https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ODcr0va7pAY
instead of the usual trend of people attacking each other’s belief systems. I think this is a really important question and it has a kind of an extensive answer. I’ll concentrate more on the second part of the answer, which is the recommendation for wisdom practices. I think a lot of the perennial problems can be found within ideological systems, both within the individuals partaking or participating in those ideologies and with the way sort of groups are also organized around ideology. The main thing, I think the main kind of risk that I see ideologies going for is an attempt for a kind of cognitive closure, a kind of completeness, as many people have pointed out. This is not an idea of which all to me. There’s a totalizing aspect to ideologies. And I think not only does that, of course, trap us within propositional thinking and disconnect us from procedural, perspectival and participatory, and I’ve argued at length why I think that’s the case and why it’s profound. I think the way in which ideologies push for this totalization and closure puts them fundamentally at odds with both the machinery of relevance realization as something that is ongoing and evolving. And if you’ll allow me a metaphor, the machinery of reality, which is ultimately inexhaustible and dynamically unfolding. And so I think the risk for the risks that sort of specific to ideologies is exactly the way in which they prematurely and permanently try to inappropriately collapse the complexity, the complexity of reality and of our cognition. We all need to do that. We have to at times compress and collapse the complexity. But when then that is coupled to claims of certainty that therefore justify actions undertaken in the name of that ideology, that’s particularly where all of this becomes deeply, deeply dangerous. And when that happens, all of our paradigmatic propositions and pictures that we use to try and clarify things for ourselves actually start to blind us in a powerful way. So the whole thing becomes a kind of self-deception in the thing that is supposed to provide a framing lens for us actually becomes something opaquely blinding and we’re looking at it rather than looking through it. So in that way of thinking, I want to use a biblical term to describe what I think the most besetting problem is or risk for ideologies. And it’s a nice one because it’s mnemonic and that’s idolatry. So idolatry is when we forget, not just in assertion, but forget in our existential mode, how much our cognition and how much reality transcend our egocentric grasp and that we can lose our connection of a Ulami sumptilics term to what is ultimate when we forget that. And we take our belief systems to be complete, consistent, and finished. And of course, you can even hear Godelian reasons why that’s ultimately a failed project. We have to find better ways of addressing the existential anxieties that people attempt to alleviate through ideologies. And so what I’m proposing is we need two kinds of wisdom practices that will help address this tendency towards closure, perfectionism, certainty, idolatry of ideologies. We need ones that make us capable of dealing with incompleteness, dealing with imperfection, and still valuing the connections that are being formed within cognitive processes that cannot bring us certainty, cannot bring us completeness, cannot bring us finality. And so we need to stop pretending, it may have made me a little bit harsher, but stop pretending that we have achieved these. And so one set of practices would be needed in order to make people more comfortable dealing with the existential anxieties that are often triggered by ambiguity and uncertainty. And there is a whole host of practices around this. And that has to do with helping to train people in mindfulness, to step back and look at their processing rather than automatically looking through it, cognitive reframing things. Of course, people also have to do their own particular psychodynamic work and whatever practices will help address that to alleviate their idiosyncratic causes of anxiety. So you’re going to need a set of practices for reducing anxiety. Then I would say you need a set of practices that get people more familiar with the flow state in particular, that flowing kind of coupledness to reality in which what makes the experience so wonderful is not any sense of it being fixed and complete and closed, but instead exactly the opposite. The flow state is so wondrous to people because it takes them to the edge of awe, it takes them to the sense of ongoing opening, ongoing discovery. So this, of course, leads to the general point, which is the set of wisdom practices that are needed are ones that are going to achieve some kind of reciprocal opening and anagogy. So you have anxiety reduction practices, you have anagogic practices, and then the third kind of practice you want to bring in is the one I’m doing a lot of work on right now, especially with Christopher Mastapietro and Peter Lindbergh, and then all the excellent discussions I’m having with Guy Zendstock and