https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Lbk3lA6zCic
Welcome everyone. I’m very pleased to be participating in this collaboration with Dr. Justin Sledge from Esoterica, Philip Holm from Let’s Talk Religion, Dr. Angela Puccia from Angela’s Symposium, Dan Atrella from The Modern Hematocyst, and my good friend Zevi Slavin from Seekers of Unity. We are collaborating to bring to the forefront where it more properly belongs, the ancient but still currently vital philosophical framework of neoplatonism, a profound way to understand reality and transform oneself in wisdom into a greater comportment and attuned affinity with that reality. Neoplatonism demonstrates an amazing capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Gnosticism, Hermeticism, magical traditions, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and I would argue science, especially current modern 4E cognitive science. Once again, it’s a great pleasure to participate in this, and I look forward to further such collaborations. As Thomas Plante in his book, The Lost Way to the Good argues, neoplatonism was the philosophical version of the Silk Road that bound the East and the West together, giving them a shared lingua franca, lingua philosophia, by which they could deeply enter into transformative dialogue and intercultural exchange with each other. We need this now more than ever, and so I’m very grateful, and excited to participate in this wonderful collaboration. Good afternoon, everyone. It is an immense pleasure today to welcome Dr. John Verbeke of the University of Toronto to Raulston College. Dr. Verbeke has a very interesting and dedicated intellectual trajectory, not least because of his formal education, which spans, you might say, the arts and the sciences in a way that is rare, but in a manner in which I would argue our culture is desperately in need of. He started out as an undergraduate studying philosophy, then another degree at master’s in philosophy. He then went back, humility being the key to all learning, to do another undergraduate, starting again as a, you might say, a kind of first-year student, because he wanted to get the science side of things, with an undergraduate degree in psychology, and then finally a PhD in philosophy, where he brought these strains or modes of thinking together. I think bringing strains or modes of thinking together is Dr. Verbeke’s great gift as a man and as a thinker. He is widely known, as I’m sure all of you and those who will be listening to this lecture online know, for his YouTube channel, for his engagement with a wide range of thinkers across many disciplines and places. He’s known in a way most of all for this mysterious M-word meaning. How do we find ourselves in the world? I would argue that there is no, people like to talk about metrics all the time, there is no benchmark, there is no metric, there is no mode of analysis of the success of any civilization, of any human culture, than the degree to which it enables the human beings in it to find their own lives meaningful by their own measure. That’s what meaning is, right? We can’t, nobody can give it to you simply speaking. So Dr. Verbeke has been thinking about that question, you might say, of meaning for decades, but I want to say one further thing, and that is that while there’s one sense in which we’re all all the time kind of thinking about what we find meaningful, and it’s something that any human being in time has access to, there’s also a sense in which people have been thinking about this for a long time, and there are modes of thought that enable us to penetrate the nature of our experience, to understand the world. Dr. Conlon’s been talking to you about the Greek language and teaching you the Greek language the last months, Dr. Bryson and our other colleagues leading us through these wonderful texts that are, I would say, very interesting. I would say almost infinitely rich on these very questions, and Dr. Verbeke’s work to me is especially inspiring because of the way he takes up the whole intellectual tradition. I think he used the word third wave Platonism or Neo-Platonism when we spoke last night, so you’re going to find, I would put it to you that you will be hard pressed to find a man who has as many people listening and trying to understand the world with his help, who also is doing so through the language, through the text, through the tradition of a very ancient and medieval past. So with that said, it’s an enormous pleasure, Dr. Verbeke, to have you here today. Thank you so much. First of all, I want to thank you, Stephen, for that intimidating introduction. Now I have to live up to it. I also want to thank the hospitality of Ralston. It’s been truly wonderful and warm. I thoroughly enjoyed my brief dip into the instruction on ancient Greek. I was like seriously impressed. I was like, whoa. I got little sections of it. Like I knew when he was talking about Socratic aporia and a few things like that. So any of the philosophical terms would leap out, but otherwise it was like you’re just conversing about Odysseus swimming around in the water. It’s like, what’s going on? I was just really, really impressed. So Stephen said, my work is an attempt to integrate, by the way, my BSc was in cognitive science, which includes psychology. My work is about trying to integrate that cognitive science, that cognitive psychology with, I think, a very defensible reinterpretation of an oft-used but poorly understood term, spirituality. What is it to seriously, take seriously the possibility of integrating cognitive science and spirituality? And so I want to begin. Oh, I just noticed, I forgot, I noticed to get a couple things from my thing I wanted to share with you actually. A couple of books a couple of books that I think are exemplary. So my talk is on levels of intelligibility, levels of the self, realizing dialectic. I hear you’ve been talking about the self, like consciousness. It is that which we are most familiar and is simultaneously most mysterious. And I’m going to attempt to bring the ancient Neoplatonic tradition and the cutting edge of current cognitive science together to try and address that burning question. Now, Eric Pearl has done outstanding commentary on Platinus. Platinus is considered the father of Neoplatonism. He’s around sort of 205 to 270 of the Common Era. And I’ll talk a lot about what Neoplatonism is. So it’s a little bit obscure to you. Hang in there. It’ll become, I hope, clearer. So Platinus wrote a whole bunch of essays called Aeneids, and I won’t go into the reason why they’re called that. And Eric Pearl in his commentary makes two interrelated and I think really important points. First is he translates the title of the Aeneid in a new way. The title is usually translated as on the three principle hypostasis, hypostasis standing under the underlying nature of things. And that’s a fair enough translation. I think Pearl’s translation is brilliant and much more accurate in disclosing what the text is about. He translates it on the three primary levels of reality. Leveled ontology. The idea that we don’t have a flat ontology, but ontology comes in levels in some important way. And then that leads into the second point he makes that self-knowledge and knowledge of reality are inseparable. They’re bound up together. This is what he argues, Platinus is arguing. Now these two come together in Pearl’s argument to the conclusion of a coordinated co-participation between levels of the self, or levels of the psyche as I might sometimes say, and levels of reality. So reality is leveled and the psyche is leveled, but they are leveled in coordinating and co-participating manner. Now he cites Pierre Haddow, who I hope you get to learn from in your education here. Haddow was instrumental in bringing back the idea of philosophy as a way of life, not the academic study of techniques of argumentation and conceptual analysis that promised much and has not actually delivered as much, but instead philosophy as what the word means, the love of wisdom. The transformation of one’s consciousness, cognition, character towards the cultivation of wisdom. So Haddow in talking about, Platinus says, in the broadest sense of the self, soul, itself involving many levels, intellect and the one, these are the levels of reality in the neoplatonic framework, are not only metaphysical principles or levels of reality, but levels of the self. The self, here’s another quote, the self we may say is whatever level it attains, which is a very different idea than the notion of the self that we carry around. That’s usually a sort of monotic, simple, single substance. This is the idea of the self as leveled and that its proper instantiation is the level at which it has attained its deepest correspondence to a level of reality. Now my task as we reflect on and wrestle together with these very provocative and strange sounding claims, levels of reality, levels of the self, the level is something that is trying to attain a level that is its ultimate realization. What does that mean? The words are all individual English words, but when you put them together, it sounds like gobbledygook in modern years. What’s going on here? How are we going to make sense of this? Now there’s going to be three stages to my attempts to make sense of this. The first is I’m going to pursue how do we make sense of this neoplatonic psychoontology. What do I mean by psychoontology? Psyche has to do with the self, ontology has to do with being, and then in the neoplatonic framework they’re woven together. And again, in a way that seems very strange to us as we are meshed in a Cartesian framework. That’ll be the first stage. It’ll be a fairly long stage of my talk. Second stage, explain why a 21st century cognitive scientist, I’ll take myself as an example, finds it both highly plausible and very rationally defensible. Why this view of the self is so important to the human being? Finds it both highly plausible and very rationally defensible. Why this view from the ancient world is so consonant with current cognitive science? That’ll also be a fairly long section. The third section will be the shortest. I want to explain why this revised, revised by its interaction with cognitive science, why this revised neoplatonism could respond to the current challenges facing the western world that I have called the meaning crisis. So that’s how I’m going to proceed, those three stages. Okay, so the first stage about trying to make sense of this psychoontology. So neoplatonism is kind of like the grand unified field theory, that’s what physicists are after, but it’s the grand unified field theory of ancient philosophy and ancient spirituality. It’s a culmination, it’s a synoptic integration, and it’s a synoptic integration of at least three main philosophical traditions. Let me just list them and briefly introduce you to them and then I’ll come back and show you how Platinus weaves them together to give us neoplatonism. The first is this platonic tradition, that’s what’s called neoplatonism. Platinus would not have called himself a neoplatonist, that’s our label for him, he just saw himself in the tradition of Plato and Pythagoras. But there’s a spirituality that he draws from that platonic tradition. Now one of the symptoms of the meaning crisis is people’s pervasive self-description of themselves as spiritual but not religious, which doesn’t mean very much at all. It sounds important, but when you ask them, do you believe in spirits? Well, no. Then what do you mean by spirituality? Well, I mean, and then, bleh. Okay, I’m going to try and specify something here. I’m going to talk about a conforming of oneself to reality in order to cultivate wisdom and meaning. And by meaning, I don’t mean semantic meaning, I mean meaning in life. I mean that thing that you can point to that makes life worth living in the face of human frailty, foolishness, suffering, and its ultimate fatality. That’s what I mean by meaning in life. So a conforming of oneself to reality in order to cultivate wisdom and meaning in life. And I think Plato does a great job at that. Now this has three core components in it. The first is a conception of reality as leveled. And here’s where we’ll start to get into what does that mean? Second, a conception of the psyche as leveled. And third, a conception of the dynamic interaction between the psyche and reality that affords meaning and wisdom. I’ll return to all of these in depth soon, but I want to continue with introducing the traditions to you. So the first is the Platonic tradition from which a spirituality, as I’ve defined it, has been drawn. The second is Aristotelian science. So I hear you’re starting Aristotle now, and we have to remember that Aristotelian science lasts a thousand years. That’s worth noting. Okay, what did you do today? Aristotelian science, right? I mean, when you start any science, even in the modern era, you’ll get introduced to Aristotle. Imagine being at a party with Aristotle. I’m really interested in physics. Here, I wrote this book called The Physics. Oh, well, I’m really interested in the psyche. Here’s the anima. I wrote it. I’m interested in how animal moves. Here’s my book. Poetry. Here’s my book. How to write books. Here’s my book. That’s Aristotle, okay? So you don’t want to be married to Aristotle. Okay, now Aristotelian science has three components to it that are central to Platinus in his synoptic integration and creation of Neoplatonism. The first is a theory of causes. And you may say, well, I know what cause is. No, you don’t. You know the Aristotelian, so you know the Cartesian reduction of all causes. So you know the Aristotelian reduction of all causes. To evolve causes to one type of cause. I want to bring back a notion of causation called formal cause that was very important to Platinus. Second, a theory of knowing by conformity. I’m splitting it up like that because I don’t want you to hear our current notion of conformity, which we use in regard to the negative thing. I want you to hear con, sharing, form, sharing the form. But form doesn’t mean shape. It means structural functional organization. It means the formal cause. So I’m going to explain in more detail what’s knowing by conformity. And then the third is an attunement relation between the two. So the way the world is structured and the way the psyche works, they attune and they can even become at one with each other. The third tradition that is taken up by Neoplatonism is the Stoic tradition. Stoicism, if I had to summarize it, and I have in a couple places. But Stoicism is basically the philosophy. But there’s a debate if it’s a religion or philosophy. It’s a philosophy religion or a religious philosophy of internalizing Socrates. So the way you have internalized other people, you want to internalize Socrates. Antisthenes, who was a follower of Socrates and the forerunner of Stoicism, when asked what he had learned from Socrates, he said, I learned how to dialogue with myself. And you may say, well, I talk to myself all day long. That’s not what he means. He means to be able to talk to yourself as if you were talking with Socrates. So what Stoicism had was three components of trying to internalize Socrates. One was the discipline, the disciplining of ascent, what you ascent to, what you say, that is true, or I agree with that. This carries with it a notion of identification. It’s not just sort of verbal ascent. You’re identifying with it. You’re putting, I really mean it. The second is the disciplining of desire. Socrates was famous for walking into the marketplace and saying, look at all the things I don’t need. And so this idea about how much have you cultivated, and notice how this will even sound odd as it drops. How much of you cultivated a rationality of desire? Socrates is famous for saying he knew nothing, but in a special way, he knew that he did not know. That was the core of his wisdom. But that’s not actually true. Socrates claimed to know things. He claimed to know that the unexamined life is not worth living. He also claimed to know ta erotica. He claimed to know the erotic things. He wasn’t saying that he was great in bed. He was saying, I know what to care about. I know how to properly proportion my caring and my attention. So the disciplining of ascent, the disciplining of desire, and the disciplining of action. Can you do the right thing at the right time, to the right degree, for the right reasons? Okay, so these are the three traditions that Platinus is going to draw together, and he’s going to synthesize them. Platonic spirituality, Aristotelian science, and the Socratic cultivation of virtue and agency, the capacity of self-directedness, self-cultivation. That’s what I mean by agency. Okay, so now let’s go back to that first stage of trying to explicate neo-Platonism to you. So I said, neo-Platonism is a synoptic integration. All three of these traditions are not placed side-by-side each other. They’re not, I don’t want you to think of them like pieces of, you know, parts of a chair, and they’re just going together. I want you to think about it more like symbiotic evolution, the way mitochondria were once separate, you know, paramecium or something, and they entered into a symbiotic relationship to a larger bacterium, and that created the pro-chaotic cell, and that made multicellular life possible. Everything was changed. I want you to think about how each one of these traditions was reciprocally reconstructing each other. They were modifying and changing each other. They were mutually maturing each other, demanding and affording each other’s inherent development. So unfortunately, I wish I could speak in parallel, but I’ll have to speak in sequence, but I want you to keep this. It’s not this, this, this. See what my hands are doing? They’re trying to capture and gesture what I can’t capture in speech. Okay, the Platonic spirituality. The best way to, now, first of all, I’m going to apologize, but I’m going to say that I have not been taught ancient Greek. I was taught these terms by people who probably didn’t speak ancient Greek, and so I’ll probably mispronounce them. So take it as a way of feeling superior to me, so I don’t, right, so I don’t, I don’t get, I do not, I don’t want to ever lose touch