https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vHJsaSc5rFc
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m so excited to have yet once again, one of my favorite interlocutors and companions on this journey, the amazing Rick Rapetti. So Rick, it’s so good to have you back again. I’m so excited about this conversation. John, it’s always a pleasure and an honor to be a part of your work. As you know, I love your work and I am very happy that you are not only somebody who invites me onto your platform, but that we are developing a nice friendship, so. Yes, nice friendship and we’re working on various projects together. And I thought I’d give you the opportunity to mention a project that you invited me onto and that came to a wonderful fruition, which is the anthology. Maybe you could speak a little bit about that. And I’ve been mentioning it frequently, both in a popular setting and in academic settings. Well, let me show the book. I don’t know how clear that’ll come out. I mean, pretty clear. Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. And this is actually my wife is the artist who made the cover design. Valerie, and that’s, you’ve been looking at her stuff every time I’m on the platform here. Right. Yeah, so this is the Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. There are 26 chapters in there. One from me, one from John right there. John, should I rehearse how I got you involved in this at the last moment or is that anecdotal? I think that’s a good story. Let’s just bring that in because that’s how we actually met. That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, so I was in the late stages of editing this book with 26 chapters. And in the last couple of months, I was about maybe a month away from my deadline to hand over the manuscript, completely edited by me. And I had a couple of contributors who kind of just went AWOL. So I was scrambling to think what to do about that. If they showed up at the last minute, if I’d have time to do their work and they just weren’t responding to my email side, who knows what happened to them. So I knew I could possibly, if I found someone else, I can maybe put someone in there and in fact, one of the people who I wasn’t hearing from was doing stuff in neuroscience, contemplative neuroscience, all that kind of stuff. And I wanted somebody in the science space. And I accidentally found your work while I was preparing to teach a course in ancient philosophy that I hadn’t taught in quite a while. And I was just boning up on my pre-socratics and whatnot. So I was watching YouTube videos or really listening to them while I’m jogging because I’m multitasking. And I found voices with, not voices with a break, the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but it didn’t even come up because of that. It just came up because there was some pre-socratics mentioned or something in my search. And one of your videos in the early sequence that was from the ancient era in your Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, I forget who it was about, but it was one of the ancient Greeks. And I was so impressed. And you were mentioning in there how you were trying to reverse engineer enlightenment or whatever. And I was like, this is really interesting. This is a lot more than what I was just looking to remember. What’s the difference between an aximander and an aximenes, you know, this kind of thing. I just wanted to refresh, because the names I always get them, you know, I’m sloppy with that. So let me listen to a couple of videos while I’m running. I was hooked. I started listening. I went back to the beginning and I listened to the entire series. I was halfway through it when I realized this guy might be perfect for a chapter. I’ve got one or two openings. You know, I had promised the publisher a certain amount. I had word counts. I couldn’t go too far over, but I don’t want to go under either. So I said, you know, what do I got to lose? You know, most people, especially this guy, he seems so busy, but let me just try. So I emailed you. I said, hi, I’m so-and-so. This is my project. I have an opening. I think your work, if you can, you know, knock something out in a matter of a month, which most people need a half a year to a year when they agree to write something for an anthology. And you said, yes. So I think you said, I might need an extra week, but I said, okay, fine. And like, but you got it to me before, I think the deadline, even, I don’t think you actually needed that extra week. I don’t remember the details. It doesn’t matter, but I was so thrilled to have a chapter by you. And that’s how we met, because you agreed to do it. You wrote an excellent, and not only that, but very few of the contributors write a chapter that has only minor, like, you know, editorial proofreading kind of changes. So yours was like almost 99% perfect when you gave it to me, which was also wonderful. I only had maybe one other author who was that clear in their writing and very little editing work on my end. So yeah, I loved the piece, and I really resonate with your piece. So that was it. And then after we started that correspondence, you invited me onto this platform. So that’s, yeah, that’s the how we met thing. So I got a lot more than what I had hoped for. So yeah, I guess one of the takeaways for people is, don’t be ashamed or hesitate to ask people for things. You know, it might work. So about the anthology, I think it’s a wonderful book. Maybe clarity by contrast would help. How would it differ from the psychology of mindfulness meditation? Because there’s several books around that topic out there. Yeah, yeah, this is not only the psychology of meditation, but just meditation. So there’s an Oxford handbook on meditation. There’s all sorts of handbooks on mindfulness and this and that, and I’m in one of those. The same thing with psychology. The key difference is that, while there is a philosophy of meditation in the history of Asian philosophy, Asian philosophy is loaded with