https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SCAn_Ar9E24
The next question is, I guess for both of us. It is phrased in orthodox language, but it refers to something that you have been discussing on your own, that we have discussed together on several occasions. So I think you will be as able to give input as myself. You discussed the problem with the representational theory of mind and the necessity for a conformist view. In other words, the conformity view of knowledge. Is there also an alternative in the orthodox conceptions of an iconographical symbolic understanding of mind? Meaning, is it possible that our ideas about the world are iconographical representations of the world that also allow symbolical participation in the world in the Dionysian sense of symbol? So I’ll start out maybe setting the ground here, which is that, of course, the idea of symbol is not unique to orthodoxy, even though it is something which is given high value and a central place in orthodox tradition and orthodox practice. But the way that we use symbol is not in the technical sense a theory of knowledge. We spoke about the conformity theory of knowledge, and that’s not really a symbolic theory of knowledge. And in fact, the idea is tending more towards the idea of identity or the convergence of the object of knowledge. I can say that the way that we described it as the pattern that is exemplified in the object of knowledge conforming to the pattern as it is understood intelligibly in the mind. And perhaps even moving away from a representational theory of knowledge, if we were going to go in the direction that I think you had mentioned of Locke’s theory, where the idea that is in the mind stands for the thing that is out there in reality. And you had mentioned about how there has been substantial criticism of that idea. One of the hallmarks of 4E Cognitive Science is the rejection of the proposal that cognition is inherently representational. Many people in fact deny representations. I think that’s too strong. But one of the hallmark defining features of 4E Cognitive Science is the rejection of the Cartesian computational Lockean proposal that what the mind is made out of and works with is representation. Right. However, that doesn’t mean that representations are useless. No, I think the proposal that the claim that the mind never uses representations I would argue is false. Most people are coming back around to that. So in the orthodox church we think of symbols as a means of using, in the most basic sense, of using one thing to represent another thing. But more specifically in the orthodox church, a symbol is frequently some aspect of concrete physical reality. It may be a word, it may be a melody, it is very frequently an image as an iconography. And it represents not simply one thing but rather a form or a pattern which extends throughout a large number of instantiations. And so through one element we are able to make present the possibility of a large number of possible instantiations by means of representing the pattern. And we consider this to be a means by which we can then participate even in a non-propositional or in a way that is often not explicitly propositional. Or even in a position of consciousness in a larger aspect of reality. And more importantly perhaps we could say of what we would consider to be higher levels of reality. So I guess what I would say here is that the orthodox understanding of symbol is not an alternative to the conformity theory of knowledge. Rather it is a way of using what would be the elements of the conformity theory of knowledge. In other words this idea of patterns in order to gain additional modes of access to those patterns from other angles. So there is a lot in there. First of all I agree with not conflating the symbol or the icon with conformity. But differentiating them and then articulating the relationship between them which is what I heard you doing. And I would like to try and pick up on that and talk first about attention. And again it is not what you think it is. And then relate different aspects of attention to the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. And try to show you how that is at work in your everyday perception. And then I will return to the topic of the symbolic and the iconic. Because I think talking about the symbolic first off means we will default into unrecognized romantic interpretations of the symbol. Or we will default into treatments of the symbol that use the Persian distinction. We will turn the symbol just into a sign. Just something that points at something else. And I think those are deep mistakes. So first of all attention is not a spotlight that you shine on things even though we think it is. In fact attention isn’t something you directly do. This is the work of Christopher Moll. You pay attention by modifying how you are doing other things. So you can pay attention by instead of just seeing, looking. You can pay attention by not just hearing but listening. You can pay attention by looking and listening. You can pay attention by looking, listening and remembering carefully. You can pay attention by remembering carefully. There isn’t any one thing you do to pay attention. In fact if I say to you I want you to