https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ePF2B9dqKHQ
welcome. Welcome everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here again and I’m excited to get to some of the questions that have come in. The first thing I’d like to do though is I’d like to thank all of my Patreons for their support and I’m getting a lot of requests for more one-on-one time with me. I appreciate that. I would ask everybody to appreciate that my time is getting very stretched. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to introduce two new tiers on Patreon with limited spots. One tier will allow you a one or like email correspondence with me. The other one will allow you to have a one-hour chat with me plus some email correspondence with me. We’re going to call that John’s Pen Pal tier. So that will go up on Patreon. It’ll go live right after the Q&A is done. So again, deeply appreciative of all the support. I’m trying to be as responsible as I can to all of you. So thank you again. So I’d like to start with a question from Carol King. And she asked me a question about the Marshmallow test and how it’s been reinterpreted to represent economic disadvantage and then what my general thoughts are about scarcity. So the first thing, just quickly go over the Marshmallow test. This was a famous test largely around the work of Ida Commishel. And what it consisted of was you would put a, it was under what’s called the delay of gratification framework. And what you would do is you would bring in a small child typically around four years old or a little bit older. You find something they like, a marshmallow, hence the name of the test. You would put a marshmallow in front of them. And then you would say you can have the marshmallow whenever you want. But the longer you would like, but if you wait, and it was often the longer you wait, there’s an increasing chance you’ll get a second marshmallow. And so what you were measuring is how long the children could delay gratification, how long they would delay before they gave in to impulse and ate the first marshmallow. And then what came out of this was a series of very strong predictions. Now there’s two kinds of predictions that came out of this, and we have to keep them distinct. The first, and this is the one that Carol is referring to, has to do with long-term predictions. So this ability to delay gratification, it was purported, was sometimes purported as better or at least as good as measures of general intelligence for predicting your future longitudinal success, your long-term success, how well you’re going to do in school, how well you are going to do in your work life, how well you’re going to do in your relationships. And so this was considered a very big thing. It was considered one of the mainstays of the idea of emotional intelligence as something distinct from intelligence, because this ability to delay gratification was considered central. Now, that’s the one set of predictions. And let’s address those. Please remember, there’s a second and I want to come back to those. So recently it was found in an attempt to replicate this study with a greater number of participants, much more diverse sampling, that the ability to delay gratification was actually being confounded with when they did it and they didn’t find the replication the way it was purported. What they found was in the earlier research, there was a serious confound with socioeconomic status. So what they were finding was what they went back and did the reanalysis of the original data, what they found was children who could delay gratification came from higher socioeconomic status. Children who couldn’t delay gratification came from a lower socioeconomic status. Now, here’s the thing. That, first of all, makes sense. If you have brought up in a quite wealthy environment, it’s not that risky for you to delay gratification. If you brought up in a more impoverished environment, it is very risky for you to delay gratification. So it makes sense, actually, for children in these different socioeconomic classes to be able to delay gratification to a different degree. That’s all well said. And then once you realize that the ability to delay gratification is being affected by socioeconomic status, you then realize that socioeconomic status is a very powerful predictor of how kids are going to do. So the kids that delayed longer came from higher socioeconomic status and that higher socioeconomic status predicts their long term success. And therefore, the idea that the delay of gratification was independently predicting this long term success falls away. Now, that’s important, not just because the Marshmallow test is famous, but this ability to delay gratification is one of the sort of central things around many versions of emotional intelligence. This is why I’m very, very suspicious of the notion of emotional intelligence as something distinct from general intelligence. Now, this lines up with a lot of increasing work around scarcity mentality. When individuals are put into scarcity, their cognition goes through significant transformation, often in ways that can be seen from a more long term perspective as deleterious. But the thing you should know is that scarcity mentality is not just an economic. If I put you into a situation where you feel you have time scarcity or that you have metabolic energy scarcity. In any way in which an important resource that contributes to your ability to solve your problems is suddenly in your apprehension significantly limited, you will lose cognitive flexibility. You become much more impulsive, you’ll be much more limited in the alternatives you’re considered. You will be much more short term. All kinds of things happen if you move into a scarcity mentality. And so part of what’s going on, and like I said, this is in one sense, it’s very adaptive because if you are things are things are very scarce, you should focus your limited resources on