https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=muGtDZePSlE
Okay, Mary, we are recording and it’s good to see you and talk to you again. I invited you to have a discussion with me because you’re producing and we were just talking about the fact that you’ve released another video today and you’re making a lot of really excellent and insightful commentary and criticism and the good sense of the word of criticism of my work. So I thought it would be good if we could, you know, talk and we could discuss some of these issues you raise and some of the proposals you make and some of the insights you have. So thanks for coming on and talking to me. Well, thank you for your time. I was told by a number of people when I made my video, not the one today, but the last one, that if I put forward another way of knowing, it would be unacceptable if it did not start with a P. Well, maybe we could start there then. Because I want to talk about the parabolic stuff. I think that’s very interesting. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Sally McFaig’s theology because she does a lot of work on the role of parable and the role of metaphor. She also wrote a book called Speaking in Parables, which I read, which is quite good. And one, Metaphorical Theology, which was also quite good. I’m not familiar with her. So she makes arguments similar to yours. So you might find that, I think, some very interesting literature to take a look at. So here’s how I guess I want to start thinking about that. Of course, we’re proposing a taxonomy and there’s no sort of objective way to decide if a taxonomy is right or not. You have to just decide in terms of how useful it is, how effective it is. So let me tell you sort of the principles by which I was operating and the distinctions I had in mind and then what I think about the parabolic stuff. So when I was thinking about the taxonomy, I was thinking about it in terms of what does it result in, like propositional results and belief, procedural results and skills, respectable results in the here nowness of presence and participatory results in a sense of belonging, attunement at one minute. And then each one also has like a normative standard. There’s truth, power, presence, right? Again, one minute. And I wanted to keep that distinct from particular methods of knowing. And what do I mean by method? So a method of knowing is something like the scientific method. There is historical methods. And methods of knowing, of course, aren’t the same thing because both the scientific and the historical method both result in propositional knowledge. You can do, of course, different kinds of methods for training different kinds of skills. I can do Tai Chi for training martial arts skills. I can learn to swim, which trains a different set of skills. There’s different methods. And so what I’m wondering is, is the parabolic a kind of knowing or is it a method? Because I’m not clear what it results in that’s distinct from beliefs or skills or states of consciousness or states of the self. I’m sort of running out of an inventory of things. Right. So before you answer, let me make one more thing because I want to make sure that you’re not I’m not misrepresenting. I do think what you’re talking about is important. That’s why I talked about McFadden’s work at the beginning. So this is not meant to dismiss the phenomenon at all. OK. The point is whether or not it should be understood as a kind of knowing or an important method of knowing that might be analogous to the scientific method and give us a way of acquiring beliefs or skills in ways that we can’t acquire scientifically or historically or et cetera. And why why there is a little bit of history sort of behind that proposal, of course, is people have been talking for a while about things like narrative and metabolic ways. Sorry, not metabolic metaphorical. I confuse parabolic and metaphorical, you know, narrative and metaphorical methods for gaining new beliefs, which is still for me would still count as a kind of propositional knowing. OK, so let me take a let me take a stab at it. OK. OK, so the question is, what is it? No, is it knowledge or is it a. Or is it is it a kind of knowing or is it a what was the method, a method, a method for getting a particular domain. Right. Or so I can. Right. I understand. I just. OK, sorry. Target on the on the word. OK, so. I would say that I would question whether it’s a method. Because. I’m taught because of what I said about the way that children seem to do it automatically. My question was not my my point about it was not that the child does it as a method, but that it seems to it seems to presuppose that there’s something the child knows already. So that’s not so it’s not in making the it’s not in making the metaphor as a as a as a way of as a. I’m losing that word again that you said as a as a method, but rather what is laying underneath it? What does the child know that is being expressed? So what a child does that. So that makes sense what I’m saying. I think so. Let me understand. So the is the issue then that you weren’t. So obviously people use metaphor and we use metaphor to change belief. And so for me, that would count as propositional knowing, although there’s some maybe perspectival shifting going on in there. And that’s I think that that’s fine. But what you’re saying is what you were interested in was the possibility that children don’t have to be sort of taught this. It’s sort of an innate ability. Is that the idea we’re getting to? Well, that it’s an expression of some kind of knowledge. It’s an expression of some kind of knowledge, but it’s not any of the kinds of knowledge, except you might push back and say, well, it’s maybe it’s participatory knowledge because the child is embedded within the family is already participating in a family. Well, it’s sort of what I want possible. Yeah. But I’m thinking about the the reason I called it parabolic is it has to do with the setup of the relationships. Right. And I talked about how when we set those relationships up, we collapse in combinatorially explosive nature of the of the different ways that we can that we can compare two things. The example I used was the child comparing the knife and fork and spoon to the father, mother, baby. That is combinatorially explosive. If you were just to go to the knife and the father, what are the ways they are like? What are the ways they are? This is coming from what you said, right? What are the ways they are like? What are the ways they are just similar? It’s combinatorially explosive. How does the child collapse that all that combinatorially explosive to the point of saying father, mother, baby? And I’m saying that it has to do with with relationship. OK, so let me let me try. I’ll ask you a question. And how is that any different than Rutherford using the relationships within the solar system to explain the structure of the atom? Right. So here’s the sun at the center, the planet’s orbit. Here’s the nucleus at the center and the electrons orbit. So you’re mapping relations. In fact, that’s that’s Deidre Gettner’s sort of theory of what we do in metaphor. We map a system of relations from one domain onto another. OK. And why I bring up that example is obviously because it’s clearly within scientific theorizing. And secondly, it would be implausible to me that you you had sort of any innate knowledge of the atom or something like that. Right. And that and that is and that is kind of the that is kind of gets to my point that that that there is something that the child knows innately. OK, that is being expressed. Now, is there something innate innately? Knowledge being expressed when someone goes says, well, the atom is like a solar system. There might be that might go to I read your paper, you work about the geometric shapes. Yeah, that work that you’re looking at. You’re looking at geometric relationships and you’re able to map them one onto the other. Yeah, but that’s different from from that