https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HA6mTfdnf7w
Welcome, everyone. It’s great to be here again. And sorry, I think. Sorry, minor glitch there. It’s wonderful to be here again. And this is the fourth Q&A. And I deeply appreciated the previous ones. And so let’s get to the questions right away so we can get as many in as possible in our limited time. And so the first question is from Patreon supporter Mike L. Thank you, Mike, for your support. I hope that you’ll find my answer to your question helpful. So you asked the question, since Sam Harris does advocate spiritual practice, why do you lump him in with those with a purely materialistic reductionist worldview? So that’s a good question. I don’t know if I’ve ever explicitly put Sam Harris in a metaphysical category. I usually put him in a category of more of an epistemological category that he strikes, I think, more clearly, which is he represents himself as a proponent of rationality. And so I have some criticisms of that. I think his model of rationality is too narrow. I won’t make that argument in detail here. It’s something that, in fact, the next few episodes in the series are trying to address. I’m not blaming Sam Harris of this in particular. I think it’s rather he’s symptomatic of a too narrow conception of rationality. To put it very briefly, our culture has tended to conflate rationality either with intelligence on one side or with logicality on the other. And I’m going to try and argue and show you. So I’m sorry, this is promissory, why those are inadequate. Now, why I think I might infer, I’m not claiming that I have any direct quoted evidence to this effect. But what I might infer that he’s in a form of reductive physicalism is because of some of the things he talks about with respect to phenomena like free will and whatnot. I also share with Sam Harris that, and some of you’ve heard this, that I generally consider myself a compatibilist in that I think many notions of free will that we somehow possess within us, an unmoved mover, don’t ultimately make sense to me. So that’s an epistemic criticism. But they also, I’m not quite sure what people are wanting. Let me just step aside from answering the Sam Harris questions to say this. This is a genuine question. This is not me being sly. I want to enter into a dialogue with people who can give me a clear, precise, sorry, maybe that’s too stringent. I shouldn’t hold people to a standard that I myself cannot meet. But at least the clearest possible explanation of what it is they feel they would be losing if they found out for sure that their notion of free will was false. This is not a trick question. I’m not trying to do something rhetorical or sly. I want to get, like, what would be the phenomenological difference? What is the fear? What is the concern? And so that’s how I want to address the issue of free will. I want to get into a deeper discussion with people about it. I’ve already said in earlier episodes why I don’t agree with it. That being all said, let’s return back to Sam Harris. Because this is a different point. This is not on the issue about whether or not free will is a true or false claim. It’s that what I’m saying is based on what he said about that, what he has to say about atheism and what he has to say about being able to read sort of moral principles off the scientific worldview. I’m concluding that he has a pretty reductionist, physicalist approach. Let me now take the time to again point out to people that there are many brands of physicalism. And there’s a considerable and important philosophical difference. And this is something I teach in the university courses. And many people have been arguing for, and Jerry Fodor way back in the 80s was arguing for this very deeply. There’s a big and important philosophical difference between reductive physicalism and non-reductive physicalism. A reductive physicalist thinks that ultimately the talk about, right, that all other levels at which we talk will be ultimately completely reduced to the language of physics. So this is the idea that the way in which we’ve come to realize that lightning is just and nothing more than electricity, we will be able to show that the mind or consciousness is nothing but brain behavior. A quick reason why many non-physicalists like myself reject that idea, let’s not do consciousness because that’s a vast problem. Let’s do one that I think is more amenable just for the purposes of discussion here. I don’t think intelligence is identifiable, reducible to a brain state in the sense that intelligence is nothing but or just or only a brain state. Here is why. Because I believe that artificial intelligence is a real thing and it is going to become even more and more like our intelligence. And the machines that are generating artificial intelligence do not have organic brains like mine. They do not. They are made out of different components, organized differently spatially. They don’t have to have the metabolism that I have, etc., etc., etc. That means intelligence is what is called in the philosophical literature, multiply realizable. The same intelligence can be implemented in a physical system that has the organic mush in my head called a brain, but it could be implemented in this physical system in front of me right now, a computer. And so therefore, trying to reduce intelligence to a particular material set of properties, one specific set, is a mistake. Here’s another thing that is multiply realizable. Evolution. Here’s another thing that is multiply realizable. Erosion. Here’s another thing that’s multiply realizable. Combustion. These are all things that you can’t say that combustion is identical with a particular state of wood and oxygen because other things other than wood combust, etc. That being said, many people who are non-reductive physicalists like myself want to talk about what is the nature of these higher order patterns like intelligence and erosion and evolution. And the idea is, sorry, that, sorry, that was being presumptuous on my part. Many people would argue that these patterns are, these higher level patterns are real patterns. And here’s my basic argument