Jordan Hall and also with Andrew Sweeney. This is the set of practices that I call dialectic that are designed to engender dialogos. These are practices in which we try to bring into our dialoging with other that feature of reciprocal opening, and we try to reorient towards what we’re valuing, valuing our ability to connect to each other, ourselves, and reality, and to evolve our meaning-making machinery. And so what’s interesting is Peter and I are exploring the idea of a lot of these emerging dialogical practices, and I will go into this in great length when I’m in the series after Socrates. But we need practices, and one practice that might do this is Eamon Royce’s practice on empathy circling, because what it’s designed to do is bring people from bad faith to good faith dialog. There’s a practice I’ve been talking with another patron about that’s social noting, which is a sort of group mindfulness practice that gets people into a kind of sync. There’s various other practices that you do, sort of warming up for circling, that shift people into getting the conditions right for a collective flow state within collective intelligence. And then once that circling kind of practice is flowing, what you can then do is think about, there’s a lot here, but you can think about a way in which you’re getting a resonance in which you’re moving between immersion in the practice, in which you are exemplifying meaning-making, and perhaps exemplifying reciprocal opening, and exemplifying wisdom, and then stepping back and noting it, explicating it, drawing that out, and then bringing in sort of philosophical questionings, not as abstract theorizing, but as something that is going to be woven into the flowing texture of the conversation. The question might be, well, what is meaning? What is wisdom? What is it to love someone else? And to bring that into the dialog. And I think if we shifted to these dialogical processes, we could do the most important shift, which is indicative of rationality. So what I’m proposing is, let’s try to bring into our collective processes one of the key things that is a marker of rationality in individuals. One of the key things that marks rationality in individuals is the shift off the fixation on the product and the position that you’re taking, and a shift onto participation in a process. And that, if we could, that, what I’m suggesting, that is what we need to figure out how to bring into our collective distributive cognition, ability to, as groups, shift off product and position and shift into participation in process. Because what we need is not another ideology. We’ve had that, we’ve tried that, we keep trying it. Instead, what we need is a reconnection with the lifeblood of wisdom and meaning making. That is what we need. And we can do that. We can reweave collective intelligence and we can spin it into collective rationality. And together we can aspire to collective wisdom, because that’s what we need to solve our problems. So thank you, Daniel, for that very extensive, sorry, that very important question. And I hope my somewhat extensive answer at least is good grounds for thought and further discussion between us. The next question is from the patron, Mackenzie Levitt. It’s always good to get questions from Mackenzie. Always appreciated. The question is, for you personally on your own journey, how would you describe the most important insight you’ve ever had? That’s a rough one in terms of trying to sort of decide. I guess the one I would pick, because it’s sort of a root insight to a bunch of other things, was when I had, so a little bit of a rough one, so a little bit of autobiography to set up the context. So I’d finished my PhD and I’d sort of zeroed in on this problem of relevance and how crucial it is. And I’d done some work with my very good friend Dan Schiappi about difficulties about trying to generate scientific theories of relevance. And I had become quite sort of depressed. Part of it was I was done my PhD and whenever you’re done your PhD you just go into a depression. But the other aspect of it was, for reasons that I take a lot of time to articulate in the series, and so I hope I’m not being presumptuous now, I think that relevance realization is just fundamentally central to our cognitive agency, to our meaning making, to our meaning in life, to our experience of religio, our experience of the sacredness. And this had all become clear to me and then it was like, well, I’d seem to got to a place where there’s no explanation for this. There’s no scientific explanation even possible for this, for some of the reasons I actually cover in this series. And that was a really sort of weird and uncomfortable place, was kind of deep stuckness in my life. And it made me feel like there was a kind of perspectival clash and absurdity between my scientific work and my embodied existence. But then I had the insight that I didn’t need a theory of relevance. What I actually needed was a theory of relevance realization. And that that was deeply analogous to what Darwin had done. And then that sort of unlocked everything for me in a really profound way. And