https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aiBe3NsF5R8
Welcome. This is our second question and answer session, and I appreciate all of the enthusiasm. First of all, again, I want to say thank you to my viewers. The amount of feedback and support has been really, really wonderful, and I’ve also been impressed by the enthusiasm for this Q&A session. I want to start by addressing a couple of big questions that have surfaced through the video series, especially some of the last episodes that have been posted, and they’re sort of central. And then after that, I’ll address some questions that have been tweeted, and then at the end, we’ll try and get into some live questions. So the one thing I want to start with is this issue around personhood, because there has been some discussion about what am I saying about personhood and what was I saying about the newborn? I want to try and go over this really, really carefully about the ontology of personhood. So I was arguing that agape was necessary or at least indispensable to the formation of personhood, and then some people were asking questions about what did that mean about what I thought about the ontology of a newborn, et cetera. So let me be very clear that I think a newborn has the real potential for personhood. And if you note, I made an explicit attempt to argue in the episode on Aristotle, I believe it’s episode six, that possibility and potentiality are real. They are a definite part of the ontology. And I think that saying that a newborn has the real potential is exactly what commits us to our moral responsibilities to them. So to use what term that Paul Benakley uses, I think newborns have a moral status as persons, precisely because that real potential to be actualized as a person can only be actualized by the informing of agape love. And so we have a moral obligation to bring about the actualization of that real potential through agape love. And we do that because of course, persons are intrinsically valuable to us. Now, that being said, we should not confuse potentiality and actuality. To say that a newborn is potentially a person, and here I’m speaking very technically and very accurately, is to say that it is not actually a person, because that’s the difference between actuality and potentiality. It needs agape to become an actual person as opposed to being a really potential person. And that matters because we value actuality differently than we value potentiality. You would rather have actual money than potential money. This has even been shown experimentally. You will take a little bit of actual money now over the real potential for money in the future. So the valuation and the metaphysical status are importantly different. And notice that when you ask, okay, well, what makes something actually a person, you’re talking about, well, what makes, what is it to act as a person? And notice that we don’t treat infants as beings that can act as persons. They’re not allowed to own property. They’re not allowed to get married. They do not have freedom of religion. They cannot go where they choose, right? And also, they cannot commit a crime. They are in no way moral agents in an important sense. We do not treat them that way. That does not mean that we do not have an agopic and moral responsibility to them. Of course we do. And that’s what I just argued. And then the thing to then ask is, well, what is it to act as a person? And then to use a contrast that many people use, like, well, you know, you can love a dog agapically and it will never become a person. I agree. And what is it that a dog will never have? In what way will a dog not be able to act as a person? Certainly dogs have consciousness. Certainly they have intelligence. Certainly they have emotion. Certainly they are able to enter into long-term social relationships. That’s exactly why we have dogs in our houses and we treat them as members of our family, right? But what is it a dog will never have? Well, the dog will never have moral agency. It will never have reflective rationality. It will never have the capacity for self-supiential self-transcendence. And that’s exactly what is still missing in the newborn. The newborn cannot act in any of those passions. So when I said that a newborn in that sense is not actually a person, that is what I meant. And that, again, is not lessening our moral responsibility towards the newborn. It is increasing it because, as I’ve just said, the newborn has the real potential to be a person and that thereby really obligates us to provide for them the information of agapic love that will actualize that potential into personhood. Now, there might be some other ways in which you might still object. You might say, well, human beings are in the image of God. Some people said that. And I don’t think that is fair to me. I made it clear that I’m not a Christian. And so simply asserting a doctrine to me is unfair to me. There’s no shared normativity between you and I, if that’s all that’s happening. I have no way of responding to that. If you’re not just asserting a doctrine, but you are making a metaphysical claim, the metaphysical claim might be something like, well, human beings have souls and animals do not. I would like to first pause here and note that that doctrine, or at least that assertion, because I want to make a distinction here between a doctrine and assertion, so I want to correct myself. That assertion has not also been morally innocent. It has served as a justification for a lot of cruelty and inhumane action towards animals. So we have to be careful about that. So this notion of a soul is a very problematic notion. And that overlaps with another question that people have about, you know, why my commitment to physicalism? And then that is usually discussed in connection to the phenomena of consciousness. And the idea is that there’s something inherently non-physical about us because we possess consciousness, and consciousness has something inherently non-physical