https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BIWymDIy5Rw
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. I’m John Vervecky and let’s get right to the questions. So the first question is from Scott Rowan. Hi John, I hope you and your family are keeping well. We are. Thank you very much for asking Scott. I’m very excited for January the 9th and the start of After Socrates. So am I. Everybody is working really hard and I’m really looking forward to it. So thank you for mentioning that and I appreciate your support. So Scott says my question is I’m reading Spinoza’s Religion by Claire Carlisle. Best book on Spinoza ever. Still say that at the minute on your recommendation and I’m trying to understand Skantia Intuitiva better. Yes of course. Would I be correct in saying that Skantia Intuitiva is the kind of knowing that you get in rationality? The knowing you get, I think it’s supposed to be when you’re right in relationship with the world, the ground of being, the kind of knowing that comes to you when you are correctly balanced and flowing throughout your day. Anyways, thank you all for your wonderful work. Warm regards Scott. Skantia Intuitiva is it overlaps with what you’re saying Scott. It’s definitely about relationship, ratio, but Skantia Intuitiva has a particular important aspect to it. It has an all at once-ness. And so you have a grasp of the whole, of the ultimate, and you have a simultaneous grasp of the particular, the part, the feature, and you are grasping how they completely interpenetrate. So you see the whole in each part and you see how each part fits into the whole. And so it’s the simultaneous bottom-up, top-down comprehensive realization that helps you feel that profound right relationship to what is most real, what Spinoza calls blessedness. And as you said, the ground of being, the kind of knowing that comes in when you are correctly balanced. It’s a little bit more than just balanced and flowing though. It is, like I say, it’s this, it’s this to see the world in a grain of sand and have it in a wildflower that Blake talks about. But as you rightly note, that sets you into the most fundamental kind of rationality, the ratio religio, the most properly proportioned attention and apprehension and adaptive fit so that you are in a deep reciprocal opening and your love for what is most real is being most engendered and satisfied. And that is leading you to more and more correct the ways in which you might be drawn away from reality through self-deception. And so it does fit into your daily life in the way you’re saying. But that connection between scansia intuitiva and rationality and then the connection between rationality and inferential reasoning are all very important in Spinoza. But scansia intuitiva is much more like a noesis in the neoplatonic tradition. It’s that insight-like experience rather than an inferential kind of experience. So I think you’re overlapping with scansia intuitiva and the overlap is right, but there’s a little bit more to scansia intuitiva. And so I hope that answered your excellent question, Scott. Thank you for asking it. So the next question is from Felix. Hi, John. My question is related to your conversation with Donald Hoffman on the Theory of Everything channel. That was a really powerful conversation. Yeah, I was really, I came away with a very different opinionism with the right word because it’s based on actual argumentation and reason and experience. Yeah, I have a different attitude towards Donald Hoffman than I did, and so I really appreciated that conversation. You mentioned that you recently understood that relevance realization realizes its own irrelevance in the state view of prajna. Yes. It always seemed to me that relevance realization points to the same thing as dependent inter-origination. Yeah, I mean, I think you need an argument towards that effect that the of intelligibility, relevance realization, and the ground of reality, reality realization, emanation and emergence have to share the same fundamental kind of grammar. I’ve made that argument recently, and it’s going to be coming out in a video. Zevi Slavin has put together a bunch of collaborations from different channels, and my talk from Ralston about that will be coming out very soon, so take a look for that. So now back to Felix. I’d love to hear more on your thoughts on this in particular when you see it as a potentially fundamental problem in your attempt to integrate science and spirituality. So I don’t think it’s a fundamental problem. Well, no, I get what you’re saying. My fundamental project, and I guess why I had that initial reaction, is I think there’s now a way of integrating this that will be helpful. So as I’ve been arguing, a scientific naturalism should not only talk about the things derivable from our fundamental sciences, our hard sciences, as they say, physics and chemistry and biology, but it should also include that which is presupposed by them. And I think that means we’re on the place that Heidegger is talking about in Being in Time. I just recorded an excellent video with Johannes Niederhauser on Heidegger’s Being in Time. We’ll be releasing that very shortly as well. And this is Heidegger’s thing about not engaging in ontological confusion. And the main ontological confusion is when we think of being, capital B, as a being. Or we think of it as an abstract property or the highest genus or the most perfect being. And all of those are ways of losing the ontological distinction. And Heidegger’s point is that science presupposes that fundamental ontology has been taken care of, that we have some understanding of being, because it deals in what Heidegger calls regional