https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4mC4Tndkdv4
Welcome. It’s great to be here again for another live Q&A. I’d like to begin by once again thanking all my subscribers, all my viewers, and all my Patreon supporters. So as always, we’ll begin with the questions from the Patreon supporters. And so let’s get to them. This is always so interesting and enjoyable that I’ve noticed that the questions are getting very, very incisive and very perspicacious. So that’s really, really impressive. Okay, so the first question is from Patreon supporter Mackenzie Levitt. And the question is, what is the most useful way to characterize the relationship between mind and brain? So thank you, Mackenzie, for your support. So that’s a very, very hard question. You could say, and I think it would not be dismissive, you could say that almost all of my work as a cognitive scientist is directed towards trying to answer that question. If you’d asked me that when I was in grad school or shortly thereafter, I would have given sort of a classic answer, like Jerry Fodor would give and say that the mind is the software and the brain is the hardware. And like you can make the distinction between, for example, word and then what’s happening, right, which is a way in which you’re organizing information processing as a program that can be moved around to different hardware. And whereas the hardware is the actual, you know, physical stuff inside the machine. And well, I think there’s some important kernel of truth in that. I think the relationship is now moved. Sorry, I would now characterize the relationship in a way that has moved beyond that computational metaphor. Whereas I think of the mind’s relationship to the brain as the mind is a dynamical system that is being run, it can be implemented on many different material platforms. But that dynamical system is not just in the head, in the brain, it’s between the brain and the body and between the brain body, the embodied brain and the world, and form of dynamical coupling. And so just to give you perhaps a different analogy, then instead of it like being the software hardware distinction, you can think of a dynamical system as something like, as I’ve sometimes used like combustion, combustion is a self organizing system. But you know, you can run on different things. And that’s why you can catch fire with wood and then the fire can spread to other material and the combustion, right, it isn’t locked to a particular material implication, it has to be connected to and implemented in something material, but it’s not reducible to that material property. So that’s how I would answer that the problem with answering that question that way, though, just to be as fair to the question as possible is the word mind is very equivocal, you could be referring to intelligence, in which I think what we’re talking about, the mind is a dynamical system that’s running relevance realization on the embodied embedded brain. You could be talking about consciousness, which I think is a higher order thing, etc. So I’m answering the question sort of very abstractly. So it would cover both intelligence and consciousness. And so that’s why I’m answering it somewhat abstractly in terms of it’s a dynamical system that is running on the embodied and embedded brain insofar as you are enacting sensory motor behavior as you attempt to solve problems and achieve your goals. So that’s the that’s the that’s sort of my my search overall abstract answer to that question. Like I say, I think at times a better way to answer that question, which I don’t have time for right now is to go in and I tried to give one example of it answer one of them, like what’s intelligence, and then perhaps what’s consciousness, and then more difficult. What is that? What is the self? What’s that? What kind of relationship that is? Does it bear to the brain? But I’m at least trying to give you an overall response. So thank you very much for that question. Answering that question is kind of an answer that answering that question not only for each one intelligence, consciousness, the self, but being able to answer that for each and all in an integrated manner, I think is the primary goal that defines cognitive sciences discipline. So I’m saying that to indicate to you that I’m giving you what I think is the best proposal for how we will eventually be able to answer that question. I need you to understand that it’s of course controversial, and it’s not something that we have completed cognitive science is not in any way finished in a position to claim to have finished answering that question by any means. Okay, so let’s move to the next question. So this is also from Mackenzie, and this is what is your favorite example of a film that symbolizes the meaning crisis? That’s very good. It depends by what you mean. I like the matrix insofar as it represents the meaning crisis, but also portrays neoplatonism and gnosticism as the answer to the meaning crisis. So the way the meaning crisis is symbolized, right, is of course he feels, and then this is when Neo has a discussion with Morpheus, and he talks about how things just don’t feel right. It’s like a splinter in his mind, and that’s very much a way of trying to get at the phenomenology of the meaning crisis, that gnawing sense of being out of sorts and out of place and disconnected from oneself and reality. And then what’s interesting is that that is understood through the metaphor, the gnostic metaphor, the neoplatonic metaphor of the cave, the cave that has become the entrapping prison. And so that brings with it also a sense of entrapment, which I sometimes wonder is that perhaps sometimes the people who are criticizing physicalism from a religious perspective, if one of their motives is they feel that physicalism is not adequately representing their sense of entrapment, of