https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nk7VHiCzf2k
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. First of all, I want to begin by apologizing that we needed to do the time shift. Normally we do the Q&A the third Friday of the month, 3 p.m. Eastern time. We’re in October here in Canada, Toronto, and we’re going through a period where the weather is highly variable. And when there’s lots of rapid barometric and humidity change, it really messes up the mirrors in my left ear. And I was not capable of, I was not in a place where I could do the Q&A last Friday. I apologize for that. Things are a little bit better now. They’re not perfect, but they’re doable. And a lot of life is not having things perfect, but just having them doable. So we’re going to proceed now. As always, we’re going to start with some questions from patrons, and then towards the end we’ll move to questions from the live chat. So the first is from an anonymous patron. Whoever you are, thank you for your support. The question is, what are the best practices for character development? So I think the best practices for character development is to see character as a system of virtues that you identify with, and then also to see each virtue as a particular way of being wise. And so we go through these. We can think about we cultivate a virtue by thinking about the ways in which, well, this model comes from Aristotle, the ways in which we’re trying to make our behavior as appropriate to the situation, where the situation often includes things that we regard as inherently valuable, because virtue has to do with our relationship to what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful. So using a standard example from Aristotle, so my relationship, one way in which I have a relationship to the truth and to goodness, sometimes even to beauty, is my speech. And so one of the virtues, let’s say zero and more on truth, is being honest. So what do I want to do? Well, I can go wrong in two ways. I can say too much too often, and that would make me boorish. It would make me interruptive. It would detract from other people’s ability to speak. It could be unkind. It could be overwhelming. It could be cruel. So I don’t want to just say everything that I’m thinking, but I could also fail to say enough, and I could be, in that sense, I could be kind of cowardly. I could be manipulative by being passive aggressive. I could be deceptive by being inadequate in the amount of information I’m presenting. Or another example, courage. Have I faced danger too often? I’m just an idiot. If I avoid it always, I’m a coward. So what you have to do is you cultivate virtues, and you cultivate virtues by basically setting up habits that act as what’s called a virtual engine. You set up habits of noticing and counteracting, like reducing when you’re deviating by being, by doing too much, by saying too much or facing too much danger. And then you also set up habits that motivate you to generate behavior when you’re not saying enough or when you’re not facing enough danger. And so you build up habits that act as what’s called a virtual engine. Some of them are making you do more when you’ve been doing too little, and some of them are limiting your behavior when you’re doing too much. So you basically cultivate virtues by cultivating virtual engines. But then of course, virtues don’t stand separately from each other, right? You want to cultivate virtues in relationship to each other. You need to get good at getting a systematic relationship between the virtues. So like, am I, and this is where, you know, a lot of literature and parable and myth is very helpful, because what parables often do, one of my favorite is the parable of the prodigal son, is it tells you how our various virtues are in a non-reducible, non-resolvable tension with each other. The prodigal son tells us that compassion and justice are, right, if you always do pursue compassion, that’s not good. If you always pursue justice at the expense of compassion, that’s not good. They have trade-off relationships. So you figure out trade-off relationships between the virtues, so they get to come into a systematic relationship. Now you’re starting to cultivate character. But there is another degree of systematicity that you have to address, which is you’re cultivating those trade-off relationships between the virtues, also in how they complement your personality. So character is often described as second nature, because you’re taking on all these habits and then systems of habits, right, you’re doing all this virtual engineering and then putting the virtues together in opponent processing of various virtues. But you’re doing all of that ultimately to compensate for your personality, where personality doesn’t mean your personhood. Personality means your dispositional traits, you know, and we often talk about the big five or the big six, like are you more open or are you less open, are you more introverted, extroverted? And what you have to do is you have to cultivate your virtues and your skills to compensate for the deficits in your personality. And so that’s a process of identification. What virtues are you identifying with and how do they fit together with your constitutional personality. But running through all of this is that what you’re throughout, and this helps you to coordinate and create the system of the virtues, is the idea that virtue, as I like to say, is the beauty of wisdom. Every virtue is a way of seeing what is most appropriate in a situation and acting appropriately towards it. So every virtue requires this linking of discerning through appearances, discerning through self-deception, discerning through distortion, seeing, right, discerning the relationship between the larger perspective of various virtues, what’s happening here now in this situation, and also being sensitive, being open to what’s disclosing itself in the situation. So you’re trying to get this harmonic relationship between discernment and disclosure, and what you’re trying to do in every situation in which you’re trying to act virtuously is you’re trying