https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rkkMUZ3EjSM
Hello everybody. Welcome to our monthly Q&A, our patron Q&A. First, as always, I want to begin by thanking all the patrons. Your financial support helps me to do a lot of the work that I’m doing, and so I appreciate it very much. And I’d like to get questions as soon as possible. We have a lot of great questions. The first one is from Mike Garigan, and he says, from Awakening from the Meaning, that’s the video series, you propose that there is a crisis in meaning. So if there are individuals or societies that have awoken from the meaning crisis, what would that look like? So there are, we can first look back into the past and see societies that weren’t suffering the meaning crisis, because they had cosmos that homed them, that supported a mythos that gave a legitimacy and an overarching sense of sacredness and guidance to ecologies of practices for the cultivation of wisdom, the amelioration of foolishness, and the affordance of flourishing. And so there have been times, of course, in our own past, where the societies were ones in which the kinds of issues we see prevalent today were presumably less. That’s the basis for the answer I’m going to give now for what it would look like for societies, and then I’ll move on to say what I would think that would mean for individuals. Societies that have awoken from the meaning crisis would be societies in which many of the negative symptoms that Chris, Master Pietro and I have published, the symptomology of the meaning crisis would be significantly reduced. So we would expect significant reductions in suicide, in anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, a reduction in loneliness. We would see a reduction in addictions. We would see a reduction in the need to escape, especially escaping into the virtual world, into games in order to try and find the three dimensions of meaning. We would presumably see an affordance of the positive responses to the meaning crisis. We would see, and we’re already seeing these, emerging communities of practice in which there are well-designed ecologies of practices that are situated within communities, and the communities are situated within communities of communities, forming an initial subculture, perhaps then helping to form the mainstream culture. We would see places in which it’s well understood and well accepted that that’s the place where you go to practice your ecology practices, to cultivate wisdom individually and with others. And so you would see more and more of individuals who are living lives that clearly exemplify an ongoing amelioration of the perennial problems, the perennial problems of despair and absurdity and alienation, anxiety, and also have got a good response to the historical issues. They have learned enough of a framework for integrating their community and their ecology of practice into a scientific worldview, entering into reciprocal reconstruction with that scientific worldview so that these communities and the individuals within them are regarded as being morally and intellectually responsible, even exemplary. Those individuals would have lives that were less beset, as I said, by perennial problems. They would have an enhanced sense of connectedness from the cells to each other and to the world. And all of this is not fantasy in the negative sense, the pejorative sense, because these communities are coming into existence. I’m helping with other people to network them into a viable subculture. Ecologies of practices with good design principles are emerging. The overarching meta-practice of educating and relying upon collective intelligence within distributed cognition, the dialectic into dialogous practices, those are all coming into existence. So of course, it would still be a world beset, but I’m beset by the struggles of human life, the vicissitudes of fortune, both the gifts and the the the gaffes of fate. But I would hope, because there’s good evidence that this is the case, that as individuals became more reliably assured of meaning, they would be less driven to pursue simple subjective well-being or pleasure and wealth. They would have learned to distinguish all those apart, all those from each other. A good life should have a life of subjective well-being, of pleasure, and of meaning. But those individuals would have reprioritized those, so they would be willing to sacrifice a considerable hit to their standard of living, measured as we do now in post-industrial capitalist standards. They’d be willing to sacrifice that individually and collectively, as we are willing to do in the past, because they are getting in return more meaning, more wisdom. So that society would presumably also start to put less and less stress on its biological environment. So that’s my answer to your question, Mike. Thank you. That’s a very good question. I want to now move on to what Ren has to say. Rens Versteegin. Thank you, Rens. Hi, John. You’re having a huge impact on my life. Rens, I’m happy to hear that. That’s very encouraging, and thank you for sharing that. I’ve been trying to conform to society for a long time, adapting wherever I go. This has been a very useful strategy to survive and even to thrive, but it has come to a limit not knowing who I am or where my values are. Yes. After finishing Awaking from the Meaning Crisis, I felt such a strong at-homeness in the way different thinkers saw see the world and being itself. It gave me the courage to start building my own philosophy and value system from now on. Whether this is choosing what I like or finding out what resonated within me from a long time before, I don’t know. But I’m so excited having started this journey of self-knowing and through that, hoping to get to know being itself. Thank you so much for that. Your way of conveying all of this in such an embodied way makes you one of my ideals to strive for as well. Thank you for saying that, Rens. I take that very much to heart, and I take it very seriously. I take that responsibility seriously. I really aspire to live up to that. Rens goes on. I still have quite some content to go through, so I don’t really have any questions yet. I’m also doing a meditation series, which I find extremely helpful and insightful. Thank you, Rens. I hope many people can find