https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UWPGnjID4bY
Welcome everyone, we’re here for our monthly patron Q&A. Thank you very much for adapting to the change in the timing. We’ve had work schedule changes and so we need to move the Q&A’s to Sunday. So they’ll be on Sunday afternoons, the third Sunday of the month, 3 to 4 p.m. Eastern time. Okay, so let’s get to right to these questions. There’s a bunch of good questions and I’m looking forward to taking a look at them right now. All right, so first is from a Lillia Patron and she asked, do you think it would be important to synchronize the Verveckian definition of rationality with the economical rational actor? Theory one, yes. And so there’s been a recent voices with Verveckia, I believe it was, was it last Sunday? Where was myself, Greg Enriquez, who many of you have seen me interact with, Alexander Bard and Alexander Yilong. And Alexander was representing the economic model, explicitly so, account of rationality. And the discussion, I think, was very vibrant, very useful. We all agreed that it was progress. We all agreed we needed to continue to continue the discussion. And the main core was exactly that, about trying to integrate my account of rationality as systematic and reliable and systemic addressing of self-deception. And then the economical model, which tends to be a utilitarian model and much more oriented towards a computational account of value and probability. And of course, I have criticisms of that account following L.A. Paul and calling Agnes Callard, sorry, that that account can’t deal with transformative experiences with some of the major aspirational decisions we make in our lives. And that’s why Agnes Callard proposes that we need a new account of rationality, an additional account called Proleptic Rationality. So all of that is missing from the economical account. And that was part of the discussion. And we’re going to return to that. And then we got into some deeper issues that have to do ultimately with sort of a fundamental ontology and whether or not value is a purely subjective thing or, as I was trying to argue, ultimately a transjective thing. And that therefore we need to move out of an ontology that is so anthropocentric in this generation of value as standard economic models. And then, of course, that also comports well with the fact that we ourselves have to take in, have to incorporate more of our biology and our biological embeddedness into our account of how we are rational or irrational. So I don’t think we’ve come to a place where those two things, those two positions on rationality have been reconciled. I can say honestly that they have been put into very good dialogical discussion. And we’re going to continue the discussion at this more ontological level. And I want to get back more to the transformative and aspirational aspects of rationality that are left out in the standard model. And I think it’s important. I think it’s important first because the economic model is a pervasive model and it’s closely tied to the computational model. And I therefore think it inherits a lot of the defects of the computational model. But it also has some significant strengths. And importantly, it is the model that is used in the governmental and business world. And therefore, being able to bridge between that model and the more ancient model of rationality may help make those domains and spheres of influence more receptive to the idea of wisdom and its relationship to rationality, as opposed to the often morally neutral and virtual, I was going to say virtually ignorant. And that’s true. But in many ways, an ignorant of virtue account of rationality that is at work today. Also, I think the model that I’m proposing makes room for what Nazik has called symbolic utility. The fact that a lot of things are valuable, not because of any direct utilitarian goal satisfaction, but having to do much more again with the broader topic of meaning and meaning in life. So there’s a lot there. And all I can say is I’ve begun work on addressing that issue. And I’m hoping to continue that dialogue and keep it going. So here’s a second question from an anonymous patron. The Buddha had a list of games, quote, he would not play and that his disciples should likewise not play because he believed them to be a cause for negative. Negligence, end quote, including board games, ball games, dice games, hopscotch, charades, playing pretend with carts, plows, windmills, bows, etc. Apparently this is on Wikipedia. Games Buddha would not play. What about games was the booty Buddha wary of? That’s a hard question for me to answer, since I don’t know if I can totally put my mind in the place of the Buddha. But perhaps I can answer that first question by answering the second question. How should we interpret, recontextualize his teachings or his intentions today? So I don’t know if the issue per se is gaming, but games that seem to be popular, attractive to people, and therefore could be the cause of negligence. And I take it that what’s crucial about that is the Buddha’s concern that human beings can be overcome by the pursuit of entertainment. And the thing about entertainment is it’s this very interesting thing we have created where we engage a lot of the meaning making machinery, even often at a Darwinian survival level, a lot of games of chance play with our predictive ability and are trying to anticipate and deal with surprise, competition, etc. And so we can think of video games today as a good analog. And the thing about video games is they often address a lot of the missing meaning needs of people, giving them a narrative order, a nomological order and a normative order. The problem is, so the people while people are getting meaning in life within the game and flow within the game. So while they are reciprocally opening within the game in their life in general, they are reciprocally narrowing. And this is deeply, deeply problematic for individuals. And I think we could then recontextualize the Buddha’s question to be basically