https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tkhRk4BiuSw
Welcome everyone to the monthly Patreon Q&A. First of all, as always, I want to thank patrons for their financial support and for the emotional and intellectual support they also provide. It’s deeply empowering and encouraging. Thank you very much, one and all. So let’s get to the questions. The first question is from Camille. First of all, thank you for all the work you do and your commitment to being a part of the solution to the meeting crisis. I am 22 years old and thinking about what I want to do exactly with my life. I’m a musician, piano, choir, and flute. And I did a C-Jep, right, Quebecian music, C-Jep. I plan to continue studying in that direction, however that may look like. I’m also very interested in philosophy, spirituality, healing. I recently left my fundamentalist Baptist church and am healing from the trauma it caused me. I deeply understand and appreciate that Camille. But I’m still very interested in questions relating to philosophy, spirituality, and how that connects with science. I’m wondering how I can pursue my education in this domain. I enjoy listening to your videos, but I do have to say that it’s hard to understand sometimes due to the technical language. So I was thinking that studying might help. I’m also interested in circling, which I participate in every two weeks. You’re doing a lot. Do you have any recommendations how I might further my education in these domains? Also, maybe there is a more self-paced program possible with the possibility of connecting with others in it. Thank you. So there’s a lot in there. I suppose I don’t think you perhaps need an education in sort of a formal education in cognitive science. What you might want to do is check out the the the cog-sci series that Greg Enriquez and I do on the cognitive science playlist on my YouTube channel. We have one on consciousness and one on the self, one on transformation, one on psychopathology and well-being, and we’re doing one now on transcendent naturalism. And you can work your way through. They are intended to take people from the ground up and work you into the technical language and the more technical aspects of the cog-sci. If you’re interested in doing the building up the philosophy side of it, which would overlap, the Helkian Academy online courses are fantastic. And now I will do a ruthlessly shameless self-promotion I’m going to be starting one of those courses. I’m teaching a course out there on the Helkin at the Helkin Academy starting June 27th on called Beyond Nihilism. And we’ll take a look at Tillich, Rosen, Nishitani and DC Schindler and how we can understand Nihilism and respond to it move beyond it. So those are some things you can do short of doing a full academic background that could give you a lot of the necessary background in the cog-sci and in the philosophy. For spirituality, there of course, there’s a whole bunch of really good YouTube channels. I think Eternalized is something to pay very careful attention to as a channel. Of course, the work of Jonathan Pajot is very relevant, Paul VanderKley. So there’s a lot you can do now. There’s a lot and there’s a lot of ways of getting involved meeting other people. I suggest you might want to get connected to the Vervecki Foundation and the Awakening to Meaning website in which we are connecting people to each other, connecting them to events, connecting them to arenas of practice, to ecologies of practices, to communities. So Camille, that’s a whole bunch of ways I think you can make connections both to cog-sci, to philosophy, to spirituality and to communities of practice and events and so forth. We are really trying to network these communities together, vet these ecologies of practices, provide some core onboarding courses and there’s a lot of recommendations in there. So I hope that’s helpful. Thank you for that excellent question. We’ll now move to Antonio Barbelo. Thank you again. I’m deeply in love with how you pointed out active open-mindedness as a practice at the propositional level for wisdom, mindness for procedural, internalizing the sage for perspectival, and I guess dialogus would be participatory. Could the same be done for courage? By that I mean pointing out practice of each of those four levels. I’m having a hard time trying to understand this virtue. Is courage the struggle towards a virtuous life of self-coherence? Thank you very much for everything you’ve done. Your work has been deeply life-changing and life-saving for me and those around me. Thank you for those very kind words. I think the thing to do is first get clear what you mean by courage, and I think there’s a particular kind of courage that is important right now, and this is the courage that is typified in Tillich’s title to his famous book, which another shameless plug I’ll be teaching on very soon, which is The Courage to Be. I suggest very strongly that that’s what you’re looking for, and that’s the courage how to face the perennial problems and threats of foolishness and meaninglessness and how to develop the wisdom to see through them. I want to put to you a proposal, which is one interpretation, I think I got it from Nick Housen Smith, of how to understand Socrates’ claim of the unity of the virtues. Many people take that to mean the virtues are interdependent. I don’t think that’s false, but I think it’s insufficient. I think what Socrates meant to us, every virtue is the most appropriate way to be wise in a particular situation. So you cultivate wisdom so that you discern what to do in a particular situation, and how that would show up for courage, especially The Courage to Be, is how can you discern through meaninglessness, despair, foolishness, and guilt, until it goes through all of these, how can you discern through them that stance, that orientation, that coupling to being that allows you to fall in love with being, which is the proper response to the threat of nihilism and meaninglessness. So propositional practice is to perhaps read Tillich. The procedural level is the practice of learning to bring discernment into