that series helpful and insightful. One quick question. I missed the last Dialectic to Dialogo, so I would really like to participate next time. Any plans for the future? There are definite plans for the future. We’re still in planning. There’s definitely going to be one in the summer. Guy and Karenna and Chris and I have been talking. I’m unclear if it’s going to be June or July. I think it’s probably going to end up being June because July is getting a little bit hectic for me, but that hasn’t been finalized, because there’s definitely one coming. Thank you very much, Rens. The next question is from Rachel Hayden. Always wonderful to receive your questions, Rachel. I’m looking forward to talking to you again soon. I know we’re talking about a potential video and other voices with Reveki between you and I. I’m looking forward to that. And I’m very grateful for the way you are spearheading a project to get art more involved in awakening from the meaning crisis, the religious and that’s not a religion, etc. So Rachel says, hello, would you say a bit about the role of agape within dialectical practice, which generate dialogos? Yes. I’m thinking partly of any parallel to Iris Murdoch’s exhortation to see justly and lovingly when practicing art. And that also overlaps with what Iris Murdoch has to say in her amazing book, The Sovereignty of the Good. I know that you often highlight the importance of phylia for such practices. And I’m also wondering about a relationship between phylia and agape in this context. Thank you so much. So excellent question. Yes, adjusting loving attention. So just to quickly review, phylia is the love of fellowship. It is when we get into mutual resonance with each other. There’s deep reciprocity, there’s deep reciprocal opening. And in the dialectic into dialogos practices, we use circling and other practices to afford that phylia. And then that phylia is directed towards Sophia, directed towards wisdom, so that we go, we build upon the deeply resonant right relationship we have with each other in order to get into a resonant right relationship with wisdom. And therefore, we have the fellowship love of wisdom phylia sophia or phyla sophia or philosophy as you now know it. But this is very much not current academic philosophy, but a practice of entering into a state of collective intelligence in which we experience the emergence of new ways of understanding, making sense in a mutually resonant and affording fashion. So that’s how phylia shows up. And I think it’s very important. Agape, which is specifically a Christian notion, although it has strong parallels in the Buddhist notion of Karuna. Agape is the love that is creative of personhood. The prototypical example is the love that a parent often portrayed as a mother, as for a newborn child, that love of course is not erotic. That love is not fellowship or friendship. That is a love that is given precisely because it turns this human non-person into a full-blown cognitive moral agent, a person in a community of persons. So agape is not a love of consummation. It’s not a love of communing. It is a love of create. It’s a love that is creative. Now, where does agape show up in these practices? So when we’re in phylia, there can also be the sense of what Socrates talks about. When he talks about himself as a midwife. So the whole point of dialectic into diologos is for us to all be Socrates to each other, except for the part where somebody has to kill us with hemlock. But we’re all trying to be Socrates to each other. And Socrates also described this practice as not only causing us to fall in love with beauty or the virtues or to fall in love with wisdom itself, but he also talked about how it helps us give birth. He was a midwife. He helped people to give birth to themselves. And notice the deep connection between concept and conceive, where conceive means to have a thought, but it also means to, of course, to be pregnant. And Plato talks about dialectic, and we get a kind of pregnancy. We enter into this practice, we enter into this practice, and we want to give birth to more logos. We want to give birth to more logos, more speech, more of this connection, more of this dynamic, reciprocal opening, enhanced relevance realization, activation and acceleration of collective intelligence. We want to give birth to logos. We want to help people to give birth to themselves. And so that’s where agape tends to show up for me, in what we get the sense of we’re helping people to give birth to the depths of themselves, but we’re also trying to give birth to presence, the logos, and to give to birth it and nurture it. And so that’s an agopic kind of love. And that shows up in the practice as we try to help each other give birth and as we collectively try to continually birth the logos more and more between us and beyond us. And so I think for me that’s how agape shows up. I tend to emphasize phylia because phylia is in the dialectic side. Dialectic is what we can do. It is a practice. Dialogos is a process that takes on a life of its own. That’s a defining feature of it. So we don’t do dialogos. We participate in it by doing dialectic. So I emphasize phylia because it’s found within the dialectical practice. The agape co-emerges with the emergence of the logos, the dialogos. So I hope that answered your question, Rachel. Thank you very much for it. It’s an excellent question. The next question is from Joseph Pickens. Thank you, Joseph. Hi, John. You’ve talked about how our culture has largely reduced knowing to the propositional. Yes, I have. For some of you, I tweeted about the link. I also posted it on YouTube. My talk at Cambridge is now available in which I talk a lot about the four kinds of knowing. I’ve got quite a bit of feedback from people saying it’s the best presentation of the four Ps of knowing that they’ve seen me give. So for those of you who want to get introduced to this, I recommend checking out my Cambridge lecture. It was really exciting, by the way, to be invited to give a guest lecture at Cambridge. It was very well received and it was kind of a magical place. Let’s return to Joseph’s question. You’ve talked about how our culture has largely reduced knowing to the propositional, which may reflect an implicit representational view of cognition that we hold as a