philosophy about meditation. And there’s some philosophy about it in the Stoics and whatnot, very little. That’s explicitly even discussed as meditation, right in ancient Western philosophy, the stuff that Hado talks about. And this is also related to something that I’ve heard you talk about, how analytic academic philosophy has kind of veered away from this deeper contemplative approach where philosophy is a way of life and it includes a kind of meditative reflection. In the history of Western philosophy, as particularly the contemporary era, there’s almost no discussion of meditation, philosophy of meditation. Only very recently that individual philosophers like you or me or Evan Thompson or this one or that one have even addressed meditation. And if they have, it’s only part of some larger thing. It’s been a kind of ancillary, auxiliary, secondary, footnote or whatever. I mean, there have been a couple of things that have come out that have been more directly about meditation, but not entirely about it. Like Evan’s book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, he discusses meditation in there, Evan Thompson. Of course, his recent book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, that discusses meditation, but it’s not the primary topic. Let’s talk about what would or should philosophy think about and want to say about and explore about meditation itself. So meditation has entered into the kind of mainstream culture with mindfulness is everywhere. Mindfulness for dummies, Mcmindfulness. I’ve heard you talk about that, the critique of the watered down kind of consumerists turn it into popping a Prozac mindfulness. And it’s being absorbed in all kinds of contexts, in the boardroom, in the business world, in police departments, in schools, in the healthcare system, in the UK, in all sorts of places. But philosophers, that’s that metaphor about the owl of Minerva. Philosophers are represented by the owl of wisdom only come out after something’s been established and accepted by the culture. Monday morning quarterbacks usually. Yeah, yeah. They are not usually prophetic or early on the scene of anything. They like to wait till the dust settles, at least modern Western philosophers do. Right, right. Or they’ll chime in on anything. But you’ve got little fragments of it appearing here and there. Like the philosophy of psychedelics, Chris Leatherby just came out with that book. Western philosophy, even analytically kind of informed Western philosophy, not continental. I mean, Anglo-American, the analytic tradition is very slow to kind of move into these other areas like the philosophy of psychedelics or the philosophy of meditation. But it’s happening now. And as you know, meditation is kind of like the sine qua non of my own meditator, my own philosophical practice. Right. It revolves around meditation. And so this is just something that I’ve been thinking about a need for this for the longest time. And I think the time is ripe and apparently the publishers agreed. Yeah, I mean, like I said, it’s a beautiful volume. I think it’s really pertinent. You know, post-Hedeo, we’ve got the revival of philosophy as the cultivation of wisdom. And even within the Anglo-American tradition, wisdom is now a topic again, after centuries in which it was not addressed. And then of course, one of the goals of meditation and contemplation has across cultures and times been the cultivation of wisdom. So it see, they should naturally go together, at least philosophy as a way of life and a mindfulness set of practices. So I think it’s really needed to bring them together. I wonder if you could say, what would they get in a philosophy of meditation? What’s the philosophical approach to meditation and what is it gonna be? Because I think one of the things it does, although I mean, I’m a little bit biased because that was the centerpiece of my article. One of the things philosophy does is bring the perennial reflection on wisdom into the deep discourse with perennial practice of the cultivation of wisdom in meditation. And so what do you think this book would offer the reader? That they wouldn’t get, like you say, there’s a thousand books on mindfulness and there’s a brain is doing this, the neuroscience or psychology, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A mindfulness enhances insight and self-regulation and all that. But what is it that somebody could get? For one thing, I think is, exactly the bridging between the cultivation of wisdom and the reflection on wisdom and a way of life. But also, philosophy can often bring like a synoptic integration, an attempt to get an integrated whole, an understanding, a comprehensive understanding and in-depth understanding of a particular phenomena. So I guess, do you have a sense of my question? I’m leaving it very open. Yeah, no, I do. And your question was already formulated in a very rich and contentful way. Almost already implies the answer. It’s certainly a philosophy of meditation is going to do all the things that you just asked about ideally. But this book is kind of just like a baby step in the direction of a comprehensive philosophical account. Of what meditation is, how it might work, its relevance to philosophy and vice versa. Yes, yes. And I don’t know if you recall in a previous talk with you about meditation and philosophy and their relationship to each other. I mentioned one of my Dharma teachers, Ruth Denison, her Buddhist name is Dhammadena. She was a student of Goenka’s, Theravada and Burmese. At a retreat at IMS, the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie, Massachusetts, she casually in a Dharma talk said, mindfulness is just extraordinary attention to ordinary experience. And I remember having a kind of insight that I thought that’s what philosophy is. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So to me, meditation is a philosophical practice. Right, right, right. So that’s the foundation of what I think the two coming together is all about. They’re two different tools for the same purpose. And I think that’s the same thing, the sapiential process. Right, right. So what about the continental? One moment, that’s the first thing I would say. Oh, please. Yeah, and then, so like in this book, you’ve got 26 different chapters from different perspectives, right? And I said, it’s kind of like a baby step. It’s the first step. My desire is to just get this into the conversation. So when Western philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition or even in the continental tradition or other people in this space see that there are people on both sides or on three or four different sides all starting to speak the same language and address the same questions that gives the subject matter credibility for others who might be on the fence, there’s a lot of scholars who are privately practitioners also, right? And so this is an opportunity to get them out and into the fray and to contribute to this. What should we think about meditation as philosophers, as professional academics and scholars, whether or not you’re a practitioner, what should we think about it? There’s the epistemology of it. Does it help us with or how does it help us with our epistemology? What can it contribute? And what can it help us with metaphysically in terms of some of the questions like Heidegger is concerned with, the continental is low, phenomenology, certainly meditation and phenomenology are very, very similar. So I don’t know if you had time, you probably didn’t have time to read these chapters, but because there’s 26 chapters and they’re all pretty dense, but there are a few chapters. There’s a whole section. What is it? Part four, which is about meditation and phenomenology. Right, exactly. So there’s one guy in there, Stanislaw Tomalsina, who’s a Vedantic scholar and a really brilliant philosopher out at San Diego, who wrote about phenomenology in Vedanta, which is like the monist view. And then there’s another, a pair of philosophers, Dan Zahavi, you might’ve seen his name, self, no self, that guy, the phenomenology and everything. And one of his students, a PhD student, Odysseus Stone, they wrote a critique of the idea that they see some people claiming in the mindfulness community that mindfulness and phenomenology are the same thing. So they’re like defenders of phenomenology and they have a kind of critique. Their critique is largely of the Mick mindfulness or the John Kabat-Zinn, MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and saying how the goals are very different. Yes, yes. And then the person after them is Christian Kosaru, who’s a scholar of Indian philosophy and phenomenology, who thinks that most of Indian philosophy can be seen through the lens of phenomenology. So he defends the ways in which those two things are in common, this kind of thing. So that’s just one little thread about phenomenology and meditation. And that’s important to have those people all talking to each other. That’s one sample. Well, that was exactly the question I was gonna bring up. I wanted you to, because you had talked about the Anglo-American tradition, but I know the book addresses especially the phenomenological tradition. And they are like, yeah, it seems to me, and again, the book is addressing a pertinent thing. Those two things need to be in deep discussion with each other. I agree that they’re not identical, but I disagree with any proposal that says they’re not intimately related to each other. Right, right. So I think that’s very clear. I think the book is definitely fulfilling a role that, and I don’t think this is preposterous to propose. I think this book is fulfilling a role that I have not seen in any other book about meditation or mindfulness. And I think it’s an important role. Even these two things that we’ve just talked about, I think are really, really important. Yeah, one way that I would put what you just said is that having these discussions within the normative context of contemporary philosophy, right, contextual norms govern arenas, right? So, like the debate between the critics of McMindfulness and the defenders of it, that’s in one space, but it’s not really in the philosophical context. So we’re bringing these things into the philosophical context where professional philosophers, they specialize in communicating with each other with philosophical norms, right? Charitable interpretation, positive critical feedback, being careful about points of agreement and disagreement. Those norms are good, they’re not enough, as you and I know, from doing what Ron LaHave calls deep philosophy. It would be great to get all those people to do some deep philosophy about this stuff, because, and I think of course, meditation and deep philosophy go very closely. Yes, yes. And it’s great to begin almost every exercise in deep philosophy with some kind of meditative practice. So, if we can bring that set of facts that I just mentioned to the broader analytic Anglo-American and the continental traditions and have them see these discussions play out within this new domain, the philosophy of meditation, well, it’s only new in the West, as you know, it’s ancient, you know, in Taoism and Hinduism and Buddhism, but that’s been kept separate from, largely separated from Western philosophy. But that’s all opening up now. It’s very, very cool. I hope that maybe there’ll be a follow-up volume, because I think it’s, like you said, it’s- I think there can be, yeah, easily, because I invited twice as many, more than twice as many people as the ones who were able to write. And most of those people who I invited were like, oh, I love the idea, I’m just too busy right now. If you had a later deadline, I could do it, you know, that kind of thing. So, I know there could easily be a volume too. Well, I’d like to pick up on something that you and I, before we turn the camera on, we’re talking about could have gone in the anthology or could go into perhaps a future special issue of a journal, but also in our last conversation, we were, I wanted to