https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3ASBh3eZ_PM
right now. Sweet. Yeah. So I was just saying you guys did a wonderful narration about this issue of rationality, how you know, sort of the foundationalists, the rationalists are thinking about it and how we need to break out of that. And then how as you lean into that, you start to intersect with faith. I thought that rocked. Yeah, you wanted to give a summary of your conversation about consciousness. Yeah, well, I can certainly give you a snippet of where I’m coming from. And then, you know, John and I actually, I think are complimenting each other here. So you know, my life’s work, one way to frame my life’s works is on the problem of psychology. Okay. So the problem of psychology, I actually did a blog went a little viral on it just recently was we should know about the problem of psychology and the way we know about the problem of quantum gravity. Okay. And what I mean by that is everyone should be aware that the field of psychology has struggled forever is try to define what the hell it is as a science of. Okay. And to this day, it remains, is it a science of mind? Is it a science of behavior or is it a science of some combination in there in? And there is no language system that allows you to clarify what is meant by a science of say, mind and behavior. That’s the normal blending. All right. And we should be really conscious of that. You know, not to make a pun on words here. Okay. And it’s right quite remarkable. I mean, we’ve known this since 1927. Lev Vygotsky really nails it and calls it the crisis of psychology. Never been resolved. And it’s at the, to me, it’s at the foundation of what I call the enlightenment gap. The enlightenment gaps, the modernist inability to develop a language system that’s coherent enough to define the necessary terms in the field of relation so that we get coherence. And that’s what my system is about. You know, what I’m working on is the behavior and mind, mind, mind problem. Okay. And what I mean by that is you have to sort out what is behavior. What do you mean by that? And then there’s actually three different definitions of mind that have to be disentangled for you to actually have a language system that then has the appropriate references. And then when you do that, then all of a sudden the field becomes much less tangled and you start to be able to talk with coherence. So the, how this, and how this dialogues, and that’s what Greg and I are doing in each episode, dialogues with the, what’s called the hard problem of consciousness is we, there’s a long argument there. It’s very similar in sort of structure to what went on in awakening from the meaning crisis. There’s first of all, the historical analysis of how to get to the culture of cognitive grammar that has made this aspect of ourselves that is so familiar and personal, so deeply, deeply problematic. And we first of all, take a look at sort of the Cartesian arguments. And the main point there is the, what’s called the mind body problem, the problem of the relationship between consciousness and our material existence, our physical existence is better said by the way than material is enmeshed. It is woven together with and is inseparable from the cultural cognitive grammar of the scientific revolution. I made similar arguments in awakening from the meaning crisis and then expanding that out. And then, so how that problem, which is right, what Greg referred to, the generation of the worldview of modernity is, became then enmeshed into what Greg calls the problem of psychology is our endeavor to do a lot more work at setting up the problem, formulating the problem of consciousness really clearly. And what comes out of that are there are two issues that tend to be separated in professional academic discourse about consciousness. There’s the generation or nature question, which is how does something like consciousness, how does it have a place within the physical world as described by science? Like, how does it, one way of putting that, although it’s all, it’s also everything you say about consciousness is contentious, is how does consciousness emerge from the physical world? And Greg and I are, and this is how it also meshes with Greg’s work. Part of the argument there is, you know, that that’s that question is ill-posed. We should be asking a deeper question of, you know, how does life emerge out of non-life? How does sentience emerge out of animate life? And then how does consciousness emerge? So it’s much more of a continuum question than the stark contrast. And then that is put into dialogue with the other question, which is, well, what does consciousness do? I mean, for Descartes, there was no question, but because he’s pre-Freud and pre-Chomsky. But given that most of our intelligent behavior doesn’t seem to require consciousness, what is it that consciousness does for us? That’s the function question. The point is we have theories, cognitive scientific, neuroscientific theories that tend to address one, one of these questions, the nature question, the generation question or the function question, but not the two together. Part of the argument that I’m presenting and Greg is helping me with is that that’s also a fundamental mistake of analysis. The two questions are deeply integrated. And although it’s harder, we have to try and frame them and answer them in an integrated fashion. And then there’s a long argument about that. But the main idea is that the function of consciousness is to do what I call aspectualization. Aspectualization is out of all the properties, zero in on the relevant subset of this thing, how they’re relevant to each other and how they’re relevant to me. And although I have to say that in three ways, those are all just one relevance realization package. So right now, this is a phone, but it could be a weapon. It could be a platform. Right. And the point is I’m always aspectualizing. And then the idea is that aspectualization, which is basically a process in which relevance is becoming salient in the sense that it’s arousing your investment of your time and your energy. Aspectualization is what makes so your brain as a your body brain as a physical thing, as covariations with the world. Right. It has mental states that reliably covariate. And that can actually explain a lot of your even unconscious behavior, reliable covariation. The problem with covariation, and this is a standard issue, is that covariation isn’t doesn’t have the precision of representation. Right. So the thing in the world that’s covariating with this is it covariating with it as a phone, as a tool, as an object, as a platform, as a potential weapon, as a thing given to me on my birthday, etc. Right. And so and this this idea actually comes from Descartes. Many people don’t know that, know this. What consciousness does is it takes the reliable covariation that give us our rudimentary intelligence, our ability to respond in a reliably, reliably discriminatory variable fashion with the variations of the world. And what it does is it aspectualizes them for us. And when they’re aspectualized, they’re now ready for reason. They’re ready for it. And I’m meaning that very broadly. And Greg is being charitable with me on that. So, right. I love the frame. I can frame it. I love it. Yeah. Right. And so the idea is that that’s one of the main functions of consciousness. That’s why consciousness is so needed in situations where we’re facing novelty, complexity or ambiguity, because aspectualization is needed. And what I can show and I’m not going to do it here because there’s too much, not enough time, is most of the functional