https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lSdcj2wIk5M
Welcome everyone to the Q&A. First of all, as always, I’d like to begin by thanking all of you for watching the series and the comments and all of the support. So today we’re going to begin with the questions from the Patreon supporters. I’d like to start with the question from Matt Gumbly, a Patreon supporter. His question is, what do you think the extent of the phenomenological differences experienced in cognition by biologically modern humans from significantly different historical contexts? For example, pre- versus post- Paleolithic revolution, pre- versus post-axial age. Are the hypotheses that accentuate the differences such as superior wharf and bicameralism credible? Let’s answer that in reverse. The bicameralism I take is a reference to Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I remember talking to somebody about that book and they once said to me, it’s a book filled with a hundred really good ideas and a thousand really bad ones. So Jaynes had the hypothesis that before a certain period of socio-cultural complexity, the two hemispheres were much more distinct in their functionality and the left hemisphere experienced the right hemisphere as an independent mind or consciousness that would periodically command or speak to the left hemisphere and this was an experience of the gods. It’s a very interesting idea. He tried to marshal some evidence for it in terms of ways of rereading ancient text. I find the idea interesting and it does line up with some ideas from the later work done by split brain patients and stuff like that. However, overall I would say I don’t think the evidence for it is that convincing. I think there’s good reason to believe that the problem solving we see in even let’s say let’s talk about the much earlier, the Paleolithic period, the projectile weapons that are happening during the upper Paleolithic transition and the calendrics and very sophisticated technology and the trade networks. I find that very interesting to believe that that kind of sophisticated cognition was possible without the kind of functionality we see today which is a pretty continuous and complex interaction, pretty almost seamless between the right and the left hemisphere because of the kind of problem solving that was going on there. So generally I would put aside the Jaynes proposal. The superior Wharf hypothesis is this is the idea that our language affects our cognition in the way we think and there are of course there are different versions of the superior Wharf hypothesis. They’re from weak to very strong. The strong version is a which is sometimes called a form of linguistic determinism is that the language you speak really seriously constrains the language you speak. It really seriously constrains the kind of cognition you can have and the idea is like famously or infamously because it’s not really true. There’s a lot of ways in which it’s factually inaccurate but the idea that the Inuit people have many different terms for snow and so they can perceive many different kinds of snow that people who presumably people in other parts of the world can’t. So I mean Berlin and Kay and others who did tests on that you can get huge variation in the way people cut up the color spectrum in terms of the names they have for colors and so some cultures will you know we have like eight basic ones other cultures have four right so people cut up the color spectrum with their linguistic categories in very different ways but that seems to have no impact on their ability to actually perceptually distinguish between different colors different hues different shades and think about it this makes sense. You see many many different shades of red you know something between scarlet and chartreuse or whatever the colors are and you don’t have a name for it but you’re still capable of perceiving it finding it familiar etc. So the strong version of the superior Wharf hypothesis has been one of the most sort of empirically disconfirmed hypotheses in cognitive science. Now of course there are weaker versions there’s there there seems to be some evidence for example that being multilingual as opposed to monolingual can have a significant impact on work your ability to use executive functions from working memory etc. And you know that empirical data is still you know controversial but it’s it’s a reasonable position to take with respect to the superior Wharf hypothesis. Now I suppose I have something of a weak superior Wharf hypothesis in this way where I think not so much our linguistic categories but what I would call our cognitive grammar the fundamental categories that we use in order to work out our ontology and articulate our experience. I think that has a significant impact on the way we can formulate problems and try and solve problems and I’ve articulated that in the series. Now to the core of Matt’s question does that would somebody living in the pre-axial world have had a phenomenologically different world? In one sense no I don’t think for the reasons I’ve just articulated that their perceptual experience would be fundamentally different. But of course perceptual experience isn’t all that goes into the phenomenological field. The way you are sizing up situations and formulating problems which could be very much affected by your cognitive grammar. How you’re basically creating a salience landscape I think is very deeply affected by your cultural cognitive grammar. And in that sense what you find salient, what you attend to, what kinds of problems you formulate, what kinds of situations you size up that I think could be different and in that way it could contribute to a phenomenological difference. And so a question that emerges, a final question before I move on to the next one or a question that’s implied by Matt’s question is does that make the phenomenology of the people in that period incommensurable and accessible? That’s a very difficult question. It’s hard to know how to answer it. I think of course there might be some aspects in which their relevance realization is fitted to their time and place and so there will be a degree of inaccessibility. However I do think and this is something I try to do in