with my aspiration to humility. So this is the notion of the ascent, anagagai, anagagai. It’s, there’s two places where it’s, sorry, three dialogues it’s sort of discussed. The most, most explicated perhaps is the symposium, which I hear you’re going to be reading, but the Republic of the Republic of the Republic of the Republic of the Republic of the Republic of the Republic is also important and the Phaedrus also have this notion of the Phaedrus also have this notion of the Phaedrus also have this notion of the Phaedrus also have this notion of the Phaedrus’ ascent from a world that’s largely illusory to a world that is more and more real. But I’m going to focus in mostly on sort of what you get if you integrate these three different dialogues together, the vision of the ascent. It’s called the ascent because of the myth of Plato’s cave, which was made into a movie called The Matrix. There’s a reason he’s called Neo, Neoplatonism. There’s a reason he’s called The One. The One is the designation of the greatest reality in the Neoplatonic framework. The fact that she’s Trinity says that Neoplatonism and Christianity integrated together. Okay, anyways. So if you know the parable, there’s people trapped in a cave, they can’t move, they’re chained to a chair. Behind them there’s a fire burning, there’s people moving back and forth talking and they’re carrying objects. The people can only see the shadows and hear the echoes and they think they’re real. That’s supposed to be us. Or Neo when he’s still in The Matrix. Somebody gets free and turns around and sees the fire and sees the shadows being cast and the echoes being cast. And moves towards the fire and then Plato makes it clear that every time you move to this state of enlightenment, your eyes have to adjust. It’s initially startling, it overwhelms you. The eyes have to adjust and then as they accommodate, you can see more of a pathway. The escapee sees a pathway leading up and as he’s leading up, it’s leading up into the real world. He’s getting hit by more and more sunlight and he has to stop, he has to accommodate and then he can see more of the path and he keeps doing this cycle. He gets out and initially he can’t look around, he can only look at sort of reflections and then he wants to try and find the source of the light and the life and he can only glimpse it. It’s the sun and then he returns back down into the cave and he’s again befuddled because his eyes are no longer set for that dark environment and he tries to tell his compatriots about the upper world and they threaten to kill him because they think he’s mad. Okay, so the ascent. Now first of all, two things. The ascent is not just an ascent, it is always a return, an ascent and a return. One of the things that happened in sort of standard platonic scholarship was an overemphasis on the ascent. Now notice there’s a cycle here. There’s a movement, the world discloses more of itself, it’s overwhelming. The person has to accommodate, they have to go through a transformation and then they can see by that new light and that allows them to move forward and then the cycle continues. It’s this looping process. You have to be really careful with platonic mythos. I do not like when they call the allegory of the cave. That’s like calling Jesus’s parables allegories. If somebody offers to turn one of Jesus’s parables into an allegory, walk away from them because they are misleading you fundamentally about what a parable does. The closest analog to a parable is a Zen koen. A parable looks like a narrative, you take it in as a story, you’re familiar with stories and then it blows up the whole narrative approach from the inside. Same thing with the platonic myths. They’re not allegories, they’re rich and you have to dip into them and swim within them. Within the Republic, the dialogue in which that allegory is set, Plato lays out the first psychology that we have. He talks about how inner conflict reveals three different levels of the psyche. Three levels that keep getting rediscovered by the way in the history of psychology and cognitive science. The first level he calls the monster and he locates it somewhere in your genitalia and your stomach. This is the part of you that’s repetitive in nature. You have to think of each one of these levels as representing different degrees of cognitive scope. What you attend to, your salience landscape, what stands out for you, how you’re rewarded. This is the level in which you are very urgently motivated. You’re motivated in the here and now. You’re motivated by superficial characteristics. You are rewarded by pleasure or punished by pain and you find things salient insofar as they are urgent to you. You need this. This is not evil. If you don’t have this, you won’t eat. If human beings don’t have this, they wouldn’t reproduce. The race would die, etc. This is what you need when you jump out of traffic when a car is bearing down on you. Now the next level up, I’m not going to translate because all the translations are misleading. I’m going to keep the Greek word, it’s thymos and it’s somewhere in here and it represents that we are also cultural beings. Now the cognitive scope is not just immediate superficial perception. Now this is the socio-cultural arena. This is the fact that we are encultured beings. So this area is the area in which you have all the social emotions like pride and shame and guilt. Respect, honor and this is moved by seeking honor and avoiding being dishonored. This is why if you want to lose weight, which involves challenging the monster, you join a group. It’s reliably predictive of you succeeding because the culture imperative is as powerful as biological imperatives. This of course explains a lot of other otherwise bizarre behavior that human beings engage in compared to other animals. We marshal millions of us together and fight tectonic wars. There’s only a few other species that do that and unlike other species that do it for territory, although sometimes we’re doing it for territory, we’re often doing it for purely cultural reasons. Okay, now he represents this by a lion because lions are social mammals. And they represent that sort of they often stand stood as symbols of pride. That’s why we call it pride of lions. The next level up is represented by a human being and that represents your capacity for very broad cognitive scope for pursuing long-term goals for caring about whether or not things are true or false. Real or illusory. What Plato gets very right about these three levels is that they’re often in conflict with each other because they have different cognitive scope. They have a different degree of motivation that the monster is very urgent. The lion is powerful, a little bit more developed. The human being is very weak, very weak motivationally. And although we don’t like to hear it, I’m going to tell you that this is backed up by tremendous amount of evidence. I hope this doesn’t undermine anything happening at Ralston. People who teach, who teach in the world of science, people who teach, philosophers who teach moral reasoning, there’s no correlation between how good they are at that and how moral they are in their lives. Surely there’s no, no, doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t, doesn’t make a difference. So what I’m not saying is, is moral reasoning useless? No, and that’s not certainly what Plato’s saying. What Plato says is you have to ally the human being that has the reasoning capacity to the lion with its cultural motivation. How do you do this? Well, here’s where Plato did stumble upon something that we’ve forgotten for which there’s increasing cognitive science evidence. We reason best when we are in dialogue with others. We have a model given to us from, by Descartes that reason is monological. Reason actually works best in dialogue. You take standard reasoning tasks that people fail at reliably. There’s a one called this Ways and Selection task. I won’t go into it. It’s been replicated since 1966, robustly replicated. You take university educated students, you give them a basic test. It’s for basic conditional reasoning, very simple test. 90% of them fail. They show what’s called confirmation bias. They only look for evidence that confirms a rule. They don’t look for evidence that disconfirms it, overwhelmingly, without realizing it. Put them into groups of four so they can talk to each other. The success rate goes from 10% to 80% reliably. That’s one among many examples. Take a look at Mercer and Sperber’s recent book, The Enigma of Reason. The dialogical nature of rationality was one of the central discoveries of Plato. That’s why Plato wrote dialogues. He didn’t write the right dialogues because they were just sort of ornamental. He wrote dialogues because he was trying to portray because he was trying to portray the inherent dialogical nature of rationality. That seems odd to us because we are so enamored and enmeshed within a Cartesian framework. Okay, so you’ve got the psyche and it’s in conflict. The conflict drives your attention in different ways. John wants to lose weight. That’s the human being. Long-term goal, abstract. But he comes home and there on the shelf, the counter, is a chocolate cake. And it’s like humming with chocolate-ness. It’s super salient. It’s super salient. This is called hyperbolic discounting. And that present stimulus is hugely salient compared to that future abstract goal, which is very, very, very low in salience. So you eat the cake all the time knowing that that’s not what you want. That’s not your long-term goal. This is this conflict. But if the human being can ally with the lion, the human being can be taught. The human being can then train the lion and together they can tame the monster. When that happens, when you get that internal harmony, the conflict goes down and that means your salience is more and more properly proportioned to the coherence of the world. Your current goals, your long-term goals, the superficial features, the in-depth and abstract features, the cultural world, the biological world, and the rational world. All of these things get properly coordinated, not so in abstract ideology, but in the actual ratio religio, the proper proportioning and disposing of your sense of connectedness to the world. So as you get the inner harmony, you start to disclose more real patterns in the world because of the proper proportioning of your attention. Your salience landscaping is now best following the contours of the causal structure of the world. You get asymmetric dependence. You start to realize that some stimuli are actually dependent on, asymmetrically dependent on, other stimuli for their understanding. You start to explain things. You start to understand them. That’s what intelligibility means. It’s understandable to you. It’s explainable to others. What starts to happen, and this is very important, you start to get the proper proportioning of the relationship between appearance and reality. So we are now in the hermeneutics of suspicion. This is Paul Recour, where we take it that appearances are overwhelmingly misleading, distorting, deceptive. There’s a hidden agenda. There’s a cabal. There’s a conspiracy. And the moment of truth is, aha, see, all along I knew they really didn’t love us. That’s the hermeneutics of suspicion. It was given to us by Freud, by Marx, by Nietzsche. But Plato makes clear, and then Marlo Ponti picks it up, DC Schindler. This is a point also made by William Gibson, the great psychologist. You can only note that something’s an illusion if you can point to something else as real. This is an illusion in contrast to this reality. Noting an illusion is completely parasitic on noting a reality. Noting a reality. It makes no sense to say everything’s an illusion. It’s like saying everything is tall. It makes no sense. It sounds like you’re saying something, but you’re not. So what is it when appearances are properly proportioned to the underlying reality, so that they disclose reality and take us into the depths of the world? This is the platonic account of beauty. This is what beauty is. The hermeneutics of beauty. One of the things that impressed me is the attention to beauty that I’ve been noticing in the Ralston community. And I take it that is not a coincidence or accident. Notice that we can’t even, as soon as I say that, oh, beauty, beauty, oh, and the hermeneutics suspicion rolls in. And then what we have is we settle into an aesthetics of the smooth, as Hans says. The beautiful is what is easy, what’s smooth, what’s pornographic, which requires no effort. There’s no sense of disclosure. There’s no sense of moving into depths. It’s surface, smooth, easily consumable. That’s why we, you know, and think about the beauty of your technology. It’s smoothness. If you read Plotinus or the ancient writers on beauty, they talk about being struck by beauty. Rilke talks about beauty is, you know, it’s like a terror that could kill you but decides not to. When was the last time beauty struck you like that? So, anagogy. The psyche gets more aligned, which allows it to see more deeply into reality. It gets better at finding the real patterns. It trains discernment, which it then can turn back upon itself and discern the more real patterns within. So it can more properly align itself. So it can then see more deeply into reality so that it can more properly align itself. And this is like the light causes the accommodation. So you can see by the light it causes the accommodation and you ascend. And here’s Plato’s great proposal, and this is why it’s a spirituality. There’s two things, in addition to all of your desires, you have two meta desires. One is you want, however your desires are being filled, to give you inner peace. You do not want to be riven by inner conflict. It’s a meta desire. If I say to you, I’ll give you these two things, but you’re going to be riven with inner conflict and guilt and torture, you’re going to be riven with inner conflict and guilt and torture, you go, no, no, I’m sorry, I’ll pass. What’s the other meta desire? Well, I’ll show you what it is by the experiment I do with my students. How many of you are in satisfying romantic relationships? They put up their hands, I say, oh, that’s the group I’m going to address. I choose romantic relationships because our culture has decided that romantic relationships are going to bear all the burden that God, tradition, philosophy, and history used to bear. That person, I’m straight, but I’m just using Mike as an example here, right, you, you will do all of this for me. And of course no relationship can bear that. The person crumbles and oh, right. And then we’re given one of the great evils of our time, romantic comedies that continue to tell us that the essence of love is infatuation and we just have to keep hoping that the universe will give us the perfect person to satisfy all of those metaphysical and cultural goals and good luck with that. Okay, so I asked them and I say, okay, of those of you who are in satisfying romantic relationships, how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that would destroy the relationship? Almost all of them put their hands up and I say, why, why do you want to lose your relationship? And here’s my students who, you know, hard-bitten by skepticism and postmodernism and everything, because it wouldn’t be real. That’s their answer. And then they sort of realize what they’re saying and they’re sort of like slightly embarrassed. In addition to whatever satisfies your desire, you have the meta-desire that whatever satisfies it is real. What Platonic Anagag is doing is inner peace that connects me with what is more real, it gives me more inner peace that connects me with what is more real, that gives me more inner peace that connects me with more real. It satisfies the two meta-desires. That’s why it can make a powerful argument for being the cultivation of wisdom, the enhancement of meaning in life. Okay, that’s the Platonic tradition. Now, the Aristotelian science. To know is for the knower and the knower to share the same form, same structural functional organization. And what do I mean by that? If I ask you what a bird is, you’ll say, you know, it has wings, it flies, feathers, beak, so I’m going to put a couple of words together, and you’ll say, a couple wings on the table, a bunch of feathers, a beak, and then I’ll gather them together and throw them into the air. Flying, feathers, wings, and beak. Is that a bird? You go, no, that’s a horror movie. And then when I ask you what’s missing, you’ll say, well, they have to be put together in the right way. And it’s very, actually very hard for you to articulate. You can tell me the content, but when you try and tell me what the formal cause is, the structural functional organization that makes it knowable as a unified causal thing, you’re sort of like, yeah, it’s sort of the, and you know it’s not just the shape. That’s what form means. And Aristotel had the idea that is very different from our idea of knowing. Our idea of knowing, again, is a Cartesian one. The person that knows a chair is the one who can best represent the chair, describe it to you. Aristotel says, you know who best knows what a chair is? Somebody who could make a chair. Somebody who could take wood and give it the structural functional organization so that it acts, that’s where actualized comes from, so that it acts like a chair. So the carpenter and the chair have the same form, the same structural functional organization in mind and in matter, but to know the chair is for the forms to be shared. That’s a conformity theory of knowing. It’s not a stupid theory. It’s actually a theory that is coming back powerfully. So conformity theory is like an attunement theory. When they’re sharing the same form and it can move towards an at-onement. I’m not going to use the Christian term atonement. It’s at-onement. They share the same form to such a degree that their identities are interpenetrating and bound together. See, our epistemology puts us at a distance from things. This connects us. The object is over there. I’m here and if I’m Descartes or John Locke, I’m inside a little cupboard or cabinet or a little tiny room. I’m getting postcards from the world and I’m trying to assemble them