accounts that I made this argument elsewhere, most of the current functional accounts of consciousness actually converge on this idea of consciousness is this kind of higher order relevance realization, aspectualization that readies us for reason in a powerful way. Now, what that also gives, I would argue, is it also starts to explain the phenomenology. Why? Well, what does aspectualization give you? Well, it gives you what I call the adverbial qualia. It gives you the here-ness and the now-ness and the togetherness, the adverbial qualia. And the problem that has sort of hamstrung a lot of discourse about consciousness is that we over-focus on the adjectival qualia, the greenness, the blueness. And what’s coming and I’m not going to say that those aren’t part of consciousness. Of course, they are. But the adverbial qualia are actually qualia and they can actually be so they’re part of the nature of consciousness. It’s what it’s like to be conscious, but they are directly explicable in terms of the functionality. Now, what might that do for you? Well, it might help to account for the fact that you can actually have states of consciousness in which there are no adjectival qualia. You can be in the pure conscious event that’s achieved in deep. But what doesn’t go away are the adverbial qualia, the here-ness and the now-ness. That’s why these states are described with superlatives of here-ness and now-ness. Eternity and unity, ultimate togetherness. So the adverbial qualia seem to be both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And that seems to be there’s more to this. I’m just giving you a gist. Now, what this ultimately leads to is this idea. You have participatory knowing that set up the reliable covariation and generate affordances. And then you have this higher order relevance realization that is doing the aspectualization. And that gives me my perspectival knowing. And consciousness is my participatory knowing of and through my perspectival knowing. That’s why when I’m conscious, I’m not only what’s it like, it’s also who I am. I know I’m conscious by being conscious. And so I’m trying to give an account that in an integrated fashion explains the functionality and the phenomenality of consciousness. And it also helps to explain a deep intuition that is presupposed but never addressed through all of this literature, that we attribute consciousness where we where we have evidence for intelligence. People reliably do that. Well, here’s a reason why, because there’s a deep continuity and functional relationship between the relevance realization that gets the covariation going and the higher order relevance realization that aspectualizes that and readies it for reason. That’s it. And that, of course, everything I said, pretty much every single sentence needs argument and evidence. And what Greg and I are doing is unpacking the argument and the evidence. So, yeah, for me, that all of that fits. It all fits in my unified theory frame. And so what John is doing so very quickly, I said there are three different really meanings of the word mind, mental process. OK, so one meaning what I call mind one, that’s a neurocognitive functional account of mental behavior. I’ll say that again. It’s a neurocognitive functional account of mental behavior. So what you do there is you see an animal behaving. I got fish over there. I go up. I feed them every time I feed them. They get all excited. OK. Why? Well, there’s a classical and operative. There’s an associative relationship. And I can analyze the hierarchical structure of their nervous system, relate it to the contingencies of the environment and analyze the animal behavioral patterns in relationship to that, where the cognitive refers to the information instantiated within the nervous system and the mental overt mental behavior refers to what I see. So that’s a pure science externalized view. Right. And that’s what some people mean when they talk about mind. It’s like, oh, that’s the that’s the neurocognitive structure that are regulating and controlling behavior. That’s one definition. And you then divide it up into all the stuff inside the brain, the informational architecture, and then how it’s regulating the stuff outside that’s between the animal and the environment. That’s what I call mental behavior, because you have to have that actual specifier because atoms behave, cells behave, but they don’t behave as mental entities. OK, then what you get is mind to an emergent function, which is essentially conscious phenomenology. What John’s theory is of is of the processes by which that neurocognitive architecture comes together, engages in perspectival and participatory knowing. That’s mind to now mind to is funky and really challenging, especially in the language of science, because it’s you can’t see it right. It’s epistemologically contained, unlike mind one, which is epistemologically available from a science perspective. Mind two is epistemologically across the gap of first and second person. OK, that’s a nightmare. And that’s that’s why science is fucking tumbled over. But then you get mind three. OK, mind three is human justification. We just listen to John’s mind three. Give us a narrative about his theory of consciousness. Right. Now, the cool thing about mind three is that goes. Between across the skin without a boundary. All right. So the information contained in my head as I talk and through my skin. So it’s actually intersubjectively available from interior exterior positions. So mind one is available through the exterior and its classic neurocognitive behavioral position. Mind two is phenomenology consciousness. And then how does that work? Which is John’s fundamental theory and actually lines right up with the unified theory with enormous specificity and precision. And John’s got some brilliant insight. That out of the adjectival versus adverbial shift, my mind went boom. When I saw mine just did. I mean, you just brought it up first time I heard that. What? I was like, oh, my God, it’s the witnessing function and what you’re witnessing together and you split those things and then you can have a pure consciousness event as you find a meditation, which means then the quality you go away, but you’re still present with the here and now. And it’s it’s boom, you know. So now you actually then hone in, you split that thing off. And my whole the first thing I stumbled on in 1996 was the justification hypothesis and theory, which is what is the mind three? What is the fundamental organization of human mind? Three. You guys were talking about rationality last time, and I wanted to jump in there and say, hey, actually, guys, use justification and then split it across personal and social and analytic and you will be able to manage your rationality narrative there. That’s another conversation. But anyway, mind three is a totally different ballgame. It cuts right through the skin. So we got to divide up mind three, mind to mind one. And then there’s all another argument for what behavior is. But you do that. We start talking with a level of specificity and clarity that’s never been achieved. And then and then the implications of that are hard to overstate. So we probably I hope you haven’t I mean, you have an amazing capacity to take a lot of complex information, but I hope that wasn’t right. But you were geeking out here, so we’ll shut up. No, that was great. That was fantastic. I liked all of it. Um, no, so thank you. And it’ll take me a little while, I think, to do some eddies like the adjective adverb that I can feel them already doing stuff. I am changing as a consequence of that. That was a new thing. And it’s