https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sPLreFRV_Fs
Hi, this is Paul and I’m anticipating a very special conversation today. Those of you who follow my channel, and I’m sure John and JP will repost this on their channels too, know these two gentlemen and these have been wonderful conversation partners for a while now. And JP has written a very interesting paper on the symbolic world connecting one of my favorite books, which is CS Lewis’s Miracles with John Vervecky’s work. And I found that to be fascinating. And JP has a video where he talks about this himself. He has a video where he and John talk about this and he has a video where he talks about this with Jonathan Peugeot. So this is getting chewed on quite thoroughly, but I wondered if I see sometimes my role in this whole group is to try to kind of keep things that regular folks can understand and not get them that have things float too far up. So maybe we can make sure our philosophical chatter is something that folks who perhaps don’t know a lot of philosophy can understand. So thank you both for being here. Thank you. It’s going to be really cool, I think, to discuss this with you guys, because obviously, you know, it’s just the way someone that you know well, Paul, you’ve been reading him for a while. And obviously, John, you know your own work. So it’s going to be cool to discuss this article, which tried to mingle both. Well, it’s a great pleasure to be here. So I’ve watched your video, JP read the article. I saw your obviously I was there when the video you had with me. At least I hope I was. And then I also watched the one I think yesterday or maybe this morning between you and Jonathan, which I thought was really good. So yeah, I mean, what’s the right am I flattered being sort of put into, you know, the company of CS Lewis? That’s really impressive. I want to confess, I haven’t read all of Miracles. I’ve read the first two chapters. And I because those were the chapters that for me had the most direct bite. I’ve read similar arguments by John Hott in why naturalism is not enough. Yes, I think a more updated version of CS Lewis’s argument. So that’s that I don’t have the extensive familiarity that Paul, for example, has with Lewis. I know the Narnia Chronicles and I’ve read some of other of Lewis’s other stuff. And I’ve read books about, you know, the influence of neo-Platonism on Lewis and things like that. So that’s sort of where I’m coming from. OK, I thought maybe we go in an order like this. I’ll give a little bit of introduction to Lewis, why I think he’s a particularly interesting person in terms of the meaning crisis, as I think John’s formulation of that has just really been when I first heard John say it, it was like just lights went on. It’s like, oh, OK, that’s that’s what we’ve been talking about. And then maybe, JP, you can give a bit of a reduced lay version of your argument. You’ve made it several times now. So and then some of John’s thoughts on your argument. And then we’ll just go from there. So Lewis, Lewis, Lewis, for me, you know, before I ever got into this YouTube stuff, Lewis, for me and many other Christians today is is a really important figure in the 20th century. He was born at sort of the height of modernity in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His mother died at a very young age. His father didn’t quite know what to do with his two boys. He went to English boarding schools, which went disastrously. He he sort of withdrew into an imaginary world with he and his brother, where they began to sort of put together a lot of the stuff that would come out in terms of Narnia later. He he gave up Christianity. He’s a very precocious boy. He gave up Christianity fairly early. And he is one of his best tutors was a former Presbyterian who sort of became a hard bitten atheist, but was extremely rational and logical and would demand nothing less of Lewis. He was called the old knock. And so this was Lewis’s coming up. Lewis then was dragged onto the battlefields of the First World War, where he had sort of a death pact with a buddy of his that each of them would care for the other’s parents if one died. His buddy did die. Lewis was injured in a gas attack and it was exactly the right kind of wound that sort of laid him up in the hospital to allow him to survive the war. He he be he entered into a very mysterious relationship with the mother of his dead friend. And many believe that that was a sexual and romantic relationship that he had with her rather surreptitiously. He went on to become a lecturer and a tutor at Oxford and then Magdalen College. And along the way, met J.R.R. Tolkien, who had also been in the First War and Lewis’s whole cohort had been in the First War. And Lewis eventually really through Tolkien becomes a Christian and through the likes of someone like Owen Barfield begins to try to find a way to integrate the imagination and the validity of knowledge through imagination into his worldview. He he remained he, you know, after he he had this relationship with this woman and he would often call her his mother, a Freudian, could have a field day with C.S. Lewis’s relationship with this woman. And and eventually moved both this woman and his older brother, who was a military man, who was also an alcoholic. And they all three lived together for an extended period of time. And Lewis began to continue to develop his Christianity during the Second World War. Lewis, at least during his life, his life reached the height of his fame through some radio broadcasts in the UK during the war and began writing Christian apologetic books like Mere Christianity Grew Out of the Radio Broadcasts, The Screwtape Letters, which was a very imaginative treatment. And then The Problem of Pain, which was his first sort of straightforward, imaginative or straightforward apologetic book, Miracles in some ways was the last of his straightforward apologetic books. And it seems he he sort of turned his back on that because a lot of biographer, you know, biographers speculate that he saw the shallowness of that particular approach in terms of how it helped people. During the war, he was asked to do to talk to airmen. And of course, this was during the blitz of Britain. And what that gave him was a lot of opportunity to talk to regular people about Christianity. And that really molded and shaped those radio broadcasts. But I think it also led him in the end to sort of divorce himself from straightforward apologetics and move then into narrative, which, of course, gave birth to the Narnia Chronicles. And what I think is his his best piece of fiction, which he a lot of people really believe he wrote with Joy Davidman, who became his wife eventually. And then she died, which really hurt him. His book, Till We Have Faces. So this this piece, Miracles, was in a sense Lewis at the this was the pinnacle of his straightforward apologetic work. And I see Lewis and Tolkien as really pioneers on the Christian front of dealing with the meaning crisis, both on what, you know, both being veterans of the First World War. And, you know, Barfield was right in there as well. And they all of them spent a great deal of time trying to figure out, OK, if they were confronted with the failures of modernity and then beginning to ask, how can we create a coherent picture of the world? Now, where Miracles comes in with me is that as a pastor, I have long sort of tried to straddle two worlds. One world in which I’m deeply embedded is obviously the church, Christianity, a Protestant tradition, which in some ways I think the relationship between Protestantism and the meaning crisis would itself be a very interesting conversation. But I found myself always having on one hand immersed in this book, the Bible. And this picture of the world, you know, particularly in some place like Genesis, where you have a cosmology, where you have a table and a bowl and waters above and waters below. And so week after week, I have to exegete and attempt to attempt to apply this book to the lives of people who imagine themselves living on a globe, going around a sun and, you know, and just the difference between, let’s say, a Genesis cosmology and the contemporary cosmology is really symbolic, I think, in many ways of this meaning crisis. And so I would often find myself emotionally, okay, how do I maintain my Christian faith in the light of what is the deep secularism that we live in the midst of? And so I found myself, you know, two or three times a year reading this book, Miracles, because, you know, why I don’t think we often know why we do things. But I found Lewis, in many ways, just being able to, in my mind and heart, hold modernity back. That would at least give me a space and Lewis and his book Miracles really attempts to put together a new image. You know, one of his most interesting books, which I’ve only read a couple of years ago, entitled The Discarded Image is supposed to be a synthesis of a couple of lectures, a couple of series of lectures that he used to give, where he was trying to teach people in the middle of the 20th century, medieval and Renaissance literature. And Lewis recognized that this classical medieval picture of the world afforded so much meaning that that enabled people in that world to manage so much suffering that this for him was a cherished image. The only problem with this image was it wasn’t true. And so I think what we find Lewis trying to do in the Book of Miracles is at least a straightforward attempt. I think later in Narnia, he does it mythologically. And so he attacks the materialism that he was dealing with in the early and mid 20th century, and he’s trying to bring back the world. And I think later in Narnia, he does it mythologically, but a straightforward attempt to address the meaning crisis and put the world back together. And so he attacks the materialism that he was dealing with in the early and mid 20th century. And I think JP, you nicely bridge some of that between updating that. And that’s what he’s trying to do in the Book of Miracles. So you two, if you want to ask any quick questions of clarification for that before we sort of throw it to JP, go ahead. I’m fine with that right now. Okay. That was great, Paul. Thanks. So JP, how did you find this book? And I mean, this obviously impacted you. Yeah, I was thinking about writing on it. Now the internet fails. Oh, that’s too bad. Have him turn off the Netflix. See me at all? Okay, okay. You just paused and hopefully you’ll You’re still frozen. Yeah, you’re still frozen. Well, well, maybe, maybe we’ll pause JP until he can come back with us. John, any in terms of this, the little bit of, or at least the degree that you’ve become aware of, are you back JP now? Can you see me and hear me? Yes, we can see you and hear you now. Yeah, it was always good on my end. I always saw you perfectly. Anyways. Okay. Okay. So let’s go back to you then, JP. Okay, I’ll try. Yeah. So I’ve been wanting to write something on miracles for a while because it pops up naturally when you talk about emergence. Some You’ll often hear some Christians or some, let’s say, non naturalists use that argument sort of I think to involve emergence, let’s say to explain the mind or some other properties that naturalists will sort of be just abandoning the game. But I think I was open, I could do some things opposite and it was just really difficult to pinpoint down to something that I could actually write about because the subject is sort of too large. And after, you know, I know that Paul, you talk about this book so often on your channel that at some point I