Meaning Crisis and the Tree of Knowledge- Voices with Vervaeke (Z-PvG5M7OLE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z-PvG5M7OLE

concerns about it. Everybody has the right to let me know. So, okay. Fair enough. Okay. All right. So it’s six o’clock and I’m going to go ahead and get us rolling then. This is our last theory of knowledge meeting of the season, because we’re going to take a little break for a little while and get resettled. And I couldn’t be more excited. This is a perfect finale for me. So, for john to come and share his wisdom with us today so let me tell you a little bit about my frame on john. And what he means to me. I really see john as a modern day hero of the academy. And I use that in a reference of course to john as a neo platonic visionary and scholar. Let me tell you a little bit about why I say that and I don’t say that lightly I can’t say that I’ve seen that frame be applied to too many people. I think the academy, as really the current state is certainly in the midst of a major crisis. I felt that for a long time in relationship to what the academy was trying to do. It seemed to me to be sort of a landscape of chaotic fragmented pluralism that didn’t appreciate its proper role in relation to the times. It didn’t appreciate its proper mission and vision. It didn’t have an idea for creating a space in which we could both honor knowledge and cultivate wisdom. And then I look out at john’s life. I look out at his journey for making meaning out of this life, how he transformed his own early struggles which he’s talked about in terms of the community he was socialized into wrestled with that with honor and integrity, explored the possible And then the meaning making systems entered into a number of different communities became super well versed in Eastern thinking bridged Western philosophy bridged Western science, and then emerged onto the scene, I think, in a way that certainly I encountered John through what he’s now most famous for, which is the awakening from the meaning crisis, which I, I really do believe is arguably the most impactful course that I have taken. I’ve seen John through the emerge podcast world. I listened to him heard about the meaning crisis and took it. And as I confess to him as soon as I started to absorb it. I doubled my walks, so that I could accelerate through it. And so, in that series and what he embodies in his life is exactly the antidote to the crisis of the academy. And then the meaning crisis fundamentally represents a tackling of knowledge and at its heart, at the core of what it represents in terms of the chaotic fragmented pluralism along the deepest questions of matter in mind. And then does so in relationship to speak to the deepest concerns we face, and then to channel those into what is the kind of practices and ecologies and ways of being that is so desperately needed in this time between worlds. And not only that, as he connects to other people. He is transforming and generating an emerging practice of the logos, which is in the best socratic tradition, and I have been honored and thrilled to connect with john and contribute my part to that journey. John, just thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, the fact that it came from you means a lot to me. I’ve. I said this at the end of well which we will release next Friday, our final episode together of untangling the world not, I mean I’ve just been astonished by Greg, and his work, and the, and he saw things about the connection between his work and my work that have been able to ground and afford an ongoing, very productive and creative cooperative dialogue between us that I thoroughly and deeply enjoy. I like, I like hanging out with Greg in his mind. It sounds like there’s two people. And I, and I, and as we, as we made our way, as we made our way through, I mean we had some conversations that I started to get a sense of what was going on, I started to get like he’s, he’s, he’s bloody Aristotle, and I’m getting this sense. And then I like I said I wanted to, I wanted to do the work on the unconsciousness in a dialogical fashion and Greg turned out to be the perfect partner for that. And I’ve just been, and my appreciation for his participation and contribution and friendship throughout that just grew and grew. So much so that I want Greg and I and another person you might have heard of Christopher Mastapietro to work together to do something similar on the nature and function of the self, so, you know, people are much more revealing by their deeds than by their words and so the fact that I want to continually include Greg in the development and promotion of my own work, which I is dear to me, indicates how, how dear he has become to me. And so, I’m very very grateful to, to be here. And so and to, to, to participate in Greg’s community so when he asked me to do this I said sure, of course. Thank you so much. I am, you know, it’s been a great journey on consciousness, and I’m looking forward to the self. Yeah, it’d be a lot of fun. It should be a lot of fun. I really I mean, like, especially some of the insights that we like that co emerged right. That was really, really wonderful, really wonderful. So speaking of the self john. I think the folks here would love to hear a little bit of your, of your narrative about, you know, the. How did you. You can start anywhere but I think the, you know, sort of your journey to the awakening, and then your journey sense the awakening in terms of the remarkable impact those are two sort of phases that perhaps. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s feeling like the you know the before the common era and common era division for me I hope that’s not sacrilegious. Because it’s the birth of the new axial age is going to be dated. I’m just talking about my own personal experience I don’t I don’t. There’s this weird thing I’m socially phobic by nature. And so when I started doing. Yes, I became a teacher, of course. And so, when I started doing the series I was experiencing sort of a profound exposure. And then I got sort of used to that it was it was waking me up in the middle of the night for quite a while. And then as things sort of settled in. And I accommodated as human beings or want to do a second thing started happening which is this entity john verveke started emerging that felt like something somewhat separate from me as I live my life. It comes out and really, because when I meet people now, they often act as if they know me really well, which is a very strange experience for me. So it’s it’s it has sort of a. So yeah, in terms of my sort of sense of myself and my presence in the world, the awakening from the meaning crisis is definitely a bifurcation point. So, I mean, my narrative is, I was brought up. Not everybody of course is brought up in religious context but if you are your religious like it’s an ally, you have a mother religion like you have a mother tongue. It’s, it’s, it’s, even if you like even if you never speak your mother tongue again it’s informed all your other language learning, but I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian family, both the nuclear family and the broadly extended family. And, of course, I didn’t understand it at the time, except at levels of sort of anxiety and distress that that was traumatizing for me in some very powerful ways. And then, in, of course, as you might I mean this sounds like a standard biography in my adolescence. While at high school I started reading some literature. And two or three major books they just sort of blew me open. And it’s just like these, like, I’ll, it was just that kind of profound. What the it’s like you’ve been living here and you suddenly realize the world is like that. Do you remember any specific. Any of the particular books come to mind that. Yeah, I know them. I heard. Right. I don’t mean I know the text by heart but no one’s that. So there was a science fiction book by Rogers allows me, who’s part of what was called the new wave and science fiction is interesting of course because it’s the it’s the fiction where we play with mythology and science and the relationship between them, which has a lot to do with And then I read it and I didn’t see the rest of my work. And so, and what that did for me is it exposed me to, you know, Vedanta and Buddhism and Hindu mythology. And then around the same time I read said hard up by Herman Hesse, which had a similar effect on me. And then I read, I was reading at the same time. Robertson Davies got to have a little plug for Canada in here. And then I read this book called fifth business which introduced me to young, and the idea of the unconscious from a psychodynamic perspective. And of course the importance of mythology and alternative ways of interpreting Christian doctrine. Right, and this sort of just blew me apart. And. So I’ll just open up the chatting, because some people are making comments. And so I. I’m actually my own, you know, personal, I mean I’m also an adolescent at the time so I fell into my own personal meeting crisis I became very nihilistic started publicly declaring that there is no purpose to human life and arguing for that. And I got a somewhat infamous reputation at high school. And people are simultaneously attracted to that the sort of starkness of the dark vision I suppose, but also somewhat horrified by it if they hung around it too long. So, but what started happening is because of that because I started arguing and discussing with people I started reading more and more deeply and more and more comprehensively. And when I got to university. I took a course on philosophy. I was the figure of Socrates in an introductory course. And that provided for me a re articulation and restructuring of what was happening for me. I reconfigured it around that I was searching for wisdom, and that wisdom had to do with leading an authentic and meaningful and virtuous life. And that’s what the point is and then at the time, can I just go ahead you’re right there, just show. So when I talk about the sort of the potential and the crisis of the academy. That’s what I mean in relationship to what I think we’ve lost, you know, as sort of an organizing frame of the role of the academy so that’s just, you know, no, really, say that. The, the Academy, sort of tantalizes me with this. And then what quickly happens, and many, many people that are in philosophy will tell you this, the topic of wisdom falls off the table. It’s never discussed again. You spend infinite time working on, you know, trying to refute skepticism and working out like and I found all of this independently valuable, because it’s very powerful set of tools for, you know, you know, reflecting on science reflecting on culture, reflecting on ethics reflecting on arts, and that’s very, very powerful. But the original hunger that was partially satiated by the introduction to, to, to Socrates, then goes went completely on