in my little room and figure out what’s the correct picture out there. And after 400 years of trying to make that work, we now know that doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. We need a contact epistemology. Now, Platinus takes Plato’s notion of anagagai and Aristotle’s notion that knowing is conforming. And then he puts them together and he says, you know when you know a level above you, you start to conform to it because that’s what knowing is. And as you conform to it, you are actually being transformed. The very structural functional organization of your being is being altered and you are being more made more real. Knowing is transformation. We’ve lost this idea. We think of knowing as the result of a method. This is Aristotle, sorry, this is Descartes’ proposal brought to culmination in live nets, the universal calculus. We won’t have to argue about our problems. We’ll just have a calculus and we’ll calculate the answer, the universal method. But the ancient and the medieval worlds had this idea that there are many truths that are only disclosed to us after we go through profound transformation. And you know this is true because you don’t try and teach a four-year-old about Heidegger. This is what the ancient world said, as the adult is to the child, sorry, as the child is to the adult, which you just got a second ago. The adult is to the sage. There are many truths that are not disclosed to us because we haven’t gone through the requisite transformation. But what Plotinus is saying, that requisite transformation requires that you come into contact with more real levels of reality. So knowing is transformation, which one becomes more attuned and at one with within oneself and within reality. It’s an at one meant this way and this way, like an anagogy. So I’m going to use a word and I actually got this from Nishitani, this use of this word, so the Japanese must do the same thing in his amazing book, one of the first books in the world, Religion and Nothingness from the Kyoto School. He uses the word realization to mean both senses of coming into an awareness of what’s really going on and things being realized, actualized, coming into reality. So coming into awareness, coming into reality. And now I can use those two senses together. I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Christian and I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Christian, I’m into the second and second reality and now I can use those two senses together. I’m not equivocating, I’m demanding that you hear both of them together, because that’s what you need to understand this theory I’m presenting to you. What’s being presented is the corealization of self and reality. So, the third tradition, the Stoics, the maturation of agency. Well, how’s that going within Plotinus? Well, he said, Plotinus will say, well, I can give you the disciplining of desire because I can give you the normative guidance for all of your desires, which is anagogic realization because that makes use of the coordination and the development of the meta desires. That should be your ultimate normative standard. Oh, thank you. Okay. What about the disciplining of assent? What should I assent to? I believe that’s true. Well, the normative guidance of the conformity theory. You should most consent, most assent to that which identifies you. And notice the word identify has both those meanings. To assume an identity and to assign an identity. I’m always, this is the Stoic point, I’m always doing both of those simultaneously, interdependently. I’m assuming the identity of a teacher right now. I’m assigning the identity of students. Imagine if I took this into an encounter with my partner, Sara. That’s a disaster. That’s the wrong agent arena relationship to take up. I want to be kind to you, but that’s not the way I’m going to be kind to my son. That would be weird. We’re always, unconsciously, assuming identities and assigning identities. And what the Stoics are saying is stop doing that unconsciously, automatically, reactively. Bring that into awareness, pro-shosh, attention, pro-chiron, ready to hand, so that you can decide rationally if you are assuming and assigning the right identity. This, of course, leads to the disciplining of action. The normative guidance of attunement and atonement. What is bringing you into, as the Stoic said, the flow with the flow of nature? And that’s Heraclitus, by the way, which you’ve been studying. The co-realization, the flowing with nature is that coordinated co-realization of self and world, agent and arena. So that you can bring your best actions to bear on the tracking of what is true and good and beautiful. Okay, that’s the synoptic integration. That’s Neoplatonism. That’s tremendously pretentious that I just uttered that sentence. Okay, within the context of this lecture, that’s Neoplatonism. I consider myself a Zen Neoplatonist. That’s a thing you can be, by the way. And both of those have taken a lifetime to get into, so I’m aware that I’m ultimately misrepresenting. So what are the levels of reality? Once you’ve got that psycho-entology, what’s the levels of reality? So there’s the level of sensible presencing. I’m going to make use here of a great Neoplatonist scholar who has not read as much as he should be, and that’s Corban, Henri Corban. So you have sensible presencing. What do you mean by that? So I was taught to pronounce it idos, because I guess it’s like idea, but is it edios? What’s the Greek word for like the form? Eidos? Okay, close, sort of, edos. Okay, now translating it as form isn’t wrong, but it’s related to the verbs for see. A closer translation would be something like the look of something, or a more modern term aspect. Now, what Plato was trying to get us to see was, okay, you think you see an object. You think the senses give you the reality of an object. You actually never see all of the object. You never stop and think about that. You are never perceptually grasping all of the object. And not just its perceptual aspects, this of course has many possible ways it can interact. Of course, I can use it as a book, I can use it as a platform, I can use it to stand for the letter I, etc. And as soon as you realize this, you realize there is an unlimited multi-spectuality to anything. But here’s the thing, right, and this is what’s part of what’s called third wave Platonism, a phenomenological wrestling with Plato. Here’s the thing, those aspects don’t strike you as a cracophony. They don’t strike you as a cracophony. Each one, each, there’s no identity, that’s not identical to that perceptually. No, it’s not, not or that, or this, or this. And yet, you find a through line, a through line between all of those aspects. A through line that is not itself an aspect. It can’t be an aspect because it is the through line through all of the aspects. It’s the intelligibility of it as a thing that is not actually in its perceptual presencing. It is ultimately only grasped conceptually, but you’re doing it right now. The problem is we’ve turned Plato into, I go off in my room and sit in the chair and I, no, it’s right here in your perception. That’s the through line, that’s the sensible world. And then Plato wants to know, well, what, what, what are these through lines? What is the, what is, what is the aspect that’s not an aspect that binds them all together? Now notice the term I used here, through line, line. I used a geometrical term. Here’s something we also forget. Aristotle has no math in his science. That’s why his sciences look so different from ours. Ours is the same. That’s why his sciences look so different from ours. Ours is bound to math. That’s Descartes again and Galileo Kepler. But Plato had supposedly on the door to the academy, unless you can do geometry, you can’t come in. But so first of all, remember that. Secondly, there is no algebra. Math and geometry are the same thing for the ancient Greeks. And see, and geometry is, right, it’s simultaneously abstract conceptual, but it also is perceptual, because you’re working with figures. Like lines and triangles. They are an instance of what Corban calls the imaginal. This is the use of images, not in the sense of imaginary. So if I ask you, picture a sailboat in your mind, and I ask you, are the sails up or down, you can tell me. That’s imaginary. That takes you away from perception. The imaginal, like the through line, is the use of images to enhance your ability to perceive something. Like I was using the through line to get you to realize this thing that is not a perceptual aspect, but nevertheless binds them together. Notice how much the imaginal infects all of your cognition. You’re using images to enhance your capacity to understand and grasp reality moment by moment. What are you talking about? Well, I hope you see what I’m saying. I hope you get my point. Can you grasp it? Do you understand it? Maybe it’s a little hard for you. But I’m almost halfway through. I’m almost halfway through. I’m almost halfway through. I’m almost halfway through. I’m almost halfway through. I’m almost halfway through. But I’m almost halfway through my lecture. There’s all this imagery being used to bind the sensible to the conceptual. That’s the imaginal. So there’s a level of reality that is disclosed to us, the sensible presencing. Then we get the imaginal. We get all the through lines. And then that points us towards the intelligible, the whole edetic ecology, all of these forms and how they all interpenetrate and relate to each other. Each level depends on the level above it for its intelligibility. If you just had the sensible presencing with no through line, it would just be a cacophony and there’d be no knowledge. If you had just the through line, you wouldn’t be able to grasp it conceptually and relate it to other through lines. Asymmetric dependence upwards, realness as you’re going up. At the very top is the one. What? To know something is to make it one. What is to make it one? Oh, they’re both books. Here’s another one. You’re wanting them. So to know things are to want them. But that’s how to know. What is it for something to be something? It is for it to be one. This is why you regard this as a thing and not this and the air around it. Even though this is always found with air around it. But they don’t one together. They don’t form an integrated causal whole. So things are and are knowable by being one. So as we move up more and more real, we’re moving into the source of all wanting. Now it is not something you can grasp. Why not? Remember when the prisoners get out, they can’t look at the sun. It’s too bright. If I were to try and explain to you what the one is, I’d have to find some division within it and something more basic that would one it. But I can’t because it’s the one. It can’t belong to any category because it makes all categorization possible. It is the source of intelligibility and being. But that means it is nothing that you can directly understand because it is the source of all of those. But Plotinus promises that you can come into relationship with it. Not in your knowing, the way we understand knowing, but in the knowing that is eventually your being. You can be one. And therefore you can be realized by the one. Now this gives you a world that is flowing. But I’m using motion, although it’s not motion. It’s what people are calling vertical causation. Everything is emerging upward. Everything is moving out of chaos into self-organizing, becoming one, becoming noble. So you think of our world. You have the quantum, whatever the hell it is down there. And then it coalesces into things and those coalesce and you get self-organization and increasing intelligibility, predictability. You move from quantum to Newtonian, et cetera. But there’s top down. There’s overarching principles. There are laws. Where is equals MC squared? Where is equals MC squared? Where is it? Where’s the event? On Tuesday afternoons come to the square. Equals MC squared. Equals MC squared is a form. It’s a way in which reality is one. And it is a constraint. It’s a top down constraint on all the possible events. So the emergence upward and the emanation downward. You have all the microchemical, the quantum, the quantum, the quantum, the quantum, the quantum. And there’s a fundamental constraint. The emergence upward and the emanation downward. You have all the microchemical activity in a tree. And it builds this particular structure. Why do trees do that? And why do their leaves spread out? What are they doing that for? To increase the probability of a particular event happening. A photon hitting a chlorophyll. The causes emerge a structure. And the structure constrains, shapes the possibilities of the events. Upward emergence, downward emanation. Everywhere. Interpenetrating. Inherently dialogical. Inherently dialectical. One starts as one becomes many, starts as many becomes one. It’s one mini. It’s one oneing. It’s mini miniing. And it’s one miniing and miniing oneing. And now John’s going insane. That’s right. Because when you try to put this into linear language, it starts to get very clunky. Ultimately you have to realize it dialogically. Dialectically. Between each other. And between the levels. Okay, stage one of my argument is complete. I want to move to stage two and argue how current cog Psi is converging on this self same worldview. But also developing it for the scientific age. First of all, the need for synoptic integration. The Plotinus pursuit. I’m a cognitive scientist. I teach my students that cognitive science is the discipline pursuing synoptic integration. How so? This is one of the most equivocal words in our culture. Mind. And because it’s equivocal, we can equivocate on it. And because it’s equivocal, we are fragmented in what we mean by it. And therefore what we mean by ourselves. What do you mean, John? Ask a neuroscientist. What’s mind? Brain. Brain brain brain. You’ll study. Here’s the default mode network and here’s the task centric network. And then you ask an AI person. So is mind brain? No no no. Mind is not brain. You don’t need to have a brain in order to have mind. I can make artificial intelligence. Which means I don’t need an organic brain at all. I can make it with motherboards and silicon chips and transistors and etc. Oh, then what do you mean by mind? I mean information processing. And I want to talk about, right, learning algorithms like deep learning algorithms etc. That’s what intelligence is. That’s what mind is. Oh, psychologist, do you think that’s right? Well, no. Because, you know, I think what we’re talking about mind, we’re talking about behavior. We should be doing experiments on human beings and collecting the data. Like they do in physics. And doing statistical analysis and making predictions. That’s what mind is. Oh, then the linguist comes in and says, silly person. And you’re like, oh, I’m going to do a little bit of math. And you’re like, oh, I’m going to do a little bit of math. And then the linguist comes in and says, silly people. Notice what you’re doing right now. Noises are coming out of your face hole. And yet you’re getting ideas in your mind. How does that happen? Language is what mind is. You have to study language. You have to understand the tree structure of sentences. Their underlying deep structure. And the generative grammar. That’s to understand mind. And the cultural anthropologist comes in and says, what’s wrong with you? Long before the internet integrated computers together to release the power of distributed cognition, culture wove human minds together to release the power of distributed cognition. Most of our problem solving is done in massive concert with huge number of people coordinated by culture. How many of you made the language we’re speaking? Put up your hand. How about the technology we’re depending on? Running the electricity grid. Any of you? Any of you? Any of you? Any of you? Who invented? Who should I pay the royalties for the literacy you’re using? Imagine I took literacy away from you. The number of problems you can solve drops astronomically. Stop pretending that you’re a monologic being. So each one of these disciplines talks about its own level. The brain level, the information processing level, the behavioral level. And then the cognitive scientist comes in and says it’s unlikely that these levels are not causally interconnected, the level itself is. The level of the brain. The level of the brain. Then the cognitive scientist comes in and says, it’s unlikely that these levels are not causally interacting and constraining each other. It’s very likely that language is affected by culture and language affects behavior and vice versa. Very, very likely. But where do we go to learn about all that causal, that bottom up causation and that top down constraint? Well, nowhere. That’s the job of the cognitive scientist. The cognitive scientist uses philosophy. Yes, philosophy. Philosophy is not about sitting around in a cafe saying vaguely French things. It is not the nothingness of being, it is the being of nothingness. It’s not that, right? What you want to do is philosophy is about synoptic integration. It’s about here’s a discourse, here’s a different discourse, here’s ethics, here’s our language of cause. Can we put them together so we can get a comprehensive understanding so we can live our lives as integrated beings rather than fragmented wantons impulsively driven around? Synoptic integration. So cog-sci is very much in the neoplatonic tradition of seeking a synoptic integration across levels of reality, especially the levels of reality that correspond to levels of the self, levels of the psyche. Now recently with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller, Mark Miller is a former student of mine. I recently published such a synoptic integration within understanding of cognitive reality. It’s called, it was from August of this year, it’s called predictive processing and relevance realization exploring convergent solutions to the frame problem. Okay, so relevance realization, which I’ll explain to you in a minute, and predictive processing, which I’ll explain to you in a minute, are big synoptic integrations within cognitive science, attempting to do that thing I just said and then we integrated them