https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KoqibFwvQJ4
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. So last time I tried to develop with you the right side of the plausibility argument I’m making and try to give an account of central features of human spirituality and to try not use that term therefore in a vague indefinite way and I made an argument for how relevance realization can explain many of the facets that are found within the normal attribution of human spirituality and I proposed a term, religio, to cover all of those aspects of spirituality that can be explained by the machinery of relevance realization. There was of course an important lacuna, there was something that was still missing from that account and this was the account of the sacred and then I proposed to you in order to avoid confusion especially post-Schliermacher that we should make a distinction between the metaphysical proposal of the ground or the cause of the experience of sacredness where Schliermacher is emphasizing the experience and then for reasons of the way my argument has unfolded since I’m talking about the psycho-existential machinery of sacredness as opposed to the metaphysical proposal at least initially that is where I should begin. So I’m talking now we began to speak about a way of using the theoretical machinery we have developed here in order to talk about sacredness and we began by going to the work that we’d already talked about about domicide back to the work of Geertz and we talked about the sacredness one of the ways it functions one of the ways we can experience it is that it functions as a meta-meaning system that affords worldview attunement and thereby homes us against horror but then I noted that of course in the Hellenistic domicide there was not only the machinery that attempted to re-home us like the syncretic religions and one could probably argue also stoicism as I’ve already argued but there was also there was an alternative response which was the transgressive response of the Gnostics ultimately and I then said that gives us an opening into another aspect of sacredness and this is the work of Otto and his book that as I mentioned was typically entitled the idea of the holy and I said a better translation would be the experience of the numinous and what Otto was proposing is that before we had a moral interpretation of holiness there was a pre-moral view of what I’m calling sacredness and this or at least an aspect of the sacred of sacredness I should say and what Otto was pointing to was the experience of the numinous which is closely related to the adjective that is most applied to God for example in the Old Testament which is glorious God is shining and overwhelming and powerful but glory does not carry with it any moral sense in fact one way of interpreting what’s going on in the book of Job is a contrast between some of Job’s moral arguments about his suffering and God’s response is to present his glory and how numinous he is and so you’re seeing a sort of a conflict between these different aspects of holiness in Job of course that’s not all that’s happening in the book of Job and perhaps when I speak of young we’ll get back to that but right now what I want to pick up on is this insight by Otto that a part of sacredness seems to be the experience of the numinous and the numinous seems to be transgressive in important way it seems to be in fact it seems to be taking us into the heart of the very thing that the Gertzian model of sacredness was supposed to home us against which is experiences that border on horror now Otto describes this experience of the numinous as having three central aspects to it it is a mystery very much in the way I argued last time the other sense that we got from Marcel of something that right brings about sensibility transcendence that sort of trajectory of trans framing and then it has two opposing poles in it which make a lot of sense I think given what we’ve what we’ve built together here one is is that it is deeply fascinating it compels so a good way of I think a very plausible way of understanding is this is super salient to you it is really grabbing your attention involving you you can’t pull away so it’s super salient and then the other is he said right it’s it’s like it’s terrifying it’s horrifying it there’s an aspect of horror to this now I got to stop for a minute and you know I don’t want to use the word terror it goes back to his original term but the problem with terror is of course it has become deeply enmeshed with us with notions of terrorism and I want to put that aside that I’m going to use the word horror because it doesn’t have that that kind of association but I have to now distance how I want to use this word from how it’s become typically used by us so I much mentioned to you that most mystery novels and mystery movies aren’t mysterious at all that they don’t have you confront mystery they give you just a difficult problem to solve and in that sense their instances of a kind of important modal confusion that is pervasive in our culture the same thing with many horror movies many horror movies do not actually expose you to horror many horror movies actually expose you to being deeply startled with fear okay so deeply startled with fear so so much much of what passes for horror movies are movies that prey on our sort of ancestral fear of predation so that where there’s some monster that although the monster points towards something and I’ll come back to that and this is work of course made by good work done by Jonathan pageau on how we should think about monster monsters we’ll come back to that and the monster is basically hidden in some way or unknown and it’s preying upon people and most of the what’s called horror is how that the surprising way in which the monster will suddenly appear and prey upon its its victims and then they get ripped apart so you were startled oh no ah right and and that and most of that is not