right again. So, I, like I said I went on academically in philosophy because I found an independent, independent value in the tools, but I turned out, I like, I went outside the Academy for the cultivation of wisdom. So, what I was living there. I was living near a place that was called the meditation and Tai Chi center, where they were teaching. And I’d already been because of said hard to and Lord of light and even young, I’ve been already starting to do some meditating on my own and I was getting a taste for it. And so I went there and I, and they taught an ecology of practices. That’s where I got that idea from. They taught the past the meditation meta contemplation and Tai Chi one for flow, flow induction. And that we can get an optimal grip on the world. Yeah, very much. And so that’s where I got the radical introduction through an ecology of practices to these other kinds of knowing. I didn’t articulate it that way at the time, but what was what was happening is I was being dumped into, you know, being immersed in people who have a tradition of exploring and cultivating in depth, procedural knowing prospectable knowing and participatory And so that just grew in me. Now for a while these two things were just trundling along. I was leaving like these two lives, the wisdom cultivation life and the you know the academic knowledge accumulation life. But then what happened and I got I came to a point of frustration in the academic life I got my MA in philosophy and then I left the Academy. Yeah, I wonder about that. I got so frustrated that it was like this isn’t just not Right. It’s not doing. So I left for about a year and I did these practices of the really really deeply got really started going more than a year. And then I started hearing about this new interdisciplinary thing. That was actually trying to provide a much more comprehensive and integrative analysis of the mind, especially emphasizing its capacity for making meaning. That’s how cognition. That’s how cognitive psychology distinguished itself from behaviorism. For example, we talk about the mind works in terms of meaning. So I went back and I got into this and and I really loved it. I really love this synoptic integration. And then as I got into it. I went back and I did a specialist BSC in cognitive science. I got a scientific training. And because I’d already done all the philosophy when I did my philosophy degrees. I didn’t have to take any philosophy. So I was able to double up on all the psychology. So actually I ended up taking more psychology than you would for a psychology specialist. Right. So people started offering me while I was in graduate school. Jobs teaching psychology courses. So I started teaching the University of Toronto. Yeah, yeah. They’re teaching the psychology courses and what started to happen is the cognitive psychology and the cognitive science are starting to talk about wisdom before the philosophers, by the way. The philosophers are now talking about it again, and especially because of Pierre Hadot and other important influences, Nehemiah and others. Right. But, but where I first saw academics treating it like as the central topic and exploring it was in psychology. Around 1990 a book was published called The Nature of Wisdom. It was the pivotal anthology that launched the field. So what started happening is I started to be able to teach about mindfulness. I think it was the first person at U of T to teach about it. From a scientific perspective. And I was also starting to teach extracurricular courses on mindfulness. So I started teaching about mindfulness insight. I started talking more about transformative experience, more and more about wisdom. I started to be able to teach a course on the psychology of wisdom. And so what happened was these two strands sort of chaerotically just came together and suddenly they were interwoven deeply and really speaking to each other. And what happened is the interest in my work and my teaching among my students suddenly like people, I like, I could sense that it was making this huge impact. Right. And then my friend and colleague, Evan Thompson was supposed to teach a course a long time ago. Called Buddhism and cognitive science because he wrote The Embodied Mind. He’s a founder. He’s a major figure. Yeah. For E cognitive science and the bridging between Buddhism and cognitive science, although he does not consider himself a Buddhist. And so he couldn’t teach the course and he said, John would be a good person to teach that course. So I taught that course. And what I started to see was two things that the confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science was very deeply analogous. What had happened to me in my life. A wisdom tradition and this inter and cognitive science had come together. And of course that resonated with me. And then what I realized is why the students were taking this course is because they were trying to do they had some inchoate intuitive sense that they needed to do that. And then I started teaching about that. Hold on. So you’re saying like if we could put knowledge and wisdom together somehow, John, that would be like a good idea. Oh, yeah. And so the course took off. And what happened is as I started to broaden the course and you know when you’re teaching a course you start doing all this much more research and I started gathering the argument that this wasn’t just something amongst the student population that this was reflective of the culture as a whole. That there was this well meeting crisis. And so the course started to evolve into an argument about that the meeting crisis. The thesis of the course was that the confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science was occurring precisely because people were searching for a way of responding to the meeting crisis. So I started to really build that and then I started to integrate that with my scientific work on relevance realization and my psychological work on the nature of wisdom. And then I had a student come to me. He was just finishing up so there was no bribery involved or anything. He was done. And he said, you know, this was a life changing course for me. And he said, and he’s taking some of the, he’s taking those other courses with me as well. And he said, you know, my dad’s a professional editor. I’m a professional videographer, right, everything. Let’s put, let’s, I’m a, let’s put it, let’s put this, I got a bunch of friends will work for free for you. Nobody ever says that to you, because we really believe in this and we want to get it out. And so Alan came to me. And he put a crew together and had his dad working. They were all happy. And I kept saying, you sure you don’t want any kind of remuneration? No. And that’s how the awakening from the meeting crisis came to be. Beautiful. Beautiful. What is, can I haven’t really asked you this, I’d like to, I mean, I’ve heard you mention this, but what is your sense of this sort of time between worlds and, and, I mean, how, how much of a crisis are we facing john in your estimation, and how has your view evolved say and where are you now in relation. So, that’s a good question, Greg, because it’s evolving since I released the series. And the book, we shortly thereafter, Krister from Master Pietro and Philip Misovic and I took one part of the argument that many of my students found sort of the most fun part, which is the whole argument about the zombie mythology as a cultural expression of the meeting crisis. That’s the book. So, I’m by nature kind of a dower person. My friends say, some of my best friends that say that I sort of wear a cloak of melancholy. I think that’s kind of interesting because I, I tend to see the world’s somewhat through a dark glasses. So, I, I was responsive to what Alan had said to me, and I thought it was, and I mean this seriously. I thought it was, it was morally important for me to at least put out the argument and put out the information. But I wasn’t sure of the reception or potential impact or making a difference. I thought it was a good argument, right. I had the confidence at that. But, you know, there’s lots of good arguments on YouTube and that they don’t necessarily go anywhere and make any significant impact. But of course my colleague, and somebody who I’m sort of on basically friendly terms Jordan, Jordan Peterson had sort of opened things up in a certain way. Have people heard of him? Yeah. So, I was pessimistic. My view was that. My view is that we are genuinely facing a meta crisis, ecological, socioeconomic, energy, and they’re all interacting, a political crisis of gridlocking. We’re seeing the undermining of many of democracies. And I think, and these are all interconnected. Thomas Bjorkman calls it the meta crisis. The idea is the crises are real. They’re not independent. They interact with each other in very complex ways that makes solving any one of them very difficult. And then I argue, I’ll just state it now, but I have arguments for this, that the meaning crisis so denudes us of the resources for transformation and transcendence and cognitive flexibility and insight that, and for bringing about a radical change in what we’re deeming real and relevant. That the meeting crisis really almost sort of cognitively lobotomizes us. So we’re very incapable of addressing the meeting. I was just contacted by somebody from the EU, Brussels, we had an interview, he wants to talk to me about how we have to, right we how we have to address the climate change problem, but he doesn’t want to talk to me about anything about weather or climate, or he wants to talk to me about how do we get people to transform? How do we afford aspiration? How do we enhance cognitive flexibility? Because there’s the dawning realization that just dumping the propositions on people is not working. It’s almost as if the world needs therapy, John. You’d think so. And so, um, I was generally like I said, then what happened, and you are an example of this is the series put me in touch with a lot of people, both people at the theoretical level. Well, Greg, you fall in two camps, right, people who are at the theoretical level and then people who are at the practice level. I don’t like to say practical, because that’s that word has taken on another connotation that’s not appropriate, but people who are actually practicing. And I, you know, and so I started meeting people like you, Jordan Hall, right, and you know, the people at Rebel Wisdom, but I also started to meet all of these emerging communities of practice, like Rafe Kelly and Savilla King and like where people are basically cultivating the technologies of practices in order to try and awaken themselves and each other from the meeting crisis got into dialogue. And I mean this both as a pun and as a real thing. Good faith dialogue with people of some of the existing religions who are trying to see the ways in which their religions might be reformulated and revivified. I think that Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Peugeot are much more radical than they will admit they are. But that’s we’re friends so I’m allowed to say that. Actually, I’d like to double click here for a second. Yeah. Okay, because I think this issue. So we’re, I hope folks are feeling a drumbeat here. Right. So there is a fragmented chaotic pluralism that can be transcended some there’s potential for co hearing certain knowledge systems I think they’re key fault lines, and then it’s using those fault lines bridging transforming them into something genuine wisdom at one level, and I know john you talk a lot about your belief that in response to awakening from the meeting crisis is the cultivation at some level of a religion that’s not a religion. Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. So that’s why. And that’s why the good faith dialogue with people that are home to within existing religious traditions are are genuinely important to me and I am very respectful of the religious traditions because I think most of the the NGO, most of the meaning making connections that are conducive to meaning in life. And most of the practices by which we overcome self deception and afford self transcendence. And I think the many of the religious traditions of practices that have addressed that have very for very long time, been home to within religious worldviews and religious communities, and I think it would be a great mistake to not pay attention that’s why many secular symptoms of the meeting crisis have a religious tone or or religious quality to them. Or, or the people going on like for this bizarre behavior of people going on zombie walks. We talked about in the book, which is a really bizarre thing for human beings to do. Right, if you, if you would just say to them I want you all to dress up as you know as people from the Christian narrative in the thousands and walk down the streets they’d all say, haha. You know what they’ll do they’ll dress up like zombies and stay in character for hours and walk around together and say, what the hell is going on. Jesus, right, right. Or, or, or Comic Con, or, or going into a video world and like becoming a wizard. I mean, all of that, all of that. We talk about a lot of these examples in the book we talk a lot about it in an article we just published in the journal, the side view, all the symptoms of the meeting crisis. And so I think that what we need is we need to exact as much as we can. We need to put the practices with some good education from the existing religions, but we need to put that those ecologies into deep dialogue with the emerging and cutting edge cognitive science and see if we can re situate the ecologies back into a scientific worldview, which I think the connection to Greg’s work is so important, because in many ways, that’s Greg’s problem. I don’t mean to trivialize it Greg I hope that that wasn’t too simplified. I thought he said, John, exactly. That’s my, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure why I was really called the first call with the tree of knowledge, but this is this is, this is the essence of the issue is that this is a knowledge wisdom science religion conundrum that we face in the 21st century and it is the tackling of that world not as it were. Very much, very much. And so, I think that, I think that there’s good evidence that if you belong to an established wisdom tradition and all the traditional ones are within a religious framework, you are actually much more likely to be successful in becoming wiser, then if you try to do it within a secular, secular situation but for reasons that go back to my own personal biography, and also because of the fact that the nuns the NONES people who declare that they have no religious affiliation are the fastest growing demographic group, trying to recommend to people that they should simply return to non viable religious traditions that are not currently well coordinated with the scientific worldview. I don’t think that’s going to be a viable proposal for many people. And if you take a look at the nuns, you’ll see that they’re not sort of all new atheists. In fact, the majority of them self describe as spiritual not religious, and they often have a lot of them very wonky metaphysical views. So the idea that these people are largely ill religious is not correct. They what they basically have is the religion of me or the religion of we have a little tiny group. And so, trying to, and that group is growing, and it’s growing at the same time as the, the sort of the nihilistic effects of the meeting crisis are becoming more pervasive. So trying to simultaneously address right those people respond to nihilism which I think requires something like the kind of comprehensive transformations that you used to find in religion, at least, that’s how I’ve experienced it myself and what I have a lot of argument and evidence for. And I think we, what we have to do is we have to create a religion that’s not a religion, it’s got to give us all of what the religions used to give us without committing us to the axial age to world mythology, without binding us into ways of thinking about all of this just in terms of ideology, just in terms of belief systems, etc. And so, people are kind of trapped, sort of between two traumas, many people have been traumatized to varying degrees by the established religions which is why they’ve left, but many of them are aware of the way in which pseudo religious ideologies like Nazism and communism drench the world in blood. And so they’re sort of trapped, not knowing which way to go. And, and so now, as you sort of, I believe that you think about this new phase that you’re in in terms of D logos, cultivating the kinds of at least the transformational practice and seeding the potential of connection and awareness that would enable the kind of transformation that you would hope to see. Well, that’s, thank you, Greg that that that helps me not have to shamelessly promote some of my recent work so thank you. But to be more serious, the proposal for this actually emerged in a way that exemplified it. So I was talking to, well, somebody we mutual friend, Jordan Hall, and he, he was talking and he’s very interested in the ecology of practices. And he said, but he said, but you need a meta practice. You need a meta practice that helps people gather curate coordinate that transform the ecology of practices so they can. So that like an ecology, they can more appropriately evolve to what he sees as the acceleration of the meta crisis, and I went. That’s right. And the same time with dialogues I was having with Jonathan pageau he said, Oh, john does all this work but it’s all about all these practices and processes, but it’s all very individual, and he’s missing you know he’s missing the community aspect and I went, Jonathan’s right, Jonathan’s right. And so I went in, and I looked at the person who I had continued to study on my own, all throughout my entire biography, which is the figure of Socrates, and the whole Socratic tradition that starts with Socrates and moves through Plato and Aristotle into into stoicism and into the neoplatonic tradition. And this practice of dialectic and how it was continuously re like it was continue in continuous development for basically, you know, a millennia or more. And it’s, it’s a process. And, and, and, and Greg knows a lot about this it’s a process that integrates sort of an internal in an internal alignment of aspects of the psyche, with an external alignment of how we can discourse with each other, so that we can make those two movements, a coordinated a coordinated movement by which we can afford getting into the machinery. So most of our. Let me just, I was going to say something realized I had introduced the topic, most of our cognition is done in distributed cognition, long before the internet networked computers together to disclose the power of network computation networked people together to release the power of distributed cognition, we’re relying on it right now. I didn’t invent this language that I’m using none of you did either. I’m not running. I didn’t invent any of this equipment, I’m not running the electric grid. I’m not maintaining the zoom platform and on and on and on, other than your naked body I would, I would predict that everything that is around you or you’re using is the result of distributed cognition. But of course we’ve created this bullshit about being rugged individualists in our cognition, which of course I think traumatizes lots of people and Greg has to help them in therapy with that. And so, what dialectic into the logos is, is a practice where you’re basically coordinating meditative and contemplative practices individually with getting into something like a collective flow state with other people, so that you can tap into the power of collective intelligence, and then recursively exact it, transform it into collective wisdom. And the idea is that collective wisdom and there’s evidence and argument for this is the best thing we have for a meta practice that will help us to gather together. It will train us it will enculturate us in the kind of processing, and the kinds of character, and the kinds of sensitivity that the awareness of normativity that we need in order to create good and vibrant ecologies of practices and communities that sustain them. And this of course is exactly what dialectic was in the ancient world. So what I’ve been doing is trying to do the historical analysis, and then do tons of participant observation, get involved with circling insight dialogue empathy, empathy circling the anti debate and talking to people like Greg, who you know, how is this overlap with the kind of things that go on in therapy, and between and then, and also all these emerging communities of practice around all of these, they’re growing like weeds, all of these communities where people are rediscovering the flow state within distributed cognition and how powerful and what’s interesting is when you go into these, these, these practices, and you’re involved for example in guys send stock circling practice and people start doing it I’ve experienced I’m doing participant observation, they, these are secular people, the language they start to use for describing what emerges, and what they’re experiencing what they’re participating in. It’s inevitably religious language they use all this religious language and spiritual language. And it’s, and so, my hope is that by talking to all of these emerging practices deeply dialoguing with them, and doing the historical resurrection or at least right refurbishing of the ancient practice of dialectic that working with many people Christopher I think from our show as my main partner but also people like Greg and guy and Jordan. We can craft a version of dialectic for us that can serve as a place where we can create the kind of community and