decided to read it in the course of my working on miracles. And I was very pleasantly surprised to see how many of Luis’s ideas could align well with what I had discussed in previous discussion with John. So the what I try to do in the article is to It’s the The target like which Luis sets his arguments at the beginning of the book miracles. He may be half of the book. I know a really, really large part of the book is spent doing philosophy. Trying to explain how the naturalism of this time is broken and he tries to sort of make room within a that within a worldview. He tries to explain how something non natural could intermesh with the natural. He starts with reason and then later you will get to to divine reason to God. And the points I think can be well made using non reductive naturalism non reductive physicalism. The first point The first point That Luis uses to break the naturalism of his time which the naturalism of his time was pretty much seeing nature as one big interlocked mechanical system. Just material, fairly straightforward materialism and Luis’s way of breaking with what he gets to arguments that the main. The first one that he gives is an argument about reason. About the number of activity of reason and it’s something that you can correct me, Johnny. I’m wrong, but I think it’s an argument that I’ve heard you give in other places where okay. It’s very similar. I think it’s very similar to an argument I’ve given you. Yeah, so the I can try to summarize it. So the, the, the issue which Lewis raises is okay if If only the material level of reality is ultimately real, then it means that our theories which are not material are not real. So our theories that point to materialism are destroying themselves so that world view cannot work. There has to be something else that intermeshes with with nature. So by using reason as a way to intermesh with nature as having some sort of top down causality upon nature, he is starting to carve some room for for miracles. But updating that following my discussions with with John, you, you see that okay. The first filtering has shifted because now naturalists will at least not all naturalists, but at least the non reductive kind of naturalists will be ready to grant that consciousness or you can see rationality to use Lewis’s terminology is not reducible to neurons or whatever material constituents you would you would want to bring out. It exists at the level of a complex functional system of a brain in the body in an environment and this whole complex causal network then as top down irreducible influences on The constituent cells or any other material constituents and this popped up in in cognitive science, but we can see other layers in naturalism. If you look at other scales, so you can see, for instance, the relationship between whatever happens at the fundamental level of physics, where it’s just fields of potential and particles emerging from there. You can see this again as a a meeting of emergence from potential out of which things emerge particles will emerge and a simultaneous emanation from the from the laws of physics. And because we have this top down theory, this abstract principle that can explain to us why it is that certain particles emerge. We’re happy with the at least we’re more satisfied. We can accept and move on the fact that certain particles will pop out of potential. So we have sort of a layer of potential out of which things emerge. By simultaneously being informed by some pattern by the emanation of a certain pattern. And you can see nature as made of those different players and those layers intermesh with one another. So The old school materialist idea that the world is made sort of bottom up from parts is it’s one half of the story that Particles will make atoms which make molecules which make cells, organisms, societies, and so on. That’s that’s true. There’s material causality going some sort of bottom up. But there’s also a top down causality from patterns that go all the way down to there’s an information there’s an emanation of patterns upon that potential. So for instance, in me, Me, JP as a whole extended in a body and environment, I have a top down causality that constrains the potential of my of my cells that constrain the potential upon their molecules and so on all the way down. So, whereas Lewis had to make a lot of effort to explain how you don’t have just one layer in the world, not just one material layer. Non reductive physicalists can already grant the fact that there are different layers in reality. The and the fact that the intermesh with one another. So the move that Lewis has to make instead to bring out bring miracles into this. Is yes to explain how it is that the different extremes in that system can sometimes manifest themselves in ways that will be It’s unusual, but still current in some miraculous ways. One cool analogy that he gives is that of a scientist in England, who are studying a fish tank. And most of the time, you know that fish tank is sort of a closed system, you can explain what happens within the system by just knowing the system, you don’t really need to know what’s going on. Let’s say in the house and next block. But if there is a bomb that falls somewhere nearby the laboratory, then that causality that you used to observe in the in the fish tank will no longer be exactly the same. It’s, it’s going to be weird. You’re going to see regularities that weren’t there before, but it doesn’t mean that the there is no so that there’s no intelligibility there. You just need to go to a higher frame, you need to Know about the entire neighborhood, for instance, and know that once once you know that you’re in wartime England. You’ve gotten to a higher frame where you can explain, oh, okay, well, the fact that the bomb fell at this place can explain why the there’s this new kind of causality that’s going on in the fish tank and This new kind of causality isn’t sort of just arbitrary or whatever, it’s still explainable, it can still make sense, but you have to go to a higher frame. And now when it comes to miracles, the idea will sort of be the same. And yeah, I’ll be curious to know, john, if you agree with my formulation here, but in previous discussions, you know, we we talked about the fact that there’s a ground of being and there’s a ground of intelligibility. And as the two intermesh at the different layers, you’ll see different things existing in the different layers that I mentioned earlier. And the, I think that the main difference between the way that I conceive of it at this point and the way that Lewis, I think, I wouldn’t say I don’t want to necessarily bring Lewis into this because this formulation was so different from modern naturalism, but the way that I would frame it is This this earth this potential at the bottom layer of nature from which things emerge and this Even this This ground of intelligibility, which will inform which will shape the which will shape the emergence. Those two are not static. I’d say that in if miracles are true. What happens in miracles is that the What happens in miracles is that the Much like the fish tank, we will be in a case where heaven and earth don’t behave exactly the same way as they typically do the the the emanation will not take shape in the same way that it typically does. And we can still make sense of it. It doesn’t, we don’t have to just sort of Accept miracles as some freak accidents, like in the case of the fish tank. Once we know that okay in in certain in a certain situation you have this meeting of heaven and earth in the regular nature and in miracles, you have this other meeting of heaven and earth. Once you know what is sort of behind both frames, which in a Christian context would of course be the actions of would be good and so Would be good and so then you can still have something that makes sense as a whole. And it’s the same sort of maneuver that we do it and the other layers of reality. We accept that see what happens at the fundamental layer of physics, because Once we have the laws that can explain the regularities and that can make predictions. We’re happy with it in cognitive science. Once we have some Theory of our mind can inform matter, we can accept the the emergence that happens within the brain, for instance, in the same way, once we take the frame of miracles. Once we take the theological frame sort of and invoke something behind And we should still find something that makes sense. Indeed, we should find something that explains emergence and the nation better. It’s sometimes something that gives us more intelligibility than we had prior. Does that make sense so far, John? Yeah, I’m following your argument. Okay, cool. So then the this was sort of the first part of Lewis’s book, at least the way I frame it is, you know, you need to make Let’s say a case to say that miracles are metaphysically possible, not necessarily that they’re plausible just yet, but at least you’ve made room for them. So whereas Lewis did it against the nationalism of his time I tried to do it against the nationalism of our time. And then in the second section of the book, the way I see it, the last three chapters. So the grand miracle. Miracles of the old creation and the miracles of the new creation. Miracle, sorry, Lewis tries to make the case that miracles are plausible and he talks about it in terms of style. We should recognize in the incarnation and in the different miracles of Christ something that is deeply consonant with nature, something that illuminates nature, much like the example of the fish tank that I gave earlier or another analogy that he gives and that I think is really powerful is It should be like a situation where we, we have a certain book, but we have a missing chapter. We don’t have the central chapter of the book. But once someone gives us that central chapter, which would be the miracles of Christ in the case of Lewis’s book. Once we have this central chapter, we should find that it makes the whole work more intelligible. It’s possible that the central chapter itself, maybe, you know, if you try to just look at the central chapter, it’s possible that the central chapter itself is not as powerful as the central chapter. It’s possible that the central chapter itself, maybe, you know, if you try to just look at it in itself, it could be difficult to understand. He talks about it sometimes in terms of the sun. It’s not as important that the central chapter itself is intelligible as much as that it makes the rest of the work intelligible, much like we can We know that the sun is in the sky, not because we can see the sky. In fact, we cannot, but because we can see everything else because of this. So Lewis will take a few features of nature to try and show this. And at this point, it seems fairly coherent with the relevance realization, I think. So yeah, again, it’s a point where I’ll be really eager to know about John’s feedback on this. Lewis selects, well, he selects four things, three things that are about nature and one that is about the interaction between nature and supernatural. So the first thing is The world is made in layers. So Lewis talked about nature and then reason and then other layers, including God. But in our modern world view, we already have different layers within nature. So the incarnation should show this and indeed it does. It’s the case of God coming down through the different layers of being Through heaven, through Israel, a group, and then finally to an individual person and then coming back up. So you have this going out, going through layers and then the three features of