https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9Edkw-PC_jI
Hello and welcome to the question and answer. It’s a great pleasure to be here again. As usual, we’re going to tackle questions first from Patreon supporters and then some questions that have been tweeted and if we have a chance on some remaining questions that are live. So let’s get right to it because these questions are always very good questions and I want to try and get as many in as possible because I think they’re usually beneficial for a wide variety of a wide number of people. Well the first question, just one second John, I think we’re having some trouble with the I’m going to say something here. Can you guys hear me? Can somebody please respond? We’re just seeing there might be some audio problems. Thank you guys. We just had a bit of a glitch there. Okay. So thank you very much. It’s great pleasure to see you all. Let’s begin. So the first question is from Sergey Mekharkin and he’s a patron. And the question is, could you provide a definition of some example and some examples of what is propositional, respectable and participatory knowledge? I’ll also throw in the fourth procedural. I think I understand what it refers to but want to make sure. It goes on, in case you have done that already in one of your first videos on the meeting crisis, I would encourage you to correct me to it. I started watching the meeting crisis series somewhere in the middle so I might have missed something. That’s fine. I should mention that I was just being interviewed by Ali from Rebel Wisdom this morning and the whole video is basically about the four kinds of knowing and that’s going to come out at some point. But let’s address this question right now. So this is a taxonomy. Of course, taxonomies aren’t true or false. They’re effective or not. How well do they explicate? How well do they integrate? How well do they afford explanation? An integrated set of phenomena in a systematic and useful manner. So the form of knowing that we’re all familiar with, and I call it knowing because I want to emphasize the process, the cognitive process as opposed to the resulting product. So we’re very familiar with propositional knowing. This is the knowing you have by believing that some proposition is the case. I believe that a cat is a mammal and that could be true or false. So what I acquire when I’m acquiring propositional knowledge is I acquire presumably well-justified sets of beliefs and I get a conviction from that. I get convinced about it. So I get conviction about the truth of my beliefs and when that’s done rationally and systematically, we call that a theory. I’m using theory the way it’s used in science, not the way it’s used in everyday discourse. And so the sense of realness that goes with propositional knowledge is that sense of conviction in the truth of the proposition. And of course, philosophers have spilled a lot of ink trying to figure out what that is and I’m not going to go into that. All I need now is to get clear what the reference is. I’m not trying to offer a theory of what truth is or some such thing. This is procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something. This is knowing how to catch a ball, how to ride a bike, how to walk to the street, down the street to the corner store. And so these are things that are not a matter of belief. Now, of course, you’re exercising beliefs while you’re doing these things. We’re making an analytic distinction. You’re not claiming that it’s ever the case that just one kind of knowing is in operation. This is an analytic taxonomy. But in addition to all of your beliefs, you have to know how to catch a ball, which is very different from all the beliefs you might have about balls and all the beliefs you might even have about ball catching. You have to actually know how to coordinate and move your mind and body in such a way that you catch a ball. And so what results from that is not a theory, you’re getting a sense of empowerment. You’re getting a sense of power. The sense of being connected to reality isn’t a conviction in the truth of a proposition. It is the sense that your skill is empowering you in an efficacious manner with respect to the world. And a lot, and this is the thing, our culture has really emphasized and perhaps fetishized propositional knowing, perhaps because a lot of the professional knowers are academics and theoretical knowledge is what they spend their time on. I’m guilty of such a sin as well. But most of your cognitive agency is actually carried by your procedural knowing, knowing how to get up and move around and move objects and interact with the world. That’s what’s actually turning out to be very hard to give to artificial intelligence. So that’s your procedural knowledge. What’s your perspectival knowing? Well, your perspectival knowing is the knowing that’s not had by having some beliefs or skills, it’s by having a particular state of consciousness. And so this is knowing what it’s like to be sober. This is knowing what it’s like to be here now in a particular way. So when I’m sober, I’m not aware of an object, it’s more adverbial. I know what it’s like to be here now in this particular way. So it gives you your sense of here nowness. It’s your salience landscaping, how things are being foregrounded as salient, backgrounded and less salient. The things that are foregrounded are constantly differing and shifting in how they’re salient to you. So this is knowing what it’s like to be here now in a particular state of mind. And we wrapped that all into this somewhat nebulous word. It’s obviously a metaphor of a perspective. What perspective gives you with the salience landscaping, what perspectival knowing gives you, it gives you your situational awareness. It gives you a sense of how you are here now so that you can learn and apply your skills. So participatory knowing. Participatory knowing is the knowing in which your knowledge of yourself and the knowing of yourself and the knowing of the object of your knowing are deeply intermeshed at a very foundational level. So a good way to think of participatory knowing is to think about sort of co-determining, co-inhabitation. So how are you inhabiting your mind and body such that you have a particular self? So if perspectival knowing is done with states of