to, like, courage. I’m trying to see through the way in which fear might be distorting and biasing my vision, to see what’s really being disclosed here so that I can act most appropriately to this situation. So then above and beyond the habits coming into virtues, the virtues being systemized into characters, into character, you are engaging in a comprehensive ecology of practices for the cultivation of wisdom. And I’ve talked a lot about this, both from a scientific perspective of the best sort of science of what that looks like, and also from a practical, existential perspective of teaching people ecologies of practices from the Eastern wisdom traditions, Buddhism and Taoism, and also right now from the Western wisdom traditions, epicureanism, stonicism, and neoplatonism. We’re about to move into neoplatonism. So I think if you have that nested, now going from top-down wisdom into the system of virtues, and then the virtues into, you know, virtual engines of habit that are fitting to your personality in a complementary, compensatory manner, so you have deep identification with your character, a deep interweaving of personality and character this way, and then also, of course, personality with personhood, your moral agency, then I think that’s how you can appropriately cultivate your character. So the next is from Testitos. Patron, thank you very much for your support. And this second question overlaps with the first. What are, sorry, what are some techno, what are some psycho technologies to organize self to future self relationships that possibly increase goal salience and help chaining daily, congruent actions together? You’ve mentioned virtues and virtual engines, which I’ve just done, having needs versus becoming needs. Some others talk about goals versus values. Companies use quarterly objectives and key results. Is there a good system to think about these together? Yes, so I think there is, and this is where I rely a lot on, well, first of all, everything that I just previously said goes into answering this, about how you nest psycho technologies for the virtual engineering of habit, and then the systematization of virtues, and then the identification interweaving with personality in one side and personhood in another, and overarching that, setting it within a trajectory and a tradition of wisdom cultivation. That is all very important. You also need within it, you need behavior in which you are engaging what Agnes Callard calls aspiration, in which you are putting the future self and the current self into dialogue. Meier, Seth, and Fischbach, in their work on self-regulation, talk about this as frame widening. It is a good practice to dialogue with your future self. You say your future self doesn’t exist. I will come back and refine that a little bit. Think about the point about the dialog with your future self. Obviously, this is an imaginative visualization practice, but this is no different than the kind of imagination visualization processes we do in therapy, where we will talk to different aspects of ourselves, and we use imagery for that. We do the empty chair technique when we talk to, obviously, somebody who is not present. I remember when I was going through therapy, we did the empty chair technique, and I was talking to my dead mother, obviously. This is a version of serious play. Serious play is needed in order to set up a dialogue between yourself and future self. Because while your current self causes your future self, your future self normatively challenges your current self. They have a dialogical relationship. Each is contributing. You have to give voice. You have to imaginatively invoke your future self and give voice to your future self and allow it to talk to you. Ways in which you can implement that are journaling. You can even have a future self that is at the end of the day. I know I’m going through my day and I’m trying to note my biases for active open-mindedness. I know that my journal waits for me, and my journal is almost like this future self that is going to reflect back on what is happening right now, and that is how they are talking to each other. You can do it directly through imagination. You can do it through serious play practices. There are versions of active role playing that allow you to get into this dialogue. Of course, if you belong to a religious tradition, there are religious traditions that allow this kind of practice to occur when you’re talking to your soul or to your character or to your better self. But there’s also practices that you do now that have to do with trying to, right here, right now, you can see this even in some therapies like dialectical behavioral therapy, where you try to give voice to your wise self, because your wise self is the self that is often trying to speak on behalf of your future self, because aspiration is ultimately a process of what’s called proleptic rationality. Aspiration requires, is bound up, enmeshed with wisdom cultivation. So you try and sense your wise self. So, I mean, part of that is with your journaling. You can try to note the ways throughout the day in which you were virtuous. This is also called watering your Buddha in the Buddhist tradition. You try and, right, it’s one of the three jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sannyas. You try to remember throughout the day when you were more like the Buddha, or you’re more like Christ, or you’re more like Socrates, and you celebrate it, and you identify with it. You invoke it, and you basically affirm that you want that to grow within you, to become more prevalent within you. And then what you can do is also, and this was a technique that has been, it’s a perennial technique. It goes back to the Stoics. Jordan Peterson has more recently revived it. You do reverse journaling. You write a reverse narrative. You write about your future, potential future selves, and then you write the narrative. It’s like you’re reverse engineering it. Okay, here’s John, and things have gone really horrible. How did he get there? And you write a reverse narrative. And here’s John, and things have gone very well in a reverse narrative. And