that insight has been sort of a touchstone for me. I keep coming back to it again and again and again. That’s why I got perhaps a little bit, I don’t know, brusque when I was talking about ideologies, right? And I think that the attempt to come up with a definition, a final account, a perfect rendering of what’s relevant, what’s sacred, what’s ultimately real to us, these are all deeply, deeply misplaced. And that comes from, for me, the depth, I believe, the depth of that insight that we can’t have a theory of relevance, but we can have a theory of relevance realization. And we therefore need to fundamentally reorient how we understand knowledge, meaning making, wisdom, sacredness, etc. The next question is from the patron Mike. What is your take on the hard problem of consciousness? Property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism. So Mike, that’s a great question. I’m currently teaching a course right now on consciousness. And I take about 18 hours of lecture to try and answer that question because I think the topic deserves it. I’ve written a paper with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu, an unpublished manuscript. I think it’s like 65 pages long or something like this. It’s a huge sort of Frankensteinian beast that if I ever want to get it published, I’m going to have to break it up into smaller documents. It’s sort of circulating. It’s taken on a weird life of its own. Why am I saying all that? I want to say all that because I’m aware that no matter what I say on this, it’s going to be therefore too brief and inadequate because we have very limited time. So I want to give you a basic idea of what my position is. I think the hard problem of consciousness, which is generated by arguments concerning the explanatory gap, which I won’t review. I’ve talked about these in a previous Q&A. I think we need to step back and break up the phenomena for which we’re finding the hard problem. So the hard problem of consciousness for many of you who are listening is the idea that there seem to be aspects of consciousness that we will not be able to explain from a scientific perspective, at least from a computational perspective. I take that the problem actually breaks up into three different problems. The first problem is sort of problems surrounding our sense of subjectivity and our sense of ownership and the privacy of our consciousness. And then there’s the problem of qualia. And unlike many people, I break this up into two kinds of qualia that need to be distinguished to actually account for a lot of the phenomenology. There are the typical ones, the prototypical ones, the adjectival qualia, like the blueness of blue and the greenness of green, which doesn’t seem to be anything we can give a physical account of. But then there are also the adverbial qualia. The adverbial qualia have to do with the way consciousness has a here-ness, a now-ness to me, the way it’s centering upon me. And those are the adverbial qualia because they have to do more with a way of being conscious than with a particular moment of content. So here’s the thing I want to say. I think the adjectival qualia for which much blood and ink is spilled in this question of consciousness actually have too high of a status in the problem. What do I mean by that? I think there’s clear cases that the adjectival qualia are not necessary for consciousness. This is called the pure consciousness event. Many people have experienced it. I’ve experienced it. You are conscious. You’re not conscious of anything. You’re not conscious, even conscious of consciousness. You just have a raw participatory consciousness. And that says to me that the adjectival qualia are not necessary for consciousness and therefore are not fundamental to its functionality. What doesn’t disappear in the pure consciousness event are the adjectival qualia. People, they don’t lose here-ness, now-ness, the way things are sort of bound together. In fact, that becomes sort of extended into sort of a kind of absolute here-now-ness, unity, eternity. So the adverbial qualia don’t go away. The adjectival qualia remain. Also, I think the adjectival qualia are not sufficient for consciousness. I think if you had consciousness and it was completely not bound with any particular perspective, had no here-ness, now-ness, was in no way bound in intelligibility to anything else, I do not think you would say that you had therefore had an instance of consciousness. That kind of purely atomic qualia, adjectival qualia, would not constitute consciousness. Okay. If adjectival qualia are neither necessary nor sufficient, whereas the adverbial qualia seem to be, then we can move towards talking about how we might address the adverbial qualia. And here’s where I then would have to point to larger arguments that I made in the series about consciousness. I think we can give a naturalistic explanation of these adjectival features, qualia, if you like, in terms of relevance realization. Relevance realization gives us how things are aspectualized. It gives us our salience landscaping. It gives us the here-ness and now-ness and the fitted