talk to you about the Agnes Callard, Galen Strossen, you know, paradox of self-transcendence, which is integral to the mindfulness tradition, the wisdom cultivation tradition, and obviously to the work of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard and transformative experience and aspiration. But it was also connected to some of the problems around, you know, the paradoxes of free will. We had a really, you actually shifted my position in that discussion in a way that I found very, very helpful and grateful for, but perhaps we could zero in on, you know, bringing it into this because mindfulness, at least when we put it back in an aspirational, sapiential framework and not just a therapeutic or fitting you well for being a corporate drone kind of thing. When we put it back into that framework, it puts us right into this challenge that Strossen has posed. You know, I do bring it up in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I brought it up in other work, and I believe I talk about it again in After Socrates. We have 17 episodes filmed, by the way, and we only got- I can’t wait to see that. Yeah, and I’m getting a lot of positive feedback from some of the sort of beta watchers. So maybe I’ll just quickly review the paradox or the problem or the dilemma. I think Galen, Strossen thinks of it as a dilemma, perhaps it’s more of a paradox, but we can talk about that. So the paradox goes like this. He uses the term self-creation, but it’s clear that he means something like self-transcendence. He doesn’t mean the non-controversial self-creation of an autopoetic being that’s growing or something like that. He means you become a self other than you are. So I think, in fact, a better term would have been self-transcendence, but I understand why he brought in creation because it makes the pivot point more explicit. So when I say self-creation, here’s self-transcendence, but I’m gonna still use self-creation because I think it is a fortuitous phrase. He says, okay, so you’re going to create a self other than you are. If you merely extrapolate or grow from the self that you are, that’s not self-creation because you’re not making another self. You’re only extending or developing the self. So you need a source of genuine novelty from outside the self. But if the self that is created is other than yourself, then it is not self-creation, it is creation by an other, and therefore it is not self-creation. So on either choice, these are the horns of the dilemma, right? It’s either the self, but it’s not genuine self-transcendent creation, or it is genuine transcendent creation, but it’s not done by the self. So therefore you can’t put the two together other than in an oxymoron. And yet we seem to constantly invoke across all of these sapiental traditions, including the mindfulness tradition, like the possibility of enlightenment, et cetera, a radical self-transcendence is a real possibility. Do you think that’s a fair presentation of the paradox? Yeah, that’s excellent. Two things right off the bat that reminds me of the Mino paradox. Yes, yes, yeah. And I think the same answer has to be brought in here, that there can be, same as there can be partial knowledge, there can be partial self-transformation. Yes, yes. This is a process, it’s a gradual process. So there’s incremental new self coming in, some of it from the outside, perhaps, maybe, maybe not, but it’s being assimilated by the self that’s already in the self now, and this kind of thing. It’s also like a kind of sorties thing, or the fallacy of the heap. Yes, yes, yes. Those are my intuitions about that. And I’ve critiqued Strawson about this. In fact, my very first paper at, well, it wasn’t my first paper, it was one of my first presentations in public on Buddhism and free will, was at the Columbia Society. At Columbia University, they had a conference on Buddhist ethics that was revolving around, Owen Flanagan’s book just came out, The Bodhisattva’s Brain, which Buddhism Naturalized was the subtitle. And Strawson was in the audience. I’m friends with him, because I just know him from communication and whatnot. But I gave a criticism of him in that presentation, which was precisely about that I thought he was guilty of a fallacy of the heap. Right, right. And I made some analogies with it. I don’t remember them off the top of my head, but he came up, when it was over, and it was people could come up to the microphone with the Q&A, I got very nervous when he got up and walked up to the mic. But he said, you know, I agree with you 100%. He said, I am some kind of a compatibilist. I was just kind of pointing out the problem. Yes. You know, I said, okay, fine. I was so happy that he said, I agree with you. He thought it was reasonable that, of course, it’s like Zeno’s paradox. It would be as if I was critiquing Zeno’s paradox. And Strawson came up and said, I do believe in motion, but I just think that we do have a logical puzzle here, that kind of thing. So I was very happy about that. But the other thing I wanna say, coming at this from a completely different point of view, maybe supporting, steelmaning him, the problematic part of the paradox. I don’t remember, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, I had a friend who moved out to Marin County, where there’s a lot of crystals and all that kind of, that new age, hooey stuff. And I remember him telling me, there’s a community of people who believe in something called walk-ins. Did you ever hear this phrase? No. Yeah, or so you can have a walk-in appointment in a beauty parlor, but yeah, I didn’t either. And he said, well, it’s this belief that there are these kind of ethereal aliens who will just kind of walk into and take over your mind and body. And he read a book about it and everything, and I thought, well, that’s insane. But some agent external to you comes in, and then you’re a new being. It would be kind of like a walk-in, which is a displacement and a kind of murder of the self, so to speak. It would be a killing of the