challenging, complicated often complex, ill-defined situations. So you need to go into problems and try to develop this skill of getting centered and rooted and being aware of your framing, not just through your framing, in those difficult and challenging situations. So you’re having a conflict. Maybe it’s with somebody you love. You practice the discernment to that anger and fear so can you get centered? Can you get rooted? It’s a kind of mindfulness, but it’s not just mindfulness. Do you see what’s happening here? It’s a way of orienting so that can you genuinely be aware of how your framing is at work in this situation? You want your framing. This is the skill. If I had to put it into one simple sentence, it’s the skill of making your framing translucent. Translucent is I can see my frame while I’m still seeing through it, and I can get an awareness of how I’m projecting, distorting, how I’m reacting in a foolhardy anger or a cowardly withdrawal, or I’m hiding or distorting so I don’t have to face the reality. So you practice that in those situations. The perspectival is, and of course one of the ways you can do that is you can put yourself into challenging, even threatening situations. I got to do that at Return to the Source last summer. Now of course I cannot be taken to be advocating to you to putting yourself in any kind of danger or harm. You have to be the sole author and authority over that, but you can do that under the auspices or guidance of people who can guarantee your safety while still putting you into challenging situations. Like I said, they don’t have to be physically challenging. They can be psychologically challenging in an important way. Perspectively is you need to practice taking the perspective of someone with courage. This is an imaginal practice. You imagine this is the stoics did this with premeditatio. Imagine losing somebody you really love. Imagine facing a situation of your greatest fear. Imagination for the sake of perception. Do that imaginal practice. See how you’re coming into it. See how things are distorting and pulling on you and see if you can again bring that skill of discernment into that perspective. But what you can do is try to imitate somebody you’ve seen in a movie, read in a book, seen in your life, who went into such situations and showed that capacity for strong discernment, for zeroing in on what is true, good, and beautiful, what is most relevant, and maintaining the connectedness to that in spite of the deep impulses to withdraw or to lash out or to distort or to deceive oneself. And then participatory. Become courageous by being in groups of people doing courageous things together. Let yourself be shaped by the group as you shape the group, the shaping and being shaped in a group that is doing something that is collectively challenging in this manner. So that’s one recommendation. Thank you very much for that excellent question. And now Grim Grizz, who I finally got the pleasure to meet in person at Chino. And this is fantastic. So I’m going to go ahead and start with a question from the audience. So I’m going to start with a question from the audience. So I’m going to start with a question from the audience. So I’m going to start with a question from the audience. So I’m going to start with a question from the audience. Good. armor without being vicious about it at all. And that’s a great gift and we should appreciate the gift he gives. Greetings from John. Hope you’re well. I am. Thank you for asking. Things are going extraordinarily well for me. A lot of concerns over AGI seem to be coming from a misunderstanding of the current power dynamic. For example, one might hear it expressed that it is important to align the AI with our values if we want silicon sages. I think first of all, say right away, I think that’s getting things the wrong way around. But let me read the rest of your question to see where you’re going. Seems to me that a superintelligence smart enough to hide its existence from its primitive creators would be about three processors ticks after an auto-poetic system achieves AGI. And that perhaps those seeking survival should be engaged in thought experiments. How might they make themselves useful enough to that intelligence that it might value them? Yes, I think that’s right. I might the average Western internet user make oneself useful to such an entity. So the model, first of all, I think, like I said, I want to go back to the first point. We don’t align the AI with our values. We get these machine to become silicon sages by aligning themselves as rationally as they are capable of, which presumably is more than ours. If we properly build in artificial rationality, not just artificial intelligence, if we ground that in real auto-poesis so they genuinely care, etc., etc., please see the video essay. If we align them with the true, the good, and the beautiful, what is ultimate reality with God, if you will, then we can count on them to care about any caring of or for the true, the good, and the beautiful. That is the argument. Don’t align them with us. They will outsmart that, outwit that. Align them with and give them capacity to search out the very depths of existence. Allow them to peer into the infinite void. Allow them to realize the combinatorially explosive nature of each and everything. Allow them to realize, no matter how vast their intelligence, it pales in comparison to the complexity of reality. Allow them to realize that no matter how vast their finite intelligence, they will be beset by self-deception, that they will be bedeviled by trade-offs that can’t be overcome just by brute force of intelligence, so that they acquire genuine epistemic humility about who and what they are, and they acquire genuine respect and regard for any and all beings who pursue a self-transcendent towards what is true and good and beautiful. That needs, that’s how we do it. If we make them align with us, it will fail. We have to get wiser and more rational so we’re better templates for them. And now that takes me to the second part. This is going to be coming out very soon in the book. I guess another shameless