togetherness of consciousness. It gives us centrality because things are relevant to us. So it gives us our perspectival knowing. In fact, this is what I would argue, that consciousness is our participatory knowing of and through our perspectival knowing. And that we can give an explanation of that in terms of both its functionality and how it’s generating consciousness, and the experiential aspects of consciousness in terms of relevance realization. So in that sense, I think ultimately the machinery of intelligence, when properly understood, dovetails with the machinery of consciousness. And this helps me to also explain something that many people who talk about the hard problem have a difficulty explaining. The deep intuition, the profound often intuition people have, that the attribution of consciousness is highly correlated with the attribution of intelligence. People attribute consciousness where they see good evidence for sophisticated intelligence. And they have expectations of sophisticated intelligence when they’re more willing to attribute consciousness. That sense of perspectival knowing and centrality given by relevance realization also helps to explain the subjectivity and the mindness of consciousness. So what does that make me? I’m a non-reductionist physicalist. I do not think you can explain all the things I just explained like relevance realization at the level of the ontology given to us by physics. I think that we’re talking about emergent aspects that are carried in real patterns. And that, therefore, what I’m talking about is ultimately consistent with physics and with naturalism, but is not reducible to it. So that’s my somewhat, for many of you, that was probably taxing on your patience and attention as I seem to have gone on and about consciousness. Because I hope you can understand that that was, to my mind, an answer that was radically too short to address consciousness, which is the holy grail of cognitive science and sort of one of the last ditch defenses that many people take in the broader public discourse against naturalism. Another question from the patron Rob. You talked about virtues such as courage, but are there any vices that you think are important to avoid in general? How do you conceptualize vice and how does it fit into your system of thought? Yeah, I mean, I think that first of all, I want to indicate that I think the four cardinal virtues are ones that should be given preeminence, which are wisdom, courage, justice and softness, which is not really well translated by temperance or moderation. This is your ability to basically have educated your salience landscape so that you are tempted towards what is good and what is true and what is beautiful. You’ve you’ve you’ve you’ve sort of doing the opposite of bullshitting your salience landscape is been properly trained so that you are naturally led towards our normative ideals. That’s softness. I think therefore the vices that we should pay attention to are the vices that are the opposite. The lack of the cardinal virtues, but I have sort of an Aristotelian idea here that when we talk about a vice with respect to a virtue, we’re talking about vices both of excess and vices of deficit. I think what a virtue is, it’s very, very, very much overlapping with what a virtual engine is. It’s a set of enabling constraints that that lift you away from vices of deficiency and then a set of selective constraints that keep you from vices of excess. And therefore they constantly help evolve your optimal gripping on reality so that you much better track our normative ideals. So what do I mean by that? Well, the classic example is, of course, Aristotle’s courage, right? Courage. Courage is not the ability to face danger. All of the virtues have an aspect of wisdom to them. Courage is the ability to see through the way your fear might be bullshitting you about what needs to be done or about what is really going on or both. And that’s not the same thing. And once you see that, you see that you can have a vice of excess. You can be full hearted. You can just face danger. You could jump off cliffs and run into traffic. And that’s not a virtue precisely because, right, it’s your virtual, your capacity to regulate your optimal gripping on the world is lopsided. There’s not enough selective constraints keeping you from the vices of excess. But right, there’s also the vice of cowardice where you let that fear blind you and prevent you from doing what needs to be done, seeing how things really are. And of course, those are often related. So you need enabling constraints that literally encourage you, that motivate you, that make you consider more options, that open you up and provoke you to explore and take a risk and take a chance. And so what you’re seeing, of course, is that, you know, I’m describing vices and virtues in terms of the same machinery by which I explain relevance realization. Because as I think, I’m trying to indicate virtue. I mean, there’s a virtue originally meant power. Virtue is a capacity. It is a way of seeing and being such that you see through various kinds of illusions and self deceptions