the more probable the more probable outcomes, the more probable outcomes are the more immediate ones. So on and so forth. This is important in general because there has been, I think, an unfair offer of criticism of certain of the to put this in because I’m questioning the whole argument that the moral behavior of poor people, they seem to be more irrational. Margaret Thatcher famously made this argument a long time ago. Right. And that is to miss the whole fact that people who are socioeconomically poor off do face scarcity mentality and therefore their behavior shows that they are do face scarcity mentality and therefore their behavior shifts into this more short term and flexible, less creative, more reactive response to the environment, which is adaptive and makes sense. All that being said, I don’t think the we should throw out all of the research done by commercial because they also did a bunch of other predictions that aren’t longitudinal and therefore are plausibly not confounded with socioeconomic status. And this has to do with some of the manipulations and interventions they did. So in particular, and the reason why this I think should be preserved is because this evidence that I’m now going to talk about is convergent with independent evidence. So, for example, what things can you do to get children, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, to be able to increase their ability to delay gratification? So now we can talk about this differently because we’re not talking about how the children come in from their environment. We’re talking about interventions we can give any of the participants and see how it changes their behavior. And so one of the things that seems to be predictive of an ability to delay gratification is your ability to do what I call a transparency opacity shift. This is to step back and look at your processing rather than automatically looking through it. This was famously done with one. A girl in the experiment who was taught to pretend that she was looking that there was a frame around the marshmallow and she was looking at a picture of a marshmallow rather than a marshmallow. And she famously said, well, you can’t eat a picture. So she was stepping back and looking at her representation and realizing its distinction from the object. And this affords the delay of gratification. And this lines up plausibly with how mindfulness and other self-control strategies improve our ability to deal with our impulsivity. So, you know, the media sort of presents it as, you know, the marshmallow test has just been this sort of disconfirmed. That’s a little like that’s a little too hamfisted. What we should say is instead there’s a confound with socioeconomic status that points us to another important relevant variable that has important policy implications, which is the real impact of a scarcity mentality on our cognitive framing, on our cognitive problem solving. But we should also remember that there are aspects of the marshmallow experiment that shouldn’t be rejected because they have to do with attentional and cognitive strategies that you can and anyone can use to intervene and increase their ability to reduce impulsivity. And almost all of our therapeutic strategies involve these kinds of transparency, opacity, shifting, disidentification strategies, etc. So that’s, I think, sort of my best take on the status of the marshmallow test right now. So I’d like to turn to a question from Patreon supporter Sergey. He asked, could you speak much more on your concept of existential inertia and serious play? It’s a long. So I have a lot of an episode that has a long chunk on that. I have a whole separate talk on there on Gnosis that’s on my channel, if you’re interested. So I can’t give that complete argument here because of time limitations. The basic idea of existential inertia is it comes it’s derived from Frankfurt’s notion when things are unthinkable to us. And I think that’s also a relation on an older notion by James about when options are viable or live options to us. So Frankfurt gives the example of, you know, that he has a child and he couldn’t simply abandon the child. Now, what does he mean by that? He doesn’t mean he can’t imagine abandoning his child and he can’t make derived implications about that, you know, how it might reduce his monthly expenses or whatnot. He can do all of that imaginary, imaginal work. But what he can’t do is in create a salience landscape with within which he can assume an identity, a particular agent arena relationship such that he will start to carry out the action of abandoning his child. So I don’t quite like the term unthinkable, but that’s that’s that’s his term. So we’re sort of stuck with it. So what I understand him to mean using the explanation I just gave is that we can run the propositional and for me, propositional also means pictorial, right? Where we’re using pictures as images, we can run the propositions in our head, but we can’t actually go through the perspectival and participatory transformations that are needed to do the salience landscape, create the situal awareness, trigger the right procedural skills and get the right agent arena participation going such that we will begin to undertake the task that is being merely represented in a propositional function. Now, of course, you know, it’s a good thing to not abandon your children, but my notion of existential inertia is the reverse. So consider somebody who can think about that they want to stop getting into this. They keep going into this horrible pattern in their romantic relationships. They know it. They can say, I keep doing this horrible pattern in my romantic relationships. They can derive inferences in their mind about what it would be like if they didn’t have that pattern. They would suffer less. They might beat somebody better for them. Their friendships wouldn’t be so massively taxed. They can imagine not being in being in a relationship