https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F0C02mium6c
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m really pleased about this meeting today. James Gofield is somebody who reached out to me because of awakening from the meeting crisis and he sent me some of his work and part of what I want to accomplish here is get more of you to know more about his work because I think his work is important. I think it’s relevant. I think he’s doing some important work at integrating phenomenology with process philosophy and what I would ultimately argue is a platonic tradition and because there’s a lot of discussion about the importance of form and constraint and so I’m just and he’s doing it in a way that is I think very, very rigorous, very clear, excellent writing and so I just like I said I’m looking forward to the content of this conversation but I expect James and I are going to talk more than once but I want more people to know about him and his work. So welcome James. Hi John. Thank you for having me. It’s a real privilege. Yeah, so I could begin a little bit with a background. Yeah, that would be great. How I got into philosophy. So I’ve always been interested in the nature of humanity but I started in anthropology and the questions that I was asking about the dynamics of culture and specifically the roots that could come from religious beliefs and mystical practices specifically. They really weren’t things that I could answer within the methodologies of anthropology. So I’ve gradually moved to my mind into something that was a bit more abstract away from ethnography into cognitive science and psychology and evolutionary psychological approaches to religious traditions still in my masters and I was focusing on the nature of consciousness. So at Goddard College I was subjected to embodied cognitive science, Varela’s work and Thompson’s work and that really made a significant impact on me. And gradually though I found that even those traditions were insufficient to address the questions that I had. So I moved toward actually philosophy of cosmology and the anthropic cosmological principle and a lot of work in philosophy of physics with David Baum specifically. And then tried to tie it all together in what is now my first book. So I’ll ask you in a moment to talk about a little bit about your book but I’m interested because in the paper I read the connections to religious experience, transformation, mystical experience aren’t that readily apparent. But do you think that you are working out an ontological home for these experiences in a way that is now more satisfying to you? Yes very much so. It gradually was pushed more to the context, more to the background of what I was doing. So initially it was very much at the foreground because I was sort of taken into philosophy by mystical experiences that I had and I thought that there might be some sort of perennial overarching universal truths that could be found through the religious traditions. And I found that I kind of reached a dead end in transpersonal psychology. I thought that that might be perhaps some of the most rigorous ways that are available now to really work out systematically like the structure of the soul if there is such a thing. And I found that that just wasn’t really satisfying for what I was trying to do. So gradually in moving my attention to philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology and trying to find common threads of evolution and process, I found that the issues of spiritual transformation were, they were still present, but they could be articulated in completely different ways. And in a way a lot of the paper and my book, it’s kind of talking around those very issues. And if someone is interested in them, and especially if someone has studied anything about mystical traditions, I think that it would be quite satisfying because I’m trying to sort of through a logic of homology, like show common structures in nature that people could recognize through those traditions. Yeah. When I was reading your paper, I was reminded of like John Scott’s Erogina, where you’re getting this very sophisticated ontology, dialectical ontology, being worked out. But always in the background, of course, is a neoplatonic mystical tradition of self-transcendence and transformation. And I really, so when I was reading your paper, I got the same kind of, I got the same, it triggered that memory in me. This is what it feels. I’m not saying you’re saying the same things, but it was like, oh, this is what it felt to me like when I was reading Erogina or when I’m reading Nicholas of Cusa or some of these people, right, or Plotinus, where you’re getting this very penetrating ontological analysis. But it’s always in this, like it’s always, you can tell that it’s always in service, if not in dialogue with, you know, affording people, well, it’s affording what I talk about sort of as a phenomenological ontology of intelligibility. And so that they can make sense of these experiences and transformations and how these experiences and transformations call to them or claim to be disclosing reality to them in some important way like the really real and things like that. And so I got that sense when I was reading your paper. That’s good. That’s something I was kind of going for. I actually read Nicholas of Cusa first. I first came to him at the same time that I first came to Harris’s work. The two books were given to me as introductory texts to a philosophy class, my very first philosophy class, which now I find completely ridiculous. It took me years to get through them. And then it ended up being the cornerstone of my doctoral thesis. So yeah, that was a hard class. So yeah, and I suppose that’s really where I would like to start. But let me lay maybe one more background plank down for us. Because this was also apparent in your paper. You’re deeply influenced, especially by Evan Thompson’s work. I can see that it’s coming through, as am I, and Varela and the four E, Cognitive Science. But in a way that I think feels similar to me, I mean, to the work that I’m doing, I want to go beyond that. So I find myself both reaching back to Marlo Ponti and the phenomenological tradition and then also reaching out or back to the Neoplatonic tradition on one hand, Whitehead on another to try and get a more fundamental picture. And part of my reason is that I want a more adequate framework and ontology just for its own sake. But part of it is I’ve been three decades as a practitioner of a lot of transformative practices. I was just in a discussion with another group of people there putting together what’s called a monastic academy, a secular academy, their ecology of practices. And so I’m trying to do an ontology that’s not only satisfying as an ontology, whatever that might mean, but also that can bridge between the scientific world and the spiritual world in a way that is respectful to both of them. And I have a sense that I need to read more of your work. And but I have a sense that your work could be important in that task, in that endeavor. Is that a fair thing to demand from your work or am I being unfair to you? No, I agree very much. So I have very much appreciated listening to and looking at a lot of your videos. I’ve found that a lot of my work resonates with what you’re doing, the very point of it. And one thing that you have pointed out that isn’t often pointed out is just how impoverished we are with our ontological understandings, especially in psychology. And that’s one of the main motivations for my work. And I think that ontological argument that is very much rigorous along the same lines of current metaphysics, analytic metaphysics, can be made through a phenomenological methodology. That’s actually the specific angle that I’m taking. And one of the implications of that is that there should be a kind of continuity between the process of living and growing and self-reflecting that is informed by the more accurate ontology of our nature and our understanding of nature itself. And to put that another way, our development should be continuous with evolution, going back through evolution and into cosmology. And this is the contention that has made a lot of Fourier cognitive scientists a bit wary. And it’s where I have had occasion to bring in appeals to philosophy of physics, which, of course, cognitive scientists are doing great philosophical work in dealing with the arguments of cognitive science and philosophers of mine likewise. But one of my concerns is that it can’t be done. The work that they’re trying to do, the questions they’re trying to answer can’t be satisfied without actually connecting in a much broader interdisciplinary way. And this has significant implications for education. So the very conception of growth, like how we go about learning, it connects to the process by which we engage in interdisciplinary work. And to my mind, that is going to give us a framework for understanding our spirituality, is seeing the way that we grow. And it will be continuous with the very process of cognitive development, going back to single-celled organisms, how they have