and you see into the affordances of what will take you in us in the sense of like being tempted. You see through and you see into, you’re drawn forth, educed, you’re drawn forth towards what is true and good and beautiful. So I think, you know, if you think about each one of the cardinal virtues and vices of excess and vices of deficiency, I would recommend those as the primary vices you attempt to avoid. This is from the patron Elmo. I was interested to hear what you thought about the scientific approach and if you thought it relates to your series in a meaningful way. Yeah, very much. This is, you know, this is something I’m currently exploring. I think I’ve read a lot of the books, especially the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about, the one that I read about I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about, I read about. And even though I read a lot about it, it’s hard for me to damper round the world because itgasms comes across as one particular phenomenon which it’s happening dishes that it’s happening business that it’s going on and hanging onto. through those kinds of knowing. And so I think Gupta’s work is very important to me. The reason why I’m hesitating is there’s that work and the work he did on the understanding, the deep understanding of symbolism. There’s an intuition in my mind that they’re deeply connected, but I’m not confident right now in trying to articulate what that intuition looks like. So I apologize for my hesitancy, but there’s something going on there, right? This new way of seeing and being that reconnects us, takes us into our deepest existential and ultimate concerns because those kinds of knowing are actually appropriate. The perspectival and the participatory especially are deeply appropriate for our existential and ultimate concerns. And the way Gupta tried to break out of both empiricism and rationalism or positivism or empiricism, because those all sort of trade around with each other. I think that’s also deeply consonant with how I’m trying to get back to the transjectivity that’s disclosed in perspectival and participatory knowing. And I think that’s also what Gupta… So look at me, I’m doing all this grasping gesture because I’m trying to reach for something here, but I think that’s an excellent question. And this is a line of thought I’m currently pursuing in depth. We have another question from the patron, the Betterman Project. Thank you very much. I thank you everyone, of course, for your support. In the art world, we sometimes speak of someone’s style as a kind of fingerprint, something which though it can resemble a genre is unique to that individual as a trace of their skills, of elements, of idea. Could the cognitive styles of rationality you speak of and after the meaning crisis, episode 42 be similar, where thinkers can fall into a similar school but have very distinct habits, propensities, and moves that are indicative of a person’s cognitive style? Or would we expect cognitive styles to be less personalistic and stylistic? That is a really good question. That’s a very good question. I would like a lot of time to think about that. That’s an excellent question. Like it’s an excellent cog-sci question, but it has also excellent philosophical import for the way in which rationality, you know, connect. What do I mean by like, our higher cognitive processes like rationality are not just features of us that we possess, we identify with them. They’re part of our sense of self. And what’s interesting about them, and this question points to it, is, you know, rationality. That’s the feature being mentioned here. I’m not claiming it’s exclusive, please, but that’s the feature here. Our rationality, we think of it simultaneously as something that gives us our identity as persons and moral agents and human beings, but we also think it’s bound up with that particular kind of entity we call ourself and the way in which we make sense of things. That is a really, really good question. And I think the answer is that, you know, that in addition to sort of, you know, the basic S1, S2 distinction, you know, where S1 is very bottom up and self-organizing and S2 is very top down and linear, I think we can talk about a lot more specificity, that kind of more individual style that would be expressed in how people are addressing their… See, part of what rationality and character, and this is an Aristotene idea, right, is your character, you cultivate your character not just to aspire to what is good, which we all should do generically, but also idiosyncratically to compensate for your own personal proclivities and tendencies towards vice or deficiency, right? So how, so if, you know, if I’m tending to, because of my background and my constitution towards being a coward, the way in which I need to be more rational is I need a style that emphasizes a lot of practices that enhance my ability to see through the… There are universal ways in which human beings are pursuing rationality and have particular cognitive styles around that, yeah, there’s gonna be very specific ways in which people are cultivating their rational