https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Bft-jIZ2oqM
Hello everybody. I am here today with John Vervecky. John Vervecky is a professor of cognitive science and psychology at the University of Toronto. I think many of my listeners will probably be very well aware of you and you won’t need an introduction for them, but I suspect that there’s a good chunk that also don’t know you yet. John has a wonderful YouTube channel where he has some just excellent material. The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series is a YouTube series that I would recommend for anyone. I’m really interested to talk to John Vervecky. John Vervecky has talked to a lot of other people in sort of this corner of the internet as it’s sometimes called. He’s sort of like, I don’t know, maybe the unofficial philosopher of this corner of the internet. And you talk about philosophy not just sort of in an abstract learning about way, but in the good old fashion. What does it mean for my life? How do I live my life? How is this something that I can put on? How is it something that I can make relevant for me? And I think that John Vervecky’s tools and sort of cognitive framework, I guess that you could say that you’re laying out is, has been helpful for a lot of us in trying to explain these things you bring together, not just ancient philosophy, but modern cognitive science and psychology. And you’re also really interested in artificial intelligence. I should say that in addition to this YouTube channel, sort of like my hobby, my day job is I work in artificial intelligence and health care. So I really appreciate how you you bring those sorts of things in. I often feel like my theological side and my professional kind of academic side don’t get to to mix very much. But you help bring them together in a way that I think is very interesting. So what I what I really wanted to kind of focus on, and who knows where the conversation will stray to, but John is an expert in neoplatonism. And you think of neoplatonism not just as something that was intellectual curiosity from the late stages of the Roman Empire, but something as relevant now. And so with my channel’s focus, that’s kind of if I had to say my channel’s focus is either the Trinity or the not Trinity, and who is Jesus of Nazareth and how does that relate to God? So I guess I could say it this way that that growing up in my church, which had this sort of, you know, very minority position on theology was saying basically, Jesus is not God himself, that we had the sort of, I guess you could say a story that went something like this, that there was this pure Jewish idea of Jesus as, you know, the prophet, the Messiah, the Son of God as a human being. And then it got mixed with Greco-Roman philosophy somewhere. And that unholy marriage generated the doctrine of the Trinity and led it astray from its original Jewish roots. And so that was kind of part of the story that I had growing up. And I remember, I don’t know, I didn’t take much philosophy in college, I think I took philosophy 101 for my distribution credits. And that was about it. But I sort of got more curious in philosophy, I don’t know, after college, and I was listening to Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy, or history, the history of Western philosophy. And there’s a there was a chapter on Plotinus. And when I listen, I’m like, that’s the guy. There it is. There’s that that pagan influence. But then, as I listened to him, like that, that set off a whole spark of curiosity to try and figure out what happened. And it’s hard not to like the guy, the more you read him, and the more you understand about him. And then I come to realize more and more that that just neo-Platonism and Christianity are so intertwined, that one, one couldn’t separate one from the other, really. And that the story was way more complicated than than I thought. That’s well said. So, so sort of kind of, you know, I grew up in a slightly weird house that, you know, we had this kind of, you know, austere minority church doctrine, but my dad also loved philosophy, and we had Plato on the shelf. So on the one hand, Plato ruined everything, but on the other hand, we should definitely read him. And you know, that’s good stuff. And don’t ignore the great books and that sort of thing. So, so it was sort of a strange tension that way, I guess you could say. But anyway, enough about me. So, so how did you get how did you stumble upon neo-Platonism? And what did it mean for you, I guess? Well, first of all, Sam, thank you for that background. It’s very helpful for me. I think it will help us fit to each other in this conversation a lot better. So thank you for that. Um, so, I mean, I encountered Plato, I’d gone through a sort of my own, I’d left a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and became sort of a virulent, almost Sam Harris kind of, or at least maybe Richard Dawkins, I think maybe Sam is softening over time. Richard Dawkins, kind of militant atheist. But the hunger I had for deep connectedness. So for all of the ways in which my religious upbringing, I think it’s fair to say traumatized me, it also left a taste in my mind for something larger than myself, deeper than myself. And then when I read Plato, in the first year of university, and I encountered the figure of Socrates, and I read the Republic, which is one of the most expansive of Plato’s dialogue, and I just fell in love with it. So I continued on with philosophy. But after you get past sort of first year philosophy, even though the word philosophy contains the word wisdom, literally in it, the topic of wisdom falls off the table. And so I pursued academic philosophy, because I got an interest in, you know, epistemology and metaphysics for their own sake, the meta science, philosophy of science became really important to me. And so I continued on, but that hunger for wisdom was not properly being addressed. And so I took up an ecology of practices is where I got the term from that idea from where I was a past the meditation meta contemplation Tai Chi, Chuan, Chi Kung, and I started to get this sense of the cultivation of wisdom. And then, and I came to a conclusion that I think many people in the West do that the Western philosophy has nothing to offer like what I was getting from the Buddhist and the Taoist practices, they were so transformative and right. But the other person I had also been interested in, introduced almost at the same time as Jung. And, and that sort of stuck around in me to there. And, and I’ve come to see later, and I sort of talked about this a bit in the series, Jung is kind of the Plato of the psyche, right? He takes a lot of Plato’s, a lot of the archetypes come from Plato’s theory of the forms. It’s very much a cycle. It’s a, an internalized psychological model of the platonic universe. So that was sort of sown in me, the platonic stuff was sown me, but I’d come to this conclusion, blah, blah, blah. But then I started to read, because I got into cognitive science, I started to read some of the emerging philosophy, more psychology, a later philosophy of wisdom. And I got introduced to the work of Pierre Hadeau. And Hadeau just blew my mind open, what is ancient philosophy? You know, the inner citadel philosophy is a way of life. That’s where I got introduced to the idea of Western philosophy is a series of spiritual exercises that we’re supposed to cultivate wisdom, bring about transformation, transcendence. And I got very interested in stoicism. And then I saw its connections to current cognitive behavioral therapy, most of the therapies, and I said, Oh, this is powerful stuff. It’s still being used today. It’s efficacious. And I started at Hadeau, I read the Simplicity of Vision by Hadeau, which is his little thin jewel of a book on platinus and what and I started reading platinus and I started seeing and the way he wove when you’re reading platinus, it’s simultaneously like you’re doing a spiritual exercise, and you’re following an argument. And just the aesthetics of that were deeply, deeply attractive to me. And I was I started going very deeply into it. And then more and more, I wanted to know, but how do I practice this? How do I practice this? And, you know, and I bumped into the work of Arthur I Lewis, and he argued that Western spirituality, the grammar of Western spirituality is largely neoplatonic. You see