https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HiAtn4ea18w
He’s been teaching at the university since 94, and he currently teaches courses in the psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight, problem solving, cognitive development, and higher cognitive processes such as intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and wisdom. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He’s the author of the book, Zombies in Western Culture, a 21st Century Crisis, which integrates psychology and cognitive science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He’s the author and presenter of the YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Please welcome Dr. John Bervicki for this talk. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Isabel. It’s a great pleasure to be here, and I’m glad that you guys are doing this. I mean, this is an excellent idea. I started a similar process for the cognitive science program with their student association, CASA, and that has turned into a great event. So I hope that this also comes to a similar fruition. So what I wanna talk today about are the problems of transformation and aspiration in the psychology of growth. I’m gonna start, maybe this is an opportune for me, to set up a bunch of problems that confront us when we wanna talk about growth and change in any non-trivial fashion. So this is what I’m gonna do. Not all of this overview will make sense, but it’ll give you a sense of what’s coming. I’m gonna talk about the problem with transformation. The central problem I’m gonna ask is, is it a rational process? Is it ultimately a cognitive process? Then we move on to aspiration and the problem with concluding that development is an irrational process. The third thing will be to move on to a discussion of a non-inferential form of rationality that is relevant to transformation and aspiration. But that will then take us into another problem, the problem of the paradox of self-creation. I will then move on to build a case for how we could potentially overcome the problem. These are all conceptual problems, of course, with the problem of self-creation. We’ll talk about dynamical self-organization. Talk about self-dissection and dynamical development. Then I wanna make use of Mark Lewis’s work on reciprocal narrowing and talk about its converse reciprocal opening. And then move on to discussing enacted analogy as a solution to the kind of ignorance, bidirectional ignorance we find problematic within transformation. So most of that was like what? Abstract and vague. So let’s start with something, well, I don’t know if it’s concrete, but it’s at least initially more interesting. So this goes to the seminal work of L.A. Paul, who literally wrote the book on transformative experience entitled Transformative Experience. And I think it’s a very important book and I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with Laurie. So let’s start with a thought experiment. The point of thought experiments is not to establish an empirical result, that would be very different from this thought experiment. The point of a thought experiment is to highlight what is normally backgrounded and bring some of our unquestioned intuitions into prominence. So here’s the thought experiment that she uses in her book. Your friends come to you and they offer you just indubitable evidence that they can do the following. They can turn you into a vampire. And then she asks you, should you do it? Should you do it? Now, what’s the problem? What’s the problem with this? Well, the problem with this, and we’re gonna build this up gradually, is you don’t know what it’s gonna be like to be a vampire. Until you’re a vampire, you don’t know what it’s gonna be like. And also you don’t know who you’re gonna be once you’re a vampire. So let’s unpack that. This not knowing what it’s like, this has to do with prospectorial knowing. This is knowing what it’s like. It’s knowing what it’s like to be drunk, knowing what it’s like to be sober. It’s bound up with a state of consciousness rather than the possession of a set of beliefs. So what are you doing in your prospectorial knowing? Well, I’m doing it right now. I’m salience landscaping. Things are standing out to me as salient. And this is dynamically shifting. When I turn my attention to her, she stands out, she fades, but now she stands out, she fades. So there’s that dynamic salience landscaping that’s going on. I’m constantly sized, what Maiten calls sizing up. I’m picking up particular features. I’m foregrounding some, backgrounding some others. And of the ones I’m foregrounding, I’m configuring them together. And the way I configure them together, it brings in what Marlo Conti called optimal grip. So I’m sort of moving around objects to try and get the best balance between the detail and the overall amount. I can’t never get all of the information and my too close, too much detail, too far away to get the gestalt and I lose too much. And I’m always shifting around and that shifts according to what problems I fix. That means I’m also aspectualizing things. I’m seeing everything, I’m seeing it as something. I’m seeing this as electron, I’m seeing this as a table. All of that is happening right now. That salience landscaping, that sizing