https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TaEDsyZggcc
Thank you. Welcome everyone to another episode of voices with for Vicky, I’m very pleased to be here with Dr. Scott Jordan, and he’s going to introduce himself. And then we’re going to talk about a particular epistemological ontological position that he’s arguing for that I feel is deeply convergent with a lot of the work that’s been happening in this corner of the internet, especially the work I brought in with people like Gary. And then we’re going to talk about the work that’s been happening in this corner of the internet, keeping these generative ideas alive is very important. So I’m Dr. Scott Jordan aka zombie Scotty cognitive psychologist philosopher at Illinois State University. I’m also the producer of the dark loops productions channel on YouTube, where I have long winded our two hour and a half dinner post dinner type discussions that become nuanced detailed and nobody wins. And the part, the point of this is my strong belief that the conversation and human kind is how we got where we are not being right or not the issue of being right or wrong. And then our as more and more media are, you know, what we call short attention span. I just have strong belief in the, in the power of long winded nuance. That’s very convergent with work I’m doing around what I call the logos, which is the idea of a form of dialogue in which the point is to create emergence and insights so that both people both participants feel they get to a place that they got to on their own doesn’t mean they come into agreement. It just feels like they have afforded each other’s movement in thought and orientation. And so that sounds very, very similar to what you’re talking about. Yeah, I just call that good jazz. Well, I often use the jazz metaphor myself. So, the thing that maybe we start with, because it seems to be sort of the, the, the fundamental level of your thinking is what you call wild systems theory, and you’re, you’re, you’re addressing a lot of issues that I address in awakening from the meaning crisis and So why don’t you start there with, with what you mean, and I watched your presentation, feel free to take some time presenting the argument because you know the argument is is careful. And I’d like it. You know, as much, you know, clear, coherent structure as well. Well, you’re again very, very kind and please, you know, interrupt me when when things aren’t making sense. The, for me the issue is how to frame what it means to be that kind of framing tends to scare away experimental psychologists quite often our rhetorical system tends to be perception, action, cognition. And I understand all that I grew up intellectually in that world and have published in that space. The thing for me it always came down to volition and consciousness you know why we do what we do, why it feels like we feel why it feels like it feels. And, you know, I spent a lot of time listening to various people speaking right, and it was in the mid 90s when the Tucson conferences came around. And we really got to see the hard problem sort of emerges the problem right. And I think that’s a good point. So people listening the hard problem of consciousness was brought up by David Chalmers at the Tucson conference, and he posted that once we gave a completely functional account of the brain. There doesn’t seem to be any way of explaining what are called qualia. These are properties that are thought only to exist in consciousness, like beauty or the fragrance of a rose, etc. Oh, thank you. I, because when I write the trade book, it’ll be saving the taste of ice cream, right. I can give a scientific account of, you know, taste receptors and neurological processes. And as I, as I struggled with whether or not the hard problem is a problem, right. What I started doing was understanding that the language we use, we use it transparent, as if we feel it’s appealing to something that’s not us. Right, so I can say neurological, and when I use the word neural process. I feel as if that word that statement is referring to something on the other side of my experiences. Right. And, and this, what I’ve come to learn is this, this other ring is an inherent property not of just the brain but of all living systems, right. Systems can’t exist without an other and what I mean by that is, if you look, this is gets to the roots of scientific roots of wild systems I was highly inspired by Stuart Kaufman and his notion of auto catalysis. Right. And the idea that in the probiotic soup, as the ratio to diverse chemical types and possible reactions between them reach a certain critical point you saw massive explosion in what he called self sustaining networks are autocatalytic. And this means that if a and B, interact and produce a product, a B, and that a B ends up being a catalyst for the a B reaction. You have a system of self sustaining work. Right. And there’s just something that really appealed to me about that. And so in a lot of my work I’ve been trying to wild systems, at least scientifically in the end, is a is an attempt to reveal the homological unity from across the phyla. And so we have a system of energy transformation, energy self sustaining energy transformation system so if we just begin arbitrarily with chemical systems you see the work is producing products that sustain the work. Then you go from this. So, single cell, you go to two cells interacting with the neural network it’s Donald have right he taught us that neurons that fire together wire together. Data indicate now that that is a self sustaining energy transformation process in the sense that one neuron undergoes action potentials that actually gives rise to recursive processes back in the nucleus that then generate synapse formation. So the work of being in Iran generating X potentials and stuff actually sustains being a neuron, because it leads to synapse formation, etc. And then Jerry Edelman taught us that this is a property of the brain as a whole. Right with the notion of neural Darwinism. And then, ironically enough it was BF Skinner who taught us how this plays out at the behavioral level. One of the problems with positive reinforcement it was always circular. Right, why does behavior happen more often because it’s being reinforced but what does it means to be mean to be reinforced well the