https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gCnGTaF9VGs
So welcome everyone to a very special Voices with Raveka. I’ve been really looking forward to this for a long time. And here’s two people that I really sort of, I love being in relationship with. They’re wonderful people and I’ve had ongoing discussions with them. And both of them I consider friends. I have tremendous respect and affection for both of them. I’m going to introduce them and then ask them to say a little bit about themselves and their history with me, just to give us some context. And then I’m going to, and then I’ll introduce what we’re going to discuss to all of us together and how we’re going to move forward. So I’ll start with, I guess with Paul. I’ve known Paul a little bit longer than Mary. So I’ll start with Paul. My name is Paul VanderKlay. I’m a pastor of a local church in Sacramento, California. I first got to know John because I started making videos about Jordan Peterson. And one of my listeners says, Oh, you’ve got to listen to John Vervecky. I said, who’s John Vervecky? I don’t know. And so started listening to John. And that was a little bit before his awakening from the meaning crisis project came online, which was better because he had some other videos that the sound was a little iffy. And the awakening from the meaning crisis had better production values. And so John and I have spoken a number of times. If you go to my channel, I think one of my favorite videos with him was I often when I begin a relationship with someone to sort of do a common history together. And so on my channel, you can find who is John Vervecky and why does it matter video like that. And I got to know Mary in a similar way. Mary started watching my videos and I had a couple of conversations with Mary about a number of things. And so it’s been a delight to get to know these two wonderful individuals. And so a conversation like this is always welcome. Okay. Well, I’m Mary Cohen. The sea is silent just to confuse people. I started I got into watching Paul VanderKlay because of Jordan Peterson. So the YouTube algorithm pointed me in his direction. I was quite excited and I probably listened to just about everything he has put out for the past couple of years. And and from Paul VanderKlay, I got led into John Vervecky and I listened to a lot of his conversations with people as well as all of his meaning awakening from the meaning crisis videos, which I found very interesting. A few of them I’ve gone back and listened to twice, which is a high praise for you, John, because I haven’t listened to anything twice. So so anyway, this has been quite a delightful journey for me. I live in Georgia and I’m a grandmother and a stay at home person. I have homeschooled a number of kids and grandkids over the years. And I have a lot of interest myself in philosophy and theology. I grew up in the cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and then worked my way backwards through the Protestant Reformation to become Catholic. And so I have a strong interest in all of these themes. And I did have some some college philosophy also. So this has all been right up my alley because I stay at home and I do a lot of gardening and I have chickens and all that stuff. I have more time to I don’t watch as much YouTube as I just am able to just kind of listen to it. So this has been wonderful because it gets me out of my mundane existence. And into some really high level thinking type of stuff. So I’ve really enjoyed it. I should mention that, of course, as Paul indicated, he has an ongoing series of videos that he does. I recommend them strongly. I also has a Discord server and he uploads that those Q&A sessions. Mary is going through a wonderful series. I have because of time, I can only dip in and out of it where she’s going through the work of Ratzinger as an approach to, I think, a phenomenological Catholic might be the best framing, a phenomenological Catholic way in which we might consider responding to the meeting crisis. So I highly recommend everybody checking that out. Mary’s going through it very carefully. And so she has that as sort of the skeleton theme. And then she will then do responsive videos to other things she’s seeing. And so I recommend that to everyone. Not to mention chicken videos. I see the chicken videos. And one of the things I love about these conversations are that so you have a university professor and you’ve got a local pastor and you have a homeschooling mom and grandma who’s raising chickens and knows a lot about the biology of growing food and feeding people. And I mean, just I like how the interdisciplinary nature of these conversations is so rich. I agree. And I think I hope this is taken as a as a complementary characterization. I think the multi-perspectival nature of this is central to it. I think we suffer. This is part of the ongoing project. And Paul has contributed to the anthology that Christopher, Pietro and I are putting out, is the ongoing project of trying to get out of monologue, which is becoming predominant or a culture and back into genuine good faith dialogue. And what does that look like? I should mention in good faith to that. And I’m very. I feel very homed with these two people, even though they are Christian and I am not. Nevertheless, they are welcoming and I hope they feel that I do the same for them. So just to make it clear, I’m welcoming them here and I want I want there to be fellowship between us as we discuss these things, because I think more and more and more I’m coming. I always thought this, but it’s becoming more and more a priority to me. The manner of what we’re doing is more important than the material, ultimately, at least right now, to my mind. So. So what I’d like to do is I’d like to propose very much in a Socratic fashion, sort of a provocative topic about which there are differing perspectives and invite us to enter into dialogue about them. And I guess because it’s it’s my channel, or at least the initial invitation was to my channel. I’ll take on the Socratic role. That, of course, is something that I aspire to as much as possible. And I’ll try and propose some provocative challenges to some of the things that are going on here. And there’s another person that I want to mention whose work has, I think, influenced all of us to some degree. And I’ve entered into dialogue with him as well. And that’s Jonathan Pajot, because I think I strongly recommend his channel as well. And I’m also going to be responding to some of his things. So. I want to the topic I want to talk about first is narrative and its role and its relationship to what I call dialogos. What I mean by dialogos is open ended dialogue that is Socratic in intent in which we are trying to provoke existential insight. It’s not just discussion. It’s not just conversation. There’s the attempt to mutually provoke and promote insight, existential insight. It’s designed to be a form of dialogue that is open ended. We’re supposed to follow the logos where it goes, dialogos. And the intent for that is not to come to ultimately a theoretical conclusion, but to afford existential insight and potentially transformation. So the narrative, of course, is a topic that is deeply relevant to that. And I want to enter into dialogos about it. First of all, I want to state so there’s going to be a bit of a monologue here just to lay out some framework. And I appreciate you guys hanging in there. So thank you. First of all, I want to state that I’ve argued explicitly and I still stand by my argument that narrative is important. I made it one of the three orders, right? There was the normal logical order, the normative order and the narrative order. I think narrative is indispensable for transforming episodic memory into autonoetic memory so that we become temporally extended selves capable of long term projects, capable of deep moral commitments. And I think that for me, and I don’t want to get into the ontology of this or the relevance to the abortion debate, for me, those are I won’t say they’re the final definition of personhood. But if you don’t have those capacities, if you’re not temporally extended, right, if you can’t pursue long term plans, we as a culture generally withhold the rights of personhood. We treat we say people have to be treated this way, but we don’t let them vote or own property, etc, etc. So that’s all I’m talking about. I’m talking about it at that level. So I’m just saying that’s a way that I think as a culture, we have recognized them right as at least central features of personhood. So what I’m saying is without narrative, you’re not a temporally extended agent that can pursue long term goals. And that means you’re also not capable of deep moral commitments. And I take those to be central. I’m not as I said, I’m not going to make them the essence because that got into a hairy debate. I’m just going to say they’re central to personhood. So the point I’m making is narrative is central to personhood. I still stand by all of that. Here’s, though, the things that I’m I want to talk about. And part of it is provoked by Jonathan’s work. And I probably I should have invited him as well. But part of it is also some very powerful arguments Paul is making about the story verse and narrative. And then Mary’s making some, you know, some very provocative in the good sense of the word. All right. Provocative claims about that narrative is deeper than dialogus. And I want to explore that. And here’s so I want to sort of bring up the first challenge. But in order to do that challenge, I need to invoke a distinction that’s really important to cognitive science. So that’s where I’m going to speak from, because that’s what I should do. You guys should speak from where you are. So there’s a distinction in cognitive science between a rule described system and a rule governed system. Let me give you a couple of concrete examples where this comes out and why you need the distinction. So I can use calculus. To describe what the solar system is doing. In fact, I have to use calculus to describe what the solar system is doing. But I don’t think the solar system is doing calculus. Why don’t I think the solar system is doing calculus? Because it can’t make a mistake. It can’t get it can’t miscalculate. And it doesn’t care what it’s doing. Right. So