in a nutshell for why that’s the case. All of the information that I use in order to make inferences about the bottom level realm, at the level of the particles, the particles are identical, the forces are identical. All of the difference that makes all of the information by which the science is possible is at this level. It has to be real or the science isn’t real and then the inferences about reality are not based on real patterns of real information. That strikes me and other people too as implausible. Now, why is this still physicalism then? Why isn’t there some kind of Platonism or something like that? The idea is that these higher level patterns are nevertheless, right, part of, can be understood as consistent with the entities, properties, processes of physics. It’s not that they are, so let’s go back to it. Let’s go back to erosion. Erosion can’t be reduced to what’s happening in this particular kind of clay, just like combustion can’t be reduced to a particular state in wood. But notice what you never get. You never get erosion that isn’t physical in some sense. You never get, well, free of any, you know, clay or dirt or rock, there’s erosion. That doesn’t happen. See, multi-realizable means it is not reducible to any, you know, particular physical medium, but it also demonstrates for the similar argument that it’s not independent from it. It’s much more closer in that sense to an Aristotelian view than a Platonic view. So that is why I tend to be very suspicious of people who seem to talk as if everything beyond a certain simple, I’m trying not to be insulting to hear, so I’m really trying not to be, but a certain simple physicalist ontology, right, that’s why I resist them. I’m proposing a very rich physicalism and therefore I’m very critical of people like, again, I’m concluding and I’m willing to acknowledge that my inference is wrong, if people provide me with good textual evidence, but I’m concluding, I’m surmising that he seems to be committed to something very much like a reductive physicalism. That being said, I think the fact that he is talking about spiritual practices is very important. I also am concerned, I guess I have concern about how those spiritual practices reveal something about reality and are not just ways in which we’re modifying cognition and consciousness that we find sort of personally beneficial. See, one of the things, one of the things that I would emphasize that is available to you when you’re a non-reductive physicalist is you have real relations, like what I talk about when I talk about the transjective relationship between the agent and arena, and so I think spiritual exercises don’t just, right, transform how we are present to reality, they transform how reality can be disclosed and presented to us, and so I think in that sense what I’ve seen him say, again, I’m open to talking to him or talking to people who are talking on his behalf as long as it’s a fair discussion, I think his model of spiritual practices tends to be very unipolar. So all of these things sort of sit together in my mind as more than impressions, they’re conclusions I’ve drawn, I think he has a very truncated notion of rationality, which makes it very problematic for him to deal with metaphor and symbol, I think, in some important ways. I think his, again, drawing a conclusion, I think that he seems to be advocating a kind of reductive physicalism, a kind of what’s called the identity theory, and I’ve given you reasons why I find that deeply problematic, and then I think his advocacy of spiritual practices, well, I appreciate him doing this, especially with the influence he wields, I am concerned that it’s very unipolar. It’s only talking from the transformation of consciousness and cognition and not how there’s alteration, transformation in the way reality can be disclosed to us, and I think that’s crucial because for me the capacity for anagogy is central to a more rich understanding of spirituality. My final criticism of Harris is I would like to see him being more self-critical. I would like him being more so. I’ve tried to demonstrate that in my own series. One of the things I’ll do, for example, I’m going to do it shortly as I’ll present the theory of the cognitive scientific theory of wisdom that myself and Leo Ferraro published in 2013 and then subject it to criticism. That capacity for self-criticism, and that work is not very old, right, but the capacity for genuine self-criticism is, I think, something that bespeaks to me, you know, a good scientist, a good thinker, so I would like to see that more in Harris’s interactions. So for all of those reasons, that’s why I tend to, I guess, what was the verb, I tend to lump him in with that. Now, like I said, I’ve tried to indicate where some of them I’m more confident in, my criticism of his view of rationality, and then others where I’m drawing a conjecture, I’m drawing a conclusion, an interpretive conclusion from some of his work that I’ve read and some of the arguments I’ve seen. So that, Mike, I hope that answers your question. Let’s move to the next question. So this is from a Patreon supporter. Thank you again for your support, Mackenzie Levitt. What do you think about the idea that what people call spiritual entities are imaginative and intuitive personifications of certain patterns of being? Could this offer a new way to understand religious expressions like the spirit of Christ lives within us? So I think that there, I’m in broad agreement with the intent and the spirit of this question. The idea that some of the terms we use are personifications, there are ways of bringing the machinery by which we relate to people into play so that we can get access to patterns that are very difficult for us. This is not identical to, but I think it’s consonant with an argument that Paul VanderKlay has made, and I want to talk to Paul again about it, where he thinks that the best way in which we have to approach certain realities is what Pascal calls a spirit of finesse, where we’re bringing in much more of our perspectival and procedural and participatory skills, and that the best way to trigger and activate the finesse we need to deal