https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=J-eHKAIi1cE
Welcome everyone to the Cognitive Science Show. I’m really happy to be here for the start of a new series, Psyche Pathology. We’ll explain why we’re calling it Psyche Pathology and Wellbeing. And I’m here with my frequent nemesis in intellectual crime, Greg Enriquez. Greg has been my partner for so many of these. We do a lot of work together. And then I think with appropriate, and I hope not condescending, pride, one of my former students. He’s still technically one of my students because I’m on his PhD committee. We collaborated. We’re writing papers together. Gary Hovinesyan, and he’s here. And I’ll ask each one of you, we’ll start with Greg, and then go to Gary to just introduce yourself, say a little bit more about yourself. And then we’ll start with what we’re going to be doing together in this series. Rock on. I noticed we’re both GHs. So we’re here. GHs are working with you here, John. Yes, it’s beautiful to be here. Really excited to come back, particularly excited about this series. I love the conversation that you and Gary had. Obviously, I jumped on that in dialogue with both of you, saw some of the work that I was doing to connect to that. So yes, I’m a professor of psychology at James Madison University in a combined clinical and school program, which I directed for a long time, as folks may know. I’m sort of known for this thing called Utalk, a unified theory of knowledge, which addresses this issue of what I call the problem of psychology, which is, hey, what is this thing called psychology? Can we connect it to the natural sciences, do justice to human behavior and our subjective experience of being in a coherent way, and also situate that for a collective narrative in the 21st century that’s wisdom-oriented? That’s what I’m trying to do. And then I see John doing all of his stuff. And of course, we did our connection. And this is just another building block for that. So thrilled to be here. Great. So GH number two, we’ll go ahead now. So my name is Gary Hovnesin, and I’m very excited to be here. John and Greg, I knew each of you independently before you knew one another, actually. Totally. So I am currently a PhD candidate at Duquesne University in clinical psychology. And my interests are very, very, have been very informed by a lot of John’s teachings. I was an undergrad and I took many of your courses, actually. And I think in 2015, when I started to get a little more serious with research and academia, the very first conference I went to to present my research on that was written in one of your classes was where I met Greg at the Society of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. And I remember having these intense conversations with Greg. And I was like, oh, there’s this TED talk you should check out. It’s by this professor named John Vervecky. It would be right up your alley. Unbelievable foreshadowing there. Crazy. Totally. Loved it. So many years down the line, here we are, the three of us. So I just love that. So that’s just a little bit about me. Makes my psyche heart warm. So there it is. So what specifically triggered this is that Gary and I have recently published a paper integrating personality theory and relevance realization theory, which dovetailed with some of the work that Greg and I and Chris talked about in the elusive I and some of the other work that Greg and Zach Stein and I did towards a metapsychology that is tutor transformation. Gary and I are currently working on a follow up in which we want to integrate relevance realization theory with attachment theory. And the idea here is to start to build a comprehensive framework. The work I’m doing with Mark Miller and Brett Anderson suggests that that framework in itself also be integrated with the big picture framework coming from Carl Friston’s work around predictive processing, especially the 4E version, which Carl Friston himself endorses, by the way. And so all of this means like we seem to be moving towards a potential consensus model of what human cognition and meaning, making and affect, because part of what this model says is those are no longer separable things. How all of these things are coming together and gestalting into potentially an ontological hole that is theoretically and existentially meaningful. Now, that opens up the possibility, of course, of providing a better or improved normative standard by which psychotherapy works could work out. And that was addressed to some degree in the series with Zach Stein, but more now to get more a more careful model of what the pathology of the psyche is. So we’re calling it psyche pathology because we wanted to put we wanted to flag this isn’t just an adjectival thing, psychopathology. There’s a new emerging conception of the psyche, that hole, that gestalt I was talking about that’s emerging. And what is it for it to fall into pathos? What is it for it to become overwhelmed and lose its agency in some important sense? And so that’s the psyche pathology. And then that only makes sense, as I said, against an emerging framework of what well-being is, what the psyche as a whole is, when it is optimal, when it is flourishing, when it is perhaps well-fitted to itself, to other people and to the world. And so that’s what we want to explore. This is right on what’s happening right now. And these are two people that for me are fantastic because they are both, to my estimation, excellent cognitive scientists. I would hope so, especially with Gary, because I’ve trained him quite a bit. So I’m really again, I keep having this. I’m very proud of Gary. But he’s a fantastic cognitive scientist, especially in where phenomenology for e-cognitive science interact with psychology. And he is also, as he indicated, he is an emerging, he’s going to get his PhD, he’s moving towards his final practicum. He’s going to be a fully trained clinical psychologist, psychotherapist. This is also an area of overlap. So both of them are experts at bridging between the theoretical and the therapeutic. But we’re going to have to increase the scope of what that means. That’s part of what we’re going to be doing here. So and then for me, that lines up with my concerns about trying to bridge between cognitive science, for cognitive science, meaning making, the cultivation of wisdom and well-being. So that’s why we’re all here. And that’s what the project is. But I want to do what I frequently like to do to start these projects is to seem like it might be almost impossible to undertake the project by problematizing it, by pointing out why it’s a difficult thing we’re undertaking to do and what are some of the issues that we are facing. Because as we. If I can I just just jump in there and just say, just sort of echo everything you said there about why this is really meaningful. Certainly in relationship to my own history, you know, I my journey starts with the problem of psychotherapy. You know, basically you’re with a person in the real. You have to bring some credible, comprehensive knowledge and value system to interact with that individual. And you have to make some judgments about what is optimal, what’s not the cluster of fact value in the real. How do you position yourself is an enormously complicated reality. And I needed a big picture coherence and this just wasn’t one. So I really am really excited about this simply because this returns me essentially to the home of my journey. And so I just wanted to echo everything you said there and and just share that as well. So this is really close to my heart here. Thank you, Greg. Gary, do you want to echo anything here before I start the problem? Yeah, I very much agree with that. And I would even say that from my own experience as a fresh trainee, I found that. Lacking the theoretical knowledge and grounding to begin with, while sort of jumping into the practice itself, that ended up becoming the grounding itself. And so I I’ve been thinking