https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QvLSkzes_II
Okay, well I’m delighted to be here today with these three eminent gentlemen, all three accomplished gentlemen, and we are going to have a wonderful conversation today. I’m just going to do a brief introduction and then I’d kind of like to clarify some terms because I know that both Dr. Rebakey and Dr. Wolfgang Smith have terminology that they use that is specific to their work. So joining me today is Dr. Richard Smith, who is president of the Philosophia Foundation, which is working to proliferate the ideas of Dr. Wolfgang Smith. Dr. Richard Smith received his degree in math at Berkeley and a PhD in system science and decision making under uncertainty. And Dr. John Rebakey has a master’s and a PhD in philosophy and a bachelor’s specializing in cognitive science and all of these are from the University of Toronto. He’s also the maker of the wonderful 50 episode series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and a recipient of numerous academic awards. Dr. Wolfgang Smith graduated at the age of 18 from Cornell University with a BA in philosophy, physics and mathematics. And he also received an MS in physics from Purdue and a PhD in mathematics from Columbia. He was then a mathematics professor at MIT, UCLA and Oregon State University and did research in the field of differential geometry and has written numerous books, including Cosmos and Transcendence, Vertical Causation and his newest book, Physics, a Science in Quest of an Ontology, which hopefully will answer John’s question, which he raised when we had the conversation with Michael Levin when John said that he’s searching for an ontology of causation. So hopefully we’ll be able to get into that. My guests both have a common interest in James J. Gibson and his groundbreaking work on what it means to see. And I want to get into that in more depth. But I wondered if first I could have each of you just do a little bit of definition of terms. So if we could start with Wolfgang Smith, could you describe for us what you mean when you talk about the physical and the corporeal and how that relates to the three realms that you talk about, the eviternal, the intermediary and the corporeal. So what is the difference between physical and corporeal in your ontology? Well, the difference is really quite simple. And actually, I would say that James Gibson is really the man who enables us to understand this difference in depth. Because the word physical has received its contemporary connotation from the physics world, the physicists. That’s what they deal with. The physicists deal with the physical. And as we all know, they conceive of this in terms of some kind of a mechanism. In other words, the physical is a domain owning only quantities. There are no qualities, nothing other than sheer quantities in the physical. And the word corporeal, as I have used it in my writings, is, as it were, the counterpart to the physical. It is the world as we perceive it through our five senses. And this is based upon the ontological assumption, if you will, that what we perceive is not a res corgetans, it’s not something in our brain, but it is actually the real exterior world. And so, quite a long time ago, I convinced myself that in addition to the physical realm, which is all the physicists see and for the most part believes in, in addition to this is the corporeal, which is something greater than the physical. The physical is, so to speak, a part of it. And let me just mention that on this basis, I wrote a book in 1995 called The Quantum Enigma, which claims at least to solve a very famous problem which has occupied the world of physics for about a century, namely the so-called measurement problem of quantum mechanics. So for about ever since quantum mechanics was conceived, the physicists have been puzzled by the fact that in the act of measuring a quantum object, a quantum variable, the mathematical structure, say as a wave function, collapses in an instant and yields a number which is not there to begin with. It’s not there before you do the measurement. And this is obviously very mystifying. And physicists, as I say, have been trying for close to a century to resolve that puzzle. And it seems to me, after more than a hundred years of failure, that they really can’t do it on the basis of physics. And the reason they can’t do it on the basis of physics is because this corporeal realm, as distinguished from the physical, enters the picture per force. So this is the key to the resolution of the measurement problem. And getting back to James Gibson, we see that, in a sense, he is the scientist who has given us that key. Okay. So again, the corporeal enters into the measurement problem through the measuring device, right? Yes, I should add very quickly that if you pursue this line of thought, you arrive inevitably at the conclusion that every corporeal object XA determines a corresponding physical object SX, which you might think of as a kind of part of X. It is what remains of X when you look at it through the lenses of the physicist. That’s great. That gives us a good start. And so, John, the terms that I thought might be helpful to define here for Wolfgang and Richard and for our other viewers is that you’ve made fairly famous this term, relevance realization. And you’ve also talked a lot about the problem of intelligibility and then your four Ps of knowing. So I thought if you could describe for us what you mean by relevance realization and your four Ps of knowing. And then after you do that, then I’ve got some questions for you too about James Gibson. Sure, I’ll do that. Although I think also the stuff I talk about with emergence and emanation is very relevant. Add that in there then. So relevance realization, this is in many different domains in which we attempt to study cognition and intelligence. We bump up against this problem that we can’t check all of the information available either in memory or in the environment. We have to select for that and we can’t select it by some algorithmic search where we check all the information and evaluate it because that would be combinatorially explosive. So what we do is we actually ignore large amounts of information and we don’t do this in a merely arbitrary. We do it neither in an algorithmic nor an arbitrary manner. And we do this when we’re paying attention, when we’re consulting memory, when we’re considering sequence of actions, etc. And that this is a very central notion and yet it is typically not centrally addressed within cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence. Although it’s now coming to the fore in artificial intelligence and some of the work that I’ve been able to recently publish. And so for me, and this is where Gibson comes in directly, relevance realization, the finding things relevant is not a subjective property of the organism nor is it an objective feature of the world. It is an affordance of cognitive interaction. You can hear the notion from Gibson right there. And what that means is that it is a real relation that is neither objective nor subjective. But what I said, all transjective, it’s actually more primordial because it makes their intelligible relation between subjectivity and objectivity possible. And that this is taking place at multiple levels within an organism. There’s the participatory level, which is a level at which the organism and the environment are being co-shaped at multiple levels, the physical level, the biological level, the cultural level, so that affordances open up between them. There’s the perspectival level in which human beings are doing salience landscaping. And they’re rendering some of those affordances salient to them so that they have a situational presence and awareness. That situational presence and awareness tells them which skills to