https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lCvhTFwVDm4
Welcome everybody to our monthly Q&A. I’m sorry we had to move it at the time a little. I was at a conference. I spoke at the conference. I had to be in a panel discussion. But thank you, Madeline, my executive assistant, saved me from that as she saves me from so many missteps in my calendar. So we’re here for today. We’ll be back to the regular time probably next month. So I’m John Vervecky. This is a Patreon only live Q&A. We’ll take a bunch of questions that have already been submitted by patrons. And then about the last 15 minutes in we’ll take questions from the live chat. So let’s get started. We’re going to start with the first question. And this is from Matt Wilkinson. And I’ll read the question out and then I’ll reply to it. First, can I say thank you for the amazing recovering from the meaning crisis. I’m watching it for the fifth time and each time I discover more so deep and profound. Thank you, Matt. Watching Awakening from the Meaning Crisis five times in a row. That’s a genuine dedication. I did, I hoped, I aspired that I would create a series that people would feel they could go back to, not necessarily the whole thing, but perhaps specific episodes multiple times and get different things from it each time. So Matt moves on. My question, I haven’t listened to all past Q&A so I might be repeating past questions so provide too few to choose from. First, could you explain more about your transformative experiences and how they came about? So I’ll answer that one first. I’ve had different transformative experiences. Most of my transformative experiences have come about as a result of my ecology of practices, especially the deep flow states induced in Tai Chi Chuan, the mystical experiences that have occurred to me within meditative and contemplative practice. And then how those were at, how those, what do I want to say? Initially they just sort of happened to me and they weren’t transformational experiences in that fashion. But as I also cultivated a sapiential ecology of practices, practices for the cultivation of wisdom, etc., those experiences, the flow experience, the mystical experiences could be more and more taken up into the sapiential practices, would influence my lexio divina, would influence my practice of phyllo-sophia, would influence my, the dialectic into dialogos, and via that ecology of practices, it’s almost like transformers, pun intended, like I meant in like the electrical grid. This framework actually takes sort of the transformative power of these experiences that can occur within meditative, contemplative practice, Tai Chi Chuan practice, etc. And it transforms it in a way that so that it will percolate through my psyche and permeate through my life in a transformative fashion. I’ve had a few much more spontaneous ones that nevertheless fit that sort of a chirotic moment in my life where my life was turning. Because of that, because of the sort of kairos placement of the mystical experience, it became a transformative experience. One is I had left Christianity, but I was still hungry. I went into university and the very first book I read in philosophy, in the introduction philosophy, was Plato’s Republic. It had an overwhelming impact on me. And then I had my mystical experience, the first one in my life, which was basically of sort of the platonic forms, that realm of intelligibility, and that had a pivotal effect on all my life. Generally, though, the transformative experiences have been a little bit more cultivated rather than just spontaneously occurring. So I do have some first-hand understanding of what people talk about when they talk about transformative experience. And that’s been helpful for me to understand. I mean, there’s important philosophical and theoretical questions, definitely, definitely, that should be addressed when we talk about transformative experiences. But there’s also important existential issues, and they can really only be understood if you’ve had some familiarity with transformative experience. So I’m grateful that I have an ecology of practices that has produced, or allowed me to cultivate, I don’t know which way to put it, transformative experiences. Second question, I’m struggling with the Vipassana meditation. Specifically, I find myself washed away on thoughts but unable to see them coming. And so Brett, breathe into the space between them as your instruction suggests. Can you provide any advice to help with the practice, please? So don’t do that for a while, then. Don’t do the trying to find the space between your thoughts, like we talked about in some of the later instructions. Concentrate on following the sensations of the breath, labeling your distractions and coming back to your breath, and being willing to do that a lot. Because typically, if you’re unwilling to, like if you start to get about being distracted, then that’s when this kind of, it kind of builds up on itself, this negative reinforcement. Sorry, I was using that in a colloquial sense, not in a technical sense. So what I would suggest you do is set yourself, again, back deeply into the attitude of befriending yourself, and that you’re training the puppy dog, and that your practice is going to be, right, I’m just going to follow the breath, and when I’m distracted, I come back, and that’s a good thing. That’s a good, well, I was lost in thought for like five minutes when I came back. That’s good. It’s a good thing. You’re learning how to come back, even when you’re caught up in extensive mind wandering. That’s a good thing. I also strongly suggest that in addition to your seated practice, you take up a moving mindfulness practice like yoga or Tai Chi Chuan, because it helps engage the cerebellum cortex loop, and this is very helpful for people who are finding themselves getting overwhelmed by distractive thought, because doing a movement mindfulness practice usually helps quiet the mind sort of outside of that inner struggle that you face when you’re doing good pass enough. This is why I strongly believe that we should not be teaching most