about it really as a pragmatic matter and how the kind of know how the participatory knowledge and everything that goes into the practice of psychotherapy, it’s very difficult to articulate in theoretical terms. And sometimes maybe it’s not even necessary, though, for for theoreticians and for people who want to convey this kind of information and knowledge to others. It’s definitely necessary, which is what we’re up to. Thank you, Gary. So, as I said, I’d like to try to problematize the project because the degree to which we formulate the problem well and articulate its many intersecting factors is the degree to which we will be carefully guided in our attempts to offer a truly responsible and responsive answer to the phenomena that is in question. So that’s how we’d like to begin. And Greg and I often have begun our series this way about what is it that what’s the challenges we’re facing and why are they important to address them right now? So today I’ll I’ll be doing sort of the center line. So in the series, Greg and I have consistently been working out a new way of trying to present material in which typically one person takes center stage and presents an argument step by step manner. And then the other two circle around in dialogos, asking questions, reducing, drawing out challenging and thereby integrating an argumentative and a dialogical practice in something approximating the Socratic dialectic as a way of trying to show the development of the ideas in process so that they’re not presented in the pretentious fashion that we do, which is we only present these things once they’re complete and all the evidence is right. And that has value, of course, for justification. But entering the period that we’re entering in, in which more people are living virtually and needing to connect, we want to present this material in a fashion that invites much more involvement and engagement and encourages other people to see the process and the practice of science and not just its products. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just drop in there. I’ve said this a couple of times before. When we first did the Untangling the World Knot and you proposed this format, a seed was planted that continues to flourish that I just want to emphasize. This is a new medium that affords a transformation in regards to the way in which academic projects are undertaken, shared and displayed. And for people inside the Academy know that publication and at most a special journal issue with back and forth written dialogue and occasional panel presentation on debate is by far the normative for academic knowledge construction. This is radically different. For it’s a totally new dialogical approach that engages larger audiences and it’s to me tremendously exciting as things evolve. So I’ll just plug that. It’s John’s brilliant idea that I’m happy to be on his coattails around. Well, it’s not just my idea, but thank you. Yeah. I mean, it goes to work that I’m doing with you, with Christopher Master Pietro, with Peter Lindbergh, with Guy Sandstock about trying to inventio to discover, make and remember what the dialogical mode was because we have lost it in the West and we need to recover it. Okay, so we’ve put out all the bells and whistles and rang all the symbols and both in both senses of the word. And so I think it’s time to actually get into the nuts and bolts. So I want to be a bit of the epistemic devil’s advocate here and try and like I said, problematize why is coming up with this Gestalt model of well-being of human functionality. This has been one of Greg’s continuing points. We practice as if we have the analogy with medicine, but we don’t. Medicine has a model of physiological well-being, well-functioning, etc. In terms of which it can with a certain amount of respectable rigor. There’s questions and problems, but nevertheless with a certain amount of respectable rigor, explain what disease and pathology is. We do not have the equivalent ontology when it comes to the psyche. Now, what are some of the problems facing us when we try to come up with that, that model of well-being and the interrelated model of psyche pathology? And these two things are inter-defining. That’s the point. That’s the first point to get right from the beginning. Can’t talk about one without being able to talk about the other. So here’s the first problem. And I’ve talked about this in several other places. We talked about it even in the elusive eye with Christopher Massacaprieto. It’s the fragmentation of the mind. And this is the issue that the term mind and all the things that are associated related to it, like self and personhood and personal identity, because they all interweave, but I’ll just stick with mind because it’s easier to present. That term is now radically equivocal for us. It has multiple different meanings in a profound way, and therefore we can fall prey to equivocation, which is an invalid way of reasoning, if we do not track carefully these different meanings. So let me try and explain what I mean. When you say mind, you might hear what the neuroscientists mean by mind, and you mean brain function. And then you mean there’s a certain way of gaining evidence, which is you do fMRIs and EEGs and Dense EEGs and some emerging light technologies. And what you do is you look at neurons and ion pumps and neural networks. I mean, neuronal in the sense of actual neurons in the brain. And you do all of that and you talk about entities like networks and anatomical areas. And so you have your whole language, your ontology, the way the grammar in which you do your theorizing, gain your evidence and make your claims. And I want you to think about this like a country with its own language and its own customs and its own terrain. But when I say mind, you may hear, and I just talked to Josje Bach, for example, you may hear, no, no, I’m talking about like what we’re talking about in artificial intelligence. I’m talking about intelligence. And that’s not bound to an organic brain because it could take place in a computer. So I’m not talking about brains at all. I might be talking about various kinds of learning algorithms or patterns of activation within neural networks. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to make simulations and I’m going to run them and I’m going to compare some of their performance to human performance. And I’m talking a totally different language, but totally different stuff and gathering evidence in a totally different way. When you hear mind, you may hear a discipline that we three share. You may hear psychology, you may hear, oh, you mean whatever it is psychology means. And that’s Greg’s point. But you have something like behavior and mental experience. And notice what my hands are doing, by the way. And then what we’ll do is we’ll do experiments on human behavior about these mental states. And we’ll talk about things like working memory. And we’ll talk about our statistical means. And so a new language, a new methodology, new entities involved. Or when you hear mind, you may hear, oh, what he means by mind is what he’s doing right now. He’s making noises come out of his face hole so other people know what he’s thinking. And language and language use is what we mean when we’re talking about mind, because that’s the only real way we get access to minds. And so now I’m talking linguistics and I’m going to talk about parsing the sentence tree and relationships between verbal phrases and noun phrases and rules for transformation. And I’m doing all that kind of and I’m gathering different data, talking about different entities, right. And using a different methodology. Or when you hear mind, you may say, oh, what you mean, you mean culture. You may you mean the way we network people together in distributed cognition, the way we network like the way we network computers together in distributed computation. And culture is what we mean by mind. And then you’re talking about the