this. Are we getting addicted to entertainment in a way that is detrimental to our agency and our aspirations to wisdom? And given the research we have on video games and social media, the answer to that seems to be, I mean, it’s not absolutely, you know, convinced convincing yet, but it’s progressing steadily in the direction that the answer to that question is yes, we are in a very real sense entertaining ourselves into a kind of vulnerability to the manipulation of political and economic forces that wish to manipulate us for their benefit and not ours. I think that’s becoming increasingly clear. This stuff is causing mental health issues. And so I suppose the question the way I would maybe I’m just worried about hubris here, but I would reframe what the Buddha said is it’s not entertainment per se, because the Buddha was very clear that if you simply are rejecting something, that’s just negative attachment and you haven’t properly processed some challenge. So maybe a better maybe in that context, we could say the better question to ask is how how much mindful reflection have we all done on the place and role and power of entertainment in our lives? How much once we get a clear understanding of that, is that impacting on our cultivation of wisdom and our character? And then, of course, we would also need to put that into, you know, reflective equilibrium with the covid situation that we’re in and that many of us are starving for kinds of social interaction. And that perhaps right now, the only way those can be met is through the earthsats, you know, surrogate of entertainment. So I, unlike the Buddha, don’t think we should avoid entertainment at all costs. Again, I’m really worried about hubris here. I think it’s more the issue of can you use it judiciously and can you properly budget? So here I would take an epicurean response rather than a Buddhist response about, well, I’m evaluating this pleasure. Is it a necessary pleasure? Is it a natural pleasure? And then, you know, is it an unnecessary and unnatural? And ask yourself, well, how how much is this actually needed for biology and mental health? There’s some good evidence that entertainment and play are important for the brain. And so I think it’s legitimate to say it’s a natural need. It’s not necessary the way food and water and shelter might be, but sociability is really important to us. It’s a very important need. So I think ask yourself this question, and I don’t know how to answer it in general. I think perhaps we’d all have to answer it individually is, you know, how much is this necessary? How much is this going beyond what is naturally and needed by me in order to maintain my mental health and my cognitive flexibility? And if you’re going seriously beyond that, ask yourself, how much is this detrimental to my agency? How much am I making myself vulnerable to manipulation? And how much is this detrimental to my character? And those two those two questions are, of course, also related. So that’s my best answer there. So next question. Here we go. And Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions Are Made, She Turns My Former Thinking About the Filtering of My Sensual Perceptions Upside Down. In order to reach allostasis for the body, the brain predicts what is going to happen and what the body will be needing. Only after this, the sensual perceptions come into play. If you are lucky, this means that assimilation is the default mode. Is this the core of our predicting what my body needs? And then in parentheses, we listen to the 50 lessons from March 20th to March 2021, and it helped us over this time and produced meaning in so far as we can much better sort things out. Well, great. So this is from the patron, Jovo. So what’s going on there in general is the question about the integration of this kind of model that Barrett is using and the RR, the relevance realization theory. And what I can say is I am working explicitly right now and in detail and in depth. And we’re about 80% of the way through with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller to integrate relevance realization theory with this particular model that Barrett is using, which is called the predictive processing model, ultimately based on the work of Friston and then additional work done by Andy Clark and my co-author and former student Mark Miller. And what I can say is that the two theories really need each other. They fit together very well together and that the relevance realization part, the relevance realization theory will help to refine a particular aspect of the predictive processing model, because in the end, the predictive processing model faces the question of what should the system predict and and and how many things should it predict? At what spatial temporal scale should it predict them? So should I be predicting objects just in front of me? Should I be predicting what’s going to happen tomorrow? Ten years down the road, should I be predicting things that are happening, you know, two or three miles away? And your answer can’t be, well, predict all of them, because that’s combinatorial explosive. And so in the predictive processing model, there’s what’s called precision weighting, which is a way in which you try to give extra weighting, extra value, extra valuing time and effort to particular kinds of predictions. And so you can see right there, that’s where the predictive processing model and the relevance realization model come into close, close proximity and why there’s basically an integration just ready to be made there. So Jobo, we’re hoping to have that paper done this year, maybe even by the fall. And that will give you, I think, a much more sophisticated answer to that question about the specific thing of motion. Mark Miller’s main, he does many things. I don’t want it to sound like he’s only, but one of his main theoretical innovations is integrating predictive processing with affect and moving from a computational model of predictive processing. And by the way, Friston is also in agreement with this, as is Clark, as is everybody else, moving away from a computational to an embodied cognition version of predictive processing in which affect plays a significant role, especially in that precision weighting. And as some of you know, I’ve been arguing for a very long time, relevance realization is not cold calculation. It is affect laden because it has to do with the risky decision about how to spend your valuable, precious, limited resources and to what degree you should arouse your energy and move your mind and body in problem solving, which is all what affect and emotion have to do with. So there’s a lot there and there’s a lot coming. So I hope that answers your question. Next is a question from Rob Gray, who I get to talk to frequently and Rob has been inviting me into his circling group. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much for that, Rob. Rob asked the question, how can art, music, dance, even sports or crafts contribute to a good life? Is there any good for a cardio science, especially the embodied aspect or other writers about how these kinds of activities contribute to broader benefits in personal or social life or on the role of aesthetics and crafting in a thriving society? So there’s here, Rob, I want to show you a book that I have I’ve ordered. I’ve not yet read, but I’m about to read it. I’ll just show it to you and then I’ll read out what it says. There’s a book called Fans, How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthy and More Understanding. And the reason I bought the book is because I heard him in an extensive interview and his basic thesis, which I think is just so consonant with a lot of my own work, is that what sports sports are basically secular religions. They basically activate all or many of the same processes and functions that are activated by religion and therefore contribute strongly to increasing our sense of community, our ability to pick up on other people, our ability to connect, our ability to connect to something beyond ourselves, to move around in a non-literal time, a metaphorical time, because the time within a sports arena is not real time. It’s more like the ancient time of the continuous cosmos in which patterns, right? And every year there’s the Grey Cup and so and the Super Bowl, et cetera, et cetera. And so there’s a lot in sports that I think needs to be discussed more. There’s some very good cognitive science emerging between coaching and embodied cognitive science. Some of the discussions I’ve had with Nick Winkleman and his work on language of coaching and, of course, Rafe Kelly, all of his stuff on poor core and embodied cognition and meaning making. So there’s that about the cog-sci of art, music, dance in general. Of course, there’s good cog-sci on how these things can contribute to the flow state, especially jazz music and sports. I think there’s some on dance and related things like rock climbing, Tai Chi Chuan, martial arts. And, of course, flow is conducive to optimal experience, optimal performance, enhanced well-being, enhanced meaning in life. So there’s a lot that these things do contribute to good life. I’d be interested in knowing. I haven’t seen any research on whether or not certain kinds of crafts. I’m interested, for example, in whether or not origami is conducive to some important kind of, because there’s, because of gesture, right, and its connection with cognition, and also because of folding and making, very complex spatial navigating, and the fact that it’s being done for its own sake, autopoetically and not teleically, not for some external goal. I see if that makes any significant contribution. And, of course, you should know there’s lots of evidence that things like music create what’s called cognitive reserve. They enhance your overall cognitive performance and give you resistance to dementia and Alzheimer’s, things like that. So I think Aristotle’s right. Well, Plato would say this, too. Plato would argue this for this also in the public, both Plato and Aristotle. This goes towards something that Rafe Kelly is really talking a lot about that’s very good, which is reintegrating the gymnasium with the academy. So each informs the other in a mutually affording fashion. But Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics would argue that a good life is one that contains art and music, dance, sports. Perhaps crafts. So there, I hope that’s helpful, Rob. It’s an excellent question, as your questions always are. Next is from Mike McElroy. I just finished reading Fred Evans’ 1993 book, Psychology and Nihilism, A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind. I have not seen this, and I want this book. I want this book right now. So thank you, Mike, for like, wow. I found it to… This is Mike, not me. I found it to be a brilliant history and assessment of philosophy, cognitive psychology and modern culture in general. His work fits with yours to a degree, with maybe some disagreement over Plato’s and the postmodern role in encouraging or fighting against analytic views of psychology. While a good disagreement always moves things forward, Socrates would like that. Just wondering if you’ve read it. No, I haven’t. And what you might think of it. I want it. I think you’re bang on. It sounds deeply convergent with my own work. Whether it stands up well as a critique or is a bit outdated, given the revolution in cognitive psychology. I think I… Here’s my prediction. Mike, I think it’s going to still be relevant to cognitive psychology, because cognitive psychology is still predominantly making use of computational cognitive science. I think it will probably foreshadow a lot of moves about meaning and sense making that have come to prominence in 4E cognitive science and that were neglected in computational cognitive science. So thank you for that. I’m definitely going to look up that book. So, yeah, I’m going to ask Ammar to make sure that question gets saved so I can track that book down and order it for myself. It sounds amazing. So, Oistin Siverstein, good to see you again. Ask a question. What are