about it. First of all, as I stated in the series, I respect this. I think this is a philosophically respectable position. So to say that I disagree with it is not to say that I hold people who hold that view in sort of intellectual dis-respute. Now, notice what’s happened in the history of this. The things that we try to claim were non-physical about us have been shrinking. If you go back a century or so, there was a, you know, the idea of a non-physical idea. Vitalism was the claim that there is something inherently non-physical about being a living thing. So that living things had to use Bergson’s famous phrase, an elan vitale, which sounds like an amazing hair shampoo, elan vitale, this vital spirit that was not capturable by any kind of physical description. Nobody that I know argues for vitalism anymore. And if you take a look at the polling, even Americans, Americans, one of the most religious countries in the world, there’s just an ever-increasing number of people who will admit or say that they accept that life is a purely biological phenomenon. And so the idea that, you know, that soul stuff was sort of integral to life has been fading. Then, of course, there was the attempt to sort of, well, there’s something special about intelligence, that we are specially intelligent, and that points again to something non-physical about us. As we’ve learned more and more about the capacity of our nearest biological cousins, even dogs, right, but let’s say bonobos and chimps, the claim that they don’t possess a lot of what we call our intelligence is becoming more and more untenable. And, of course, also as artificial general intelligence, the advent of that looms ever more pressingly. The claim that there’s something non-physical about intelligence is drifting away. And so, for example, if you look at a work of a theologian, I respect John Hicks. He, when he’s talking about the relationship between neuroscience and spirituality religion, he does not try to make an argument for a non-physical aspect of human beings in terms of life or intelligence. He zeroes in on consciousness. I am not going to now, in the next five minutes, try to solve the problem of consciousness. That is ridiculous and pretentious. What I want to say is why I think it is, why I have the position I have on consciousness. And I, because what I’m responding to here is the, some people have said, well, I’m just sort of dogmatically toeing the scientific line that, you know, it’s just a dogma. I don’t think that’s fair. And that’s what I want to respond to here. So I want to make it clear that I’m not claiming to give the knockdown account of consciousness or anything ridiculous like that. I’m merely responding to the claim that Breveke is saying these things because, you know, that’s just what the scientist has to say. So, famously, Chalmers distinguished between the hard and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy, it’s not easy, he just means it’s doable. The easy problem of consciousness is trying to explain what consciousness does. I won’t repeat the arguments I made in this series. I gave a bunch of convergence arguments that what consciousness seems to be doing is a special higher order version of relevance realization. So what he means, the hard problem is the nature of consciousness. How does something like consciousness emerge out of things that don’t possess consciousness like physical processes? And that seems to zero in on what are called the problem of qualia. Qualia are the experiential centers of consciousness. It’s the experience of blueness, right? And the idea is there’s nothing in the physics that gives us that qualitative aspect of our experience. Now, I agree that this is a very problematic thing. There’s two things I would say about this, is that people tend to lump together two different types of qualia. There’s what you might call adjectival qualia, like the blueness when you’re experiencing blue or that felt nastiness of pain when you’re experiencing pain. But there’s also adverbial qualia. This has to do with sort of that my experience is perspective. Time things have aspects for me, ways in which they are relevant to me and things are centered on me. So there’s a phenomenological field, there’s a perspectival. I’m the subjective center of that. And that sort of centeredness and aspectuality and temporality, I’m going to come back to this later in this series. I’m going to just gesture this argument. I think that can actually be explained in terms of the functionality of relevance realization, that the ability to generate a salience landscape and so forth will account for those adverbial things. So the sticking point for claiming the non-physicality to consciousness are these qualitative, these adjectival qualitative aspects of our experience. And there are good arguments, and Chalmers has made some and others, that we may not be able to give a physical explanation of them. I’m not going to go over all these arguments. I’m going to give one argument just as a demonstrative example. The argument goes something like this. Imagine two people who have an inverted spectrum. What that means is whenever I’m experiencing greenness in my subjective experiencing, they’re experiencing redness. And whenever I’m experiencing redness, they’re experiencing greenness. And the point about that is we will function exactly the same. We will both point at an apple and say green, because I’m using the word green. Suppose I’m privileged and green lines up with greenness. And then the other person is using the word green and it lines up with their qualia for redness. The point is we will act and say everything. There’ll be no causal behavioral difference between us. We will act exactly the same, but we will have different qualia attached to our actions and our experience. And then arguments along of this ilk are designed to show that two things could be causally and functionally identical and have fundamentally different qualia. And that means