with some very complex aspects of reality is through taking a stance that God is personal. I’m not clear if Paul is ultimately advocating that God belongs properly to the category of persons, or if that’s a form of personification, or if he’s trying to say something between those two, so I’ll leave Paul to address that point. I don’t want to saddle him with anything. What I would say in that is, we have, I think, some very good argument, clear evidence also, that certain ways of activating our cognition put us into the correct pattern of processing in our brain so that we can couple to and pick up on some of the more complex patterns in the world. Let me give you an example. Alicia Uriero in Dynamics and Actions argues that when we move into a narrative way of thinking, that gets our minds organizing in this highly multi-layered, self-organizing, referring forward and backward, multi-layered, so you get this highly complex way of processing information. It’s a very, very much puts you into the correct pattern of processing your cognition for picking up on dynamical systems in the environment. Narrative helps put your mind into the frame that couples best with dynamical systems in the environment, which is why stories, although we have to be taught them, they’re not natural to us. This is something I want to talk to Paul to again when he talks about it being on the machine code. I’m a little bit worried about that way of talking about it because of Daniel Hutto’s work that we have to really practice and practice and practice and through a long developmental arc before we get narrative, but let’s go back to the point. It’s so I’m personifying right now, if I understand the word correctly, in that I’m seeing what’s happening around me as a story because there’s a complex dynamical system happening in this environment and the narrative helps me couple to it. Now do I think that there’s actually a narrative running sort of in the physics of this room? No, not at all, not at all. But do I think that the narrative way of thinking might be indispensable for me actually coupling to these patterns? You bet. So you can watch exhaustion hunters. These are people who hunt animals by basically running them down. There are some of the very few hunter gatherer groups that are left and what they do is they track the animal when they hunt the animal down. Humans have a tremendous capacity for marathon running and using their frontal lobes to track signs and what they do is they just keep chasing the animal until it heats exhaustion and they’re capable of killing it. It seems to be a very prevalent hunter gatherer strategy by the way. Obviously, it’s not going to work in some environments, but now what’s interesting is at certain points, the hunters, Leo Ferraro, I’ve seen a version of this and then Leo Ferraro referred me to another version of this, a documentary film on it. They’ll come to a point where they’ve lost the animal most of us would just say, okay, well, you look for signs on the environment. You know what they do? They do things like they hunch over and they try to imitate the animal. So what they’re doing is they’re getting into this again. They’re turning their cognition into a particular, they’re trying to get the perspectival knowing and they’re trying to get into the agent or relationship of the animal and when they do that, then they go, oh, it went that way. And then they track the animal and then they come back to a point where they can find the signs and they can then see the antelope, for example, that they’re tracking. So I think very often what religious symbols do is they exact cognitive processes so that they can then be used to put us into a frame of processing that genuinely couples us in a real relationship to real patterns in the world so that the world is disclosing itself to us in ways that it couldn’t do before. So if that’s what the term, the terms the spirit of Christ living within us are doing, doing, giving people access, for example, to putting them into a frame of processing that allows them to access and respond to and exact aspects of their own embodied and often unconscious cognition, then I see myself in agreement with the idea that these are personifications. The problem we face, and this is why I’ve taken so long to answer this question, and again this harkens back to some of the criticisms I have of Harris, is when we hear personification and when we hear metaphor, we hear ornamentation, we hear dispensable frilliness that’s added on just for some sort of aesthetic aspect, and that is not what I’m arguing for. What I’m arguing for here is something that is deeply powerful, it activates us and puts us into a direct, perspectival, procedural, and participatory relationship with real patterns in the world. Are these things literal? No, but what we’ve got to get between this literal and therefore it’s real and metaphor and therefore it’s just ornamental. That’s why I’m trying to work so hard on this notion of the transjective, the transjective. So I hope that answers your question, and I think this is an issue that a lot of people are talking about, and I hope you consider other voices in this. Of course I’ve already mentioned Paul Vanderkley is talking about this. Jonathan Pajot is doing some of the most important work on YouTube, in my opinion, on the whole topic of symbolism. Christopher Master Pietro and I did some discussions about our work on symbolism. I think part of what is emerging in this sort of the sense that people are having that we’re in this kairos, this cusp of cultural change, is we’re trying to get outside of a literalism and a fundamentalism without just slipping into, well, it’s just, it’s merely a metaphor. And so that’s where I’ll leave that question. Excellent question. Very provocative, very thought-provoking. Thank you very much for it. So the next question is from Patreon Felix. Felix says, thank you for your fantastic and helpful work. You’re welcome, and thank you for your support and your encouragement. Every time I get this, it’s helpful and meaningful to me, every single time. I need this encouragement. I very value it. Thank you much. As