seems to me different. Now, if the child were 10 years old and were in a classroom and they were having a social studies lesson about families and for some reason the teacher pulled out a knife, fork and spoon and used it as a as a metaphor for the family, well, then the child’s being taught something similar to the whole thing with Adam and the solar system. But this child seems to know something that is being expressed when the child says, you know, mom, daddy, mommy, baby about the knife, fork and spoon. And just like with my daughters, they seem to be expressing their knowledge. Like when they said, you know, dogs are boys and cats are girls. And they said all dogs are boys, all cats are girls, you know, right from on that. And then people in the comments under that video that I did that he talked about knowing that when they were little, like what I think Sevilla King said, I knew that when I was two years old, when I was two years old, I knew all cats were boys and all I mean, all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. What did so my question is then what did she know? So what kind of knowledge is expressed by that? Not I’m not talking about the expression itself, but there’s something known. So that’s a different question. So let’s let’s shift off there then. So if the issue isn’t primarily sort of metaphorical mapping, which I think is an important ability, I talk about this in like, I think like the second episode. So that ability, I think, is one of the things that comes gives us emerges in the upper Paleolithic transition. And I would say the ability to do metaphor is probably innate, whether or not specific metaphors are innate, we can come back to that, at least the ability to do the mapping. But if the question is innateness, then it seems to me, then there are many there are many kinds of potentially innate forms of knowledge, if that’s what we’re talking about. So for example, I mean, you know, Lewis Carroll famously argued that I can’t teach you how modus podens work, I can’t teach you if P then Q, P therefore Q, because what would I possibly use to teach you? I need the rule in order to teach you that rule. So the rule is unlearnable. So it has to be innate or a sense of contradiction. Like, how could I teach you contradiction? It has to be an innate ability. And this is kind of, you know, an idea that goes back to Plato. That we come with a lot of knowledge that must be innate, because if we don’t have that innate knowledge, we can’t actually explain learning. And then a recent version of that, of course, is Chomsky, right? The idea that we come with a universal grammar that allows us to learn any particular language. So you don’t have to teach children language at all. You teach you have to teach them literacy. You don’t have to teach them to speak. You just have to expose them to speech and they will learn it. And so that to me then seems to me to be sort of a different thing we’re talking about, because it seems to me again that what I could say is, well, it seems to me that there are probably propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory forms of innate knowledge. That innate knowledge isn’t a separate kind of knowing. It’s what we’re saying is this is a knowing that isn’t is not learned. But again, what does it result in? Does it result in well, it results in a belief or a skill or so? For example, here’s the combinatorially explosive. So I’m glad we shifted off of metaphor because I don’t think metaphor explains how we collapse combinatorial explosion. It actually presupposes that we can do relevance realization. So if the question then this is good, I think we’re making good progress together. If the question is, is one and this is Plato’s answer and I think Chomsky’s answer is the question is part of how we constrain combinatorial explosion and do relevance realization hard wired in if you’ll allow me that horrible metaphor because we’re not really wired in any ways. But that’s the common language we use for it these days. Is that one of the ways? I think that’s definitely the case. I think in fact, so I am deeply critical of the opposite view. The opposite view is John Locke’s view that were tabula rasa. Is that right? So I think if you’re tabula rasa, then you just face Plato’s Minos paradox. If you don’t have any, right? If you don’t have anybody that’s just too combinatorial explosive. You can’t even get started with any learning whatsoever. And I think Locke’s four principles of association are too weak to explain all of learning. I’ve just been teaching a course on all of that. So if the question is, do we have innate knowledge and does it contribute significantly to our capacity for reducing combinatorial explosion? Yeah, I think so. And I think there’s lots of stuff. I think the ability to walk as an example of procedural, that’s innate. If you leave children alone and let them practice, they’ll walk on their own. It’s not really true to say they learn how to walk. As you said, they express it. It comes out. And so I think that’s fine. I agree with that. I just don’t quite see that. I don’t think it belongs to the same taxonomy as the four Ps. That’s what I’m trying to say. Okay. So let me ask you then just the question. When the child does that? Yes. Or takes three blocks and makes a little family animal. And what is it the child knows and what kind of knowledge of your four Ps would you say that is? Well, I think that what the child is knowing is exactly what you said it is, which is a system of relations between concepts. And that’s prototypically what… That’s what propositional knowledge is, right? You have various concepts. Like there’s a system of relationship between mom and dad, which are concepts, and then between fork and spoon. Or which example? Fork and knife, right? I want to get it right. Knife and spoon, or whatever. See, I’m not a very good kid, I guess. So I mean, and I think we do have that ability to do that mapping between. Now, an interesting thing you might be saying is the mapping itself is not an inferential process. I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I’m not sure it’s propositional either because the child cannot… The child cannot form… So you’re saying we have propositional knowledge before we’re able to… Articulate it? Articulate propositions. Of course we do. Of course we do. Think about, you know… So, right, the child clearly knows that cats and dogs are both animals, right? Because that’s why she doesn’t ever, ever… You’ll never see the kid group together a cat and a chair. And they somehow belong together in a category, right? And so, in fact, there’s good research, Scott Atron has shown, that one of the innate things we might have, and Mithran talks about this, is we might come with an innate capacity sort of to distinguish between living things, non-living things, and artifacts. And so we don’t have to learn that. We have some basic machinery that helps us. Because if you look, for example, across different cultures, at how they categorize living things, they tend to have these hierarchical structures that are the same. Now, obviously what people put in the categories are going to be different, depending on the animals and the environment. But the logical structure of how they categorize animals is very similar. And Scott Atron did a lot of work to show that. And it strikes me as very plausible that we come sort of evolutionarily prepared to identify in a kind of very precise way living things. And that seems to me to be, you know, taxonomies are sort of prototypical instances of propositional knowing, right? Yes. That would explain what you just said. That would explain why in your, when you were doing the work on the squares and circles. Yeah. You put plants and animals. Yeah. You put plants and animals almost as though they were opposites. But people put the circle for the plant as well as for the animals. Did you notice that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re not