horror I mean I imagine it has I find those movies boring actually the I understand why some people this is just a statement of taste I don’t find them very interesting the sort of startle and puncture movies don’t don’t appeal to me they’re often enmeshed also with sort of crypto messages about sexuality and things like that that need to be challenged putting all of that aside right so when I say horror you have to there’s a few movies that capture it because horror has to do with what we talked about with respect to gears horror is when your sense of contact with reality is being challenged undermined where you feel you have a grasp on things and then it’s slipping away so horror therefore is often prototypically not associated with fear or directly with fear it’s associated with insanity or madness and of course there is the primordial fear of becoming insane right now the monster points to something very very interesting and this goes back to the work of Mary Douglas right that we often find creatures that are intercategorical for us monstrous because that’s on a continuum with another important feature of things being intercategorical so what is meant by intercategorical intercategorical are things that don’t fall into our ready-made categories and therefore we typically regard them as weird she talks about how they’re unclean she does an interesting discussion about and in the Bible the book of Leviticus all the animals that are unclean they’re very weird it’s a very weird collection if you tried to find some sort of essence like why owls are unclean and crocodiles are unclean and whatever and certain birds are unclean and certain it doesn’t make any sense and then she goes in and argues well no what happens is is there’s various ways in which categorizing there’s ways in which people have categorized things and those categories right have a certain pattern and when that when that pattern is being broken then these things these things challenge our grip on the world they challenge our grip on the world so let’s for example like there’s there’s an idea Douglas argues that you should have an interconnection between a creature’s sort of shape its morphology its means of locomotion and its location like where it lives so if it lives in the sea it should swim and therefore it should have a fish shape so you have things that are in the sea that don’t seem to be swimming like the crawly shellfish and therefore they’re kind of weird and they turn out to be unclean and right and then you also have this same she argues the same schema is applied now we we think all those archaic ancient people no but remember don’t don’t do that because we talked about how we also have purity codes we find things unclean that thwart our system of categorization so right remember if I take this and spit into it repeatedly and then swirl it around and drink it back you’re grossed out that’s unclean to you because I have this whole structural functional organization a way of categorizing myself and my self’s relationship to my body and how that’s other than the environment and then there’s important boundaries that shouldn’t be shouldn’t be crossed and when the spit comes out of me it becomes intercategorical it’s it’s me but it’s not me because it’s not inside me but it’s outside of me but somehow it was produced and it’s intercategorical it’s yucky and get rid of it right so this is not a feature of ancient thought this is a way in which we respond to things that violate our core categorical ways of making sense of the world now some of those things we just regard as yucky or gross or unclean but if the the intercategorical thing is intercategorical between really really central categories and it is represented as threatening to us then it can it is what it originally invoked horror for us so if you take a look at many horror creatures they’re prototypically intercategorical right the wolf man is intercategorical between the bestial and the personal right the ghost is intercategorical between the living and the dead the vampire is also intercategorical between the living and the dead and also between right being a being alive in the sense of consuming and being alive in the sense of being able to be generative because of course the vampires consume and do not produce and so and of course and there’s the work that Christopher master Pietro and Philip Misovic and I did and Jonathan page ultimately sorry not ultimately independently not ultimately maybe ultimately but independently did work on the zombie and how the zombie is an intercategorical monster to represent our current situation the meaning crisis and you’re going to see a video of Chris Chris method Pietro and I talking about all of that so I won’t get that into detail so the fact that the monster is intercategorical points right and that and that and that intercategorical this can be on a spectrum from just yucky to losing a grip on reality and intelligibility because of the deep connectedness between realness and intelligibility this points right again to the connection to madness and all of this points to losing a grip losing that contact that comprehensive grip losing that optimal grip on reality so you can create pretty significant horror without having to do the startle and puncture moment I want to relate one to you where I’ve had the most for me the most prototypical and salient example of an experience of horror that had nothing to with sort of the prototypical being something jumping out of the shadow with sharp pointy bits so I was watching Kubrick’s the shining many of you have probably seen it if you haven’t seen it of course there’s been 10,000 memes about it it’s pervasive throughout popular media and my own I intellectual arrogance contributed to the aesthetics of the horror I was watching this movie and I and spoilers here but this movie’s been around for a long time so I think it’s fair game I was watching this movies I was watching this movie and I’m you know