https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rDcm43EVVhE
There’s been more requests to have you back on than just about any other guest. Thank you for sharing that. I’m grateful to hear that my thoughts work well for the people and I’m encouraged by the feedback you’ve given me. Thank you. Good, good, good. Well, there was certainly an area that we didn’t get to cover in our last conversation that I wanted to start with today and I wanted to do it as a way of introducing my regular listeners to a concept that’s part of your normal vocabulary. But admittedly for some in a traditional religious context, like in my context, this term can sound to some a bit frightening, but I’ve actually found it to be really, really helpful and I actually found it to be a concept that actually maps on in many ways to traditional theological ideas about liturgy, spiritual formation, etc. And that’s this concept of psychotechnologies. So maybe you could explain a basic primer on what is a psychotechnology and give some examples of the maybe more revolutionary psychotechnologies in human history. Sure. So the idea is influenced by a lot of people, but Godspeed is probably the strongest influence, but also Olsen and others. So this is, you know, tech day and then we took that into technology tool. Let’s just talk about normal everyday tools. First, there’s profound analysis by tools, full use by Heidegger and Harmon. So our relationship to tools is actually has this weird double sidedness to it. We take tools almost for granted. In fact, they as Andy Clark argues, we’re natural born cyborgs. We identify with them. So other than your naked body and the atmosphere, everything around you is a tool, including the clothes you’re wearing. And of course, all of this. So we in one sense, it is the most it is it is blindingly familiar to us and so much so that we identify it. But then we don’t realize because of that how profound tools transform us. Clark was trying to convey that in his book, Natural Born Cyborgs, there’s an excellent philosophical book, The Universe of Things by Shibaro. And he’s also relates a story, I forget the author, I bought it the book, the science fiction author, The Universe of Things, about how this mechanic has this almost mystical experiences where he really feels the tools around him as alive. And it’s very, very disconcerting for him. And so before we even get into psychotechnology, I want people to appreciate how simultaneously technology in the sense of tools, not just computers and cars, but clothes and walls, right? And buildings, right? Those are all technology. How much it permeates you, but how profound it also transforms you. So what is it like a tool? I think of like a regular tool like a hammer. It’s designed to fit, right? Your biology, your physiology, your anatomy, and work with it and extend it and enhance its power. So if I try to push a nail into wood with my hands, it’s largely useless, but my hammer is designed to perfectly fit on my hand and with the leverage of my arm, extend it and concentrate its force and all that so I can drive a nail in. So that’s how a tool works. It’s designed to fit us. That’s why it permeates us, but it also is designed to empower us. That’s why it has the capacity to transform us. And what we have to think is that there are ways of organizing the formatting, the formulation, the communication, the transformation of information that can do the same thing. It can, those transformations of information, of information processing, better said, are designed to fit the way our mind works and extend it and empower it. And so when you have a standardized way of formulating and transmitting and transforming information processing, which are all various symbols too, right? And so you could in some sense think of a symbol as a tool as well. It can be. Well, we’ll come back to the symbol. That’s a good example. Let me give a less controversial one and then we’ll move to stuff where it might not seem as readily apparent. So the thing about these is we internalize them, right? Like I said, they become a part of our very, very work and move of our minds, the fabric of our cognition. And so we get the socially generated standardization of information processing designed to be internalized and enhance our information processing so that we indwell the world in a different way and not just in a specific area like a skill, but in a domain general kind of fashion. That’s the psycho technology. Now that was all very abstract. So let’s do a very concrete example. Literacy. So we are natural born linguistic beings. We speak, but we are not naturally literate. Of course, there’s all of prehistory. In which human beings are illiterate vast areas of the earth today are populated by people who are illiterate. They of course are linguistic, but they’re so literacy is something that we have to socially generated. We have to learn it. We internalize it. But notice how profoundly we internalize it. Notice how hard it is for you to think without making visual use of letters here, right? And think about how much it has been internalized. It’s become automatic to you to read. In fact, if I put some letters up in front of you, you cannot help but read them, right? It’s just okay. But think about how it empowers you. Think about how well, think about the reverse. Imagine if I remove literacy from you. Think about all the problems you could no longer solve. Think about how literacy allows you to tap into your past self and communicate with your future self. So what you can do is you can link all those versions of yourself together and massively increase the power you can bring to solve your problems. You can store information outside of your mind and then look at it and reflect on it. Imagine if you tried to become aware of your thinking and you couldn’t write it down. All you had was what you could keep in the ephemeral state of working memory. But I can also use my literacy to communicate my thoughts beyond my existence to other human beings and have them communicate. I can read play dough. I can be in touch with one of the greatest minds of all time because of literacy. So that’s what a psychotechnology is. It’s a tool that profoundly permeates you in internalization, but it also profoundly empowers you to indwell the world, to be able to see patterns with increased cognitive power and interact with them more powerfully. So those are second technologies. Another is numeracy. Notice that literacy isn’t just something that you do in a very domain specific way, like the skill of playing tennis. I can’t use my skill of playing tennis pretty much outside of the game of tennis. But where can I not use literacy? Well, everywhere I turn. That’s why it’s a tool. Everywhere I turn, I can use literacy and it’s something standardized between us. So I’m trying to give you all these different facets. That’s what I’m trying to convey with a psychotechnology. Music be another example of one as well? Music is interesting because there’s two aspects of music. And this is why music is really interesting because it stands on the border. So music is in one sense like language. It’s natural to human beings. All you have to do is be exposed to music and you’ll be musical. Small children will dance to music. They will start singing almost as soon as they can speak. Music is like language. But what we can do is we can think of all the way in which we have created musical literacy. We’ve created the notes so that we can play the music of Beethoven. And we can look at it in an enduring fashion. So music is like language, but there’s a musical literacy that’s analogous to written literacy. And the thing about that is people have noticed that there’s overlaps between musical literacy, linguistic literacy, mathematical literacy, if I want to put it that way. Yeah, and it seems like in the same way that these expressions, what makes them a psychotechnology is that they both extend you out to others, but it also becomes a seamless part of you in some sense. The people get concerned about transhumanism sorts of conversations, but I’ve got a friend whose name is Micah Redding and he leads the Christian Transhumanist Association, which seems like a weird combination of words that wouldn’t go together. But part of his argument, I’ve had him on before, is that when we think about these specific technologies and them potentially being integrated into our body, like if you could somehow take an iPhone and make it part of you, part of his argument’s been, well, it is kind of already part of you anyways. Even though it’s in your hand, it hasn’t been fully internalized. What’s the next step? It’s used in such a way where you can actually feel, when you’ve misplaced your phone or you’ve had it in your hands all day and you go set it on a table and you leave and you go someplace else, you can almost in the same way that people that have lost a limb before, I’ve got a friend that just lost a finger in a work accident, and he still has the sensation of that finger being connected to him. Psychotechnologies seem to work like that. I can’t imagine somehow if you were amputating literacy from me. How would that even be removed from the very fabric of myself and my conscious experience? Yeah, so much would be good. You would shrink and your world would shrink dramatically. The issue, of course, about these, and perhaps that’s what overlaps with your discussion of transhumanism, is there’s a difference between the power and our identification with these technologies, especially psycho technologies, and how they transform us. And whether or not that transformation is tethered to what’s true and good and beautiful, whether it is transformation that is seeking wisdom. So, of course, literacy, you’re a Christian, you find certain literate works sacred to you, but of course, literacy can also be used by propaganda. That’s why after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union immediately started getting everybody literate for the precise purpose of being able to subject them more to propaganda and control. So, I’m just showing that like a sword, which is another kind of technology, by the way, I do a martial art form with a sword, and you inhabit the sword, you indwell it, and it becomes part of you, or else you’re not doing the form very well. But, you know, all second technologies, like all technologies, are double-edged swords. So, the issue wouldn’t be, I guess, I was discussing with your friend, the issue wouldn’t be if it’s going to happen, because he’s absolutely right, it’s already happened. In fact, it’s been happening since we started making the Shulian hand axes. Your brain, if you use it too long, it starts to incorporate the tool into your body image, and it moves into objects like the rubber arm illusion and other things. But your sense of self is much more plastic. So, the question isn’t when, he’s right, it’s already been happening. The question we should ask is towards what end? Towards what end is this identification with a particular technology taking place? Now, there’s one other point he makes that I’d like to highlight, which is there is an increasing integration of psychotechnology with cyber technology. These two are