the series, I think it’s possible for us to reverse engineer to a very significant degree that cognitive conceptual grammar and I talk about it in the series and try to make a worldview viable for us again so that it’s not just something we’re conceiving of, it’s something that is reshaping our phenomenological field and therefore I think it’s possible to at least have a significant bridging of horizons between our current phenomenological mindset and those of people in the past. So I hope that tries to gives at least the beginning of an answer to a very rich and profound question. So the Patreon supporter Mike Cohen asks a question, are you familiar with the work of Fernando Flores? He calls ontology. If so how do you see this work impacting the meaning crisis? I am not familiar with that work at all, I’m sorry and so I’m just ignorant so I’m not going to make any pronouncements on that. I’ll move to the second question which is are you familiar with the integral work of Ken Wilber? If so do you see this offering any ways forward for the meaning crisis? I am somewhat familiar, I do not claim any kind of significant expertise with Ken Wilber’s work. I also am familiar with some people who’ve come out of the integral movement and some sets of practices that are associated with the integral movement such as circling. Insofar as I have seen some of the practices, I think those psychotechnologies, those practices like the circling practice, I think will help to play a very significant role in helping us reconfigure something analogous to the old Socratic Platonic dialectic, to come up with something like a meta-psychology that we can collectively share so that we can get a much more authentic discourse going between us and I do think that this is going to be, I’ll pun here, an integral part of responding to the meaning crisis in that I think we are going to need these collective psychotechnologies and the intelligence of distributed cognition in order to reshape and reorganize our ecology of practices for responding to the meaning crisis. So insofar as I can see that connection, I can see that work. I would like to point out though, I just had a wonderful discussion with Guy Zendstock, the guy who invented circling, and although he was associated with integral, Guy made it very clear to me in a way that I found very insightful and helpful that his original and ongoing inspiration for the practice of circling is Heidegger and not Ken Wilbur and I found that very, very revealing and it actually helped me make much better sense of the practice and what’s going on in that and I’m going to talk about Heidegger in the series, we’re filming some of those episodes right now, and so I think I’ll try and make some connections there at that time. I have a more general familiarity and more in depth with transpersonal psychology in general, that’s the category to which Wilbur is often put. I know the work of Michael Washburn, which I found much more developmental and dynamic, his book, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, I found really useful. Jorgé Ferrer’s work on revisioning transpersonal psychology and trying to set it into relationship to participatory knowing, I think is a really pivotal book and I think that notion of participatory knowing and the work that Ferrer is doing on that, Jorgé Ferrer, a revisioning transpersonal psychology and another anthology called The Participatory Turn, I think that, as I tried to argue in the series, is going to be important to responding to the meeting crisis. Right, so the next question from the Patreon supporter DS, are discovering meaning for ourselves and engaging in the modern world of work at odds, how does our societal work structure impact or assist the meeting crisis? That’s a very good question. I’m hesitant to answer it because I don’t want to treat work as a homogeneous category. There’s many different kinds of work, some of it of course very satisfying, other forms of work, drudgery and bordering on exploitation. And so I’m very hesitant to pronounce as a whole, I’ll try and, but I will nevertheless try and undertake my responsibility to at least provide some response to an important question. And so what I would want to say there is the degree to which it is, I think, unquestionable that work has a very significant impact on our identity, on our cognitive practices and habits, and on our communicative practices and habits. So it’s quite possible therefore that work could have a very deleterious effect on the kinds of cognitive practices you would need to engage in, in order to start to respond individually and perhaps collectively to the meeting crisis. One way, for example, in which that may more broadly apply is something I talked about in the series, the degree to which we’re involved in a system, I guess for want of a better word, a capitalist system, we can be subject to a very complex and complex process of a capitalist system. We can be subject to a series of constraints that are reinforced at work that could seriously trap us into confusing the having mode and the being mode. I’m not arguing that this is a necessity of all work. As I said, I’m very reticent about pronouncing on a very heterogeneous category in any comprehensive way. But there are certain shared patterns for a lot of people within the market economy that we work in that tend to commodify things and tend to lead to a danger of trapping people in mode of confusion. And this, of course, was one of Fromm’s persistent concerns. And I could see that as being exacerbated by people’s work. Now, on the other hand, I don’t want to just be dour about this. I’ve been increasingly asked to come to workplace situations and talk about mindfulness practices and wisdom practices. I’m working with Peter Gosar and Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd to put together, well, basically, it’s a business. It’s called the Sophia Framework, in which we’re going to go to business sites and offer a series of workshops on how to improve rationality, insight, self-regulation, empathy, and how to coordinate the psychotechnologies and practices with the explicit goal of not just sort of improving workplace culture, but also in a way that has a take-home