that there will be no physicalist explanation of qualia. As I’ve said, I think this only applies to adjectival qualia, not adverbial qualia. So let’s grant the possibility that adjectival qualia cannot be given a physical explanation. This is a very puric victory, because that argument that shows that qualia cannot be given a physical explanation also shows that qualia have no causal powers, that they have no determining difference-making capacity for your behavior. They cannot change your behavior. And this is part of the larger problem that if the mind is in some way non-physical, it can’t causally interact with the undeniably physical nature of your body. And so what you end up having to say, and this is of course what some philosophers find worrying, is that these qualia, which are so central to the claim that consciousness is non-physical, are epiphenomenal. They have no causal role. They have no causal function. They can’t affect your behavior, etc. So that is, as I say, that’s a very puric victory. It seems to me the opposite is true, that it is the felt nastiness of pain that is somehow affecting my behavior, my physical behavior. I touch the fire, I go, ow, and my hand moves back. That’s a physical motion. And so it seems more plausible to me that qualia must have some causal capacity, and therefore they should ultimately be capable of being given a physical explanation. Now, even if that’s not the case, and I keep admitting there’s many people I respect who would say, no, no, in the end, qualia are non-physical. I’ll accept their epiphenomenal status. I wonder whether or not they are actually constitutive of consciousness. So many people have reported and Forman has written books on this, and I’ve experienced myself that in a deep meditative state you can get to a state called the pure consciousness event. You’re not conscious of anything. You’re not conscious of yourself. You’re not conscious of redness or anything like that. It’s a pure consciousness event. So there are no adjectival qualia in your consciousness at all. That’s a defining feature of it. Now, what’s important is the adverbial qualia are still there. There’s a here-ness and a now-ness and a unity to your experience. So the adverbial qualia don’t go away. The adjectival qualia do. And that is, I think, just an incontrovertible argument that adjectival qualia are not necessary for consciousness, that you can have consciousness without them. And so, again, the arguments for their existence, random, render them at best epiphenomenal, and they do not seem to be necessary for consciousness. I doubt that they’re sufficient. If you just had disconnected blips of redness and blueness that were in no way bound together perspectively and could make no impact on your behavior, would that be consciousness? It’s very, it’s at least questionable. Now, all that being said, I have no illusions or delusions that I’ve convinced many of you. That has not been my goal. My goal has been to try to show that there are, there’s arguments, right? I think good arguments for the position that I’m taking. And then I’m not just espousing the position I’m espousing, because it’s, you know, it’s dogma, and we’re not allowed to trespass on the heresy of physicalism. That may be the case for some people, but I am not under that kind of dogmatic compulsion. I am making the claims I’m making for the reasons that I have articulated to you. So I try to answer sort of those two questions together, because although they’re distinct questions, they overlap and mesh in important ways. There’s another question, question or series of comments that I want to address, and then I’ll get to the tweeted ones. And then I’ll get hopefully to some of the live ones. This has to do with some people saying to me things along the following lines. They basically just sort of say, well, you know, why are you doing, it’s all just an illusion of meaning. There’s often a bit of a, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know these people directly or personally, but there’s, I sometimes sense that there might be some condescension in it, right? Isn’t it obvious that nihilism is true? And, you know, people are just eluded to talk about meaning, etc., etc. I want to respond to that, because I think that that position is a little bit more difficult than the people who espouse it realize. And the argument, I mean, I have to make an argument that I’ll make in much more detail later. I have to make it somewhat schematically and quickly, but the argument goes something like this. The argument is that the determination of truth depends on meaning. If I’m going to determine if something’s true, I have to be able to first understand its meaning. If I say to you, Google Frips often bippibop, is that true or false? You have no way of answering that, because you don’t know what I meant. And the meaning, of course, that I’m talking about, if we think that there’s something to empiricism, is of course not just the meaning of utterances, it’s that the meaning of my statements, right, that propositional meaning is somehow connected, right, to the structural meaning in my experience, right, the way I’m making sense of my environment. And so that if you sort of say, well, I, you know, I don’t either meaning and truth necessarily presupposes meaning for its establishment, it’s not quite clear what you’re now doing, because you can’t be asserting a belief. And to say, you know, well, there really aren’t beliefs, or we, right, I don’t know what that means. You know, to believe something is to believe that it’s true. If I believe acts, if I say, I believe that cats are a mammal, but I think the proposition cats are mammals are false, that’s just inconsistent. And so, insofar as you’re committed to asserting true beliefs, you’re committed to the indispensability of meaning. Now, you may bite the bullet, and you may say, you know, maybe a form of a limited materialism, you may say, well, I actually think that there are no such