activate or acquire. That’s their procedural knowing. And only after they have that know how do they actually have the capacity to move propositions around in an inferential manner. And part of the thesis is our culture has been obsessed with the propositional knowing at the expense of the procedural, the perspectival and the participatory. And that has significantly undermined our capacity for understanding how things like relevance realization and how intelligibility itself is actually generated. So I’m deeply in debt as most of what’s called 4E cognitive science are to Gibson because of this notion of non-propositional, non-computational aspects of cognition that ground out in affordances that co-emerge between the organism and the environment. Each one of these kinds of knowing has a kind of memory associated with it. Propositional has semantic, procedural has procedural, perspectival has episodic, participatory has autonoetic, the knowledge of the memory that we call ourself. And what we’ve lost is because of that propositional tyranny, we’ve lost how to properly align and organize those together. So we have a very truncated notion of rationality. We’ve reduced it to computation and we’ve lost a lot of what ancient philosophies saw as crucial in the cultivation of wisdom. When I take that basic cognitive framework, which is this very dynamic bottom-up, top-down way in which outside and grounding propositionality, which intelligibility is co-created with the world, I come to the conclusion that either that bottom-up, top-down dynamism has nothing to do with ontological structure in which case if there is no way in which that fundamental grammar of intelligibility creation touches the structure of ontology, then we’re doomed to skepticism and solipsism. And so I propose that it’s more likely, as the neoplatonic tradition held, that reality is also structured in a similar way. Things emerging, the return to the one, things emanating from the one, and that we need an ontology that will comport with the fundamental structures and grammar of our cognition, or as I said, we’re locked in skepticism and solipsism. And towards that end, I’ve argued something convergent with Wolfgang that I think it’s convergent. I’ve argued that we need an ontology in which science and the activity of science and the activity of scientists is properly ontologically real or else we’re in the condition that we’re claiming this level at which we’re doing science is somehow not real or epiphenomenal, but it’s somehow giving us real access to the fundamental deep reality. And that’s just a performative contradiction. That makes ultimately no sense. We need an ontology in which measurement, argument, debate, et cetera, all are real and science is properly real so that the conclusions derived from scientific practice would also therefore be real. And so I propose that we need something like a neoplatonic ontology in order to address that issue. Could I clarify one thing there, John? At the end, when you were talking about that we need a science that is properly ontologically real, when you use that word real, are you referring to something similar to what Wolfgang was saying when he said corporeal? I would know. I don’t think from what I’ve read of Wolfgang, I don’t think he equates real with corporeal. I think he equates real with because there’s the tripart cosmos, right? And I take it that all those levels are real. So I’m not doing that. I’m not saying that real equals corporeal. But I am saying the reverse. I’m saying what he’s calling the corporeal has to be real or we fall into all of these performative contradictions. And we also we lose conformity to reality. Right. And that and we’ve tried we’ve tried all kinds of representational strategies to try and get back from, you know, being locked inside the inner cabinet that lock at us, right, and getting postcards from the world. And we’re trying to find out how we can assemble them so that we know what the world is. That just won’t work. We get locked into skepticism and solipsism. What I take real to be is something like an inexhaustible intelligibility. So that something is real to us if we can continually find out more about it. And in a way that is intelligible and inexhaustible to us. And so I take it that the ultimate source of realness is some kind of inexhaustible source of intelligibility. I find this very interesting, if I may jump in. Very fascinating, in fact, because it seems to me that we are both actually Platonists. I am. I’m an avowed Neoclassic. That’s what we are. Yes. From what you have just said, it makes me realize all the more vividly that the basic fact about Platonism is that what we call the intelligible or the intellectual, or sometimes even the mental, is in essence the source of all of our ontology. In other words, being comes from what I call the eternal realm, which is what in popularly is called the realm of ideas. But in order to comprehend what this really means, one needs to very, very seriously study the ideas of Plato, not through the lenses of a contemporary philosophy department, but going back as far as possible to the earlier writers who I think had a more living understanding of what this is about. I agree, although in about the mid-90s, the third-wave Platonism with Gonzalez and Hyland and Kirkland and a bunch of others were arguing for the kind of Platonism that are now arguing for the kind of Platonism that I’m arguing for. They, of course, are pitting themselves against the mainstream academic interpretation of Plato, but even on scholastic grounds, they are winning round again and again and again. For me, that’s very encouraging. I think that, and work by Berman and others, the Platonic objects of science, more and more people are arguing that science is actually better grounded in Platonism than it is in Cartesianism. I can say specifically for cognitive science, that’s exactly the case. A lot of people wouldn’t quite recognize it because they’ve been jaundiced by that academic view of Platonism where Plato is all about these arguments that we abstract from the dialogues and all that sort of stuff. More and more people are seeing the deep convergence between 4E cognitive science and a neoplatonic explanation of intelligibility and its fundamental relationship to realness. John, just for those who aren’t familiar, could you go over very quickly the 4E cognitive science? Sure. The 4E cognitive science is that the proposal that cognition is not computation in the head. The proposal is that cognition is inherently embodied, that our embodiment matters. This isn’t just Cartesian play, but it actually matters. Being a living being matters to us being a rational being. There’s a deep continuity between being a cognitive agent and being a biological agent. In that way, it’s reminiscent of Aristotle in very central ways. It’s embodied, it’s enacted. This is right out of Gibson. It’s enacted. It’s not something. It’s the interaction between you and the environment that actually creates the affordances, the intelligibility, the sense-making. It’s embedded. We are deeply connected, dynamically coupled to our environment. So you have to look at cognition in a much more biological lens than a physics lens. You don’t use physical analogies like billiard balls hitting or things like that. You say, well, look at organisms. They’re involved in niche construction. They shape the environment and the environment shapes them. We have to look at the organism-environment dynamic. That’s the embedded notion. Then extended. Extended is this idea that most of our cognition is actually not done individually, but it’s done in and through and in concert with other people and various kinds of information processing technology, literacy, etc. For example, we can have this conversation because there are myriad of human beings