I’m watching this character and he seems to be going mad the Jack Nicholson character and that that inner of itself is very interesting and of course evocative of all of this and then I’m getting oh right Stephen King right all right has some sort of deep criticisms of alcoholism and so this is a very extended metaphor for the descent through alcoholism into madness and and then I sort of I was patting myself on my back I get this movie this movie’s all it’s just a symbolic way of talking about alcoholism and everything and he’s hearing voices in his head oh that’s clear sense of madness and I had it all well structured well in hand as we say and then there’s a scene where he gets his wife actually traps Jack Nicholson inside some sort of pantry and locks it from the outside and then I remember sort of coming to sort of a full stop and I’m what’s gonna happen now she’s trapped him he’s locked in that’s it and the voices are talking to him in his head and I’m sort of dismissing that because yeah yeah he’s mad he’s gonna talk to the voices but so what and the voices are sort of in his head are sort of chiding him and you know what do you do how’d you let it get to this and I’m going yeah yeah you’re mad and you’re gonna spiral into insanity great great and everything and then the voices say okay it’s time to go and then the voices say now we’re gonna let you out and then they open the door from the outside the voices in his head and a chill go went down my spine because I realized oh I’m in a much different world than I thought I was in I thought I had this completely down and no no these voices have an independent reality and there’s something else going on here now nothing nothing startling was happening all they were doing was opening the door so he could get out but it was an absolute chill of horror going through me because right and that’s the most profound experience of horror I’ve ever had in a movie precisely because what had happened there was I went from being out here looking at all of this to I don’t know what’s going on and I was suddenly participating in his madness because I didn’t know what was going on and I was losing a grip on this situation and there were forces at work here that I didn’t understand that’s horror okay that’s horror and I mean I think there’s situations that bring people into genuine horror but I think it’s much rarer than we realize all right so given that and like I said we will return to talk about this later given the sense of horror as being you know the polar extreme of this continuum of the the weirdness the eeriness the yuckiness of the intercategorical the the spaces in our grip on reality through which things can slip right we can return to this so the numinous is super salient there’s almost something like a flow state in that we’re being drawn into it but it also has with it aspects of horror it shakes at the structure of our worldview now you say whoa like what’s an example of this okay so here’s an example of I think where people brush up against the numinous it’s fairly widespread so many of you will have encountered it it’s one that I find I guess annoying because I find it dangerous so this happens you’re driving home and there’s been an accident on the highway and people are slowing down it’s very dangerous to slow down everybody knows you shouldn’t slow down like that because it’s dangerous to slow down because the chances are you’re gonna cause another accident which does in fact frequently but nevertheless people feel compelled to slow down they are fascinated by this because they hope to see something horrifying not just disgusting they’re hoping that they will see death that they’ll they’ll somehow get a confrontation with this and that of course is horrifying because death has the capacity to the confrontation with the threat of death the presence of death has the possibility to completely sever your grip on reality literally in fact right but they can’t look away but if they see something they they’ll they have the potential of being very unpleasantly horrified but of course there’s something also missing in this because they can’t actually see death right they can see the fact of death in the sense of the results of something or someone dying but that won’t actually put them into something we’ve already discussed that won’t actually get them give them what they want a grip on the mystery of death the phenomenological mystery of death and that tells you something right wonder and awe have us open up to mystery but if the mystery becomes overwhelming if it causes us to lose any potential sense sorry or yes any sense of our potential ability to get right an insight or an understanding that typically comes with wonder right ah sort of liminal but with horror it’s like I’m it’s it’s expanding so fast and ah I’m getting overwhelmed so fast I’m being forced to accommodate so fast this is like the absolute worst culture shock and I’m experiencing horror so we can think of horror is when notice what you’ve got here you’ve got all the indications flow right or something like flow at least the beginning of it right where you you’re getting drawn in in this accelerating loop something like it at least right it’s super salient to you but it’s it’s super salient and this is why I’m hesitating to just call it straight out flow it’s super salient but not in the fact that you’re deeply coupled it’s super salient in the way that you’re seeking to be deeply coupled and you’re you’re the machinery is going faster and faster but it’s not actually getting a purchase because what’s happening is you’re getting horrified by a mystery now it’s like wow that’s that’s an experience of the numinous and if you read parts of the Bible like or you can read other literature too but the Bible of course is prototypical for a lot of these people these researchers like Otto like there’s passages in the Old Testament in which God is like this right just weird and strange and horrifying