the solar system isn’t it isn’t rule governed. It’s rule described. So although I can use calculus to describe it, what it’s doing, it would be an incorrect description to say it’s doing calculus. Similar. Another example, I’m playing chess with a computer program. But Daniel, this is Daniel Dennett’s famous example. When I’m playing chess, I’ll often take what he calls the intentional stance. I’ll talk to the computer as if it’s a narrative agent. Oh, the computer wants me to do this and it’s trying to deceive me. And it wants me right. It won’t. None of this is actually going on. The computer doesn’t care at all if it wins or loses. Right. It doesn’t. Right. It’s its identity is in no way challenged or threatened if it makes a mistake. Right. And so although I am. Talking to it as if it’s rule governed, it’s only rule described, because, of course, it is rule describable. That’s what I do when I actually lay out to you what the computer is doing. So I want to propose that in direct derivation, there’s a distinction between things being narratively describable and things actually being narratively governed. So we can tell stories about all kinds of things and we do it all day long. And I don’t deny that at all. In fact, I argue for that. We practice narrative all the time. But that is not sufficient evidence that those things are actually unfolding a story because there is no direct implication between being narratively described and narratively governed. You have to do extra things to show me that what’s going on is narratively governed. And so I think it’s insufficient, for example, to say I can tell a story about whatever X, Y or Z to legitimate the conclusion. Therefore, there is a story going on in X, Y and Z, because I can tell a story about the solar system, and that doesn’t mean it’s doing calculus. I can tell a story about the chess program, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually endeavoring to deceive me or play chess or do any of those things. So that’s the first part I want to make. And my concern, so my first thing is to state a concern, which is I’m concerned that a lot of times I see people saying, look, I can tell a story about this and therefore a story is going on. And that has to be false. It has to be false because that would eradicate the distinction between narratively described and narratively governed. And secondly, we know that there are instances where we think there are stories that are going on and there are no stories going on. I take this to be a defining feature of conspiracy theories, which are very prevalent and very problematic right now. Right. And so. Next point that I want to get to, so now I’m going to lay my cards on the table. I want to get to what is it about us that allows us to learn narrative, allow to allow us to realize when we are subject to narrative bias, like in conspiracy theories, allows us to adopt narratives other than the ones that we currently have. When I, when I endeavor to see what your narrative is. And what I think is that narrative is not necessary to intelligence and consciousness. Here’s why I think this animals. So we have clear, I think undeniable evidence of sophisticated intelligence, tool building, Caledonian crows, right. The chimps, especially the bonobos. We even have evidence for self recognition in some of these animals. They passed the mirror test, right. Which has taken us very good evidence for a sense of self. And these organisms do not have narrative. We can attribute a narrative to them, but we have no independent evidence that they are being governed by a narrative. And so I think that’s clear evidence that narrative is not necessary for sophisticated intelligence, sophisticated consciousness. I think denying consciousness to chimps and, you know, would be just a moral crime, right. And even a sense of self. We have evidence. They have all of that without narrative. Francis DeWalt has provided good evidence that these creatures have the first, the first movements of morality, what he often calls proto morality. They will do altruistic behavior. They will share when it costs them personally to do so. I’m not claiming they have full blown morality. I think that’s too strong, but they have something that would allow an organism, right. The ability to start to learn morality. So narrative is not necessary for all of those things. And I think that therefore there must be very sophisticated cognition that right, has to be in place in order for us to acquire narrative ability. And then my final argument for that is developmental psychology. Children aren’t capable of narrative until quite well into their development. Notice the things that have to be in place before they can get narrative. They have to have developed linguistic competence. They have to know how to enter into conversation and they have to get the very beginnings of temporally extended, right? They have to, they have to get what is needed for temporally extended stuff. They have to get the very beginnings of introspection. All of these things come online and are sort of co-cured together between the ages of three and four. Now, interestingly, what most developmental psychologists are proposing is that what allows us to learn things like narrative is dialogue. And you see kids capable of dialogue before narrative, because they start to do things almost immediately that are necessary for dialogue. They have, and, and we, we forget how important this is. They have joint attention. Joint attention is when you look at something, they’ll look at it too. Try to get another animal to do that with you. Try it when then you realize, wow, that’s a very sophisticated ability. They come, they start imitating your emotional expressions. And very, very soon they start to do turn-taking in their interactions with you. These are all the things that are at the core of dialogue and they actually afford. And notice that you have dialogue before you have narrative because you have one sentence speech where you have like, you can utter one word and you would gesture like, Baba wants their bottle. And then you have telegraphic speech, which are still not full-blown sentences, but it’s bound up in dialogue. And then only after all of that is mastered, do you get the capacity for them to do narrative. Finally, we have good evidence that you, we can transcend narrative. We can transcend narrative when we’re in the flow state, which means we can enhance our agency and be in a non-narrative frame. That’s one of the features of the flow state. The narrative frame drops away, or in mystical experiences, we can have profound states of meaning that are not narratively bound. And so I think both the primordiality of something like the ability to couple to the environment in dialogue and the ultimacy of states that are trans narrative points out to the fact that I think narrative is, I don’t want to be too tentative. So take this as said with kindness. I think that narrative is being overblown a bit. And my concern with that is that narrative is like, narrative is one of our most powerful heuristics. We have to learn it and practice it. And like all heuristics, and I think this is undeniable, this is what the no free lunch theorem proves. All heuristics come with an equal degree of bias. So if something is a very powerful heuristic, we have a mathematical logical proof that it comes with an equally, you know, equally powerful bias that we have to be on guard about. And so my concern is if we, if we, if we try to write narrative into the fabric of the universe and the fabric of our cognition, we might be licensing that bias right at a time in which we need people to be able to talk across narrative divides in an important way. So that’s the Socratic provocation. That’s what I wanted to say as a way of laying out what my concerns are, both if you, if it’s fair to say, scientifically and existentially. Okay. I’d like to pick it up here for a minute and I want to see if we can kind of disambiguate a couple of things. And also if I can refine a couple of things that I said previously, the first thing that I want to refine, I think is let’s make a distinction between story and narrative that a story, this, I, I think the story is just the thing happening, but the narrative is the telling of it. And we can make a distinction between the thing happening and the telling of it. A story is any, any progression we could say, or any movement, but the telling of it is different. So, so I could tell a story about something, but that thing might not itself have any sense of having a story, just like you said about the, about the planets, right? Right. So I would say it’s still in a story, even though it doesn’t know it’s in a story, but it still is a story. And the proof of that is simply that if you talk to an astronomer about the origin of it and everything, they’re going to tell you a story. It’s already in the story, but the narrative then would be the telling of the story. That’s a distinction I would like to make. Okay. So that’s a good distinction. Let’s call narrative the cognitive act, right? The cognitive communicative act. And then we’ll, we’ll say, and you want to reserve story for what’s happening, but you don’t, you don’t want to say that every happening is a story, do you? It’s possibly, could you give me an example of a happening that wouldn’t be a story? Well, I, I, I take it that like one of the differences between a story and a happening is a story is teleological. A story is moving towards some goal state. And so, and, and that’s why the solar system isn’t doing a story. There’s no goal state. It’s not trying to do anything. It’s not trying to go anywhere. It’s not trying to be anything. It’s not trying to, that’s why it’s not proper to say it makes a mistake. If it can’t make a mistake, it also can’t succeed. And if you can’t succeed, there isn’t a story. There’s no T loss happening. Well, I think even from a totally materialistic perspective, there is a T loss, which would be right. The final state of, of entropy, right? No, no, but it’s not trying to get to entropy, right? If it’s getting there, then there is a, there it’s, it’s happening. But that’s not the, but that’s not the same thing as a T loss, right? Because if you trip and fall, you get to the ground, but you weren’t trying to get to the ground, even though you end up there. Right. If, if, what I’m saying is if you move intention from an event, there’s no story happening. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Well, okay. Okay. So you, want to say, so what you’re saying is that in order for there to be a story, there has to be intention. Yeah. I think a story is a T a lot. I mean, that’s why we tell the narrative, right? Because we’re trying to figure out what the goal was or the lesson to be learned or how we can change our behavior to achieve the goals we want. Why else do we tell a story other than to modify our behavior and give us a And that’s why we want to know, right? The narrative of some event that has happened because we want to understand the motives of the perpetrators. We want to understand their intentions so that we can possibly change their behavior or change our behavior. That’s why we’re disturbed when there’s like a mass killing and we can’t know. We want to know why did he do it? We, well, and we don’t say, well, you know, he pulled his finger and that caused a chemical explosion and the bullet went out and that penetrated. We said, no, no, no, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think without motive, without intention, without goal orientation, I don’t think it’s proper to talk of a story because then, I mean, then, then it just becomes, I think, a trivial thing, right? Then every like one domino knocking another randomly would become a story. Well, but I want to go back to the astronomer, right? So the astronomer that that tells the story, the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story that tells you a story of how they think we ended up with a moon, you know, circling the earth and, you know, moon circling planets in the development of the solar system. It is not is not he is not saying that in order to change our behavior, is he? I mean, what is it? No, but I think I’m disagreeing with you in the sense that I don’t think he’s telling you a story. I don’t think he’s telling you a story. I mean, he could he could say, well, the moon wanted to be like he could he could make it like we do this sometimes in children’s narratives. I’m trying to use the terms the way you’re using them very carefully. Right. Right. But I don’t think he’s telling you a story. I mean, I think he’s telling you, I think we have to allow the possibility that there are nomological principles. He’s basically invoking gravity and he’s invoking various principles of Newtonian principles. And he’s saying because of this principle and this principle, this happened and this happened and this happened, like the biologist that tells the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, you’re not telling a story because he is explicitly committed to the fact that evolution is not teleological in nature. That’s that’s that’s that’s the defining difference between the evolutionary story and intelligent design. Right. So, OK, well, let me put it this way. I accept that that’s you are what you’re saying about it. I think, you know, you might have to argue with all of the publishers of of scientific textbooks who have titles like the story of life or the story of this or the story, you know, there’s there’s. You know, I think that I think that you’re using the word in a much more technical sense than most people would use it, which is fine because you’re technical, but I’m the most people. I’m the representative of the most people. Well, that’s fine. But but but again, we like you have to be careful about that’s used for rhetorical purposes, right, just like we make a picture of the solar system for the atom in our textbooks, those physicists thinks the atom looks like that at all. And so it’s there in order to help get people stage by stage into thinking. So, you know, and secondly, we don’t want to confuse properties of how we have to speak about things with properties of the things we speak about. The fact that I often relay things to you in a story, I also have to relay things to you in English because that’s the only language I have. I don’t think the world is made of English. Like that doesn’t make any sense to me. I know I have to I have to unfold things at a certain temporal scale because that’s who I am. But that doesn’t mean right. So the fact that I talk about evolution in seconds doesn’t mean that evolution is that the at the time scale of seconds unfolding, we can’t confuse properties of how we have to talk about things with properties of the thing. My sentence, the Eibel Tower is heavy, is not itself heavy. Right. Right. So the fact that we have to talk about things that way, again, doesn’t license conclusions about the things. That’s what I’m saying. OK, well, I’ll accept, you know, I’m going to accept that that’s the perspective that you’re coming from. OK, fair enough. That’s fair enough. And it’s really good to know that. So my so I wanted to make a distinction between story and narrative. You want what when I say those words, them to basically be the same thing. Now, I do want to allow you the distinction between what you call narrative and what’s going on out there. I think calling what’s going on out there, a story prejudice is the case in your favor. I think we need a neutral description description because if you say, well, I’m just presupposing that everything is teleological and narrative. Well, that’s fine. You’re allowed to do that. But you know what you can’t then do? You can’t then do say, you know, because things are theological and narrative, I believe in God because that’s not that’s just that’s just building it in right that like I want to what I’m going to what I’m what I’m calling to you, what I’m invoking is I’m invoking a point made by C.S. Lewis in miracles. Right. He says, I’m not going to say everything’s a miracle because it’s run by God, because that’s just to define the thing ahead of time. I’m going to work from within the scientific worldview, find something it’s committed to and then draw it out from there. And that’s what I’m saying. See, my concern here and I’ve been I’ve been clear about this from the beginning is I want to create something, a way of talking that bridges between spirituality and science. Right. And I’ve been clear that that that is not a project. And Mary, you’ve supported me on this. So I’m invoking you. This is not a project to me to subvert spirituality underneath. I’m not trying to do that. Right. But what I’m saying is if it’s going to be a dialogue, it has to be a dialogue. That’s basically what I’m saying. Right. OK, so that was the first that was just to say, you know, I wanted to I wanted to make a separation between those two words, because previously when I was talking about narrative, I think I would have used story and narrative interchangeably. But somebody wanted me to somebody in one of the comments under my video really wanted me to get into the difference between story and narrative. And I think that and and I think that the narrative is the telling of the story. It’s not the you know, the story is already there. The narrative is the telling of it. So where that there is, we might disagree. OK, but I want to make the distinction between the story and the narrative. The second distinction. Why don’t we just make a distinction between events and narrative? Because we can agree that we’re talking about events. You talked about unfolding. OK, we could we could do that. So let me so let me ask you, though, because there’s there’s something that I’m confused about that you said that I feel I would like you to disambiguate. Please, that is, that is you started off talking about kind of the Socratic, the high level dialogue of the Socratic, the Socratic interchange, right? I totally agree with you is this high level project that people enter into together. OK, but then you started talking about the baby and the baby Babylon. And you and it seems to me that you’re a little bit ambiguous here in what you’re calling dialogue. The baby is not entering into a Socratic project with its mother. And so I would like you to do and you and you specifically at the beginning wanted to make a distinction between our ordinary conversation that we have with one another and dialogue, and then I think you know that’s a very good down the slope on that. So I tend to reserve the term and this is an excellent criticism you’re making. And so I think this deserves a good response. Yes. And I’ve been trying to be strict about reserving the term deologos for that upper level thing that we’re talking about this. The thing that’s called the thing exemplified in Socrates, for example, deologos. However, I do think that we have to because it’s high level, we have to talk about the lower level processes that it is dependent upon, and I think that’s dialogue. And then I think dialogue breaks down into those things I was trying to talk about, you know, the imitation perspective taking ability, the joint attention ability and the turn taking ability, which kids come pretty, pretty much ready to do. And then I was trying to say that and I was trying to do something analogous with the animals. The animals clearly are not capable of narrative or even dialogue, but they have something below that that allows them to be very intelligent, conscious and have a sense of self. So I should stipulate to be more careful. I should only use the term deologos for the upper level stuff. I should use dialogue for what what takes place, perhaps in speech. And then I want to talk about I don’t know what to call. I don’t know if we have a term for that, this these proto abilities that make dialogue possible. I’ll just call them proto dialogue abilities right now. And so I should distinguish them. The reason why I and you’re right, I have been equivocal. And so I want to acknowledge that right now. This is a legitimate criticism. But what I’m trying to what so this is not a justification. I think Mary’s criticism is is bang on. It’s an explanation because what I’ve been focusing on and what I’ve been trying to get to is the deep continuity between this higher level stuff and this lower level stuff, because I think when Socrates provokes an insight into us, right, it’s reaching into the depths, it’s that it’s it’s going into the very core of our cognitive processing because he’s asking for a restructuring