increasingly reinforcing each other. The phone is a great example. That tremendous literacy and access to literacy to the internet, but you also have the cyber power of the distributed computation on the internet. And so, the second technology and the cyber technology are integrated. So, he’s also right to point to that. And so, that’s also something that we need to reflect on. I would say at the level of philosophical reflection on what this means for us. We are running a horrible, un-femeditated, unreflective social experiment on human beings to reach which we’re tethering them to their phones. They’re not even phones. Calling it a phone is a ridiculous misnomer. It’s basically a computer, a Star Trek-like level computer and social media and the internet. We’re having profound, and there’s increasing evidence, it’s having profound impacts on people. And we’re getting the first generation of people who’ve grown up their entire lives enmeshed in this. And they’re being changed in a way that we don’t really understand. Yeah. I mean, I feel it on a gutter level. My wife and I try to. We are not very good at times in practicing this, but having a screen Sabbath, you know, or we just unplug and you can feel it in or a practice of fasting from social media, which, you know, in some sense doesn’t seem like the great ways that desert mystics would have practiced fasting. But you can feel its absence. You can feel yourself unplugging. It changes your conscious experience. And that’s kind of why I wanted to start there because the line of inquiry I wanted to explore with you today, John, was primarily about really the nature of consciousness and the way that psychotechnologies and culture, which we’re all enmeshed in culture, connect together. You got guys like Hirt Hofzfiede, who was a Dutch social psychologist, did that groundbreaking work with IBM. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work at all. And, you know, his pioneering project was trying to map out across national social cultures. What are the shared values within that culture and trying to give some sort of score ranking. So for example, among the either 150 to 170 nations, he and IBM did this research on the United States ranked number one in terms of having a value for individualism, which would be no surprise. Australia, New Zealand, they were up near the top as well. But Hofzfiede talked about that we have these three layers of psychological conditioning. First of all, there is some sense in which we have a universal human nature. And, you know, similar what we might see with dolphins or chimpanzees, there are shared behaviors, shared appetites, one of which might be the desire to use tools as humans, to adapt tools. That seems to be a unique thing that we do better than any other species on the planet. But that’s not the only layer. For Hofzfiede, you also have culture, which is not simply inherited like our human nature is, but it’s inherited and learned. I should say it’s primarily learned behavior when we’re in culture. And then finally, your genetic predispositions, your inherited personality predispositions, which are largely again genetically determined. The thing for me that I wanted to explore with you, because it seems like we have this universal human nature, this drive to use tools. And then some of these tools and the symbols that we develop become so incorporated into us, it’s hard to sift through. This is something different from our conscious experience. It almost seems to affect the very experience of consciousness. But the way we receive and make these adaptations to psychotechnologies is via the level of culture. So I’m curious, could you share your thoughts on what possible links you see between culture, distributed cognition, and how in particular, how psychotechnologies seem to emanate from a top down experience on us as individuals? So we’re enmeshed in culture, but I didn’t really individually get to choose literacy in some sense. The culture that I was in from the top down brought and imported this psychotechnology into me. And yet there’s also an emergence from the bottom up that you start seeing cultural changes. So what sort of links do you see between a term that you commonly use, distributed cognition, culture, and this both top down and bottom up effect in which these new psychotechnologies, these new liturgies, spiritual practices can be shaped by culture, but also individuals can play some sort of role in shaping the cultures they inhabit. Yeah, excellent. So let’s just be, let’s give maybe a concrete example of that top down, bottom up that you’re talking about. Of course, Shakespeare. So Shakespeare doesn’t choose literacy as you said, but what does he do? He uses literacy to create these plays and so much of our language and our phrases and even ways of thinking go back to Shakespeare. So I’m just trying to give people a concrete example of exactly what you’re talking about. The literacy and the drama are given to him culturally, but then he does this thing to it that permeates back out and transforms the culture. Now not all individuals have that power, but I’m using him as an exemplar of that, you know, the emanation and the emergence in distributed cognition that is afforded and accelerated by psychotechnologies. So is that a good way of capturing what you’re talking about? Perfect illustration. Okay. And so the thing, like, so again, what’s the, now what do I think is the connection between distributed cognition and culture? And then we’ll bring it back to second technologies. So I use a metaphor. I’ll use it again because people seem to respond to it. People are aware of the internet. They’re aware that by linking computers together and getting distributed computation, we massively can increase the amount of information we process, maybe like almost a godlike, and I don’t mean to be religious, but almost a godlike proportions, which often overwhelms us and has empowered us to solve problems and communicate. But it’s also generated problems that were not present for us, you know, 20 years ago. People forget I grew up largely without access to the internet for the, I had to go to the library and, you know, photocopy and all that kind of stuff. But all of that. Okay. So, but long before the internet networked computers together to release the power of distributed computation, culture is a networking of humans together, to release the power of distributed cognition. Most of our problem solving is not done as isolated individuals. For example, even our conversation here, you and I, we didn’t create English. We’re not running the electrical grid. We didn’t make all this technology. We’re not managing Zoom. We’re not managing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So again, notice how that gets us back to, again, notice the deep interconnections about how we’re cyborgs and how most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition. And this is particularly difficult for people in North America, because as you said, you know, the United States is the most individualist country in the world. But the idea that most of what we do is done individually is largely false. It’s a myth. Now, I mean that in both senses. It’s largely false, but it’s been a guiding principle. It’s been a way of resisting the tyranny of the majority and important political ideas. So, but I want people to understand that most of the time you are integrating with distributed cognition to make the machinery of culture. That’s why one of the most powerful punishments you can give to somebody, solitary confinement, are turning them into a castaway because they, we are naturally, we’ve naturally evolved to seek out, and because we’re mammals and we’re born so prematurely, we’re dependent on, like, I want to say that, I want to, and don’t cringe. I’m asking people not to cringe. We are deeply and continuously dependent on the power of distributed cognition. And then what we just said a few minutes ago is what psychotechnologies do is, psychotechnologies, and I basically think of culture as ecosystems of psychotechnologies and technologies interwoven together that basically constitute and empower distributed cognition. That’s how I understand culture. And as you pointed out earlier, not just synchronicly, but dichronically, culture gives us the ratcheting effect. Because of distributed cognition within, embodied within culture, I don’t have to learn everything from scratch like it is now. I can make use of millennia of human achievement, and I don’t have to start from scratch. That’s how I understand culture, and psychotechnologies empower and extend, synchronicly and dichronically, the power, the cultural power of distributed cognition. So what is it that produces cultural change when so much of these factors seem to be top down, pressing upon us, and yet you see, I mean, we’re going through, I mean, your entire Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series is focused on a long process. I mean, you go, you start from beyond Western Civ. You certainly have pockets of exploring Buddhism and things like that that aren’t Western focused, but the back half of the series seems primarily focused on Western Civ and the Meaning Crisis that’s happened. That seems like what we have are these forces of oftentimes competing, sometimes complementary subcultures, microcultures network together, whether they’re academic institutions, whether they’re religious institutions, whether they’re—how is it, how can a Shakespeare emerge out of that particular culture that he inhabits and then change and shift and affect a culture when it seems like so much of what we do is the top down forces—and I don’t mean that negatively, they’re also positive. I mean, our conversation is happening, John, in large part because I think you as an academic that is not in the same professing faith tradition as I, and I a Christian pastor, 50 years ago, this conversation, not just from a technology standpoint, but from a values standpoint, would have been a lot more difficult, maybe even impossible to have happened. And certainly at other points in history, this sort of thing, we both would be labeled heretics. So something has shifted in the value system of this networked distributed cognition, the networked experience of culture. And to me, it’s really fascinating as to what is it that can cause such changes to happen. It’s where the individualism brushes up against this. Do you have any gut feelings about that or even maybe beyond that, any sort of research that’s gone into the way cultures shift and change, whether it’s on a micro scale or a macro scale? So something in between gut feeling and research—hypothesis—hypotheses and some initial theorizing. So this is a plausibility argument. I think it’s plausible that distributed cognition—I’ve got some published research. There’s one paper out in Frontiers of Psychology, one coming out in Presence, and hopefully another one shortly in Phenomenology and Cosmos Science, working with my good friend and colleague Dan Schiappi. And we’ve been studying how the NASA scientists, which is this very small community, learn to do science via the rovers on Mars. And it is this very powerful little tiny microcosm where you can really study