opposites because they’re both alive. Yeah. And it’s, yeah. So yeah, it’s interesting where the mappings are like beyond 50% because that’s where it matters. Because it’s 50, it’s going to be mapping 50% because there’s two things. Yeah. It’s when you’re up sort of beyond 65 to 70 that it’s interesting. Everything below that. Yeah. I think you’re right. It just, it doesn’t reflect anything. Yeah. That’s a good point. But it was also like, it’s also interesting how, you know, we do some, a lot of people are agreeing on these mappings, you know, that, you know, living and dead with circle being alive and square being dead and things like that. Which again, there is, again, here, let me point out something really interesting to you. When people agree to that mapping, but they don’t find the metaphorical equivalent. I think I sent you that paper too. Right. Yeah. I saw that. Yes. Yeah. They don’t find the metaphorical equivalent at all intelligible to them. So that says to me that the mapping and the ability to… Like they can say dad is square, but they don’t say mom is circle. Yeah. Or, yeah, or if you, if you can’t say to somebody, you know, that’s really circular as a way of saying it’s really alive. It just doesn’t work for them. Right. Or work for people. And so that’s what I mean when I think that the mapping ability, the ability to map these relations is probably, at least some of it is probably an important innate function. And then what I think is really interesting, what you brought up is, because this is what you went on to do, is the way that… I’m hesitating to my words. I can hear philosophers in my head right now. But the way in which that innate capacity, that innate symbolism, if you’ll allow me that word, might be something that comes to particular expression within religious experience. Because this was all part of your overall essay on personal experience. Right. Right. I thought that was a very interesting idea. Well, it was an answer to you saying when we were talking about whether God is personal and you talked about the ambiguity. Yeah. One of the things you said is that between our knowledge of a person and the ground of being, the differences and the similarities are combinatorially explosive. But if… And that’s where I use the thing about the fish and the bird, right? So the difference between a fish and a bird is combinatorially explosive. The similarity is combinatorially explosive. But if I say to you, bird is to wing as fish is to blank, you and sling go fin. It collapses that combinatorially. Looking at the relationship between the things, instead of looking at the things, collapses that combinatorially explosive nature of the similarities and differences. What do you think about that? Okay. Well, there’s two things to say about that. First, I think there’s an important idea there. And this goes back to the point I made earlier, though, because, again, sorry, I don’t want… The number of relations you can find within a thing, right? Again, think about the problem this way. Mary Henley brought it up. How do you decide which thing to use as your source for? Let’s say we’re Rutherford, and we’ve got all this data about the atom, and we’re trying to figure what should we map it onto? Well, it’s combinatorially explosive. Do I map it onto a clock, a table? Do I map it onto a river? And so she says you get to this problem because if you say, well, I need something to constrain what I search, my search, so I’ll zero in on the right thing. But that’s just the problem again, zeroing in on the relevant information. So I think what I’m suggesting to you is that I want to acknowledge a good point you’re making. All your points are good. I don’t mean it that way. A point I’m in agreement with and a point that I’m challenging. The point I’m challenging right now is your ability to map relations actually presupposes a lot of relevance realization. Because in order to get the two things paired together that you’re then going to draw the systematic relationship to, you have to have done a lot of relevance realization in the first place. Okay. Now, what you should say to me is, but some of these pairings seem very natural to me. Well, I want to say something different, which is that yes, when I’m creating the analogy, I’m, you know, I already, I think I already know things about fish and I already know things about birds, that’s in their, you know, their body shape and their the function of their limbs, etc. That makes me able to make the analogy. So I agree with you there. But that’s not the same thing as when I say, say it, and someone else responds instantly with the answer. In other words, if I’m sitting down trying to think of the analogy, yes, I’m using, does that make sense what I’m saying? In other words, no, no, no. So let me say it back to you, make sure I’m understanding you. So you’re agreeing with me that generating the metaphor in the first place is requires relevance realization. But once you have made that mapping, it’s a powerful way for me to help you. Like, let’s say I’m the speaker of the metaphor. So I somehow, I’m waving my hands now, I somehow solve relevance realization, combinatorial explosion. I come up with a good metaphor. But when I pass that metaphor on to you, that really helps you very rapidly collapse the combinatorial explosive space. Is that what you’re saying? Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. See, so as a cognitive scientist, I have to, I have to pay attention to the first problem, because that’s the problem of trying to give a computer or an AI the ability to generate and recognize metaphors in the first place. I agree that what we can do is we can collapse combinatorial explosion for people through the use of metaphor in very, very powerful ways. There’s many ways in which we can help each other collapse combinatorial explosion. So what, what did you want me to take note about that? Because… Okay, I wanted to say that I wanted to apply that, I wanted to apply that to what you said about the difference between our knowledge of a person and the ground of being. Right. You say there may be a combinatorially explosive number of ways in which the ground of being is personal. Right. Maybe a combinatorially explosive number of ways in which the ground of being is impersonal. Right. Right. All right. Then I, then what I said was, but if we map relationships, we can collapse a combinatorially explosive, that combinatorially explosive number of things. So that that’s when I said if God the Father is to God the Son, in, if God the Father is to God the Son as John is to his son in some way, suddenly that combinatorially explosive nature has collapsed. And of course, my argument is that it collapses in the direction of the personal. You’d have to come up with your own set of metaphors for collapsing it towards the impersonal. But that’s the case that I’m making because that was like that original. Right. So I agree. I think I’m, if I understand you correctly, I do think that one of the ways in which we can collapse the combinatorially, we agreed on this last time and it was helpful for both of us. So I’m making a request that we could, we can have this common term of ultimate reality. Right. Yeah, I’m sorry. No, that’s fine. And so the idea is, and the idea which you know I’ve argued for, that that reality is combinatorially explosive. But I do think we can collapse it. We can collapse the combinatorial explosion. And I even agree with you that, and I think I’ve argued this, that there’s that we’re going to inherently have to rely on metaphor and symbolic things in order to make that collapse work. That I’m in agreement with. And the fact that people would find, I want to make sure I don’t use my adjectives confusingly, that people would find metaphors to persons personally relevant. There we go. I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t screw up, I think. That also strikes me as very plausible because I would agree with you that we’re sort