https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UrPvWaUjKgA
Welcome everyone to the fifth episode of Psychopathology and Well-being on the Cognitive Science Show. I’m joined again by Greg Enriquez and Gary Hovinesian and I’m going to turn things right over to Greg to review what we did last time. And then Gary is going to take center stage today and talk about some recent work that he and I have been doing that’s relevant to this whole project that we’re undertaking with Greg. So take it away, Greg. Lovely. Yeah. So we built it. We started with some problematizing that John did. And then we handed it over. I took sort of the Utah frame on well-being. I described the nested model, which is a descriptive framework for thinking about well-being in terms of the subject of experience of being nested in biological functioning. That’s nested in biological functioning. Then that sets the stage for that structure to be nested in the environment, both materially and socially, and then ultimately contained within a normative structure of an evaluator. That afforded us kind of a map, I think, to de-problematize or clarify some key aspects of what goes into well-being. It also set the stage for us to clarify what we mean by psyche, which is sort of this epistemic inside out vector and how that might relate to psychology, which is this outside in sort of scientific vector. And then we inverted that a little bit and started to talk about psychopathology from this perspective, especially when we kind of considered our transjective views like inside out, outside in, across, and the meta theories that we built together, which then says, hey, what are the transjective agent arena? Agent other arena relations that either afford people potential for growth and reciprocal opening and those capacities or what trapped them. I identify a triple negative neurotic loop where individuals get stuck in negative situations, negative feelings that have negative reactions to those that then drive them into dead ends, what I used to call a reciprocal narrowing, that then trap them and afford them limited capacities for adaptive functioning and create kind of all sorts of maladaptive consequences. I see that as really at the heart of the problem of psychotherapy. And now I feel like we’re in a position and then structure sort of the character developments, trait aspects and other kinds of things that then inform that view. And I think Gary’s well situated to do that. Great. Okay. Thank you for that. So, essentially the part that I want to use there as my access point for proposing my argument is the bit about constructivity. So we’ve been discussing, I remember in the first or second episodes, you gave a nice historical overview of the enlightenment gap and the different kinds of problems that arose from it, especially for the scientific study of the mind. And the core claim, if I were to make one based on all that would be that any account of mental well being or psychopathology that’s predicated on the dualistic sort of Cartesian understanding of the mental and the physical, right, is bound to run into the kinds of fallacies that we saw. And so, in order to do that, we have to be able to circumvent in our study of the mind and in our explanations of mental well being and psychopathology. We looked at the different normative fallacies, the equivocation fallacy right between what counts as psychologically unhealthy versus what psychologically normal or abnormal in the statistical sense, or the equivocation between again psychological normativity and social norms and values, as well as biological norms, etc, etc. As well as historicity, right, that’s another big, big one. So, if we want to, the argument here is that if we want to produce a good, right, plausible account of mental well being and psychopathology, we have to do something else than just presuppose these frameworks that we inherited from the time of the enlightenment. So how are we going to do that. So, I want to start with a kind of example and I, you know, my typical approach would be to sort of take up the standard argument in the literature and then to demonstrate its weak points and then to let it collapse on its own weight, and then to do the whole academic thing of here’s my account and these are all the ways in which is better, but instead let’s go through anecdotes and some relatable examples. So, you’re a therapist, and the client comes to you and complains about people that that the client gets to know that at first the relationships tend to be good and fun and easygoing but eventually and sooner or later, everybody sort of turns around and people grow distant over time and don’t seem to be interested in interacting with your client or building a friendship or anything like that. So how do you make sense of this, this is the presenting concern. I don’t get why people eventually get distant from me. There’s three ways that we can go about this one of them is by sort of locating the problem in the world in the people. Oh, you just haven’t found the right people. They, they’re the problem, you’re okay. And that’s a kind of naive common sensical way to go about it if a friend comes to you and and says something like this you might offer him or her these kinds of words that don’t worry about it you’re okay I know you, it must be them. If you go to a cognitive behavioral therapist, they might do something else they might actually inverted and say, Ah, did you just say people always leave me. Let’s look at that absolute claim and then try to undermine it by using logic and reasoning and things like that and so the presupposition there is that the problem isn’t actually in the world, but it’s in your thoughts or behaviors, and what we’re going to do is restructure right modify your behavioral and cognitive patterns. And that’s eventually going to lead to the kinds of consequences that you actually want, presumably. But that too is a little bit naive. It’s less naive than the first stance in my opinion but it’s also still naive because self and world they’re inseparable. There’s, it’s not the case at least from the point of view that we’re coming at this from right, it’s not the case