pay attention but I don’t want you to do any of those other changes that I just mentioned. Just pay attention. You don’t know what to do. So in this sense and you really have to like don’t push this too far. Attention is adverbial in nature. It’s doing, it’s not just an act of shining to make something salient. What it’s actually doing is bringing about what Christopher Moll calls cognitive unison. It’s taking a bunch of independent processes and getting them to cooperate together on finding, like sharing a goal of determining what’s relevant in a situation. So that integration is often we, because of the sort of spotlight metaphor, we often don’t realize that it’s happening. What I often get my students to do is pick up an object and have like a pencil and I ask them to close their eyes and tap on the object as if they had not seen the object. You can actually do this. You can place an object that they haven’t seen and they close their eyes. All they can do is tap on it and then they have to tell you what the object is. I imagine you believe you could solve this problem. Yes? Yes you can. The answer is yes you can. Okay? And what you can do is, oh it’s a cup. And what I often have people do is I’ll say continue tapping as if you were still trying to figure out what it is. But now I want you to shift your awareness into your pencil and notice what the pencil is doing. And people can do that. I go, oh yeah the pencil is going through all these sudden movements and they’re different and it’s giant. And then I say, now instead of paying attention to your pencil, pay attention to what your hand is doing. Oh I can do that too. And then I say, are you aware of the cup anymore? And they go, no. Not at all. You see what’s happening is you’re not aware of your hand, you’re aware through your hand. It’s all being integrated. You’re not aware of your pencil, you’re aware through your pencil of the mug. And attention can go this way and instead of looking at something it can look through it the way I’m looking through my glasses right now. Or attention can step back and look at rather than looking through. It can move in these directions. Does that make sense? I want you to then think of an idea. Notice what happened when I was tapping the cup. There’s a pattern and I don’t actually realize the pattern. I see through the pattern to see the cup. Does that make sense? If I attend to the pattern in the right way, I’m actually not attending to the pattern, I’m attending through the pattern. It’s not like I’m completely numb. It’s not like if my hand went numb I would suddenly be aware that I couldn’t feel my hand or I couldn’t feel the pencil. But I’m aware through it. So Polanyi who made this distinction made a distinction between subsidiary awareness, that which you’re aware through, and focal awareness, that which you’re aware of. I’m aware through the subsidiary awareness of my hand and the pencil. And Merleau-Ponty independently came up with exactly the same argument by the way. So pay attention to two great thinkers independently coming to something. I’m aware through, I have a subsidiary awareness of my hands, of the pencil, but I have a focal awareness of the cup. But of course I can have a, I can see through a pattern if I attend to it in the right way, namely a non-anomalist way. There’s a pattern here and I can see through these to something beyond them. In exactly the same way I can see through the pattern of the individual tappings to the cup. Does that make sense? So there’s no like heavy distinction between like in your phenomenology about this. Because, oh well that’s abstract, no you’re doing it all the time. Can I borrow your phone? I promise not to do anything. You think you see all the phone. And you never do. Because there are so many aspects to the phone you can’t possibly see them all. You would have to take all possible perspectives on all possible aspects to see and somehow see them all at once. In order to really see all the phone. But what you do is dip, dip, dip, all of the phone. Do you understand? Like really, pause on this. You don’t, speaking at a purely physiological level, you don’t see all the phone. But you believe you do, right? Yes, you did just what I was talking, you’re seeing through, you pick up on some aspects. And you see through it to what I call the through line. The through line. That’s not weird and abstract and neoplatonic is it? Actually it is though. Because there’s a good case to be made that that’s what Plato was actually talking about when he was talking about the forms. There’s a lot of argument. I don’t need that to be true but I think it’s at least a plausible thing to say. Okay, so this gets us into the imaginal. There’s a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. This is the distinction made by the neoplatonic philosopher, largely of Persian philosophy, although he worked in France, Henri Corbin. He was a long time friend of Carl Gustav Jung. And Corbin gives a lot more explicit credit to Jung than Jung gives to Corbin because, well, Jung was very much into building the mystique of Jung. Just like Heidegger was very much about building the mystique of Heidegger. Or Madonna was building the mystique around Madonna. I don’t think they’re all equally