ontologies. It deals with systems of beings and even the principles of them. And the universe is one such system of beings. And I think that when relevance realization realizes its own irrelevance in the state of prajna, that is when we cross that threshold. That is when we cross, I’m going to use a Heideggerian term here, from comporting ourselves to things and systems of things in science, to comporting ourselves to being, the ground of being, and our fundamental sources of intelligibility. And for me, that does not in any way transgress the scientific worldview, because it actually is a way of properly being responsible to the ontological difference between systems of being and being itself, which is not something that science itself can do, but which it presupposes. It ultimately presupposes the intelligibility of being. So I think, and of course I’m deeply biased about this, Philip, but I think I’m trying to make a good case for that state that I was talking about actually helps us notice, noesis, the ontological difference, and therefore properly situate science underneath what it must fundamentally presuppose for its very own intelligible activity. So I hope that answers your excellent question. Ermin, on a recent podcast you said that romanticism has taught us to misunderstand love as a feeling or emotion. I have two questions. First question, am I correct in saying that you are differentiating between feeling love and loving someone? The latter has an action component, a choice that goes beyond the initial intention or silly thoughts of this is destiny. Well, I think that all makes excellent sense. I would also be accurate to say that love, any way you choose to define it, is a feeling, but that some people have an unsophisticated feeling function due to not taking action, and therefore never develop a particular time of knowing. I’d wager that those only with an interest in propositional knowing would have unsophisticated feeling. They would not understand the value of love or what it really is. I think what you’re doing is very sophisticated, but I would still not agree with the proposal that love is a feeling. Let’s talk about a feeling. I feel sad. Do I feel sad when I’m asleep? No. The feeling is not there. Do I still love someone when I’m asleep? Yes. See, love is like belief. It doesn’t describe an action. When I say I believe something, that’s not an action. It means it’s a disposition. I have a particular stance towards the world. If I believe that America is the greatest country, that doesn’t designate any particular thing I do, but it limits. I’m disposed to doing certain kinds of things. It’s the same kind of thing. Feeling is something that can start, can be interrupted, can stop. You can say I was sort of feeling yucky all day. Am I feeling love for all the people that I’m loving all day long? No. I don’t have any feelings. Have I stopped loving them when I don’t have the feeling? That’s not accurate. Love doesn’t come in to any particular emotion. When I love someone, that can put me into the emotion of joy, the emotion of grief when they’re absent, the emotion of anger when they’re threatened, perhaps the emotion of jealousy when I feel the relationship is threatened. We want to make love an experience because our culture is so dripping in the seeking of experience. The seeking of experience. I think it’s better to think of love as an existential stance. Love is the same kind of thing as the having mode or the being mode. It’s a fundamental orientation towards a person and to their world that is constant, expresses itself in multiple different emotions that can trigger many, many different kinds of feelings. I think the education you’re talking about, the distinction, I think there’s a deep difference, as you say, between people who only try to approach love propositionally and people who try to bring in the other kinds of knowing. I think that notion is bang on. I’m trying to think of something and that belief is like that or knowledge is like that. I know that E equals MC squared. I’m not thinking it all day long. I’m not remembering it, but I’m ready to draw certain inferences and make certain arguments and stand behind certain claims. I have a stance towards the world because of that knowledge. I think when the ancients said that love is a way of knowing its own kind of knowing, that I think is a very accurate way to understand what love is. I hope I answered your excellent question, Armin. Thank you very much. We’re going to move on now to a question from one of my favorite people to be in conversation with, Rachel Hayden. I hope you’re well, Rachel. Long question, but Rachel’s questions are always worth their length. Hello, the question of whether we should love and accept ourselves and others as we are or should instead demand of ourselves and others that we live a life that is worthy of love and acceptance is one which even people in the Illuminal Web wrestle with. Yes, I think so. On my view, this conflict is fundamentally resolved by Callard’s theory of aspiration, Agnes Callard in her book by the same name, Aspiration. If one’s current self includes a drive to meet the normative demands of proleptic rationality, that’s the rationality of aspiration, the rationality that is constitutive of becoming more rational, becoming more virtuous, becoming more wise, which is an integral part of any account of rationality. This is one of Callard’s brilliant points and a real potential to meet them. Then complete self-acceptance must include this drive and these seeds. Otherwise, we fall into what you might call evil in the sense of self-destruction. At the other extreme, there are issues of bypassing and shadow