existential entrapment, and if that is the case, I’m putting that out as a potential hypothesis to explore and discussion with people, then I would like to enter into a discussion with people about that and see if there’s a way of addressing it. I think also the Truman Show is one of my favorites as well, and obviously the pun in his name is meant to be taken seriously. It also has a sort of a gnostic theme. He’s trapped in an inauthentic existence. And then there’s the quest to try and get connection to himself, to someone he genuinely loves and to the world as it really is. And of course, that again represents some of the main things that people are doing when they’re trying to respond to the meeting crisis. I think also, and so calling it favorite might be the wrong adjective, but I think a movie that I take very seriously, and I’ve been writing some wiki letters with David Chapman about this and Andrew Sweeney has been commenting on those as well in some really brilliant ways, is Joker. And one of the things I’m trying to explore is how Joker represents a shift from the zombie mythos as a primary way of understanding the meeting crisis, which is the sort of amorphous collective horde to an individual who represents malevolent narcissism taken to its final sort of form of degradation. See, narcissism represents all that’s left of relevance realization is relevance to the self, the sort of primitive initiating aspects of relevance realization. And the Joker is of course disconnected, radically disconnected. I’ll try not to do any spoilers here. Radically disconnected from himself, his world, the people that are supposed to be the individuals he loves. So he’s clearly suffering from it. But what he does is he represents a shift towards something, and I think he represents a shift that we’re seeing in our socio-political culture, which is the shift towards a malevolent kind of absurdism. Because one of the things that narcissism can do to defend its last-ditch gasp of trying to maintain connection is to cover the absurdity of itself. Narcissism is an inherently absurd position. It tries to cover that absurdity by making as much of the world absurd around it. And in that way, the suffering of the disjunct between the absurdity of narcissism and the intelligibility and value and significance of reality is undermined, post-truth and all that stuff. And thereby, the difference between the absurd inner life of the narcissist and the world in which they are dwelling is completely flattened. And I think we see that happening in Joker. So the shift there, it may be, I don’t know if it’s going to be a comprehensive shift, but the potential to have shifted from the zombie mythos to the Joker mythos as a way of articulating a new way in which people are appropriating and experiencing and interpreting the meeting crisis, I think is something that we should all pay very careful attention to, particularly, of course, because of the intimate connection between the Joker’s program and random chaotic violence. So the next question is from the Patreon Mike. Most people see themselves in a world in terms of being a subject in a world of other objects. Is the split between self and other hard wired into it, or is it something that can be overcome with the right spiritual practice? So thank you very much, Mike, for your support and for your excellent question. So that’s a difficult question. It’s a question that I’m actually working on right now. I’ve done some work with an RA, Elizabeth Long. I’m also doing some other current work on this question of the self, it’s work I’m doing with Dan Craig and Madeline Ibramian on the cognitive continuum from insight to enlightenment. So there’s a sense in which the subject object distinction, which is, of course, was valorized by Aristotle into the sort of fundamental logic of his metaphysics. There’s a sense in which we can overcome that, in that we can move to forms of cognition that do not depend on a subject predicate format in order to be processed, which is the core of propositional processing. But you might say, well, even in sort of procedural and perspectival states like flow, where you’re feeling at one, there’s still maybe a sort of a fundamental orientation difference between sort of here and there. And of course, that itself can also disappear when you get into a state called the pure consciousness event, which there is no distinction between inner and outer between self and others. So that there are states we can get into that progressively move us on a continuum where the sense of the egoic autobiographical self and inner and outer, those various phenomenological aspects of self and other can definitely be reduced. And in some states, they seem to disappear. I’ve experienced that myself. However, I do not think that that then means that the self in terms of its functionality disappears. So if we take the machinery of the self to be ultimately the processes by which this organism manages the combinatorial explosion of information available to it and does framing, I don’t think we can move to a state in which we are frameless and we’re not framing. I don’t think that makes any sense. And so in that sense, we are always in, we’re always, so I’m suspicious of people who claim that they completely have no self. And if what they mean by that is there’s no process by which relevance realization is going on. I don’t know what that is or why you want it. I don’t know what it is to be, what the state looks like, if it could even be called a mental state at all, in which one is completely overwhelmed by combinatorial explosion and why that would in any way be something that one thought about. So I think there’s always in this sense, the machinery of the self that is the machinery of framing in a self-organizing fashion. I don’t think there’s some soul behind that. I’ll put my