that is not part of this horrible pattern. They can do all of that stuff. But what they can’t do, they don’t know how to sculpt their perspectival knowing, their salience landscape so they get the situational awareness that they do not know how to assume and assign identities such that they get the participatory coupling to the world, that they can move to that place. Where they are a different kind of person inhabiting at a different arena and those deleterious patterns no longer have a purchase on them. So in that sense, the place they want to get to is unthinkable to them. That’s what I mean by existential inertia. And that’s, of course, why people go into therapy. They go into therapy because they’re often that people very rarely do not have some good propositional knowledge of what their issue is. Right. That’s typically not the problem in therapy. It’s not like when somebody is coming in and they’re trying to go blah, blah, blah. And I keep repeating these cycles. They can articulate it propositionally, but they do not know how to bring about the perspectival and participatory transformation. That’s all interesting, I think. But then the the issue comes up. Well, what’s going on in therapy that helps to alleviate that? Now, I think therapy is addressing both existential inertia and existential ignorance. I won’t go into the existential ignorance right now. That’s the point. That’s but that has to do with the fact that very often when we’re facing significant transformation. We are ignorant, like the person going into therapy, we are ignorant of what that perspectival knowing would be like. We are ignorant of what that new identity will be like. And therefore, we’re really unsure in it because of this deep ignorance what we will be losing if we make the change or what we will be we will be missing if we don’t make the change. So I think. To use the example more fully, you go into therapy, you’re facing existential inertia since I don’t know how to bring it about. And then coupled to that and often causally related to it is I’m facing existential ignorance. And then what you need to do is you need to engage in serious play. So the serious play deals with the existential ignorance by giving you a place that is an enacted analogy that has enough of the features of the perspectival knowing and the participatory knowing you want to enter into without having you fully committed to it. You’re not all the way there yet. So let’s say you’re in therapy and you’re trying to work out a complex issue you’ve had with a family member. You’ll engage in serious play with the therapist. They may take on the role of your family member. And so that triggers enough perspectival knowing and participatory engagement that you can see what it’s like to perhaps transform those. But you’re not under the threat. And notice how this would interact with the scarcity mentality I talked about. But you’re not under the threat of actually confronting your family member. So there isn’t the tremendous irrevocable risk. And so you get into this place where you’re seriously playing, you’re enacting an analogy that’s liminal between the world and the self you’re trying to leave and the world and the self you’re trying to get to. And so that’s what I mean by serious play. This enacting where I create some symbolic analogy of the identity I want to get to, of the world I want to move to. And I play in that. That’s what the enacted is. I play in that. But I play in it seriously. I’m not playing in it for fun. I’m playing it because I’m trying to trigger the perspectival and the participatory change hopefully enough so I would get a sense of what is needed. That will help, of course, alleviate the existential ignorance. What it can also help do is give you a place with and this is how we acquire a lot of our developmental skills by playing in that liminal place. I could start to know how to transform my perspectival and participatory knowing and get out of the existential inertia. So I hope that answers that question. That’s broadly what I think is going on. So the patron Sia asked me, your description of symbols sounds a lot like a complex web of mental models, objects that get manipulated in your head, enabling you to do counterfactual reasoning. These mental models interact with each other, but also sensory inputs. So your experience of the world is through these models. Would that be a fair description? And then it says, I have a machine learning background and your description of symbols as a lens fits very well with models and machine learning, which are statistical distributions that you fit to your data. And if they don’t approximate the real hidden distribution of observation, the model will miss important patterns in the world. So, yes, I think, but I think that I. I think we’ve got a gene, a species thing that we’ve got to be we’ve got to take care of. I think the way you’re using models, mental models as a psychologist, I have some issues with how that is used in within psychology because it’s often used in a very nebulous, unformalized way. So putting that aside, but if I understand you correctly, and I think I do because I have familiarity with the notions you’re invoking for machine learning, I would say that models are a much more comprehensive, their genus. They have to do with a lot of the ways in which we are forming patterns of interaction with the world. I would say that a species of what you’re calling models are symbols and they have to do a lot of very specific functions above and above and beyond just successfully modeling the world to us. So as I tried to indicate in some of the lectures, I won’t go over all of these. Symbols have these functions of ecstasis. They have functions of invoking participatory knowing, perspectival transformation goes back to what I was talking about. Serious play, they engage us in serious play so that they have an inherently transformative aspect to them that is