https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UxjdHNqn_L0
So here we are everybody, this is both Voices with Verveki and a Theory of Knowing. This is a simultaneous thing we’re doing here because we figure we have to move closer at least in time because we’re collaborating so frequently and so deeply. And we wanted to just share with you both what we’ve both been up to, how our paths have been intersecting and also a little bit about a project we’ve got coming down the road and just open up about that. So the place I want to start is I want to start with Greg’s amazing new book, which is a new synthesis for solving the problem of psychology, addressing the enlightenment gap and I’ll hold it up for a while. Soak it in. Okay, so I mean, so as many of you probably know, Greg wrote a book, The Problem of Psychology, and this is the response and it’s developed. I think it’s fairly fair to say, Greg, that this is on sort of the cutting edge of your thought is what’s been happening up until very recently. I can see that a lot of the work you’ve been doing, some of the work that we’ve done together has shown up in the book. It’s an impressive thing and I’m going to be promoting it regularly and reliably. I have been and there’s people I want Greg to get in the conversation with because they want to talk to him about this amazing work. He’s like our new Aristotle, as I keep saying. And so making me blush. Well, why don’t you say a little bit about the book and what you like, how you hope it it and what they should be expecting from it and what problems it’s addressing, et cetera. I will definitely. But let me also say welcome to you talking with Greg because we are going to put this on either side. I just got, I’ve got 10 minutes left in the fourth episode. I think it is of After Socrates. And I’ve been tracking this and I want to talk with you about this because this is beautiful. Just unbelievably beautiful. I am finding my way towards Socrates through you, John. And it’s filling my soul. So it’s a beautiful thing. So I want to circle back in. I’m getting and I know you’ve been involved in a whole bunch of other projects. I have queued up a conversation with that you have with Jordan Peterson and a bunch of other things that you’ve got going on. So I want to make sure that we highlight before we get into the book why I’m super excited to be getting caught up with you and what might be coming down the line, friend. So it’s a really, it’s been a fun week listening to what you’ve been up to lately. So just want to circle back in. Well, thank you. Yeah. I’m looking forward to talking to you about it. But let’s say, let’s discuss your book first because I mean, it’s impressive work and I won’t read it out loud because it’s just between friends. But the note you wrote in it for me was really touching and I found it very moving. So thank you for that. Good. Absolutely. I feel our fellowship and I feel your courage and leadership and you’re doing unbelievably important things. And the book itself grew as a function. I mean, I was definitely deep into the book, but our synergy sort of helped me round out the book and certainly shows up in a number of different places. So you know, yeah. So if we want to talk a little bit about what the book basically is, it’s my latest sort of academic argument for the field. Whoever cares about contending with these issues, I try to lay out what I think is a pretty clear argument. So the books title, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology, called Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. So we’ve talked about this some, but I’ll just reiterate the problem of psychology. Okay. I really, I cannot believe I say this everywhere. I’ll say it here. I can’t believe how much attention like quantum gravity gets. Okay. You know, oh God, we need movies and you know, Stephen Hawking and holy. And we have an unbelievably important problem that I think is super well specified academically. So here’s how I specify the problem of psychology. And that is if we situate ourselves in natural science, there’s a great, unbelievably powerful epistemological knowledge structure. We can get a pretty good grip on physics being concerned with energy, matter, space and time that then goes into chemistry and astronomy. The ontology of those things is pretty clear. Geology is pretty clear ontologically. Then we jump into biology. Some good questions about how that happens with biology is science of life. We got genes, we got cells, we got ecologies, we got organisms, multicellular organisms. We then climb up into neuroscience. Oh, okay. We’re talking about neuroscience cells and stuff like that. And then boom. Okay. Then boom, we hit the thing called psychology, behavioral science, cognitive science. No offense, but we run into this particular issue where all of a sudden our ontological grounding that the experts go, oh yeah, at least that’s what we’re talking about. Sure, we can debate whether a virus is alive, but nobody debates whether biology is the science of life or livingness is an interesting thing in the world that we can all be curious about. Psychology is not that way. Psychology doesn’t have an ontology. Why not? That’s the fundamental question. Understanding its history, understanding its confusion, and then being able to specify actually this is a great error. This is not just a feature of the nature of psychology and science. This is actually a misconstrual. We have a mistaken what it is that the science is about, what it is that we can be about, and how to put the pieces of the puzzle back together. So a new synthesis diagnoses the problem initially, then it introduces, you talk a unified theory of knowledge, its core ideas, and then lays out basically this argument. And the summary can be said that our current discipline, my current psychology, is academically. You open up a little academic one-on-one book and it says psychology is a science of behavior and mental process. The origin of that description is that science has access to behavior, and then we can measure behavior and study behavior, and then we infer mental process. And then we develop research programs of behavior that gave us data, and then we build models, research programs that build models of mental process. Which means that the field is a science because it applies the methods of behavioral science to its subject matter. And that’s called methodological behaviorism. And that is the actual infrastructure. Now the idea that something’s a science simply because you apply the methods of science, hey, isn’t that just science? What are you a science about? And so then what this book does is it takes a science of behavior and mental process and then says, what is science, behavior, and mental processes? And then it maps them. It uses the tree of knowledge to give us a new big picture, big history map of a coherent grounded naturalistic ontology that says that actually the picture that science tells us about the way things behave in the world is that there are material objects, there are living organisms, there are, wait for it, minded animals, and then cultured persons. And we can carve nature at these joints and we can elucidate these dimensions or planes of existence. And then it introduces the periodic table of behavior that elucidates this further. So we can say, here’s a big picture view of science. These are the domains of behavior that science measures. And by the