https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7LH77EpSRNw
Welcome to the monthly Q&A. It’s a great pleasure to be here again. Thank you very much for joining. The first thing I’d like to do is mention that with Daniel Greg, I’m beginning an Indiegogo campaign to raise some money. He and I are working on a book, The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment. I’m not getting any salary or money out of the book. The point of the campaign is to help finance Daniel, who’s going to be sort of working full time on many aspects of the book so that he can decrease the time that it’s going to take to get it out into the public. So that campaign is up now. It’s available. There’s a short video out on it that I tweeted about, and there will be a longer video coming out, I believe, today or tomorrow, in which Daniel and I discuss at greater lengths the content of the book, what the book’s trying to do, how it links up with the work I do on the work I’ve done on in the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the work I’m going to be doing in the After Socrates series. So please take a look at that. As I said one more time, I’m not getting any personal income out of this campaign or out of the book. So I’m just going towards supporting Daniel as he undertakes the job of working on it, doing some of the writing, doing a lot of the promotional work, developing a lot of the art, et cetera. So let’s turn to some of the questions. I’ve already had a quick look through some of them. I just want to make an overall comment. I’m very appreciative of the quality of the conversations that I’m receiving. It’s impressive. The insight and the acumen that people are bringing to bear. And so thank you very much for that. So the first question is from a patron supporter, Felix. The question goes, hi, John. With reference to Lakoff’s work, to what extent do you think our imagination and experience are determined by being body beings? And with reference to Christopher, that’s Christopher, master of Pietro, and Guy, that’s Guy Sendstock, the inventor of circling, to Christopher and Guy Sendstock’s conversation regarding the bowing of the world. Do you think we are determined as body beings to seeing the world itself as body or bodies? Many thanks, as always, for your fantastic work. Thank you, first of all, Felix, for your kind words. So let’s take, there’s a couple of things in there. Let’s take them bit by bit. The first one is Lakoff, the work of Lakoff, often in conjunction with Johnson, Lakoff and Johnson. So some of you may know this because I mentioned it in the video series. I did work with John Kennedy in the 90s and the early noughties, critiquing, not just criticizing, but critiquing the work of Lakoff and Johnson. And the idea that our abstract cognition is deeply influenced by the fact that we are embodied embedded beings was one of the central ideas. So to give a famous example that I talk about in the series, and it was the central example of their first big book, Metaphors We Live By, we tend to talk about philosophical abstract argumentation using the language of war, like he attacked my position or I defended my position or he undermined what I was trying to say, etc. And then the idea is because we’re embodied beings, we make use of our fundamental way of making sense of the world is embodied interaction and we create these patterns. And then we use those patterns in order to create patterns of intelligibility for more abstract domains. Now, I think the idea that conceptual thought, abstract conceptual thought is in some sense grounded in sensory motor interaction. I think that’s an important one. I think it’s a pivotal thesis of what’s called 4E Cognoscience. Tversky, Barbara Tversky, the famous Tversky of Kahneman Tversky, is he has a new book out called Mind in Motion, where she in fact tries to argue very deeply. And John Kennedy and I made a very similar argument in 2004 that a lot of our thinking is ultimately grounded in the fact that we’re spatial and that we are navigating through space and that we use all of these spatial relations and our navigational skills and our perspectival awareness in three dimensional lived space in order to inform, constrain and render intelligible a lot of our abstract thought. And so I think all of this, I think, is central. I think it goes back ultimately to the just seminal work of Marlo Ponti, the Phenomenology of Perception, which has deeply informed for Icarxai. So I think the phenomena of the grounding relationship between intelligence and embodiment, I think that is deeply right. I argue, for example, in my work on relevance realization, that it is the bioeconomic constraints of the body that actually put the constraints on the problem space and problem solving that actually afford us being adaptive intelligent beings so that if we if our brains weren’t embodied, I don’t even know what that could mean. Maybe some sort of disembodied computer thing. But if our brains were not if our brains did not have to be regulated by cost functions that are bioeconomic in nature, they would not have their adaptive functionality. And this lines up with a lot of the arguments I’ve made about relevance realization, the fact that in AI, they’re increasingly talking about the important role of cost functions, et cetera. So all of that is the ways in which there’s deep agreement with Lakoff and Johnson. But John and I also had criticisms of Lakoff and Johnson because we tend to argue that they saw the relation as very it’s very simplistic and to bottom up that all that’s happening is there’s it’s very it’s if you’ll allow me a bit of a stretch. Their idea