creating these products, running the electric grid, managing, blah, blah, blah. All of that has to do with making the clothing that I’m wearing, etc. All of that has to be constantly in place in order for us to solve most of our problems. Those are the four E’s. I think there are two more E’s that I’m trying to advocate to get added. Cognition is inherently emotional, not in the romantic sense of hysteria, but in the sense that relevance realization is not cold calculation. Relevance realization is why you care about this information and you don’t care about that information. Why it grabs your attention. Why it motivates your arousal. That’s how cognition is inherently emotional. That lines up with other work by DeMazio and others. Then exactive. This is the idea that what often happens is the brain, the embodied embedded brain, I’ll just say brain for short, accepts processes that emerge for one kind of problem into another. Just to give a quick biological example, the tongue has been accepted for speech, although most organisms don’t use the tongue for speech, etc. We have good reason, for example, that the part of the system, not the part in your brain that is handling your sensory motor navigation in the physical world gets exacted into how you move around, look at the language I’m using, move around the conceptual world or up or down. We use all of that. Are you following, by the way, what I’m saying? I’m almost getting to the end of it. We use all of that in order to navigate conceptual space. I would advocate adding in those two other keys. This is a very different model from the Cartesian model of computation in the head. It’s deeply indebted to Gibson, to Marleau-Ponty, to aspects of phenomenology, especially post-Hydagarian phenomenology, etc. Well, that brings me back to one of the things I wanted to say about Gibson. This is primarily so that I can get my thought in there and then I’m just going to let you guys talk about it. I was asking myself, why is it so important what Gibson did? It seems to me that Gibson grounded seeing in the objectivity of ecological perception. John, what you were talking about when you were saying that we are embedded, we are coupled within the environment, which implies that there is an environment to be coupled within. It is not just inside our heads. Gibson studies showed that we are all seeing the same world. Because if my perception of red is different than your perception of red, then a lot of scientists would say there is actually no red. It’s just neurons firing in the brain. But Gibson’s work indicated that there actually is a world and that there actually are qualities. From Gibson’s work on seeing, we can recognize that objects actually exist in space. They have color, texture, and the apple is objectively red regardless of who is seeing it. But why is this important? I got to thinking about C.S. Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. If we are trying to believe that everything we experience is just inside our heads, colors or fragrances or ideas of what is sublime, we no longer inhabit a common world. This leads to relativism and postmodernism and nihilism and ultimately, the control of some men by other men. So I guess that’s the direction I was hoping we could go, is that you could each talk about what you learned from Gibson and how it affects your work and why you think it’s important. So I go first? Is that okay? Or do you want to go first Wolfgang? Well, I wanted to say something, John, about what you have just explained a few minutes ago. Looking at this from my own, I would say Platonist point of view, I would say that you have elevated the discussion of the issues that interest you from the corporeal plane, where for a long time the discussion has been centered because we have an ontology which believes in a physical mechanism with nothing much beyond that. So you have elevated it from that level to a level which includes what I call the intermediary or psychic realm in the picture. But my question is, from my Platonist point of view, the third plane that enters the picture and in fact in a primary way, and that is, you can call it by various names, I like to call it the eternal realm because it is a realm which transcends the domain of time. There is no time in that eternal realm and this is really where things originate and this is really the realm from which things get their reality or more precisely their being. So my question is, assuming that I have not misinterpreted you, I hope I have not, my question then is, do you acknowledge this difference between what I call the intermediary or psychic realm and the eternal and does that enter into your considerations? Very much so. So I was answering the other question wearing my hat as sort of a representative of a lot of cognitive science, for e-cognitive science. Now I can answer on my own behalf, which is I very much, I mean, I very much think there is something that corresponds, you’ll understand my hesitancy in a second, to what Platonist called the one, and that the source of intelligibility is not itself intelligible. The source of being is not itself any kind of being and in that sense there is a, it is a no-thingness and therefore it is not properly understood under the categories of time and space. One of the difficulties in our culture is we’ve lost the ability to discern that superlative no-thingness with the nothingness that is at the bottom of nihilism and part of our lack of wisdom is we can no, we no longer have the tools by which we can adequately distinguish between those and I think that’s one of the driving forces, sort of the ontological forces of nihilism in our culture, but I very much acknowledge that and for me that is not only something I acknowledge like you do out of sort of a reflection on science and intelligibility, it’s also something that I, it has been disclosed to me in three decades of meditative and contemplative practice and so for me the two are deeply resonant and mutually supportive. So that is something that is actually in which I have, I place a large degree of epistemic confidence very much. Is that an adequate answer Wolfgang or? Well yes, I find it extremely interesting and I hope I’m not misunderstanding you but is it, would it be correct to paraphrase your position as acknowledging what I call the three levels, the eternal, the psychic or intermediary and then the corporeal as the sphere that you in concert with James Gibson are so to speak rediscovering in your own sphere of interest? Well I mean I was privileged to take a course, an entire course on the ecological approach to visual perception with one of Gibson’s primary proteases John Kennedy and so I learned this very deeply. Now the consequences of that are still rumbling through me and that was a while quite a while ago but for me and this is why I would maybe push back a little bit on how Mary characterized what Gibson did. For me what has eventually crystallized is that Gibson undermined in a very powerful way nominalism the idea that reality is ultimately based on individual spatial temporal objects and that all relations between them are just mind-dependent projection and you know and you can have the Kantian version and Gibson basically undermines that. He says no no there are real affordances are real relations they’re not in the object they’re not in the subject that’s why I hesitate to call it objective I don’t know that’s quite the right word because he’s trying to say no no because affordances aren’t object centered and in that sense they aren’t objective they that they to my mind they bind the subject and the object together and they undermine nominalism and they say there are real relations. Once you get the idea of real relations you are starting to move towards the idos the platonic idos the I don’t want to use the word form because