anthropologist who does ethnography. And notice each one of these has totally different language, totally different theoretical entities, totally different methods, totally different kinds of evidence. When you say mind, it’s like you’re trying to say something that belongs that this is like a word. It’s almost like by weird, some sort of weird phonological history in Spain, they say mind. And in Hawaii, they say mind. Well, in Hawaiian, right. In, you know, in Papua New Guinea, they say mind. And they just happen to be using the same word, but they’re all in different countries referring to different things in different ways of making sense and creating knowledge. This is the proper problem that cognitive science faces. Now, that fragmentation of the mind and therefore, and we already did this in the elusive eye of the self and of the person, right, is not only a deep epistemic problem, a problem about speaking clearly and getting clear knowledge about the mind. It’s an existential problem. Because we’re fragmented. Because we’re fragmented. And here’s the what I think the eminently plausible thesis of cognitive science. These levels that we’re talking about brain level, information processing level, behavioral level, linguistic level, cultural level, these levels are very plausibly not operating independently and distinctly from each other. It is highly probable, eminently plausible that they are causally interacting, mutually affecting and affording each other. And therefore, insofar as we don’t have a way of talking about bridging between these levels, we are leaving out the important way. And here it comes. They gestalt together. So we need a discipline for trying to talk, but get these various other disciplines to talk together. But as you can see, that’s an extremely problematic thing to do. So the first problem is that we’re facing when we try and say, well, I’m going to tell you what the psyche is, is we face a cacophony of voices about the nature of the mind, the nature of the self, etc. Do either one of you want to riff on that point? What would you prefer if I went through all the points or if I stopped? I mean, just frame that. There you go. That’s a brilliant articulation. The one other thing that I’ll simply add, especially because for me, at least, it’s going to come up when we talk about psyche, is those are ontological reference that you nailed. Very, very key. I also want to emphasize an epistemological conundrum. OK, an epistemological conundrum around mind is are we talking about it from a scientific, nominative, generalizable perspective? Are we talking about it from a first-person empirical real perspective in the subject of experience of being? And so you then have this whole other epistemological dynamic. Indeed, I would argue what happens with modern empirical science is it discovers this sort of third-person behavioral view of the world, but it’s essentially blind to the first-person qualitative view of the world in certain ways. So I just add that as another point of a potential equivocation in relationship to the frame of reference, what mind might mean. But it’s a brilliant articulation of all of the shades of the rainbows of reference that we have no clarity about. And if not, how the hell can we actually do science if we’re going to be mature in relationship to articulating the terrain that we are mapping? So brilliantly said, John. Yeah, before Gary says something, I’d like to respond to that response. By the way, I like the rainbow of reference. Is that yours? That’s beautiful. That’s really good. That’s a merch, John. No, put it on a T-shirt. Greg said that. I like that. That’s beautiful. Yeah. And so that’s the sort of existential import, I would say. The two points, the ontological and epistemological. And Greg and I have talked about this. They reinforce each other and bounce off of each other. Right? So that ontological fragmentation doesn’t leave the inner subjective first-person point of view alone because it doesn’t give you a sort of stable locus from where are you talking from? Even from your first-person perspective. And so the equivocation between the ontological levels also leads to internal fragmentation in a profound kind of way. Gary, did you want to say anything about the fragmentation issue? I’m dwelling with it and I’m sort of working with the epistemological distinction that Greg was just mentioning. Because maybe one of the problems is that when we objectivize the mind and then it sort of fragments and explodes into this potentially combinatorially explosive space of studying one of the same thing in so many different ways, when we assume the first-person perspective, we gain something from it, but we also lose something else, which is the sort of generality potentially that comes with the objective sciences or the scientific way of studying the mind. Although at the same time, by studying it in that manner, all we end up really working with is averages. And averages don’t quite exist at the ideographic level. So there’s the question of what’s more real, the averages or the individuals? Well put. Nicely. Exactly. That’s definitely stitching that together is absolutely essential. In fact, there’s a theorist by the name of Jim LaMale, who’s made his entire career essentially on articulating the agri-ideographic conundrum and how psychology botches it. So it’s a brilliant comment there, Gary. Maybe one of you quickly, for the sake of the audience, speak on the nomological ideographic distinction, just quickly, if possible. Right. So essentially, what psychology tends to do is it tends to create aggregate variable clusters. Like, what is, how does attention relate to depression? And we’re going to do studies on that and we’re going to get a correlation relation. But then you’re speaking about depression and you’re speaking about attention variables. And then you’re trying to take those and put them in a particular individual in a particular place and a particular time and make comments about that. But the aggregate variable analysis is radically different than the ideographic real individual analysis. OK, I did a little blog on this and said, OK, we can do an aggregate analysis that say if you have a daughter, your attitudes towards feminism shift accordingly. And then I pointed out actually mine didn’t because historically this was the case. And in fact, the way they say they shift, given the measurement, couldn’t actually ever shift in one person this way. It never could because the averages actually aren’t really the shift that you measure. So it’s just a number of different ways that there’s a fundamental difference between talking about an ideographic, real, particular, contingent entity and a generalized knowledge about variables in place. If that I mean, that’s great. One summer. That’s great, Greg. And that will actually help me to bridge into my next point. So I’ll invoke it using some philosophical terminology that it dovetails perfectly with Greg’s psychological terminology. There’s a distinction between nomological generalizations, law like generalizations that like so equals MC squared is a law like generalization supposed to apply universally. And so those are generalizations. They’re supposed to be general descriptions of the constraints on all causal interactions in the environment. That’s very different from a historical analysis of a particular causal pathway. So notice I can ask, why do things fall? And then I want to know why I’ll come up with something like a universal theory of gravity, Newton, for example, right. Or overturn that with Einstein, but et cetera. Right. Or I might ask, why did Napoleon lose at Waterloo? Then I’m not trying to find the universal law for all Napoleons at all battles Waterloo, because there’s only one of each. Instead, what I want is I want a causal pathway. And this is what you do in history. And this is how history is different from science. I want a causal pathway that explains the