together. And thankfully, as you never know, this paper is getting very good reception. Imagine how it’s been 25 years. Nope, we don’t like this. Okay, but that didn’t happen. Okay, so first of all, what’s the frame problem? Now I’m going to shift gears and we’re going to move into cognitive science. Okay, so we’re trying to build artificial agents. So everything behaves, an agent is something that can determine the consequences of its behavior and then alter its behavior in order to achieve different goals, different consequences. That’s not all an agent is. I’m not, I’m just saying that’s a necessary criterion. Agent has to be able to determine the consequences of its own behavior and alter its behavior accordingly. Okay, so we want to make a robot do a very basic thing. We want to make it find a energy source. You do this, it’s called food. And then we want it to take it somewhere else. You do this too. You typically do not eat your food where your fruits come across it. It’s considered really gross. Imagine if you’re in the supermarket. Okay, and what we do is we take it to a safe place where we’re free from predators and we combine together as primates so we can fight off the predators and stuff like that and call it dinner. Okay, so, right. So this is a very basic problem we give to a robot. We’re going to take a wagon, there’s a battery on that wagon, and it has to take the battery somewhere where it can plug into the battery as its energy source. But we’re going to make it a problem. We’re going to put a lit bomb on that wagon. So we send the robot in. This is from Daniel Dennett, the current cognitive scientist philosopher. And the robot grabs the wagon and pulls it. It pulls it because it wants the battery to come along. That’s its intended effect. There’s an unintended side effect, which is what? The bomb comes along. The bomb goes off. The story’s the robot. And we go, oh, stupid us. We should make the robot not only determine the intended effects of its action, but also all the side effects because the side effects could be relevant. So we make a better robot. We put it in this situation, right, and it comes up and it grabs the handle and then it sits there calculating and calculating and calculating, and then the bomb goes off. Why not? We put a little black box in. Well, it was doing what we instructed it to do. It was calculating not only an intended effect, the battery comes along, but all unintended side effects. The right front wheel is going through more than 30 degrees of arc. So it’s a left front wheel. So it’s a back left wheel, back right wheel. The angle of the wagon respect to the robot is altering slightly. There’s grass underneath that’s being indented. The air around the wagon is being distorted. The wagon’s position with respect to Mars slightly altered. How many unintended side effects are there? Astronomically vast. Here’s the frame problem. How do you get the robot to zero in on just the relevant side effects? Because nature doesn’t come labeled. And this is what you can’t do. You can’t check each one and see if it’s relevant or not, because that will take you the rest of the history of the universe. How do you zero in on the relevant information? You’re doing it right now. Think about all the things you could pay attention to and all the combinations. You could be paying attention to that spot there and then that, or that spot and there. It’s combinatorial explosive. It’s more than the number of particles in the universe. Well, what do you pay attention to? Well, I pay attention to what’s most obvious. Well, obviousness is not a physical property. A physicist comes in, oh, 17 grams of obviousness. That’s not the answer. The answer is explaining to me what’s the most obvious. That’s not the answer. The answer is explaining to me how your brain generates a sense of obviousness such that you are a general problem solver, such that you can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. You can learn about swimming. You can learn about the Australian government. You can learn about somebody’s favorite college. You can learn to play tennis. We have no machines that are close to that. We have machines that can beat us and go. Yeah, then challenge it to a swimming match. It’ll fail utterly. I’m not demeaning these successes. They’re real and they’re important. Pay attention to it. Autonomous AI is coming, and it’s going to have more of an impact than the Industrial Revolution. But don’t give in to the hype. We’re nowhere near machines that have what you have. That ability to find the relevant information obvious. You pay a price for that. Sometimes you ignore information that is obvious. Sorry, that is relevant, but you’ve ignored it. See, this is the thing that makes you intelligent. You’re intelligent. It sounds like a Zen Cohen. You’re intelligent because of your tremendous capacity to ignore most of reality. Because if you didn’t, you’d be dead. All that you could be paying attention to. What about all that you can be remembering? Do you know how much memory you have? All the possible combinations of all the things in your memory? It’s combinatorially explosive. And yet, you’re remembering the right things right now. Hopefully, none of you are thinking about William Shakespeare’s play King John. Maybe you are. Now you are. But before, I was like, whoa. And here’s your answer to me. Well, I wasn’t thinking of it. Why not? Well, because it isn’t, oh, right, relevant. But how did you know it wasn’t relevant? Did it yell at you? I’m not relevant right now. Well, how do you discern among the billions of voices in your head that are saying to you, I’m not relevant right now? Sometimes they’re wrong, because they are. What about the actions you perform? You know how many sequences of actions? I can bend this finger and then this finger. I can bend them together. I could bend two twice this time. I can say weird things. What’s the sequence I should engage in right now? Out of all the possible ones? Well, what’s obvious? How do you know? Because it’s relevant. Oh, good. Now the thing about, right, you’ve got all the sequences of behavior, but you have all the sequences of behavior. You’ve got all the sequences of behavior, but you have all the possibilities you could consider. All the futures you could be planning for. How do you choose which goal you should be focusing on right now? And then of all the possible pathways to it, which one would you choose? And then of all the possible pathways to it, which one do you give priority? It’s called a metoil explosive. You know the number of goals you could set for yourself? You could decide to collect all the porcelain cows that have ever been made. You could make this your life mission. It’s not impossible. You could do it. You don’t. But think about how many possible goals there are for you as soon as you understand the example. Now this is the really amazing thing, and this is what we can’t give to any machine. Right now, of all the things you could pay attention to, out of all of the things you could be remembering, out of all the sequences of actions, out of all the possibilities you should consider, you’re zeroing in on the relevant ones. Not perfectly. Can’t be done perfectly. But well enough so that you are a reliable, general problem solver. You have general intelligence. Nothing else does. This is the thing that has fascinated me. This capacity, and notice the word I’m using, for relevance realization. It’s both coming into awareness and connecting to reality in the right way. Relevance realization is primary. All your other cognition depends on it. If I want to form a representation of something, well what is this? This is a bottle. Is that all of its properties? How many properties does this actually have? It’s a bottle, it’s a potential weapon, it’s a container, it’s a human-made artifact, it’s a plastic object. How many true descriptions are there of this? Combinatorily explosive. And you choose which aspect, remember that, finding the through line? You choose which aspect is relevant at this time. That’s what representations are. This is John Searle’s argument. All representations are aspectual. You don’t represent all of it. You represent an aspect that is relevant to you. So of all of the properties, you zero in on the relevant ones that are relevant to you. Representation presupposes, is asymmetrically dependent on relevance realization. What about another basic ability, categorization? Well you did it earlier, John, you held up these two things and I categorized them. It’s like Sesame Street. I know that these two things are similar. I grouped them together and that’s how I formed categories. No, we’ve been trying to get computers to do categorization for a very long time. We’re getting close, but we might be on the wrong track because they make freakish mistakes that we don’t make. Why is it so problematic? Look, similarity has two senses. One is a logical sense. Truly sharing properties. Not all properties, but many properties. That’s not what you mean by similarity, the logical sense. This was a point made by the philosopher Neslem Goodman in 1972. Take any two objects, a plum and a lawnmower. Both have an odor. Both have round surfaces. Both are shiny. Both are found in North America. Neither one existed 300 million years ago. Both contain carbon. Neither one is a particularly good weapon. How many things that are true of both of them do you think are true? How many things that are true of both of them do you think I can generate? Astronomically vast. So they must be similar. But if I can do that for any two objects, everything is similar to everything else, which means nothing. What you actually mean is relevant similarity. Out of all the logical similarities, you pick out the ones that are relevant to you. Categorization depends on zeroing in on the relevant information. Communication. Am I saying everything I’m thinking to you in my words? No way. I’m depending on you drawing implications, drawing implicatures. Which ones? All the possible ones? No, that’s astronomically vast. Any loopy ones you want? No, that’s weird. It’s neither arbitrary nor algorithmic. You have to derive, here it comes, the relevant ones. Same thing for inference. Read my work. Every cognitive process depends on relevance realization. It’s preconceptual. It’s pre-linguistic. It’s pre-experiential. It’s pre-normative. Before you make any normative judgment of true, good, or beautiful, you have to have done relevance realization because you have to be connected to it before anything else happens. Ratio religio first. Remember that? Okay, now relevance is not detected. It’s not in the world. Because there are no essential properties to relevance. Right? Something can be relevant because it’s big, it can be relevant because it’s small, it can be relevant because it’s fast, it can be relevant because it’s slow, it can be relevant because it’s hard, it can be relevant because it’s small, it can be relevant because it’s ephemeral. There’s no definition for relevance. There’s nothing this is a, you know, a Vickensteinian move. There’s nothing you can point to. That’s an essential property, that’s context independent, This is how you can detect it in the environment. It’s not an objective thing. Oh, well, then it’s subjective. That’s ridiculous. It’s not subjective. If you impose the wrong relevance, you’re dead. Every year until cell phones, this reliably happened to thousands of human beings. They would go into an environment where they knew. They knew there was flammable gas dispersed, but it was dark. And so they would strike a match to generate light. That’s the intended effect. What was the unintended side effect? They blew themselves up. They’re like the robot. They didn’t check a relevant side effect. See, this is the thing. This is how you know it’s not just subjective. Because the very things that make you so adaptive with relevance realization make you perpetually susceptible to self-deception. Because you are always, always ignoring what’s outside the frame. And what’s outside the frame can, in fact, be relevant to solving your problem. And you know when that happens. You have an aha moment, an insight moment. You go, oh, I thought she was angry. But she’s actually afraid. I’ve been misinterpreting her entirely. You have an aha moment. That relevance realization process is self-correcting precisely because it’s not purely subjective. Self-correction makes no sense if something is purely subjective. What are you correcting for and against? Oh, what do you mean? Things are either subjective or objective. René Descartes, René Descartes, René Descartes. No. Right? Compare this to a biological notion, adaptivity. Great White Shark, adaptive. Yes. Is that in the Great White Shark? So if I put it in the Sahara, it’s adaptivity? Nope, it does. Is it in the water? Water is adaptive. It’s not subjective or objective. I’ve coined a term. It’s transjective. It’s about the real fittedness of the two together such that real action and real knowledge is… See what my hands are doing? They’re doing conformity. They’re doing contact. They’re coming into real relationship, real fittedness of one to the other. They’re co-shaping each other. The environment shapes the organism. The organism shapes the environment. They’re co-fitting. They’re co-shaping. They’re conforming together. This is at the core of current biological theorizing. The world is a place of niche construction and ideas like this. Organisms are shaped by the environment, but organisms shape the environment. World and organism are co-shaping. Look at me. Me and the physics. The physics of the world shaped me in this room. Biology shaped me to be bipedal. So I can… This is walkable to me. And then culture made buildings around it and taught me how do I operate within buildings. On all of these levels, the world and I are shaping and being shaped by common shared principles. This is what an affordance is. Look. This is graspable to me. Yes? Yes or no? Is the graspability in this thing? No, an ant can’t grasp it. Is graspability in my hand? I can’t grasp Africa. You know what I mean. It’s about a righteo religio, a right fittedness between co-shaping. Both are shaped by physics. Both have been shaped by culture. This is a tool. Both have been shaped by biology in important ways. Biology? I want this so it can carry around water because I’m a thing that needs water. Relevance is not detected. It’s not projected. We participate in it. What do you mean? Do you make an insight? I need an insight right now. There we go. Is that how it happens? Do you just wait? You do this thing where you’re constantly shaping yourself and letting the world shape you. And it’ll self-organize and you’ll have an insight. You participate in it. It’s a participatory relationship. Mutual fitting, co-shaping. Look, problems aren’t in the world. Those they are. We’re known to wait. If you’re a different organism, you don’t have those problems, right? Well, they’re just in your subjectivity. Just make yourself better. Solve your problems. It doesn’t work. I’m still hungry. Problems are transjective. They’re about you not being fitted to the world. Intelligence is about problem solving. It’s about refitting you to the world. It’s about participation. It’s not about representation. By the way, I’m going to talk about this in a minute. It’s about you not being fitted to the world. It’s about participation. It’s not about representation. By the time I’m at the level of representation, all the relevance realization machinery has been running massively, fitting me and the world together. Now, relevance realization has to ultimately be explained by processes that are not themselves intelligent. If you say, you know how I do relevance realization? There’s a little man in my head, a homunculus, that says, that’s relevant. That’s not. That’s not an answer. Because what should I do? I should ask the little man, how do you do it? Well, inside my head, there’s a little man. It’s just an infinite regress. It doesn’t give you any answer. So you want a process, right? So think about how phylogenetically a non-intelligent process, evolution, has produced intelligent beings. Right? Again, co-shaping. So, relevance realization is self-organizing. This is what’s called dynamical systems theory. It’s a self-organizing process. Like evolution, like your biology. There’s no one running your biology. Your biology is self-organizing. You are a dynamical system of dynamical systems. Your brain is not a machine. It’s a dynamical system made up of dynamical systems that can make itself into a new kind of dynamical system. And it’s doing it right now. We are so far from the Newtonian framework. But a lot of psychology hasn’t heard that yet. I want to show you something. So don’t look at the board for a sec. Okay? And I could make this actually precise, but I can do it good enough so that it’ll work. Okay? So, let’s say you’re a little bit more intelligent than I am. Okay, so read that out quickly. What does it say? The cat. Okay, notice here you’re reading it as an H and here you’re reading it as an A even though they’re identical. Ooh. Okay, now, suppose it was all Newtonian and linear for you. And this is like a Zenko and also. In order to read the word, you have to read the word. And you have to read the word. So, you have to read the word. And you have to read the word. And you have to read the word. And you have to read the word. And also, in order to read the word, I must read the letters. But in order to disambiguate the letters, I must read the word. Therefore, reading is impossible. But it isn’t. Because what’s the answer? You’re simultaneously going bottom up from the features, the letters, and top down from the words. Simultaneously. Neural networks. Dynamical system. Simultaneously bottom up and top down. You’re doing it right now in all of your attention. How does your attention zero in? It makes use of an important strategy called opponent processing. So, you have two networks. There’s actually three. There’s a salience network. But for the sake of this, I’ll just talk about the two. Keep it simple. You have two networks. And they are opposed to each other, yet they are causally interpenetrating, interrelated. One