consciousness and procedural knowing is done with skills and propositional knowing is done with sentences, participatory knowing is done with the structure of yourself. So how are you inhabiting your mind, body, and how is that affording you inhabiting the world so that you get a particular structure of agency and a particular structure in which the world is setting itself, disclosing itself to you as an arena is what I should say. So what you get with participatory knowing is existential mode. You can be in the having mode in which the way, the agency you’re assuming is the agency of a consumer who is trying to control and they’re relating to the world in terms of categorical identity and they’re trying to solve problems in order to get control and consume things. But you may be in the being mode where you’re not trying to satisfy your having needs. You may be in the being mode in which you’re trying to satisfy being needs, needs that are met through undergoing developmental transformation. You need to be honest. You need to be mature. You need to be in love. And in that case, you’re not treating the world in sort of an I-it categorical fashion. You tend to enter into I-thou relationships where you’re trying to not control and manipulate, but to make meaning and to create meaning structures. And so the participatory knowing goes deep into the way in which your organism, your psychological, biological organism and the environment are fitted together, first biologically in kind of a niche and then culturally where the world is shaped and you are shaped so they fit together. And that fitted togetherness in which you are inhabiting your mind, body in a certain way and then you’re inhabiting the world in a certain way, they are co-structuring each other and co-determining each other. And so this is, of course, what you feel is lacking when you experience culture shock or when you may experience a kind of loneliness because you’re far from home. So participatory knowing gives you that fundamental attunement. Let me try and give you now, as I did with the other ones, some concrete examples. The problem with participatory knowing is because it’s so primordial, the examples tend to be sort of very philosophical because we’re going into the deep connection between how you inhabit the body and the kind of constraints on your ontology. Now, this is an example from Toad’s book on embodiment, very important book called Body and World. So it has to do with the philosopher David Hume. The famous skeptic. And what Toad’s points out is if you look at, if you look behind Hume’s epistemological arguments, you actually have to pay attention to the perspectival and ultimately the participatory knowing that he’s engaging it. So Hume is relating to the world as if he was as if he was static and unmoving and just observing. So what would the world be like if I don’t move and I’m just a spectator, if I’m an unmoving, non-interacting spectator? The thing is, if you inhabit your body in that purely sedentary, frozen fashion, like you do not get a sense of your continuity through time and space, you do not get a sense of causation, you do not get a sense of the interpenetration of the past into the present and the future. So what you find is Hume’s ontology is so constrained by his participatory knowing that his salient landscape gets shaped such that you get all the famous Humean conclusions, right, that he can’t find agency, he can’t find causation, he can’t really find time and space, etc. And so what this shows is the way you are inhabiting your mind, body, your habitus, deeply affects your ontos, the way in which being can be structured for you. So the participatory knowing is in that sense very deep. It sets up the agent arena relationship that then, right, it sets up the constraints that constrain the perspectival knowing so that you then get what’s going on in the perspective. You get the existential mode, right, at the participatory level, which then constrains the salience landscaping, which and then that salience landscaping constrains your situational awareness, which constrains which skills you can learn and the set of skills you can apply are ultimately determining what kind of objects and what kinds of things you’re going to form beliefs around with your propositional knowing. And so what’s really important about this for the meaning crisis is part of what I think goes on in the meaning crisis is the fact that we have over identified knowing with with propositional knowledge and we’ve over identified realness with truth. And we’ve forgotten that we also we also we have a normativity on us of realness as power. We have a normative that’s for procedural knowing. We have a normativity on us of realness as presence, which is what we’re seeking for in our virtual emulations of reality, which is the normativity of realness within our perspectival knowing. And then we have a normativity of existential mode attunement, which is the kind of way in which realness confronts us with when we are talking about the participatory knowing. That’s why when you’re far from home and the agent arena relationship isn’t jelling, all the other things are sort of you’re sort of here and you have beliefs and then your skills. And there’s a sense in which it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel right. Something something is missing because what’s missing is that more fundamental attunement. Because we have over focused on propositional knowledge and reduced everything to propositional knowing and reduce all realness to truth. And we never really actually pursue truth. I’m sorry. We always pursue relevant truth because of the combinatorial explosive nature of reality. But because we fetishize this upper level, it has tended to disconnect us from the procedural, the perspectival and the participatory, the embodied aspects of our knowing that connect us to the grounding of our agency and connect us to the fundamental grammar for the disclosure of the world. And that’s why the four kinds of knowing are deeply relevant to understanding the meaning crisis. So I hope that was helpful. And like I said, there is going to be a more extensive discussion that I did with Ali from Noble Wisdom about this coming out. So and he’s also preparing a film and an essay about these kinds of knowing. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be coming out about this. You’ll have extra resources beyond just the question I just gave. So next. This is from an anonymous patron. And I should. In case I forget. Let’s do this right now. I want to again express my gratitude for all the patrons for their support, both the financial support and many people, you know, you know, I get a fantastic conversation with the patrons. And that’s also a kind of support because some of those discussions are so encouraging and so enlightening. So thank you all of you very much. The question is, in the future, will the scientific worldview be able to incorporate thoughts, consciousness or perspectival knowledge? Are there things about being that will forever be beyond our grasp? Well, those are two questions. It’s interesting that they’re put together because they are. It’s not it’s not a mistake to put them together. I call it often does. But let’s do the first one. It depends what you mean by thoughts. If you mean by thoughts. Both things analogous to statements of belief and drawing out relevant implications. I think that’s something we’re getting very close to being able to do. You mean skills with the advent of neural networks and deep learning. We’re getting something that is also capable of implementing a lot of skills. So if you if you if you include in thinking what’s happening with you when you’re catching a ball, then those two, I think, are already sort of coming to fruition right now. The perspectival knowing that has to do, of course, with the central issue of consciousness, because as I explained, they’re deeply woven together. So this comes down to the deeper question about whether or not I think there will be a naturalistic explanation of consciousness. And here’s where we have to slow down because. Holy consciousness is the holy grail of cognitive science trying to explain it. It is the hardest thing. I do. I have argued in the series and I’ve argued elsewhere, and I’m going to be at a conference next September, the Urban Abbey with Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Paget. And this is going to be the topic, the topic of the conference is consciousness and conscience. And I’m going to be talking about this. I do think a naturalistic explanation of consciousness is possible. I I’ve laid out an argument on that. It’s a large manuscript. I don’t have published bits and pieces of it circulated. I’m also presented bits and pieces of it at various conferences. And I teach a course regularly on neuroscientific and cognitive scientific use of consciousness. So do I think so? Yes, I do think so, because I do think that I can’t give that argument here because it’s not an easy argument. So I’m just going to gesture towards it. I do think that if we can explain relevance realization and we can explain complex, recursive, dynamic relevance realization and an evolving connectedness to the world so that it makes sense to talk about that, and then we can talk about how all of that can be relevant to something like what’s going on in working memory, both an online and an offline global workspace that’s doing an higher order recursive relevance realization, because that’s what working memory seems to be doing. And that’s what consciousness seems to be for. We can get a long way towards explaining the function of consciousness. And then once you have the idea of salient landscaping and this perspectival knowing, you can get a lot of the features of consciousness. You can get the sense of here, the sense of now, the sense of how things are centered on you because of the way things are relevant to you in this highly complex texture manner. So consciousness is basically this highly texturized salient landscape that’s doing here in this now this it’s aspectualizing everything. So things are appearing to you under a particular way of presentation. Like this is presenting itself to me as a cup, because that’s how it’s aspectualized as relevant to me. And so consciousness, a lot of the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, the here in this, the nowness, the togetherness, a lot of the features that go into subjectivity and a sense of centeredness and a sense of ongoingness. A lot of the central features of consciousness, I think, will be capable of being given a naturalist explanation. Now, I have a lot of respect for people who would disagree with me on that, because right now there is a lot of philosophical disagreement from a lot of people that I respect about all of this. Consciousness is very, very hard, like I said. So I am answering the question as it was asked. I’m answering the question as to what I have, what do I believe in terms of what I have argued for? What do I think there’s argument and evidence for? Now, I want to pass to the second question, which I don’t think is identifiable to the first, but I can see why it gets provoked by the first. Do I think that there’s anything that’s always going to be beyond our explanation? Yes. I mean, there’s a sense in which that’s and I’m not attributing anything to the patron. There’s a sense in which that has to be the case because of the combinatorial explosive nature of reality and the fact that we’re finite beings. There’s always going to be huge aspects, dimensions, patterns, relations between things that are beyond our ken. That does not license anything. Right. So the problem that I have with that is what I would sort of the problem I have with how some people respond to that is they then take that as a license for a particular metaphysics. So they say, well, we’re ignorant of it. Therefore, we conclude that it is X or it is Y, which is just to deny the basis of the argument, which is you’re ignorant, which means ignorance means you can’t draw any conclusions about it. So to the degree to which reality is combinatorial, explosive and beyond us, we shouldn’t draw any conclusions about it. The proper attitude in that sense is to is to to to acknowledge what I acknowledge, I think, with an appropriate humility, one’s ignorance. So is there that’s one way of answering that question. Are there things that are in principle unknowable to us? Not so now we’re shifting from sort of quantitative combinatorial explosive, although that’s also sort of qualitative to as I mentioned, as we’re talking about