of wired for attachment relationships and living things and perhaps even, you know, as mammals, there might be a parental child thing that’s innate for us. And so that might give a kind of, I want to use, like I don’t want this, please, this isn’t meant to be dismissive. But it could make it, that could be easy. That could be easy for people, right, to do that. It could be accessible. Okay, that’s better. I like that better. That could be very accessible for people, both in both senses. Individually, that I can make sense to it for myself. And also, it’s easy for me to communicate to you how I’ve made sense of it. So I acknowledge all of that. I think that’s all right. And I think this is convergent. I think maybe you’ll disagree, but I think this is convergent with Paul’s argument, Paul Van de Klay, right, that we need to, because of the nature of reality, we need to bring a spirit of finesse to it rather than a spirit of geometry. And that, he says, tends to orient us towards personal symbols rather than impersonal ones. So I’m trying to represent your argument as fairly as possible and where I’m in agreement with it. I guess the issue for me, then, is that doesn’t seem to be an exclusive property of personal symbols. So there are a lot of impersonal symbols of ultimate reality that also collapse the combinatorial explosion. It seemed to go towards, again, very plausibly innate things, like the fact that we come plausibly innate with an ability to gestalt holes. And so you can think of Plotinus’ metaphor of the one, and think about how much we invoke this notion. And whenever we’re trying to explain something, we talk about how it’s one, how it’s unified, right, and that, or towards Paul’s point, does the spirit of finesse require personal metaphors? No, I don’t think so. I practice Tai Chi Chuan, as you know, and Taoism, and this is very much the art of finesse. And the point of it isn’t just to get physical finesse. The point of it is to give me a participatory sense of the Tao. And so, well, I argue, well, I agree with you. I don’t argue with you. I agree with you that the metaphors do the collapse, and there might be an innate basis to them. It seems to me I can make an equivalent argument for that. I have impersonal metaphors that also collapse and are also based on innate mechanisms. Well, and I would respond to that by saying that I agree. I don’t think that the impersonal metaphors are in any way illegitimate, because I think that the personal can include the impersonal. I guess the question would be, can the impersonal include the personal? So that might be something to think about, because I don’t think, we have this cataphatic spirituality as part of Christianity, which goes beyond the identity of God as any fitting into any categories that we have at all, right? And you know I’m very respectful of that. And I guess one of the reasons we’re coming around to this is getting back to all of your great work on the meaning crisis. The big question kind of out there that you put of whether Christianity had the resources, what does it have? Does it have the resources to deal with the meaning crisis? And of course, my big argument that I’m making is, yes, it does. And I’m trying to bring some of the thinking, Christian thinking, to be back on these questions that you have laid out there so well. So that’s what… No, and I want to respond to that, because I think that’s a very good point you’re making. First of all, Mary, I want to remind you that I’ve never claimed a foreclosure argument. I’ve never, I never do that. And I make that very, very clear. I, you know, this is kind of like there’s an urgent problem and we have to sort of place our bets as to where we’re going to place our resources. And that’s why that’s all I’ve tried to make it clear. That’s always the style of the argument I’m making. Now, where I’m a little bit stronger, but I think you don’t fall into this camp. People that are sort of committed to, you know, a two worlds mythology and a strictly personalistic mythology for Christianity, because I do think that is, I don’t think that has the resources. But what I see you doing frequently and what I see JP doing, right, is you guys are… I don’t know, I don’t want to get you in the hot water by saying something that might make you look like a heretic or something like that. But it seems to me like you guys are trying to craft a different vocabulary from the phenomenology. I mean, isn’t Ratzinger doing that to some degree too? Yes. Von Hildebrand did it. The number of Catholic theologians did it. And they sensed, I would say, early in the 20th century or in the mid 20th century, that they could no longer, as I put it, invoke Thomas Aquinas and expect people to stand up and salute. Yes. It wasn’t doing the work that it had once done. Which I think, I’m not being dismissive of Aquinas, I think it was important work, what Thomas Aquinas said was important. And the training of the intellectual strata of Europe was really on hand. And the whole bringing of Aristotle into the discourse. But it’s kind of reached sort of reached an end where we’ve maybe mined it not from a personal standpoint, because I would say that just anyone coming up and learning philosophy is going to get a lot out of Aquinas. I agree. I’m not saying it from that standpoint, but I’m saying that from culturally, having that kind of status, it doesn’t have it anymore. And so there is a desire to find new ways to talk about these things. And it’s not a matter of heresy or that I would fall into heresy or be accused of heresy or anything like that. I don’t have any fears and I don’t have any position to lose or anything. I’m not famous or anything. So, but I do think the phenomenology is key. And all the personalism of John Paul II, I don’t know, like his theology of the body and all of that work that he did. Okay, so in my latest, this kind of brings us up to what I did today, the video I released today. So I want to talk about meaning. You keep distracting me. I’m supposed to be doing Ratzinger and I keep talking about your stuff instead. But you talked about meaning. And I think this was part of your conversation that you had with Sweeney. And also part of the conversation you had with Guy Sundstock and Johannes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Niederhauer? Niederhauer, I said it wrong. Okay. And in talking about- I might have said it wrong too. I’m just learning Johannes’ name. Great guy, by the way. Great guy. I’m really lucky. I love the conversation. You’ll see how many things I tied into it in my video. But I want to focus on this idea of meaning because what occurred to me when you were talking about meaning, and then also mentioned making. Making was part of the conversation with Guy and Johannes, right? You mentioned people won’t make things and what does that do to people? How does that connect? I talked a lot about that in my video today. Oh, you’re whetting my appetite for it. But this part about meaning, you talked about the fact that meaning is not just like having a purpose, like set a goal and you’ll have meaning, but it’s being connected to something larger. So that got me thinking about, okay, but meaning goes in two directions. This is like this opponent processing stuff in the eminence and emergence, right? Not just that you mean something to something larger. So you’re embedded in a structure larger than yourself. You matter to it. That’s the word I wanted. You matter to it. But it’s also that things matter to you. Yes. These are interrelated. Yes. The more that you matter, the more that things matter to you. The less that you matter, the less that things matter to you. Yes, I agree. So the illustration I used was of a hunter. All right, a hunter goes out and gets food, brings it back for his community. And I was listening to Joe Rogan talking to a guy that was a hunter, they’re both hunters. And they talked about the great satisfaction and the great feeling of being a provider, of being