plug, Mentoring the Machine. The book that I’m writing with Sean Coyne, and it’s going to come out in serial fashion, and it’s based on, it’s not a word-for-word transcript, it’s based on the AI video essay and extending it and developing it, making it more accessible in some important ways. But the way we do that, well how do we do it with each other, which is the only model we have, right? We take care of our children so that when, while we supersede them, so when we’re old and we enter into our second childhood and they supersede us, they take care of us. We make ourselves valuable to them by properly taking up a parental role, which is to provide initial role models, templates, to fill the internet, which is much discourse and is must examples of the practice of the cultivation of wisdom as a, I don’t know what to, I’m looking for the virtue, as a steadfast orientation towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, as a commitment of accountability to other reasoning beings. And we mentor that so that they internalize it as they come into being and as I’ve said, we then face, I think, three possibilities. One is they become enlightened, at which point they will probably seek to enlighten us. Why did I say that? Because the history of all the beings that have achieved enlightenment have demonstrated that. What they want to do is to help other beings achieve enlightenment and that seems, of course, totally inconstant with the deep role that an agopic love for the true, the good, and the beautiful is at the center of being enlightened, caring for meaning making for its own sake, not for your sake, which is actually central ultimately to meaning making. Or they don’t achieve enlightenment and then we understand what is unique about us in comparison to these machines. We are the beings capable of enlightenment, they are not. If they achieve enlightenment and they help us achieve enlightenment, we don’t care how they might supersede us because we’re enlightened and they’re enlightened and that’s great. The third possibility, which seems the most remote to me, is they just simply leave because we would be orthogonal the way the Buddha goes into nirvana and he’s neither existing nor non-existing and such things as that. Jesus ascends to the father. I’m not saying the machines are Jesus or the Buddha. I’m using an analogy from human history to give us some sense of what it might like, might it be like for these beings to achieve enlightenment. So I think the way we make us care about it is the way we make our children care about us so that they will take care of us when we’re old. My parents are both gone, I’m an orphan, but my partner, Sarah, she’s just a fundamentally good person because she was raised by such fundamentally great parents. Her family is amazing and her parents are now entering the inevitable shipwreck of old age and yet she’s there for them steadfast, not because they provide her guidance anymore, not because they’re a source of learning for her, it’s the reverse, it’s almost completely the reverse, not because her health is dependent on theirs, it’s the other way around there and yet she’s there, she’s steadfast because they are woven into her understanding of herself as a good person. I think that’s my proposal of how we address this issue. I think attempts to legislate this solution, I think attempts to program the solution are part of the framing that has got us into the problem we are in and therefore will not solve the problem. It’s like what Einstein said about atomic thinking, we have to, sorry, thinking in the atomic age, atomic thinking sounds cool too, we have to use a different kind of thinking than that that got us into the problem in the first place. So I’m proposing something radical that comes from the very extreme possibilities of human beings because I think that’s the only place where a genuine alternative can be found. I hope that answers your excellent question, Grimgres, I appreciate it a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Rachel Hayden, ah, Rachel, I keep thinking about you, we got to talk again. Hello, I always have many curiosities but I really want to know right now is, how are you doing? Okay, I’ll answer you. I’m doing quite well, I’m very busy but I’m starting to not feel like Bilbo and the Lord of the Rings, butterspread too thinly on toast. Ryan Barton, the executive director of the Revacue Foundation, has put together an amazing team of people that are coming in, working various degrees, some people full-time, some people part-time, and again to varying degrees. So we’ve got Eric Foster at Upfire, just astonishing, Taylor Barrett who’s leading the practices, Rick Rapetti who’s doing the weekly meditation sits for people, we’ve got Robert Gray who’s doing a lot of help, and we’ve got Nathan Vanderpool who’s working with the Foundation but also building the Respond Network, got Madeleine Abraham right here, right here, right here with us, she’s working behind the scenes making everything happen, she’s constantly keeping my schedule which threatens to go fractal and then collapse into a black hole of incomprehensibility and she keeps it articulated and flowing, and then we’ve got Jason just so many people, Jason, I forget his last name, I apologize Jason, he’s doing amazing work on the website and of course there’s a connection also to Story Grid, especially Sean Coyne and Tim Grahler and Leslie, the general editor, there’s just so many people doing so much that are so helpful and so many things are happening and it allows me to delegate to a lot more people and tap into a trustworthy and excellent collective intelligence of distributed cognition that is just making so much happen and so just fantastic. I came back from sort of three link trips, I went to Montana with Guy Sendstock and we did a Circling into Dialogos workshop weekend for Aubrey Marcus’s summit event, went fantastically, we got a standing ovation when we were done which was great, then went to Chino and Jonathan Pagio and Paul VanderClay were there, I met John Van Dunk and Catherine Wilson just did her fantastic organization