cards on the table and be honest with people. I don’t think there’s anything beyond the self-organizing processes. I don’t think there’s anything to the self in its deep fundamental machinery beyond the self-organizing of the framing that’s happening in relevance realization. And in that sense, I think there’s always an inner and an outer. There’s distinctions going on for processing. Now phenomenologically, you may not be experiencing any inner and outer, but I’m pretty sure, because I’ve studied the pure consciousness event, that you’re still, because it still has salience in it, it still has a sense of here-ness and now-ness, the unity to it. These are all in fact venerated in the traditions. That to me indicates that relevance realization is still going on and therefore there’s still the distinction between what’s in the frame and what is outside the frame, which has been indispensably excluded from processing so that your cognition is not overwhelmed by a combinatorial explosion of information and options, etc. So we should be careful, and I’ve made this point before, we should be very careful in moving from our phenomenology to our theoretical explanations of functionality. We should not simply import from phenomenology to functionality. The fact that there are phenomenological states of consciousness in which the autobiographical self disappears and even the sense of inner and outer experience disappears, I’ve experienced those myself, doesn’t leave me to conclude, for reasons that I’ve just argued, that the sort of functioning machinery of the self, the self-organization of relevance realization that gives your cognition its coherent, integrated, and developmental abilities. I don’t think that can be made to disappear by any spiritual practice. Now the question then of course remains, which ones are relevant to our sapiential and our moral development? I think overcoming biases of egocentrism, getting more flexible in our perspectival framing, all these kinds of things can be improved in a significant way. And insofar as these altered states facilitate an enhancement of our cognitive functioning such that we can address perennial problems of self-deception and self-destructive behavior, I think that’s the normative standard the normative standard by which we should evaluate these claims to removing the subject-object distinction. And I’m not sure if there is any other independent normativity that we could bring to bear to evaluate those kinds of claims. So that’s my best attempt to answer that question. That’s a really good question. And I’m going to be talking a lot more in after Socrates about different kinds of self-knowledge and the very great difference between, for example, knowing your auto-bike, yourself auto-biographically and then becoming metacognitively aware, the self-awareness of your awareness, that kind of direct procedural perspectival metacognition. So we’re going to talk a lot about that in after Socrates. So hopefully that will also give some more conceptual vocabulary and theoretical grammar to wrestle with the perennial problem of what should we think about our adherence to and the nature of the self. So I’d like to turn to another Patreon supporter, Sergei McCarrion, sorry, Matt Carcan. Thank you. I’m just sorry for mispronouncing your name, but take comfort in the fact that nobody gets my name right. So thank you again for your support. I’m going to read your question. In a recent Q&A, you talked about Sam Harris and mentioned that his meditation practice is to focus on transforming the mind, but not on transforming how the world reveals itself. Two Ones mind could you elaborate more on ways on the ways how medication meditation can be adjusted to focus more on the ladder transforming the world or on other practices that could be employed for that purpose? Maybe you could also point to some guidance on how to do that practice guided meditation course by you or someone else. So one thing and I’ve argued this and I published a paper with Leo Ferraro on this a chapter in the book on what’s it called hypnosis and meditation towards a con what is it towards a science of conscious planes I think is what it’s called. And there’s an article in there on mindfulness and we argued that the meditative practice of stepping back and looking at the mind and I made a similar argument in the video series should be complemented with contemplative practices that are meant to look out into how the world is disclosing itself to you. Now of course you’re transforming the mind, but the goal there is to transform the mind in such a way that you’re transforming how the world is disclosed to you. So meta is a practice like that and what you do in that practice is you can do it either imaginatively or you can do it literally but let’s say it imaginatively you would call up the image of somebody in your life and then you direct a sort of open-heartedness towards them. That’s not the goal although I think some versions of loving kindness contemplative practice misrepresent that as it’s a method it’s meant to put you into a state of openness and receptivity and what you’re trying to do is become aware of the identity you’re assuming and the identity you’re assigning that whole co-identification process because that of course is affecting how the world is able to disclose itself to you. If your identity is locked and the right and and then it’s locked to right the identity you’re assuming is locked and then it’s locked to the identity you’re assigning that thing’s ability to disclose itself to you in new ways is seriously truncated and hampered. Your salient landscape is sort of really boxing it in almost like in the nine dot problem. So one of the practices you can do is a meta practice and you can you can buy books on how to do that or loving kindness. There is also in the book from the Buddhist