https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Wd5RbwgPsRY
Welcome to the monthly Q&A with John Bruegge. I’m always pleased to be here and to answer questions. We will take questions first from the patrons and then we will take questions that have been tweeted and then we will take questions from the online chat. So let’s get right to it please. So the first question is from the patron, Karan. It’s pronounced apparently in Danish. The question is where does our human animal instincts fit into the four kinds of knowing and how does knowledge of the four kinds of knowing help us transform and transcend. So the human instinct, the notion of instinct is actually a very difficult notion to pin down because it generally has referred to sort of completely innate abilities and that’s very plausible for organisms that don’t do any learning, perhaps like spiders. It’s unclear if it applies to mammals although there’s probably some instinct or reflexive behavior. So I’ll take it to mean something that’s innate and largely reflexive and that is not altered significantly in learning. So I have instinctive behavior along that line. I have a looming reflex. So if things suddenly change the ratio in my visual field, my head will move and I don’t have to initiate that. I don’t have to learn that. It’s unlearned behavior. It’s sort of wired in by evolution to be adaptive. So I’ll take that that’s what we mean by instinct. The term is used very vaguely and sloppily in general and many things that are called instinctive behavior really it’s not quite clear that it should be called that. Anyways I won’t get into this academic cul-de-sac. Let’s just take it that that’s what’s meant by the term instinct. So behavior that has been rendered largely innate due to our evolutionary history. So notice that that doesn’t mean we don’t have to practice it either. You could make a very good argument that walking is instinctive for us. That doesn’t mean that kids don’t have to spend quite a bit of time for the practicing for that innate ability to come online. So we have to be very careful. All of that said here’s what I think. I want to here’s how I think I would want to respond to that question. Insofar as evolution has shaped us in certain ways for perennial patterns across many different environments. I think this would fit clearly into what I call participatory knowing. Let’s talk again about what participatory knowing is. Remember the four kinds are propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory. Participatory is the deepest. And it’s the way you should analyze it at sort of three timescales. There’s the evolutionary scale in which what we’re talking about is how evolutionary processes have co-shaped the environment and the organism to fit together. This is called niche construction. So what that means is of course here’s the environment here’s the organism. The environment puts selective pressure on organisms but organisms also interact in their environment and you get a mutual reciprocal shaping. And then for us at a higher level we are also preachers of history because we exist culturally. And culture also is something that through the use of tools and technology and simple systems culture is something that shapes the environment to me and me to the environment. So this room around me is all a tool. And then of course I’m shaped. See the tools on me to that. And then also practices. There are certain ways I’m supposed to talk and express myself etc. And then on top of that so there’s the biological co-shaping at the evolutionary time scale, the cultural co-shaping at the historical scale and then at the cognitive scale there’s the ongoing co-shaping of the environment in terms of the sensory motor loop. I’m sensing that’s the environment impacting on me but I’m also moving and adjusting that to be changing the environment the sensory motor loop. So participatory learning is these three layers in which the organism and the environment at a biological, cultural and cognitive level are mutually shaping each other. That being said I think the instinctive knowledge that you asked me about and the way I tried to rein it in and specify what it meant it’s clearly would belong to the biological evolutionary biological level the evolutionary time scale in which the organism and the environment co-shaped each other. So for example the one I gave walking is instinctive to human beings. Bipedalism predates our species by several species and it’s an innate characteristic and what happens is because we’re bipedal we have also like that that’s the way the environment selected put selective pressure on us but our bipedalism also enables us to do all kinds of things that shape the environment so that we make the environment more walkable to us and that brings something out. What does all this participatory knowing generate? It doesn’t generate theories like propositional knowledge. It doesn’t generate skills like procedural knowledge. It doesn’t generate perspectives like perspectival knowing. What does it generate? It generates affordances. It generates that most of what’s around me is walkable. Being walkable is not a property of the thing or me. It’s a real relation between us. So participatory knowing at those three interpenetrating levels of the mutual shaping, that mutual shaping creates affordances between the organism and the environment and then of course perspectival knowing prioritizes making some of those more salient brings that into my conscious state and then that gives me my situational awareness and then that allows me to apply and acquire skills and that gives me my procedural knowing and then the procedural knowing allows me to know how to propose, how to question, how to adaptively seek and how to state and how to use language and that eventually generates my propositional knowledge. How does that all relate to transformation and transcendence? I think we should understand transcendence in terms of a deep transformation in the dynamic coupling between an organism and its environment and the deepest kind of transformations are ones that and this is ultimately a platonic notion, right, that a line stack those four kinds of knowing so they are mutually affording, mutually constraining in such a way that I am participating in the generation of affordances and then I am selecting the best optimal grip within my perspectival knowing so that I get the best set of skills, best theories and what this affords is ultimately hopefully a process that is developmentally reliable in a progression towards the overcoming of self-deception systematically through all the kinds of knowing and the affordance of an enhanced coupling to the world which would be an enhancement in both a sense of our