whenever people hear that they think shape and that’s not what I’m talking about right and so for me but I have to tell you that that’s not something I mean I did well in John’s course so John and I went on and published work together but this has been percolating through me and it drew me in to 4e cogsi but that’s how it came to fruition for me it was not so much that it put me into the vertical ascent because I had an independent pathway in which I was invested and I mean spiritually practices in the Socratic Neoplatonic pathway but what it did for me right so it wasn’t so much that vertical it was the undermining of nominalism and that opened things up for me and it opened up the possibility that I could integrate the phenomenological and and and sapiential transformations I saw in me and other people with a proposal about you know an ontology that explained intelligibility and the actual reality of science that’s how gibson worked for me sorry that was long but I was trying to answer that really good question so for me I don’t I typically don’t call affordances objective because the word objective to me is is a holdover of the very normalist position that says what reality is is objects it’s very good I like what you say very very good point yeah and the that undermining of nominalism right of you called propositional tyranny earlier that’s so key right because that is it opens the door to a new ontology yes in the beginning you talked about an ontology that’s consistent with science right and we’ve also like wolfgang has introduced the word being and being is actually what science denies yes so when we get to kind of what’s real and what’s not real is science dealing with the real science is not entirely dealing with the real because science has um this is a term from eric vogelin decapitated being right um by focusing on quantity on extension it has um really denied being and it never addresses being at all and then presumes that it can go back and you know eventually kind of recapture being from the ground up with all of its uh observations that’s because science has misunderstood itself as what can be derived what we can computed from some of its findings and its main claims and not paid attention to what is being presupposed and needs to be contemplated it right we need to science isn’t just what’s derivable from our physics it’s what is presupposed I would argue by our physics in a deep and profound way and so like again but for me it’s the nominalism and the computationalism that’s and wolfgang you do this in your book we’re only looking down we’re only looking down we’re only looking down and right but the ancients don’t do that right they say what must the world be like such that it’s intelligible and they’re willing to look up and down at the same time and for me that’s why it continues to be an inspiration for me I’m saying that too I hope that coheres with what you said and that’s my one sentence summary of wolfgang’s work is the measure cannot be measured well ultimately that has to be the case it ultimately has to be the if to be and to be understood is to one that which ones right can’t be grasped by anything that has any any difference or distinction within it this is platinus’s famous argument yeah and I take it that that’s ultimately the case if we claimed to measure the one it can’t possibly be the one and then the last thing I just wanted to get in is Karen’s comment about the control of some men by other men right which is where we’ve gotten to with science and with nominalism right there is this situation now culturally where you know there is no reality certain people are able to define the truth and define reality and that ultimately leads to nobody really having control over the truth right and now we’ve kind of returned to this seems to me kind of the very situation that science set out to overcome which was other people telling you what the truth was right and now scientists are trying to tell us what the truth is even though they say there’s no truth the vertical dimension cannot be excluded from the project of working out intelligibility and if we exclude it from the foreground it is going to come back in you know neurotic ways right from the background absolutely I yeah I think there’s a deep connection between what I talk about the meaning crisis and the loss of a proper understanding of the vertical and the horizontal and the relationship between them I talk again I was again not to take anything you have provenance you published on this before I did but I’ve been talking in the work I do on dialectic into the logos about the vertical dimensions of ratio the horizontal when we’re dialoguing with each other and that what we want is to properly integrate and coordinate them together would you agree john that what Gibson finally did is he has in principle saved our generation from Cartesianism he has broken the bifurcationist axiom which has bedeviled our civilization since the 17th century I mean I would put him in with a bunch of other people which are people that are you know important in for e-cognitive science I think Marlo Ponti does tremendous work on trying to overcome the bifurcation I think Whitehead he even uses the term is doing a lot to try and overcome the bifurcation so I think there’s there’s been a whole group of people that in different domains and what’s happening now is they’re all being sort of networked together by this emerging community let me ask you john how much is James Gibson recognized say in the contemporary academic community hugely hugely the many people will will say that well within cognitive science not so much in psychology but in cognitive science especially for e-cognitive science he’s a titan he has a status like Piaget has for developmental psychology because many people argue that the notion of affordances the notion of that that perception is sensory motor inaction are core are core things we have to get if we’re going to understand cognition but isn’t it still true that in the academic world and specifically in the field of cognitive psychology the so-called visual image theory of perception is still the standard if you yeah yeah it is and so please allow me the distinct I teach in both so I’m allowed to talk about both right please allow me though the distinction between cognitive science and cognitive psychology I agree that that is still the prominent thing in cognitive psychology and and the whole representationalist framework and one of the things I do is I try to use for e-cognitive science that has an ongoing critique of the representationalist and the Cartesian framework and I try to and I’ve been hired to do that so I’m not doing anything to seem duplicitous to bring that into the courses I teach on cognitive psychology and I mean I’ve had long-standing success with my students and they go on to excellent graduate programs and if it’s not bragging I’m now getting a lot of success in getting stuff published in important journals but to your point for a long time I was looked at like what’s he doing what’s he kind of thing so yeah but I think I have good reason to believe that I’m participating in a real change of that computationalist representationalist straight jacket. Would it be true to say that even now a lot of people are getting degrees in cognitive psychology and they think that when I look out and see the external world what I’m actually seeing has to do with neurons firing in the brain. Isn’t that view still more or less a standard? That is still the standard view although I would point out that they are involved in the performative contradiction that I was talking about earlier because they don’t think the charts they’re reading and the computer screen that is giving them the data they’re using in their experiments is just neuronal firing they think it’s somehow real and