behavior happens more often right. Or if you look at, if you look at, if you look at behavior in terms of energy sustainment when when when someone climbs up a tree and grabs an apple and eats that apple, the energy release, and then sustains replenishes all the systems that produce the climbing behavior in the first place. So then I said hey we can look at ourselves as kind of an ecosystem a multi scale ecosystem, all based on this notion of energy transformation. And then I had to tackle things like meaning and cognition and perception. And you find things like, for example, there are always borders to our movements there are always borders to our perceptions and there are always borders to our thoughts so, for example, people that are diagnosed as schizophrenic they think they can see themselves much better than people who aren’t. And the reason is, is because of a certain cerebellar cortical architecture that is constantly priming the cortex with what’s happened in the past. In the lab what I’ve always studied is anticipation, and not just the kind of conscious type right, but the unconscious anticipation of being the unconscious forecasting of possibility, simply in the act of being when a single cell is doing the work of being a single cell it is simultaneously broadcasting to its context, the degrees of freedom it has in that context. It’s not doing that by talking to it. It’s doing that by being in it and shaping it. And for me I’ve tried to define that anticipation of something we are, as opposed to something that we do. And so, for example, anybody listening right now has at least two thoughts in their head, right, the ones I’m putting in there and the ones they’re having like wow that’s kind of cool, right. That ability to create the other is how we can be someone, it’s how we can move our bodies in the face of perturbation, it’s how we can generate stable perception in the in the in the in a reality of flux. And it’s how we can have thoughts that we don’t experience is coming from outside of us because we create our own borders, and we do so necessarily to be a system within a larger space. So this idea then that we can look at ourselves as a homological unity of recursive architecture self-sustaining systems is where I go scientifically in wild systems to do the following. Once I can look at us as systems that are multi scale, so sustaining energy transformation systems that are actually embedded within a larger energy transformation hierarchy, which is something we all learned in sixth grade called the you know, it’s called the circle of life forever. But in a more fundamental level, once I can do that, then I start to think differently about context. And suddenly, I no longer need the words objective and subjective. And what I mean by that is, if I am an emergent embodiment of what I’m in phylogenetically, ontogenetically, socially, diatically, you know, at every level, then I can come to look at what this is I can look at being as the self sustaining embodiment of context. I can look at my muscles and my brain and my bones as an embodiment of the contextual constraints of moving a mass or gravity field. I can look at the dynamics of a zebra as somewhat of an embodiment of the dynamics of a lion. And then when you start to see this notion of embodiment of context, then it gives me another move toward meaning. Right, instead of meaning being something that has to emerge out of physical, physical processes or physical work. Since I’m not using the word physical anymore. Meaning is what I’ll just call embodied context or embodied aboutness. And therefore, meaning is grounded in the sense that meaning is being. And then life being isn’t the creation of meaning or isn’t the creation of sense making it’s the management of meaning. And this just displaces the whole issue of meaning that cognitive psychology has been trying to discuss, you know, from a subjective objective framework for 400 years. So when I say things like embodiments of context and we are meaning instead of meaning being something that we create, I find myself in a similar space of like Marlowe Ponte. I find myself in a similar space. Well, my, my, the philosopher I rely on most is Mike Oak Shop. He would use the given his, given his intellectual heritage as what we call an idealist. He chose to say that everything is experience. And that just put in contemporary subjective objective minds that just puts him on the one side, a subjective side of the dualism. Exactly. So, so wild systems then basically equates meaning with being. And one, some of the implications that I’ve come to, not just by reading science and philosophy, but by reading just reading literature and watching movies. WG WG subalz the rings of Saturn is probably for me the most profound text I’ve ever read into next to Arthur Clark’s childhood childhood sand. But, um, in the rings of Saturn WG subalz generates a gives you gives the reader the experience of being an embodiment of context and an energy transformation hierarchy. And it gives you the phenomenology of being that way. And what I do then in my work as a, you know, when I’m writing wild systems and an analytic framework because that’s how we communicate. In other words, I have to write prose that are, you know, repository and such. And you’re not working to generate that kind of phenomenology because it’s, it’s not poetry, it’s a different phenomenon. But it’s guided by the same sort of notion of inherent inherent embeddedness and inherent meaningfulness. And one of the thing and then I’ll just I’ll shut up. The beauty of subalz and there I say what I’m trying to get at with wild systems is that we are all inherently entropy engines. We are all systems that intake transform and dissipate energy. We’ve created this whole humanistic framework in the West that deny that prevents us from recognizing the entropy generated every moment of every day by our being. We refuse to acknowledge the destructive aspect of what we are. And to the point where we create ontologies that afford us eternal salvation and a non contingent reality. As long as we suffer through this contingent reality in the quote unquote right way. Now, on the one hand, you can we can call it incoherence that we don’t believe it, but it’s brilliant. Sociologically, it’s brilliant for for managing the anxiety of of living in