able to bring back the game, cut it up, give it to their friends, and their friends send them pictures of it on the barbecue grill. And just the feeling that I’ve provided for my family, I’ve provided for my community, and how deeply that touched them. And so I was thinking, okay, like, the hunter matters to his community. The more he matters to his community, the more his hunting is going to matter to him. Yes. And the more his hunting matters to him, the more he matters to his community. Yeah, I agree with that. So what I tied that in with is that this gets back to several conversations ago that we had when we talked about worship. Right. All right. So I realized that, see, what I did when I was talking to you about worship is I used the optimistic explanation. You know, it’s the virtue of justice, and this will apply to our relationship to God. And that did not strike you. That did not, like, you didn’t go, oh, wow, yes, this is great, right? And I noticed that, and I said, ah, there’s something inadequate about saying it that way. So I wanted to try to say it another way, which is that the human, the, you know, man, I’m using man generically, is a priest. That is his status. You know, within the cosmos. Because he mediates between different levels of reality. Okay. So the hunter is gathering, you know, or a farmer is gathering something from down here, bringing it up and then giving it to the higher order, to the community. Sure, sure. All right. So that’s, and that in itself is a priestly act. So that worship is this mediation between these different levels of reality, bringing the blessing down from above and dispersing it out, or gathering from below and then sending it up above. And that is what, that is what worship is. In one of the illustrations I used on the back, because I used the hunting illustration several times in my video today, was that, for example, the hunters have to get hunting licenses right from their community. They have to get a hunting license. And then the fees they pay for the hunting licenses are used in conservation. So they’re bringing the blessing of the higher order is mediated through them to the, to the lower order, to the, you know, to the earth. But that, that point, that human point of sitting there as the mediator between the different levels is, that is what it means to be a priest. And that is like the role of man in the cosmos is to do that thing, to mediate between the different levels. I like this. So let’s talk about this, because you’re right, that was more impressive to me than the, the to a mystic representation. So the idea of mediation between levels, ontological levels, and that being an important feature of human beings. I think that’s important. And I like this idea, the idea that mattering to something is a reciprocal relationship with our internalizing an order. So both of these, both of these contribute to meaning in life. One is right, that the sense of mattering to a overarching thing. And the other, which I think, I think this is what your hunter analogy is doing, is also that I can internalize that I can take that order, and I take it in and it gives me intelligibility. And so that’s why making sense is also a significant predictor of meaning in life. So if I’ve mattered to something, but I can’t internalize it right into me, then it doesn’t, it doesn’t contribute as much meaning in life to me as if I can internalize it. So yes, in the internalization in the sense that you are, you are composed of different levels too. So you are doing this is happening internally. Yes, I totally agree. Yeah, as well as externally. But, but you know, when people don’t have meaning, they will not just say, I don’t matter. They’ll also say nothing matters to me. It goes both ways. And it’s, and the two things are really joined. Yes. And that’s, I try to sort of get at that notion with the notion of transjectivity. It’s both the way things are relevant to us. That’s the internalization direction and the way in which we’re relevant to things. Right. Right. And so yeah, I totally agree with that. And the idea that again, this is something that we don’t just think. It goes into the very structure, the way we relate to the different levels within ourselves. I like that Augustinian analogy that sort of the levels of the psyche, you know, mirror the relationship between us and a higher order. I think that makes sense to me. Well, that’s platonic too. So. Oh, very platonic. It’s yeah, it’s very much anagogic. It’s basically what affords anagogy. Right. And so I agree with that. And then the idea that human beings have an important role not shared with other organisms because they are mediators between, I don’t know what to call them, the order, the ontological orders, that strikes me as very plausible too. So is that what you mean by worship? Because I see the mediation and I get it. And I get that the mediation is deeply a kind of enacted symbolism and it’s about, you know, the two getting the loop formed of meaning in life, mattering and internalizing. I get all that. But like, what makes it, and I get that, like I said, I think it has, it could have a sacred import to people, a sacral import to them, precisely because it has to do with sort of the fundamental connection they have to themselves in the internalization and the connection to reality that they have in the mattering. So I get all that. What’s the specific connection to worship? Well, the worship is, it’s the same thing on a different level. So like, I talked about the hunter going, getting the animal and bringing me back to the community. Okay. So the community is the higher order. The environment is the lower order and the hunter is standing in the middle. Or you can use the example like we have in the mass, we have gathered together the elements, which is, you know, the bread and the wine, which is, you know, from the environment. And then brought it into the church. And then through the prayers of the priest, it is made into the body and blood of Christ. And then it is offered to God. So it’s offered to that higher level. So it’s the same. It’s that priestly action, again, that mediation between the different levels. And also is bringing down the blessing of God. And then that, so it’s not just a one way street. No. The priesthood is not a one way street. It’s not just offering to God. It’s also bringing the blessing of God down to the community in the same way that the hunter, you know, to make the analogy that the hunter is by paying his fee, contributing to the conservation. So bringing a blessing of the whole community or the state or whatever you want to, whatever that higher level is down into the environment. So is, are you saying that worship is a particular species of the genus or, so let me be clear with an example. So let’s say I’m doing Tai Chi, one of my favorite examples. And of course I am, right, I’m trying to connect to the environment. I’m trying to sort of matter and fit to my environment, right? The Tao, I’m trying to conform to the Tao, right? And the Tao, of course, is much beyond me. But of course I’m also internalizing the Tao and I’m experiencing that in the phenomena of Chi, right? And that, of course, is, you know, it energizes me. It provides me with insight. I get into the flow state. So I feel like I don’t mean anything. I’m going to use your word and please don’t be offended. I feel blessed in that sense when I’m receiving that. And I feel like also that I’m, right, that I’m connecting to something much larger to myself. And I feel like I’m mediating between my internal personal self and a larger order of what’s real. Would you call that worship? I would call that, I would certainly call, well, I would not want to put a definition on what you do that you are not comfortable with. But I would say that that is an exercise of priesthood. Okay. I would say that in other ways, too. Like, for example, when you go to the library or do your research, you’re taking from this