value for people. I have done a few focus groups with people on this and got a lot of very positive feedback. So there are also aspects of the work world that are responding to this. And so there’s hope that there might more and more be a recognition of needing to make meaning cultivation an important consideration for workplace culture. And ultimately, that’s going to be, I think, more and more important as we get increasingly interactive with artificial intelligence. So keeping human beings, human beings’ capacity for meaning cultivation and insight and self-transcendence are going to become much more valuable because those are going to be the traits that are going to be distinctively, for at least for some significant amount of time, distinct from AI. So I’m not prophesying. I have no capacity to do that. That’s ridiculous. But there are reasons for hope, right? So are we going to have a rational hope that because there are some, as I said, there’s some indication for interest in this, in the workplace culture, and there’s definitely going to be a need for it in the future. So the Patreon supporter, Clinton, asks, how broadly does the salience of the affordance of modern technology vary between individuals? In other words, do handy people, the technically inclined, live in a totally different universe than people for relying on paying or requesting favors of them? And who can otherwise only use technologies as end users? So it depends what you mean by different universes. It’s plausible because of the neuroscience we have about the way the brain sort of wraps. So we even have it in other primates. If the primate is, for example, using a tool, the brain will wrap some of the machinery for constructing identity around the machinery for using the tool. And this has to do with that transparency opacity, shifting and other things I’ve talked about. And so I think there’s a big difference between somebody who can use a tool in that way. They can sort of see through it and be through it and identify with it. And people who are as you and users are on the outside. And the technology doesn’t form a sort of a cognitive prosthetic for them in any significant fashion. And therefore, I think it stands to reason on the basis of that argument that their salience landscape would be significantly different, given the degree to which they can both indwell and internalize the technology. I’ve actually in fact, when I was asked to talk again, within the business world on issues around people adopting new technologies, I pointed out that one of the problems that many of the corporations are facing and many of the companies are facing is that they are often only paying attention to a utilitarian way of framing the new technology, showing people what the technology can do and how it can improve performance and improve productivity and blah, blah, blah. And that leaves out the whole fact that we are naturally born cyborgs, that human beings seek to indwell technology and seek to internalize it. And therefore, their identity is importantly, existentially at risk when they come into a new substantial technology. And that needs to be taken into account when you’re trying to introduce new technologies. And this is basically an idea that goes back, or at least can be made coherent with some of Heidegger’s arguments about how technology tends to create a particular ontology and a particular way of dwelling in the world. So the next is from an anonymous Patreon subscriber. When you talk about providing a top-down structure of psychotechnologies for these wisdom communities, especially for more secular ones, I sort of picture this as just a tool shed for them to draw from whenever they want to solve some problem. Meditation helps me relax and send off positive vibes after a hard day at work, or the view from above would help me plan for the future and therefore make me more successful. In your view, would that really be sufficient or what else is needed for them to pattern themselves on and participate in these new or foreign psychotechnologies without diminishing their significance? Yes, I think there’s more to it than the tool shed model. And I try to convey this, and I’m going to talk about this again later in the series, with this notion of an ecology of practices. And so it’s very important to think about these various psychotechnologies. All of these psychotechnologies are affecting what we find salient, doing relevance, affecting our relevance realization machinery. In that sense, as always, the very machinery that’s making us adaptive and improving our adaptivity also comes with inevitable cost and a vulnerability to certain kinds of self-deception. So the psychotechnologies have strengths and weaknesses. And one of the things you need to do and one of the things the top-down strategy can do is to provide people with a way to help them. And one of the things that the top-down strategy can do is to provide people with reliable vetting, reliable information, science-based where possible, and a lot of this is possible to be science-based, about the strengths and weaknesses of various psychotechnologies and how you would need to coordinate them together. So to give one example, which I will talk about so I’m just going to gesture towards this now, but it’s coming up. There’s one important psychotechnology you need is called active open-mindedness. And what active open-mindedness does is it helps improve your inferential reasoning so that you don’t fall into certain biases, like confirmation bias when you’re seeking evidence for your inferential practices, etc. And what it tends to do is it tends to shut off that more intuitive aspect of your cognition so you’re not constantly leaping to conclusions. And in that sense, it really improves the way in which people use inference and evidence to alter their beliefs. But it has the cost precisely of really constraining and restricting the intuitive insight machinery. And so you can have an opposite and complementary psychotechnology of mindfulness, which basically tries to shut down the inferential processing, the attempts to fix and assign belief, and tries to open up the insight and intuitive machinery. And of course, that is very beneficial, of