a world of mock, right, and living in a world of pain. So I would never deny anybody the mental health that they come to by by believing in such frameworks. At the same time, there’s an incredible amount of damage done in our current world because people believe that they can be good in some abstract way and creating models of thinking about themselves that don’t engage the entropy laid nature of simple being. So that was a lot. So that was a lot. I hope I said what wild systems meant means in any coherent way and I’ll stop. Well, that was that was that was wonderful. So let me try. First of all, some points of convergence. So yeah, cool. And then also places from which I want to ask some questions. Yeah, because you’ve said things about consciousness. You said things about intentionality, intentionality, by the way, is that the technical term that philosophers use to talk what Scott was talking about about this, right? Non controversially, our thoughts are about things right like I’m thinking about the table in my dining room or something like that. And he was he was pointing towards that. And then also meaning. And so there’s a lot there that. Now, first of all, I come from a 40 cognitive science background in the model. Marty Ponte plays a pivotal huge role in and, you know, a lot of post height agrarians. Yes, that way. And so a couple points of convergence. One is, you know, Kaufman’s work complex dynamical systems theory play crucial role. In addition to auto catalytic processes. There’s, you know, there’s discussion and you invoke self organization your presentation self organizing system. And then there’s the discussion of auto poetic systems. These are systems that are self organized to seek out the conditions that preserve their self organization. And this is how a paramecium is perhaps different from a rock. Right. Right. And then as soon as you get that seeking behavior, this is where my work comes in. The organism has to right has to somehow deal with a particular problem. The problem of that activity, the environment is constantly shifting and changing. It has to evolve either cross generationally or once learning evolves, it can do it within within its own lifespan kind of thing. And for me that for me, this is where my work comes in. Once you start talking about adaptivity and seeking and problem solving, then you face the issue that I talked about, which and this will get I think to what you mean by orders of cognition. I’ll throw it out there and we’ll see if it resonates. I deal with the problem of relevance realization, which is of all the information available the organism, the organism can’t pay attention to all of it. And so, we have to select some subset, especially with us with memory of all the memory we have we have to select some subset of all the possible combinations of all the possible sequences of action and yet somehow what we do is we do this. We ignore most of the information we ignore most of our memory, we ignore most of our options, and we zero in on the relevant information. And so relevance isn’t something in me, or in the physical environment, it’s constantly being code code generated. So I’ve coined the term transjective as that which actually is more from which the poles of subjectivity and objectivity co emerge right there’s a there’s a there’s a real relationality that is both of what I, how I am presenting myself to the world, and how the world is presenting itself to me so that we can be co present together. Fantastic. And so I also in that light and I think this is where it also converges I think with you I talk about trying to systematize that in terms of kinds of knowing. So the one we’re most familiar with the one that is prominent in scientific inquiry analytic philosophy is propositional knowing, knowing that proposition, but this is dependent on procedural knowing skill knowing how the skill knowledge is dependent on tribal knowing this is again what I was just talking about that relevance realization, how the world is presenting itself to me how I’m presenting the world, how I’m presenting myself to the world so we’re in a perspective, but the perspective is ultimately dependent on participatory knowing the way being biology evolution culture, shape me co shape the environment to me so that we belong together. So affordances are generated. And so, and so this is like the agent, Chris, master Pietro and Philip Misevic in the book we wrote, we call it the agent arena relationship as my module. Right. And so, you know, the floor is walkable to me, because we both been shaped by gravity, but right culture has also built the floor and train me to walk on it. Right. And so walkability is not in the floor it’s not in me it’s right. And so you can see this deep deep relationality, and for me that maps on to multiple multiple multiple points he’s notion of the chiasm. Right. And the embodiment and the chiasm, and trying to trying to basically translate. So, this is one way of understanding my project, trying to translate that kind of phenomenological language into the functional language that’s more familiar. So, that’s relevance realization idea that I talked about, it can be integrated with predictive processing models that lines up with your anticipation. And then what you can get is you can get an account that can go into the heart of cutting edge neuroscience and machine learning, but also be very respectful, and accommodating and responsive to our, the phenomenology of our experience and the functionality of our behavior. So I think you can see there’s just a tremendous amount of convergence there. And just one more thing Scott, before I ask a couple questions. This, you know, since I’ve been doing this public work in addition to my, you know, academic work. I keep hitting this convergence, I keep people that I’ve not you and I haven’t met until literally today, and yet, getting to the same, like, and that’s not to diminish your work, I hope you don’t take it. It’s quite the opposite. There’s nothing more satisfying than following, following your work following the the itches in your thoughts, and finding out years later that the body of work you’ve generated is coherent with others who experience similar pitches. And so that similar it is a form of coherence. Yeah. You know, the thing is, this way of thinking about the world