then you use that for discernment and disclosure, so you know how to move forward. So all of these, when you practice them, at least I found, they all mutually reinforce. They just naturally start to glom on to each other, and mutually afford and reinforce each other. And so if you integrate what I’ve just said with my previous answer about the cultivation of character, I think that’s a way of answering your question. At least I hope it’s helpful. Here the next question is from Rachel Hayden, who’s also a patron. Hello John, thank you so much for the book list advice last month. You’re welcome, Rachel. So far I’ve really enjoyed on bullshit in particular, as you should. It is rightly considered a masterpiece. And for those of you who are unaware of it, it’s the classic work by Harry Frank for distinguishing bullshitting. I’m not trying to be vulgar. This is a term. It’s being used technically, bullshitting from lying. So basically the idea is the liar manipulates you because of the way you care about the truth and telling you, pretending that something that isn’t true is true. The bullshit artist tries to manipulate you by getting you to not care whether or not something is true or not and just be caught up in how salient it is. Some people have, I just want to slow down a little bit about this, the idea is we are often self-deceptive. This is a Socratic idea. When we find things salient beyond our understanding of them, so we’re not really, we’re not, we’re our concern for the truth or the at least the understanding of what we’re after is not calibrated, is not coordinated with how salient and motivating something is. So you can ask people why you’re doing this. Well, I really want this. And then you ask them, well, do you actually understand the phenomena that you want? Do you understand what it entailed? Like, well, I want to be happy. Okay, what’s happiness? What? Well, you’re pursuing it so deeply. What is it? What is it? Do you understand it very well? So the idea is we can often bullshit ourselves because the salience of things is so radically disconnected from our understanding. Now, some people say, but sometimes, like especially in therapy or other situations, the salience is there way before the understanding. That’s why I’m in therapy. I think that’s a very good point. But I would say that’s to, that means you haven’t fully picked up on that intention defies action. What’s the difference between a wink and a blink? Well, it’s the intention behind the action. When you’re in a situation in which somebody is making something salient at the expense of understanding its truth, because they don’t want you to question them anymore, they don’t want you to reflect and explore, that’s bullshitting. When the salience exceeds our understanding, and that is motivating us to increase our understanding, to ask questions and explore like we do in therapy, that, of course, is wonder. And Socrates famously said that wisdom begins in wonder. So if once we distinguish those two together, we can understand we have these two aspects to bullshitting, which is the separation of salience from understanding or for caring about the truth. And that goes to the fact that that is directly framed in order to try and shut down questioning, shut down wondering, shut down reflection, shut down the attempt to cultivate wisdom. Okay, so all of that is now, I think, a good enough background. So I want to now go on with Rachel’s question. As a U.S. citizen, oh boy, I’m a Canadian, and like the rest of the world, we’re watching and like the rest of the world, we’re watching what’s happening in the United States with an increasing mixture of concern and fascination and fear, especially for Canadians, because, you know, we share this long border and we’re a very small country population-wise compared to the United States and militarily. So it’s a very concerning thing. So I understand your situation. I have lots of friends in the United States, Rachel, and the degree of anxiety that they’re expressing is really significant. So as a U.S. citizen, how does one work at the meta-political level while not abdicating responsibility at the political level? So I’ll finish up the rest of the question in a sec. The distinction, the political level is the political level is where you identify it for a particular position, which advocates a set of policies that are supposed to bring about a particular goal, and that’s the political level. The meta-political level is working at the level of what are the cultural cognitive processes that are presupposed by that previous level? What do we need to do in order to be able to have a system that is self-correcting so that we can select the correct policies and the correct goals and the correct ways of implementing the policies? So in particular, I’m very concerned, and I’ve had some discussions with Zach Stein about this, also with Matt Cooper, about that the meta-political level has very significantly degraded the United States. We have lost the commitment to the idea that we are largely self-deceptive and we need people who are opposing us in order to give us the opponent processing that is self-corrective, like you find in all biological systems. Instead, we have turned that into adversarial processing in which the chances that I’m wrong are minimal, I’m right, I’m self-righteously right, both sides say this, the left has to say I’m self-righteously right in getting you, in pointing out, you know, how much human beings are subject to fate, and the right says I’m self-righteously right in telling you how much we should hold human beings individually responsible for their behavior. And of course, like the prodigal son, and like justice and compassion, they’re both right and they’re both wrong and at different times and at different degrees, and we need them to cooperate not at the political level, at the meta-political level of being committed to the process over their position so that ultimately everybody, everybody benefits from this self-correction. So the problem is how do you work at the, how do you, those two levels right now, especially in the United