undergone the process of adaptation and self-transcendence. That’s amazing. I mean, there’s so much resonates. I mean, that’s sort of that trying to get that connection is at the heart of the work I do on relevance realization. I just finished a series with Greg Enriquez and Zachary Stein called Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation. I want to get you talking to Greg. I want to get you talking to Zach. I think everything you just said about education, Zach Stein would be just like, you mean? I watched all of that. Yeah. So I really like it. I want to get you into conversation with both of them. I think they will love it. So I mean, I had similar sort of things. I remember when I was first diving deep into trying to explicate and articulate Evan Thompson’s deep continuity hypothesis, I realized that the principles were not as bounded. There’s no reason why you won’t get something like the neoplatonic continuity, like you said, there’s reasons for why the principles have a deeper continuity down and perhaps even up than are typically talked about in four-E cognitive science. Now, there has been some movement up in that there’s work. Now, serious work about extended-minded distributed cognition is starting to come in. But yeah, there’s an unwillingness to, I don’t know if it’s unwillingness, that may be too harsh, but there’s a neglect of trying to get to a fundamental ontology out of this in some ways. Although, to be fair, Evan does pursue ontology. So instead of talking about this sort of from the outside, let’s try this. I think we framed it well that there’s a deep need to get a form of theoretical discourse that bridges between the depths of our spirituality and our deepest understanding of reality. And while four-E cognitive science sits, I think, in that project, you and I both agree that it needs to be extended in a profound way. And that’s what you’re doing. And you’re making use of Harris’s work. And until you mentioned him, I had not heard of Harris. You’re not alone there. Yeah, right. And now, like I mentioned before we started recording, I’m buying Harris’s book, I’ve got your book, I’ve got your paper. So you’re not going to be able to do it all because your work is like, at least let’s get started. What is it you’re bringing that is, what’s the problem with doing what we’re talking about to get this bridging going? What are some of the fundamental problems? How are you making use of Harris and a reinterpretation of certain aspects of phenomenology to try and address the problem? And ultimately, I hope we get to, how does that connect up to things like the meaning crisis and some of the work I’ve been doing? We don’t have to get there right away. It does connect. It does. I think that, so there’s, in the very beginning, there’s an articulation by Harris. It’s his line of argument. And he begins with the, at least logically, not chronologically, he begins with the idea of what are the conditions of having synthetic apriori? So any kind of understanding of the basic structures of phenomenology, independent of looking at the world, that actually give us insight into the nature of the world itself. And he starts with the concept of wholeness. And this appears very much as a kind of meditation. And he runs through a number of axioms, basic assumptions that need to be made in order to have any kind of discussion at all about anything that would arise in phenomenology. So what he’s doing is very much in the tradition of Descartes and Lucero. And it interfaces a lot with Kant, of course, but he tries to get past Kant’s divide between the phenomenal and the numinal. Ultimately, that’s where he’s headed. And he does that through a line of argument that I just haven’t seen anyone else make. Well, to some degree, Teilhard de Chardin has done this and Whitehead, various individuals have tried, but he ends up in a very different line of reasoning. So wholeness, right, in the beginning, he adds to that the claim that there must be dialectical relations, right? So whatever it is that occurs is going to be arising very much along the lines of a Buddhist epistemology of interdependent co-arising, right? That’s essentially what dialectical relations is. And through a very long line of argument, he shows that in physics, there’s examples where this kind of dialectical relation is actually fundamental to the phenomenon that’s actually arising. So it’s something that we seem to have support for it being an empirical reality, right? And then he runs through biology and he ends up saying something similar for the nature of a self-organizing system. And in doing so, he’s anticipating autopoiesis. His argument for it is uncanny. It’s absolutely spot on to what ends up being said by Varela in the 70s, but he makes this argument from metaphysics to cosmology to biology to cognitive science in 1965. And that’s what I found very useful. And he did that prior to knowing Bohm’s argument. And essentially, it also anticipates Bohm’s conception of the implicated and explicated orders. So in the end, a very kind of overview of it, right? We can go back into details if you’d like, but in the end, he ends up positing a coherence theory of epistemology. And I think this is where we can see an interface of ethics and epistemology, right? Where we have an obligation to, in a pragmatic sense, take into account as many perspectives as we can and try to synthesize them, try to bring about a kind of binocular convergence across individuals. And so this appears as a kind of empathy for our practices of engaging with one another. It also appears as a kind of symbiogenesis when you look at it in the case of biology. And you can see that that kind of evolution on a collective scale for people in different organizational spheres appears as interdisciplinary dialogue in the case of societal organization, right? So from this ontology, you end up with a series of arguments that are basically homologously mapping on to specific theories in physics, biology, and cognitive science, and then giving rise to an ethics and an epistemology. Very, very quick overview of the entire thing. And that was excellent, by the way. So let’s try and let’s do it again, not because of redundancy, but let’s try and do it and we’ll have to work together on this too and try and not rely too much on specialized jargon. And not because what you said wasn’t coherent and clear, it was. But I ultimately want to make the case that we started with that, right, are part of addressing the meaning crisis and affording people the transformations that they’re seeking and hindering for is that we have to address the fact that we have an impoverished ontology that can’t afford us doing that. And so I want to take the work you’re doing and the work you’re doing with Harris’s work and try and get it where people could see how it could be relevant to them. So the way I heard you saying is Harris is, you know, he’s starting from this place where he’s trying to look at, you know, one of the things that is in the key of, you know, phenomenology is how we’re making, how we make sense. And this is, of course, a fundamental term in Evan’s work and Varela’s, you know, sense making and to pay very careful attention to what are the conditions of sense making. And then I saw you and you’re doing it on behalf of Harris, making this move, which Gerson talks about is a fundamental difference. So in Cartesian, the Cartesian approach, you sort of start here and work out. And what Gerson says in ancient epistemology, you take it that intelligibility is as neutrally as possible. And then you try and ask, what does the world, what must the world be like such that this is possible? Right. And so what I see you doing is I see you trying to do that. What must the world be like such that there’s intelligibility here? But also, what must the mind be like? Right. Such that, like, I see you trying to move from both poles. Right, right. That’s what’s I think interesting. I mean, Harris isn’t unique in this way, but I guess the way he runs with it is somewhat unique. And it is that he’s working simultaneously from sort of the inside out and the outside in exactly of phenomenology. And in doing so, he’s articulating the structure of phenomenology and sort of the limitations for our different modes of reasoning and how we can reason our ways into corners and such. And one of the main, like, this is quite important for a lot of discussions in religion and in politics, actually, as well, and in ethics is showing the space of discussion such that you can see when we get into the stratosphere metaphysical discussions and you can see kind of how we are creating our own cage in a way, specifically that some of the most fundamental assumptions, right, is that the world needs to be whole and we need to be able to cognize that in some manner. And so the horizon of our phenomenology is coincident with the horizon of the world. Right. And that then gives rise to certain ways of conceptualizing the world that we’re in, the way that we posit that horizon. And there’s, I think, often in actually in professional cosmology, even there’s conflations