things as belief. How that isn’t self-contradictory is very difficult for me. But, you know, you may embrace a kind of comprehensive skepticism. You may say, yes, I get that what I’m doing is self-undermining, but I accept the self-undermining. And what I’m actually saying is it completely self-undermines, and there’s not, and I embrace a kind of absolute skepticism. I accept that as a possible position. But then what you have to, I would argue, what you have to agree to is that that position is not adopted on the basis of argumentation or evidence precisely because you have denied the possibility of argumentation, because you’ve denied belief and truth, and you derive the possibility of evidence, which is also required because evidence is defined as something that changes beliefs because of its potential truth, etc. So all of that being said, what that means is trying to assert that there’s no meaning is a very difficult position to sustain. Now, maybe you can, but simply asserting it or asserting it as obvious or that’s what we should conclude, I think is very problematic. Now, has our history led us to the prevalence of nihilism? Very much, and I acknowledge that. That’s part of what this series is saying. What you might be saying is, well, maybe there’s meaning, but the value of it is a delusion. Again, the value of truth and the value of meaning are bound up together, and if you value truth, then of course you’re required to value meaning, and so again, saying that that’s a delusion or illusion is very hard to maintain. Again, I am not trying to refute nihilism as a position. I’m trying to refute the idea that it is the obvious, clear, indisputable conclusion. We should just simply accept that meaning doesn’t exist or that we shouldn’t value it. I’ve tried to show why that is deeply, deeply problematic. I’ll try to, in the course of the series, advance other arguments as to both the indispensability of meaning and a way, I think, of understanding it that can fit it back into our ontology by not putting it so easily into our established epistemological categories of either subjectivity or objectivity, but that’s an argument that I’ll have to just promise because it’s coming in the series. That’s a lot of the heavy lifting, and I wanted to address those three questions because many people were bringing them up in one way or the other, and I was trying to show, and I understand, you can’t make all the arguments that you need to make when you’re making a statement, and so I’m now taking this opportunity to try and lay out some of the arguments for some of the claims I’ve made. Again, trying to show you that there is reason behind some of the claims I’m making. It’s not just a dogmatic adherence to a scientific worldview or that I swim with scientists, so I have to be quiet about certain things. So now I’d like to pass on to some of the questions that were tweeted, and we’ll shift gears a little bit here because these questions, I think, are, and this is not meant to be in any way dismissive or demoting. These questions tend to be a little bit more practical in orientation, not quite so philosophical and full-blown theoretical. One question is, how can one not be autodidactic in a place where there is no wisdom center? So yeah, and I take this question very, very seriously. I am, I will remain critical of autodidactism, but the fact that for many of us there are no wisdom centers often means we’re thrust into this. That is precisely one of the problematic aspects or dimensions of the meaning crisis, that we shouldn’t be autodidactic in the pursuit of wisdom, but we seem to be forced into it because of a lack of traditions, guides, and centers. I don’t have a good answer to that other than to tell you what I’m trying to do about it. I mean, so as I’ve said before, one of the gifts of these series is I get to, and I’m increasingly interacting with people who are setting up such centers and such communities. There’s real time and real talent being put into creating these things. And in a very preliminary fashion, and I’ve started to talk to some of these people, I’m trying to get them to network together and to join and to link up with other networks. We would like to create something like a virtual wisdom institute where we create a co-op that would help to vet these various groups, facilitate their development, facilitate their coordination, mutual support, and try and extend a network that would help to address this concern of giving people places where they can reliably and safely go to start pursuing wisdom and self-transformation in a less autodidactic fashion. And so, as I said, I’m trying what I can about that. I also plan to release, although this doesn’t completely address the autodidactic, but hopefully to help some instruction videos about various practices that I refer to, how would you go about trying to learn this practice? But hopefully the goal for that is to not to reinforce people staying in their homes and learning, but to get some preliminary skill development so that they then have the educated sensibility to go out and find various groups. So I take that concern seriously and there’s things I’m trying to do and planning on doing to try and address it. The next one is, are you a sports fan? It depends what you mean by that. I enjoy playing certain sports. I enjoyed playing soccer. I played it a lot in high school and things like that, and tennis and baseball. I enjoy playing soccer. I enjoy playing soccer. And tennis and things like that. I used to follow hockey for a while, but I’ve sort of fallen away from that. My life is just really incredibly busy. I don’t follow basketball. And I hope the Raptors win just because of my allegiance to Toronto and things like that. So not that much of a sports fan. I am, paradoxically, I’m very interested in sports psychology. I’m very interested in the psychology of sport and of coaching because that has been very informative for me trying to understand transformational