different kinds of patterns. But just for to try to get more clear, now we’re talking qualitatively. Are there kinds of things we can’t know? So this is a different question. This is a question not of our finitude, which, of course, limits us, really limits us in powerful ways. And now we’re turning to the question of what’s called epistemic boundedness. Epistemic boundedness is a particular and important species of finitude. So, for example. I know a cat. I love this cat and this cat is really smart. He’s a really smart cat, highly intelligent. And he can do things that there is no move around the world and solve problems and deceive me in a still affectionate manner. I really love this cat precisely because of this is intelligence. So he’s clearly intelligent, better than any robot we way beyond what any robot is capable right now, because he’s intelligent. Does that mean he can generate a theory that explains his intelligence? No. It would be utterly miraculous if he somehow was able to generate a theory that explains his intelligence. What am I trying to show you? That the possession of a property does not guarantee the ability to explain it. But by no means. Many creatures have very sophisticated intelligence. Chimps go far beyond that of this beloved cat. But I also I would be absolutely dumbfounded if somehow a chimp using perhaps sign language was able to give a explanation of intelligence that turned out to be plausibly true. That is a highly, highly improbable event. So the chip, while being highly intelligent, is epistemically bounded. They aren’t capable of explaining intelligence. It might be and consciousness might be an example of this. There is a connection between the first and the second question. Consciousness or aspects of the world might be the kinds of things that although we are highly intelligent, our cognition is not set up so that it has the ability to explain them. There might be certain aspects of the way our cognition evolved. It’s highly plausible that render us epistemically bounded so that there are certain kinds of things, no matter how much information we were gathering about them, for which we could not come to any explanatory conclusion. I think it is hubristic to a very great degree to conclude that all other creatures on the planet are epistemically bounded, but we are somehow privileged. Notice even how limited it is because we acknowledge that children are epistemically bounded. We acknowledge that there are many things they are incapable of knowing until they have matured. And so what we’re basically saying is even the really smart human beings that are children are epistemically bounded, but not us adults. I find that that’s special pleading. And therefore, technically, it requires an independent piece of information as to why we have this even highly intelligent human organism is acknowledged to be epistemically bounded. So I think it’s likely that not only are we quantitatively limited by the finitary predicament and the fact that reality is combinatorially exclusive, I think that it’s quite possible that we’re epistemically bounded in a qualitative manner, not just quantitatively. And therefore, what do we draw about that? Well, the point is, again, where we are epistemically bounded, we are ignorant and then we should be silent. We should be silent. Then say, oh, because you’ve acknowledged epistemic ignorance, I now have evidence that I now can claim that Zeus exists or some such metaphysics. I think is I think it’s just an invalid argument. And it’s it’s max of being unfair because you’re requiring some people to not be hubristic and respect the fact of epistemic boundedness. Well, then you claim that you have some secret doorway through it, which is just to deny that epistemic boundedness actually exists. So I tried to answer that question very comprehensively. What does this mean for me as a scientist? It means the following that I do my best to try and advance knowledge. I’m always a fallible list. I’m always a fallible list. And I as I’ve argued in the series, I don’t believe we should pursue certainty. I think that misrepresents our status and it misrepresents how cognition works. I do wonder about how you would show epistemic boundedness methodologically, because usually you can only show a limit if you could transcend it. And I also wonder how you would distinguish between biological epistemic boundedness, the kind of epistemic boundedness that might happen because of the way my brain evolved and cultural historical epistemic boundedness that I might be epistemic bounded for my whole life because of my cultural historical circumstance. By the way, that does not license relativism precisely because, as I said, all that license is is ignorance. And that’s the only thing you should draw from that. So I hope that was helpful. I find that topic very interesting, thought provoking. It’s the kind of thing that can wake you up at 3am, but hopefully you can fall back asleep by 4am. All right. So let’s go to the next question. Do you plan on writing a book? This is from Mike, patron. Thank you, Mike. You plan on writing a book that summarizes a series of you fill your book zombies and Western cultures already serves that function. I do not feel that zombies and Western culture serves that function. Zombies is the first of four books that are coming out in sequence. Christopher, Master Pietro and I are doing a lot of work on the second book, which is called Unsheltered, which will further develop the genealogy that was laid out in the series and go over it in a more literary and argumentative fashion. That’s going to be followed up by two more books. You should also know that Daniel Craig and Madeline Ibermio and I are working right now. We’ve taken many of the episodes from the series and also some of my independent talks. We’ve transcribed them. We’re putting them into a book and we’re also extending and adding to it from recent, more recent work. Daniel’s writing some stuff. Madeline’s doing some work. This is a book that’s also coming out next year. It’s called The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment. Some of you should know that there is going to be an Indiegogo campaign. I’m not getting any money from this. I’m going to say that right now, clearly, completely. I’m committing myself to that. The point of the Indiegogo campaign is to raise money to help pay for Daniel and Madeline to do all of the extensive work they’re doing on putting the book together, doing the transcription. They’ve done a lot of volunteer work, but it’s getting to the point. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done. And so we’re trying to do this so that we can raise some funds for them. For that, the campaign will be launched in January. There’ll be some short videos about it. There’s an extensive video between Daniel and I talking about the book and some of the main themes in it. So that’s coming out. I’m currently working with Chris, also revising a book I’ve written and I’ve used informally. But it’s The Practice of Meditation and Contemplation and the Cultivation of Wisdom. So it’s basically a book version of the courses I teach on meditation and contemplation. I’m going to add some extra stuff into that about some other wisdom practices. So that’s also coming out. So there’s going to be quite a bit that is going to cover off the content. I also intend to take the next series, After Socrates, The Pursuit of Wisdom through Authentic Dialogue. And I’m going to have that transcribed and I’m going to release that whole series as a book once that series is done just from beginning to end. So that’s all coming. So I hope that answers your question, Mark. So we’ve got an anonymous question and this is the question. What are your holiday plans? That’s a great question. I enjoy Christmas time much more than I enjoy Christmas day. I don’t dislike Christmas day or something like that. I guess Scrooge actually liked Christmas day because that was after the three spirits, right? But I like the season a lot. I like the archetypal elements of the darkening of the world and the way it rubs you against the slightly rough edges of your own mortality. Well, at the same time, your head is lifted upwards by all the lights and all the attempts people make, not only to have physical light, but to bring a lightness to the demeanor and the spirit and how that enlivens my personal relationships. So I plan to spend a lot of time with the people I love. I’m not planning on going anywhere this year. The last couple of years I saw from my wonderful partner, she and I, we went to Cuba and I had just an amazing time. I spent New Year’s Eve last year in Cuba, which was like, whoa, that was a lot of fun. But this year, I think it’s going to be a much quieter one. And so I just want to spend a lot of time with the people I really love. It’s really important to be able to linger with people and to savor those moments of cherishment when nothing is, it’s not towards any end. It’s just, it’s just the state of being with people and feeling that deep, that deep human connection and that love. And so those are my plans. I hope you all, however you choose to celebrate this time of the year, I hope you all have very wonderful holidays. Next is a question from Mac G, a patron. Aside from The Courage to Be and The Psyche of Sacrament, are there any additional books or commentaries on Paul Tillich that you would recommend? Yes. So I recommend also two books by Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith, which is his theory of symbolism, which I will be talking about, not in the episode that was released today, but the episode that was going to be released next week. Also Beyond Morality, because that’s his excellent discussion of Adaphe, which as some of you know has had a deep influence on me. John Dourley has a second book. I’m trying to remember what it was. I’m reading it. It came out after Psyche of Sacrament. It has Tillich and Young in the title. I can’t remember, I think it’s Recovering the Sacred or something. I’m not sure. It’s a John Dourley book, and it’s got Tillich and Young in the title. That’s an excellent book. So Psyche of Sacrament really introduces, it’s a good, great book. It introduces Dourley’s argument about the deep similarities, the deep consonants between Young and Tillich, which I will explore in the upcoming episodes. But the more recent book really, really, really, really does a good job of taking it very deeply. And also critically, in the good sense of the word, criticizing aspects of Tillich, criticizing aspects of Young. I think it’s just a really good book. So that’s what I would recommend. So a next question by Mac again, who is a patron, and again, thank you, Mac. If I recall correctly, I’ve heard you mention Iambagokos, the master and his emissary, in passing. Are you familiar enough with his work to evaluate his argument? Does he still have any glean anything from his work that you find insightful? So I haven’t read the master and his emissary. I’ve seen presentations of it. I read the follow-up essay, and you’ll see why. It’s not that I’m trying to slight MacGowkrest at all. I would love to have an extended discussion with Ian. I think that would be really, really interesting. But what I did is he wrote a follow-up essay about how the main thesis of the master and the emissary impacts on well, for lack of a better phrase, impacts on the meeting crisis, how it’s contributory towards the meeting crisis. So that’s the part of his work that I’m very familiar with. And I think it’s very consonant with what I was arguing earlier. I think I would, yeah, I mean, I was familiar with the neuroscience that MacGowkrest placed his work on for quite a while because I teach courses on problem solving and insight that have to do in part with some of this differentiation of hemispheric functionality, which again, you always have to take sort of with a large grain of salt because we’re talking about sort of statistically normal location of function. But there are individuals who have hemispherectomies and have what are left and right functions within the remaining hemispheres. So you have to be a little bit, it’s more a functional thing than an anatomical thing. And the way I understand it, which is similar, but I think different from MacGowkrest is in terms of the kinds of problem solving. So I think a functional analysis, the left hemisphere is basically for dealing with well-defined problems. Because they’re well-defined, they have a large degree of familiarity for us. Whereas the right hemisphere is about dealing with ill-defined problems and therefore