culture. Right. The representational view is that to be cognitive is to have something in your head, something like a picture or a proposition that points to the world, most likely much more of a proposition than a picture. And there’s some arguments about that, about how pictures are inherently ambiguous representations. So let’s say you have a proposition that something like a sentence that stands to that represents, that points to some state of affairs in the world. And we, since the enlightenment, we have prioritized that view. The old view was a contact epistemology in which, when we knew something, our mind conformed to it. Our mind took on the same structural functional organization as it. And there was a, there was a consummation of conformity, not a fusion, a conformity. That’s very important to note the difference. During the enlightenment. And I go over this in great detail in the series, so I won’t repeat it. The sense of the mind being separated from the world and there being a veil of appearance, a veil of illusion, a veil of delusion between us and the world. And that we’re trapped inside our subjectivity and on the other side of it is an unreachable world, right? Became to prominence. And in that view, we have to get some state in our mind that somehow points to and points through appearance and points to the world. So that is what Joseph is talking about when he’s talking about the propositional and the representational. Joseph goes on, to me, propositional knowing has the representational quality to it. Exactly. I totally agree. While participatory, perspectival, and procedural knowing all have more of an inactive quality to them. Exactly. Inaction. This is a term coined by Francisco Varela and developed by my friend and colleague, Evan Thompson. I really, strongly, strongly, strongly recommend that people become more familiar with Evan’s brilliant, important work. It’s the best work in 4E cognitive science. Okay. So what does inaction mean? So inaction is this idea. So action is when I sort of shape the world and perception is when the world sort of shapes me. Romanticism gives emphasis to action and the will and empiricism gives emphasis to perception and to experience. Inaction is to say that very separation, which arose also in the enlightenment, is a mistake. Inaction is to have the idea that we are engaged, in fact, the word I want to use, and it’s the right word, we participate in a sensory motor loop. So I’m constantly moving in order to improve how I’m sensing the world and I’m constantly sensing the world in order to improve how I’m moving in the world. Even when I’m sitting still, I’m shifting my attention. My eyes are moving with saccades. All kinds of stuff is happening. And as the world is disclosed to me, that changes what I see. And as I change what I see, I change how I move. And as I change how I move, I change what I see. And there’s a sensory motor loop. I’m neither acting nor perceiving. I am enacting. I am enacting. Okay? So I think that’s exactly right. The perspectival, the participatory, and the procedural are inactive in nature. And this is one of the main arguments about those three kinds of knowing. And it’s an attempt to capture the deep insights of 4E cognitive science, one of them being inaction, but also embodiment, embeddedness, and embodied, embedded, enacted, and I can’t remember the fourth one, embodied, extended, extended. That’s what I’m trying to remember. I tend to add two more, extended, of course, is very relevant when we’re talking about distributed cognition and collective intelligence. So all of these, the three non-propositional P’s are very much designed to and are evidenced from and come from this whole 4E cognitive science and how much it it emphasizes how much of cognition is inactive. That’s why I’m very particular about emphasizing a particular way of understanding the participatory, the perspectival, and procedural precisely because I am wanting to stay very true to, which is an interesting use of true, right? It’s an inactive sense of true. I want to stay true to 4E cognitive science and the way it’s pointing to the non-representational inactive nature of the non-propositional kinds of knowing. Okay, let’s return to Joseph’s excellent question, but I wanted to fill it in for people. As a result, I feel the start discontinuity between the propositional and the other three P’s, between the representational and the inactive. Where do you see the bridge between the propositional and the other P’s and more broadly between inactivism and representationalism? Is there an inactive way to see propositional knowing? Yes, and this goes to a lot of past work that and current work that I’m doing with Dan Schiappi. Dan Schiappi and I have just published three papers about the scientists using the rovers on Mars as a way of really demonstrating the dependency relationship between propositional knowing, procedural knowing, perspectival knowing, participatory knowing, explicating what they are, showing how they’re exemplified. Dan and I are talking a lot about the connections between the representational, propositional, and the enacted non-propositional for those reasons. Also, because both of us are trying, are together working on understanding two deep and important forms of philosophical framework that emphasize the non-propositional. One is Plato and what’s called the third wave of platonic scholarship has deeply revealed the importance of the non-propositional. It’s very much where the notions of participatory, anybody who knows Plato, participation, perspectival, and procedural come from. Phenomenology, phenomenology very much has emphasized, especially in Marleau-Ponty, the procedural, the participatory, and the perspectival. Dan and I are trying to integrate the platonic and the phenomenological together. This is not easy, but the idea is that the bridge, so I would argue that the main engine of the non-propositional forms of knowing is relevance realization, recursive relevance realization. Many of you can see some of the series I’ve done with Greg Enriquez, especially the one on consciousness, the one that Greg and I did with Chris on the nature and function of the self, the elusive eye. You can see us building that up very carefully. How the non-propositional kinds of knowing, the