is that the abstract mind is tabular rouse. It’s just an empty slate. And then sensory motor behavior writes on it. And then that’s what gives us our abstract conceptual thought. And this is this is shared with Piaget. And the there’s both empirical evidence and argumentation to say that’s not right. There’s a lot of intrinsic constraints within abstract space. It’s not a blank slate. It has lots of things going on there that constrain which of all of these interaction, you know, interactional sensory motor patterns get taken up or how very different sensory motor interactional patterns can be taken up for the same abstract meaning. I point this out that we’ll say I see what you’re saying in order to talk about understanding. We use understanding, which, by the way, was original. Right. So notice that grasping. So notice seeing standing right standing within standing under grasping. All of these different sensory motor things are somehow all being used for the same abstract thing. Well, what draws these what selects from all of my sensory motor patterns those ones and why why are there differences? The differences between them ignored. And how is it they can all point to something unless there was a serious set of constraints there in the first place. So in addition to the bottom up, there’s top down. And I’ve proposed that the way we can make sense of that is through a more recent idea from Michael Anderson about cognitive acceptation, that we can take sensory motor processes and they can be exacted. But when they’re exacted, they have new functions and new abilities. They’re not simply mapped in a bottom up fashion. There’s also top down constraints in terms of, you know, the field. I’m exacting it into it. I take this sensory motor pattern and then I’m exacting it into a new domain. And that new domain puts huge constraints. And in a top down abstract fashion, it re-engineers just like I’m using my tongue for speech, even though it evolved for taste and moving the food around in my mouth. So this helps to explain why a lot of those words that I used at the beginning, he attacked my argument, don’t quite have the sensory motor meaning. John and I pointed this out in 96. We pointed out, well, yeah, you can say he attacked my position, but notice other words that I could use when I’m attacking a castle, like we assaulted or stormed the castle, don’t really work as well. You wouldn’t say in a philosophical argument, he assaulted my argument. That strikes people as weird or odd. Or notice you can’t transfer backwards. You can’t, you know, because one of the synonyms for he attacked my position is he criticized my position. Now, unless we’re doing a Monty Python routine, you can’t use that as, you know, as a synonym for attacking the castle. You know, let us criticize the castle. It doesn’t really convey let’s attack the castle and try to destroy it. See, so there’s there’s it’s a much more complex relation and there’s a lot more I can say about this. The point I’m trying to make is I think the embodiment issue is correct and deeply grateful to Lakoff and Johnson for bringing that out. I think the cognitive processes at work are much more sophisticated, much more dynamical, much more self-organizing, having a lot more to do with this idea of adaptation than simply the straight mapping of what Lakoff and Johnson called image schemata. Now that goes towards your second point. Do we have to see the world as a body? I’m not I’m not sure that that’s the case, precisely because as I’ve just tried to show, we don’t map all or maybe even some of the central properties of our embodied patterns up into our abstract, conceptual and theoretical space. So I think it’s quite possible that we may have to see the world in maybe some fundamental terms that have to be shared or continuous with our sensory motor interaction. But I do think that it’s possible to see reality not as a body. There are, of course, famous traditions that argue this deeply, the neoplatonic tradition in the ancient West, for example, in which it was very explicit that you had to leave thinking in corporeal terms behind to get at the true depths of the world, what was ultimately the case of a reality. So I hope that answers that very excellent question. It was a complex question. And I point you to some of the episodes in The Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, where I try to tackle it very deeply. Great. So here. Oh, hello. This is this is from Mackenzie Levitt. Hi. It’s good to hear from you, a Patreon supporter. Thank you very much. Here’s your question. Do you think our culture will eventually adopt a widespread development and use of wisdom institutions? There’s two there’s two ways I can interpret that question. Would I predict that it’s going to happen? No. Ceteris paribus, I don’t think so. I think our culture is awash in some very large scale patterns of bullshit and foolishness that are making change very intractable. This is this is my best explanation for why we’re not making the transformations we need to save the planet and to save our civilization and to save our social institutions. Now, the question might ask, is it possible with our efforts and with a lot of teamwork that we could make that transformation? Yes, I do think so. So what I want to avoid is any sense of complacency in answering that question in a positive manner. I think unless we work really hard, really concerted and really smart, I don’t think we’re going to get that transition to where we want it to be. Where our culture has widespread development of wisdom institutions. I think it is rational to hope for such a thing and to work and therefore to work hard for it and also rational to believe that if we succeed, that could contribute significantly, not solely, but could contribute significantly to addressing these other urgent and existentially threatening problems that we’re facing. So thank you very much for that question. This is from an anonymous Patreon supporter. Any New Year’s resolutions? That’s an odd question. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I sort of understand why people do it. I guess the symbolic turning of the year is supposed to be an auspicious time to trying something new. So I understand the symbolism. So in order to answer the question, honestly, I would say something like, what might I resolve to do? But then I suppose I wouldn’t try and hinge it on some pivotal moment because the evidence shows that that’s largely ineffective for transforming people’s behavior. What I’ve instead tried to do is create a strategy in which behaviors are adopted initially very sort of locally, somewhat superficially, and then they start to permeate of their own accord through the rest of my life. So, for example, I took up the practice of trying to record at the end of the day any of the cognitive biases that I had noticed throughout the day as a way of trying to train active open mindedness and increase my rationality. But what has happened in a way that is exemplary or exemplary of this kind of thing happening in many other places is that practice has taken on a life of its own and started to grow. The journal is now almost has a perspectival presence for me. I often noticed things because it’s almost like I become aware because I think, oh, what would my journal think about that? Which is kind of this interesting personification. Because it’s like what Socrates said is, but he’s going to face this person no matter what when he goes home at night, namely the Socrates that’s going to ask him to reflect on his day. And also what’s happened is I’ve started to write content in my journal other than just the cognitive biases. I’ve started to notice more pervasive patterns and existential modes that might be contributing to the self-deception. So a way this is interesting because the Buddhists talk about this, about drop by drop, you fill up the jar. So I started with this very sort of easy to do practice. Right. But, you know, and then I located it on a regular time and regular space, so it’s just repeated. And then what happens is a lot of these practices just don’t take. And I understand that’s the case. But there seems to be a way of getting them. So they start to take on a life of their own and they start to permeate and presence themselves in your life and in your reflective awareness in a more comprehensive fashion. They sort of percolate, which seems to me to be a much more successful strategy than sort of the I resolve to attempts that seem to be the prototypical thing you do for New Year’s resolutions. So I found that a much better strategy in general for trying to transform my behavior, generally try and find a habit that is easy to start, but has this potential to grow of its own accord and take on a life of its own and then sort of percolate and permeate through your life and your cognition. I found that a much more successful strategy. So that’s how I would answer that question. I hope that’s helpful to people. OK, so the next is from a patron supporter, Sergey Markikin. Given the importance of wisdom for increasing personal and public good, it seems a good idea to work on increasing personal wisdom. What do you think about the possibility and needs of pushing or nudging or even forcing someone to work on increasing her wisdom? So that’s an interesting question, because I have two different populations that I’ve interacted with around that issue that have given me two very different sort of results and therefore have led me to a very similar conclusion. One is when I work with my students, and I was actually talking about this yesterday in a lecture, of course, I’m teaching on the psychology of wisdom, about what you’re actually trying to do is induce aspiration to people by trying to set up an agagia for them. If you can set up an agagia, will you give them a bit of resolving inner conflict and anxiety so they can see a little bit more clearer and then they start to realize some patterns, start to see through some illusions, start to break, you know, inappropriate framing, and then they get better at sort of experiencing real patterns. They get better at realizing and then they can turn that back onto themselves. And if you start to sort of enact with them and get that going, then that can actually help them to overcome the aspiration paradox. They can act because you can’t infer your way through it, but you can sort of and agog your way through it. And then and then, of course, as I argued elsewhere, that requires you actually give them, you know, inactive analogies that sort of point back to the life they’re leading and forward to the life they’re going into. And I think and we talked about this in class, this has serious overlaps with techniques that you use within therapy. I think you can do that. Now, that counts as nudging. I think you can nudge people in that way. And that’s all I would ever try to do within an academic situation because I’m dealing with autonomous adults who I do not have any authority over other than scholastic authority. And with my children, it’s a different thing because I have parental authority over them, and I’m trying to do something much more profound. And I have permission. In fact, I have obligation to intervene, to intervene, perhaps interfere, intervene in their lives in a much