real like it’s a good thing. And just if I just like to flag the the de-babilization move that I think is consistently showing up here that is so powerful. Specificity and clarity like the disambiguation. It’s like, hey, guys, a lot of the problem here is actually just the grammar. A lot of the problem is that is the is the things we’re using to try to do to figure stuff out, the slowdown, let’s get the tools in order. Let’s get things clear. Once we get to clarity, a lot of the problems go away. And those that don’t go away, we can actually now begin to dress. Yes, it’s really interesting. And I was noticing, Greg, I just had in my mind, it popped into my mind as you’re talking at that last step, systems of justification, the visual image of the tree, because it’s, of course, three. You have the trunk. It’s all it’s all this is happening in the context of still the deep fundamental connectedness to the whole of real and the way the whole of real is kind of coming up in these stacks. So I’ve got this mind three, which is sitting in mesh in mind to which is sitting in mesh in mind one, which is sitting in mesh in all the way down to then, you know, reality and fully constrained by the constraints to give rise to that being a coherent structure all the way up. And then it has its own novel or specifics of what it’s doing in that environment. It opens up a lot of adjacent possibilities when you shift into that language, different information processing. So one one argument, in fact, about the one of the new theories. And again, I won’t go. I’m not going to try and burden people because Greg and I unpack this in detail. But one of the more most recent and promising theories the function of consciousness does agrees with that. The idea of consciousness is this aspectualization. But they also bring out an important. Well, I’m sorry, I realize it was funny. They’re going to bring out an important aspect of the aspectualization. But what’s that aspect? And this is even tightening this idea about letting it for reason. I mean, aspectualization is what turns co-variations into representation and representations through their specificity can become truth bearers. And that’s needed for reason. But what aspectualization also does and what consciousness seems to be specifically needed for is dealing with counterfactuals. Unconscious cognition doesn’t seem to be able to deal with counterfactuals. Right. And so what you’re getting in the readiness for reason is, of course, you’re getting representations, which are truth bearers. But there are unconscious representations. But when they are aspectualized such that they can enter into counterfactual consideration, then you have genuine readiness for reason. Now, of course, that’s going to just be adaptively important. And of course, when you recurse that on yourself, you get a needed capacity for self-correction because self-correction presupposes I should have done X, which is a counterfactual. Right. So I’ll just add a quick comment to that. So just so you were tracking here. So when he says ready for reason, we’re talking still at an amnolable level. And for me, then we’re actually talking then about, OK, ready for simulation across possible paths of investment. That’s where the counterfactual will come up. So you’re sort of like, OK, I can now hold. And by the way, this is then connects into what’s called working memory, perspectival working memory. So how does the thing hold and then run through various simulations of possibility and then make comparison relationship to possible paths of investment and create a cost benefit analysis of the affordances that you want to then track. OK, so then what happens is that’s happening at the mammal level. OK, or birds and where exactly is and all that’s super crazy in the animal world. But essentially, that’s what’s going on. Right. And then actually, I want to then say, yeah, and then there’s an extra ready for reason that we do when we actually start talking to each other. Yeah. Right. Which then said, well, how the hell do you know you’re not bullshit? You know, right. Yes, there we are. Yeah. And then you’re sort of like, now I’m going to justify. Now it’s like, why do you you know, now you have propositional language that’s tracking the simulation. Right. And then you have the question of the proposition. Now you have propositional knowledge on top of perspectival participatory knowledge. And then that’s right. So so you’re talking about it, as I understand it, is something along the lines of the the location in justifications, justification space of what we might call reason to. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. So which was then the mind three kind of reasoning versus mind to kind of reasoning. Right. Which is simulation. We do that all the time. You imagine you simulate various outcomes. Right. But you’re not necessarily propositional. Then you get into propositional knowing. OK. And then what you what we got was initially personal and social indigenous justification. And then when we get in the pre-modern formal and most notably Socrates, you actually get formal analytical epistemological justification, which well, how do you know you’re not just fucking bullshitting? It’s like, is it here’s math. Mathematical truths are like this. That’s that’s that’s deductive truths. Do we have deductive truth systems that we’re actually moving? Or we’re all just making this up a bunch of for our social needs. And then now I’ll say you get philosophy and boom, real. Ah, ha. So this implies, by the way, how neat. I believe that we just hit this implies that when you’ve achieved a particular level of distributed cognition. That you achieved a capacity to actually have distributed relevance, realization. Yes. You also have witnessed the emergence of shared consciousness. Yeah, you have to be that. I think that’s right. A whole bunch of new age people just had a very weird feeling. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Not that one, dude. Not not that one. No, no, no. We’re talking right. We’re playing jazz here, folks. You know, OK, that kind of that’s like that’s you can disambiguate. You can de-babalize that. What I just said is exactly what is implied. Just now you have to grasp it with the right. I think your point about so this is actually your de-babalization thing resonates enormously to me. That’s what I’ve been fucking obsessed with. Because in 1990s, I realized I was I was equivocating. I love John’s word about equivocation. I was really I realized that I was like I was getting driven by something crazy and I didn’t have the word equivocate. But that was the issue. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’d listen to other people and they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I mean, they knew within their little frames that the frames didn’t line up. So they’re arguing about stuff that couldn’t be corresponded to each other. So it’s like, what’s the point? You know, so anyway, that’s that’s been my obsession for a long time. That’s sorry, I want to make sure you’re done great, because I know that’s. I’m done. Yeah. You want to follow the deal. Sorry. You’re also my friend and I want to make sure that I’m. I’m not worried about a friend of me, brother. So about that, about shared consciousness, I mean, Dan Shapi and I are doing a lot of work on this because about the rovers on Mars and the scientists working together to move the rovers around. And that’s where a lot of this stuff about participatory and perspective of knowing really comes to the fore. But let’s try something. Let’s let’s move into that carefully, because I don’t want to make the New Agers happy, but I do want to perhaps make us ready for the next paradigmatic place. So so let’s take a look at what we were saying about notice, you know, how we use these two terms. We sort of had awareness of the world perception and then we had imagination. And we talked about working memory here. But the thing that we’re now realizing in cognitive sciences, those are not we sort of think of them as different, but they’re actually interwoven like this. Right. Then this is all what’s going on and what’s called predictive process. Imagination is just the is just the top down aspect of realization. And perception is just the bottom up aspect of it. And you can pull them apart in certain ways. But notice how consciousness in bridging between them. Because when I’m doing this on the world, I’m conscious. But when I’m doing this in my head, you know what I still am conscious. And consciousness is exactly that bridging, right. That allow that we’re right. We’re bringing into sort of a meta cognitive awareness, the way we can play with the relationship between the top down and the bottom up of aspectualization. Now, something analogous to that, I think, can go on. And I want to be really clear that I’m making an analogy here. Something can go on in what is called the social imaginary, the kind of shared. And we’ve talked about this, the paradigmatic images and exemplars that constitute a paradigm. And then from that, you know, groups of people have shared awareness of objects and relations in the world. And there’s something analogous. It’s not a consciousness, but there’s something analogous to consciousness moving between the social imaginary and the socially shared awareness. And that is doing something very much like you said, Jordan. It’s doing relevance realization. It’s managing relevance realization at this at the level of distributed cognition. So while I don’t think that’s a consciousness, I think there is something analogous to that going on at the distributed cognitive level. And that part of what we could be seeing the potential of is the simultaneous restructuring of what that whatever we want to call that is and what’s going on in here, because we always think that this is the way it’s always been for us, our experience of consciousness. The Greeks don’t have a word for consciousness. It doesn’t exist for them the way it exists for us as a phenomenon. Right. And so it’s quite likely we have the potential to radically transfer that outer I don’t know what to call it. I don’t want to call it consciousness, but that outer analog of consciousness and the inner experience of consciousness in a very profound way. And I sometimes think Jordan, and I hope you find this complimentary and not insulting, I sometimes think that I sometimes use that a way of trying to understand what you’re talking about when you’re talking about coherence. Yeah, that feels right. The word that word just kept coming up for me. And Greg’s used that particular word a few times in the past, in the past few moments, and there’s a strong coordination there. So it’s almost like I’m using the word coherence at the level of distributed cognition and then with a huge use in the word coherence at the level of mind, I believe mind too. Right. And so the challenge is to say, OK, how do you actually enable coherence at the level of I think mind three? I may not be using that term just right. Yeah, no, that’s right. Is that right? Yeah. So here’s some mind three then is what it is that starts to connect us on a highway of information. Okay. And then that’s a lot that then rises us from primates into people. Okay. That highway of information, that capacity to justify that creates indigenous knowledge. Okay. And then ultimately we start building civilizations, then we get much more material control and voila. And by the way, we get then the evolution of cultural knowledge, which are these systems of justification that build upon each other. All right. And so when we do, we get plugged into Cartesian dualism in a particular kind of way, right, that the Greeks didn’t. So our relationship to ourselves, our relationship, I think that Shakespeare opened up a soliloquy to ourselves. Yeah. Right. Right. In a totally different way. So we’re getting this all this mind. Mind three is kind of a blank slate. It’s waiting to absorb. It’s an organ of culture. It’s waiting to absorb the narrative and then bring you all online. And then we feed those of you feed back on it. Okay. Yeah. No. And so, and what you were talking, when you guys were talking, remember the singularity conversation, you, you, you riffed off the singularity paper I gave. Right. And you instantaneously recognize that we were changing paradigms, right. Accelerating paradigms in space change systems. So what we’re actually seeing is this paradigmatic, you know, flux, crazy flux. Right. Those paradigms are these, the center of these paradigms are systems justification. Okay. Look at what Peter Lindbergh did with culture 2.0. He gets that table. He gets the archetypal justification, the anti-justification, the leaders that create the paradigm. This is what I stand for. This is my investment pattern. These are my people. This is what I’m against. All right. Um, and what’s happened is, is that technology intersection and information is completely outstripping any paradigm that has for sense making capacity, which is driving the system insane. And what we’re actually trying to do is, is there a meta position of all of this crazy paradigm that we could do without babble and not in some top down authoritarian way, but actually sense make so then we could actually have sovereignty so we can network ourselves together and write this shit before it fucking collapses. At least that’s what I’m hearing. Yeah. So the, the map to me hold this cause I’m following you completely, but I want to make sure that it’s actually being held more broadly. Um, and I’m not sure if this metaphor is going to work, but just to kind of do the two to three, just keep moving back and forth. You know, if I talk about coherence at the level of mind, I guess, mind one and two, there’s something that happens there. It’s like an epileptic seizure is a really nice clean example of what happens when that coherence breaks down. There’s a series of feedback loops, signaling structures and mechanisms of an inhibition and excitation that when the neurocognitive architecture is coherent, it works right. It produces a, a set of emergent properties that are available in this new space called mind two that can generate behaviors and counterfactuals and all that kind of stuff. Right. And right now, what we’re sort of witnessing in mind three is the equivalent, the moral equivalent of an epileptic seizure because we don’t yet have the kinds of signaling structures and inhibition and exitory feedback loops to maintain coherence. If we can attain coherence, then something locks at that point and we’re doing something new on that substrate. A hundred percent. Can’t put it, couldn’t have said it better. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that lines up with what, what I’ve been trying to do or to get a two, or at least the project I’m concerned with that I’ve seen it as constantly in resonant. I mean, right. John, aren’t we trying to distribute deal logos to bring people together in interpersonal participatory harmony, right. And then pull the logic so that our propositional systems align. And then if we can extract a particular kind of justifiable knowledge, right. And then hone in around that to create some sort of integrated pluralism that gives people enough distributed cognition of where they’re going, but has enough integration. So if there’s a degree of clarity and coherence and harmony, is it like that? That’s the infrastructure to hold the emergent system in a way that’s at least puts the constraints on it. That allows it to grow, but doesn’t predetermine what you can’t predetermine in this kind of emergent flux. I agree with all of that, Craig, except I would add to it. And I think it goes with it well, is that deal logos is not just argumentation of drama. There’s also what you have to, all the prospect of participatory knowing has to be transformed through some enacted symbolism, right. That’s what’s going on in deal logos. Exactly. And that’s so consistent. Why the hell did I turn this goddamn thing into a garden, right. And a cartoon is my dad’s, it’s a cartoon. You know, it’s like, but it’s like this art. I was an, I was a humanistic calling and I was doing all science. Of course I’m a practitioner as well, but I’m trying to bridge and all of a sudden it’s like the next transformation is going to have to have that synthesis of science and humanities is going to have to embrace the entire totality of human experience. We can’t have a master and his emissary, you know, break as we did in the 20th century. We’ve got to bring back participatory knowing we’ve got to bring back the entire thing has got to come around and it’s a transition in the humanities and creating that synthesis. So is it, is it, I mean, I’ve got three things that are sort of coming up as being the, well necessary. And I don’t know if they’re sufficient. So, so one has to do with, I guess there’s two phases of bullshit. One is the interfacing. There was the outer facing. So don’t bullshit yourself and bullshit me. Yeah. And then, and then the third has to do with this, the, the grammar and just be very careful to not, um, hmm. What’s the, it’s funny. If there’s a recursion here, isn’t it? Self-referentiality, um, be very careful to not equivocate, be very careful to achieve clarity in the communications methodology and be very aware of when and where I have to speak a little faster, unfortunately, cause it’s coming too quickly. Um, when a niche for bullshit has opened up in the ambiguity of the communications methodology. Yes. Brilliant. Mm hmm. And, and the, and the, why that’s particularly dangerous and requires us to be careful and full of care. Let’s use both senses of that word, careful and full of care. Um, is that what we’re talking about here is not a static grasping of what is, but an aspiration, right? To transformation and the problem with transformation is it moves you into non-logical identity. It takes you out of script. And I’ve made this argument before. You can’t infer your way through radical transformation. It doesn’t work. So that’s why we have narrative narrative trains us in non-logical identity, right? To change it. So you can look at the picture of yourself as a four year old and go, there I am. Which is like, what’s right. And you just do it without thinking because narrative has trained you and non-logical idea, identity and symbol trains you in non-logical. And you have to teach kids all of this and we teach them in, in dialogue, how to do this, we’re training them in non-logical identity because that is what affords them. It opens up the counterfactual space and makes it transformatively available to them. They can ident, they can go through aspirational transformation. But the problem is non-logical identity superficially looks like contradiction, looks like ambiguity, looks like equivocation. And so that is particularly right for bullshit. That right there. That’s why I’m engaging in for me, this whole project of the logos and all of these wonderful conversations, because I think this is about trying to simultaneously create the new cultural cognitive grammar, but also afford the transformations, right? A perspective and participatory knowing that hone my skills and virtues so I can distinguish and discern between the bullshit and the non-logical identity of transformation. Hmm. Thanks. So good. Yeah. So it’s, we’ve used that language. I think I’ve, I’ve talked about it in terms of like, does it, does the thing rotate this way or does it rotate that way? And you’ve talked about in terms of reciprocal closing and reciprocal opening. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Like if you’ve got your stack upside down so that relevance realization is no longer grounding you to the whole of reality, you’re in deep trouble in exactly this location. Yeah. And what I was just doing, by the way, is I was just like as much as possible, like seeding myself in the stack, being in the right direction, listening to you and noticing like how the, the felt sense of, of relevance realization was like guiding my, and orienting and making it, you do that aspect realization of what was happening so I was able to orient on exactly the right thing and everything was saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We’re definitely, I didn’t have to worry about the propositional stuff hanging together because I was safe in the space of the exploration of the emergent possible when you actually open things up. But if you’re not grounded in your, in your relevance realization, and particularly if you’re topsy turvy, then opening that thing up is, is, you know, well, it’s going to be a real problem. Absolutely. And so, and you said, Jordan, you said something, you know, super simple, but also super profound that I want to come back to you like bullshit self bullshit other. Okay. So in the unified theory, you have your private narrator mind three, all right. And then you’re sit on top of that, your mind to experiential self that then embeds itself in its mind one. Okay. The mind one into mind two is, you know, I use the short end. Well, I’ll be dialogue with John about this called the attentional filter. Okay. Which basically is shorthand for all the stuff John’s talking about. I’ll bring stuff in relevance realization, bring it into perspectival knowing, and you know, and we’ll be dealing with that. Then you have the narrator that’s, that’s then that narrator is going to bullshit self. Okay. And I call that the Freudian filter. All right. Because that self needs to be like, Hey, I’m a good person, you know, and needs to believe that it’s doing the right thing and it’s internalized mom and dad’s rules and as a good thing, living it up, blah, blah, blah. And we know cognitive dissonance is all about that. Maintaining a justified state of being. And you can analyze this empirically. It’s unbelievably robust. And then there’s the private to public filter. You know what I call the Rogerian filter because I’m a clinician, but it’s also lying and bullshit or what you’re trying to do to just maintain the public image and not avoid the judgment of other. Okay. So then you bullshit say, Oh yeah, I love that sweater. Oh God, I’m like, whatever the fuck you want. Right. You know, so you love me and I get social influence. So it is learning that calibration at the social and personal level. How do you calibrate bullshit self bullshit other, and then we have the whole analytic problem and we’ve inherited grammars that are not fucking up to the task. And so now we get this whole issue of like, well, good luck actually trying to make sense when your forefathers fucking can’t make sense. You know, you’re not handed the grammar that’s needed in the situation you find yourself in, or at least we have to rediscover and re put together philosophically. And we get that right. We get the analytic, we get the social, we get the personal, and we’re at least