aspects of God fascinating super salient and you’re drawn in and it’s like like I said I don’t want to call it anti flow because anti flow is depression but it’s like the it’s like the shadow of flow you’re you’re trying to and you’re getting drawn in and all the machinery of coupling is speeding up to try and get what it can’t get which is a stable relationship and so wonder it that you don’t get wonder you might not even get awe if it’s too much it can pass into horror so it’s plausible that this is one of the ways of interpreting certain even commands in the Bible like the you know you’re supposed to it’s often translated as you’re supposed to fear God this doesn’t make any any sense for a lot of reasons because God is prototypically not the object that you can run away from or fight or like what your fear would be absurd it doesn’t make any sense but I think a better account of this is right you’re supposed to have awe for God and notice how this is the basis of this word awesome but it’s also the basis of this word awful right because it borders our borders on horror so there’s a sense of the experience of sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility the very very precipice of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world it’s supposed to take us I would say right it’s supposed to draw us in and the hope is not to just throw us into horror but to take towards horror until we experience right that sort of boundary between awe and horror where we are forced into a situation of confrontation with a demand to change the demand to change who and what we are and in that sense this will overlap with the higher states of consciousness in that this carries with it a sense of being terrifically real and I mean that terrifically real and that right it is putting a demand on us to accommodate to expand our capacity to framing for framing that it is pushing us to our very very very limits and the aspect of horror is the sense stronger words needed here the realization that we are indeed finally ultimately limited that no matter how much we grow we can’t grow enough to encompass the mysteries that we are confronting so the point of the horror I think is to get us not only to grow but to remember that our growth will always be the growth of a mortal limited being a being there is always caught up in relevance realization so notice how I’ve been pushing how much this is taking you to sort of that deepest powerful accommodation the deepest opening up right forcing tremendous change on you varying who you are this is also an aspect of the sacred now think about how you can relate this on the continuum that we’ve been talking about this is the ultimate frame breaking but this isn’t just breaking any frame this is you know this is trans frame breaking this is breaking your capacity for framing or at least taking it to the very as I said the very limits where you are forced into a trajectory of trans framing that is also acknowledging that you are ultimately insufficient it’s supposed to in this and I’m using this in a technical sense it is supposed to humiliate you the problem for us humiliate is that we can only hear this negatively but of course humility a deep deep appreciation of one’s inescapable limitations is part of I’ve argued the function of horror it is to bring you to that state of accommodation well maximal accommodation while also deeply reminding you sati that you can never become right anything beyond a finite being it’s to prevent inflation it is to prevent you ever assuming that you are more than you can ultimately be so it’s a deep kind of reminding that’s put at the heart of this power look if I if I could just sort of accommodate in wonder and all there’s a temptation that I would have inflate and think I am right now this puts you the numinous and right therefore puts you into contact confrontation with something that is much greater than yourself and also that has an existence by definition independent of you precisely because of the way it can threaten you so notice what we’ve got here we’ve got over here we’ve got right worldview we’ve got the sacred doing these two things sorry I keep slipping on that it’s just the way language drives you a I fear we’re not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar okay so sacredness over here we have worldview attunement and it’s very clear right why that would be regarded as sacred this homes us against horror but we’ve of this other notion of sacredness which is the numinous which is designed to do the opposite it’s designed to expose us fascinate us horror with horror so over here we had right basically what I’m going to argue is meta assimilation we had that meta meaning that is designed to get everything to fit together to belong together the agent in the arena fit together but then you have the opponent process the opponent process and this is as I’ve already argued this is meta accommodation sacredness is doing a very powerful at not at the level of your even of your individual projects or problems this is doing it at the level of your existential being in the world it is doing higher order relevance realization it is pushing the machinery of relevance realization again down through all of the levels of your knowing into your existential modes into the depths the primordial depths of the agent arena relationship and then it’s blowing it apart setting it in motion with opponent processing that’s doing powerful powerful higher order relevance realization sacredness I think is a deep way in which we are seriously playing with and now the seriousness is at the level of awe and horror and also home which is also deeply serious to you we are seriously playing with the machinery of relevance realization and pushing it towards greater and greater greater and greater development of optimizing it improving it enhancing it so if that’s right if sacredness is right the experience of this machinery as opposed to either one of its