course, for affording insight, for allowing you to tap into the implicit processing, implicit learning, but it also carries with it a cost. I don’t argue for, and in my academic work, my publications, I think the idea that mindfulness is a universal panacea for all aspects of self-deception, I think that’s just empirically false. And so mindfulness also blinds us in certain ways to things that need our inferential processing in order to be appropriately addressed. And so what we need is we need to be practicing the two of these together and learning how to optimize the balance between them. And of course, while you’re doing all of that, here’s a problem with both of these. These tend to both be very sort of, you know, sitted cerebral sedate practices, and they leave off the important role of movement, which is a very powerful way of accessing our procedural and participatory knowing. And so you should have a movement psychotechnology coordinated with these two more cerebral psychotechnologies. I’m trying to give you an example of what this town strategy looks like. It looks about how to coordinate and create a self-organizing ecology of practices in which you get, you know, checks and balances and mutual constraints between the various psychotechnologies. Also part of this top-down strategy, and this is something that came out of a really excellent discussion, a couple of discussions, especially the second one I had with Jordan Hall, this idea of sort of a meta psychotechnology, a psychotechnology for how to learn about and coordinate and engineer and integrate in the way of inscribing psychotechnologies. We’re going to, you know, this meta psychotechnology, and I’m very interested in what this might look like. I think it’s going to need to be sort of something that we do collectively, accessing distributed cognition. I think it being something very analogous to Socratic and Lincus and Platonic dialectic. And one of the things I’m working on right now is to try and recover what that was as a practice. There’s some just excellent work being done on that right now. And then to put that into dialogue with current practices like circling, authentic relating, that are also trying to get back to a way of accessing distributed cognition, putting it into a collective flow state, optimizing it so that we can get a place in which we can deeply discuss. I’m sorry that sounds trivial. I’m really trying to emphasize, I mean, there’s going to be much more I’m going to say about this, but ways in which we can deeply discuss both the theory and the practice of psychotechnologies and in this collective way, create models and templates for how various ecologies of practices can be coordinated together. So that’s how I would answer the question of how the top-down strategy looks like something more than just a toolbox. That top-down strategy has to be really informed by some good science and I think it also has to be really informed by a general thing about understanding and responding to the meaning crisis. So we have another, I want to answer Daniel Starling’s question. First of all, Daniel, great to have a question from you. It was such a pleasure meeting your wife and daughter on that beach in San Diego. I’m so sorry that I misremembered and said she was your sister. That was some sort of weird Freudian thing that might have been projected onto you and I’m sorry about that. But I’ve really appreciated your support and it was such a pleasure to talk to you via email and to talk to her and to meet your daughter. I want to take a look at your question. So Daniel, who is also a Patreon supporter, said, how could your theory of relevance realization be falsified such that it meets Popper’s criteria of demarcation? So that’s a very difficult question to answer. It’s a very good question. One of the problems I would have with it and so I want to go carefully here is I sort of generally reject Popper’s notion of falsification. I think the work that was done by Duane McQuine, all kinds of issues about how you can trivially change any proposition into a falsifiable proposition by just adding a conjunct, you know, adding a conjunct. So I think in concordance with many, I think a consensus in the philosophy of science, falsificationism, the idea that science progresses by falsifying hypotheses, I think is something I’d want to challenge. So we next move to another theoretical problem in that, you know, the argument for relevance realization is supposed to be an argument pointing towards sort of constitutive necessity, things that the system would have to have. And so there’s an aspect in which the situation, the notion of relevance realization couldn’t be disconfirmed. You couldn’t sort of pile up empirical evidence against it because of sort of a transcendental argument. The very ability to pile up the evidence is going to presuppose relevance realization machinery. You’re going to get into a vicious sort of self-defeating position. Because if, like, there’s a sense in which, if cognition is not dealing with combinatorial explosion, if it’s not dealing with ill-definedness, right, there’s a sense in which it can’t be cognition. So that aspect of it, I think, is something that has sort of more of a transcendental argument. It’s not as strictly transcendental because it’s built up from considerations about actually empirical facts about, you know, combinatorial explosion, limited time and resources, the finitary predicament. And so it’s not a full-blown Kantian transcendental. Now, Daniel, the particular claims about how relevance realization might be implemented, I think those are eminently falsifiable. So I think it’s quite possible, disconfirmable, sorry, to be more consistent. It’s possible that efficiency and resiliency might not be the correct logistical norms, or there might be other ones. I have no clear argument that what I’m presenting is exhaustive. So in that sense, it is just directly an empirical inductive and abductive hypothesis. And something that I’m going to get into in episode 32, the way that might be particularly implemented in the brain in terms of self-organizing criticality in the firing and small world network formation in the wiring, that might be wrong. Although I think in some