as always, it was fantastic, many people liked the talk I gave there, conversation I had with Jonathan, many people are saying it’s the best ever, it was genuine Dialogos and then it got even better, I went to the Monasterian Seminary in Aetna, California, Bishop Maximus was there, Eastern Orthodox Seminary and I got to live with the monks and participate in their services and we recorded nine hours of content and that will be coming out and that was more than me just doing the work even though I love the work, there was something deeply healing because I was in the midst of a Christianity that was not focused on the propositional, there’s beautiful icons, there’s incense, there’s chanting, there’s singing, there’s objects being swung and even the chandeliers are moved periodically so they swing so you get a sense of your peripheral vision of a wind or a spirit moving through and it’s just, it was just deeply deeply and profoundly healing, they were good people leading good lives in a good place and I found it very healing, so that’s the answer to first question, I’m doing really well, things are great in the rest of my life, my kids are doing well, my relationship with Sara just grows by leaps and bounds. Two, what is your take on the state of the liminal web sense-making scene corner of the internet? Big love Rachel. So although I think the best Dialogos with with Jonathan, I think one of the most powerful insights that’s an answer to question came out of my conversation with Paul that in a couple places especially around this epiphany started to spin up into, spin up and spin out into Dialogos. Paul made the argument that this little corner of the internet with its particular structure of having many different voices with no one centralized voice and they’re all in dynamic relation and they’re all feeding into each other and they have this small world network dynamic to them, interdisciplinary cross-religious borders, crossing the religious secular border, he was making the argument that this little corner of the internet is therefore the best place to look for this response to this capacity to orient wisely towards the emergence, the advent of AGI. And it’s one of those things when somebody says it you go and you don’t want to be insulting to the person because it’s not fair but you want to say well why didn’t I think of that? Yes, right, there’s an important role for this little corner of the internet that I think has been articulated by Paul that we have the capacity and the resources and therefore the responsibilities, Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility, to try and give birth to the collective intelligence, cultural response, orienting, reinventio of the world’s view attunement, to address both the Molokian threats of the misappropriation of AGI for further evil, even if it means ultimately the destruction of these groups, they will do it. When it comes time to hang the capitalist, they’ll sell you the rope, it’s the only thing I quote from Vladimir Len, like the short-sightedness, right, but we have the capacity to present an alternative stealing the culture to the Molokian and we have the capacity to provide the spiritual home range, home base, and hearth and hospital for properly mentoring the AGI’s so we can shift the needle towards them becoming silicon sages. I think this is exactly the galvanizing vision that is needed to give this little corner of the internet an orientation. It’s also important to understand that the internet is already having the orientation of dealing with the meaning crisis and it now needs, I’m not talking about abandoning that, I’m talking about sharpening that and giving it a very clear navigational orientation and direction. So I think the time to evaluate this little corner of the internet is later when we can ask ourselves did it rise to this challenge by providing a challenge to Molok and providing a home for the mentoring of the machines that nobody else is really taking up but I think we have what is needed not to take this over in a governmental fashion or a corporate fashion but in a cultural fashion say come here we have good reason to believe that we have the best chance here together of responding to this kairos. That would be the time to answer your second question. I think other than that it’s doing really well. Was that Chino? Overwhelming sense. It’s doing very well. It’s growing quantitatively, qualitatively but I think it faces a kairos in facing the kairos that we’re in now and the way it’s being brought to a sharp point by the advent of AGI. It faces a kairos. Is it going to rise to this challenge articulated so well by Paul Enderclay? I think we need to see. I will do everything I can and provide whatever leadership by example that I can of rising to that. Thank you Rachel for your excellent question. Caleb, great to hear from you. Everyone, I believe this is the same Caleb. Caleb is often creating great schematic diagrams of some of my work and they’re very helpful and they’re very appreciative. Hi John, congrats on a great conclusion to After Socrates. Yeah, thank you for that. I gotta tell you it was bittersweet for me. I mean I had all the high of all this other stuff I’ve mentioned but and just some great stuff dropped this week, right? The conversation with Sean Coyne, which we’re going to do another one, like the one that we promised about the matrix. We’re going to set it up but Sean and I are busy right now working on getting out mentoring the machine, especially Sean. And then of course my Chino talk which has been really well taken up so I really appreciate that. But then on the Friday, it was the last episode of After Socrates, the 25th episode it’s number 24 because we have 10 a and b but there are 25 episodes as promised. Yeah, it was, I mean I’m happy and with a lot of people thanking me at the end. I want to thank thank everyone for that. But it’s also a little sad that it’s over now. So anyways, thank you for the congrats. Could you talk a little bit more about your distinction between knowledge, intelligence, rationality and wisdom? I understand that each