up, that optimal gripping, that aspectualization. Now what does that give me? That gives me a sense of here now. What’s it like to be here now? And things are centered on me in that here now. That’s what we mean by perspective. We use an aesthetic metaphor like perspective in painting to try and talk about the here nowness, the way things are salience landscaped, sized up, aspectualized, centered on a point of view and how the way everything is fitted together. We, right, we know how to manipulate this reliably, for example, within psychology. We can do what’s called construal level manipulation. So this is a robust finding in psychology that when you manipulate the people’s level of construal, it has significant effects on their cognition. This goes back to an ancient practice from the Stoics called the view from above. I can ask you to sort of imagine yourself in this room and then imagine yourself sort of about Toronto, seeing all of Toronto, then imagine yourself above the country, then imagine yourself above the planet, the solar system, and I can actually also get you to imagine yourself extended more and more through time. And what happens is as I alter your perspective, your sense of identity and your sense of what’s relevant and significant, what’s foregrounded and background, all of that is shifting and that has huge impacts on your cognition, this is a reliable finding. What does this perspective of knowing give you? Well, it gives you what they look for when they’re trying to make virtual games. When they’re trying to make games in virtual reality, the most thought after thing is a sense of presence. It’s a sense of being there, being here now in the game and things in the game being here now to you. This is that sense of presence. So when I talk about perspectival knowing, that’s what I’m talking about. And you don’t know what kind of perspectival knowing you’d have as a vampire. And perspectival knowing matters because it really gives you your situational awareness. It tells you what skills you can acquire in a situation, what skills you can apply in a situation. So I don’t know what it’s like to be a vampire in that very deep and important sense. I don’t know, I’m ignorant of the perspectival knowing what it’s like to be a vampire. But there’s another kind of knowing that’s missing. I don’t know who I’m going to be. This is your participatory knowing, knowing who you are. This is knowing by being. I know that I’m John by being John. It’s not just a set of beliefs. I instantiate my identity. I don’t just have beliefs about it the way I have beliefs about it. What’s going on in who you are? Well, there’s a continual process of co-identification. I’m always in an interdependent fashion. I’m assuming an identity and I’m assigning identity. Right now I’m a speaker and you are an audience. I’m not always a speaker. The people I’m relating to are not always audiences. Sometimes if I go home and talk to my partner like this, things are going poorly. So there’s always an agent. I’m assuming the identity of a particular agent. I’m always assigning an identity of a particular arena. And what that does is it opens up affordances between us. This is a notion from Gibson. Affordances is something that’s not in me or in the object but in the way, for example, let’s do it biologically. The way evolution has shaped me and through niche construction, the way organisms, human beings, have shaped the environment so the biology and the environment fit together. Notice that we have this environment laid out in a particular way because it affords me walking around and talking to you. It doesn’t afford me flying because I’m not a bird. But if a bird was here, there’d be flying affordances. So, Wittgenstein once famously said, and this will get back to vampires, even if lines could speak, we wouldn’t understand. What does he mean by that? He means their biological heritage and the way they shape the environment and the way the environment shaped them gives them a particular pattern of affordances. So they have agent arena relationships that I don’t have. Because I can’t get into those relationships and find those affordances, they don’t affect my perspectival knowing because those affordances actually constrain my perspectival knowing. And so the lions have a different agent arena relationship and that means what they find salient and salient and salient is what they find salient. So they have different types of relationships and what they find salient and relevant and important is very different. So even if they could speak, it wouldn’t make any sense to me. But what is the case for the lions is of course the case for vampires. Perspectival knowing makes us situationally aware of which affordances can be appropriated by our skills to solve our problems. So we have this biocultural niche making that makes affordances and then our perspectival knowing selects out those ones that are appropriate right now for solving my problems. That’s perspectival and participatory knowing and it’s exactly what you lack with respect to the vampire. So let me give you a comparison to some more standard kinds of knowing just to draw out what Ellie Hall is trying to get us to foreground which we normally background but what we normally foreground especially in