it, as you said, through Christian spirituality, you see it within the Sufism of, you know, Islamic spirituality. I know, the Persian Sufis still venerate platinus, they even talk about him. Similar kinds of things, I think, can be said about Kabbalah within the Jewish mystical tradition, and other traditions. And so this really started to take to me that I started reading a lot of books on how to practice it. And then I just, I just kept going and going and I can’t, you know, the wisdom of Hypatia, and I’ve taught that as a course, I started to see that verse Lewis was right, and Hado was particularly right, that neoplatonism was as rich a religious, philosophical, spiritual tradition, not none of those adjectives quite work, right? That was comparable to anything in the Eastern or Asiatic wisdom traditions. And I started reading the Kyoto school and I saw the deep interconnections. Suzuki’s essay comparing his little book comparing Christian and Buddhist spirituality and the essay comparing Eckhart, of course, who comes out of the neoplatonic tradition, and, you know, aspects of Zen. And like, so I started to see other people were seeing the deep connections. And so I started to think that neoplatonism was definitely philosophy as a way of life. And then I started reading books like Nature Loves to Hide and John Spencer’s The Eternal Law, arguing no, no, neoplatonism has been deeply influential in the history of science. And I saw that, you know, within mathematics, a platonic or even neoplatonic view is still intellectually respectable. And I started to think, oh, this isn’t just something from the past as a spiritual exercise. This has the potential with significant modification and reformulation to be integrated with the scientific worldview in a way comparable to the attempts I was trying to make to integrate Taoist and Buddhist wisdom cultures into the scientific worldview. And so that’s how it sort of came about for me. Great, great. That’s really interesting. So could we maybe we could talk a little bit more about what neoplatonism, I guess, was kind of in its historical heyday. And then we can perhaps, after we do that a little bit, swivel back to the present and talk about how it can address some of these bigger questions that we were just talking about. I remember in your Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, when you talked about neoplatonism, you sort of described it that it was a way that brought in the best science, right? You know, the ancient classical world was actually quite better at science than we often give them credit for. Yes. And it brought in the best philosophy and psychology and theology and spirituality and cosmology, you know, where did everything come from? And it was all, like you said, in this integrated package, where even those sorts of labels that I’m giving it weren’t clearly distinguished. It was sort of all in one fell swoop. And, you know, by the time of maybe like 300 AD, if you were a Greco-Roman citizen of any reputation, you probably wanted your kids being taught by neoplatonists in the school, in the city that you live near, or that sort of thing. And it’s almost one of those things that once you see what it is, it’s like, you know, there’s so many layers to it, and so many layers of what we’ve inherited are from that, that it’s like, oh, wow, it’s almost like part of the water that we still swim in, but don’t recognize. But going back and looking at it in its historical context and understanding where it came from, you can kind of see where it is still and what it was. So maybe if you could talk a little bit about Patinus, or maybe even the people leading up to him, and sort of what they brought to the table and what it was in its historical context. Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, so, yeah, I sometimes use the metaphor that Plotinus is the grand unified field theory of, you know, ancient spirituality, ancient psychology, philosophy, etc. Yeah, I think that’s right. And it’s, I mean, I think that Plotinus saw himself as a disciple of Plato, but I think Plotinus is as great a philosopher as Plato in many ways. And there’s been a growing appreciation of the neoplatonic tradition. So what you see in Plotinus, I mean, that this is a lot, and I take a, you know, I’ll have to be sort of compressed here, you know, sort of giving the gist. So what you have, what Plotinus does is he takes from Plato two really important things. He takes from Plato, a central idea, which I hope we can unpack a little bit. So I’m just going to throw it out there very loosely right now. That there’s a deep connection between realness, things being real, and their intelligibility. That’s a profound idea. And that to try and get closer to reality is to try to trace out, you know, the ligaments, the texture of our intelligibility, not just in a conceptual manner, but also to use modern terms that they didn’t have, but also in a phenomenological manner. And that is the way in which we can enhance our sense of connectedness. And then that immediately bleeds over into the spirituality that was drawn from Plato. And Plato has this model that I call an anagogic spirituality, and that’s a term taken up and made central in Neoplatonism. This is the ascent out of the cave in the famous parable. But the basic idea is there’s a way in which I can learn and become more connected to the intelligibility of my psyche, how it fits together, how it’s organized. And I can thereby reduce the inner conflict of my psyche and the way that inner conflict drives me to passionate, reactive, mindless, self-deceptive behavior. So I can alleviate that, which brings me an inner peace that we deeply crave. All the spiritualities have this as one of their goals, a kind of inner peace and fulfillment, you know, the abundant life that Jesus perhaps, maybe that’s what Jesus was talking about too. I’m always hesitant when I attribute things to Jesus of Nazareth, right? Out of honor and respect, not out of criticism. But that very task also tends to clear our vision, as I said. We tend to be less reactive, less mindless, less self-deceptive. So we start to see more into reality. We start to get better at connecting to the world, which satisfies another deep meta desire in us to be deeply connected. So in this sense, we start to realize in both senses of the word, the world better, right? We start to become aware of it and we start to connect more to its underlying real patterns. And then what that does is living in that world nourishes our capacity to realize our psyche. And then that affords us realizing the world. And this is a virtuous cycle. They afford and reinforce each other. I start to see more deeply into the world. The world gets, the world’s underlying real structure gets more deeply internalized into me. And those two meta desires are mutually satisfied. So from Plato, you get this idea about, you know, I want to connect to reality while I’m going to trace out the textures and the structures of intelligibility. Again, not just conceptually, but ultimately phenomenologically. And then if you connect and you see how that connects to Plato’s spirituality, it’s not just conceptual. It’s not just phenomenological. It’s inherently transformative. You have to be engaged. This kind of knowing requires profound self-transformation. Then Plotinus turns to the greatest scientist of the ancient world, the universal genius, Aristotle. All of our science starts in Aristotle. Every book, every course will ultimately, your physics or something, they’ll start with Aristotle. They’ll talk about how foundational he gives us. We use scientific terms that we owe to Aristotle, actuality, potentiality, et cetera. And the Neoplatonists, while the people reflecting on this, realize that because this is a process of change that Plato is committing them to, Aristotle’s theory of change is central to them. And this is about actualizing potential, the idea of actualizing potential. And Aristotle does this really interesting thing. He takes that process of self-actualization, and we have it in psychology. People like Maslow, you’re trying to self-actualize. You’re trying to inform, transform yourself so that you more and more actualize, realize your potential. But what is that potential for Aristotle? Well, for ultimately, it’s a way of knowing. And here we get back to the intelligibility again. And