distributed cognition that will properly home and cultivate the ecologies of practices that people need in order to respond to the meeting meeting of the practices. So I do think that dialectic will play a central role in the religion that’s not a religion. Sorry, I think I’m talking an awful lot that’s be a note I was just soaking that in those beautiful. So I’m going to offer a few other things and we’ll open it up to questions. Okay. So, so one of the things that I want to just, you know, I’m continually struck by the degree of convergence across so many different domains. So those of you that know, so, inner and outer dialogues. Yeah. Greg I can’t hear you. My microphone. Can you hear me. I can hear you now. Okay. So, we had one of the fundamental basic maps that I use around human consciousness is a phenomenological heart system, our perspectival participatory knowing guided by valence qualia and then functions, right. And then a private narrator, okay, which we’ll get more into when we do the self and then a public self and and the flow within that when that is shared to create a sense of relational value and coherence. And what you find is you find people nourished psychologically nourished, moving towards transcendent and realization. Okay. And then what you so often find is broken static between the body between the phenomenology between a narrator and a public self constant filtering constant conflict constant challenge and struggle, a broken dichotomize space, interpersonally, inter psychically, that’s the people that come to see me. And with brutal internalizing neurotic conditions and conflicts and isolation and despair. Okay, so, so to me, it’s striking to me to have that that’s a very basic model on on both accounts right it’s just basic, what is our human natures what are the kind of interpersonal inter psychic context that we are oriented to come together around. And what is conducive to building the kind of social ecologies that are oriented toward flourishing, I think we know a huge amount about that. It’s sad to me that we don’t know how to consolidate that how to distribute that and cultivate the colleges of practice that actually watch that flourish. And, you know, I think that that’s what I see you doing and what you described there in relation. So, I’m going to pull up one, I’m going to share my screen real fast, because I just have to share this diagram to show the interface and I just want to walk some folks through it. We talked about this at the second to last the pen ultimate episode, but I’m going to share my screen and then I’ll hush up and I’ll invite folks to. So, so folks can see my screen here. So, I can see your screen. Okay. So, so here is, this is my representation of john’s fundamental brilliant theory around cognition. And I share this just to just to build off what what I was just tracking off there was to show the synchronicity between our ideas is quite striking. And so what I’d like to do is I just like to show you. For me when I heard about john’s recursive relevance realization, and by the way, somebody asked and this is I think a good question that I’m not sure that we are highlighted enough in the video, in the video, SIM, stands for scale invariant multi level modeling. And what it refers to is the constant iterative processes across hierarchy to stay in contact. It stays in context both within a system and between systems to maintain harmony through a recursive relevant realization process. And what this does is it captures both the nature and generative function of the cognition in what I would call the neuro cognitive functionalist model of mine. And it just does so unbelievably brilliantly in my estimation. But what john and I then are syncing up around is okay here’s a broad model of sort of thinking about science the natural scientific account of humanity writ large and organized in relationship to a model of both reality and science or scientific modeling of it. We talked about a shared sense of description, which as john and I were know, what do we mean when we talk about consciousness mind self unbelievable complexity there yet we have models of the four P’s of knowing and my map of mine that correspond really dramatically closely. And that allows for a metaphysical sinking up in a way that I found to be extremely exciting by metaphysical sinking up I don’t mean anything magical mystery or supernatural I simply mean our concepts and categories align with a level of precision that is in my estimation, very important. A number of people have metaphysical models but I think you also need metatheoretical models. Those are a transparent dramatic view. And john I you know you identify and I think totally rightly so is adopting an integrative model of cognitive science and yes, capitalize it right where you basically say these are different territories, but there is a mountain range view of these territories that has potential to cohere. And then you offer a foundational thread that ties the various mountain ranges together and allows for a coherent picture to pop, and that’s, that’s what I experienced your theory is doing. And then for this complex interconnected relation of constructs of both cognition of intelligence and of phenomenological consciousness, and our journey allowed us to connect that to what I did is sort of create a neuro behavioral evolutionary base, okay that And then sets the stage for the evolution of a neuro cognitive SIM three our model. And then we saw that link up very nicely. We then also saw the linkage between okay when we put this model in relation to a inter subjective other. And then finally, there’s this connection between the system of propositional knowing, which then gives us our distributed cultural network of persons that know. And so ultimately what you see then is while I developed these four different models, I didn’t really have a precise model of neuro cognitive functionalism that would enable me to go from cognition and intelligence into consciousness and boom, I find john, not only does he have that, but the way it networks and coheres the system together has been, you know, it’s been truly transformational for me. Yeah, I just wanted people to see that lock and key inner relation and just one of the reasons that I’ve been really psyched about are sinking up as it were. So, so for me, first of all, your slides are great, by the way, great for me. The fact that you what I look for when I’m doing my work, I look for independent lines of convergence, because they tend to increase the plausibility, the theoretical plausibility of your constructs. And so the fact that there is this convergence and then like I said, one of the things this series has afforded me is meeting a lot more of this convergence. Obviously there’s a selection bias there. But nevertheless, when the people that are being selected have worked out things to the degree that you know Greg has, then it becomes a well it becomes I think a very good plausibility argument for the theoretical work. So that’s been a godsend to me. So thank you for that. Well I’ve gotten, you know, you know me I got million more questions and possible domains that we can explore but I want to make sure that other folks have an opportunity to share their reflections observations and questions. So why don’t we just transition into the q amp a actually I’ll pause right there as people think about that. John is there, I see some questions already coming up. Is there anything that you want to make sure that you have an opportunity to share that I, we didn’t necessarily touch on in that summary or anything that’s alive for you or on your mind that you wanted to. I don’t think so. I think that was a very good overview. I’m happy right now. Great. See, hand. Nick, you have a question. Hey john, big fan. Great to meet you and since he speak like, oh, nice to meet you. It’s really cool. I mean it’s really special, honestly. So, earlier you were talking about like the meeting crisis kind of depleting our capability to, to hit this transcend this point of transcendence. So, essentially I’m going to be asking you here if you believe in free will, because I’m, I’m very, I come from almost entirely non dual perspective. Yeah, I don’t personally believe in free will. I don’t think we have to do anything to do this. I think this transcendence is going to happen this fifth joint point next stage and evolution is going to happen. I don’t think we have to individually or in a group choose to do anything to make it happen. But that’s kind of what I’m asking you. Do you think we actually need to choose to do these things or do you think that it’s, you know, it’s evolution is going to drive itself forward. Oh, that’s a very complex question. And let me try and answer it in stages if you’ll allow me. So I would first of all separate the existence of choice from the existence of free will. I don’t think that the first is evidence of the latter. So in that sense, I’m deeply influenced by for example, you know, Spinoza. So I think what we’ve always met by choice was the degree in which our, our, our freedom of choice, which is, which is, which is the first step in the path to freedom of choice. So in that sense, I’m deeply influenced by, for example, you know, Spinoza. So I think what we’ve always met by choice was the degree in which our, so I’ll use language that I think is appropriate to Spinoza, but what is technically anachronistic because he wouldn’t have had it available. I think when I choose what I mean when I say that is the most causally relevant factor for explaining my behavior is the self organizing processes within my consciousness and cognition right now. And whenever we give an explanation of why something is happening, we always give the causally relevant thing. Well, why did the Titanic sink? It depends what you want to answer. It sank because it hit an iceberg. It sank because Britain was compete competing with America. It sank because the British steel had flaws in it at that temperature and the British steel had flaws in it, but blah, blah, blah. With the actual explanation for any event is the entire previous history of the universe. And this is a, you know, this is a standard problem in the philosophy of science. So there’s nothing illegitimate about zeroing in on causal relevance. It’s what we do everywhere all the time whenever we giving an explanation. So if the causally so I can invoke it legitimately is what I’m saying. So if the most causally relevant factor for explaining what I need to explain about my behavior is the dynamical self organization going on within my consciousness and cognition. That is when we make a choice. But I don’t think that in any way indicates that we have some soul like boss in the center of us that can create actions ex nihilo like a God in some inside us sort of internal universe. I think that’s a misleading idea. And secondly, I think it’s ultimately an