more profound manner. And what what happens there is I have realized how often I have foolishly mistaken the thought that I have been foolishly mistaken in thinking that I could push people into wisdom. Trying to push my sons to being more wise has often had the opposite effect. So there’s been significant failure on my part. And I’ve tried to learn from that. It points me back to paying more attention to how much implicit narcissism and hubris can haunt even our what we think are even our noblest goals. So that’s an important thing. I don’t know if anybody other than a god, this is Socrates’s idea, has the wisdom to try and push wisdom on to anybody else. That’s what I’m concluding for that. What seems to have worked with my older son, my younger son, is 15. And he’s still, of course, in transition in profound ways. What seems to have worked with my older son, who is becoming just an incredibly decent and good person. What seems to work more with him is living an example and trying to invite him into aspects of my life and having shared interests so that in a way that it was talking that’s similar to what I was talking about, resolutions, he starts to catch little things, little habits, little ways of thinking, little ways of redirecting problems, ways of maybe improving study and solving this. He starts to catch those. And then what starts to permeate and percolate is something that starts to take on a life of its own. And what’s awakening in him now is the personal aspiration towards wisdom. So that’s what I think is the best advice that I can give in terms of what I’ve concluded from both where I’ve succeeded and where I’ve drastically failed and how you can try and if I’m trying to use this as a neutral verb, lead people to wisdom, when whatever wisdom I might possess. As I also argued on Thursday, I think one of the sure signs that someone is not wise is that they claim to be because wisdom is I think this is one of the profound truths. And I don’t have time to talk about how profound it is. We are always philosophers, which means lovers of wisdom. Wisdom is something that is always something we’re aspiring to. It is always how we are evolving, always how we’re developing. So I hope it’s understood that in everything I said about nudging people towards wisdom, that I’m speaking as a lover of wisdom and not as someone who is claiming to be wise. The next question is from the Patreon supporter Betterment Project. Seems like an appropriate segue from what we were just talking about. So thank you very much for your support. Can you detail why it is that existing religions do not hold the answers to the meeting crisis from your perspective? Now, that’s the I want to answer that question. In sort of a slow step by step fashion, because and I don’t attribute any. Any incorrect intent from the questioner. But there’s two ways in which you can be asking that question. Do I think let’s do one way. Do I think that individual people can find in the existing religions ways to cultivate wisdom and self-transcendence? Yes, I do. So I might have answered that question. Well, say that actually, I don’t think it’s true that the existing religions can’t give responses to the meeting crisis. I think that they can for certain people. I’ve met these people. It would be dishonest for me to claim that individual people do not find ways within the existing religions to find ways to cultivate wisdom and self-transcendence. If that’s what you’re looking for, that clearly happens. What I do, I want to make. I do want to make a comment that I notice that those people have a transformative relationship to those religions. They don’t simply sort of adopt religions sort of as in the classic orthodox form. They’re often interpreting and transforming them. So if that’s what we’re talking about, I think it is possible for the individual religions to do that. Now, let’s talk about what we might be asking. Do I think that or do I see these people as fine as they’re finding their individual responses to meaning the threat of meaning loss in their lives? Are they finding their individual responses to the threat of meaning loss in their lives? Are they also cultivating answers to how those meaning making projects can be safely re-homed within a scientific worldview that would otherwise be at best dismissive of them or is usually critical or deconstructive of them? What I don’t see in the existing religions or in these people that I otherwise have deep respect for and I want that remembered, please, is I don’t see an answer to those problems. I often see like I’m not going to really think about the science or maybe a little bit of a I’m going to resist the science in some way. I find that problematic. Here’s why I find that problematic. I take very deeply Heidegger’s point that the scientific worldview of the scientific worldview of the scientific worldview is deeply woven into every fabric of our cultural cognitive grammar and in our life because here’s what Heidegger, part of what Heidegger was arguing. When we talk about science, we don’t mean the abstract theories alone inside the ivory towers of academia. We mean the way in which we have an ontology folded around, folded around the scientific worldview. We have a scientific worldview that’s folded around us, supporting every aspect of us. That’s technology. Technology is the embodiment of a scientific worldview. So it’s kind of strange for somebody to say, for example, while they’re on YouTube, while they’re using computers, right, I don’t really accept the scientific worldview. That’s a performative contradiction. That doesn’t make any sense ultimately. You deeply accept it unless