sense it’s highly plausible that it’s got to be related to small world network formation. But that might be too crude, too vague a model. There might be other ways in which dynamical systems can be understood that might be much more perspicacious and be much more in comport with the empirical evidence we’re going to get out of the brain. So in one sense, on pain of sort of epistemic self-refutation, as long as you grant me certain assumptions of accommodative sort of explosion and finitary predicament, something like relevance realization has to be the case. But the particular set of bioeconomic logistical norms and the particular ways in which that might be implemented in the brain, I think those are all empirically disconfirmable hypotheses. It might be, for example, that neural synchrony actually isn’t doing significant data compression and that’s not how the system is trying to generalize. All of these strike me as directly disconfirmable and therefore empirical. So you have to be very careful. Of course, this is one of the tricks of the trade when you’re doing theoretical psychology about what is something that’s open to empirical question and then what is something that is what is presupposed by empirical data that is not in question such as combinatorial explosion and the finitary predicament. I hope that sort of answered your question, Daniel, and I hope we get to talk again in the future. So I’ve got a question from Twitter. I’m not a Patreon. The question is, how would you describe your personal meaning purpose in one sentence? So the cheekish thing I could do is my meaning or purpose is to respond to the meaning crisis. There we go. That was done. That was easy. That would make me like a real jerk, right? But there’s a deeper truth to that in that for me, trying to really understand what meaning cultivation is and what wisdom is such that I could make a contribution. This sounds so pretentious and I don’t want it to be. I’m trying to convey that with this that I could make a helpful contribution to the reduction in foolishness and the affordance of flourishing such that people’s sense of connectedness to themselves and to each other and to the world is enhanced. That’s my meaning. That’s my meaning. So another Patreon supporter, Ben B. R. asks, do you have any relatively quick natural hacks to make entering the flow state easier? Natural as opposed to electro stimulation, feedback or pharmacologically, and also something quicker than decades of meditation. Yeah, a natural mental feedback exercise to practice to enable entering the flow state. So I don’t know how much that means. I don’t think there’s sort of a quick and sort of dirty magical formula you can do. For the reason that the problem that has to happen to maintain the flow state is there has to be an ongoing increase in the challenges and demands facing you or else your capacity for learning and problem solving will overtake the environmental demands and then you will fall out of the flow state and begin to move into boredom. One thing I could recommend you could start taking up that will very quickly start to get you into the flow state is to take up a challenging movement practice. For example, for me, Tai Chi Chuan does that. A lot of the Taoist practices, and you don’t, I mean, you can practice them for years and they are inexhaustible in their capacity to teach you and transform you, but they also start to rapidly get you into the flow state because these practices, Taoism is basically the religion of flow induction. It’s more than that, but that’s a lot of the core of it. So finding a movement practice, and why do I emphasize movement practices? Because they tend to give us, they’re much more likely to give us that clear feedback that we need. We can tend to make them challenging just by rearranging the environment or putting demands on our balance. And movement practices, get the cerebellum to kick in, and having the cerebellum kick in is really important for helping to increase the chances that you’re going to get into the flow state. So I would recommend considering something like that as a way of getting at least an initial, a practice that can initially get you into the flow state. What you’ll find though is that the flow state, it has this wonderful dialogue, right? As you’re doing, as the practice engenders the flow state, the flow state starts to take you more deeply into the practice. You start to see things in the practice and then that takes you in deeper. And so not only are you rewarded with more flow, you’re rewarded with a deeper understanding of what the practice is doing for you and through you. So another Patreon supporter has asked, Gordon Gold has asked the question, do you have any thoughts on how our transition from longer form linear narratives to more choppy and fragmented meme culture impacts meaning making and a sense of personal identity continuity? Yeah, I do. And it’s something that I’m currently working with on Chris Master Pietro. We’re doing work based on some really interesting work done by Han and he’s got a whole series of books dealing with this kind of thing. Especially, I would recommend, his work isn’t that bad. It’s not like reading Khan, but it’s not a book you take to the beach, but The Scent of Time is a particularly important book. So he argues that our experience of time is being fundamentally changed. Time is becoming more atomized and buzzing rather than flowing in a cascading manner for us. And that goes back again to that phenomenological difference thing we were talking about earlier. So let me give one really interesting way in which you can see this. Let’s take it as a reasonable, because we have evidence for this, that music was a central psychotechnology invented in the upper Paleolithic transition. That music is a psychotechnology that plays with your salience landscape and your insight machinery and your flow machinery powerfully. Music is a universal. So let’s say that music is really central like this. Notice one of the things, and I want to apologize, I can’t remember the name of the person, the theorist, who is doing this right now. I apologize. Anyways, the argument this theorist is making is talking about the death of melody that in