interconnectedness, our optimal inner alignment and our outer connectedness, that to me would be the experience that would be properly called a kind of transcendence when we are going through that systematic and comprehensive developmental change so as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Its transcendence is ultimately if it’s going to be a transcendence in the aspiration to wisdom, it’s going to be that kind of overall comprehensive developmental shift and so the animal instincts have to be included in that. I mean this is one of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche, the order can be flipped around because it’s German, I wish Johannes was here, he knows German much better than I do. The quote is basically along the idea that the heights of my spirituality reach into the depths of my sexuality, again with the sexuality is referring to my whole biological Darwinian heritage, the spirituality is all those ways in which I can transform and engage in self-transcendence. So I think properly situated within the stack of the four kinds of going and in a developmental trajectory in the dynamical coupling to the world, the animal instincts would play an important role. My concern in answering this question has been throughout, there is a form of, there’s a version, I would think a decadent version of romanticism that tries to locate sort of authenticity or a genuineness or an infallible way, an infallible source of guidance for how we act in terms of our instinctive behavior and I think our instincts are just as liable to drive us into self-deception and self-destructive behavior as anything else, but they should not be demonized, they are not the beast within, they are adaptive, they are needed and so they have to be properly situated within an overall just culture of our psyche. So the next question is from the patron, Pastitos, who I just got to meet in a one-on-one conversation recently, which I really enjoyed, so I thank you for that. So this is a really good question. Do all cognitive biases stem from an adaptive essence? That is, are they particular failure modes of our otherwise adaptive heuristics? Or are some biases just an artifact of how our cognitive machinery is slapped together by evolution? Such a difference exists would also influence their impact on self-deception. This is a really insightful question. I think it’s a really good question, and I think it’s a good insightful question. So it’s one I need to give more thought to, but I don’t want to just cop out here. So I want to understand that I’m going to always try my best, but this is really much just you know on the fly. I think it’s probably the case, so I am convinced of the idea that the brain is a clutch. This is the idea that you know it’s a bunch of machines that have been sort of slapped together by evolution, as Pastitos says, but I’m also, but I also counterbalance that with a lot of the more recent work by Michael Anderson and the circuit reuse and exaptation hypothesis, which is it doesn’t look like the brain is as clutchy as we thought, because a lot of stuff that originally evolved for doing one particular job has been exacted to doing other things. So you know my standard ones, my tongue has been exacted for speech, the brockish area for sophisticated control of my right hand has been exacted for managing the syntax of my language, and there’s a whole host of these. And so because of the increasing evidence for exaptation, the brain isn’t quite as clutchy as we sort of thought it was. However, I think it’s also the case that we fall prey to forms of self-deception and self-destruction that are simply anachronistic in the way that Pastitos says. So I think it’s likely that we have a problem with ice cream and that people tend to overindulge in things like ice cream because we evolved on a savanna where, you know, and we’re mammals, so milk, yay, right, and then lots of fat, lots of sugar, throw in some salt, make it cold, oh my gosh, if you’re on the savanna, so if you’re going to come across anything that has any of those properties, and because of their rarity, and because of the precariousness of your life, you’re going to gorge on them when you see them. And that that machinery is still largely in place because it only was significantly challenged probably around 10,000, maybe 20,000 years ago. That’s not long enough revolution to do enough. So we have this machinery in us that says gorge on the ice cream, and we go into the store, the supermarket, and because of runaway capitalism, we have 17,000 auctions of ice cream, and you can buy them in various overwhelming quantities, and we eat too much ice cream, we just eat too much ice cream, and that’s self-destructive behavior. So I think that I would still want to say that the majority, and you see the problem with saying even that that’s maladaptive, it’s only maladaptive if we have this complex civilization wrapped around us, if civilization collapses, God forbid, then that machinery would again become adaptive. Why this matters, by the way, the subtlety of this, I’m sorry, sometimes we want really like, it’s not that easy. There is a hypothesis that’s gaining plausibility that the disorder, we call it the disorder, and I mean no moral criticism by this, the ADHD, hyperactive, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, right? And it looks like that that form of cognition is actually deeply adaptive. It’s really good in a context of being a hunter-gatherer, and for 99.9% of our history we were hunter-gatherers, so that behavior wouldn’t have been a disorder. It would have been deeply adaptive and probably conveyed considerable social social social status on these individuals, and therefore reproductive success, which is why this form of behavior is so prevalent. It’s just now we we take these individuals, we take them out of hunter-gatherer societies, and we stick them in this sedentary, suffocating, purely, you know, superficially symbolic world, and they don’t fit in without difficulty. Now is that a case of it being maladaptive? Is that a case of them suffering from self-deception? It’s very gray. So what I’m saying is that the disorder is very, very so what I’m suggesting in this as I’m trying to unfold this in a nuanced fashion is there’s probably a continuum of how we should address the question of how adaptive the machinery of self-deception is. I think it was always to some degree adaptive, because if it wasn’t at least for a significant part of our evolutionary heritage adapted, it wouldn’t have the motivational compulsion that it does. So maybe think like but then you know other things, is it even maladaptive? Don’t know. So the question is, I think that there are clearly patterns of self-deception