that whatever problem you’re having is caused by conditions right that reside exclusively in the world or exclusively in yourself. It’s about how you come into relationship with worldly conditions, and there’s something about that dynamic that right takes the form that the matter of expression that it does, which you then call your suffering. So, what we’re interested in is that in between space that transjective space, not what’s going on objectively in the world or in others, let’s say or subjectively in your thoughts feelings and whatnot but how to put these two poles in a fruitful productive circulation, so that you can hermeneutically right zero in on the essential dynamic that’s bringing about the, the problem, so to speak. So I, I noticed that john you’re wanting to say something let me take a step. Oh yes, I just wanted to buttress or amplify that become something that I’m starting to do more work on I’ve done it here and there bits and pieces but I want to do it more explicitly which is the ontology of a problem. What kind of entity is a problem. And you just did. So one of the one of the thing and you can even see this happening in the literature around insight problem solving. There was sort of this realization in 1995. After literally decades of work. Wait, nothing is intrinsically an insight problem, there’s no constellation of conditions or or patterns of emotion that are intrinsically an insight problem. And that’s about as far as they got, but what they didn’t take it as well. That’s the case for any problem problems don’t exist. Like there’s nothing that’s intrinsically a problem that doesn’t make any sense. Right. And as Gary just said, it’s right it’s not the case that the problems are just in your head, or it couldn’t be the case that your problems could kill you because they can if you don’t solve certain problems you die. Right. And so they can’t be your problems are just in your head. So, right, if you really get into what the ontology of a problem is, it’s not in the world it’s not in your head. It’s properly right, it’s properly transjective. So, I think the the ontology of a problem is basically the privation of an affordance. It’s a description of the privation of an affordance, and therefore it’s an inherently a transjective thing. And if we take the core of intelligence to be general problem solving intelligence is therefore inherently a transjective thing based on the ontology of what the problems are. And I think that that goes exactly to what. So your anecdote I think is exemplifying the, you know, the general features of the ontology of problems. And this, I mean, and it’s really hard to get people out of both, like, you know, the stoics are all about the problem isn’t in the world because people like, oh, I got to move the word right now it’s in your foot but the problem is, you know, no it’s not, it’s not romantic either it’s not just in your head, right there right. And I think it’s really surprising if you take a look at it, that we have done very little work on the ontology of problems. And like I said, and, you know, you know, two and a half decades before Weisberg sort of says hey, I don’t think anything’s intrinsically an insight problem and let everybody sort of thrown back on their heels. Right. It’s like, yeah. Oh, right, right. And then, and then, and then, and then, and I want to give the guy credit that was like, but the fact that there wasn’t a, that people didn’t stand back and then say hey wait, I don’t think problems at all are exist in the physics or whatever you want to say, right. I wanted to throw that in as really amplifying what you’re saying I think part of what we need is a phenomenal logical phenomenology and ontology of problems that I think will deeply ground, the, the, the reality of the transjective because if you think problems aren’t real. I don’t know how you’re living your life. I really don’t know how you’re living your life. Well, I’ll just supplement that real fast. So, you know, I’m president of the Society for exploration psychotherapy integration, my orientation or theme for the years, the common core of psychotherapy starts with what problems are, and we agree that they’re entrenched maladaptive problems adaptive, of course, is an agent arena relational dynamic across time. Yeah, now meaning a normative reference to it. And so and if you look really at the all of the formulations, although they certainly emphasize inside or out often, they actually have to be brought to bear on the transjective across time. Yes. Excellent. Okay, so let’s let’s keep moving forward then and keep tying these things. These thrust together so on the, on the, on that note of right I mean the entire series of is entitled. Psychopathology and well being, if I remember correctly, so psychopathology, right, that’s the right series there Gary that’s right place. So, so. Psychopathology right, let’s do a quick etymology of that there’s there’s three words that psycho pathology comes from the first is psyche which broadly means something like mind or soul or if you want to make it even more phenomenological life world, right, pathos suffering, we can say, and logos, right, the meaning or intelligibility of whatever it is. And so, to do a psychopathology is to get an account of the logos of the suffering mind. And that’s a very complex things thing to do because human minds aren’t simple. They’re not basic they’re very complex they’re linguistic they’re cultural they’re historical, they’re affective they’re cognitive they’re embodied, they’re situated they’re worlded all these things have to be taken into account. How are we going to do that, we have to start simple. And so, my, my first premise is that to get to where we want to go we have to start with the theory of recursive relevance realization. That’s going to set the first principles, so to speak, but not in a kind of dogmatic sense, but in a, in a way that will disclose and elucidate what’s going on at the level of basic dynamics and structure, when we’re considering right, the phenomenon of mindedness of embodied mindedness. So, Can I just make a quick real point just so that people that are following. So we talked