https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=q3nI0GOR2gg
Welcome everyone to Voices with Reveke. I’m joined once again with my good friend, Laman Pascal. So Laman, what would you like to discuss today? Well, John, actually I was just thinking an interesting thing about your name, because it’s Voices with Reveke. And I refer to you sometimes as Reveke, which everyone knows what I’m saying. It seems formal and distant, though. Sometimes I call you John, which feels comfortable for me, but then nobody knows which John I’m referring to. Right, right. So I thought I’d run this by you. What if I just call you the Verve? That’s fine, that’s fine. People keep coming up with different names for me. Jordan Hall likes to call me Johnny V. So yeah, that’s fine. If the Verve catches on. Okay, that’s great. All right. I was thinking that we could talk about non-duality. Sure. What I mean by that is the sameness of difference in general. Right. A traditional conversation about why not two is a little bit different than the assertion of oneness. Yes. The ad-vata, not two, sort of preserves the structure of difference, but suggests there’s something transcendental and common between them without just canceling all those differences. Right. So in my mind, there’s kind of maybe three types of non-duality that I might call emergent, intrinsic, and analytic. Okay. So emergent non-duality is a little bit like what we’ve talked about a lot, the overflow, a bunch of things can create a commonality that exceeds them. Right. Intrinsic is sort of the argument that in the fundamental logical structure of reality, there’s some sort of transcendental unity. Yeah. Analytic is what interests me today because I have some ideas about how proximity and adjacency kind of supersede the difference between one and two. And I know your notions of transjectivity are somehow related, I think, to analyzing things in a way that supersedes some of the conventional distinction between separate and not separate. Yeah. So maybe you could give us a refresher on what you mean when you say transjectivity. So I mean also at multiple levels of analysis, but sort of what joins those multiple levels of analysis is the central idea of flipping around, and this is the influence from the Kyoto School, especially, well, both Nishida and Nishatani, flipping around Aristotle’s idea of the relata, our primary, and then the relation is between them. And then, of course, the most austere version of that is somebody like Ockham who says the relations, maybe he makes an exception for cause. I’m not sure. Hume doesn’t. But anyways, right, that the relations ultimately aren’t real. They’re just normal logical. They’re just there in the mind. And transjectivity says, no, the opposite is the case. And you’d like to say you have clear precursors to this idea in the Kyoto School, most explicitly, you know, of the notion of place, Nishatani’s notion of the, like, it doesn’t quite work in English, but you know, when he says this or this, the Japanese or is both an or and an and, right? And that notion also Whitehead. And the idea is that the and I think it’s coming into prominence even within analytic philosophy. So that may be the connection that we want to follow up on philosophy of science, lady, men and now with the notion of structural realism and they’re all converging from very, very independent and diverse frameworks to the idea, know that ultimately the relations are primary. The relations are primary and they’re what you. I take it a little bit farther than that. I think it’s neither the relations nor the rollout are primary, but the relations and the rollout, right? Are all together in a process. And this is again, more like the Kyoto School of co-determination, co-creation. So examples of that are, you know, cognitive examples are affordances are, are transjective in nature. They’re not a property of the, of the agent. They’re not a property of the environment. They’re a real relation between it. That co-shapes the environment to the agent and the agent to the environment. The idea that relevance itself is when relevance realization. It’s ultimately a transjective process. Relevance is sort of the, the idea that relevance is a kind of a, a kind of a, a kind of a, a kind of a, a kind of a, A kind of a transjective process. Relevance is sort of the ultimate cognitive affordance, if I can put it that way. And so, but this also goes all the way up metaphysically to the, the relationship between emergence and emanation is ultimately a transjective one. Or epistemologically subjectivity and objectivity ultimately are grounded in. A relation that is between them, beneath them, and beyond them in really important ways. in all those sort of ways, but you can see that it branches out, but it doesn’t branch out in a chaotic fashion. There’s a systematic relationship between all of these dimensions that I’ve discussed. That’s where I’m really interested is in this idea of structured non-duality. It’s very easy when you have the mystical experience of a kind of overwhelming state in which difference between yourself and everything appears to be undermined. It’s a very beautiful state to be in, but it seems to be something that has to work with the structure of all the conditions that we find ourselves in as well. So you’re saying there’s obviously a problem in speech as to where we say an identity ends and what we say is causal, right? How separate am I as an agent of speech from the things that I’m referring to? How separate is my perception from the world, these sorts of things? Are you saying it’s, in your mind, a little more than a problem of how do we say which one is which and something like the relationship between the two is a fundamental structure that supersedes that relation? Yeah. Nonetheless, a structure, like the background code, is made up of relationalities rather than distinct entities? Something like that. So, yeah, so far that sounds good. I guess I want to say more to try and explicate more. So the idea here is, and I guess I failed to mention perhaps the deepest influence on my thinking of this, was just reading Damasius this morning. This really amazing book, Damasius’ Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles. And that is the culmination, in fact, the final pagan representative of the Neoplatonic school. And so I was actually reading a passage in the book that has to do with justice. Because here’s the idea. The idea is that intelligibility is our best way of understanding being. That understanding is not a representation of. Intelligibility has sort of two sides to it. Our epistemic grasp of it, but also the structure that affords that epistemic grasp. So intelligibility is sort of the affordance of being or the way being affords itself to us. Right? But again, that cannot be a purely cognitive act because it has to afford our being, not just our