States, are like, there’s a dichotomy, even an antagonism between them, because people are so identified self-righteously with their position often, and an adversarial processing, that it’s very difficult to get people to consider the fact that we should be ultimately committed to democracy, to rationality and democracy above and beyond our particular goals and position. The fact that most Americans are more afraid and are more distrustful of the opposing party, Republicans of Democrats and Democrats of Republicans, than they are of foreign enemies, tells you that the country is in a very bad place indeed. So how do you work at that level? How do you put those two together when the political and the meta-political level are so antagonistically poised with respect to each other? So I want to read the rest of Rachel’s question. There is such a myriad oppressing political issues, but with the meta-crisis unfolding so rapidly, it almost seems counterproductive to spend so much energy on, as you say, increasing unhelpful left-right debates. Yes, and so the connection I take it that Rachel’s making is with adversarial processing, with winner-take-all, zero-sum gain, and the other side is distrustful and evil, you see the dialogue moving more and more towards bullshitting on all sides. It’s interesting that if you take a look at work at Sloan, and you get people and they come into these situations and they’re so opposed to each other, and you get them to talk about their values and their position, it just exacerbates it. But let’s say that it’s about healthcare, a big issue in the United States. If you shift and say, well, before we get to the positions and the values, can you guys both explain what is healthcare, how it functions, how it actually works, and why it’s breaking down, and why it’s not functioning? Like, what’s the actual machinery of healthcare? What happens is, and this is what’s called the knowledge illusion, this is a way in which we systematically bullshit ourselves, we confuse the salience of our access to information with the depth of our understanding. You can see this in even very mundane things. Do you know how a bicycle works? Oh yeah, sure, sure, I understand bicycle. Draw a bicycle, draw a bicycle, a diagram that will actually explain to me how it works. Most people can’t do it. Do you know how a toilet works? Oh yeah, sure, sure, sure. Well, draw a diagram, show me, how does it work? Oh, I don’t know. So we suffer from the knowledge illusion, and notice this weird feedback loop. The knowledge illusion makes us bullshit ourselves and focus on our values and our positions, which then exacerbate the knowledge illusion and make the adversarial processing work. But in the experiments, what happened is, when you ask people to explain the knowledge illusion, explain the mechanism of the phenomena over which they’re disagreeing, if they’re honest, and people aren’t always honest, but if people are just dishonest, there’s not a lot we can do. But if they’re honest, and in the experiments they are, what happens is, you see them converging towards each other. They start genuine dialogue because the realization of their shared ignorance causes the realization of shared humility and the shared need for wondering and for becoming wiser, for getting a coordination between discernment and disclosure going on, and that’s how you can do it. So I would recommend to you that what you can do is, you can do this within these situations. You can try and get people that are left, right to still deal with a political issue and then, okay, we need to solve this problem, but instead of values and the position, let’s work on getting a very clear explanation of what the phenomenon actually is. For you personally, Rachel, I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask for this advice. So that’s a general, and I mean a piece of advice, what I just gave you. I hope you find that helpful. But personally, this is, I’ve become increasingly frustrated, and I see friends and family being bludgeoned into silence from both the left and the right, both the left and the right undermining science and engaging in revisionist history that supports their particular political ideology. And when that’s happening, it’s hard to be virtuously allied with either the left or the right, and it’s happening. I consider myself quite left for most of my history, but I increasingly think that’s irrelevant because the left and the right, to my mind, are now undermining, right, are mutually undermining through the tsunami of bullshit, the meta-political level, the science and history, and those three are so interconnected together, by the way. They all mutually depend on each other that it’s very hard. So I suppose my response there then, and what I’ve sort of defaulted to, is while working as much as I can to get people to converge and to also afford a re-identification with the meta-political level and a recommitment to it, at the political level I recommend to people trying to find people, and this isn’t a trivial thing I’m about to say, but I generally are looking for people who display virtue and wisdom, and that for me takes priority. So I’ve, in Canada, I’ve watched the Canadian governments handle the COVID crisis, and this is just an objective fact, just look at the numbers, okay? I don’t want to argue with anything about this. We’re handling the COVID crisis way better than the United States, and I’ve seen this, that, you know, quite leftist liberal government, because it’s a de facto coalition between a liberal government and a socialist party, or socialist parties, actually, work cooperatively with a quite right-of-center provincial government that’s working with a right-center municipal government, and everybody acted pragmatically and virtuously, and they practiced listening to the science and discernment, and then paying, being sensitive to what was being disclosed, and so all three of these levels have my support, because they’re saving lives, and they’re putting aside their positions and their ideologies in order to save lives, and so to what degree you can find that happening in