these questions. And how do we form groups and how do groups change? And how do we basically ordinate distributed cognition? It’s interesting, and maybe we can talk about it at some point, how there’s almost this imaginal, almost religious dimension to these partner scientists when they’re doing this work that is very fascinating. In what ways would you say religious, or at least has the appearance of it? Let’s just talk about that. So one of the things they look for is they look for a very interesting capacity, which is the ability to see like the rover or to be on Mars, to have a sense of being present on Mars through the virtuality of the rover. Now what’s interesting about that is normally when human beings identify, I’m using, in fact, I keep using Polanyi’s term, indwell. When I’m indwelling my sword, I feel through it, I sense through it, I act through it. It’s almost transparent to me, which is what I said from the beginning. It’s simultaneously familiar but transformative. And think about how you feel through your clothing, and somebody brushes up against your clothing and stuff like that. All right, so what they do is they’re looking for the capacity for people to see like the rover, see through the rover, and be the rover, and be on Mars. Now what’s interesting about that is they don’t, with my clothes or with my sword, I have, I’m very tightly feedback loop, tightly coupled, what they call in virtual gaming, I have joystick control, right? They don’t have that with the rovers because the time delay, right? So they get batches of information, and then they get basically 2D black and white photographs, and they have to somehow generate a sense of being on Mars so they can do good field work. And what they do is they do this, where Tessie calls it, drawing as. They do all this imaginal stuff, they mark up the photographs, and they do stuff with their imagination, and they do it inactively. It’s not in their head, it’s imaginal. So for example, you’ll get one of the scientists, they’re trying to figure out how to move the rover, and she’ll say, okay, this is a rock, and she’ll put her phone down, and she’s on a squiggle chair, and she says, what we, and her hands are the cameras, and she’ll say, okay, we need to do this, I need to do that, and I do, oh right, and then she notices and realizes things, and she does this imaginal identification. But they, right, so they, they, they, they, they, pardon me. Very shamanistic. Very shamanistic. They technomorphize themselves, they become the rover, imaginally, through imaginal enactment. They also anthropomorphize the rover. They say, they don’t, when they’re moving the rover, they don’t say it needs to go there, they’ll say, we need to go there, or I need to go there, or we’re going to get stuck if we go there, right? So, so they’re doing this loop, they anthropomorphize, and they technomorphize, and it’s all this imaginal augmentation, right, so that they can, and what they do is they, she actually says it’s like, it’s like, it’s totemic for them. The rover becomes this totem through which they bind their identities, and through which they get access to the presence of Mars and the Martian landscape in this alien other world. So much so that they will do things like this. These hard-nosed scientists will say, you know, I was in the garden, and I kept getting my right wrist stuck and caught, and I got to the lab, and Spirit, that’s one of the rovers, interesting its name, by the way, Spirit’s right wheel was constantly getting stuck. That’s what they, they go, I don’t know, I don’t, you know, haha, there’s some kind of sympathetic connection. Do you see what I mean? They’re talking, right? That’s what I mean, this shamanistic, like you said, a kind of spiritual identification, a profound kind of distributed sympathy, and right, with the rover. And so, that’s what I mean about, like, we’re studying, and we’re studying how they, how the scientists organize themselves and coordinate themselves so that they can get this to happen. I’m glad you took the time to explain that, because that gets exactly to the nature of my question, which has to do with the nature of conscious experience. Obviously, in some sense, our conscious experience is networked together via culture. I mean, there is a way in which we could say, and I know some, again, Christians would be uncomfortable with this term, and I’ve used it before, there is a sense in which we have a collective conscious experience. I know that sounds maybe more Jungian, but there is even a sense of collective unconscious. I know that was what maybe Jung was more focused on. Reductive materialists would say that all of this simply just emerges from the material processes, right? Of our fleshy brains, you know, it’s encoded in symbols. We have these highly complex ways of decoding, and we feel this shared conscious experience, even sometimes with what we might say are non-living things, like the spirit rover, which I love the term. But of course, you have all these sorts of ontologies in many traditional religions, including historic Christianity, that reject, in some way, shape, or form, reject that consciousness is simply reducible to these mechanical material processes. It seems like, as I’ve gone through your work, and I’ve heard so many conversations between you and Paul VanderKlay and others, that you also seem to have a problem with a reductive materialism that might reduce all of this to simply being, well, it’s just our fleshy brains. Is that fair to say? Is that maybe even, if it is true, is that maybe one of the ways that you are able to find yourself being so conversant with Christians and other religious thinkers is that maybe you have a suspicion about consciousness that it can’t be purely reduced to a mechanical materialism? So yeah, that’s an excellent question. And I had a long, two very long extended discussions with Bernardo Castrop around this question. And then I did an entire video series with Greg Enriquez called Untangling the World Knot. So these are profound questions. If we get a chance, I’d like to try and talk about some participant observation of something analogous to the rover, but with something that’s more, I don’t know what to put it, more obviously sort of spiritual in people’s experience. So we can come back to that. It has to do with what I call dialogos. But let’s address the primary question. So the first thing is I’m hesitant about the term collective consciousness, because one of the interesting features about distributed cognition is we seem to have an intelligence that supersedes but it doesn’t seem to possess its own consciousness. And so some people call the intelligence and even the intentionality of the we, they call it a zombie, because it’s like a philosophical zombie, it’s extremely intelligent, but there’s nothing going on there like consciousness. In fact, one of the primary questions of consciousness seems to be, why is it only at this level? Why do I not have consciousness at, you know, why isn’t there consciousness in sort of individual neurons? And why isn’t there consciousness when I get collective brains together? And then you get weird gray things like does an ant colony, which clearly has distributed intelligence, does it have an emergent consciousness? And so these are all really intertwined and interesting questions. Now, if you are open to those questions, hang on, I’m getting a really weird signal here. Hang on, Paul. Yeah, it’s okay. There’s something going wrong with my signal. Are you okay on your end? Yeah. Okay, so if you’re really open to these questions, you have to be open to this real possibility, which is the reality of levels. And not just levels of descriptions, but actual sort of levels in reality. So let me try and work this through. Why am I not a materialist? Well, first of all, I don’t know anybody who is. So I understand that there’s been a history of scientific materialism, and it goes back to people like Descartes, but I don’t know of anybody who believes in Descartes’ idea of matter. So for Descartes, matter is different from reality. And so I think that’s the is definitively, and I want to say that again, definitively inert. It is inert, right? And that’s all there is there. And so for Descartes, there can’t even be empty space, he posited in ether, because everything has to be filled with matter, and matter is inert, absolutely inert, internal homogeneous extension, no internal structure, no internal activity. We don’t believe that anymore. Right? That’s not how matter is. Matter is inherently self-organizing, dynamic, and in addition to matter, there’s space and time, and there’s relativity and quantum entanglement, and there are causal relations, and there are structural functional organizational relations. So most people now say that they’re, who I think are incorrectly labeled material, they would call themselves physicalists. And what they mean by that is they don’t believe, they believe that everything can ultimately be explained from the terms of physics. Now I reject that as well. Increasingly, a large number of people and researchers myself think no, that you can’t, for example, ultimately reduce biology to physics. Biology is defined in terms of the capacity for evolution, and evolution is not something that you can explain without invoking historical causal pathways that don’t belong to the nomological law structure of science. I won’t get too technical, but there’s- Right. For me, the way I’m using it is in the metaphysical sense, right? So when we’re talking about what’s ultimate reality, what is that which is necessary? For me, when I talk about a reductive materialist, a reductive physicalist, their answer is there’s nothing beyond what we might say is the closed mechanical universe. There isn’t another layer beyond that, or maybe there’s a multiverse, there’s other functions, but the question of ultimate reality is a question of material versus categories that in traditional religions might say are spiritual, right? Well, that’s what I’m trying to push on that. I’m trying to challenge the either or there, because I’ve tried to argue, as I just did now, that life is not reducible to closed mechanical processes. And just to be provocative, there’s been a longstanding interpenetration between ideas of spirituality and ideas of life. Oh, yeah. I’m not trying to bifurcate the two. I mean, I would actually say that’s part of a historic, going back to even the Hebrew thought. That’s exactly right. But I’m saying it’s the acknowledgement that even while they may be integrated in some sense, that there is, whether we want to call it consciousness, that consciousness—my conscious experience is inextricably linked to my, if you will, material brain, my fleshy brain. I was not conscious before this moment. I’m not like Origen thinking that we have pre-incarnate souls, and then, I’m not suggesting that this is inextricably linked together, but that it’s not reducible to simply that. You also think that about you being a living thing, right? Right. Yes. Right. And so it’s not reducible, but it has what Evan Thompson calls deep continuity. There’s a deep continuity between you being a living thing and you being a fizzy—there’s a deep continuity