sensory motor loop is basically being dynamically coupled into the world so that relevance realization is constantly evolving our agent arena relationship, that’s participatory knowing, our salience landscaping, that’s perspectival knowing, and the actual sensory motor interaction with the world, that’s our procedural knowing, and of course all the kinds of memory that map onto each one. Now the thing about relevance realization is it aspectualizes things, and there’s a lot in here about the forms, and you can take a look at some of the work I’m doing with Johannes Niederhäuser and Daniel Zaruba, but the basic idea is relevance realization aspectualizes things. That’s what perspectival knowing does. Things are aspectualized. This is seeing as, so you see this as a watch, but I can also see it as a gift from my partner. I can see it as something that marks time. I can also see it as something that captures the astronomical relations between the earth and the sun and etc. etc. So we’re always aspectualizing things. So we’re never seeing all of anything. So even visual aspects, you don’t see all of the visual aspects. Try to really stop and think about that. You never actually fully see any object, yet you perceive, this is a part of Marleau-Ponty and Marleau-Ponty and Plato come together. You don’t really see all of an object in the sense of you experience the whole, all of its aspects. You don’t ever experience all of its multi-aspectuality, but somehow you grasp that there’s a whole there. There’s a through line, which is not itself an aspect. And so you’re always aspectualizing, and that means what you’re doing is you’re creating the very machinery for representation. Representations are always aspectual. Again, if I represent, if I form a mental representation of this as a watch, that plugs into the fact that my perspectival knowing is already aspectualizing it in terms of the skills I’m bringing to bear on it, and in terms of the agent arena relationship. I could be a watch wearer. I could be a gift receiver. The representation points to, plugs into, is prepared for by the aspectualization. So aspectualization takes non-propositional relevance realization and then puts it into a logos, puts it into a way in which it has been given an intelligible, structural functional form and a through line in our experience. And then that is actually makes possible the possibility of representation of propositions that point to those aspects. And that’s exactly what a representation is. It is a directing of attention to a particular aspect or to write the through line of all of the aspects that you want to do something about. Now this goes to the second part, and this is Greg Enriquez’s work, which had priority, which had a provenance before the work done by Mercer and Sperber, in their book, The Enigma of Reason, I won’t go into that in great detail, but this is the point that as soon as we get an open ended communication system, and Arbib and others have argued that it was probably something like gesture. So animals have a closed communication system. The call means this, eagle’s coming or lion is coming, but we have open ended systems. So when I pantomime, I use, watch this happening, I use the perspectival and procedural and participatory knowing. So I’m assuming a certain agency, I’m making things salient to you, and you can see me, right, I’m pantomiming, I’m opening a bottle and pouring a drink and taking a drink. I can use the inaction to actually make you think of something that is not present, that’s displacement. And pantomime is open ended. I can pantomime many things. So when you get that capacity, something important happens. People get access to your mind in a profound way that they couldn’t get access before. So think about just even like language. Soon as you have language, people gain access to an intimate part of your cognition in a way. So you’re now exposed. So in addition to pointing at things, like and how they’ve been aspectualized, you need to do something else. You need to be able to justify and defend how you’re pointing at things, what you’re making people think about, what you’re claiming about the world. So the propositions emerge as a way of pointing at aspectualization, but also justify the fact that we are the ones pointing to the world in a particular way. And so there is a bridging process from relevance realization into aspectualization into the ability to point at something specific, right, to point at an aspect and then to having to justify the way we point. Because when we point outward with our language, we are also giving people deep access pointing into our mind. And so we start to have to create justification frameworks around these representations. And that’s when we get full-blown propositions. So that was a long answer. But I hope it was a helpful answer. It’s still very much a work in progress. But I guess, I think it’s honest and fair to say that Dan and I are consistently making very good progress on it. It’s a hard problem. And it takes a lot of careful thought and even more careful reading of some of the great thinkers to try and get an insight into this. So thank you very much. So question from Rob Gray. And many of you know that Rob shows up in several of the videos with me, you know, his philosophical fellowship, etc. Rob has his own channel that I want you to consider looking at where he talks to other people about my work. And I’m very grateful for that. I’m very grateful that Rob is in my life. But thank you so much, Rob. So Rob says, Plotinus in Aeneid 161. Wow, I’m so glad you’re reading Plotinus. That’s amazing. I’m glad people are taking up my proposal that we may be able to come up with a post-normalistic neoplatonism that could act as the courtyard for theologos rather than the courtroom of debate. Plotinus mentioned scientific understanding as a source of beauty. Now, of course, for Plotinus, science means something different than it does for us. Overlapping but not identical. It means a deep knowledge of sort of the causal structure of the world. But he’s not really invoking our modern notions of mathematical measurement and experimentation. So I’ve given you the overlap, but don’t import, right, the scientific revolution into this. So Plotinus mentioned scientific understanding as a source of beauty, but I rarely hear scientists sound like they find their theories beautiful, instead often feeling cold and functional. But I wouldn’t say joyous or overflowing with beauty. What are some reasons you find science beautiful or virtuous or lovely if you prefer? Can scientists love the beauty of science as a practice and what would that look like? Can good science lack beauty possessing only truth? Thanks. And only saying what others think anyway. You’re a beautiful philosopher scientist person. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Rob. So let’s take the first part. So scientists do invoke, and this is work that goes into, you can find the philosophy of science, especially around inference to the best explanation, which is at the core of science. They don’t invoke, sometimes they invoke beauty. They’ll say, you know, something’s beautiful. But they use other terms that are in some sense stand-ins for beauty. A term that’s very important is elegant. This is sometimes equated to being parsimonious, but elegant is obviously an aesthetic term. So elegance does come up. Why is elegance important? Because elegance points to that we can do a lot of different things with our theoretical function, or with, let’s just say with our theory. So a theory is highly elegant if it’s relatively simple, but it can do a wide variety of things. So, you know, explain a wide variety of many different phenomena. This is why Einstein talked about, you know, how important imagination is, because that ability to zero in on elegant theories is actually something very important. Elegance is part of plausibility. So the two things that make a theory plausible, well, three things. And plausible here doesn’t mean highly probable. Plausible means worthy of being taken seriously, worthy of investigating, right, etc. And you need to be able to judge which theories are plausible before you begin to gather the evidence that will tell you which ones are probable. You need an idea of plausibility so you know which are the good alternatives theories that you need to control for in your experiment. You need plausibility because you need something to guide you to determine which of all the logically possible implications you will derive from your data. So plausibility comes before, during, and after our experimental and theoretical investigations. So plausibility is indispensable, irremovable. You can’t get rid of it by doing an experiment to establish plausibility because that experiment will also presuppose plausibility. So we need an aesthetic sense of plausibility. We need a sense of trustworthiness that we have many different converging sources leading to our proposal. It’s called abduction, our proposal of a theoretical entity or function that can explain many different things. But we also need that to be elegant, that that function will indeed, the self-same function will explain many different things that will be highly powerful through trustworthiness and convergence, elegance in divergence, and then we want to balance between these. So if I’m only explaining a few things, I don’t need a lot of trustworthiness. But if I’m going to try and say, you know, E equals MC squared and look at how it explains these really crazy wide variety of things, the curvature of space, the explosion of atomic bombs, how the sun works, right? Then we better be convinced, and of course that’s what Einstein did, that that has emerged from many independent lines of investigation and that Einstein put them together in a way that is both trustworthy and elegant and well balanced between them. So that’s how I think beauty really shows up, sometimes in what the scientists say, but very much in what the scientists practice. I find science beautiful precisely because it is a very powerful practice for enacting the integration of the aesthetics of plausibility with, right, and the abduction with deduction and induction in order to come up with a powerful account of the world and that that process of the generation of plausible explanations is also bound up at the self-same time with the overcoming of many sources of self-deception in our cognition. So I find that a very virtuous thing to be doing. I’m reducing self-deception and I’m enhancing the plausibility of my explanations. That means I am being intellectually virtuous and also generating a beauty of intelligibility. Can scientists love the beauty of science as a practice and what that would look like? I think I’ve sort of indicated what the beauty of science is and how I think we can come to love it. There are more and more people talking about a virtue ethics, a notion applied to epistemology, virtue epistemology that to know is to engage in a kind of virtue. So apprehending the world well, aspectualizing the world well, explaining the world well, arguing about and justifying your claims well. Can good science lack beauty, possessing only truth? If science is not just generating truth claims, what it’s doing is it’s generating plausible explanations. Intelligibility, which is what explanations give us, is itself beautiful. We find things more beautiful the more we find, this is Plotinus’s argument at least, we find them insightfully intelligible to us. And this is also an argument made completely independent by Ellen Scarry and others and how beauty prepares us for truth. I’ve tried to show you that and how beauty sets us up for the plausibility that is indispensable. And what it does is give us what we can only actually ask for. We can’t ask for all truth because all truth is combinatorially explosive. What’s what caused the sinking of the Titanic? It depends. So you can’t say everything because it would literally be the entire post-previous history of the universe. Instead what you do is you zero in on what’s most relevant because it’s proportional to what you want to explain. So if you want to know why it sank at a particular time, then you’re going to tell me this is why the Titanic sank. But if you want to know why it sank so slowly, why was it a British ship that sank? Listen to my words very carefully. Depending on which aspect of the event you want to talk about, you’re going to change what you’re bringing in as the relevant causal factors that you find most plausible and most proportional to explaining the specific