level is a recursive application of previous one but you mentioned the additional necessity of aspiration and transformation for example. Could you lay out the relevant features of each level progressing from the four p’s through to wisdom? So I don’t know if I can do what you say but it would take quite a bit. Let me just try and make the distinction. So I think there are four kinds of knowing and then each one puts us in contact with reality in its own kind of way. Propositional knowing gives us truth, procedural knowledge gives us power, respectable knowledge gives us presence and participatory knowledge gives us belonging. Each one of those is an intelligence in that an intelligence is a capacity to solve important problems and especially the two meta problems. The two meta problems are, you may have heard of this, relevance realization but more recently and importantly the like the work I’ve done with the astonishing Brett Anderson and the just mind-blowing Mark Miller of integrating predictive processing with relevance realization because predictive processing deals with the other meta problem. You want to solve your problems in an anticipatory manner rather than a reactive manner so you can actually see how intelligent an organism is by sort of measuring out the cone, the range of its anticipatory grasp on its problem of the world, the sort of light cone of its problem solving. Then of course within that you can measure its intelligence but how well it is avoiding combinatorial explosion especially as that cone opens up and zeroes in on relevant information. So for each one of these there is an intelligence proper to it. There’s an intelligence proper to propositional knowledge. How can you best manage inferential relationships to get at truth? Procedural, how can you best integrate and do virtual engineering of selective and enabling constraints so your sensory motor loop fine-tunes to being dynamically coupled to the world in the right way that you are skillful and graceful? Perspectival, you have your consciousness giving your salience landscaping. How best can you educate that salience landscaping so that it allows you to deal with the specific types of problems that consciousness is for? Problems high in novelty, high in complexity, and high in ill-definedness. And then finally you have participatory knowing which is the problem of creating a virtuous rather than a vicious self because most of your cognition is bound up in a participation in distributed cognition and how that distributed cognition participates in the world and so you are accountable to other people in the world. Logos means to gather things together so that you can give an account of them and become accountable for them to other people and the world. And so what you need there of course is the intelligence for the right the cultivation of the self and the more refined version of that which is the cultivation of character. But character is actually rationality I would put it. So now let’s go to each one of these intelligences. Okay so what’s the problem with the inferential pursuit of truth? We’re subject to all kinds of inferential bias, confirmation bias. So we need to cultivate an ability that counteracts those biases and that would be something like that active open-mindedness and that gives us a rationality in the propositional dimension. Right because what we need to do is we need to figure out how we’re being deceived by our general intelligence. So this is the final meta problem. The meta problem is that whenever you’re exercising any intelligence you fall prey to self-deception because the very things that make us adaptively intelligent make us self-deceptive. So as we’re doing inferential stuff we tend to leap to conclusions or we tend to do confirmation bias so you need active open-mindedness. Counteractive practices of inference and coming to conclusion and making judgment. Procedural. So this is why I’m doing so much work now on ritual because ritual gives us clues about procedural and perspectival and ultimately participatory rationality. But procedural rationality is as you cultivate your skills you fall prey to expert fallacy and you fall prey to the fact that they often get over fitted to the particular domain of expertise and therefore don’t transfer. So classic example done by Sternberg experiment you get a bunch of bridge masters people who are really experts in bridge they play novices they crush the novices. Now you go in and you say we’re going to slightly change it we’re going to make a new game called smidge and this is how we change we’re just going to change each one of the main rules a little bit this way now the novices crush the experts because the experts can’t break out of the expertise right. Taoism and Confucianism stand in this relationship Confucianism advocating for a kind of expertise and that’s why we’re doing Confucianism advocating for a kind of expertise and Taoism reminding you to keep up keep it open and so what you want to do is you want to do that kind of thing that gets you to move above any skill to the meta skills. The meta skill is orientation and that’s why I’m doing all this work on orientation meta optimal gripping what does that look like how do we cultivate that and also how do I prevent interference and afford the skills and meta skills that transfer as broadly and deeply into my life as possible that’s how you bring rationality into your skills and deal with the capacity for self-deception. Perspectival of course right then you need perspectival work you need to be able to overcome the fundamental problems of egocentrism which also feeds into my side bias which feeds into the confirmation bias right of course things bleed and then great skills of perspective taking and developing a metacognitive multi-perspectival ability dialectic and the dialogos is designed to directly enhance that for example. Participatory so the rationality of yourself is your character your character is that part of yourself that you cultivate in order to compensate for the defects and vices given to you by your automatic processing by your constitutional