and self-destructive behavior that are not running off of sort of standard cognitive biases and heuristics. I still think they are running off of adaptive machinery, but how adaptive that machinery is, is not a yes no kind of quantifiable answer, because it’s relative to our particular historical and environmental context. So I think that does make a difference to how we try and deal with patterns of self-deception. So it means, and this is converted with something I’ve argued, that we have to think of different kinds, and this goes back to my the answer to the first question, that to think of different kinds of intervention strategies that are working at all of the levels of the stack of the four kinds of knowing that can reach down into the animal instinct level and up to our most highest personal cultural level of cognition. Which means, and this is something that I have been putting quite a bit of thought in, because I’ve been trying to think about the design principles for an ecology of practice, and we need to have practices that have complementary relationships with each other, but we also need to have practices that afford the stacking of the four kinds of knowing and layering of practices so that they can be properly exacted in our developmental progression. So all of this ties together. I wish I could give you a sort of succinct clear answer, because it’s a really good question, but I think the answer is that we have to posit a continuum, and then we have to put that into the dimensions of our design space for how we try to think about creating an ecology of practices. So thank you for that most excellent question. I’m sorry for the rest of you. You’re like, oh, is he’s going on so long? But I think it’s a really important question. Questions like this that go to the heart of self-deception and the heart of strategies for intervening, I think are ones that we should return to and keep trying to get better and better answers on. So Rob Gray. Hi, Rob. I have every month, I look forward to the meetings I have with Rob. They’re wonderful, the discussions and the sense of connection, and it’s just great to have this ongoing relationship with Rob. Rob, I believe, is coming also to the Senga pretty regularly. It’s just great. So Rob asks a really good question. Do you have any personal observed dead-end practices? In other words, practices you thought would be fruitful but wasted your or the practitioner’s time. Are there any practices you used to do or wish you could do but are too time resource intensive to do given the rest of your goals? This is an excellent question. The answer is yes. There was a practice that I took up that I had such high expectations for, and I pursued it very diligently, and I pursued it a couple times in my life. Sometimes practices take at different stages in your development, and so you should come back to them at some point. I’ve done this. This was a practice. I read a book, and I recommend the book because I think this works for people. I can’t remember the first name. Last name is Raguner, and it’s about lucid dreaming. I saw and I know also about eastern traditions that are similar, dream yoga within Buddhist and tantric lineages. I had done some earlier lucid dreaming work in my 20s, and when I was going through union therapy, and I still do dream work, and so that is conducive to lucid dreaming. What he proposed, and I bought a bunch of books on this, various programs to induce more lucid dreaming, and it’s quite a lot of effort. You have to do these reality checks throughout the day, and you have to all do these trainings. I was doing it. I was being extremely diligent. My sadistic ego, super ego, my sadistic super ego, one of the benefits from it is it tends to make me willing to be very diligent in the project of self transformation. I pursued it quite diligently, and I got, and all the books say it takes a long time, and that’s true for a lot of wisdom practices, so I hung in, and I hung in, and this is no criticism of this. I know that other people, this works for me. I got one or two lucid dreams. The other thing is I’m a long-term meditator. That’s also deeply predictive of lucid dreaming, and I talk to people about it, like my friend and colleague Anderson Todd, and I had one lucid dream, and I had that powerful experience that Wagner talks about. I was able to within the lucid dream talk to the dream weaver, and it was, oh, wow, and then you get a sense of coming into contact with the numerous depths of the psyche, and then that was it, and it just sort of, and the cost to benefit ratio was just getting diminishing returns. I was putting more and more time, and it was like, no, that’s it. That’s all you get, and I’m not sure why that’s the case, so obviously I haven’t developed the expertise in the practice to get a good sense of why it’s not working, and it’s not because I can’t remember my dreams. I can. All that dream work means I can remember my dreams, and it’s been disappointing. It’s just been disappointing because I saw this as a very plausible way of trying to bring into a naturalistic context some of the more theurgic practices from neoplatonism, and also make another connection between my current practice and Jungian practices, and it just didn’t gel for me. So I’ve reflected on that quite a bit. Why is it that sometimes these things gel, and why is it sometimes they don’t? And it might be that there’s a whole host of reasons, and none of these are definitive in my mind. It might be that, oh, I mean, sorry, this sounds, oh, sorry. So try to take this the right way. But it might be a lot, my ecology of practices, it’s a complex dynamical system. Maybe it’s working well enough that there really isn’t much of a place for this, or it’s not getting much of a functional purchase, or it could be that I have some resistance to it, but because of my idiosyncratic background, perhaps my particular religious heritage is somehow interfering on a level I’m not aware of. Perhaps it’s my age, I’m getting older, and so the capacity for that kind of vivid imagery is starting to fade in me, which also makes things like active imagination more of a challenge for me. So I don’t know. But the thing to think about that is, again, first of all, what I said before, if a practice doesn’t work, but you had some sort of intuitive sense, try it again at another, at a significantly other point in your life, because it might be just the idiosyncratic place in your psychobiological development. But it also might be that certain things won’t work for you because of sort of more permanent conditions within you, or also because of, like I say, the relative success and functionality of other things that are happening for you. So it should have