projections. I think Rachel’s referring here to spiritual bypassing, which is a growing problem. Notably, the self which is loved and accepted must on this view be extended temporally towards the future better self. So in a Murdochian, she’s referring here to Iris Murdoch, sense we still have need of encouraging our better angels. I would like your comment on this because my view is not one I’ve heard from others, which makes me wonder if I’m missing something. So if I understand Rachel correctly, there’s a sense in which we are wrestling between two different things. We have to properly befriend ourselves, extend compassion towards ourselves, and that means a certain kind of acceptance for who and what we are. Now that can get overblown and it has been overblown our culture with the whole self-esteem movement and that people’s feelings should never be hurt. This is a source of many, many errors. Nevertheless, there’s a sense in which we need a certain amount of acceptance of who we are right now if we are not going to be arrogant, if we’re going to exercise proper humility and compassion towards ourselves and thereby compassion towards others. So that’s on one hand. The other hand is the Socratic, right, know thyself, which is know the self that you’re knowing is your virtuous best self, your wisest self, that the self is properly understood developmentally, that the self is an inherently aspirational kind of thing, and that if you do not pursue that aspiration, then you are fundamentally thwarting the self in its core. The unexamined life is not worth living. So Rachel is asking, well, how do you balance the two together? And I think the move she’s making is right. And this is like the distinction that you have to, that Tillich makes between the essential self and the existential self, ultimately deeply influenced by Heidegger, especially the Heidegger of being in time that I was talking about earlier. The existential self is the self that you are because of the way that you are thrown into reality by fate and by chance and by circumstance, and you’re affected by accident and failure, and you’re wrestling with this, and you’re in an ongoing project of trying to interpret what you are and define who you are. Then Tillich puts that in contrast to the essential self. Now, like the ancients, I think that a part of the essential self, like what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the essential self, is what makes me a rational cognitive agent with a rational consciousness and self-consciousness. So it’s basically the question of myself as a virtuous cognitive agent with cognition and consciousness and embodiment. And then the idea here is that that cognitive agency, no matter what it is existentially, essentially it is one that must aspire. It must develop. It must evolve its relevance, realization. It must evolve its relevance, realization. It must evolve its relevance, realization. It must improve its optimal grip. It must become more, have more virtuosity and more virtue. And so I think that while we should accept the inevitabilities of our existential self, we should realize that that existential self is ultimately grounded in an essential self. I’m not totally happy with these terms, but I see why Tillich uses them. And the essential self is that Socratic self. And so I think it’s improper, if this argument is correct, to accept our existential self to the exclusion of how it is grounded in our essential self. And once you, so the act of acceptance of the existential self, as Rachel suggests, and I’m in agreement with her, should take you into its grounding in the essential self, which is a properly Socratic self, and put you into aspiration. So I hope that answers your excellent question, Rachel. You end by saying, either way, thank you so much as always, and I hope you and your team have a wonder-filled and peaceful holiday season. You’re the best. Thank you so very much for your excellent question, Rachel. This is from Alexander, and I can’t quite read the last name. It’s not completely within the cell. Alexander, oh, here it is. Prokopis. Thank you, Alexander. John, do you think it’s possible that the power of the conversations in this little corner of the internet could themselves be threatened by a combination of the propositional tyranny that you have identified, and with the generalized chaos that makes us cling tighter, then it is good to those who we feel we agree with? That’s really good. Okay, I’ll keep reading. Are you still challenging each other, making use of the trust you have to probe one another on real points of conflict you have? So I’ll finish the reading, and then I’ll answer the question. At the conference in Thunder Bay, I was struck by how much of a wall had appeared to be between you three and Dr. Mondrell, and I’ve heard the three of you make much sharper arguments that can get through to people like Richard, when you don’t seem to have at your disposal then. Yeah, there’s a, where this is very much a work in progress, and we are very much trying to sort out how to do this, and this has been really on my mind, because Dr. Jordan Cooper published a critique of one of my episodes in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and I’m going to release a video tomorrow in response, and I was really, really, and I was wrestling with it, about how to balance like properly responding argumentatively, but also opening up the possibilities of dialogue, posing questions, extending invitations. So I think this is an important issue, and the problem that we’re facing right now is this little corner tends to be at the very high level of the bridge building dialogue, which can often become