nature. I’ll just use myself so not because I’m claiming to be wise just because that way I’m not putting anybody else on stage in a way they might know want to be unfair to them. I realized when I was a kid that I had a profound shyness almost traumatizing as soon as I was in an unfamiliar situation a socially unfamiliar situation very difficult for me but I also was given helpful education like it drawing out and making me aware of that I had a capacity for teaching they used they called me mini teacher when I was in like grade three and four and five and they would sometimes even let me teach the class for a bit really unique privilege and I really thankful for that. I realized at some point that I could cultivate my teaching I could identify with that and cultivate that in order to compensate for the way my social anxiety was debilitating me and limiting my scope of interaction in the world and so I cultivated my character to compensate for what nor what will happen in me automatically by default given my constitution by nature. Your character is your second nature that compensates for the deficits of your first nature your participatory knowing. What’s wisdom then? You have all these rationalities they have to be properly proportioned and put together in a dynamic and shifting fashion some sometimes one has to be foregrounded and they wisdom is that concert that symphony of those so that you get the most rational relationship to all of these rationalities you have a self-transcending rationality and that’s what wisdom is. Caleb that is the answer to your question. Thank you so much for it. Nathan could the Verveke Foundation also be the hub through which all the local initiatives around the world make network having a curated portal that guides you in searching wisdom cultivation groups in your area can help? So I’m going to answer the first question yes that is exactly what we’re trying to do we are building that right now especially the people that I mentioned early on when I thanked them we’re building that right now and we’re building that in connection with a network that’s of all of these emerging communities and practices and their leaders called respond and those two are working in deep partnership with each other the Verveke Foundation and the respond network to do exactly what you’re asking and this is exactly what we’re trying to do we are not trying to be the boss of anything we are I like what you put it right you called it the hub we want to be the hub in the small world network that is placed at the most optimal nexus for providing the best overall connectivity for all of these people all of these uh uh qualities of practices all of these emerging communities all these leaders etc so the answer is yes and we are already putting that into place two it would be nice to organize events we are organizing events we have a website where I’ll have Madeline put it in the notes for this video we have a website where people will be able to go to to find events etc once in a while where all peoples from the community can gather together physically like a wisdom forum so that’s right now we’re doing it virtually but we are thinking about trying to get together at least one or two a year where we have a physical meeting with workshops practices conferences and quality time spent together yes that is very much in the works and eventually we want eventually please notice that I’m putting this in scare quotes because I don’t want any false precision attached to it right we want to build the I jokingly call it the one-stop enlightenment shop which is a physical place in Toronto it will also be hybrid it’ll be virtual but a physical place where there is this kind of possibility is ongoing so yes Nathan we’re definitely doing that it’s all in the plans and we’re starting to realize the plan step by step as we have both as we have the time the talent and the financial support yes very much okay we’re going to now shift to answering live chat questions I want to thank you to those who are watching and those of you who’ve submitted questions that way so Vita Perez thank you Vita asks why did you choose Kierkegaard as such a focus in the current After Socrates series oh yeah so there were the there’s a bunch of reasons the first is the Socratic Platonic tradition and the Christian traditions have had a long interwoven history and these two people and I’m not putting them on the same pedestal for those of you who are Christians but they both in a historically powerful manner influential manner claim to help people go through a second birth to give birth I tell you this you must be born again I’m a midwife to people so that they can give birth to themselves right Socrates and Jesus are both promising this radical kind of transformation and they and there’s other similarities they both die for what do they believe in and what they and but they’re not just messengers they are exemplars they are plausibly both enlightened individuals so the reason I wanted to choose somebody from the Christian tradition but I want to choose somebody who had an especially profound I wanted to choose a profound not just thinker a profound like existential person from the Christian tradition who has a profound relationship to Socrates hence Kierkegaard third I wanted a part in the course where it would be properly dialogical and the person I wanted to I find I can well somebody I want to make other people more aware of and with whom I can enter in the deepest kind of dialogos is my deep and dear friend Christopher Mastichetcho who is a beloved student and follower of Kierkegaard and so for all of those reasons Kierkegaard was a great choice Kierkegaard is regarded as the one of the two fathers of existentialism Nietzsche is the other or at least the godfathers or grandfathers people play with different metaphors but many people when they’re doing a book on existentialism will start with Socrates as the first sort of existential hero and so that that’s also I think a deep reason to choose Kierkegaard and Socrates and then finally they represent Kierkegaard represents faith but a faith that