network, the task force network, is trying to keep you focused on the task. Like, hopefully, paying attention to this bizarre speaker in front of you right now. But there’s another part called the default network. It’s generating mind wandering. And you may think, I wish I didn’t have that part of me. I wish I could just stay zero focused like a psychopath. That’s by the way how you make it. We can shut off areas of the brain with transcranomagnetic stimulation. And you can shut off areas of the brain so that you don’t wander away from the task. You become absolutely clear. You become psychopathic. And the fact that the US military and other militaries, the Canadian military, isn’t doing it not because they have any moral grounding, just because we’re so pathetic. But the fact that the US military, is studying this right now. I’ve been approached by the US military. So, your mind wanders. And then it’s brought back. Now think about this like the Darwinian evolution. The wandering introduces variations, new things you could pay attention to, new connections you could make. Most of them are killed off, not all of them. Some of them are brought back to the US military. And then you’re back to the US military. And you’re back to the US military. So, you see a lot of them, some of them are brought, and it allows you to have a bit of an insight or innovate or make a new connection, see something more in depth. Variation, selection, variation, selection, opponent processing. Nobody’s running it, it’s self-organizing. What about your level of arousal? I don’t mean sexual arousal. Freud has taught us to think of arousal as sexual. Arousal means how much metabolic energy are you expending right now. You’ve got to constantly adjust it. That’s not good, right? That’s too intense. And so we’ll move on to the next point. And I can’t be Canadian, I’ll just be middling arousal at all times. It doesn’t work. Because you have to be able to constantly calibrate. Is there a little man in there going, more stimulation? No. What you have is you have your autonomos. You’re doing Greek, what does that mean? Autonomous. Self-governing, self-organizing, self-regulating. It’s divided up into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system. They have opposite biases, but they are interconnected. The sympathetic system is biased to seeing as much of the world as a threat or opportunity. It’s constantly trying to arouse you. The parasympathetic system is biased to trying to see as much of the world as safe place for you. It does a safe place to relax and recuperate. And they’re like this. And they’re constantly pulling and pushing on each other. So you’re constantly evolving your arousal. And your attention and arousal are doing this. You’re in an interconnected self-organizing consciousness. You’re constantly using opponent processing. I just gave a talk in Prague at the International Symposium on Democracy. Democracy was the idea I proposed to you that at the level of collective intelligence within distributed cognition remember we don’t do most of our problem solving as individuals, but as collectives what we want is opponent processing. And democracy is the style of governance that is supposed to give us opponent processing. He and I have opposite biases, but we cooperate in the shared understanding that the best way I can correct myself is by looking through his eyes. And the best way he can correct himself is through looking through my eyes. And we can have opponent processing. We don’t come to a final agreement. It’s constantly evolving. It’s self-correcting. But we have abandoned opponent processing for adversarial processing in which one side is determined that its bias should be absolutely triumphant and destroy the other side. So what you have going on at multiple levels within your cognition and how you are connecting attention, arousal, to the environment is this opponent processing self-organizing. I won’t go into the detail, but that’s the proposal of how you get relevance realization going in a system. Our model for the mind should be life, not machines. This is a neoplatonic notion, by the way. Okay, predictive processing. Predictive processing also starts with the central idea of adaptivity. And here is its main core idea. Adaptivity is based on anticipation, when I can predictively prepare for the world. The more I can predictively prepare, the more adaptive I am. Because you want to predictively prepare for the tiger rather than bumping into it and having to react to the tiger. You want to be able to know where the food is going to be rather than wandering randomly trying to find it. So the idea is, organisms are trying to predict in a way that is relevant, relevant to their preparing for the environment. Now, here was the big insight in the predictive processing model. It’s also known by the Bayesian brain, but I think invoking Bayes’ theorem is actually a bit of a red herring, because applying Bayes would be combatorily explodable, computationally intractable. So I’m just going to put that aside. I think what Karl Friston and Mark Miller and others are doing is note that they had this really powerful insight. The brain doesn’t try to directly predict the world. The world is, in some sense, is too complex, too undetermined. So what the brain does is it actually predicts itself. You’re saying, that doesn’t sound like it will help. So what you have is you have this level, and this level of causality interacts with the world. This is your sensory motor loop. This is your sensory system and your movement system, and they’re integrated. I move by sensing, I sense by moving. Even when you think you’re not moving, your eyes are moving, your attention is moving. You sense by moving, you move by sensing. It’s a sensory motor loop. So this is the part of your brain. It’s directly interacting with the world. And so there’s patterns of activity. So this layer of the brain is generating patterns of firing and wiring in the neurons. So far, so what? Now what this level does is it doesn’t try and predict the world. It tries to predict the pattern that’s going to be there. And it tries to complete the pattern before it gets completed in action. So, for example, this is happening right now. If I had to rely, if you had to rely on just my sensory motor loop for walking, I couldn’t do it, because the feedback is too slow. Your cerebellum is actually a generative model. It’s predicting the environment. Most of your walking is being driven by the top-down prediction, and all that’s coming up from the bottom is error correction, where the prediction was off, and then the cerebellum calibrates and adjusts. Does that make sense? So the bottom level is the top, this level is trying to predict this level. I’ll leave that arrow like that. And then this level gives error feedback, saying, well, that prediction was off. And then what you do, and this sounds weird, is you step, look at what’s coming here. We’re getting levels, levels of realization. It’s like this. Each level is predicting the level below it, and the level below it is giving it feedback. All of this feedback, by the way, is completely accurate, because it’s completely internal to the brain. It doesn’t depend on how the world is. And you say, well, who cares? What happens is, and this is the really powerful insight, by doing this process, the brain generates more and more abstract capacities to predict what will come, what will happen here. And by doing that, you actually get the organism to sense and move around in the world in a more and more intelligent manner. There’s nobody running it. So most of the time, okay, most of this, you’re not directly detecting. Now, it’s not an illusion, because you’re correctly predicting it. You’re not seeing that whole wall and its color. Your eye doesn’t subtend enough of an angle to do that. What you’re doing is you’re grabbing quick little samples and then making a prediction, and the prediction’s true. It’s not an illusion. I hate it when people do that. Oh, well, it’s not detecting. It’s some sort of naive empiricist bullshit. Sorry. Crap. Because, right, a true prediction is true. The defining feature of an illusion is that it’s false. Okay? So you’re doing this, and each one of these, and think about Plato here. The lower you are, the more immediate the pattern it’s grabbing. The higher up, the more abstract and long-term. Plato. The levels of the psyche. Reflecting levels of cognitive scope, levels of cognitive grasp, types of motivation. It’s all there. Bottom up, top down, simultaneously. Okay? Now it’s imaginal. What do you mean? This arrow, but the arrow is never by itself, is perception. This is imagination. In fact, predictive processing says when you’re doing imagination, you just shut off the bottom up and you just run the top down. But most of the time you’re not amusing this for imagination, you’re using it imaginally. What you just did with that wall, that’s imaginal. It’s the use of imagery, imagination, for the sake of perception. For the sake of putting you in contact with reality. It’s bottom up, top down. It’s platonic, sensible, imaginal, abstract. The knowledge of the world and the knowledge of the self are completely interdependent. The brain predicts the world by predicting itself, and in predicting itself it comes into contact with the world. Self-knowing and knowing of the world bound together. When I say generative model, don’t hear the brain is making pictures or propositions. No, no, it’s about preparing the organism for its world. It’s about skills and states of mind. Yes, it’s about beliefs too, but also about skills, states of mind, traits of character. All of these levels are different ways in which those predictions are instantiated. Now, what’s the central problem facing this predictive processing framework? What should you predict? You know how many patterns around the world you could predict? Combinatorily explosive. Remember, you want to predict things that are relevant for the organism to prepare. It has to zero in on that, oh, here it is, relevant information. Now, what was happening as I was working with my colleagues on relevance realization framework, predictive processing was converging on this same problem, this frame problem, what’s relevant. Because they realized that they needed a separate function called precision weighting, which is the system has to give privilege to certain predictive pathways and ignore, dismiss, discount others. Recognize this problem? They called that precision weighting and they said that’s actually what attention is doing. Predictive processing needs relevance realization, but relevance realization also needs predictive processing. It’s like relevance realization is Darwinian natural selection and predictive processing is Mendelian genetics. They come together and mutually support and afford each other. What did the precision weighting do? What was their explanation of the precision weighting? Well, you exploit trade-offs, which is what I showed you already. You make use of opponent processing, trade-off relationships. You’re zeroing in, trying to get an optimal grip. What’s an optimal grip? This is a notion from Marlo Ponti. So my attention is evolving. Should I be attend here? Depends. I might need to read the, should I attend there? What’s the right distance at which you should look at something? What’s the answer? Depends on the context, depends on what’s happening in relevance realization, depends on the needed fittedness in order to prepare for the environment. So they were zeroing in on opponent processing for optimal gripping, which is totally convergent, independently convergent with the work on relevance realization. Okay, so predictive processing, it’s massively recursive. Relevance realization is also massively recursive. It has to be because it’s self-organizing, self-correcting. They’re both pointing to opponent processes, emergence emanation, a system that is simultaneously integrating up and differentiating down. This is the neoplatonic picture of the psyche, also the neoplatonic picture of reality. What, out of this framework, what’s the fundamental generative grammar? Not the what you think, not the what of your cognition, but the how. What’s the fundamental grammar of cognition? There is an emergence emanation structure. Intelligibility or relevance is neither objective nor subjective, but participatory. It’s self-organizing, it’s dynamic, it generates connectedness. Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are completely interdependent. It makes use of levels that are sensible, imaginable, and intelligible. This is the cutting science, but it’s the same thing as the neoplatonic framework. So, the convergence between 4E cognitive science and neoplatonism is very significant. I’m going to run a little bit longer, is that okay? I hope you’re finding this interesting. Now, you may argue that this is the fundamental, this grammar that I just laid out. Maybe the fundamental cognitive grammar is neoplatonic grammar, but that doesn’t mean the reality is laid out that way. That doesn’t mean the reality is laid out that way. Now, that’s the Kantian perspective. That’s Kant. Kant’s Copernican revolution is not that the world is structured and that informs, gives form to my mind, but my mind imposes a structure on the world. So, I never know the world as it is in itself, the thing in itself, the Dingan Zik. It’s the culmination of the nominalist tradition that starts in the late medieval period. The idea that all the patterns in the world are imposed on us, are imposed on the world by the mind, by how we talk about it, how we think about the world. Kant takes that through a Cartesian lens and brings it to, I think, a legitimate conclusion within that framework. I think the framework is bankrupt. The first argument I get is I want to take the idea that the world is a structure, the first argument I get, I want to take is from this excellent book by Norris Clark, W.N. Clark, Explorations in Metaphysics, especially this particular essay. Listen to the title of this essay. The We Are of Interpersonal Dialogue as the Starting Point of Metaphysics. Plato’s cheering for that. Yay, finally they remembered. The We Are of Interpersonal Dialogue as the Starting Point of Metaphysics. Now Kant’s position is that whatever structure we find in our experience of the world, our minds have imposed on the world. The world is like, so John Locke had the mind is a blank slate that the world writes on, Kant turns it around, the world is an empty canvas upon which you express yourself. I need to express myself, do you? Is that really the right way of thinking about it? Yet when we engage in meaningful interpersonal dialogue, the whole point of such communication is that that information has been pre-structured outside of our mind by another mind. That’s the whole point of interpersonal dialogue. If I know exactly what he’s going to say and he’s not going to give me any information, there is no communication, there is no interpersonal dialogue. You sometimes run into people like that at a party. But when it’s genuine, the very act presupposes that there is pre-structured information that’s pre-structured by a mind other than your own. Now of course, Kant accepts this presupposition because he writes the Critique of Pure Reason in German. Who is he writing to? Why is he writing to the We Are of Interpersonal Dialogue? Why is he writing in German? Did he invent German? Why does German have, like English, multiple perspectives? First person, second person, third person, why is it doing that? Well, surely Kant was aware of this obvious performative contradiction. Well, if he is, he didn’t seem to do any of that. He was just writing a book about the world. He was writing a book about the world. He was writing a book about the world. Kant was aware of this obvious performative contradiction. Well, if he is, he didn’t seem to do anything about it because there’s nowhere where he attempts to prove the existence of other minds or the pre-existence of a shared language. Dialectic dialogue, which is genuine, is privileged in disclosing reality because it shows us that in fact we are in contact with a reality that is pre-structured and possesses perceptives available to it other than our own. Other people correct us. Other people point out to us our bias or our self-deception. And we know when that happens that we could not have realized it for ourselves. Kant is assuming this as well. Or why is he writing through a critique? He’s trying to convince people to take positions that they otherwise don’t have. He’s trying to get them out of a particular peer-assist bias. Everything he’s doing is contravening the position he is stating. This is a performative contradiction through and through. I want to add to this. Contra-Kant, we do not start out as Cartesian monologues with introspective ability. If you ask a three-year-old what’s going on in their head, they’ll say blood. It’s about four or five where kids can first start introspecting. I kept a record when my younger son first introspective. You don’t want a cognitive scientist as your dad. That’s really weird. You know how you get the ability to be metacognitive? To be aware of your own cognition, to reflect on your own perspective? This is what you do. You internalize, remember internalization? You internalize other people’s perspective on your perspective. This is how you can come. By imitating them and how they interact with you, you can come to disclose to yourself biases that you can’t realize within your own perspective. In fact, the third-person perspective is often more powerful. That’s why you’re so wise when you’re giving romantic advice to your child. You’re so wise when you’re giving romantic advice to your friends, and you’re so crappy in your own love life. Igor Grossman has shown this experimentally. You get people to describe a problem they really have. They inevitably describe it from the first-person perspective, and they don’t see a solution. Then you say to them, I want you to re-describe the problem from a third-person perspective. They do it, and then they get an insight. Oh my gosh! They get a-ha moments. You are able to enter into a relationship with yourself because you internalize