https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NFv9iZYr9KU
Welcome everyone to the monthly Q&A. It’s a pleasure to be here with you again. Thank you for your patience. So we had to move things around. Both myself and Madeline have been ill and then overwhelmed by events while we’re trying to catch up. So the flexibility that you’ve extended to us is much appreciated. Things are getting back on track and should be running smoothly again very soon. A special note, many questions were submitted requesting book suggestions. If we don’t get to your questions, we will review your requests and send you suggestions via the Patreon direct chat. So I’m going to take a bunch of questions that have already been submitted by a tweet and so forth. And then about 45 minutes through we will switch to questions that have been submitted via the live chat. All right, so the first question is from Scott Rowan. This is the question. You once said in a video that a buddy helps you to go to sleep but a friend helps you wake up to possibilities that you couldn’t on your own. Yes, that’s part of the larger discussions that a buddy helps you entertain yourself or engage in entertainment whereas a friend helps you to cultivate virtue. So although we have never met, you’ve become a deep friend to me for helping me wake to possibilities that I could not have on my own. Thank you for saying that, Scott. That’s a very powerful thing to say to me. So thank you from the bottom of my heart, Dr. Verbeke. You’re welcome, Scott. I hope someday we do meet. My question today is about practice because one of the major lessons I’ve taken from you is that we become what we practice. Yes, I have two children who are six and nine. What simple practices would you recommend? I focus on teaching them at that age. Thanks, Scott. So there are two books and I can’t quite remember the name of the authors. Matthews comes up, but that might be incorrect. Try and look it up right after we’ve done this video and put it in the notes. One is dialogues with young children. The other is philosophy in the young child. And it’s basically how to take the natural curiosity of young children and naturally adduce it into the preliminaries of philosophical reflection. I think this is a very important thing to start doing. I tried to do that with my kids. Then there are some very good books that introduce children to some of the sages. There was a very beautiful book called Siddhartha that I used to read with both of my children, exposing people to young children to the Buddha. Of course, there are similar books around Jesus. I believe there are books now that do that with Socrates, Lao Tse. So exposing them to more the person and only their thinking sort of background to the symphony of sages, I think is also something you want to do right from the beginning. Secondly, in addition to that sort of philosophical training, you might want to get them doing a very basic martial art practice. So I do not recommend doing seated meditation with young children. We do not have enough research on that. And because the frontal lobes have not properly developed, I’m hesitant to recommend any kind of seated meditation practice. I’m also hesitant to recommend a very strenuous kind of yoga practice or anything like that. However, there seems to be very clear, at least traditional evidence, that doing a martial art practice, especially something, a mixture of a hard style and a soft style, the hard style tends to be external style, something like karate. The internal style is something like Tai Chi Chuan. One of them or both of them is very good for practicing mindfulness, training attention, training proper social interaction, beginning the cultivation of self-regulation and virtue, and giving them a regular place in which as an alternative to video games, they can find transferable flow induction. I think that’s a really important thing to do with children. I taught one of my sons Tai Chi Chuan. The other one was, did not want to do it. I just couldn’t. You can’t force any of this on children. The love of wisdom is like all other loves and friendship. You can’t force it on people. Best you can do is exemplify it. So exemplifying it and hope that there’s some beauty in your exemplification that draws them in. I am happy to say that my son, who I didn’t do that, he has been drawn into other things that I hope I exemplified. We’re now really connecting very deeply in ways that I think are very much a cultivation of wisdom and insight and flow. That has been a great joy for me. So I recommend that, and I don’t recommend doing too much more than that. The other thing, and perhaps it’s the most important thing, is how are you modeling is how are you modeling this? Are you reading philosophical texts in front of them? They don’t have to be reading it. Are you? Are you discussing with your partner the nature of honesty? Just naturally the nature of truth, the nature of love. When you try to get them to change their behavior, are you trying to do it because they see you already modeling it? I don’t know you, Scott, and I’m not making any judgment on you one way or the other. But what I’m saying is, I mean, and we even have a proverb to this, right? Children pay much more attention to what you do than what you say. So let’s review. I think you want to expose the, oh, there’s one more thing I want to add to this. So I’ll add that in the review. You want to expose them to naturally occurring philosophy. And those books I recommended are good on that. You want to expose them to the person, the personalities and the personhood of the sages. And there’s lots of books specifically to be read to children about this. You want to get them into some kind of martial art practice or gymnastics. These are the two I would recommend. There are really good programs in both for children, and they’re well vetted. I do not recommend a seated mindfulness practice