broader, wider community of scholars, right? And then you take that in, you filter it through yourself, then you distribute it to a community of students, right? So that’s the same thing. And then from your community of students, you gather some around you or some close to you who will do research themselves and then contribute back up to that wider community. So I see this as like a very fundamental aspect of what human beings are. And so, no, when I went into my video, I talked about what led me to thinking about this is in Catholic theology, we say that Christ has three offices, priest, king, and prophet. And that all of the baptized participate in all the offices of Christ. But Christ is also the last Adam. He is man. He is the archetypal man, human being. And so that means that Adam, man, generically also participates in those offices or had those offices. So what I said in my video is that if we look at the history of man, we see a perversion of those offices. We see that instead of bringing down the blessing of God and gathering all of creation to praise God, man instead embarked on a mission of creating civilization on the blood of his brothers, which we see with Cain, the story of Cain and Abel right there at the beginning. And then perverted the kingship, the dominion by tyranny and slavery and all of those things. Perverted the office of prophet by instead of speaking the truth, speaking the oracles of God, instead perverting the truth and lying and deceit and all of those things. But that Christ comes and he purifies our participation in those offices. He shows us how to participate in them correctly. And he does that by uniting the opposite. So he is the priest and the victim. He is the king and a servant. And he is the logos of God, the word of God, but he’s also the baby who cannot speak and the silent lamb. So by uniting those opposites, he trains us in those offices correctly, which none of us are doing right. But he does offer us that way. That was beautiful. That was a beautiful articulation. Thank you for sharing that. So let me see if I get it. You’re saying given the meaning-making structure of human beings or the meaning cultivation, as I prefer to say it, that there’s these three offices that typify, are essential to human. You said priest and king and prophet. And that what Christ does, at least symbolically, is give us a way of reframing, to use my language, those by combining, if you’ll allow me, breaking frame and making frame. He gives us the little baby that breaks the frame, but then he is also the logos, which is to get us to expand to a bigger frame. He breaks the frame of the tyrant king by being the suffering servant, but then also expands to a different idea of what it is to be a king by leading the transformation of the world rather than just a country. And so I think this is a very powerful argument for the—what do I want to say here? You need to say this more, Mary, because what you’re doing exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. You’re going back and you’re trying to re-language these symbols in a way that connects up with, you know, the machinery that’s being revealed about human beings in cognitive science. And that’s a powerful argument you made for why Christianity—I hope you take this as a something positive—why Christianity could be so powerful and persuasive for individuals, as opposed to, you know, the idea that, you know, people are Christians just because they’re sort of believing what they’re told and stuff like that. I think what you just did there was really good. I really like—I think it’s good. I think it’s good. Well, good. Good. So, okay. So let’s see. I sort of want to put a pin in it, I guess is what I’m saying. Like, you’re trying— I couldn’t have done it without you. I could not have formulated it without you. And also just all of the conversations that I’ve been listening to. I mean, besides you, of course, Paul VanderKlay, but also like some conversations with Joe Rogan, which sometimes, you know, the language on Joe Rogan’s podcast is like, it’s not in my wheelhouse. And I have to—so I have to do a lot of mental bleeping when I’m listening to Joe Rogan. And also like some stuff from Eric Weinstein and different things like that. So I think all of these, you know, I couldn’t have pulled this together without all of that, in which I think it’s something special that is going on here. I think so, too. I think so, too. I just, like I said, I like that as an example of trying to reformulate Christian mythos in a way that makes it—I’m struggling to not be too diminutive. It makes it deeply functional for people, as opposed to just a set of claims. What I’m saying is you’re transforming the mythos into something that will itself become transformative for people, rather than just transmitting doctrine. That’s what I’m trying to put my finger on. Right, right. Because I could see when I had had that conversation with you and I talked about worship, and what I stated was doctrinal, and it was domestic. But I could see, and I’ve heard people say, I said this in my video, I’ve heard people say, you know, when we talk about that we ought to worship God or that God is deserving of worship, and people say things like, oh, well, your God is just like somebody whose ego you have to keep stroking. That it comes across like that that’s what it is. We have to constantly tell God how great he is, otherwise he gets depressed or something. Yeah, God comes off as the largest narcissist of all time or something. So I had to try, I had to think, okay, how can I express this using some other language and tying it in phenomenologically, and tying it into just to life, to the things that we’re doing every day to show. And this is why I think this gets us out of the two world mythology. I might be wrong about that, but you have to tell me. Because once it ties into things like gardening and hunting and making things, and ordinary work that people do, doesn’t that get us out of the two world thing? Well, I think it might. I have to think about that question, Mary. I’m not confident that I can answer it right here, right now. So that’s what I’m being a little bit hesitant. The way that you are reconfiguring transformation in terms of functional processes that people can engage in and enact, rather than relying on a particular metaphysical picture that they have to adhere to, that seems to me to, I’ll say this, it seems to me to be definitely on the right track. Yes. Okay. Okay, well, then I guess I’ll keep pondering. Well, I mean, I want you, speaking for myself and I imagine others, I want you to keep doing what you’re doing. And I think it’s very interesting. Yeah, I want to think about that question you asked me. It’s a good question. It’s a very good question. Now, the way, what I like about this is I can see what you’re talking about and I can see how a lot of it is integrated with, like I said, with sort of a cognitive science perspective on meaning. Making and transformation and things like that. That’s why I tried to throw in that extra bit about the frame breaking and the frame making. So Jesus is representing sort of like an intentional scaling. Please don’t take this the wrong way. He’s representing like an intentional scaling mechanism that helps us, you know, we cover the optimal grip on kingship and priesthood and prophecy. That I think is really cool. Yes. Now I want to ask you a question about, this gets back to the child thing a minute, because when you did all this work about the shapes, which I thought was very interesting. Have you done any work about, and you talk about pre-metaphorical… Understanding. …understandings. Have you done any work on family relationships and metaphors using family relationships? I haven’t. Mary Douglas has done quite a bit of work on that. She talks about various domains that are natural sources, natural symbols, like the body is one. So there’s of course tons. We do, you know, the body of Christ, right? So we do