psychology is propositional knowing and procedural knowing. So propositional knowing, you know propositions are statements that can be true or false. These are of course prized in science. Propositional knowing, we manipulate propositions by inference. The results are beliefs may be collated into theories and we are guided by a sense of conviction. I’m convinced by that argument. I’m going to adopt that belief. That’s different from procedural knowing. That’s knowing how, knowing how to catch a ball knowing how to ride a bike. This is manipulated by sensory motor interaction. It gives you, doesn’t give you beliefs or theories. It gives you skills and expertise and it’s accompanied by a sense of power. It’s guided by a sense of power. Perspectival knowing is manipulated by attention and awareness as I’ve indicated. It gives you your situational awareness and it’s guided by a sense of presence. Your participatory knowing is manipulated by various agent arena restructurings. It gives you affordances and it’s guided by a sense of belonging. You belong here. You belong here. Okay, so now that we got, try to, the guts of what Paul was pointing to, which, the thought experiment does two things. It foregrounds the perspectival and the participatory knowing and then it shows us how we have a special kind of ignorance therefore when we face this decision. We are perspectively ignorant and we lack participatory knowing. We don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a vampire and we don’t know who we’re going to be. And this is deeply important to our agency, our cognitive agency. And you say, so what? I’m never going to be a vampire. Like what’s the point of this? This is why I don’t do philosophy. That’s why I’m in psychology. Well, L.A. Paul’s example, right, is designed to, like a good philosopher, to sort of set you up because she says, the vampire example is actually deeply analogous to many real-world situations you’re going to face. Here’s one. Have a child. I’ve had two, so I totally get what she’s talking about. Because before you have a child, you do not know what it’s going to be like to be a parent. Being a child gives you no perspectival knowing of what it’s like to be a parent. You don’t know who you’re going to be because having a child changes your preferences and your values and even your sense of identity. You can’t live in a purely egocentric manner anymore. It just doesn’t work. You don’t know what it’s going to be like, you don’t know who you’re going to be. shots, doesn’t work. Des integer remained against your world to become a wolf you don’t know what it’s going to be like. You don’t know who you’re going to be. So now you should be a little bit more concerned. Because these are some of the most important decisions you actually will make in your life. Now here’s what’s problematic about all of this. That perspectival and participatory ignorance means, according to Paul, that we cannot apply standard decision-making procedures. How are we supposed to, how are we told, like sort of in the academic literature, how do we make a rational decision? So what we do is we assign a probability to the outcome, and then we assign a value to the outcome, and then we calculate, usually it’s some multiplication function, probability times value, and then I can compare all the outcomes, and the one with the highest product, that’s the one I should choose. It’s all calculative, it’s all computational, it’s all inferential, it’s beautiful, and it can’t work in the situations I’ve just pointed out to you. Why? Because you’re ignorant. You don’t know the outcomes, you don’t know the outcomes until you’ve already gone through the transformation. You don’t know the values, because your values are not going to be constant from here and there. You’re going to be a different person with a different set of preferences, a different set of values. And notice that the ignorance goes both ways. We say, well then I shouldn’t do it. But then you don’t know what you’re missing. Well then I should do it. But then you don’t know what you’re going to be losing. So it looks like, and this is what Laurie seems to conclude, there’s no inferential way through such transformative decisions. I want to not take an independent argument and strengthen Laurie’s argument. This is an earlier argument, and I presented this to Laurie in person, and she said, oh this is good. This is an argument from Jerry Fodor. So first of all, let’s make a distinction, because Fodor is criticizing Piaget, who’s behind all of this conference, like some sort of specter. So we need to invoke one of Piaget’s note distinctions, conceptual distinction, between quantitative change and qualitative change. So quantitative change is increase in content. This is the idea, you can use the same function and constantly acquire new information. So let’s say, think about all the information I can acquire through alphabetic literacy, and I can keep acquiring more and more and more information. That’s quantitative. Qualitative change, which of course is central to Piaget’s theory of development, because he has a stage model of development, and the difference between the stages are qualitative. Qualitative change is an increase not in just content, more importantly it is an increase in