capturing something about some aspect of the world that’s real and of course I try to constantly well not constantly frequently point that out that we’re involved in a tremendous amount of incoherence in how this picture I’ve been arguing that since my thesis in 97 so I can say I’ve been trying to challenge that representational straight jacket for quite some time now but do most people still get it still get their degrees well within that framework yes yes but that like what I can say is there are many many people who are getting PhDs in cognitive science who are challenging that framework I can also say that I think it would be wonderful John if you could lecture the physics community because they are still basing the entire world view on the premise that the world we perceive is a an ens cogitans the thing of the mind what this enormous breakthrough that Gibson has in principle achieved has still not penetrated into the physics world I can tell you that with complete assurance I find that very odd because you know Neoplatonism was playing a huge role in the scientific revolution and you know John Spencer and others have pointed out it it also played a huge role in the scientific revolution of the early 20th century and he documents this quite well at times and so it’s odd that that history keeps getting forgotten when when physicists I’m sorry like they look they are willing to do without batting an eye you know speculative ontology and propose entities that cannot possibly be empirically validated multiverses and you know all kinds of electrons moving backwards through time how would we possibly test that things like and yet and yet when you say well could you conceive of there being you know real patterns that are real sort of constraints on possibility that are as important as the causal relationship between events they go no no no and I find that perplexing I don’t know like and I’m not trying to besmirch anybody’s character I find it perplexing because it’s like well you stopped being sort of Newtonian physicists a long time ago you do metaphysics even if you won’t call it that and why not do it well and explicitly and connected to a good history then just do it individually and implicitly I find that I find that perplexing I’d add beyond perplexing problematic and culturally um devastating in my I have in my writings many times drawn attention to the fact what I believe is the fact namely that most physicists getting back to the physicists for a moment most physicists do not realize that they are making a metaphysical or ontological assumption in the form of what Whitehead calls bifurcation yes they think it’s this is simply the way it is it’s as obvious as two plus two equals four and in fact if you ever try to explain to a physicist what Whitehead calls bifurcation and explain to him that this idea entered the picture in the 17th century and it has changed our world you’ll find that he won’t know what you’re talking about I speak from experience so what’s it and I believe you by the way so what I’m now saying is not a challenge so I go through that history and awakening from the meeting crisis in detail and what’s been interesting to me is the number of PhD students in physics that have appreciated that argument and have commented and let me know about that which gives me some hope that it’s possible that that it’s possible that it is possible perhaps we people need to confront this material earlier on in their graduate career before maybe they’re ensconced or something but like I can say that back to you Wolfgang that has happened and it’s happened multiple times that when I you know when I go through and I say well look what happens you get anomalism and then you get you know all that you get what happens you get Descartes and the bifurcation and that looks and I try to say look at how this this isn’t natural this came at a particular historical point for historical reasons and here’s all the problems with it etc and like I said I get a lot of these students graduate students in physics who say well I really appreciated this thank you for doing that so What do you say John is very very encouraging and in a way I agree with you to the extent that I have knowledge of in this sphere because I do believe that this age in which we are still confined in the large scale of things namely the the rationalism that came into being during the 17th century and has given birth to modern science as we know it which is based upon bifurcation I believe that this is coming to an end and people like yourself John are making it happen in other words you what you’re saying belongs much more to the future than to the past Well I hope because I’m getting I’m getting towards the end of my academic career so I hope I hope that’s true yeah I I I think that’s I think I hope that’s right that’s where I’m placing my epistemic bets I mean and it’s interesting how figures that leave I I I am I’m a deep fan of Spinoza because Spinoza saw I mean he knew Descartes worked better than most and yet he saw the bifurcation and he tries to address it and he tries to stitch it back into the project of blessedness and wisdom that’s why the work is called the ethics not the physics and he and he has this Gantian to Ativa which is this mystical you see the hole in the parts and the parts and all the hole and and and what’s interesting is Spinoza is going through a revival right now and I don’t think that’s coincidence and what’s particularly interesting is I was I had the great pleasure to talk to Claire Carlisle who wrote one of the best books ever I’ve ever read on Spinoza and nobody had ever written a book with this title Spinoza’s Religion and she talks about how you can really and it’s a beautifully written book you have to understand Spinoza as belonging to the entire tradition of participation in God and that how he’s trying to get this back into the Cartesian framework before it strangles off that tradition and I think it’s a beautiful book but I she couldn’t not not and this is not besmirching her excellent talent and she’s a gifted writer but I don’t think she she could have got that book published 12 years ago I don’t think it would have been published the fact that you have all these books published on Spinoza and I read many of them and not think about it all that time and nobody writes a book Spinoza’s Religion right that’s just so telling in fact if I’m not mistaken Spinoza has been somewhat ignored yes the last 100 years yes very much so he’s been ignored and more than ignored he’s he’s been ignored and condemned in various ways but now that’s coming back to the coming back to the fore and I’m encouraged by I’m encouraged by things like that I so you do you too John you feel that we are approaching a turning point in our culture we’re at the end of a of an era what René Génon termed the reign of quantity so this reign of quantity is coming to an end I I think we are at a kairos I think the meaning crisis and there’s lots of people you know writing convergent with this has exhausted a particular that the framework we’ve been in and we are at a kairos and I’m using this the way Paul Tellick uses it right we we are a point of criticality in which a major turning can occur and that’s of course has tremendous negative potential but when a system is critical in this fashion when it’s losing its structure it’s also possible for individuals to make a difference they can’t otherwise make when the social structure is very stable so we have this kairos opportunity and I am deeply invested in it so in addition to my academic hat I wear two other hats that I didn’t even conceive I would be wearing one is I try to help people develop ecologies of practices for bringing about fundamental transformation and then I’m also doing work trying to get all these emerging communities it right one of them is