that’s not just at the level of some of our beliefs or ideas. He’s asking for us to aspire to wisdom and virtue, which is a much more comprehensive thing. So. My explanation, again, not a justification, I think I want to acknowledge that Mary’s criticism is right, I was being ambiguous, and so I’ve tried to specify disambiguate right now, but what I don’t want to lose in the differentiation that I just made is the idea that there’s a deep continuity, that when you’re engaging in dialogical practices, it reaches into dialog and then it reaches down into these proto dialogic things because I mean, I’m trying to get. I’m sorry, I don’t want to be too poetic here, but I’m trying to get the get back to the Greek sense of the word logos, that the logos reaches up into the very highest organizing principles down into the depths and see and and and and just to put sort of a Christian spin on it, which is a weird thing for me to be doing, I suppose, right. I know because I’ve always been very impressed by in Arkean logos right in the beginning was the logos translating it as the word is, as many people point out, is grotesquely inadequate. And there’s something profound going on there about the logos is primordial. It’s not in the beginning was the mythos. There’s a Greek word for story and narrative, and it’s not there. And there’s something profound going on there. Right. And that’s what so and again, I’m not trying to call you out on your own carpet, but I’m trying to say I’m this has been deeply influential for me like because, you know, of when I read about that in Heidegger, there’s the Stoics and logos, all of this stuff. And and I see there’s work I’m reading on Socrates right now where his will and he repeatedly says this and because I didn’t get it in the translation, it’s making a huge impact on me and he says he’s he’s always following the logos. He’s always willing to follow the logos wherever it will go. And so and while you’re right, Mary, and I acknowledge it again, I want to try and invoke something that has that kind of expanse to it. That’s what I’m trying to do. Right. And I wanted to do that, too, especially when we get into the second part of this conversation. I think that’s that’s definitely where I want to go with this. But I want to come back to the baby for just a minute because not to not to poke it too, too hard. I’m going to I’m going to pull my grandma card here and say that nobody’s talking to that baby and nobody’s nobody’s giving that baby anything to imitate, nor entering into or nor pulling that baby into dialogue on any level, except for the fact that the baby has already. Has has appeared on the scene as part of a story. But that’s not a story that the baby is aware of, right? It’s not it’s not. But it’s but the but the that doesn’t mean that the baby’s not part of the story. So if I if I tell you the story of a baseball game and I talk about somebody hitting the the ball with the bat and, you know, having a home run, the bat and the ball are not aware of the story either. But I can’t. But they’re still they’re still in the story. Doesn’t take them out of the story, their awareness, the awareness. It does not change whether the whether the story is whether there’s a story there. In fact, I would say actually that any thought that we have that the baby is not aware of the story just because the baby cannot do the narrative. And here’s where we’re distinguishing narrative and story, right? That I I don’t think that’s even true on a by a lot basic biological level, because we know that that baby was already in a relationship with its mother before it was even born, going back to when it was first conceived. We know things, for example, that the baby leaves traces of its own genetics inside of the mother, right, which means, by the way, people, I’m just going to say this, that Jesus left traces of himself and his mother Mary. Now we can go on with everything else. I just want to. I’m always the Protestant. Yeah, I’m not going to touch that one because that’s but I mean. Saying that the child’s part of our story isn’t that’s not to say that the child is itself a narrative being right, that doesn’t follow any more than saying baseball is part of my baseball. So the baseball is a narrative being that doesn’t follow. Right. And notice we do we enter into dialogue immediately with children because we do ghostly dialogue with children immediately. How’s Timmy today? How like we enter into ghostly dialogue on the child’s behalf. Wait, like we do that immediately. We don’t write right away, right away. We’re doing we do it before. Right. Right. And that’s what I mean. We we are we are we in. And what I’m saying is they participate almost immediately in our dialogical framing because they start to do joint attention. They start to imitate us. And then they start right. They start doing turn taking in their responses to us almost dialogue has no meaning. Let me jump in here. Let me jump in here. Maybe a bridge between the two of you as the Protestant in the room. Regardless of the anyway, Mary. Yeah, that was that was really sweet. I love it. You know, one of the one of the things in listening to this, that that so I listened, I re listened to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis 32. And I didn’t get a chance to do all the homework. But the and John, I really like what you said now about the distinguishing between dialogue and the deal logos just yesterday I preached on John one. It was part of the lectionary. And sometimes sometimes I have the experience that when you’re running up to the sermon, sermons are live things and I often find that it’s for getting preaching very is very much connected to a flow state. And so I often find myself having insight while I’m preaching, which is probably a terrible thing for a preacher to do because you weren’t planning on things, then you say it anyway, at least I do. But but the you know, part of what’s what I think about the bigger aspect of this project, it’s it’s and if Jonathan Peugeot were here, the one of the things that he said that continues just to come back to it again and again is that we are we are patterns watching patterns and it is I think it is extremely difficult for us to. To not narrativize everything we see because I, you know, and I, you know, from our earlier conversations, John, when, you know, you made the point and quite rightly, this interesting, this interesting convergence of facts that for most of us, we can’t remember, we don’t have much conscious memory. And again, memory is tricky. But but we we we don’t seem to have much memory prior to our capacity to to wield narrative and that ability of ours to wield narrative is is central to memory and ideation and so much of what we do, even by virtue of the kind of sophisticated both dialogue and dialogos we are attempting to do now. And of course, that doesn’t mean so right now my my son and his girlfriend and their dog and I can, you know, I don’t know why this younger generation really wants to replace grandchildren with pets, but there we have it. But, you know, we talk to their dog and I sometimes talk about them like the grand dog and, you know, and the dog, you know, as this dog, we have other animals in the house. But as this dog comes in and descends and lives amongst us, I just watch us relate to this dog and watch the dog relate to us and all of this. It’s we’re we’re going to always have the difficulty of having to see through these narrative lenses and and use them. Just like you say, we have English. We’re always so. So we’re going to it’s going to be very difficult to sort of try to get behind these things. Yet yet I can see in your project the desire. You know, I was watching the the self. You know, I haven’t mastered all the fancy vervekey words as as Job toss up the and I haven’t mastered all the all the Mary words either, because when I try to use them and I get them wrong, Mary always notes them, which I appreciate. So I my mastery of the fancy Mary words improves, too. But but there’s the self organizing. You know what what we’re you know, what we’re what we’re interested in getting at in the. You know, this this haunts Lewis’s miracles, it haunts it, haunts the, you know, the early Christian project of knowing the mind of God by exploring. Exploring the world, in a sense, beneath our narrative, our narrative grasp. And so the entire the entire effort to understand things that go on their own physics, as Lewis calls it, in nature and and the whole project of OK, self organizing, there are building blocks to this. And, you know, I’ve always I’ve always held that or not always held. I’ve recently held as I think about the meaning crisis and think, OK, how how have we gotten here and why is this so acute with us now? There again always seems to me to two motions. One is that we discover the world is stranger than we thought when the world was simply a matter of atoms that we narrativized or storified as billiard balls that we can build up from according to Newtonian physics. And then, you know, quantum Newtonian physics gives way to quantum physics, which gives way to string theory and this weird, weird world of fields out there. So so the the nice atomistic world that we imagined ourselves in, which I think part of the reason we’re desires, another thing I want to bring into the conversation here, because part of the reason we desire that world is because all these tiny little balls, we can sort of get our minds around and grasp and wield and and manage. And once we’re into the way the the rain of fields now, our imaginations are looking at seascapes and water and things that are incredibly difficult for us. So that’s one side of the meaning crisis. The other side of the meaning crisis is the fact that that whereas before we were sort of self-contained agents in a world of objects that we could manipulate and manage and we could govern and your use of that word govern, I thought was really important, governed by narrative to what degree of things governed by narrative. That the other half of the meaning crisis is the idea that there are things governing us from the inside that are going on their own. It’s the continual penetration of physics, of nature within us. You know, we learn propaganda by which we can manipulate the body politic. We learn