specificity of that event in contrast to its universality, because we ask different questions. We ask questions of why is this universally happening? And we also ask questions, why is this specifically happening? And we have two modes of explanation broadly, scientific and historical. How does this come up to the next point, which is the point that was basically brought up with Kierkegaard in response to Hegel. And before all of you go, oh, no, I’ll just do this very quickly. Hegel had tried to propose a universal account of sort of human freedom and spirit. Right. And what Kierkegaard was pointing out is no, no, the particular account of how I specifically exist does not come fit in that at all. It doesn’t tell me how I, Kierkegaard, live and understand my life and how I should live forward. He said, famously, Hegel made a system and then sat down beside it. Namely, there was no place within it for any specific individual to live. And this is Kierkegaard’s point about existential existence. So this is the existential problem. And this was highlighted particularly. And this is where Gary and I, we can wave the Canadian flag. Oh, Canada. Charles Taylor made this brought this forward and said, look, there is a dimension of human beings that falls outside of the normal logical science, which is this existential dimension. Namely, human beings are self-defining creatures, self-interpreting creatures, creatures that care and invested in their specific existence, not just their general features. And so he pointed out that seems to be a key feature of what it is to be a human self and a human person that’s different. And so this is taken up and this problematizes things because there seems to be a central aspect of being human being that is existential rather than normal logical. Or if you think like I do with like with Quine, that science discovers the essences of things, there’s an existential dimension to the self that is different from its essential dimension. And this was a point picked up by my favorite philosopher, theologian Paul Tillich, when he made a distinction between the essential self and the existential self. And you say, what does this have to do with psychopathology? Well, here’s a distinction that comes from Kierkegaard and it was picked up by Tillich. You have to distinguish between psychological and existential anxiety. Psychological anxiety is presumably something that we I’m presuming here. And this is going to come into question. Presumably, it’s it’s it’s a malfunctioning of the essential features in the scientific sense of human functioning, et cetera, et cetera. Existential anxiety is precisely confronting the fact that you are a self-defining, self-interpreting creature and you therefore bear a tremendous responsibility for the meaning of your own existence. And there’s nothing pathological about that. In fact, Kierkegaard was on that people need to experience this angst, this potential sickness unto death if they are going to wake up to their true humanity. So we’re problematizing this problem here because we need to somehow keep distinct, yet ultimately relate the essential and the existential dimensions of the self, the person, the psyche. And that makes this very, very problematic. You don’t have to worry if you’re a physicist studying atoms or how the atoms think of themselves or how they want to present themselves to the world. Even as psychologists trying to do our normal logical science, we run into this problem. Our participants try to please us and deceive us because they have an existential existence, not just an essential existence. And so that is a particularly problematic aspect. It’s not just a problem, like I mentioned, in how we study human beings. It’s a problem in getting a fundamental ontology of human beings because there’s a sense in which human beings are radically unlike the other beings. Or as Heidegger famously said, we are the beings whose being is in question. And that makes us have a special relationship to being that we have to take into account. Anything that you guys want to add to that as a problematic dimension? Yeah, a couple of quick points. So this is absolutely central in the therapy versus theory world of clinical psychology. A longstanding set of debates about how when it is appropriate to scientize the process, what does that actually mean? Which is going to basically bring nominthetic variable process that reduce uncertainty and afford you, hey, efficacious outcome population wise. At least that’s the argument. And then the humanistic clinician, that’s like I’m working with the ideographic real here. So that relationship. And then you can see it as sort of let’s say, take me, for example, I come to you for therapy and I’m miserable because my unified theory of knowledge is not getting the attention my ego wants it. And I feel depressed and I have a narcissistic injury relationship. But we can then take, oh, depression and narcissistic injuries are generalizable features of the human condition. But how does it what does it mean in relationship to my particular uniqueness? And then how do you as the client therapist deal with? Well, OK, does it matter if I am just a narcissist and have created some fantasy or does it matter actually if I’m actually speaking real and other people can’t see it? And the world would be totally different if there’s a truth claim that’s actually embedded in my sadness or whether it’s a narcissistic projection. And how are you going to use science to make some determination? But I would guess we would all think about the nature of the analysis would be kind of different if what I’m seeing is actually true and no one else can see it versus whether or not I sort of made it up in my head and I’m attached to a narcissistic fantasy. That’s a very ideographic judgment kind of place. Science does not tell you that stuff. And those of us that do the clinic work know the only other thing I’ll say, John, and what you said in terms of the psychological anxiety, I would probably prefer the term psychiatric anxiety if we’re actually going to put it in context. The context of being pathological. Right, right, right. Well said terminology. Yeah, well said. Yeah, and I’ll just reflect what I’m hearing, like a good clinician would, and what Greg is saying that what we’re usually dealing with in the clinical context is meanings. And right there are points and periods in the process where we’re trying to not just tell or impart knowledge or insight in the patient as that’s not effective. That’s hardly ever effective, but try to facilitate some sort of experience that will transform them almost from the inside to invoke dualistic language, though it’s not that either. And the scientific point of view, it doesn’t really tell us how to deal with meaning itself, and it doesn’t really say what meaning itself even is. And so there’s this radical, I would say there seems to be at least this radical difference between on the one hand, the kinds of epistemologies that go with each of these systems, right? The scientific system or way of systematizing things and the maybe therapeutic way or the human science way. And there is also an ontological question there of what even is the connection between, let’s say, meaning and causality of purpose and determination. So that’s sort of what I was hearing and what Greg was saying as he implied. And that segues beautifully into the next point, which deepening this point about the issues around our ontology. And Gary put it, and this is the central problem I actually tried to tackle in my thesis way back in the before time of 1997. We did have telephones. Was what that exact problem that science gives us a worldview that purports to explain or disclose the intelligibility of everything. But it has not to date given us an explanation of how we do science, of the meaning making truth seeking practice of science, which involves meaning, which involves acting purposefully, acting normatively, seeking