our music, because of the proliferation of streaming and YouTube and all of this, and so therefore the increased competitiveness of what’s happening. And think about how this is kind of bullshitting. The salience of the music is becoming more and more prominent at the expense of any complexity and cognitive and perceptual cognitive processing of the music. So we’re getting music in which we’re getting more and more just hooks being linked together, more and more rhythm and melodies, and we’re getting more and more rhythm and melody, which is often contributes to a narrative sense to the music is being significantly undermined. And so, you know, if you listen to some current music, a lot of it, right, popular music is of course what I’m talking about, right. It’s very much hook. There’s very little melodic change, right. Very rhythm heavy, very repetitious. This is often accompanied by a significant lyrical impoverishment. So there’s not that much sense of a narrative development within the lyrics. And so all of this is I’m trying to give you a concrete way in which our experience of time is being atomized, because when we engage in music, we get into a participatory way of knowing how we are extended development and developing cells through time. That’s what music is. That’s what it triggers. That’s the kind of identity it involves and the way in which that is a connectedness to the environment. And as we are removing the melody and the complex cognitive processing and getting caught up in the salience, we are tending to atomize that time and that sense of identity in very important ways. And I don’t believe anybody’s done any empirical work on this. It’d be very interesting to see, interesting in an epistemic sense, but not interesting in a moral sense of course, the impact that this is having on people’s cognitive processing and their sense of narrative identity, which is a mess of course with their sense of modal identity, the agent of relationship. I would predict that we would see a significant impact on people who had only been exposed to this kind of non-melodic music. But that of course is an open empirical question. So I hope I’ve answered your question in an interesting fashion. So one final question from a Patreon supporter anonymous. You mentioned that you struggle with social anxiety disorder. This is something I’ve also struggled with as well. I just want to pause here and say, I get this. I understand this. I don’t know you, you don’t know me. But I think it’s important just to say here how much of an impact on a person’s life this has. And so I don’t want to do something trivial, but I sympathize very clearly about what you’ve just said. And I hope you are finding some successful interventions. I’ll return to continue to the questions. Severely impacting my academic career. Yeah, I get that because academia is already a terrifically paradoxical place in which you are put into competition. Very competitive thing with strangers, yet it often requires a kind of epistemic intimacy. You have to be engaged in discussion and debate. Yeah, it’s very challenging. I totally get that. So I was wondering how you suggest handling it outside of the usual roots of CBT medication. How this work could be relevant to those suffering from social anxiety disorder. So one of the things that helped me precisely because it wasn’t just CBT or medication, and you are already saying those definitely need to be pursued. And was these movement practices that I was talking about? And I’ve also seen how this is helpful when you’re going into things like these collective dialogue practices. So when you get good at a movement practice and you get an increased self-awareness and a being at home-ness in your body, that gives me at least, and I don’t, so please understand the kind of advice I’m giving you. I’m giving you personal advice. I don’t know of any scientific work backing this up, but when you have this increased self-awareness that of course can be combined with meditative techniques, CBT techniques to help, so it can magnify and help your ability to interact with your symptoms from, and that’s something I found. But in addition to that, what it gave me was a sense of presence and groundedness that was not dependent on the social reinforcement I was getting in the situation. And it acted as a, you know, so in the disorder of course, we tend to misinterpret ambiguous action as negative or rejection action from other people. And having that sense of how I was present and grounded that was independent from that evaluative machinery acted, it acts as, because it keeps the hypervigilance and the overinterpretation of the signals I’m getting from other people. Also, as you get into your body and you activate that participatory knowing, you tend to get access to other ways in which, at least this is what I’ve found, I want to keep qualifying it that way, other ways of connecting to people that don’t seem to be as, quite as cognitively penetrable by the anxiety machinery. And so I’m able to sort of sync up and connect to people in a way that isn’t as directly attacked by the anxiety machinery. So that for me has been particularly helpful for sort of those three reasons. Those practices, the movement-minded practices, help me carry mindfulness into moving around in the world and help to increase the effectiveness of the other interventions. Being grounded in and being present through my body, right, gives me a counterbalance, that sense of, you know, disconnect and, you know, being, you know, not being properly present to others or people being inappropriately present to me. And then, as I said, thirdly, by accessing the participatory knowing, I found that it gave me another way of communing with people and connecting to people that wasn’t as cognitively penetrable by the anxiety, and that also helps, has helped me as a counterbalance. All right, so we’re switching to some live questions. Oh, we have another Patreon supporter, Alec Wellwood. Would it be possible for you to create some sort of resource or conglomeration of your etymological points that you think are important? Yes, I think I’m going to, I’ll try and do that. I’ve also noted in episodes and commentary where I have sometimes