between the way the form of this horizon is discussed in a physical sense with the metaphysical sense. Right. And to understand what kind of data we have available that gives rise to the empirical conception and how that relates to our metaphysical conceptions, that at least can give us a space to enter into some interesting dialogue that sometimes is missed. And this is where we bump into dogma. Right. So understanding kind of the form of an individual’s horizon and how that gives rise to our thoughts and how that guides us and how we’re going about our lives. Right. That’s a very basic contribution of a phenomenological methodology, but it’s also relevant even in the case of particle physics and cosmology and, of course, in every other discipline. Right. So I think that’s very, very important what you just said. Right. And trying to avoid that conflation. So let’s try and do that. Let’s really. So there are different dependency relations that we’re noting when we’re trying to get at the intelligibility. And this comes out in your work and you just invoked it with the horizon. There’s a sense in which all intelligibility, and we’ll work out what these senses are in a sec, but all intelligibility depends on my conscious experience. Right. And then one danger that phenomenology is sometimes facing, and you bring it up in your paper, is trying to escape sort of out of a kind of subjective idealism because you can get locked into. Well, you can say, you know, that means the world and existence and being are dependent on my consciousness. And you can speak that in an unlimited fashion because there’s another sense in which your phenomenology tells you, and Heidegger made this that our consciousness is dependent on a world that gives to us things in various ways. And so you have the fact that if I’ll use the metaphors that we were using a minute ago from the inside, the world sent to seem to depend on my consciousness. And from the outside, my consciousness seems to depend on the world. And then we’ve tried various reductive strategies with saying one of those is true and the other is false. And we bet or and we bank. And one of the things I see you doing, you know, maybe I’m getting it wrong, but I see you trying to get no, no, there’s a way in which we have to hold these both true. And that is actually fundamental to our ontology. The one thing our ontology has to do is both of these. Is that a fair take? Yes, yes. That’s incredibly important, actually. Thank you for bringing that up. That gives me some traction for where to head next. So one of the main moves that comes out of this that I think is somewhat novel, at least for current discussions in phenomenological ontology, is the appeal to neutral monism. There’s a number of important reasons for that. And this is, I’m super curious to know how you react to this, because you appeal to neo-Platonism, Platonic tradition. And I’m not exactly sure how we relate on these issues, but very, and it would help me to work out a lot of. But I also appeal to Nishitani, right? And Nishitani is, and Nishida are deeply influenced by James’s neutral monism. So the Kyoto school, so and trying to get those two to talk together is part of what I’m working on. But go ahead. So yes, this is incredibly important because what it allows us to do is to say that whatever sort of unifying principles, as Harris would call them, or structures or holes, just gestalts that we come up with that map onto the world, they are not the world, but they are partial reflections of it, right? So our mathematics are not like the scaffolding of nature. This is an important move in this approach. And what it does though, is it opens, I think it provides a much more rigorous way to conceptualize a methodology that comes out of it. I don’t think that other approaches are going to give this sort of conceptualization of an ongoing clarification, right? So one thing that Bohm articulated, and actually Thompson has this in common, and Harris to some degree as well, is the idea of a heterarchy, right? So there isn’t actually a fundamental level that we’re trying to get at, from which we can derive everything. And instead, we are to look at in a pragmatic sense, the practices that we engage in, our habits of thought, and our way of mapping certain structures onto the world. And what’s really quite elegant, and I think interesting about this, is that you can see it play out in physics, in the case where certain conceptions of information are taken to be absolute, they’re taken to be fundamental, and the scaffolding of our ontology. And this is quite problematic for its own reasons, but it guides the research. And you can see this in the case also, though, of individuals who have absolutely no scientific training at all, where we listen to a song, or we hear someone say something to us about who we are, our identity, right? And we take this as a kind of guiding principle for how we understand the way that we relate to the world. It sort of colors, and it gives us a lens through which we see the world and our relationship to it. And I think that, interestingly, there’s certain teachings within Buddhism that have pointed out at least the awareness of that process in certain contexts. And I think it can be generalized. And I also think that neurophenomenology is one instance in one area of neuroscientific and phenomenal phenomenological research that actually does this very well, where it says that the reality is not the verbal report, the phenomenological report, or the neuroscientific report. What we have are homologous relationships. And each one is continually clarifying the variables and the values and the relations that we deem relevant in each case. It brings about an ongoing clarification. So that’s what I mean by generalizing neurophenomenology. It can certainly be applied to that way of thinking to be applied to the whole of scientific endeavors. So let’s do that. I want to unpack that. That movie just made was really good. And the idea that there is no privileged level. It’s not forbidding talking about levels. At least I don’t see that in Evans order. But it’s saying you don’t privilege any level, that they all have an equal claim on realness. So for me, this is a rejection of Scotus and Occam in a profound way. We’re rejecting Scotus’ notion of the univocosity of being, and we’re rejecting Occam’s notion that right, normalism, and that all the patterns are not real. They’re just projected around the world. All that really exists are the raw individuals. These are sort of fundamental things that are being challenged. And by the way, challenged with good reason and good argument and good evidence from the practice and the content of the existing sciences, which is a point I think you’re making. And just to be clear about how that might go, I think it’s clear how that goes with Nishatani’s his ontology, because it’s exactly that. Like everything is present. Sorry, that will make it sound like Indra’s net, but it’s not. But he has the circuminsensuality of everything. He’s trying to get a way of talking about what an ontology of complete co-determination, co-emergence would look like. And so I think that meshes very well. And you already alluded to, Sudden, certain Buddhist ontologies that are consonant with your work. Later, neoplatonism gets into a very similar place as to why you see people in the Kyoto school like Suzuki comparing Eckhart to Zen and things like that. Because by the time you’re getting to Kusa, who’s in that tradition, and Erogyna, you’ve got the idea that, if you’ll allow me some bottom-up and top-down language, the emergence and the emanation are as real, and they completely co-penetrate. It’s not like emanation starts and then it meets emergence. They completely interpenetrate bottom to top and top to bottom. And they’re both equally important for the intelligibility of reality and for reality itself. And so that’s where I see the connection in the later work of people like Erogyna and Kusa, where you’re trying to get… And think about Kusa when he’s talking in The Vision of God. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but he sends the monks with the treatise a painting. And the painting is got this… They were very fashionable because perspective painting has just been discovered. And the thing about these paintings is wherever you go, it looks like the painting is looking at you, the portrait is looking at you. And he says, so do that, but when you’re over here, ask your brother monk who’s over here what the painting is looking at. And then you’ll see, and he says, and he uses that to try and explain the proper state of mind and consciousness you need to get into in order to understand the God, ultimate reality. And so that’s… You might not find that convincing, but my point is to try and show you that there are significant developments in later Neoplatonism as typified by Erogyna and Kusa that I think do line up in a lot of ways with what you’re talking about. And I also think it’s fair to think of people like Spinoza and Whitehead in that tradition. Whitehead saw himself in that tradition as a footnote to Plato. And so I think, yeah, I don’t think… Again, I’m not trying to convince you. I’m just trying to make it plausible to you that there are real connections between what you’re doing and aspects of the Neoplatonic tradition. There most certainly are. I’m interested to know how you would posit our relationship to the forms that we can identify. I think that’s really what we’ve come to here. We identify a system or a structure on a given scale. What is that scale? What is that form? And what’s the relationship between our knowledge of it and ultimate reality? That’s the questions that we’re trying to answer here. Yes. And that’s actually the question where the spirituality and the philosophy come together because I think that there’s something to the Platonic idea of kind of knowing that’s a conformity rather than a representation or correspondence theory. So that’s one thing I would want to say that part of what we’re doing is participating in it. And I think this is part of what I see in the connections between your ontology and your epistemology because what you’re saying is… And what I’m saying, and then I’ll ask you if that’s what you’re saying. What I’m saying, for example, is the principles of evolution by which we emerged as a biological species are in deep continuity or homologous to the principles of relevance realization that are running our intelligence. So it’s not the case that our intelligence just points when it’s theorizing about evolution. I would ultimately say the way… The reason ultimately why the mind can touch reality is because of a shared identity of principles or form, as you might put it. And part of what we’re doing, and this is the Platonic idea of anamnesis, at least one interpretation, is we’re bringing into awareness that conformity as a way of giving us… I think that’s what’s behind the sense of realness that licenses any particular ontological claim we want to make. And that’s ultimately what I think the various reductionisms we’re trying to get at. By pursuing a reduction, they were trying to bring about a conformity between knowing and the structures of reality, but they were doing it in, well, a reductive way. And to get that insight, which I think is at the core of Marla Ponti’s work on realness, to get that insight and articulate it in a non-reductive way, I think that’s the project that we’re facing. And that’s what I’m finding so exciting about your work. Now, I might be misreading you, but that’s part of what I’m seeing. Right. There’s a lot there. So, my approach or my appeal to coherence theory and my conception of the neutral whole of nature being basically a kind of fractal that we’re trying to mass onto continually, that doesn’t at all refute the methodology of reduction. And in fact, reduction is it plays an incredibly important role in moving us along and bringing about greater clarity. Right. The question is what forms map to what scales in what ways, right? We’re continually trying to do this in better and better ways by, and this is where relevance realization becomes increasingly important. We need to take into account more and more perspectives of a given phenomenon so that we can clarify it and make sure in what ways it’s relevant. Right. So, I very much appreciate Noah Moss-Brenders’ work on symmetry breaking. I mentioned that in the paper. So, that’s pretty much the strongest way of, I think, connecting the ontology and the epistemology that I’m trying to provide here of symmetry breaking. Right. So, what we find are different kinds of symmetry breaking or symmetry making processes. And we do need to be productive. So, people are probably going to think of this in shape and actually symmetry, right, that something is symmetrical if it’s unchanged under various variations and symmetry breaking is when that breaks down. So, maybe unpack that a little bit and then, right. So, we can think of a homogenous space with no differences as being absolutely symmetrical. And there’s an interesting argument that Harris makes that kind of is at the very basis to a lot of his conceptions of nature. And it’s the idea that we cannot have a state of nature that’s completely homogenous like that because the lack of difference pretty much refutes any conception of there being matter. Like, we can only have a conception of matter if there’s some form of self-differentiation. And that brings us to focus on the whole, right, because the difference at the most fundamental level is basically a function of the whole. It’s a difference that the entire system, in a sense, exerts on itself, referring about the most fundamental difference, right. And it always must be there. And what’s more, we do not have an empirical means of establishing what that is. No, exactly. This is, to my mind, a very fascinating and important conception. And it’s a way of positing a kind of phenomenological ontology that also is the ground of our conception of nature, but it’s not something that’s empirically known. But it’s something we have to empirically posit anyway on pragmatic grounds because it’s not something that’s likely to change given any further inquiry. Well, yeah, I think that’s a very important point. And part of what, this is maybe an aside, but I’ll just put it out there. Part of what I’ve been trying to advocate is that we understand by natural nature or naturalism, not just what is derivable from our sciences, but what is ultimately presupposed by them. And what I hear you saying and what Harris is saying is that the presupposition of self-differentiation is fundamental both to the possibilities of knowledge and the possibilities of being. Because part of what I take is, what you’re saying is that there’s a sense in which absolute homogeneity is not different from sort of absolute chaos in the sense of, I know there’s differences in analysis, but I’m trying to get at this point that it breaks the two poles, if you’ll allow me, trying to speak neutrally here, that we presuppose an intelligibility that knowing is possible and that the world is knowable. And homogeneity smashes both of those. It prevents them from coming into existence. So good, you’re nodding, so I’m getting it right. So I think that’s very important. And then you said something before that that I also really think is very important. And I’ve been trying about the multi-perspectival, right, as a way. So it relates to the conception of scales. The idea is that… Is there a structural realism in here? The idea is that… So is there a structural realism in here? Yes, I’ve tried to deal with that. Okay, so the question is, how real are the structures that we posit or that say physics has when it says that this model of an atom or some physical phenomenon, we can project it onto the world. It gives us positive predictions. How real can we say this thing is that we have? So I, at this point, turn to a pragmatic conception where if a model maps onto the world and it gives us continuous predictions in such a way that we can’t find any way of relating to it that could possibly come up with a difference, then we take it to be real in that sense. And it serves as a kind of guiding principle from then on. And we can say that this is true of… And usually this happens on certain scales, right? So physics has its basic structures that it projects into the world and it says, this is not likely to change, right? But the idea is so when you begin with a self-differentiating conception of nature, that is simultaneous with the self-differentiating conception of our own phenomenological field. And what both show in their evolution is self-differentiation into a scale of forms. So the task then is to try to map out the different scales, the different holes that occur. Because in the very beginning, it’s a symmetry break that basically is a difference of one hole that’s effectively homogeneous to two that is just one thing relating to its symmetrical partner. But there’s no way to posit what their relationship is unless you add an axis and bring about a context. So it’s the context and that triadic phenomenological structure is inherent from the beginning. And to my mind, there’s no way to get outside of that. So it has, for my work and for other people’s work in different ways, particularly Hans Jenny and his kinematics research, he had his triadic phenomenology as well. It was very similar to this. This serves as a kind of guiding principle. So we’re always seeing the focal aspect, some sort of kinetic motion to a difference, and then a context that allows us to posit what that difference is. And essentially, this is what we’re seeing iterated throughout nature in different ways. And we’re trying to characterize the properties or the relationships that we bear to these different levels of nature that are essentially the continuation of this process across all the scales that have given rise to us. And that then there’s a further argument to say how it is that that process has given rise to its own self-awareness. Right. There’s a similar argument about that triadic structure running through Eastman’s recent book, Untangling the Gordian Knot, where he’s trying to do