nature that Lewis selects is sorry, are selectiveness, vicariousness, and death and rebirth. So selectiveness is something that we observe in general in nature. As far as we know, there’s only one planet with life on it. On this planet, much of the planet’s history was not populated by any sort of life or there wasn’t much interesting for most of it. Even in the species that do exist, most of them go extinct. Lots of those animals don’t reproduce. It’s very undemocratic. It’s very selective. And we see the same sort of pattern in the incarnation where God will select just one people and then finally just one person. God will select just one people and then finally just one person and marry to fashion a body for himself. So it’s you have this pattern of selectiveness. And Lewis explained that in the incarnation, you can see it. The incarnation is sort of the green miracle. It’s the miracle that will contain all of the other miracles. But in that incarnation where God selects to incarnate himself down through those layers of being, it is it in a way that will shed light on nature. In particular, it will shed light on how selectiveness is supposed to work. It’s supposed to work in a way that brings out vicariousness. The fact that we, if the selected devote themselves to the unselected, you can see something that’s beautiful, something that isn’t as tragic as what we can see in nature in general. The fact that there are parasites in nature, there’s all kinds of animals that prey on one another. Things that live depend on their sustenance on others and one that can be terrible at times and nature, it’s often terrible. It can also be done beautifully, like how we can take care of the sick, how a mother can take care of a child or ultimately how Christ himself in the incarnation can take care of everyone. So the selected devote themselves to the unselected. The unselected vicariously depend on the selected. And then the last facet of nature that Luis talks about is the pattern of death and rebirth. That is also all over the place in nature where organisms die, societies die, forests go out of existence and so on. And of course Christ uses this pattern in the incarnation. And here I tried to make the connection between this idea of God selecting with relevance realization, where we select certain features of the environment to be able to go through different layers. So for instance, if I see some object, I will only pick out a certain part of it. I will select just a part of it so that rather than seeing just a jumbled mess of parts, I see just one object. I can perceive the form of the pen rather than just a big mess. So Luis’s point was using style that we can see in the incarnation miracles. We can see a grand miracle that sheds light on the way that nature as a whole works. And today I would only add that what we can see exemplified is relevance realization, which is, of course, spread throughout nature. So this was the grand miracle. And then Luis will finally explain how individual miracles of Christ can fit within that framework. And at this point, I don’t really make any explicit point in any connection with John’s work. We could maybe try and explore it. There would probably some connections to make with relevance realization even in there. The fact that often what Christ seems to do in miracles is to sort of set some dynamical systems back in order. They see some people are sick. They’re not able to maintain their structural functional organization as one organism and by coming to contact with the logos, which is the origin of emergence in the nation. Then those people will be healed. They will be put back sort of into one just one organism. You could probably bring out something like this also for, let’s see what he does with multiplication of loaves and fishes where you have, let’s say an ecosystem or a living thing like bread and rather than letting this, these dynamical systems function as on their own in the cycle that takes a long time. He does them focus sort of in one moment. But I don’t know that I necessarily want to keep going further into those. I can if you want, but because it’s not as related to John’s work, at least in my article, maybe you would want to reply already. Okay. That was a lot, JP. So, first of all, let me express genuine appreciation, gratitude for you making use of my work. I think in many ways we’re all on the same side of the tracks. I think Lewis is doing a version of neoplatonism. I think it’s very clear he is. I think that’s pretty undeniable. And then I think what you’re trying to do is integrate it with a version of naturalism that I’ve been arguing for. I’m very interested in that possibility, which because Lewis tends to push them apart. He sees neoplatonism and naturalism as opponents. That’s clearly the case in Miracles. And then you’re trying to bring them together and that I share that project with you. I think the idea of making deep connections between the structure of being intelligibility, how it makes sense, how it can make sense to us as rational beings and relevance realization, of course, is also something I’m very deeply interested in. So I appreciate all of that. And that’s not just sort of faux flattery. I really appreciate it. I like the work you’re doing. So there’s a couple things, I guess. There’s a couple places where I’d like to maybe talk. Yep. So I mean, one place is in that, right? To my mind, there’s a significant difference between what Lewis is doing and what you’re doing. And so I feel a tension in there. And I’d like to explore that a bit. So Lewis makes an argument that goes back to Plato. It clearly originates in Plato. I forget which dialogue it is. And that argument, it keeps ramifying all the way through philosophy, cognitive science, McDowell, others. So this is the classic argument about the space of reasons and the space of causes. I’m trying to call to use language that I think will be generally accessible to people. So rather than just talking about emergence and emanation right now, let’s talk about we seem to have two ways of thinking of ourselves, because that’s what Lewis runs off. One is, well, why am I sitting on this couch? And, you know, Socrates gives the, well, one answer you could give is, why am I sitting on this couch? One is, well, why am I sitting on this couch? And, you know, Socrates gives the, well, one answer you could give is, well, my muscles move this way. And there’s all these biochemical events. And that’s why I’m here, right? And then the other way is, well, I’m sitting on this couch because I want to be able to talk to Paul and JP and therefore it’s rational. It’s a good reason for me to be sitting here so I can justify what happens. And then what I see Lewis arguing, and Paul, please, you have my permission to jump in at any point if you think I’m misrepresenting him. What I see Lewis doing is saying that there is an incommensurability between the space of causes and the space of reasons. No matter how you order cause, and Plato made a similar argument, no matter how you order causes, you won’t get reasons. And because Well, it has to do with the fact that reason tracks truth and meaning and causation doesn’t operate, at least, now this is where maybe where JP’s point is, causation doesn’t seem to track truth or meaning, right? Is that okay so far, Paul, am I being compared to Lewis? No, I think you are. That’s a very big point very early in the book. And so, and then what I see Lewis doing that I think adds to the tension. So right away, JP, I see Lewis, you know, saying he wants to, because his argument against, his argument is that naturalism is not the whole show. If I can show something that can’t, no pun intended by the way there. If I can demonstrate that there’s something that can’t be accounted for in it and then, you know, I think that’s a very good point. If I can demonstrate that there’s something that can’t be accounted for in it and then he makes an argument and JP is right, I make an analogous argument. I was influenced by a little by Plato, but Lewis was too, so that’s, we’re in the family together, which is the argument that that the, you know, when the scientist is giving reasons for this, right, that that’s that that rationality doesn’t actually fit into the causal worldview. And I’ve made this argument before. I say things like one of the things that science can’t explain is the cognition that generates science, etc. And that’s one of the problems in the meaning crisis. So I think that point, Paul, about that connection, I think you’re bang on. I think Lewis is directly responding to the meaning crisis right there. But I see his argument is pushing them apart and then he makes a second move. And he needs this move. So he’s basically showing that reasons can’t be causes. I’m sorry, that causes can’t be reasons. And so one way you can think of what JP and are talking about when we’re talking about emergence is, emergence is the idea that causes can become reasons. They can, there’s an emergence, right? And Lewis is sort of denying that. And we can come back. I’m just trying to lay out the tension points here. Is that fair for everybody so far? Yeah, yeah, keep going. Right. And then, and then, and then Lewis does something very, and by the way, there’s many people who take this, all this language, you can see it in work, where, you know, retrieving realism by Taylor and Dreyfus recently or McDowell’s, that the space of reasons and the space of causes, trying to get them in some way to touch and connect is a very deep problem. And I agree. So then Lewis makes a second move. And this is again going to, I think, put him in tension with what JP has been saying, because Lewis, Lewis makes an asymmetry argument. Right. And I know Paul loves this argument, because he uses Lewis’s terms for it, which is colonization. I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about when he was using that until I read the Lewis book. Why is it colonization? I kept looking at it. It’s British imperialism. Like, what’s going on here? I don’t understand. Right. No, it’s straight from Lewis. Yeah, I knew it when I read it. Ah, there. That’s where it’s coming from. And then Lewis makes an argument. And, and he basically makes the argument that, right, reason can sort of insert itself into the causal order, but the causal order can’t make itself up. Now, I’ll just pause here to say that that’s where my deepest disagreement with Lewis is. Because most people who are impressed by the problem of reason and causes think the, the, the problem is completely symmetrical. Right. The problem is completely symmetrical. Why? So that if there’s a mystery of how reasons emerge out of causes, there is also an equal mystery, and the Neoplatonists knew this, about how reasons can become, how reasons can become causes, because you need that to explain why I’m on the couch. Right. And Lewis says, if you, if you know, if you don’t keep causes distinct from reason, right, you’re going to lose thought. But you know, if, but if you don’t integrate reasons with causes, you’re not going to be able to explain action. Right. And so for many of, myself included, and that’s one of the, one of the reasons why I don’t consider myself a pure Neoplatonist, because I think the arguments about the mystery of emergence into normativity and the emanation of normativity, reason into causes, are equally symmetrical. And I can’t, because when I, I don’t see any, look, if you make this argument, and Lewis has to make the argument this way, that there are no causes that are reasons, you know what that entails? That there