the truth. Trying to be as rational as possible and notice the rational is simultaneously a descriptive and a normative term and we’re presupposing all of this to do science without explaining it so. Science scientists and the human beings that can be scientists don’t fit into that. Worldview in a profound way. Greg talks about this also in terms of what he calls the enlightenment gap and that’s the deep problem of the fact that does the psyche even belong in the worldview ontology of science and that sort of. You can see how all of these problems are sort of they get deeper and deeper. And so that was a perfect segue to that point. Related to that, related to that problem of is. If we’re in a meaning crisis as a culture, not because anybody is disordered, but because the worldview does not home us, given the previous argument. How do we distinguish psychiatric pathology from appropriate response to the fact that we’re in the middle of a meaning crisis that has been exacerbated by COVID? Right, this is the general problem and for me, this is the most pertinent version of it, but let’s scale it down to, first of all, an easier example and then remember this larger example. There’s real controversy today, whether or not, for example, ADHD is actually a disorder. Nobody denies that the phenomena that’s being referred to exists. But some people have argued and they’re taken seriously, they’re not regarded as loony. No, wait, if I take that form of behavior and mental experience and here again I’m doing the hand waving that Greg keeps pointing to, right, and I. put it back in the environment in which human beings existed for 99.9% of their biological history. That would not be a disorder at all, it would probably optimize them for hunting, for social interaction, they would probably be high status individuals. So notice how that’s different from bubonic plague. If I give you bubonic plague now, you have bubonic plague. I give it to you in the upper Paleolithic transition, you still have the bubonic plague, right, whereas. In you know 200,000 years ago that behavior, whoa look at him or her, great hunter, great leader, here, oh poor child, medicate them, medicate them, the idea being that that. Very evolutionary adaptive behavior doesn’t do well in a sedentary, highly abstract symbolic environment. Is that a disorder or not? Okay, so I think that point is now fairly easy to take. Now take it back up. Is a lot of the behavior we’re attributing to people a disorder or are they actually trying to use evolutionary machinery. To respond to this toxic environment of the meaning crisis, that is a very problematic issue for trying to talk about well being. And and psyche pathology. I mean, Fromm said it a long time ago, like you have to be really careful when you’re talking about sanity and insanity. If you’re talking about people within an insane society or an insane culture. So that is also, I think, a problematic issue. Anything either one of you would want to say about that? I’ll just echo this. This is a huge, I’ll give two quick examples. One from Martin Luther King who in 1968 addresses the American Psychological Association and tells you’ve given us a great word maladjusted. And certainly there are some cases of maladjustment that we would want to address at the level of the individual. And at the same time, we should also remind ourselves that there are some cultural society situations to which we would want to be maladjusted to. In relationship to their own sickness. So in relationship to the civil rights issues and other kinds of issues, the suffering of oppressed blacks in this regard is a perfectly appropriate response to an evil, unjust system. And he speaks to that really well. At a more family level, I would recommend the movie Ordinary People by Robert Redford wins a 1980 Best Picture and it shows clear a psychopathology of depression, PTSD, a suicide attempt. We have to identify a son who loses a brother and then the unfolding of the family system through the film gets you wondering where exactly is this pathology? Is it inside the heart of the individual because he’s struggling or is it a cold mother dynamic? Is it an oppressive society that tries to create a persona where everyone tries to manage impression and the affective heart is not attended to? So you can see in that really lived experience, richly acted and brilliantly are portrayed in my estimation, exactly this kind of dynamic in the real. Best performance Mary Todd Amour ever gave. Yeah, it’s a beautiful articulation of upper control of sort of a super ego, obsessive, compulsive personality structure and what it does to the heart in a system. And then where actually is the pathology because in the DSM sense, it’s clearly in Conrad, but if you watch the film, it doesn’t feel that way in the heart. That’s for sure. Well said. Excellent example, Greg. Gary? Yeah, I’d like to say that what I’m hearing right now is that whatever the category of disorder is, at least in the mental sense and whatever mental even means, it’s not reducible to either biological conditions or personal conditions or interpersonal conditions or social conditions or cultural conditions. It’s sort of distributed across all these levels. And in that sense, we could sort of extend the thesis and say that there’s something about disorder that’s world involving in the extended mind sense, whatever that means, because any one of these variables can in a meaningful way be involved in the what formation of some kind of disordered manner of being in the world with others and with oneself. So that sort of problematizes the what individualistic assumptions that we tend to sort of bring into the picture, at least from the DSM point of view. Yeah, so. And notice how that now circles back and reinforces the fragmentation problem. Because now notice how we’re talking at all these different ontological levels and we’ll invoke different kinds of languages. And so these two problems now reinforce each other, as you just saw with what Gary said, right? So you can see this is getting very problematic. I’m getting all wavy, John. How are we going to put this back together? So the next is when you invoke disorder or malfunction, when you’re talking about disorder, you’re ultimately talking about function because you don’t just mean a descriptive order, you mean a functional order. And so you’re talking about functioning. And the problem for function is that function is teleologically normatively understood. So what’s the function of a knife? How do you determine if a knife is a good knife? Well, you determine what it’s this is Aristotle, right? Well, you determine what its function is and then you see if it does the function well, right? So a knife is supposed to cut things and this is a bad knife. It’s dull. It’s not working because it doesn’t cut things. So function is dependent on good for doing X. That’s and this causes a lot of problems for functionalists and famously so because they want they they they rightly understand the scientific worldview as being non-teleological and not having normative entities like goodness in it, but good for doing X. They rightly understand the scientific worldview as being non-teleological and not having normative entities like goodness in it, but good for X is both normative and teleological. And this is one of the great problems with computational functionalism, and I won’t go into it. But the point is we automatically get into a teleological normative frame when we start talking about function. And one of my this is a critical point I want to make, not just a problematizing point. I find a lot of clinical work, not my two to cohort, my two collaborators here. But I’ve been I’ve been in situations where I’ve witnessed a psychiatrist, for example, diagnosed and they speak as if they are pointing to a fact like like, oh, like the way I would say. Oh, that has that object has a mass of X. Right. They talk that way. But what they’re