way, all science is about behavior. Physics is about the behavior of energy and matter in the universe. Chemistry is about the behavior of structure matter. Astronomy, behavior of galaxies. So if everything’s about behavior, then it’s what kind of behavior are we interested in? And the unified theory grounded in the tree of knowledge system says, oh, there’s a line between living organisms and the minded animals. We can specify that with behavioral investment theory. And now, by the way, a recursive relevance realization framing. Right. It delineates the process by which neurocognitive structures allow agent arena relations to carve paths of behavioral investment in the world from the animal kingdom all the way up from ants to us and create that structure. And then there’s a joint point between minded animals and cultured persons, which I delineate called justification systems theory. It’s a framework for that. And this book then specifies with a map of mind says that there are three different meanings reference for mind. Mind one, neurocognitive activity, both behaviorally with it between the animal and the environment and then the neurocognitive activity within the nervous system. And then there’s self-conscious, subjective, conscious experience. That’s the felt experience of being in the world, which is trapped within the perspectival knower from the inside out. And then finally, mind three, a justifying self-conscious system that’s whether it’s present in other animals or not, iffy, it’s certainly well elaborated in us. This is Rene Descartes reference to I think, therefore I am that kind of mind. Mind one, two, three are totally different reference. And we need a map of mental processes so we can map science, we can map behavior, and we can map mental processes and we can tie them together with a new system to give rise to a coherent, intelligible integration, something that I think somebody calls logos. It’s very beautiful. And it goes a long way towards the reciprocal reconstruction between science and spirituality that will allow us to bridge them back together again. A long way. I mean, you’ve done more than most people I know who are working on this because there’s other people working on ontology, of course, and you make use of their work. You’re a very good scholar as well. You know, but in many ways you’ve done this, I think, the most intensively and extensively, so it’s very systematic, it’s very clear how we could have a scientific worldview that nevertheless could properly accommodate and home our quest for meaning, our quest for good personhood, our quest for well-being. And of course, we’ve done many shows developing those arguments too and showing developing that. Right. Well, I would say, yeah, let me, I mean, you’re, to me, and as I wrote, you’re the real hero of this, John, at the level of the bridging there. I mean, at least especially in terms of this architecture, but what this architecture does in the book, and I’m trying to do more of that with the whole Utah model, and hopefully we’ll see where that grows. But I do think, yes, the nature of the architecture, and I appreciate sort of the Aristotle reference, I’m a systematic thinker. I want to get right angle understanding across things. If there’s lack of clarity, we need to seek intelligibility. We can bring to the fore core intelligibility that within the scientific logos explodes intensively and extensively our capacity to understand. And when that happens, people can pick that up or have already done it through their own climbing up the mountain and be in such a much better place to hand us a science that does justice to our meaning, making mental health capacities. And then the grounding of science can bridge to the concerns about how to build a science spirituality way of being in the world. And that’s what I thought so excited about us because your whole, so after Socrates’ vision is exactly that structure. And this can ground some of the logos of that in a big history view that clarifies a lot of areas of confusion. Yeah, and I like that way of putting it, you know, in the big history view, there’s other people talking about that, like Rich Blundell and others. And, and, and, and this, I mean, you, you, I’ve heard you use the phrase, you know, this is a coherent descriptive metaphysics. And that, and in that way, it’s like the Aristotelian framework, it gives us an overarching way, right, of where, how we can place things and how we can place them in proper proportioned relationship to each other. I mean, there’s just been a lot of work there done on this. So what, what, like what’s happening with the book? I mean, I mean, I know it’s first, it’s, it’s, it’s just recently come up, but I would assume given, given the quality of the book and the community built around you, there must be some feedback happening for you already. Certainly there are people that have read through it. Mostly friends of the system have read through it at this point. And so I’m getting definitely positive feedback from friends of the system. I’m starting on the sort of podcast circuit, you know, as we all know, in the overloaded, you know, to actually grab a hold of a 500 page book and digest it. It’s going to take a little bit of time for the system to, so I’m basically, I’m doing some podcasts. I’m set. I’m gonna use the, there’s a whole vision that I have for our Utah community that will sort of one aspect of it will be to get bite size elements of the book on a YouTube kind of conversation and being able to, because it’s a, it is, it’s a big complicated argument. We’re going to get it down into the bite. Yeah, it has to be, you can’t just, you know, but there are, but people, you know, and God love them. It’s hard to digest, you know, that meal. You want to break it up into particular. So we’re going to break up the book into its core elements, maybe go chapter by chapter, maybe go point by point, have dialogue about each one of those points. So people can take it home and then they can be in a much better place. Say, oh, this is why this is important. This is why this makes sense. This is what this really introduces. And then, cause it is, it’s a 25 year project that is very big and pretty abstract at one level. We’re going to try to make it manageable and digestible. So that’s one of the projects that I have in the works. Well, if there was a course on, you know, how to awaken from the meeting crisis, I think this would be a required reading in that for that course. Now, right. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I think the project, I mean, and, you know, I get it. There’s other people doing specific work on emergence and causal levels and they’re trying to do and that work needs to continue. But right. We need, we need the comprehensive systematic integrative vision that has to, but it can’t just be like slapdash. And this is the thing. Greg has done this very carefully. And you can see it in the work. And, and so, and there’s rigor in it, but there’s also, it’s not rigor in a strangling sense. There’s room within the project for areas that can be developed. Like he’s not like, in one sense, this is kind of a masterpiece, but this isn’t Greg’s final word to my mind. At least that’s like, this is like, okay, now we can start doing a lot of other stuff that we need to get done because this is finally like, this has finally been cleared up. Is that a fair way of seeing? Oh, oh, beautifully fair. And exactly. So, right. This is when I’m, I’m trying to help us just get a coherent grip. That’s it. Yes. Yes. We lack it. I want to get awareness that we lack a coherent grip and that a coherent grip is feasible to get us just the basic outline of a paradigm of understanding that clarifies all of the equivocating language we use around mind and behavior. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, and the work that’s done into that is then say, once we get that, it affords us so much in relationship to, well, psychotherapy, but no, it’s affords us much in relation to the science and spirituality intersection of this meaning crisis moment. If we get that right. And this is why our synergy feels so exciting. So that’s, that’s really what it is. And I’ll say in terms of, yes, and you know, I try to, people who know me as like, okay, this whole Utah thing has this weird garden and, you know, forced you to do a whole thing on the coin. The garden in the coin don’t show up in the book at all. So in terms of the nature of the real sort of division architecture of this, of this kind of metaphorical bridging structure of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge and bringing our human identities and merging science and collective wisdom with our subjective experience of being in the world. That’s the future of Utah. That’s the real architecture of Utah and the way in which it would afford us a vertical and horizontal integration that creates a context that doesn’t specify the DIA logos because it’s an arena for which we can come together and engage in dialectic DIA logos kinds of structures and clarify from deeply misguided stuff that comes off the enlightenment gap. This matter mind, we fucked up the matter mind relation horribly, or at least analytic philosophy in science and physics and all of that. The way that they just couldn’t grip the whole broke our grammar and we need to put the grammar back together. And when we do, that’s going to afford us a whole bunch of different wonderful opportunities to sort of rewrite the culture, which is absolutely something we need to be doing right now, given the disasters we’re looking at. Yeah, that’s beautifully well said. Beautifully well said. Is there anything else you’d like to say about your book? Well, for those of you that are fans of John’s, well, who’s not a fan of John, right? Lots of people. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess that happens, you know, when you actually get out there, huh, John? All of a sudden there are people you’re bumping into. But here’s what I’ll say. People are interested in the intersection of us. You know, we’ve been having a lot of conversations. One of the things that I find to be super exciting and we’ve touched on it, but we haven’t really. And it shows up in this book is Chapter 14. And that is Mind to Be in the Relational World. That’s the title of it. So in terms of my map of mind, I basically say there’s a pretty easy way to delineate the map mental process. There’s overt mental activity. That’s what I call Mind 1B. You observe that. That’s what they used to call behavior from behavior’s perspective. And there’s a neurocognitive structure. Okay, so we can then model is the easy problems of consciousness. If you want to use a Chalmers kind of frame, it’s basically the neurocognitive functional structure, subjective conscious experience of being. Okay. And then this justificatory inside and out. So that’s Mind 3. Well, then it gives rise to the idea that actually what we humans do, especially based on Tomasello’s work and others, is the shared attention and intention space. Okay. Which allies with our capacity to all track your eyes. I’ll track your motion and I’ll create a model and sync up with that. And I would argue that creates an implicit intersubjective space. Okay. So that, and think about us. We now know each other. I’ve got a model of John. You’ve got a model of me. We have a friendship. And then we can really create a specific kind of almost third other relational world. That’s called Mind 2B. It’s this idea that our shared subjective space create a particular element. Now, how do we do that? And what does it mean? Well, in the unified theory world, I was building a model, the human relationship system, specifically the motivational emotional model called the influence matrix, the fourth little thing on the tree. And what it delineates is this idea that we’re going to track our relational value and social influence and our self other power, like self over other, over other self, our connection with others, affiliation, hostility, our autonomy on self other differences and positions. Okay. And why is that really exciting to me? Well, what it says is I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was actually intuiting would be what is the relevant relational architecture? Okay. That is a cross context, but relatively invariant. And that will be, oh, the process dimensions of self and relationship to other. What are the salient elements of a landscape that are going to be seen as relevant? Oh, it’s changes in relational process. Okay. And then what are people going to actually try to realize in a relational participatory dance? Oh, they’re going to be realizing a particular structure of moving toward high relational value, low relational value and tracking that. So what the influence matrix is, is essentially can be framed as the architecture of our recursive relevance realization in relation. And so I was then able to put your war. I said, all right, here’s behavioral investment theory. It’s got this weak neurocognitive functionalism. I can pull from John who’s anchored to predictive processing and then gives us this beautiful model of better cognition. And then I can come back to that and say, well, I built this model of motivation and motion of the architecture of our self other relation. And it should, according to John’s model, be a structure that tracks recursively relevance realization in relation. And that’s what it, and I would argue that that’s it. Yeah, that’s actually what it does. So that’s a beautiful point in my estimation of synergy. And it brings your cognitive perceptual structure emphasis, brings it to my motivational emotional emphasis and puts it in relational world. So that’s one of the chapters I’m very happy with. And yeah, yeah, me too. I really like that was unbelievably central and it bridged behavioral investment theory into the influence matrix in a new way that had that afforded me a way of coherent integration that I didn’t have before, basically that language. And so I deeply appreciate that. That’s amazing. That’s great. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I think people who are interested, especially in the cog side part of my work will like that. But I think people who are interested just in the general project of can we create a worldview that can properly home our need for meaning and afford our cultivation for wisdom? I think Greg has done some fantastic work on that. Just some fantastic work. The last thing I’ll say that I will just encourage people to consider is that the alluded to this before, but I really just want to echo this. I really want us to get the thinking, looking out at the animal kingdom and seeing minded animals. So when we see animal, when we see living plants, we should see minded animals. What do we mean by mindedness? We mean an embodied embedded complex adaptive sensory motor looping system. Yeah, indeed. It’s the it’s the whole system that for cognitive science basically is pointing to rather than the information instantiated just within the nervous system. And indeed, the mindedness angle that I bring is unbelievably complementary to the four E cognitive science for you, relatively traditional cognitive science. And I want to say to society, folks, think about this. Could you imagine if we lacked a vocabulary for what for living creatures? We just call them really complex stuff out there. That failing to differentiate life from matter to us would be amazing. I would argue failing to differentiate minded animals from living organisms is also amazing. So I really want to help us see that the way we screwed up the matter mind. Now, Aristotle is crystal clear on this. There’s vegetative plants and there’s sensory motor animals and there’s rational humans. We got to remember and rediscover that dimension of existence that really science is mind blinded in many ways. We got to recover that. And I want to help people be like, God, you really are walking around blind. I’ve had a number of people that I’ve been walking with the woods with and helping them see, oh, that’s a minded squirrel. Yeah, it’s a minded squirrel. It’s sensory motor, functional awareness and responsivity. And it’s moving very differently than the trees. Right. You know, the trees are have their own particular kind of input processing structure. They have their own bio intelligence if you want to use that term. But the squirrel is different and we should be very clear about that. So one of the things we really at a broad level, I hope to take home, doesn’t have to do with academic stuff. It’s like wake up, folks. There’s a minded dimension of existence. We’ve been blind to it’s super important for a part of our vocabulary. And actually, I think that so many things are opened up when you appreciate that grammar. Well said. Those are the things that I wanted to kind of emphasize in relationship to the book. And you should everybody should know for both audiences, voice it was for Vickie and you talking with Greg, we are going to do a series together, another one, and we’re going to have probably multiple third or fourths in it as we do. It’s going to be a dialogical series. If you’ve watched any of the cognitive science show, there’s a there’ll be an argumentative core, but there’ll be dialogue and oftentimes dialogs spinning around it. And it’s on I think we’re going to we haven’t totally settled on the title, but perhaps something like transcendent naturalism. We’re trying to get an account of an ontology that robustly supports the human experience of transcendence and the disclosure of aspects of reality that are extraordinary. And that I’m trying to use a neutral term without ever departing from a naturalistic framework and thereby hopefully doing a little bit more bridge building between the scientific world and the world of human spirituality. So I’m looking forward to that. So that’s something for everybody to look forward to. I’m looking forward to it a lot. There’s a lot of different people that are doing this work, and we’re going to try and have some of them on with us. And of course, we’ll try and bring as many as we can, at least via citation and explanation into the overall process. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. It’d be an honor again to join with you in that kind of thing. And I really mean you highlight this, you know, the nuns out there, the current, you know, structure of our thought and relationship to how we’re going to cultivate meaning in life in relation. I really believe that there’s an opportunity to join with many others, but to add our voices to what would be ways of being, what would be logical structures, what would be relational dynamic elements that would afford this capacity to engage and love life and enable that does afford that felt sense of transcendence that is very consistent with what we scientifically know, but really enables the kind of living that people are like, yes, yes, that is what my core participatory knowledge seeking system can tell me is like, I am in right relation to the world in this regard. So I’m really looking forward to that. And then we also have, and Greg has put this together, he’s been very busy. We have a conference coming up soon. And so Greg, why don’t you speak to that because it’s right in this theme as well. That’s right. I’m looking forward to this. So put this, we’ve sent out, saved the date and by the hopefully by the end of January that we have a whole pattern in the next six to eight weeks how this is going to unfold. But this is March 17th and March 18th. We have 45 people lined up to come and give talks and other, and we are highlighting somebody special. Given the keynote is John, and we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, kind of what that would be. But ultimately, the title of the conference is Consilience, Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons. And basically what we’re trying to envision here is that there is this sort of a meta-theoretical architecture for people to come together and achieve a much more coherent vision of knowledge. Think you and me together, for example, of like, okay, hey, psychology, cognitive science may be able to put on a naturalistic framework that coheres and does justice to our experience and ways of being in the world. That’s novel and affords a kind of conciliance that hasn’t been available to for. So there’s a logic that allows us to unify our knowledge, but unify our knowledge towards what we want to orient. And I know that you’re exploring, I’m looking forward to the next episode of Socrates here because I know orienting is coming up on it. But we’re going to orient toward a wisdom commons. This is a term that Peter Lindbergh’s talked about in relation to the Stoa. It’s been kicked about by the Respond Group and other kinds of elements. It’s sort of like, hey, how are we going to create a communitas in relationship to the ways in which we can network with each other and pull a system that affords us to address the wisdom famine? Where do we go for wisdom? I think you started after Socrates with. And so what we want to hear, we want to at least start it not with arrogance, but with a sense of dialogue, dialectic, dialogos kinds of structures. So the idea is we come together, share some notions, get some logos orientation, and then spring that forth in a way that’s press practice, research, community, cultivation toward a wisdom commons. Yeah, and it’s not going to just be academics. There’s going to be people that are building these communities from the Respond Network, building these ecologies of practices, trying to network together. And both Greg and I have been involved with them. We owe a lot also to people like Nathan Vanderpool. And that whole network is going to show up and play a vital role. So it’s both high-level theory and also ground up. Right? No, no, the emerging. Yeah. These are the emerging. Yeah. This is really key. That the only way it’s going to be successful and the only way we can overcome some of the limitations of, say, analytic philosophy, which, you know, or other kinds of elements is to have an interface, a dialogical exploratory interface structure and body up practice, like Rafe Kelly’s type of work and relationship, you know, and many others. And I have a number of individuals, most of my