competence. It’s an increase not in how much, but in how many kinds of things can be known. What you’re doing is increasing the kinds of things you can know by adding new functions. So for example, compare that first situation, where I stick with literacy and all of the information I can represent, with now this situation. I have literacy and then I add in Cartesian graphing. Now I can represent all kinds of information that I couldn’t represent before because I have a Cartesian graphing, a new function. That’s qualitative change. Does that make sense? And if we’re really talking about transformation and growth, development in a way that we find interesting, then I think what we’re almost always talking about and assuming exists is qualitative change. But Fodor famously claimed that Piaget’s whole idea of qualitative change and qualitative development was false. Why would he come to such a strong conclusion? Well, one is that he was Jerry Fodor and Jerry Fodor always came to strong conclusions about everything. You don’t want to have dinner with Jerry Fodor. So let’s take, first of all, Fodor’s view. Fodor famously was of the opinion that cognition is computation, that a cognitive process is a computational process. What does he mean by that? He means the inferential manipulation of propositions. That’s what computation is for him. The inferential manipulation of propositions. That means you’re using some kind of formal system. You’re using a logic. A logic is a formal system for guiding how you inferentially manipulate propositions. That’s what a logic is. Okay. So what does Fodor then claim? Well, let’s get a notion here. We need to talk about the strength of a logic because logics can be weaker or stronger. What makes a logic stronger? A logic is stronger if it can represent more kinds of arguments. Think about how this is matching up with qualitative change. A stronger logic can represent more kinds of arguments. It can implement more kinds of programs. So a very weak logic is propositional logic. It’s only when you use variables like A or B to stand for entire propositions. The problem with that is there’s many kinds of arguments you can’t represent. You can’t represent arguments that make use of things like all or some. Because propositional logic can’t distinguish between all and some. So what you move is to a stronger logic called predicate logic. Predicate logic gives you ways of representing things like all or some. Arguments based on all cars or catalogs. Some catalogs are broken. Does that mean all cars are broken? No. Right? That kind of argument? The problem with that logic is it’s weak in the sense that it can’t represent other important kinds of arguments you want to make. You make arguments that rely on necessity versus contingency. It is necessarily the case that versus it is only possible that. And so in order to do that you have to have what’s called modal logic. You see how each logic is stronger than the logic before it? Because each logic can represent more kinds of arguments than the logic before it. So if cognition is computation, if cognition is largely the inferential manipulation of propositions to change belief, if that’s what cognition is, then qualitative change has to be a change from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. That’s how you make a qualitative change in cognition. You go from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. Because what I’m doing is I’m adding functions. That’s how I’m getting from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. So Fodor, I think, very correctly argues that if you think cognition is solely computation, the inferential manipulation of proposition by belief, and the only thing that motivates us are our beliefs and our desires. Then I think he’s right. That qualitative development would mean a change from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. You go, okay. And then this is what he does. Jerry Fodor gets you standing on a rug and then he pulls it up. He says, but notice, there is no inferential way to go from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. There is no way within propositional logic to manipulate it and get predicate logic, or manipulate the propositions within predicate logic and get modal logic. What does that mean? It means that there’s no inferential way to go through development. There’s no computational way to go through development. What would apply to things that are becoming very important right now, like Bayesian inference models of development? Now, if cognition is computation and there’s no inferential way to go through it, then there’s no cognitive way to go through development. So Fodor concludes there’s no such thing as development. The question that comes to mind is, let’s say that Fodor’s wrong and there is development. I think his conclusion is in some sense absurd. But does his argument therefore compel us to conclude? Because what we might think is, well, what that shows is that transformation is an inherently irrational process. It’s an inherently irrational process. And it’s an inherently non-cognitive process. There is no cognitive process through there. There is no rationality governing transformation. And we might be tempted here, as our culture is perennially, towards