event. The proportionality and the relevance of our causal claims is something that a lot of philosophers of science talk about. I was very lucky when I was a graduate student to study with Stephen Yablou who made proportionality very important. So notice what we’re getting here. We’re getting elegance. We’re getting aspectuality. We’re getting proportionality. We’re getting causal relevance. I think you can’t pursue propositional truth through science unless you also have a commitment to beauty. Now, Flatinus’s understanding of beauty, not ours, which is Han rightfully argues in Saving Beauty, we have reduced to what gratifies us, what he calls the smooth, the easy. That’s not what Flatinus means by beauty. So we always are only pursuing causally relevant, explanatorily proportional intelligibility of truth. And I think like Flatinus, that means that truth and beauty are deeply interwoven together. And this, of course, is an argument also that has been made being made very beautifully, pun intended, by D.C. Schindler. For example, in his book, is the three books I’ve read so far, Titus’ Critique of Impure Reason, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, and The Catholicity of Reason. So thank you very much, Rob, for your excellent question. I hope I answered it well. Matt Wilkinson. Hello, Matt, and thank you. I’ve been wondering how your take on psychology relates to that of Jordan Peterson and Ian Milgrist. So it was interesting when I was in the UK because the person who came up most, and when people wanted to sort of connect my work to other work, in fact, the people that came up were exactly these two people. And in this order, Jordan Peterson and Ian Milgrist. Of course, I know Jordan relatively well. I’ve had a very deep discussion, in fact, dialogos with Ian on Rebel Wisdom. So JP, Jordan Peterson seems to focus quite a lot on hierarchies and in lobsters and archetypes and God. You seem to focus much more on the cognitive mechanisms of salience, etc., while Ian says similar things from a left-right brain point of view. Is there a way of synthesizing all the points together? Let me answer that, and then I’ll go on to the final note. Yes, there is. So first of all, Ian’s work and my work. I have, it was a gift given to me by Jonathan Roussen from Perspectiva. I have Ian’s new book. I’m going to read it in the summer. It’s an impressive two-volume book, so I’m only responding to what I know of Ian from our discussion and from the Master and His Emissary. So I emphasize a lot problem formulation, restructuring problem formulation by insight that redistributes, reproportions what we find salient, alters our salience landscape, the aha moment and the flash of insight. And Ian and I talked about that, and I think of insight as a particular way in which the left and right hemisphere are working. I think the left hemisphere is organized around well-defined problems that are familiar to us, and the right hemisphere is organized around ill-defined problems that have novelty, a significant component of novelty. And so exploitative left hemisphere, exploratory right. And independent of Ian’s work, there’s a large body of work arguing, increasing body of work, that what’s happening in an insight is we try to treat, we frame a problem initially as a well-defined problem, and then we realize we can’t work it through step by step. Instead we need to do, right, we need to explore for a new gestalt, a new overarching way of proportioning, restructuring our salience landscape. And so we move from the left hemisphere to the right, so this is breaking a frame, and we find a different gestalt, and we bring it back to the left. Now it’s in sequence, but I want you to think of it almost the same way, but parallel, right? The same way you’re reading the letters to read a word, but you’re also reading the word in order to disambiguate the letters. So it’s, I can describe it in sequence, but you have to see it more dynamic, of dynamical coupling. And so I think there’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of connection between the work I do on insight and the work that Ian does. And of course I think of insight as central to the cognitive continuum, you know, fluency into insight, into flow, into mystical experience, into transformative experience, and also insight being therefore central to the cultivation of wisdom. So there’s some very deep connections there. I think that as we get, this now connecting to Jordan’s work, as we get into, and as we have more and more insight about our capacity for in realizing wisdom, insight, seeing into things, we’re getting, we get more and more disclosure of the phenomenology and the functionality of how we’re making sense of things. I’m going to use the word intelligibility to that. So I get more and more disclosure of the experiential structure, of the cognitive structure, and also the functionality of how I’m making sense. And for me, that the structure of intelligibility is, I think the best exposition and explanation, explication of it is what I find in Neoplatonism, late Neoplatonism, so that we get emergence, right? We get causal interaction that produces emergence upward, and we get the structuring, real structuring of possibility that gets emanation downward. And so in one way, that’s very much a hierarchy. And Jordan is deeply influenced by both Christianity and Jung, but also by the fact that we’re not just talking about the and Jordan is deeply influenced by both Christianity and Jung. And so that hierarchy is already implicitly Neoplatonic. Jung, of course, was deeply influenced by Platonism. Many people, in fact, say that Jung is the Plato of the psyche, and Christianity has been deeply influenced by Neoplatonism. The one difference I have with Jordan is I see the emergence and the emanation as completely interpenetrating with each other. It’s not a hierarchy in the standard sense. At every level, emanation is coming down, and at every level, emergence is moving up. And I would argue you can actually see that in some of the great Christian Neoplatonist synthesizers like in Aquinas and Maximus and Aregina. And so you can see how I’ve tried to stitch Ian’s work into insight, and then when that machinery is directed onto intelligibility, it discloses something like a hierarchy. But I think