your thoughts on prayer as a psychotechnology? And how does it relate to mindfulness, meditation, contemplation and prajna? Thanks. So this is something that I’m actually in the middle of. Revising my attitude towards this. You all know that I have a lot to say about mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prajna. But with all the work I’ve been doing on inner and outer dialogues, and so I have, with the help of my one of my all time great collaborators, partners, dear friends, Christopher Mastro Petro, we have both undertaken the practice of what’s called internal family systems therapy, which is a burgeoning therapy right now, gaining a lot of advocates and adherents and some increasing empirical evidence for its efficaciousness. It’s a post Jungian model in which you learn to dialogue with sort of sub-personalities within the psyche. And then there’s related work by a guy named Raph that my good friend Anderson Todd has put me on, called ally work, where you learn to interact with sort of what I guess Jung would call more archetypal patterns of self-organization in psyche and get into dialogue with them. And so if you think about these things mythologically, which is not the same thing as scientifically, but it’s also not the same thing as in some sort of superstitious fashion, if you think about them, then you could think of prayer as a way in which we dialogue and think about this in a fully platonic sense. In Plato, this all this IFS and all this stuff goes back to Plato. Plato talked about thinking as dialoguing of the soul. He talks about the different parts of the soul, getting into proper relationship with each other or different parts of the psyche, if you want a secular term. But here’s the idea that also is drawn from Plato as I modify that inner dialogue that affords an improvement in my connectedness, my coupling with reality, my dialogue with the world, my transjective agent arena relationship with it. And so maybe something like this is possible as a thought. Could I get into a dialogue with what Jung might call the self, what IFS calls itself, what other traditions have called the ground of being or your soul or your Atman, right? Could I get into a dialogue or relationship with that that would then put me into relationship with that, with sort of the deepest grounding patterns that are humanly accessible to me in reality? What I’m saying is the degree to which I can conform to the ground of my psyche improves my ability to conform to the ground of reality, perhaps. And then the dialogue within also becomes a reciprocity without. And maybe that would seem like talking to, and I mean this respectfully, so I’m trying this on, what if God is exactly the depth, that thing, we get this kind of alignment with that kind of alignment and so everything is resonating together so that we see from our depths into the depths of reality or we see from deep perennial patterns of self-organization within to help us realize deep perennial patterns without. I mean, so if I could talk to the force of Eros within me and that reconfigured so I had a less infantile, a less anxious attachment relationship to my Eros and I could more appropriately relate to the Eros I see without me and those were now more properly calibrated and tuned to each other. Is that kind of like Eros the god? And isn’t my dialogue with it something like prayer? So for many of you, you’re going to find that disappointing because it’s not a view of prayer that involves talking with supernatural beings. But for some of you, you might find that valuable. I do know that there’s a difference in the cognitive processing. For example, if you do brain scans on people who are believing Christians and take a look at the parts of their brain that are active when they’re praying to God or to Jesus and then compare that to when they’re praying to Santa or talking to Santa Claus in their head, you get very different patterns of brain activity. The brain activity in the first are much more how the brain is organized when it’s talking to another person. And of course, we all talk to other people in our heads and hear voices, oh no, wait a minute, every night. It’s called dreaming. Every night you talk to voices that you are hearing outside of yourself and as real and as disclosing some aspect of yourself to yourself. So I think there’s a way of thinking about it. You can tell my hesitation and my caution because we’re starting to trespass on ground that is so rife for manipulative superstition and I’ll pray. You get the prosperity gospel of the United States and that absolute bullshit and the secret and if I just wanted or pray for it, I’ll become wealthy and I’ll get all the sex I want or whatever. There were millions of people praying in Auschwitz, sincerely, passionately. I’m confident the deepest passion they could possibly muster for liberation and it did not come for years. Millions of them died, their prayers unanswered. We should not, so we have to be very, very careful to not become hubristic about this and attribute to ourselves and our prayers powers that they do not have. On the other hand, given everything I previously said, I think there’s a mythological interpretation of prayer that is completely consonant with emerging cognitive science that could explain a powerful efficacy of prayer in affording anagagé and thereby affording wisdom and maybe we shouldn’t ever pray for anything other than wisdom because if you’re praying for anything other than wisdom, you’re ultimately probably, myself included, sliding towards vice and doing something vicious and foolish. So there, that would be my best attempt to answer that really interesting question that’s at the cutting edge of my own current participant observation, my attempts to, again, get into the transformative process. I’m pursuing this work not only scientifically but personally, psychotherapeutically and also to try and afford an evaluation of it as a psychotechnology. I think that IFS can be well integrated with CBT and EFT to give us a very powerful ecology of