previous self, or at least an annihilation of it. If a completely external self entered you, it would be like a possession. Yes, yes. That’s the strong intuition in this problem. And I think it’s really important. And you have, of course, this paradox comes to the fore when you have radical metanoia, like in St. Paul or Siddhartha, where the old man and the new man, right? The unawakened, the awakened. So I wanna give you my response, and then what you think about it, because I think it dovetails with this, which is, and this goes to another famous article that Strawson wrote around the self, and Greg and Chris and I talked about it in the Elusive Eye, the folk- Great series, yeah. The folk list of self attributes, yeah. Right, and it’s a monadic, autonomous self, right? And so I’ll bring in a notion from Tillich. Tillich says, you have autonomy, which of course is the primary value of the enlightenment. It is the value par excellence of the enlightenment, of the European enlightenment, the autonomy, the autonomy of this and the autonomy of that, right? And then you have a heteronymous, and Tillich talks about, like if you were possessed, like you say, by the foreign agency, he calls it demonic, but the Wachens would be at least daemonic, they could be daemonic too, right? Yeah, yeah. And then he says- They were actually being viewed as, in a positive way, like when you see those UFO fans hoping that the good aliens will come and save us, you know? So it would be daemonic then, not daemonic, right? Right. And then he points out quite rightly that both of those are in a sense polarities, and therefore misrepresentations of the fundamental nature of the self. That the self is actually a dialogical tonos between individuation and participation. Our own cognition is, right, this interpenetration between individual cognition and distributed cognition. We’re both using English, neither you nor I invented it. Is that an alien possession? No. Is it part of our autonomy? Well, not quite, right? Because we are participating. And so he talks about a theonomous notion, which is God, right? And the idea is, one of the problems I have with Strassen is he has a monadic model in the question, not Strassen himself, but in the problem, there’s the presupposition of a monadic self. Whereas I think of the self as not either individuated or participating, but in this, right? In this dialogical relationship at all times. And this is part of the 4E cognitive science. And so I think the question could almost be reversed. I’ve been arguing, for example, in my course on cognitive development, that it’s not the case that there’s a history of the mind and the functionality of the mind. That’s a computational model. But to the degree that the mind is inherently self-organizing, and especially when it’s self-organizing between the organism and the environment, there is no way to pull apart its history and its development. It develops by functioning and it functions by developing. And you can’t separate those out. The notion of self-organization completely merges together, right? These two things that we put as polarities. And so I think the self is something that is dialogically participated, rather than autonomously generated or demonically or demonically received. And so I think the paradox is resolved by getting a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of the self. If you see the self as inherently developmental, as inherently self-organizing, then you can’t actually separate it into these two moments that he wants to separate it in order to pose the problem. That’s how I would respond. Yeah, I like that line of thought. And you said that was Tillich who started. Yeah, so I think he’s right about this kind of false dichotomy, the model that’s being presupposed, and then that gives you this paradox. Yes, yes. Ironic that Strauss and, I love what you said. And one of the thoughts that came to me is just even, the embedded and embodied, the 4E thing really is a tremendous framework for your solution. Yes. But our embodied nature, our bodies alone are constantly exchanging oxygen and carbon monoxide and food and waste material. That paradox is completely refuted just by our eating. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. What I mean is our cells are constantly changing. And so what does that mean? Yes, exactly. On every level, it seems to be that your model is the more appropriate one. Some of the things that I said, what’s ironic about Strauss and even more so is that he’s a Buddhist meditation practitioner. Yes. A scholar practitioner. And I’ve talked to him about this, that he has said that over the years, what did you find the most tangible consequence of meditation in your life? He said, I’ve noticed that over the years, I’ve become less reactive. Okay? Now that’s not an alien entering into him. Right? That’s a gradual process of more mindful interacting with his own, the contents of his psychophysiological, visceral, et cetera. Right? Gradual process of deconditioning. Plus it’s part of Buddhist philosophy. Yes. That as you increase mindfulness of all the different aspects of your being, some of them of which are captured in the eight-limb, eight-fold path, the eight-folds of the eight-fold path. Right? Your volitions, your views, your speech and listening. I always add listening, because it’s not just speech. Speech is a two-way thing. Hearing and speaking. Your effort, your actions, your livelihood, all the different ways that you meditate, all of those things create this kind of processual transformation gradually that you just described. And he knows that. And it’s built into the, he knows that. Yes. He has to know that. And so that’s why he said it’s just a puzzle. It’s like a Zeno’s paradox that he’s articulated. And one of the things that I say is, I made the argument that, look, the more you practice meditation in the Buddhist tradition anyway, you cultivate, and studies have shown this, you cultivate detachment, even very simple meditative practices