you just sort of, I don’t know, thinking that what am I hesitating to say? I don’t want to be insulting. But if you think that this technology is somehow not dependent on our science and the hyper technology that’s happening right now is so deeply enmeshed and the technology feeds back and enables the science, they are deeply wedded together and they surround and permeate our environment, our work, our communication, how we make use of almost all aspects of our cognition. They give us terms and ways of thinking. People talk about hardware and software with a real lot. That’s what I’m talking about. Okay? So the idea that we can somehow neglect the task of resituating meaning-making within a scientific worldview strikes me as not existentially viable. Of course, of course people should, and I engage in discussions with people who do this, make philosophical criticisms of particular scientific theories. That should be done. That should be done. That should always be done. That’s very different from trying to say, oh, I just sort of reject the scientific worldview. That strikes me as not existentially viable for us. So I don’t see the existing religions sort of en masse. Again, there’s probably individual theologians, if that’s a broad enough term for the philosophical intellectuals within the existing religions. Right? There’s probably individual theologians who are wrestling with this. I’ve read some of them. But do I see the institutions wrestling with how do we reintegrate the psychotechnologies and the practices of wisdom and meaning-making into the scientific worldview? Do I see them doing with that? Not that much. Because here’s what you have to struggle with. The scientific worldview is deeply undermining, and it has been doing it for centuries, and I’ve made an argument at length about this on this series. I’m not going to repeat it here. It’s been undermining the two-world mythos of the axial revolution that gave us an explanation of how our wisdom and meaning-making fits into the fabric of reality and gave us guidance and legitimated our practices. That axial age two-world mythology is disappearing. I do not see any of the religions providing an answer to it en masse. I’m talking with people. Again, I want to be really careful here. I’m talking with, you know, JP Marceau and Mary Cohen and some of the work that Paul Van der Kley. I see people, individual Christians, trying to say let’s try and break out of the two-world mythology and come up with an alternative ontology that might work. I see individuals doing that. Do I see Christianity as a whole doing that or Buddhism as a whole doing that? No. This helps to explain another important fact. Here’s two people I’ve met, one personally, got to have dinner with him. The other, that’s Stephen Batchelor, the other is a deep, you know, he’s a friend of mine, somebody I deeply respect and he was a former colleague of mine at U of T, and that’s Evan Thompson. He’s a great believer in Buddhism. Evan Thompson has written a book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, precisely for these kinds of arguments. They cannot find within Buddhist modernism, right, anything that addresses this concern that I’ve just raised. And these are deeply sensitive, deeply, deeply, people have practiced deeply, dedicated their lives, right? These are not external critics or dilettantes, and these are people of deep integrity, people who have, you know, were deeply identified with or at least deeply friendly to Buddhism making this point. So that’s what my concern is. That also helps to explain why I think for many people, it’s one of the fastest growing demographics, the nones, N-O-N-E-S, the established religions, the nones, the nones the established religions don’t have an answer. Because how they sort of mesh with, without getting into sort of magical new agey kind of thinking, how religions mesh with the scientific world view, measure, measure, mesh with this hyper technology and mesh with the way the science and the hyper technology are on ways that we’re often not even very aware of, fundamentally altering our cognition. I don’t see them, I don’t see that being done. And so I think that’s why the nones are, why that number is increasing. So one more point on this, and this is a point that I’ve made in a recent discussion with Jordan Hall, it was a private discussion, but Jordan gave me permission to talk about it. Right. So answering that question means reformulating our thinking in a fundamental way to get us out of the kind of thinking that has put us into the problems that we are facing right now. That we are facing such dramatic threats that we have to think in a dramatic, I think in a deep sense. We have to realize in a dramatically different way than we have before. And it’s unclear that we have the time scale that the established religions typically take in order to make that kind of fundamental transformation. Paul Van der Kley has made a very good point. In other ways he uses it as I think a legitimate criticism against some of my ideas, which is religions take a long time to change because they’re very conservative because you don’t want to, it’s hard fought and hard won wisdom and you don’t give it up easily and you don’t just go with any new flashy idea. That’s true. That means that religions are very conservative and very slow in their capacity to change. And we don’t have the time. We don’t have the luxury of that time. So what is normally, I would deeply agree with Paul, what is normally a very adaptive feature of religions is one that in this context is maladaptive. And let’s remember, every adaptation necessarily has context in which