doing is saying function. And when they say function, they’re invoking a teleology and a normativity. And what is behind this is a default teleology and normativity, which and this connects to the previous point. See, I’m trying to link them. I should that what is normal functioning within your society. Right. So you are malfunctioning if you do not function to be a good member of your society. That’s how the teleology and normativity is smuggled in. And so what that means is we are implicitly relying on a socioeconomic post-Protestant, mostly at least post-Christian view of the world without being able to in any way, legitimate it at all. And so we are actually caught between an assumed ontology for our functionality and our explicit claims about what we’re doing when we’re diagnosing people. And I think that’s deeply disingenuous. Now, as soon as we get into the fact that there’s this other dimension, I’ll broadly call it religious because I don’t have a better word. Right. Soon as we pretend that that’s not there, we’re also now cycling back into the existential essential thing, because I get one of the people I use to two of the people I use till like Ed Kierkegaard properly saw there are deep connections between the religious endeavor and the existential endeavor. Religion has to do with meaning. It has to do with your individual right and our collective salvation, etc, etc. I’m not here proselytizing. I’m trying to say that we’re bumping into right unacknowledged religious background and heritage that is necessary is indispensable for the functionality that we are then using at this level that often sets itself antithetically to that religious heritage. And that’s another deeper kind of fragmentation. But it’s a fragmentation within the very process of diagnosis. Beautiful. Yep. Just jump on that real fast. So look at Thomas Zahs and his critiques of psychiatry fundamentally makes a very strong critique that much of medicine can be reduced to functional specifications. We generally reduce things called lesions where lesions are actually neurophysiological breakdowns that you can then specify and use reference in the natural world to at least grant you some distancing to say, hey, that’s a problem. Jerome Wakefield breaks up on this. And then he basically says, when we move to psychiatry, the referent is social control and social normativity. And actually, what you’re doing is you’re judging things as deviant Lee annoying. And those deviant annoyances actually need to be already laying the great anti-psychiatrists like we don’t put people in mental hospitals because they’re suffering. We put them in because they’re insufferable, which is a nice catch in relationship to whose values are actually operating off high. I’ll put a little teaser for next time. It’s not for me. It’s not just biological living processes versus social justification processes. We’re going to get to a mental dimension that’s more transjective and relationship to the agent arena relationship. And we’re going to specify some mental disorders that are transjectively different in the process by which they unfold. And that’s going to give us a different reference point than either just social control or biological malfunction. But nonetheless, what you say is exactly right. The referent point about what we’re using to judge the functionality is unbelievably ambiguous and slippery and filled with equivocation. For example, like the notion of the that a person should have a certain amount of autonomy is taken for granted, even though that’s a very Western liberal capitalistic way of understanding human functionality. There are cultures in which that kind of autonomy would be regarded as madness. And so again, and you see how all of these different problems are all mutually reinforcing each other. Gary, did you want to address this point anyway? Yeah, I guess the word itself normativity is, you know, it’s very it lends itself very easily to equivocation. Also, in some other senses, right. When people say that something is normal or not, do they mean it in the statistical sense that it deviates from what the average is? Or do they mean it in the social sense, just like how you’re saying it? Or do they mean it in the cultural sense that some things are valued more than others? Or do they mean it in the biological evolutionary sense that based on our evolutionary history, there’s a kind of deviation that’s happening, that’s putting the biological system as such at a kind of what significant disadvantage? Or do they mean that it just feels bad, which sort of pulls it back into the person? And you could have normativity also seems to be one of these categories that sort of distributes across all these different layers. And it’s hard to pinpoint it. And I guess one of the things maybe I’m getting a little ahead of ourselves right now. But one of the things we’ll probably talk about is how the 4E cognitive science movement, it tries to take normativity and teleology and explain it as an imminent property to. The poetic system itself, whatever that means, which changes it in a radical and significant fashion and makes it a little more. Intelligible and what immune against all these or I think against all these challenges, so. Beautiful. But again, a beautiful segue from Gary. You might think we’d influenced each other. But because this takes us into a perhaps what many philosophers would say is the key issue that we’re pressing on, which is the issue of normativity itself. This is either explained as the problem of goodness or the is ought dichotomy or the fact value dichotomy. And this is often invoked in order to divest responsibility like, well, I don’t have to talk about that because that’s a moral issue or an aesthetic issue. Although to pretend that epistemic issues are free of normativity is ridiculous because truth is a normative value. We pursue the truth because we consider it good and inherently valuable. Right. And so we have all these arguments from Hume and Moore about the naturalistic fallacy and is ought distinction. What that does is actually problematize this very project because if you’re talking about if you’re trying to help people, you are blurring the is ought distinction all over the place. And as Gary pointed out, people smuggle it in in various ways. Right. Well, I’m not talking about normativity. I’m talking about optimal evolutionary functioning. Aha. And why? Because you think the ongoing perpetuation of the species is a good thing. And why is that? Because human beings are inherently good beings. Oh, no, that’s a moral claim. Oh, exactly. Right. So we have this weird and I was brought up like my mother’s need, the is ought distinction and you can’t go from an is to an ought and it ramifies and just problematizes everything. And that’s true. But as I just tried to indicate, trying to keep them cleanly apart is turning out to be deeply problematic. The critiques that came out of case beer and Greg and Zach and I talked about this, we can review it again. And also the work that Putnam has done breaking down the fact value distinction and also my own work on relevance. Relevance is both a descriptive and a normative thing. And relevance realization is absolutely indispensable to being a cognitive agent. So the you can’t identify the is in the art. But as Gary said, there’s a movement on to try and reintegrate them. So we face the problematic around normativity itself. We can’t quite identify reasons and causes, but the attempt to keep them separate is collapsed and failed. So we have a much messier, messier situation about this when we’re talking about psychopathology and well being. Notice the word well being is both a descriptive and a normative term. Totally. Yeah, I mean, this is central and from my own entry into this, you know, the whole you talk starts this problem of justification. And when you get into the problem of justification and the idea that humans operate on propositional networks