thoughts about being. And that intelligibility is ultimately a structure of some kind. One way of interpreting all the Plato and Whitehead’s take on Plato is what the hell is this structure we’re talking about when there’s structure of intelligibility? But the Neoplatoness, and I think Whitehead has a similar idea, is that that intelligibility All the language is going to fail, but it rests within, it subsists within, it emanates from, it returns to. We have all these spatial metaphors for something that’s not actually an event, but within a oneness that is not a homogeneous oneness in the sense, right? And so it’s not one in the sense of the numerical one. It’s the one in that it is the non-structure that makes the structure possible, but that structuring of the non-structure is nothing ultimately separable from. So there’s a non-duality ultimately at the core of the intelligibility. But non-separable structuring of the non-structure. Yes, yes. And the point about, because ultimately what we’re trying to capture, right, is we’re trying to capture the non-logical identity, which is another way I think about talking about, so of non-duality, the non-logical identity, which is also transjective in the way I’ve been trying to articulate between indeterminacy and determinacy, that relationship that Heidegger is groping towards when he’s trying to talk about presencing, that emergence of being, of intelligible being, but it’s not emerging out of any other kind of being, because that would just be an infinite regress. It’s the non-homogeneity of the oneness that really intrigues me today, I think. It has to be. Because it’s very easy to think of, if I’m not just this self, then what am I? Everything or specific things in which I transcend this identity, such as me and my tools or me and my interlocutors and things like that? How do we think about specific non-dualities rather than just a generic non-duality? Well, that’s why, first of all, I tried to articulate it in terms of, and again, this is the inspiration from this. I don’t follow it verbatim or anything like that, but the inspiration from this is, again, the neo-platonic idea that there’s some sort of dynamical hierarchy, and you can see them moving towards something. They didn’t have this metaphor because it wasn’t available to them, sort of like a holographic nesting of non-dualities, of these ways in which we find that the mind, in order to make sense, is caught in this double movement. It makes dichotomous divisions, but then recognizes that it has to somehow put them back together. It gets the emergence of, or maybe let’s use more technical language. You get the emanation into the distinction, and then you get the corresponding return to what the underlying unity might be. The neo-platonic idea is you can see that movement that’s no movement, all kinds of levels of analysis of how we make sense. Their ultimate claim, which I think is a good argument, is if that process doesn’t ultimately conform to how reality unfolds, then we are bound to absolute skepticism. There has to be, again, a non-logical identity between that process in our sense-making and the way reality also unfolds. If I could just put it, there’s a non-logical identity between the emanation and the return, and then there’s a non-logical identity between that within our cognition and consciousness and reality itself. Then that’s nested at many layers. Right. You’re seeing a double-acting, self-determining meaning structure, hierarchically nested non-dualities. Exactly. Ed, you’re saying that if that’s not the case, then we can’t believe anything. Basically, yeah. Basically, because if you’ll allow me the metaphor I sometimes use, if our fundamental cultural cognitive grammar isn’t tracking reality in a reliable fashion, we’re basically epistemically and thereby also ethically screwed. We really are. You notice that’s not a deductive argument, and this is the point that the neo-platonists make. I can’t give you a deductive argument for that. All I can rely upon is your deep commitment, this is a kind of faith, that knowledge is real. There’s a sort of, I guess I’d call it a Cartesian move, which would say any position where knowledge isn’t real requires some knowledge, so it doesn’t take a position outside of that faith in knowledge anyway, that no one can take the non-knowledge position functionally. Yeah. The problem, of course, with Descartes is he puts it, I agree with that move you just made, and I don’t like to besmirch Descartes because he’s everybody’s favorite hobby horse and I think he’s a scintillating genius who has to be taken profoundly seriously. But I do disagree with him, precisely because I do take him so seriously, that the way he formulated that issue was so restrictive that it leaves, like I think of Hume, and still within the Cartesian framework, but what you’re left with with Hume is a pretty devastating skepticism, like a pretty devastating skepticism. But I think there’s a way of rescuing the insight you just said from the clutches of Hume if we break Descartes’ grammar. And don’t forget, Descartes is fundamentally committed to some dichotomies that he regards as exhaustive and complete. And that’s precisely the grammar that I would challenge at Descartes that would then liberate that insight you just made and restore us back to something much further removed from the Humean skepticism. Well, if you’re saying my formulation exceeds that of Descartes, I’ll take that. Actually, on the subject of Descartes, he’s really interesting to me because some of my thinking about structured non-duality comes from trying to weigh the seeming totality of tautological style proofs that Descartes is trying to leverage, you know, geometry and mathematics, but also in the philosophy of self-experience and the kind of postmodern critique that you can’t necessarily trust any totalizations. I would look, I would read Descartes and I would go, you know, even just the I think therefore I am translation, which has some problems, but you go, how clear are we that that first I and that second I are the same thing? And you could say how clear are we that one equals one? Is that first one really the same as the second one? And so there’s one argument that says you can’t be sure. There’s another argument that says, well, nothing’s truer than that. There’s a space there. There’s a kind of wiggle room, right? That it seems to me it doesn’t have to be absolutely true. It only has to be maximally true for all of the math to function just fine. But the skepticism or the flexibility of postmodern thinking to be involved, right? That we’re thinking of it on a kind of a gradient of approximation where it never gets to 100 or 0. It’s always in there somewhere. Yeah. One equals one gets pretty close. But the reason I think of that is because that idea of proximity seems to me a way of talking about instances of nondualism. When