experience and perspectival and participatory knowing. So although I’m not directly a sports fan, I enjoy going to a baseball game or going to a hockey game. I’m much more an enthusiast of sports psychology. So what’s my daily routine or habits? I was interviewed about this and I talked about it. I’m not quite sure what to say about that. My days have some constants in them, but there’s also parts that are very different. I usually begin the day, I have Meniere’s disease, as some of you may know. It’s an unfortunate disorder. It’s chronic and there’s no norepinephrine and what will periodically happen is my inner ear will fill up with fluid and that will put tremendous pressure on my inner ear and I’ll get ringing in the ear, pain, tremendous vertigo, vomiting. I would not wish it on my worst enemy or nemesis. I’ll take pain, really, really bad pain over that experience. So I’d start my day with having to do a series of exercises that are designed to try and moderate and alleviate the Meniere’s and then that usually leads into a whole set of practices I do. I do various forms of Tai Chi Chuan. I do some Chi Kung. I do some Pranayama, some yoga and then I do a Siddha meditative practice, contemplative practice and then I do some other other sapiential practices drawn from the neoplatonic tradition and then I generally do some Lektya Divina. I’m not reading the Bible and I mean no insult to Christianity, although there’s evidence that Lektya Divina is not specifically of Christian origin, so I don’t feel that that’s inappropriate. There seems to be some evidence that it goes back to a neoplatonic heritage. So I will often do a Lektya Divina. This is a special kind of reading that I’ve already talked about in the series and I’ll do that with some neoplatonic texts. I’ll do that with a Taoist text and some Buddhist texts and so I start the day with a series of practices that way and then my day varies considerably. Sometimes I’m teaching and other times I’m doing research. Sometimes that research involves discussing with other people. Sometimes it involves looking at the work that’s been done in my lab on some of the experiments we’ve done, the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab. So I have no, I hope, sorry that’s a very strong statement, right? I hope I have no delusions about how privileged I am. I mean I’ve worked very hard to get where I am, but I’m very lucky in that I get to do work that I find very deeply meaningful and to interact with colleagues and students that, you know, these are bright, bright, enthusiastic, interesting people and so I’m just extremely grateful for that. I acknowledge that. That leads to another question. So there’s a question about, you know, finding work which alleviates or engages in alleviating the meaning crisis. Are there institutions or organizations that are, you know, awful useful help for people who want to develop wisdom or essential psychotechnologies? There are. Again, that’s part, and again, I’m not the expert in this. I’m learning about it because I’m coming into contact with, you know, groups of people who are setting things. I had a wonderful discussion with a person from Scotland this morning and he does some really interesting work. He set up a charitable organization in which he’s teaching mindfulness to youth at risk, to prison inmates, to adults going, facing trauma and so, and he wanted to talk to me because he was considering ways about sort of broadening that to address the issues around the meaning crisis because he took, he was making a case, a case I agree with by the way, that a lot of the mental health issue is actually exacerbated and perhaps in some sense derivative from the mental health crisis is exacerbated and derivative from the meaning crisis. So there are, there are people who are setting up places where they teach, places where there is an integration of teaching and therapy, there’s places where there’s integration of teaching, therapy and community building, and so I, my hope, and there’s at least some preliminary evidence for this, is that this will be a growing sector of the economy. I think some of the more traditional sectors, there’s possible avenues within teaching, within therapy, there’s obviously all kinds of important work, you know, in which we’re doing care for people, palliative care in which all of this is important. Of course you may want to go into the, help facilitate some of the research on this, you know, research that’s going into psychedelics, altered states of consciousness, meaning in life, so that would be an academic thing. So that is my best answer right now. I understand that it’s not that satisfying an answer and like I said, I’m hoping that this will gel and grow as a part of, a part of our economy. It will need to because loneliness and meaninglessness are growing. We’re facing the aging of our population which tends to increase the possibilities of meaninglessness and loneliness and things like that. The society need heroes. Is there something regular people can trust inside or outside of ourselves that helps them to avoid being lied to mostly, you know, so-called saviors who take advantage of the need for meaning? So there’s a lot in that question that I think is, so the question is, and this is, this is part of the, you know, the distrust that has built up. And of course the fact that we still hunger for heroes is easily evidenced by, you know, the success of things like Endgame, Avengers movie and all the TV shows around the Marvel Universe, etc. We talk, we talk about that in the book, Chris and Phillip and I. So it’s a very real concern that people take advantage of our need. So here’s why I think we need, for lack of a better term, heroes. And, you know, we need, there’s increasing research, you know, Igor Grossman has good research and I’ll talk about this later in this series, the Solomon effect, that if you can move from, so you have a very difficult problem, it has to do with perspectival of knowing. And