dialogous, and it’s excellent like that. But we’re not enough, we don’t do a lot of practicing together, so that’s the level at which you can more meaningfully challenge each other, and then those non-propositional challenges can counterbalance the more propositional challenges we make when we get into argument with each other. There are times when I’m happy that, I was, let me put it this way, I was happy in Thunder Bay because it seemed that I was able to act as a mediating bridge between Richard on one hand and Jonathan and Paul on another, because I’m trying to bridge those two worlds together. I do think that we need to challenge each other more, and it’s not that we don’t challenge each other. I’ve, you know, I’ve responded a lot to criticisms that Paul and Jonathan have made, and they have too, and I mean, I can’t give you a clear, I mean, I agree with what you’re saying, and I can’t give you sort of a clear program of response because I, like literally this week, I was wrestling with that and trying to figure out how can we, how can we make it so that we can challenge each other on one hand, but also allow people to be working out their thinking. Like even Popper said, don’t refute, don’t attempt to falsify an immature hypothesis. A lot of time people are thinking aloud and they’re working out and jumping in with sort of a harsh, I want to criticize this or disagree with that, is not really appropriate. You got to, you should do a lot of question to try to draw it out. One thing I can say is we try to have both of those within the practice of dialectic and didiologos, both drawing out what the person was saying and then trying to explicitly say what was missing, what was mysterious, what you think wasn’t properly addressed and what was proposed, but this is very much an ongoing thing and I keep wanting, I keep returning to it because I keep wanting to improve my responsibility to it and also improve how I can exemplify doing exactly what you’re talking about and you know, it’s not a static simple rule because it adjusts according to context and so yeah, I would very much like want to assure you that I’m thinking a lot about this and I’m trying to bring it into practice and I’m trying to figure out how to properly exemplify exactly what you’re talking about. So I know you would have preferred probably a more like this is what we should do. I don’t have that clear an answer and of course I’m not in a position of authority. I’m not the pope of this little corner of the internet or anything and saying this is what we should do now. I’m going to try and propose more and I’m kind of interested what’s going to happen between me and Dr. Cooper around this sort of, I guess it’s a debate, but it’s a very philosophically respectful and careful and inviting of dialogue debate and see if I can learn something out of that. So thank you very much Alexander. I hope that wasn’t like an answer in a definitive sense, but it is a statement of my commitment to being responsible to the issue that you’ve raised. The next question is from Peter Rouskvist. In episode 21 of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, you said we have a cult of authenticity that pre-incrued yourself, which is Lutheran is the ultimate authority of your life. A cultural grammar emerged from this and it trains us in narcissism. How does the idea of being true to yourself train us in narcissism? So the cult of authenticity is there was two separate points and I think I ran them too quickly together. This is exactly the episode that Dr. Cooper, who’s a Lutheran theologian, was critical of. So I should have said that Luther was about being true to your conscience and conscience is that sort of fundamental way you know yourself from a moral perspective. And the point I was making there is that Luther challenges tradition and history and the church and the institutions and many other theologians and philosophers when he makes the proposal that he makes. And that makes that interior decision the ultimate authority for your life. And then the problem around that, and this is what Dr. Cooper and I disagree on, is whether or not Luther was not, you have to make a distinction between what Luther was saying and the implications and consequences of what he’s saying. And about that, look forward to the video that comes out tomorrow. I don’t think Luther wanted us to fall into subjectivity or anything like that, but the problem is once somebody has made that stand, everybody can make that stand. There’s no principled reason, there’s no principled way why you can say I get to do that and you don’t. That’s the problem and of course that’s why Protestantism fragments and continues to fragment at an accelerating rate. There’s a seed sowing in there. You created a principle, the principle gives you down to individual decisions. Now what came out of that was a notion of authenticity that’s influenced by romanticism and the sense of your true self and you have to be true to yourself. And then the problem with that is the notion of authenticity again comes, wow this is synchronicity, from Heidegger’s Being in Time. That’s explicitly its origin and what Heidegger meant there is the authentic person is the one that takes up the fact that we are self-interpreting, self-defining kinds of entities or as he famously said it, we are the beings whose beings are in question. You know, a lion’s born and it’s a lion. We’re thrown into the world and who and what we’re going to be as a self is in our hands. So Heidegger was talking about the responsibility we have to becoming a self and how we can become inauthentic by refusing that responsibility and letting everyone, like what he called Stuss Man, just