a pre-existing dialogical relationship you have with others. That’s how it goes. Kant presupposes self-knowledge without acknowledging it or explaining it, explaining its origin or development. So, if you abandon those things, the we are of interpersonal dialog, your metacognitive abilities, your metacognitive memories, your metacognitive sense of your own growth of identity, of the fruition of your cognitive faculties, if you abandon that there are other minds, then you’re not going to be able to understand the meaning of the problem. You’re not going to be able to understand the meaning of the problem. If you abandon that there are other minds and other perspectives, and the pre-structuring, if you were totally Kantian consistent, you would be trapped in a radical solipsism and skepticism that you would moment by moment be in performative contradiction with. Perhaps it is all a Cartesian demonic dream, but there’s one of two options. It’s a simulation and there’s nothing, if it’s all a sim… Remember, that makes no sense. In order to know it’s all a simulation, I have to have some real experience that allows me to see that this is all a simulation. And if that’s not possible to me, if it’s a simulation by… and I can in no way find out I’m in a simulation, you know what I should not do? I should not pay any rational attention to that. If there is a way of finding out it’s a simulation, I should pursue it. And I think that’s what philosophy and science do for us. We participate… I’m proposing to you that the Kantian projection thesis… I’m not even going to attempt the Lockean detection because that just doesn’t work. The Kantian projection thesis as to why we have the cognitive grammar we do doesn’t work. The better explanation is we have the cognitive grammar we do because it participates in the same cognitive grammar of reality. Because it’s about our being dialogically bound to reality, both horizontally with others and vertically within metacognition, within layers of realization and self-realization. Look, think about it. I propose to you that the relevance realization is using the same kind of grammar as biological evolution, variation and selection. The mind and life are participating in the same principles. This is the work of Evan Thompson, the deep continuity hypothesis. But both evolution and cognition are participating in the same principles of invariance and invariance interpenetrating within reality. We are co-participating. Given that argument, the neoplatonic grammar is not just the grammar of cognition, it’s the grammar of reality. It’s the grammar of realization, both cognitive and ontological, and of their coordinated co-participation that makes relevance realization and makes predictive processing, makes adaptivity, makes agency, a real ongoing reality. And I think the good in Plato is that the promise of that, the promise of the fittedness, never has failed. We get individual thoughts that are wrong, but the grammar, fittedness, has never failed. The through lines are inexhaustible, and our ability to conform to them has been inexhaustible. You can’t give an argument for the good, because the good is that which is presupposed by all argumentation. It is even more fundamental than relevance realization and predictive processing. It’s the fundamental idea behind relevance realization and predictive processing. That’s stage two done. Stage three will be a lot briefer, mostly because I’m tired. Also, I’ve written a book, a series of articles, over a very long period of time. I keep publishing, just published this year in August. Recorded talks, I have a 50-part video series where I’ve talked about how the West is increasingly, because of globalization, the whole world is suffering from a crisis in meaning. By many objective measures, people are increasingly more disconnected from themselves, each other, and the world. The average number of friends you have is going down decade by decade. The amount of worldwide sadness is increasing, anti-correlated with wealth, even as wealth goes up, how sad people are. Loneliness is an epidemic. In 2019, they did a survey in the UK. Eighty-nine percent of the people feel their lives are meaningless, even though we know that meaning in life is predictive of well-being, of cognitive ability, of good relationships, of successful agency, of warding off all kinds of mental illness. That’s why we have a mental illness problem, because we do not have a sufficient way of grounding that meaning in life. Now, here’s something I can argue, but I’m running out of time and energy, that connectedness, that ratio religio that is given by relevance realization, predictive processing, that sense of connectedness that gives you the fundamental conformity to reality, that belongingness together, and it’s a connectedness to yourself and to the world. That sense of connectedness to yourself, to the world, and to other people. Remember the dialogical? Those are the three domains, those are the three dimensions that are measurable in meaning in life. When people will say that they feel strongly connected to themselves, to other people in the world, they’ll rate their lives as worth living, which is the measure that matters here. The ratio religio, it’s all been talking about intelligibility, it’s also experienced by you existentially, emotively, motivationally as meaning in life. That makes perfect sense. Of course you have a terrific normative system, of your capacity for ratio religio, because it’s fundamental to your access to reality and to yourself. When we put the meaning in life machinery at risk because of our particular scientific and historical framework, not to mention our degrading political frameworks, et cetera, we undermine ratio religio, and we’re not just undermining meaning in life, we’re undermining the meaning in life This is disastrous, and it shows up symptomatically across cultures, across time, in many, many symptoms. But if you take it that neoplatonism, this is what Arthur versus Lewis has argued in many books, the perennial philosophy, platonic mysticism, the Gnostic state, neoplatonism is the cycle, sorry, wrong term, I apologize, the cycle of the Gnostic state, the philosophical grammar of the spirituality of the West. You go into Christian spirituality, you find neoplatonism. You go into Sufism, you find neoplatonism. You go into Kabbalah, you find neoplatonism. Thomas Plante argued it was like the lingua franca, it was the philosophica franca of the Silk Road. It allowed people from the East and West to talk to each other. It gave them a shared courtyard, not a single room, but a courtyard where they could connect to each other. Neoplatonism enters into reciprocal reconstruction with religion, but it also has done it with science. It did it in the end of the Renaissance. Kepler and Galileo are deeply influenced by neoplatonism. It happens again at the beginning of the 20th century. Read John Spencer, the eternal law. Many of the people that were involved with the new scientific revolution were influenced by neoplatonism or related things that were given a neoplatonic spin, like Vedanta, which probably interacted, by the way, on the Silk Road with neoplatonism. See, neoplatonism is a powerful, powerful cognitive grammar. It shows a dynamic capacity to understand the world. It shows a dynamic capacity to understand the world. It shows a dynamic capacity to evolve and to enter into reciprocal reconstruction. But it promises us a spirituality of deep connectedness, of conforming to reality for the sake of the cultivating of wisdom. What did this have to do with wisdom? You know what wisdom is, ultimately? In very complex situations, the ability to zero in on the relevant information, often requiring insight, and shape yourself, your agency, so that you’re best fitted to that, so that you can intervene in that situation better than any other person could. That’s wisdom. That’s enhanced relevance realization. That’s what neoplatonism promises you, with an enhanced sense of connectedness, meaning. Meaning’s all about purpose. No, it’s not. Purpose is only one of four dimensions. Meaning is much more about mattering, about being connected to something that has a reality independent of your existence and your egocentric perspective. If you want to know what is contributing to your meaning in your life, ask yourself, what do I care about such that I would want it to exist even if I don’t? That’s your meaning in life. That’s why people have kids. When you have a kid, your finances collapse, so wealth is gone. Your subjective well-being, it’s gone. It’s gone. You’re always hungry, you’re always tired, you’re always wet. There’s an alarm bell that’s a kid crying, going off. Your partner doesn’t like you anymore. Why do you do it? You ask me why, because they want to be connected to something that has a reality beyond them. Iris Murdoch said, love is a realization, the realization that something other than yourself is real. Neoplatonism promises you the rationally justifiable capacity to wisely fall in love with reality again. That’s how you awaken from the meaning crisis. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you. That was an absolutely wonderful, thrilling journey through a huge intellectual tradition in a kind of synoptic way, but also through your own thinking about that tradition over, I know, decades. Now, I just want to draw out just a couple of themes, and we’re going to open it up as soon as we can to the many questions I know the students and my colleagues will have. I was just saying to them that it’s wonderful how closely your argument, how deeply within the argument we’re, in a way, tracing this year, this sort of development of the concept of the human self from ancient times to the present. We had, in a way, a kind of sketch of that over a thousand-year history in your lecture, and the fundamental contention of Dr. Verrechi’s talk that, in a way, the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition gives us the categories, but also this gives rise to the spiritual practices that are so generative. Dr. Hedley, as you remember, gave that wonderful lecture in Pythagoras’ cave. We made the hike up to Pythagoras’ cave with Cambridge Platonist Douglas Hedley. I want to start by taking on one of the really fundamental contentions of your talk, this wonderful moment when you talked about illusion, the hermeneutics of suspicion from Marx to Nietzsche and others, that all of this is just an illusion. You want to believe it, or it makes you feel good to believe it, or whatever. You say, no, you can only judge an illusion in relation to something you think is not an illusion. This is a profound, as you know, Platonic argument. Boethius takes it up, where you can only judge the crooked with respect to the straight, or the imperfect circle with respect to the perfect circle. But there may be no perfect circle. When you’re looking at the imperfect circle, well, where is the perfect circle? Where is it? Well, that’s somehow in you. The very activity of your thinking is implicated in ontological realities. Aristotle and others will essentially argue that your ability to do that is the activity of the perfect in you. When Aristotle says that God moves all things by being loved, the claim is that your very subjectivity is already in the image of, is already connected with what is most real. And yet at the same time, we’re not where we hope to be, in some sense. And I wanted to ask you, if we just go straight to the heart of maybe the all-important question, is what are the practices you have found most productive to bringing you better into what is more real, illuminating your vision, ennobling your will to be closer to that? Yeah, you’re right, Steve. And I’ve given that a lot of thought, a lot of study, a lot of participant observation. I have come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t want to delimit a specific set of practices. Instead, I talk about what I call an ecology of practices, and I talk about certain design principles you want. What do I mean by that? First of all, there is no panacea practice. Every practice is working within that machinery upon a processing. And so where it has strengths, it has complementary weaknesses. There’s a formal proof for that called the no-free lunch theorem. It’s a great title. I won’t go into that formal proof right now. But the idea is, I say I was doing a meditative practice. So meditative practice is best understood. I was talking to Michael about this. This is an analogy I use, and it’s become a meme, so I hesitate to do it, but it works. Remember I was talking about framing, relevance realization of framing? So I’m going to pun, but the pun is intended. This is like your framing. I see through it, and by means of it, and beyond it. And so my glasses and how they’re framing my perception are actually invisible to me, transparent. What I need to do is I need to step back and look at them, make them opaque. That’s what you’re doing in mindfulness, meditation. You’re trying to step back, and instead of automatically looking through your mental framing, you look at it. And it takes practice because your mind will, out of habit, will leap, and you’ll start thinking about what you need to do, or you’ll start remembering. No, no, no. Not what I’m thinking about. I want to step back and look at my framing. That’s meditation. That’s good. The problem is, suppose I notice there’s a distortion and I clean it or adjust it, which is what’s supposed to happen. How do I know that I’ve improved my glasses? I have to put them back on. I have to see if I can now see more clearly or deeply. That’s contemplation. Our culture, like many, it has truncated mindfulness into a single practice that it has commodified and then made so that you can be sort of satisfied with your life and corporate capitalism. That’s not what’s going on. Instead, what you want is contemplatioc. That’s the Latin, and it comes from the Greek word theoria, where we get theory from, to see deeply into reality. So you want meditative practices like Vipassana. I’m speaking, for example, from the Buddhist tradition. But you want contemplative practices like contemplating on the impermanence or the interconnectedness of all things. I often take people through, and you can see videos of this online, through a neoplatonic contemplative practice where you take them through those levels of self and being. I can do it for you sometime if you’d like. And you take people through. That’s a contemplative practice. If I just contemplated, I could be projecting onto the world without knowing. If I just meditated, even the Buddha said, don’t just meditate. You don’t want the contentedness of a cabbage. You want to be able to… The eightfold path, like right understanding. That’s not moral rightness. That’s right handedness. That’s optimal gripping on the world. You need, right? You need this opponent processing. But I don’t want just still practices where I’m just sitting. I want moving practices like Tai Chi Chuan because I want to engage the cerebellar cortex loop. I want to get into a hemispheric opponent process. Like your brain is… Every practice should be paired with its opponent process so that you optimize self-correction. And then you have to link these pairings also to pair. Like you have to create an ecology of practices. And then you also have to have a correct pedagogical program. Like what practices of scaffold or advanced practices. But let’s say, well, certainly if I just do all the mindfulness practices. No. Because what mindfulness does is it shuts off the inferential machinery in order to enhance your capacity for insight. That’s what Vipassana actually means. To see through illusion and into reality. To have fundamental insight. Why do you have to shut off the inferential practices? All that self-taught… Because they’re in opponent processing with each other. Now, when you… Insight is cognitive leaping. You leap from some part to the whole. You leap out of the frame you’re in. When you like it, you call it insight. And you say, look at how smart I am. When you don’t like it, it’s the same machinery. When you don’t like it, you call it leaping to a conclusion. Because there are times when you have to do the opposite. You have to shut off the insight machinery. So that the inferential machinery can run more effectively. There’s a set of practices for doing that called active open-mindedness. So not only should you be practicing an ecology of mindfulness practices. You should be practicing an ecology of active open-minded practices. And putting them together. You should have dialogical practice. You see what I’m… This is an ecology of practice. So I talk about a meta-curriculum of design principles. And then you talk about domains in which they should be applied. So I think that affords a proper pluralism. Which is neither an absolutism or a relativism. For how one can respond to wisdom. Because I want to be able to say, because I think it’s true. Different cultures have had different philosophical frameworks. In which people achieved significant degrees of wisdom or enlightenment. And I don’t want to say this set of practices. What I say, what do they share? They share the same meta-curriculum. The same design principles. The same patterns of self-organization and self-correction. My analogy for this is natural selection. The process of evolution is the universal process. But that doesn’t mean all the organisms are the same. What it actually predicts is a diversity in how the organisms fit their environment. Which is what you see. Sorry, that’s a long answer. But I’ve given a lot of thought into this. So I would like to afford something like the Neo-Platonic Silk Road. I’m working with a whole bunch of other people. Both scientists and leaders of communities. To generate this meta-curriculum in these pedagogical programs. So that people can go between just being autodidactics and being dilettantes. And just reinforcing their bias as they become spiritual but not religious. Because that’s what it largely means. It means the religion of me, it makes me feel really good. They can be challenged by these design principles that are non-egocentric. But that doesn’t mean they just have things imposed. They