psychotherapeutic community and individuals like Rachel Hayden will be talking about her aspiration and things along those lines. There’s a lot of different elements that would be, hey, this is real. This is about finding the philosophy and phrenesis in embodied ways that, you know, that is relevant for our life across the various domains and certainly not cloistered in an ivory tower academic for sure. Right. Which makes it, I think, so exciting. I’m looking forward to it a lot. So, yes. And so now what I’d like to do, so those are some of the things that we have. As I said, I am finding my heart filled with Socrates, as a function of this past week. I was like, I got to get caught up on after Socrates. So what I’d like, John, if you can tell us a little bit about that project. Of course, there are four episodes out and I know you’ve had a conversation with Guy Sensack, but let’s hear my audience know kind of about this project and how it came about and where it is. I think you’ve been either wrapped up or almost wrapping up on it, but what’s its mission? Yeah. So we’ve got 19 of the 25 episodes. We’re going to film then the final six. I think the third weekend of February in Canada, it’s a long weekend. So we’re going to do that. Well, the series came about and some of you who are familiar with me, with, you know, with the Utah, you know, the interest in the dialogical aspects of rationality and of meaning making and of sense making. So, and that has been growing. That was a response to criticism made of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by Jonathan Pageau and Paul Van der Kley that my model was very individualistic. And I took that criticism to heart and I went and I’ve been doing a lot of experimental participation and participant observation and all of that stuff. And, you know, doing Rafe Kelly’s Return to the Source and living to tell about it. Living to tell about it. Doing Irish hamburgers, you know, at least some of it. I couldn’t attend all of it, but her wisdom project. I go into the Respond network. I won’t go on about that. So that’s been going on. And then, you know, developing, trying to reverse engineer practices from the Socratic, Platonic, Neoplatonic tradition. And I’m very clear that I’m not claiming these are accurate reproductions. The evidence is too under determined. I make that very clear from the beginning of the series. I can’t be confident to do that. What I can do is try to do a reverse engineer that I think is at least faithful to what we have given to us and also is faithful to what we’re facing right now. So that’s the nature of the project. How can we recover what was going on in the whole Socratic pathway that starts with Socrates and goes through a whole bunch of figures? And about accessing the dialogical contemplative aspects of rationality and wisdom and meaning making and not just accessing them theoretically, but as I said, creating reverse engineering, dialoguing into existence practices for realizing this. So it is not like the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and being an extensive lecture series. There is a lecture series in After Socrates, but it’s intensive. I’m not doing the cup. I’m following this one line. This one line, I’m following it through. And it, I will, in addition to the lecture, the lectures, of course, build as an argument. There is a series of points to ponder, and that’s me to encourage people to reflect and hopefully get into dialog groups and dialog groups are forming. Peter Lindberg has one at the Stoa being run by Robert Gray and Lizel, I can’t remember Lizel Van Wick, I believe. And so, and that’s been very well attended, but there’s lots of these. And that’s what I want. I want people to take this up in discussion and shared practice. And then in order to afford that, there’s a whole pedagogy of practices. There’s practices that are building on each other. And each one is, it resonates with what’s going on in the lecture and the points to ponder. And so you’ve got, you’ve got an ecology of practices building in line with the argument and in line with sort of reflect, the building of reflection and the building of, of, of dialogical community. The production values are significantly better than Awakening from Meaning Crisis. Not that the people there didn’t do their very best, they did. I’m always, I’ll always be grateful to Alan Kian for the work he did. But sound, picture, animation, graphics, we got, we, we’ve really put everything we could into this so that people get the information they need. We play with the format. There’s episodes 10 A and B, and they’re 10 A and B because they have to be joined together. Where myself and Christopher Mastro Pietro and Heather Barrett and Guy Sendstock, we take you through like the entire ecology up to that point and how you can onboard onto dialectic and to dialogos. Dialectic is a practice, dialogos is a process that you, that takes, takes on a life of its own and you find yourself within. And then we also switch the format. I get to sort of the culminating figures of the whole Socratic tradition. Ariadjina who argues that ontology is fundamentally dialectical in nature, not in the Hegelian sense, but in the Platonic sense. And Nicholas of Cusa who takes learned ignorance to its epitome, which of course starts with the Socratic. My wisdom consists in that I know what I do not know. And so, and then it switches, it switches to the series within the series, which is a mini series, which is an ongoing dialogical series between Christopher Mastro Pietro and I, and some of your people will know Chris because he’s been on the elusive I. And so, and that’s on Socrates and Kierkegaard, which is a way of exploring in depth the relationship between Socratic midwifery and Christian midwifery. And with, and Kierkegaard wrestled with this Christian, Kierkegaard of course, considered himself a follower of Christ, but his teacher was Socrates. He wrote his PhD on it, the philosophical fragment, whenever he like his Socrates is always there. And so there’ll be the series within the series. And then Guy will join us and we’ll do a trial log, and hopefully I’ll get into triologos, on Boober, of course, who represents the, it’s kind of an epitome of the integration of philosophia and dialogos. And then we all come back, the four of us, and we have a couple of open discussion. Well, we’re going to do one, sorry, we’re going to do one where we do dialectic onto dialogos about dialectic into dialogos. That’s appropriately meta-modern. Yeah, well, you know, part of the process is to be self-critical in the right way of critical, if it’s going to be, you know, self-organizingly critical. And so that’s going to be, and then we’re also going to, we’re going to discuss the emergence of all of these communities around, you know, that I think they all belong to this family of how do we seek, how do we reliably seek, because we can’t make, but how do we seek to be taken up into dialogos. And so you’ve got authentic relating and circling and dialectic into dialogos and all these things, and we’re going to talk about this and what that means. And so that’s the nature of the series. And it’s directed, all of that is directed towards not only the welcomed criticisms that Jonathan and Paul gave, but also a comment that many people make after going through Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is, yes, but what do I do now? This is a deep attempt to answer