letting what everybody believes or everybody think or what the culture says or what the market says dictate how we understand ourselves. So inauthenticity is the failure to take up the fundamental responsibility that is constituted of being a self. That has degenerated and this is Ordono’s critique, that is degenerated into being true to myself and being authentic. Just what is it I really want? What is it I really want? That’s not what authenticity means but with that degradation and I did not unpack this clearly in that episode. This is an episode when we come, as we’re doing the book forum, I’m going to add a significant amendment to it, like addition, but that note, what authenticity has become for us is I get to decide based on what I most want. So you get these two notions coming together and they overlap because of course Heidegger is in Germany, he’s deeply influenced by Luther and is deeply influenced by Kierkegaard who’s a Lutheran, so there’s all these connections coming in. What I said is that helps to integrate with, again, not something that Luther was preaching and certainly not something that he would hold theologically, but in Luther I see exemplified that possibility of a self-assertive subjectivity, meshed with a kind of self-loathing that you’d see in Paul and deeply in Augustine and his sexual addiction and I think deeply in Luther, and then that is healed by a undeserved attention and love that is given to you for utterly mysterious reasons. Now I get it, theologically if you have a god in there and the god is the person, then that’s not narcissism, but if god falls out of the equation which it has for many people because they did not find the Lutheran god made sense to them, then what you’re left with is this self-assertive subjectivity that is in the face of an interior self-loathing that is masked by the seeking of undeserved attention and love that’s all-encompassing. That’s the structure of narcissism and that is the argument I was making. I did not make it that clearly or that well, which is part of the reason I’ve responded to Dr. Cooper’s excellent criticisms, the way he presented them forced me to clarify my thought. He presented them respectfully, he set up the context, he said that the overall project has value, there was no ad hominem, he wasn’t insulting or accusatory, it was excellent and I want to respond in kind. And so I would ask in addition to what I say to you now Peter that you take a look at the video when it comes out tomorrow. Thank you for your excellent question. Okay we’re going to move to the question from Ken Lowry. Hey Ken, good afternoon John, good afternoon Ken. Brief context first, I live in a jurisdiction where psilocybin has been legalized for clinical therapy of mental illness. Lucky you, as someone attempting to create space for the intersection of wisdom, medical science, and spirituality, I’m strongly considering becoming a facilitator of these treatments. My question is where do psychedelics fit in the ecology of practices and further when engaging the general public, one kinds of heuristics might be helpful in orienting this emerging modality towards the good. Okay I’ve answered this question in many places, that’s not a complaint and so there’s a lot to be said here and I’ll try and keep it as brief as possible. Psychedelics seem to function equivalently to what you do in machine learning. The problem with machine learning is they do what’s called overfitting to the data all attempts to understand the world we take a sample of the information and we try to figure out we try to generalize to what the world is at large and you can do something that’s like selection bias, you can do something where basically what you’re doing is you think the patterns in the sample belong to the population and that’s called overfitting to the data. So if I took a poll of all the people watching this and say how many people you know have watched awakening from the meaning crisis and most of you answer that and if I then conclude most of the people on the earth have watched awakening from the meaning crisis that’s an example of overfitting to the data. Now you overfit to the data precisely because you’re a very powerful pattern detector and that’s what our brain is and that’s what these more advanced machine learning systems are and so what you want to do is you want to actually throw in noise into the system and what it does is it breaks the system from overfitting it loosens it from overfitting to the data so that it can now pay attention to patterns that might not be in the sample better so you get over sampling bias and it looks like dreaming there’s a theory that dreaming is about dealing with the overfitted brain there’s a lot of similarity between what’s going on in the brain and psilocybin and dreaming and so areas of the brain that are normally dominant becomes less less dominant areas of the brain that typically don’t talk to each other are talking to each other more basically you allow the system to stop being overfitted and explore possibility space new ways of new kinds of patterns that might be in the world that’s what it does and so it is not inherently good or evil that state now we’ve known from even from the time of leery that when you’re going into that state set and setting matter your mental set matters and the setting you’re in matter because they deeply influence how that the possibility space you start exploring once you’ve been loosened from overfitting i want to add uh two more s’s i was talking about three but i’m going to talk about uh four in total so set setting sapience what have you done to be cultivating wisdom in the sense of what practices have you done