at this stage. Third, you have to really exemplify this. You have to do a lot of things around them, and your presence in the practice is all you’re doing. You are not trying to get them to join the practice. You want this insinuated into the background context of their life. One other thing I wanted to mention is you want to expose them to very well written versions for children of some of the great myths. You have to start training them and how to deal with the imaginal. And that will be important for getting them to start being able to integrate the sensual and the conceptual via the imaginal. I would recommend that. And then a little bit later, you might try, once they’re really good at reading and talking with you about material, you might try a simple lexio divina practice with them. All right. Thank you for your question, Scott. It was an excellent one. Jose Ferry, if you follow your definition of wisdom, some states of flow generate wisdom processes. Can we coin a new term for that? Some states of flow generate wisdom processes. Two, I’m a new patron. I would love to know if the monthly video in my tier is the same of the Q&A or if possible to talk in person in the video with other patrons. So I’ll answer the second part first, Jose. Which is, I’m assuming it’s Jose or maybe it’s Josie. Forgive me. It’s hard. It’s phonetically. Could go either way, depending on whether it’s Spanish in origin or English in origin. So I apologize if I’m mispronouncing. But I’ll answer the second one. We are going to put together a patron day where we will, we meaning Madeline and I, we have a patron day. We meet. We’ll discuss many of the unanswered questions that have come through. We’ll have a small group. We’ll have general Q&A. I’ll be moving around talking to people, having meetings. So anything that falls through the cracks, we’re going to try and gather together and get a more direct in-person, it’ll obviously be done virtually, but in-person patron day so that we can more fully address the communicative concerns of the patrons and also to try and get more direct connections and also do a little bit of community building or Senga building. Now to your first question. If you follow your definition of wisdom, some states of flow generate wisdom processes. Can we coin a new term for that? I think you’re, so are you saying like a term for flow states that generate wisdom processes? That would be, that’s a, yeah, we should have a new term for that. I haven’t thought to do that, but yes, I mean that was, I would argue, that that is a primary way and I’ve argued this in a video I released a long time ago and that done a lot more work on trying to get a paper done on this. That’s what Chi eventually, sorry, not eventually, that’s what Chi or Ki originally meant. It meant something like, I would argue it meant something like flow states that are conducive of wisdom, but it meant not only the subjective side of the flow state that is conducive of wisdom, but also the objective side, the way the world is disclosing itself, right? It was super salience and at-one-ment. And so I think that Chi is actually a good word for flow processes that generate wisdom processes and especially enhance connectedness that is central to meaning in life. So I think the Chinese have already given us a word and maybe we should just use that word instead of trying to coin an English neologism. But I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that’s I think a really good way to think of Chi and a way of giving a term for the flow states that are conducive to the cultivation of wisdom. Thank you so much for that question. So the next question is from Emmett. Hi John, I was wondering if you could elucidate your neoplatonic view as it relates to emanation and emergence. I’ve heard you mention that you think both are just as ontologically important. What would you say to someone who thinks that the constraints which you think come top down through emanation can be explained by the powers, dispositions, and relations of the entities at the base level? So a weak emergentist that is also reductionist, for example. Also thank you for all your amazing work. So thank you Emmett. That will allow me to address this in some detail. Why do I not think you can’t, why do I not find the emergence sufficient? Because the emergence can’t actually explain the order and the nature of the holes. This and why they are normative. Why are the, why do these gestalts rather than others emerge? Why do certain, why do gestalts have the relations they have to each other? Why is it that only certain properties emerge in the gestalts and are not found in the powers and dispositions? So many people, Whitehead for example, Plato for example, think we have to explain why the constraints have an ordered intelligibility. And of course we already do this to some degree. People that are reductionists, for example, have a very difficult time explaining laws in terms of the powers and dispositions of the entities that are subject to the laws. Because laws are counterfactual supporting, they are supposed to generalize over all possible entities, all possible dispositions and relations, and therefore they are not reducible in that fashion. Laws seem to in fact indicate that there is an ordering of intelligibility, asymmetric dependence between sets of constraints that cannot be explained by the emergence but are actually presupposed in it. So I think if I were to put it in a slogan, emergence always has a problem explaining the nature and the ordering of the wholes. Emanation has a symmetrical obverse problem. Emanation says their all understanding is based on how things are integrated until we must get to the principle of all unification integration that is itself purely one. And before you say what a silly idea, oh really? What does the Big Bang claim everything came out of? Oh, an absolute singularity. And what does entanglement