psychology by which we you know, so our baby is not sleeping through the night and that is annoying us. And so, you know, we talk to an expert in psychology that will say, OK, well, when is the baby eating? And of course, this was wisdom that mothers had had before, but now suddenly they have the patina of of people who are who are managing the the little balls of the universe. And so with these few tips and an extra science, and we see this in the pandemic, right now, we want to be science based, you know, it’s just interesting how these things go. So so what I see is is as we’re the just like you say, we’re only going to have English and we’re only going to have narrative to deal with that. That’s going to be a real issue in this. But I like the way you laid it out. And I think you you made a very compelling case. But to come back now to the DL logos and what did I make a compelling case about? So the the your your initial laying things out, I thought it was your initial laying things out, I thought it was very compelling that, you know, DL logos is in a sense. Now, is it dialogue towards narrative or is it DL logos towards narrative? So I do you want me to answer that question? Yes. OK, sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you. You were just progressing to a new idea. I think what I’m saying is we we to to use the terms that I the specifications I made in response to Mary, I think we use dialogue to get into narrative and then we use DL logos when we’re trying to go trans narrative, when we’re doing things like the parables, parables look like narratives, but they’re not narratives, right? They’re they’re designed to push us into a non narrative framing or in in Zen. When when we do the co on and right and we’re there, we’re even taking the dialogue within a narrative and we’re trying to push it into a non narrative, non non non dialogue state, but we’re nevertheless we’re not giving up the relationship between the student and the teacher. So there’s that’s DL logos. That’s almost full blown pure DL logos. And when Socrates brings people to a Aporia, the narrative stops. That’s the moment where DL logos is most happening. So given what we’ve just said here together, I guess a more precise way of saying it is dialogue brings us into narrative and then DL logos takes us beyond it because it’s designed to take us, try to get us to a place, an aporetic place from which it’s possible to shift our narratives or come into new narratives or even perhaps go into a post narrative state like, you know, you know, the Sufi stories are designed to their narratives and they’re designed to try to snap you into non duality so that you have the experience of non duality. They’re supposed to try and subvert the grammar that narrative works in terms and egocentric subject object distinction is supposed to be broken down by the narrative. So those examples of where I think we’re using DL logos to try and get beyond narrative. And that’s what I see Socrates doing again and again and again and again, because what he’s trying to because he’s trying to people will say, well, they’ll do the monologue and he’ll try to break into it and subvert it. And this may be tendacious, but I think I see Jesus doing that a lot, too. I mean, you guys know better than I do. But right. But I see him doing that all the time. But I see and I see that the gospel is often saying the disciples are trying to impose some narrative on it. And he said, no, you’re not getting this. You’re not getting what I’m trying to do with this. Like, for example, I agree with, you know, people like what’s her name? Levine and Bourgeois have been reading a lot, McFaig, that, you know, if you if you’re out with Levine, she calls it the domestication of parables. If you’re turning them into allegories or or morality stories, you’re not getting the parable. The parable is supposed to provoke existential change, existential insight. And so I think that’s I think a parable is an example of what I would call DL logos transcending narrative. I would before Mary jumps in and how she wants to. So I think in some ways we’re definitely working with a hierarchy here. And so you kind of have dialogue into narrative and then and then maybe a deal logos that sort of breaks narrative. But I think about your conversation that you had with Jonathan where and and and where, in a sense, the beyond narrative also in some ways then flips down to serve narrative, totally, totally, because when we would say, OK, pastor, you went into your office and you had a mystical experience of union with Christ, but you have to bring that back into the pulpit and back down to the people. And so there’s very much a sense and I very much get this in terms of the logos and Peugeot speaks about this very, very well. I still try to master the fancy Peugeot in words, too, where, you know, that which goes up must also come down. And so what we have is a lot of of the bringing together of the you know, the the union of heaven and earth in this and heaven. You know, one of the things that’s always again, sorry, sorry, Mary, to put you off here for a second, but I want to get back to you. One of the things that I’ve always noticed about about scripture is that. Just just try and just try and describe the life of the age to come. You know, I’ll have all these kind of evocative images and metaphors, you know, streets made of gold, if we actually were using gold to pave our streets, I think we’d be quite annoyed because I don’t know that gold makes a particularly good paving material. But, you know, so you have all these, you know, they’re almost parabolic, but they’re they’re very, but they’re very foundational. But the sense is often that then the Apostle Paul says it himself. I can’t talk about this. And so, again, I just want us to be conscious of the tools that we’re using all the way up and down the chain as we talk about the relationship between these things, because I bet we’re not going to dispense with any of them. And so then the question is, what exactly are we what are we desiring in the midst of this conversation? And that is always sort of my suspicion that what we desire is mastery because we quite with good reason wish to lay things out better than what they have been. But of course, better is also a complex thing. So anyway, there’s I’ll shut up for a while again. I’ll just answer your point quickly and let Mary talk. I’m not proposing any kind of exclusivity around dialogue and deal with us. No, what I’m challenging is what is increasingly to my ears, sounding like an exclusivity claim for narrative. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not proposing a counter exclusivity. I’m trying to show that there’s things outside of narrative that are important and narrative depends on them and interrelates with them together. That’s my challenge. So I want to say clearly I’m not proposing an exclusivity. I’m proposing something other than narrative because I want to challenge what sounds increasingly to my ears like an exclusivity claim for narrative. OK, well, first of all, I do want to say that I was not making an exclusivity claim for narrative. The question was, which what is the thing that determines the meaning? That was the question. Like, does the narrative determine the meaning of the dialogue? Well, then it is the dialogue something that is determining the meaning. That was the kind of the initial. And this was bouncing off of the conversation that you had with Jordan Hall on this topic, where the two of you discussed like a hierarchy of meaning between narrative and the logos and you put the deal logos at the top. But I want to come back to what you just said a few minutes ago about the Socratic dialogue and what Socrates was and these are your words trying to accomplish, which is what what is when you say that in this dialogues, he’s trying to accomplish a bringing of someone to someone that’s a teal teal teleological statement right there. So you so to so you can’t you’re not you haven’t divorced dialogue and. Till the ology and therefore you haven’t divorced as a separate thing sitting above it, narrative and dialogue. Well, I’m not I’m not trying to claim that Socrates is ever operating non-teleologically as a cognitive agent. I think living things and cognitive things, especially that was my invocation of animals, they do operate teleologically. That’s the difference between a paramecium and just a self-organizing tornado. So I’m not claiming that Socrates isn’t operating as a what he is in that situation as a moral agent, I clearly said that I think moral agents have to be capable of teleological functions and even a narrative. And Socrates is willing to use narrative when he tells the parable of the cave, right? The it’s called the allegory of the cave, but it’s not a parable. And by the way, Paul, the parable of the cave is you go both up and you come back down, right? So that’s that’s in Plato, too. And so I’m committed to that very strongly. So what but what I’m saying is Socrates, what Socrates is doing in the dialogue is he’s trying to get people to a place where they abandon the narratives that they have identified with. And he’s and so and what he’s often doing is he’s trying to do it, induce a state in them in which they are thrown into aspects of their cognition that aren’t available to them in a narrative fashion. That’s that’s what I take. It is happening in things like Socratic, Aporia, the Zen, Cohen, the Sufi parable stories, right? They’re trying and I would argue and you may you know, you guys may not. You may not agree with me. I get that. But I think that’s what very often you see Jesus doing in the parables, because a lot of the parables just are not open to a moral interpretation. Like the parable of what is it? The the parable of the laborers were, you know, the ones at the beginning of the day agreed to this wage. And then the ones come at the end and the ones at the end are pissed off. And then Jesus says, I’m the kingdom of God’s like that. You go, what the heck is that supposed to mean? Right. And what I take it to be is he’s trying to blow you out of that framing and say to be in the kingdom of God is to not be in that framing where you’re always keeping track of everybody and measuring and what’s the story going? And you don’t get out of that. Right. And