we’re close, we’re not separated, but we’re not unified either. Yeah. So I like this. So I’ll phrase it this way. You’re trying to sail between the skill of Descartes and the Charybdis of Derrida. You’re doing this using Zada’s fuzzy logic, which is this is a really interesting thing to be doing. And then again, I think I agree. I think that’s right. And then I’m trying to get on this notion of proximity. And what’s interesting about Damasius is he actually goes one further than the standard Neoplatonist. So you’ve got a kind of organismic nonduality, which is called like sucke. This is how everything is self-organizing. And when you start to look at self-organizing dynamical systems, well, the dynamical system is more important than the components, right? That gestalt nonduality, right? The whole, right? And then above that is what we were talking about. Yeah. But that relies on some intelligibility structure that actually makes it both to be and makes it so that it’s knowable, right? And then above that is what we’re talking about. Well, there has to be some principle that organizes the emergence of principles, the indeterminacy and the determinacy. And then Damasius says, yeah, but in so far as you’re even thinking that you’re still right. And he actually says you can’t, he posits a fourth level called the ineffable. And he does not mean it. He does not mean by it. It’s just the homogenous blob experience. He means that the attempt, it’s kind of this idea. I think that what you’re getting at, because he talks about this, it’s almost like you get this movement of compression and then you get a sense of the trajectory extends beyond itself. But you can never, that’s as far as you can get. You can see the trajectory of the asymptote. And then that is the closest concept you have. But it is not a concept at all of what the nonduality actually is. Is that something like what you’re saying? I think that’s very similar in certain regards. And I think, you know, seeing the asymptote, you can approach, but you can never be there. But in approaching, that’s the only position you can take. So in fact, that’s the there where you are in the eternal approach. Yeah. It’s a bit like the Sufi notion of because the beloved and I are not two, therefore I am devoted to the other of the beloved. Because that’s the perfect expression of the fact that it is not separate from what I am. There’s a similar idea also in at least the Eastern Orthodox version of Christianity, which overlaps with Neoplatonism about epic cases that the union with God is not homogenous rest. The union with God is an infinite process of self-transcendence and only that trajectory of infinite asymptoting. It’s the most, it’s not equal to, but as you would say, it’s proximate enough for us to be our best grasp. That’s not even the right word, but our best appreciation of God. So these are, who is it, maybe the fifth or sixth Zen patriarch talks a lot about prajna being the same as Samadhi. Yeah. Think of what prajna means, but there’s this idea that there’s a level of insight that is equivalent to having the transcendental experience. Yeah. To me, there are certain concepts that kind of reify that. Right? The infinite asymptotic approach is a way of saying being and becoming in one gesture. Yes. They’re interesting ones. Like if we say thought of the self as a figure eight and my attention’s in the middle and out here is all the things, other people and tools and the world and my perceptions and in here is all my structure and everything like that and I’m holding that position. That figure eight describes sort of in one picture things that are traditionally regarded as self and other. Yep. It’s like the notion of proximity describes in one word a phenomenon that implies being separate from, but also implies being together with. Yeah, yeah, it does. It’s a way of not saying, it’s a way of speaking that conveys but does not say, as you said, something that is, like I like to put it, you know, between beneath and beyond being and becoming also between beneath and beyond being and not being because the asymptote is always not, there’s a knot in the asymptote as well as there is. Yeah, that I think that’s exactly right. I was trying to convey, when that’s where it comes back to the transectivity, I was trying to convey a similar notion with trying to understand the sacredness, sacredness or the sacred, sacredness is the experience, sacredness is the experience of the inexhaustible, right? The moreness, but I was trying to convey that the inexhaustible isn’t a homogenous blob. It is, right? It is, it is the precursor to determination because it’s always the moreness. It’s the mystery of the moreness into the shining of the suchness which folds back into the mystery of the moreness very much like your figure eight, which of course, when turned on its side is infinity and things like that. It made me, it brought up for me two more ways of thinking about non-duality in instances and I think one is, which I would connect with some translations of the Kyoto School, the notion of the field. Yes, very much. Because the field is the precursor of anything. Yeah. It’s the proto-particle. Well, yeah, exactly that. And then on the other hand, I thought of infinitesimals and the role they may have played in Leibniz’s attempt to understand the ineffable. Yeah, yeah. There’s also an infinite approach of intensifying proximity which is both a part and not a part at the same time. Yeah, in fact, if people don’t hold us too strictly against the possibility of anachronistic equivocation, if we could put the two together, if we could think of the infinitesimals as sort of the non-localizable quanta of intelligibility and then the field as what a field, like very much like what a field is in physics, not just an amorphous blob, but the infinite potential for the determination of the trajectory of those quantum particles of intelligibility. And you somehow put them together. That’s getting closer to, I think, the metaphysics of non-duality. Well, I think if we combine Leibniz with Richard Feynman, we’ve really got something. What else did I want to say? There’s an interesting, let’s say, adjacency. So next to this conversation is a conversation about the generative potential of thresholds. So that when someone says to their lover that they want to be one with them, they don’t literally mean they want their liver in the same place as the other person’s liver. They mean they’d like to be closer, closer so that some other function between the two of them takes place. I would say it takes precedence. It takes precedence. Yeah. It’s already there and it’s being emphasized in that process. And it’s going to take precedence over, for example, my relationship to you is going to, within certain contexts, important contexts, take precedence over my relationship to myself. That’s what I think they’re trying to convey. Would you call that an amplification of salience? Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s an amplification of salience insofar as what the job of salience is to bring into realization, both senses of the word. The job of salience is to realize affordances. There is an affordance, an existential affordance between you and your lover. This is one of Plato’s great, great insights, right? There’s an existential affordance between you and your lover. And when you make it salient, it is realized. It comes into awareness and it is made an actual real relation that is given priority in your processing. And thereby, you realize, again, an aspect of reality that is not realizable by you or maybe much less chance of being realized by you on your own. The importance of this generative condition being emphasized in proximity. It’s interesting to me because I can think of a lot of areas of life where the image looks like that. Like the old notion that life evolved in the tide pools between the land and the water. Or somebody tries to do a chi teaching. You don’t feel it tingle when your hands are all the way apart. You don’t feel it like this either. You feel it about here. I would argue that’s the optimal gripping phenomenon. That’s the optimal gripping. I think thresholds put us in touch with sets of opponent principles or patterns such that we can craft a virtual engine. Such that we can bring about that optimal gripping. And that’s why those thresholds, I think, have been, I think you’re right, have been regarded as sacred. Because they represent sort of the best opportunity for us to get the opponent processing going that gives us the optimal grip. That’s so important. Do you think there’s a limit on the kinds of interactions that can produce optimal gripping? Like there’s me in my body or there’s me in the world. Right. There’s these sorts of optimal gripping. There’s our conversation. But is it applicable only to some things or can I think of any two things and imagine that they’re going to engage in an optimal grip? Concepts, entities, anything. Well, I mean, there’s clear examples of optimal grip at the conceptual levels. So I haven’t thought of this question. So I want to think I want to think it aloud with you. That’s yeah, please. There’s clearly examples of optimal grip at the conceptual level. So Eleanor Roche, who did a lot of work on the nature of categorization, she talks about this notion of the basic level. The basic level has no metaphysical priority. Right. But what she said is, like if you’re walking down the street, you’ll point to something, you’ll say that’s a dog. Right. You don’t say that’s a mammal. That’s a living thing. You might say that’s a cocker spaniel. Right. But typically that means you’ve got a more intense interest in dog. So but why is why would the most common way of designating that thing be dog or cat or table? And she says we try to find them when we are too specific. Right. Then what’s happening is we’re emphasizing we’re emphasizing too much the differences. And when we’re too generic, we’re emphasizing too much the similarities, the identities. And what we want and it’s very much like Marla Ponti’s notion of the visible optimal grip between the overall. Right. And the details. What we want is we pick a level that gives us sort of the best product. You can think of them like numbers, the best product between the similarity within the category. Well, the differences between the categories. So the basic level is again, the kind of thing we’re talking about. The basic level gathers in it sort of the best of the differences and the best of the identities so that we get we have the best possibility of making sense of the world. So there’s a clear example in the conceptual domain. I think that’s pretty pretty I think that’s a pretty solid argument for that. And then all the work I’ve done about with Dan Schappi about the NASA scientists getting an optimal grip on Mars through using time delayed black and white photos from Mars, which is like they do. And in fact, they look for that. And then all the all the sort of mental gymnastics they go through in order to bring about that. But they nevertheless they bring it about. So that’s not an argument by any means for saying everywhere. But it’s surely an argument for saying, well, it looks like there’s many different kinds of domains in which optimal gripping is both possible for us and highly normative for us. Do you think there would be is it possible there could be domains in which that wasn’t the case or is that the case in a way that applies as a rule to any domain? Yeah, I don’t know if there’s domains. I mean, there might be there might be types of experiences. So I not every not every cognitive psychologist would agree with what I would what I’m about to say. Many would and I think I could make a good argument. So you’re probably aware of what’s called the fluency phenomenon. So when we process information fluently, regardless of the content, we think it’s more likely to be true. We have more confidence in it. We have a greater sense of reward. Initially, they thought that all that all that fluency was marking was ease of processing. But that’s ridiculous because you don’t get a fluency effect if I just say the same word over and over again. Cat, cat, cat, cat, which is very easy for you to process. And so I would argue that there’s a lot of different ways to process information. I would argue that what we’re actually talking about is fluency is marking that you have optimal grip on the situation in some fashion. But it’s clear that we have instances where optimal grip is not working. And I’m thinking here of something very analogous to chick set my eyes work on flow. And I think flow is a specific kind, an important kind of optimal gripping. And she talks about, well, we can fall below flow into boredom, or we can the environment can exceed our capacity. We fall into anxiety or horror. So I think there’s clearly experiences of the world that we are capable of optimal gripping either because they are too demanding for us or because our skills so exceed them that we don’t need optimal grip. We can discharge our interaction to some more automatic, almost algorithmic procedure. So at least in terms of human beings. Yeah. The limit in terms of things we have no need to enter into a flow state with and things that are just way beyond our ability to turn them into a flow state. And that I think that’s what it is to be a mortal as opposed to a god. Yeah. All right. But suppose I sit down in the Zendo and what I want to do is manipulate my attention in such a way that I can maximize my flow states. And so I’m thinking, how can I be at the place of maximal non duality and intelligibility the most? And so then do I either try to very precisely and quickly get to the, you know, calling it a dog as opposed to calling it a mammal, right? Am