idea that does not drive more morality, but actually undermines it. So I’m rejecting both it for metaphysical reasons and for moral reasons. The last thing I want is for my actions to be arbitrarily disconnected. You know what I actually am questing for in my life. I want my thoughts to be as completely determined by what is true as possible. I want my sensibility to be as completely determined by what is beautiful as possible. I want my actions to be as completely determined by what is good as possible. That’s what I’m after. I don’t want freedom of will. I want the most complex responsibility and responsibility possible. So both for metaphysical and moral reasons. I reject right the idea of choice being evidence for or being identified with freedom of the will. So I think I would say that and then when it comes to the idea of do we have to make it happen or wait for it to happen. I’m concerned about that because that sounds to me like the dichotomy that we were given between sort of rationalism, sort of romanticism where it’s the I express my will or empiricism where I’m the blank tablet that gets written upon. And what I’ve been trying to argue on the basis of really good for E cognitive science is both of those are false. Right. What’s actually happening is a self organizing loop that I participate in. And if you take a look at the non tool traditions, you can see this in the sheet. You can see it in this a tiny. You can especially see it in to Nabi when he talks about self power and other power and how they act on the basis of the non tool traditions. You can actually see it in to Nabi when he talks about self power and other power and how they actually are transcended in non duality to afford the transformation that’s actually needed. And so, sorry, I’m shouting. I didn’t mean to. I’m just getting passionate about this. Part of it is also triggered that sense of exposure. When you talk to me like you said you knew me a member I mentioned that. I’m overcompensating I can feel it. So I’ll try and dial it down. But that’s how I would answer your question. So I think you can move out of both. You can liberate it. You’ll allow me the idea of agency. I prefer to talk about agency rather than choice from free will. And then you can integrate that into the cultivation of virtue and you can integrate that into a sense of participant. Rather than action or passion. And that makes sense when we talk about the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of wisdom. That’s why we even use words like cultivation. You don’t make a plant and you just don’t wait for it to happen. You cultivate it. You do things to improve the conditions by which it can self organize. That’s great. Actually, that’s a wonderful transition for Greg Thomas to ask a question. Greg, we got introduced and he’s been on rebel wisdom and done some cool stuff on jazz. I think you. Yeah, I think he reached out to me in an email and I have not responded to him and I apologize for that. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Greg. I’m super busy. I’m right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, we’re going to jump right into the question, and it is this. Is there a distinction between intersubjectivity and transsectivity, which is your coinage, or are they basically synonyms? your coinage or are they basically synonyms? I think one is a species of the other genus. I think transjectivity between people is intersubjectivity. But I think there’s a larger genus in which you can have, I think even non-person cognitive agents have a transjective relation. This is what we mean in 4E cognitive science, that even a dog has embodied, embedded, enacted, extended cognition. So I think I would say that intersubjectivity is a particularly powerful and important way in which we can access and become more aware of transjectivity within a cooperative situation that then prepares us for, if you’ll allow me, the more impersonal aspects of transjectivity. That’s what often happens in the dialectic process. If you want to get people to have affection, to fall in love with being, talking to them like that won’t do it. And I think, by the way, that’s the short answer of how you overcome the meaning crisis. You’ve got to get people so they can fall in love with being again. But the way you do that is you first get people to have that sense of intimacy, coupled connection, affection, reciprocal opening with other people. And then when they start to become aware of the power and the potential within that, they start to become affectionate to the process that is making that possible. And then that opens them up to a more expansive understanding and accessing of transjectivity. Beautiful. And I just want to make a quick statement that when I hear you talk about dialogos, it reminds me of what I call the higher frequencies of democratic discourse. Oh, I like that. Well, that’s good. Really, because when you look at the very process of democracy as democratic conversation, as what Danielle Allen, political philosopher at Harvard, in her book on the Declaration of Independence, our declaration, she talks about there was a process to write the declaration that was a group writing process. Yes. Yes. Thomas Jefferson is officially, that was a group writing process. And that was a process of dialogos, both directly in dialogue verbally, but also in writing. And there’s something about that that has to do with the very democratic process that I think is important for us to explore. I think that’s right. I think that’s deeply right. And I like the metaphor. It actually jives with a paper that Chris and I are trying to get published right now about how we talk about behind whatever we speak, there’s the much more that we convey. And when we try to speak what we convey, we just open up the deeper levels of conveyance. And then we talk about how you have sort of everyday discussion about when the conveyance starts to break down because there’s, we move to debate. But then as you’re indicating, we move to the hot, if debate, if the shared normativity that’s required for debate breaks down, we move to this higher level of dialogos in which we’re basically trying to re-engineer cultural communing so that we can get back to a shared conformity so that we can then drop down to resolvable debate and then drop back down from there into living our lives in social cooperation. And I think even like think about the way, so I’m deeply influenced, of course, by Dewey on one hand and Habermas on the other, right? And you can see the universal pragmatics in what I just said. But putting the two together, the idea of that what democracy is supposed to be is something very analogous to living things. It’s supposed to be a fundamentally self-correcting process that uses opponent processing. And we’ve lost that. It’s broken down into adversarial zero sum. But if we could get back to people committing, right, to the shared project of self-correction, right, the higher frequencies that you talk about, I think that would do, that could, I think all the attempts, sorry, this is going to be really bold, everyone. I think all of the attempts to restore democracy at the political level are pretty much doomed to fail because we have so eroded the communicative machinery and the shared normativity that’s needed that I don’t think the answer is going to come there. I think what we have to do is get back into what Aristotle thought, that politics is ultimately about living the good life and about meaning making and about creating culture. And so we have to get into the machinery, the non-propositional machinery, where most of that heavy lifting is done. And I don’t think political ideology is going to do it at all. And so, look, you have two choices when you’re facing burgeoning complexity. You can either look for the single answer that’s the final story for all time, right, or you can get into a process that can adaptively evolve because it’s dynamically self-corrected. And the choice of democracy is that way and the choice of authoritarianism is that way. Thank you so much, man. Thank you. So we have Rachel and then Michael. Rachel, would you like? Can you? Can you can you hear me? I can hear you now, Rachel. Hi, Sue. Yes, John, thank you for all the work that you’ve done for this community. First of all, I’m a member of your Discord channel and I’ve been loving the live audio chats. The meeting crisis is fascinating to me. I actually wanted to ask you about something that I’m struggling with a little bit, that thing being mindfulness. I heard you mentioned that you were the first mindfulness instructor. Now, I’m sure you know, mindfulness has become very de jure from corporations to apps to pretty much everything is mindfulness, mindfulness, mindfulness. And I find that that gives me anxiety. And body, man, and body, man, and body, man. I feel like more disembodied because there’s a constant pressure to be mindful and embodied. And it was actually maybe it was partially due to quarantine. But I had a pretty serious anxiety attack because I felt like I wasn’t mindful or embodied enough to like even be in society like at all. And then the inner voice in my head kept screaming, you’re never going to get anywhere unless you’re embodied enough. You’re never going to succeed until you’re more mindful. People are never going to like you until you’re mindful enough. Focus on your body, bitch. You know, just really, really brutal, really brutal stuff, probably due to my own psychological trauma. But I can’t help but think that much of this was the constant watered down mindfulness commercialization that I see everywhere. How would you recommend that somebody like me conquers this and is able to be mindful and embodied without getting triggered by the constant stream of mindfulness commercialization? Yeah, excellent, excellent, excellent. So like you, I hope you don’t find this is intended to be an act of sharing. I hope you don’t find it insulting. I also suffer from a sadistic super ego in a lot of ways. My friends gave me that, that I didn’t come upon that insight myself. And of course, I think it has to do with that. I was brought up with a particular model of God, et cetera, et cetera. So I won’t go into that in detail, but I commiserate with you very readily. And then on the other hand, and I published on this, I published and given talks at conference, I’m very, very critical of the Western appropriation of mindfulness. And mindfulness is not sitted meditation that makes you sort of accept your status quo within present day capitalism. That’s not what mindfulness is. Right. In fact, mindful, there isn’t even a single act or practice that’s mindful. Mindfulness is properly an ecology of practices. There is a meditate. There should be meditative practices. There should be contemplative practices. There should be movement practices and they should be all integrated together in a mutually