not necessarily the case for many of our mental models. And that’s transformative aspect, that ability to afford self-transcendence, that ability to sort of trigger anagogic transformation, the ability to thereby mediate between whatever frame I’m in right now and on a frame that I’m aspiring to. All of those things, like I said, there’s, I unpacked this in much more greater detail than the episodes. I don’t have time to do it now. But what I would say that what’s specifically different about a symbol, how I’m using it, which is not the same way it’s used traditionally, like within machine learning, where you, for example, compare symbolic processing with connectionism. I’m using it, how it’s used within cultural anthropology and theology and the related philosophical discourses, where, as I said, the specific difference, the centrality of the functionality of the symbol in affording transformation, self-transcendence, is what, for me, a crucial specific difference between a symbol and just a broader class of models. So I hope that answers your question. So there’s, let’s see, I’m just checking for the next question. And it’s coming up now. So this is from Patreon. Back to Oguz. Hi, John and company. Thank you all so much. I’ll lay the question out in three parts. Do you think meaning-making narratives are more powerful when armed with cultural specificity? I think that’s a very good question. I’m coming to a distinction in the video series that isn’t yet, I haven’t made that explicit, but I’m, so I’ll bring it up now, but I will ask for your indulgence because a more complex argument is still forthcoming. So part of what, and I’ve already discussed it to some degree, and you’ve also seen it in, I think, some discussions. You might have seen it, I should say. I shouldn’t. Oh, wow, that was so presumptuous. Forgive me. But perhaps some of you have seen it in some of the other video discussions I’ve had with people. So whereas I think the machinery of meaning-making, right, in terms of relevance realization is universal, of course, how that fits to a specific historical environmental context is, right, going to be different. So let’s use the analogy, like the machinery of evolution is universal, but how this particular creature is adapted is going to be very different in this environment from how this creature is adapted, etc. So this is the idea of niche construction. So what that means, I think, is that there is going to be, your relevance realization machinery is going to tailor you and fit you to a particular cultural, historical, environmental niche. And therefore, to the degree to which you have things that are specific to that niche construction, you will thereby increase or enhance your fittedness, if you’ll allow me that, your cognitive fittedness, to that particular environment. And what this can then mean is that certain things become indispensable to your sense-making capacity. The example I often use is that English, because of my particular cultural, historical, environmental background, the language English is indispensable to me. I could not, I cannot do without it. I can’t be a cognitive agent, or at least to the degree that I need to be or want to be without English. If you take English away from me, I can’t communicate, I can’t pose or solve any of your problems, I lose access to literacy, etc. So English is therefore indispensable to me. And I think there are many ways in which your relevance realization will produce things that are indispensable to you. And therefore, your particular set of symbols might pick up on that cultural, historical, environmental specificity and help you to engage with those indispensable functions. They’re indispensable precisely because they give you a kind of, they give you a kind of, let’s say, a context sensitivity. And that’s all I think implied by some of the arguments and evidence I’ve presented. The issue for me is to confuse that indispensability with metaphysical necessity. It would be to claim that every cognitive agent must speak English, or they cannot be a cognitive agent. That would be to claim metaphysical necessity. Now, of course, there are things that are metaphysically necessary for agents. I think agents must have a capacity to determine the consequences of their own behavior. If they don’t have that, they can’t be agents, right? And what I’m trying to get at is that many things that are indispensable, I think, have often historically thought to have been metaphysically necessary. So I think that particular symbol systems often make claims for exclusivity, ultimacy, finality, perfection, which I think doesn’t make any sense given the way that relevance has no essence. And I think that’s an important point, and I’m in the process of making that argument in an extended fashion in this series. But I also think that there’s often a confound there. And I sort of understand it, because if a particular set of symbols is indispensable for you, it’s unthinkable in the way I just explained a few minutes ago. It’s unthinkable to you that there is a viable other way of doing it. And that makes sense to me. But that is not the same thing as it being transcendentally, metaphysically necessary. So it would be ridiculous for me, I think you’re all aware of this, for me to say, unless you speak English, you’re not an agent. There’s no other way to agency except through speaking English, cognitive agency. You’d say, that’s ridiculous. There’s been, right, no, no, not at all. Okay. So I think what comes out of this is that we have to understand, and we have to therefore deeply respect things that have a cultural specificity for the reasons I’ve articulated, as long as that is reciprocated with understanding that that cultural specificity, unless there’s an independent argument that it is metaphysically necessary or essential to our cognitive agency, that if that kind of argument is not forthcoming, then the person who is making use of