that as comprehensively and as helpfully as I can. Well, everything, it’s a beautiful attempt from what I can tell so far. I mean that in a loving attempt in a core sense. I was really, I was captured in the first episode by your naming of the, in the discussion of what After Socrates means. Can you share a little bit about that? I was really struck by that and that sat with me ever since. So I feel on the trail. So can you tell us a little bit about that? I think it’s really beautiful. Yeah, I’m trying to play on the word, the phrase After Socrates and the many meanings it can have. I’m not equivocating, I’m calling them out and explicating them and invoking them in a coordinated manner. One, of course, is I’m After Socrates in the sense of we’re trying to track Socrates, we’re trying to find him, we’re trying to catch up. There’s a way in which he is elusive and that the way he’s elusive draws us into a quest for a way of life. And so that is like, that’s part of what’s going on. The other is we’re looking at what came After Socrates and you know, this is a Hegelian idea. Everything that comes out of Socrates gives us a way of sort of reading back and seeing what was being given birth to with the advent of the whole Socratic, Platonic, Neoplatonic pathway. And then of course, you know, I’m After Socrates in an aspirational sense, in a sense that he represents, you know, and this has been taken, this was taken up by Plato, this is taken up by the Stoics, it’s taken up in different ways, that Socrates represents a sage that we can internalize in an aspirational manner. Not that we should be worshipping Socrates or anything ridiculous like that, he would be aghast at that proposal. But Socrates offers a way in which he’s a midwife, you know, the two great midwives are Jesus, you must be born again, and Socrates, I’m a midwife, right? And he offers to be a midwife. And well, we are properly, if we are understanding wisdom and rationality as we should, which is that they properly and necessarily contain an aspirational dimension, then that way of being After Socrates, the aspirational way, that way of knowing myself through Socrates in an aspirational manner, is also crucial to becoming wiser and to be leading a better life. And so I’m trying to invoke all of this and more with this. And I’m trying to, like what I mentioned, like you can see Nicholas’s koozahs, learned ignorance, and this profound, like it’s this combination of argument and spiritual exercise, dealing with the paradoxes as conceptuality reaches towards infinity, and how that gives you what he calls learned and learned ignorance, how that is the culmination of the Socratic project. There’s a kind of self-knowing, and there’s a kind of profound aporia, and yet it’s opening you to the depths of reality. He thought of it as God, right? And then, but you can then you can go back and say, but Socrates, right? And we know that Socrates isn’t just sort of an arguer, he’s capable of standing still for 48 hours in an absolute mindfulness trance as he wrestles with this kind of stuff. And of course, in the symposium, there’s a deep contemplative aspect about ascending, right? All of this is after Socrates. Lovely. And one of the things that I was struck by, I really love the way you positioned his epistemic humility, and yet at the same time, his claims about being in the world, being willing to die for a way of being in the world, making a particular set of, well, the examined life, the way forward is X, and at the same time, I am wise because I know what I know, what I know not. These kinds of elements, I really, I felt myself growing into that, because I think I had struggled some a little bit. I think I come with, hey, I want a tree of knowledge, I want my air still in, I want to learn shit that’s cumulative. And then this whole, wait a minute, in what way do we not know, and I love epistemic humility, I’m a scientist, oh my God, at that level. So that’s another thing that I’ve appreciated so far, is really the feeling my way into that, the wrestling with that, internalizing it, and the seeing of it as a reciprocally opening dialectical kind of the learned endurance thing. So that’s been really also moving and meaningful for me. Yeah, I mean, after laying out how I’m after, and how I hope we can all be after Socrates, this isn’t about me. I mean, and I try to make that really clear in the first episode, I feel in some important ways, really inadequate to the task. But once we get that, I then lay out the problematic. How is it that Socrates doesn’t know, and yet knowledge is virtue, and yet he’s the most virtuous, right? And yet there are things he claims to know, like the unexamined life is not worth living, and that dialect, that dialogos is the best way for human beings to be. Like, how do we get that all sorted out, and start to, and again, not just abstractly, of course, we have to get a theoretical answer to that problem. But the answer to that problem should put constraints on how we try to reverse engineer practices that can engage us and encourage us along the Socratic way. Totally. And the last thing I say, and this is pretty much where I am in relationship to this, is the way that you have guided me, I’ll speak for myself as a student of this production, the way you’ve guided me into the dialectic dialogos, shining the light on the core participatory knowledge, has just been, oh, I mean, it’s just been really special. And so just for people to know, okay, our educational system, everyone already knows this that knows you, but I just need to say our educational system doubles down on propositional knowledge as the primary knowledge. And what we’re revealing, 2500 years ago, that there’s an unspoken kind of knowledge, something found in the dialectic, something found in apprenticeship, something found in the way of being in the world that is unspoken, and it’s fascinating that you’re unspoken in a particular way, and you give hypotheses as to why it’s unspoken. And then you unfold that, and I didn’t know you were going in this direction, frankly. I did not know this was coming. So for me to know you pretty well, and usually be able to, I know where John’s going. And there’s like, oh, you’re flipping the dialectic hidden into the core participatory knowledge, and then pulling up the identity structure of the agent arena relation as a foundational core as what it is that we’re actually trying to grow into the, you know, it’s sort of like the way, you know, in Daoism, it’s just sort of like, oh, and so anyway, I just thought that was elegant. I thought it was beautiful. It was a little bit surprising for me. I’m not normally surprised along those lines because I’m normally tracking, and I was like, just beautifully, pleasantly surprised. So I wanted you to know that I really found that. Well, thank you for saying that. I mean, that means a lot to me coming from you. Um, I mean, I mean, I’m experimenting with the medium. I’m experimenting with the format. You know, and I’m drawing on all kinds of scholarship and bottom-up practice. I mean, I hope this is taken fairly. I’m proud of the work I did. I mean, I feel, like I said, I feel inadequate. I mean, I think Socrates is a sage on the level with the Buddha or with Lao Tse. And if people aren’t insulted with Jesus, right? And so, and I’m not a sage, and I don’t pretend to be, but I mean, he has at least done what he wanted to do. He’s created in me. He’s made me a lover