I trying to hit the right note or am I trying to build the muscle that the strength of doing the optimal gripping process that goes back and forth? Is it better for me to get more practice of going back and forth or more process of perfectly landing in order to maximize that experience? Well, I think your question is good. So don’t take my response as an attempt to be dismissive or cop it out. Because what comes to mind is martial art. You have to be doing both all the time because if you only try to do one at the expense of the other, you will not do as well as if you try to do them in a highly coordinated fashion. Trying to land it perfectly is what causes this process to be practiced. So I try to land the strike, right? I try to land the strike, but also what I need to do is explore the range of movement I could bring to bear on the strike. And then it’s the deep learning. I have to do the variation and then bring it into the compression and do that. So that, of course, is expanding the range, but it’s also trying to get me, I’m trying to get a more and more multi-dimensional compression going on. I’m trying to not just do the compression with my taxonomic schemas, but presumably, this is what Bachelors suggests, the state of enlightenment would be take all of the dimensions in which people are optimally gripping and you found the meta-stable optimal meta-grip between all of them. You’ve got sort of multi-dimensional compression and variation, the ultimate non-duality of emergence and emanation going on. That’s, I think, what you, and that’s how you can see all of these different wisdom traditions, I think, are often trying to get us to make that sort of next level of deep learning. I’m really enjoying the high level of spiritualized abstraction in this conversation. This could be an ancient Tibetan manual, we’ll just call it the three pearls or some obscure thing. This is a tragically arcane conversation as far as I’m concerned. It makes me very joyous to be old. It is. It is. I want to celebrate that with you. I do think, though, that what we’re talking about, especially the metaphors and especially the connections that I’ve been throwing out and you have also been throwing out to the broader corpus of my work, although I agree with you, there’s a sense in which this is arcane and quite abstract. It’s a way of articulating an apex, a culmination point of, well, I’ll use the language we used earlier, of an entire field of trying to make sense of human meaning making and human flourishing that you and I both have been engaged in. There’s a sense in which people can do this and what they’re doing is just they’re doing a mental masturbation thing. If people want to do that, that’s fine. I’m not a prude or something like that, but I want to be clear that that’s not what I’m trying to do here with you and I don’t think you are either. I think the attempt is not to make some sui generis status that appeals to narcissism or something like that. It’s the idea that, well, we can talk this way, but to do the Zen thing again, ultimately, there’s a non-identity between emptiness and form. All the way up is identical with all the way down, the way up and the way down are the same way. I’m also interested, and I know you are too, on how this feeds back down into things I was saying earlier. You mentioned when you’re sitting and meditating or you’re doing martial art or you’re trying to even make sense of your existential situation because if it doesn’t reach back down into those levels, there’s a sense in which I don’t think it’s something that is that important. Yeah, I mean, I’m pro-masturbation, but there are definitely practical elements to this. On the one side, there’s the practicality of good theory, which is if things are fundamentally structured around a kind of dynamic non-separateness, then that’s relevant to our physics, that’s relative to maybe how we write speech, how we do everything. There’s a personal practicality, which is not only the practicality of the meditator, but also the emotional situation of everyone’s relationships with everyone else and everything all the time because separateness isn’t just a logical condition, it’s a thing I suffer from. Exactly, that’s exactly right. I mean, that’s such a Neil Platonic pearl you just said because the drop, I mean, so Neil Platonism, what you just said was fantastic, by the way. I hope you didn’t think I was insulting you. That was not my intent. That was not my intent at all. But you’re reading something like Damascus or Latinus or Percus and you’re getting this like really hard and abstract, but the thing that’s driving it throughout is this deep, deep existential concern to overcome the suffering that comes out of separateness. And you see the same thing sort of driving Vedanta. When you enter Vedanta, you can get into some very rarefied spaces, right, both conceptual and existential. But the abiding concern is the same, is that there’s a sense in which if we live within an ontology of separateness, we are suffering and we are suffering in ways that are profound and often that we are, of which we are ignorant and those two things really actually exacerbate the suffering. So I think that what you just said that I think that’s the pearl. So you said the three pearls? Well, there’s at least one of the three pearls, right? That’s actually the pearl of great price, that all of this, that’s how I would want to put it now. And thank you for that. If all of this does not alleviate the suffering of separateness, I would even go say, I would even start to make a stronger thing. I would say that it’s somehow on the wrong track. That goes back to the point I made earlier about, you know, in the end, the suffering of our skepticism or our doubt, right, is because we have to wrestle with and perhaps overcome the, you know, as you said, the fundamental separation between the intelligibility and the world. Ultimately, they have to touch, they have to touch. There’s an interesting, for me, conjunction of contemplative practice and therapy in this notion. If we use a spatial metaphor for consciousness, and I take advantage of this proximity notion, there are practices in which I’m going, I’m too identified and now I’m going to be the witness, which means pulling back a little. I’m adjusting back slightly. On the other hand, therapeutically, I feel separate from people, from things, from myself, and I’m asked to lean forward a little, you know, explore that feeling a bit more. So that’s very interesting to me because it sounds very similar to this optimal gripping process. It is. It’s interpersonal optimal gripping. It is. It’s very much. So what we’re trying to get an optimal grip on is what Siegel calls mind-sight resonance. Am I making myself intelligible to you so that you can make yourself more intelligible to me, and you’re constantly trying to get that optimal grip? And then I