but I’d argue, what you’re doing is working to overcome this dualism, the separation of him is actually a Western problem. Oh, very much, very much 80% of the world is holist. Right, it’s only the West that believes these dualisms and when I read like Andy Clark’s work. Right, big fan of Andy Clark and what I’m reading is a computation is turning holist, slowly but surely page by page. You can see it in Chalmers work now who’s you know writing about. That’s my background I was I was I grew up in first generation cogs I computational, yes, very folder. And then, yes. And then the evolution into what’s called third generation, or a cogs I very, very much that yeah very much. Now for me, all of that scientific background is. I mean, it has an inherent value as a knowledge project but for me there’s an existential project. Totally, which is what I call the meaning crisis, which is the Cartesian grammar cultural cognitive grammar that we’re in tract in has basically undermine the capacity to to acknowledge, we can’t live without it but we can’t acknowledge and live forth from it, how the right meaning that sense of fundamental connectedness between us in the world, then you can see this, the symptoms of that hunger for that connectedness, and for a ecology of practices that sustain it and a worldview that legitimates it, you can see that hunger throughout our culture in all kinds of symptoms, is what I call the meaning crisis and so this philosophical discussion we’re having is not just to my mind at least not just about alleviating intellectual, you know, problems, it’s about addressing existential issues that people are thrashing around with. Oh, I can, you know, I completely agree gets to the point where I you know if I’m at a bar and we’re having a conversation I’ll say look, man, I’ve reduced my worldview to a personal opinion. Right. Because I know that the world tends not to agree with the kind of things that we’re talking about particularly in Western academia. You’re absolutely right. Now, the issue of crisis I agree. For me the crisis comes from phenomena such as cognitive psychologists and philosophers telling the world that they don’t have conscious will. Yeah, there is this, this is just dangerous. Yeah, and our system of great. Because the model they’ve adopted for the beast which tends to be a computational information processing approach assumes that the, the, the, the purpose of conscious will is to cause actions that just comes, you know, that comes right out of the architecture is just, let’s just say not correct. You know what I’m talking to my students I say hey how many of you. Remember when you decided to come to this university, and they’ll all raise their hand. And they’ll say now look at the way you have shaped your life because of that choice. And many of the ways that your life has changed because of that choice were never predicted choices and about predicting all outcomes it’s about, or taking whatever powers we have within us to transform the context that we’re living in, and as you said to seek right, but this idea that it means it’s a command conscious will is a command I give to make a particular thing happen. We can say that but then they tell them, you know, to do the lab at work and find that we really don’t have that control and follow you know patch hate pet Hager’s work and we really don’t have that control and sale and passive things that conscious will doesn’t exist is just a disservice, and something that I’d be mentally work against. Yeah, I think I agree with Gallagher that most of those criticisms are looking at the wrong level of analysis for where we’re really totally. You, you mentioned, I don’t know if it was when we were recording or before you see yourself as following in the footsteps of spinosa to so do you have a view similar to his about free will where he thinks what we’re actually describing is not some unmoved mover within but something like the degree to which we’re self determining the degree to which we’re in adequate relationship to the world, or how do you understand it or is bringing up, I was irrelevant at this point. No, I bringing up spinoses. Awesome. I. He’s just one of those people. Deep influence on me by the way, deep influence on. Yeah. Well, so what I think spinosa got, you know, back when back in his day when when we were beginning when when I’m Western world was beginning to put God in nature. Yeah, yeah. And the cart was doing his work on different substances right it was spinosa who said, Wait a minute. The, the only thing that is real is that which doesn’t depend the only thing that’s a substance is that which doesn’t depend on anything else for its being. And the only thing that qualifies is everything. Yeah, yeah. And that that insight, if, if you experience every statement and then you experience the final everything. It’s like you can see them I can see my students eyes lift. Right. They boom. There’s nothing that I’m not part of. And then this is this is the way of experiencing not just thinking about who I am but experiencing who I am. This is the type of phenomenology I believe will give culture courage to recognize its status as an entropy engine from top to bottom. And then instead of doing the right thing what we do is try to manage our self respect as entropy systems, because we’re not going to escape the destruction of being. And the problem is we tend to say well destruction exists at the level of my thoughts now every single cell in your body is breaking something down. And there’s no level of being in which that’s not happening. So we don’t escape, you know, the beautiful ugly contingencies. So, when we continue to what I call it is sort of the realest the realest holy grail of finding things as they are independent of, you know, us and seeing things purely. I just think that that has given rise to incredibly destructive ways of thinking and ways of being so spinos is totally on target. Hey, if we’re all part of everything then what am I but an embodiment of everything. And that’s where his concept of finitude comes from. In other words, if reality is an infinite and God is that reality, and I am in that, then I am a finite aspect of that infinity, I am a finitude. It’s very similar to the my notion of embodiment of context and I have no problem. It’s not only are we converging in the same