like mindful, even mcmindfulness. Yes. Over eight weeks, they give, there’s a, there are a bunch of these scales that test people. Like the Toronto mindfulness scale and this scale. So over the course of eight weeks, people experience decentering, detachment, all sorts of things like that. So I argue, I bring, that’s where I bring my philosophical lens and I made this comparison with Frankfurt. Frankfurt says, higher order volitions are volitions about lower order volitions. I don’t want to have that desire. I don’t want to act on that desire, right? So when you meditate, you’re detaching from those things and you’re in the same time, approving of Dharmic or pro nirvana, you know, approving of volitions that will lead to more mental freedom and reduce suffering. That’s a meta volitional thing that you’re doing. So you’re constantly altering the contents of the self, whatever the self, the metaphysics of the self are, you know, yourself is certainly composed of your volitions and your habits and all of that, whatever the metaphysics of the self is irrelevant, you’re in this endless transformative process. Yes, yes. With this, you know, it’s the feedback loop. It’s like eating, you know, it’s gradual. So those people who have these eureka moments, often transformation hits you like a light bulb and there’s a radical shift that people notice, but those are typically the result of lots of efforts on the small scale. And in my analysis, I think I even mentioned it in the article that we discussed last time about free will, this libertarian philosopher, not political libertarian, but the ones who believe in that autonomous, Yeah, yeah. you know, what is it? Almost dualistic that, you know, the self is a monadic mind that’s not conditioned by anything. One of this libertarian, Robert Kane, he says, oh, he tries to defend this idea by coming up with this concept of self-forming actions. So it’s like the first time that you, an agent, a young moral agent, maybe age five, six, seven, right, has some kind of dilemma or conflict or a torn decision. And he says, it’s almost like the pro and con of it cancels out and they’re stuck like Burden’s ass. Right, I was gonna say, yeah. Yeah, so then he makes the analogy that it’s like the collapse of the wave function, the agents, both intentions are the agents. So it’s not external, they’re both the agents desires, but agency first manifests in enacting a choice, right? And then, okay, so then that builds an identification with the agent’s own will that I chose that over that. And the agent forms itself over time. Well, that part, there’s something right about that part of it, but it doesn’t, you know, whether or not that justifies the libertarian model, that’s another question. But he came up with that just as a way to try to show that a model could be possible that wasn’t completely irrational and incoherent because libertarian, it’s very hard to do that prime mover on moved self thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he tried to show how there’s this gradual process with that the self creates itself and bootstraps itself, but not ex nihilo. Right. Right, so, but then I said, when you practice mindfulness or meditation or any of these, you know, sapiential practices that transform you, not all of them, but many of them, particularly the detachment and decentering that you can get from meditation in the Buddhist tradition, you’re engaging in self unforming actions, you’re conditioning yourself. Yes, yes, yes. And then you’re also creating new attachments or identifications of like the Dharmic ones, right? I wanna be more loving and altruistic and right. So you gradually deconditioning the old self and adding new, so you’re doing self unself forming actions and self forming, and I’m not talking about the metaphysics of self, it’s a pragmatic placeholder. Yes, yes. The process, you know, this is the causal functional process that I’m talking about, which is organic, it’s completely naturalistic, there’s no creation ex nihilo, but, you know, Strossen himself who poses this dilemma is doing that in his practice over the years. Yeah. You know, so that’s the way I come at this. And, you know, I said to deny it is to engage in something like the fallacy of the heap, that if it’s either 100 or zero, it’s either an alien or it’s a continuation, that’s like something like, well, I can’t put my finger on exactly, N is a number of grains, plus one is a heap, or minus one is not a heap, N is the number in between the heap and the non-heap. Yeah. You can’t put an exact number on it, it doesn’t follow that there are no heaps of sand. Yes, yes. Just like with the Zeno paradox. I think your argument and my argument actually converge. Very much so, yeah, very much so. We’re coming at it from slightly different, the emphasis in attention to different details of the same process. I think that’s right, I think that’s deeply right. I wonder if Strossen, because the place where I actually saw his meditative practice showing up in his work was in his critique and denial of the requirement for narrativity to the self. That’s where I saw, that struck me as, oh, that’s something I wondered when I saw, because he has that famous thing where he talks about, I forget which volume it was on the self. I was reading all these anthologies when I was preparing for the elusive I, and actually when I was preparing for the course that I teach that became the elusive I. But he makes that argument that many people think the way the current self and the future self are bind together are with narrative, and then he claims that he does not have that experience. I know, I know. And I thought the only thing I could reach, and I’ve been a strong proponent of the fact that the self can be non-narrative. And I’ve been arguing with people like Jonathan Pagio and Paul Van de Klay around this issue, because I thought when he was talking about that, I thought, well, I get what he means, because I’ve experienced that in deep meditation, deep contemplation, a