the people you want at the political level to support, I recommend that’s what you do, but also look for people at the political level who care about really, who care about it with their character, care about the meta-political level, and care about the interconnections between the political level and science and history. Dewey made a brilliant argument, John Dewey, the great pragmatist philosopher, that democracy, science, and history practice well, mutually depend and afford each other, and anything that is pulling them apart and fraying them and making them subservient to the victory of an ideological position will always have, I hope, my virtuous resistance. So thank you very much, Rachel, for your question, and I hope I didn’t get a little overdramatic there. I care about what’s going on, because literally hundreds of thousands of people are dying, and then literally millions of lives are being disrupted and destroyed, and COVID is making the meeting crisis worse, and so her question, your question, Rachel, deserved an in-depth answer. The next question is from a patron, a friend of mine. I get to talk to him regularly once a month. I also met him personally before any of this, meaning my online presence sort of expanded the way it has. He was involved with the demonstration of the philosophical friendship. So I’m talking about Robert Gray, and it’s always a pleasure to interact with Robert. So Robert’s question is, what is lost from online teaching compared to in-person teaching, perhaps at the high school, college, age level? What is gained? If you had the resources, is there any cool idea you implement using modern technology to change the way mass education works today? Thanks, John and Amar. I hope you are both warm. Actually, Rob, it’s warm right now in Toronto. We’re getting a freakish day for late October in Toronto. It’s supposed to get up to 23, but it’s like a spring day here, which of course is going to confuse everybody’s circadian rhythms and stuff like that. It’s also not particularly good with my ear. In fact, I can starting to feel it coming on my ear. But anyways, this is a great question. Let me do it the other way around, Rob, because I was surprised by what I’ve noticed by what’s gained by the online teaching. So what I use in my online teaching is I used a flipped classroom model. What that means is I record my lectures asynchronously, and they’re put online, and the students can watch them whenever they want to. That’s nice because it bridges between having live action speech and having written text. They can watch it at different times. They can rewatch it. They’re not bound by time zones. Then what I have is time in the week that would normally be dedicated to the lecture, I have what I call town halls. So what I do is I break that time up, let’s say it’s a three-hour block, into half-hour increments, and then I break the class up into small cohorts of around 10 people or so, or if it’s a larger class, more, but still much smaller. Then people come in on Zoom, in a Zoom room, and we have open discussion, which they come in, they watch the lecture, and they’re instructed to come in with making connections, comments, criticisms, asking for clarifications, bringing up topics for discussion. What I’ve gained is two things. I get to have more one-on-one interaction with my students, and I get to know them more personally, which helps me tailor my education to them and tailor my feedback to them. Also what’s enhanced is student-to-student interaction. Students are much more likely to talk to each other and also feel supported, which was odd because it’s a virtual environment. So that was definitely gained. What was lost, and this is strange, what’s lost, and this is really important, and it’s something I’m struggling to figure out how to do, and I’m struggling to figure out because I’m not only a teacher, I’m the director of the COGSI program at the University of Toronto, what’s lost is the hallway experience. We can capture right now, pretty good, I think, I just described it, what was going on in the classroom, but what we don’t have is the hallway experience, which is especially important at college level, but also to some degree at the high school level. This is when people outside the classroom in the hallways, we’re also lacking this at conferences, the foyer experience. We’re doing the rooms where we’re listening to the speakers, but we’re not actually conferring. We’re not meeting together in the hallways or the foyers and talking to each other and doing that weird blending of mixing the personal and the professional, meaning your education or your professional practice, together in discourse where we move with humor between sociality and epistemology, and all of that is so vital, so deeply vital. It’s like the hallways are the arteries in the veins along which education flows, and the rooms are the organs, and those organs are now starved for the circulation that makes them so vital, vitally alive, and so what’s been lost is the hallway experience. I’ve been trying a lot of things, and the technology is, it allows me to do some of that, some of it, a bit here and there, but the technology is not good enough. Having what I would want is a technology that implemented the hall rooms and the foyers in between the classes, and of course there’s a bit of this going on with the discord server, but then the coordination, there isn’t an overarching coordination technology yet between them, and so what’s happening is like with Amar’s amazing techno mage help trying to loop together YouTube and Zoom and Discord and other things, and it depends on his particular genius to be functional, but what I would really like is a technology that made that really smooth and powerful and very user-intuitive friendly, because I’m something of a techno peasant when it comes to that level of stuff, and then I would like, and this goes to the conversations I’ve had with Jordan Hall and with Zach Stein, I would like the development of the cultural cognitive grammar of dialectic into dialogos that optimizes us for dwelling in and coordinating those two spaces