they often have a degree of unpredictable novelty for us. And so the left hemisphere, as you may expect for familiarity and for well-defined problems, it looks for very fine-grained step-by-step intervention because that’s how you make your way through a well-defined problem. It looks for clarity and certainty because that’s again the standard you should hold yourself to when you’re doing a well-defined problem. Whereas when you’re doing, so it’s very featurely oriented, very narrow frame of attention. It works according to a high standard of clarity, even pursuing certainty, at least in a psychological sense, not a Cartesian sense. The right hemisphere, of course, if it’s dealing with ill-defined problems, it’s going to go to the gestalt. It’s not going to be worried, it’s going to be very ambiguity-tolerant. It’s not going to be that worried about absolute clarity or certainty. It’s not going to do things step by step. It’s going to try and get you to react overall. So you can think about a well-defined problem, sort of searching in an area for your lost keys or something like that, that you drop it in the grass, you’re very familiar with the grass, you know how to look, you can do this step-by-step search, blah, blah, blah. But that while you’re doing that, a huge eagle sweeps in from the left and is about to hit you in the head with its claws, then you’re going to react to the gestalt. You’re not going to go, oh, I’ve got to make sure what kind of predator it is, and I’ve got to do this carefully. No, you’re going to go, ah, predator, you’re going to dodge, you’re going to move all at once. And what’s interesting is this seems to, and this is something that McGovern doesn’t talk about, but it’s central to my work, but what seems to happen in an insight problem, and this goes back to ongoing work by Cunias and Beeman and Bowman, is that you start a problem, and it’s mostly in the left hemisphere, and you’re trying to solve it in a step-by-step manner, perhaps like the nine dot problem, and it’s not working, and then you get a sudden shift into the right hemisphere, where you’re opening up the space, you’re losing the constraints, you’re going more gestalt, and then you find a different or alternative problem formulation, and you bring it back into the left hemisphere. By the way, metaphor seems to trigger the same kind of shifting, which tends to support the argument I make, that there’s deep connections between metaphor and insight, and therefore we should understand symbols in terms of that kind of thing. All that being said, I think I can say something to the effect that when Magyokos talks about left hemispheric dominance, I would translate that into saying that’s a preponderance, a dominance for preferring well-defined problems that are handled in an inferential propositional manner, and it feeds back into the point I made about the dominance of propositional knowing to the exclusion of the kind of knowing that it’s not just in the right hemisphere, it’s also found in what is found predominantly in the right hemisphere. But I think that’s the point that what we need are, we need to not only emphasize inference, we need to counterbalance that with practices that bring out insight. That being said, I would want to refine what’s going on. It’s not just a left-right thing. That’s too simplistic, because if we understand it in terms of functionality and problem solving, it’s also a front-back thing. It’s also you have all your frontal lobes that are good for all of this sort of lobe, and that’s a good point. So, I think that’s the point that we need to understand. It’s not just about the way that you’re working memory, manipulation, very explicit, being in conversation with your cerebellum at the base of your skull. The cerebellum cortex loop is turning out to be radically important for understanding procedural, perspectival, and I think ultimately for understanding aspects of consciousness, and certainly for understanding participatory knowing. One of the things we need to explain is why did the cerebellum loop change the way it did in evolution? Why is it when you’re sitting absolutely still and unmoving in meditation that cerebellum is firing like crazy? It’s not just left-right, it’s also front-back. It’s cerebellum to cortex. It’s also out-in. It’s also the cortex with other aspects of the brain, and not only that, it’s brain-body, because your nervous, your brain is part of the nervous system, and as I’ve already emphasized, your bioeconomy has a huge impact on your cognitive functioning. So, I would want to extend the left-right, the front-back, out-in, and brain-body, and then finally body-world. So, that would be my way of saying we need to build beyond what MacGillivray has said, if we want to incorporate as much of the cognitive science that is relevant to the topic of the meaning crisis. Now, as I said, I preface this by saying that’s the aspect of his work that I’m interested in. I’m sure he had other projects that he was trying to do, and everybody has to focus on a particular thesis in a book. I’m responding to the question that was asked. I am not saying that MacGillivray’s book should be ignored because it doesn’t address all these issues. I’m saying how I think we need to go beyond the argument that was made there. Okay, so we have an announcement. Thank you to Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and support the science we’re doing to find solutions to the meaning crisis, and we really do depend on that. And as I keep saying, I’m not drawing any kind of income from that support. It is getting channeled into making more videos and doing more experiments. That’s where it goes. So as I mentioned, and I’m doing a lot about this, some of you can I’m so happy. The people I’m getting to meet and the people I’m getting to work with, just did another one. This is our second one. We did a four-way between Dias and Stock, Jordan Hall, Christopher, Master Pietro, and myself. And again, it’s all about this project of trying to understand the psychotechnology of dialectic and trying to understand the process within collective intelligence, distributed cognition of via logos. And so I bring that up because what’s happening right now is just so much, I’m putting a lot of work in, but again, so much help and insight and feedback, and it’s