the same thing with the I take it the parable of the prodigal son. It’s not about God’s forget. Oh, God forgives. He’s the father. No, because justice does matter to us. Right. And we don’t have a nice, clean algorithm for that. But somehow you can get to a state, the kingdom of God. I think that’s what Jesus is pointing to and with somehow justice and compassion are interpenetrating in a way we don’t right now understand. That’s what I take them to be doing for us. And so, again, I’m not saying that we don’t speak. And we’re not acting in a teleological fashion. But what I’m saying is we’re not always speaking about or directing our actions towards a narrative purpose. That’s what I’m saying. OK. I I I I want to make the case that. None of these. Dialogues. Between anyone, between you and Jordan Hall, between us, none of them, that the dialogue itself cannot. Cannot rule the meaning. It has to be the narrative, even in the sense that what we’re doing in this dialogue is attempting to come to some point, even if it’s a point beyond narrative, that’s still an intention and that’s you. You have not made the case that the dialogue is what is ruling the meaning. The narrative, the narrative, the narrative rules the meaning. What I mean by that is in order to interpret the dialogue, which you have just interpreted the dialogues, what is your interpret the dialogue play? You place it into a narrative. I don’t think I interpret the dialogue just out there in the ether somewhere and disconnected from everything. So, OK, first of all, I don’t think the explanation I gave you was a narrative. It was an explanation. And it’s not I don’t think it’s correct to say that all explanations are narratives because equals equals MC squared is an explanation. It’s not a narrative. And but it’s not a dialogue either. No. But if we’re talking about dialogue as the governor of meaning and you’re saying that meaning depends on narrative, that that that’s what I find problematic. And that’s where, again, I go to the case of all of the organisms that don’t have narrative and they act on purpose, but they don’t have narrative. Acting intentionally is not sufficient for acting narratively. All these organisms act on purpose. They do things that are meaningful to them. They’re doing relevance realization. They’re acting in terms of the meaning of things, but they’re not doing narrative. That’s what Bertrand Russell met when he said no matter how eloquently a dog barks, it can’t tell you that its parents were hard, right, were poor, but hardworking. It just can’t do it. Right. But it doesn’t mean the dog isn’t intelligent. It doesn’t mean the dog is unconscious. It doesn’t mean the dog isn’t communicating with you. It doesn’t mean that the dog isn’t acting on purpose. It doesn’t mean any of those things. All of those things can exist. All of that rich meaning making of a dog’s life, a dog’s consciousness. Let’s do a bonobo bonobo sense of self. They mourn the loss of their of their loved ones. Right. All of this stuff. All of that happens without narrative. And to say that that meaning depends on narrative, I think is too strong. Well, I’m not saying that meaning in some cosmic sense depends on narrative. What I’m saying is that the way if you’re talking about dialogue and narrative, I’m saying that the meaning of any dialogue. Is dependent upon the narrative in which that dialogue resides and all dialogues reside in a narrative, but wait, isn’t dialogue or even implicit dialogue, the thing that transforms a chronology into a narrative? If there’s no possibility of dialogue, you don’t have a narrative. You only have a chronology. You just have a listing of events. OK, let me let me put it. Let me give you. I tried to propose to you that at the level of human discourse, dialogue and narrative are completely interdependent. Right. Let me let me let me give you the example that I gave to Seville when I had my conversation with Seville, because I was trying to work this out and asking her what she thought about it. So the other day I walked out of my house and I walked along the edge of my garden. I was going to collect eggs from my chicken house. I had a little basket in my hand, put the eggs in. And as I walked along, I came to the corner of the garden. I noticed that in the lawn there was a dead mouse. And I paused and looked at the mouse for a moment. And then I went and I collected the eggs and I walked back. I paused and looked at the mouse again. And then I walked in my house. And what I was thinking about was, should I give this mouse to my chickens? Because normally I find if like if I had trapped a mouse, I would throw it to the chickens and they would happily eat it because chickens are not vegetarians, even though it says vegetarian fed chickens or vegetarian fed eggs. So so I thought dinosaurs. What I was looking at was to see if I saw any signs of trauma on the mouse, because there’s lots of cats around and stuff that might eat mice. But I didn’t see any sign of trauma. And then it occurred to me maybe the mouse ate something poisonous and that’s why it died. And so for that reason, I would not give it to my chickens. Now, I’m telling you a story. First person, right? I now someone could my neighbor could be watching me from the other side of her fence. And she might say, I saw you walking along and I saw you stop and look at something in your yard. And then you went on and then you looked at it again. When you came back, what were you looking at and what were you thinking? And I would tell her we would be then in a conversation or a dialogue together. That’s what her if she was just telling what she saw, she would be doing it. Third person, I saw her do this. I saw her do this. It’s when we get into dialogue, then it’s suddenly so. So to me, like narratives are first person or third person. But the dialogue always has to be second person. It sounds to me like what you were going to say, I thought the next sentence was going to be it’s only when I was able to enter into dialogue with somebody that it became a narrative. I would say no, because I would say that that I’m that I’m I would kind of say that we’re always there’s always an internal dialogue. Otherwise, I wouldn’t remember. But then you’re saying I didn’t mean internal dialogue. There’s always an internal narrative going on. Right. There’s always an internal. Otherwise, we wouldn’t remember. We wouldn’t be remembering what we did. Mary, Mary, that’s not true. But because you don’t have a narrative for all your skills and you remember your skills. OK. And you get into the flow state and you can have hyper effectiveness and you’re out of narrative. So, I mean, I’m just trying to say I like I don’t think it’s true that we’re always in narrative. And I again, I’m not arguing for the exclusivity. I seem to think what we’re moving towards is like that it only because I think it’s we have to conclude that animals can remember sequences of events. Yes. OK. So simply being able to remember a sequence of events isn’t to be a narrative agent. But when you are capable of entering into dialogue with another perspective, second purpose perspective, then it becomes a narrative. That’s what I’m suggesting to you. You remember a sequence of events, but when you talk about it to your neighbor or they talk about it to themselves or to you, then it becomes a narrative. It seems it seems in this to the other minds, other agents is important to this whole progression. Yes, the baby babbling is. I mean, the baby babbling, to what degree the baby babbling is aware of itself as an agent. That’s a question. The dog, to what degree the dog is aware of itself as an agent. And so it’s interesting, you know, because as I’m listening, I mean, part of the things that we’re always doing with each other, too, is we’re not we’re not just listening to each other’s words, a sort of a flat thing. We’re always trying to mind read each other. This is fundamental for dialogue. Yeah, because I want to get at not just the words that you’re saying, I want to get at the intention behind the words that you’re saying. And of course, this is a very tricky business. I want to say to that that and I said this from the beginning, I mean, I think we clearly start mind reading before we have right narrative. But I will acknowledge and I’ve said before, I think narrative is something we learn as a psychotechnology that massively increases our ability for mind reading. Right. I think the primary function of narrative is mind reading. So so is is part of and I just to be clear that, you know, I think you’re exactly right that when Jesus uses parables. He does that to break narratives. We are narrative. One of the lovely things that Jordan Peterson talked about was he said, you know, part of the reason we use stories and I think part of the reason we use narrative to go on from what he said is because our narratives can die so that we do not. Yes, yes. And so part of the reason Jesus and this is I just this morning released my conversation with Jacob from the Discord server, who is a Hasidic Jew of sorts. And and one of the real that we didn’t talk about it too much in the video, but one of the real issues between he and I actually has everything to do with Jesus, because one of the things that Jesus does in the Jewish tradition is is is completely disrupt the Messianic tradition and redefines what a Messiah is. And that’s I mean, if you understand, if you understand that, you know, where that is going and then look at the crazy things Jesus does, which, of course, culminates in his crucifixion, which he, you know, to get the language right. And this is difficult, which he participates in. He doesn’t he goes down to Jerusalem, even though everyone in the world knows that there’s going to be a conflict and which will likely end in his crucifixion. He participates in this in order to obviously to achieve other goals, which, of course, makes the resurrection vital in terms of the entire story. But, you know, so so you see very quickly that these. OK, so we have lots of narratives floating around. And in many ways, what we’re trying to do is get the narratives right. And so I’d say we’re both using dialogue, which let’s say is beneath and a. An incredible part of achieving narrative developmentally, let’s say we first achieve dialogue