of justification, which are essentially is ought networks, whereby you have to simultaneously sort what you are seeing narrating collectively and then narrating collectively what you’re going to do about it. So just as recursive relevance realization does that in the agent arena relation, we move up to the culture person dynamic and think about systems of justification. You see yet another example of a particular insight that then blurs or entangles or networks together is ought issues. And that certainly is something that we need to be wrestling with rather than fantasizing that we can, you know, slice them qualitatively differently and be done with it. Yes. Well said. Anything you would like to say, Gary, about that? Yeah, because I think you already said it in your previous point. So it was the setup. We did not coach this ahead of time, I promise you. And so for me, that then leads to a final point. And I’m going to shift specifically to well being and which is and this is a point that has been made by the rise of positive psychology, which has to do this is more of a historical point. That’s sort of behind a lot of these more ontological epistemological existential points I’ve been making, which is we have a long history of studying the mind in terms of how it breaks down. And how it breaks down. And because we have the analytic tradition and we’re not allowed to break minds apart for good, for good, legal and moral reasons. So we have to rely on them sort of naturally breaking down in order to analyze them, because that’s what analysis means. And then that can give us a model of how they should be put together and work. And that gives us both truth about the mind and also the ability to do something good and alleviate suffering by figuring out how we can restore minds when they break down. I don’t think any of us are saying that the analytic method should be dispensed with. What positive psychology says, though, is that the analytic method is necessarily incomplete. What it says is, yes, but you also have to study phenomena, not how they break down from the statistical norm, but also how they can exceed the statistical norm. You have to see, right, the excellence of the mind to get certain patterns and powers and and features properties revealed. So patterns, properties and powers are not disclosed until the mind excels above the statistical norm. And then we of course, now we’re into the problem of, again, the normativity issue. But the idea is, well, maybe certain important aspects of the psyche are only revealed when the psyche has found happiness or wisdom. Right, or or has become virtuous. And so because we have a history of studying the mind only as it breaks down, we have a lopsided account of its powers, its properties and the patterns by which it discloses itself. And so behind all of these ontological, methodological, existential and epistemological problems I’ve made is that we have a history that has not given us much data to to deal with these problems. Precisely because we have only taken a pathological framework for understanding the mind. We have not taken a positive framework, which means looking at the mind and gathering data about, you know, the way it excels the statistical norm. And so underneath all, like I said, the ontological, epistemological, existential, even ethical issues is this historical. We have a historical paucity. We do not have much data to address these problems the way we need to from within psychology and psychiatry because it has operated almost exclusively within the pathological framework. Totally, I completely agree. And I very much appreciate the positive psychology movement as a function of that. One thing I will say, led as it was by Seligman, who’s definitely committed to a methodological behavioral view of psychology, it could well have been synced up a little bit better to the philosophically informed humanistic movements that certainly were deeply concerned with human potential and justified very much in relationship as a third force to speak to the positive side of humanity. And I wish that positives and their movements, certainly within positive psychology, to ground it in a philosophically informed, appreciating the human value element, understanding, bridging to say virtue ethics in Aristotle, things like that. There are elements of that. But it did kind of also come out of the box as, oh, we’re going to just carve up what is the good through an empirical methodological process and list an alphabet of findings in relationship to, oh, these are values that you should do, like keep a gratitude journal in relationship to what is your existential reflection on the human condition that would orient you to fulfill that particular procedure. And a lot of positive psychology is a little thin when it comes to some of that. And this kind of conversation, I think, can enrich that perspective. Yeah, just to riff on that before Gary replies, I one of my related criticisms I have as positive psychology is positive psychology isn’t a thing in the sense of an integrated entity. It largely works in terms of collecting data in ways that are not relying on the pathological framework. But what holds it together as a discipline is unclear. It’s just that the rest of psychology is negative psychology, John. Well, that yeah, it’s it’s kind of it shares that sort of right. It doesn’t have to. I’m not claiming it has to, but it seems right now it shares the problem that post postmodernism shares, which is it seems to be parasitic on a critique of something else rather than being able to to disclose its own stable ontology method, theoretical entities, etc. Like I when anybody asked me what positive psychology is, I explained it the way I just explained it. I explained it in terms of how it’s not how it’s not pathological psychology. Right. And it’s like, yes. But what would you do? Well, I’m going to study human excellence. Well, that’s an interesting thing. And how do you do that without talking about the longstanding history and philosophy about how difficult answering that question really is. And it really is difficult. We’ve been asking it since Socrates, at least I think. Yeah. And how exactly the cultivation of virtue and excellence is sort of motivated by maybe some sort of will to overcome suffering or to contend with it more meaningfully. And I’m not sure what else to say besides that sort of circularity that I’m seeing there, how even positive psychology, any attempt for me actually to imagine or conceptualize how one could excel above them, beyond the norm, for example, it in my mind inadvertently leads back to the essential or existential problems that we have to be contending with anyway. Because it’s like you might ask, well, OK, let’s let’s study people who experience flow states like lots of flow states in their life. What are the kinds of things that they do? Well, let’s say athletes or or artists or whatnot. And when they’re really good, they’re really well off as well. And so there’s economic factors that sort of go in. And then there’s social factors. Their social world opens up in a particular way that it’s it might not be able to otherwise. And then there’s obviously personal factors, things having to do with ambition and confidence and self-esteem and whatnot. And so in the absence of all those things, it’s hard to imagine how there wouldn’t be suffering. And so when you have something like a life that’s organized around flow states that lead you to a better place, that’s only defined as better in relation to or in negative relation to the suffering that is there to circumvent. So even the positive psychology sort of reframing of the problem to me necessarily leads back to the suffering that would otherwise be there for us to contend with. So I wonder about that. To me, it’s a little it’s a puzzle because looking at the positive end of things as such also makes sense to me intuitively. And yet the two just like the mind and