of wisdom. And so I am proud of, I brought together really talented people and I brought, I believe my best A game to this project and just poured my heart and soul into it. And so it’s good that people that I highly regard or have high regard for it. So thank you for sharing that because that’s, you know, you don’t know when you really, when you take yourself to the Socratic Kukar Guardian limit, you don’t know how it’s going to land. But I’ve had so many people, like the crew, Chris and Casey, Chris and Casey Altorf, you know, the amazing work that Eric Foster is doing with, you know, promoting it and marketing it and helping present it and helping with the, you know, with the aesthetics of it. The amazing work behind the scenes that, you know, Ryan Barton is doing about putting together, you know, how people are, can build communities. I am relying deeply on the distributed cognition I talk about as being so central and it’s been, I’m really, like I said, I’m really happy that it seems, I mean, it’s been out, we’ve got four episodes out now and both qualitatively and quantitatively getting a lot of positive feedback, a lot of positive response. And I know, I really know I’m demanding a lot from my audience, like, but not as much as Awakening from the Meeting Crest, it’s only 25 episodes. But that’s because I think the answer to the question, what should I do now, shouldn’t be given a simple answer. I mean, you’re asking a question that requires me, at least insofar as I’m a teacher, to take on the responsibility of helping you ground and transform and enrich your life. Your life is not the kind of thing for which a simple answer should be given. And so, and there isn’t, I mean, there’s one sense it’s simple answer, but in a profound sense, you know, the answer given by Socrates and Plato and the Stoics and the Neoplatonists and et cetera, et cetera, right, that’s the answer to the question, what should I do now? And so I really deeply aspired to be as responsible as I could to that demand. And so thank you for saying that. It means a lot to me. And yeah, I- Yeah, I’ll say that. I mean, so as, you know, my primary practice, as you know, psychotherapy, as soon as I heard you delineate the four P’s, I immediately was like, oh, I now have a language to be pretty clear a lot of what my field is fucking up, which is that we’re trying to create diagnostic structures that afford procedural knowing through particular recipes, you know, of ways to get to A to B, when in fact, what’s actually happening is an alienation of participatory knowing at its core and how to cultivate a particular kind of identity. So, and I have been utilizing that frame to basically be like, are you, is this a procedural kind of problem, or is this a participatory knowing problem? And I have internalized that language and utilized it a lot. I mean, the whole coin, the human identity, I put the identity in the agent arena relationship dynamic and a transjective. So I have access to that. And then the way that we are pulling the dialectic of what it is that Plato’s pointing to, what is the Socrates pointing to, and the way that you’re arriving at that and cultivating it, to use a participatory term that you highlight, it’s just really, it’s a beautiful thing. And all the people that are contributing, it’s because they feel the flourishing potential here and they hunger for in a particular way. It’s really beautiful to see it come to four. Thank you. You know, the work that I participated in with Igor Grossman on the consensus paper on wisdom, you know, and this metacognitive perspectival ability. Well, this is what the dialogues are all about. This metacognitive, metapersonal, and that’s what it is, right, perspectival ability that then can reach into what you’re talking about, that participatory transformation of your character, your identity, your way of being in the world. I mean, this, how this is converging with all the work about how just, we’re much better at cutting through bullshit when we work dialogically together than when we work monologically on our own. And of course, Greg knows this, hence therapy, right, as a pretty non-controversive example of that. So I tried as much as I could, like I said, to even like exemplify that. And, you know, and you and I, and you and I and Chris, and you and I and Zach, Zach Stein, and you and I and Gary Hovenici, and we’ve been really trying to how, and I hope you see, my friend, how all of that went into After Socrates II. How do I get, you know, how do I get this building, how do we share the building of an argument, right, that is nevertheless doing this dialogical thing around it that is epitomized in the Platonic dialogue? And so I wanted to take the opportunity to, you know, thank you for all the work we’ve done together. You’ve often been a driving force. You’re done, let’s do this now as a coxsai thing. And I go, yeah, that’s great. But, you know, we’ve been really, and we’re doing a lot of, you know, participant experimentation about how do you get those back together the way they were so seamlessly together in the Platonic dialogue. And I hope you see that that’s also coming into After Socrates. Oh, it totally is. Absolutely. It’s part of my own, yeah, and I like to feel a part of it. Absolutely. I felt a bit of a part of it. I remember, you know, I think I wrote you when we had that opportunity to do Untangling the World Not, right? And I was like, oh, good, I get to hang out with John. John’s great. And I was like, wait a minute. This is a totally new sort of academic kind of enterprise that you and I are starting. And we are, this is unlike a paper, this is the zoom, the format, the time, this is going to create a new way to think about thinking about problems and addressing problems in a particular type of way. And I woke up, you know, that next morning going, oh, my God, there’s a real potential here. And I felt that in our own thing. And you are exemplifying that with the After Socrates. You can feel it. And that is, and that is, I’m glad you listened to the criticism, because listen, we can do the talking head stuff, we can do the zooms, but fundamentally, let’s face it, it’s to the extent that this thing spreads out in the community, grabs people in their need for a philosophy of meaning, and then engenders communities to come together and distribute and spread and cultivate that. That’s really where obviously the real difference is. And it’s having the foresight to know that and seeing what we can do to see that. And that’s what I see you as an absolute leader on. And that’s inspiring for sure. Well, thank you. But I mean, you’re putting together the conference that is doing exactly what you just described, right? And if what Greg said is lighting you up, then come to that conference, because that’s where we’re doing it. Yeah, this is this is very exciting. I mean, it’s very, it’s been very draining on me. So I’m not complaining. I’m really deeply, appreciatively grateful for people’s engagement. And I want to be as responsive to it. But what I’m saying is, I’m really, first of all, I’m glad that I can have people like you, that I can touch down with, peers that I can like, okay, you know, am I going, because I don’t want to grift and I don’t want to become a guru, right? Like, like all this, like, like, I can touch down, I can help you ground it. Yeah, exactly. Right. And then I’ve also got an organization that, you know, again, thanks terrifically