wonder again if we could put that the optimal grip is like, again, that nexus point, and yet it’s moving through a asymptotic field, right? Like, it would be ridiculous if we sort of said, ah, that’s it. Now, where there will never be an optimal grip and conversation that could possibly transcend this one. People do make that claim. That would be inhuman. That would be ridiculous. So one of the interesting things about things like the flow state or optimal grip is they portend that there is always a metastable, they portend metastability. They indicate by instantiation, by what they are, they indicate that they are one point on a continuum, a metastable continuum where there are many of these places possible. Now that we’ve brought up suffering, there’s something else I’d like to fold in which I might call dark non-duality. Here’s the anecdote. I was at the Winnipeg Human Rights Museum last month, and there’s a lot of terrible stories about people who’ve been excluded and transgressed against violently by larger collectives. Yeah. The interesting thing to me was how similar the people who were being targeted for persecution were to the people who were targeting them. So there’s a little booth there and there’s a story about this, you know, black woman who was found to be in the white section of a theater back in the day and was attacked and then subsequently charged for her mistake. And the interesting thing is she lives in the same country as them. She has the same physiology. She has the same clothes. She has the same language. She likes the same movies. Yeah, yeah, obviously. Right? She is almost as similar to them as you could possibly get. She’s in that ambiguous sweet spot between sameness and difference. Yeah. Right? But something is provoked in them where they feel like they can’t police the boundary between sameness and difference properly. And it unleashes this antagonism. And when you see these, you know, racial antagonisms and things like that around the world, the people they attack are very, they’re similar enough to be different, right? They’re not attacking hedgehogs. Yeah, yeah. No, no. Yeah, exactly. This is interesting to me. And cognitive dissonance plays in there too, because those things are very close, but they don’t produce this nice non-duality effect. They produce a kind of circuit break, which leads to an antagonistic discharge. Yeah, it’s the, I was talking about this with Guy earlier and in one of the lectures where, of course, it’s the uncanny valley, right? You know that with respect to robotics? Yeah. And so you get the uncanny valley or you get all of Mary Douglas’s work that the things that fall between the cracks of our categories, instead of them being, as you said, sort of opening the wonder of the possibility of an underlying unity, they provoke the horror of the unclean, the impure, the uncanny, the eerie, the weird, the horrific. And so that again goes though, again, I would argue, that again goes towards, again, this meta-optimal breath we’re talking about, which is eating, right? I’m worried about getting super meta here, but as we try to approach non-duality, there’s a sense in which we are looking at the space, I’m using grip, right? We’re looking at the spaces, right? What we’re actually not gripping, the space between my fingers is what I’m actually not gripping, right? And then there’s a degree to which that can undermine your confidence in your ability to get a grip. So I’m thinking about like a Piaget-Aliens model here of you need, you have to always be toggling between assimilation and accommodation. If there’s not enough assimilation, it’s just going to break all my fingers, right? But if there’s not enough accommodation, I never open my hand, if you’ll allow me that metaphor. And so I think those two have to be together. That’s what I mean about getting meta, though there’s a non-duality between the dark and the light non-duality. Yeah, right? Sort of thinking that’s exactly what I’m saying, right? They have to be together. And that’s why I precisely, and Chris and I have argued this, that the notion of the sacred always has within it this interwoven, like non-logical identity between that which homes us and that which horrifies us. And I think that’s always the case. And you even get that, you get that, right? Even in Christianity, the vision of God, there’s the idea that there’s a terrific aspect of horror to actually, if you would actually completely be one with God, that would be the most horrifying thing a human being could ever, in fact, you couldn’t endure. You would just be burnt away by the glory of God. And I think that’s right, because I think, and this isn’t going to surprise you, I think reality is ultimately combinatorially explosive. And what we’re talking about here is a way of disclosing the combinatorial explosion without getting destroyed by it. But you don’t sense that it’s combinatorial explosive unless you get some sense of the threat of the explosion. Yeah, I think that the, at least approximately absolute conditions at either end of a spectrum define every moment of flexibility within that spectrum. Yes. So we don’t, everybody’s at a temperature. Nobody wants to be at absolute zero or so hot and destroyed. Those are implicit within being on a gradient. Yes. You vaguely hear the horror of God and you’d need to in order to adjust yourself to be in the sweet spot. So, and what I’m about to say now is in no way, in no way to be understood as any justification for the racial bigotry and violence that was demonstrated and perpetrated on that woman. But there’s a sense in which, again, remember that caveat, the racist can’t help but be racist. Again, this is not an ethical justification. I’ve now said it three times. Unless they have a change in their worldview grammar that allows them to shift to, like their set point has to be able to shift. It’s a metastable phenomenon. So I mean, that’s what I, I have some issues around this notion, but that’s partially what I understand what people are trying to articulate with the very poor naming of, I think the name is poor of systemic racism. I don’t think that’s quite the right word. But I think what they’re trying to articulate is that there has to be, that we can make all the laws we want and we can do all the things we want, but we have to basically change the parameters of the cognitive cultural grammar so that a different kind of optimal gripping is possible for people. We have to move where they would find horror. So I’m thinking about like this, and they have a worldview in which, here’s home and here’s horror, right? And the black person falls out here. And they need a worldview that when which it shifts, and that’s not the case. And so that there’s something we have to do above and beyond. And I don’t, here’s also one of my problems. I don’t know, I don’t think I want to give the government this job because