to really help you challenge and become aware of your self-deception because if you don’t have those and you let your salient landscaping run wild your chances of bullshitting yourself are also increased so set setting sapience and sacredness there should be a sacred setting around this because what that should what that means is not only should it be set into cultivating wisdom but there should be a a philosophical framework and i mean philosophy in the ancient sense a philosophical framework that helps you to translate these novel and anomalous experiences back into a fundamental insight into the intelligibility of things you should have a sacred framework that helps turn that i’ll use a metaphor here to turn that ambient light uh from uh from the trip into something more like a laser that can incisively carry you into the depths of being help you to help to turn the trip into reciprocal into responsible rational reciprocal opening that is also an enhancement of the love of what is true and good and beautiful so the psilocybin and related things like lsd right um all the psychedelic ones should be mental set that goes to problem formulation the setting because cognition is inherently embodied and embedded and enacted so i i get why liri said that weird that i’m quick i think you need a sapiential framework because you need a lot of practices that have prepared you have started to cultivate you in virtues of seeing through illusion and into reality to properly process and metabolize the experience and then you need a sacredness that gives you a fundamental philosophical normative framework so that that that extra psychological power is properly cultivated and disposed towards rational responsible reciprocal opening so that you are becoming more rational and more rationally falling in love with reality that is how i think psychedelics should be used i do not think the government should prohibit anything to adults children are a different thing because prohibition doesn’t work and secondly these drugs aren’t addictive in the traditional sense of addictive right it doesn’t mean they they’re risk-free that’s false they have different kinds of risk and trying to mitigate those is what i’m talking about and psilocybin should be we should be using these things the way they’re used in indigenous cultures they they’re within that they’re you know their mental set setting sapiential framework and a sacredness often shamanism is taking that role so that’s that’s my answer psychedelics should be set within the four s’s so thank you for your excellent question ken so on to somebody who of really increasing importance and this is rob gray and rob is going to be playing a direct role in our q a’s rob’s going to be taking on answering the q a’s specifically around that are specific to practice and uh look really looking forward to that rob has been doing so much about translating all of this into communities of practices practicing it learning other people learning from other people going through all the courses rob is properly set to address a lot of practice questions and so i’m i’m really happy and to welcome rob on board with this to rob asks how do you understand love and reason in schindler’s play to critique of pure reason how are they different and how can they be personally purposely cultivated and living a good life so the thing that i’m really interested in and you know the the conversation i had with ken and david a really sad news david is suffering a personal tragedy in his life and so there’s going to be delay between when we talk again but we both want to talk again but i i want to very properly give david uh the time that he rightfully needs um but i found that that conversation so amazing and i and and i really want to come back to this question of the two leaps the leap of reason and the leap of love what’s the leap of reason i was talking about it and rachel was talking about it earlier the proleptic rationality that rationality has to properly be aspirational in nature part of what it is to be rational is to aspire to be more rational than you are and that’s a transformative experience that’s an aspirational experience it’s not something you can simply infer your way through or just uh sort of directly enact you have to do all the stuff the serious play you have to take the leap right there is an inherently transformative leaping aspirational quality to reason if what you want is to become more and more properly attuned to reality then there’s love which is reciprocal opening in which you enhance your capacities for participatory and perspectival knowing such that your sense of self and identity become more and more bound up with that which you love and vice versa if what you love is a sentient being um and then of course spinosa and playdoe to for me two pivotal figures about this see that these two need each other that the leap of reason and this is dc schindler’s this is david’s point the leap of reason is ultimately motivated by a particular kind of love even an agapic love the love of reality for its own sake not for my sake that’s what when you say that is true you find that that is a good thing to do because it is real and that alone is makes it good it’s real for its own sake that’s an inherent part of being real so rationality requires in its pursuit of what’s true and what’s good and what’s beautiful it requires love what i said earlier about love not being a feeling or an emotion but an existential stance that affords reciprocal opening means love needs the ratio religio ratio rationing ratio the proper proportioning of our of right the proper proportioning of our attention of our intelligence of our affect of our