between your physiology and your physicalness, if I can put it that way. In a similar fashion, there’s a deep continuity between you being a living thing and you being an intelligent thing. But in the same fashion, it’s a deep continuity. It emerges, and it doesn’t emerge into some kind of metaphysical independence, but it—because that’s the whole point of a 40-cognitive science, your cognition is inherently embodied, enacted, trying to separate you being a cognitive thing from you being a living, embodied thing is an impossible project. But that doesn’t mean I can reduce your intelligence, too. For one thing, other creatures have other bodies. We might generate artificial intelligence, which isn’t made up of the same kind of physical stuff as us at all, but it’s still intelligent. So you don’t want to identify it with, but you—so it’s not reducible to, but it’s also not independent from. And then I think—and the argument I make is that as life is to intelligence, intelligence is to consciousness. Being an intelligent thing, consciousness is something that emerges from, it’s not independent from our intelligence, but not reducible to it, but it’s also deeply continuous. That’s why measures—things strongly associated with consciousness, like you being able to keep things in your mind and your working memory, but measures of working memory are almost on parity with measures of general intelligence. There’s deep overlap between the relevance of realization going on and intelligence and consciousness. What I’m trying to show you is this, right, this—every time we’re moving up a level of emergence, we’re also disclosing a level of emanation the other way. Yes. So I think of—if you have that non-reductive physicalism, and all that means is that I can’t come up with any of these levels as being somehow inconsistent. So the biology is non-reducible, but it can’t be inconsistent with the physics. You can’t—biologists can’t say, oh, you know what evolution does? It breaks the law, the second law of thermodynamics. No, it doesn’t. You can’t possibly do that. Okay. So I call that naturalism, that non-reductive, right, where you’ve got real emergence and real emanation. There’s a difference between—I guess the core of what I’m giving out is what is the thing that has made you such a more charitable conversation partner with people like me than if instead I was sitting down with Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins. There seems to be a difference there in that even though there’s obvious disagreement, there is a degree of mystery to the conscious experience that you seem open to that at least in some way maps on to whether it is Christianity, whether it’s Hinduism, that there are these traditional religions that have affirmed—there is in some sense, if you will—let me just grab from David Bentley Hart, for example. Please, I’ve read some of him. Okay. So Experience of Consciousness Being in Bliss, great book. I might have butchered the title there, but it’s in some sort of order, Consciousness Being Bliss. For like Hart, David Bentley Hart argues, he makes the case that our experience of consciousness is a real, however finite, participation in God’s consciousness, or in some sense, we might say an ultimate consciousness, a necessary consciousness, a bedrock layer by which, in some sense, we are plugged into even though it is finite. It’s something that emanates. We talk about emanates for those that are watching the video here, top down, emergence, bottom, up. I guess the thing I’m trying to get at is there are voices that say it is only emergence, in some sense, in multiple layers. You could get even to certain degrees of panpsychists that are saying consciousness is simply a bottom-up thing. I’m saying traditionally, religion, various religious traditions have emphasized, no, there is a top-down emanation by which we are participants. Again, I am a fan of Hart’s framework, that there is this fundamental, ultimate, necessary, bedrock layer of consciousness that we call God, right? That which I can think no higher than, that I derive my being from, that all contingent conscious experiences participate in in some way, shape, or form. Is it true, like am I sensing or am I misreading, that what makes you a good conversation partner with people in religious traditions is at least a sense in which you’re down for the hunt, the phileasophia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of figuring out where this rabbit trail of consciousness might actually lead to in a way that’s not close to it being, that there has the possibility of some sort of ultimate or necessary consciousness. So that, I’m very, first of all, I mean, I was close to eight hours of then a conversation with Bernardo Castro, who is an analytic idealist. He does think that reality is fundamentally a qualitative experience. And so I have a lot of respect, even affection for Bernardo. We definitely got into deep dialogos. And so I take that position very seriously. I tend to have, and this may be odd saying this to a Christian, given the deep interpenetrations between Neoplatonism and Christianity, I tend to have a more sort of Neoplatonic take on it. So let me try it this way. I agree with you. People who are, just like I think, I argue that there are symmetrical problems for emanation and emergence. Why does it all come together? Emergence can’t explain that. And then emanation is, why does it never break apart? You have equal mysteries. And so this is what I’m deeply influenced by people like ultimately John Spada Seragina, who I think is the epitome of Christian Platonism. And the idea is that every moment of emergence discloses a moment of emanation and vice versa. Every place where we point to how eternal constraints are shaping time requires emergence. They are interdependent, interdefining. And he ultimately sees God as therefore, and I mean this in a deeply metaphysical sense, as dialectical in nature. Not in the Hegelian sense, but in this Platonic sense. So what that means for me, and this is an idea I get from Pearl, whose book on Dionysus, theophanies, and his other work on Platonism. I think he’s one of the great Neoplatonists of our time. Whoever he was, pseudodionysus. Yeah, pseudodionysus, whoever he is. But Pearl’s work on that and Pearl’s work on thinking of being, I think that’s the title of his book, I’m probably butchering it, one of the really great book on classical metaphysics, epistemology. Here’s the idea that there is a deep relationship of participation between levels of our psyche and levels of reality. So at the level of just being a physical emergent thing, I’m plugged into, if you’ll allow me that metaphor, think of it almost like what we were talking about earlier, I’m plugged into this sort of phusis, the Greek called it, which doesn’t mean what we call physics today. It means the sheer blossoming, the springing forth, the bursting forth of things that Whitehead emphasized that how new things just keep happening. And then at the level of being a self-organizing, a living thing, I pick up on, I plug into how the universe is so self-organizing, solar systems and tornadoes, etc. And then I’m a living thing, right? And that means that I’m making sense of the world. And then I pick up on the fact that the world, I plug into that the world is ordered and it’s intelligibility. There’s something about it that’s mind-like, intelligent-like, just like there’s something like it’s vital, and there’s something about it that’s present and emergent. And then when I go to consciousness, consciousness gives me this unity in multiplicity and this multiplicity in unity. This is the weird phenomenal and mystic for all this stuff. And we get the fact that it’s a world. I have an inner world and it plugs into the outer world. There’s this holographic holism to things. The inner face. Yes. And then beyond that, there is what the Greeks called hypotonic, hypotenosis, oneness. There’s this, and sort of at the level of myself, not the ego, but almost the union sense, the sum total, organizing principle of my psyche. And that somehow plugs in. And notice how it’s not present to me, but it’s constantly structuring me. And there’s something that I plug into reality and hypotenosis. And there’s something like the way the universe is, or I would now call it, the cosmos is wanting, and I’m wanting, that there are two species of the same genus. But does that mean that what’s out there is consciousness? For me, I don’t like to do that because for me, that, and Plotinus made that argument. He said, if the one is thinking, then it’s not ultimately one. If the one is unfolding in time, like your consciousness, then it’s not ultimately the one. You have to have the mediating layer of the noose or the logos, which is what brings the, what’s beyond all categorization into some sort of level of perception. And that’s why you’ve got the deep interpenetration of those three hypostases from Neoplatonism and the three hypostases, because that’s actually the term used in the creeds. It’s not persons, but three hypostases of the Trinity. Yes. And so for me, and I think this jives with how the mystics talk about God, for example. And so for me, I say, calling it consciousness, it would be for me like calling it life. You really think it’s a biological living thing? No, but there’s something about life that discloses something about this fundamental nature of reality. So it’s appropriate that, you know, that’s, you know, Eric Gina says it’s not life because life, life depends on it, but it’s in some sense, the cause, not the event cause, but the metaphysical cause of life. And therefore life discloses an aspect of ultimate reality that would never be disclosed in the life of this universe. Intelligence discloses things and so on and so on and so on. And it’s those sorts of shared frameworks that allow you to be conversant with others that maybe hold to those similar convictions, even if… Not only that, but conversant with the world. Yeah. You and the world plug together, fit together. So you and yourself, you and others, and you and the world all fit together in this mutual participation. So, you know, like I said, the intelligibility within me and the intelligibility without are two species of the same genus, but also your intelligibility and my intelligibility are two instances of the same species. I guess I meant more specifically, John Vervecky has a particular ontological convictions that allows him to enter into dialogues with Paul and Leitner, right? Because we have this shared framework in a way that would make it more difficult again, if I was sitting with Dawkins right now or someone else. That shared framework, those layers of questions, the one part of the question was getting at that sort of mystery of consciousness and our connection to it all. But also the other part of, well, what does John Vervecky feel or believe about, or at least is intrigued about the nature of consciousness that allows him as an individual to have charitable dialogue, nuanced, oriented towards what I believe is like, I’d like to say, and you can correct me on this, John, feel free to, but I feel a sense of shared orientation towards a telos, a shared telos when I have conversation