tradition there’s what’s called contemplating the marks of existence in which you enter you first get into a meditative state but then you direct your attention outward and you try to for example contemplate how everything is interconnected or how everything is impermanent. You try to realize that not think it or believe it but realize it as phenomenologically present in your experiences so that the world can reconfigure how it discloses itself to you. I also find that for me, Lexio Divina, the sacred reading is a way in which I can use texts, sacred texts, to be a medium and a vehicle through which reality can disclose itself to me in different ways. So there’s some excellent books on Lexio Divina out there. They’re mostly from a Christian tradition, a tradition. There are some versions of it also from within a neoplatonic tradition. I will at some point do some instructional videos on some more of the meditative practices contemplative practices like Lexio Divina. You also want to do a moving practice of some kind that gets you involved with like like moving Tai Chi and gets you involved with other people sparring in it because that also opens that machinery up to having the world disclosed in a more flexible manner. Again, one of the things I’m working on really seriously right now with the help of a lot of great people is trying to understand authentic relating practices, authentic discourse, and this whole notion of trying to get the metapsychotechnology of dialectic because dialectic was precisely directed towards opening up, trying to get the process of anagogy going so that the world can open itself up in conjunction with how the psyche is opened up and that happens in a mutually accelerating fashion. So that’s a whole set of practices that I think you could consider for trying to create a state of mind and a state of being because it’s not just a state of mind, it’s a state of consciousness or cognition. It’s also a state of identification of existential mode that you can cultivate in order to afford the world disclosing itself to you in a more ongoing and perhaps deeper fashion. So here’s another question from Mackenzie Relic. Does the reality that is disclosed in relationship have its own ontological status? So that’s a very good question. So I’ve tried to indicate that I think so. I tried to coin the term transjective to indicate the ontological status of things like affordances because of course the fact that the glass, the mug is graspable, it’s not just a property of it, not just a property of me but a real relationship between me and this. This first goes back to Gibson. It’s a sort of a central example of this but there’s many ways, there’s many other ways like fitness, biological fitness is a real relation. So I think it has an ontological status and that’s what I’ve called the transjective and I’ve tried to argue that the problem is the words, sorry I’m hesitating because we use these words in a slippery fashion. Subjective and objective are often used as ontological terms but they’re often also epistemological terms. They’re about ways of knowing as opposed to kinds of being and we slide between them. So insofar as the transjective is its own ontological category, I think it is more primordial than subjectivity and objectivity as epistemological categories. It’s the ontological thing that grounds the relationship between subjective and objective ways of knowing and so I do think it has its own ontological status. Now I think that ultimately maps into the fact that something like structural realism is correct in which I think what’s fundamentally most real and physics seems to be moving this way. In fact, there’s many people in theoretical physics who are very interested in the philosophical position of structural realism because what’s structurally real, so you can look at Ladyman’s book Everything Must Go as an example of that and this is the idea that ultimately what’s most real are the real patterns, the real relations and that we should take that as the ontological primitive and then see objects and events and whatnot coming out of that. I think you could make a good case and some people have that Whitehead was arguing for something like that. So insofar as transjectivity is a real relationship that grounds subjectivity and objectivity in the way I’ve described, I think it is a species of the real relations, the real patterns that I think are ultimately the fundamental building blocks. Now that of course is a very controversial thing to say. The West from Aristotle on has tended to view objects, the things that are related as primary and then the relation as derivative, which is of course the direct opposite of what you see in Eastern philosophy in which the relations take priority and the relata emerge out of the relations and this also has to do with the fact that the West equates realness with actuality whereas Eastern philosophy often sees real possibility as more real than actuality. And so these are some very important contrasts but you do see with the rise of structural realism and the discussion of real patterns the very real chance that the West might be shifting to something much more analogous to what has been prevalent in the East in which real relations and systems of relations are the ontological ground from which everything else can be seen to emerge. So that’s my best attempt to answer the question on the ontological status of relationship. So the next question is from Christina Draganetti who is a Patreon supporter. Thank you Christina. Is there a bibliography for the awakening course? It would be very helpful. No we haven’t made a bibliography. I’m going to do one probably at the end of the course. I do put up the panels but I understand having all the books listed at one point would be very good. So I do hope to have that done like I said by the uploading