it will be maladaptive. So that’s my answer to that question. That’s why I don’t think the current religions are going to be solutions on mass. Again, there’s two different versions of that question and I’ve tried to answer them separately. And I would appreciate and I’m requesting that people do not take that question. I’ve clearly said that I think that the individual religions, sorry, religions could give people individual and legitimate in that sense responses to the meeting crisis. But here’s my reason for suspecting that the existing religions cannot. Now, one final point about that. That is not a deductively certain argument. I have not given an argument that I think is legitimate. That is not a deductively certain argument. I have not given an argument that forecloses on religion. I mean, I could only do that if I had a comprehensive and complete theory of religion. I do not have such a theory. I suspect that no one does. So Jonathan Pajot, for example, to bring another person of import into this, thinks that Christianity is going through such a transformation right now. I disagree with him for the reasons I’ve given you. But I respect Jonathan enough to say he might be right. My argument does not foreclose on his proposal. So I’ve given you an argument as to why I suspect he’s wrong. But that’s all it is. That’s all it is. Anyone I think who tries to make comprehensive, conclusive, absolute claims about religion is presupposing that they have an understanding of it that I seriously doubt any human being does. Here’s another question from Mackenzie Levitt, Patreon supporter. What most excites you about your new series on Authentic Dialogue? Wow, that’s such a great question because there’s so many things. So what’s most exciting about it is I’m just learning so much. I’m just learning so much. And as a kind of a geeky guy, that just really, really like, ah, that’s just been so exciting. I’m learning so much about something that I find so profound, which is the processes by which communication and transformation and aspiration occur. And I’m learning a lot about a person who’s a hero for me, the sage that I try to internalize, Socrates. So all of that has just been like, oh, you know, mind candy, mind candy. So that’s just been fantastic. Secondly, what’s really been exciting is taking up a lot of these new practices and getting to meet the people that are doing it and getting involved in these discussions and actually feeling the power of And starting to see the possibility of a psychotechnology dialectic that can really help us, you know, get more coupled to the dynamics of DLogos and enhance them so that we can access and exact collective intelligence into collective rationality, into collective wisdom, so that we have that meta-psycho technology that will give us ways of, you know, of guiding how we create and curate our communities and our ecologies and practices. And that, right, when you go from ideas to practice and you start to feel the power of these practices, and again, not just in the power of conviction, how they’re giving you new beliefs, but the power in how they’re actually reshaping your perspectival and participatory knowing, even reshaping your skills, it’s deeply impressive, right? Think of the word impressive. I’m noticing that I’m, like, even when I’m teaching, that we’re back to the percolation point, that these practices that I’ve been engaging with Guy and Jordan and with Chris and, you know, and other things, especially all the stuff I’ve been doing with Peter Lindbergh, and some of the stuff I’ve done, I’m going to be doing also with Edwin on empathy circling, right? That those things are, like, they percolate into you, and they start to transform your salience landscaping and the way you feel sort of coupled and connected and the way you can get into sort of mindset resonance. And I notice all of that shifting, and I’m even noticing how much more, this is like a normative awakening, how much more, it came up in my lecture yesterday, how much more the normativity of dialectical thinking, of being in dialogue, how much, I’m coming to see how much more valuable that is than just monologic, you know, argumentation. I’m really sensing, like, oh, yes, I see why, I see how in dialogue I can wed theorization to, you know, emotional involvement and identification, you know, to use Plato’s terms. I can sort of, I can integrate reason with spirit because I can bring the normativity of truth and falsity into proper integration with the normativity of being a cultural being. So the cultural cognitive machinery is more properly accessed in dialogue and dialectic than just in monologue and treatise. And so that’s going from being an idea to something that I can feel its fingers shaping the normativity of my discourse and my teaching and even the way I’m relating to people and being able to understand them and resonate with them. And that is just so deeply, deeply exciting. And so, you know, when you can taste, you know, when you can taste from the depths of your being, something that can right in the depths of people’s face-to-face meeting with others, you know, give them a way of, you know, ameliorating self-deception and opening up the connectedness that is so central to meeting life, when you can actually taste that, that’s so, it’s so exciting. It’s so rewarding. So thank you very much for that wonderful question. And I want to thank, again, I tried to mention as many people as I can, all the people that I mentioned, you know, that have been teaching me and practicing with me and guiding me and are there with me, like Peter Lindberg, you know, companions on the way, just so much. So