this little corner of the internet and others are Rafe Kelly’s you know and trying to get these communities into a community of communities I was just down in Vermont at the the Maple Monastic Academy trying to get that to happen to try and build a viable subculture so yes I I am deeply invested even beyond an academic dimensions in trying to clarify and direct the kairos as best as possible well I wish you the best of luck John nothing is more important than that well I have a lot of good friends and colleagues there’s Mary and you know and John John John as much as I appreciate the the uh the nomination I’m Karen not Mary oh Karen I’m sorry Karen sorry so um since Wolfgang has asked you a lot of questions John I wonder if you have a question you might like to ask Wolfgang from your reading of his book can can I just say one thing before sure just to put a pin in something that I really want to put a pin in and celebrate which is the idea this that Gibson has um is the death of nominalism and representationalism that is such a liberating event it’s it’s uh epoch right we’ve been trapped in this nominalism and representationalism and rationalism for hundreds of years I think it’s led to the crisis the cultural crisis that we’re in the meaning crisis that we’re in so to recognize that um is so it’s such a big deal that um I just I thank you both for helping to make that so clear and I think it is it’s such a liberating thing for so many people and for our culture that uh I just wanted to really call attention to it well thank you I agree with that completely yeah yeah Karen I wanted to apologize that’s okay John well you know what’s going through my mind as I see you I’m thinking of Mary yeah I know that’s that’s why I came out uh and you you had many conversations with Mary so um and who is Mary okay so Mary Cohen uh was a member of our little corner of the internet and she did many wonderful um conversations with John and with others and she had her own youtube channel she was a brilliant thinker and she passed away recently and we lost her so we were watching uh you and Mary recently I guess with John and Mary and a young man JP Marceau JP Marceau yeah yeah yeah do I have any questions for Wolfgang is that what we’re asking you yes based on your reading of his book yeah you’re reading vertical ascent well yeah that’s the one that called out to me because I’m all about an agagé right and I talk about an agagé a lot and that’s the vertical ascent it’s the ascent out of the cave but also the return right uh you right and DC Schindler in Plato’s critique of impure reason makes a very good argument for that um I guess what I would ask Wolfgang is uh so for me and this is you know this is knowledge is only a component of virtue and wisdom and so for me I’ve been doing both scientific work and I published on it but also experimental participation where you know I’ve been teaching things to people and practicing things um I’m wondering what Wolfgang thinks about the kind of practices that human beings should be engaging in in order to facilitate and I think I’m going to use this word you know really strongly the proper contemplation of the vertical ascent right and so theorizing is to my mind not ultimate it’s necessary uh but there are other things that people need to be doing if this is going to be deeply and transformatively realized and not just taken into a conceptual memory bank do you know what I mean Wolfgang and so what that’s a very vital question and I must tell you John I am by nature and perhaps by education too by background by education I don’t mean anything connected with the universities that’s not where you get education so education in my sense has also predisposed me towards a very traditionalist understanding of these things I feel that wisdom is not something we or anyone can invent it has been given to mankind ages ago and in a certain sense when it comes to the things that are really important I would say that I see things in the very opposite way of the modern person who gets his wisdom from the universities in the sense that I regard the ancient schools as far deeper and more normative than the later ones for example I don’t think that you can point to uh philosophies of the modern era as remotely on the same of the same caliber or level or depth perception as what you find say in Platonism when it is properly understood and incidentally let me mention in this connection that I regard it as utterly impossible for a contemporary man to simply get by the dialogues of Plato read them and understand what is going on that’s yeah I agree with that impossible very deeply very deeply in fact I am lucky I in my young years I managed to acquire the complete works of Plato translated by Thomas Taylor and I have his 1804 edition the complete works in fact I was working on something this morning I don’t know if I can display that do you see anything on your you’re holding the your hand is in there but it flipped over yeah that you open up the open it up oh I’m sorry I’m sorry I wanted to show you this page yes that’s the works of Plato yes that’s the 1804 edition of Plato’s of Plato’s works and the valuable thing is the commentary of this 18th century English Platonist called Thomas Taylor called Thomas Taylor who was ignored during his lifetime he made a living as a bank clerk but he translated not only Plato but the neo-Platonists and most importantly his commentaries open up an entirely new way of understanding these ancient books so I’m now turning to Thomas Taylor’s interpretation of the Timaeus to learn a little bit about how the ancients really conceived of this universe and incidentally I’m just writing a paper on that one of the things that I find fascinating is that the Timaeus if you really understand it correctly and as I’m sure Thomas Taylor does you find that the Timaeus actually explains the ontological basis for what we know as the Ptolemaic astronomy this division the tripartite division of the integral cosmos repeats itself so to speak or is present iconically you could also say on the corporeal level itself so in other words the universe that we see through our telescopes turns out according to the Timaeus to be in truth Ptolemaic which means that it breaks into its ideal sphere so-called fixed stars yes the earth is at the center that’s another that could occupy us for a whole lecture in its own right and then between the two between the stellar realm and the terrestrial there is an annular region known as the planetary and this is not the invention of Ptolemus or anyone in fact but it is it is it is an ancient truth which the Pythagoreans and Platonists were still so to speak comprehending they did not invent that either they expressed it and I believe that this tripartition is simply a fact it’s not anybody’s theory it’s simply a fact and incidentally just to close that subject if you believe that you’ve got your work cut out for you because it means that you need to write many books to explain to the contemporary mind how notwithstanding what we call the facts of astronomy and all that that ancient model if you will is still definitive thank you thank you for that Wolfgang we seem to have lost John momentarily I’m not sure if if he just lost connectivity and we’ll maybe be back in a moment but but while we’re waiting whether to see whether John is able to come back I wanted to just read something from your one of your books Wolfgang that I thought was so meaningful and I think it connects up to what you’ve just been saying the things of nature point beyond themselves though they be corporeal they speak of incorporeal realms they are symbols there’s an analogic correspondence between the different planes and then you go on to say that a radical change has taken place in man’s perception of himself according to ancient belief there is a