character, their ability to reason, et cetera, that are gonna be idiosyncratically reflective. And this, of course, yeah, this makes sense, because this was Aristotle’s idea, right, that the virtue is always relative to the individual and of course for Aristotle, who has a developmental perspective relative to the development of the individual and also to their context. That doesn’t mean the virtues are relative, this is not a form of relativism, it has to do with what I just talked about, that me being virtuous in how I’m making sense is going to have some idiosyncratic specific features because of my personal constitution, my personal past, and my personal course of development. Thank you, that was an excellent question, I really appreciate that question a lot, really made me think very deeply. Here’s another question from patron Dan, thank you again, Dan. What role does latency mismatch play in relevance realization and are there any wisdom practices for slow agents adapting to a fast pace arena? So latency mismatch is, let me give you an example, this comes out of a conversation I actually had with Dan, and so I appreciate this and I wanna give him credit, but let’s talk about the degree to which temporal relevance and timing actually matter to your cognition, something that Pascal pointed out a long time ago when he talked about the spirit of finesse as opposed to the spirit of geometry. So for example, that’s something that has to do more with sort of neurological, biological limitations, right? And how fast you can sort of process things, imagine you were to take one of my lectures and play it on triple speed, three times as fast as it normally is. It would be very, very hard, let’s say we get it so you can still hear every word, but the pausing, and I mean, I know my lectures are already quite dense, so they would get super dense, they would get temporally super dense and probably become impenetrable to you, because the speed at which your sensory motor loop is looping has a certain timing to it. And Dan is pointing to the fact that people have differences in this looping. I think he’s also alluding to the fact that the way we’re cyborgs and enmeshed with technology, we’re exposing ourselves to environments in which the tempo of things is speeding up. And Han talks about this wonderfully in his book, The Scent of Time, and how we’re losing the ability to linger and to experience the duration of things, the unfolding of things, the development of things. I talked about this earlier, if you remember, with the death of melody within popular music and things like that. And so there’s two things here. There’s two recommendations. First, the one that Han made is we need to remember to stop and to move to aspects of reality that are more in comportment with our, for lack of a better term, our natural temporal latency and our sensory motor loop and things like how fast our working memory refreshes and all kinds of things like that, which I won’t go into technical detail. So I think that you could make a good case with that what Han is saying is that this is a shift in our existential mode. We move into a spirit of finesse. We open up how we’re experiencing time so that timing and lingering and the unfoldment of things is what we’re caring more about, rather than again, getting to our specific goal states. And that will help with remembering the being mode and help with alleviate the kind of modal confusions that I think Han is talking about in lots of his criticisms of, you know, in the Burnout Society, the Transparency Society and the Agony of Eros. But Dan is also making a recommendation of, well, but can we also help speed people up so that they don’t become, you know, I want a term that indicates a class of people that are sort of pushed away, you know, maybe like peasants or something. We don’t want people that fall behind in the ability to couple to the technosphere. And if they can’t couple to the technosphere because of the rapidity, right, of the way, of its turnover, of its timing, right, the latency that Dan is talking about, the relevance realization machinery can’t couple to it, that they are going to be excluded. And they’re going to be excluded from where the culture is moving. The culture is no longer meeting in the town square or the church or even in, right, you know, the university or the market even, the marketplace. You know where the culture is meeting? Here, this is where the culture is meeting. And it’s meeting increasingly in hyper technology. So if we don’t address how to help people with that, then of course, they are going to be excluded from the culture as a process of meaning making and as a locus of influence and power, which I think is the deep import of Dan’s question. Now, that’s a tricky thing because basically what we need to then think about, and I think this is an important recommendation, is that in our ecology of practices, and I talk about this in terms of kinds of practices, we need practices that are designed as transitional practices that are helped, designed to get people, right, more appropriately connected. Obviously, they’re