the culturally specific thing must acknowledge that they should not confuse indispensability with any kind of metaphysical necessity. So that’s how I would answer that first question. So I think I answered your second question because your second question is predicated on me giving a no to the first one. And I gave a qualified yes. So I’m going to move to, I think, is that it? I think that’s, yeah, that’s it. Okay. So I’ve got a question from Alex, Patreon Alex Wellwood. I’m very curious about absurdity. I had an information recently about how things feel absurd. The forces want to deal with how real it is. I’m wondering if the reality of absurdity and horror can be similar in a way to the reality of an ecstatic experience. And in that, could there be deep insights that could be useful? I’m having a bit of trouble. I’m having a bit of trouble. Sorry, things just moved. Articulating exactly what I’m getting at, but I appreciate if you could elaborate a little bit. Thanks. That’s a really good question. And I do think there is a deep connection between your absurdity machinery or our absurdity machinery, because I’ve experienced absurdity as well. So I’ve had experiences. I think this is a fair way to say it that we could describe as profound absurdity. So I think there is a deep connection between the machinery of absurdity, the cognitive processing of absurdity, and that by which we have ecstasy. I think, in fact, and Nagle also argues something similarly, and of course, he’s the author of the essay, The Absurd that I Make Use of. He thinks that absurdity is, as I’ve argued on his behalf, not driven by inference or argumentation, but actually driven by our capacity for self-transcendence. It’s driven by our capacity to move to a perspective that encompasses our lower order perspective and then define that there’s a clash in relevance between the perspectives. So what’s relevant in the higher order perspective is not relevant in the lower order’s perspective. And this may be the perspective where I’m sort of living my life. Now, interestingly, I gave a talk on this recently. I created a link to this on my channel, if you want. I gave a talk recently StoiconX in Toronto about the stoic practice of the view from above, where they get you, they deliberately got you to practice this rising above yourself and viewing yourself from a more encompassing perspective, not just spatially, but also temporally and socially, etc. And there’s all kinds of cognitive science evidence, which I go into detail in that talk, about how that affords enhanced cognitive flexibility and ability to reduce impulsivity, increased capacity for wise reasoning, because what it’s doing is it’s really manipulating your perspective. You’re taking a more encompassing perspective. It’s deliberately transforming your perspectival knowing. And then by doing that and altering the agent arena relationship, you create challenges to people’s sense of identity and their sense of agency. You get powerful versions of this in what’s called the overview effect. When astronauts are seeing the Earth from space, it provokes profound experiences of awe and wonder in which it has a huge perspectival aspect to it. There’s tremendous sense of beauty, and it also has a tremendous participatory transformation. They come back feeling often that they need to transform their lives and their identities have been significantly altered. So this is very powerful stuff that’s going on. And part of what I was trying to get out of the talk is it can go into absurdity. It can produce wonder and awe, but if the person can’t bring some kind of connection between the two perspectives, the higher order perspective can undermine the saliency and the relevancy realization of the lower order perspective. The fact that the higher order perspectives can undermine the lower order perspective is what gives them their transformational power. But if that transformational power isn’t properly constrained or limited, it can just eat away at the capacity to be connected in your lower order perspective, the perspectives of your everyday life, and that can render you feeling deep absurdity. So the trick, maybe that’s the wrong word. That sounds too trivial. The task. The task is to get proper training in self-transcendence. This is, again, one of the reasons why I am opposed to the indiscriminate use of psychedelics to provoke self-transcendence. Again, I argue against prohibition, but the indiscriminate use does not give people training in the discernment to pull apart the self-transcendence that would lead into awe and wonder and the self-transcendence that can lead into absurdity or horror. So that’s why it’s very important that the cultivation of self-transcendence always be deeply bound with the project of enhancing our capacity for overcoming self-deception, for being more wise, to put it in a simple term. Now, I think what we can do is we can respond to the threat of absurdity, and I’m going to do this in not this week’s video, but next week’s video. So just briefly, there are ways of playing with the view from above, playing with this self-transcendence, and that don’t trigger absurdity. They can afford the transcendence but constrain it in a way so that we don’t fall prey to absurdity. And this has to do with the fact that attention, and I’ve tried to give you many examples, is simultaneously bottom-up and top-down and simultaneously flowing in and out. It’s a tremendously complex, dynamic self-organization. And so there’s a notion you can see, and you can see it both in Spinoza, I would argue, and other people in the West, and also in Buddhist practices. So Spinoza gives the example of you’re reading his work, the ethics, and you’re following all the premises. It’s very hard, but at some point you can get an awareness of the argument as a whole. And then what can happen is you can get to a state that he calls scanty intuitiva. You sort of get the argument as