worked. All the predictors, I did all the research, all the predictors there, I did all, and it just didn’t gel for me. And so I hope it’s helpful for people to hear that, because what was helpful for me was wrestling with the fact, of course, I was disappointed because I saw it as potentially powerful aid, but also to step back and realize, well, there might be good reasons also why it’s not taken for me, or there might be reasons that have to do with my mortality that I need to deeply accept. And so I think that was a very helpful question, Rabban. I hope I was able to answer it. About ones I would wish I could do more, I would love to take up sacred geometry, which was a practice of sort of doing a meditation as you’re sort of doing geometric proofs, sort of our Euclid. It was part of the Neoplatonic heritage, because I have a strong suspicion that sacred geometry really bridges powerfully and extends rationality through that bridging between propositional and prospectable knowing, because of the way geometry brings in perspective and shape and construction, procedural element, but it’s also deeply rational and inferential and analytic. But I just don’t have the time to undertake it right now. So that was another great question, deserving of a long answer, and I hope you found that helpful, Rabban. Next question is from another patron, I believe, is Janet Stewart-Migueroa, I believe. What are, might be, the psychological effects on women from the masculine use of pronouns in all great written works and continued use in our spoken language for most part? I greatly appreciate your sensitivity to these issues in your lectures. Thank you for saying that, it does matter to me. And I’ll finish the question and start addressing it. Most men, in my experience, and even women, are seemingly oblivious to how it offends, divides, and excludes. It troubles me greatly. So it’s always been something that I’ve, you know, there are works of art, too, that come to mind. One was a fairly recent science fiction book, Insularly Justice, and the other was a classic science fiction book, Fire Slug, In the Left Hand of Darkness, about how implicit we form models when we’re reading, given the way language is used. Of course, because that’s how all the models are being generated in terms of language being used. That had an impact on me. And part of it is, I think, my upbringing. I was, my father was quite absent. I don’t mean he didn’t live with us, but he was, like, not present for a lot. And so I was very much brought up in a household of women, my mother and three sisters. And so they taught me very deeply that I should treat them, even saying this feels wrong, but I should, I shouldn’t have to say it, or even it sounds even pretentious to be saying it. But they taught me that, you know, that I should treat them as full persons. And I don’t need to say they sat me down, and oh, no, it was like an atmosphere around me that I just internalized to a very significant degree. I’m not claiming anything ridiculous that I’m completely free from sexism. I’m claiming that, and I’m not, in fact, claiming that I’ve worked hard on any particular virtue. I was lucky that I was brought up in a certain way that helped me to realize things, and then I noticed that. And I’ve also, as I’ve undertaken this project of taking on a public persona, it has concerned me. Now, how accurate this is or not, but it’s least pervasive perception that, you know, a lot of the IDW or whatever we want to call it, whatever this is, I don’t, I don’t think that, according to Wikipedia, I’m not part of the intellectual dark web, I’m part of the intellectual deep web, whatever that means. But I’ve noticed a preponderance of the audience and the authors, and I’m one, you know, are male. And I have always wanted to try and make my work more inclusive of women, not just because of my upbringing, but also something that I’ve noticed in my classrooms. So it’s important to set up the culture of your classroom very well. And so for many years now, I make an explicit statement asking women to participate more in the class. And I don’t have any hard-pressed scientific evidence about that, but I have reliable anecdotal evidence that when I do that, more women participate. And then what I inevitably find is that class goes better for everybody. And so it came to my mind that that would also be the case for what, if you’ll allow me the analogy, and I don’t mean anything pretentious by it, but that would make this classroom go better. And so I’ve wanted as much as possible to be inclusive in that way. I want to be as inclusive as is possible and always, but I’m addressing a specific thing right now. And like I say, I’m particularly sensitive to it because of my upbringing. And then like I said, the influence of some pretty powerful works of science fiction that really called this out for me. I’ve also had the reverse experience. When I was a teenager, I read Strangeness, Strange Land by Robert Highland, and it made quite an impact on me, the notion of rocking things. It’s sort of my first introduction to what ultimately turns out to be a neoclatonic idea of noose and oasis. So I decided as an adult, hey, I go back and read that. I couldn’t read that book. I was about 30 or 40 pages in, and it’s so incredibly sexist. And there’s a figure in there that is just, oh. And so like I said, I’ve had both positive, I’ve had very powerful positive and negative experiences around. It’s been in particular in science fiction. And perhaps that’s because science fiction is the genre. I know it’s put down on by, oh, it’s science fiction. Who reads that? Right? Except look around, look around. And you know why? Because science fiction is the genre that in which the main character is not any person, the main character is the world. So science fiction is the form of fiction that is most playful of our world views. And I think that’s actually deeply relevant to the pursuit of wisdom and the transformation of our fundamental understanding of ourselves and reality. And so I don’t think it’s any coincidence that both my most positive and negative interactions with the phenomena that Jeanette asked me about had come in science fiction. So that’s sort of my autobiographical explanation and my pedagogical motivation for why I try to be so sensitive about this and why I think we should all make an effort to address this. It concerns me, for example, and I can’t do anything about it, but it concerns me that most of the people that I talked about in Awakening from a Meeting Crisis historically were men. But if you notice, but if you notice, when I get to the cutting edge stuff, the thinkers that are most influential in my thinking right now, like L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard and Iris Murdoch, are all women. And that’s no coincidence either, because just like the classroom, if we bring in the women, everybody benefits, everybody benefits. I wish we could get past this, I think, largely useless polarization on this. Sorry, but I feel strongly about this, again, because of the way I was brought up and the impact of particular works of literature on me, and like I said, from my own pedagogical practice. So I hope that answers your question. Another question from Ben Gao. Ben is a patron and he’s really an important person in all of this community and the work he’s doing. Ben, so thank you, Ben. Thank you, genuinely. Thank you. Ben’s question, do you see the wisdom practices you teach as relevant to existential risk humanity faces? I want to come back to the use of that adjective, but I’ll come back to it in a second. It’s helpful to individual well-being, which is already life-changing. Thank you for saying that. But these practices seem not scalable enough to impact culture. This is one of Paul VanderKlay’s well-taken criticisms of my work. Or can wisdom be hacked into human beings in Yuval Harari’s conception of human hacking? So first off, this is a minor note on Ben’s question, existential risk. I wish we could find another term for threats, threats to human existence, because the term existential, of course, has a philosophical meaning, which can be confounded and confused with this sense of something that is threatening human existence. So I give it, those of you out there who are connoisseurs of language, I make a request for you, if you could come up with another way of referring to risks to human existence as a whole, other than the adjective existential, so that we could keep the philosophical sense of existential sort of separate from what we’re talking about. That in no way addresses Ben’s question. It’s just a request that I wanted to make. I do think that there is a connection, and I have been working hard to try and bridge between, because I take this criticism and related criticisms from Jonathan Pageau seriously, bridge between the individual wisdom practices and trying to get collective wisdom practices going. That means wisdom practices within distributed cognition. So in a way that is strongly and structurally analogous to how I’ve argued how we can take individual intelligence and recursively bootstrap it into rationality and into wisdom, I’m trying with the help of many people to work out how can we take the collective intelligence found within distributed cognition and bootstrap that up into collective wisdom that would then act as a bridging point down to individual ecology of practices and then up to the networking, the small world networking formation of communities. And so I’m also getting, I’m trying to get deeply involved with community building. And then this takes me to something that I’ve been talking about, which is, well, two things, bridging all of this verbiage, right, with art. And so Akira The Dawn recently, and this was on, we also appeared together on the Stoic, has taken some of my work, and I’ll talk about what it is in a sec, and then put it into meeting wave, put it into music. And so disseminating these ideas artistically through popular culture, I think is very important. But it has to be, whoa, I mean, it has to be handled like, like, in a way. So allow me, if you’ll allow me to speak a little provocatively, how do we propagate ideas without getting into propaganda? And my hope is that the artistic dissemination of the ideas will keep close pace and be constrained by the degree to which communities are forming and networking into hierarchical, sort of, you know, not a hierarchy, like I said, that’s what I want, an extended small world network of such community. Because what I want to do, and this is what Akira The Dawn put to music, is I want to steal the culture. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is I’m not trying, my position is ultimately, and this goes into issues of policy, my position is ultimately not political, it’s meta-political. And I thank Zach Stein for pointing that out to me. Because I don’t want something like the French Revolution, or, you know, the Russian Revolution, or the Chinese Revolution, or the Iranian Revolution, these revolutions have not generally turned out to be a good thing. Political revolutions. But I want something like the Axial Revolution, or what we got in the combination of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. But my primary model that sort of splits the difference between them is what you saw in Christianity. Christianity didn’t try, and there wasn’t a political revolution, it didn’t try to topple the government, or anything like that, and not because there hadn’t been slave revolutions in Rome, of course there had been, Spartacus comes to mind. But instead what happened was they built a new way of being and seeing, a new ecology of practices, and that was commensurate with community building, and it was commensurate with artistic dissemination and symbolic expression. And what happened is this networked out, and in a bottom-up fashion, the culture shifted until the state, which had been even trying to oppress and suppress Christianity, had to accommodate itself to the way the culture had been stolen. And we said, oh, but the elites took over. Yes, they did. But even when the elites had taken over, the culture had shifted, and things that had been acceptable previously in the Roman power structure were no longer acceptable. Christianity may infanticide an immortal thing. Look around you, we don’t practice infanticide, we think it’s a horribly immoral thing. Before, and this is an argument made by Tom Holland, right, before the Christians stole the culture, infanticide was an accepted practice both within Greek and Roman culture. Or the fact that we should have welfare, you know, concern for treatment of the sick, treatment of widows, treatment of the poor. This is, again, although to some degree it’s been under threat by neoconservatism, this has been a pervasive part of our culture all the way through the Middle Ages. Doesn’t mean that those societies were perfect or they didn’t abuse people. They do. But the culture had fundamentally shifted. And so I think we’re at a point in which we are facing, this is the point of Ben’s question, we are facing comprehensive, you know, threats to our existence. And our civilization is under strain, terrifically. And so we, I think, are in something in that way analogous to the end of the Bronze Age, or the, you know, the year 3, you know, 395 in the Western Empire. And if we, it’s not like I’m doing it. That’s a ridiculous thing. I’m just trying to help. There are so many, I