people just seated meditation. They should be doing the meditation, seated meditation, and a mindfulness movement practice. So that would be my advice to you, Matt. So thank you for that excellent question. So we’re now going to move on to a question from Ilias. I’m following the meditation course on YouTube, and I finished the sessions about finding your center route, flow, and focus. As the lessons progress, I need more and more time to do all the exercises at the speed that each of them were taught to the point that I leave at least 20 to 30 minutes to do them all. Yes. My question is, should I speed up the process of finding my route and flow in order to have more time for the focus exercise? Yes. Now, I can’t give you an algorithm for doing that, but you should be, right? And you might find that you don’t have to do as much inner coaching. And again, this is different for different people, but you should be able to more and you don’t, you want to be able to move to that you can find your center like that. You can find your route like that. I mean, you have to do that in the martial arts, by the way. So this is very doable. And also I’ve done this practice for a long time. So slowly do this very carefully and deliberately and pay attention to the sense of stress or effort that this is requiring from you, right? You don’t want too much stress or effort, but you want to be reducing the time that it’s taking you to do each one of the finding your, finding your, like finding your center, finding your route, finding your flow, et cetera. I can’t remember which episode it is, but later on in the episode, I show a sort of a faster way, a different version of finding your route. That’s a little bit faster. You may be able to find that and find that helpful. But generally you want to be making these things more and more something you’re inhabiting, like the way you know how to sit down on a chair. Like initially when you’re a kid, you know, to practice, but you want to get to the place where you can just do it. So you have to, you do have to slowly step by step, again, remember the caveat. Pay attention to how much effort and stress this is taking. You don’t want it to be too much. Remember we are never just enduring, right, in our meditation. We are always at the level at which we consider ourselves. This is taking effort, there’s a little bit stress, but I know I’m learning. If we’re, and that’s the sweet spot you want to be in. So get to that place where each time you’re trying to do it a little bit, you know, a little bit faster, a little bit more gestalt-y. You may not have to do it like, like I don’t have to go like all the way through the lines to find the center, sort of, sorry, to find my route. I can just sort of do it as a gestalt, and you’re trying to move towards that gestalt step by step by step, and it’ll fluctuate, it’ll fluctuate, but over time you will get to the place where, you know, going through the core four shouldn’t take you any more than five minutes. Okay, so I hope that’s, I hope that’s a good, helpful answer to you, and thank you very much for that excellent question. So this is from Todd Felt. I just wanted, before I forget, I just want to thank all the patrons. I mean, I’m eager to get in and do provide good service by, right, answering your questions, but I also just wanted to take time and say thank you all for your ongoing support. It means a lot to me, and I want to thank you all very much. So Todd said, listening through the Awakening series as someone with an engineering background parallels between theoretical constructs from engineering and the philosophical cog-sci subject matter present themselves pretty frequently. That’s great to hear because that’s exactly, that is an intent, that is something that I was working towards, that’s a goal I was striving to achieve, so I’m glad to hear that, Todd. That’s very encouraging to me, and are often incorporated into the material, e.g. framing certain phenomenas as dynamic systems, problems, object-oriented, cog-sci, etc. Identifying these parallels seems to be a potential way of gathering otherwise non-obvious insights into the subject by providing a systematic set of tools and methods that are well-known and mature in other contexts. I totally agree. Is there any explicit effort to find and apply potential analogous frameworks from other disciplines? Do researchers from different disciplines regularly bounce ideas off each other for this reason, or is it just left to chance that connections like this will emerge? Okay, so I have to state up front I’m biased in that answer, and my answer I’m going to give you because of my particular profession. I’m a cognitive scientist as well as a cognitive psychologist, so I have exposure in both a single department and an interdisciplinary program. I agree with you that looking for these bridging insights, what I call synoptic integration, across the disciplines, I think is enormously important for the study of the mind and cognition. I do not think any, and that’s the central premise of cognitive science, that none of the disciplines can answer all of what it is to be a mind because each concentrates on a specific ontological level, neuroscience of the brain, artificial intelligence on learning algorithms, psychology on behavior, linguistics on language, anthropology and culture. They have different methodologies, they have different languages, they have different ways of gathering evidence and what they consider evidence. What that means is that all these different areas, or let’s call them better, all these different levels of the mind, the brain level, the information processing level, the behavioral level, the linguistic level, the cultural level, the connections and the cultural level, the connections and relations between them are unaddressed. And it’s implausible that these various levels of the mind do not in fact causally interact and constrain and condition each other. In fact, it’s highly plausible that they do. So getting these transfer insights between the various disciplines, I think, is important, and I think that is the