I understand it, you are a materialist, yet one of your favorite philosophers is Plato. That’s for sure. How do you square Plato’s idealism with your own materialism? To put it another way, how does anagogic spiraling function a materialist that is one world universe? So again, this is the issue about what it means to say one world. If, as I’ve argued, one is a non-reductive materialist, it makes sense to talk about emergent levels, layers of reality that have properties that the constituent levels don’t have. Some of you want to see this idea developed in more detail. Please take a look at some of the discussions I had with JP Marceau. We’re going to have another one soon when I talked about the deep continuity hypothesis in contrast to his panpsychism. And so how I would understand Plato within a non-reductive physicalist framework in which anagogic spiraling still makes sense is the following. By the way, I want to pause and say it’s a fantastic question. I want to apologize because I should have directly addressed this question at some point in this series, and I don’t think I did. So I thank you for the opportunity to address this telling lacuna. But here’s what I would say. I would say that when Plato is talking about the Eidos, and I’ve already argued this, is this is the structural functional organization. It’s also patterns of intelligibility. So I think, for example, that evolution or erosion also have patterns of intelligibility. They are real patterns. The structural functional organization, their structural functional organization that makes them be also is what allows them to be intelligible to me. I’ve gone over that in this series, so I’m not going to press on that point too much. And so what I get from Plotinus’s notion of anagogic is that as you know things, especially when we’re talking about the procedural participatory knowing, there’s a deep conformity. And so as my cognition becomes related to different patterns of intelligibility, different levels or layers of reality, different aspects of reality will be disclosed to me. Let’s pay attention to what that means. Hydrogen and oxygen are not liquid. But water is. Water has properties and powers that hydrogen and oxygen don’t have. Now water isn’t made out of dead elves. It’s still physical because there’s a story, sorry that’s the wrong word. I should be more careful, forgive me. There’s an explanation of how the hydrogen and the oxygen work together to produce a structural functional organization which is real and has causal properties that are real in the way it interacts with other things that have other structural functional organizations. So as I am able to couple to different pattern levels of reality, different patterns of intelligibility, I’m also gaining access to different causal powers and properties of reality and that is also calling forth for me different powers and properties within my cognition and that’s how the onyc-anagogy can flow. So I want to remind you that many of the people who are responsible for the scientific revolution of the earlier 20th century, both the cosmic, relativistic and the quantum, are deeply influenced by neoplatonism. John Spencer does this in his book called The Internal Law. He argues this, but the neoplatonism didn’t lead them to posit a two world or to abandon their commitment to physicalism, but of course what it does show, and look at the deep divide between relativity and quantum mechanics. If there’s anything that tells us that our model of the world is layered is that the attempts to get these two reconciled together are proving to be very, very difficult. The relationship, I predict the relationship is going to turn out to be very complex, just like the relationship between being a living thing and being inorganic chemicals turned off, organizing and autopoetic and dynamic and developmental. We had to go through all of these conceptual innovations before we could see how life was a physical thing, but that doesn’t mean that life isn’t a nerd thing. Okay, so I think that it’s possible, and I’ve tried to give you some ways of understanding of both the practice of science and also to practice sort of a platonic spirituality of anagogy in which you can reconcile a platonic, I guess a platonic view. I don’t think you should call what Plato has a theory of the forms. I don’t think that’s quite right, but anyways, that’s another question that you can reconcile the platonic view with a non-reductive physicalism. So I think that the deep continuity hypothesis, the idea that there’s a deep continuity between things that are self-organizing and things that are autopoetically living, and that there’s a deep continuity between autopoetic things and things that are intelligent, cognitive things, and then there’s a deep continuity between cognitive things and rational beings and so forth, that deep continuity gives us something very analogous to what Plotinus had with the great chain of being, the levels of reality that a person moves through in anagogy. What does deep continuity mean? Deep continuity means what I’ve been arguing for. It’s not my idea, it’s Evan Thompson’s idea he developed from Francis Gourrel. Deep continuity is to say there is just like, that the some of the core principles in the structural functional organization of self-organizing things are taken up and expanded upon in autopoetic things, and then some of the principles of biological organization are taken up and developed, exacted into cognition. I’ve tried to show you this, what I think is a version of this, in how the bio-economic principles of our embodied brains are exacted up into constraining information processing and making us intelligent cognitive agents. That’s a non-reductive physicalism, and there’s a way in which their reality is really layered, and there’s a way of course in which, as I’ve just shown, through exaptation we can as I said before, this is not just an ascension within, this is a point that I get from Eric Pearl, right, and I tried to do with the Rotter example, as there’s exaptation within my cognition, there’s also disclosing of powers and properties within the different levels of