spatial temporal space, we’re, we’re converging across history. Right. And and the same insights that led me to where I am, are not unlike the itches that let’s be knows it where he got. But I can only express myself in the context in which I sustain myself. Of course, of course, though, you find these compatibilities and it’s just, it’s a rush. So, um, talk a little bit more about that because I find that very interesting. So the idea that I’m embodying my con. Yeah, this is this sounds very similar to me to Palen use notion of internalization and indwelling I well the environment and, and I internalize it and so trying to draw any kind of line between them is only pragmatically useful it’s right kind of thing. So, and I get that and I get how that and for me that is the sort of primordial grounding of of a model parties idea right. Ultimately, the way I’m connected to the world is right my body is a body among other but I don’t have a body. I have a body. Yes, I participate a body right and and and then participating anybody. I’m participating all bodies because bodies are into defining etc. And that sounds very similar to to what I heard in your talk. And I take it that that is that that that is the fundamental grounding of intentionality I agree with you. Now, what do you say to people who would say, I get that. And that gives you kind of a fundamental aboutness. But then of course there’s still nevertheless the problem of specific intentionality, which is, I think of the table, and I’m not thinking of the door, even though I’m embodying both that the entire context rights for me that’s the problem of again of selectivity. And I think that’s a very important way to go ahead. I love it. I mean, I would argue all those arguments are coherent when we talk about the being and phenomenology of a single cell organism. And that specificity comes from the degrees of freedom embodied in the, in the system. So earlier I talked about that being anticipation, the my being is a pre specification to reality of how I can possibly be here. And that in and of itself is a selection of the things I can engage in. Now, in terms of you know. I answered that question I don’t know if you want me to keep talking because I’ll just keep going but when I when I read Ponte. What I read in Ponte is an attempt to draw attention to the inherent relationality of bodies. Sure, he does. You know, and what I’ve done in my work is pushed and push and push and ask what’s not relational. In other words, if I’m trying to get to the point quickly. I’ll ask people do you believe there’s anything that exists as it does on its own independently of all context. Nobody says yes. Yeah. Nobody believes in the nominal. Right. So I mean there’s nothing that exists independent of everything else. If that’s true that all phenomena are inherently relational, and then science and ontology become different, because what we’ve done is we’ve done it in a way that’s not so much a calculus to look at stables and stable entities and quantify change over time. Right. What dynamic systems allows us to do is actually look at instability and ask ourselves how on God’s earth could stability ever exist. I totally get that I totally agree with that. So, I’m not disagreeing with you because I know it’s okay. What I was trying to get at, especially towards the end of his career, let’s say within Marla Ponte because I think that’s something okay, both oriented towards especially, you know, in the invisible any invisible and you know the related work and it comes out in Lowe’s excellent book, right. Marla Ponte is really wrestling with the relationship between the chiasm of meaning, and then what he increasingly calls logos, right, the way we render it intelligible. I mean, I have access to an intelligibility presumably that a paramecium doesn’t. And, and so for me, for me, that’s where the relevance realization machinery helps to move on toes, and the logos to twice to say how the logos is grounded in the onto so you actually have an ontology, rather than just a demonstrative pointing at the on dose. If that if that makes sense. Yeah. I. So again, I think. I think single cells. Do the things that we would call intelligent just at smaller spatial temporal scales. And then what we see over the course of evolution is the scaling up of these systems and as they scale up and can generate more config more complex sorts of organizations, different degrees of freedom in which they’re embedded become unleashed. When we get to us. The degrees of freedom are so unbelievably unleashed right that we can quote unquote think about anything, which I’m not sure is true but. And then we really start to feel separated. Right. And the other ring of being right, the necessary creation of border starts to feel like a real problem. And elegant ontological problem. And I would argue with your earlier statement, it’s a practical problem. Right, that I have borders but it’s not ontological. Because if I have if my borders themselves the singles, the borders of a single cell are naturally necessarily about the context in which the single cell sustains itself there’s nothing that is not about. And so what I get in trouble for is just completely obliterating the traditional notion of representation. There’s nothing. Okay, not arguing for a notion of representation like you I’m trying to. But what I, and I don’t want to. In fact, I explicitly argue you can’t ground relevance realization you can’t ground intelligence representation, representation presupposes it rather than being able to ground it. Right. Nevertheless, like, I guess the point, and again, all the party is wrestling with it. We do have, we do have representations in language we do use representational structures. And so, there’s an additional thing about trying, I mean because I want to understand the fact that I can talk about paramecium and they can’t talk about me. What that means and because, and I think that I, for me there’s a thing in Heidegger that, which I think is still in Ponte and he’s wrestling with it, which is, we are the beings whose beings are in question to ourselves in a way that’s not the case. For other beings. And so, and why I’m not hoping on this just to go to this. No, no, doing this is because, right, the meaning that people are talking about in meaning in life isn’t just that