together, the circulatory system of the hallway and the vital organs of the classrooms, so I hope that answers your question. It’s a really good question and really important. Next question, this is from an anonymous patron, and I want to thank you for your support. How do I forgive myself for my mistakes? That’s a question that I deeply identify with. To some degree, I think because of my personality, I’m socially phobic by nature, quite introverted, and then also because of my upbringing, I was brought up in a very punitive form of fundamentalist Christianity. I have internalized a very sadistic super ego, as my very good friend Leo Ferraro designates it, and so this is a question that I’ve wrestled with very significantly. It puts pressure, it tends to fragment, or at least, you know, cheer, make threadbare, the fabric, the tapestry of my sense of self, because when I look back at my previous self, I tend to want to pull away because of the foolishness and the vice that I see in my past self, and this is not, I hope it is, I mean, it doesn’t, I’m doing it right now. I hope this is genuine and not just false modesty or egocentrism. So I pull away and then that takes to fragment. That’s one of the reasons why the prospect of personal immortality I find horrific, because that fraying strikes me as, would just be inseparable cleavage and destruction given enough time. So, sorry, that was a long preamble to tell you how seriously I take this question. So I have found there’s practices from the Eastern tradition and the Western traditions that help me to deal with that, and what they do is they help me to replace punitive guilt with two things, replace punitive guilt with moral guilt and replace punishment, part of, right, that’s part of punitive guilt with what’s called intelligent regret. So punitive psychological guilt is basically what you’re doing is you’re hurting yourself psychologically, you are painting yourself as a way of trying to modify your behavior. Now, all behavior modification starts there pedagogically, but the mistake is to end there. If you were to, like if you were to just use punishment on a dog all the time, you’re going to turn it into a monster, right? In fact, you want to use as little, this is what all the research shows, even with your kids, right? So think about it with yourself. You want to use as little punishment that is necessary for bringing about compliance. Often we have trained ourselves, sadistic superego, to overpunish way beyond what is needed for modifying our behavior. So we have to let that go. We have to let that go. So what do we do? Well, what we do is we first try to put aside psychological guilt and look at moral guilt. Part of what I do in the journaling is every day I get into the habit. Habit tends to reduce the over-dramatic nature that our consciousness always brings with us. Part of what consciousness does is it just turns up the drama on everything. So you get into the habit of acknowledging, you know, writing, when, what was a vice that I committed today? Why I was dishonest? A vice of commission. You know, I was dishonest. What was a vice of omission? I could have been more empathetic there. But you get it into the habit of doing it. Now what happens is all of the super affect starts to go away because you’re more interested in the virtue of this. You’re more interested in cultivating the virtue. I also look for my bias, my particular, like a, so, you know, I caught myself today, oh, the narrative bias. There it is again. It’s literally happened, right? So you get this middle place between ah and ignoring it because you’re noting it down, you’re writing it down in the third person, and then I do the fourth thing. I also try to notice a virtue, a way in which, again, my inner Buddha expressed itself or my inner Socrates came to life. And I don’t get, I do that, I don’t do that from like, oh, look how great I am. I try to, you know, hold against narcissism, but genuinely, right? Because if you are genuinely being attracted to the virtue, eventually you’ll get softerson. You’ll get that meta-virtue. You won’t have to resist the temptation to the vice because you’ve gotten into the habit of finding the virtue so salient. Just like as an adult, you don’t find your children’s toys or children programming so tempting anymore. You can get to the place where you’re more and more tempted to the good. And then that goes along with replacing punishment with intelligent regret. You get to the place where, like, if your friend has done something wrong, you talk to them as a friend. You don’t punish them. You don’t make them feel really bad. You might do that a little, little tiny bit. Minimal force to get compliance, to get people to listen to you and to take seriously and to commit to a behavioral change. That’s what compliance means. Compliance doesn’t mean subservience. So minimal force. But what mostly do you, when you persuade them, you persuade them, you say, well, look what’s happening and look at how you’re getting trapped and look at how this is self-deceptive and self-destructive. And you also inspire them to aspiration. Look, this is what I really love about you. You have this. Like, you try and train them in softerson, in turning their eyes so they’re tempted to the good. Well, do that to yourself. Befriend yourself with intelligent regret. Replace psychological guilt with moral guilt by getting into the habit of reflecting on your vices and your virtues so that it’s not just this overwhelming affective place. Because those habits will actually modify your behavior much better than all this punitive affect, especially if those habits are conjoined to intelligent regret, which appeals to you as an intelligent, potentially rational adult rather than as a pre-linguistic child. So I hope that’s helpful to you as a way. It’s been very helpful to me. It’s an ongoing project. I suspect, I mean, I suspect that I will always be skewed. I see it in my behavior. I see it in the friends that I love telling me that I still am skewed by my sadistic super ego. But it is something that I think I’ve, the advice I’m giving you, I’m