justification for the discipline of cognitive science. Because of that, I have to do a lot of what you’re saying, Todd, on a regular basis. That is part of my job, my academic job. It’s part of my theoretical interest as a scientist. Is this the case in general? Not as much as it should be. Not as much as it should be. It’s getting better, but for a very long time, and that’s one of the reasons why cognitive science emerged, these disciplines were not talking to each other in any deep, insightful or transformative manner. So I think that is because we became enamored of specialization as the way in which we would get more knowledge. And specialization is important. But the problem with specialization is it tends to emphasize and incentivize innovation and originality and finding some new niche or some new phenomenon. And many people, myself included, think that has contributed to the replication crisis. Because what we don’t do is do enough of what we’re talking about here, Todd. We don’t do enough systemic incentives to get the knowledge that we need to get the knowledge to make sure that we’re not missing out relevant information, that we’re not missing out important causal connections, ontological relations, etc. So I think we need to, the academic community in general needs to balance off people who are specialists with people who are integrators. And so I think who are specialists with people who are integrators. And so I think that’s how I would answer your question, Todd. Thank you very much for that question. So the next question is from Rachel Hayden. It’s always a special moment for me to get any kind of communication from Rachel. It’s really wonderful to get a question from you, Rachel. You have a special place in my thinking, and so thank you for your question. So Rachel’s question is, Hello, I’m thinking about charitable and or mutual aid practices as part of a religion that’s not a religion. I haven’t heard much about this topic, and I would love to get your take on it. I’ll finish the question, and then I’ll answer both. Also, if I may, I’d like to mention to everyone that Alexandra Zachary and I are hoping to hold some live discussions for artists and all types on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord so people can contact us there if they are interested. So Rachel and Alexandra want to talk to artists of all types on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord so that people can contact them there, and I really encourage them, I encourage as many of you as possible if you are an artist of some kind to get involved. If any of you have been watching the series I’ve been doing with Brendan and Layman, you know that the artists, we’re hoping to call and inspire artists to become more directly involved in the project of responding to the Meaning Crisis and helping to afford a culturally viable and disseminable religion that’s not a religion. Now let’s go back to Rachel’s first question. I haven’t heard much about this topic, the topic of charitable or mutual aid, and I’d love to get your take on it. So I haven’t said much about that because I didn’t know how to frame it properly. I think that should be part, I mean if agape is going to form an important part of a religion that’s not a religion, then agape is to work, agape is a creative act, hence the connection to the arts by the way, agape is a creative act, you’re trying to create a part of the art that’s not a religion, then agape is to work, agape is a creative act, you’re trying to create the conditions that produce, protect, and promote personhood, and personhood within a community of persons, and so you have to be doing things to try and afford that as much as possible. So you know a lot of the work I do I’m not getting paid for, I get some remuneration, but most of it is pro bono, and that’s important because for me it’s a way of trying to practice integrity and trying to actually enact in embodied fashion agape rather than just talking about it. Of course people will have to consider how to get involved in mutual aid or charity work in a way that is responsive to their conditions and in which they can be responsible, but I’m a little bit hesitant to take, I don’t want to take the lead on this, and I’m concerned about this because we need this to be done in a way that, what do I want to say, what, I’ve got a bunch of things I’m very concerned about it and they’re very silent and I’m trying to decide between them. We need to do this in a fashion that is not part of virtue signaling, is not part of virtue signaling or a way of people dealing sort of with their therapeutic guilt issues or with right, also you know we’ve got to be wary of the way in which all of this kind of stuff has been an avenue for significant abuse and fraud. So on the one hand I think what Rachel is suggesting is necessary, on the other hand it’s extremely fraught and so that’s, and I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family where this whole idea about this and tithing and giving and I saw it being wielded in a very abusive fashion. I’m not saying that’s always the case, I’m not saying that, but I do have concerns about that potential and I don’t think I’m the right person to adjudicate on this in any way. I’m happy to talk to anybody and offer my best rational reflections on it. I definitely think it needs to be done, but we need people to really understand that and I think that’s the right thing to do. I think we need to really take up the time and the effort to seriously think about how can we do this differently than it’s been done before so that it has the generative power that the original expressions of agape within you know the original forms of Christianity for example or you know Karuna within Buddhism, how they had such an authenticity and generative capacity in them. When we get something like that going, that would be my concern and I don’t think I’m the right person to take the lead on that. I’m happy to help, but I think my own background probably limits the degree to which I can come at this fairly. I do think that the real enactment, the real and