with you or I listen to you, even though maybe you don’t feel that way. But when I listen to you talk with Paul Vanderkley, I feel like there’s, we’re standing on different convictional locations, if you will. And yet there is this participatory desire towards a telos that transcends us. And that allows us to hunt together, if you will, follow that, follow the scent. Yeah, I like that. See, unlike Dawkins, well, I’ve already indicated many ways in which I’m unlike Dawkins. I just think of myself as a naturalistic, you know, plateness. Some of the plateness were like, what? But what I mean by that is, like, people only look downward in deductive derivation. They say only what can be deduced from the sciences exists. That’s ridiculous. You also have to ask yourself, what is presupposed by all the sciences? Right? What is presupposed? Intelligibility is presupposed. Order is presupposed. Suborganization is presupposed. That possibility is structured is presupposed. That actuality is structured is presupposed. The possibility and actuality are post structured. Oh, boom, and then that gets you, I would argue, and other people are arguing, Berman’s book on Platonism and the Object of Science, that science presupposes Platonism in a profound way. Tyson’s book, Schindler’s book, so much of it. I’m not a lone voice. Many people are coming to realize we have to pay attention not only what is deducible from our science, but also what is deeply metaphysically and ontologically presupposed by our science. In that way, I think I’m open to, yeah, there’s a T loss of opening myself up to and with other people, opening myself up to, you know, I’ll use a metaphor here, I mean it as a metaphor, higher dimensions of being. I’m interested not only in the mystery of consciousness, I’m interested in the mystery of intelligence, the mystery of life. I’m interested in the mystery of real possibility. What is it? What is possibility? Our technical definition of information depends on there being real possibility. Our conservation laws depend on real possibility. What is it we’re talking about when we’re talking about real possibility? These are all things that deeply open me up and what I’ve found, and I’m finding it right now with you, is there’s a resonance. Somehow that opening up resonates with people. I happen to think there’s something profoundly right, I’ll have lots of criticisms of it, there’s something profoundly right about the neoplatonic approach to epistemology and ontology that I think gives us a shared language by which we can resonate with each other. I mean one of the things you have to acknowledge is the deep attraction ongoing and profound that Christianity has had with neoplatism, and there’s a reason for that. I think there’s a reason for that. Well yeah, and for me, my own theological framework, I’m in keeping with what I see as the early patristics like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, who maybe made a distinction between what we might call the philosophical theism of the Greeks versus the paganism. Obviously in many ways the early church fathers had some very harsh language against paganism, but in some sense we see this blueprint in Acts 17, Paul’s on Mars Hill, and he’s talking with the Athenian philosophers, and he says, I see this statue that you have here to your unknown God. And he’s actually really complimentary. He says, I see that you men are religious, that you have great religious zeal. And then he actually, he doesn’t quote from the Hebrew scriptures at all, he quotes from two poems to Zeus as an analogous, as a way of saying, I think there’s some shared, even though our language is missing here, he’s very complimentary to that. But yet, I believe it’s just the chapter before, he casts out the Pythia spirit from the slave girl in Acts 16, who their masters, of course, are making money off of this girl that probably had some affiliation with the oracle of Delphi. What she’s saying, she’s actually as she’s saying these men are sent by God Most High, she’s actually speaking something true. They’ve been, I share those as a blueprint because early on there did seem to be some sense in which gosh, was it, it may have been Clement of Alexandria, and not Justin Martyr, who essentially said that for the Greeks, what God was doing in Plato was analogous to what he was doing in the Torah with the Jews. So I have no problem affirming that. I know that’s like, we’re not getting a Trinitarian framework in the creeds without all of those guys swimming in the cultural sea, that was Platonism and later Neoplatonism. But I also have no problem with that because I also understand my cultural theology is that the logos Christ is always made manifest within culture. There is no unseparated from culture communication. And if God, you said dialogical, if God is dialogical or at least communicative in his very nature, which would be a core Christian expression, Jewish as well, God said, let there be light as his first act, a communicative act. In the beginning was the word communication. There’s no way to separate the fact that the revelation, the emanation always happens in a culture, in cultured communication. So I’ve got no problem with the mapping of Neoplatonism. In fact, in some ways I see my own perspective as akin to what C.S. Lewis came to believe in things like the discarded image, which again, for me, and I’m not asking for your agreement on this, I see Christ as the fulfillment of those sorts of even some of the pagan longings and symbolisms. And Christians very early on took and adapted images like the phoenix, for example. I mean, a totally pagan symbol and you see them in these Christian catacombs and the shepherd of the hermits, right? That symbol of the hermits carrying a sheep, we see that easily translate later into images of Christ. I don’t have any problem with this. You said one thing that was really interesting, John, I want to pick out a bit because you mentioned even by analogy and metaphor and even reticent in saying this phrase, that you were open to higher levels. And I’m curious, is that traditional religions in some sense, though we wouldn’t always use this language, have always been open to psychotechnologies, particular spiritual practices, opening us up to different states of conscious experience that move us from, I mean, I just had it, and this doesn’t happen every week, I want to be clear, I just had it this past Sunday. Our sanctuary is once again filled with people. The mask mandates have been lifted, people are being vaccinated, and the sound of people’s voices, I’m sitting in the front row getting ready. I don’t preach every week. I’m sitting in the front row and this wall of voices around me and also the sound from the speakers in front of singing hymns together, I was enraptured in that moment. It took me from a different state of consciousness than what I had an hour before the service. So that’s always been part of religious experience, incorporation of psychotechnologies, particular practices to change those states of consciousness that in some sense we would say open us up, I feel it as an opening up to that ground of all being. When you practice Tai Chi and meditation, are you seeing yourself as doing practices that allow you to level up in a sense, in a state of consciousness? Why do you do those practices we know that there are physiological benefits to things like meditation, to doing something like Tai Chi or prayer, beyond just therapeutic purposes? Is there a sense in which you find yourself going, I do think there’s something beyond at least this conscious state, these practices open me up to that and I feel that there is some access of the true good and beautiful happening when I practice Tai Chi or meditation? Well very much so. I mean I think there’s sapiential and existential transformations that occur. I’ve talked about those at length elsewhere, but towards the leveling up, yeah I do think that in my practices I very much am doing that moving through the levels of co-participation. That’s what I mean by participatory knowing and it’s being transformed and against modernism and I mean by that what happened in the Enlightenment. I do not believe, one of the things that happened in modernity was the idea that truths require transformation. Science has disclosed yes there are a lot of truths that do not require transformation. I do not want to deny that, but we also are getting good, I think good science, the cognitive science pointing towards that there are truths that are only capable through transformation. That only through these transformative processes will certain truths about reality be disclosed to me. And I talk, you know, make use of the great work of L.A. Paul transformative experience, Agnes Kellard, aspiration, other things like that. Doing experimental work on awe and how it might open us up in ways that we can’t open ourselves up, things like that. So very much what I’m realizing in both senses of the word in these practices is, depends on which metaphor you want to use, deeper and deeper and higher and higher. I think we should use both together, aspects of reality. I think the practice that I engage in that would be maybe perhaps most resonant for what you just described when you go to church is when I do theologos practices and philosophical fellowship, theologos circling practices. Because, well, let me suggest I have more rigorous arguments, but I’ll do this in a suggestive manner. I say that there’s something fundamentally right about Ergena’s idea about reality unfolding in this dialectical fashion. And then that’s since it’s, as you said, it’s theological. It is the, if you don’t mind me trespassing here, it’s the incarnation and the resurrection of the logos, right? The downward and the upward, right? But that is also the case between people. So when you do circling practices, what happens, remember the scientists on Mars, and I said, I wanted to come back to this. What happens is you develop, and we talked about this last time, individuals, but you can develop a collective flow state. You can develop a flow state that’s not running on individual cognition, but that’s running on distributed cognition. And people, what happens is, first of all, people just find it intrinsically meaningful to be of this intimate, I don’t mean sexual, intimate connection to other people, right? But then what starts happening is they start, well, you watch people go through this developmental progression. First, they’re just like, they’re so intimate with others, and that meaningfulness of that connection is just, oh. But then what they start to do is they start to sense an intimate connection with the presence of, they call it different things, the we space, right, the spirit. I call it the logos because it’s very much like what’s in the language, but it’s beyond the language. Remember Heraclitus said, don’t listen to my words, but listen to the logos within them, right? And so what people get is they get, and I’m publishing on this with Christopher Mastropietro, they get this intimacy with the logos. And then some people go a little bit further, and that’s something that Guy Sandstock, the guy invented circling, and I are exploring. They go from intimacy with