reality. That was an excellent question, so I wanted to take a lot of time to try and give you my best take on it. So the next question is from a Patreon supporter, thank you, and it’s Mackenzie Levitt. Could you say what your favorite genre of music is and why? Favorite genre of music, that’s a tough one. I suppose, you know, sort of the desert island test, if I could only listen to one kind of, one genre of music on a desert island, it would probably be classical music and mostly orchestral symphonic. I tend to like that, I tend to like that, I tend to like that kind of I tend to like that kind of dynamically complex it is and how you’re constantly shifting these patterns of intelligibility in this very complex evolving manner. And I like the long form that’s often found in the music, and I like the long form that’s often found in the music, and I like the long form that’s often found in the music, and I like the long form that’s often found with classical music. But let’s be honest, because that’s what you guys deserve. I’d get by really well on the desert island if I had the Beatles and I could listen to the music of the Beatles, precisely because there’s something about the music that’s so complex, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and I like that, and something about the music, I mean, obviously that dates me in certain ways, but in a lot of that music you find a quite exemplary intersection of poetry and some fairly powerful and interesting melodic structure. And so I hope that answers the question. Yeah, that’s sort of the two genres I find myself listening to most often. One more thing, but it also depends, like so often if I’m doing spiritual practice I’d like to put on sort of canticles being sung or Japanese shakuhachi music, precisely because that music is conducive towards enhancing, getting into, you know, a flow state and mindfulness. So I guess like many people, it’s somewhat eclectic, and I’ve tried to give you sort of an overall hierarchy, and Jonathan would be happy about that I suppose, and the context in which different genres, you know, gain different priority for me. Thank you very much for that question. Next question is from Steven as well. Clarification for previous questions. So God doesn’t actually have to be watching the universe to keep it existing, it’s just a helpful perspective. Also that’s the idea, what’s the one? So there are interpretations, I mean you can even see this in Plotinus where he says that everything is sort of contemplating itself in some sense. I, like other people, I think Pearl and others, resist idealism in the modern post-Cartesian sense of the word interpretations of Plotinus. So yes, I don’t think if you mean by God, sorry this is, that’s what everybody says when they talk about God, but what do you mean by God? I mean, and that’s that’s, right, so I take it, let’s mean a standard sort of classical theism. What I mean by God is an independently consciousness that has something somehow, I don’t know how, analogous to our mental states, and that those mental states being in an intentional relationship to reality, perceiving them like Berkeley would say, actually somehow keeps them in existence. If you ask me does that God have to be there in order for the universe to exist? No, I don’t think so. Why? Because I’m generally deeply critical of idealism as an epistemological and metaphysical position. So idealism classically has problems with the deep ancestry issue, it has problems that I need an independent argument, a non-circular independent argument for God in order to posit God as a solution to the ancestry problem. So there’s many of these deep deep deep issues, but if what you mean by God is something more like Spinoza’s God, which is right, and what Plotinus probably meant by the noose, right, which is the set of all the patterns of intelligibility and how they like, think of something and something that would be included to this but not reduced to it, part of all the current laws of physics, right, these are all the patterns of structural functional organization, right, and all of sort of the ones that we’re going to discover and all the patterns that make living things, living things, etc., all the patterns that make erosion erosion, and make evolution evolution, all of that, and how do they are all, right, deeply deeply interconnected and inter-defining, interdependent, and then the idea is that if what you mean by God is that set, that set of properties and principles, let’s use principles, that set of principles that totally constrains the probability possibility space for all actual events, I guess something analogous also to Whitehead, then I can sort of see, and that’s very much the kind of God that Einstein was talking about, he was very clearly and explicitly invoking Spinoza’s God, then I could see that. Now what’s the one? Now what’s the one? I think that’s an, so for those of you who don’t know, this is the ultimate entity in the neoplatonic system, Plotinus, for example, and for Plotinus, the one is not the pattern of intelligibility, but that which makes any and all patterns of intelligibility possible, and so the one isn’t anything you know, it’s in a strict sense, because it can’t be an object of thought, because it is the source from which all patterns of intelligibilities belong together in an intelligible fashion, and I take it that what the one is in a model such as mine is something like the ground of being. Now the thing about the ground of being is to say that it’s ideal is equally a mistake as to say it’s material, because it’s precisely no thing at all, it’s the no thingness, because, and this is something that I think the, especially the Christian neoplatonists made very clear, right, though that which grounds and makes all understanding possible is not something itself that we can understand, and so I take it that what the one would be for me is an acknowledgement that whatever ontology one has, there is an aspect to it that is a no thingness, that it’s, and thing doesn’t just mean, oh please stop doing this, some people, thing doesn’t just mean a material body, many things are incorporeal in that