all kinds of body metaphors. I mean, we even use the word familiar. We have familial metaphors, of course, quite significant. And I think the first one goes to the fact that we are innately embodied. And the second one, I think, goes towards the fact that we are innately mammalian. Especially as primates, especially the primates, we are, we deeply depend on attachment relationships. For not only our survival, which we do, but also for our coming into personhood. You know, so I take it that her argument is there are certain things that are going to be natural symbols to us because they are deeply grounding of our cognition and our personhood. And they’re always available to us in some fashion. So that makes them a sort of a natural source. What she quite means by natural is a little bit unclear. You can at least get what she’s talking about, I think, intuitively. Okay, so I’m wondering what happens to people’s cognitive machinery. See, I’m getting all the revake-isms in my head. When there is, I mean, we do know that people suffer terribly. Children suffer terribly when there’s disruption in a family. Like being embedded within a family might be as important as being in a body. Oh, I think it is. Cognition. Yeah, I think it is. I do deeply think that’s true. Of course, there’s lots of cultural historical variations on what a family is. And so I don’t want to say that ours is sort of the universally prescribed type or something like that. I think that’s true because you, sorry, there’s a weird thing banging around my head. My colleague and good friend, Jeff McDonald, he teaches relationship psychology at U of T here. And he basically says, and so you’ll see why I was sort of smiling a little bit, he says that attachment theory is the way, the truth, and the life of understanding romantic relationships. If you want to know why people get into the romantic relationships they do, or even the friendships they do, what you do is you look at attachment theory. So attachment theory is the different ways in which children and parents are attached. They can be securely attached, anxiously attached, avoidantly attached, and then they can be attached, and then what he’s been, he’s got a lot of evidence and argument to support this. What you can see is that pattern plays out powerfully through people’s lives in ways that they’re often only really vaguely aware of. So this is again the kind of stuff I try to point to when I talk about the machinery of the self as opposed to just the machinery of consciousness or cognition. Because these processes by which we form our romantic and our friendship relationships are of course ways in which we are also simultaneously forming our identity. And so the attachment relationships you have to your parents and to some degree your siblings deeply inform the kind of existential modes you’ll get into and the kind of self you will turn out to be. And that’s why you know trauma and violence within the family is deeply, deeply disruptive of people in really comprehensive manners. Right. So I’m wondering how you would think that the societal disruption of family and of young people forming families is connecting with the meaning crisis. Oh well, that’s a good question. Chicken and egg. Is it a chicken and egg problem? Well, a bit, but Mary Epperstadt actually has, you know, How the West Really Lost God. I’ve read her. What have you read this book? No, but I read, did she write Adam and Eve After the Pill? I don’t know. I don’t know her work in general. I only know this one book. Her basic argument is that there’s a very strong correlation between the rise of the disbelief in God, if that’s the way to put it, and the breaking down of stable family structures. And this makes sense, right? Because again, if you cannot connect to perspectives beyond you that you are willing to internalize, that will seriously truncate your ability to make the kinds of connections that you see sort of as central to religious and spiritual life. Well, you know, in his encyclical Phidais et Ratio, John Paul II talked about faith as preceding reason. And he said it like this, he said that faith is the original position of the human being, and he quoted a psalm that said, you have made me to trust at my mother’s breast. Yeah, Erickson talked about that too, the developmental psychologist. So, so what you’re talking about, okay, so this gets me to another question, because I’ve talked some about marriage and, you know, family life. And one of the things that questions that I had, when you look at your religion, you look at your, I shouldn’t even call it your, let me just say, because I know, I know that puts you in a position you don’t want to be, is that you’re founding something. So as I say, the religion that is not a religion. Okay, what is it that would ground within that, ground the sacredness of family life and the sacredness of the commitments of members of the family to one another? It’s like in through, through the, you know, I’m not, I know that there are ways that this is done in other religions, like in Hinduism and Buddhism as well, because obviously they have marriages too. But I’m not, I’m not clear on how their marriage commitments are connected with their religion, I’m sure they are. But I know, of course, within Judaism and Christianity, we have the concept of the covenant and the marriage covenant, a covenant being the kind of an agreement that forms a family, brings people into family relationship, like adoption or marriage. And that being, you know, that there are sacred oaths connected with, connected with forming a family in the, in marriage. What in the religion that is not a religion, what would be the, how is that grounded? How is that sacredness of family life grounded in your conception? I mean, not for someone like you, an experienced man who’s, you know, who has made a commitment, possibly not on the legal angle, but spiritually to someone, right? And who can be trusted to live that out, you know, fully trusted. I’m very, very committed to my partner. I believe you, I’ve heard you speak of her very, with great affection and with a great deal of, with a great deal of soul connection kind of thing. And I believe that. But everybody’s not you. Good thing, good thing. As many people pointed out, we’re talking about, you know, we’re talking about the 28 year old here. Yeah. So, I mean, so part of this, and this is, I think something Jeff would agree on, I think we need to make attachment theory and the understanding of romantic relationships, we have to make that something of our general education to people. Just like we, I mean, think about how we’ve come to realize that even certain aspects of education border on being almost sacred for us. Like we would find it odd if an education system thwarted people ever gaining literacy or something like that. We would find that sort of deeply, deeply problematic. I would hope that the religion that’s not a religion would take very deeply, I try to argue for this, the fact that human cognition is inherently dynamic, inherently developmental, inherently transjective, et cetera, and therefore take very seriously the good science that Jeff and other people point to about the relationship, the deep relationship between attachment and romantic relationship, and they would add to it. There’s the very good work of Siegel showing that your ability for auto, Paul is going to love this, he’s going to jump up at that when I say this, right, that your capacity for autobiographical narrative is predictive of your ability to form an attachment relationship with your children. And so getting people to be more conversant with autobiographical narrative and with fiction in general. The fact that we have reduced our culture’s attention to fiction and to the role, think about how Jordan Peterson is trying to bring back a future authoring as a way to get right, right? So I would see that the religion that’s not a religion would take very seriously all of this very good