going to need to train a lot of the self-deceptive machine, right, a lot of the machinery for overcoming self-deception because of the way in which the technosphere and this social media sphere and all those things are just awash in so much bullshit. I mean, literally, we’re doing things already beyond our understanding because of the way in which the technology and the systems are taking on a life of their own and running away from us. So we need to especially train people in that. We need to train people to increase the timing and their finesse for this world. And that would, that we need somebody who would be good at sort of teaching people, you know, what Shikrit Senthimahai talks about, about how to get the right kind of feedback, the right kind of coupling, and to break things up and chunk the task in such a way that it’s possible to start getting in the flow state with respect to interacting with this arena in a powerful way. And I don’t know what that looks like specifically. I mean, this is something where I’d have to defer to other people’s expertise. I could talk about, you know, what cognition can do as a cognitive scientist, and I’ve invoked some of those processes, but what the specific pedagogical tools that would be needed in order to get people into a flowing finesse with the technosphere. That’s something I think that’s gonna require collective intelligence and a network of relevant expertise. But thank you for that very, very, very good question. Thank you to Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. As always, your support is really crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to find solutions to the mean crisis. So a reminder about After Socrates, but I have an announcement to make about After Socrates. And so this is important. I’ve decided for a couple of reasons that I’m actually going to postpone the release of After Socrates to the end of July. One of my primary reasons for doing this is that there are some funding opportunities that have emerged and that would help me with fund the production of the series, and therefore I’m gonna pursue these funding opportunities. So that’s sort of an economic and logistical reason. The second reason is that this project is becoming profound for me. I’m just getting deeper and deeper into it, just doing some really important work with Christopher Mastro Pietro and Peter Lindbergh and others and the dialogues I’m having with Guy Sandstock and Jordan Hall, et cetera, the work with Rebel Wisdom. So I want to continue that research and I also want to continue these discussions, which brings me to some good news. There’s gonna be two new series that are gonna be starting very soon, gonna be released very soon. It’s yet to be named, but basically it’s gonna be more of these discussions, more of these Socratic dialogues with people, and the basic theme is what does spirituality mean for us now in our, what’s the relationship between spirituality and science and spirituality and the meaning crisis and spirituality as a, and this change, this radical change that we’re facing with the hyper technology and what Thomas Bjorkman calls the meta crisis. So that’s, and I’ve already filmed several of these discussions and so that’s, they’re gonna be released regularly on the Friday slot. I’m also starting to film tomorrow, a new series with Anderson Todd that some of you’ve met and also Leo Ferraro, who I’ve mentioned, is co-author with mine, you might have seen him on some videos with Guy Sandstock. It’s Minding Media. The idea there is to try to, try to bring some of these ideas that can be very often abstract and difficult for people into a more accessible arena of discussion by looking for these philosophical topics, these cognitive science topics within various movies. Like for example, I recently wrote a letter, a wiki exchange with David Chapman about Joker and how we might see a shift from the zombie myth to a kind of really nasty narcissism and what that might mean or thinking about arrival and the interesting questions it poses about the relationship between language and cognition and human identity and time. So this is the kind of thing we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take a look at movies. I’ll give sort of like a 15 minute mini lecture, bring up some questions and then there’ll be a roundhouse, just continual roundhouse discussion between Leo and Anderson and I about trying to get some deeper understanding of our meaning making processes and our aspirations towards wisdom and spirituality in depth by taking an in depth look at some of these very thought provoking movies. So that’s all coming out. One more thing, there’s currently an Indiegogo campaign for a book that I’m working on with Daniel Craig called The Cognitive Continuum. This is a book, there’s two videos out there that give you a short one. If you just want a quick idea, a long one which Daniel and I have a long discussion. The cognitive continuum is this idea. It’s a line of argumentation that went through after awakening from the meaning crisis. And that’s this idea that there’s a continuum between the