they are not body things, like again, like like patterns of erosion, they happen to bodies and between bodies, but erosion itself isn’t a body, like because it doesn’t happen, it’s not locatable in one distinct specific spot in time and space. England exists, but it’s made up of people that have bodies and objects that have bodies and buildings that have bodies, but it itself isn’t a body because it’s not limited to, what do you mean when you say England went to war with Germany? There’s English people in Germany and they’re related to, right, blah blah blah blah, all that sort of stuff, so the no thingness doesn’t just mean not a body, it also means not a process, not a principle, not a law, because all of those are things that are objects of understanding, they, we are all, this is what I’m trying to get at when I talk about, there’s something in us that corresponds to this, that allows us to ultimately have a deep conformity participatory knowing of the one, because there’s an aspect of us that’s like that, because the process of understanding is never something that is in my frame, and so that gives me something, I participate in that phenomenological mystery that I can never make the framing that makes my understanding possible an object of my understanding, I can theoretically talk about it, but I can’t bring it into something disclosed phenomenologically as an object for me, that gives me a participatory analog for how every pattern of intelligibility is ultimately depend on that which, even saying that is a mistake, is dependent on the ground by which all things are intelligible, which itself is not anything that can be made intelligible precisely because it is the ground that makes things intelligible, that in my mind does not in any way license any kind of idealism, any kind of dualism, any kind of two-worldism, because if you make any of those moves you have ignored the argument that got us here, which is an argument for no-thingness, and no-thingness is no better situated within idealism than it is within materialism, there is no inherent improvement by saying oh well the no-thingness is a mental thing, it’s still a thing, so I don’t think there’s any inconsistency with holding a non-reductive physicalism and holding something like the neoplatonic one, because I don’t think the neoplatonic one is consistent with any physicalism or idealism or dualism precisely because by its very nature it transcends them all and it has to or it isn’t the one. So I hope that’s a long and complex argument, I don’t know what that means for some people’s views about God, I’m just trying to answer the question because it was directed towards me and how I try and get these things consistent in my own thinking. All right, next question is from Patreon supporter Stephen Laswell, thank you Stephen, did your interest in spirituality practices emerge from your study of cognitive science or did your interest in cognitive science result from your personal spiritual disposition? Chicken or egg? The thing of course is the chicken and the egg, the egg predates the chicken, we now know that, so we’ve got to come up with a better metaphor, right? So that’s a good question, I would say that Chris Master Fietro said this of me and because he’s such an insightful and dear friend, I take it very seriously, he said that and given all and you have to you have to and he knows everything else I’ve just argued so he’s not denying any of what I’ve just said but he said he thinks that I’m in some sense is a deeply religious thinker and I think there’s truth to that in the sense that these questions about how to live deeply, how to live meaningfully, what is self-transcendence, what is wisdom, these questions have, I don’t want to create a romantic glorification of my own autobiography, I’ve had a long-standing affinity with them and I’d already gotten into philosophy and encountered the dramatic transformative figure of Socrates and that had a huge impact on me but then when I found that that pursuit of wisdom and meaning and that exemplification of dialogus that I saw in Socrates was not being carried up into academic philosophy, I then undertook spiritual practices that did two things for me, I think they helped to develop that affinity and helped to enable me to pursue more meaning and wisdom and also they gave me practices by which I could try and carry out the aspiration, the aspirational demand, if that’s the right word, that I found coming from my encounter with Socrates and so as I was taking up these practices I came to sort of an end of my philosophical training and by that time I’d always been interested in philosophy of mind and by that time but the practices had moved me to a place and the academic world was changing and cognitive science was emerging and I went into cognitive science from that sort of emerging, I don’t like this word, spirituality and some of the philosophical work that I had read surrounding it from Taoist and Buddhist traditions and I found, as I’ve mentioned before, that other people were already trying to draw these things together so I hope that answers your question. Now it’s very much now like this that the spirituality and the cognitive science are constantly doing this reciprocal reconstructing and restructuring of each other, I couldn’t make any clear division between them now and how things unfold for me. So I’d like to make an announcement, I’d like to thank you to all the Patreon subscribers and your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to try and find solutions to the mean crisis. We’re going to shift to the live questions from the chat and please identify yourself as a Patreon subscriber to receive priority for your questions. So are the live questions now coming up? Right, thank you. I’ve got such a great team here, I could not do this without them, so lucky. Here’s a question from Lowell Union, you’ve talked about wonder and emotion being essential to rationality and how we must find that place that puts us in the flow state to get our goals done. How do you do that? That’s a great question. So the flow state, I practice Tai Chi Chuan which is a Taoist practice and