self-correcting fashion. And even the scientific study of mindfulness, I have criticisms of published criticisms of they tend to reduce mindfulness to just a list of features, which is just overly when you just all you have is a list of features, you’re missing all the structural functional organization of a phenomena. So you have this truncated and superficial version that’s wedded to an overly simplistic importation that is helped to use to sell people, basically something that’s analogous to Soma from Brave New World. So as you can tell, I’m very critical of this. I think what you have to do is you should join a community. I’ve done an online met for COVID. I met daily and taught people, took people through a meditation course, meditation and contemplation course. It’s all on YouTube. And then we then went into the Western tradition and we’ve gone through epicureanism and stoicism and giving you a rich repertoire and strategies for how to integrate and cultivate an ecology of practices. And this is all framed within a different way of formulating this, which is meant to subvert my sadistic superego and other people. And this is a metaphor that comes from the heart of the Buddhist tradition, which is think of mindfulness practices. Notice the plural as a way of befriending yourself rather than a way of trying to meet some external standard that has been given to you. And so for me, the idea that what I’m trying to do is for friend myself with other people that I can befriend who are befriending themselves and that if we can all not use standards of harsh perfectionism, because what the hell good are they for? They’re not good for anything. What if you did mindfulness under the standard of cultivating a virtuous friendship with yourself and other people? And that actually goes well with mindfulness as a rich and evolving ecology of practices that is homed within a Sangha. It’s always the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. And if all they’re giving you is a little smidgen of the Dharma. They’re just starving you and they’re putting you into a normative structure that I think is actually deleterious to the transformation people want. All of these things. I mean, another slogan I have is I talk about stealing the culture. All of this is radically countercultural. I want to do sorry, this sounds ridiculously pretentious, but remember what I said about there is no political solution to quote the police. I hope you guys are old enough to know that the group, the police, right? Spirits in the material world, great Gnostic song. I think I want to be like what the Christians were. They set up communities of transformative practice and then they network together and they created a counterculture that stole the culture bottom up. I’m not I’m not I’m not saying I’m not trying to convert anybody to Christianity, but what I see these all of these communities that are emerging and starting to network together doing is they’re stealing the culture. And so I I would like to teach people mindfulness in the context of befriending themselves so they can steal the culture. Beautiful. Yeah, it’s really it’s worth noting here, I think, again, another point of convergence. So I’m not a meditative practitioner, but I’m a big believer in psychological mindfulness. And so basically, that’s a metacognitive stance. And you can extract a huge amount of wisdom from some basic principles of what I try to encapsulate in calm. Yeah, calm. Curious acceptance, loving compassion, motivated toward valued states of being in relationship to a critic, which is critical, rejecting, irritable, tense, you know, and controlling. So that that that, in other words, a sadistic super ego and then embodying that in relation, think about yourself as sort of internal family systems and thinking about what you’re doing. And then you can also think about the way you’re doing things. In relation, think about yourself as sort of internal family systems and how to cultivate that inner dialogue along those lines and then interpersonal dialogue in the proper context for that. Sorry, Greg, I didn’t mean to interrupt. No, go ahead. I like I’m influenced here also by Han and his idea that we are now we are we have moot. And this is how he has a critique of Foucault, right. And the panopticon idea, it’s one of the best and most succinct critiques of Foucault that I’ve read. But Han has the idea that we have now moved into the stage of self exploitation by being put into an achievement culture. And that’s exactly the opposite of what at least the Buddhist and Taoist homes of mindfulness were supposed to be doing. Mike, Mike Mascolo has a question. Muted, unmute. I tend to sound better when I’m muted. Hello, John. This was a very exciting talk. I wish I had a question for you. I don’t. I wish that what I kind of want to be able to do is to celebrate what you’ve said and comment on it or ask you a question, but I can’t do it. And so I apologize that the way I want to try to connect to what you’re saying is to is to is to give an opinion of what’s been moved in me from what you said. So I’m going to talk about me rather than you, even though I want to talk about you. I’m sorry. It’s OK. Greg, could you share? Give me a share screen capability. Greg. Yeah, OK, good. So I’m resonating so deeply with what you’re saying is the crisis of meaning. You know, the crisis of meaning is about, you know, for me, ideological cacophony and a technological worship where we think that everything is going to get solved by by our technical and capital capitalist free market. And as I look at the world, I think that the world is going to be a place where we can and I listen to what you’re saying and I listen to people like you and what you’re saying. It’s really complex that what we’re doing and we got a lot of smart people talking about complex issues. And I ask myself, well, how do we create a movement with such complexity? You know, how do we reach people? Which leads me to this idea of simplicity. Is there some way that we can take these highfalutin ideas and reduce them, not dumb them down, but to make them simple, to make them simple like Bach, you know, to make them in some way that an anchor of ideas that can begin to generate these communities, these ecologies of practice that you talk about. And this is my best attempt, a failing attempt to do this, a kind of a thinking about how it all comes together, if you will, and if you’ll indulge me for one minute. Sure. I think that at base we are relational beings and I think that that is a very integrating concept. I think we’re relational beings. What that means for me, and I’m going to go back to McMurray, theologian, who talks about fundamental motives of humans as being, you know, a dialectic between fear for the self and love for the other. And I believe as a relational person that all identity, all selfhood, all practice, all morality, all ethos comes from intersubjective relations. It comes from how we relate to the other. It doesn’t come from God, doesn’t come from evolution. It doesn’t come from Kant’s mind. It comes from relations that they emerge from relation that when we relate, we create a morality of rights, a morality of care, and a morality of virtue. And I think something like a trichotomy like this or like Greg’s integrity, that which enhances dignity and integrity through well-being through integrity. If we could get people to see, hey, we are relational beings and what ties us together is some notion of virtue, the good. We don’t talk about the good. We talk about technical stuff. We talk about, you know, how do we solve things through the market? We don’t understand that all of this is tethered to, in my opinion, a conception of the good. We don’t talk about that. I say if we could find ways to get people to begin to talk about virtue, not just individual rights, but care and virtue, that provides the glue or the motivation for communities or ecologies of discussion to coordinate, to bring together diverse ideologies, clash them together in such a way that we can find the good in them and create something novel. And that something novel might be knowledge, if you will. I don’t know how much sense I just made. The idea here is how can we get to the masses in a way that is as simple as Edith Bunker and then bubble up to be the most profound transformations that we need. So I want to respond to you in depth because I think your point is prescient in an important way. You have to allow me to distinguish between when I’m talking about some of this stuff in the language of explanation and science to try and articulate it so it could fit into a scientific worldview and how I talk or what we do when we’re engaged in the practice. What you just described, Michael, is what we do in the practice of dialectic. We don’t do any of this heavy theory. You get people to come in. You get them to circle to get into distributed cognition. And then this is how the practice goes. One of you is going to start. The four of you are going to pick a virtue. You’re going to propose an account, what you think that virtue is, what’s courage. And then what another person is going to do is they’re not going to dispute you or debate you. They’re going to amplify you. They’re going to be a mindfulness mirror. They’re going to say, oh, when you were getting to this one point, you clenched your fist. Go back and clench your fist. What does that feel like? Draw this out. And so what you do is this amplification process. You’re constantly drawing the person out to say more and more. About what that particular virtue is. And then you move to a stage where the second person, basically after the first person says they’re finished, the second person comes back and says, OK, here’s what I heard you saying. I want to make sure. And I don’t get to go on until you agree that I have heard you. And so you do this until the first person says, OK, now you’ve heard me. And so and then the second person now says, what did they learn? What did they appreciate? What did they come to value? What was novel for them in this proposal? And then and only then they can say what was mysterious or missing or off for them? And what they have to do is like jazz. And maybe Greg will like this. They have to riff. They can riff on the first. They can’t make a totally new proposal. They have to amend the first proposal and riff on it to make a second. And then they make a proposal. And then another person does the process with them. And then they circle around and around virtue. Like a platonic dialogue. And then what happens is you bring all of the small groups together and you have a group question, which is what is virtue? Or what’s the relationship between courage? Sorry, what is what is what is our virtue? Or what’s the relationship between courage and wisdom? And then you want to see people discuss virtue and they don’t discuss it as a cold topic because they’ve been involved