finding it helpful in my life in making a difference and giving me a life that is left overshadowed by this, you know, this Bronze Age capricious deity. All right. We are shifting to live questions from the chat. Thank you again, all the Patreon supporters and everyone watching this right now. As you know, but it always should be said, your support is crucial to contributing to producing these videos, the lecture series, and for supporting the science that we’re doing to find solutions to the meeting crisis. And we are doing the science. We’re starting to find it. We’re starting to get the experiments going, even in these difficult times. So the first question is from Karima, who’s a patron. It’s great to have you here, Karima. You left a comment on a video recently. I think it was the video in which I was doing invoking the logos, and your comment was much appreciated. Thank you. What in your current research on consciousness is new, something that astonishes you? Wow, that’s a hard question. I’m sorry. This sounds like a hallmark card from Cognitive Science, but consciousness never ceases to astonish me. It’s that kind of phenomena. And I think if you’re in a place where consciousness ceases to astonish you, I think you’re not aware of what consciousness is anymore. But I don’t mean to sound flippant. For those of you who are interested in this question, I’ve been helped by my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez. We’re going through a series of dialogues, a sort of a mixture of lecture and dialogue and trading back and forth between myself and Greg called Untangling the World Not, which is developing an argument about trying to give an account of consciousness. And the fact that what’s astonishing me about consciousness is if… I mean, but I’m trying to separate my… It’s bound up with the answer I just gave. Consciousness… We’ve tended… I want to be very respectful of my colleagues, but we’ve tended to make consciousness this separate weird thing and we don’t know what it does or how it emerges. And that’s one way of capturing how sort of unique a phenomena it is. And some people then tie sort of… They treat it as a spiritual sky hook in which they try and hang various very questionable metaphysics. But the opposite is happening to me. I’m seeing how interwoven… Because I’m also preparing a course called The Illusive Self on the Nature and Function of Self. So how interwoven consciousness is with intelligence and the self and agency and biology and consciousness… So it’s kind of the opposite of this weird thing that doesn’t fit in. Consciousness is kind of, for me, ontological super glue right now. And it glues to… It contributes to the processes by which the self is glued together, the agent is glued to the world, the different kinds of knowing, especially the perceptible and participatory, are glued together. The way our intelligence and relevance realization is glued to aspects of the way our personalities connect us to the world. Intelligence is sort of relevance realization within people. Personality is basically a way in which evolution has distributed relevance realization across people. Because we have these various different degrees of openness and consciousness and stuff, we actually get this amazing capacity to realize relevance in distributed cognition. And so consciousness is gluing all those together and it’s moving us all around. And it’s tremendous self-transformative capacity, like in mystical experience or when you’re in the practicing dialectic and the dialogus, and you get that third factor, the sense of the logos, the we space emerging, and that weird and wonderful consciousness associated with it. So for me, what’s astonishing right now is the power and breadth and depth of the super glue of consciousness. So here’s another question from Jackson Lipford, who’s also a patron. How does one dream and set goals for the future, a la reverse narratives, without inviting self-deception and bullshitting? So the thing is, and this has been one of my concerns about, I don’t know if Peterson does this. I haven’t been privy enough to the inside of this, how it works. So I’m not criticizing that, but I have seen people implementing this, the reverse narratives, falling prey to what Jackson is exactly saying, self-deception and bullshit. And then the answer there is, well, do a lot to really undermine the machinery of bullshit by getting into the practices in which you’re constantly trying to deeply reintegrate what you find salient with what you find important. Sorry, that was an equivocal way of putting it. Integrating what you find salient with your attempts to understand as deeply what you take to be true or most real. And so you have to be, there’s nothing in the practice, I would say, of reverse narratives that’s going to do this job. I think you have to be cultivating an ecology of practices that’s about cultivating wisdom and virtue. And you have to pay much more attention, much more attention to how the world and other people are telling you you are transforming than from your own first-person perspective. Because of course, we overestimate how well we’re doing. We overinterpret our experiences because of narcissistic narrative bias. And we often, because of introspection, we pay attention to the wrong things because introspection is a very flawed mechanism, very flawed process. So pay much more attention to how people are reporting to you your transformative trajectory than your own sense of it. Have them talk to each other. And so I think if you do that, if you pay attention to the people that you honor, the people that you think, what do I mean by that? The people that you feel are deserving of respect because they have given you good reason to believe in their character, believe in their character and their wisdom and their care for you. And then listen to them a lot, while also cultivating as much as you can an ecology of practices that reduces self-deception and bullshit. And then that is what will give you what is needed to counteract the tremendous bias, like the narrative bias, like narcissism, like my side bias, like