made an etymological error and I’ve gone back and tried to correct it. So, yes, I’d very much like to do that, and there’ll be some more of that going. I’ll try and figure out how we could make that work, how we could make it available to people, because I understand the interest, because, again, and this will come up, and I’m going to be filming one of these episodes soon, but it’s not going to be coming out until much later, I guess, maybe January of 2020. I’m filming an episode on Barfield and that sort of etymological argument and how it overlaps with some of the work done from the Lakoff and Johnson framework. I’m going to be talking about that. So, yeah, I think, yeah, and of course Heidegger also brings this up, this sort of etymological argument. So, yeah, that’s a very good request. I’m going to try and figure out in conjunction with that how to put together some of the etymological resources, although you should know that there are some very good etymological dictionaries out there and online, and you might want to begin by consulting them, but if I’m interpreting you correctly, you’d like more than just this sort of etymological dictionary, you’d like me to perhaps comment on that etymology, how that, on how that etymology is relevant to particular issues in the series, how it pertains, and so you want something more than just the etymological dictionary, at least that’s what I’m presuming. So, I will try and figure out how to make that happen. So, I want to thank the supporters on Patreon. Your contributions are helping to fund solutions to the meaning crisis and research on that, both in the lab and in outreach. There are many benefits, including priority question asking, which is, you’ve just seen being enacted here, early access to the videos, which I know some people are finding, I’ve talked to some people about this and they find that valuable. You get them released the day before they’re released publicly. I know for some levels of support, there’s also the opportunity to talk to me directly, and so I think I’m getting some feedback that people are finding these benefits from Patreon support valuable, and again, I want to thank people for that. So, a few more questions. These are sort of some questions from coming in live. One question from Twitter. I’m interested to know how you think automation and AI will affect the meaning crisis. That is a profoundly important question, and I want to, at some point in the series, devote quite a bit of time to that, probably towards the end, where I sort of do a bit of wrap up. There’s many ways in which I think it’s going to happen. First of all, I mean, in just sort of a coarse way, and I don’t mean an unimportant way by saying that, what I mean is just that I’m talking about the sort of level of resolution. Many people’s economic lives are just going to be dramatically altered, and that’s going to have an impact on their sense of meaning, their sense of connectedness. I think that’s a very important point. I think that’s a very important point. There’s two ways in which the advent of AI is going to impact on the mean crisis. First of all, and this is something I said in a discussion I had early on this week, the advent of artificial general intelligence isn’t going to be like a digital event. It’s not going to be no autonomous AI, but it’s going to be like a digital event, and it’s going to be something that’s going to be like a digital event. It’s not going to be no autonomous AI, then bang, autonomous AI. No, it’s going to be doing what it’s doing. It’s going to be growing, right? And I strongly suspect for reasons that go back hundreds of thousands of years that we will do what we have always done with emergent technology. We will cyborg with it because we are natural born cyborgs. Other than oxygen in my naked body, everything else in this room and everything else that’s happening is technology. We are natural born cyborgs. We will cyborg with this stuff, right? And the computer, you know, computer human interaction research is growing dramatically because it turns out, as I’ve mentioned, right, when you try and do computer brain interaction, it’s not as hard as we thought it was going to be because the brain does this wonderful thing because we’re natural born cyborgs. It redesigns itself to try and optimize its integration into interface with these technologies, which is kind of science fiction scary, right? And but is that going to happen? I see that happening. And so the notion of what we are and our identity and where think about how we identify with this technology, our clothing, right? Right. And so our identity is going to be shifted and altered in a fundamental way. Think about how your identity is altered by this thing. It’s going to be dramatically transformed in ways that are kind of unforeseeable as we more and more directly cyborg with this stuff. What’s that going to mean? So I think that’s going to have a huge impact on the mean crisis. Then there’s another one. And I want to tread very lightly here and very respectfully. But the advent of general AI, like you think Darwin had an impact on our religious sensibility towards our identity in our existential place. You think Copernicus did you think Darwin did? That’s nothing to what’s going to happen if and I believe it’s much more when we get artificial general intelligence. It is going to impact on our religious and spiritual sensibility in ways that are going to make the Darwinian impact and the Copernican impact look small. What if you may meet a human made machine that is capable of self-transcendence? And from that self-transcendence capable of acting, speaking, and advising you in a deeply existentially wise manner while being also able to put that advice and that practice into something profoundly aesthetically beautiful. What do you do with that? What do you do with that? What do you do with the notions of spirit and soul? And I am not, and anybody who knows me, I am not making fun of people who have religious commitments. I don’t do that. But what I’m asking you to consider is that this will have an impact on our sense of who and what we are that will be more profound than the Darwinian and the Copernican revolutions. And I think it