in intimate relation with other human beings. And the co-creation of new ways of seeing and being. I believe deeply in Plato’s sense that you can’t possibly learn about a virtue unless you already have some important seed of it within you. That’s why he starts. That’s why all of the dialogues are on virtue. And that’s why many of the dialogues don’t conclude with the definition because the proposition is not where the answer to what is courage or what is justice to be found. It’s found in the unfolding of the dialogue. And when people and people get a sense of that and they don’t want to come to a conclusion, they get into this state of wondering and together and constantly unpacking what virtue can mean for them. And you can see that they’re identifying and engaging and they’re starting to aspire to the virtue, not just reflect on it. And it doesn’t mean they’re all saying the same thing and it doesn’t mean they’re even generating a theory. That’s what happens in the process and practice of dialectic. Yes. Another great thing. I’m asking for everybody to understand. That’s why I often say to people, don’t tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice. I’m giving you all these beliefs because I’m a scientist, right? And Greg’s a scientist. But the project is to translate these all into accessible practices of transformation. That’s the project through and through. And it is tragic that the universities, which have become increasingly broken and pathetic, that what’s leaving it is humanities philosophy. And that are the very things that we need in order to cultivate wisdom, imagination, and the needs of living. I got to meet Nicholas Maxwell and he’s been a clarion call to that about that for decades, right? From Knowledge to Wisdom is a pivotal book about that critique of the universities per se. Now, I want to be clear. I like the University of Toronto. They treat me very well. But I think, and they’ve done, they have, I don’t fit in well. I don’t fit into the academic assortment box really well. And I’m really grateful for this. They sort of bent things and restructured things to make a place for me. And I want to express sincere gratitude for that. Nevertheless, I agree with your critique, Michael. I think the universities have become untethered for being what they should be. I think Nicholas is absolutely correct about that. And I think Zach is right about it too. That by severing education from the practice of intergenerational enculturation, we have ripped the guts out of education. Education should be about maintaining our culture. That should be its priority. Insofar as it can also help the market, OK. But not primarily about helping the market. Corinne, you had a question. That’s a brilliant, I couldn’t agree more. I’m actually writing that section in my book right now. Yeah, well, my question goes right along with this conversation. Asking about, like you mentioned, literature was your breakthrough from your fundamentalist. Yep. Upringing. I’m wondering that. What role could art, music, literature, all of that play in the discussion we’re having about how to move forward? Oh, pivotal. Pivotal. How though? Like how? Corinne is a professor of art. Well, I mean, how is really important. Because if there isn’t, look, how can I try and say this? The reason I’m stuck is because I’ve had like about, and it’s on YouTube, we’ve had six long-term discussions between myself and Andrew Sweeney and Chris Master Pivotal about things like this. I’m trying to do like her. I think that, let me try it this way. When I was talking to Michael, and you can see it, and I sort of alluded to Greg, there’s like a jazz element even in dialectic. And so I’m deeply influenced by Ellen Scarry and other people’s work that beauty trains us for unexpected truth and for virtues that we do not yet, we have not properly yet developed and related arguments around that. And I know that not all of art is about beauty. I’m just searing in on this to give me a place to answer, to give you a way of talking about this. I think that if the best way to, well, I would argue one of the best ways, I’m being too strident, and here’s where I’m a Platonist through and through. I think beauty is one of the most accessible, picking up on Michael’s idea, ways in which we can get people, and this is Murdoch’s point too, right? In which we can get people out of egocentrism, that we can get people to get to a place where it is actually possible for them to start to challenge a cultural cognitive grammar. And I think I can do all of this talking, but if there’s no beauty in it, that it’s going to be largely ineffective. So I think getting artistry in here, translating this, especially what I said earlier, if it’s not primarily about the propositional, but the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory, we need artistry to make that translation and to beautify it, so people will take it up in an aspirational fashion. I think art has a central role. That’s why I was really pleased when Akira The Dawn took one of my things and he made a meaning wave about it. And I got to talk to an artist about this, and I talked to artists quite often, and they sent me their work that was inspired by my work, which is like, wow, that’s really, really interesting. And by the way, my relationship to literature and how it impacts on me is ongoing. I just read with a good friend of mine and colleague Dan Schappi, The Plague by Camus. And I hadn’t realized this. This was really interesting for me. I’d always taken this slogan from Camus, and it’s from The Plague, and it’s from a character called Taru. And when I started reading it, and Dan had already read it, and he said, you’re going to identify with Taru, you’re Taru. And I’m saying, what? I’m reading this character, and it’s Taru who actually utters this line. I want to know how to be a saint without God. That’s the whole problem I’m up against today. And I’ve taken that as one of my personal slogans. And seeing that, like, encountering that within the narrative setting of these people, and of course, The Plague is a grand metaphor for the possibility of the loss of meaning, the confrontation with absurdity, all of Camus’ themes. It does something, right? It does something. You know, in The Death of Ivan Illich, where Tolstoy talks about that Ivan had always knew he was going to die, the way two plus two equals four, like a proposition. And then one day he realized, because he bangs his chest, and he’s not getting better, he realized he was going to die. And the proposition is the same, but you know that the meaning has totally changed because it’s been set within the narrative context that gives you the perspectival and participatory knowing. That’s exactly what happened when I encountered that line in The Plague. And art, that’s the power of art. That’s the power of art for me to do exactly that kind of thing. And so I think it is one of the most important ways in which we can translate the propositional into the perspectival and the procedural and the participatory in a way that draws people, beautifies things, draws them outside of an egocentric perspective, so they can seriously consider altering their cognitive cultural grammar and aspiring to something else than what they are. I hope that answers your question. I think this will ultimately won’t be done by people like me that I’m talking about. I think it will ultimately be done. And don’t forget, martial art is also an art. The martial artists are also doing art. I’m a Tai Chi martial artist. You don’t do Tai Chi. The verb in Chinese is you play Tai Chi, like you play music. I’m making music with my body. Other questions? Getting near the hour and a half marker here. I also wondered about the painting that’s behind you. I always see the bottom of those horses. And I wonder where they’re going. So this is a thing from North Africa. It was given to me by my partner. I have a very strange deep attraction to deserts. I sort of a desert aesthetic. So one of my favorite movies is Lawrence of Arabia and things like that. And so she gave me this, right? Basically about that. And in fact, when I first moved into this apartment, I sort of set things up. And one of my best friends came over and he said, hey, the way you’ve designed this, it looks like a desert wisdom. And so she gave me this to fit into the desert wisdom sort of decor that I have. And so that’s why it’s there. And that’s what it means to me. It’s supposed to represent a really important historical moment within Moroccan culture. But that’s all I got of the particular history. Thanks for that, Corinne. I had wondered that too, that I never reached consciousness to ask. So there it is. I keep changing my backgrounds because I used to do the bookshelf thing and then people were like they started, you know, and everybody has the bookshelf and I thought, yeah, everybody does. And then I had people, they wanted to know what books were on my bookshelf rather than any of my work or any of the stuff I was trying to talk about. So yeah. Any other questions? Okay, in case there was someone else who hadn’t spoken. But I’m wondering both for John and Michael. Michael, when you were speaking, I mean, I resonate with what you were saying, but I wondered to a certain extent whether or not it’s a developmental issue that must be brought to bear. Where when I say developmental, I don’t mean to get into any particular developments of theory, but I mean to enact what you’re talking about in those different qualities, right? Care, the good, and such. You have to increase your care and your intersubjective relating with wider and wider circles of people. So if you only care about the people in your immediate family or your ethnic group, etc., then that care could be there, but it may not extend further. I think so developmentally, we have to get to a point where enough of us have a circle of care that is broad and big enough and deep enough to encompass beyond our immediate groups, beyond our nation to what I called in my last class, the big H, the humanity that, you know, as human beings. So I’m just wondering, John, if you think that that actually has to be brought to bear, you know, some developmental consideration. I’ll give Michael a chance to respond to since you invoked him. Yeah, I mean, I think cognition is in, look, when cognition is a dynamically self-organizing system, there’s no clean or viable distinction between how it functions and its history. It develops by functioning and it functions by developing. There’s no distinction between how it functions and its history. It develops by functioning and it functions by developing. There’s no separation of those. You see this as we move from computers to neural networks and dynamical system models of cognition. I teach a course on cognitive development. Cognition is inherently intrinsically developmental in nature. So if we’re going to actually plug into