a kind of philosophical romanticism. Well, it’s all some purely non-cognitive, non-rational, affective thing. I guess people in California are clapping for that or something like that. But that’s very problematic. Concluding that transformation is non-cognitive and irrational is deeply problematic. This goes to an argument by Agnes Keller in her book, Aspiration. Let’s talk about a very important kind of transformation, especially the kind I think we’re alluding to when we use the word growth. And this is self-driven transformation, when you are driving yourself through transformation. She has a name for that process. She calls it Aspiration, the title of her book. So what happens in Aspiration, let’s say, here’s my current self. I don’t like classical music. This is false. I love classical music. But this is for example. I don’t like classical music. But I want to be someone, in the sense that I think it would be good to be a person who likes classical music. I currently don’t want to like classical music. That’s precisely why I don’t like classical music. But I think it would be good to be someone who likes classical music. So what do I do? Well, I take a music appreciation class. Appreciation has a double sense of increased understanding and changing what you value. And then that results in a new John that actually likes classical music for some reason. Not because it gets him more dates with girls or anything like that. It can’t be any external thing that this John already had. It has to be that John comes to like music for some reason. And that’s what John is actually aspiring for. And there are many things that have that feature to them. Engaging in a liberal education, she famously argues, is another example of this. If my goal in education is to become a better person, self-improvement, then I’m engaged in Aspiration. Okay. Now the next argument I’m going to make, I can’t actually find her explicitly making it anywhere. I think she should make it, and I think it’s directly implied by the arguments she makes. But I’m going to make it on her behalf because I think it strengthens her position. Because I think we can immediately ask ourselves, what about the aspiration to rationality and to wisdom? Because one of the things I aspire to be is to being more rational. One of the things I aspire to be is to being more wise. All of you, I believe, want to be less irrational and less foolish. Yes? And notice how that’s a transformative process. Now let’s put this together. If that transformative process is inherently irrational and non-cognitive, because we’ve adopted Romanticism, look at what we’re probably getting to. Because it means the aspiration to rationality and wisdom is itself irrational and non-cognitive. If I’m aspiring to become rational, which would put me through a transformative process, and we’ve concluded that transformation is inherently irrational, notice what I’m getting into. I’m getting into the attempt to become more rational is itself irrational. Which is a performative contradiction. It’s a performative contradiction. It would make the attempt to achieve irrationality performatively impossible. Because you should be more rational, right? So you know what you should do? You should aspire to be more rational. Oh, I can’t do that. Because that’s an irrational thing to do. Notice that being rational couldn’t be a normative ideal for you. A normative ideal, I’m using normative in the philosophical sense, not psychological. Aught implies can. If I say, you ought to do this, it implies that you can do it. So if I say to you, you ought to become more rational, that means you can do it. But given the performative contradiction, you can’t. Therefore, rationality also becomes an epistemic self-contradiction. Rationality makes no sense as an ideal. If we exclude aspiration from rationality, and thereby exclude transformation from rationality, we will call all of rationality into question. Deeply, profoundly. That would undermine science. We recommend science precisely because we claim it is a rational way for improving our capacity to overcome self-deception as we attempt to improve our beliefs. So Callart, I think, correctly concludes that aspiration has to be a kind of rationality. She calls it prolectic rationality. She calls it prolectic rationality. It is a non-inferential rationality. It does not consist of arguments to change belief. We’ve already rejected that. This prolectic rationality, the fact that it’s non-inferential, makes sense since it applies to non-propositional knowing. It is not applying to propositional knowing. It is applying to perspectival and participatory knowing, which don’t work in terms of the inferential manipulation of propositions. Instead, it’s going to be due to changes in our patterns of attention and our patterns of co-identification that change consciousness and change character and thereby change the self. We’re not trying to change our beliefs. We’re trying to change our self. But then that lends us into another paradox and problem. This is the paradox of self-creation that Callart gets from Strassen. The paradox of self-creation. What’s the paradox of self-creation? It has to do with the fact that the self is not based on logical identity. Notice again how logic isn’t going