Aristotle has this profound model of knowing that’s at the core of his science. It’s a conformity theory, which is when I know something, what’s actually happening is it’s not that I have an accurate depiction or description of it. He uses the model. The analogy he uses is somebody who can make something, like who make a chair, is much better than, knows it much better than somebody who can only describe it. And so what is it that the carpenter has? Well, the carpenter has, he has a paradigm in his mind. He has a structural functional organization of how to inform the wood, how to give it a particular structural functional form. And Aristotle’s ideas, that’s what actualization is. When I give something a form, I take the potential that’s in the wood. By giving that form, I make it act as a chair. And so the carpenter has the form that actualizes potential into the actuality of a chair. And so, and using these terms very carefully, the carpenter and the chair actually have the same form. So they conform, they share the same form. There’s an intimate at one minute between you and something when you truly know it. And so Platonus took these ideas and he put them together. He said, okay, so I want to do the anagogy thing from Plato. I want to trace out the intelligibility. That has to do with knowing I’m going to be constantly fitting myself to what I know. And as I get deeper into knowing, it’s going to more and more help me to self-actualize. It’s going to inform and transform me. And he put the Platonic and the Aristotelian idea together that we could, by properly knowing, and that doesn’t just mean describing or depicting, we could engage in an ongoing process of self-transcendence and self-transformation, get deeper and deeper into reality. So he adds to it this model of the way in which our scientific practices and our spiritual practices can be deeply integrated together. Last thing, and then I’ll stop. And then Platonus sees people that come after Aristotle but go deeply back to Socrates, the internalization of Socrates. And these are the Stoics. And from the Stoics, Platonus gets an idea about how important the cultivation of virtue is. But this was running all the way through Aristotle and Plato. But in the Stoics, he sees a lot of practical ways in which you can integrate that. He sees the Stoics talking about this intelligibility as a living thing, which he thinks is very similar to how Aristotle talks about the unmoved mover. And so that’s this idea of the logos. And so he draws all of the Stoic practices and this idea of the intelligibility of things being a living. I mean, we’re talking by analogy, not biologically living, but sort of dynamically self-organizing, autopoetic aspect of reality. And therefore, even we can more even more vitally connect to it and be vitally nourished by it. And so he brings that all together. Now, after him, what happens, you get Porphy, who largely follows him. And then Iambicus comes along and says, this is all great, but you’re not doing enough. What I would call what I talked about my series, you’re not doing enough ritual, you’re not doing enough serious play, because that the there’s aspects of the psyche and there’s aspects of reality that can’t be accessed unless you get involved in symbolic practices. And he brings in what’s called theurgia. And then that’s taken up by Proclus and ultimately by Damasius. So that’s my best attempt to give you a quick overview of Neoplatonism. Sure, sure. Yeah, that’s very interesting. Like one of the things that I sort of imagine that’s kind of most, I don’t know, distinctive of Neoplatonism. Like in our modern world, when we learn about cosmology, where things came from, we started the Big Bang. What happened before the Big Bang, who knows? Don’t ask. There are the laws of physics. Okay, where the laws of physics come from? Well, they just are brute facts. And the laws of physics are built out of mathematics. But what’s mathematics? And where did mathematics come from? And what sort of ontological status does mathematics have? Completely left aside in modern education. Like, we have science and math that just is, takes those things as assumptions. And maybe philosophy classes will deal with those sorts of things a little bit. But in my experience, they normally talk about it in sort of like a, here are a bunch of different things that people used to think kind of way. And it’s very rare. Like there was a good conversation between Sir Roger Penrose, the physicist, and William Lane Craig, where they got into these sorts of questions. I would recommend anyone listening to go find that lecture. But it’s very, very rare that physics and metaphysics seem so separate in our world. But in the neoplatonic world, they, from what I can tell, and you can correct me if I get sort of the details of this wrong, they had the metaphysics and the physics coming together. It was like there was this cascade where everything starts sort of at the one or the good, which is almost utterly beyond even being able to talk about. It’s sort of, you know, it’s both being and almost not being at the same time. It’s almost utterly indescribable. It pretty much escapes language and comprehension, but we can kind of talk around it or talk negatively about it to kind of imagine it. But then somehow, out of that, instead of just nothing happening, like there’s this first emanation that comes out of it, and that’s sort of like noose or mind or the rational principle. And that’s sort of what you might say is like the realm of mathematics or eternal truths and eternal forms. And it’s sort of like what the one thinks about itself or something like that. I don’t totally get that, but it’s something like that the realm of intellectual or the intellectual realm is the second highest thing other than just pure being itself. And then somehow then the next realm are rung on the hierarchy is like soul, which I kind of understand is like the animating principle, right? Like the intellectual realm has all of the eternal truths, but it’s sort of not like in motion, right? It doesn’t change. It’s not active. It’s just always itself. It’s always true, right? The Pythagorean theorem isn’t really alive. It’s just always the Pythagorean theorem. And then like soul sort of animates that. And that’s like the metaphysical realm. And then there’s like the physical realm that mirrors that, where we have matter. And then like what I think is really interesting, instead of just explaining where everything came from, it’s also like ourselves are like that, right? We have our soul, and then we have our intellect and what we have like our physical matter. And we have our soul that’s connected with that. And then even higher than that is our ability, our own ability to think the forms. And then that kind of connects up. So when you’re talking about an agogay, that ascent sort of, if I get it correctly, like the goal of Neoplatonist spiritual practice was to kind of realize this hierarchy of being, and then how that hierarchy of being is sort of mapped within yourself. It’s like the whole universe, the whole cosmos, but also we are like a microcosm, a microcosmos in ourselves and that we climb up it in ourselves and that we climb up it in the cosmos as well. And perhaps with the goal of this deep kind of spiritual union with the one. And I was wondering if, because our cosmology seems so disconnected from spirituality in the modern world, is there any sort of way that you make use of that kind of old Neoplatonic integrating of those two things now to kind of answer those questions of, well, why is there math? What is math? Why does that seem to connect to physics, et cetera? Yeah. So thank you. Yeah, that what’s called the procession and the return and then what you describe, the microcosm, a macrocosm, that’s that Aristotelian conformity integrated with platonic anagogy. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. And so, well, let’s flip it up the other way around. Let’s start from sort of the scientific worldview and say to this, to say to even, let’s say, the physicists, why are you trying so hard to integrate relativity with quantum mechanics? Why does it bother you so much that these theories can’t be integrated? And what is your faith that there is an integration to be found? And this is the Neoplatonic idea, right? That the intelligent, when things are intelligible and they also have their existence to degree to which they are one. So we think of, right, we think of Apollo stones as not typically even a thing, right? And it, right, whereas, you know, a dog is integrated and it’s, it’s, therefore it’s, it’s a real thing for us. It’s not just a collection of things. It’s a real, and so, whenever anything is understandable, it means we can, like, think of it like, it was originally inter-standing, but it’s now understanding, but they both work. When we can find something that integrates a bunch of things together, then we understand it. Now that’s how we know it. We know it by finding a oneness, a unity. That’s why the scientists are pursuing. We’ve got to somehow integrate quantum mechanics, right? But they don’t step back and ask, well, why? Why do you need to do that? What’s driving you? You have a deep intuition that realness, knowledge are both caught up together when things are integrated, when there’s a oneness behind them. So oneness simultaneously is what makes things real and it’s what makes them realizable to us, right? And so, and then what are, and so what are these, what are these laws? Well, they’re ways in which, you know, in which the possibility of things, and this is where Whitehead and other philosophers are helpful, where the possibility of things are really being shaped. You know, so equal MC squared isn’t an event, as you said, it doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s not an event, it’s not a thing, it’s location. It’s a way in which the possibilities for how things can unfold is being shaped. But when you start to get into the math, you start to say, but you want all the math, all the shapings to ultimately be integrated. They talk about, I want to get an one single equation that I can put on a t-shirt. Well, why? Because you have a sense that all of these things are aspect of a deeper, more transcendent, more affording, more grounding intelligibility. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, you can see the neoplatonism right at the core of it. Okay. Right. Now let’s go, let’s go back down. And so, FUSIS, you know, and what you like, yeah, it means how things emerge from themselves and what science is more and more, especially like cognitive science and biology, which like, these are the areas you should pay attention to where you want to see where the cutting edge of science is. Physics has a kind of prestige, but physics hasn’t been really theoretically innovative in like 40 years. That’s why they really need the integration I was talking about earlier, because they’re at an impasse. But if you look in, you know, biology and you look even in chemistry, but especially biology and, you know, cognitive science, the idea of emergence is becoming really powerful. And what’s the idea? It’s this powerful idea. You take a bunch of separate things. And if they are self-organizing, if they, right, restructure themselves spontaneously, you’ll get new emergent aspects of reality. So I’ll use the standard and somewhat hackneyed example. Hydrogen at room temperature is a gas, oxygen at room temperature is a gas. It nourishes us as a gas, oxygen, hydrogen doesn’t do anything for us, right? But when they interact with each other, they form a new structural functional organization, water, and water is a liquid. It has a whole bunch of different properties and it’s nutritious to us in a completely different way than oxygen is, right? And so, where is this coming from? And a neoplatonist would say, well, what’s happening is as you start to, right, bring more form into things, you actualize more of the potential and you bring out more of reality, right? More of what’s potential and reality has been actualized. Water is real, right? Water is real. And, but there’s, we would, like, try and think about it this way. There’s aspects of the world that wouldn’t be disclosed to us unless water was realized. We can realize, oh, the universe is this kind of universe because it’s a universe in which water can exist. And then it’s a universe in which life can exist. And it’s a universe in which cognition can exist, right? And what you do is this emergence makes you realize, oh, the depth that I have to attribute to the universe in order to account for this orderly emergence. So that one, that’s, right, that one is not just some amorphous blob. It is something that is underwriting and affording all of this complex structure that the emergence is revealing. So this is the neoplatonic return. Everything is returning to the one. Everything is getting more and more actualized and disclosing to us the profundity of the one, its capacity for richer, it’s inexhaustible source of integration and emergence. And as we do that, that also, on the other hand, takes us deeper and deeper to realize how that one is affording everything, how it’s being expressed in everything in reality. So I think it’s very easy to see emergence and emanation within our scientific worldview. That’s how I would do what you would ask me to do. Yeah, yeah. And I think that evolution, the theory of evolution is extremely misunderstood and has a lot to do with this. I think that we sort of get taught that evolution has no goal, right? It’s just randomness and a series of, even unfortunate isn’t even the right word, just events cascade and then life and species and all sorts of things come out of this. And really what I think that you can see that evolution is and what it’s getting at is that it’s almost like evolution is this form-finding algorithm, this T-LOS exploration algorithm that works within the material universe where it’s trying to figure out what the form of an alligator is, right? And the closer it can get to the form of an alligator, the more it lasts, right? Alligators look the same for a couple hundred million years in a row because they’ve probably gotten really good at being the form of an alligator and there’s something permanent about it, right? That’s what the neoplatonic insight is. The more you resemble the form of what it is that is sort of up in this intellectual realm in the material realm, the more permanent and the more real you are, right? If you’re a deformed alligator, you’re probably not going to do as well in this world as a properly formed alligator. You’ll beat your deformed alligator competitors and your offspring will be more like you and the form of alligator perpetuates. And that biology is like this process of trying to find all these possible combinations of forms, right? And they interact with each other like a new predator comes in and it changes the needs of the herbivores to get away from that predator and stuff. So it’s kind of dynamic at the same time, but there’s also all of these patterns that just keep emerging over and over again. And that’s sort of like the process of emergence is that to be permanent, to last, you need to embody a form that is autopoetic, like you say, self-structuring. And that the more you can do that, the more you last, although you is sort of, you know, it’s not just individual organisms, it’s lineages and communities of organisms too. And that’s sort of where emergence comes from is the need to last, right? Because by definition, what lasts will be around more than what doesn’t last. And that’s sort of the same thing as the carpenter making the chair, right? Bringing the form into the world. I think that’s well said. I mean, that’s sort of at the core of the theory I have of what I call relevance realization. The brain is back basically doing something like that. Yeah, the idea is, if we could use some of the Aristotelian language, organisms that most best, and we can start talking about this now given the work of Owen Gilbert and others, where you talk about natural reward in addition to natural selection. So organisms that sort of, sometimes it’s best and sometimes it’s first. There’s a little bit of trade off there, right? But organisms who best or first conform to invariant, relatively invariant features of the environment will persist, like you say exactly. And the ones that can shift as those features shifts, right? So there’s two ways and there’s sort of a static conformity. This is what’s invariant and I get sort of invariant aspects to pick up on that. And then this is what is invariantly variant, if you’ll allow me to say. Sure. So I need to have a part of me that’s constant. And the ones that get sort of