to Ryan for doing this, and for hiring people that the genius that is Eric Foster. And, you know, there’s the work that Madeline’s doing. And, you know, and Robert Gray’s come up, there’s just so many people, right. And we have a new board for the Viveki Foundation, like, amazing people on the board. And so what I’m saying is, I’m very grateful that this is taking shape, because I would, I think I would be burnt to cinders without that group taking shape around me. And I’m very appreciative for that. And, you know, I hope they’re not only protecting me from overwhelm, I think I hope they’re protecting me from hubris. Because I eventually, I eventually, like, I want, I want people to focus on the path, the Socratic path, I want them to focus on the practices, focus on the path and the practices, focus on the points to ponder, focus on the practices, right. Focus on that. And eventually, I mean, the vision is I’d eventually like the Viveki Foundation to help build the community of communities working with respond, working with you, working with all of these people, and then for it to disappear. Right. Like, we have sort of a long term model. And how long term it is depends on how things unfold, a sort of self obsolescence, like it will, without sorry, without being condescending, it’s a parental model, the job is to give birth to something that will eventually, right, have an autonomy. And so, eventually, the Viveki Foundation should completely disappear into whatever this is, the Socratic way, or however we end up naming this. And so, I, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, I just want to express gratitude again for you, and what we’re doing here right now, like I said, and for all these other people that I’ve mentioned, just the fantastic work. I, for me, I’m continually, and you and I have been doing this, and we’ve been exemplifying it, I’m continually, I continually don’t, I don’t want you to see the polished finished project, I want you to see the bumpy, messy process and how beautiful and glorious and rich and juicy it is, and then, then you might, you know, have a proper appreciation of what goes in to the sausage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s lovely. Are there other things that you wanted us to touch on as we? No, I think, I mean, those are the big things that we’re, you know, that we’ve each been doing and how they’ve been intersecting, and, and of course, we’re going to have the next thing working, you know, and I’m, and I am going to try and ask Eric to get involved with some of the, you know, the creating the thumbnails and some of the other stuff, because, like I said, he’s, he’s fantastic, but I’m really looking forward to doing the work on Transcendent Naturalism with you. I’m doing some work right now with, with, with, with Emery Elkay. He’s a student of mine and we’ve collaborated before in an independent study project, and we’re studying a lot of the work on some of the really best work in philosophy and mathematics and cognitive science on emergence, and then of course elimination, and really, and I think that’s going to be ready to hand for me when we go into the Transcendent Naturalism, you know, the work of Holly, Michael Levin, Bacowicz, all these kinds of people, and so I’m hoping to bring, that will be my contribution. You, of course, have your huge repertoire you’ll bring, and then hopefully we’ll get it going, and like there’ll be the three or four of us and Adia Logos will catch fire, and so I’m really looking forward to that. Yeah, no, I’m really looking forward to that too. I, I, ever since we sort of named that as Transcendent Naturalism, that has been growing in the, in terms of, you know, that’s a great description of what I’m after with you talk as a scientific humanistic philosophy that, that grounds us naturally and orients us towards a potential both of a collective wisdom and a spiritual transcendent angle of way of being in the world, so it’s, that sounds, that’s a great fit and I’m really looking forward to that. Yeah, me too. Yeah, well, you’ll see stuff that’s going to go into the Transcendent Naturalism. Some of you may have seen the talk I gave at Ralston College. So Zevi Slavin, another great person, another beautiful, amazing person. Absolutely. He was on my channel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he did this, he put together this amazing project where we got a bunch of us and we simultaneously released while referring to each other on December 30th on Neoplatonism and I put up my talk on Ralston on levels of intelligibility, levels of reality. That’s going to go into the Transcendent Naturalism talk. That shows up also in After Socrates. So yeah, everything is going to keep moving forward, I think, in a creative fashion. So I’m very excited about it. It was funny. I was leading, so I did this you talking workshop and we, you know, just basically describing stuff and then, all right, let’s make it real. I was like, so we’re going to sit in our organism and then we’re going to sit in our animal and we’ll sit in our mammal and then our primate. This creates a vertical orientation and then we’re going to dialogue and then we’re going to create kind of a communal sense of justificatory narrative, third mind kind of collective wisdom and it is that in between and down and then I’d pop on your thing and I was like, hey, that sounds familiar. Yeah. I think we sometimes see the same kind of reality. Yeah, very, very much so. Very much so. Okay, my friend, I think we’ve brought this to a close. So we’ll try and end this simultaneously, but I want to thank everybody in both, was it with Raveki and you talking with Greg and I’ll give Greg a chance to thank his audience now. Absolutely. Yeah. So I want to send a shout out to Christian Gross, Masiya Grala and in relationship to a number of people that are helping out with the conference, Corey David Barker, Rob Scott, Robert Gray is helping out with the conference. Yes, Robert’s everywhere helping. Hey, yeah, Andrew Robinson is helping with the conference and we’re putting together, I’m really excited about that and we’ll be rolling that out. We’re developing, the Utah community is developing, well, Christian and Masiya and I are working behind the scenes to develop a Utah circle. At some point I’ll take you there, it’s a platform kind of like a combination of Facebook and a course structure. It’s really for these academic learning communities. I think it affords a lot. It’s kind of like a discord server, but I think it’s actually got a lot to it. So we’re going to build the Utah circle and that will be a place kind of where a hubbing structure where people can come gather, not that it’s dominated by Utah, but it’s just a home to connect into other ideas and afford that kind of connection. And for this corner of the internet, I just talked with Layman Pascal and the integral stage folks and the meta-modern spirituality and Brendan and they’ll be coming and bringing an arc disciplinary view that led by Corey David Barker. So anyway, and the Spahn group is obviously going to be presenting. So it’s really exciting, a lot of wonderful things happening. I’m thankful to my own crew and what we’re doing and I’m really excited about the year for Utah going forward. Excellent, excellent. So, all righty. Well, it’s always a joy, John. I really appreciate it. Always a great pleasure, Greg. Thank you so much for all that. Thank you so much. Thank you.