was at a conference yesterday put together by Rafe Kelly, all these communities of practice that are emerging to deeply try to stack the four kinds of knowing, create ecologies and practices that reliably and systematically help people respond to the meaning. It’s growing, it’s growing. Is it going to win out? I don’t know. But even if, you know, maybe the project is to try and do what Christianity did. You know, the Roman, at least in the West, Christianity saves the Eastern Roman Empire, as far as I can tell. But my son Jason would know that better than I do. But, you know, it doesn’t save the Western Roman Empire. This, in fact, was one of the, you know, the pagan critiques of Christianity. It didn’t save the Western Roman Empire. But what it did is it gathered the candles of wisdom and knowledge and the new forms of sociability and the new forms of knowing and the new ecologies of practices. And it preserved them. And it sowed the seeds. And it kept a socioeconomic, sociocultural structure going so that a new civilization did not have to start from scratch the way it did after the collapse of the Bronze Age. So maybe that’s the project we’re engaged in. And then we have to be able to commit to things that will exceed our own lifespan, trying to sow seeds now that will make a long-term difference. Maybe that’s a grandiose vision. But maybe this is a time for larger visions. Because, and again, even saying that sort of bothers me because, you know, we do need larger visions, but we don’t want to give it to utopic thinking. The problem with utopia is this is a construal-level bias. When we look into the future, we tend to conceive of things at a very high abstract level of construal. And so we don’t notice all the minutiae details and all the side effects. You know that this happens. You know, it would be great if I learned Japanese and I can see all the wonderful things. And I picture that. And then I start taking Japanese. And oh, it means getting up at this time and traveling here and writing there and, you know, being embarrassed when I make a mistake. Oh, there’s all this detail. And that’s the problem with utopias. They’re very, very, they’re very bound up with construal-level fallacies like that, construal-level bias. So I hope other people, and I’m trying myself to be as reflective as I can, that we can talk about these larger visions without falling prey to that kind of utopia construal-level bias. So Ben, you asked a big question and you asked about a big picture, and that’s my answer to it. And then that’s my sort of at the end of tail end is myself corrective caveat to my answer. I hope you found that helpful. Here’s a question from Luke G, who’s a patron. I’m currently dealing with my father’s death, expecting a second child to be born within days while studying MBA, four-year MBA, and running a family business that is struggling due to COVID. At the same time, my super ego sets a huge expectation on my performance. I understand that. It feels very oppressive if these are not met. What would you advise? How to stop seeking for certainty and become adaptable? What would be relevant here? So I appreciate, first of all, your question and sort of the way things are there in your question. One thing to do would be to try to separate out these various things in your mind, because we do have a tendency for what’s called encoding specificity. All of these things are stressful, but most of them are negative, and therefore we tend to package them together as one thing. But if you could sort of pull them apart, because you need to respond to them in different ways. So there is nothing anyone can say to you about grief other than we have, if we have gone through it, and I have, I’ve lost both parents, is to say that we understand. The words are useless, but there is nothing that humanizes a human being more than going through grief. You can’t solve grief. You can’t solve it. You have to grow into another person in another world so that the size of the hole that grief makes in you shrinks by comparison. You don’t really get rid of that hole. What you do is you grow a self and a world that is more encompassing such that that hole is comparatively not as large in you. But if the idea is I will stop missing my father, that’s not going to happen. And you wouldn’t want to be ultimately the kind of person that was incapable of grief, the kind of person that would stop remembering your father. What does happen, and there is no quick way through this, any of the attempts to short circuit grief are damaging. What can happen, though, is if in community with others, grow into a different, more expansive person in a deeper world, and that hole only in comparison shrinks, then the degree to which you relive your relationship to your father diminishes. So it doesn’t have to be as biting to you. It will always, I predict, will always come with a sense of loss. But right now that sense of loss is tending to mask a fuller picture of your father. The loss is super salient to you right now. So the saliency of the loss through this comparative shrinking of the hole in your world, because that’s what a depth is. Every person is a doorway to a way of being in the way of being in the universe and a way of being inside of us. Your father is a doorway into the depths of your psyche, and it was a way, your father was a way for you to see into the depths of the world, and that is taken away. It’s like, ah! So the loss is super salient to you right now. But if you go through this long process, what could happen is the loss isn’t so super salient, and that hole, it is such a feeling of privation right now, it becomes less comprehensive in your experience of the world and of yourself. And other aspects in which your dad is woven into that come to the fore for you. And then you start to experience, again, this won’t happen, this will not happen soon, but you start to experience gratitude and also forgiveness for the ways your dad might have hurt you. And so that’s about the grief. About expecting your child, there’s, that’s where you can really trust. You have to trust your biological heritage, you have to trust the love you share with your partner, you have to trust that there’s an instinctive and relational machinery that we’re about to bear. Be willing to learn, be willing to share, be willing to make mistakes, and remember that as long as you are committed and agapic love to the child, children are resilient. And they, that doesn’t mean you can be abusive or neglective, no, but we tend to, and this is whether your super, your statistic super ego can intervene, we tend to magnify the mistakes and it’s oh no, right. So here’s where trust in your biological heritage, your relational resources, and the deep