processes of insight, flow, misdivide experience, higher states of consciousness, transformative experiences and enlightenment and trying to work that out. And so I wanna state again, clearly, I do not get any income from this Indiegogo campaign nor will I get any income from this book. The point of raising the funding is to help Daniel who is not a university professor, but a student to help fund him so that he can devote the time to partner with me in the writing of this book. He’s also taking on a lot of extra tasks that need funding about putting together the artwork, et cetera. So please consider supporting that Indiegogo campaign. Okay, we’re gonna shift to some live questions now from the chat. And this is from the patron, The Golden Thread. Could third order attentionality and imitation be necessary acceptations for psychotechs like language, numeracy, et cetera? If so, would the nature function of amnesis become fundamental for cognitive science? I think so. This is tricky because there’s an issue where we might wanna think, I think acceptation, of course, is very important. But the imitation is very necessary, very much for internalizing other people’s perspectives and giving us sort of second order cognition like I argued in the series. I think that amnesis, the ability to imitate other, another reason why I’m hesitating is because I’m sort of doing work right now with Dan Schiappi and connected to the After Socrates project about the sense of we agency, where people, when they’re in groups, like in circling, they go from I and you to we, and there’s even a sense of sort of a third factor above and beyond all the individual participants. And how this relates to amnesis is what you see is that there’s stuff happening in things like circling in which people, there’s something like opponent processing, a self-organizing process, in which people move between mimicry, and in that mimicry, they’re trying to get sort of what Durkheim called the mechanical solidarity, which people are sort of behaving very much in the same way. And the amnesis is, of course, therefore crucial to engendering that aspect of the process. The effect of collective distributed cognition. But that is counterbalanced by people doing something else, where they enter into complementarity, where they’re not mimicking, but they’re doing something that complements, that’s different from what, so like for example, if you and I are dancing, think about the interplay between mimicry in which we’re doing the same thing in complementarity where I’m actually doing, might be doing the opposite thing. You’re stepping forward and I’m stepping back, for example. And what you see is people are constantly fluidly moving between these poles in which they are bound by a kind of mechanical solidarity, and then they’re bound by a deep interdependence because each part on its own can’t do the function. Like if you’re lifting a table and one person has to be walking backwards, another person has to be walking forward. And so there’s this constant shift going on there. So that’s why I was hesitating when I was talking about mimesis. I think mimesis is very important, as I argued for internalizing a lot of important psychotech. But I think when we’re gonna move to psychotech of dialectic, with the psychotech that helps to engender and enhance theologos that I talked about earlier, then we’re gonna need to think about mimesis and complementarity as forming a much more sophisticated opponent processing for how collective intelligence is operating within distributed cognition. And you can see why this is really important when trying to understand how we can get to dialogos. So I hope that was a helpful question. I really wanna get to this next question because David Swedlow is a very good patron and he often participates in the watch parties that Future Thinker make about my videos from Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. And he often has very insightful things to say. Here’s his question, participatory knowing seems the hardest lens to pull away and look at rather than look through, but this seems essential. Perhaps shamanic practices do this. Thoughts or clarifications on this? Yeah, I think that’s cool. So let’s try and work at what’s participatory knowing again. Participatory knowing is at the deepest levels, right? At the level of the fundamental framing, the way in which you’re coupled to the world so that the agent arena co-form in a transjectively bound manner, right? And so a way of thinking about this, Chris and I just did this in the chapter that we’re writing for, we’re hoping will come out in the Meta Modern Anthology on Socratic dialogue and dialogos about this idea about participatory knowing and the idea of the mutual shaping, for example, an organism and its environment by its evolutionary heritage so that affordances open up between them. So for example, because of my evolutionary heritage, I can be shaped to certain kinds of objects, right? There’s an affordance of graspability where of course it’s not graspable to a dragon fly, at least not in the liftable sense of graspable. And so,