are no reasons that are causes. You can’t have it both ways. If you say, well, there are some reasons there are causes, you know what that means? That there are some causes that are also reasons. And Lewis sneaks it in at one point. Like, I’m sorry, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not accusing him of being a sloppy writer. Far from it. I don’t think that. But on page 41, he does this thing where he’s trying to talk about God and he invokes this, it is thus still an open question whether each man’s reason exists absolutely on its own, or whether it is the result, notice that’s a causal word, of some, and then he puts it in bracket, rational cause, because he needs God to be a creator, right, which is something that is both a informer of reasons, but also a causal thing that has effects. And so he, God is a rational cause. But then if God’s a rational cause, then there are causes that can be reasons, and the whole argument against naturalism actually self sort of self destructs. So I take it that where if JP gives up on like that because of that internal contradiction, and Paul, I know you want to defend Lewis at some point, so I’m just trying to state my points a problem. So one of the things that what I’m saying the non reductive naturalist wrestles with, right, yes, he does have the layers and there’s the interpenetration of emergence and emanation, but I think the good non reductive rationalist, maybe that’s self promotional, but the ones that I think through it very carefully, maybe that’s what maybe I should be saying. They take very seriously the possibility that there are causes that can be reasons and reasons that can be causes. And one of the things I tried to do is, it’s central to me this argument, is I try to argue that relevance realization is exactly the space that mediates between causation and reason. And that’s what most of the theory and the argument of relevance realization is about. Now, what does that mean for me? Well, that what that means for me is you have a choice with the interpenetration of emergence and emanation, either they completely interpenetrate. And then what you have, I would argue, is you have a choice between a non dual account of this that somehow right they completely interpenetrate and and they’re non logically identical with each other because reasons and causes aren’t logically identical. They can’t be on pain of infinite self refutation. They have to be literally non logically identical with each other. And I see that argument in Buddhism and Taoism, right, which is, you know, form and emptiness, the yin and the yang, right, right. Or you have an argument for some kind of Well, I guess it’s an asymmetrical dualism that there’s all this emergence and emanation, but then there’s something beyond the natural order. The problem is I can’t see how you put those two together, JP. Because I think the if you accept the machinery that sort of that we’ve been, I think, in some agreement about it, it undermines Lewis’s asymmetry argument, which is argument for something beyond, right. And then what it gives you is that it gives you, I think you have to make a complete interpenetration, right. So wherever, like I said, you have to make a complete interpenetration. Right. So wherever, like I said, and that’s what I tried to do. I tried to do that with the relevance realization argument. So I guess this would come down to this question. And sorry, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, I’m not trying to be coy. We’re all friends here and I don’t want to damage that at all. So that’s right. You won’t. You won’t. Go ahead. Okay. Okay, good. Is the difference between how the moreness and the suchness comes in this object, difference in degree or kind from the incarnation? Because this was a question that came up in the late Renaissance in the battle between the Cartesians on one side and the magical neoplateness on the other. And the reason why the Catholic Church actually ended up siding with Descartes is they argued that the neoplateness were basically saying there’s no difference in kind between natural events and what Jesus did. It’s just a difference of degree. And I think if I don’t, if I don’t misunderstand you guys, that sounds like a kind of heresy. Maybe not. But it’s not going to, what I’m saying is if, if you say it’s only a difference of degree, then the bomb outside the fish tank doesn’t work. Right, because you’re using that as an analogy for a difference in kind, right? If you say it’s a difference in kind, then you’re back with how do reasons become causes and how do causes become reasons. And then you’ve abandoned, right, the sort of central grammar of non-reductive physicalism. Sorry, that was a lot, but I’m trying, Paul, I’m trying to, I’m trying to do what you asked me to do, too, which is not use too much highfalutin philosophy. I’m trying to use really sort of basic terms and ideas and put it together. And the, you know, I think one of the tremendous strengths that Lewis brings to his book is he, even though I promoted this book quite a lot and a number of people have written back and said, this book wasn’t so easy. It’s okay. Fair enough. But I know, John, that was that was very, very helpful for me. I really appreciate the clarity and the clarity of that formulation in terms of laying these things out. So, and I’m going to have to ponder this. I’m probably not as fast as the two of you in terms of taking this in and sort of digesting it. So I know, JP, you have something you want to, you want to respond to. Yeah, I’ll definitely want to read about the dispute with the cart and neoplatism in the Catholic Church. It’s not something I’m aware of. My intuition was to see it more as a difference in degree. And even it’s one thing that I just indicted towards the end of the article. One of the things that happens in Lewis’s treatment of precise miracles is you get the idea that the miracles don’t really sort of cause anything. They are sort of reflections of bigger patterns, but they don’t really bring anything causally. So you’ll talk about, let’s say, in some miracles, Christ will sort of focus old patterns, patterns that happen at the grandest scales of emergence and omission. You will focus them on one point at other in other miracles. Christ will take future ways in which heaven and earth will meet, and he focuses them in some other miracles. So I can try to give examples. So, for instance, one old Christian miracle would be already mentioned, the multiplication of the lobes and fishes, for instance. It’s an old pattern in which heaven and earth meet, in which patterns and potential will meet to create lobes and fishes. It’s an old pattern. And Lewis says that, OK, in these miracles, what Christ does is he takes the pattern that happens at the cosmic scale and brings it into the human scale. And in other miracles, such as, for instance, the walking on water, that’s not a normal pattern. Lewis says that it’s a pattern of the new creation when the heavens will be remade, when there will be new laws of nature. But the way Lewis talks about it is very much a top down thing. Like the walking on water is not really bringing anything about. It’s sort of almost giving us hints of what will happen. And it gets more dramatic in other examples, for instance. I don’t think that Lewis talks about this specific problem. Maybe, Paul, if I’m wrong, you can correct me. But, for instance, when he even when he talks, for instance, about the resurrection, you won’t say that the resurrection really brought anything about it. Not per se. But it’s super important in terms of dogma that we say that it actually caused something. So in the miracles of Christ, you have to say that at least some of them are causing things bottom up, that they’re bringing about new patterns. And so I’ll have to think back about what John, you said, and I’ll be happy to hear your reply to what I just said. My intuition was to see the miracles of Christ in deep continuity with the relevance realization that already happens within nature. It’s sort of another. It’s sort of relevance realization occurring at the grandest scale possible. This is the way I was I was seeing it. So there’s I mean, I mean, and that came out in the conversation with Jonathan. I think there’s something deep. I mean, and this is, again, part of the the contact epistemology that Charles Taylor says we have to sort of recover. I think there is a deep continuity between how. The moreness of of anything, the mystery of the moreness comes into the mystery of the suchness and the mystery of the suchness reflects it goes into the mystery of the more. I mean, and I mean, and I take it and I hope this is OK that, you know, that’s that’s one of the claims, right, that reality and it’ll take God to be what you guys take to be ultimately real is simultaneously, non logically identically mysteriously transcendent and equally mysteriously imminent that. And so. I take it that we’re that that’s sort of a shared thing where we’re talking it right. And they and then the idea that relevance realization is a process that capitalizes now I’m using capitalizing Paul uses colonialism. Boy, we sound like real inheritance of the right. But the capitalizes on that fact about reality that there are aspects that are top down invariant and aspects that are bottom up novel and all that sort of thing. And I think that’s deeply right. I think there’s a deep connection between the intelligibility of the world and the relevance realization machinery. And I do think there is deep continuity between these levels. Between that level and then even within levels of the brain, etc. And I would give an example of this an example you use that and then I’ll turn the question around. This is an example, and I think it’s a good example. I use it elsewhere. The placebo effect. You can’t explain the placebo effect at the biochemical level because it’s a flower pill. It has no causal powers as a flower pill. It’s only because it is taken up within cognition and given a particular meaning. That it actually causes the person to be healed in some fashion. And let’s remember that all medicine uses the placebo effect. People think incorrectly that what happens when I take a medicine is it’s not doing the placebo effect. No, no. Every medicine is has to just be somewhat better than the placebo effect. Every medicine includes the placebo effect. Now, here’s my question. Is the placebo effect a miracle? I don’t want to say so. Why not? It’s mostly a definitional thing, I believe. I don’t think so. I think it’s a conceptual thing. But let’s play with this. Let’s play with this as friends. Yeah, yeah, because Even when I read Catholic theologians on the subject, they typically want to draw a sharp line between okay to use our mother language, I would say the real mother language. Okay, to use our mother language, I would say the relevance realization that happens at the highest scale possible. And the realization that happens at the lower scale. So you would only classify a miracle per se as an instance of the realization that happens at the highest scales, but it’s deeply continuous with what happens at the lower ones as well. See, I’ll jump in here because I’m prone to agree with John on this. And because, you know, I think part of why the book resonated as resonated so deeply with me, especially I think it’d be very interesting, John, to read the chapters on miracles of the old creation miracles of the new creation. Because that very much gets at your question about about kind or degree, because the argument that Lewis