something similar. So another step back. So what we’ve got is we’ve got, if you’ll allow me, we’ve got a vertical aspect where we’re trying to see this fractal relationship, a real relationship, pragmatically, I’ll get it right now, but a real relationship between these different scales. And then this is also intersecting with trying to explain how we can keep those two dependencies that we talked about earlier, both together as real. The world depends on my consciousness, my consciousness depends on the world. So could you clarify a little bit? Is that question making sense? Why does finding this, for Harris and for you, why does finding this scale, which right, of forms, why does that help to get past all of the knots we’ve always gotten into about the subjective objective relation, etc.? Yes. So I think that it allows us to see how it is that we’re positing something to be coherent. So one thing to be kept in mind is that any given, I think, scale that we tried to investigate to any given level or whole, it occurs as it does because of our participation and our sort of bringing forth an entire scale of other forms, right, that are related to it, that make it appear to us the way it does. So I think that this methodology, it allows, and the ontological conception, it allows us to, I think, bring to light how it is that we’re bringing forth the different gestalts that we encounter because they are fundamentally interconnected with each other, right? And the goal, I think, is to aim toward coherence, right? So to see how all of the phenomena that we encounter are actually interdependent and self-organizing along this scale. So what I’m hearing you say, and I thought that, thank you, that was good. What I’m hearing you say is something like the mutual constraint and constitution between these scales is pointing to something that’s ultimately more fundamental, and in terms of which we can explain. Sorry, I gotta take a drink here, water. Throw something when I try. I’m talking too much today. Sorry. I’m hearing you say that that, getting clear about that takes us to something in terms of which we can explain intelligibility that doesn’t get us into those binds that we’ve gotten into in the past. At least that sounds like the hope. For example, someone could say, well, what you just said sounds to me like idealism, like saying that it’s all, right, it depends on our participation. Well, that’s just idealism, and we’ve done that, and here’s the 17 problems with idealism, or someone can say scales, those scales are, you’re just talking about structural realism, right? The thing about neutral monism is that we are continually clarifying what relationships compose the whole. So we aren’t, I think that it’s a fallacy to extend our consciousness to the whole being, like there’s just no good argument for doing that. So to extend the properties that we find subjectivity, which aren’t really things that we can explicate very well anyway, as being individual properties that really aren’t extending that into the whole of nature doesn’t make any sense. So what we’re trying to do is continually explicate what constitutes the whole. And in doing that, we’re continually differentiating it because we’re participating in it in different ways. So a fundamental part of this is this conception of a kind of binocular convergence that takes place through understanding the world through others’ eyes and trying to see how the phenomenon in question, we can gain a clear picture of it by taking into account more parameters of it basically, or more parameters of ourselves, really. So what this ends up giving us is an open-ended conception of human nature. So we can’t actually define ourselves in relation to this neutral whole or this scale of ongoing forms of form making. What we have instead is a path of evolution. And it appears very much more in terms of symbiotesis. And the interdisciplinary methodology that comes along with that, I think, is that is the best that we can get for basically approaching science and understanding our relationship to the world. So the biggest problem with most of metaphysics up until now is the presumption that basically properties or entities exist independent of our observing them, independent of our beholding them. There hasn’t been enough attention paid to the contextualizing acts that are taking place. So what this does is it allows us to see how the scale of forms is essentially self-referential. And it appears like the topology of a Klein bottle. So we can’t get outside of it. And when we try to talk about nature, in a sense, we’re talking about our own projections onto this very process. So the process is not us. It’s not exhausted by us. We know that in the very conception of it being a neutral whole. But what it is is this ongoing evolutionary process. That’s very interesting. So I like the sort of creative tonos there that we’re trying to talk about it. We’re trying to simultaneously say, like Harmon says, that our experience should not be half of ontology. But nevertheless, we’re not trying to absent ourselves from that ontology, either. The objectivity can’t be had. Complete objectivity. It’s a continuous objective making, I think. We’re continually making ourselves more and more acquiring a kind of God’s eye view, but it can’t be achieved. It’s a trajectory. And that trajectory goes, to my mind, continuous with nature itself, with the very process of nature. So this is where I get into my positive of teleology. So the telos in humans and in consciousness, I think, is a continuation of a telos that’s in all of biology and the self-organization of the universe. It’s just a different order of it. Well, let’s talk about that in a sec. But before we pick that teleological thread up, I suppose there’s a pun in there. I wanted to also emphasize the point you just made. And you’ve made it a couple of times, because I’m seeing now the deep connection between a dialogical understanding of epistemology, something that I’m arguing for, the necessity for dialogue. And I think that is, by the way, a platonic point that you need to get. If what you’re pointing to as real is a trajectory of coherence towards the whole, then you cannot have a monological frame for pursuing that. You have to do it through as many perspectives as possible. And then what that means, both methodologically and ethically, and I think even existentially, is, and this is a problem I face as a cognitive scientist, but what is the language by which we bring about? And this goes back to Nicholas of Cusa. How do you get all the monks to talk to each other so that they realize that there are these multiple perspectives, but that doesn’t mean the perspectives are fragmented. It doesn’t mean they’re discredited. It doesn’t even mean that one perspective dominates all the others. This is where the point that I made about neurophenomenology and the method of homology identification comes into play in an important way. So this is also how it can be extended into all sciences, but you can see this across just people using language in different ways, where what you’re doing is you map out the closest thing that you can get to a common structure, and then you begin to identify relationships that you are sensitive to. And in doing this, you continually bring about more relations that maybe you weren’t sensitive to before, because by looking at the situation through another person’s eye, and this can be anything, you gradually begin to increase your sensitivity. So this is, again, where it becomes a methodology for phenomenology, where we are broadening our phenomenological horizons in an ongoing way by increasing our sensitivity to the ways that we relate to the world. And in doing so, we’re sort of shaking up and broadening our very conception of our identity. Right. But also the various ways in which the world can disclose itself to us. We’re also altering the identity of the world in a profound way. Exactly. And then the idea is that this dialogical convergence coherence, that it gives us a trajectory of sense making that points us to… I’m trying to get at… See, one of the traditional problems with Neutromanism, you know, Russell faced this, is like you have no language to talk about it. There’s no way of of saying what it is. Like, and you point this out, you know, James named it very poorly. There’s pure experience or something like that. And that sounds like feeling, that sounds like subjectivity. And then, right. And so what I’m hearing you say, though, is that this idea of, you know, a scale of forms and a commonality of forms, across scale, gives us a language by which we can coordinate all these perspectives. And in that coordination of perspectives, we start to get a sense, like I mean, in the cognitive, we start to get a sense of the whole. We start to get a sense of the whole. Is that right? Yes, 99% right or so. The thing is that Russell, he was making the very mistake that everyone else is making with all the other approaches to philosophy of mind, which was presuming that we could have an objective analysis of something and that that’s precisely what we needed. There