propose? That that singularity is somehow still present even underneath the laws of nature. So be careful when you point your finger at what’s ridiculous or not because you may not realize who is included in your ridicule. But what’s the problem for the emanationist? How does difference emerge out of pure oneness? You can see the classic neoplatonists wrestling with this. The classic neoplatonists keep wrestling with it. Why does, oh the one overflows or somehow the difference was there within it? Of course this problem translates directly to the physics of the Big Bang. Why doesn’t the singularity just eternally subsist? Oh well, enough probability. That’s not an answer. So I think any attempt to prioritize one over the other is to not recognize these two fundamental deep problems. Why do these particular gestalts emerge? Why do they emerge in an ordered fashion? And why is the ordering half-finished? Why is the order half-finished? Why do they emerge in an ordered fashion? And why does the ordering have an ontological hierarchy to it? Why do we have levels? So we need to, we seem to need something like what Jerry Fodor called the laws of form or what Whitehead said, the organization of the platonic forms or what Plato said, the forms insofar as they are bound together within the good or the one. The problem with the emanationist is why are there forms and for each form why are there many different instances? Where does all this difference come from? I remember reading with a bunch of people in grad school a book called the Metaphysics of Meaning by Gerard Katz and he, Gerald Katz, and he basically argues that the emergentist can’t explain top-down normativity coming from the whole and the emanationist can’t explain the differential causality that is at work within emergence and they need each other. Emanation needs something that can receive it, which would be emergence, and emergence needs a space into which it emerges, which is emanation. I think any attempt to get outside of this symmetry is doomed to fail. I’ve only given you very cursory summary arguments of the whole position. I could do all of this in more depth. That’s why I think we are faced with the kind of primordial paradox that emergence and emanation are co-essential and co-fundamental to both ontology and intelligibility. That is why I’m so interested in figures such as Regina on one hand, Whitehead on the other, ancient and modern. I hope that answers your question, Amit. Thank you very much for the question. Elias, Elias Trikopoulos, two-part meditation question. My distractions arise already while doing the core four. Should I try to meditate on those distractions or wait until I move my focus to the breath? Yes. So the answer to your first question is yes. Do not try working with your distractions, meditating on your distractions, while you are establishing the core four. You are not stable, rounded, and open in the right proportioned way in order to relate to your distractions with the appropriate mindfulness. So very clear answer to the first question. Do not just label the distractions and return while you’re doing your core four and wait for there to be that internal flow of your core four before you start to meditate on your distractions. So I would say yes, as soon as you start focusing on the breath, for example, in basic Vipassana, don’t immediately start meditating on your distractions. Do that for a while until the flow and the focus that you’ve got going seem to be having some internal momentum. That’s part of finding your focus, I know, but just carry that on until it has a bit of momentum. I can’t give you a rule for that, just a sense of it, and then as you’re distracted while you’re following your breath, meditate on your distractions. Second, I don’t fully comprehend the concept of meditating on mental distractions. It is relatively easy to understand how to apply the five factors in acquiring mindfulness on physical distractions. A pain comes, I become aware of it, I focus on it while it’s still there until it goes away or I go away. Yes, when I’m mentally distracted, however, while I’m distracted, I’m not aware of what I’m being distracted. When I become aware of my distractions, it stops being a mental distraction since it already belongs to the past. How can I move my focus to it then and meditate on it? Yes, so I know this sounds a bit paradoxical, but you can just, and this is what I tried to get at with this translucency. You’re still seeing through your frame, but you’re now becoming aware of your frame. And so with practice, you get a translucency. It’s like lucid dreaming, and there’s a relation there, translucency, lucid dreaming, where you are aware that you’re dreaming, but you continue to dream. You don’t wake up. Your awareness doesn’t wake you up. In the same way, you can be in the meant, the mental distraction can be running and part of you pulls away enough to become aware that you’re in distraction. You can realize that you’re ruminating and that doesn’t automatically shut the rumination off. Often, for a very long time, it will. But what can happen is you can pick up, let’s say it’s inner speech. I mean, you turn on it, the inner speech goes silent. Yes, but can you feel in your framing what was, because it’s still there, what was making that focus on inner speech? And perhaps you can even feel in your framing what might be pulling you back towards that inner speech. Can you feel it? Can you feel what’s happening, how it’s trying to bubble towards thought? So you’re trying to become aware of the framing. You’re not making it transparent and going back into thinking, but you’re not just leaving the framing behind. You’re trying to get that translucency. You’re trying to pick up on the echoes in your mind that give you the awareness of the framing as opposed to the thoughts that were framed therein. Try to catch yourself. What does my mind feel like? What’s its