just plain fun too. Working on After Socrates, the next series, the one I mentioned earlier. So we’ve got, I’m working on the follow-up, which is, you know, After Socrates, the cultivation of the pursuit of wisdom through authentic dialogue. So it’s After Socrates in both senses of the word in that we’re trying to emulate and come after him in that sense, but also After Socrates historically. So I’m trying to, first of all, look, right, at the ancient practice of dialectic that seems to have started around Socrates. What was going on there? What are the dimensions? What is it doing? Because it seems to be what Jordan Hall was asking for. It seems to be a meta-psycho technology that basically accesses and accentuates the power of collective intelligence and bootstraps it up into collective rationality, and therefore acts as a place, acts as a way in which we can curate and vet, perhaps generate, the ecology of psychotechnologies. That’s certainly what dialectic was doing in the ancient world. I want to get a very clear understanding of that, and then, and there’s a lot of great work that’s come out on that, and then put that into, well, put that into dialogue with all these practices, and many of which I’ve been doing participant observation with the help of Peter Lindberg, my really valued partner and good friend in all of this. We’ve been doing circling practices, we’ve done the insight dialogue, we did empathy circling, just trying to learn, and of course the ongoing rich dialogue I’m having with Guy Sendstock, who is just an amazing source of insight and wisdom. I mean, he created circling, and he created it in a philosophically profound way. He’s just also a fantastic friend. So I’m doing all of that because the second half of the series is going to be once we get an understanding of what ancient dialectic was, can we use the template and put it in discussion all these emerging practices so that we could get something like a better psychotechnology for the emerging ecology of practices that is already happening right now. So I want everybody to be aware of that. Okay, we’re going to shift to some live questions from the chat. Please identify yourself as a patron subscriber to receive priority in your questions. So we have Andrea Tengredi and Mackenzie Levitt. Oh, hi Mackenzie. It’s good to hear from you. And the question there is, was there ever a specific moment where you realized you needed to deepen your commitment to living wisely, or has this always been a pursuit that interested you? That’s a fantastic question. Specific moment, that’s hard. Maybe a specific period in my life. So as I mentioned, when I was in high school, I sort of, because of the work of, as I left, a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, which is like leaving alcoholism. And I’m sorry, that sounds like it’s harsh to people who pursue that. I’m speaking from my personal experience in the sense that it was harmful and traumatizing, but nevertheless it leaves a craving in you. And so I fell into a kind of personal meaning crisis, existential crisis, and that was developed by encountering some science fiction that introduced me to the philosophies and mythologies outside of the Christian framework, and that has a huge impact on me. And then I read, I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and that was like, oh, these sort of Buddhist and Hindu mythologies can actually be directed towards the pursuit of wisdom and the overcoming of a sense of alienation, because that’s of course what Siddhartha is famously about, the inner journey that Hesse talked about, that Rilke said is actually the only true journey. I’m not sure I’d be quite that romantic, but I appreciated that very, very deeply. About the same time I read, also read Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, which introduced me to great Canadian literature, to Jung, and then I got a sense of the depth of the unconscious and that there’s aspects to our cognition that are self-organizing and that can be the source of growth and insight. But that was sort of like this, scattered, existentially inchoate for me, and then I read Plato in first year of university, I read the Republic and I read Socrates, and then it crystallized, not into a dead crystal, not like the cold beauty of a diamond, but like the living beauty of a fire, right? It came together for me, it caught fire, and that this, the unexamined life is not worth living, right? Socrates died for that. The unexamined life is not worth living. And that went very deep and it constellated all that together and it set it into motion for me, and that’s when it began for me. No, Plato is sacred for me. I constantly return back to that, and as I grow and learn, to the degree to which I have, right, I get a deeper understanding, not just sets of beliefs, but a deeper understanding through all the kinds of knowing of why the unexamined life is not worth living. So I guess I read the book, and I read the book, and I guess that would be the kairos for me. There’s all these important precursors, but the encounter with Socrates and the wake up, the clarion call that the unexamined life is not worth living is what really sang to me. Andre, I think we need another question. Could you briefly describe your own personal journey in your daily meditative and contemplative practice habits? Yeah, so I have a bunch of practices that I do every morning. I do a whole bunch of a set of warm-up practices and also practices for helping to ameliorate the manures that I have in my left ear. And then I do some tai chi. I do a very fast form called the jing. I do a weapons form, a sword form. I use a wooden sword, by the way. I don’t try and hurt anybody. And then I do a slow form, a modified version of the beijing form. I do that very deeply. I usually supplement that with some qigong, some standing and breathing practices, also what’s called jianjian, some standing practices, holding position. And then I sit. I do practices that are again supposed to get me sort of deeply into my body within a seated posture. It basically has to do with sort of holding your breath and rotating various parts of your body to try and really interiorize and open up your introception and get sort of the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system communication going. So