of episode 50 where we’ve made a bibliography of all the texts available. I don’t know there I know that future thinkers they’re doing a I believe it’s every Monday they meet and do a watch party and they’re going through episodes of the awakening to the meeting crisis series and they they’re doing a series of videos and they’re doing a series of videos and they they they have a link to all the course notes. I think there’s a running bibliography there as well so you might want to check that out. So that that that is definitely something that’s going to happen. There are like I said there are course notes because of the watch parties that future thinkers are doing. Excellent discussion of my work by the way there by the people that tune in for that. I’ve been very appreciative and grateful for that. There’s also some really excellent commentary and some of it critical but yeah but constructive criticism by Andrew Sweeney. He’s got a site on the medium where he’s got a commentary on all all the videos and I think it’s an excellent commentary. I think it makes material very accessible without in any way dumbing or watering it down. So I recommend taking a look at that excellent commentary and reflection. If you want to see some more critical more critical take by Andrew on my work you can take a look not only at some of the stuff he does in the commentary. Andrew is a great guy. We have a good relationship so but he and Alexander Bart who also I have a I have a good working relationship with. They did a recent video on criticizing me and in comparison to Jordan Peterson and then I responded and I think there’s some excellent discussion about that. Okay so let’s take a look at the next question from Stephen Laswell a patron. Thank you for your support and Jordan Hall has taken to calling me Johnny V and I like it. Is it cool that we started calling you Johnny V? So I want there’s there’s a lot more to that and I I I I I talked to Jordan directly about this so I need to relate this story. I don’t mean to be overly personal. This is about how people are going to call me so I suppose it’s appropriate to be a little bit more personal right now. Not that long ago well let me turn around and explain. I used to live in Whitby and it was a very difficult situation for me often socially. I’m very socially phobic and I often did not have much in common with the the people that lived around me. They were not bad people and not I’m not judging them as people. If and when I did that in the past I apologize I think that was wrong of me like wrong but nevertheless there was a there was disconnect. I didn’t belong there and I mean this is something that has happened to me periodically through my life a realization of not belonging. It’s perhaps why I got interested in relevance realization. But so I used to go to parties and social gatherings and there was a there was a woman there and like we weren’t friends in the sense of spending any time together outside of these social circumstances but we were very friendly acquaintances and she was a quite high status woman. She was very driven you know attractive halo effect very smart you know successful mother raising great kids so she’s very high sort of high status and she went out of her way to make me feel welcome when I would come to those parties and gatherings and she would do that and no one had ever done this before by saying hey it’s Johnny V or welcome Johnny V and that meant a great deal to me. It meant a great great deal to me. Unfortunately not that long ago she died quite young and unexpected and very significant loss. And so when Jordan started doing that it called up and you know it’s a little bit bittersweet but it called up the deep appreciation I had for that wonderful woman and it also made me feel because I thought it was constant. He was also welcoming me into a social situation in the same kind of manner and so I’m deeply deeply appreciative of that. So as long as people understand that context I’m very happy for people to refer to me that way. I’ve talked to Jordan about it and like I said I’ve expressed my gratitude to him for saying that and I’ve said to him I’ve asked him if you know if he likes saying it and I said if he wants to continue referring to me in that way I’m coming from him especially I would really like I would really like and appreciate that. But as long as people understand that there’s a there I understand it’s playful and it’s great and I appreciate that as long as people understand that for me all of that is there but there’s also a more serious depth to that appellation and as long as they respect that and and the woman that is called to mind by that appellation I’m happy for people to refer to me as Johnny V. So thank you very much for asking that question and once again thank you to he’s becoming a good friend somebody I deeply respect. Thank you to Jordan Hall. So a another question from a Patreon supporter so this is Ivor. Thank you Ivor for your support. Your question is what are the baby steps that lead from the mentality of a wanton or a ham or a hamlet towards wisdom? Yeah so this is this is the question that I think this is the burning question right now there’s a kairos around this. David Fuller was in from Rebel Wisdom last week to film some videos and he and I were talking and Peter Lindbergh was there we were talking to about you know this turn towards you know practice. How do we take these ideas how do we take this emerging intelligibility and translate it effectively into interaction? I mean that’s the central question. It’s part of what I’m what I’m directing the After Socrates video series towards. So I think a good way and Bellman who introduces the idea of this problem of the wanton a good way of getting into this that’s I think a baby step is something that I talk about in this series which is learning