the logos to intimacy through the logos, which is that the logos is just like life and intelligence and consciousness. The logos discloses aspects of the intelligibility of reality that are otherwise not disclosed to us. It puts us in touch with reality in a different way that we are not familiar with. So we are simultaneously in touch with each other, with the logos, and then with aspects of reality, the intelligibility of reality that are otherwise inaccessible to us. And people find that profoundly powerful. And if you, what seems to be happening, again, I just got to be suggestive here, there’s more rigorous argumentation available, is that collective intelligence is being transformed into collective wisdom. And people, and remember that most of the words for wisdom go back to seeing, but not physical seeing, seeing in the sense of realizing, become aware of, connecting, seeing into the depths of reality in a way that they hadn’t before. And so I think, and I don’t mean anything insulting by it, I think that what’s happening, you know, two or three are gathered under my name, there I am also, right? That what’s happening in a good church service, a good gathering, ecclesia, is something like that. Now, the way you’ll differ from me is you think there’s an extra notch to it, and I’m not in the place to deny that, I’m not in the place to confirm it. But for me, I can understand a lot of what you’re talking about from this particular framework that I, and not in an dismissive, I’m not saying it’s all about the good church, I’m saying it’s powerful, it’s important, it’s transformative, it curates, it creates and curates our group and our individual capacities for wisdom. That is deeply, deeply important, and gives us profound experiences of meaning, meaning in life, connectedness, religio. Yeah, if I may, I’d like to give a little push as to why I would say there’s another level. Sure. And I could even use internal in my own particular tradition. We have to have a way of making a value judgment as to whether or not the shared experience is aiming us towards wisdom, towards our good, towards the good of the whole. And even in my own, even in Christianity, there’s a long history of debate about what sorts of mystical experiences constitute something that is a connectivity with the Logos, with the Holy Spirit, with, constitutes a genuine moment of communion with God, or because we also have in our tradition as to others, the existence of what might say are intermediary agencies that can affect that conscious experience. So, I can borrow the language from St. Paul, principalities and powers. Others might be more comfortable with hyper objects, for example, that there are these mediating levels. And so, what I have to be able to do is to be able to even make a value judgment as to whether or not, and again, I’ll keep it to my tradition to make sure the critique is pointed internally. There’s been plenty of experiences, especially in Charismatic and Pentecostal circles, where certain things happen in that, that, that dialogos, that, that circling. I’ve been in drum circles that have had similar shamanistic sorts of rituals to them. And certain things have manifested themselves that bring particular Christian leaders to a point of debate on whether or not what is manifesting itself is what we would say is the Spirit of Christ, or even, for some Christians are uncomfortable with this terminology, even if you want to just use it on a psychological level, we might say it’s demonic, right? Which isn’t for good. It’s actually disordered. And we can certainly see this in so many different states of altered conscious, altered states of consciousness that simply leveling beyond ourselves, to me doesn’t seem like satisfactory enough as a value judgment we have to make. I mean, you brought, you had this conversation with Jordan Peterson recently, just came out this week, and, you know, at least one point in which you guys were efforting towards dialogue, Peterson brought up this question of value hierarchy, and what becomes relevant and salient to us. Let’s take, again, I’ll stick with my own tradition. Let’s take a worship service where there’s a lot of spontaneity, speaking in tongues, again, those aren’t even normal experiences at my own church anymore. But speaking in tongues, you know, glacelea, there is dancing, there are, for lack of a better term, this is what we’d actually call manifestations where people would, you know, you’ve seen them in shakers and Quakers too. To be able to identify what is relevant and salient in that moment, whether or not you manifest these things largely has to do with your value system. So if you come into one of those meetings and you go, I don’t value these things, you’re more than likely not going to experience them, right? If it’s against the same way, if you value it, if you’re open to that being for your good, you are more likely to have that experience in and of itself. So the question I have is when we just simply stop and say, well, and I’m saying you’re saying, I just simply want to stop there, maybe there’s just a healthy degree of agnosticism about the levels beyond that, which I can appreciate it too, but maybe a bit of, you know, Kantian doubt about what goes, what we can say beyond that. If we don’t acknowledge there’s a beyond that, how could we make a value judgment to say we’re actually cultivating wisdom together versus something that might be some sort of, we’ll take some crazy extreme like a occultic Nazi ritual in the old Reichstag. And what they’re tapping into might be a principality in power, it might be a hyper object that is actually not aimed towards the one, if you want to use the neoplatonic language or in the Christian tradition, the worship should be aimed towards the father, you know, towards the logos, towards Christ, towards the triune God. But this is exactly the point. And this is exact. So yes, yes, this is a fantastic question. This is exactly the point. This is the crux of the matter. Right. And this is partially why I’m working very hard with, with Dyson stock, you know, move circling into the logos and the logos of the file of Sophia. How do we make sure that there is actually that we are enacting a participating in the love of wisdom, as opposed to the love of power or the love of race to use your Hitler apparently did these kinds of weird rituals. So that’s exactly the issue. Now, I think the question is, well, I’m saying I think it’s the question is the question. It’s one of these sort of four questions that vexes me and inspires me right now. Because this is, and you made allusion to this. And I want to be careful because we’re in fellowship together. I don’t want to trespass on that. Don’t worry about it. I don’t want to say, and it sounds like your theology doesn’t want to say there’s no way in which there’s goodness or truth or beauty happening in those religions. I would never say that. Yeah. Right. So, right. So that brings that brings, you know, the reality of pluralism here. Right. So what we have to say is, so I’m willing to say the following, and you won’t fully agree, but I’m trying to show how far I can move towards that’s great. Yeah, I’m willing to say that for for many individuals, the Christian framework with an I mean, this, the imaginal framework, and the philosophical framework, what you might call it, they come together sort of maybe in the liturgical framework is indispensable. Just like English is indispensable to my cognition. But you wouldn’t say, well, you can’t be cognitive if you don’t have English. You have to have a language. Right. Right. And so I want to say that there are important universals that are going to be found. And insofar as there are universals, science can study them. And insofar as science can study them, science can give us guidance about what’s functional and what’s malfunctional. And then we can use that to make judgments about are we actually improving our capacity to overcome self-deception? Are we improving our capacity to pursue long-term growth? By their fruits, you shall know them. Can we enhance the fruition of virtue and wisdom and meaning? And if we can, then for me, that would be how I would say we would try to curate and criticize in the more expansive sense of critique. Any of these events, any of these practices, and say, well, no, looks like this is happening. To use some of my language, is this generating reciprocal narrowing? Is it generating reciprocal opening? Is it affording a distributed cognition that’s solving more problems? Or is it affording a distributed cognition that’s causing more problems? Lots of that’s how I would say it. I don’t want to move into an apologetic either here. I don’t want to make it clear, John. I’m not trying to make it apologetic. I’m actually trying to sift through this because the question I still come up with right away, what you said is good or what you said is not good. When you said, what we can do with science is be able to say, this is what is good and this is what is not. I know you didn’t say good and what is not good. What is functional and malfunctional, it presupposes a narrative structure underneath by which that value judgment can be made, does it not? Well, it does it or doesn’t it? You’ve got Platons and Spinoza and others that say, no, no, what it actually presupposes is our best possible model of what a human being is and therefore what the best possible life for a human being could be. You’re right. Science can’t give us that. Science actually presupposes it. Science presupposes it in a fundamental way and we could get into that at some point. To the degree to which we have an independent, and that’s why, by the way, that’s why making an argument on behalf of your position, you could say, well, we need a model that narrative empowers us to enact. I need a model like tech and technologies that it dwells me, internalizes and that I can dwell within, and dwell and Christ provides a living model for me. I talk in my work about the need for internalizing the sage, but what I would say again is, again, I came to that out of the cognitive science, how do children develop? They internalize adults who have broader, more encompassing perspectives. Why do we think the adult’s perspective is better? Well, we think it’s better because, and then we give all these answers about what a human being is and what a good life is. So is that presupposed? Yes. Now, is that something that we should just presuppose without question? No, we should question it. And science, it doesn’t, can’t generate it, but it gives us the tools by which we can question it and provoke it to try to be the best it can be. I don’t think that model should stop being self-correcting in any manner. And see, so on the other side, for me, the dark side of religious experience for me is that what I’ve tended to encounter dogmatic ossification of the model and a refusal to accept that, like everything else for us, it has to be static. It has to be constantly self-transcending and self-correcting. And so that’s my hesitancy. Oh, I feel it. I feel it too because we have, again, I’ll stick to my own tradition as well, we have been reticent to accept essentially universally held scientific findings because it