resiliency of children when they are situated within an agapic context, you can have trust in that. Working on your MBA, I hope you’re doing all the pedagogical interventions that are sort of doing all the pedagogical interventions that are strongly recommended. I’m a teacher, you know, you should get into a study group, you should be meeting with people, doing regular Q&A. I know your time is limited, but tapping into distributed cognition is one of the most powerful ways to bootstrap your cognitive flexibility, your ability to learn, your ability to reflect on material. Dealing with your family business and COVID, there I’m ignorant, I’m sorry. I don’t, I’m not an entrepreneur, I don’t have much knowledge about that. I think the question that follows up on that about shifting into trying, you know, not trying to always look for certainty, but to instead concentrate on building adaptivity, increasing your cognitive flexibility, increasing your meta-perspectival ability, increasing your connection, right, to all the four kinds of knowing, etc. Lots of things, and I’ve got lots of material out there, the lectures in the meditation contemplation classes of how to enhance your adaptivity. Stoicism offers a really wonderful place for really building up adaptivity. So those are things you can do. So try to keep the problems separate, and because there are different strategies for the different problems, and I hope that was helpful for you. It won’t always be the way it is now, and I know that’s a stupidly simplistic proposition, Luke, but if you start to do some of the things that I’m recommending, what you want to do is, can you start to get a taste of the future? It won’t be nourishing, because nothing’s going to leap in, but if you can start to get a taste of the future, that acts as a powerful reminder, not just in thought, but in the guts of your being, that it won’t always be this way, and you won’t always be this way. Don’t give in to reciprocal narrowing. I encourage you, Ben. I encourage you, Luke. I encourage you to keep going. Okay, we’re going to shift to questions, live questions from the chat. I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science that we’re doing to find solutions to the meaning crisis. As you can tell, I’m reading that because Amar has phrased it beautifully, and I wanted to get it down right. Here’s a question from Lizelle Van Wick. She is regular attendant to the Sangha, the meditation live stream. Thank you, Lizelle, for coming. You often mention the dangers of a fragmented autodidactic approach to wisdom in the meaning series. Yes, I do. I’m also quite aware of the dangers of community approach. Yes, Luke, think, etc. Being indoctrinated as a kid, and I was too as well. Please say more. This goes towards a sort of meta point, and it’s one I like to return to again and again because it’s one that our culture keeps forgetting. Here’s where Telak is very helpful to me. We are always pulled between individuation and participation. If the individuation pole is too strong, we can become autodidactic, and then we fall prey to bias and self-deception. But if the participation pole is too strong, we can fall prey to cult-like behavior and group think and diffusion of responsibility and all kinds of things. Like Lizelle, I grew up in such a situation, and I found it quite hurtful and to some degree traumatizing to me. So the answer is that we need to create, and this is Telak’s answer, it’s not my answer, we need to create persons within a community that is committed to the creation of persons, which means that what should be foremost in any community we want to belong to is a recognition of these two polar dangers. That we want people to have ongoing and richly rewarding access to distributed cognition, but we also want people to be able to hold it at bay when they need to individuate, pull apart, and offer critical reflection upon group dynamics. And we want individuals who have been brought up to respect what the community has to say, but also because the community has been committed to a process of self-correction, be encouraged to participate in the self-correct machinery of that community. This was supposed to be, and when you read Dewey, I mean, we could do what Dewey is arguing, John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher and educational thinker. I mean, this is what, you know, Dewey saw that, and these two things were supposed to always be together. There’s these two great self-correcting systems we have. Science is a self-correcting system and democracy, and the idea is, and the reason why they tend to go well together is they’re both self-correcting systems, and when people are in them, they are self-correcting systems of distributed cognition that nevertheless encourage individuals to try and make a critical difference and that encourage individuals to be different from those around them. And so in democracy, we try to balance the power of the majority off against constitutional rights of the individual, and that’s how we, and in scientific practice, we, you know, we have peer review and all these things, all these things, but the individual scientist in their individual lab can, is basically doing their own thing, and so we’re, there’s that constant, and then these two things were supposed to self-correct on each other, so science was supposed to not be commodified, right, and become largely driven by, you know, funding and sort of publication motives that are external to the quest for knowledge, and was supposed to be held in check by sort of democracy constantly reminding science of its commitment to the community at large, and then if democracy was supposed to be responsive to the way in which science gave us facts and information, and whether or not that’s the case right now, of course, is highly questionable, but it is possible that there, it is possible that given what Dewey has argued, that we can get a dynamical system of opponent processing that optimizes the relationship between individuation and participation so that we can constantly steer between, and that’s what every virtue does, it steers you between, you know, particular vices of access or deficit, we can get a virtue, a virtual engine that steers us between autodidactism and groupthink. So that’s something that’s very much on my mind and the mind of people I’m working with, I know, in trying to do this project of community building. Pete N. What role does temporality play in the reciprocal narrowing, anagogic paradigm? The addict seems to lack vision or even belief of the future. Yes, I think that’s directly right, Pete. I think that when you get down to the reciprocal narrowing and the world can’t be any other than it is, and I can’t be any other than