aware of that. And we come into harmony with that and the right logos. Fucking A. You know, it’s, it’s really cool. I don’t know if you, if this is something you do, but if you, if you run a simulation on every, you guys, you guys removed the term with the ESS, right? The evolutionary stable strategy. Yep. That, which is not an ESS is self terminating. And if you, if you run it out long enough, it goes to the null evaporates. So I just ran a little micro simulation on that. So I would like to propose that every single strategy that is not on the line that you’re describing, which is to say every single strategy that is on the line of self bullshit, every single strategy is on the line of other bullshit. Uh, is a, is self terminating. This is a white heads claim. Yeah. Our one hope is that evil is ultimately self destructive. Yeah. I, I’m going to propose that I can, I can prove it. Although I don’t know that I can prove it in propositional language just yet. Right. I think wisely, we know that that’s true over time. I will say, you know, villains, you know, you know, in their lives, get away with shit. Well, this is the problem, right? We have a, we humans have a time horizon. You know, if, if, if your civilization, every single civilization collapses, but they all collapse in a thousand years. You’ve got like, you know, 15 generations that are like, yeah, it’s cool. What are you talking about? And then those, those last few generations are like confused. What’s going on? Why is, why is everything getting worse? I don’t get it. Right. And then, and then you have this horrible crisis and everybody just sort of loses their minds, right? History becomes utterly lost. Grammar becomes, you know, put into a, into a blender. And then you kind of reboot on this new basis and you start again, like, Oh wait, okay, we’re cool. So it has to do, I think a little bit with time horizons that are. Exactly. It dumps entropic externalities into the shit of the system. And that’s going to back it up eventually. Right. Exactly. And that’s going to back it up eventually. And so you end up with, there will be a reckoning, but there are ways to sort of, you might die in advance of that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s like the inverse of the guy who plants the tree shade is not going to be in. Right. Exactly. But we want to, I was participating in big history conference and it was be a good ancestor. That’s what it, that’s what it, that was the title of it. Like, yes, you know, you want to extend yourself in time. You want to be on the right side of history. Be a damn good answers. Don’t leave your bullshit, you know, to your future self. Don’t leave it to others and don’t leave it to your kids. Yeah. And so here’s the other piece of it. I think this other piece is also super, super important, which is to say that the good news and it’s like the best possible news is that, and also, so we’re not saying don’t eat cotton candy, eat broccoli. I would say we’re not saying defer your local quality of wellbeing in exchange for people you’ll never know. That’s a, that’s a, that’s a thing, but it’s not the right thing. What I’m saying at least, and I believe that we will collectively say is, and also this particular location, this, this, this, this spot in justification space also happens to be the location that has the highest possible meaningfulness of your present being in the world. And so you get the thing that is actually the thing that is the most valuable in your life while you are alive and happen also simultaneously to be participating in that thing that is most enduring, well, actually can not, is not self terminating. Yeah. So when Kant, Kant talks about wellbeing, essentially he’s got a wonderful summary of it is, is happiness with the worthiness to be happy. Okay. So, so when you’re bullshitting, you’re cutting away at that worthiness, right? So it’s a, it’s that dialect is, you know, yes, we want happiness and don’t do it. Don’t, you know, you’re losing it. If you’re sacrificing it without integrity, you know, if you’re bullshitting to get there, it’s worthiness to be. And it is that, that’s a dialectic of that’s, that’s an integrity piece and holding that. I think that’s the bringing up con and happiness is a great segue then for me, because I think this is one of the most bullshitting words we have in our culture right now, which is, Oh God. And I usually hate it, but when I somehow across the Kantian edition, I was like, all right, I can now bring this term back. The Greeks have multiple terms for it, as they always do where we have one. I often feel like we’re four year olds with our clunky terms and the Greeks have these same thing with love. I mean, holy shit. Love and wisdom. We have one word, they have Sophia, they have the visas. Right. So anyways, so sort of the modern stuff on or the recent stuff on this seems to be going this way. Like I said, there’s a lot of conceptual confusion, but there’s a parsing that I think is emerging and to take happiness and to pull it apart from three things that we put together, success, subjective wellbeing and meaning in life. And they can all, and they are not identical because they can vary independently from each other. You do need a certain amount of success in order to have subjective wellbeing. Subjective wellbeing is a sense of the autonomy and competence and connectedness of the cell. It sort of solidifies the cell, right? That that that that that that’s what subjective wellbeing is. And if you don’t, if you’re in poverty or if you’re oppressed, right, if you don’t have enough success in your life, then you don’t have good subjective wellbeing. The thing is though, and this is what the research shows, once you get out of poverty, right, then huge changes in wealth and power only bring small changes in subjective wellbeing. So after a certain stage, success and subjective wellbeing peel apart from each other. Well, then you said, oh, then what ultimately matters is subjective wellbeing? No, because subjective wellbeing is not the same thing as meaning in life. Meaning in life is about ultimately mattering to an intelligible order that is greater than yourself. That’s why you can write. And so that’s why what goes down when you have a kid, subjective wellbeing. Why do people do it? Because meaning in life goes up. Right. And so what we have to understand is that when we’re proposing what you’re proposing, I’m proposing to you, Jordan, that when we say to people, look, you know, commit. Well, first of all, mattering to an intelligible order than greater than you, that is actually meaning in life. And joy is not the same thing as subjective wellbeing. Subjective wellbeing is the positive sense that yourself has been solidified and strengthened. Joy is the sense of losing yourself in something beyond yourself, like in awe and wonder. And what we have to understand, what we have to get people to see is, but you should. And this is, you know, the stuff I’m doing with the Epicureans in the morning Sanger classes. You have to prioritize these in the right way. You shouldn’t identify them and you have to prioritize them in the right way. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy in some ways. You’ve got to get enough success so that you’ve got enough subjective wellbeing. But you know what you ultimately really want? You ultimately want meaning in life because those other all those first two reliably go down with old age. And we many people think that’s why they’re terrified of old age, because they can reliably and accurately predict success and subjective wellbeing are going to go down. But, you know, if you measure old people, older people, they actually are much happier than us. How can that be? Because their meaning in life is going up tremendously because they have in general, we’re talking probabilistically, not individually, they have more wisdom and they have more sense of mattering to things beyond themselves. And so we have to pull the happy. This this notion we have of happiness is one of the most bullshitting things we have right now and we have to pull them apart. The babble around that, the seventh branch, the one with the red circle on that, that’s an analysis of what wellbeing is. That’s what John’s talking about. It’s like, how do we non equivocate on what the fuck do we mean by wellbeing? And a lot of what John said is it would be embedded in that analysis. But yeah, yeah. And make sure that what we seek is wellbeing is the argument. And then a rich analysis of what the components of wellbeing are. Sorry, I was my mind went a little bit of an Eddie, but I think it might be useful. So I was thinking about the fact of the good news. And then as we were talking, I was then thinking, oh, yeah, and there’s also bad news. So the good news is, is that like, wow, we’re really we’ve actually got some pretty seriously high quality stuff. There’s actually a lot of hard questions if you’re able to not bullshit yourself, not bullshit others and then move skillfully through clarity. We can we can make some good ground. The bad news is it’s really, really fucking hard to do brain surgery in the middle of an epileptic seizure. I’ve worked a couple of times at night with that basic realization, so I agree. Yeah, yeah. And this is where I often part company from my religious friends and and certain of my ideological friends, because I do not believe there’s a tea loss to history. I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t I don’t have that kind of faith. And and that’s why I’m also very suspicious of utopian visions, et cetera. So that’s where I would say to you, Jordan, that, yeah, doing it well, you’re having the epileptic seizure when when when like like myself, I’m just speaking for myself, but perhaps also for you guys. But when you don’t believe that there’s any inevitable tea loss, then it’s yeah, I think that’s why the discussion we’re all having about a reinventio of faith and reason and continuity of contact and wisdom is so important because. I guess for me, what else is there? What else is there that we can do? I agree with you, Jordan, it’s a race and there’s I I I actually think the probabilities are against us, but I think the moral argument is we’ve got to try our best and even if we fail, maybe we can light enough candles so that there’ll be enough light for the next group of people. That’s no that’s what I I like to rule in Albert Camus to play. I want to know how to be a saint without God, at least the every common conception of God. And so for me, that’s that’s how I think of it. It’s like, yes, it’s the probabilities are we’re going to lose. But the moral argument is, well, there’s we have to try our best with the best people that we can and with the best skills we have. And even if we fail, if we do a good enough job, then maybe we have sufficed enough, satisfied enough that we’ve lit enough candles. So there’s enough light for the next group of people. Well, and I would say I would say the same thing, but from the interior of that, which is if you’re operating in this way, what you discover is that there is no other way to operate. So I don’t have to imagine a T. Lewis, I don’t have to imagine a better future. All I have to do is act in the way that I know is the right way to act. And I will, in fact, do there’s a perfect isometry. I mean, perfect. They are identical. They are the same thing. They’re just looking at them from two different perspectives. I agree with that. I think that’s well said. And that to me, in McClendon in his book on the wisdom of vacation talks about, you know, the three degrees. You start with the Epicureans. That’s like primary school. Then you move into the high school. That’s the stoics. And then you move into university. That’s the neo-Platonists. But what you just said about that, that’s that’s that’s a very stoic thing, right? That, that, that, that, that, right. And yeah, so I agree with that. We’re fucked, guys. Let’s just go get drunk. I mean, you know, there it is. You know what? You were in this trajectory and yeah, I’m scared as shit. You know, but what you said, Jordan, and what you both said, I mean, what you’re now all of a sudden when you wake up in a particular way and you’re lying in a particular way, and it’s just unfolds in some ways. I mean, just because like the virtue, like Aristotle talked about in terms of you cultivate a particular kind of line of virtue and the structure essentially starts to unfold itself. This is Sockerson. This is the virtue of the structure. Sockerson is to have this. This, you know, this training of your Stanley’s landscaping so that you are you are tempted, who are tempted to the good. What is it? Sockerson? I don’t know. Yeah, it’s what it’s one of the cardinal virtues. And it’s you should probably know it then. It’s usually translated as moderation, but it doesn’t happen, right. Or temptations. So you’re tempted to the good. So you’re tempted to the good. Or moderation, but it doesn’t happen, right. Or temperance, which doesn’t capture it. In fact, many people have tried to argue that maybe the closest thing we now have in our culture for Sockerson is something closer like mindfulness. McGee argues that in his book. So I don’t translate it. Sockerson and Sockerson is in contrast in Cratia. And Cratia is, you know, Cratia, the most Cratia, the power of the people. And Cratia is to exert power on yourself. So this is when you’re restraining yourself. Don’t take the cake. Don’t take the cake. Right. But wait, Sockerson is to be just not, it’s to be naturally tempted to the good. Right. Right. This is the difference between the Kantian and Aristotle vision of morality. Right. I mean, Kant’s view, the deontological view is you have to cultivate the discipline to control the sin, essentially. And the strength of morality is the ability to regulate that, in essence. And the Aristotle view is to figure out a way to train the system so that they are aligned toward the virtue so that they are in harmony. That’s what I mean. And notice the weird aspirational nature of temptation. With four breaths out. When you’re tempted to do evil, who’s tempting you? It’s some aspect of you. And it’s aspirational, but it’s an aspiration that reciprocally narrows. But we can train aspiration that tempts us to reciprocal opening. That’s Sockerson. And if we crack the bullshit equation, right, to help people understand why their animalistic shit starts and then they can rationalize and then bullshit. And we can, you know, the ability to actually align that thing with insight seems that we can do better. Yeah. I think what you said a few minutes ago, really, I hadn’t put it, but putting those together, Sockerson and Stoicson, because it always bothered me that the Stoics said that what they wanted to do was, and Nietzsche, this pissed me off, that it was to, you know, to flow with nature. And it was like, wow, Nietzsche rags on. But what you just said, Jordan, right, if we get into a state where we are Sockerson, that we’re Sockersonic, right, we feel naturally aligned in ourselves and then we feel naturally aspirationally aligned to the good. And then that’s to always flow towards the good. And I think it just made, I just sort of, oh, that’s it. That’s what they’re talking about. That’s what