non-narrative. And I talk about a nomological sense of the self, a sense of the ordering of one’s being and that ordering to the ordering of reality that is not a narrative thing at all. It’s more logos to logos to use a neoplatonic idea than it is the extension of a mythos, right? And so I got what he was saying there, but I was wondering just now aloud to you, I’m wondering if his experience of the self as more punctate and non-narrative is maybe part of what is going into the problematic. So what I’m proposing to you is the following, that one way in which people think they can respond to the paradox is to invoke the narrative nature of the self. Well, stories have non-logical identity, that’s how they work. And I think he is right, and now I’m trying to steel person him as well. I think he’s right in challenging that presupposition. What I’m proposing is maybe one of the functions of the paradox is to get us out of just assuming that the presupposition of the narrative structure of the self solves that paradox, solves that problem. And I think he’s right, this is my attempt to steel person him, that meditative experience, and you were nodding as soon as I said it, right? Meditative and contemplative experience can put you into a non-narrative sense of self very profoundly, right? And so we need a notion of self that can solve the paradox without relying on narrativity. And I think you were putting your finger on that when you talked about the deconstruction of the self as taking place, because that’s very much a non-narrative. And you see that the parables and the Sufi stories and the koans are very much a non-narrative. All designed to trigger the narrative and then to black hole it, to make it collapse in on itself and fall apart, to try and disclose the non-narrative sense of the self. So this is what I’m proposing to you. I’m proposing that part of what the problem, the paradox does is help to call into question the presupposition of the narrative self and place a demand on philosophers, right? In the sense we’ve been talking about today, to come up with a notion of self that does not depend on narrativity in order to address the paradox. What do you think about that as a proposal? That’s really brilliant, John. That goes a big step past what I contributed. But I think as you already pointed out, what we’re both contributing to this is very synergistic or convergent. That’s brilliant. You know, I’ve thought about Strawson’s claim to not have that phenomenology. It’s very peculiar, but not that peculiar for folks like us. Yes. And he’s been practicing for a long time. I don’t know when he started practicing, but in his 1986 book, Freedom and Belief, he brings in Buddhist meditation, the community, the sangha, as an example of, you know, his father, Peter Strawson’s piece about freedom and resentment. Do you remember that? No, I don’t. Oh yeah, it was a kind of classic where he says, look, if the scientific times or whatever came out with the headline tomorrow saying, determinism proven, right? No free will. Peter Strawson said, it wouldn’t, in the least, it might have a momentary blip on our normativity, but he thought we’re so entrenched in our reactive attitudes, our normative interactive patterns, that that wouldn’t really corrode it or, you know, force us to revise our belief. The underlying presupposition is that we think we have free will and that all normativity rests on it for the most part, right? So Peter Strawson is saying no. And Galen was saying something like, well, Buddhist communities live without that. They, well, on the one hand, they live with the belief, and I think he might’ve been exaggerating, that everything is deterministic, and they have no conception of the self and all the normativity of the self out the window, right? So it’s a kind of interesting continuation from the father to the son in that line of reasoning. But one of the things that he said then, and he actually contributed to my first anthology on Buddhism and free will, and he plucked out some stuff from Freedom and Belief and revised it for that collection, where he said, philosophers who believe in determinism, but still act as if they have free will, should practice meditation so that they could really experience the impersonal flow of causation through them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, and then there would be no disconnect between their theory and their phenomenology and their practice. So, but I’m saying, he wrote that original version in 1986. This is a long-winded thing to say. It sounds based on what he even said in 86, because what he wrote recently from my other book was based on that. He’s been practicing for decades. Yes, yes. And he’s a brilliant philosopher. Yes. And he’s, in 1986, he was talking about experiencing the impersonal flow of causation through oneself, right? Speaking about oneself in some causal functional sense. Yes. Kind of, I think that he probably is quite advanced as a practitioner and experiences the absence of the narrative self. Yes. One of these detachment things that happens when you practice. You start to see your thoughts as his thoughts or as thoughts and not as me, right? So, yeah, it’s really a clever angle that you put on that, that the paradox is to get us to reconsider. Without actually saying it’s targeting the narrative self, it does target the narrative self. Very much so. Yeah, that’s one of those presuppositions that’s questioned in the background. Our sense of self that’s challenged by that paradox is a narrative sense of self. That’s what I think. It’s the notion of the self as a protagonist in a story. Yeah. As the main character in each of our narcissistic universes, yeah. And so here’s where I invoke your Raro and the idea that any such narrative actually presupposes a dynamical system of self-organization. That’s the actual rounding of the possibility of narrative. And so if we move to a non-narrative sense, we can invoke what we talked about from Tillett, we can get a non-narrative