connectedness and it is, in one sense, but it’s also the fact that they need that human beings are in some sense also existential, their self defining beings right and the beings who beings are. And so they need a project that brings those two properly into relationship to each other, the self defining aspect, and the self organizing aspect of you’ll allow me a couple of slogans. How do those, and obviously the self defining depends on self organization. Yeah, but it nevertheless is something that human beings need to address and and one of the things and I’m not arguing for religion one of the things that religions did was to put those give away of putting those two together. Does that. You’re absolutely right, coach, I mean, I’ll say this much. I mean, when we culture spends a lot of time, trying to organize how you’re going to examine your own potentials. Yes, yes culture spends a lot of time and it doesn’t even have to be conscious. As a matter of fact, most of it isn’t. And, and, I mean, in, we can see in the last four, five, 10 years how cultures able to manipulate what we believe we’re about rather quickly. So, for me, we never have these powers independently of being human being in a context of human beings, of course, of course. So, So I can’t define when I look at individual abilities when I look at individual, you know, individual powers things that we try to do problems that we try to solve. I think the data are pretty clear in the last 20 years and cognitive neuroscience that, you know, our belief in theory of mind that somehow the the the quote unquote subjective mental states of others were invisible to us. It’s just not the case. Yeah, data are increasingly clear that, and we can talk about this I. Oh, I’ll supplement that I mean there’s increasing evidence that our capacity for rationality should is it operates best dialogically, rather than logically that we, we have evolved to reason in distributed cognition, much more than within individual cognition. Yeah, I do. And I think part of what I’m trying to do in some, I don’t know what kind of in my mind and some of my public work is, right is to get people to. So there’s a lot of emerging communities in which people are getting into collective flow states in which they experience the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And I’m involved in those a lot of participant observation participant experimentation, and, you know, and some psycho engineering, like what kind of practices together that can optimize people to so that they can sense this and what’s really interesting Scott is when you’re in these situations and I’ve been in them multiple times you practice and people rediscover how much of this resonance, or also like a mutually shared mutually generated flow state. Right. And, and when they get into that they, they, they first of all talk about they rediscover an intimacy they’ve always known that they longed for but they didn’t realize it they say this weird thing it almost sounds like Plato’s recollection, I always knew it but I had to remember it right. So they do that. And then they, and this is independent of their autobiographical background they start to use religious and spiritual terms to describe the phenomena because it’s the only language. Right. Yep. And then they go through three steps. So, first of all, they sort of just want to celebrate the intimacy they found it’s not it’s not sexual it’s not familiar, it’s not friendship it’s something like this fellowship thing. They do that. And then they start to get they start to sense the intimacy with the we space or the logos, or the guys, they have all the different terms right. And then, right, right. Then, through all of that, they start to sense an intimacy with being itself. And it’s different from right it’s different from theorizing right people will offer, but it’s, it’s a different it’s it’s much more like the ancient theory, where there’s this contemplative transformative conformity to other people, right, to pattern to the political patterns of shared intelligibility and then of that to being or to reality. And for me, trying to understand how we can create communities that can practice this without telling people to go necessarily go back to the established religions that are largely not meeting this function. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech but I tried to show you how I’m trying to part of what I’m trying to do is take a lot of this stuff. I keep doing the science, but I want to I want to bridge ultimately between science and spirituality, where what I mean by spirituality is is exactly that that capacity to enhance that connectedness, help people to deal with the inevitable self deception that comes in that process, both individually and collectively, right, and really afford. Not just talking about this but and also not just because this word is too thin not just experiencing it. I use the term realization it’s a much more profound thing that’s happening. Yeah, I’m writing a working on a paper right now where I talk about WG subalt as we discussed earlier the Rings of Saturn and what he does in that book is actually create a technology that affords transpersonal experience. Right, right. But the, in the interesting thing about the experiences, the spatial temporal specificity of voice, or a voice is is lost, but the vibrancy of perspective persists right so and in, and that that phenomenon. People achieve that phenomenon in many different ways, of course, and LSD meditation. For me, it’s hiking in the smoky mountains and being on the top of a mountain when the sky is clear and the moon is out and I know that my hand is the second thing being touched by the light from the sun to the moon to me. Those are more transcendental type moments transpersonal type moments. And there, what what I what I love about what you’re saying there is if we think of this as a sort of primordial form of being. You see this experience of connectedness expressed in a lot of indigenous ontology. Yes, very much. Yes, yes. And so then, what we tend to do is and say oh okay, so you’ve got this sort of primordial relationality primordial about this. And then, when we go from there to our spatial temporal bounds becoming increasingly local. We start to act as if we failed. Right that somehow what we got to do is stay in Shangri-La