of the hierarchy much more interdynamic and interpenetrating and interaffording. Okay, so we now are going to move to some of the live questions from the chat. So thank you, all of you who tweeted in your questions ahead of time, and thank you for those of you who are on the live call right now. I’m going to address a couple of questions. One is from Andrew Elfrid. I’m currently a geography undergrad doing research on the geography of suffering. Wow, I didn’t know that such a thing as possible. That’s very cool. Do you have any thoughts on what might be a worthwhile avenue of focus for a geographical spatial lens? Wow. So I’m going to presume, Andrew, that you mean suffering in the sense of loss of agency. You might want to focus on the work that is done on, I forget the author of the book, but there’s two. Well, there’s a book on orientation, and he’s doing the phenomenology and the cognitive science of orientation, because we take it for granted that we can orient ourselves. And think about how that goes from the very most primitive thing you’re doing to how you’re orienting yourself in the conceptual space. There’s a continuity there, and orientation is very important. And you can think of environments that disorient us, and how, at all of those levels, and how that robs us of agency. You also might want to look at Bortoft and others who are talking about a new way of thinking about the concept of a way of seeing. A way of seeing that is not looking at objects, but tracing the through line. Goethe was a premier example of this. So Goethe was, he taught himself, he learned it from Plato. It’s not clear, but he learned to see multi-spectual in a multi-spectual way. He had to use imaginal processes to supplement the perceptual processes so he could perceive the through line, the er form, the platonic form of the thing. And so I think paying attention to some of that literature, and how it integrates with this orientation, or sorry, with the orientation literature, could be very valuable. Because when we lose orientation, we lose agency. And also, when we only see the flat surface of dead still objects, we actually significantly undermine our agency in the world, because we have reduced the intelligibility, the degree to which the world can disclose itself to us, and draw from us more and more responses. It reduces our responsiveness, and therefore our responsibility to the world. I hope that’s some help for you, Andrew. I’m going to now move to a question by Pumbaa. I probably missed something, but it seems like many of the problems of the meaning crisis can be solved via a secular Stoicism and Buddhism hybrid. What is the biggest component missing from this? So first of all, I have to guess to some degree, what parts of Buddhism or what parts of Stoicism. But I would put it to you that when you’re integrating Stoic practice, for virtue, and some of the other practices, like the View from Above, and you’re bringing in Buddhist meditation and contemplation and self-transcendence, you’re starting to craft something that’s a lot like Neoplatonism. And one of the advantages that Neoplatonism has that secular Stoicism and Buddhism do not as clearly have is a deep history of reciprocal reconstruction. What do I mean by that? Neoplatonism was able to, reciprocal reconstruction, the two things restructure each other and fit together better, right? And so Neoplatonism was able to do reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, with Judaism, with Islam, you get Sufism, for example. There’s good arguments for it being able to do that, like Plant and others, with Buddhism. Stoicism was taken up into Neoplatonism. Arthur V. Lewis has argued very well that Neoplatonism is the spiritual grammar of the West. One other thing that Neoplatonism has repeatedly, in the Renaissance, for example, and in the Einsteinian quantum revolution, what Neoplatonism has repeatedly done is entered into reciprocal reconstruction with science. So Neoplatonism gives you an access to history and to scientific frameworks, while also taking up Stoicism, and taking up a lot of the material, a lot of the meditative, contemplative, and aspirational practices from Buddhism. Neoplatonism was also the intellectual Silk Road. So there was the geographical Silk Road, but as Thomas Plant and others have argued, Neoplatonism, because of its capacity for reciprocal reconstruction, was the intellectual, philosophical Silk Road that bridged East and West powerfully together. So that’s what I want to suggest to you, Pumbaa, is actually perhaps missing. A way where you can see that made more concretely is to see my series, Meditating with John Vervecky, Meditation and Contemplation, obviously drawn very strongly from the Buddhist tradition, and then we move into the cultivation of wisdom, and we go through the Epicurean, Stoic, and then into the Neoplatonic tradition, and then you can see how all of them relate together. So that’s what I would say is perhaps the biggest component. So thank you very much, Pumbaa. We’re going to move to a question from Ahmed. Muhammad, is there any irony threatening this little corner of the internet, in that the dialogues are on Zoom and recorded and consumed on YouTube? I worry about these things being reified. I think that’s a very good worry, worry, and that’s why the majority of the practice and the majority of the community should not be on Zoom, precisely because there should be living ecologies of practices, there should be living instances of the meta practice of dialectic into dialogos, there should be a living relationship from the ecologies of practices to the collective intelligence, the education of the collective intelligence, and vice versa. All of that, yes. However, there is something interesting, and Chris and I have been talking a lot about this and reflecting on it, in that Zoom allows us to do something that was a dichotomy in the ancient world or into the world until very recently. Plato famously worried about the reification you’re talking about, because writing, and then Derrida criticized him for that and blah blah blah blah. I won’t go into all of that. I think Derrida misreads Plato at this point. He’s got a very old reading of Plato, but I won’t go into that right now. Plato was worried of reification and writing, and so he