when people typically describe it, they describe it from the first person perspective. If that person re-describes the problem from a third person perspective, that often will help them to have insight into the problem. This lines up with it’s convergent with evidence from the Berlin paradigm studying of wisdom, that if when you’re trying to solve a wisdom task, you imagine talking to someone else, that will help you to better solve the problem. And of course, those things both line up with the fact that we improve our own metacognitive ability by internalizing the perspective other people have on us. So Leo Ferraro and I argued that one of the things that seems to be across many different wisdom traditions is that trains perspectival knowing to bring about these improvements in our capacity for insight and solving the problems that are most pertinent to us is a process of internalizing this age. We have to find figures who are wiser than us that we can imitate and emulate the way a child imitates an adult and that’s problematic, I’ll come back to that side, but analogous to that, so that we can develop these skills of reflective metacognition that will improve the cultivation of wisdom. Now of course, that is problematic because an adult child relationship is not the kind of relationship that should exist between adults and that’s where the sports psychology has also been valuable because the relationship between the coach and the athlete is also an analogy I would use. You can see that the athlete often has to go through this process of internalizing the coach and what that looks like in order to translate the knowledge into the perspectival knowing into the procedural skills and the participatory transformation of who they are in order to become the kind of athlete they want to become. So that gives us another sort of way of thinking about it and then there’s you know when it’s done properly there’s a teacher-student relationship so if we can try and you know use many different models the hope is that we could come up with a way of finding these people in a beneficial fashion. Jensun Kim one of my former students and current colleagues has done research within wisdom traditions and many people have many instances of very positive role models for their cultivation of wisdom so that is a very prevalent thing. That all being said this is precisely why we need what I was mentioning earlier we need some co-op non-hierarchical but co-op organization that’s mutually self-correcting mutually supporting for trying to vet institutions and individuals in some sort of way and also vet you know a curriculum a shared curriculum it could be diverse it doesn’t have to be a monolithic but some vetted shared curriculum precisely to address the possibility of you know abuse and I think the degree to which individuals can cultivate their skills in the ways that I’ve suggested may help with that process. So someone a question has here has advancements in machine learning causing caused any revision to your thesis the naturalistic imperative is unattainable. So that’s literally my PhD thesis about the naturalistic imperative and if somebody went out and read that congratulations you’re that’s really that’s very that’s that’s very very very very very very very very very very very that’s really that’s very that’s that’s that shows a real commitment to trying to understand something. Yes the answer to that is yes and so my more recent publications especially work that I’ve done with Tim Willicraff Blake Richards Leo Ferraro and others have pointed to the fact that these advancements I think have changed my mind towards the possibility of solving the naturalistic imperative precisely because the work that I’ve done with one of you know like Tim is one of Tim Willicraff is one of the you know stars of you know the work on machine learning and and both Tim and Blake were co-authors with me on the relevance realization paper the point I’m trying to make is that I think the the advances in machine learning can give us some of the theoretical tools for talking about an explanation of relevance realization that’s now in publication in terms of machine learning and I think and as I argued in my thesis that was the problem that was sort of resisting attaining a satisfactory account of the naturalistic a satisfactory solution to the naturalistic imperative so yes it has definitely changed it and I invite you to go out and seek some of those publications and you can see how the change works. Okay so I’m now going to try and move to some of the live questions I’ll do my best to get to all of them but I apologize if I can’t once again for somebody like myself who’s very socially phobic and who finds this kind of putting myself out there for lack of a better phrase deeply challenging very stressful for me that’s sort of bothering my ear right now in fact I’m deeply appreciative of the fact that and people of course welcome to disagree with me I’m deeply appreciative of the fact that people are supportive they’re respectful and and and they’re enthusiastic so again thank you thank you very much. So how did one question so one person was very interested in the pure consciousness event how does the body react to the pure consciousness event is there a response depends what you mean I mean to use a model ponti term the lived body is not present in the pure consciousness event because because there’s a there’s a sense in which I’m not present John Verbeke completely disappears now before that gets like oh no think about how much that overlaps with phenomena that’s not as sort of strange which is the flow state which I’ve talked about in the series when people are in the flow state they regularly and repudily report a loss of self-consciousness so it is not problematic and notice what what and this is this is something really really crucial I think is one of the fundamental insights of Buddhism I’m not promoting Buddhism here but we we we normally have this idea