regular enactment of agape has to be a considerable part of any ecology of practices both individually and collectively. So thank you Rachel, that was a difficult but very pertinent question. Thank you very much. So this is from Mike McElroy. Hi John, in a recent chat with Andrew Sweeney you said that you saw freedom as not an intrinsic good but rather an instrumental good. Yes I did. I was wondering if you could elaborate some more on that. Isn’t freedom an inherent good and usually described as much as most writings about freedom? If you could relate it to to Isaiah’s Berlin’s famous notion on the two freedoms, freedom from and freedom to. Yeah Berlin’s, I rely on that all the time, freedom from and freedom to. That would please me to no end. Keep up the great work. Thank you Mike. First of all that distinction that Berlin has made between the two, I rely on that all the time, freedom from and freedom to. I’ll bring that into my answer. So why do I think that freedom is not an intrinsic good? So there’s two ways in which we could be talking about freedom here. We could be talking about sort of political freedom in the sense that the state or other vested interests cannot unduly put duress on me in order to manipulate me towards their end. So this is the sense of moral freedom that is a recognition of me or the recognition of you as an intrinsically valuable human being. So that notion I’m not disputing but it’s not really the freedom that’s the intrinsic value there. It’s that freedom marks the intrinsic value of a human being. So I don’t have any right, so that’s how I think about sort of political freedom. That the intrinsic good there isn’t freedom. What bears the intrinsic good is the person and the freedom is a way of everybody acknowledging the intrinsic value of human beings. So that’s what I would say about political freedom. What I was specifically talking about with Andrew though was a deeper notion and it’s one that perplexes me and I think there’s some sort of defect in me in some way and I don’t mean that just ironically. Maybe I’m missing a certain gene or maybe it’s I have a gene similar to Spinoza because what I’m talking about there is what’s often called free will. That’s what I was responding to with Andrew and I don’t know what it is that people mean by that. Now here’s what we have to be very careful. We have to distinguish Spinoza’s notion from sort of a kind of Christian notion or at least a Christianized notion. Spinoza’s notion is that something is free to the degree to which it is self-determining. What he means by that is the degree to which my self-organizing autopoetic processes of body and mind are the most causally relevant explanation of my behavior then I’m free. Notice by the way that all explanation of all behavior invokes causal relevance. All explanation of all behavior invokes causal relevance. What caused the sinking of the Titanic? Oh well the Titanic hit an iceberg right. Well really or was it that they were going too fast or was it that the United States and Great Britain were competing for sort of supremacy in the world? Was it the fact that the British steel mills of that time were not as good as ours today and so the metal had flaws and contamination in it that caused it like blah blah. You know what you end up saying? The entire history of the entire universe caused the sinking of the Titanic in some fashion. That’s ridiculous because that would be the same for everything we wanted to explain and so what we do is we pick out what are the most causally relevant factors and that’s relevant to how we’re trying to explain things because like when I want to know what caused the sinking of the Titanic notice I can just modify the question slightly. What caused the Titanic to sink so slowly? Well that’s a different thing okay. So causal relevance is necessary to any explanation of any behavior. So me invoking it is not some slippery slope. So if what you mean is no no I mean that you’re totally you know free of all of history and all of causation that you’re something like Aristotle’s unmoved mover within yourself. That there’s some aspect of a human being that is not causally affected by anything else even their own bodies even their own memories and that it can just arbitrarily make you do things. That seems like something first of all how would you get any evidence that such a thing exists given that there is no it doesn’t respond to any other entity in the universe. It has no causal interactions with anything. How could you possibly obtain any evidence? You can’t say well I know that because what you’re saying is your memory can be you know it causally interacts with this in some fashion right. This is these are deep questions so that’s one issue. I don’t understand what it is people are thinking they’re claiming they have because I don’t know how you could possibly get any evidence for it but here’s the point that Mike brings up. I don’t know why you’d want it. I know why you want political freedom that makes great sense to me. I know why you want to be self-determining as much as possible that makes sense to me. I don’t know why you want free will as having an unmoved mover within you. That makes no sense to me. It means that your actions would be absolutely arbitrary. They would not be responsible or responsive to any features of your environment. You would not for example believe something because it was true because the truth of it wouldn’t cause you to you’re still free. I don’t want that freedom. I don’t want that freedom. I want my thought to be as responsive and responsible to the truth as possible. I want my actions to be as responsive and responsible to the good as possible. I want my sensibility and my sense to be as responsive and as responsible to the beautiful as possible. I in that sense want my thinking, my action, and my experience to be as determined by what’s true and what’s good and what’s beautiful as possible. Freedom is instrumental if we, right, if it even exists. Freedom of the will, I don’t think it is, but what I think people mean is they think freedom is what I think people mean