motivation of our arouse of metabolic arousal that proper orientation love needs that it needs it that the the religio the binding the relevance realization has been as deeply cultivated into virtue as possible so that self-deception has been reduced and mean the capacity for religio optimal gripping meaning in life has been enhanced love and reason need each other the leap of love which is always a leap beyond egocentrism a turning around of the arrow of relevance not how is it relevant to me me but how am i irrelevant to thou right love the leap of reason and the law the leap of love deeply into need and interpenetrate each other and i think that’s exactly dc shindler’s point and so um i i want to develop this further i want um i want to talk to david more and i hope it happens i i again i’m not trying in any way to rush him he’s gone through something and he needs um but i i really um i’m really looking forward to furthering that discussion but that’s my that’s how what i see him saying that’s what i’ve been independently arguing we were deeply converging in our first conversation so that’s how i would answer your excellent question robert and again really looking forward and welcoming you to your participation we are now switching to questions from the chat first of all i want to thank all the patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now your support is absolutely crucial to continuing to produce these videos to producing series like after socrates to allowing me to go to places and and and make presentations etc so thank you so very very much for all of that okay so um the first is from category error seven that’s a great that’s a great uh nom de plume that’s fantastic a category error made famous by of course uh gilbert rile and the book concept of mine i don’t know what category at seven is category of seven is i wonder what the first six were but anyways very intrigued have you thought about theories being a form of compression of the whole of reality avoiding combinatorial exposing using a form of rr and how this might relate to trying to reify the forms yes um yes and i think very much i don’t think that the forms there’s a long argument here and i don’t know if i have much time most there’s a lot of philosophy of science and you know this goes to denett’s notion of real patterns that when you get a compression that is gives you more cognitive scope or power other than the data set itself that that’s actually a real pattern that’s what we mean by a real pattern uh so i think that there are real patterns that have that compressive relation but i do not think that i’m not anomalous i don’t think that compression relation is just in our head i think it is a real thing in reality because it gives us access intel it gives us intelligibility it gives us access to reality in a fundamental way and so it’s part of it’s part of intelligibility which is the transjective relation so when you when you describe relevance realization sort of from the cognitive agent side it’s transjective you talk about relevance realization when you talk about it from the world side but it is transjective notice i’m not doing the contian thing then you’re talking about intelligibility and so i think the real way of understanding it is the compression is the way in which reality has been realized such that cognition can relevantly realize it and so you know again agent to arena is relevance realization even though it’s properly transjective and arena to agent and this is only a distinction in concept it is not a distinction in reality that’s intelligibility so relevance relevance realization and intelligibility are two sides of the same coin and therefore i think it’s proper to think uh think of the compression function as producing real patterns that can be really picked up by relevance realization they make it possible for a finite being to live in an intelligible world and in that sense be an intelligent being i think it’s very very dangerous to reify the forms and they’ve been reified in many ways usually and almost always propositionally and that is why i have tried to with the help of dan chappie and learning from john russon and the work with daniel suruba and johannes niederhauser christopher master pietro and all these people try to get back to an enacted phenomenological understanding of the forms rather than to grasp them as propositional definitions or universal concepts or or or generic categories or essences in the Aristotelian sense but understand them is exactly that unfolding the the forms are what afford the reciprocal opening between us and the world they’re real in in in that important sense and you can get that in the phenomenology when i talk about like the multiple aspect multi multi-aspect reality of anything and that nevertheless between all these aspects which are unlimited you can find a through line that is coherent with all the parts make sense to each other even though they’re not logically identical like right in the guts of your phenomenology that’s where i think we should be looking for the forms so i hope that’s a good answer to you category error seven next question is from omri cohen are you aware of a practice that could help rectify an improper amount of precision weighting assigned to bottom-up signaling in case is where a person becomes overwhelmed by sensations yeah yeah and so that’s that that excellent by the way i’m glad you’ve read the paper you clearly have the paper i wrote with brett anderson and mark miller about integrating relevance realization and predictive processing yeah when when people are doing that in one way people that shows up i’m not saying this is your case i’m just using as an