makes in those last chapters are are very much a degree that the miracles of the old creation are I mean when doesn’t water become wine. I mean, that’s one of his arguments. Water becomes wine all the time. Now obviously when you’ve got something like the Virgin birth, you know, you’re, you know, Lewis’s is, you know, working on some things, but I mean, your, your comment about what medicine isn’t a placebo obviously, you know, is a very, very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And so, you know, I think that’s a very important point. And they are being administered a drug. Now, obviously, the traditional case of the placebo effect And they are being administered a drug. now, obviously, the traditional case of the placebo effect is that the doctor has one thing in mind is that the doctor has one thing in mind and the patient has another. And this gets into really interesting questions And this gets into really interesting questions of distributed consciousness. And I’d say perhaps even to one degree, distributed realization in terms of… Well, because lingering in the book is the question, what is a miracle? And, you know, I’m in some ways, you know, I would have to do quite a bit of more work and I’m really going to probably really have enjoyed this conversation. I just want to say, John, you know, don’t worry about, I can’t speak for JP, but you should really never worry about offending me with frankness in any of this because I so trust the quality of your good faith in these conversations. So I’d rather have you be just blunt. Maybe that’s my New Jersey nature, but I frankly love it. And I know Louis loved it too. Louis, you know, the thing that Louis said was, you know, the best thing in the world for him was, you know, basically, well, for him, it was male friends, but that gets into a whole other thing, but friends sharing, you know, nobody loved to go at it hammer and tong like C.S. Lewis about these things. Yeah. And that comes through. I mean, that comes from the book and don’t misunderstand me. I mean, I wouldn’t be devoting this much time if I didn’t think there was, and like I said, there’s a lot of important, and I started this by saying there’s a lot of points of deep agreement, but I guess for me, maybe it comes down to I’m kind of a Zen naturalist, Neoplatonist, and Louis is a Christian supernaturalist, Neoplatonist. And I see a lot of the things that, and that’s why I brought up the placebo effect. I see that just deep continuity and that it’s because the placebo effect that I’m like, I’m a non-reductive physicalist or as JP said, if everything above atoms is an illusion, then the machines I’m doing and the experiments I’m running are illusions. And then the science I’m generating from those as an illusion and the science that’s supposed to tell me that there’s nothing but atoms at the bottom would itself be an illusion. And then the whole thing just disappears in a performative self-contradiction. And so I think the fact that we’re just like, we’re on the same side of the track in that we take all of us together, take this problem very seriously. There’s lots of philosophers that do. And I think there are many people, like for example, within the new atheist camp, who don’t get this problem and why it’s such a profound problem. And so in that part, when it gets onto that, I find myself more in allegiance with Louis. But like I said, I think there’s lots that there’s many layers and ways in which we have things like the placebo effect. And I think they just undermine any bottom line, only one level real kind of materialist physicalism. By the way, when you go down a net block has this thing that says, you don’t end up at matter if you do that. Because if you’re going to go all the way down, you end up in probability waves. And what the heck are those? And so I think that what I’m trying to say is, I think miracles depend on there being a difference of kind. And I think all of the arguments that I can marshal seem to only give me differences of degree. And I like, what is it about the bigger level, other than it being big JP, that makes it a miracle when the placebo effect isn’t a miracle, or the fact that I have a scientific theory, because that’s another example, isn’t a miracle. Because the scientific theory also runs off of higher level properties, right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down. Right. Yeah. I’ll, there’s one thing that I think I could, instead of trying to answer, let’s precisely what miracles are, I’d rather try to find a way to say it within your system that I’d be happy with. Well, that’d be welcome to me too. So does, would that mean that in your system, I’d say without trying to call them miracles, would you say that, let’s say what Christ did, like these events, or metaphysically possible, that they’re just higher level occurrences of the placebo effect? Because if it’s possible, I don’t really care where we draw the line of what is or isn’t a miracle. Well, but see, that’s, that’s the, okay, that’s brilliant way you just did, because that’s the pivotal question. The pivotal question. And the question is, what is it we’re talking about when we’re talking, when we’re talking about the constraints on possibility? Right. That’s it. That’s the key question. Right. And see, Lewis, I think has a way of introducing miracles as difference in kind, because he says the constraints on possibility do not form a unified single system. That’s how I understand what he means by the naturalism is the whole show. And because he says there’s things beyond that put, right, a higher order, make higher order possibilities possible. Sorry for that pun, but we don’t have a verb that does that other word, right, that he can actually introduce something like Jesus walking on the water, right, because what he says is, yes, and he says this, he says, basically, within this constraints of possibility, that can’t happen. Right. He, he takes it seriously. He doesn’t, one of the things I like about Lewis is he’s not dismissive of his opponents. Right. And he says, yeah. And he says, but only if you have something outside of it, right, then I, then I, then there is real possibility outside of this. And then if you have the asymmetry, then you can talk about the real possibility intersecting with the natural system. I think you have to be a supernaturalist in order for there to be the difference. And I mean that in a very strict sense, I just argued here in order for there to be the difference of kind that Lewis wants. Now, if so, I’m going to be honest, because we’re friends, and we’re trying to be honest with friends should always have all things in common as much as possible. Right. So I think within what I’m arguing, something like Jesus literally walking on the water is not possible, but that, but what I’m not denying is a separate claim you’re making is that this is an event, this is an event, I would call it a myth. Okay. This is an event that illuminates so much more. And that’s why we keep this story around because it’s powerfully illuminative. It enhances our more comprehensive relevance realization. I totally get that. I think that’s what all mythic language does. But the thing is you can have that mythic language without miracles. So for example, the Buddha said this, he said, this is how you know somebody is not one of my disciples if he offers to perform a miracle. Because for the Buddha, right, if you didn’t have this system, and there’s lots of, he’s fine with mythological symbolic talk, he tells parables as much as Jesus does. He’s as great to my mind, a parable list as Jesus of Nazareth, right, the parable of the raft, right, the parable of the mustard seed, he’s got a mustard seed parable too, right, there’s a ton of them. Okay. So great. He’s a master of that. But notice how he has exactly the opposite attitude towards the miraculous. Well, and I think it’s right here when we’re getting into this definition, because I don’t see, one of the interesting, so I was in the Bridges Meaning Discord server yesterday, and we have a former Hasidic Jew who is part of our crew. And he’s, you know, he’s very curious about Jesus, but thinks the Apostle Paul is a charlatan, which makes for really fun conversations in a group where there are a lot of Christians. But you know, he asked me, he said, you know, you Christians don’t believe in Messiahs much, do you? And so he and I got talking about that. It was especially for the, you know, for the Hasidic. It’s a fascinating conversation. Anyway, no one got too far afield there. But you know, one of the things that comes, see, maybe I’ve read Lewis wrong, but I don’t think so. I think part of the power of the book that I think Lewis makes is he’s, I don’t know that he’s making an argument that miracles are different in kind. I think the power of the book is that there are difference in degree and that the, and I’m curious, John, about your take on the fish tank argument, because I think in many ways the fish tank argument is completely illustrative of Lewis’s point, because in the miracles of the old creation, the miracles of the new creation, he argues that walking on water is something we can’t do for possibly reasons akin to the placebo effect. And I mean, that’s a huge argument. I mean, don’t get me wrong as someone who sinks reliably. But that is, and using that illustration, the argument would be why does Jesus bid Peter upon the water? And why does Peter, at least for a moment, sustain? Now I think a difference in kind would say that Jesus somehow enables Peter by and this is where I’m very uncomfortable with supernaturalism. And I’m more comfortable in a sense with Lewis making the argument that what we’re really dealing with is sort of a divine naturalism where, and even though C.S. Lewis uses the word supernatural, I think the force of his argument in the book is that if taking more into account the, you know, walking on water is the old creation, again, and you have to understand what he deals with nature in terms of this book, and this is very consistent with, I think, Lewis’s attempt to re-enchant the world, that in fact what we’re actually dealing with is something very deep about, I mean, it gets very deep and very spooky and very wooey for a lot of people in our culture. But I read Lewis as making that argument, and we’re talking about the fact that he’s doing it in a way that’s not a subject of our culture, but I read Lewis as making that argument, and what was so interesting, I listened to that, I thought that rebel wisdom conversation, John, between you and Jonathan, that was amazing. That was amazing. And I think- I really like that one. And part of that was Jonathan said something at a point which, you know, sometimes wow, he is really invested in a way that few people are in terms of his understanding of story and the world and symbolism. And so I think I would argue that for me, the power of Lewis’s book has been that, you know, and one of the questions I would have is, yeah, we don’t have time for some of this, but- so I think that is the force of Lewis’s book, that in a certain way, what Lewis tries to do is, in fact, re-enchant the world by dispelling the supernatural. And Lewis, late in his life- so Lewis, of course, his relationship he had with Joy Davidman, really complicated thing on many different levels, Joy Davidman is dying of cancer, and Lewis has- I don’t remember if Lewis prayed, I know he did pray, but had someone pray for them, and there was, in a sense, in Lewis’s mind, and I’ve seen this with others, and this is part of the reason why when I look at