is they want to be able to cultivate self-organizing the virtues that allow them to be more and more determined by what’s true, good, and beautiful. They don’t want that to be, they don’t want there to be extraneous factors, political or other than their self-determination to be the most causally relevant factors, but surely they want an education. Surely they want to learn. Surely they want knowledge. So for me, freedom is at best an instrumental good. When it becomes an absolute, like in cases of absolute free will, I can’t understand why it has any value at all, let alone intrinsic value. And what about freedom from and freedom to? I think we need to be bringing this into our conversation more and more and more. And this is a deep question. I’m going to take time on this because this relates to something that I’ve been talking a lot about. So I’ve been talking a lot about the hermeneutics of suspicion. This is Paul Rucker’s notion that because of figures like Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, and then perhaps you could extend that into Derrida, etc., we have a hermeneutics of suspicion. We’re always suspicious that there’s a hidden motive, an unconscious reason, that there is a secret conspiracy, a hidden cabal, and all of this. And then the prototypical moment of truth is when you can disclose that, when you can say, aha, I accuse, I accuse, right? Like in the Dreyfus affair, this, there’s the conspiracy, there’s the secret motive all along. They really wanted to do x, although they were saying y, right? And that’s the hermeneutics of suspicion. Now the hermeneutics of suspicion is needed. I’m not saying we should try to eradicate it any more than I should. I’m saying we should stop reading Freud and Marx and, you know, Nietzsche, etc. But the hermeneutics of suspicion frees you from, that’s what its job is. It’s designed to free you from, and by the way, you should direct the hermeneutics of suspicion more at yourself than you should at anybody else. Because the point of the, the point is to free us from being deceived, being deluded, being manipulated, being bullshitted. So there’s an important function there. But here’s what people are, what we’re progressively forgetting and what concerns me. This goes, you can see this point being made by Plato, Hegel, Marleau-Ponty, philosophers in different traditions saying something along this line. The moment, right, realizing that something is an illusion, and that’s what the hermeneutics of suspicion depends on, that’s the moment. Aha! There’s the illusion. I now see the man behind the curtain, to quote the Wizard of Oz, right? That depends on you taking another experience as real. Namely, when you move the curtain aside, you now see the man, that’s a real experience, right? The hermeneutics of suspicion is actually completely dependent on a deeper hermeneutics. This is the hermeneutics in which appearances are not deceiving us, not distracting us, not distorting, but when appearances are disclosing of a deeper reality, like the elegance of a scientific theory, these are the hermeneutics of beauty. And the hermeneutics of suspicion is always dependent on and in service to the hermeneutics of beauty. And the hermeneutics of beauty is freedom to, that is freedom to connect in a meaningful fashion to what is real. So that’s my extended answer to your question, Mike, and I did invoke freedom from and freedom to, so thank you very much for that excellent question. Right, so we’re now going to move to Brian Rivera. To what end should homo sapiens use the enhanced cognition of the altered state? How do we prevent or guard its misuse? I think that’s excellent. I think that’s an excellent question, Brian, and this is particularly becoming pertinent because we are getting increasing research into our capacity to induce altered states, obviously with psychedelics, but I was just at a conference where, oh, I forget Michael’s name. Oh, I’m sorry, Michael, he’s a research scientist, I forget his last name, and he’s been doing work with VR and with electrical stimulation of the vestibular system to create altered states of consciousness in people. I was particularly interested in that. I got to ask him about that work because I’ve suffered from manures and the vestibular stuff, and I get these, I get really horrible altered states, massive vertigo and a sense of disconnectedness from reality. So we’re getting more and more study of, understanding of, and promotion of ways of altering our state of consciousness. I think altering our state of consciousness is a powerful way in order to transform perspectival knowing and perhaps even participatory knowing. I think this is very powerful for enhancing our capacities for insight, foresight, hindsight, mindsight. All of these are potentially enhanced. There’s tremendous potential to alleviate otherwise treatment-resistant maladies. People who have treatment-resistant depression, for example, can be bounced out of their depression by use of psychedelics. People can be, treatment-resistant addiction, and the psychedelic can bounce them out of that. People facing, you know, imminent biological death, and I don’t mean, I don’t mean while they’re in the state, because obviously when you’re in the state you might not be thinking about that, but they could have a mystical experience within the psychedelic experience that returns them back, so sorry, that when they return back to normal consciousness, they are not bound up in existential dread about their imminent demise. So the potential uses of this are important. That being said, I want you to think of anything that reliably, I’m going to give you an analogy, anything that reliably alters your state of consciousness is a powerful tool. It is like a chainsaw. Chainsaws are powerful tools. You can use a chainsaw to really alter the landscape. You can use these things to really alter your salience landscaping, but you don’t give a chainsaw to just anybody, and you don’t give it to any, just anybody, and say use it however you want. Do what you want with it. Play around with it. See what you can do with it. That’s