the best overall balance of that survive. And yeah, so evolution is this self-organizing process that continually realizes, sorry, I hope this doesn’t sound too punny, continually realizes the forms of conformity for living things. Now, I may differ with you in that I don’t think of that as a teleological process. And it’s precisely because it’s not teleological that I find it helpful, because I want to ultimately explain how I can be a purposeful problem solver in terms of processes that are not themselves purposeful problem solvers. Because if I can’t do that, then I’m going to get locked into an infinite regressive explanation. And again, that’s again where I find the neoplatonic thing helpful, because it argues that as you move up with this realization, you get to something that is less and less teleological in nature. You get to something until you get to the one, and the one doesn’t need or it has no purpose. It ultimately has no purpose. And so I don’t know if there’s much of an argument we need to have about that. But I see that process as doing what you said. I see it exploring, but I don’t see it. And maybe this is where the difference is. When I think about T loss, I think of the ability of a system to represent future states as goal states and to pursue them. And I think that’s what distinguishes a teleological process from a non-teleological one. And I don’t see evolution doing that. And that’s precisely what I want to say, because I want this to be as the neoplatonists would. I want something that reaches down into the inanimate aspects of manner. And I don’t want to attribute representational capacities to them or foresight. And I want to see it also present levels of reality that are beyond me that the mystics and these traditions tell me are also non-teleological. So I don’t want to ground this in a teleological frame, because I don’t think it comprehensively covers the scale properly. That’s why I’ve taken the position I’m taking. So here’s why I might push back on that a little bit. So there’s a couple different ways, I think, to talk about purpose in biology and evolution. So the purpose of a polar bear is to hunt seals in the Arctic. And so they are white so that they can sneak up on seals. The purpose of their whiteness is so that they’re harder to distinguish from the snow around them, so that the seals can’t see them as easily. And they’re big and fluffy because it’s cold. Right. And, you know, et cetera, et cetera. There’s purpose in all the sorts of aspects of a polar bear that are sort of all centered on their purpose, which is hunting seals. But the polar bear isn’t aware of its own whiteness, probably not, as the reason why it’s white. When they’re sneaking up on seals, they cover their nose with their paws because their nose is black. But they probably don’t know why they do that sort of thing, right? It’s like at the level of instinct. So they’re, well, I’m sure there’s, you know, polar bears are probably, you know, more, well, they have some level of cognition and that sort of thing. But there are purposes that are not in their own mind that they’re acting out. And I don’t think that you would disagree with any of that. But I feel like it’s almost like the theory, the process of evolution, the mechanism of evolution, the ability to encode a form right in sort of, you know, DNA and that sort of thing. And then to translate that into a form, into, you know, there’s the DNA of a polar bear, which can get translated into an actual polar bear. And then, you know, the polar bear has more polar bear offspring if everything goes well. That mechanism of, you know, information, embodiment of information, but also the search algorithm, right? You know, each child’s a little different. There’s some randomness and the randomness is useful, right? The randomness is because the environment changes or we’re not a perfect polar bear yet. There’s still room for improvement in polar bearness. And that it’s this, it’s almost as if the purpose of evolution is purpose itself, right? Like there are a lot, you know, there’s the purpose of an alligator, the purpose of a beetle, the purpose of a maple tree, the purpose of all of these different things. And they have lots of different sub-purposes and make their livings in lots of different ways. But it’s like life itself is searching for purpose itself, I would say. And that, you know, there’s nothing, the process of evolution isn’t thinking this, right? It doesn’t have a mind in that sense, but it is almost like it is the bottom up, you know, emergence of purpose itself. So I think that’s great. And when I said representation, I didn’t mean necessarily consciousness. I think paramecium have sort of internal chemical processes that track things in the environment so that they, so let’s say when we talk about teleology, we’re talking about agency then. Let’s try a different term. So paramecium is an agent. It doesn’t have awareness, it doesn’t think. But the paramecium can in some sense detect the consequences of its behavior and then change its behavior, right, in order to maintain its autopoiesis. It’s a self-organizing system that is self-organized so that it can detect conditions that will preserve or threaten its structural functional organization. And if that’s what you mean by purpose, yes, living things are on purpose. That’s what distinguishes an autopoietic thing from a merely self-organizing thing. Autopoietic things are self-organized such that they seek out the conditions that will promote their continued existence. So I agree with that. And I didn’t mean to attribute anything. I think I fumbled when I used the word foresight. That brings with it, and I apologize for that. That was careless on my part. I meant more this ability to detect forward and adjust. So I think wherever there’s agency, and I mean it for like the paramecium, it is appropriate to talk about purpose. And I think living things are precisely the things that generate norms for themselves that they then bind themselves to. And merely self-organizing things like fires and tornadoes don’t do that. So they’re a subspecies of self-organizing thing. And I think that so they are not only autopoietic, they are autonomous. They generate laws for themselves. They generate constraints on themselves, norms that they have to. And if that’s what you mean by purpose, I agree that living things act on purpose. And I, right, now when you say the function of the whiteness of the polar bears to preserve it, yes, but that is actually, sorry, this isn’t meant to be a pun, but that’s parasitic on the fact that the polar bear is an autopoietic thing, right? Because the polar bear is struggling to survive, right, if it’s this way, that functions for the polar bear to do that. It’s appropriate to say that it meets a need that the polar bear has. But I don’t think it’s appropriate to say, to talk that way about tornadoes or hurricanes or fires, right? And we do talk that way without, though, well, the fire needs wood. No, the fire doesn’t need wood. We need wood if we want the fire to continue. But the fire isn’t trying to keep itself, it isn’t seeking out the conditions. So I don’t think fires act on purpose, right? Now, whenever you say that evolution is acting on purpose, I think this is closer to the kind of work on teleology. And if you’re moving in that direction, Sam, I’m in agreement with you. What I was criticizing earlier is what I take to be what many people mean when they talk about evolution feeling teleological in nature. Dennis Walsh talks about the fact that, let’s use your polar bear, the whiteness is, it doesn’t make things happen. It’s not an action on purpose, but it’s conducive, right? It’s conducive to the polar bear surviving longer. And he says, if we want to talk about teleology as conducive, rather than, right, rather than as, like, something analogous to an action, then he says we have to think about the fact that, as you said, it helps us to explain why there are polar bears around. The polar bears are white, and that’s conducive in a white environment to the meaning of survival. And the way you talk about that is you say for living things, it is appropriate to attribute functions to them. And where we want to attribute functions, there’s that. Now, I think, if you’d allow me, evolution, right, evolution itself isn’t purposeful, but it’s functioning for the purposeful