taste, its tempo, its texture when it has been thinking and still wants to be thinking? What’s going on there? What does that feel like? You’re trying to catch the framing while it is still active. It’s subtle. It’s not easy. And that’s why I said mental distractions are the hardest. That’s what I was trying to get at when you’re trying to pick up on the voice, because when the language dies, you can still get a sense of the voice of it. Who was doing that talking? It’s still sort of echoing there. The voice, the very recent memory of the voice can get you to focus on how you were framing it. I was being, I was really, I was like, oh, I was thinking that and that’s me and I’m being planning and that sense of control that comes from planning. Or this was me sort of wandering and the sense of just wanting to receive. You’re trying to step back through the voice of your inner speech and become aware of the framing that makes that inner speech come to life, makes it focal, that focuses your attention on it. And that is still there because the attraction to the inner speech is not completely gone when you pulled away and noted it. It’s still there. It’s still there. It’s still running. That’s what I’m asking you to try and get aware of. It’s hard, Elias. I get it. It’s very, very subtle. I was trying to get at when you’re trying to get that place where you’re noticing, like I said, when you’re outside the mouse hole and you’re noticing the way your mind is bubbling and trying to take the shape it needs to have in order for you to become an inner speaker and an inner listener. Like who was listening to your speech and who was speaking it? Those are still there, right, in some fashion. Try to pick up on that. It’s subtle. And you’ll only get glimpses of it for quite a while, but it’s very, very powerful when you start to see it more and more. Thank you very much for that question. Andrew Alfred asks, what does it mean to be human and truly connected to others? Wow. I’ll read the rest of your question. Also as a side note, in March you answered my question on the geography of suffering. I’ve been reading Bartoff’s Takings of Period Seriously and it’s completely changed my view of the world. I’m so glad to hear that. Bartoff’s book, I’m still reading it. Excellent book. I’m reading a whole constellation of books. I tend to read books in constellation. So I’m reading them but also trying to see through them what they converge upon. Because I’m really trying to get at this new way of seeing how it takes place in eidetic adduction, how it shows up into dialectic and to be a logos. I’m reading with my dear friend and one of my most important writing partners, Daniel Chappie, we’re reading Uxkul’s book on, oh what’s it called? It’s where he, oh. Anyways, he’s famous for the idea of the umvelt, what a particular organism’s world is like. And what I realized is people like Thomas Nagle says, well you don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. Well Uxkul does this thing where he, okay this is how the fly’s eyes work. This is what it can make salient. This is what it can’t make salient. This is the kind of, and then you, and then imaginally you can know this is what it’s like to see like a fly. Maybe not the adjectival quality but the adverbial quality for sure. And you realize why flies can’t see spider webs. And so really enhancing, I think it’s something like the the world of animals or, oh what a time to lose an important title. I’m reading the book right now. But, and so even extending, right, that ability outside, imaginally extending it outside of our own species. Because the idea of finding the through line of all possible salience landscapes, of all possible patterns of intelligibility, right, that’s kind of like trying to get at where intelligibility and reality as a, as an ongoing, as a realization, where intelligibility and realization are completely intertwined and interwoven. Where the good is. Because the good is the perpetually kept promise that the depths of intelligibility will disclose the depths of reality. So all of that I think is really, really important. This new way of seeing and being. You mentioned another author at that time who has written about the phenomenology of orientation. Yes, yes, aha! But couldn’t remember it. You have to remember who it was. I’d love to dig into that orientation literature. Yep, reading it right now. Werner Stegmaier, here’s the book. What is orientation? I wish I had the Uxkoll book right beside me right now. But just look up Unwelt, U-M-W-E-L-T, and then you’ll get Uxkoll and then you’ll get a listing of his most important book. There’s actually two books in one in the volume that I have. But that’s the orientation book. So using all of that, what does it mean to be human and truly connected to others? So I think being truly human, the first part, and here’s why I make use of the work of my good friend Greg Enriquez and how we’ve collaborated together with other people, that being human is to integrate in a way that is both viable and virtuous. It’s supposed to be both viable and virtuous in both senses of virtuosity and good character traits. It is to integrate in a way that is both viable and virtuous the primate and the person. So what is personhood? We are persons, but we are primates. And for me, to be a good human, to realize my humanity, to try and preserve, protect, and promote my humanity and that of others, is to find the affordances and how they fit together in a homeostatic cluster, gestalt, find the affordances for the integration, the reciprocal opening between my primate nature and my personhood. And this of course is Plato and the tripartite nature of the soul. So for me, realizing my humanity is to bring about that integration in a way that is viable and virtuous for my being in the world. To truly connect to others is to agapically love through my humanity, their humanity, so that I help them