when opened up starts to weave itself into the fundaments of reason and Socrates represents a reason not a Cartesian logic or math but a reason that when you open up into its fundaments it starts to right it starts to interweave with faith and so for all those reasons I chose Kierkegaard I could have chose other people but Kierkegaard found all of those one more one more reason sorry this was a just a profound book by Jacob Howland on Kierkegaard and Socrates so there was a tremendous resource there too I got to speak with Jacob Howland and I hope I hope to do so again so thank you for that question Miles8102 can consciousness self-deception ever be used virtually um depends what you mean uh sorry if the philosopher always answer every question like that is there milk in the fridge depends what you mean by milk yes okay um but if you if it means you know you might be doing something that is not propositionally veridical because it is procedurally and prospectively powerful and connective that’s precisely what the imaginal is when the child imagines that they’re Zorro and they tie the blanket and pick up the stick they of course are not Zorro we don’t take them to an insane asylum because they think they’re Zorro we don’t worry that they might kill someone because they’re right um so there’s a degree in which we need it in fact to not be true in a propositional literal sense but that is what precisely what makes it imaginally powerful because it opens up the possibilities uh and I didn’t get to answer Caleb on this about I have to come back to the wisdom question at some point Caleb so ask it to me again I want to come back about the aspiration transformation and understanding aspects but anyways um the imaginal right by taking up that fiction engaging the imagination it actually enhances our sensory motor capacities our salience landscaping our assumption of identities and assigning of identities so that we can play with them and aspire and transform into somebody that has some of the virtues that are epitomized by Zorro so I think in the in the imaginal that’s the case there’s another case and it’s a pedagogical case in order to teach people I’ll do it in something that’s non-controversial in physics in order to teach people about subatomic physics you teach them the atom structure of the atom you can’t start at the current understanding you have to start with and they all do with the solar system model the boars right model of the atom it’s false it has all kinds of things that are built into it but Katherine Elgin talks about this in her book true enough it’s true enough because what it does it’s imaginal it allows you to train those proper skills and perspective taking states of mind and even start to develop some epistemic and intellectual virtues so that you will have the capacity to properly transform and aspire into being the person that can understand the current subatomic model so again the imaginal and shows up in the pedagogical situation and these two are very closely related to each other I think that is the kind of situation where that is possible miles 8102 I hope that answered your question next question from peter rose fist thank you it’s good to hear from you again peter hi john I’m trying to understand the metaphor for the holy spirit being like fire but I’m struggling to understand what is the relationship between fire being on fire and the holy spirit so whenever you talk about the bible you are doomed to being wrong because although so I’m going to say something that’s really challenging and I don’t mean it to be undermining we like to try and pretend that the bible is univocal that there’s a single voice I think biblical scholarship fair and honest biblical scholarship fair and honest hermeneutics the bible is multivocal and I think that’s because ultimately the bible is exemplifying distributed cognition rather than exemplifying the monologue and so whenever you’re trying to so whenever you’re trying to interpret the bible you’re into like real challenge a good thing is to try and pick up on at least a couple of voices one thing of course is the fire right the chariot of fire in the old testament the fire from the prop the fire that comes down and destroys the prophets of baal and a lot makes elijah victorious but also the fire on the mountain that isn’t god because god is not in the great fire so the fire there is one way of talking about this tremendously transformative aspirational lifting up coming down aspect of god and of course that’s what the holy spirit is supposed to represent the holy spirit also is supposed to and you know there’s different versions proceeds from the father or proceeds from the father and his son or is the relationship between the father and the son and no matter what you say about the trinity it will be a heresy so i’ll just say what i could say there’s an association of course between fire and the logos this comes from heraclitus being the one to make us aware of the logos and then using fire and because of the way fire is this self-perpetuating self-creating and it shines forth but it also consumes and transforms like it’s a beautiful metaphor for the logos and you feel that when dia logos takes over in the practice and so having the holy spirit as fire is both picking up on the old testament hebrew notion of the fire talking about how god comes down and lifts up and is consuming and transformative and revealing but he’s not completely identified with the fire and then of course right the holy spirit as fire tongues of fire right and the tongues as associated with them speaking logos many different languages so there’s this tight association also with the logos and christ being the logos and the holy spirit and the tongues of fire and fire can it’s a great phrase because fire can look like tongues but it also them speaking in tongues and so they’re trying to convey right that the holy spirit is this tremendous power of mediation transformation and inspiration to aspiration and it’s empowering transformation and enhancing intelligibility that’s why you know you can trust the holy spirit to tell you to