made this contrast between living logos, calling it living speech, as we usually translate it, very very truncated, not capturing all the dimensionality. So he made a distinction between living logos and dead text. There’s a similar kind of thing in the Bible, the spirit of the, right, the spirit liveth but the letter killeth. Sorry, I’m doing Shakespearean because I was brought up with the King James Version of the Bible, which has a kind of charming beauty for me even still. Now what we have with Zoom is the possibility of engaging in the living logos, but also storing it like writing. We found something that bridges between writing and speaking, writing and logos. We’ve also got something that bridges between the private and the public in a powerful way. So there’s also tremendous potential to bridge in ways we previously couldn’t bridge. And so what that means is there’s the dialogues, and what starts to happen is a meta-dialogue opening up between the recorded dialogues. That’s very much happening. I’m trying to help shape that with the cooperation of others where we do something like the following. We have a series and we’ll do episode one on my channel and then episode two on the second person’s channel, episode three on the third person’s channel, and we circulate between so we get the dialogues and the communities and then the meta-dialogue between the dialogues and the communities drawn together. So there is risk, but there’s also tremendous opportunity on it, and I hope we can appropriate it. I hope we can apprehend it and appropriate it wisely. Okay, final question from Marcel Gabriel. What would you say is the core difference between men and women? I think we can map women with emergence and men with emanation. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve seen so many mappings. I’ve seen a Goodellian mapping. So Godel says you can’t have any system of intelligibility that’s simultaneously complete and consistent. I’ve seen the argument that men pursue consistency while women pursue completeness. I don’t know if that maps on to your proposal. And of course you have the classic Daoist mapping of men onto yang, the expansion, right, and women onto yin, the contraction and the grounding, and then they’re into penetration and the famous signal. I’m not sure which we’re doing. I’m not sure, and I mean this seriously, if we’re actually explicating the difference between men or women, or we’re doing what Levi Strauss says, we take an existing difference and we use it to make sense of other differences. We also do that not only in the differences between men and women. He makes the argument, I think, very well that we also use the differences between animals and also between human beings and animals to try and make sense of important relationships in the world. And we’re doing this all the time. And so, right, I don’t know which way the intelligibility arrow goes. I’m also not clear what, and I’m not attributing anything to you, Marcel, I’m not clear what it is people want to do. I get, I think I get what’s going on now. I mean there’s a sense in which we’re in discussion because we’re in confusion about, you know, about gender, about sexuality, about orientation, and of course not confusing or conflating them together, but also not just having them atomically separated from each other and unrelated because they are related. Trying to move past a simplistic romanticism, trying to move past a simplistic medical empiricism. Rachel Hayden is doing some of the best work on this. And I don’t even know, as I said before, if that’s the crucial difference. I mean Christianity thought that the difference between men and women was not the crucial difference. The crucial difference was between whether or not you were in the church or not. So they thought of the act of religious conversion, Paul uses this language, of an old man being replaced by a new man or an old person being replaced by a new person. And that that difference is the more relevant difference. So Paul will emphasize that difference and then say in Christ there is no Jew, no Gentile, no male, no female. So we should be willing to question whether or not the difference between men and women is a primary fundamental difference or if it is actually dependent on other kinds of differences. Yeah, like there’s just so, I mean here’s another difference. This is one, Zach Stein, you know the intergenerational difference, the relationship between the parent and the child. Is that not a fundamental relation too? And what does that, how does that relate to emergence and emanation? How does that relate to consistency and completeness? How does that relate to yin and yang? Like so I’m not being much help here because I have not put, like I’m aware of the problem to some degree as I’ve articulated it to you, but I have not put the time and the research into trying to think through what is actually the most rationally justifiable explication of the relations of intelligibility between all these kinds of differences, all these kinds. Other cultures, like I said, the differences between animals were projected onto societal difference and taken as more fundamental. That’s what’s going on in totemism, for example, at least according to Levi Strauss. Other, like I say, other cultures emphasize the difference between the converted and the unconverted. Other cultures emphasize the difference right between child and parent with one generation and another. And then they get mapped onto various other pre-existing differences within our ontology. We’re always using, and this is Mary Douglas’s idea, we’re always using our own embodied existence as natural symbols for other aspects of reality. So we need to wrap it up everybody and I want to thank you all for joining me at this Q&A. We’re doing these every third Sunday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. This video will be made publicly available on YouTube channel, my YouTube channel afterwards. I want to thank you all for your ongoing support, both financial and in terms of the words of encouragement you give me. And finally, I want to thank Madeline who’s running everything behind the scenes and making all of this work as smoothly as it has. So thank you very much, Madeline. Take care everyone. Thank you for your time and attention.