these bottom-up materialists, I just scoff, I’ve seen way too much. And now people might say I’ve been bullshitted or, you know, I’ve been placebo-ed, I don’t know, but, you know, there’s an exchange that happens, and Lewis starts taking on Joy’s- some of Joy’s pain and physical problems, and she’s relieved of them for a time. And I’ve just seen, as a foreign missionary, as a Christian minister, I’ve just seen stuff that makes me believe I wonder if we weren’t made to walk on water. And so, I don’t know where that puts me at in terms of medieval Roman Catholic theology, but there I am. Can I try to put it in a way that to see if both of you would be happy with it? Let’s say, so right now, let’s say, as we know in our day-to-day life, how the constraints on possibility shape the emergence in the world, like we won’t walk on water, like as far as we know how the constraints on determination work, it won’t happen. Let me just leave it there for this point. But I think if I understand what Paul is saying and what Lewis could respond is, okay, beyond those constraints that we know, there are, let’s say, more fundamental constraints that explain the current constraints, but that could also give rise to other kind of constraints where it would be possible to do like Christ did, to walk on water, and so on. So behind, let’s say, what we currently think, typical people in North America, let’s say, behind what we currently think is the ground of intelligibility, there is a higher level of intelligibility which could give rise to, let’s say, other laws of nature which would permit us to do what Christ has done. Would that be at least metaphysically possible, John? So let me try to make sure I understand you. So the idea is we have something that is supposed to be simultaneously the source of intelligibility and the being of things, like the causal structure and the information structures at the same time, and it grounds all of them. And then what you want me to do is consider the possibility that source could give rise to other constraints that would actually undermine being an intelligibility, but then I’m supposed to accept as intelligible and existing? Well, kind of. If you go to the ultimate grammar, you’re not, so that’s the problem I have with the fish metaphor. It’s a spatial analogy that’s misleading, right? Because actually the bomb can impact on the fish tank because they’re all within the same physical space, right? And it’s not like if you go down to the ground and you monkey with it, it’s not like you can just over here, there’ll be a, it’s like, no, no, all of it, right? It’s like, it’s like if you say, you know, I want you to use, you’ve got this language and you can do all those things with language, and then I want you to, right, and there’s these constraints of a noun and a verb and subject and predicate, and if you just took those away, I want you to speak now. And I’m going to say, I can’t, that doesn’t make any sense to me. That doesn’t make any sense because those constraints are constitutive. Okay, so just to make sure I follow correctly, is if we were to suppose that there is, let’s say, more, a more fundamental layer of intelligibility, it would, like, blow everything apart and it wouldn’t make anything intelligible. Well, if it blows everything above it, then it’s not the ground of intelligibility, right? And I’m sorry, and to be fair to me, this is a classic neoplatonic argument I’m making. This is an argument that’s used against Gnostics and other things. No, no, no, it has to, right? There has to, right? It has to be sort of rational in that sense all the way up and down because if you break it anywhere, your justification for it completely disappears. Yeah, that was very good. Thank you. I’m sorry. It’s really good. I mean, it’s super clear. At least I know what I’ll need to work on. Yeah, I fully expect you’ll come back with. What I like about you is we do this and you keep coming back with better and better stuff. And I mean it. The work in that essay and in that video and the discussion with Jonathan, to my mind, that’s the best work you’ve done. I mean, it’s really good. It’s really good. I mean, I take it seriously. That’s why I’m here. You’ll come back and that’s great. That’s what I love the most, right? The fact that I say this and I mean it every time I say it. The fact that you guys find my way of, you know, organizing concepts and making arguments helpful. That to me, that means a lot to me. Yeah, well, it’s super useful to me. It’s a great way to do open processing. It’s kind of weird that maybe one of the best ways for me, maybe the best way besides just engaging directly in liturgical practices, the best way for me to grow within my Christianity is to engage in arguments with you and then come back when you, because you’re able to pinpoint, let’s say, the difficult points in what I’m doing so that I know exactly what I need to work on for, let’s say, the following months. And I can go much faster through, let’s say, all of the issues that I may have by using you as a shortcut to pinpoint the bad points in my argument. So it’s, yeah, I just sincerely want to thank you, Jon. No, well, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me. I mean, you guys know that I, I, I, I emulate or aspire to emulate Socrates. And if I can help people through phyla, opponent processing to, you know, be a midwife so they can give birth to their own more developed thought, that to me is, for me, that’s a significant contributor to me judging that I’m leading a good life. So thank you for that. Thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me. What did we lose JP? I don’t know. I don’t know how I didn’t hear me say that because I don’t want to repeat it. Did you hear what I said, JP? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re just fine. So my outgoing connection seems bad, but I see you both perfectly and I hear I heard everything. Well, some of my life seems like that. So Well, you know, I want to get back, come back to the earlier points you were making, John, and forgive me if I’m, if I’m just being slow, because I very much do want to understand you. You know, a lot of this gets into the question of what a reason is. And this, this very much gets into the, you know, so let’s imagine, so let’s use the placebo, the placebo question. No, let’s, let’s, would the placebo effect work? Let’s say there’s a family for whom a child is, you know, the doctors don’t really have any effective safe and effective medicine for this child. Would the placebo effect work if let’s imagine the child is too young to understand the construals of a placebo effect? Would the placebo effect work if the drug were administered to a child, but the parents, you know, the parents are in a sense, the ones who are being duped with respect to the placebo, because so to me, so much of this gets into, you know, with, you know, when the conversations with, and again, a huge, I think we all, owe a huge debt to you, John, because what you’ve done with your, with your work, I think, in this space has been to, you know, is to establish a grammar, to at least you’ve given me a lot of new ideas through the way you formulated all of this. And so when we, when we would imagine a placebo being given to a child who cannot understand what a medicine is, and the doctor administers this, and the parents perhaps imagine that it’s a medicine, where is the distributed, I mean, there’s distributed cognition that you talk about a lot. Definitely. And, and I think, you know, so I’ve been reading more 18th century um, philosophes lately, and 18th century history, because I think where, you know, it might be that a lot of this really was sort of philosophical in the 11th and 12th century, but when it comes to the 18th century is where in some ways the rubber really hits the road. I mean, obviously through deism and through a new formula, through a new distributed image of the world, the discarded image gets destroyed. And, and so one, one has to wonder, you know, the, the idea behind the celebrity atheists, as Jordan likes to call them, the idea behind them is that in some ways the, um, you know, Voltaire just sort of keeps expanding and wins the day, even though Voltaire didn’t completely get rid of God. But part of, part of me asked the question, you know, why would we have a meaning crisis if reality weren’t in, in this strange way distributed between us like it is? And, and why would, why would some of these other forms, you know, one of the things that I think one of the real powers of narrative is its affordance in distributed cognition and not only cognition, I think you mean cognition in a much broader sense. You know, this is distributed construal of, of the world that we commonly interact with, which clearly has a, a determined physical nature. And, and so it’s, I think, again, when Lewis argues that the world is, the physical world is colonizable, you know, one of the illustrations he used is, uses is, you know, sort of like a kingdom is to the king that when the king arrives, suddenly the kingdom begins to take shape. Now, now again, for us, because we have this very firm line, which quite rightly was placed by the enlightenment between that which we wish and that which happens, you know, to the degree of, let’s say, walking on water, the question then comes into, well, how strange is this world? And, and, you know, when I, when I listen to the atheist Christian debates, to me, a lot of this runs down into, okay, y’all are doing your rituals and you’re doing your prayers and you’re, you’re talking to this God and you’re doing all of this stuff. And we think, we think that that, that simply is irrelevant to the real world. And, and so in many ways, the questions are where in fact are these boundaries? So I, I’m trying to, there was a, I can’t tell if there’s two questions or you started asking me what was going on with the, the small child and the placebo. Right. And it was the point of that. I just want to make sure the point of that is to introduce the idea, you know, that this child is going to do it because, you know, not, they don’t have a belief structure, but they’re imitating their parents and that the parents have been sort of to some degree, the child can inherit or the rationale. The child might not even know. I mean, if you’re getting into a question of boundaries, I mean, the child might be unconscious and the doctor administers a placebo in the sight of the parents. And I don’t know that if they’ve done any studies along this, but it’d be a very interesting study. Yeah. Well, with that, I don’t know. So, yeah, I, I’m ignorant there of what would happen. I mean, you have to be, you have to do so much to control for the clever Hans effect. And if there’s any clever Hans effect happening, explain that. Oh, the clever Hans effect is, so there was this horse that could do multiplication. All right. All kinds of things. And people would ask it, you know, what’s two times six. And the horse would knock out how many things it could, and it would give the right answers. And it’s like amazing. It turned out that clever Hans couldn’t answer any of the questions if its owner wasn’t around. Yeah. Yeah. Because what was happening and there’s no fraud, by the way, this is the important point. There’s no fraud. The owner was giving these ever so subtle cues when, when, when the, when the horse was doing, so the horse was able to predict when it should stop. Right. Clever Hans. Right. And we do this all the time. And so, I mean, I talked about this when I, when I talked about stuff in the series