through me and through themselves find those viable and virtuous ways of seeing and thinking and acting and being that integrate, reciprocally open, how they are both primate and person. We are not angels, pure persons. We are not pure beasts, pure primates. We are the primates that are persons. And you can only be a person within a community of people that are agapically committed to your personhood while always agapically compassionate about your primate nature and being. We are called to a recognition of the intrinsic worth and value of primate persons. When we realize that value and how it is a value that transcends our own egocentric valuing of ourselves without crushing how we agapically love ourselves but into weaving the two together, then I think we are both fully human and truly connected to others. Thank you, Andrew, for your question. Matt Gumbly, do you have any intuitions about the utility of the triple R model to give a functional rather than descriptive model of autism? I hope I recall Greg correctly pointing out that the current big five personality matter is descriptive in the sense that it is a set of identifiable personality characteristics rather than functional in the sense that it describes the structural functional organization of those personality traits. And I thought there might be a similar dynamic at play with autism and wondered if there was scope to understanding it in a more functional way with triple R. So first about autism and then secondly about personality traits. So, Matt, you’ll be happy to know that Brett Anderson, Mark Miller, and myself have a paper at the Journal of Phenomenology and the College of Sciences on exactly that. Integrating triple R and predictive processing in order to go have an integrated functional account of actually the spectrum from autism to psychosis. People have been arguing that there’s actually a cognitive continuum and we’re all on it somewhere and we are doing exactly that. We have got very good reviews from the reviewers, really, really good reviews. We have completed or we’re completing the revisions and going to resubmit very shortly. I was just talking texting with Mark today. I was proposing an analogy that triple R is like Darwinian, the Darwinian theory of evolution and predictive processing is like Mendelian genetics. They need each other and they complement each other. They mutually explicate each other. They fit together and then they give an integrated functional explanation. Gary Hovinesyan and I have used the triple R model in conjunction with Colin DeYoung’s cybernetic account of the big five. So Colin took the descriptive account of the five traits in big five theory, put them into a cybernetic functionalist account and then we used relevance realization for ECogSci to further develop that functional account. That has already been published in the journal of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. So the project of doing exactly what you asked for has been done and I’m very proud of this paper. I think it’s an important paper. Of course, Brett deserves most of the credit for the paper. He was first author on it. But of course, Mark and I both contributed. Just so powerful. This integration, Mark and I are going to be working together for the next two or three years. Brett and I are continuing to work virtually. Mark is going to be coming to U of T. We’re going to be working. This deeper integration of triple R and predictive processing and the idea of autopoetic adaptive agency coming out of, I would say, autopoetic adaptive affect affective agency. So quadruple A, which is at the core of 40 Cognitive Science. So these three are being significantly integrated. That triangle is also being integrated, has been integrated with big five. And Gary and I talked about that with Greg in Psychopathology and Well-being. We just completed that series. It’s on my channel under the Cognitive Science Show. And then Gary and I are working also on integrating that triangle with not so much the predictive processing part, but that will be implicit, maybe a little bit more explicit in this next paper, right? But integrating that with attachment theory. So the idea is to actually provide a comprehensive framework that will explain, that’s not, will explain by integration all of these fragmented theories we have about cognition and human nature. So very, very excited about all of this. This is a very exciting time in my professional academic life. Lots of things are coming to fruition and lots of people are taking up my work and taking it beyond what I could do. There’s genuine dialogos happening. And then I follow them and we dialogue together. And I just, and then all of that is happening academically. And at the same time, all the work that I’m doing with Chris, Master Pietro and Guy Sandstock and Johannes Niederhäuser and Daniel Zaruba, and I dedicate adduction and dialectic into dialogos. And then Chris and I are writing a paper trying to bridge between those. And it’s just, oh, I’m not in pain. I’m overwhelmed by the fact that so much seems to be catching fire. And I hear I’m using Heraclitus’ metaphor for the, for the logos, the fire for the way of, as a symbol for the logos. So much is catching fire. And so, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively, it gives me hope. It gives me hope that the theory is developing in a way that powerfully will enable the practice. The practice is developing in a way in which it can deeply appreciate and appropriate the theory. And that we may get to a place where we could steal the culture and win the race against the forces that are powering the meta crisis. Now, this, of course, is all my own egocentric narrative bias. So take it with a grain of salt. But I did want to share with you that this is not just an academic kairos for me. It feels very much like it is a larger kairos. And the fact, Matt, that you’re asking that question, and