therapeutic practices that people should in general consider using and so something at least deeply analogous to prayer strikes me as something that we would find within both IFS and to a degree also because you use things like the empty chair technique in EFT which are very much like prayer in both IFS and EFT. So with all of, sorry, I got a little passionate there at one point. If we could take a humble, not hubristic, and scientifically open-minded but nevertheless rationally reflective stance, we might have a way in which we could exact, hopefully respectively, prayer as a psychotechnology. So that’s what I would propose. Okay, so Ari Fisher, first-time questioner here. Great, Ari, good to see you. Great, good to meet you. What do you think of Jonathan Peugeot’s assertion that the ontological structure of reality actually looks more like a hierarchy of beings as we find in many religious traditions rather than Plato’s hierarchy of abstract concepts? I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a great question. I think that’s a great question. Rather than Plato’s hierarchy of abstract concepts. I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you or your question. This, of course, I’m very familiar with this point of contention between myself and Jonathan. And as many of you know, Jonathan and I are like, we’re friends and we both value and respect each other’s work. I want to take a moment here before I address Ari’s question. I have to read the rest of his question, address it. But I was talking to my partner last night about this and I just, Sofila King, who, and if you haven’t seen her channel, please take a look at it, Quality Existence. It’s interesting because it’s actually relevant to this question because Persig is basically with his novelization of his metaphysics of quality trying to do something a little bit like what Peugeot is talking about with respect to Plato. So I’m talking about Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. But Sofila King talked about this corner of the internet as people like herself, myself, Jonathan Peugeot, Paul Vander Clay, JP Marceau, Mary Cohen, Karen, who’s running the meeting code, Sam, the Discord servers, Rebel Wisdom, Jordan Hall. I just, I really appreciate this corner of the internet. I think we’re all making something that is going in a very interesting direction. But of course, there’s bumps along the way and there’s issues that don’t, you know, where things don’t go quite the way they should. But general overall, that the whole thing and the way it’s progressing, you know, and other people like Guy Sendstock that get involved and Christopher Pietro and there’s just, I’m not trying to take credit here, so please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. But I did not expect this to emerge the way it’s emerging. And yet it is, and it’s growing and it’s vital. I just, I’m really grateful for it. You know, I wouldn’t have met and, you know, JP and, you know, Sam and all these people, Sam Adams. So anyways, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for that. One should be appreciative when one discovers a home that one has not expected to come to. And that’s all I wish to do right now. Okay, so let’s return back to Ari’s question. I haven’t read any Plato, so I’m just quoting here. I don’t know actually what Plato says, but Jonathan seems to insist the categories of being beyond the human also have will and volition. Thank you for serving goodness and truth with your big brain. Okay, you’re welcome. So this has to do with some very, so there’s just a lot of good work. Hang on, I want to recommend something. I got to go off camera. I’ll be back in one sec. Sorry, I hadn’t anticipated this, but so I’m diving. So as you’ve heard many of me argue, and there’s a recent video with Paul and JP and myself, and you know, and you know, I keep coming back to the point. And this was definitely true in my own case that a lot of what I find deeply valuable in Christianity, especially something like Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the Neoplatonism. Everybody acknowledges the deep interconnections between Christianity and Neoplatonism. But I want to recommend a couple books to you. Here’s this book, Returning to Reality, Christian Platonism for Our Times by Paul Tyson. Excellent book. Really interesting, philosophically well written, and he’s arguing for the viability of Christian Platonism. And he starts actually by pointing out how much Platonism there is in Lewis and in Tolkien. And stuff that, you know, and soon as he said that, I go, of course, like there’s in the silver chair with, you know, with Plutolglum in the Narnia Chronicles, and they’re trapped in a cave with an intent to get to the bottom of the sun. And he’s like, oh, my gosh, of course, that’s Plato, right? And coming out of the cave or Tolkien, the ring of power, that’s Plato, Gaiji’s ring of invisibility that would allow you to be immoral and do whatever you wish. Right. And so like and then but what he’s properly arguing for is an account of the viability of Christian Platonism today. And then, of course, there’s this excellent anthology, excellent anthology, basically arguing, you know, comprehensive history for Christian Platonism. And so he’s arguing for the viability of Platonism today. And then, of course, there’s this excellent anthology, basically arguing, you know, comprehensive history for Christian Platonism. And so, oh, sorry, I want to get one more book. So sorry, this last book is not on Christian Platonism. This is the most technical of the books, but this book is bloody brilliant. This is Platonism and the Objects of Science. This is the most technical of the books, but this book is bloody brilliant. This is Platonism and the Objects of Science by Scott Berman. And Berman, it’s basically arguing that the best account we have of how we’re able to do science is a Platonic account. So that the the nominalist account, the contemporary and ancient Aristotelian counts, the constructivist accounts, he has demolishing