symbolic correspondence between the cosmos in its entirety and man the theomorphic creature who recapitulates the macrocosm within himself no doubt the reason for this centrality is that man having been made image of God carries within himself the center from which all things have sprung and that too is why he can understand the world why the cosmos is intelligible to the human intellect he is able to know the universe because in a way it pre-exists in him I just thought that was a wonderful way of putting it Wolfgang and I think that’s from cosmos and transcendence but well it merely enunciates a truth which say in Plato’s day was what every student in his academy would learn this this was known it was accepted as true and it it is true and will always be true but the fact of the matter is that in modern times this has been forgotten and it’s completely at odds with the contemporary way of looking at the cosmos and looking at man what you learn what you imbibe partly by osmosis if you enter into a university so what nowadays only a few oddballs if you will understand is something that was regarded as the educated cultured well done show in ancient times well so if I could just draw you back for a moment now that John is back you know John’s you know John’s original question there was what practices might you recommend for people to be able to get back to this understanding and you pointed to the reading that you were doing in Plato is is reading one of those things that you recommend are there other practices are there meditative practices or prayer or other traditions that you recommend well let me say first of all that reading is a double-edged sword because it can take you to heaven and it can also take you in the other direction it depends on who and what whom and what you read I personally have as you have no doubt observed a great preference for ancient ancient reading I feel that the ancients actually were wiser than we by long shot and as it turns out since the Copernican revolution we in the west in the western world have been very much misled so reading nowadays is a very dangerous thing if you happen to read the most popular books recommended in our universities it is apt to lead you astray so I think John agrees with me that some of the most valuable books to read and to use in our formation are the ancient ones Wolfgang if I may invite you to speak a little bit about your Catholicism and how you understand Catholicism and kind of the esoteric versus exoteric aspects of Catholicism well as part of an address to John’s question about how do we grow in alignment or wisdom with these this well let me answer as briefly as possible by just starting at the beginning and in the early part of my life and in fact I would say the first half I was about 40 years older so when I began to shift but in the early part of my life I was fascinated with the Vedic tradition and I made many many trips to India when I was very young in order to see at first hand how the best representatives of the Vedic culture practice their religion and so at one point I spent seven months living amongst sadhus in remote places just to communicate with them as best I can and observe their life and try to form some idea as to what they have achieved and I can tell you that this has revolutionized my life because I realized that these advanced sadhus who actually had devoted their life to that practice were actually able to enter ontological planes that we in the West don’t even know exist and what I in my later writings referred to as the three levels the corporeal the intermediary and the abiturnal these are levels that the the most advanced of the yogis that I met actually on a daily basis were able to enter and I have no doubt about that and in fact there are experiences which very much testify to the truth of that so this is so in the first part of my life I was very much interested in pursuing these higher matters from a Vedic point of view and then later in life I think thanks in large measure to a wonderful Catholic lady whom I married thanks to her influence I returned so to speak to the religion of my childhood I was baptized as a child in the Catholic religion I returned to that but I would say from a somewhat new point of vantage and in fact I have recently published a book in which I talk about what the title of the book will tell you what it is about it is entitled Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom so I here at the end of my life I look upon the Vedic religion in light of Christianity so this book so to speak explains my views relating to religion but on a personal level I have in my latter years returned to the religion of my childhood with the difference that now I see it with different eyes and I embrace it with all my being which I could not do as a child so these intermediary years have helped me to be a Catholic not nominally but fully as fully as I am able to to be thank you for that Wolfgang I really appreciate you opening yourself up on that and thank you for asking that question too Richard and if I well I’d like to have John have a chance to catch up and see if he missed anything there but I did have a follow-on question too last 10 minutes or so this my internet keeps dropping here I heard the reference to Catholicism and then everything froze and my signal dropped so I did Wolfgang just wrote a new a wonderful new book two books in the last year I think but one of them is Vedanta in light of Christian wisdom oh I’d like to read that it’s a wonderful book and Wolfgang was speaking of how he traveled in India and met many sadhus as a young man after sitting in you know academic philosophy classes and realizing that this was not the philosophy he was looking for right and really wonderful little book but but in it and and Wolfgang I’d invite you to talk about this too you make a connection between Vedanta and Christianity through Meister Eckhart around this idea of Chitta Vritti Niroda right the removal of mental modifications how do we eliminate the things that are keeping us from ultimately connecting with these other realms which are part of our being right like the intermediary we do have a connection to the intermediary realm we have a connection to the eight eternal realm just because science has denied that they exist and pretended that all we should you know only look at the nominal guys don’t look over here just keep looking over there right and by the way we’ll tell you what nominal you know what the names are so meanwhile that idea of Chitta Vritti Niroda in terms of the core practice the core the essence of the practice that ultimately helps somebody to not just be captured by the nominal and the representational or just the cultural paradigm welton shang whatever it may be that that’s the that’s the key process well we have similar backgrounds I went into academic philosophy and encountered the figure of Plato and wanted to take up a Socratic way of life and that academic philosophy the topic of wisdom fell off the table I went on of course because I valued the set of skills it was giving me but I turned to outside of the academy and went to a place where they started learning Vipassana meditation metacontemplation and Tai Chi Chuan and I did that for and continued to do that and that way I’m sort of proto-Zen and it was only through the hat that I came back and especially by the help of Pierre Haddow discovered the western wisdom tradition within ancient philosophy especially neo-Platonism and figures like Eckhart and of course in the Kyoto school you have people like T.T. Suzuki comparing Eckhart’s the same eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me to Prajna that’s realized within the Zen tradition so in again we’re very convergent in that way Wolfgang I also went out came back in and rediscovered the whole neo-Platonic