that that you know that our ego and our agency are identical that if I lose my ego that you know that that self-conscious I that self-conscious narratively constructed identity if I lose that I lose my agency and Buddhism is saying no that’s not necessarily the case and what the flow phenomena I think shows is that you can lose your ego precisely in a way that enhances your agency because age the enhancement of your agency is is exactly what’s happening in the flow state now the so your sense of you know your your the sense of being John right disappears it um there is that sense of having even a first person uh sort of presence to oneself you’re not even conscious of your consciousness so in in that sense the body is the lived body is not present to you in awareness but I imagine and I work needs to be done on this there’s another way that question could be interpreted what’s happening in your brain and what’s happening in your body physiologically and neurologically during the pure consciousness event I am deeply interested in this question I’m deeply interested in this question and I would like to know better what what what is going on I imagine there is significant deactivation newberg has in the book why why god won’t go away he has the hypothesis that the areas of the brain what he calls the orientation association area the areas of the brain that are sort of responsible for locating you physically in space are are being deactivated during these deep states of meditation and therefore your sense of being anywhere in particular is dissolving and you’re getting that that no awareness now that’s not the same as no here nowness which is really as I emphasized earlier which is very important and so I imagine there’s huge changes patterns of deactivation shifting of processing we know that psychedelic experiences get different areas of the brain to talk so in that sense I think there’s major probably unique responses happening neurologically and physiologically during the pure consciousness event it seems to it seems like in episode 19 you said that augustine philosophy was beautiful and maybe even complete does this mean that we need to get back to augustine’s philosophy in some way um that’s um I I did think that augustine’s uh philosophy was very beautiful in the way that he integrated uh christianity and uh platinus and the aristotelian narrative order via the incorporate the incorporation of platinus because platinus had already integrated aristotle uh with with playdough so I do think it’s very powerful in that it’s this really beautiful um admirable articulation of the uh of the narrative and normative and and nomological orders and as I argued that seems to line up very clearly with um the way people currently articulate uh you know scientifically the dimensions of meaning in life the purpose the narrative order uh coherence uh the nomological order and significance depth right um the normative order so in in the sense that we need to get a world view that can beautifully articulate um the three orders in a way that fits into the agent arena relationship of our world view and reaffords world view attunement um then there’s a sense in which that is what we need to do but I do not think we can return uh to augustine I uh I mean so the the series goes on to try and show the history of how the augustinian view uh was significantly undermined and that and and not just undermined uh philosophically as I tried to show there are the there are there’s always the creation of new psychotechnologies it was the invention of new psychotechnologies that created the changes in consciousness and cognition that you know promoted uh the two worlds mythology that you know came to a kind of fruition in augustine but there have been new psychotechnological developments since then and just like we can’t go back to the bronze age before the actual revolution because we cannot give up the psychotechnologies of literacy and numeracy and abstract symbolic thought I don’t think we can go back uh to the augustinian world view because we cannot give up these psychotechnologies that we now have like graphing in the scientific method etc etc the ones that I the ones that I lay out in this series um so in that sense I don’t think um we can we should or can go back to augustine I think and I’ve tried to portray this I think we should pay augustine deep respect and see what can we salvage from that augustinian view now I know that Jonathan Pajot and Paul VanderKlay will probably disagree with me on that uh and and I’m happy to discuss that with them so I’m just giving the reasons for the answer that I have given um what’s my favorite color um I’m not sure um um I don’t I don’t really I don’t really you know um I I tend to like a kind of soft blue a lot of times I guess um I don’t know if that reveals anything about me um but um interestingly enough so what I’m what are my feelings about existential threats um do you think humanity will survive um uh the coming century um so I don’t think I should comment in things on things for which I don’t have expertise just offering you my untutored and unsubstantiated or uneducated opinions is something that I don’t want to do um I do think that there is good evidence and good reason uh for um you know some very serious looming threats ecological uh you know socioeconomic potentially potentially military etc also there’s a potential that ai could go wrong in some important ways and that I have a little bit more expertise about and at some point I’m going to talk about that um and the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial rationality in uh the series so the only area I feel competent to address on is is that I do think that the meeting crisis exacerbates and interferes with our ability to respond to these other crises I’ve made this argument before and so I’ll briefly review it the idea is in order to answer these kinds of these very significant existential threats I think we have to bring about really