how to get into the flow state within movement within interaction. The reason for that is because first of all the flow state is a universal. As far as we can tell you know there is no you know it’s the same kind of description and evaluation and appreciation of the state across you know genders, socioeconomic groups, occupational positions, language group, all of it you know we find people getting into this and so why is that valuable for being neither a wanton nor hamlet because in the flow state you get the you get the immersion you get the contact right with the world that the wanton has. You’ve got that immersion into the contact and the interaction and the machinery of your agency but you also have what hamlet has. You have this you don’t have you don’t have propositional metacognition but you have this you have this procedural perspectival metacognition that you because you you have tremendous flexibility there’s so much creativity and flexibility and the ability to innovate on the fly this is why you see it in martial arts and jazz. So you get you get the flexibility of hamlet without getting right the way his continual stepping back reflection and narrative self-discussion monologue the soliloquy as the epitome of that is just you know innovating and preventing him from taking action. So you get the positive of hamlet you get the flexibility and the ability to redirect and innovative and be you know very intelligent I would even argue deeply rational in your interactions and then right but you get the you get you do get the the coupling to the world and the immersion and the machinery of your agency what’s so important about flow is your agency is enhanced even while that that sort of mattering narrative ego drops away the the continual how’s my biography and how’s my hair thing in your head which really puts to the lie that ego’s claim and its narrativity as I’m running the show and without me you can’t be an agent and that’s just in the end bullshit because flow universally provides counter evidence to that lie because what it shows is that can drop away and your agency is precisely enhanced then that can really also help address you know a tendency towards being very egocentric in your perspective so all of these things right the flow state helps you to take those baby steps beyond both the wanton and hamlet I would recommend Slinger-Lynn’s book trying not to try because what you want to do is you want to find places where you get a very good taste for the flow state and then learn how to restructure your experience and broaden the places in which you can get into the flow state and that will help I think get those baby steps towards some fundamental aspects of the steps towards wisdom all right so so we now have an announcement thank you to my patreon supporters your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing good plan solutions in the meeting crisis and although I’m reading what Amar has written I’m totally behind it but I thank you and I totally mean it so thank you very much for that we’re shifting to live questions from the chat please identify yourself as a patreon subscriber to receive priority for your question so the next question is from patreon Andrea Tenridi and thank you for your support Andrea and the question is what do you think about animal ethics and their treatment and role in human society that’s a very that’s a very important question so I thought a lot about this and I’ve reflected on it in on my life and it’s affected my personal practice so I’ve tried to understand sorry I’m trying to answer the question about what I think but I’m trying to also justify it in terms of argumentation because of course you know this is something that around which is there around which is controversy I’ve tried to understand one of the sort of one of the primary projects of an ethical way of life is to protect and to protect produce promote meaning-making creatures for reasons that I’ve argued here in Q&A and I’ve argued on the series I think we are wired to find I think we are wired to find meaning-making and meaning-makers inherently valuable and I think that is the ultimate rounding of the you know the mid-shine of the with others Heidegger talks about I think it’s the ultimate rounding of ethics the ethical is that which reliably helps to produce protect and promote meaning-making and meaning-makers So I think that insofar as we have good evidence for organisms being capable of such meaning-making we have a obligation to them even though they might not be able to reciprocate with justice to us because justice is only capable where there’s reciprocity between moral agency so I don’t think we can expect a justice for example from animals but nevertheless we should extend ethical obligation towards them now that gets it that that of course is always the question about where the where the morality grounds in the metaphysics in the ontology I’ll tell you how I’ll tell you how I thought about this and I’m I don’t think I can have I think my position is a plausible one but I do not I do not think it forecloses and I’m not trying to foreclose on bringing this into discussion or other people’s position I’ve taken to not eating creatures for which we have good reason to believe there is intelligence because I think of intelligence as the behavioral marker of relevance realization and that relevance realization is the the ultimate grounding of what we of the meaning-making we’re talking when we’re talking about existential kinds of meaning so I don’t eat for example mammals so I don’t eat octopus it doesn’t come up but I wouldn’t eat crow no pun intended by the way no idiomatic pun intended there but because of californian crow’s intelligence so I mean that’s very clear I mean you know and that comes up because I eat sushi octopus I think is more intelligent than a dog there’s