much. I foresee it’s a transformative experience. You cannot foresee, you cannot infer and imagine your way through it until you are already anagrogically swept up within it. And so, so much gratitude for that. So much. Thank you very much. So, I want to now thank two Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. As always, your support is really crucial to continuing to produce the videos and supporting the science that’s going into addressing the meaning crisis. I want to once again mention again, and it follows exactly on the answer I gave to that previous question, the new series that’s coming out after Socrates, the Pursuit and Cultivation of Wisdom through Authentic Dialogue. So that’s coming out soon and it’s going to pick up on some of these themes. And hopefully you’ll get a better sense and better reason and evidence for my enthusiasm for this project of trying to get a deep understanding of ancient dialectic as both something that was between people, right, in conversation, but also between people and reality and transformation and aspiration and how that ancient template can give us something by which we can shape, carve, induce, draw out and improve these emerging practices of authentic dialogue and relating and give us something that is, I think, plausibly what Jordan Hall is asking for when he’s asking for the meta-psycho-technology. I also want to remind you of the Indiegogo campaign for the book, The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment. Please take a look at both the short video and the long video. And I ask for your support. I want to remind you once more, I am not going to draw any income from either the campaign or the book. Any income from the book is going into the Verbeke Foundation. The money from the campaign is going to support Daniel in his work on the book. And it’s excellent work on it. It’s been a great pleasure and a great gift to work with Daniel on this. So I please ask for you to consider that and consider supporting it. So I want to turn to now a couple of questions that are coming in live. So here’s one from Carmia Cynthia Clayton. Thank you, Carmia. I’ve noticed some of your comments on my videos and I appreciate them. Thank you again for your involvement and your support and your engagement. Her question is, what are your latest ideas for lessening the meaning crisis through a religion that’s not a religion? So I mean, part of it goes towards what I was just talking about. Some of my most recent ideas are about trying to get this meta-psycho-technology going and activate collective intelligence and exact it into collective rationality and collective wisdom. And that’s going to have an anagogic and analogic, a deeply symbolic and aspirational aspect to it. So in that sense, and I know this because I’ve been even involved in circling practices and some of these practices, that’s going to have a kind of very religious feel to it, even though it’s not going to be dedicated towards sort of some prototypical features of many religions and it’s not going to be based on the ontologies of those existing religions. So that’s one thing. The other thing is there’s a bunch of ideas that are coming out right now. And I’m going to ask for some patience on this because they’re actually emerging in my ongoing discussion with Jordan Hall. So Jordan and I had a recent conversation specifically on the religion that’s not a religion and some of the powerful ideas that were coming out of that discussion. We’re not prepared yet to release that publicly. We’re going to have a couple more discussions and then come back and release that. I would point you to something else. I had an excellent, I’m very grateful to it, conversation with Andrew Sweeney about this. It’s going to come out on his channel. And he asked me a bunch of excellent questions about the religion that’s not a religion. And because I’m running out of time here, there was a long, I had a much longer space there and forum. And it was dialogic because he was asking me questions and probing in which I try to answer that question in depth. So I’m giving you, I’m trying not to do a cop out here. I’m saying there’s a place you can go to look at those ideas. Andrew is going to release the video shortly, I believe. Andrew has also written a really good commentary on Medium about my arguments and ideas about the religion that’s not a religion. That’s already up there. I recommend you go there and take a look at that. And then in addition to that, the promise that Jordan, Hall and I are going to shortly in the future, again, in dialog format, release a video about getting much clearer about what we mean, what we’re talking about and some newer ideas. In connection with that, I want to remind people something that I keep saying. We’re not trying to found a religion or anything like that. Please, that is not what is going on. Neither are we trying to destroy any existing religions. There is something happening right now. There are emerging communities of practice. And they often approach me because they hope that the work I’ve done can help them to communicate, to train, to connect with other such communities. And instead of just doing that sort of haphazard, it’s the idea is like, no, no, can we do this in a highly reflective fashion? Can I do it in conjunction with some of the brightest and best and committed minds on this? Can I do it in conjunction with this project about dialectic and dialogos so that we can perhaps guide this emerging process so that it can address the meaning crisis more comprehensively and more effectively and hopefully also thereby also provide a community network of communities