a whole, but you get how the argument plays in each premise, and you see how each premise fits into the whole argument. It’s very much like I’ve shown you, how you see the whole word in order to distinguish the letters, but by distinguishing the letters, you’re able to write gestalt and integrate the whole word. And so you’re simultaneously seeing the gestalt in the parts and the parts in the gestalt. And what that does is that gives you the access to the range of the self-transcendence, while also getting the various levels to be deeply interpenetrating so that there is no perspectival clash between them. And I would argue, and I asked for your indulgence and wait to see the longer argument, that that’s the primary way in which we respond to absurdity. Because there is no argumentation that it’s driving absurdity, the arguments are always after the fact. What we need is a perspectival and ultimately participatory transformation that alleviates our absurdity. And we can see examples of that, like completely independent traditions converging on the same conclusion that there’s a state possible to us that can become more and more second nature to us, in which the field of self-transcendence is opened up for us, but we are not torn asunder by its polar distance. So I think that would be my attempt. And like I say, there’s more on this forthcoming in this series, so I hope what I’ve said here gives you at least an initial understanding and that the further work in the episodes that are pretty, like I think the next one and the one thereafter will give us what we need to carry out, sorry, not give us, well, maybe us, give you what you need and so that your understanding can be improved or at least afforded. So I hope what we’ve done together is we’ve built a little bit more understanding. Are you familiar with the work of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman? If so, I’m curious to know your thought reaction to his multimodal user interface theory. He seems to be suggesting a scientific and mathematical proof via evolutionary game theory that we exist in a sense in Plato’s cave, a world of illusion, and that’s from the Patreon VRL. So I want to give a very serious caveat to my response. I’ve basically only, I’ve watched one video by Hoffman and one argument. So I’m going to respond on the understanding, a social contract here and now, that my understanding is limited. So I’m going to respond to the argument I saw. And here’s the problem I have with the argument. The argument seems to run off. And see, this goes to, I think, words, a central issue. The central issue is that realness is a comparative term. Something, you can only determine if something is real, right, in contrast to how an illusion has been overcome. Reality is always a comparative term. This is more real than that because I can see from here how I was limited or self-deceived there. Now, of course, that means I’m precisely not seeing here how I’m self-deceived or limited. I have to move here and so on and so forth. And of course, that means we can never be completely free from self-deception because that would mean we’d have to leap out of our capacity for framing, which I think would be complete cognitive suicide. So let’s take it that realness is a comparative term. And I think that’s actually operational in Hoffman’s argument. He takes it as real that evolution has occurred. He takes it as real that certain scientific measurements have given us access to the causal and historical patterns of the world. If you’re saying on the basis of how evolution operates, I conclude that we are all in an illusion. I want to know why you think your information about evolution is not just itself illusory. If I was in a dream, if I was in the matrix and the matrix was feeding me all of this data within my labs or in my archaeological investigations about biology and evolution, that would be a real problem. And I think that’s would also be illusory. See, the thing is, it makes no sense to me for the reasons I’m trying to articulate that we could be comprehensively in an illusion because there’s nothing on the basis of there’s nothing forming the basis of the comparison. Now, what he might be saying is, well, a lot of our experience is illusory. That’s right. And then, yeah, that’s great. And then it’s like, my answer to that is, yeah, we sort of have known that since the actual revolution that a lot of our experience is illusory. So the problem I seem to have with his argument is it seems to equivocate. It does what’s, you know, kind of maybe a deepity or a Martin Bailey kind of thing. It seems to equivocate from something that is trivial in the sense that we have known it for a very long time to be true, which is much, much of our experience, much of our conceptions are illusory with which, like I said, we’ve thought this comprehensively, right, since the actual revolution with a radical claim, which is, you know, it’s all an illusion. And that’s just, I think when you make that claim, you just drop down a Cartesian well with David Hume in which the only thing that’s not an illusion is what’s happening right now, solipsistically isolated in your present experience, because everything else is inferred. And if that machinery is ultimately illusory in nature, any inference, even that something happened five seconds ago, becomes, right, open to being, open to the accusation of being illusory. So I would need to know on how he’s using, I need to know more. And I caveated this by saying I’ve only watched the one thing, saw the one argument. It wasn’t a short video. It was, I think it was an hour long, but that is it, you know, that’s not the man’s entire body of work. And so I am acknowledging right now that I might be unfair to him. But insofar as I’ve seen people talking about the argument and the way the Patreon asked me the question, not only is it an epistemic thing, like how could it possibly all be an illusion? On