to work for us here. I will do things like this. I will pick up a picture of myself as a five-year-old and say, oh, there I am in Dundas. And you don’t look at me and go, what? How bizarre. That person is so much smaller than you. So much younger than you. And you are in Toronto and they are in Dundas. How can that be you? Silly John. And notice she wouldn’t accept the reverse. There is no atom in my body that’s been in my body for more than seven years. That means, would you accept this in a court of law? Well, I killed her ten years ago. Well, that person killed her ten years ago. No atoms in my body were present ten years ago. So I couldn’t have done it. You go, oh yeah, right, let’s get them going. Okay, so the identity of the self is not logical identity. It’s not logical identity. The self is identical because of a continuity, of a causal continuity. There is a causal continuity between that John and this John. That’s important for the paradox. Okay, so here is current self trying to create future self. Yes? But if current self causes future self, there is causal continuity. Yes or no? Yes or no? Yes. If this current self causes the future self, there is causal continuity. So it’s the same self. So there has been no new self made. There is no growth. It’s the same self. Ah, but what could happen is that the current self is the same self. What could happen is something external to the self actually introduces the needed novelty. But then, it’s not self creation at all. It’s something other than me has driven the creation. I can’t get self and creation together according to this problem. If the self does it, there is no creation. If there is creation, then the self is lost. Another way of putting this, and I think this is helpful, there is no subjective or objective way to drive self creation. There is no subjective from the self or objective from outside of the self way to drive self creation. And if we think that’s exhaustive, then there is no such thing as growth. We should pack it all up and go home. Okay, let’s try and take this in stages, the paradox of self creation. So let’s take a look at development. So, Mayor Schultz actually responded to Fodor’s claim that there can be no qualitative change, and they actually produced an answer. What’s the answer? They didn’t produce an inferential process. They produced a neural network that can alter its own architecture. So they created a dynamical self organization that changed the competence of the network. Now what’s interesting is when you move to the idea of development being inherently dynamical, relying on processes that are inherently self organizing, notice what’s happening. Because when a system is self organizing, there is no deep distinction between its function and its development. It can’t develop without functioning, and it can’t function without developing. You can’t get the separation between function and development that Fodor wants, that Fodor needs. Because when things are self organizing, they’re simultaneously functioning and developing. That’s an essential feature of a self organizing system. Let’s also expand the notion of rationality. We have to if we’re going to follow what Callard has said about polyptych rationality. Instead of thinking of it as just logical guidance of argumentation, let’s think of rationality as a systematic and reliable practice or set of practices for reducing self deception and affording problem solving. We can get at what this rationality more specifically means if we look for what does self deception look like in dynamical development, in development that’s based on the idea of a self organizing process. What does self deception look like in there? Well this goes to the work of my friend and colleague who used to be at Oisey, Mark Lewis. Mark Lewis, I’ve seen him give the talk and I’ve been at a conference where there was a symposium on this. I can’t review all of this evidence here, but there’s a huge amount of evidence that our standard medical model of addiction is not well supported by the data. It’s well supported by governments in terms of funding. It’s not well supported by the data. So Mark has been arguing for a learning model of addiction that he calls reciprocal narrowing. Reciprocal narrowing. And notice how this is going to make use of prospect problem and participatory narrowing. So here I am. I drink some alcohol and that alters my cognition and limits my ability to solve problems. So I have fewer options in the world. The arena shrinks for me. There’s fewer things I can solve, fewer goals I can achieve. I internalize that because agents in arena are always co-identified. I internalize that and so I lose some cognitive flexibility. As I lose cognitive flexibility, my ability to solve problems in the world goes down. So the world starts to shrink. The options available to me shrink. My cognitive flexibility shrinks. Do you see what’s happening here? You get a reciprocal narrowing until agency and arena reciprocally narrow until I can see no alternatives in the world and I can’t be anything other than this. And then you are now in the compulsive state of an addict. Reciprocal narrow. See how that’s prospect problem and participatory narrowing? Right there. And that’s the kind of self-deception you can get in