate that deeply I think I think that it’s a real challenge to to try and maintain that that that presence and that balance between being critical and appreciative particularly doing it through a screen I think this is a whole new challenge for yeah yeah yeah I mean I I’ve learned so much about doing that from you in conversation and so so thank thank you for that and I think yeah I really do I do I can co with you this is quite a beautiful conclusion to to this to this series it’s come to a nice slow gradual nice landing as we’re here and I am it is possible night here so I think my physiology is helping come to that sort of that red eye landing but my my real hope is that we one day have the opportunity to to see each other face to face and to I would love that yeah I mean I’ve got I’ve got it I’ve got to come to Europe and to to Israel I want to see Bernardo I want to see you there’s all kinds of people I want to I want to meet in person very much I hope that why don’t we make a conference one of these days we should we should we should make a conference about all of this that’s actually been mentioned to me by Greg Greg Enriquez about making a conference around this I think that’s a very real idea and we should think about doing it yeah hopefully we’re getting released from the grip of COVID so hopefully yeah but anyways we have this next thing we’re going to be doing and I’m very excited about that yes yes I think it’s going to be an interesting change of gears from what we’re doing here what we’re doing here has been much more slow and rigorous and tedious and I think that can be much more grasping and much more poetic hopefully if anything for my conversation with and your conversation as well with Guy indicates it’s going to be a lot of fun so very much looking forward to it it’ll be it’ll be not that it won’t be totally platonic but it’ll be more Heideggerian than platonic with with Guy so that’ll that which adds great benefits to it so anyways I’m going to let you go so you can go to sleep but thank you so much and I’ll send you a link as soon as this is up and and I look forward to our work in the future so have a good sleep my friend you too John thank you so much okay bye bye bye brother