the basis of what would we point to, like I had to do it on the basis of X, I can point to this and say that it’s an illusion. But if everything I point to is an illusion, I don’t have the basis for calling anything else an illusion. It’s exactly equivalent to saying everything is real. It’s exactly equivalent to saying everything is real because everything has the same epistemic status. And if I have nothing to contrast it with, there’s no difference between saying everything’s an illusion and everything’s real. They’re both equally, I would say, meaningless because you’re misusing terms. It’s like saying what’s north of the North Pole. Also, if we’re in an illusion that we have no way of escaping from, why would you care? What possible difference could it make? It is irrational to devote any attention or effort to things that can make absolutely no difference at all to what you believe, what you know, what you judge, what you act. So I’m afraid I’ve conveyed something that I didn’t want to, which is, I may have come across as a little too harsh, but that’s just because it’s not direct. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m very concerned about really careful use of real and realness and things like that. And I guess in the end here, I still side with Plato. You only know you’re in Plato’s cave because you can leave the cave. You can see the fire. It’s only when you see the fire that you realize you were only looking at shadows. It’s only when you walk up the path and into the broad daylight do you realize that you were trapped underground. So that’s ultimately my response there. I would like to thank patrons for your continuing support. It’s been amazing. When one engages in a project like this, one of course hopes that it will find purchase, that people will find resonance with it, that it will come to matter to people in a way that affords them. Amelioration of issues or enhancing it, moving towards articulation or flourishing either individually or collectively. And the fact that that has actually happened, I mean, it’s gone beyond my hopes. I think it’s been a wonderful day for me. Words are sort of inadequate here. It’s just, it’s tremendously encouraging. It’s tremendously empowering. It motivates me to do more. I’m in the process of working on a follow-up series. So I just want to say that. I want to remind you all about something I said at the beginning. We’re opening up some limited spots on two new tiers, which include access to my time, which is becoming increasingly limited precisely because this project and the ones that are forthcoming are taking off. And again, very grateful for that. And those will be live at the end of the Q&A. So we’re going to switch off now in the last few minutes and switch off of the Patreon questions to some live questions. Here’s the first one. These more personal ones are always sort of intriguing and mysterious to me. If you could have a superpower, what would it be? Your favorite superhero? Well, I suppose your favorite superhero. Well, I suppose, I mean, I’m under a bit of an obligation here because Amar is here and he and I play a role-playing game together in which we actually assume superpowers. So I guess the most honest answer would be to talk a little bit about what that looks like for me. So my character basically is kind of like Yoda. He can do sort of super-tie chi and he can feel, like from Taoism, he can feel the chi and work with it. And he uses that generally as a way of trying to get at the depths of things and come to a more wise interaction with the world. Well, of course, along the way, doing lots of what-ho and let’s get into action and all that kind of stuff because after all, it is a game. So I suppose in one situation, how I would extend my answer is I would, superpowers that sort of enhanced the sages that I try to internalize would be this kind of superpowers I’d like to have. I’d like to have, like I said, like, you know, that capacity with chi that I see in the Taoist masters. I would, to have Socrates’s capacity for dialogue and dialectic and self-transcendence and the integration of rationality and spirituality and existential involvement and concern, to have that, that, I mean, it’s practically a superpower even in him. But I would, I would dearly, love that. To have the capacity. Now, let’s be clear. I mean this respectfully. I hope people are getting this. But to have a capacity, like a superhuman capacity for agapic love, which was perhaps, is this sacrilegious? I don’t intend it to be. Was this perhaps what we saw in Jesus of Nathers? To have that also, because of like the tremendous capacity we make persons, as I’ve tried to argue with Agape. So those are, those are the three superpowers I’d love to have that, that, that, that more deep enmeshment of mind and body and embodied, embodied brain and world that is exemplified in the Taoist masters. To have Socrates’s mastery of dialogue and dialectic. And again, I hope it’s not sacrilegious. To have Jesus’s capacity for agapic. Those would be the superpowers I would most like to have. Because the other ones strike me as ones that I would get bored of within about three or four days. I can cast lightning out of my fingers. Okay, I do that for a day or two. And then what? I’m back to, I’m miserable. I don’t have meaning. I’m not doing well in my relationships. Right. But this, what the superpowers that I’ve mentioned, super chi and super agape and super dialectic, I would be able to cultivate the best possible life. And so that’s why we want those superpowers. I hope that’s a good answer to that question. It’s an interesting question. It’s really thought provoking in some ways. Thank you for that. What are your views on transcendental meditation? The technique, not the business? This is from Emilio. I don’t know very much about it. I’ve sat, I’ve never practiced it. I’ve sat with a couple of people who have practiced it and sort of compared notes