example one way this shows up quite often for some people in meditation is they get like they have trouble with their breathing because they get overwhelmed by the sensations and then they they’re trying to they they get sort of overwhelmed by their breathing and then they feel that they need to control their breath and it sort of spirals i suggest a practice of moving mindfulness in those situations and it really seems to help so don’t don’t do a meditative practice like a seated meditative practice or contemplative practice do a practice where you’re training the mindfulness and the flow induction but through movement and so you’re really making use of brainstem and cerebellum and the cerebellum cortex loop and so i recommend taking up something like tai chi chuan or and yoga especially flowing yoga and and make that your core practice for quite a long time before you move into stillness practices seated practices etc i i hope that’s helpful to you amri okay andreas i started watching the meeting crisis series on episode 16 reciprocal narrowing resonates with my current challenges do you talk about dealing with this later in this series other sources yes i do first of all other sources the notion of reciprocal narrowing comes from mark lewis just had dinner with mark a couple weeks ago and his notion of addiction and i think it is the best account and reciprocal opening i i talk about reciprocal opening much later in the series i do talk about it and a lot of other work i’m doing you’ve heard me talk about it actually a lot uh today about the connections between reciprocal opening the leap of reason the leap of love look at the video i did with ken and david look at the video i’ve done on gnostis there’s a lot out there uh like i say if you want to get into the reciprocal narrowing mark lewis is the person to look at so there is a lot out there i do develop it a lot i hope you’ve seen it andreas in a lot of uh the discussion today and it shows up in a lot of my videos uh but it also is talked about uh later in uh the series so i hope that helps you andreas and one last uh question from um the chat from philip oh uh let me see thank you philip could we consider hyperagents as borrowing agents and sentience of human beings through appearing in an individual mind as a partial personality similar to young’s archetypes those partial personalities would then be an interface from hyperagent to individual while cultural socioeconomic incentives as well as rituals would be the interface from i i totally agree with that and that totally agree with that uh philip uh would be the interface from the individual towards hyperagents i talk about something like that uh in i can’t remember episode uh when i talk about the socratic demonium i can’t remember i think it’s eight or nine or maybe earlier and after socrates so i have i have an episode directed uh directly towards that and exploring that i think that’s bang on and totally convergent philip um totally convergent and like i say in that episode i can’t remember the number and we’re it’s a blur because there’s also we’ve got 19 in the can and we’re doing all this editing right now uh and um planning the remaining six um but it’s the episode where i talk about the socratic demonium and i talk about internal family systems theory and and of course there’s deep resonance is there with uh young in theory and i talk about ally work and stuff like that so yes um please look forward to that and you’ll see it uh within awakening from the meaning crisis um perhaps we can take uh one more question uh we have a little bit more time left not much we have to let end a little bit early because we’re going right into another uh meeting at four um but uh i’ll see if another question comes up yes and this question is hi john regarding psychedelics would you ever create something that’s more formal rigorous than just mention it should be put into a framework example uh shamanism the four s’s uh yunus yes um i need i need dr hu’s tartis i need to go to a place that’s outside of the dimensionality this of this of this space time continuum where i could spend some time doing these things you are at you are totally right i have an epistemic even a moral responsibility to do what you’re asking i just don’t have the time to i haven’t had the time to do it yet i would like to get to a place and hopefully with the new organization of the verveki foundation uh to do that what you’re proposing that is exactly what needs to be done i feel called to do it i just need the time and space and energy resources to do it and so yeah um i the answer is i should be doing it um the answer is under the right conditions i think i can at least begin it in a way that other people will find helpful other people will have to work on it as well uh but that time is not right now but hopefully it’ll be soon these are all excellent questions i want to thank you all for joining me for this amazing q a we will be continuing to do these every third sunday of the month i really want to thank the supporters at patreon we’re reorganizing everything right now in patreon and it’s be really important uh we’ll see you see you see you soon in our patreon exclusive zoom call to discuss some exciting changes in this new year so there’ll be a short break and then um we’ll just do a bit a little wrap up here um with this live feed and make sure it gets uploaded and everything and then i’ll um i’ll see you soon the zoom link is in the chat please note that the zoom link is in the chat the zoom link you need to come over to the patreon only meeting is in the chat all right everyone we’ll talk to you soon in uh that meeting and thank you for this wonderful q a