arguments for them. He basically argues why the Platonic version. Nobody’s going to say, well, that’s it, it’s finished. But what this says is, like, if you think that a Platonic stance is not intellectually respectable or viable, read this book and tell me if you still think that. So here’s the idea that there’s actually the real potential for a tightly, vigorously argued, rigorously argued integration between science and playfulness. And then that, of course, brings up the potential of the religious integration. Now, of course, the point I often make with Paul and JP and Jonathan is, of course, Neoplatonism also integrates into Islam with Sufism, into Judaism with Kabbalah. Right. And even across time and culture, the Platonists are very much interested in the Platonic. And even across time and culture, you see it being integrated by the Kyoto School with Zen Buddhism. So that leads me to how to answer your question, which is a lot of these variations vary, as you may expect, on how personalistic they take the Platonic. I’ll just use the general name, the Platonic forms. These are the overarching principles that are discussed in Platonism. Christian Platonism tends to see them as, as Jonathan would argue, as full of will and volition. There’s other forms of Neoplatonism that do and don’t. It doesn’t seem to be the case for Platonists that they have something analogous to will or vision, but maybe something like that in Proclus. So what I’m saying is if you do a good historical overview of this, you’ll see that there is, there are occurrence that move towards seeing powers and principalities. Sorry, better way of saying it, seeing principles and laws as powers and principalities, and those powers and principalities as also something analogous to persons. Some of you can see the debate I had with Mary Cohen and JP about this. Not the debate. No, there was much affection, a mutual affordance, dialogus with JP and Mary Cohen. And where you also get versions of this that do not seem to push towards personalism, if you’ll allow me to coin that term. And then this puts me towards John Hicks powerful argument that I keep coming back to again and again and again, and is one of the cornerstone arguments for my non-theism, which is, he calls it the fifth dimension. He calls it the fifth dimension. There’s a spiritual dimension to reality, let’s say, right? And I don’t mean anything supernatural about that. What I mean is there is something about reality that transcends the everyday world of the sensual perceptual, and our relationship to that in important ways is valuable for the cultivation of wisdom and meaning in life. So leaving that bay, because I don’t need to get clear, I don’t need a precise definition right now, because that’s exactly the point. In fact, trying to give a precise definition may be a mistake with respect to Hicks’ argument, because Hicks’ argument is that the spiritual dimension, if we take a look at the unresolvability of the arguments. So we tend to get focused on our argument and the other person’s argument and our metaphysics, and then Hicks says, look even at the debate between the theists and the atheists. And nobody’s been able to resolve it. I know individual atheists and individual theists think it’s resolved. I’m not denying the sincerity. But if you step back and look, you know, it is intellectually respectable to be on both sides still. Again, both sides will disagree. I’m sorry, but that’s just the case. And also between Protestants and Catholics or between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox or between Christians and Muslims and blah and blah and blah. And this, of course, is the classic pluralism argument. We have unresolvable, ever increasing pluralism, which is not what you would expect if there was a definitive decision about whether or not that spiritual dimension is personal or impersonal. But Christianity and Islam and Judaism, personal, yes. But Taoism and huge aspects of Vedanta and Buddhism, not personal. Oh, but there are gods in Buddhism, but they’re irrelevant. That’s like they are irrelevant to enlightenment. That’s that’s the whole point. They themselves do not. In fact, they are often in need of enlightenment themselves. Right. And of course, in Zen and other things, there aren’t any. And then there are beings that are sort of halfway like Bodhisattvas. The point I’m making, and this is Hicks’s point, and I think it’s a profound point, went like right like this into me. It’s a meta argument. What’s the best account we have for unresolvable, ever expanding pluralism of a relationship to the spiritual domain, which is that reality is in a profound sense ambiguous about this. It’s ambiguous about this. It’s ambiguous about this and attempting to claim you can resolve it is to say you have somehow got a position on this that will resolve what has never been resolvable and will end the proliferation of pluralism, which seems implausible to me. And then I buttress that Hicks argument with an argument from Nelson Goodman, which is there is no. There is no formalism by which we can decide whether or not two things are similar or not. Look, what I mean, what we’re basically saying is there’s nobody says, you know, those upper levels are exactly people. They’re analogous to us. They’re similar to us in having will and volition. Well, the problem with similarity, if any of you have watched my series, is that right. And I assume many of you have right. And this is Goodman’s point. Any two objects are similar or any two objects are as dissimilar as we choose. Because any two objects share an indefinitely large number of truly share properties and any two objects, no matter how similar we might think they are, have an indefinitely large number of true properties that they don’t share. We choose. See, when we’re talking about similarity, we equivocate between a logical meaning of similarity, which would which would mean everything is both similar, maximally similar and maxly dissimilar to everything else, which would make similarity totally