between the Vipassana. I know there’s been some research done on transcendental meditation, some of it good, some of it suspicious because it’s by the Transcendental Meditation Institute. So conflict of interest bias. So I suspect that, so again, mostly ignorant. I don’t, I’m not claiming expertise from the conversations I had, what I see operational transcendental meditation seems to have important aspects with deeper forms of Vipassana when you were, you’re trying to move into a state of non-duality. Like, so you get beyond focusing on the breath and then you start to focus on the space between the thoughts and then you, right, you have the experience where your attention is simultaneously as out as it can be into the world and as in as it can be into yourself or soul or psyche. And it seems to me that transcendental meditation is trying to get to that place too. That’s, I think what transcendental consciousness is. I don’t know. So that’s my best take on it. What I would say of it as not as a practitioner, as a scientist, that like I said, I’m suspicious of quite a bit of the studies because of the biased nature of the studies. I suspect that where transcendental meditation is tapping into a lot of the attentional processes that have been studied in other forms of mindfulness that it’s reasonable to conclude that a TM would have, would also have significant predictive benefits. Have you considered a series on Plato’s dialogues? Ha! That’s a great question because the series that I’m working on now is going to, it’s going to be about, it’s going to be about Socratic dialogue. We’re going to talk about the Platonic dialogue. What I’m interested in is the following. I’m interested, I had an amazing conversation, I expect everyone with Jordan Hall would be, with Jordan Hall, but he proposed that what he’s talking about is the need for a meta-psycho technology by which we shepherd the ecology of practices. And I thought that was a really powerful and interesting thing to say. He’s also talked about a bit recently with Tim Adelan in Voice Club, if you want to take a look at a recent video about that. And it struck me that something that did that in the ancient world was Platonic dialectic. Now, Platonic dialectic, of course, was a historical thing. It was changing, but you get this constant reference, especially in the Neoplatonic tradition, that, but even with the Platonic tradition, right, of dialectic as this practice, right, that it governs all of the other spiritual exercises and regulates them in some important way, shepherds them, as I try to say, picking up on the ecological metaphor, if you’ll allow me. And so I’m really interested in trying to understand what that was and how it worked. And there’s just some great work by Drew Hyland and González and Abel Rapé and a whole bunch of other people, right, who are really unpacking what was going on in the dialogues. And we have to pay attention to the drama in the dialogue because the perspectival and participatory knowing is as important as the propositions that are being uttered. So all of that, I want to unpack that deeply. But then what I want to do, and this is intended, I want to put that into dialogue with all a lot of the current practices that people are engaging in, like Gysenstock’s circling and some of the work that Peter Lindbergh is doing with, you know, the anti-debate on authentic relating. And see, because we have a rich heritage, we can look at Socrates and then we can look at the legacy, we can look at the Stoics and we can look at the way dialectic developed and changed. And then we can put it into dialogue with a lot of these current practices. And so that we can hopefully in that dialogue find a way to tap into the collective intelligence of our distributed cognition so that we can get this meta-psycho-technology that will allow us to better cultivate and coordinate an ecology of practices. And so this series is going to be called After Socrates, the Pursuit of Wisdom through Authentic Dialogue. And so we’re going to be in that series going into the Platonic dialogues, at least for the first chunk of the series, to get a deeper understanding of what Socratic and Lincoln’s Platonic dialogue mean. And then again, like trace it out in some of the legacies that come out of it. You know, we go to the Stoics, you know, other versions of the dialectic, and then put that into dialogue with what’s going on right now as a way of trying to give us an enriched vocabulary, an increased set of, you know, a repertoire of templates, sort of more theoretical space for Amherst to move around in as we try to come up with sets of, you know, ways of cultivating ecologies of practices in a collective manner that taps into the power of distributed cognition so that we can more readily address the meeting crisis. So that was a great question. Thank you for asking it. It gave me a chance to plug what’s coming. I’m very excited about this next series. It won’t be as long as Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. It’ll probably only be like 20 episodes. But this issue about how do we recover dialogue and dialectic? How do we get at this ability to tap into both the power of our distributed cognition and the inexhaustible power of our and the inexhaustibility of intelligibility is something that is crucial and urgent for us right now. And so I want to pick that up in the next series. So I’m already working on it. I’m enjoying it. And I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you. And I hope that many of you will find it beneficial. So I think that’s it. Again, I can’t get to everybody. And I wish I could. I really do, actually. But I want to thank you for your time. And we’ll be doing these live Q&As every month on the third Friday of the month. We’ve sort of settled into a regular routine. And I look forward to seeing you again in a month from now. Thank you very much, everyone, for your time and attention.