I think that’s a disaster. But there’s something we have to do above and beyond government policies. Well, you and I have talked about this. I think you can see I’ve been influenced by our conversations, right? And also the conversations I’ve been having with Grant and Zach, right? That there’s something above and beyond policy, which we have to do. But there’s something else we have to do that addresses, like I said, I’m not happy with this term, systematic racism, but it is something about we have to do the cultural cognitive transformation that shifts the possibility space by which people optimally grip and make sense of what it is to be a person, etc. And I don’t know quite what that is. I don’t think we should give that mandate to the government. I think that’s a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. So you’re saying you’re a racist. Yeah, I think it’s an interesting term, systemic or systematic racism, because I think it has two facets. It has like, some algorithms will produce unwanted side effects, and the interplay between institutions will cause things to happen that aren’t necessarily in the constitutions of any of those institutions. We need to look at that as causing structural exclusions of various kinds. Yeah, and so the idea is sort of- There’s this cognitive cultural dimension that’s really important that has to do with how people are negotiating sameness and difference. Exactly. So the solution to the racism problem is in a way the same. It’s a subset of the dharmic solution to every problem. Yes. So in that sense, it is properly and it should be resituated as a subset within the perennial problems of the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Now, yeah, sorry, you’re right. And I didn’t mean to exclude the idea that there are patterns within distributed cognition that operate in a way that leads to the mistreatment of people. I acknowledge that too. So I don’t know what to call that either. I don’t like the term because it implies- it implies a system, which is not quite the right way of thinking about this. But anyways, so I do think that that connection you just made is a really important one. I just want to savor it for a minute. I just wanted to acknowledge you’re right. I agree with you. There’s these two aspects to the notion of systemic racism. But I like that idea, right? Because you see that and at times it’s off-putting, aesthetically, even epistemically for me. You see that though in these traditions. You see Neil Claytonism saying if we could just get everybody to realize the one, then it would be wonderful. Everything would be great. Or Buddhism, if we could just get everybody- or Taoism. And then most of the time I find that off-putting. It’s like, really? Really? But now you’ve given me a charitable way of understanding that. Instead of thinking of it as a totalitarianism of a particular view, an imperialism of a particular view, it’s more like the claim that any of our projects of reform ultimately are just subsidiaries of this overall project that we’ve been talking about today. Thank you for that. That’s a much better way of interpreting those claims. Because many people do read them imperialistically. I’m not the only one that does that. And I think having an alternative way of interpreting that kind, which is a very pluralistic interpretation, by the way, that’s very good. Thank you for that. I think that’s excellent. Yeah, I like having- there are problems and you get weird moods from the way the translators at least are expressing some of the ancient thinkers. You think, what is that? What would Karl Popper think? Is this proto-fantasm? There are charitable ways to accept the structure of what they’re saying. Yeah, that’s true. So the question then comes up is, what do we do to either make a specific modulation to the gripping, say in society, and go, oh, we want that one on the inside, or generally promulgate an intensified capacity to do the gripping? That’s the case. Is that just the result of doing more gripping? Like people would say, have more perspectives, have more experiences, shift states more often so that you have to do more and that muscle gets stronger? Or is it the result of some particular attitude about all of that that makes it easier to do? So for me, I mean, so that’s why I tried to make that distinction between policy and sort of cultural cognitive transformation. I mean, I think we should keep trying to make specific policies that move the thing around, as you said, the kind of cognitive overton window or something like that. But what’s going to happen about that is I think I think we have to have an ultimate commitment to the procedural justice over any substantive justice precisely because that’s not going to be finished or final. We’re going to have to need a self correcting process. It’s going to have to move it around. Right. So that’s, I think, what I would say to that point. But I do think the project, the project of not, which given what you said earlier about these two dimensions, I see that them now is being complementary. There’s the project, not a policy making, but basically the cultivation of wisdom. That’s what you’re talking about. And I think we should do both. And what would be really optimal is if we had a cultural project that was hugely invested in making people as wise as possible. So some of the wisest people went into the project of moderating and monitoring the democratic process of policy setting. That would be, I think, really good. How do you either, A, attract the wise or, B, establish a metric to determine who is wise? Well, I mean, on the second one, I think we’re making good progress. I mean, I don’t think that’s a computationally intractable problem. I think, like I said, I participated in the wisdom task force where we got the people who have fought the longest and the hardest and done the most empirical and theoretical work on it. We got it together. We were able to come to a consensus paper. It got published in a high-impact journal. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re done. That’s ridiculous. But those are pretty good measures of significant progress, which I think should, the rational response to that is, oh, we can make progress on this question. We’re not doomed to endlessly flailing about it. So I think that’s what I would say to the second point. The first point is Plato’s problem. How do you get somebody who is wise to be ever interested in such a sewage system as the political arena? I don’t have an answer to that. I mean, the Romans came up with this really cool answer. What you do is you get a bunch of gay or relatively asexual men that won’t have natural offspring, and then you get a, you know, you have schools out there training people, and then the emperor adopts the best person as his son to be his heir. And that works for a while, but the problem is that’s a really culturally, really culturally historically specific solution. I don’t see, I don’t think we could do something. But what it does mean, just, I mean, although I’ve basically thrown most of it away, it does indicate that it, I mean, actuality is a proof of possibility. So it is possible. It is possible. Yeah, I think we’ve seen something like that work with the Romans at periods. We’ve also seen it work plausibly well in the Tulkou system of the Himalayas. Yeah, yeah. Right. You’re going to like have a bunch of wise people pick out the kid and then train them to be wise, but it is narrowly culturally specific and takes a long time. Yeah, it does. It does. You can’t get, you can’t get to Marcus Aurelius until you’ve had, you know, you know, literally centuries before with Augustus and everything like that. So I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, so that’s possible, right? Here’s the government side of it. And like I said, getting progress, I think it is reasonable to conclude that we are making progress on, you know, understanding and measuring wisdom and that that can continue. I don’t see why not. I think the burden of proof is on the pessimist now, on that one. And so optimism here, and at least real possibility here, that, but that’s, I think, the best we have right now. It’s not, it’s not despair, right? No, it’s, it’s not bad. I think we are moving forward and I can, I can imagine a world in which there’s even a decent computational rendering of the algorithmic proto-behaviors that lead to increase in this optimal gripping capacity. Yep. Yep. That would be, that would be nice. Yeah. And again, not in a metastable fashion in that, in which there is an ongoing development, a trajectory of transcendence, right? Complex computations are interesting in terms of metastability, right? Like digits of pi are stabilized by a particular geometric relationship that holds over the entire group and yet absolutely unpredictable. Well, the thing about like the work of, how it is at Kenslow, his work on the metastability of the brain, the brain seems to, again, gotta be really cautious, but it seems to have evolved to seek out like metastable processing because it, like, in states of metastability, it is simultaneously integrating and differentiating very much. That’s why I keep making the connections. It’s very much the neural network implementation of non-duality in a very important sense because it’s getting a state that is functionally between, beneath, and beyond differentiation and integration. It’s a very interesting condition when a set of processes enter at an emphasized proximity threshold. The other thing is emergent at that process and then that thing starts to exert some kind of governing control over that system such that it almost becomes the definition of that group. I agree and I think what we’re also seeing, maybe this is the third thing we should add in because maybe it mediates between the cultivation of wisdom and governance, is we’re seeing, we’re starting to begin, I was going to say we’re starting to get a grip on, there’s a pun in there, we’re starting to get a grip on, and you participated in the anthology, like, we’re starting to get people coming together into an initial biological coherence about how we can get that kind of state also within distributed cognition, which I think would mediate between the individual cultivation of wisdom and something like governance on the other side. It’s very generally applicable if it’s correct and it seems hard to think why it wouldn’t be correct that interactivity thresholds play the privileged role in meta-stabilities. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s basically right. Well, I gotta go soon. Yeah, this is probably, this is a lot to digest for anybody watching. It was very, very rich, very, very rich. You gave me some very, well, you reduced from me some very powerful ideas and you also presented to me some very powerful ideas, so thank you for that. Thank you very much for that. This was wonderful, I think, and whatever the next time is, I think I would love to start with this idea of what the proto-skills or the root computations are that comprise the set of processes that generate wisdom that make people better at all the varieties and scales of optimal gripping. I would love to undertake that. That’s something I don’t know that I want to know. What is that set? So, I mean, yeah, let’s do that and I’d love to have that conversation. Again, remember what I was arguing for. I wasn’t arguing for a finished theory. I was arguing for good reason and evidence that we are making real progress. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we’re not going to sit down next time and nail that set. That’s it. But we’ve been clarifying a little. We’re doing pretty well. So, and this again, to end with a platonic note, we are never the gods. We are always the lovers of wisdom. We are always by Leosophia. We are never the gods. The gods are loving the gods through us and not. One thing that we didn’t get to touch on and we might want to come back to at some point is, right, because we talked a lot about the system of relations, as we should, but I’m also thinking about like, you know, Harman’s work and object-oriented ontology because we talked a lot about sort of the moreness of the field, but we also, we did indicate that there’s like the quantum of the suctionist, but object-oriented ontology tends to emphasize that and, you know, it talks about that, you know, what do they say, overfilling and underfilling, that you don’t want to lose, you don’t want the thing to completely dissolve into its relation. Exactly. I think that’s, there’s a role for the infinitesimal in that. Exactly. Exactly. I think we absolutely, if we’re going to say relational structures and processes and adjacencies are the fundamental, we don’t want to lose any of the reality and dignity of the things that are in those relationships. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was trying to hear and I’ve sort of, I see myself moving between Neoplatonism and speculative realism and then I’m trying, what I meant when I said I’m trying to get beyond either saying the relata are more real or the relations are more real, getting beyond both of those in some way. You know, this shift to the relationship between the relationships and the relata is fundamental. Yeah, yeah. An additional quality. Yeah, which needs to be somehow explicated and articulated, yeah. And it’s something like what we were talking about. That’s a dimension of non-duality that I think is rich and needs to be explored. This was structurally, emotionally, humanly, and mystically fabulous. Yeah, I agree. Okay, it was just wonderful. Thank you so much, Limec. This will probably, I’ll upload this probably in the next month or so. Sure, terrific. Okay, take good care of my friend. Good to see you, John.