they’re trying to put their finger on. And they use and people don’t get this because they think of Stoicism as this downward thing. The word, one of the words that’s most frequently used by the Stoics to describe what they’re after, and Lenin brings this out in his book, is joy. Stoicism is supposed to result in joy, not in crassium. But Sockersonic joy. Yeah, it’s funny, I feel like I could I could give Frederick a just a quick twist and he’d be cool because the to me, this metaphor is actually very simple. It’s like you just make it practical, like woodworking or his favorite sculpture. Sockerson is to have built a skillfulness of relationship with the object to be able to actually flow with its natural texture. Michelangelo nails it. Right. And you just say, OK, replace the stone with life, the whole of life. And that’s it. You’re done. It doesn’t. It’s not easy. Right. It’s a skillful relationship. It’s actually building wisdom, applying wisdom, building a the naturalness like that’s the problem. The problem is an assumption of a primordialness as opposed to a skillfulness. Yeah, it’s not the infant’s naturalness in relationship to nature. It’s the truly skillful, wise person’s naturalness. To have discovered a way of sort of co-creating with what nature is giving you. So you’re the artist’s masterfulness. That’s it. And that right. I mean, Joe, John, I mean, we go back to our 11th problem of consciousness blog and your analysis of the perspectival, phenomenological, participatory grip of self in relationship to the world when individuals have that’s transcendent experiences, right, is then coming into relation to the self and to the world and having a more fine groomed, flowing relationship with the stone, with life. It’s funny that we now enter we now and go move to the sculpting image because now we’ve graduated from Stoicism to Neoplatonism because that’s what’s Plotinus’s famous metaphor for his project of the of the of the Antigra, because he said you you you are basically a carved block of stone and you need to cut it. You need to carve away everything until you release the statue within. That was his chosen metaphor for describing this process. And so it’s deeply resonant with everything you just said, George. And also what you just said, Greg, about, you know, we now are talking about that Sockerson can come into a kind of intensification when people are having these awakening and transcending experiences very much. All right. Check this shit out. Watch this. So, Greg, taking this the systems of justification now drop drop in Brother Greg, who’s not present in this call, but he’s now present in a big way. So I’ve got my jazz trumpeter and my jazz trumpeter is playing, but he’s not cool, which is to say he’s hung up. He’s worried about whether his system of justification is being taken. Right. How well am I doing? He’s worried about what’s happening. Of course, he’s getting his own way and you can feel it right. It feels crunchy. It feels like it’s not there. It’s not loose. It’s not cool. And then you got this other guy. This other guy is cool, which is critical. Right. He’s on the one hand, he is non attached. Right. So we can bring in a little bit of the of the of the Eastern flair. He’s he’s so good with what he’s doing that he is no longer trying at all. And the effortlessness is part of the flood. Right. But it’s again, it’s not some random jackass who doesn’t know how to play the trumpet. Right. Right. That’s also not attached. Right. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about somebody for whom the skillfulness of flowing allows him to actually get out of his own way and let the thing do the thing it’s supposed to do without the least bit of concern for his interior or the other folks, which is a way of producing beautiful music. And then, of course, at every once in a while, he’ll stop. He’ll kind of look around and he’s like, everybody’s like, whoa, dude, that was awesome. It’s like, all right, I don’t know what just happened, but I’m going to keep working on that vibe because that’s where it’s at. Exactly. So and essentially then the mind three, that self-conscious mind three is sort of checking out and you’re just in a perspectival participatory groove at an inner subjective, usually an implicit, inner subjective way. But I think something else just came out of that. Right. It sounded to me, Jordan, I think that you’re talking about now that there’s there’s there’s two existential modes within the justification framework, there’s an impractical mode, which is the one that we have taken as being paradigmatic. But there’s also a soft, pristine, yep, yeah, mode of justification. Yeah, no, it’s we’re trying to seek that. Right. Yeah. If we open up and we find that and you’re light and the shine light through and there’s a pathway. Yeah. And the cool thing is you can actually, you know, when you’re there, like there’s a way of actually being there and feeling that like, you know, some basketball players will talk about notion of like when they’re in the zone. Yeah. They can be aware of being in the zone. Yeah. You got to be real careful. Yeah. You got to be real careful. Right. You give yourself too much of that energy and all of a sudden you’re jacked up out. Right. You basically want that observer function, that narrative. All right. I’m just well, this guy’s fucking on fire. Yeah, exactly. You’re just like checking out going, wow, I can’t watch in this thing. But that imagine that now being truly in the collective. Right. Right. And can you imagine the transformation between the chaos, the epileptic chaos and the collective insanity of psychosis that we’re seeing versus the. Yeah, yeah, I can. I can’t imagine that fingers crossed. Right. It’s interesting how it circles back in a way, because I mean, in one sense, we’re talking upwards about sort of theologos and distributed cognition. But when we get when you get that, when you get collective flow, right, you also get an altered state of consciousness. And so it also that’s what I meant about it reverberates back into. And many people go, I didn’t know. And they have this weird anamnesis experience that they just, you know, I’ve never been here. They say this paradoxical thing. I’ve never been here before, but this is truly who I am, which is like, what? Right. But that to me, that’s the hallmark of somebody trying to articulate that they just want an aspirational burst. Right. And some huge way. Right. They felt the alignment. And then, of course, the crucial thing is to say, yes, don’t throw words at it, man. Right. But don’t do that. That’s that’s just going to make a mess of things like this. Just let it be. All right. Well, gentlemen, I think this is where we should let it be. This is a perfect time. Let it be. All right. That was great jazzing. I really enjoyed it. So if you guys want this for your channel or whatever, let me know. I’m going to upload it at some point on Voices with Verbeke, because I think this was a gem. We just covered so much and it just took off in so many ways. Yeah, do actually send me the raw link. I will actually upload it as its own object on my channel because I’m interested in seeing I think that actually creates a different. Yeah, yeah, it does. We the one I just did the one I just did with with Paul and Jonathan. We’ve released it on all three channels. And yeah, you get a deal. Oh, you get a meta deal. Logos thing happening. It’s really cool. I’m setting up my channel, so I’ll be adding it whenever. So, yeah, well, when you know. Yeah, I’ll send you the file. Yeah, that’s good. I really enjoyed it, guys. Yeah, that’s a lot of fun. Take care, guys.