is no one language that’s going to give us that. There’s a path, there’s a trajectory of kind of methodology that we can articulate with better and better accuracy. So the language is continually being made as we’re becoming more sensitive to relationships by applying this homological method. So the autopoiesis within the language is instantiating to a degree the autopoiesis we find within life and within the universe. It’s a way of communicating with the body, the autopoiesis we find within life and within the universe. That’s what you mean by the process. It’s self-referential, it’s self-disclosing in an important way. We see in the very attempt, like the very attempt to craft the language better and how it starts to, like you say, it starts to take on a life of its own. That in and of itself also is a factor for disclosing the reality we’re trying to talk about. When we hit upon this trajectory and it’s been, it’s precisely how evolution has worked really well to bring about increasing complexity. I argue even before there was animate beings, but certainly in the case of biological evolution and all cases of cognition, it’s the threat of increasing complexity that’s been continuous throughout all of that. Mostly yes, that is pretty much correct. Thank you because I think I’m getting a clearer picture. Now I’ll let you pick up the thread of teleology that I wanted to put aside because you also have a different reading of teleology than the standard reading, to be fair. It’s not what people standardly mean when they spoke teleology. The end isn’t the goal. The telos isn’t an end state. This is what Harris said over and over since 1965. It’s more like the process of a symphony being played out or the process of the way life grows. There’s this telos in the self-organization and self-differentiation. In the case of a seed, this really gets the point across that there’s something implicit within the organization of the seed and its relationship to the world. The tree is the explication of that. The idea is that the same is true for our developing psyche with regard for how we interact with the environment. This then coincides with attachment theory. The very process of becoming aware of the relationships that we have and growing beyond them. Self-transcendence in all cases of cognition is basically that process. There’s an unfolding that’s more like an domino effect but then it turns back on itself. That turning back on itself is an iteration of the process. To my mind… Can I try something? See if it’s intelligent. Sorry for interrupting but I want to make sure I’m staying with you. I’ve been making an argument that the cognition is inherently self-organizing and it’s inherently dynamical and that it functions by developing and as developing it functions, you can’t separate development and function. Development and function are inherently a process of self-transcending. It sounds to me that you’re saying that that’s kind of what you mean by teleology. That the process is autopoetic but by being an inherently developmental self-organizing process, it’s always also an inherently self-transcending process in some degree. It’s a growth process in some way. Is that what you’re meaning? Am I understanding you? Just in the case of a cognitive system, right? We can leave the idea of natural teleology for a moment or later. In order to bring about an increase of complexity of cognitive functions, the system requires being able to reflect on the limits of at least some of the cognitive functions that it’s enacting up to that point. That’s the kind of minimal sense of wisdom actually. This appears in the case of biological interactions as a kind of interruption because the automatic reactions to the environment are insufficient. That’s where the limitation occurs. That limitation is basically when it’s when a being is self-aware of that limitation. That’s essentially wisdom. It can occur just in the case of self-transcendence of an organism adapting to its environment and choosing to essentially act differently in response to stimuli in order to preserve its coherence. Great. I think we’re on the same page about that. You’re proposing that that principle extends into non-animate things. That’s what you said a few minutes ago. Right. I think that that principle is a continuation of a process that also can be identified in cosmological evolution. Yeah, we’re largely in agreement that it occurs through an activist, autoproject kind of lens from evolution to us. There’s an elegant conceptualization of how we go about transcending ourselves that’s homologous to how biological organisms have come about adapting and evolving. There’s various arguments that have come out of least action principles in physics and specifically in Paul Davies’ work as well. I have essentially appealed to them, but Harris’s conception of this, he appealed to a lot of scientific work. Bohm also effectively said without stating the cosmological anthropic principle, he said in his own terms that life is implicit in the whole and it’s necessitated by the evolution of the system. He is a determinist. For the simplest approach to this argument, I could simply appeal to Bohm’s implicate order and say quantum mechanics effectively supports the idea that the structures and systems that we see, whatever we see, they are necessitated by the original conditions of the universe. Of course, that’s very much, it ends up overlapping a lot with the complexity theory that say that the universe is a complex self-organizing system. The states or tractors that end up coming about were implicit in its original initial conditions. But this can also be said in terms of the metaphysics, the phenomenology itself that is put forth when you start with the whole and the self-differentiation. The idea is that when we go back in time, we’re always required to posit a constraint in the same way that an autopoietic system has a constraint. But of course, the universe isn’t, so this is an important point, the universe isn’t alive in the same sense that an autopoietic system is. That would be a mistake of categories. This is something that I’ve bumped up against a lot. Of course, people have appealed to some sort of pan-experientialism or pan-psychism. I reject that as well. I don’t think that the universe can be conscious in that way. Consciousness is implicit in it as a feature of it, as an aspect of its self-referential self-organizing process. The process unfolds very much like a seed into a tree. That brings me to another thing which overlaps with the discussion of teleology, which is you also invoke the anthropic principle, but you do some really cool stuff with it, which is also very interesting because standard uses of the anthropic principle often go along fatalist lines or deflationary lines. The fatalist line is the universe was somehow set up for us, which I don’t think is fair to the original intent of the anthropic principle. Then the other one is a deflationary count. It’s like, well, all it’s saying is of all the universes, the only one, there has to be, we happen to be one in which consciousness is possible, big deal, nothing’s happening. But I hear you saying something more like, again, the ancient Greek idea, no, any notion of reality we posit has to include the very possibility of that reality being knowable. Then that brings you into what there has to be a real possibility of knowers and things like that. I hear you doing something like that, which is closer to how I’ve always tried to understand at least what I thought was the original presentation of the anthropic principle. Right. Okay. So, right. So yeah, the original conception was just that we look out at the universe and we see a hospitable world. And we need to ask ourselves, what does this tell us about ourselves? What does this tell us about the world? And it’s like the weak anthropic principle just says that, of course, wherever we find ourselves, we’re going to look out at the world and see hospitable conditions. And this might actually give rise to certain constraints on our predictions about what the world should be because we find ourselves in the hospitable universe. So the deflationary accounts have all, they usually appeal to some version of multiverse theory. Yeah, probably. So, right. So what’s really interesting to me is how we relate on the conception of possibility. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and argue with my advisors about this because they’re analytic philosophers and we disagreed a lot. So there’s a number of different arguments to get to the teleological anthropic principle as Harris articulated it. This metaphysical is empirical. And one that might seem relevant right now is, so it comes from the metaphor of a chess game. So this comes from Mark Lange, his conception of, or his book, Laws and Lawmakers. I found this really helpful for articulating the argument. So if a game of chess is played and a series of moves are made right to the end, and if the knight or the rook and the king never castled, we don’t know if that was possible. We can think of laws of nature. So I think that this is a good way to get at the issue. If a law was never instantiated, our conception of what its nature would be, or that basically tells us our view of certain fundamental entities, like how strongly we are leaning towards some kind of platonic view. So if no castling takes place, we don’t have enough information to know whether or not it was actually possible. So we could look out at the world and we can derive some laws, the rules of the game, from what we’re looking at. But those are always going to be extrapolations beyond the empirical data, which are the actual moves that were made. So following a dialectical holist approach, there is no room in the ontology for things that don’t obtain. There’s nowhere to put them. The only place that they could be put is in a kind of abstract platonic universe. And in doing so, though, or in making this move, it means that something fundamental like our existence from a Cartesian first principle approach, it can’t be reduced to a conception of like it might have not occurred, which is in analytic metaphysics and in cosmology, usually the line of argument that’s taken is just the idea that under certain conditions, the universe could have been different and then we would not have arisen. So there’s no fundamental aspect of us in our relationship to the world. But from a phenomenological perspective, that’s not possible. The entities that we individuate, we always have to bring back to the conditions of their individuation and they rest on us, the most coherent framework we have of our epistemology. And that of course rests on the basic structure of our phenomenology. So if our epistemology is some sort of guide to our ontology from a phenomenological vantage point, we can’t get rid of ourselves. That was a pretty rough, I didn’t know that I was going to have to run through all of that, but that was my best attempt off the top of my head. Well, that’s good, James. So yeah, there’s a sense in which, well, this is what I’m hearing and it might be overly simplistic because I know it’s a complex argument. But I’m hearing, there’s a sense in which there’s binding relationships between realness, intelligibility and phenomenology that means we, as you said, we can’t be optional, in the sense that whatever ontology we’re positing, we have to commit to something that can posit the ontology. And in so doing, one of the conditions is that we have to be here in a sense. It’s literally inconceivable what the ontology would be if there were no human beings. So in a pragmatic sense, then we’re basically necessitated. There’s like a few different arguments that bring us to that conclusion, but that’s one of them, yeah, essentially. It’s strange to me that the phenomenologists haven’t recognized their interface with anthropic reasoning in this very way. So I’ve tried to- I thought that was very creative. And I mean that as a compliment in your argument. I thought bringing those two together was a very, very, very powerful move because it made me sort of reminded me of the thing you discover as a child where you can’t imagine your own death. And people say, well, of course I can. And they imagine a black space and you say, no, no, you’re still within imagining. And so what you’re trying to get at is that- and again, I get that you’re not trying to smuggle in a sort of a crypto idealism, but you’re trying to say that there are ways in which our ontology binds us into the history of the world in a fundamental sense. So am I getting you correctly? Yes, yes, that is correct. So at first, it’s just an epistemological argument. And then through a number of moves, I bring in a kind of pragmatic line of reasoning. And I say, if we want an ontology and we’re following a phenomenological methodology, and we think that pragmatism is the best way to jump from that to the ontological conclusion, we then can’t get rid of ourselves in any way. And there’s no rational conception of having other worlds where we don’t exist, whether instead of this one or in parallel to this one, so that the other worlds don’t actually bear upon our analysis of our nature. All that matters is bringing about the most coherent conception of the holes and the self-organizing structures that we find in the world. That is our task. And everything else is basically a kind of logical exercise. And I think it’s somewhat of a distraction in a lot of cases. Yeah, I get that. So how do you, let’s not bring it into something concrete. So I’ve granted in discussion a lot of the points you’re making. How would you confront a scientist who says, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Human beings have only existed at this point. I want to be able to talk about the deep past where there’s no human beings. What do you mean? How would you respond to that? So I mean, it’s pretty straightforward to take a pragmatic approach and say that what is our relationship to this past? I mean, we’re not removing ourselves from that. And that’s really just phenomenological. But you continue on with this methodology. And I think that there’s no sense in basically trying to trick ourselves in believing that we’re ever observing something without ourselves. And in doing so, we’re more likely to recognize the biases that we’re projecting onto the things that we’re trying to analyze in the world. Right. But what I’m trying to say, that was a point that I wanted to say a moment ago, actually, that the only way that we could do this is if we accounted for the constraint, the fundamental kind of bias that we’re bringing about in engaging with the world. And because we can’t do that, then we’re left with this line of reasoning. So yeah, that’s why we can’t take ourselves out of the picture. So yes, but. And I’m agreeing with the argument. What I’m trying to do is pull apart two things that are often conflated together. So I’m trying to do a phenomenological analysis between acknowledging everything you said that we can’t pull ourselves out of the picture. And the other picture that says, well, I didn’t always exist. Right. And so we didn’t always exist. And it’s pretty clear to me that I didn’t always exist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so you’re you’re it’s clear to me that your argument is differentiating between those two. And they’re often conflated together in a confusing way. So I’m trying to get you to pull them apart. And it’s like, OK, so in Harris’s writing, he recognizes straightforwardly that the process isn’t always conscious. So that’s the way that you can get at this notion of a world that exists outside of ourselves. So we can avoid solipsism and idealism by way of appealing to this conception of neutral monism constituted by self-organizing scale of forms, because it’s not conscious. And that’s essentially how that works. Right. But there is a question that was like, well, when we look at the past, what are we looking at? Like the past where we weren’t there, especially looking at the cosmological or astronomical operations, right? Millions of years ago, prior to our existence. What is that? Yeah. Yeah. That’s what you want me to answer right now is conceptualization of that. Like so much written on that in the philosophy of science of different philosophers who have tried to articulate that it’s well, I don’t. Well, is there a problem, though? Like, is there a problem that you identified anything that I’ve said with regard for that? I’m trying to get. I’m trying to get how we could put together these two propositions that we can’t remove ourselves from the ontology, but there are points where we did not exist in the history of that on top. Trying to get the ontological and the cosmological claims coherent together. That’s what I’m trying. Right. Well, the best that I can do is the line of empirical argument line of empirical argument and the metaphysical to some degree, but which basically shows that it’s a conception of the evolution of the universe that appears to be running toward increase in complexity and self-organization and a kind of increase of orders of self-reference, which essentially you can kind of decompose consciousness into these orders of self-reference at different scales. That’s essentially what makes us up to my mind is this continuing enfoldment of nature. OK, so then what I hear you saying is perhaps one way you could deconflate it by putting in some qualifiers is we’ve like and we’ve we were always implicitly here, but we weren’t always consciously here. That’s what I hear the distinction. There’s a sense in which, right, that’s because I’m trying to get it back to the teleology that we are always implicitly here because the universe is like is this implicate order and we are like we’re like the seed. Like there’s a sense in which the tree is not a seed, but the tree is implicit in the tree in the seed. But nevertheless, the seed can’t do things that the tree can do. I’m trying to get at like how you put the how we were always here and with but we’re not always here and right. Well, yes, perhaps the simplest way to do that is to picture the evolution of the universe as a phase space with an attractor and the attractor runs through