radical transformations in consciousness cognition character uh communitas and that’s very problematic for us because many of us are post-religious and we distrust as some of the people in the live questions have shown religious institutions because of the history so we can’t make use of the thing that has in the past been responsible for bringing about that kind of comprehensive transformation in the threat of in the face of serious environmental and or historical change that’s religion so for many of us that’s not available to us but we also have significant distrust in the secular alternatives political machinery political ideological movements pseudo-religious ideological movements and we distrust those of course because of their history and the way they drench the earth and titanic blood so I do think what I can say is that if we do not come up with a significant response to the meaning crisis I think that’s that there is reason to believe that will radically increase the probability that we will succumb to one of these deep threats and that is of course one of the urgent motivating factors for why I’m doing all of this and why so many people and it is now so many people I’m aware of me so many people are trying to bring about the changes it of course is I think a very sad state of affairs and I’m not taking a political side here I’m making a meta-political comment it is a very sad state of affairs that these issues and the meaning crisis issue and its attendant you know issues of mental health and loneliness these are just not central concerns in the political arena and that means I think isn’t it a plausible conclusion that there is no political solution as the police said that it’s going to have to be a cultural solution in some powerful way and so that’s the hope is that what I see happening culturally these groups and these movements will take well they’ve taken root they will grow and flourish and I hope I can help that one one sign of hope is people will good evidence they will go through radical transformation they will suffer radical diminishment in their standard of living and other things if they have good confidence that their meaning in life will be enhanced so that means we do have a motivational engine if we can if this becomes a culture and that’s an important if then it does have important motivational purchase on people because if people have good reason to believe that they that sacrifices and standard of living etc. would would would be commensurate with you know increase in wisdom and meaning people will there is good reason to believe that people will do that so that’s the best I can say about that question okay you talked about poetry that has a contemplative meditative aspect to it especially when spoken aloud any recommendation fit this criteria I think a lot of poetry does and and and I I think I mean there’s some poetry that is just meant to be recited you know I I’m a big fan of E.E. Cummings you know with up so floating mini bells down just saying that the musicality of it is just a serious part of the poem but I mean I find that the musicality of poetry is is I find it in a lot of the poetry that I read and it just and that’s what happened in that in that poetry party it just comes out when it is recited and shared right and recitation means you know said aloud in the company of other people that are giving caring attention to it I think a lot of poetry would be improved by that one of the things I’m going to do I’m in the process of starting to do is just you know collect a YouTube playlist of poetry that I think is expressive and reflective and responsive to the meeting crisis and I will I will eventually make that available and start adding to it on an ongoing basis kind of analogously to the way I do the book recommendations the for on on on Twitter for people who are interested in responding to the I have one more question I’ll try and make it a lighter one do you like dancing so that’s that’s a that’s an interesting one so I’m highly socially phobic and so in general I don’t like dancing and I guess this is also sort of generally a feature of men we don’t like dancing but that’s really exacerbated for me in social phobia now I do like I deeply like isn’t the right verb I deeply appreciate and savor the dance like aspects of doing Tai Chi Chuan for example or or yoga and that leads to a funny story my my partner she loves dancing and I’ve gone to dance with her and she’s Persian and so there was Persian dancing and it was like at first it’s oh no what am I going to do it’s going to be terrifying but what I found was all I had to do was sort of modify some Tai Chi movements and postures and I was I was able to come off as a passively good Persian dancer so that was one of the best dance experiences that dancing experiences I’ve ever had in my life so unfortunately we’re running out of time and and there’s a lot of questions that people have sent and and that are still coming through I will try and gather them together again and you know put them you know you know take them forward into the next give some of them I can’t give all of them I’m sorry give some of them pride of place when we come to the next question and answer session I will try to mention some of these if possible when I’m being interviewed going for for the future I take seriously my responsibility to try and respond to your questions as extensively as I possibly can ah and so you can we you can pose those questions are with hashtag meeting crisis and also hashtag ask for a vacant okay so both of those so that’s our time for tonight and you know and there’s a lot of people that are you know coming in and saying hi and shouting out and again I I wish I could respond to that a lot of people are thanking me for my time I want to thank all of you and I always do and I need you to all believe that it is always sincere I want to thank all of you for your time and attention thank you very much and I hope you all have a good evening