in which we can start to also, as we resolve issues around meaning, start to bring wisdom to the problems in the world right now that are exigent. That’s the project. So please understand it that way. So another question. Seen any good movies lately? Yeah, I have. I went with my two sons recently to see 1917. And I was deeply impressed. Movies that really impressed me are movies in which there’s this wonderful consonant between the use of the format and the content of the movie and the message of the movie. So like Lawrence of Arabia is a prototypical example of that. You know, David Lean just did this amazing thing. And what I found was something analogous in 1917 that I like. So they have this thing that’s it’s a little bit of a it’s like it. There’s a little bit of manipulation, but it’s right. It’s like it’s a continuous shot. It’s like real time, continuous shot. And so you’re following these two characters around. Right. So, you know, there’s a temptation with World Wars to step back and think of them broad scale. The problem we do that is we turn off a lot. This is what cognitive science research shows. We turn off a lot of our moral and empathetic machinery when we move to this high level of control. Instead, what 1917 is doing is keeping you really immersed. So you’re not standing back and reflecting on your own emotions. You’re actually being present in a participatory way within the situation. And you’re so you’re deeply engaged with this. So what’s happening, of course, is you get a lot of effective responses because, you know, there’s there’s moments of fear. There’s moments of heroism and you’re getting all of that going on. Well, of course, I’m not I’m not going to speak about specific stuff because I don’t want to do any spoilers. But you know, there’s a lot of things that you can do to help you get to the point where you’re not just going to be spoilers, but that immersive right presencing and effective engagement is to put you face to face and try to really hear what I’m saying when I say that put you face to face with the deep absurdity of trench warfare and World War One and what it says about even what I was talking about earlier about the deep enmeshment of science and technology into the guts and fabric and the deaths of our lives. I Titanic death and the absurdity of it. And to think that World War One wasn’t enmeshed with science and technology and that World War One didn’t dramatically change the cultural cognitive grammar of Europe, I think, is to be naive. And so 1917, I think, is a beautiful movie and work of art for conveying you into that and then through that conveying that message to you. So I highly recommend it. I hope that it’s not a movie that you enjoy. That’s the wrong verb, but it’s a move. It’s a it’s a work of art that draws from you and gets you to think and understand and even have your sensibility transformed to a significant degree. So here’s a question from Rice Castle Twitter. You speak about having and being modes and we often try to solve being problems with having mode approaches. Do people also try to solve having modes, having problems from the being mode? Yes, they do. And I mean, they’re somewhat comic sometimes, but they can be tragic and you can get instances of this in therapy where people need to do some very having mode things they need to go out. So let’s say this is only meant to be one example. They need to get a job. They need to get a job. Right. They need to have financial resources so that they can feed and take care of themselves. They need to do that. And instead of doing that, they go into this metaphysical abstraction about who am I and what am I and what’s ultimately real and what is a good human life. These are all questions, of course, that should be asked. They are being mode questions. But when people are asking those questions as a way of actually avoiding the concrete practical task of getting a job and getting food because you need to have a job and have food, they can often get stuck and they can get stuck in kind of a Peter Pan situation where they’re always contemplating all the metaphysical possibilities of who and what they could be. I have so much potential. I could be this. I could be that. I could be I could have this life. I could have that. And they don’t want to kill any of the possibilities. But decision means to cut. And at some point, you have to stop glorying in all of the possibilities and actually do something. That’s, of course, why we have the mythos of Peter Pan. Right. You can’t live in Neverland. You can’t be listen to the language, a lost boy forever. And so it is very possible to have a mode of confusion in which you’re treating having problems from the being mode. Thank you very much for joining me in this Q&A. Again, excellent questions. I hope I strive to do good service to these excellent questions. We’re going we’re doing this every third Friday of the month. I’ll be back on schedule next month. I had some personal issues that required that we moved things. And I appreciate everybody’s patience and understanding about that reminder once again about Patreon support. I’m not drawing any income from it. It is supporting the science, supporting the video series. It’s supporting the work we’re doing. The Indiegogo campaign. Same thing. It’s not I’m not drawing an income for it. It’s supporting a project that’s beneficial to a lot of people. And I want to thank all the supporters of Patreon. And you can, of course, support my work on the meeting crisis by going to Patreon.com slash John for Vicky. Thank you very much, everyone, for your time and attention. I look forward to interacting with you again.