countered a specific narrative that we had been taught. For example, whether it’s the age of the earth or Darwin’s work, right? We’re guilty of the same thing, but the place that I can come back to is to be able to say, all right, there’s still, even beyond that, there’s still, if I’m going to make a value judgment on whether, see, this is how it was pitted to me when I was younger, science or faith. If I’m going to have to make a value judgment on choosing between this story and this story, where is my compass aimed? And I’m saying there has to be a bedrock. And this is where, again, I know I’m still in some sense in the Christian narrative, using it to critique a particular sub-Christian narrative. But I know it’s not just universal. I think this is why we’re able to dialogue is because you could say, well, it’s also part of a neoplatonic narrative. It’s also part of this narrative that there is a fount of all truth, goodness, and beauty. There’s a source. And so, you know, that allows me a framework to go and be like, okay, this framework affords me the ability to say, even within my Christian narrative and the sub-Christian narrative, which said, you can’t believe that the earth is more than 10,000 years old, I was able to consult something higher than that, that sub-narrative, and say, oh, no, no, no, there’s actually, okay, deeper theological truths here. If God is good, and he’s oriented himself to be disclosed and known in the world, and he’s given us vehicles to be known and to know the world, then I can fully explore all of these vehicles and see where they lead. And so, for me, that allowed me and afforded me the opportunity to be like, well, and again, the Christian theological term is general revelation. The general revelation here is pointing to a much older earth, a much older cosmos. But I had to still do that. And what I’d like to be able to say is that this affirmation, the affirmation of the immanence of God, and yet the ultimate transcendence of God, affords me the ability to say, God is at work here, present within this cultural context and story. And yet, I also always have to remain open to transcendent truth, a truth that transcends where I’m at, so that I would be able to repent and metanoia, to see things a new way than what I saw them before. But I still have to go to some reference point, right? And I’m not saying it’s solid, and here it is, and I’m just going to Jesus smuggle this right into the conversation. I didn’t know that was a verb. But I feel like what allows a shared conversation between you and I and you and others in divergent faith traditions is at least, okay, is there another level that we could keep exploring together? But I also wonder too, and this gets maybe to like, you know, Tom Holland critique, Paul’s brought this up plenty of times, is that we are so swimming in this particular culture that’s indebted to a particular narrative that has instilled us with these values of what is true, good, and beautiful, that scientists—I’m not saying you, but maybe even Dawkins says, well, we ought to live this way in the world. And they’re not even fully aware that they’re importing that value system, the ethics of it from a particular story of the world. And, you know, I just, I don’t see there being a place where we could go and be like, well, we can’t, maybe a hyper postmodernism, which is to say there is no meta narrative that is not a mask for a play for power. Like, we have to have some shared meta narrative framework. And how do we get there together? At this point now, I feel like I’m just babbling. I need to let you talk, John. I like everything you’re saying. Yeah, I mean, I think the argument of Holland and Van der Kley call that a lot of this is burning the fumes of Christianity. And therefore, I think it should be rightly criticized. Like, even the performative contradictions, like Dawkins getting up and giving a speech on how useless religion is, and then people line up to have him sign a copy of his book for them, which is a completely religious act. How could he have caught a piece of paper that’s been mass produced somewhere else? How is it connecting you to this guy? I don’t mean to make him into a boogeyman archetype. That’s another thing Christians can have a temptation to do. No, I’m trying to give an example of the fact that what you’re trying to point out to is that they are, not only are they, I’m trying to extend the point, not only are they running on the fumes of Christianity, they are actually still running off of religio. And I have arguments as to why that must be the case. And so I wasn’t trying to vilify him. I was trying to deepen your point and say, no, no, I think that human beings are in an important sense. I’m not denying the Holland historical argument, but I think there’s a different argument, which is human beings, I think, are constitutively religious in nature. That’s the point I’m making. And I think that’s important. Now, because of that, I am going to connect this, I do think there’s another level. And the level that you’re talking about is the level that I’m also very concerned with, very interested in, and that I experience it transformatively and I reflect upon it scientifically, which is what I call the sacred, which, but I proposed that exactly the thing you said should be foregrounded as a feature of sacredness, which is it is, and I use that language, it is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. Right? You can continually go to it and come back from it, like almost going to another culture, like an anthropology, and you come back and you see things anew. You have metanoia. God, if you’ll allow me, I mean this in a praise fashion, not a condemning time. God is like the far country, the advanced country. God is like the place where you go, like Narnia, so that you can return and see this world anew. And God, or the sacred, never ceases being that for you. That’s the prophetic path of ascent and descent of the prophet. Yes. And if you are in, if you are, if you’re, I’ll use your metaphor, if your compass is pointing towards an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility and metanoia that is transformative people reliably towards virtue, I don’t know what else, what other standard you would use. Well, you have to have a logos though, because if it’s inexhaustible, there’s almost a fine line, I sometimes feel a kindredness with Buddhism in some sense, because there’s, it almost feels like at a certain point, the infinite becomes a certain sense of nothingness, because it feels so, you can’t get there. And so that’s why I feel like you have to have a logos. You have to have the word made flesh. But that’s what I’m saying. I didn’t say it’s just inexhaustible. I said it’s inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. And this is the neoplatonic idea. Right? That intelligibility, that there is a non-logical identity between intelligibility and realness. That’s, that’s, I think that’s what, you know, and it goes back to the pre-Supratics, that’s what the notion of logos is trying to point towards. And so there’s a moreness that there’s, there’s a sense of it’s coming from something beyond me, this intelligibility, but there’s a sectionist, it is relevant to me, that’s transformative to me, that it’s an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. That for me is the compass point that I think people are orienting towards. And what, what, what we can, I think, what we could, I’m hesitating because I want to speak very carefully. I think that there are, like I said, I think we are properly understood as fundamentally religious beings, beings that are, are, are participate in meaning and the self-transcendence of our meaning-making capacities and that orient us towards that which gives us an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. To reach which that’s universal, it can be understood and not explained away, but understood, please hear the word I’m saying, understood scientifically, understood in terms of private science. And I get, and I don’t fight against, but I also don’t accept, that individual religious faith groups want to add an extra inflection to that, a specificity. And that’s where, that is where we do part company. And I mean, I’m worried on the, I have the opposite worry of Holland. I worry precisely because we’re so wrapped up in this, we think that there is no other way. Right. And so his argument for dominion is for me, a worrying argument. It’s not a happy argument. It’s like, that just might be that we’re all just locked into something for so long that it’s very hard for us to question it and pose an alternative to it. And that’s why we need the post-modern critique. Yes. Yes. Because that has been, Chris and Dom has been a narrative that has mastered play for power. And I get concerned, I was talking, maybe last week, I was talking with Paul VanderKlay about this, and Jonathan Bejeot has been talking about this universal history that they had in the medieval era. And I do find that sort of worrying because that presupposes linking this all the way back maybe to the top of our conversation, a cultural supremacy. Yes. Right. And so I also have to hold to these concerns that if I’m going to be internally consistent, my own story here, I also have to hold to these concerns that cultures can be affected. Cultures can become hyper-objects, but there can also be a sense in which they’re inter-, from my perspective, there are those intermediary levels, whether we’ll call them principalities, powers, what is the thing that drives a Hitler towards his aim? To me, that’s spiritual. In every sense of the word, it’s an invisible value that he’s trying to make manifest. I’ll use like Dwight Hopkins’ language of spirit, aesthetic, and labor, that the spirit is the domain of those invisible values, those guiding stories that don’t become visible until they’re made manifest in art and in the way we work with our hands and the laws that create. I’m just trying to say that we have to acknowledge, and I think we’re on the same page in this, that aesthetic and labor is always subordinate to spirit. There’s a sense in which the, and I think this was kind of what Jordan was trying to make. It was hard to follow, admittedly. The conversation was very difficult to track with, but at some point, the point seemed like Jordan was trying to make is what becomes salient to us is predetermined by that value system. I need to have this dual concerns that my values, the spirit that I follow, may in some sense not be what’s true, but I also have to have some other standard to aim that to, to help me realize whether or not I’m just following this particular Western culture thing, which has been, and I’m really thankful that my professors in seminary forced us to read theologies that were non-Western theologies. So to be exposed to Latin American liberation theology, there was a book I read, John Sabrino, Principles of Mercy, and I came out halfway through that book and doubted whether or not I was a Christian after reading him. It made me think whether or not I had missed it all completely because of that perspective. I also hear Taoists talk about things. I keep a copy of the Dao Chi near me, and I enjoy