before we achieve narrative, at least in our capacity to wield it, and then maybe, you know, deologues beyond that. And when I listen to Mary, her concern seems to be OK, meaning and narrative that there’s a there’s a degree of meaning. And we would agree that dogs act purpose, purposefully, as do cats and chickens and mice and many things. You know, that’s almost the it’s almost a pretty good definition of a living of animal life, plant life, perhaps do that. It acts with a degree of purpose, even though it doesn’t we don’t imagine it cognitively wields purpose the way we do or employs purpose. So and so I hear Mary’s concern in terms of it’s nearly impossible for us to. Resist conceiving of. Misconceiving of meaning without employing that narrative machinery, part partly perhaps that it’s it’s nearly impossible for us to to conceive of so much without the exaptation of our visual machinery. It’s as as the kinds of creatures that we are. This stuff is just going to kick in because we desire to conceive of it so richly that that all of this machinery comes to hand. I want to acknowledge that. And if I’ve been neglecting Mary’s concern, I apologize, Mary. I did say it at the beginning and I am committed to it that the that our personhood is dependent on narrative in a very important way. And our ability as. Extended, temporally extended moral agents is dependent on narrative. I acknowledge that at the beginning. And so all of those aspects of meaning that are ethically and personally relevant to us are going to depend on narrative. But and if it looks like I am trying to deny that, then I’ve misled you because that’s not my intent. That is not what I’m intending to do. What I’m trying to get at, what I think is important and vital right now is what is the machinery that allows us to learn narratives, move them to the next level. That allows us to learn narratives, move between narratives, blow past narrative, restructure narratives and open our eyes to narratives we have never considered before. And I don’t think it’s narrative machinery because that’s too circular. Right. And it’s not helpful. And it doesn’t comport with the facts. So I’m trying to get at what is it that we can reach down to going right and reach up to that allows us to transcend narrative because we are not suffering from a lack of narrative right now. That’s not what we’re facing. We’re facing we’re facing simultaneously too many narratives that are competing and they’re competing in an imperialistic fashion with each other. And then they’re competing against the background of a scientific worldview that’s non-narrative. And that’s a horrible mess for us. We can’t get our narrative lives, our personal lives to talk to the scientific worldview. And we can’t talk to each other because we’re a mesh to narrative. So my concern is to try and get at this machinery other than narrative. I’m not claiming that it is exclusive or that it can operate in us independently. Right. At the personal level, I’m not claiming that. And so but what I’m trying to get at is what is it? Right. What is it that allows us to access the depths of the heights? And because I think we need that right now. And so I want to talk about this stuff in a way that’s going to allow people across like we are across religious divides, religious narratives and even people. Right. Within the personal lives and then the impersonal scientific world to talk about it in a way that will allow for a bridging, because that’s what I’m ultimately most concerned with. So, so Mary, I’m kind of curious about your concern here with respect to narrative. I think I think my concern was prompted by John’s conversation with Jordan Hall, where they were talking about this issue. And I was not the only one, because when I made my video underneath my video, were people saying I saw that conversation and I felt there was something very wrong about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That’s people made that kind of comment. Yeah, I agree. So that was the it was it. And I’ve made this and this is not this is not a criticism of you, John, nor greatly appreciate. But there have been times like one of my first conversations I had with Paul, I was talking about you and Jordan Hall. And I said, these guys are getting so meta. It’s like they’re floating up in the stratosphere. And I want to it’s like they’re in a balloon. I want to pull the rope down and I want to say, guys, guys, what are you feeding people and what are you eating? It’s like I want to get right down to the. That’s a legitimate point. Totally. I acknowledge that. I acknowledge that. So I felt like you’re John and Jordan, we’re doing it again, kind of like, well, you know, we’ll ignore all the all the narratives. We’ll just ignore them. And we’re going to sit here in our in our balloon of, you know, our meta balloon of dialogue. And somehow or another, just with this, we’ll we’ll we’ll ascertain the meaning of things. And that was what it kind of felt like. I think it felt like that to other people. And so I wanted to bring I wanted to bring the thing down more into the. And you should do that, Mary. You should do that. I welcome that. And you do it. You do it in a loving fashion. And I appreciate that. That’s why I respond to you. So, again, I’m not going to justify because I think what your criticism is out. The explanation was we were trying to talk about how it is that people move between paradigms in a CUNY sense. And right. And what is what is this? What is this non paradigmatic thinking? And we were trying to exemplify it. And that’s part of it. And then there was another concern and concern I have about Jordan Peterson, which is right. The the the the concern I have about like about hero narratives, right. And myth is that they tend to build heroes. And I don’t think we need heroes right now. I think we need communities. And I see narratives very good. Narratives are built around protagonists. They’re great for building heroes. I think what builds communities is what we’re doing right here right now, which is dialogue and potentially dialogous, because I think we’re getting into dialogous in various in various parts of this. And so that was my other concern. My two concerns I were trying to address was it looks like we’re going through a paradigm change. And we’re like, so what what’s non paradigmatic thinking? Look like. And then my other concern is we got to get away from the hero mythology, or at least we have to get away from it being exclusive because we don’t need heroes right now. I think a hunger for heroes is something we should be very suspicious of. And that’s where Jordan Hall’s slogan, the next Buddha is the Sangha. That’s what he’s trying to point to. I think he’s trying to say we’ve got to stop doing narrative and looking for the hero or the superhero. We need to return more to what builds communities and what builds communities are dialogue. And that was, you know, that was a John Dewey model of democracy. We can have different narratives. We can have different narratives, but we can still talk to each other and we can still dialogue with each other and cooperate with each other. Well, that’s what we did it poorly. I acknowledge that, Mary. And yeah, and I have a upsetting sin of floating off into platonic space. That’s why. No, no, no, it’s fair to laugh at me. But it’s why I mean, and I mean this sincerely, it’s why I want and need to be into in dialogue with you guys. I mean, you both know and I hope you acknowledge that I take your criticism seriously and I take them to heart and I try to enter into dialogue because if I don’t have dialogue with you and Paul set it up from the beginning, notice the different perspectives we’re coming from, then I will tend to float off into platonic space. So that’s precisely why I do this kind of thing. Well, and you know, the paradigmatic thinking is a really interesting question because can we think without paradigms? Yeah, well, part of, you know, one of my long term questions that I that are always beneath the surface for me is, you know, what is matter for? How does how does the material because I think you’re exactly right. I mean, we’re and I get at this always with my one eye, you know, the scientific method, you cover one eye, you take take personhood and ages, take all of that out and see the world through a different lens. And that’s enormously powerful and extremely helpful for us. But then the other eye, which is persons and agents and moving. And so we want to see out of both eyes. Exactly. And I love that. By the way, I just want to interrupt just to say that’s a beautiful that’s a very beautiful metaphor that I hadn’t thought about it that way before. Just continue, please. But I just want to say thank you. That was beautiful. Well, one of the questions, what is matter for? And and what is, you know, when, of course, in Genesis one, you know, you know, God creates the world, it is good, it is good. The stuff of the world is good. And I love how, you know, Mary gets into this because it’s all of the stuff in the dirt that we have this we have this debate in our family. Should you peel your carrots or not? And my sister’s like, no, get the dirt into the pot. And I thought of Mary right there. But but this, you know, these questions of, OK, paradigmatic thinking. So we’re always thinking with paradigms. It almost seems to be some of the, you know, the elements that we need for thinking. But I really like what I’ve kind of come to in this conversation where we have sort of dialogue beneath and then and the narrative in the middle. And then these these deal logos. And I love the, you know, again, I just preached on John one. And and as I was preaching, I was thinking about so I was I was a little annoyed I had to preach on John one again because I’ve been there so often in the last few years. I was like, is there anything new I’m going to find in John one? So then I dug into Kittle, which is the theological dictionary of the New Testament and dug into, you know, logos and Lego and, you know, to gather. And I thought gathering together. That’s right. Why? Well, what? Well, what is that? Well, we’re, you know, we’re we’re gathering. And I thought of, you know, so much of the stuff I’ve learned from you, John, with combinatorial explosion and it’s realizing too big. And