the body, perhaps might be inextricable from one another. Or inextricably what mutually implicating, let’s say, kind of like a transactivity relationship, perhaps. I’m not sure. Let’s pick up on that flow thing for a sec, because I and because this is something I’ve been talking about here and there and some of my other discussions with people on videos. So I compare getting into the flow state when I do Tai Chi Chuan to somebody getting into the flow state while they’re playing a particularly immersive video game. They’re both getting into the flow state, equally described by the machinery that Jixent Mai talks about. By the way, he just died not that long ago, unfortunately. So the issue is when I do Tai Chi Chuan, what it seems to happen is it seems to percolate through my psyche and through my life in ways that improve me in my world, noticeable by other people. Somehow I become a better person. And in that very embedded, enacted way that Gary was referring to. The person playing the video games, and I’m not saying all video games do this or this happens to all people, but it does happen reliably to some people. They get addicted to the game. Their flowing in the game actually disrupts them. Their lives makes them actually lose their agency in a fundamental way, lose their ability to take up a life and take up responsibility for their life. The WHO has even decided this is an official disorder. Both people are in the flow state. But even within the flow, so they both fall under the definition. But one person, like the flow state is somehow empowering improvement and betterment. And in another person, the flow state is empowering exactly the opposite. A loss of agency, a loss of taking responsibility, a loss of maturation, etc. So, again, I think that’s Gary’s point well said. You can’t just sort of isolate these positive like, and this is what Greg was saying, you can’t just sort of isolate these processes and say they’re sort of intrinsically good, intrinsically positive. They unproblematically disclose the excellence of the human mind. And as both of you know, I’ve tried to do work on flow and what’s going on. But I think that’s exactly the point. And other people like Schwartz and Sharpe said, you know, the list of virtues is extremely problematic. It’s a feature list. It doesn’t tell us how the virtues relate to each other, how they fit together, how they trade off between each other. Right. And so even that even that list is extremely problematic and it presupposes the undisclosed, undiscussed virtue of wisdom, etc, etc. So there’s a lot of critiques along that line. And this is what I mean about like it’s I don’t I don’t think it’s positive psychology is clearly knows what it’s talking about. And again, I’m not hostile to positive psychology. I think it’s really important. I think its basic premise is saying something important. But again, its attempts can’t take place independently from addressing the other dimensions of the problematic that we have laid out together. That would be the point I think we agree on. Completely. So we’ve done quite a bit of the problems that face us. We talked about fragmentation. We talked about the existential dimension. We talked about the fact that we don’t fit into the scientific worldview. We talked about evolutionary displacement like is it a disorder or is it just we’re not in the right environment? We talked about the inherent normativity within functionality, teleology and normativity within functional language. That led us into the normativity problem itself. And then I pointed out behind it was this ongoing historical framework that has not given us very much empirical evidence for actually addressing these issues that we brought up. I’d like to stop talking now and give both of you the chance to say any final words you want to say, any foreshadowing you want to make before we wrap it up for today. Sure. First off, I think that was a wonderful run through of a number of different aspects of the problem that also congealed into an emerging stult kind of set of pictures. I think for Gary, also, you’re a number of insights looped us right into the next thing as if it was anticipated. I really appreciate that. So for me, we’ll bridge the past previous series. We almost talked about this or had a subtitle of this in terms of a meta psychological synoptic integration. And I’ll just say that, you know, we, you know, it’s an arcane academic, whatever we left that off to try to be more open. But what you just said and what we just went through actually speaks to why we’re kind of like, at least me, certainly, I know John and Gary, and people I think like this, like the intersection here between psychology and philosophy. And indeed, really, that’s how we frame what meta psychology is, is the space in between what we’re dealing with, psyche pathology and well-being. We clearly are finding ourselves encountering all sorts of ontological, epistemological, axiological structures are metaphysical, broad metaphysical frames are unbelievably relevant in terms of how this unfolds. And I think your articulation of those problems is key and getting back to the excitement of the day is that if there is an emerging consensus that affords some kind of coherent integrated pluralism that frames the ontological issues, epistemological issues, axiological issues that wasn’t available to us before, well, maybe we will actually will be able to address the various layers of the problematization that we laid out and do afford the beginnings of an outlines of answers that are actually up to the task of addressing those interrelations in the dynamic world that we live in. That’s exciting to me. Yeah, and I guess what I want to reflect at the end of this conversation is the state that I’m sort of left in. You know, it’s a good state. It’s a state of aporia. It’s a state of impuzzlement and confusion and wonder and curiosity. Largely because we sort of just laid out like one thing I’m wondering right now is where exactly is well-being? Where exactly is psychopathology? If it’s not on just any of the levels that we were talking about, the biological or personal or interpersonal or social or cultural or historical or whatever. So that’s one question. Where is psychopathology and where is well-being? And I’m reminded of the metaphor by William James that he talked about this with respect to consciousness, but I think it maps on as a good analogy here that to try to I don’t remember the exact thing, but he likened it to trying to catch the motion of a spinning top by grabbing it with your hands while it’s spinning or trying to flick on the light switch fast enough to see the darkness. There’s some sort of conceptual confusion in our very language of talking about psychopathology or well-being that lends itself to these kinds of category errors. And something tells me that taking the non-dualist route, the non-reductionist route is necessary toward clearing away some of this conceptual confusion. Yeah, I’ll just say for me, Gary, in terms of the problem of psychology into psychotherapy and then the overarching enlightenment gap lends itself to basically this chaotic fragmented structure. And the ability for us to try to grab a hold of the spinning top is a function of mis-framing the dynamic transjective. And if we can back up and frame the dynamic transjective, we might be able to catch that motion in a new way. I’m excited. This is excellent. So I wanted to thank both of you. The way you dialogically resonated and afforded the progression of the argument and adduced from it dimensions that I had not foresaw was amazing. And so I wanted to thank you very much. I want to thank everyone here who is giving us their time and attention. And keep posted. The second episode of the Cognitive Science Show on Psychopathology and Well-Being will be coming out. So take good care, everyone. Thank you for your time. Thanks so much, John. That was great. Yep. Thanks, Gary. Wonderful.