nature of the living things within it. That’s how I would think about it, right? So this might seem slightly irrelevant to our original thing, but I’ll tie this back in in sort of an interesting way. So I saw a debate discussion between Richard Dawkins and Brett Weinstein one time, back before COVID. They were in Chicago, and I’m in Chicago, so I went and saw that. And I think that, so if there’s, so if Christianity and Neoplatonism are close siblings, there’s a third sibling in the family of Gnosticism that is also interconnected with that. And it’s sort of the estranged sibling in many ways. But if I could, you know, like Gnosticism would often say that somehow something wrong in the cascade of being happened, right? Either there was a malevolent God, right, you know, subordinate to the main God, or some God acted in ignorance, or, you know, either badness or ignorance or some combination of those things led to where we are now, right? Whereas a Neoplatonist would say, no, it’s a cascade of goodness, right? Maybe there are degrees of goodness, but there’s not a bad step somewhere in the process. And Christianity is actually interesting in that it says, well, the creation process was good, but there’s badness in the creation now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It tries to split the difference. Yeah, right, right. So there is badness, but it wasn’t in the cascade that caused us to come into being. It was sort of after that, right? And so what I think is interesting, connecting that idea to Brett Weinstein and a lot of sort of, like Sam Harris, I think will say these sorts of things, that basically evolution is sort of like this malevolent force in their imagination, that Brett Weinstein will say, evolution is a cosmic spelling bee that ends in genocide, or something like that. And that we need to transcend our programming to escape it as if it has this meta purpose to it, that is somehow we can recognize as evil from where we’re standing now. And I think that it’s strangely Gnostic in that kind of way. I think that’s brilliant what you’re saying. Brilliant. And it’s sort of like he, so we need to transcend our programming. Okay, so I like, how are we doing that? Like the Gnostics at least said, we can hopscotch the bad God to get back to the good God, right? Right, right. Yeah, we were made by a bad God, but perhaps our soul or mind or something is good, and we need to jump back up the ladder to the good rungs and escape the bad rungs. But without anything like that, I don’t understand how sort of the kind of pretty strictly materialistic evolution is a malevolent force that has some, there’s something in it that desires badness, it desires genocide, it desires death, it desires competition, it desires conquering of the fittest and that sort of thing. Yeah, and Stanovich does something within cognitive psychology very similarly. He talks about the robot’s rebellion. He’s very influenced by Dennett’s idea of means and Dawkins’s selfish gene. But what I can say again is biology, cutting edge biology, philosophy of biology, really abandoning those models to a very significant degree. I agree with you, and it sort of reminds me of Young’s idea that the default spirituality of human beings is Gnosticism, because it’s a way of projecting a narrative that redeems you from your insignificance and your powerlessness. It gives you a central role. And I have a very ambivalent attitude towards Gnosticism, because I think I agree with Pongionis. The Gnostics are sort of like proto-existentialists. They’re talking about how we often find ourselves caught in sort of existential ignorance and existential inertia. We’re stuck. That’s a common thing people say when they go into therapy. We’re stuck and we don’t know how to get unstuck. We don’t know who we really are. And so we seek Gnosis. We seek the kind of knowing, deeply participating in ourselves that will heal us from our existential inertia, our existential ignorance. So I’m very interested in Gnosis. And I’m interested in the Gnostics because they were creating this mythos that were trying to give expression to that. But I’m also very critical of them because they’re sort of like you said, it’s a pervasive temptation of human thought that puts us into what Jules Evans calls conspirituality. There’s a grand conspiracy, right? And spirituality is response to the grand conspiracy. And so I really appreciate what you just said. I thought that was really beautiful. And first of all, it shows how people like Weinstein and others are deeply, deeply spiritual and even mythopoetic without realizing it. So congratulations on that. I think that’s a very well said thing. I’m going to keep that. I’ve made similar arguments about similar aspects, but I think that was beautiful. And that’s precisely what I think is wrong. I like your idea. Let’s be clear. There’s maybe some disagreements about the finer details of how we’re going to use the term teleology, but your idea of evolution as this thing that is exploring the search space of possible forms and realizing them, making them real, right? I agree totally with that. And therefore, there’s something deeply conformable between how our cognition is doing. Look, even in your attention, there’s a part of you that’s trying to vary your attention by distracting you out. And there’s a countervailing part of you that’s trying to focus your attention in and ignore most of the… So you’re doing like evolution, variation selection, variation selection. You’re doing it all the time. It’s helping you realize what you should pay attention to. So there’s something deeply conformable between the guts of your cognition and the guts of what Neil Platonists would call nature’s suitcase. I agree with all of that. Perhaps on different timescales, right? It’s sort of that’s practical, right? Like, I can like, man, should I go have this for lunch, that for lunch, that for lunch, that for lunch? Well, I want that for lunch, right? Variation, I select it, right? And that happens in my mind in a second, but the process that’s given rise to us has taken millions, who knows how many millions of years, but it’s a fractal cascade of the same process. Exactly. And what evolution has done is it’s instantiated itself in the way our brain can accelerate that process so that we can actually conform to living things and a living environment in a very adaptive and powerful way. Yes. And sort of seeing that as malevolent, I mean, I think that’s a mistake. And again, that’s why I don’t like to sort of attribute teleology, because then you can attribute malevolence to these processes, and you can start thinking about them in a narrative fashion, which I think puts us into the wrong frame. Now, I think, you know, let’s do it at the cognitive and then go back, because I propose replacing that with what Evan Thompson calls deep continuity. There’s a deep continuity, there’s a conformability between the fundamental principles governing my cognition, and those governing, like, evolutionary processes, living things, even self-organizing things, because it’s the self-organizing nature of my cognition that allows me to track self-organizing systems in the world, etc. Now, here’s the thing. Let’s take that attentional thing. You can’t pay attention to all the information. It’s combinatorially explosive. And what you can’t do is check it and say, should I be paying attention to that? Should I? Now, what you do is you do some variation, some selection, and there’s kind of, I don’t want to anthropomorphize, but I don’t have a better verb. In the hope, you’re making a bet that that will zero you in on some of the most important patterns in your environment, and that’s what makes you adaptive, but precisely by having you ignore most of the patterns and most of the information. So the very processes that make you adaptive also make you prone to bias and self-deception, because sometimes you’re not paying attention to the right thing. You’ll sometimes realize that, and that’s what the moment, aha moment is. It’s like, oh, no, no, I’m framing this completely the wrong way. I’m treating that as important when I should have been treating that as important. That’s the sort of, you’re aware of the self-correcting nature. But here’s the lesson, and this is sort of a Buddhist take on it. The very processes that make you adaptive make you vulnerable to self-deception. This