about, I think a lot of, a lot of what looked like extraordinary, that, well, they are extraordinary. What looked like supernatural, maybe that’s our term right now, psychic events, actually get very readily explained by our really impressive capacity for picking up implicit learning complex patterns. And also, you know, doing very complex sequence of things, you know, and so, and you know, we’re, and we’re just making use of that right now. All three of us are just picking up on these huge complex implicit patterns from the way people’s, like eyebrows are moving, skulls, you know, this is furrowing, the slight changes in the rate of, like all of this and all of that’s what’s going on in John. And we’re doing it right now. And it’s like magic. And we know, we take it for granted, but when we meet people, like some of the people that are statistically, notice that adjective, by the way, statistically abnormal because of the autistic spectrum, and they can’t pick up on all of that. And then we just, and then we realize, oh, yeah, that’s actually really, really impressive. It’s really, really impressive. And that’s what I met by like, what is that a miracle? Well, like, my problem is, like, I think if you start washing the boundaries, Paul, like, it’s just like, it’s like, it’s the old, it’s the old, again, argument, right? If the predicate applies to everything, then it applies to nothing, right? And then that’s what I met. Yeah. Well, isn’t that then what the question, when we’re asking to define a miracle is, you know, we’re not saying where are the boundaries? And, and as a, obviously, as a clergy person, I live with really open boundaries a lot in these, in these issues. Well, but the thing is, I mean, and I don’t want to, we’re not, I don’t want to do one upmanship, but Paul, I’ve also seen a lot of extraordinary things. And they, and they happen outside, they’ve happened outside of a Christian context, you know, there’s shamanic things, it’s like, I don’t want to get into it, right? But the point is, right, you know, and, and I don’t buy, and I don’t think you guys would do it, because you guys are very charitable to other religions. Well, well, that’s, that’s, those are demons in the Buddhist world or the shamanic world, you know, I don’t get that. I think in fact, there’s deep continuity between what, you know, shamans do, and what psychotherapists do, in a lot of really important ways. And, you know, I know people have really miraculous experiences when they’re in therapy, right? You know, and that’s why young coin this frame, this does not, people take this to be an explanation. It’s not an explanation, synchronicity. That’s not an explanation. It’s a term for things that, right, right, there’s some, but that happens, like people, like weird stuff like that happens. I don’t deny that. The point that I make is that I don’t, I might, well, I don’t, I don’t see why any particular narrative about that gets privileged, right? Yeah, so I can try restating it to see if I got the point correctly, is within a Christian context, people would say that there is a hierarchy to those miraculous occurrences, and that, let’s say, the pinnacle of it all was what happened at the cosmic level in the incarnation, and this was sort of the, all of the most intense miracles. And as you, you, incarnation, resurrection, I mean, the whole, the whole cycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but rather than, let’s say, having this, sort of this more strict hierarchy that you see within Christianity, John, you would put it rather sort of lower, there would not be miracles that are as drastic, let’s say, at what Christ did, but in different groups, let’s say, get in a prayer group in Christianity, or a patient with a psychotherapist or a shaman in a group, there would still be sort of a social level relevance realization that can shape the events below them in weird ways, like the placebo effect, but rather than having, it’s just, so really it’s more about the shape of the hierarchy, you would keep it flatter than Christians would. Well, let me give you an example of what I mean, okay? Rather than make this up, so I watched a film, and I’ve actually seen different versions of this, and it’s like, it’s a straight documentary, it’s not a fictional film or anything like this, and so there’s hunter-gatherers, there’s some Bushmen in one of the videos, there’s somebody, they’re another group, and they’re doing heat exhaustion hunting, which is you chase the antelope, it runs, and because you’re human beings, you track it, you just, until the antelope heats exhaust, then you get close enough you can spear it, but what often happens is the antelope gets out of sight, and not only does it get out of sight, it gets out of sign, like they’re, and what you watch one of them do is he starts acting like the antelope, it starts acting it, right, and acting it out, and you can see him getting into, and this is what I talked about, and then he goes, there. Now, is that perfect? No, but is it way, way above chance? Yes, and oh, and that’s it, and they pick up the trail again, and I think that’s really extraordinary, and I think, but I think I can explain it in terms of implicit learning, and things like that, and, but notice what I’m doing, I’m invoking narrative and drama, and he’s doing that, and that actually enables him to do all of this, but I don’t, I see that as wonderful, I see that as impressive, I see that as extraordinary, but I don’t see it as miraculous, right, and like that seems to me to, and I’m trying to use one, because in, like again, that’s, that’s part of, like if that, if that kind of event isn’t part of the furniture of the universe of our history, then, you know, then how did we get, like we lose the capacity to explain how we get here, and all kinds of stuff like that, and that’s what I mean again, and so I’m trying to shift it to something, I’m trying to give you guys everything you’re saying, here’s a narrative, he has a worldview, he implement the, the, the hunter, he enacts it, he does what I call participatory knowing. One, now, now one other one, because I want to do two, okay, and I do a lot of work with this, Doug Chappie, and some of you might have seen this, the rovers on Mars, right, and the scientists have to move the rovers around on Mars, so what do they do? They say, they anthropomorphize and identify with the rover, we need to go here, we need to go here, and then what do they do is when they’re trying to figure out problems, they, they, they technomorphize themselves, like, you know, here’s the rock, and they move, and they become the rover, and they even say strange things, and they sort of laugh about it, like my wrist, you know, I had, I was working in the garden, and my right wrist was, was stuck, and then the wheel on the, the right wheel on the rover was, and I don’t believe in that, right, but they feel this kind of special kind of connection. Now, now, I, like, with Jan and I are working really hard to try and, you know, what’s going on there, participatory knowing, perspectival knowing, and I think that’s really extraordinary, and it shows how terrifically sophisticated and complex and multi-dimensional and multi-layer human cognition is, and by the way, Paul, it’s a case of distributed cognition, because it’s all of the scientists together, and, and the rover, and Vertessi even used, and says, that’s the ethnographer, that the rover becomes like a totem for them, there’s all this religious language being invoked, they even sort of get this weird sense of sympathy. Is that a miracle? I don’t think so, right? Why not? See, again, when, see, what’s interesting about Louis is that Louis is a very strange hero for many Christians who own him as a hero, because Louis, gets into his story, I think Louis, I think Louis would argue, let’s, let’s take Louis and Peugeot and put him together, I think Louis would argue if he used Peugeotian terms, that, that there are many strange things in this world, but that they, in fact, would, would fall finally into a hierarchy, and that there would be both the strangest and the strangest and the most central would in that way not be too far from each other. And so, and so Louis, Louis argues in that book, as he does in many places, that in this sense, the world isn’t democratic, because by virtue of the limited experience each of us can have, we might not be, you know, very close to that both central and most strange range, but yet, all of these other things in the world, and Louis is very much not a snob in terms of, you know, in terms of other, what we would call within a secular-ish spectrum, other religious systems, because he obviously was a deep lover of mythologies throughout the ancient world, especially European and classical mythologies, and, and I think his argument in the book is, is basically that, you know, Christianity is this, is this, this story of the central strange thing, and that the rest of the world sort of, you know, smooths itself out around it, but if that is in fact the central strange thing, that’s going to, you know, and obviously he posts it, as does Christianity, centrally on the story of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, you know, all of that. So I think that’s, again, getting back to your, your, the difference in degree and difference in kind, I think Louis on that, and I certainly could be wrong, I would hate to argue for Louis, but I think that’s his argument in the book, that if you really want to understand this strange thing that we are all participating in, including people designing rovers and, and, whoops, we lost JP, designing rovers on Mars, that, that this is the story, and of course Louis is going to fully understand that many of us will have, be skeptical about it, as many people might be about other strange stories, and the reason he begins the book with a ghost story, I think, has everything to do with this, and so he keeps saying that there are, there are patterns out there in the world that our own little range of experience might not get at, but at least what he claims for himself is that through all of the reading and investigation he’s done, he believes this is the central chapter of the story, and by this chapter the world can be known, and Louis will very clearly cite, you know, people believe or don’t believe this, but that’s, that’s, that’s his, that’s his assertion. I think that’s what the book is about. That’s interesting. I have to think about that because, I mean, I, I, I, I take what you say very seriously. You’ve read, you know Louis better than I do. It seems like, it seems like he’s arguing for a difference in kind with the whole argument about supernaturalism and the reason, and the different, there’s a difference in kind for him between reasons and causes. I mean, in so far as he’s invoking the, Plato clearly intended it that way, so it might be that there, there might be a, maybe, and maybe this is what you’re saying, Paul, maybe there’s a shift in the book between the beginning of the book and the end of the book. And maybe it’s an inconsistency in him. I mean, that could be two. I mean, he’s a human being just like the rest of us, sure, sure. But in terms of that argument, in terms of what miracles are, where I found the book helpful was because of how he, he, especially in later parts of the book, I, I could in some ways live into the narrative better and understand the world around me better by this reformulation. And so, go ahead. Well, I just want to make sure that I’m understanding that because there’s a, there’s an argument in here