useless. Or psychological similarity, which is we choose out of all of the properties of a thing, a very small subset that’s relevant to us of this thing A and of all the properties of B, we choose a very small subset of properties that’s relevant to me B. And then we notice that A and B match and those are important to us. And then how are you going to legislate what should be relevant to people. That’s what concerns me. What should be relevant, you should treat it as a person. The similarity is one that demands that you treat it as a person. Really? How would you establish that in a non-circular fashion, given that the evidence coming from the universe is so perpetually ambiguous. I happen to think that that advocates for a position called non-theism, which is that we should stop, we should reject the framework shared by theism and atheism, by both perennialism and relativism. We should reject those frameworks and try to get a relationship to the sacred that views that ambiguity, not as something to be ignored or pushed to the background, but as something central to be celebrated. The universe is inexhaustibly available to us and a perpetual fount of insight and reconnection. And I’ve been trying to argue for a non-theistic account of the sacred that relates to that. So that’s a very long answer to Jonathan’s question, Jonathan’s objection. I’m sure he would object to my objection and I’m sure the discussion we would have would be very fruitful and I would look forward to it. But I do think very strongly, for the reasons I’ve tried to articulate, I hope carefully and clearly, that both the theists and the atheists are wrong in a deep way when they try to resolve that ambiguity and say, no, the Platonic forms are definitely impersonal. No, the Platonic forms are definitely personal. It’s probably more like either one of those gives us some aspect that is transcended by both, kind of like stereoscopic vision, and we should take an evolving relationship to ours, to what is sacred as the norm, rather than a resolving relationship, which I think is not got any good reason to believe when you step out of your own particular commitments. You look at the meta argument. I think the attempt to resolve this is proven to be futile. And that’s my answer. So, so remember, right from now on, right now, we are doing only, these are only questions and answers from Q&A for patrons. We’re going to, we’re doing this to fit more patrons in because these are people who are devoting time and money, and therefore are, their questions are being given priority in this form. We’re going to try and create another form, probably not as frequently, but where we do deeper questions, patrons are asking, sorry, I misread the thing, and this is allowed patrons to ask deeper questions that are general public. I misread this, typically because again, like I said, patrons have devoted more time and more attention, and therefore their questions often, as you’ve seen, require more complex answers. There are venues, that’s what I was, I was confusing. There are venues where more general Q&A can be asked, especially if you go on the Discord server every third Monday, the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis Discord server. There is a general Q&A for people who want to go there and ask questions of me. This Q&A, of course, will be made available on YouTube stream for people who want to watch it. We also are thinking about some way, maybe a couple times a year, where we’ll do a more general public Q&A. So, we’re going to move to a couple of other questions that are remaining. There’s a question from Ahmed, Mohammed, who’s a patron. Were you inspired by Leonard Swidler and Ewart Cousins, who say that we’re entering a new actual age and an age of global dialogue? I don’t recognize those names. So, I can’t say directly. I mean, I was inspired by Karen Armstrong, who has said something similar like that. I would like to track these people down. So, I’m going to ask Ammar to hold that question in storage, because I’m going to try and track these people down. I just got a recent book on, I think it’s called Transcendence, about trying to exact the psychotechnologies from the actual age to address the current meaning crisis. I’m very excited to read that book. Maybe those people are mentioned in it. But I’ll definitely look, and maybe you can ask me that question again in a few months, and hopefully I’ll have got an answer for you. So, Stian Tolbnerud has asked a question. Any news on John and Jordan Peterson’s conversation? Yes, there’s definitive news on this. I will be having a two-hour conversation with Jordan on May 30th. He will no doubt record it for his channel. I will ask him to extend the privilege to me that he extended to Jonathan Pajow, and let me also record it, and I will be able to upload it onto my channel. So, that’s definitely going to happen. Also, this Friday, something’s going to be filmed from Theories of Everything. I think I was one of the first persons that Kurt interviewed, went into his film Better Left Unsaid, and then that evolved into his YouTube channel podcast. That’s also a podcast channel, Theories of Everything. He’s been having just some astonishing guests on there. But myself, Donald Hoffman and Bernard Kastrup will be doing a three-way discussion, I presume, on consciousness and reality, and that will be happening this Friday as well. So, I’m looking forward to that. I imagine that will be streamed usually within a week or two, Kurt will do, or maybe within days, that will be streamed on his channel, Theories of Everything. So, there’s a couple of really exciting discussions that I’m looking forward to. It’s going to be interesting to talk to Jordan again. It’s been a while. Well, a lot’s happened for him, and I’m in a very different position than I was when he and I last spoke, both in terms of the communities I get to participate in and the way I hope my thinking has developed. So, I’m looking forward to all of these. So, we’ve got to time for a couple of quick questions, and then