I do all that and then I go into a form of meditation that is taking me very deeply in. Oh, and then a contemplative practice takes me out. And then I do a practice that prajna, that sort of synthesizes. It’s more like stereoscopic fusion, the way the left and the right visual field give you depth. So I’m getting the deepest of the internal movements of meditation inward, the deepest of the outward movements in contemplation, but I’m getting them simultaneously in depth. And then within that, you move towards, you’re not meditating. You become sort of aware of your awareness and then aware of the self-presencing of your awareness. And then you move to the self-presencing of the self-presencing. There’s no difference between sort of how reality is self-presencing to you and how your own fundamental awareness is self-presencing itself to you. You get this deep place of prajna where you’ve brought awareness and that deeply dynamical intelligence into the depths of your perspectival knowing and right into the place where it’s interfacing with your participatory knowing, your fundamental sense of identity, the fundamental way in which your habitas and your antas are co-determining and co-structuring each other. And then I end with a gratitude practice. The practice goes basically something like this. I thank the self-persistence of the physical for I do not make it. I emerge from it to trust and participate in it. I thank, I’m grateful for the self-organization of the vital because I do not make it. I emerge from it to trust and participate in it. I’m grateful for the self-presencing of the intelligible for I do not make it. I emerge from it to trust and participate in it. I’m grateful for the spiritual, lack of a better adjective. I’m grateful for the self-transcendence of the spiritual. I do not make it. I emerge from it to trust and participate in it. And so what that does is you get this comprehensive permeation of gratitude which resonates with that state of prajna and then that sets me ready for the day. And so that’s what I do pretty much every morning. I hope that was helpful to you. What I also do in the morning before I undertake those practices, and so that’s one set of practices, I also record any dreams I had the night before because I’m trying to maintain as open a line of communication between conscious and unconscious mind. I also will read about a particular cognitive bias, remind myself that I need to look for self-deception. I need to look for ways in which I’m self-centered, ways in which I’m self-important, and ways in which I’m self-righteous and try to actively notice my cognitive bias. Notice those four forms of, four dimensions of selfishness, if you want to put it that way. And then what I do is I go through the day and I try to notice them. I try to actively counteract them. And then at the end of the day I journal about what I was able to notice, what I might have failed to notice, and the time that I can now notice retrospectively because of effects and behavior. I also try to notice areas where I was successful, where there was, where it looked like I was being more present, I was being more connected, I was being more insightful, being more flowy, being more rational. And then that’s how I end my day. So that’s the sort of set of practices. Oh, I forgot! Oh my, after I do the gratitude, I should have mentioned, I do Lectio Divina. I read from a passage from The Enlightened Mind by Stephen Mitchell, which is prose, and then I do Lectio Divina on it, and then I read a passage from The Enlightened Heart, which is poetry, and I do Lectio Divina on that. So that’s after I do the gratitude, I then do the Lectio Divina. I forgot. That’s really important to me, by the way. What’s really interesting for me is how the Lectio Divina, which brings me back into propositions, resonates with all this non-propositional stuff I’ve been doing with the Tai Chi, the meditation and the contemplation practices. And then it’s also really interesting to see how the poetry and the prose, the Lectio Divina, not only how each one resonates with me, but also how they resonate with each other and how that resonance between them also deepens the resonance with me. And I found that a very powerful practice. Okay, so we’ve got Stephen Laswell, patron in chat. Can you explicate how inexhaustible this can function as a constraint to relevance? It seems contradictory that something infinite can function as limited. Yes, I think that’s right. And if I said it functions as a constraint, that is, I think, technically incorrect. What I should be saying, to be more precise, is that our cognition has to have constitutive constraints, constraints that actually constitute instructional functional organization in response to inexhaustibleness, in response to the fact that reality is combinatorially explosive. So that’s what I should have said. And you’re right to catch me on a kind of sloppiness in presentation of how I mentioned that. The correct way, I think, of saying it is the inexhaustibleness of reality, which we will encounter as the combinatorial explosive nature of our problem solving, very broadly construed our adaptive attempts to deal with reality, demands that there are constitutive constraints so that we avoid the combinatorial explosion. And that avoiding, when it’s done adaptively in all the ways I describe in my series, that’s the process that gives us relevance realization. So, everyone, once again, as always, I feel like we’re just beginning. I could do this for more because it’s so interesting to get into answering people’s questions. I think it’s so helpful to me because I can see where I’ve gone wrong. And sometimes I can also see perhaps where I’ve gone right and the relative balance between them and how to improve and also how to be more helpful to the people that are following my work. And one more time, I want to thank you all for joining me in this Q&A. And I want, again, to take this opportunity to thank all the patrons for the support. Once again, I want to thank Ammar for the untiring and excellent work he does. He’s here right now helping me as always. I couldn’t do it without him. And I want to wish you all the happiest of holidays. And I hope you find some things during the holidays that are particularly relevant to you. Take care. Goodbye.