prospect problem and participatory narrowing. So I was with Mark at lunch and I said, but Mark, Mark, if it can reciprocally narrow down like that, it has to be able to do the opposite. It has to be able to reciprocally open. And he went, oh, you’re right. That was the easiest argument I’ve ever had in my entire life. And having that kind of success with Mark Lewis is not an easy thing, by the way. Plato talked about this when he talked about this process he called anadagia, this reciprocal opening, where there’s transformations in my cognition that disclose deeper aspects of the world. That gets internalized into me and discloses deeper aspects of me so that my cognition now becomes more powerful. And that discloses deeper aspects of the world and goes like this. And you know what that’s like because that’s what happens when you fall in love with somebody. Because what predicts falling in love with somebody is mutually accelerating disclosure. And that’s how you go through that transformation. That’s how you go through that transformation. You see, we can get simultaneously a solution to the paradox of self-creation and the implementation of prolective rationality together. Let’s put it together. The self functions by developing and it develops by functioning. And the self is neither purely subjectively active, nor is it just purely objectively passive. Instead, and this is a term I’m trying to get people to use, I’m arguing for, I’m arguing for that length elsewhere, the self is transjectively emergent. Transjective means between this objective and the objective. And that’s the real dynamic coupling between that I’ve been emphasizing in perspectival and especially in participatory knowing. The self is transjectively emergent. And the self can pursue that rationally if it gets that process in reciprocal opening, the opposite of the self-deceptive, self-destructive of reciprocal narrowing. This is how we can rationally go through self-transformation, self-transcendence. You might say to me, there’s still one piece missing, that bidirectional ignorance that L.A. Paul talked about. You don’t know what you’re missing, you don’t know what you’re losing. When I thought about that, I thought, well, what do people actually do? How do people actually do? I know some people just have kids without thought, but we think that’s a bad thing, right? It is a bad thing, I’m just going to assert that here. So what do they do? And I noticed this when I was looking around. So people are considering having a child and then they’ll get a dog. And then they’ll do weird things with the dog. They’ll get family pictures with the dog, and they’ll dress the dog up, and they’ll take the dog on vacation, and they’ll give the dog toys. It’s like, yeah. Or what about, you’re considering entering into a long-term romantic relationship. I’ve actually been given this advice. Go on a long trip with the person. Go on a long trip with the person. There’s a new form of game that’s emerging in the Scandinavian countries. It’s called Jeep form. So it’s live-action role-playing. But unlike Dungeons & Dragons where you’re an elf or a fairy or something like that, what happens in Jeep forming is you’re real people in a real situation, and instead of a dungeon master, there’s a director. And the director will cut scenes, give you things, and tell you to use them as props, get you to switch roles. And what you’re doing is you’re acting out socially messy and emotionally charged situations. You’re going, okay. And what are they trying to get? They’re trying to get a phenomenon called bleed. Bleed is when the difference between the game and real life blurs. And you’re no longer telling if you’re play-acting in the game or enacting your actual emotions and concerns. They’re after bleed. What are all these examples of how human beings tackle this? What humans do is they pursue not propositional, they pursue enacted analogy. They engage in serious play. They get into this place where they’re sort of jaded-faced within a liminal place. They get into play that allows them to maintain contact with the identity and the world they have or are, but it gives them a prospectable participatory taste of what it would be like to be married to that person, what it would be like to have a child, what it would be like to be on the other side of this challenging, emotionally fraught situation. So they haven’t overcommitted, but they’re not ignorant. They seriously play with an active analogy. Now, analogy in propositional argumentation is considered generally weak argumentation, borders on being irrational. But that standard should not be applied to prospectable and participatory knowing. Enacted analogy is a very rational thing to be doing, very rational, when you are trying to get to a place where you can judge between two worlds. That’s why serious play is so important. That’s why human beings keep defaulting to it as a strategy for trying to deal with this bidirectional ignorance. You’ll notice we can put these two things together, these two rational processes, this process of anagagé, reciprocal opening, and this process of enacted analogy. We do that in therapy with people. We try to get them into reciprocal opening, and we enact as therapists. We do an active analogy with them. It’s a