I am, and so this is a Heideggerian argument I’m making, right, once possibility is removed from being something that is a phenomenological presence, then once possibility in me and possibility in the world and the conjoined possibility is removed as a presence, we lose time in the sense of that which is, and this is Heidegger’s idea, that which is enmeshed with the unfolding of intelligibility and being for us. And so the future goes away. And that’s why there is no sacred second self for the addict, because there is no viable future. This is a clear example of what I pointed to before about where we can be in a place where we could propositionally and with images represent things. The addict, of course, has terms and propositions that can refer to the future, and he can imagine or she can imagine future states, but that’s not an existential future. It’s not a viable future that they can make a real developmental option for them. And so in that sense, they are trapped outside of time, not in eternity either. It’s a kind of hell. And this is where Gnostic mythology often comes in, about sort of being trapped in this unreal kind of world, like the no time of the matrix within the movie of the said name. So Mark Lefebvre is here. I got to meet Mark face to face, at least virtually. Wonderful person. He does so much, so much wonderful support for the meditation livestream community, so much on the Discord server, so much excellent edification of others, community building. I mean this non-theistically, but I mean it deeply. Mark is a godsend. So can you expand on the definition of religio? I like the short form connectedness, but I wonder if you had a more comprehensive list feel for this concept. Yes, I do. What I mean by religio is the network of affordances that result from the mutual shaping between at all three levels, biological, cultural, and cognitive level between the organism and the environment, that are being constantly generated in a multi-layered and dynamically recursive fashion by our relevance realization machinery. And in so far as that is something that comes into our awareness through all the phenomenological normativity of each one of the kinds of knowing, the religio comes into our sense of connectedness at the participatory level when we have that sense of belonging, it comes into the perspectival level when we have that sense of presence, it comes into the procedural level when we have that sense of power, and it comes into the propositional level when we have that sense of a conviction of truth, and it comes in at what you might call a full ontological level when they are all mutually stacked and we get the profound understanding that grasps the relationship of significance and dynamic coupling between the kinds of knowing. So that’s what I mean. So religio, that’s why you can sort of lose religio at the participatory level with culture shock or loneliness. You can lose it at the perspectival level when you’re with somebody, that person is just not present, or you realize you’re not being present with them. You can obviously get a sense of belonging, you can obviously get it at the procedural level where your skills are just, you know, they’re just not working and it’s just, you feel clumsy and out of sync, and you can get it at the propositional level when you get the realization that, oh crap, all of that was false, well that was false. But you can also have the opposite, and more than just those individually, you can have all of them mutually interpenetrating so that you have deep connectedness that is deeply understood. And then that is when we most have a phenomenological appreciation, all senses of the word appreciation, of religio. Kevin R. Connolly, assuming AI could one day exhaust all possible paths in a combinatorially explosion problem space and find truly novel solutions, is it theoretically possible to make obscure solutions salient for us? So this, it, so I don’t know if AI could do that. What some people think might be able to do that is something like quantum computation, but I’ve now seen some arguments that look like they’re almost a priori arguments that even quantum computation can’t cover a combinatorial, many kinds of combinatorial explosive spaces. So whether or not it’s possible is really an open question. I don’t think classical machines will ever get to that possibility, and I think it’s not questionable that quantum mechanics type machines will. But what we could say in answer to your question is they certainly could maybe explore the space, get to a place where they explore the space much better. I predict this will be some hybrid kind of machine combining classical computation with neural networks and dynamical systems, maybe with a little bit of quantum stuff thrown in, because that’s what we do. We are using some quantum stuff apparently in our sense of smell and other things. Why there? Who knows? But let’s say it’s plausible that we get machines that could go much further. Could they find things that are obscure to us? I think that’s plausible because some of these more advanced machines, especially ones that are much more dynamically self-organizing, especially the ones that have sort of these hybrid features like our cognition, again that’s what we might not be a pledge. It might be that you need these hybrid type of machinery to be generally intelligent, but those machines are already trying to, are already finding things, obscure solutions, ways of winning video games that no human being has ever thought of, and also things that are uncanny, they’re creepy. So I’ve seen my friend, Anderson Todd, share this with me, a design for a kind of, it’s kind of like between a bolt and a nut you know for attaching things that’s sort of optimally designed to deal with stress, and it’s like no human being would design this thing, but perhaps it is actually the best kind of bolt we could come up with for attaching things, and it’s really alien and creepy. So this reminds me of Wittgenstein’s things, even if lions could talk we might not understand them. We might be just orthogonal to these AI when they come online, let’s hope not, let’s hope that we can talk to them better than we can talk to lions. That’s a weird thing to have said. Anyways, is it plausible that, I think it’s already happening, so I find it very plausible that it’s going to increase, increase happening. So I hope that answers your question. So we’re at our end, we’re at the end. It always seems like it’s, it goes by so fast. I typically get into something like a flow state doing this, and so I thank you all for that. I want to thank you for joining me in this Q&A. We do this every third Friday of the month. Thank you for the support. Thank you very much. Thank you.