confirmation bias, like depressive bias, like rumintive bias that will inevitably creep into our narratives. So I hope that answers your question. Last question or maybe one or two more. Any update on the cognitive continuum book? Yes, this is from ABCDEF. And the fault is mine. Daniel has been working hard and he has sent me an updated manuscript with More Has Happened. I was supposed to read it last weekend, but I had to deal with other issues that were more exigent and so I didn’t get to it. Hopefully I’ll get to it this weekend. It’s still progressing. I’m hoping we’ll get it out or at least get it completed towards the end of this year, at the beginning of next year. I’m also working on two other books at the same time. I’m working on the anthology, which is going to be in submission to the publisher within two weeks. On Dialectic into the Logos, an anthology of many people from this corner of the internet. The anthology, I’m working with it, co-editing it and co-writing some of the chapters with Christopher Massey Pietro. We have people in there like Craig Enriquez, like Guy Sandstock, like Paul VanderKley. I’m sorry, I feel like I’m at the Oscars. There’s a whole bunch of people in there. Just amazing. Thomas and Elizabeth from Evolve in Europe, Johannes Niedermeyer and his amazing work on Heidegger and his relation to dialogue. Anyways, that anthology, we’ve been working very hard on that. That’s coming to fruition. Also, I’m working on the book, almost finished, also within two or three weeks, the transcription of the first half of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. The first 25 episodes are done. We’re just finishing up some of the editing. There’s an extensive glossary there filling out the references. Madeline has been amazing work at that. We’re also, she’s added in all kinds of figure. Those three books, because we’re doing all three, there’s a delay there, but we’re coming towards completion. One last question. Enemy of Elder, who’s also a patron, thank you for your work. Greetings, John. Thank you for all of your monumental and life-changing work on the Meeting Crisis. Once again, I’m finding deep appreciation for the grammar that you have so consistently and beautifully conveyed throughout that is very much helping me navigate the world. The series has widened for me. Now for my question, I think you would have a great conversation with Sam Harris. What do you think? I would like to have a conversation with Sam Harris. I’ve been critical of Sam Harris at points within the Meeting Crisis, sometimes perhaps a little bit harsh, because I find at times his stance is very strident, and maybe I overcompensated, and sometimes also in voices with Reveke. I’m generally critical of the new atheist because I simultaneously, as many of you know, criticize both atheism and theism. I’m a non-theist, and I think both theists and atheists have a huge shared set of presuppositions that I think should be seriously questioned. I’m also working on a video series for that, which will come out after Socrates comes out. That video series on non-theism is called The God Beyond God and The Reinventio of the Sacred, but there’s a lot of discussions with people like Chris, Deferrata Piotr, and Andrew Sweeney where you can see that at work, and some of the discussions I’ve had with Paul and Jonathan, Paul Van de Klay, Jonathan Paggio. I’m also somewhat hesitant. This is not a criticism that I’ve made, just me. Other people have noted, people who have at one time been quite staunch supporters of Sam Harris, that he doesn’t seem to be that willing to engage in self-correction. I find that a worrying feature of somebody who is representing rationality, representing transformation, especially things like mindfulness. I think we should exemplify to people, I just tried to do it throughout this Q&A, our own processes of dealing with self-deception, admitting when we are wrong, admitting when we need to reformulate or even reconsider a particular position or theory, because without that capacity for self-correction, we can’t enter into the possibility of mutual self-correction, of the mutual self-correction that’s at the core of genuine dialogos. But perhaps I’m wrong, and again, this is not false modesty. Perhaps if we were in dialogue and I got to talk to Sam about my concerns, maybe he would be responsive and responsible to them, and perhaps a genuine dialogue, dialogos is possible. I’m concerned about how that didn’t happen between him and Jordan Peterson. I have significant disagreements with Jordan Peterson. I have significant agreements with Jordan Peterson, both, and I was able to, well, Jordan and I, I don’t want to take sole credit, were able to enter into a really good dialogue that I think towards the end, it’s on YouTube, you can watch it, became genuine dialogos. I’m very happy that Jordan Peterson is back, and I would be most happy, Jordan, if somehow this gets to you, I would be happy to enter into another such public dialogue with you. And so in the spirit of that, I would like to avoid what happened between Sam and Jordan, and if it was possible that we could mutually move towards avoiding that, then I would be happy to talk to Sam Harris. So I want to thank you all for joining me on this Q&A. Excellent questions. Always nourishing and nurturing from you to me, and I hope I’m reciprocating back to you. We’re doing this every third Friday of the month. We should be back on schedule for November. November typically is a more stable month, because in November, Canada turns to just living in the bottom of a dishwasher. It’s raining all the time. Things are dark. They’re messy, and you feel terrifically closed in, but at least it’s stable, and stability helps my ear. Thank you for all the supporters over Patreon. Please consider, if you’re not doing it right now, supporting my work on the meeting crisis at patreon.com slash John Verbeke, and I want to especially thank my dear friend and techno mage, Amar, who is again behind the scenes, working his magic, making sure that everything flows smoothly to you. Thank you very much, everybody, and take good care.