given the constraints the universe imposes on itself. Right. There’s this space of states that the attractor goes through or the state travels through basically and there’s a certain iteration as it goes through these these states and that essentially is what we are and what life is. That’s what I’m trying to get. It’s really important to posit the relationship between this the process and the constraint that the system imposes on itself. That’s essentially how that works. Right. That’s cool. I think what you just did there was yeah we are that is trying to get the identity statement. I’m trying to get like I’m trying to do a hectic anything. I’m trying to get how like the ontology comes into the existential structures. Right. I’m trying to get at like what does it mean and I get what you’re saying given these constraints we are we are that trajectory but that doesn’t mean the trajectory is me. There’s a category mistake that I’m trying to help us avoid. Right. There’s an asymmetry there’s an asymmetric dependence in the identity statements that are being made. Right. I can say right that the that right like you said that that trajectory is me but that doesn’t or right but I’m not it. Something like that. I’m trying to get that my identity is dependent on it but its identity is not dependent on me as an identity. Do you understand what I’m trying to get at? I’m trying to get at because I’m trying to I’m trying to get at a simplest I’m trying to break out a way in which I can hear people responding to this and saying like you know a new agey kind of thing. I’m the universe and that’s what he’s saying. That’s what he’s saying. I’m the universe and I always knew it and it’s like that’s not I were the result of the process and were necessitated by the conditions of the process. Right. And the process hasn’t stopped. It’s still within you. That’s the point I hear you saying. It’s not like the process is it’s like it’s not like a Newtonian you know billiard ball model. Right. The process is still ongoing in the universe and in you right now. That’s the thing is properly understood this this process is continuous with evolution and with our own development and when you when we can understand and this is why homology is important is because when we see our own kind of self-transcendence we can see ourselves in the processes of the universe in a certain sense and also it gives us a clear sense of our trajectory of development into the future. Right. I would like to think so anyway. That’s what my work entails. That’s right. I get what you’re doing and I’m sorry if I’ve been sort of clumsy but I’m trying to press on this because I’m trying to get like part of what I’m trying to understand because this carries into spiritual practice are the different ways in which identification occurs and I mean it both in the sense of individuation and when we talk about like an attachment theory or other things when we identify with something I’m trying to get like I’m trying to get a clear picture of all of these ways of identification and cleat get them distinct from each other and related to each other to avoid confusion and conflation. That’s why I’m sort of pressing you on this point. I’m trying to I’m trying to say can we use this ontology if we get it clear to give us guidance on how we can be careful about not making category mistakes as we are making identification and identity claims. That’s what I was trying to that’s what I’m trying to get at. Yes that’s something that has been concerning to me as well because I’ve seen a lot of pseudoscience and a lot of just bad philosophy as well that I’ve tried to avoid and I mean panpsychism is one position I think that is something that I come up against it in surprisingly uncomfortable ways and I’ve tried to avoid it quite a lot and also it’s like what what is the sort of power of our observation right because in a lot of what we’re saying it seems like we are constructing the world right. There’s also the participatory anthropic principle which says that you know observation plays the key role in quantum mechanics and I definitely argue against all of that in various ways that I could take up perhaps another time. Yeah maybe we should do one on your take on sort of ways in which people because like people often now it’s frequent to try to derive a kind of idealism from quantum mechanics. I see this happening all the time. I’d like to hear what you have. Yeah and that’s why I like Bohm. I appeal to Bohm for a lot of these points because he’s the strongest scientific theoretical alignment that I have that is rooted in quantum mechanics and I think it’s the best conception of nature or of like matter that we can really have at a basic level and yeah his notion of like the problems with it coming to a final theory and his conception also he had a whole in his thought as a system it was basically a phenomenology and he had his line of argument for individuation that he called levation as a key aspect of our scientific practices and so I think a lot of that helps quite a lot and ultimately his ontology was as neutral, honest in its conception which I really appreciate it and I’ve tried to tie that into an activist and such and of course that provides a kind of anvil on which to bash claims of idealism because he certainly was far from that as well. And he also I mean he also wrote on dialogue he was one of the first people that’s exactly right like I’ve lately been talking about. Oh sorry I’m talking over you. The connections to your work with his thought as a system is wonderful and dialogue yeah. So I think this is a good place to stop for now James I’d like you to come back and you know I’d be interested to see some of the comments we get and then let’s keep going because I’m very intrigued by the proposal. This is one of the best presentations other than perhaps Spinoza of a neutral monism that I’ve seen in a long time. I was always, I always wanted James’s to work and but I always found it and then when I read Nishida, the experience of the good right and again Nishitani to me is one of the one of the best ones too and so I want to talk to you at some point about what that means with you know with respect to some of the central you know things within four e-cognitive sciences the idea of affordances, the idea of an umwelt, the idea of what I call transjectivity. How does that, how does that link up or not link up with what you’re talking about? Right all of that would be really great. I’ve had a lot of interesting thoughts and inspiration from so many of the ideas that you’ve brought up and I think that I’m kind of working in the clouds and a lot of your work is is connecting to a lot of practical matters that I have started to sort of derive answers for and again it’s been nice to look at your work for that reason and to develop that further. Thank you. Yeah I feel that I want to return the compliment. I think you, I mean you’re bringing a clarity and rigor to the ontology that you know I’m, I feel like I’ve been working and trying to get at an ontology of intelligibility. I’m trying to do an ontology of intelligibility and a phenomenology of intelligibility and then integrate them together and I found, I’m finding your work already and the discussion is was very helpful. I learned a lot in it. I’m finding it tremendously helpful at bringing a kind of a rigor to that project so I want to keep doing this. Thank you that’s precisely my goal. Yeah which is excellent. So let’s, I always like to give people when I’m talking with the final word before I just thank them and we close off. Is there anything like that you’d like to say? It doesn’t have to be summative or cumulative or anything it’s like just where you’re landing right now and anything you’d like to leave people with, anything that feels it’s like a little bit a thread that you just want to give a little bit more to before we close. Yes so I think that perhaps one of the strongest connections between our two projects, our two approaches is in dialogue and in education and kind of the continuation of the human potential and I’m just very interested to see how that can develop further by talking to yourself and to others that you’ve been talking to. I agree that’s the and that’s why I mentioned the bone thing too because I see your ontology especially the way you read the anthropic principle and other things. I see it as doing something like I see in Arogyna that would where dialogue, dialogus and dialectic are not just methods or you know I think they’re more fundamental. They put us into the right relationship with sort of the deepest aspects of our ontology. I see your ontology if you’ll allow me it’s not a logical implication but you know what I mean I see your ontology implying a dialogical epistemology and I see your ontology also. Yes yes yes it does. To my mind it’s an extension of symbiogenesis. It’s exactly the process that gives rise to complexity in biology but in a context of cognition. Well yeah so yeah let’s talk about that next time but this has been wonderful. Thank you so much James and I look forward to our next time together. Thank you.