right in or stay in Nirvana. I think that’s the curse of being. I think that’s the curse is that we can’t escape borders, even in the moment, even in the moment of transcendental experience there are borders. And so for me the issue is how do we come to grips with. It’s not that the transpersonal experience is more authentic and more real, it might be what we might call primordial and I completely agree with that. I get concerned that that that that that it’s somehow treated as being better than my daily life. This is the two worlds mythology right this is this comes out of the actual revolution and the two worlds mythology is actually the grandfather of Cartesian dualism or the great great grandfather right. Right. We can’t we can’t. This is, and this is part of the meaning crisis. Another way of putting it is how like 40% of the population has spontaneous experiences like talking about, but they do not, where do they, how do they place that how do they Right. Right. And right, the, the language, the historical language the cultural cognitive grammar we’ve been given is a two worlds mythology but it’s no longer viable. It’s not I don’t think it’s viable scientifically but I think it’s not not even viable, existentially. So the meaning crisis is, how do we allow people. No, that’s not that’s too weak. How do we afford people these moments of, you know, primordial and peak connectedness, if you’ll allow me to do sort of please. Right. How do we do that in a way that they can find coherent with their lives. So for me, right, having these experiences is secondary to the cultivation of wisdom, where I mean by wisdom is exactly the capacity to, you know, comprehensively deal with self deception, enhance connectedness, you know, people have to remember, you know, in Plato, you come out of the cave and look at the sun, but that’s not you stay, you go back down into the cave, right and right. And this of course is something emphasizing later neoplatonism, it’s always it’s always the flow, right. Right. Trying to understand how to give people simultaneously a worldview framework and an ecology of practices that keeps everything integrated together. And not does not lead to spiritual bypassing or escapism or fundamentalism or fanaticism because we have secular versions of two worlds mythologies to utopias and the stars. Right, right. Right. And so that is another way of like of the crux of the meeting crisis and that’s why being able to do like, I love the emphasis and this is why I think you and I both love spinosa the emphasis on on the integrated whole right though. There’s a unity. There’s a unity that allows us, as you beautifully put it to escape from contingency. It’s a unity that’s always inseparable from that contingency I think that I think that’s really really important. What I guess when I’m going on about me perhaps too passionately is like, I think this is not right. I think that I have to be really when it’s couched in like academic jargon people don’t care about it. But when you translate it into practices. Yeah, people, they, they, they get on fire about it. I’ve seen it so much. Oh yeah, last two years of my work. I think I agree with everything you say and I think one of the challenges is as follows. The phenomena, we call, we call colonialism has been has been perpetuated by dualism. Right, it’s perpetuated by goodness is perpetuated by the creation of cognitive mechanisms that allow you to generate massive amounts of destruction all in the name of the good of the God, right. And, and so much of their world has been transformed by that energy commitment. Yeah, when we really start to have those moments of transcendence, and then ask ourselves how do I translate it into my daily life. We’re terrified in ways that we never could have imagined because we’re so thoroughly complicit that there’s no salvation. Yeah, yes. I mean the car, the house, the clothes, all of it is is entropy creation. Right. And whereas, you know, in cultures that lived in indigenous ontologies that use these this primordial relationality as a founding principle of how they collectively be. It’s not that there’s no violence, it’s not that there’s no destruction. It’s simply the case that it doesn’t take care it doesn’t take place on a scale, fueled by, by, by the ways of thinking that came about as a function of dualism, and I’m not going to say that the climate of Europe didn’t have anything to do with it I’m a big believer in gun germs and steel and the idea that context matters. But, I mean the, the, the, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. One of the first reactions. White people tend to have is I’m not racist. And so what I increasingly do with my, as a matter of fact I did a proposal to do a talk at a conference next fall, where I argue that conceptualizing empathy and racism as subjective phenomena has actually been has done been damaging, because it I tend to say well I empathize with everybody and I, I don’t have a racist bone in my body and that allows them to disconnect their live life from the trauma it produces in the world. So instead of asking my students are you racist I say what stays the same in the world because the way you live your life. And so, unless in that car you’re sustaining a geopolitical infrastructure that’s probably the most one of the most energy, entropy generating systems on the planet. I’m not trying to make anybody feel bad. I’m not trying to make anybody feel guilty. What I’m trying to do is overcome self deception. The problem is, man, the West is so, and I’m not trying to condemn the West. What I’m trying to do is answer the question of how do we give people primordial relationality as an experience and then bring them back to their stride life it’s like, damn. Really, all of this. What do I got to give up to feel good. Right, and, and, and then it becomes. The challenge is, is intense and and you can see it at least in the United States you can see massive amount of political force being used to keep that self deception in place through voter regulation. These sorts of things where white supremacy is is not going to be given up. Because once, once, once that way of thinking breaks. And the complicity, and the people don’t want to go there. So, I hope that seemed relevant in all of what you’re saying. It does. It’s interesting. I want to pick