heritage and that it was you know it was actually I was actually Buddhist that introduced me to this idea right and it was I and then I realized that there was a wisdom tradition and you know coming from Socrates and flowing out and that’s how I got into it so yes taking up these practices have has been integral I go so far as to say like if you want to understand the Tao Teh Chuan you better be doing some Tai Chi Chuan because you really won’t understand it if you’re not practicing the Tai Chi Chuan. That’s very fascinating I’m happy to hear that John I should perhaps add that in this book I mentioned Vedanta and light of Christian wisdom one of the things that I do and I think it’s one of the main contributions of the book is I argue against a view which in our time has become practically universal amongst the intelligentsia. This view is sometimes associated with the term perennialism sure and more concretely it is associated with Frito Chuan’s idea of the so-called transcendent unity of religions so Chuan wrote a very influential book which claims to prove that all the different religions are really so many variants of what is basically Vedanta and if you will lesser degrees of it and this view I have found is nowadays held worldwide by the so to speak higher levels or highest levels perhaps of the educated scholars and I myself was under the influence of this view for a certain period of time but eventually I not only abandoned it but I came to regard it as a very dreadful view which as a Christian it behooves me to contradict it is what could rightfully in Christian language referred to as a heresy and perhaps as the major heresy of our day. What is that? Well it is essentially a matter of looking at the world through Vedantic eyes through the eyes of Advaita Vedanta regarding Advaita Vedanta as the non plus ultra and judging all religions including Christianity by that measure and I think this is a complete complete mistake and in fact I regard this little book of mine as a rigorous refutation of that view. I really think it is a refutation it’s not just that I express my opinion I’m a mathematician I believe that there is truth and falsity and there is a QED which means something so I do think that I have set the record straight. My conclusion is that Christianity in particular is incomprehensible from a Vedantic point of view if you look at the world through Vedantic eyes you will see all sorts of things but you will not see an iota of Christianity and as a matter of fact there was no possibility even of thinking in these terms at the time the Vedic tradition was initiated. The Vedic tradition is much much older than the entire Judeo-Christian tradition and even such basic concepts of the Judeo-Christian tradition like for example sin is not present in the Vedic tradition you can go through all the Vedic books from A to Z you will not find the idea of sin you will not in fact find the idea of the fall the fall of Adam which is of course a basic truth in the Judeo-Christian tradition is nowhere to be found in the Vedic tradition. The Vedic tradition does acknowledge that our human nature as it empirically exists is in a way mutilated as it says in one of the Vedic books in an Upanishad God has done us an injury by causing our eyes to look outwards and not to look inwards where we see the truth something like that that’s not an exact translation. The point is however that the Judeo-Christian if you will explanation of this fact which is the fall of Adam these things incidentally can only be spoken of in mystical terms there’s no scientific way of approaching these matters at all is too deep for that. So the Judeo-Christian idea of the fall which is of course basic to not only Judaism but Christianity is nowhere present in the Vedic tradition. So the point I make in my book is that you cannot grasp Christianity through Vedantic eyes neither can you grasp Vedanta through Christian eyes unless you go to the most esoteric expression of it which I personally locate in Meister Eckhart and in fact at the center of my book there’s an exegesis which I think is to be found only in Meister Eckhart which essentially enables you to understand that you can view Christianity in it in part as a yoga that there is a commonality between the Hindu yoga which is chitta vritti nirodha in Sanskrit this is Patanjali’s definition there is a a concordance between yoga as understood in Vedic terms and the central practice of Christianity and you will find this only in Meister Eckhart and so based upon that remarkable exegesis of Meister Eckhart I actually argue that the the wisdom of Christianity is wider than the wisdom of Vedanta it includes Vedanta but goes beyond so this is a gist of what I’ve done in it. Well I want to read the book I reject both sort of Huxley and perennialism I think there are two main camps in the academic world there’s perennialism and there’s a kind of constructivist social relativism which says the religions are completely unique and incommensurable and uninterpretable to each other and I hear you challenging both of those and I challenge both of them as well and I think what you said also points to the fact that we have to look often and Eckhart of course is recommending this outside of the propositional within various positions to see points where they may actually contact. One thing that’s interesting for me is what you just did I take as a convergent piece of evidence from my proposal that neoplatonism because Eckhart is a neoplatonist through and through again can be this kind of intellectual silk road a common courtyard where different religions can come and talk to each other not to convert each other but to do the kind of thing you’re doing in your book and I propose that as an alternative to both perennialism and to relativism as an approach for going forward right now so again sounds like in some important ways our work is convergent what’s the name of the book? I’m very happy to hear that we seem to have very compatible views. So I didn’t catch the name of the book because it was part of what got garbled. What’s the name of this book? Vedanta in light of Christian. Right right right I’m going to order that. Unfortunately I have to go I have another meeting I have to come to but and we lost some time because the internet signal dropped I apologize I’ve actually stayed an extra 15 minutes beyond what I had planned to try and make up for that because I wanted to hear that the answer to that question which was the most important question I wanted to ask Wolfgang. I’ll send you the MP4 so that you can listen to the end on your own. Right and you know maybe I can upload it also on my channel as well I want you to have priority on your channel of course but after a while if you can tell me okay now you can release it on your channel if you want John and I’ll do that. That’d be great thank you so much for staying the extra 15 minutes this last 15 minutes has been just wonderful so. It’s been fantastic and I mean and I’m not imposing when I say this but if we would like to do this again at some point I’d be very much happy to do so. I have enjoyed this very much and I’m like I said I’m enjoying your book. I find it deeply when I find people that that I have not known about and have not known about me and then there’s deep convergence that that encourages me that what I’ve the work I’ve been doing has plausibility and so I want to thank you Wolfgang for your work and again the many points of convergence it’s been a great pleasure meeting you. It has been a very great pleasure for me all the best to you John. You too thank you Aaron and thank you Richard but I do have to jump so thank you very much. Thank you all very much. I’ll have all this information in the definitions in the descriptions for people so thank you all for joining us. Thank you. Bye bye. I know.