cognition in its depths, we have to plug into it in a developmental program. So, I mean, one of the things that we’re also talking about is like what would be the developmental program that you would do even to scaffold people into the dialectic practice that I was describing to Michael. And then what would be once they get there, how does that, and they’re playing with this, seriously playing with this on the Discord server, the community around my work. They’re doing this about trying to scale up from, you know, entry practice levels to very increasingly expanding levels of practice. That’s what they’re trying to figure out and they’re doing a lot of work on that right now. So I think it’s inherently developmental and I think it, that’s how it has to be again like a religion. Religions have that thing. You can enter religion as a child, but you are slowly, you know, developed into something, you know, and your understanding of the religion can, it doesn’t always, but it can develop as you develop and it opens the sphere that the religion gives you access to as you go through that. This was one of Paul’s, Paul Van de Klay’s criticisms of me that I take seriously. He said the problem with what John is talking about is it’s very elitist and I take that criticism seriously as well. That no, it has to be exactly what Michael says. We have to be able to reach people coming, if you’ll allow me, off the street and they can go as far as they want, but that has to be true. They can go as far as they want or need to go in how they’re developing. So that’s one of the most tricky. And so I’m lucky in that there’s a lot of distributed cognition at work on that problem right now and I get to talk to those people on a regular basis. But I’ll let Michael respond now too. Thank you, John, and thank you for asking, Greg. Greg, I actually think that an answer to your question was you gave it in a sense. When you talked about, you know, the circle of communication, whatever, you know, these circles, which would be very similar, it seems to me that what John’s talking about, if we can create circles within our sphere of influence, that’s, you know, and then each of those people can begin to create circles in their sphere of interest, into influence, you get bottom up stuff. And then if you can find, one can find a way to kind of codify how to have these dialogical circular relations and you get a VIP, you get an Obama, you get a David Brooks, you get a whomever to start to talk from the bully pulpit. Hey, we need virtue. We need this. That’ll start a movement. You know, I don’t know if you know this, but Scotland has a mission statement for their nation in which care and compassion is part of their mission. Could you imagine a government, could you imagine the United States having that? Wouldn’t it be great if you had something like that? You know, it built into, you know, we’re going to care about, you know, so bottom up and top down, there are ways to do this. I’m reminded in that of something Rob Scott often, you know, you’ll mention, like we have to figure out also kind of going back to the art and the process of making it cool at some level, too, you know, making it enticing, making it something that says, hey, you know, I want some of that. And definitely not come across as sort of elitist professors that have figured it out. You know, I certainly have that danger, right. But it’s like, oh, that’s hip or that’s something that I really am curious about. I think this is where the art, the jazz, the music, the power of a charismatic figure, you know, Obama-like figure that can actually speak and then embody that in a particular way and then have that networked into these very sophisticated ideas that also have entry-level developmental sequences, right, that enable people and then to feel the jive, as it were, you know, and then get that in the right zone of proximal development. I just want to do something that I haven’t been able to do yet. I just want to say hi to Tim. Hi, Tim. How are you? Hey, John. How you doing, mate? Nice to see you. Yeah, I’ve been silent really enjoying it, but I actually just had a follow-on comment here. I know we’re probably moving to close, but on this topic of making dialogue or school, let’s say, or how to help a bottom-up process of people reaching out to each other, get involved in conversation, engage in discussion, that’s been something I’ve been sort of looking at at many different levels. One of them last year, when it was possible to be out in the world a bit more, was at bars and at restaurants and sort of making relationships with managers and seeing about inviting people and engaging them in discussion and what have you. And we did a number of events on that and they were very meaningful in different ways. One of the main issues that I’ve found as a broad point that I’d asked for reflection on is that it seems to me like most social spaces, this is particularly the case in Australia and England, and might be a little less so in America and Canada, but most social spaces past like even 5 p.m. are sort of run on the fuel unit of alcohol. It’s not really possible for these places to be open unless they’re selling alcohol, and in my experience alcohol is maybe antithetical, is a bit strong, but I found it perhaps antithetical to actually inculturating the kind of of meaningful flow fundamentally that we’re looking to develop here. So I just wonder, thoughts about alcohol, I thought of drinks to replace it, but it’s a real thorn I find. Yeah, so when we lost religious heritages, we lost the social space, the non-alcoholic, well other than maybe the Eucharist, right, we lost sort of the non-alcoholic way of affording people disinhibiting so they could get into collective flow state. We had, within religion, you have other disruptive strategies that are much more successful getting people out of mundane time and space, and you can think of cathedrals for example as these massive machines for putting the zap on your brain so that you’re open to perspectives and you’re open to connect to people and you’re not getting the alcoholic days to do that, right, so religions have these amazing machinery of the disinhibition and putting you into a different headspace so that you could, but leaving you with sort of, in fact, often enhancing your capacity for flow and cognitive flexibility. And so what I’m seeing in these communities of practices are people are basically doing in situ experimentations of how to create these alternative social spaces where we can get people to disinhibit, you know, Rafe Kelly takes people out and they do parkour in nature and then they come back and sit around a campfire and start talking, and you don’t have to give people alcohol, right, what happens is this kind of thing spontaneously starts to emerge, he’s having tremendous success in it. So I mean, I think both from a scientific top down and a bottom up perspective in terms of in situ practice, we can recapture techniques of disinhibition that do afford people the possibility of catching the fire of aspiration without having to dumb them down and stupefy them with our really, with this socially sanctioned drug. It’s because we, and part of what alcohol has done is it’s been fed by and it feeds back into the cultural confusion between depth and intensity. Alcohol disinhibits you, so it intensifies certain aspects of your experience, but that is not the same thing as getting a deep experience. And it’s amazing when people, for example, come into dialectic and they get caught up in the, and they talk about how powerful that is. And the language they use is really interesting because they talk about simultaneously, well, I like to use the word inventio, they talk about as if they’re discovering something absolutely new and then, but also like they’re remembering something that was always there at the core of them. And I don’t think alcohol does that for you, and I don’t think alcohol is helping because I think it tends to, I mean, it helps for other things, I understand, you know, I mean, the human species has been helped to reproduce by alcohol, no doubt. But I think that insofar as we’re using alcohol to disinhibit, it’s not affording the cognitive flexibility, and it’s actually enhancing the confusion of intensity with depth. And so trying to create alternative social spaces that do the disruptive practices, do the disinhibition, but, and get people out of mundane time and space, mundane sense of self, but also empower them for self-transcendence. We know that’s possible, religions have done that, and so, and things that look like religion are doing it right now. So it’s a very real possibility. I don’t know if, I mean, to make it something widely disseminated the way pubs and bars are, I don’t see that happening given our current socioeconomic structures. So that might also have to be something that would come out of a successful stealing of the culture, very much the way the Christian churches created a different social space of agape, and that transformed non-persons into persons, and that spread like wildfire. If I may forgive the hokeyness of this, but it seems to me that where alcohol fails, the great disinhibitor seems to me is caring and love in the service of meaning. You know, people will be less inhibited if they feel loved. In fact, alcohol tends to create reciprocal narrowing, and when you start to get reciprocal opening, people, that’s how you get people to fall in love, and I don’t mean just sexual love, philia, right, agape, reciprocal opening, that’s what affords love. I’m glad I got to answer your question, Tim. It’s very good to connect with you again, as always. Thank you, John. Great. Actually, I think that that’s a wonderful spot to bring it to, the cultivation philosophia, loving wisdom, energy. And so, John, let me once again thank you for coming here and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. It’s been great. I’ve deeply enjoyed it, not surprised by it, but deeply moved and enjoyed it tremendously. Yes, Greg. So, any kind of final thoughts you want to leave us with as we wrap up here? Just that this was really wonderful. You could tell I was getting, I won’t say passionate, because I’m a Stoic, at least insofar as I’m a neo-plateness, and so passionate, but I got into very much a flow state, and I deeply appreciate the affordance of that. And I found myself articulating things in a way I’ve not articulated them before, and I always find that very enriching. So, thank you for affording that and making it possible and welcoming me here. I hope that you have found the discussion beneficial. It’s had like a recursive relevance realization. Almost relational. Almost in relation. All right, so with that for our frame for love and wisdom, we’ll bring this to a close. Thank you so much, and we’ll keep trying to do our thing. So, all right, guys. Thank you very much, everyone. Peace. Take care.