we’ll wrap it up. This is from Ashraf. I’ve graduated and found a job and for the most part don’t have any meaningful goal right now. This is causing me a lot of anxiety and meaning crisis. Maybe any tips for finding new meaningful goals? Yes. Belong to a community of committed people that are cultivating ecologies and practices for overcoming foolishness and in forwarding enhanced connectedness. There’s many such communities. I understand any question you should have. But you need to, you cannot think your way out of this problem. You have to grow your way out of it. And you have to grow that by taking on individual practices that are connected to a healthy community. You have to have your own ecology of practices situated within a vetting community that will help those practices be challenged outside of egocentrism and autodidactism. There are, like, there’s many different communities. You may want to take a look at my Discord server where there are people practicing many of the psychotechnologies, forming groups, getting into discussions, reading books to read. You could take a look at the set of practices that Rafe Kelly has been setting up. Jonathan Pajot has a great community if you’re not allergic to Christianity. Same thing with Paul VanderKlay. If you’re more interested in something not as religiously committed, like there’s other people who are attempting to do this. I’m thinking again of Sevilla, how she’s taking people through these ongoing discussions about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. I have put out last year an entire course. You don’t have to do each one of the sittings. You can just skip through the lessons on the cultivation of meditation and then drawn from the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Taoism and then the cultivation of wisdom drawn from the Western traditions, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism. A lot of resources there for which you can cultivate an extensive repertoire ecology of practices that you can then use to integrate with some of these existing emerging communities. There are discourse communities. There’s Authentic Relating Toronto. I believe they’re going to start doing a virtual version. I know Guy Sendstock has virtual circling communities you can belong to. So there’s a lot out there. But my one most important piece of advice to you is you have to connect and you have to connect in a way that’s aspirational and transformative and that will afford self-transcendence. You cannot merely think or read your way out of this. Now, if this meaning crisis is getting starting to shade into clinical depression, you might want to think about taking up some therapy. You might even consider integrating some therapies into your ecology of practices. Everybody should. I’ve come to the conclusion because of just the overwhelming efficacy and evidence-based nature of it that one of the Socratic pieces of knowledge we all need to know is our attachment style and the proper EFT, Motion-Focus Therapy, techniques for addressing attachment issues. I’ve already talked about, you know, CBT and situating that within Stoicism and how valuable that is. And I’ve talked today about IFS and how powerful that can be at getting you into an inner dialogue that affords an outer dialogue. And then they resonate together. So there’s a lot available. There’s a lot you should do. You should definitely, whatever set of practices you take up, make sure that you have a mindfulness practice, a movement practice, a rationality enhancement practice. And some kind of dialogical practice. Final question from Jamie Morris. What do you think of the question, why is there something instead of nothing? Is it useful to ask or does it even make sense? It’s useful to ask. And here I’m deeply influenced by Heidegger and the Kyoto School, Plato and Plotinus. If you ask that question and you think the point of that question is to get to who or whatever started it, then I don’t think that question is that important or valuable. If you instead ask that question as to what is the ongoing ground of there being anything, what is the ground of being? And therefore, what is the ground also of being known, of the ground of intelligibility? And how do they fit together and how do they fit to me and how do I fit to them? And how do I enter into right relationship with that ground, with due reverence? Then I think you’re asking the question properly. And then I think that question can be one of the most proleptically profoundly transformative questions that we should all ask ourselves again and again and again. And there are variations on this question. There are questions that are meant to astonish. Remember that means to be turned into a stone, astonished, make us wonder profoundly. Like questions where you stop and think. Well, in one level, I’m just billions of little tiny organisms living together. And where am I in all of that? And how am I in all of that? That’s a similar kind of question. So the question doesn’t have to necessarily even be at a cosmic level. It can even be at your level. Why is there someone rather than just something? That is a variant on that question that we should always be asking. That’s Kierkegaard’s point. Until we ask that question profoundly and deeply. In the context of our mortality, we will not. This is Kierkegaard’s argument. We will not be able to live authentic lives. So thank you very much. It’s always been. And it continues to be. So it’s a great pleasure. I never know how these things are going to go, which is one of the reasons why I love them. We will be doing this every third Sunday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. They’ll be available publicly on YouTube, our channel afterwards. All of the patrons, thank you for joining me for this Q&A. Thank you for your support. And as always, thank you to my dear friend and techno mage, Amar. So take good care, everyone. Stay safe. Keep cultivating wisdom. Keep seeking meaning. And keep seeking how we can afford each other a way forward. Take good care.