in some sense, the answer is already underway, means there’s so much more going on between all of us. It’s so exciting. Thank you for that. Excellent question, Matt. Rolandis. Sense-making about the meaning crisis and related topics won’t be very productive doing it alone. It requires interacting with many minds. It seems to be difficult to find interested people locally, while online does not fit the bill because of differences in context. Yes. If this is a general global situation, then in fact, very few people are interested. It is bound to be a very niche, not to say elitist activity for a time being. Or is this something that is going to be done to more reliably make people more interested and involved? What are the usual mistakes slash pitfalls to avoid? So first of all, let’s deal with the first point. We don’t need to reach 100% of the people or even 80% of the people to start shifting around. In fact, in times of kairos, the system is in criticality. All of the things falling apart means that the people who are in criticality, all of the things falling apart means that the percentage that you need in order to bring about powerful intervention is probably very small, maybe 10%. Still a lot. 10% though looks more doable, in fact, the way things are growing. But I still appreciate your concern. And one of the things we have to do is we have to create sets of practices that are designed to onboard and escort people into the more centralized ecology of practices that people are trying to work with to address the meaning crisis. And this is what I mean about the role of artists and poets and musicians to bring this to wider audience. So I had the great pleasure of zooming with the person, sounds male to me, but we shouldn’t be presumptuous, who does Eternalized. And he or she wishes to have their identity kept private for now. But go on YouTube, look at their videos. They’re getting a huge number of people because they bring this. I mean, and I’ll just, just they, the person I was talking to, right, they were clearly, and they’ve said this explicitly, very influenced by my work in deep dialogue with it. They and I are going to keep talking. But they take this, this often abstract material, not just mine, but, you know, the work of Heidegger or Jung, and put it in a way that is attracting, you know, hundreds of thousands of views, because there’s an art, they have an artistry, an eloquence of presentation of the poetry of the language and the painting of, with pictures that is being done that I think is highly important. Don’t try and get people immediately interested in my work. Well, you can, but if they don’t, point them instead to, you know, the Meaning Wave stuff with Akira the Dawn, or point them to the Eternalized channel, or point them to, you know, Big Think did an animated version of the first half of Think Big Animation, Zeke did, you know, 15-minute animated version of the first 15 episodes of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. There’s, we need to put a lot of work in, and a lot of people are doing it, and I keep saying it, into getting the artistry that is the liminal zone that allows people to move into the deeper sets of practices. All right, so thank you for that question. That was the last question. We’re now going to live questions from the chat. I’m going to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support is crucial to continue to produce these videos, supporting the science we’re doing to find solutions to the Meeting Crisis, and as I just indicated, there’s a lot of indications that that science is heating up, and it’s a very exciting time. Okay, this is from Jack Harris. In Buddhism, is the Dharma the path into the attainment of enlightenment, or the attainment of nirvana? Sorry, I don’t know why I was predicting ahead. My predictive processing overtook me. I apologize. Or is the Dharma more of a trail guide to that same path mentioned? Also, is nirvana a place to exist in, or more of a state of being? I do not think of nirvana. I’ll answer the second question first. I do not think of these places, nirvana, heaven, as places in the physical sense of a place. I think we need to move beyond the two worlds mythology, and I have a lot of existing extant arguments about that, and discussions with other people about that. I’m going to speak the words of Satan. What does that mean about me? From Milton’s Paradise Lost, the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell a hell of heaven, and of course, he’s actually quoting something that comes out of the heart of Stoicism. What he’s pointing to is that there’s, I think, that meaning is a transjective property. I think he’s Satan. He’s too imperious. He thinks it can go just one way. The mind can just impose itself. If he were more angelic and not demonic, he would say, and the world can also, right, the world is also multi-placial in that way as well, and the two are resonating with each other. When that resonance is working profoundly, so that the mind is constantly opening up different patterns of intelligibility places, and the world is continually, inexhaustibly opening up different situations, states of affairs, places, and the places are mutually affording each other’s ongoing disclosure and deepening, that is what I think is meant by Nirvana. It is a place beyond all the ways in which we are reciprocally narrowed, but it is not a place in the sense of a location, but in the way I’ve just described. It is the place that is disclosed, the transjective place that is disclosed in reciprocal opening within symbolic resonance. For me, the Dharma is both the mental side of learning, and this is how Dharma is used, and the world side of intelligibility, because Dharma is also used for that, and how they fit together and can fit together. The Dharma is that. The Dharma is the virtue of the world. Virtue of virtues, and what I mean by virtue is a set of