pretty clear evidence about that I you know and that’s why I can’t I can’t see myself I couldn’t see myself eating a dog or a cat I think most people would agree with that and I think it’s then saying well but I’m okay with eating a pig that strikes me as just it’s not defensible the reasons for which for which you wouldn’t need a dog or a cat seem to also preclude you eating a pig now whether or not we that should be extended I do eat chicken I’m not convinced that they have very much intelligence I could be wrong about that I’m open to that I do not want to get flooded with emails from vegans please I there’s vegans in my family and I talk to them on a regular basis I understand a lot of these positions I do reflect on them I have revised my position of my eating habits I’m not as I said about foreclosing but what I’m trying to say is I know that these of these positions have a lot of emotional a lot of emotional resonance and value to them and as they should but what I’m trying to do is answer the question as honestly and thoroughly as I can so for me I have tried to take what seems to me well evidenced plausible accounts of creatures that do not sorry that do clearly have the intelligence that gives them the kind of meaning making that I find inherently valuable and therefore I extend moral privileges to them now this is on a continuum right if we if human beings their lives are at risk and their only way they could survive were to kill mammals like perhaps you know certain indigenous communities then of course and that’s the only way uh in which they can survive and not starve then I think that becomes a legitimate thing um so I think it’s important that we we figure out how to talk about this in a very coherent manner and this is a place in which I don’t want to sound too imperialistic but there’s a place in which cognitive science could really help make a difference I think until we get very clear on consciousness and cognition and intelligence and meaning making we we should stop making absolute claims about how we should make our undertake our ethical practices I think we should do what I’ve tried to do here I think we should make plausible we should make plausibility arguments and then try to be consistent around them we have to address this issue we can’t put it off because it’s not only animals the emergent artificial general intelligence is eventually going to get to the status where we’re going to have to raise this question as well for those machines and you right and so um let’s why not do it now so we’ve got really good practice at it for when the inevitable machines arrive we’ll have a better repertoire of skills for addressing it and knowledge for addressing it and along the way maybe we’ll treat our fellow organisms more appropriately all right so here’s a question from a patron rob thank you for your support if you were to change one or two things about the nature of public education or college education to afford better growth and future fitness of young people to society what would you do and why it could be as radically different from today’s system of education as you like thank you for that permission rob so if I could change I think we need to do we need to bring back what we’ve lost we we had a knowledge institution and a wisdom institution and they were coupled together and there was cross pollination cross fertilization between them and then the proscent reformation and a bunch of other things shut shut down the monasteries and then the university attached to the state as opposed to the monastery and I think that has been very problematic because we have lost places for which people in which people can cultivate wisdom self-transcendence pursue the understanding of the knowledge that they’ve acquired figure out how that translates into existential modes interactional relationships all of that has been lost so if I could do one thing and this is radical we need to bring something back like what the monastery was now of course because of the pluralist society we’re in and I’m not trying to in any way undermine that I think we need to do something like a secular modest series or maybe like what Daniel Forsen is doing where you have the monastic academy where it’s not tied to a particular religious tradition or religious institution and that gives people that nevertheless something that they can do in conjunction with the acquisition of knowledge that they’re doing at the university and we might want to do something even preparatory of that at the high school level if we could other society it’s like when I say that I know lots of people are out there rolling their eyes right and it’s like other cultures have and still do and all our culture did for a very long time so there’s nothing sort of natural or the way it has to be about the way we do it now and so it would it would be good if we thought about how wisdom can be brought into education I know Robert Sternberg has done a lot of work on this about how to bring wisdom into the educational situation he also has I think a recent book on how to apply wisdom to the to world problems to try and show the value that such an education could bring like to people as being citizens good citizens of the world not just sort of efficacious agents within their own life so that that was a that would be something a change I would like to see so now I want to move to a question from patron Connor thank you for your support Connor what do you make of the apparent trend over western civilization in the art world of shifting from the genre of tragedy to that of horror aside from the increased visceral potential of modern artistic mediums how would you explicate the cultural and psychological shifts and emphasis here especially as it relates to alienation agency in the meeting crisis so I already alluded Connor to some of this when the