good philosophers by the way. The imaginary is, if I ask you to imagine a sailboat, you’ll do something like picturing in your mind. I can ask you, does it have its sails up or down? And you can answer me, yes? Now notice this is imagination that in some ways takes you away from perception. And I want you to compare that to the serious play of a child. And please remember those two. One of the things that a religious life can reawaken and make people remember is that there is a category of serious play. That not all play is frivolous. Not all play is for entertainment. Play is originally seriously for development. Children play. So here’s an imaginal thing. A child picks up a stick, ties a blanket around them and says, I’m Zorro. They’re not picturing Zorro in their head. What they’re doing is they’re trying to take the framing of Zorro. They’re trying to adopt the identity of Zorro so that they can taste what it’s like to be in that world. Because by doing that, by engaging in that serious play, they might be attracted to that world. And that might help them cultivate the skills and virtues for actually maturing into somebody. Probably not Zorro, but somebody who’s heroic, etc. Do you understand the difference? There’s imagination that takes you away from perception. And then there’s imagination that allows you to start to see a through line. To start to see through patterns into a greater perception of what is possible, what is future. Or even what is actual that you have not yet seen. So I’m a martial artist. I teach people Tai Chi Chuan. So in order to get them to take the stance, they’re standing and their knees are bent. I’ll say, imagine you’re standing in a river and your knees to your feet are sinking in the mud of this shallow river. Your knees to here is like flowing water. You want these large muscles to be like water. They’ve got energy in them, but they’ve got flexibility. And from here up is like the air. You’re trying to not pay so much attention. Because normally we’re in an inverted triangle. We have a lot of attention up here and very little down here. So it’s easy to push people over. You want to invert your triangle if you’re going into a martial arts situation. And when people do this, what’s that for? What that does is that they’re not picturing something. What they’re doing is they’re looking through that and they’re picking up on otherwise very subtle sensory motor patterns. Getting a finer coordination between the small control muscles and the larger piston muscles. Getting an awareness of how circulation and tension is expressing itself in their mouth. And they’re changing it and aligning it so that they have a stance that is much better disposed towards engaging in combat. Does that make sense? That’s the imaginal. Notice it’s serious play. By the way, the verb in Chinese, you don’t do tai chi. You play tai chi. The same verb for playing music. Because music is also serious play. So let’s take that you’ve got the imaginal. And then I want to show you how much the imaginal is even operational in the cognitive domain. This is just a work of Lakoff and Johnson and others. And I’ve published a lot of criticisms of their explanation of the phenomena, but I think their identification of the phenomena is bang on. If I didn’t think that the first was true, I wouldn’t bother to do the second. So we talk about understanding. We’ve been talking about it. That’s weird because we’ve changed the metaphor. It’s now understanding. Although it used to be inter-standing, standing between people. But I hope you still grasp what I’m saying. I hope you see my point. I hope you get it. Do you notice all the words you’re using for understanding? They’re images. But you’re not looking at them. When you’re like, a little kid might do that. A three year old, you say, do you see my point? And they might look around. But you don’t look at that. You don’t look through it to this very hard to get a hold of thing understanding. You’re doing it all the time. In fact, and now I’m going to sort of call it out, your language is filled with metaphors. Such that you can’t go very far through a statement without coming up against the fact that you’re facing the reality of metaphors. But I hope that point wasn’t too hard for you to take. You’re doing poetry all day long. And you not only do it with visual images, although you’re not picturing anything when you’re doing this. You see how it’s imaginal? But you also do it enacted. So you’re knowing I’m doing this weird stuff with my hands. Susan Golden Meadow, that is her name. Her name was Golden and she married somebody Meadow, so she got Susan Golden Meadow so she sounds like a pretty pony or something. Right? But she’s got lots of work showing that this is not ornamental. If I limit your ability to gesture, your ability to solve problems and communicate will be go down and your ability to be understood goes down. This is one of the dangers of PowerPoint. PowerPoint makes people be still and look at the slide, well the audience is looking at the slide and all of that gestural stuff is no longer present. In fact, there’s very little evidence that PowerPoint helps students. I don’t use PowerPoint unless the class is so large that I absolutely have to. The only