beliefs, appropriate states of mind, appropriate traits of character, appropriate ways of participating in the world, in evolution, in culture, etc. That’s how I think Dharma is, and that’s what I think Nirvana is. It’s also what I think is not exactly the same, but convergent, not identical, but convergent. I think that’s what the Logos is, and what heaven is. I think it’s what the Tao is, and what Tao is. The Taoists are really cool, because Tao is both the way and what is disclosed in the way. They get a gold star for being a little bit more clever about it, although the Christians do say the Logos was with God and is God. Of course, you get similar things about Dharma and Buddha nature within Buddhism. Great question. I hope I answered it well. Thank you, Jack. Varun Godwile, you’ve often talked about how the actual view of the universe has stopped being visible. I’m sorry, viable, my mistake, because of the scientific revolution. I have a scientific background, and I found Buddhism most palpable to me, but I find it difficult to reconcile rebirth unless I go deep into considering the emptiness of the self. Do you have any thoughts on how Buddhism can be updated to be better integrated with the scientific worldview? Yeah, I recommend reading, two people have moved beyond Buddhism, not because I’m trying to get you to move beyond Buddhism, but you can get a criticism from people who have been deeply sympathetic and at times identified themselves with Buddhism. I recommend Stephen Bachelors Beyond Buddhism and Buddhism Without Beliefs. Read Buddhism Without Beliefs first. In fact, read the trilogy. Sorry, it’s a lot of reading, but read Along with Others, the existential interpretation of Buddhism. Then read Buddhism Without Beliefs, and then read Beyond Buddhism. And then read Evan Thompson’s book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, because you can see what is it from, and these are not hostile critics from Without Going Nah Nah, these are people deeply practicing, deeply enmeshed, especially Stephen, you know, identifying themselves as Buddhists for long periods of time, involved with Buddhist traditions and Buddhist organizations, nevertheless, launching the criticisms that need to be addressed in order for Buddhism to, instead of pretending, which it sometimes does in Western Buddhism, to reconcile with Western science, is science Western? I don’t even know. But actually, the challenges that need to be met if you’re going to genuinely reinvent your Buddhism to integrate with the scientific worldview. And I recommend one other thing. I recommend you learn more about Neoplatonism. I recommend taking a look at D.T. Suzuki’s book, Christian and Buddhist Mysticism. I think is what it’s called, in which D.T. Suzuki is bringing in Neoplatonic Christianity and Zen, and sometimes Pure Land, because I think this goes towards Thomas Plant’s notion that Neoplatonism is actually, Neoplatonism is, this is amazing, amazing, giving you the virtues for disposing the furniture of intelligibility, so you can enter into reciprocal reconstruction with science. Maybe Renaissance science, maybe it’s 20th century science, maybe it’s current science, complexity science, but it also can enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism. I think it’s really, really important that you get that, because I think it will help you also in responding to the questions that you have, in responding to those internal criticisms of Buddhism. It will also give you the leveraging logos, the gymnastics of your intelligibility to coordinate the reciprocal reconstruction with Buddhism. And so that would be my recommendation, Brun. I hope you find that helpful. Thank you for your question. So Tim has asked, Hi John, how tied up are learned values with a person’s identities, especially values that a person is exposed to over and over again during the developmental period? Can a value become so ingrained with a person and so lodged within their self-corrected processes that it becomes fair to say that the value literally becomes a part of the person in a sense? Are there any scientific papers showing how difficult it is for an early ingrained values to fade out of a person’s way of thinking? Thanks, Tim. Yes. Sorry. Multiple questions. And the answer to all of them is an integrated yes. I would put it to you that a better word than values are virtues. Virtues are, again, integrated sets of beliefs, skills, states of mind, traits of character, ways of life that orient you towards the good, not right, the good that is behind the goodness of truth, the goodness of ethical righteousness, and the goodness of aesthetic beauty, that good, the good that makes all of those possible and makes them actually interpenetrate. We have been behaving since Kant as if they’re autonomously separate from each other, the three critiques. But if you look at areas of the brain that are engaged when people are making epistemic decisions or ethical decisions or aesthetic decisions, they overlap and interpenetrate. And of course, if you don’t find truth a good and if you don’t find it attractive, why would you pursue it? And if there isn’t any reality in beauty, why would you commit? The three transcendentals, I think, are deeply interpenetrating. And I think the ancients and medieval people were right about that and Kant is wrong about that. So when I’m saying that virtues is that integrated set oriented, orientation, remember, orientation towards the good, then I think that virtues are character traits and therefore are part of your identity as a person as opposed to your identity as just a primate. You may be a bit, and you know, we may meet individuals that are very intelligent, socialized primates, but they may not be taking great care of their personhood. And of course, many of the philosophies of the way of life and religions have tried to devise strategies for waking people up to exactly that dilemma, because