will be exacerbated by the point I previously made that as that kind of autonomous AI emerges in a way that challenges our sense of uniqueness as spiritual beings, we will already be deeply cyborged with this AI. So we have one, like I don’t believe in any sort of simplistic transhumanist utopia in which we’ll get the rapture of the cyborgs or some bullshit like that. And nor do I think the light of the, you know, being a light-eyed like people are about Darwin’s theory of evolution, or things like that. That’s not an alternative. I think what we can do and what we should do is, and I think, and I have a talk about that, and I can’t go into this argument now, but please look up this talk about why the creation of AI requires the cultivation of wisdom on our part. I think we have an additional important moral imperative on to cultivate wisdom such that as we cyborg and make these machines, they do not just have intelligence, but they have rationality and wisdom and a capacity for self-reflection so that they can be more authentic in how they deal with their own proclivity towards self-deception and such that they might be much more consonant with a new way of understanding our spirituality that won’t be challenged by machines who we would have to, in all good conscience, call spiritual and to whom we would have to enter into existential and moral relations. One of the things I’m trying to argue, and this is why this difficult abstract material right now and relevance realization is so important because I’m going to use that to try and argue for a sense of spirituality that will not be put at risk by the advent of our cyborg descendants and artificial general intelligence. Oh, so apparently I’ve just reached 10,000 YouTube subscribers, so thank you very much for that benchmark achievement. I really appreciate it and I’ve really appreciated the questions. We started a little bit late, so I’m going to go another five minutes and maybe take one or two more questions that people might have. And so the question is just coming up now. I’m really, really pleased. I can’t follow all the chatting that’s going on because it’s so dense, but I want to assure people that I do look at these, the chat later, and I find it very helpful. So thank you for that. Thank you for your participation and thank you for talking to each other and thank you for talking to me. So one final question. You’ve spoken about sport and movement practices. Do you see traditional sport, Western team sports specifically, as opposed to Eastern practices having potential in the ecology of practices that could be harnessed in the future? That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know if I’m competent to answer it because I have looked at sports psychology. I’m not completely ignorant about it, but the area I know about has to do on the coaching side and the relationship between the coach and the athlete and how that’s relevant to internalizing the sage. And therefore, I don’t like to comment where I don’t have any knowledge, so I can comment on that aspect. Insofar as athletics, Western athletics, depends on the coach athlete relationship, I think that is a powerful way of training and training in a way that you can put into action how to internalize a third person perspective, at least in this context, a more sage-like perspective. And therefore, if people could take use of that experience and sort of exact it into a more existential project, I think that long-term practice of internalizing the coach in ways that you have to put into procedural participatory knowing could be a valuable platform from which you could develop internalizing the sage as the child is to the adult, the adult is the sage. So I could see via that important relationship in modern athletics, a potential way in which Western sports could contribute to responding to the meeting crisis in the way it gives people real, engaged, embodied, inactive practice in internalizing something at least analogous to the sage. And that could really help people if they were, you know, if they explicitly go back and try to exact that in cultivating the ability to genuinely, or perhaps that’s a wrong adjective, more comprehensively and deeply internalize a more profound sage figure and thereby contribute again to that sort of top-down capacity to cultivate an ecology of practices. Oh, that question came from the Patreon supporter, Andre Stringer. So thank you very much for that, Andre. Now, as you know, I think there’s also some Western movement practices in general outside sports that I think are really important. So in October, I’m going to go down to one of the retreats offered by Rafe Kelly, you know, the Evolve Move Play. And some of you might have seen some of the two of the really, I think, interesting, I found them very interesting interviews that I had with Rafe. So Rafe has basically created an ecology of practices in which the movement practice of parkour, parkour out in nature, it plays a central role in the ecology of practices that he’s putting together for his community. It’s very interesting. You do the parkour out in nature, then there’s comeback, and there’s something like a circling practice around the campfire. So I think that is also very important. And I hope to have more insight about how that might operate after I’ve been there in October. And I’m really looking forward to that. All right, so I believe our time is up. And I’d like to again, thank you. Thank you all the Patreon supporters. Thank you for the people who tweeted. Thank you for all the people who are chatting right now. And again, thank you for the subscribers on the YouTube channel. I’m not going to get into specifics. I am currently working on another series, another video series. It won’t be as long, only 20 episodes. And so I promise you, I’m very excited about this new series. I have more to say about it soon. I’ve been talking a little bit about it in some of the interviews. And so I promise you, there’s going to be a lot more content forthcoming on content forthcoming on a regular and reliable manner. So once again, thank you very much. I’ve tried my best to answer your questions. So take care. And I hope to see you again in our next Q&A. Goodbye, everyone.