I haven’t heard before. And it’s not just that I have sort of a technical interest in argument. I think it’s an existentially relevant one. You seem, it sounds to me like you’re saying something like, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of strangeness, well, right, and, right, and what a miracle is to me is an event that’s strange, but in a way that connects and illuminates all the other strangeness. Is that a fair representation? Yes. Hmm, that’s interesting. I have to think about that one because I don’t know. So, I mean, again, I see myself doing that a lot. I see myself taking things that most, like a lot of traditional people will guard as strange or like here’s mindfulness and here’s mystical experiences and here’s flow and here’s, you know, consciousness and what I do is I try and find a way in which they all make sense together. But that to me strikes me as the epitome of science, but that sounds deeply analogous to what you’re saying as well. Yeah. And I think Lewis would argue Lewis was not anti-science in any way. No, I’m not saying yes. Sorry, if it sounded like I was conveying that I’m not. What I’m saying is it would strike let me ask you this. Wouldn’t it, isn’t it fair to say that would strike many people as odd to say that there’s this deep isomorphism between science and the miraculous? Lewis wouldn’t have any problem with that. I don’t think. Yeah, that’s interesting. I have to think about this argument though, because I mean, it’s interesting because that’s one it has to do with sort of that idea about like systemic insight and systematic insight. How we can get systematic insight in our theories that reveals systemic connections in the world and we can, right? And so when like, so again, no insult meant. So do you need God then for miracles? Because like, isn’t Einstein doing that? Like he takes all this weird, he literally takes the anomalies of Newton’s physics, all the strangeness in Newton’s physics. And he goes, by the way, if you just give up this stuff that you can’t, absolute space and time, all of this makes sense. So he gives you this super strange thing and it takes all the anomalies and he makes sense of it. And by the way, it just keeps making predictions and it gives us the power to take a paperclip of matter and smash a city to the ground. Like it’s like, whoa. Like, but. Well, and do you need God? What on earth do we mean by those words? Sorry, and I didn’t want to be in. No, no, no, no. I’m not offended at all. But I, because I mean, again, as a Christian minister, I live in a sort of tribal box in some ways. Yeah. And so when we use those words, do you need God? Obviously, as someone who is a curator and promoter of ritual and narrative and pathway, you know, all of this. I mean, yes, but of course you need God in that way. And I didn’t mean to be dismissive. No, no, no, no. But, but, but, you know, this gets into this gets into these questions about into these, these really weird questions. So I listened to Tom Holland. Are you still there, JP? Or do you just kind of? He may be in that one way situation where he can hear us and see us and we can’t hear or see him. Like, if we can administer placebo. That was gone. So no, I, I, I think, I think what you asked right there, John, for me is, is so much at the heart of, of estuary of the logos of conversations with you, because I don’t know what we mean by that. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I don’t want to trespass. I mean this. No, no, Paul, you’ve done a lot of work, like getting people to wonder about this profoundly. And so I don’t, yeah. I brought the question up because on one hand, of course, Einstein, right. Einstein is by his own admission, he’s kind of a religious person, but his God is, is basically Spinoza’s God, right? Because, well, those historical reasons. But I guess it’s, it’s that question about. I, yeah, well, sorry, I’m holding back because of what you just said. And I, I want to give it its due respect. Yeah, it’s. Because he, because there’s a sense in which Einstein needs the mysterious to do the science, right? And he sees the science that he does as not in any kind of way, a contradictory with that mystery, but never exhausting it, which is why part of what I had that notion of the inexhaustible. Yes. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. That question is, that question is, is in some sense, it’s a difficulty not only in what we mean by God, but what we mean by needing, what kind of need are we talking about? Right. And I assume that there are multiple needs of different kinds, and we’re trying to figure out how to best coordinate them together. I mean, I think this is one of the arguments of the pragmatists, that ultimately, that’s what we’re always trying to do. And I think that’s one of the arguments that we’re trying to do. Yeah, I don’t want I, sorry, I don’t mean to seem like I’m fumbling. I don’t want to just say anything to that. Like, that’s like, like that. It’s like, I think that’s important. I think, because I take it seriously, this idea of our because, because I think of relevance realization simultaneously, right, that which gives rise to and grounds reason, and that which gives rise to and grounds, our experience, at least, of sacred, our experience of sacredness. I what you just said, like, yeah, and then the idea that there is some symbol on some joining together, something that joins those together. That’s, that’s what you keep you keep doing right here right now. Am I interpreting you? Yeah, yeah, no, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I think that’s very good. And so, um, yeah, um, I don’t know what I don’t, I don’t know what to do. Yeah, I don’t leave it there for now. I don’t know what happened to JP, we’re gonna get them back. We’re, we’re, we’re at an hour and hour and 45 minutes now. So, but that’s a good place to end. I like that. I don’t know. I mean, it’s a very good place to end because it has a couple of the criteria, the Socratic criteria, we didn’t actually resolve anything, which is great. Because if we resolve, it’s always a suspicious thing if things are resolved. But I think we also, I think, well, the three of us, I can’t, I’m just surmising from JP, but from his interaction, some of the things that say, we all got to places we couldn’t get to individually on our own. Yes. And I think, I think for me, those are two of the marks of DL logos. Well, I know, I know I did. I mean, I really appreciated. I mean, when you kind of, you know, laid some of this out, it was so helpful to me to see better in some different words, some of the tensions, some of the choices, some of the consequences that was super helpful. And, and it, and it’s shown better light on this book that I’m, you know, this book that I’m fairly familiar with, you know, with so much of what Louis wrote is such a complicated thinker and such a complicated human being that there’s all kinds of stuff going on under there. And then of course, the more you know about someone, it just all keeps getting deeper. Yeah, it just keeps opening up. But this final question, oh, here it comes back. This final question of where we’re ending for me has been, you know, in many ways, the, you know, this is, this is why Jordan Peterson came on the scene. It’s like, you know, and I don’t know why, but something something’s drawing me there. What’s, what’s going on with that? And then, you know, Strahan says, you got to listen to the Fervakey guys, you know, and so then to you and, you know, JP comes up with his zombie dreams, you know, this is the, you know, this is the, this is the question that won’t let me be. And well, I don’t know if we share the, if we share the same question, I have a suspicion that maybe we share the same question, but from different sides, or, and yeah, there’s something that we keep getting drawn together. And that’s not fortuitous. I’m willing to, I’m willing to acknowledge that totally. And I think that, well, I am a firm belief. I think, I mean, I want to, I wanted to invoke Morton’s idea of hyper objects, like evolution or the East India Company. These are things that, right, that don’t have, they don’t, they’re not objects in having a specific location. They are distributed entities. And often they can be distributed agents like the East India Company that solved problems and also caused disasters that individual human beings couldn’t do. And I, and I think, and that’s why I mentioned the East India Company, as well as evolution or global warming, right? That these hyper objects can only be grasped, if at all. But let me put it this way, the best hope we have of approaching an adequacy in our grasp of these hyper objects is with the machinery of dialogical distributed cognition. And so I, I, I sometimes, well, I’m going to say, I feel like right now there’s a hyper object we’re trying to get at about reality. And we’re, we’re doing this distributed cognition thing about it. And so I wanted to thank you guys for that, for that. I mean, we have to do this kind of serious play all the time. I think we really do. Yeah. JP, we, we, we, we, you dropped out at that point. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m really sorry. I realized that I had done something wrong with my setup. And I think like the neighbor’s internet was missing with my signal. So it was my bad on this one. So I’m, I don’t really want to add anything because I don’t know like what went on when I was missing. I’ll be really happy to really listen to it. And yeah, I really liked this conversation as we talked about earlier, it’s been super useful for me. And yeah, if John, in particular, you have references for what I should read, you mentioned some neoplatonic arguments against the idea that the ground of intelligibility could sort of have the kind of layers that I was attempting to get at. So if you, if you have some things you can send me, I’d be really happy to. Yeah, I’ll try and think of that. Yeah, that’s good. I’m reading, I’m reading a book, D’Amastio, what is it? Questions on first principles. He’s the last great pagan neoplatonist philosopher from around the seventh century. He’s, he’s, maybe it’s, no, no, it’s the sixth century, because I think he’s driven out when Justinian shuts down the academy, the last version of it in Athens. And, and so what’s really interesting is, it’s a very big book, I’m working my way through it, the way I went my way through Spinoza’s ethics, you know, to read it literally, I kind of mean this literally given our conversation, read it religiously. And yeah, and he represents the culmination of the entire neoplatonic tradition. And it’s, that’s the book I think that you’d need to read. That’s the book, it’s not an easy book. Sorry. But also, and it’s not a cheap book to buy. But the person who translates it and provides notes for it, Sara Abelrape, is to my mind, one of the top five, maybe the top three scholars on neoplatonism in the world today, right now. She is brilliant, brilliant. So that’s what I would recommend. Thanks. Well, thank you both. I will, after we close off, after this is rendered, I will send you both a copy of this and do with it as you will. And I, this, this was tremendous. Thank you both. This was, this was really, really good. So Paul, I hope we stayed close enough to, I don’t know what to call it, the audience that you were, you expressed that concern at the beginning of the discussion. I think they’ll love it. Good, good. That pleases me to hear that. Thank you for saying that. All right. Take care of both of you. Yeah, take good care. Bye bye. Bye.