it’s a kind of sleep. Your personhood is so asleep that you don’t even realize that it’s asleep. And this, of course, is bound up with all kinds of other issues. So insofar as your values are virtues and insofar as your virtues are virtues and not vices, and insofar as they orient you towards the good, they are constitutive of your character, which is an essential component of your personhood, right? And how your personhood relates to the fact that you’re a primate. You see, I’m using Greg so much here, right? Because one of the functions of character traits from your personhood is to enter into a compensatory relationship from the dispositional traits, your personality traits, given to you by your primate constitution. So you may be constitutionally, you know, quite fearful, neurotic, to use one of the big fives, but you can cultivate the virtue of courage to compensate for it. You may be somewhat low in agreeableness, you can cultivate the virtue of compassion to compensate for it. You may be too high in openness and lack in conscientiousness, and then you could actually cultivate the virtue of conscientiousness. See, conscientiousness is interesting. It claims both a virtue and a personality trait. It doesn’t mean that it’s an absolute good, by the way. You can be over conscientious, and we all know people that are beset by that. So the last point, are there any scientific papers showing how difficult it is for early-engrade values to fade out of a person’s way of thinking? Yes and no. You won’t find them specifically under that topic, but where you can find out how you get a deep coordinating of personhood with primate that’s ingrained in you is second nature, is attachment theory. Attachment theory is exactly about that, about these patterns of interaction, connection, interpersonal relatedness, attachment, that are so primordial and pronounced in us that they drive our behavior, especially our romantic and friendship behaviors, in powerful and often unconscious ways. And it is difficult to change your attachment style, but, and here’s the good news, just like intelligence is largely not malleable, but you can modify your rationality, your attachment style in one sense is not changeable, but you can cultivate character traits, virtues through therapy and through practice that compensate for your attachment style. So for me, to be personal, I tend to have an anxious attachment style because of things that have happened to me and my relationship to my parents and some of my romantic relationships and how that all became a spiral, and that is very challenging for me. And I am trying to cultivate, not trying, that’s too weak, I’m aspiring to cultivate the Christian virtue of trust and faithfulness as a way of compensating for an anxious attachment style. So I hope that answered your question, Tim. Thank you very much for it. And so we’re going to take one more question very quickly. How do I help the average person who doesn’t have the time or energy to learn philosophy, like people who only think of culture war type stuff, where eternalized may still be over their head? I’m working on a project to figure out ways of helping people learn important things in a more accessible way. That, again, Nathan, is where you have to find forms of art that are doing exactly that translation in both senses of the word, like translating from one language to another and translation in the sense of moving people from one world to another. So, you know, I couldn’t get my younger son interested in, you know, poetry or stoicism, but lo and behold, he gets very interested, deeply interested in rap, especially rap music that is deep, and there is such as he’s taught me. And what he’s doing now is he’s writing the poetry, he’s writing poems and appreciating the poetry and through the artistry of the music that really fascinates him, he’s also getting a sense of what it is to properly orient towards beauty and truth and goodness, and it is helping him mature. And he is starting to become more self-reflective. Again and again, I’m going to keep saying it because I think it is a central thing that needs to be said. I need, we need this community, this little corner of the internet, as Isabella King calls it. We need more artists. We need more artists. Rachel Hayden is trying to get people interested in that. I know Alexandra is doing that. We need more artists. We need more artists. I’m calling to people of artistry to give the community a way of translating people into a more philosophical way of life, not academic philosophy. That is only for a particular professional elite. I’m talking about what Pierre Hadoja means. Philosophy is a way of life. And let’s remember that during, you know, antiquity, that became a way of life. And philosophy is a way of life. And let’s remember that during, you know, antiquity, that became a very, you know, prominent thing in many people’s lives. So thank you very much, Nathan, for your question. Thank you all for joining me for this Q&A. We’re doing these Q&A every third Sunday of the month, 3 p.m. Eastern time. However, please get on Twitter. Please pay attention to Patreon, right? Because Madeline and I are, we are persons that are primates. And so we are subject to fate. And, you know, both of us have been wrestling with some pretty, pretty overwhelming forces in the last three weeks. And so we sometimes have to move this. So please keep track so you’ll be able to join when we do the Q&A. Ceteris paribus, all else being equal, it’ll be the third Sunday of each month at 3 p.m. ET. But it can vary due to circumstances beyond our control. This video will be made publicly available on the YouTube channel afterwards. Thank you for your support. And I want to right now thank you, thank Madeline, who is doing so much to make all of this possible. Thank you once and all, once again, thank you all for your time and attention. See you next month. Take care.