poles that tells us again about its deep functionality that what we’re doing in sacredness is we’re playing with the machinery of relevance realization in order to try and create states of mind states of body states of interaction with the world that optimize in a comprehensive and profound manner the machinery of relevance realization our connectedness to the world to ourselves and to each other this I would for example explain why music is so deeply associated with sacredness I mean music isn’t about anything not in a conceptual referential sense nevertheless as Nietzsche said life would be a mistake without music because in music we are playing just with the machinery of salience landscaping just with all of this machinery in a powerful way for no other reason than for its own sake we try to get into a flow state in which we are just just for its own sake seriously playing with this machinery and that’s why music is such a pivotal way in which we try to convey and represent the sacred and why music strikes us so perspectively in such a participatory way we we we don’t just we don’t we don’t just think about music or right we right it’s it’s it insinuates its way into our perspectival salience landscape and we embody it the rhythms and what’s happening in the music becomes sown into our processes of co-identification the way the world as an arena is disclosed to we and the way my agency has been structured are being deeply transformed by music one of the great difficulties with our culture of course and I suppose we need to do work on this how it contributes to the meaning crisis is the degree to which we have trivialized music and the degree to which we have severed it from at least explicitly and consciously from its connection to the sacred I think why many people still are so deeply dependent on music especially when they’re going through any transformative period in their life is precisely because of the way it puts them back in touch and helps them remember at least intuitively some of this machinery of seriously playing with the higher-order relevance realization machinery of sacredness now that opens up something that we need to talk about because I’m now invoking how we can use something that’s and we got it we’re gonna have to do work on this something that’s symbolic like music in order to right play in order to activate accentuate and play with this machinery in a powerfully transformative manner and of course right religions which are right which have these aspects to them also are rich with the symbolic machinery that is designed to activate and seriously play with this so what I want to talk about the relationship or the role that symbols have in in in our experience of sacredness so the important thing is how we’re going to use this word and symbol and meet originally means to put two things together and I want to I want to distinguish this the talk that I did with Chris that you’ll see one of the talks also distinguishes between a symbol and a sign so I’m not going into great detail here this is sort of central and semi semiotic because we use this term in multiple ways like we talk about abstract symbolic thought but when then we talk about you know the the cross as a as an important religious symbol and we can get very quickly confused and so a sign refers right so it it it by looking at it we can look through it to look at something else so I can use this as a as a sign for love because when you see this it helps you to think of love but this doesn’t actually exemplify symbols refer right but more importantly they exemplify in a particular way they exemplify by getting you to participate in that to which they refer they’re going to invoke of course participatory knowing because they have to do ultimately with getting down to the machinery of the agent arena participatory relationship so compare this as a sign for love and this is something as I said that Chris and I did to kissing someone because kissing someone doesn’t just make you think of love it actually gets you to participate it activates and gets the machinery kissing is and I mean this carefully is a serious play with the machinery of the agent arena relationship so that we can participate in a reciprocal relationship with another human being where we are right where there’s reciprocal realization occurring between us we can together remember the being mode etc so there’s a difference there I want to try and unpack this a little bit more symbols do this do this sort of double job and they do this by having at their core a metaphor and we got to slow down here because this is also something that needs to be understand understood a little bit more carefully and we talked about this before about the word metaphors itself a metaphor it means to carry over or carry across what I’m doing in a metaphor is I have two different domains and I want to see this domain differently so I basically look through this is at least the theory of block I look through this thing to look at this so I’m saying that Sam is a pig here’s Sam here’s a pig I put on sort of pig glasses sorry for that and then I look at Sam differently and there’s the salience topography of Sam is altered or Tony talks about this in salience imbalance and that reconfiguration of what I find salient in Sam allows me to see Sam differently I get an insight into Sam and of course I’m not actually claiming that Sam is a pig and I’m not just comparing and saying Sam is like a pig I’m doing this act of looking through and seeing this and thereby getting an insight into it in an important way that’s fine okay now we have to understand first of all how pervasive and profound metaphor is because we have a tendency to think of it again as largely ornamental our culture is so beset comprehensively by patterns of trivialization again and again and again you hear me say we have trivialized this we have that okay we’ve talked about this but I want to bring it back and develop it a little bit