related practices, Fijian, Qigong, Yichuan, Jianjun, a whole family of practices and they’re very powerful for, as I said, they put me into a frame of processing that allows me to, you know, exact balance machinery and coordination machinery into my cognition and they’re, you know, Taoism as I keep saying is the religion of flow, it’s the religion for getting you to get into the flow state and exact it into your cognition, exact it into your existential mode so it permeates your life as a whole. I practice also a, so I practice Vipassana as I mentioned, a mindfulness practice and metacontemplation. I also do a neoplatonic practice of theoria which is basically trying to do what I described earlier, sort of move through these, you know, these agent arena relationships between patterns of cognition and levels of reality that are in a co-determined fashion mutually disclosing of each other in anagogy and I move and I go through an anagogic ascent and I’ve been helped by that both from the Pagan neoplatonic tradition and also many practices from the Christian neoplatonic tradition and that is very powerful for inducing in me wonder and at times awe and I’m going to make this argument in some of the episodes that are coming and I’m going to try and make it a tighter argument that, you know, this brings about what I was talking about earlier, it engenders aspiration in me and what Agnes Collard calls aspiration and part of the argument that I’ve made and some of you might seen a talk I made for this or for Stoicon X in Toronto, the aspiration to rationality has to be part of rationality because if and here’s here’s to go back again circling back here’s one of the issues I have with people who try to reduce rationality to logical argumentation as I’ve tried to show making use of L.A. Paul’s work and Agnes Collard’s work you can’t go through qualitative development, transformational experience, aspiration in an inferential manner. There’s deep reasons why that doesn’t work and so the processes by which you go through aspiration are not inferential argumentative processes. If you reduce, notice my language, if you reduce rationality to inferential argumentation then you have to say that the process of aspiring for rationality is not itself a rational process which means there is no rational justification for the aspiration to rationality and then rationality becomes a self-undermining, self-destroying entity. And this is the core of Collard’s argument. The aspiration to rationality has itself to be a kind constituent of rationality and what I find is that these practices are not only conducive of the wonder and conducive of the cognitive flexibility and the insight that is important for rationality, they help engender in me the aspiration towards rationality and ultimately towards wisdom that I’ve just argued is central to rationality and to wisdom. Now I’ve made that argument in brief, I made it a little bit more detail on the, that I made on the Soacon talk on the view from above, it’s on my channel if you want to watch it. Also this argument is going to come back and develop, be developed in depth when I talk about theories of wisdom and aspiration and the divine double. So there’s more argument coming to bear about this but that’s sort of the gist of it right now. So here’s a question from Twitter from Collard and Donald One. Are dogs continuously in a kind of flow state? Could all animals be enlightened in that sense? Okay so first of all the question between the two, the connection between the two questions, I don’t equate enlightenment with being in the flow state. As I tried to argue I think enlightenment is a complex dynamical system of consciousness and cognition that reliably and systematically addresses the perennial problems. I think the flow state only addresses one aspect of that which I call the problem of the reflectiveness gap. I think you need many other features within your cognition to be enlightened because in the end I think enlightenment as I said is probably only in the sense that it is probably only appropriate for creatures who like us seem to be able to get into existential right modal confusion or seem to be capable of bullshitting ourselves in a comprehensive and culturally magnified fashion. I don’t know but I don’t have reason to believe that dogs ever experience sort of something like the existential project that human beings set. I mean I’m going to talk about this later. Heidegger famously said we are the beings whose being is in question. We don’t come with sort of a ready-made being. It is something and I’m using this word deliberately. It is something we aspire to. This is why I’m so critical of people who think you are born with your true self. I don’t think we are those kinds of beings. I think dogs might be but I don’t think we are. So you don’t see a dog sort of like what is it to be a dog? Like how can I be a good dog? Like am I failing? Am I living up to my dogness? I mean dogs don’t get me wrong. Dogs can suffer pain. I think they can suffer grief and I’m not trivializing any of that but do they fall into those kinds of issues that bespeak that we face the perennial problems? So I don’t think so and for that reason because I think it’s reasonable to conclude although by no means certain that they don’t face the perennial problems the way we do that they aren’t in enlightenment. They don’t have enlightenment. I don’t even think dogs are perpetually in the flow state because you need a balance between sort of challenge and skills and dogs spend a lot of their days just sleeping and lazing about in situations that don’t seem highly challenging to them. So that’s a really fun question and I enjoyed it. So thank you very much. We have time for another question. This is from a Patreon supporter, Christine Wyvern. Thank you very much for your support. I would be really curious to hear your thoughts on Joseph Campbell’s work and his ideas on following your bliss as it relates to individual purpose and consistent flow state insight cascade. So first of all to give credit where credit is due because I think this is always important. I’m encountering Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth especially first the show with the interview with Bill Moyers had a huge influence on me. As I said my first philosopher is Plato and my first psychologist is Jung. I met Jung through the work of Robertson Davies fifth business and then very shortly thereafter Joseph Campbell the Bill Moyers thing and that had a really profound impact on me. I’m going to devote one of the so the four final lectures of the series the series is all filmed by the way guys but the four final lectures deal with like the five prophets of the meeting. So I finished my argument and then I put it into dialogue with people like Heidegger, Tillich, Corbin, Barfield and Jung and so that there’s going to be a discussion there and so I think that what can’t I mean there’s a there’s a sense of which I think Jordan Peterson is is sort of our time periods Joseph Campbell in that what Joseph Campbell did was he brought Jung back made it accessible made it relevant got people to see how there might be value to Jung. Now of course I think there’s criticisms of that because there wasn’t much criticism and there is a lot of criticism of the Jungian framework that should be heard and should be addressed and should be responded to as there is of any important and profound framework. But nevertheless I think you know Campbell’s ideas really really did he was a great teacher and that he made Jung’s ideas intelligible and accessible and that in of itself is of great importance it had a huge impact on me it really opened me up to a deeper exploration of symbolism and of metaphor and of altered states of consciousness dream states etc. So very important impact on me continual I keep I go back to this time and time again. I’m not sure I’m not quite clear about following your bliss. Part of it I’ve seen him say that in various instances and part of my hesitancy is I’m not quite sure what that means. If it means something like a sense that one is on a path in which wisdom and virtue are reliably not perfectly and not completely and I’m not trying to say anything premature but are being cultivated or being realized in by other people with respect to you not your own self-identification or self-labeling but if other people are saying hey that was really insightful or that was very helpful or that was a wise thing or that was a really brave or very honest thing if that’s if that is becoming more and more what’s happening here that we what’s following your bliss means then I think that’s right. I just don’t know I’m just uncomfortable with the word bliss as describing that because that’s I don’t experience that in my in myself or the people that I’m talking to they don’t seem to report it as being a blissful state of bliss means kind of a sort of an ecstasy or an overwhelming kind of joy that’s going on. I think that if it if it and I’ve heard some people interpret it this way if it means sort of trust your gut in the sense that deep down you always know what the right thing to do is I think that’s absolute bullshit. Sorry this all right I don’t mean to get angry and I’m not attributing this to the person who asked the question I want to make clear about that. We’ve got to stop trying to find the divine part of ourselves and what I mean by that the faculty that is perfect and will never mislead us and and we got it just like we have to stop demonizing your perception can mislead you your thinking can mislead you your intuition can mislead you your dreams can mislead you your emotions can mislead you your there is no place this is this is this is part of the you know the first noble truth there is no place that is safe from the threat of self-deception there’s no place in the world there’s no place in yourself you do not have a secret angelic faculty that if you just get in touch with it and trust it it will lead you securely because there is no part of you that has that capacity there’s no evidence for it and we have massive evidence that every one of the faculties I’ve named lots of good empirical evidence can be reliable sources of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior if that’s what people mean and I’m not sure that Campbell meant that I’m being very careful here not to attribute this to Campbell but I’ve heard some people interpret folio bliss to mean that and that’s something that I’m deeply deeply critical of that’s something I’m deeply critical of because it it gets us it thwarts one of the things I argue we really need which is to re to to reconnect with our participatory knowing the process by which we know things by coming to identify with them whereby our self-knowledge and our knowledge of the thing are deeply intertwined and intermesh and inter-affording but if we if we have mistaken deeply mistaken ways in which we’re identifying with ourselves that part of me is the angelic pure part then it directly deeply thwarts a appropriate relationship of participatory knowing that we need in order to respond to the meaning crisis so that’s why I’m deeply deeply critical of it I’m sorry if I got a little bit hot under the collar but this is this is one of the things that I think is pervasive in the culture it needs to be given some rather sort of stringent criticism so I fear that once again we’ve come to the end of our time one more time I want to thank all the support I want to give a special shout out and thank you to all the patreon supporters thank you for for your support thank you for your courage thank you for everybody like the people who are you know are tweeting me questions the people who are making comments please remember again and some of you are emailing me right and some of you are emailing along things and I can’t respond to everything I literally can’t it’s not possible but I want to know that I want you to know that it’s it’s very appreciative and again I deeply mean this given who I am and my own sort of idiosyncratic psychological profile this kind of encouragement and the critical in the constructive sense interaction I find deeply encouraging thank you all very much everyone and I look forward to seeing many of you again um a month from now thank you very much how’s that