thing that PowerPoint seems to do is reduce the anxiety of the presenter. And that’s why they love it. Okay, so we’re putting this all together. Do you see how the imaginal, so we’ve got this idea of seeing through, finding the through line. We’ve got the idea of the imaginal is that we can use imagination not to take us away from perception but to sensitize us, enhance our perception and our conception. And that we’re already always naturally doing that. I argue that the symbol in so far as it is iconic as opposed to just representational is not representational. So you can look at it, and there’s all kinds of work, Jean-Luc Marion and Fau’s work, but if you’re just looking at it like a picture, you are not realizing it as it is meant to be realized. You have to look through it, to the through line, and that requires imagination. And when we hear imagination, we hear the romantics, and we hear removing ourselves from reality. No, stop that. That’s the imaginary. You have to use imagination in the imaginal way to see through it, so you pick up on what is visible only through it, rather than looking at it. Again, you’re not unaware of it. Remember, you’re not unaware of your finger when you’re tapping, but you’re aware through it. The focal object is not in the visible picture. It is that which you realize through it by an imaginal act that sensitizes you to what can be seen through the image as opposed to remaining at the superficial surface of the image. And so I propose to you that when we’re engaging in the symbolic, we’re doing something like that, but it is not something arcane or arbitrarily forced upon us. It is intrinsic to how we move through the world. And so the symbolic is actually enlivening something that is part of how we properly cognize the world. That would be my answer. Well, that was a great answer. It certainly dovetails very nicely with a slogan that you will hear in the Orthodox Church that icons are windows into heaven. Yes. That’s precisely the same, the idea that you were presenting there. You see through them. Yes. But I also want to thank you because I think that was a really good explanation, or rather a good example of how cognitive science can break down in concrete and specific ways, ideas that we use in the church or in religion such that those ideas can then become more relatable to people. When I spoke, I immediately used the language that I’m familiar with, which I believe is correct and which- I don’t think I said anything that contradicts what you said. No, no, no, no, no. On the contrary, I believe what I said was correct and perhaps intelligible on some level particularly to Orthodox people or to other religious people who have already had experience with this way of using symbols and relating to them. For a person who has not had that experience or who has had less experience or who has not thought about it before or who has coming at it from a purely secular point of view, the language that I might use or that we might use in the church to describe this, however true it may be, is not necessarily going to be as accessible. What is accessible to everybody is that which is immediately present to the senses. So if you can take an idea and you can- I don’t want to use the word deconstruct, but break it down, which is the same thing as deconstruct, such that you can start to explain it from that which is immediately accessible to every single person on the planet and then use that in order to, let’s say, build up the idea and then explain what is going on with the language that we use. I think that can be a very useful way of showing how cognitive science or other related disciplines can be of value to people who are coming from a religious tradition. I find that to be very important and very relevant, again, how things- I don’t know how we can- that word just always comes in- Tell me about it. To the conversations that we’ve had and I think it shows how, despite whatever differences there may be in belief or practice between us, nevertheless, the conversation between us can be highly productive and highly useful, not only to those who are outside of the Orthodox Church or a religious background, but also to those who are within. So I want to thank you very much, John, for your participation in all of these events and all of these conversations and for the very well thought out explanations that you’ve given of a large number of extremely important ideas which are of perennial value in interest, but I think that they are increasingly salient in the world that we live in today. So I really appreciate your coming here, your participation, the friendship, and all of the interactions that we’ve had. It’s really been very- it’s not just been profitable, it’s also been enjoyable. So I appreciate it. Thank you, Bishop. It’s been genuinely wonderful being here. I really enjoy being here. I enjoyed the conversation, the wonderful hospitality, the good humor, the mutual respect, the depth of the services, the growing depth of our friendship. I can only speak highly of this place and all of you. It’s been- I’ve been impressed. I found it very nourishing and even healing in some ways for me to be here. I feel that I’ve gotten more than I’ve given, so thank you very, very much.