and so what are we doing with our with our logos? What does the logos do? I mean, the logos and again, Peugeot would be terrific on this. The logos gathers. I mean, I I mentioned to the the congregation, there’s too many things even in this room. But if you if you say, OK, what room are we in? They say it’s the sanctuary. Yeah, they gather that just by that word. What they have done is they have gathered, you know, how much have they compressed into that word? And of course, all of that compression is the meaning. And of course, narrative is just strung throughout there. People were married in that room. People buried their parents and grandparents in that room. They didn’t bury them in that room. But, you know, we had the service in that room. And so you get this you get this you get this power of the logos that takes this vast, vast world and brings it to the space with our where our little conscious selves can can can commune with it. And so I very much liked how there’s the there’s the the construction and deconstruction and reconstruction of narrative. And and I think we’re going to have all of these elements continue to be at play in the process of and, you know, in the process of what. And I think, again, we’re not going to lose narrative or discard narrative because narrative is simply the way we can we can gather together events into far larger processes that have meaning and richness. I wanted to tell a story of we’re opening Christmas gifts. We were opening Christmas gifts with my son was in and his girlfriend and my other son and his girlfriend and. My that secret Santa between my kids, I have five kids and my one of my daughters opened a gift and she just started to tears welled up. And because this was this this was a little, you know, sewing thing that he had bought, but the package wasn’t good and he had a 3D printer. And she’s got a little Instagram page where she’s doing sewing and her Instagram page has lady trousers because she had made some trousers. And right in that moment, you know, years of brotherhood and sisterhood and familyhood and matter and everything came in. And for me, you know, I had, you know, 32 years of ups and downs in marriage and raising children and everything rushed into that moment and that moment was very non narrative in that. And we have this sometimes where it’s it was a moment of of joy, you know, of of deep joy, where I’m watching my children see each other at a deep level and connect with one another. And I was thinking about that moment and how in some ways timeless that moment was. It was very, you know, it was very beyond time. But all the narrative came together and I was, you know, just so much theology and and history and everything came together. And I was thinking, anticipating this conversation in that, because they’re, you know, narrative is a constituent element of this non narrative moment of bliss. And, you know, those moments of bliss are so interesting because in the midst of it, they sort of feel timeless, but as a historical agent within it, I know it will pass. And so I see all of these elements as as coming together and being fundamental to this glorious, mysterious thing that we experience now. Well, I like that. And I think what I’m taking away the way my thinking about this is changing, is I like the distinction, the way you laid out the level sort of dialogue, narrative, dialogos. I I think that’s what what I was reaching towards. So I think that’s and then the idea that that dialogue and narrative are probably relating together in a self organizing fashion, they’re mutually affording and mutually independent. I think that is I think that’s a more accurate way of thinking about that middle level, right? Or at least where the dialogue of the dialogue and the narrative perhaps do this with each other, if that meant anything to you guys. No, it does. It does. It’s it’s heaven and earth. It’s up and down. Yeah. Yeah. Can I can I I know I’m looking at the clock here and I don’t know if we’re keeping going or what, but I but I know we had a topic we wanted to get into. Well, I was going to propose we do another one of these that we do a part two. Sorry to interrupt, Mary, but I think that’s what we should do. I’m going to right now invite the two of you. I think we’re maybe moving towards a place where we could at least settle and not saying we all agree, but I think we I think there’s been genuine well, the logos, I think there’s been genuine logos here. I think there’s been insight well for the rest for me. And so that’s I thank you for it. But we want to move to another topic that is is related to this one and which is the the the the issues around what Mary is calling parabolic knowing and other people like Jonathan call symbolic knowing and things like that and then how that might be relevant to aspects of brain function, self-organized criticality that I’ve talked a lot about in my work on relevance realization. So what that next that next deal logos between us is not irrelevant to this, it follows from it because it’s a place for that bridging that I’m advocating for, I think could be very fruitfully explored. So I want to invite both of you guys. We will set up a time, hopefully in the near future. I would like it to be in the near future to request where we do a follow up and then we go in with the with that being the main topic. Well, maybe we do a little bit of bridging and say, this is what we were talking about before. This is how it goes into this. And then we do that because I think I think we’re we’re pushing the limits of time here and I feel like I feel much more settled about this. I mean, you guys afforded me what I wanted to do, which was to and you challenged me that you didn’t just afford me, you challenged me. And I wanted to clarify my think what I think my thinking was. I wanted to both clarify what I thought it was, but also come to clarity in what I was thinking. And you do both of those in the logos, right? You’re not only this is my thought, you’re not understanding me, but it’s also, oh, geez, I am understanding this better. It does both of those at the same time. And that’s what happened for me. So I wanted to thank you both very much. And but I want I want to invite you guys. Let’s do that’s the one on sort of symbolism in general and and how that relates to perhaps self organizing, criticality, relevance, realization, kinds of knowing, et cetera. Are you guys open for that? Absolutely. How do you feel, Mary? How do I feel? Yeah. About about this conversation, do I think I would like everybody to do? I said it. I said I would like you to do it, too, Paul. I said what how I’m coming out of this. And it would be good to hear from both of you how you’re coming out of this. Well, I I feel good about it. I feel like I have more clarity about what John met. I very much appreciate his perspective. And and I feel like he he heard what I had to say about it. And I don’t think we fully agree, but I think we’ve come a lot closer. Yes. And it’s been it’s been tremendously helpful for my own thinking. I am very anxious about getting into the second part of this. The anxious or eager, do you mean eager, eager, eager? OK, I’m very eager about getting into the second part of this because it was it has what was for me some extremely exciting opening of my eyes to things when we talk about, you know, especially the brain function stuff and the way that relates to, I think, to the possibility that there is such a thing as parabolic knowledge, and so I’m looking forward very much to our next conversation. Well, I am, too, but I want to hear what Paul has to say, too. This is just fun. I know I appreciate both of you so much. I really do. And I learned I learned so much from both of you. And I I thought this was really helpful just to the the differentiation between we were always talking about dialogos and dialogue and sort of understanding, you know, maybe how they, you know, how they interrelate, how they’re dependent on each other. And and to me, you know, to me, it’s getting getting at, OK, well, what how how how. How do they interrelate back and forth up and down? How how, you know, it’s very interesting, say, the story of Jacob’s ladder. And it’s not really ladder Jacob stairway. I mean, Jacob lays down in Bethel and the passengers are going up and down and up and down and up and down. And I see this as as really the. Why do we do these conversations? Well, we do these conversations because we we love the truth, we want to know the truth and and we want to, you know, we pursue dialogue and we aspire for dialogos. And, you know, in the meantime, you know, we’re we’re we’re telling stories both to illustrate, but also we’re creating stories as we’re doing it. So I think it’s it’s it’s deeply satisfying. And of course, I when I when I first ventured to stick my nose into whatever on earth Jordan Peterson opened up, I had no idea of the of the joyful fruit it would bring. And then the absolutely lovely, brilliant conversation partners I would encounter, and so I find this all deeply gratifying. John’s that John’s the brilliant one and I’m the lovely one. Mary, Mary, do not for a minute, I do not for a minute fail to appreciate your brilliance. Often almost every time after I listen to one of your videos, I always think, how have I missed any of these because I mean, and I also really want to get into this parabolic knowledge because I didn’t understand what you’re talking about at first, but, you know, and you know, but later on I contemplate daddy is the knife, mommy is the fork and I am the spoon. I think about that story and I think what’s going on there. You know, and and so there’s the wonder and how does a child what is a child doing? What is a child saying that to me gets into some of the Lewis stuff that I think that child is seeing through to something. And and to me, that’s what makes all of these conversations exciting is that, you know, we’re not just building castles here, we are seeing through to things. And I think both the the scientific seeing through the scientific eye and then the manifest image there, we’re both trying to see through to I think the glory that is in this in this existence that we are sharing. Well, that was excellent. Much, much, much love. Thanks, guys, very much. Thank you. So we’ll reschedule and we’ll.