how much of our thinking and this goes to the work of Lakoff and Johnson but I’ll criticize it in a minute and also somebody who I’m going to talk about later barfield right that we don’t realize how much of our cognition are ways of thinking and interacting with the world are being structured by metaphor so right to use an example I’m halfway through this lecture as if I was moving through a space but I hope you get my point or at least see what I’m saying but you might not be able to because what some of the stuff I’m saying is really hard it’s really hard it’s really hard to get my point but I hope you understand me it used to be understand by the way stand within but we change it to understand stand under it’s interesting right even right even words that you don’t realize are metaphorical have a metaphorical origin like interest remember this inter essay to be within something so there there were often you see we’re much more naturally poetic than we realize we are we are constantly trying to do this use one thing look through one thing at another now I have some criticisms of Lakoff and Johnson because they argue that what it is is I have some embodied practice and then that just gets projected up into abstract thought and so one of their prototypical examples is well say things like he attacked my argument right and that’s supposed to be from the hallmark of you know abstract thought that’s from argumentation where we’re at our most rational but we’re actually using this word attacked right which goes back to you know physical assault and the idea is we take what we have here and we project it onto here I think this notion of projection is too simplistic okay but this is the basic idea I I know what this is because it’s embodied physical interaction it’s participatory right I know what it is to attack somebody and then I use that right I sort of just project that onto the abstract conceptual domain and that’s how I get he attacked my argument this this reminds me of a point in barfield barfield says you know you read you read in the old text and they’ll use words like numina sorry right which stands either for wind or spirit and we can only hear it one way or the other and that’s why we break it into two words I sort of get what barfield saying here but the point is we have that we use this word right and we we and we move between these without realizing it like we attacked the castle he attacked my argument and those aren’t the same but we may actually not notice that we’re using them differently now why do I say that well this is work that I published a couple of articles with John Kennedy where we said this simple model of just projecting doesn’t seem quite right because this for example carries with it I can say I attacked the castle or I assaulted the castle right but if I say I assaulted his argument it’s like what what does that mean that’s weird the the the the the the near synonym doesn’t transfer and notice the reverse abstract thought and say instead of saying I attacked his argument I can say I criticized his argument but if I say ah let’s criticize the castle you don’t what what that sounds like a weird Monty Python routine see what I’m trying to show you is it we didn’t there isn’t a simple sort of identity relation we didn’t just project this and it’s not that right we’re just sort of trapped between two meanings we seem to clearly have an a sense of this that points downward towards the physical assault and then points upwards if you’ll allow me these metaphors towards the conceptual notice also something else notice the three things I used earlier I used did you see my point do you grasp what I’m saying do you understand it right do you get it these are very different interactions these are very different things they’re seeing there’s understanding there’s getting and there’s grasping and yet all of those independently converge towards making something intelligible right the act of making something until what select what selected these four very different things and drew them up to their common converged meaning see what I’m trying to show you is it’s not simply that this gets projected up there’s also something up here that’s constraining and acting downward helping us select which of all of our embodied existence we are going to use for our more abstract conceptual topics all right so why is that important because I think that points towards a different way of understanding what the metaphor is doing there of course is an element of projecting if projecting means to throw but I think there’s something much more complicated and interesting going on in a metaphor that isn’t simply projection which is of course itself a metaphor okay so I think that symbols are going to tap into these deeper kinds of metaphors not just the metaphors that are the ornamentations of language these are the metaphors these more profound metaphors that are structuring our cognition and they and I’m trying to point out to you that they have no not only a bottom up emergence they have a top-down emanation going on in them there’s a sense in which both sides are interacting in a powerful way we meet we need a much more dynamic account of what’s at work in metaphor so let’s build towards that dynamic account and we’ve already gained something that are going to be making use of these profound metaphors the metaphors that are not just metaphors of speech but are structuring the way we are making sense making meaning of the world now one important point of these kinds of metaphors that triggers on the participation gets into the profundity but doing something with it is one of the jobs of these metaphors right is to hold in mind so let me give you right an example of this we care about justice we really do it’s important to us our culture effect is really wrestling with what does justice mean and how do we best serve it how do we best realize it but that means you need to be able to reflect on justice you need to me to