the discussion I had about joker and because the joker of course sits right on horror I don’t think this is any spoilers because it’s abstract enough but the though there’s there’s the opposite of dramatic irony when you’re watching joker like him you don’t know in the movie what’s real and that’s constantly when you things start to get stabilized the movie shuffles them and you think you’ve got sort of oh that’s the correct political labeling for that or this is really happening and then the movie shuffles it around and it puts you in this constantly right tenuous grasp of yourself of the main character which of course with whom you of course it’s a movie you’re identifying to some degree and then the world of them so there’s this horrific element in it not and I don’t mean just the violence I mean that sense of what’s real here and that this is so unstable yet it’s compelling I’m drawn in it’s it’s very much it has some of that numinous aspect of horror to it and I think why horror is becoming more prevalent is is precisely because it indicates as I’ve said it indicates that the the loss of a sense of contact and connection has gone from being a dull ache to being a throbbing pain and I think what you see in joker for example is pain that is not ameliorated but eventually identified with as giving the only last possible motivation which is I’m going to burn the world because then my pain and the world once again are connected and so that I think is a very worrying trend that we’re seeing I think the horror is also an attempt to intensify that sense of absurdity and alienation because our culture in general tries to retrieve significance being significant with having intensity our culture is beset by there’s no depth to this so what I’ll do is make it as intense as possible so that can over stimulate you and overwhelm you that is the last gasping shadow right of god it’s right it’s you used to be something which filled you with awe and overwhelmed you there’s nothing of that so what we can do though is we can just make it so intense so visceral so stimulating that that intensity at least momentarily gives you a surrogate for the depths of significance but notice notice the that you know the hallmark you find in people like jesus and buddha where they talk about the peace that paths us all understanding to use jesus’s word buddha the buddha says very similar thing as the hallmark of the genuine experience of significance and depth there is no such peace of understanding the peace the path is understanding in these horror genres and the fact that we could no longer find peace and that we can no longer find significance and all we can pursue is the intensity that masks the lack of peace and pretends so pretentious to be the depths of significance I think points to the fact that the meaning crisis is accelerating not just in its pervasiveness but in its profundity in terms of the pain it’s inflicting on people so this is the last question so this is from a patron subscriber subscriber mahalie bordoli thank you for your support do you think peer coaching or peer mentorship could be part of the ecology of practices needed to address the meaning crisis due to their scalability yes very much um this uh this came up explicitly as some of you know i’ve been engaging in circling practices with other people particularly uh uh in part sort of an ethnographic partnership with peter limberg and uh peter pointed out something that he found that i had said in one of the circling practices has been very sort of um helpful i mentioned that in circling what you’re creating is peers and then i was i was i said you sort of you want to play on the word peer because it also means peer also means to look deeply into it and i think creating peerage is a way to get distributed cognition to generate a flow state that exacts the collective intelligence we need in order for addressing the project as jordan hall said of trying to um create in both the top down and bottom up fashion and shepherd and husbandry of an ecology of practices for addressing and ameliorating the meaning crisis so i i think yes and and their scalability is very important uh precisely because i take paul van de kee’s criticism um that any attempt to i don’t i don’t see myself as trying to replace but i’ll just use that term for now you need to attempt to try and replace religion with sort of a secular alternative faces the fact that the religions have figured out uh how to be scalable um uh in in a very profound way and so finding i think scalability is an important normative standard that we should hold any purported ecology of practices to if we want it to be able to uh address the meaning crisis so i want to thank you all for joining me on in this q a as always it was um very enjoyable the questions are always so interesting and there’s so many more i wanted to get to but as always time is the thief that steals away our life um we’re doing these every third friday of the month just so you guys uh any of you guys have just come to this for the first time you can plan if you if you want to be involved again um and uh thank you again for the subscribers over patreon um as you know i’m not taking income from this it goes into the reiki foundation and it goes back into helping to finance the the next series and work that’s being done in the lab um the consciousness and wisdom study lab and uh you can of course if you want to start and it would be greatly appreciated to support my work on the meaning crisis you can go to uh patreon uh dot com uh slash john rebeke uh and join if you want to support the work i’m doing so i want one more time uh to uh thank all of you and again thank um amara and kareena my tech team for their wonderful uh support i couldn’t do it without them and uh i look forward to seeing you again um for our next q a thank you very much you