is called the no-free lunch theorem. This is a mathematical inevitability about how these processes have to work. To attribute malevolence to that is to impose an improper narrative frame on something that is not operating narratively. It’s operating at the level of noesis, the noose. It’s operating at the level of the mathematical forms. That’s where we should be thinking about it. So I think they are performing, they’re making sort of a fundamental category mistake. They’re not seeing things. And so for me, you have to step back and have to say, oh, so what can I do? Well, I have to be compassionate, therefore, for the person who’s suffering addiction, because I have to see that their addictive behavior is just the hijacking of adaptive behavior. But I don’t want to destroy that adaptive behavior, or they’re not going to be a cognitive agent. So to say it’s like, and you do this in therapy, you do this in therapy. You say, if you start to fight these things, that you don’t, oh, I keep doing this, you make it worse. You have to learn how to enter into dialogue with it. You have to learn how to, okay, it’s not running properly. But there’s an adaptive thing in there. I have to get back to the adaptivity. I have to transform myself, afford it transforming itself. And then I’ll get released, because it needs I can’t do without it. Right. So we have to stop demonizing the adaptive machine. That’s one of the deep lessons, by the way, that I think we should be taking from machine learning, machine learning on one side, and clinical therapy on the other. Like, you know, the biggest thing you often have to do, and I know it myself, when I’m constantly engaged in therapeutic process, right? It’s like, I have to stop, like, I don’t stop, I don’t want to be doing that. And if I fight it, it’s like, makes it worse. But if I try to see, okay, I get it, it’s making it’s making me vulnerable to self deception, self destructive pattern. But what’s right, like, what’s its adaptive to use a word we agreed on later earlier, what’s its adaptive function? Okay, I’ve got to get back to that adaptive function. And then what it has is it has the capacity to evolve, adapt and evolve that adaptive function, because our capacity to evolve is itself evolvable. And then that will allow me to release that back into reality. And so I Yeah, I’m deeply opposed to that crypto Gnostic thing that people like Weinstein and other because I think it it ontologically, it’s a category mistake, we’re thinking at the narrative level, and we shouldn’t. And then personally, it is destructive to people’s lives, because it puts them into the wrong narrative for them trying to deal with the things that are upsetting them. So sure, sure. All right. So I so this will probably be the last question topic that I have for you. So you were making a pretty clear distinction between sort of mind minded purpose and you know, purpose without a mind, right? And I guess the question is, is so neoplatonism kind of had an answer for where personhood came from, right? There was that ontological cascade, right of oneness, mind and soul, right? And we have oneness, mindness and soul kind of as our as ourselves. And that’s sort of the ontological source of and standing of personhood. I guess what what I would ask for you, and this is, I guess, a huge question to answer in a short period of time. But but where what is personhood? And and where does it come from? And how does that relate to this sort of stuff that we’ve, excuse me, been talking about? Sure, sure. So first of all, I mean, I’m recording a series right now with credit, Greg Enriquez and Christopher Master Pietro called the elusive I like capital I, the nature and function of the self. And and so trying to work out, you know, this term is probably the most used term in psychology self. And it is the term that the term and this is not my opinion, my opinion solely, this is a lot of people’s opinion. This term is one of the least explicated or explained terms in all of psychology. And the the attempts that have made how and this is direct quote, form a conceptual morass, trying to trying to tease this out. You know, it’s so, again, I’m going to have to be saying something preliminary about this. But so I’ll try a couple of basic moves. So autopoetic, autonomous, autonomous things are things that we can genuinely attribute need to, we’ve sort of negotiated that as something we agreed to. And therefore, we can talk. And so I think that capacity for relevance realization that we were just talking about, it grounds in things that have needs. This is Montague’s, you know, great insight, computers don’t care about the information they’re processing, we do. And we care about the information processing, because we take care of ourselves, because we are constantly making ourselves and governing ourselves. Is that okay? So yes. So at the core, at least at the initial, let’s call it the initial moment, I don’t mean in time, I mean, ontological moment, right? You know, relevance is relevance to an autopoetic, autonomous, adaptive thing, creature, right, living being. Okay. But, right, we also, because of evolution, right, we also are we have formed attachment relationships to our children, because they’re born so premature. And what happens is an inversion. And that inversion also maps an inversion that we have in general, because not only are we biological beings, we’re cultural beings. And what’s that inversion, we come to a point in our life, and you know, there’s cultural moments, especially when you have a kid, often, when you’re going through the transformative experiences, where that arrow, the directionality of relevance realization flips. And the question is not, how is it relevant or important? Listen to the word import, important to me, how is it not right? But how am I relevant to it? Yeah, well, I have a three month old daughter. So I’m very much. You know that? Yeah, yeah. And when you when you when you ask people about meaning in life, what does our culture tell us is the most crucial thing purpose? Well, purpose is how things are relevant to me purpose matters. But it’s not the moment, it’s not the soul or even the most important thing to your sense of meaning in life. There’s right there is coherence, that intelligibility we talked about, you need that you need to be connected to intelligibility. And then that that and beyond that significance, you need that those connections to sometimes be deeper, profound, they don’t always to always be deeper for profound, but they sometimes have to be you have to have a sense that that intelligibility has depth to it, right? And then mattering, you need to have your direction of the arrow of relevance go this way, you need to be connect to relevant to something that has a realness and an intrinsic value beyond your egocentric concerns. And you’re having it with your three month old right now. We also have it with our culture in general, we also are now sort of trying to get at sort of towards our our world in general. Okay, so what happens is, the machinery starts with what’s called self relevance, how things are relevant, right this way. And there’s lots of emerging research that that is like the glue of the psyche that is so my proposal that this is central, right? But what happens is, right, and I think that has the capacity to make you kind of a proto self, or some kind of self. And we know that other organisms, other animals have some kind of self awareness. But you get a flip from importance, if you’ll allow me to transcendence, and that is the flip in which we are concerned to matter to systems, and to people greater than ourselves. And I think, as you in this situation of your, your child, I can’t remember if you said it was a son, it was a daughter daughter. Yeah, yeah. You’re experiencing a gapay, you’re not loving them for how you can import them into you, or you’re not loving them because you can cooperate in reciprocity. You’re loving them because your act of loving them helps them become a self and ultimately a person, it’s a person making activity. Right. So I think when the arrow turns this way, and it is a Gopic, we are simultaneously taking on the role of making persons. And we are also retrospectively or retroactively also becoming persons. So a person is a self that is a Gopically oriented to mattering to other selves within shared systems of