rational thing to do. It’s a rational way to bring people through self-transformation. I think that’s how we can address, and I’ve even argued solve, the deep conceptual problems facing us when we want to talk about transformation, aspiration, and growth. Thank you very much. We have about five minutes for questions. Any questions? Yes? You pointed out to a practical use of this theory, which is therapy. What are other uses that can be applied in real life? That’s why it’s important to know this information. Well, it’s important to know this information, for example, when you consider any of these transformative decisions you’re trying to make. If you’re going to have a child, you want to maybe engage in an active analogy. You want to try and see if you’re getting into a process of reciprocal opening rather than reciprocal narrowing. It’s actually intended to be very practical advice for how you should try to rationally frame each of these major decisions that you’re going into in your life. Other questions? Yes, Michat? I think the thing is you know analogies perfect. How would you know if, for example, you get a dog and you’re trying to see whether that’s what you get in the child? What aspects of that would actually be analogous and what you wouldn’t be doing? I think this is equivalent to a recommendation in argumentation. Not all arguments are equally good. You have to get some skilled practice in argumentation and logic before you apply your arguments and evaluate. I think what you need, therefore, is a lot of skilled practice in an active analogy in order to make judgments of actus. We do reliably make judgments of actus. There’s a lot of work that John Kennedy, Dan Schiappi, two colleagues that might have done, showing that human beings actually have very fine-grained abilities to judge how apt a metaphor is, how good it is. These are largely intuitive, but they are reliable and they explain the variation in people’s performance. We could learn to explicate those abilities so people could more reflectively apply those skills. Would we ever get perfection? No, but we don’t get perfection anywhere, so we can’t have ourselves to that standard. Can we reliably improve it? Yeah, it seems very plausible to me that we can. I think that’s what people are doing in G-form. That’s why the director is there. The director is actually a metacognitive prosthesis. The director is there to get people to sort of switch roles and reflect on their perspectival and participatory knowing. They’re playing the games again and again and again because they’re trying to cultivate the skill and improve it. Yes? So you mentioned the term transjective. Yeah. And you said it’s something between subjective and objective. Yeah. Is there a more complete or rigorous definition? Give me a rigorous definition of subjectivity or objectivity. I don’t think I can. Right, so don’t hold me to that standard because it’s unfair. What I want to say is that a transjective phenomena is one in which we don’t try and talk about just states in the brain or states in the world or states in the mind or states in the environment if you want to be either biological or functional. Instead, we talk about what’s actually a premier way of talking now in what’s called 4-E cognitive science. We talk about how the mind-brain is inherently embedded, embodied, enacted. Right? You’re talking about the fact that the mind isn’t in here. It’s not in the world. It’s between you and the world. It’s co-created by you and the world. Just like the affordances. Are they in the world? No. Are they in the organism? No. They’re in a real relationship between the organism and the world. That’s what I mean by transjective. Thank you. Could you speak more loudly, please? I feel like as undergraduate students, the current education system has a focus on compositional knowing. How do you think this type of reciprocal opening and the enacted analogy can be better integrated into our current education system? That goes towards somebody else’s work. They’re both here. Michelle Ferrari and Jin Sung Kim, which is about how we educate for wisdom. I think part of what we have been talking about when we’re talking about wisdom as distinct from knowledge is our perspectival and participatory ways of grasping the significance and relevance of what knowledge we possess. I think that’s a big role of what wisdom is. I think what you’re then asking is how can we start educating for wisdom? You have two of the experts about that topic in the room with you. I would direct you to them. Thank you. You mentioned how virtual reality can affect your sense of presence. I know people use VR to escape from virtual exodus. Yeah, it’s called the virtual exodus. I was just wondering, instead of helping them, wouldn’t it sometimes just make things worse? Oh, yeah. I hope I didn’t mislead you. I wasn’t trying to suggest that the sense of presence in virtual reality should be given any kind of preference. All I was saying is people seek it. That means it’s a deep and important value to them. The sense of presence really matters to them. Now, can it be hijacked by virtual reality? Yes, it can. Interesting questions come up. I gave a talk at Utism about this. You might ask, what is it in virtual reality that gives a sense of presence?