up on it in an important way, but we’re getting close to the time. So, yeah, sure. We might need to talk again actually which is which is a good thing. So it’s a good. So for me, I guess my response to that is that. I mean, even seen in my son’s they know this, but they know it and they don’t know it is like, you know, we’re all going to have to take a significant hit to our standard of living, like we can’t live the way we are. And for me, I mean, and that’s going to have real practical consequences because it’s not clear that we can sustain the population we have. If we exactly. Right. Right. Exactly. Okay, so you’re not an energy we’re pumping through 8 billion bodies. If we’re going to continue to harvest that energy the way we do and transfer to the population the way we do we are deselecting the human species. Yeah, I get that and so there, there’s different very difficult consequences and yeah, the, and it’s not clear if the decline in population that’s happening worldwide is picking up on that or, but I don’t know that those are empirical questions. For me, the issue is, and this is what I think the psychological research is very clear on people will take a huge hit to their standard of living their subjective well being. If they have reason to believe it will increase meaning in life. So this was the evidence on this is very clear it’s very obvious in fact in a lot of it is why people have kids right you like all of the measures of subjective well being go down dramatically. And you ask them well why are you doing it and they’ll say well because I’m connected to something that has a value and a meaning beyond my own egocentric concerns. Right. And so, for me, as long as people. So this is a, this is a proposal, as long as people are starving for meaning. They aren’t, they’re not going to be prepared to take a hit to their subjective well being. Right, but if they get a sense that no no the call with, wow, there’s all this capacity for real meaning, real connectedness, real overcoming of self deception real cultivation of wisdom, real cultivation of community again, as opposed to suburbia, right, or connections on Facebook, then I think people would be willing to take. And here’s, here’s further up take a hit to their standard of living here’s evidence for the great resignation, which is not a labor shortage. It’s not a labor shortage. It’s a general strike. Right. And the great resignation is showing that people are basically saying I’m willing to take a hit to my standard of living because I want more meaningful work. Right. And, and the fact that it’s being we described by virtually all the media, by the way, is a labor shortage. I think not getting that this is is a profoundly existential issue. But people are basically saying, like, and they’re voting with their lives their livelihood at least. I’ll take a hit to my standard of living. If I if there’s a real chance that I can increase meaning in life. And I think that has got to be that has got to be a more prime, a more primary message. At least that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s how I address this right. You are so completely on target. Let’s look at how Barack Obama was able to get a health camp, a health care plan for the United States. He had to sell it in financial terms. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now, what we see in American politics is a lack of courage in terms of making making ourselves more other regarding be a sign of boldness. Yes. Right. It has to we have to be bold. Not only that we have to be the biggest bad asses in the world. We’re so about each other. Yeah. Right. So how you do that. Well, how do you do this. Well, you know, what I would have preferred to hear Barack Obama say and is, okay, so how many of you would feel really cool if you found out that the taxes you pay actually help that single mother down the block when she lost her job. And because of what you’re doing, her kids are eating, they’re finding a way to get through the day and she’s not becoming depressed. Right. Now imagine that woman live three blocks away. Three miles. 300 miles 3000 miles, and the things that you’re doing in your daily life are actually making their lives more letting them generate self respect, letting them wouldn’t that just be awesome. Now on the one hand people say oh it’s just pine this guy crap and I’m arguing all that we just just been beaten down. I mean, let’s look what happened in the United States in the 60s a father son and the Holy Ghost of human potentiality were murdered in public. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay or meaning next time we’ll next time we talk if you like the thing is the meaning that we’re working toward can’t be happiness it can’t be bliss it has to be this hyper nuanced willing engagement of the sorrow that is life which is more Buddhist that I was gonna say depends on what you mean by happiness I mean if you mean if you if you mean what it’s come to mean, yeah. I mean, but if you go back to older notions like eudaemonia or Spinoza’s notion of blessedness. Or grace in contemporary culture, yeah, exactly. Well, let’s end it there and let’s talk again, okay? So let’s talk again. I’d love to, I would love to. That’d be great. This has been really wonderful. Yeah, the amount of like completely independent convergence lends plausibility to the shared conclusions tremendously. And so that’s that in of itself. And you have a very, you have a very clear mind, which I like the taste of it. I love that kind of clarity, that generativity that you were talking about. It’s very apparent. Well, it sounds like a conference to me, converging coherence, right? Yeah, yeah, very much. Exactly. So let’s talk again. And then at some point, I want you to talk to other people like Greg Enriquez and other people who are convergent with your, Greg’s work is convergent with yours in some very powerful ways. Okay, I’ll be on the phone. I just wanna introduce you into this network that I belong to, because I think you would find a happy, I think you’d find a happy home there. But I like to give my guests the last word before I shut off the recording. Is there anything you’d like to say? Huh, oh my gosh, I’m sort of stymied here. Be your best and know that it costs. Okay, well said. We’ll talk again soon. Yes, thank you so much, John.