intelligibility. That’s how I would say it works. Sure, sure. I like that. Yeah. My daughter can smile back at me sometimes. Yes. But that’s about the only reciprocity in the relationship at the moment. So yeah, I really like that that you Yeah, you have a video on Christianity in your awakening from the meaning crisis series. And that idea of a gapay as sort of, I don’t know, the force or the act of making a person out of somebody is really insightful. I really enjoyed that. I guess the question that that leads and sort of the neoplatonic way is, so where does the agape come from? Right. If I can make a person out of my daughter and my parents made a person out of me and my wife and I make persons of each other and that sort of thing, it would then seem to need some ontological source above ourselves to make ourselves a self. Yeah. So I think there’s a way. So I mean, we didn’t get to something which is, I mean, I’m very influenced by very late. So the neoplatonic tradition doesn’t we just asked me about the ancient, but it doesn’t start with the mass, it stopped with the mass, it goes into Dionysus. And for me, the sort of culminating figure is John Scott of Seragina and his model of God, which of course, he got branded a heretic because, but his model for heretics. Yeah. Yeah. And his model, which, which is the one I actually would endorse, and I think that is actually more relevant. So philosophically, right, you we have these two directions we can, we can say it all emerges bottom up, right? And then emergence has a problem with the normativity. Where’s the normativity? But you can try a sort of classical neoplatonism, which is no, it all emanates down, but the neoplatonists have an opposite problem of, well, why does it differentiate at all? And how the heck does it come into space and time and causation? Right. And so, Arigina’s insight is, well, those two, those two complimentary weaknesses are the best argument we have that they are actually completely mutually interpenetrating. So every, every moment of emergence is in a moment of emanation all the way up and all the way down. It’s Heraclitus’s, the way up and the way down are the same way. And so one story you can tell is, yes, it’s, you know, I gave that bottom up emergence story of personhood, but simultaneously there has to be, there are sort of, if you’ll allow me to stretch the scientific term, there are laws and natural forms of relatedness that are emanating, right, that constrain. So when we search the space, as you said, it’s not, it’s not just that evolution is doing the variation and the selection, it’s also reality is constrained on the possibilities that are available, right? And so there’s, there is something deeply from the guts of, you know, the grammar for our universe that lays out the possibilities of personhood. And so, you know, I find it, for example, probably unlikely that you could get personhood without having, you know, highly complex, intelligent communal beings or something like that. And it’s no coincidence that the organisms that have a sense of self are the social ones. We can have highly intelligent organisms that are really wickedly intelligent. They don’t seem to be social, they’re not social, they don’t seem to have a sense of the self, like an octopus. And so there’s things like, unless these structures are in place, right, unless these structures are in place, there’s a structural requirement that necessitates and affords personhood. And that’s emanating down the possibility space as much as all these emergence processes are actualizing upward, and they’re completely interpenetrating each other. That’s sort of the revised neoplatonic answer I would give. So there’s something in the way the guts of the universe work that, right, put constraints on the possibilities, put constraints, not just negatively ruling out. Constraints and affordance at the same time. Yeah, yeah, not only ruling out, but ruling in. So it rules out this and this and this, but as you start to move towards this, it rules you in towards personhood. Now, I don’t think that means that personhood is inevitable. Again, that’s an argument we sort of discussed earlier. But what it means is, I sometimes have this experience, not even of persons, but like I’ll see a cat go by, my partner has beautiful cats, and I’ll be struck with awe. It’s like, what kind of reality is this such that it can make a cat? And what do I have to think about what’s in its grammar such that cats are possible? Like, I just think of it as sort of this, you know, a few, you know, static equations out there, doesn’t capture that. So that’s the emanation aspect that I see. Sure. All right. Well, I want to be respectful of your time, but I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, John. Although I feel like we were just getting warmed up as sometimes it goes. So maybe we’ll have to talk again sometimes. Oh, well, if you invited me back, consider the invitation accepted. I’d love to come back and talk to you again. Maybe, you know, follow up on this one. You know, you can reflect on what we’ve discussed. We can pursue. Thank you for this. I want to really thank you because I don’t, I’ve not had the opportunity to make sort of the neoplatonic aspect of my science and my spirituality because I see, I think you’re seeing, I’m trying to reformulate neoplatonism and revivify it as a way of life and spiritual practice that will bridge between spirituality and science. Yeah. Giving me the opportunity to do that was much appreciated. Sure. And I’ll thank you. I think that like we said at the beginning, Christianity and neoplatonism were so intertwined that one can hardly sometimes draw a line between the two. And that I think that as Jonathan Peugeot and other people have said that Christianity is perhaps going through some sort of death and rebirth at the moment. It seems to have butted up against the end of a train of thought or however you want to put it. And that I think that work like yours that some way echoes and mirrors the neoplatonic world of the first couple of centuries of Christianity that helped vivify it the first time intellectually will be part of the process of revivifying it again. And I think that work like yours that integrates spirituality and science and psychology and all of these things is the raw ingredients for this process are there. And I very much am paying close attention to your work because I feel like something interesting and exciting is happening in and around it. So thank you very much. Well, thank you. I think Jonathan might be right. I don’t know. And I don’t try to foreclose. But when I talk about stealing the culture, I often compare myself to Augustine or Augustine. Canadians, Americans tend to pronounce the name differently. I pronounce them differently in the same sentence sometimes. But I sometimes, and I hope it’s not hubristic, but the idea that it didn’t save the Roman Empire and maybe to try and think it would was a mistake. But what it did, that neoplatonic Christianity, right, it gathered everything and saved it and then founded the civilization that came after the fall of the Western Empire. And of course, it didn’t fall in the East. It continued to evolve, right, in the business. And so, yeah, that’s what I’m hoping. And if that means that a death and rebirth of Christianity, you know, in a way that is consonant with this project, I’m fine with that. I think Buddhism is going through a similar thing, although the Buddhists don’t realize it as much. Because the importation of Buddhism to North America is ramifying back into Buddhism in a way that I think the more traditional people are just starting to realize. But they’re really astute people like Evan Thompson and Stephen Batchelor. They’ve already seen it. They’ve already foreseen it. And that’s why they’re both, you know, Evan wrote a book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, and Stephen Batchelor wrote a book, After Buddhism, right? They were deeply immersed in Buddhism, and now they’re both post-Buddhist in a really important way. So I think something similar is also going on in Buddhism. I can’t comment on the other religions. So if you see my work as in some way contributing to that in a helpful manner, then that is deeply satisfying for me to hear. So thank you very much. All right. Well, thank you very much. I’ll stop the recording right there.