a very bad idea. The power of these things is exactly the reason why people need to be properly educated in their use. I think we should, I think, I can’t remember the name of the person, is Tom Hayden, or who is it from that? Anyways, I think we should have a licensing system, just like we have a licensing system for driving a car or using a gun or being a bodyguard, right? I think we should consider serious, or getting married, right? I think we should seriously consider that people have to be properly licensed. They have to go through a course. They have to be tested on it. That, and part of that licensing process is that they have an ecology of practices for the cultivation of wisdom, for reducing self-deception, for enhancing rational reflection, etc., and that they also belong to a responsible community in which they can be given non-egocentric feedback about how these altered states are transforming them. I frequently tell my students, how you think you’re being transformed is not nearly as relevant as how other people, independent from like you, are telling you how you’re transforming. So, for example, I have no problem with psychedelics being used by Indigenous people who have a long-standing culture where there are, you know, the cultivation of wisdom, right? There’s community involvement. I think, I think it should be, you know, I don’t know what to say. I think anybody who thinks they should just be able to use these, these interventions on their own, on some of the fundamental aspects of their own cognition doesn’t realize how much they are setting their salience landscaping free from their understanding and opening themselves up to all kinds of bullshit. And I think that’s the shit. And I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it multiple times. People do these things and they get wrapped into a rabbit hole metaphysics that’s bizarre and non-functional. And so that is, that is something that should be definitely emphasized, that people should seek out self-transcendence, but they should seek it out within a ecology, which within an ecology of practices, a sapiential cultivation of wisdom, sapiential ecology of practices within a community of care and concern that can provide authentic and faithful feedback to the individual. I think outside of that context, it’s like saying you’re autodidactically going to teach yourself how to use a chainsaw and you go out into the forest alone and cut down a tree. It might all go well, but it might really go very badly. So that’s how I would answer that question. So thank you. Thank you, Brian, for that excellent question. So here’s an anonymous patron. What are the positive aspects of normalism that should be integrated? How is post-normalist neoplatonism different from pre-normalist neoplatonism? So some of the benefits that came out of normalism was, right, was the way it helped afford the scientific revolution, right? Because what normalism says is many of the patterns we’ve seen in the past, right, are not there in the environment. And think about how much the Copernican Revolution depends on people being able to say that. The Copernican Revolution depends on you being able to say, you know, we’re all stone cold sober, our eyes are working fine, it’s a clear day, we all see the sun rising in the east, passing overhead and setting in the west, and we’re all wrong. That pattern isn’t real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. The pattern isn’t real. So normalism is, normalism is, it’s part of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and it has an important role. It challenges the fact that many patterns that seem so real to us can turn out to not be real. And this is part of what science is about. We regularly, as human science, even as people who do science, we regularly take correlational patterns to be real causal patterns, and we’re wrong about that. So normalism gave us this thing about, look, we need to distinguish between the correlational patterns and the causal patterns, and we need to distinguish between projected patterns and patterns that are there. I think that’s great. The problem is that normalism went too far in some ways. Normalism really, it got to the point where you can see it in people like Occam, and perhaps in Hume and Kant, where almost all, there are no real patterns at all kind of thing. Because like you have to be, what normalism didn’t do was give a very clear way of distinguishing this. Science has worked on it to some degree, but philosophically, because normalism relies on the weird dichotomy between all those patterns out there, they’re not real, but all the patterns in my mind are real in my mind. They really are there in my mind. Well, how do you know that? Are you projecting those patterns as well? How do you know those ones are real? And so you get all those kinds of problems, and that’s sort of what Hume did. He said, well, you know, all that, all those stuff, but also within my mind, I don’t even find a self, etc. Okay, so that was too fast about normalism, the history of normalism, and I’m sure some people will, oh, you should have done that more carefully. I appreciate that, but I don’t want to get too far from the point. I think normalism is really important for science in the sense, and for our own lives, for the right, if applied right, within the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is many of the patterns we take to be real aren’t. But the hermeneutics of suspicion, I’ll say it again, is always dependent on the hermeneutics of beauty. We can only do that by saying other patterns are real, and I have significant doubts, very significant doubts, about the implicit and eventually explicit anomalous proposal that the only real patterns are the ones I see within my own mind. I won’t go into that, but there’s a lot of, I mean, there’s just a ton of argumentation about like why that, because for me, once you make that move, you’re going to fall into a kind of solipsistic skepticism that I take to be completely self-undermining. How is post-nomalous neoplatonism different from pre-nomalous platonism? Post-nomalous