reading from it because there’s a—it seems like a paradox, but I believe—and this is how my sort of pluralism works. It’s a Christocentric inclusivism. That’s the theological term for it. For me, I see the presence of Christ at work in the cultures around the world, revealing and disclosing himself and facets of himself that other particular cultural lenses have blinded us from. So I can see that in Taoism. I can see it in the Buddha. But I think part of interfaith dialogue, part of pluralistic dialogue is doing what I think you do so well, what we hopefully are doing well, is putting our cards on the table and saying, okay, this is the referential point that I’m starting from. This is my convictional location. So I have to have, in a sense, when I read the Buddha and go, well, that’s good. Either the Buddha is the referential point, or I’m saying the Buddha is good because it’s in harmony with some other referential point. And that’s my critique of—I don’t know, and in further conversations you can lay this out for me, John. I don’t know how we can take a discipline like the sciences and say whether or not—I mean, here’s a real example. I just had a conversation with a family a few days ago who’s dealing with an incident, not with their own child, but someone they know whose parents are presenting to them at a very young age, seven or eight years old, that they need to transition to be a different gender. That’s a value judgment that sits within a particular narrative. And I’m very sympathetic to the transgender experience, but I also encounter that and go, all right, that’s not just like a scientific claim. It’s value claim that sits within a particular narrative that has a particular standard. And it’s like, we want to level up as high as we can, but how do we level up together without an acknowledgement that we are pointing towards, or at least have some sort of held together shared North Star, if you will? So, yeah. That’s a lot there. Sorry. No, no. As I said, I don’t think of the sciences as the place in which we find that. Like I said, we have to talk about not only what we derive from science, but also what science presupposes. We’ll keep coming back to that. And science presupposes that science presupposes that science presupposes, truth that presupposes, good that presupposes, for example, that the truth is better than falsity, all kinds of stuff. So again, I don’t- And religion presupposes the intelligibility of reason. I mean, I say this to people all the time, you presuppose the intelligibility of the world when you pick up your Bible and you think the sentences make sense together as words and expressions. We have these a priori presuppositions that we all hold to. And see, and that’s where for me, I don’t only see the emanation of spirit, I see the emergence upward out of novelty. And I think if the spirit of emanation is not responsible to the spirit of emergence, and vice versa, by the way, and vice versa, then we get into serious trouble. Then we get into serious trouble. Now, what I think, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to say that the machinery of science in so far as disclosing fact can give us value, but I’m also, I don’t hold to a humane, unbridgeable gap between value and fact. Other people, Putnam and others have argued that, no, no, this is something I think is the case with relevance realization. Fact and value are deeply interdependent and interpenetrating, and we can’t separate them. And trying to delimit our behavior by claiming metaphysical and epistemological divides that I think are not ultimately justifiable, I think that’s a worrying strategy. So I would like instead to propose what I’m proposing to you is exactly what we’re doing is we’re not doing science here, but what we’re trying to do is, I think, you seem to be responding, we’re trying to be responsible, if you’ll allow me to find which the spirit of emanation and the spirit of emergence together. And so you even see in the erogenous notion of creation, that creation isn’t just top down, it’s bottom up. And of course, you have that as we’re praying to God, God is within us, the Holy Spirit affording us to pray, there’s a bottom. So I’m not invoking something that’s antithetical to your own tradition. I get that it’s not been primary or foregrounded in your tradition, but it’s not something that you can say nobody in Christianity has ever talked this way. I don’t think that’s fair to me. And so I’m proposing something that is much more deeply, deeply dialogical and say, yes, there’s a way in which I do need to be responsible to something like you said, the North Star, but I also need to be responsible to the texture of the ground beneath my feet. Because if I’m only looking at the North Star, I’m going to trip and fall. If I’m only feeling the ground, I’ll lose my way. I have to balance them in a continual ongoing fashion to each other. So I’m actually trying to broaden the polarity of the normativity. That’s what I’m trying to argue for. Well, I think we do it again. I assume this particular value, right? You can get levels of skepticism here. You’re constantly critiquing this thing without end. But I do assume within my particular story that we were made for each other as well. And so this enterprise is a productive one because we share it with other image bearers. We share it with those in which we were made to be in communion with. I mean, this is to me part of the fundamental nature of Trinitarian theology. Stanley Grince called it—maybe he didn’t call it this. Sometimes I say that and I go, wait, maybe he didn’t. You’d probably do the same thing too. Who was this? A community of God, the God community, the triune nature of God is that fundamental to God’s nature is communion. And being made in that likeness, again, this framework allows me to go and be like, we need the perspectives of others. It removes myself from this hyper individualism. So this dialogue today, John, I really—and I’m glad there was a little bit of push back and forth. I hope you felt comfortable with it too. Oh, I enjoy it. I love martial arts. I love to dance. Yeah. And I’m an athlete too. Basketball was my sport. And boy, I sometimes—if you see me out there, probably people doubt that I’m a pastor because I don’t get meaner with it. But I grew up in Detroit playing streetball and there was this back and forth smack talk that was part of the game of streetball. And afterwards, you weren’t angry with the guy across, but you were pushing each other. And you’re seeing what’s there. And so I have that in me. And I’ve tamed it down quite a bit, but it still emerges. But I find it helpful because that’s the thing that helps you deal with whether or not you’re just feeding your own confirmation bias. So you don’t have to preface if we’re able to have future conversations because I come out with so much good that I perceive to be good. And each time I talk or listen to you, just so you know, you don’t have to feel any hesitation in giving pushback. I actually think that’s part necessary for metanoia is to have pushback. We in that, we are in total agreement. For me, that’s the Socratic spirit. We’re not challenging each other. We won’t ever achieve our attainment. We won’t ever achieve virtue or excellence. The word means both. And the best things are rare, as Spinoza says. So we have to really struggle. Jordan Peterson, wrestling with God. Yeah, that’s his real. Yeah. And so if we’re not doing that, we’re not in contact, we’re not in a dynamic conformity. We’re not wrestling with something. I reminded him that Plato had big shoulders. Plato was a wrestler. We’re not wrestling with something. We’re not in dynamic conformity, ongoing continuity of transformative contact with it. I think God, the Guilherme religious language, God participates in himself so that we may participate in him. And so trying to separate all these things out, I think that’s a mistake. I think letting things like debate and dialogos and to penetrate each other is at the heart of dialogos. And like you said, our altruism is shouting or echo chambering each other. We have to be able to get to, my definition of dialogos is you and I get to a place together that we individually couldn’t have gotten to on our own. That’s taken place, that whatever reliably affords that, I think should count as a proper part of dialogos. Fully agree. That’s a great way to wrap up the conversation, John. Thank you again for the time. I hope we can continue to have dialogos in the future. I really come out feeling sharpened. The iron, to take religious language, the iron sharpening iron, I certainly feel very, very sharp after I get done with the conversation with you. Me too, Paul. I really enjoy this. I mean, I entered into discussion, dialogos with people of other faiths, Islam, Buddhism, but I have been deeply gifted by genuine dialogos with Christians. I’m grateful for that. That’s all I want to do. I just wanted to address that. Well, I’d want to, if you’re not uncomfortable with this, I felt a sense even leading in the conversation, you know, my charismatic tradition, we would call them words, get a word from God. And I’m not saying this is a word from God, but I’ve certainly felt a sense of something I wanted to express was my appreciation and encouragement to you that, you know, there are certainly ways you could probably climb particular status ladders to make a lot more money selling things. And one of those ways is via culture war. You make a blip on the culture war radar, and all of a sudden, you know, here come the culture warriors to rally around you. And one of the things I so sincerely appreciate, and I want to encourage, just offer some encouragement in that there are people that deeply appreciate that you are not enamored with being a culture warrior. And in some sense, the refusal to participate in that, I’m sure there’s probably some temptation, as I see various people in your field get big book deals or whatever because they have weighted in. And I’m not even just, if people are thinking, I’m just speaking about someone like Jordan Pearson, it’s not just exclusively that. I see behavioral cognitive scientists weigh in on these sorts of culture war issues. And it’s the sure fire way of getting yourself a book deal and a million followers on Twitter. And I just want to encourage you, I feel so grateful to not have to sift through that stuff in consuming your material. I know there’s probably some temptation there to maybe wade into those waters to maybe grow bigger following. But I just wanted to offer that encouragement that there are people that still see that there’s a narrow way unplugged from the culture war matrix. And it affords us, I think, a much richer dialogue, even if that dialogue is not as heard by as many people. So thank you for that. Thank you for the encouragement. It’s very helpful and needed. I want to as much as possible exemplify the spirit of Socrates, Amanda’s. I aspire to be as true to that as I’m faithful to that as I possibly can be. Well, I will pray that you will continue to have the strength to carry on in that narrow way. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Thank you, John. I appreciate your time. Take good care of all. We’ll talk again.