sense of the self as this self-organization that is fundamentally the history and the functioning of the self that is presupposed by any protagonist model of the self. So I think the early answer we gave together to Strassen, we can now still together give a deeper answer to this steel-personing of Strassen’s argument. Yeah, and I think we’re not rejecting him at all. No. Yeah, we’re employing his brilliant insights and in a way to show that, okay, the causal functional answer to the paradox actually is what grounds a narrative sense of self when there is one, when there is one. Yes, yes, but it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to be one. Yeah, the narrativity is fairly normal and typical of human beings because the average human being is not some soteriologically advanced virtuoso meditation practitioner like Strassen. So like this virtuosity thing, the virtuoso, the contemplative virtuosos, I’ll call them. Yes, yeah. In Buddhism, they’re called arias, like the advanced, the noble ones. They’re trying to get rid of the narrative self because they see it as the primary confusion. I’m that guy in my story. So I wonder then, if you’ll allow me, if we move to the phenomenological sense of the self that we’ve been talking about here, is that why you also get the dissolution? Often you’ll see it in various parts of Vedanta. You see it in Buddhism. Buddhism is the one we’re both familiar with, but the idea that emptiness is shunyata, sorry, that samsara is shunyata, that emptiness, right, that everyday world and the world of enlightenment are still, are ultimately the same. What I’m saying is, right, when you lose the narrative sense of self, the sense of that as being a radical transition from not enlightened to enlightenment dissolves into, no, no, there’s been a deep underlying continuity which goes towards your point, I think, right? Because if you drop to that other sense of self, you get the idea, no, no, the self is inherently self-transcending. And it is, right, if you move past the paradox of self-transcendence, I think you also simultaneously move past the paradox of enlightenment, that it is somehow radically other and yet radically the same as everyday experience. Yeah, this is so many metaphors in Asian philosophy about the snake and the rope. Yes, yes. You know, that kind of thing. In before and after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. There’s so many of these metaphors that confirm what you just said. Yeah, yeah. But the kind of causal functional specifications that we just articulated also remind me of this, what you’ll get in Buddhism about individuality. So you’ve got, like, what is the self? It’s not a real thing. It’s a process, but what kind of process is it? It’s a closely clustered stream of causally connected. Yes, yes, yes. And my conditions are different from yours. But we’re part of the whole stream and we’re all interacting. So it’s interesting that, you know, but when you see that, you see that, oh, it’s all one big show. I’m in this little part of the stream, whatever, when I say I am, you know, but I’m part of the whole thing. Yeah, so if you have the insight, then those kinds of remarks don’t seem so paradoxical, like in the Diamond Sutra that nobody’s ever enlightened, nobody ever suffers. That’s the idea that there’s no real separation. But it’s the same idea in Vedanta. I remember, and those are some of the interesting things that a philosophy of meditation has to address. Exactly, exactly. And I remember seeing once, I think it might’ve been the first time that the Dalai Lama, or that any Buddhist in over a thousand years, since like one of the first Buddhist conventions, had representatives from all the different Buddhist, you know, sects and traditions, the Mahayana or whatever, Vajrayana, all of them all in one place. It was in England, I think, the Dalai Lama, a big Congress, I forget what it was, but I saw a video on it years ago. And at the end there was Q&A, and he has his interpreter there, I forget that guy’s name. But some scholar asked him, what’s the difference between, you know, the one in Vedanta and emptiness, or non-duality in Buddhism, right? So this is a similar thing. He goes back and forth with his interpreter in Tibetan for like five minutes, five minutes. And then he comes back to the mic and he says, I don’t know. I don’t know what your time was. I thought you might be checking the time? Yeah. I like to keep these two around an hour and 55 minutes. Yeah. Because it seems to be like a really good… It’s not like you and I aren’t gonna talk again. I think this is I think this is excellent. Like I said, this really helped me get right going on. We might want to write a piece together about just this resolution. I would love to do that. I think that that would be really, really cool. But I was looking because I did want to give you, as I always do for everybody on Voices with Hervéki, the final word. Well, I don’t think I could top what the Dalai Lama said. And I don’t mind. I don’t mind quoting him when it comes to the bottom line about all this stuff. I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m trying to figure it out. And that’s what the philosophy of meditation is supposed to do. I’ve been struggling with how philosophy and meditation integrate my whole life, you know, with my confidence and faith and my doubts and my experiences and my knowledge and, you know, having other people like myself, like you and all those people who contributed to the volume, just having more regular discussions and professional research and dialogue and all that. That’s that’s why I put that book together, because I, as I’ve told you before, I need to be in communion with more people like me who understand me and who can help me by talking about stuff like what you and I just talked about. So thank you, John. I really appreciate the good fortune of being a part of this with you. So thank you. Thank you, Rick. You’re always the amazing Rick Rapetti. Thank you. Thank you.