neoplatonism takes very seriously all the arguments, methods, scientific methods. There’s more than one. All the practices we engage in, you know, some of them are therapeutic practices, realizing that your mother really isn’t that way, but you’re projecting your fears of abandonment onto her, etc., etc. Taking all of that machinery as being valuable and important and then integrating it into a neoplatonic framework. Now, is neoplatonism capable of doing that? I think so because of the abiding concern that Plato had at getting at the real patterns as opposed to the less real ones, the world of being as opposed to the world of becoming, to use Plato’s term, and also because of Plato’s great insight and understanding about our proclivities for self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. So I think that the framework is there for neoplatonism to properly, you know, accommodate the best of normalism. In fact, I see it kind of like what I’ve been trying to say here. I think normalism keeps alive the needed hermeneutics of suspicion, but it is always, right, connected to and dependent on a neoplatonic hermeneutics of beauty. So there, that’s my answer to that very interesting question and it’s one I’m still doing a lot of thought on, so that’s just where I’m at right now. Okay, we’re shifting to live questions from the format. I want to thank you, the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to find solutions to the meaning crisis. So let’s go to our first one from Josh Field. How do you see your work with the religion that’s not a religion meaning crisis intersecting with the need for new digital social institutions and how do you see metaverse-esque narrative providing potential? Wow, this great question. I don’t know if I’ll be capable of answering it well. What conditions, dynamics do you see needing to be met for adequate new digital institutions? I work in the space of spatial internet infrastructure. I’m pioneering alternative narratives. Yeah, so I think that’s very important. I had, I recommend to you a video discussion I had with Jordan Hall and then he tweeted about it because I was proposing the importance of DL logos for DAOs and another decentralized, I don’t know what to call them. They’re not institutions, decentralized agencies that are going to be more prominent in web three. I have to be very careful here because I’m largely ignorant of some of this and quite a bit of this. I’m mostly relying on what I’ve learned from Jordan Hall about this. But Jordan seemed very, very responsive to the proposal that working with distributed, working with the intelligence, the collective intelligence of distributed cognition has to be the main thing we tap into in web three, the metaverse, and that dialectic into the logos and that whole family of practices I think is going to be central for actualizing the potential of collective intelligence within distributed cognition and distributed computation so that there is a real possibility of transforming that collective intelligence into collective wisdom that will have a kind of authority over us, a kind of moral authority over us that we do not find oppressive but that we feel fully, that we are fully participating in and that we feel is actually affording our individual and collective lives. So I do think that that’s very important and I do think, I didn’t get to make that argument with to Jordan at the time, I want to be clear about this too. Dialectic into dia logos and all the other practices that help get us into dia logos, that is not a standalone practice. You need, I’ve always, this was actually done in conjunction with Jordan Hall, I’ve always understood and Chris has too and Guy has too, Chris, Master Pietro, Guy Sandstock, Peter Lindberg, you know the people at Rebel Wisdom, all the people that are talking about dia logos right now. Dia logos is not a, it is a meta practice. It is a practice that is designed to create the collective wisdom to help us collect, create and curate ecologies of practices. There should be a bottom up from ecologies of practices and a top down from dia logos and they should be constantly interpenetrating each other, affording and constraining and correcting each other. And so I think this addresses another important issue we need to address, which is all of this new stuff is going to depend increasingly on AI. Semi-autonomous, perhaps eventually autonomous AI to which we will be collaborating or with which we will be collaborating, I guess is a better way of putting it. The problem we face right now and I have a talk on this if you’re interested in it, is that we are largely pursuing artificial intelligence. Even though we have very good robust experimental evidence from human beings that an intelligence is at best a weak predictor of rationality. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. You all know this. You all know the highly intelligent person can be highly irrational. There is no guarantee that by generating artificial intelligence we will have artificial rationality. That in fact does not follow. I do not see enough care and concern being directed towards that. And then of course beyond rationality the ability to self-correct is wisdom, which is a more sort of comprehensive coordination of different kinds of rationality. Perspectival, participatory, propositional, procedural. And we are not doing any, I can’t see, there’s a little bit on artificial rationality, there’s a little bit on artificial rationality, very little on artificial wisdom. Part of the problem is we have a very good template when we’re trying to create artificial intelligence. We have us and we just are intelligent and that’s what we measure. We measure these machines against us because right now we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet. But the reason why we are not making as much progress in artificial wisdom and artificial rationality is because those are not guaranteed. Those are not guaranteed. What template should we be using? We need to be very clear about finding people who can serve as templates for rationality and even