science, and then like Jordan has done and like other people have done, like Dan Siegel has done, and others would take very seriously the project of, again, creating a set of, you know, a dynamic system of psychotechnologies that is designed to afford that. And then, and here’s to your point in particular, that would bring with it the idea that these psychotechnologies, as many psychotechnologies do, depend on very stable forms of distributed cognition. We can’t, for example, teach literacy to people unless we set up this whole educational sort of situation and machine that’s running societally. You know, if you made your own particular kind of literacy for your kid, that’s kind of useless, right, in the end, right? And so I think… You’re talking about it, you’d figure out a system of enforced monogamy. I don’t know, I don’t know, well, I don’t know if I would say enforced monogamy, because again, there’s probably, there’s probably a biological thing towards pair bonding, just because it’s the most manageable of the marriage relationships. But again, I worry a little bit, well, I’m wondering a little bit about being sort of ethnocentric on this. I mean, you know, for example, you know, you have non-monogamous relationships, even in the Old Testament, and then you have Jesus also say, accept a man, you know, leave his mother and father, right? He can’t follow the… So even the Bible’s attitude towards family, I think, is not a clear endorsement of monogamy. At least it seems that way to me. I mean, you’re probably more conversant with the Bible than I am. I do think that committed, you know, committed long-term relationships that are readily learnable by children are central to giving them this kind of education. It might be, you might be able to make a case that monogamy is the way to do that, but that needs a little bit more argument to my mind. But what I will agree on you is, you do need committed relationships, and they need to have a structure that’s stable and readily learnable by a small child. And it puts that child in a secure situation. Oh, of course, of course. So, sorry, I did… I get back. So let me say back what I’m hearing you say. I think I’m hearing you say that using cognitive science and some psychological studies of how people get attached to one another… A lot of psychological research on that. And having a community of people who understand that is going to produce a situation where when Jack and Sally at age 28 decide that they’re going to pair up and form a family, that there’s a solid community around them that’s going to sort of hold their feet to the fire to say, you know, so that when, seven years later, when Jack is out with his buddies and he’s thinking about fooling around with some woman, one of them is going to stop him upside the head and say, you know, your wife is at home, you go home and stop being an idiot. You’re not a teenager anymore, something like that. You know what I’m saying? You understand what I’m saying? Yeah. And I mean… Some kind of commitment to pressure to… Because there’s a tremendous amount of centrifugal force on the family. So there has to be some sort of centripetal force to hold it together. You know, so… I think… There will be a community before which they make vows to one another. Yeah. But… Do you understand what I’m saying? I do. But I think… Not to sort of rain on anybody’s parade. I think the practice, the weddings we now have don’t do any of that because they’re not bound to people having to learn deeply about what it means to raise a child and what it is to be a child and what it is to be a parent. And again, you know, what are the deep connections between attachment relationships? What are the things that predict it and make it possible? I’ve often found it odd… I hope people don’t jump on me for this. So I’m expressing a thought here that we make people get a license before they get a car, but we don’t make them do any kind of tests before they have a child. We take it that, well, you can have sex. That’s enough, right? To become a parent. And why do we make… I can’t… Like, here’s another important job, being a teacher. My ability to speak is insufficient. Well, I can talk. Let me be a teacher. No, no. I have to do all of this stuff because we realize, no, no, it’s so important. You’re shaping a human mind, and I take that seriously. Or a doctor. Well, I’m just going to help people. No, no. You have to go through all this and you have to pass all these tests because it’s a body and you’ve got to take great care of it. Well, parents are shaping minds and taking care of bodies. And yet, we don’t put… I’m not saying we have a government-enforced license. I was using that as an analogy. But why do we not have a culture that requires people to commit to a serious kind of education before they are allowed to take seriously the prospect of having a child? That’s what I’m actually saying. I don’t want to legislate this. Okay? Right. I understand. No, I do understand. And that’s where I think people used to learn how to take care of children by being part of large families. Extended families. Exactly. And extended families. I do think when I say about monogamy, I’m not attempting to make a case for the nuclear family, which I think has been, in many ways, very disastrous for our society. I think for one thing it does is it robs women who wish to make their family the center of their life as a career, as motherhood and homemaking. It puts them into a situation of tremendous loneliness. Yeah, no. And also, regardless of everything we say, a diminished social status. So they go with loneliness and a diminished social status, which, of course, is a terrific corrosive to people’s self-esteem and their sense of efficacy. Yeah. And let’s be honest. Of course, the nuclear family has also led to people being trapped. Because women especially have been trapped financially in nuclear families as well, which is deeply problematic. Mary, I got… Oh, okay. I was going to say one more thing and I know you probably got to go, right? Yeah. I was going to say, you see, this is why I liked your conversation with Jordan Hall so much when he started saying, as you’re talking, he keeps going to the bigger structures, into the bigger structures, into the bigger structures, right? Yeah, yeah. That is the problem. Every time we start touching these things, it’s like we’re pulling on a tapestry and different threads and start coming out. Sure, sure. It gets systemic real fast. It does. And that’s why I’m grateful that you’ve made the correction. I don’t have the knowledge or the wisdom to found a religion. That’s not what’s going on here. What Jordan and I and others are doing is to try and articulate and help and hopefully enhance a process that is already at work. Maybe we could close off there, Mary. You can say something more. I’m not trying to hog the final word on the conversation or anything like that. Well, I’m fine with that. I think we covered a lot of ground. I think we made some good progress. And I hope you enjoy my latest video. I will. And you can take care. Maybe we’ll talk again some time. Oh, of course, we will, Mary. That goes with the question. I mean, you keep doing work on my work. I’m going to keep wanting to talk to you, of course. That goes toward the point you just made earlier in our discussion. So I will definitely load this on my channel. Not sure when. Send me in an email any links you’d like me to put into, like in the notes for the video. Obviously links to your channel, anything else you want. Just send me an email of what you want and I’ll make sure that gets in there. So maybe I could close then because I was the host by just thanking you. I found this discussion, of course, always with you. I find it very it’s highly pleasurable, highly insightful. And I like the fact that you bring to it a lot of respect and care and affection. So thank you for that. Well, thank you, John. It was a pleasure for sure. Okay. Good night. Take care. Bye bye.