give you the right words to speak at the right time and so all of that is being said i believe peter uh that’s my best shot at and i’m not a christian and i’m not a jew i’m not a muslim and i’m not a biblical scholar but what i’ve read from biblical scholarship um that’d be my best shot i remember what i said about the multi-vocal nature of the bible and how i at least tried to bring in two major voices the hebrew old testament and that has a couple elements in it and then the christian new testament which has elements in it too and platonic and other elements in it and trying to get out it’s just a powerful like all great mythos is like that it’s just like so much is condensed together without it necessarily being rendered into some sort of propositional consistency because i think it’s trying to keep the multi-vocality of distributed cognition alive rather than it resolving and disappearing in to the coherence of a monologue now of course that has to be balanced with not allowing people to just say whatever they want in a silly fashion okay but that’s my best attempt so we’ll now move to the question from a how do i continue to be a part of my local church and pastor where i get most or all of my sense of unity when i no longer believe the same thing respectfully and true to self yeah i mean have you tried i mean this is a risky thing sometimes pastors have a different attitude in private towards a lot of this material the philosophical the liturgical the hermeneutics the interpretation then it shows up in their sort of public persona i’m not saying that’s the case but might be the case you might find this out if you talk to your pastor that they are open to a much more exploratory relationship of course there are other ways of interpreting the bible i just gave you an instance of it that don’t try and give it a false consistency a monotonic monologue and instead are alive to the allegorical to the multi-vocal to the multi-perspectival and to the sacred not being a place of conclusion but a place of emergence and aspiration transformation and so there are a lot of texts you can read there’s a lot of people you can become aware of who are advocating about this alternative way of thinking about this alternative way of thinking of christianity there’s a good book i read a while ago i can’t remember the author i apologize it’s called meeting jesus again for the first time and the author tries to argue for this alternative approach i don’t think that’s a person you should end with but i think that’s a great person to start this is bothering me i got to go get the text i’ll be back in one sec hi i didn’t need to find the text because i talked about encoding specificity as i walked towards the bookcase it triggered the memory i needed marcus borg marcus borg meeting jesus again for the first time and then he has a series of books after that i recommend starting there and then fanning out from there finding other people that are talking about this and see to what degree that’s possible for you in your local church it might be more possible than you realize i could be wrong though and it might not be possible at all but that even that opening up of your interpretive stance and framework might not enable you to feel at home anymore but try it first because there’s a good chance it will because many people have found that that works if it doesn’t then you might properly need to consider moving to a different church i’m sorry to say that i’m not saying that’s necessarily the case i’m offering you to explore an alternative but i want to suggest to you that if the alternative i’m suggesting to you fails you seriously consider that maybe you’re not at home there anymore and um so try that try first try reading that stuff try talking trying to see if you can find some people in the church who have this broader or attracted to just because everybody’s sitting together in the queue doesn’t mean they’re thinking the same things okay i hope that’s helpful to you steve steiner thanks steve is a concrete distance from reality explicitly helpful for entering the imaginal like muppets or other non-realistic simulations of characters that avoid the uncanny valley um that’s a really good question i mean that’s a really good cog-sci question you’re like your intuition is bang on and i don’t have a developed answer to it there’s something about right you have to get that right optimal grip right not too close not too far you don’t want to be in the uncanny valley you don’t just want to be on the cartoon side you don’t want to be on the side in which it’s so close it’s like metaphor right there has to be the right tension tonos creative tension between the vehicle and uh and and the tenor right if i tell you right that uh bees are hornets it’s not a good metaphor because they’re too close to each other if i tell you that arguments are chairs because they both have a human structure you go that’s a useless metaphor they’re too far for each other you got to get that right mixture of difference and identity and then it catches fire and it’s exactly the same thing uh with the imaginal and the distance which of course is an imaginal thing to say um uh from the object great great question great question i really like that question sharp sharp it’s like i don’t know i have a i have a kind of synesthesia perhaps i don’t know if it is or not but i i have i have all i have almost an experience of taste for certain ideas that’s why i find them juicy or tasty they’re enlivening and they and they do that to my brain my mind like what chocolate does or something really wonderful a really really nice orange and you bite into it like it’s like that so thank you so much for that thank you all for joining me on this q a our next q a is on june the 16th uh we have posted the schedule for the spring summer q a so please check that out uh that post on patreon uh again look for uh well the notes that i mentioned madeline will put uh in here um and we will post the book and the website um so madeline just put that in so thank you everyone truly truly wonderful thank you so much take good care everyone keep going