more importantly as templates for wisdom. And so getting a culture that is much more oriented towards this in connection with the generation of artificial intelligence, a culture that is constantly asking the researchers, yes, but what about artificial rationality? What about artificial wisdom? How are these computers going to be helpful in understanding meaning-making? That’s something I’m doing a lot of work on. I’m not just trying to promote my own work. I’m giving you arguments and reasons for the kinds of things I think need to be done in order to properly, what’s the right word, properly respond to the metaverse, web three, the internet of things, etc. Thank you for that excellent question, Josh. So I’m going to shift. I think this will be my last question. This is from Marcel Gabriel. Thank you, Marcel. What are the relationships between data information, knowledge, knowing, rationality, understanding, wisdom, and truth and any others you wish to add? Marcel, that’s a great question. So I don’t draw because I haven’t seen any clean distinction between data information. I think data is something like communicated information for some people. I’m not sure. So I don’t know what hangs on that distinction. Perhaps what people might mean is the difference between technical information and semantic information. There’s another way. So technical information is the kind of information that’s talked about in information theory. And this is basically the reduction of uncertainty because of probabilistic relations between things. And in that sense, there doesn’t have to be human beings for there to be information. There’s just tons of information in the universe. You hear physicists talking about this, you know, with the black hole radiation problem and that information is disappearing and things like that. Now, one of the big problems facing AI is, of course, it’s very easy to get computers to make use of technical information. But getting them to make use of information in the meaningful sense, in the sense in which information generates ideas about things, that’s one of the deep problems in AI, the problem of original meaning, et cetera. And there’s good work being done on how do we go from technical information to semantic information. And I think that’s going to be central for any deep autonomous AI. And a lot of AI is not doing that. But there are people who are working on that. So let’s say, let’s try to do it this way. Data is just that technical information that just exists whenever there are reliable probabilistic relationships between things in the universe, reliable covariation, correlation. Information is when that is meaningful to a cognitive agent, I would argue, a relevance-realizing autopoetic agent. Insofar as that information, that meaningful information, is being used by the organism to overcome potential self-deception and track real patterns in the universe, I think that’s knowledge. But we track patterns in different ways. We track them with propositions. We track them with sensory motor routines. That’s procedural knowing. We track them with states of consciousness. And we track them through the transformations and development of our character and our self and our roles, participatory, et cetera. So there’s different kinds of knowing. I think rationality is important here to distinguish from intelligence. Intelligence is your capacity to learn and solve problems and thereby get knowledge. The problem is the very processes that make you intelligent make you perennially susceptible to self-deception. Rationality is about internalizing psychotechnology that helps, using your intelligence to learn and internalize psychotechnology that helps address the self-deception that arises when you’re using your intelligence in order to solve problems and to gain knowledge. Rationality typically depends on relations that can justify in some way, justify your beliefs in one way, justify the appropriacy of your skills in another way, et cetera. I won’t get into that. But the understanding differs from knowledge in that understanding isn’t so much about what’s the evidence for this knowing. It’s more like what’s the relevance, what’s the significance of what is known. So, you know, somebody may genuinely know that two plus two equals four. They know it. They really know it. But they don’t realize that it, how it’s relevant to this situation. They don’t see it. They don’t get it. So, they haven’t properly understood the situation because they haven’t properly grasped the significance of their knowledge. That would be understanding. And understanding, because it has to do with significance and relevance, has, connects to wisdom. Notice also connects to insight because insight doesn’t alter the evidence that’s available to you. It alters the salience and the relevance. And that’s why you get a new understanding out of your insight. And insight and understanding have a lot to do with wisdom. And wisdom is about coordinating all of the ways in which you can self-correct all the different kinds of knowing that is generating understanding and is generating insight and is generating, you know, behavior that also has the capacity to transform other individuals and the person there into those kinds of agents, people with those kinds of virtue that are much more likely to be true to reality, to be responsive to the demand for what is good, and to be deeply capable of realizing beauty and the hermeneutics of beauty. And I think that’s all we have time for answering today. And so, I want to thank you all for joining me in this Q&A. We’ll be doing this every third Sunday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. Make sure you keep abreast of Twitter and when I’m posting on YouTube because as happened this month, sometimes we have to move things around. This video will be available publicly on my YouTube channel afterwards. I want to thank everybody for your support. I most especially want to thank my wonderful EA, Madeline, who’s been running everything by herself today, first time, and she did a fantastic job. So, thank you everyone. Take good care.