find within that challenge what actually grasps them in their life. In their history, in their culture, in their situation. Sorry, that’s a long answer. But that’s my answer to that question. It’s a very rich answer. So thank you very much, John. I have many other questions that I want to ask you. But we’re going to have some time to spend together over the weekend. And so I may pop a couple in. But I’m going to start, get as many in here from our, I don’t want to say captive audience. I would say this engaged audience. Starting with you, James, Dr. Bryson. Thank you, Professor Raviky. Thank you, Steve. This is a rich talk, highly stimulating, especially to the captive audience. But an audience that, as Professor Blackwood said, deepened the argument already. If I could say a word or two about the kind of curriculum we’re teaching here at Ralston College. We’re both, on the one hand, mining this platonic tradition that you’ve laid out so clearly and provocatively. For wisdom, we’re trying to recover a lost tradition, on the one hand. The other thing that we’re doing, and one of the reasons we’re moving chronologically, is to find out what happened to us as a culture. Culture moves very quickly, relatively speaking. We’re in a way a completely, in a completely different universe than Homer’s or Plato’s or Plinus’s for that matter. And yet, they speak, as you say, perennial truths that are still available to us. But what’s happened to us as a culture, when you mentioned some culprits, sort of the bogeyman, right, from nominalism through Descartes to Kant. But these are also thinkers who are engaged with the tradition that has, they’re engaged deeply with that tradition, but also they’re responding to developments and trying to make sense of them. In particular, as you said, the scientific revolution, which is not nothing. It was a tectonic shift, as Kant and others said. This is a Copernican revolution, and he was trying to mirror that in his own writing. So I wonder if you could say a word about what’s happened to us that, on the one hand, has put these cultural gems at such a great distance from us, but also, you know, how is it that we can get them back, given what’s happened to us and where we are as a culture? Yes. So I have an answer for that, and it’s 50 hours long. So I think the way you put it was exactly right in the history. Each person that I mentioned is, in a sense, trying to deal with the problem. So I’ve said this before, so I want to say it again. So it’s not disingenuous. It’s authentic. I wish I’d made the kind of mistakes that Descartes made, right? I mean, I wish I made the kind of mistakes that Hegel made. I do not present them in any kind of demeaning or trivializing manner. I think they’re titanic figures wrestling with titanic issues. But what I try to show is how these arguments led to a loss of kinds of knowing that are the kinds of knowing that are mostly responsible for the generation of meaning in life and wisdom. So, for example, remember when I said that relevance realization, I argued, I didn’t just say, you don’t care what I say, why would you do? I argued that relevance realization is, you know, it’s preconceptual, it’s pretty semantic, it’s pretty representational, right? Now, we have, because of the way certain things became salient for historical reasons, like the rediscovery of aspects of Aristotelian logic and other things. For the details, I ask you to take a look at this here. What I’m going to basically happen is that the changes happen first, not in philosophy, but in cognitive practices. So this is not meant to be exhaustive. This is just exemplary. There’s a changing styles of reading. It’s not clear when it changes, probably end of 12th, beginning of 13th. So reading becomes less and less communal. There’s some new changes and people start doing individual reading. And they also, that starts to move people from a dialogical model of knowledge gained to a monological model. Kind of imperceptibly. And it also moves people into thinking more about the gathering of propositions together, rather than a transformation done in concert, phylia, with others towards a reality. And so you start to get, and this is why logic and its emphasis on consistency and coherence also starts to become more attractive, because those two reinforce each other. And so you get the movement towards what I call a propositional tyranny, where we think that knowing is exclusively propositional knowing. So propositional knowing is knowing that cats are mammals. That’s a proposition, right? Cats are mammals. It’s just a statement that you can evaluate for being true or false. You know what propositions are, right? So, and this has its own unique kind of memory. It’s called semantic memory. How many of you know that cats are mammals? Put up your hand. How many of you can tell me where and when you learned that fact? Okay, so it doesn’t care about context. So you have propositional knowing. It comes with it, with a sense of conviction. Propositions are true or false. It gives you beliefs and it’s stored in semantic memory. But that’s not the only kind of knowing. With that change in reading and the rising prominence of logic, that kind of knowing became prominent. But that kind of knowing actually depends on procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something. This is knowing how to swim. Knowing how to walk. Knowing how to kiss somebody. Knowing how does not result in beliefs. It results in skills. Skills are not beliefs. Skills are not true or false. They fit or they don’t fit the world. How many of you are using your skill of swimming right now? Oh, your skill of swimming is false. That doesn’t make any sense. Okay, and your procedural knowing is stored in a different kind of memory called procedural memory, funnily enough. And you can damage semantic memory without damaging procedural memory, vice versa. Procedural memory, procedural knowing depends on knowing which skills to activate or acquire. That’s your sense of the situation. That’s your perspectival knowing. That’s knowing what it’s like to be you here now in your current state of mind in this situation. And it’s not about beliefs or skills. It’s about perspectives. You know what different perspectives are. You know how to move between them. Perspectives aren’t true or false or powerful or not. They give you a sense of presence, connectedness or not. That’s what you’re looking for in video games. It’s stored in a different kind of memory called episodic memory. So when I asked you when you learned about cats or mammals, you couldn’t tell me. You might be able to tell me where you learned a particular skill. Maybe not. But I bet you you can tell me episodic memory quite well. Like, you remember what happened on your last birthday? Oh yeah. And what do you do? You do an episode. What’s an episode? It’s your particular perspective on a situation, your state of mind, who you were, then and there at that place. And you relive it. You become re-present in it. That capacity to have a state of consciousness that fits you to the world is ultimately dependent on participatory knowing. Participatory knowing is the way physics and biology and culture shape you in the environment in each construction. So you fit each other. It doesn’t generate perspectives. It doesn’t generate skills. It doesn’t generate beliefs. It generates affordances like the walkable-ness of the floor, the graspable of the bottle, the sit-able-ness of the chair. This is a big deal now in 4-E cognitive science. And that has its own sense of fittedness, its own normative sense. It’s not truth. It’s not power. It’s not presence. It’s belonging-ness. You know when it’s absent when you shop for culture shock or loneliness. I’m lonely when I go into my hotel room because I miss Sara. I miss my kids. So it has its own weird particular kind of memory too. It’s not semantic memory. It’s not procedural. It’s not episodic. It’s this weird kind of memory you call yourself. It’s memory of agent arena relationship roles and identities and how there’s a through line between them all. It’s participatory knowing. As propositional tyranny increased, often for these initially innocuous reasons, people lost appreciation. They didn’t lose the functioning of these things because then they would just be dead. But they lost appreciation in both senses, like understanding and valuing of the non-propositional ways of knowing. The non-propositional ways of knowing is where most of the meaning in life and relevance realization and wisdom, it’s where the ratio religio, that’s where most of the ratio religio takes place. The propositional stuff, Plato knew that in a sense, is deeply dependent on the non-propositional. In fact, one of the defining features of third wave Platonism is that Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, is ultimately about non-propositional knowing. That’s not just my term. That’s the term that’s used in the literature. So what for e-cognitive science, the fact that cognition is embedded, embodied, enacted, and extended, there’s a deep continuity between cognition, life, and the environment. They fit together dynamically. All the stuff I’ve said. That is increasingly emphasizing how much of our cognition is not propositional, is not representational. And so the cognitive science is showing how fundamental it is. Your ability to navigate the physical environment, sensory motor, that gets accepted. It gets repurposed and used for how you move through conceptual space. Notice I was using up-down to talk about reality. And I was drawing arrows. And I was doing direction. It’s the same machinery. It’s the same machinery. The cognitive science with that deep continuity is telling us that the non-propositional is really important and giving us ways of investigating it that then can align with traditional practices for the cultivation of this. Now there’s an important thing. Sorry, this is really, this is like the question. I took 50 hours. You’ve got to give me at least a couple of minutes. You have to be careful about not confusing the language of training and the language of explaining. The language by which something is trained is not, is often not good language for how you explain something. Let me give you a very quick example. You’re probably learning about this. One of the most powerful ways of increasing your memory is called the method of location. Roman orators used to use this. You memorize a space, let’s say this building of rooms, and then you put important images in each room. And as you go through your speech, you go within the room between the images and then between rooms. And that really powerfully trains memory. So you think, oh, maybe that’s how memory is laid out. Memory is laid out. There’s objects that are memory and they’re in locations and things are really close to each other. And that’s not how memory is laid out. That’s not how memory works at all. First of all, you automatically know, you can instantly know when you don’t know something. Have you ever been to Bangkok? No. You didn’t look through all the places you’ve been through. Nope, that’s not Bangkok. Just know that you don’t know. And are things close to each other? Well, red and blue are close to each other. But blue and green are close to each other. Does that mean red and green are close to each other? No. You’ve asked people, is Taiwan similar to China? Yeah. So it must be close. Is China similar to Taiwan? No. They’re far away. And are your memories stable things? No. This is the work of Elizabeth Loftus. Memory is perpetually reconstructive. It’s constantly reconstructing, rewriting itself. One of her favorite childhood memories is this memory is that they were driving along and it was a summer day and the car broke down. And the dad went to get some help and they happened to break down in front of this ice cream parlor. And they went in and they had ice cream and a wonderful time. It’s one of her most cherished childhood memories. And once she was telling this around her family members and they all laughed and she got really hurt. Why are you laughing? And they said, well, you weren’t there. You weren’t born for two more years. She had heard it so many times and it was meaningful to the power. Your memory is not an accurate representative of the past. It’s an intelligent predictor of the future. And that’s actually what you want, by the way. So memory doesn’t work at all according to the spatial metaphor for memory. The spatial metaphor lets you train memory well. That doesn’t explain it. So we have to be careful. We’ve got the cognitive science. We’ve got these training traditions. We don’t just say, oh, automatically equal. You have to do a lot of work, careful work. I tried to exemplify that about the kind of arguments you need to make to pair them together and the kind of consider and the careful reflection you need to do. So I think by the proper reciprocal reconstruction between the wisdom traditions and the cognitive science, we can address the propositional tyranny and return us to the scientifically understood and thereby enhanced training of wisdom and meaning. Thank you very much. I think I see Elijah’s hand first. Thank you so much, Dr. Brevecki. Based on a few things you said, I wanted to ask whether or not you think the world has infinite intelligibility or that we can exhaust the world’s intelligibility, especially thinking about the idea of relevance realization. You talked about all the many ways that we can make our situation relevant by finding intelligibility and thus enhancing our agency and thus finding intelligibility. So is there an end to that intelligibility? So that’s a really powerful question. So I think the promise of the good, and that’s how I like to think about it, rather than just the premise of the good. I think the promise of the good is that their reality, if you’ll allow me to sound slightly overblown, is that they’re not going to be able to do that. If you’ll allow me to sound slightly overblown, ultimate reality is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. And I propose that we should try and recover that as a sense of sacredness, which was more kept within Eastern Christianity than within Western Christianity. So you have the notion of epic tasis. I’m probably mispronouncing that. But this is the notion that God, if you’ll allow a sacred ultimate reality, affords continual self-transcendence rather than the notion of a place of rest, of completion. So I’m not saying something that’s new, but I’m saying something that has tended to be eclipsed, especially to the degree to which Western Christianity has dominated the Western framework. So I do think it’s in fact, I think that’s ultimately something you have to invoke in order to deal with the problem of the one in the mini that’s central. Does this problem arise in the will of the central creative agent in the world? So I’m, now you won’t like me, but that’s okay. I don’t put much faith in the proposal of the faculty of will. One reason is a scientific reason. It looked like we had a notion of willpower, which is what you need to make the notion of will something that can be empirically tractable. And it was presented by a very important psychologist, Roy Bomeister, and he came up with the ego depletion, this idea that you had a certain amount of energy, ultimately metabolic energy that you could expend on trying to direct your behavior. And then once it was expended, your willpower would be gone and then you would become impulsive. But you could easily replenish it if you gave people sort of calories and all this stuff. And it took off. He wrote a book. It was a big hit. It was being published everywhere. And then it fell completely prey to the replication crisis. Two massive replication studies absolutely failed to replicate any of his findings. Now, if we’re going to be honest scientists, we have to say, well, the notion of willpower has then been sort of fundamentally disconfirmed. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t go, yay, when the science is supporting it, and then, oh, I don’t like it when the science doesn’t support it. So as far as I can tell, the notion of willpower has been significantly disconfirmed. Now, I don’t think that that means that we have to give in to some sort of deterministic framework. I don’t want to do free will determinism debate. It’s huge. But I think we should try and replace those notions, which ultimately make use of a Newtonian push pole metaphysics with the kind of ontology I was arguing for for self organization. In which you participate. You don’t will it. You don’t receive it. You don’t make it. You participate in it. Do you will a friendship? You participate in it. Do you will a love? You participate in it. Is it a matter of identification? Yes. But is identification something you ultimately will or something you undergo? Do you will an insight? So this is this is now this is the problem I have with it. I think the notion of self organization and even more importantly, autopoiesis, that we’re not just self organizing things like a tornado. We’re self making things like a paramecium. We have agency and I think agency is real and the self organization of agency and the way agency participates in the unfolding of the world. I think those are very important and I think that’s the way we should be looking. Now, if I think there’s a way of reinterpreting will along those lines, if you’ll allow me. So we don’t actually ever talk about causation, even in science. We talk about causal relevance. So if I if I if I ask you what caused the sinking of the Titanic, you’ll say, well, it hit the iceberg. Well, why did it hit the iceberg? Well, the iceberg, you know, was there at that time because of the currents and that has to do with gravity. The sun’s position, the Earth’s position with the sun. It has to do with the previous ice age, which has to do with certain ways. And I’ll trace it back, but it also has to do with the speed the Titanic was. And that’s because the British are competing with the Americans for dominance of the North Atlantic. And then why are those empires? Because the American Revolution and what you realize is the reason why the Titanic sunk was the entire previous history of the universe. That’s the actual answer. And you can’t give it because it’s the answer for everything. And it’s combinatorial explosive. It gives you no dissent. So you’re always actually doing causal relevance. So when the most causally relevant factors of my behavior are those that are due to the self organizing processes within my cognition and consciousness, that’s when I am acting according to my will. That’s what I would argue. Wonderful. OK, I see we’ll take Scott and then Max. Thank you. What kinds of visual art are most meaningful for you? What kinds of visual art? I really like Turner. I like that cusp. I don’t like romanticism per se, but I like what Turner’s doing because I get the sense of everything I’ve been talking about. I get the sense of the layeredness of reality, the bindingness of me and reality. And it’s all self organizing. It’s dynamic. And it’s the and all of that’s happening. And although the painting is a little bit messy, it’s actually beautiful because the appearances are being created. It’s actually beautiful because the appearances are being organized in order to disclose the depths in a corresponding fashion within and without. So I really like Turner a lot. Thank you. Max. That’s right. This Max. What am I saying? Michael. Michael. Did Max have a question also? No, not yet. My apologies. Got my M’s mixed up. OK, so Mike. Next question. Michael, then Adriana. We were talking about how dialogue allows us to sort of communicate and create technologies and psychotechnologies that allow us to sort of outsess information processing. How do you think social media plays into all that? Because it seems like if anything, it exaggerates some sort of social neurosis rather than creating like a super intelligent being that allows us to solve any problem. Well, I mean, it’s doing both. So, first of all, on your first point, yeah, social media has been by and large for mental health. It’s been a very bad thing. Having connections is not the same thing as being connected. I want to make that like a bumper sticker or something. Having connections, not the same thing as being connected. It’s not ratio religio. And a lot of what’s happening in social media is an increasing disconnection of what we find salient from what we consider true. So, I mean, this is because social media is exacerbating what advertising does. So I want to use a term here and I’m trying to be offensive. This is Frankfurt’s essay on bullshit. OK, so the liar depends on your commitment to truth in order to manipulate your behavior. If I get Stephen to believe P, that’s some proposition that I know is not true. I’m depending on his commitment to the truth that that will change his behavior. The bullshit artist is not doing that. The bullshit artist is trying to get you to find something salient and get you to shut off your truth seeking. This is how advertising works. Do you honestly believe that if you use that shampoo that all these beautiful people will be attracted to you? Person drinking some alcohol at a bar, young, attractive, healthy people, eyes vibrant, laughing, singing, go into a bar. You know it’s not true. Why do they pour billions of dollars into it? Because, and this goes towards, this is the dark side of propositional tyranny. It’s not primarily what you believe to be true that drives your behavior. It’s what you find salient. It’s what you find salient. That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. Right, there’s that, the Simpson cartoon where the two aliens are running for, right, you know, when I was young I dreamt of being a baseball. But now, right, we must move forward, not backwards. Upwards, not forward. Twirling, twirling towards freedom. And everybody claps. They’re not saying anything. But it’s like, it’s saying all this, it’s all these catch phrases. Why are they called catch phrases by the way? What do they do? They catch your attention. They’re catchy. That’s what advertising does. Social media is exacerbating that because it’s more and more separating the presentation of the salience of material from the truth tracking. Part of this is the digital campfire effect. Do you know what that means? Okay. When you want, when you’re talking to somebody on Zoom, their face is quite large. And this is how close I’d have to be to Stephen, which is weird in real life. Sorry. And the face is glowing and excluded. We used to have that when we were around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. And we evolved according to that. This was a significant marker of social cohesion. So we are drawn to it. But it’s not putting you in contact with your group. It’s actually putting you in contact with people who are all over the world. So by the very setup, it’s exacerbating bullshit. The thing about bullshit is it exacerbates your capacity for self-deception. Because when you decouple salience, salience tracking from truth tracking, that’s the fundamental wedge by which self-deception gets in. So social media is making that much, much worse for those reasons. The problem is when you get that, you create, you undermine the legio. You create mental distress. You create social polarization, et cetera, et cetera. However, there’s a growing group of us. We call it this little corner of the Internet. And we’re trying to show different ways in which social media can be used. I made Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Each episode’s an hour long, 50 hours of argument making use of philosophy and cognitive science. And everybody said, nobody will watch it. They were wrong. They were wrong. There’s a real hunger. And there’s more and more people doing that. And we’re trying to show there’s another way in which we can inhabit social media that is conducive to the cultivation of wisdom and to the generation of a collective intelligence within distributed cognition that could be educated into collective wisdom. So I agree with you. But I do think there is proof of concept for a hopeful alternative. What a wonderful answer. Adriana. Thank you so much for your lecture. It was very good. Very enjoyable. You talked a little bit about objective and subjective reality. And you coined this term transjective. Transjective, yeah. Transjective reality. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Is it something that we conform ourselves to the way we think, to the way the world is? Or is it more we make the world by our thinking? Or is it even like a third idea where there’s this, I guess to bring God into the conversation, God’s creating the world and we’re thinking in dialogue. Like we’re realizing what God is doing in reality. So before I get to God, that’s an odd caveat. Remember I gave the notion of an affordance and that your perception and cognition are working in terms of affordance. An affordance is neither in the world nor in your subjectivity. It’s the way they’re fitted together. And you actually have to believe that there’s something fundamentally below subjectivity and objectivity that fits them together. This is Heidegger’s point or else truth is impossible. If there’s not something that binds subjectivity to objectivity, how could there be truth? And yet therefore by binding subjectivity to objectivity, by affording connection, it makes truth possible. And so I was trying to give you examples of that in affordances. I just gave you an argument. Truth is the affordance of knowledge, right? And that’s basically what it is. And when I ask you where truth is, is it in you or is it in the world? Does it make sense? And notice that science presupposes it, but it can’t actually ground it. Here’s another one. Is your body subjective or objective? Which is it? This is Marla Ponti’s point. It’s both and neither. It seems to be a body like other bodies. I hit this body, the chair. But yet it’s me and I live it. It’s part of subjectively who I am. He talks about the body as a chiasm, not a chasm, a chiasm. It’s the interweaving of self and world. Your body is transjective. That’s why 4E cognitive science is about one of the E’s is embodiment. Your body is what allows you to conform to the world. And for the world to inform and transform your cognition. So of the three options, it’s the third option. The two are mutually shaped to each other by something more primordial. Heidegger talked about al-Athea. I talked about the transjective. Gibson talked about affordance. There are all, Marla Ponti talks about the body. There’s this convergence around the idea that there has to be something below the subjective, objective divide that binds them and is more primordial, binds them together that makes truth, life, cognition, action possible. Now, what does that have to do with God? I think the answer that’s convergent from the Neoplatonic tradition and then, which is another great synthesis. You take basically Buddhism, you integrate it with Taoism, you get Chan, and then you integrate it with Shinto and you get Zen. So it’s also a great synthesis. And there’s been a lot of connections drawn between Zen and Neoplatonism for good reason. And both of them converge. Other things too, I think this is in Vedanta, but on the idea of non-dualism. The idea that reality is ultimately non-dual. Reality is ultimately non-dual. It’s neither subjective or objective, but what binds them together. Also, and this is where Nicholas of Cusa comes in and Erugena, I don’t know if it’s pronounced Erugena or Erugena, I’ve heard both pronunciations. The Christian theologian of the ninth century. You remember when I said that reality is leveled? That means it’s not a flat ontology, which is what we’ve had for a very long time. But it’s actually not right to say that reality is leveled. Because it’s all at once. It’s more than leveled. Reality is more than subjective or objective. That’s the one in Neoplatonism. That’s Shunyata in Zen. I think it’s fair to say that the non-duality talked about Eckhart. The same eye by which I see God is the eye by which he sees me. Christian Neoplatonism is also about non-duality. I think non-duality is the disclosure of that deeper. And you can experience it. I’ve experienced it as a result of decades of contemplative meditative practices. Is that also a sense of an inexhaustible source of intelligibility? Yes. So is it sacred ultimate reality? Yes. The word God seems plausible as a way of talking about that. I worry about that word because it means things that I don’t think fit well with what I’ve just said. But I do acknowledge that there are people within the Christian Platonic tradition that use that word exactly to point to what I’m talking about now. Then in that way, it’s God. We’re going to be tracing this theme a great deal over the course of the next months in a way Dr. Verbecki has put before as really the most fundamental philosophical question, which is the relation between the one and the many. And we’re going to be, I think, after the beginning of the third term, we’ll be reading Augustine and you’ll have a chance to see his account of Trinitarian theology, which is doing precisely what Dr. Verbecki is describing, which is to show the relation between a unity and a multiplicity in a dynamic reciprocity, let’s say. Aaron next, I see your hand. Thank you very much for speaking to us this evening. For just a moment, I want you to imagine that you’re not in a room of some very bright students, but rather in a room full of maybe 30 superintendents and principals of schools. What would you say to these leaders as they address the meaning crisis in relation to America’s youth? Well, I am talking to such people because they want to talk to me. I’d say a couple of interrelated things. If you don’t address the meaning crisis, your democracy is doomed. They know this is why I was invited to the Czech Republic. The democracy there is new to them and it’s precious to them, but they’re already worried that it’s failing because they have the problem that the democracy has no T loss. That’s how they put it. They’re worried about the meaning crisis undermining the democracy, creating zombie citizens. There was a speaker at that thing and he made that phrase. He actually used zombie citizens. I said, you know, I wrote this book on zombies as the symbol of the meaning crisis. He went, what? Yeah. Think about that. Why is the zombie, it’s a modern myth. Why did it emerge? It emerges because it’s trying to articulate the increasing prominence and prevalence of the meaning crisis. First of all, if you don’t address the meaning crisis in your education, democracy is doomed, which means you have to address what puts the meaning crisis at risk both historically and functionally. What puts meaning at risk is our proclivity to self-deception, the very mechanisms that make us intelligently adaptive, make us perennially susceptible to self-deception behavior. I argue that. I think this is a reinterpretation of the first noble truth of Buddhism. It’s not that all is suffering, which is like everything’s painful. That doesn’t make any sense. In fact, that’s not the word that’s used. The Buddha doesn’t talk a lot about pain. He talks about the loss of agency. A better way of putting it is realize that there is no area of your life, no faculty of your mind, no form of organization that will make you guaranteed free from self-deception. We have to start and we have to give up the also the panacea faculty. I trust my reason. I trust my gut. I don’t trust any of them more than I trust each one of them. It’s their ecology that I most will listen to because your gut will lead. My guts never led you astray. Yes, it has. I bet you it’s done it 12 times today and you just didn’t care or realize it. So give up, right? Address the meaning crisis by teaching students not only knowledge, propositional knowledge, but non propositional pathways to the cultivation of wisdom because wisdom is about systematically overcoming self-deception and enhancing connectedness. That’s what wisdom is, I would argue. So if you want to do meaning and save democracy, you have to teach for wisdom. And that means you also have to teach for intergenerational culture rather than for current marketplace dynamics. You have to be able to build cathedrals if you’re cultivating wisdom. You have to be… This is Zach Stein’s point. Our main adaptive trait is our ability to do cultural ratcheting. And when education got uncoupled from cultural ratcheting, the fact that you don’t have to learn, you can learn from previous generations, which is now being accelerated, by the way, by hyper technologies, then we undermine again what the ultimate function of education should be, which is the building of civilization. And we have inverted it and said, no, no, what we’ll do is we’ll, right? And I’m not a Marxist, but we have reduced everything to education is solely for the sake of the marketplace. We’ve got to abandon that framework. We’ve got to go, no, no, civil education is civilizational and it is intergenerational. So cultivation of wisdom within an intergenerational framework oriented towards civilization, not the market. Of course, it should train people, but the language of training and the language of explaining shouldn’t be confused, right? Stuff like that. And so what I’m trying and this is not to be self aggrandizing. After I’m done here, I’m flying to Chicago because I’m talking with the people who will run the International Baccalaureate because they want to start to integrate some of what I’ve been talking about into their program. So that’s how I would answer your question. I’m going to bring us to a close here with one final question, then we’ll repair for a bit of nourishment. You’ve given us so much to think about today, John, and one of the things that you’ve repeatedly returned to is this notion of distributed cognition and connected that early on to freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. And I was want to ask you for your advice as we build a new college, maybe even a new kind of college, but certainly a new college. And in that context, I simply want to say that it’s my conviction that true freedom of inquiry in a sense, precisely because it depends on what other people know and setting up a context in which we can. We want to know what other people know and they want to know we know and we want. Well, I want you to correct me if you think I’m wrong. And that that involves a certain context. It’s not antagonistic or or or cynical. It’s actually welcoming of the correction that you can bring about in me and maybe I can bring about a new. And so it actually true freedom of inquiry presumes a kind of context, a kind of context, a kind of community. We often say at Rosalind College, you know, freedom of thought in a community that values freedom of thought and friendship, because a kind of friendship to me seems to be the condition of our seeking the truth. Together. And so I was wondering if you could if you have any advice for us as we as we set about to to build the best collegiate community that we can. Well, I mean, I really like all of you and I’m impressed by so I feel called to give you an answer to be responsible. But I feel intimidated by the question, too. I think if you could. Exemplify in a way that’s attractive. Opponent processing within the hermeneutics of beauty. You would do a lot of great work towards rebalancing. And the West’s orientation to inquiry. And I think you need in that modeling, you need to. Yes, friendships important. But the friendship, the problem is friendship is limited by certain kinds of. Factors. Friendship is it has to be situated within fellowship, which is the kind of thing that happened when people were building cathedrals or building and continuing the Platonic Academy. You have to feel this sense of. In a collective intelligence that transcends the intelligence of any particular individual. So I guess. Yeah. Offer to the world opponent processing rather than adversarial processing situated within a hermeneutics of beauty rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion and that builds friendship and friendship. As a real alternative to tribalism. Gosh, it’s so beautifully said, John. Please join me in giving a very warm thanks. Our gratitude, our deepest gratitude to you, John, for coming here. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.