be able to contemplate it to think about it if you’re going to think about it and not just emote or assert about it if you’re going to think about it you need to hold it in mind but how do you hold it in mind if I were to ask you without repeating the word justice hold justice in mind do it hold like what are you doing you right you might be holding sort of a prototypical instance but when I do this and I do this repeatedly with my class what people tell me is well when they want to sort of contemplate justice too so they can reflect on it and get clear about what it means to them they often invoke a symbol they invoke the symbol of the woman blindfolded holding a sword carrying right the holding the scales so one of the things you know date is that this of course is a profound metaphor we use the notions of balance all throughout our talk about justice we also use the sword as deciding cutting right but let’s stick with the balance this allows us to hold justice in mind that’s it like stop pause if that’s all the symbol was doing that in and of itself is such a valuable thing we need to pause and appreciate if I can’t relate to justice in a participatory fashion where I can engage in it and I’m trying to internalize it and I’m trying to get clearer about it I can’t do any of that unless I can activate it and hold it in mind and I need a symbol to do that the symbol is metaphorical justice isn’t literally a scale a balance what’s going on here and what’s right and how does it plug into where I’m trying to argue there’s something more than just projection going on and this gets me to a notion that I’ve mentioned to you before acceptation this really like really important work you got to read his book by Michael Anderson on this this is the idea that your brain right is in a self-exaptation machine not only across species evolutionary but more recently in his work within a brain in its own development so to remember the example my tongue has been accepted for speech it has a structural functional organization for doing a particular set of tasks but of course it has member the robot and the battery it has all kinds of side effects and those side effects are a ongoing reservoir of sets of capacities that I can tap into and make a new structural functional organization to do a new thing which is what I’m doing right now I’m speaking so the tongue has been accepted for speech and what he’s arguing is that a lot of what we see in our cognition is what he calls circuit reuse circuits that have been used for one thing get reused can he get exacted in the way I’ve just described by reconfiguring their structural functional organization right so that side effects become central effects right and and what you do is you get a new machine a new capacity created that way so let’s try and think about this right we’ve got a clear example in the cerebellum right the cerebellum originally evolved for helping you to keep your physical balance right and what it does is it takes information from many different sense modalities and is constantly looking for how to find patterns of contingency patterns of relationship between what’s happening in my vision what’s happening in my body and it’s really helping to do all this sophisticated coordination and smoothing out so that they start to coordinate together much better that’s your cerebellum it’s centrally involved in your balance but you know what you’ve done we’ve the cerebellum has been exacted to it’s been it’s used not only for finding balance between like my my my seeing and my moving it’s been exacted to find right deeper coordination between any different areas of domain in your brain the cerebellum also allows you to integrate your vision with your working memory so that you can do visual imagery now let’s put this together carefully you’ve got this right machinery of exaptation you’ve got balance and now what you’re doing when you call up the balance idea is you’re actually right notice your cerebellum has been exacted up to you manage massively complex contingencies between variables you know what you have to do to be a just person you have to know how to balance you have to optimize the relationship between you have to pick up on and coordinate and smooth out the complex interaction between multiple variables that’s justice you know what you can do if you invoke balance and don’t just talk about it but participate in it you can actually do the reverse of this you can go back through balance right and trigger activate you can go from justice through balance back to activating the machinery of the normally I am looking through all of that machinery at something but what I can do with the symbol is no no I don’t want to I want to actually sort of retrace reactivate go back through exaptation and activate the machinery of balance so that I can then use that machinery in order to get an optimal grip on this other domain which is justice see this isn’t just simple projection right there’s there is not only a projecting up there is an emanating back down you’re also reversing and going down and trying to reactivate this machinery in important way there’s a top down guidance that is intersecting with the bottom-up projection and so the symbol is in that sense deeply participatory you are trying to participate in this activation of the very cognitive machinery that is used both in participating in balance you know just look at balance you have to be balanced prospectively participatory and then taking that machinery into being just having your perspectival and participatory machinery aligned in a certain way that’s what the for you it is deeply participatory it allows you to hold in mind and then look back through to activate and then bring that back up to have insight participatory and perspectival insight into something like justice we’re going to talk more next time about the symbol and how it relates to our experience of sacredness thank you very much for your time and attention