about this as over, you know, initially psychopathology and well being. And then we made the shift to psyche. Yeah, certainly then I just want us to be clear, at least when I’m using the term psychology then is referring to the normative general. Okay, so psychology’s task for example is to understand, say the psychopathology of depression. And I would say that’s a state of behavioral shutdown and you know and that would be a normative general claim about this phenomena that would then be describable across context. However, psyche pathology then refers to the ideographic subject in the contingent real from the outside in from the inside out. So it is my depression. Okay, and then in that, oh nobody’s paying attention to my unified theory. And why am I in pain and what is the, what is the architecture that that’s not a general reality. That is my own ego manifestation in an own unique contingent real it’s not even theoretical. It’s an embodied real. So for me psyche on the inside out holds a proper relationship to the outside in of psychology and actually those things need to be ontologically and epistemically differentiated, and I don’t know that we’ve really done that to set up a proper transjective, and I feel like we’re situated to do that now so I just want to make sure people catch that actually there’s a fourth way be differentiation here psyche from psycho, and then pathology. I please john go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s excellent. And I think that’s right. One of the things I’ve been trying to do especially recently and especially some of the recent work I’ve been doing the talks is to build on the idea that recursive relevance realization can help to do both in that it can give us a universal theory of process without claiming a homogeneity of particular product. Right. And so we can just, and this is exactly analogous to evolution. We can use evolution as a universal theory but that doesn’t explain how the porcupine is specifically adapted to the porcupines ecological niche, right. Right. Right. And so, it does explain it, but it doesn’t right, but it also explains, like, why the porcupine is different from the shark is different from the bat. Right. So, so this is properly I think a genuinely pluralistic ontology, in which we can give a universal account of the nomological features that is consistent with the historical specific account, we give of specific agent arena relationships in the world. And so, for me, and that was one of the one of the strengths I saw in the evolutionary theory, as it cuts between, you know, a rampant relativism and a kind of perennial universalism and tries to, I would say using that great language, tries to give us a way, almost Heraclitus, the way in and the way out of the same way, in some way. Trippy dippy loop john of ways. And so, what I, what I’m trying to say and I’m trying to say carefully and I’m afraid I’m stumbling, but this account allows us to talk, give a unified explanation of the relationship between the two without reducing one to the other. Right, without reducing. And I’ll just say I live in a parallel universe to john and had, you know, with investment, behavioral investment theory influence matrix and justification. I see in those these general nomenclatic, and then I see my life in relationship to investment and justification patterns and it affords the local contingent real, and the nomenclatic general process and so, and then to cook up with that john system and then yeah I think we’re building a meta transjective frame here. So to, to, to sort of connect that with the train of thought that we were on earlier. What we’re going to do is start with the outside point of view, starting with the basic theory of recursive relevance realization, then move up to the outside point of view. And then we’ll move up to personality structure and function. The five major traits of personality. And depending on what happens afterwards will either stay on the outside point of view moving into attachment or will take some time moving, actually, to the inside and looking at the big five from the inside point of view, and seeing how the two connect. And that’s actually what my dissertation research is on, and I’m in the middle of authoring an article with Dr. Jesse go go to chair in my department on using I think it’s like the big five right in an individualized fashion to make sense of this person here in this context. Oh, rather than making generalities and things like that. So, I hadn’t, I just was implicit I didn’t. I’m not going to go left out to me as salient in a way ahead and before you two are facing this problem. It’s at the guts of what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get the in the outside in and the inside out to mesh in an effective manner. This is, this is not just a theoretical problem. No pun intended. This is a deeply existential therapeutic constraint that you’re always working with. I was right right right right right it’s a version of the heart problem actually, and what we’re doing is some heart problem. And what we’re basically doing is a kind of neuro phenomenology except instead of comparing brain scans with like this first person descriptions of experiences we’re comparing nominative right statistical information. Results and things like that about that help to classify people into types with what people say about their experiences to hermeneutically bring these two poles together in a meaningful way to make to afford change psychological change. So, so, yeah, so somehow integrating without reducing right the existential and the normal logical, so that you get a fair effective therapeutic intervention. Totally. And I would say instead of neuro phenomenological though deeply appreciate that view, I’d actually say, Lisa you talk to you extends out and gives a behavioral phenomenological view. And it captures a big history behavioral view from the outside that’s up to the task of contextualizing the psyche phenomenological view from the inside and mapping that. I think Greg’s right, I mean, for all the respect I give to have an. We’re not just looking at neurological behavior that I mean especially if you’re embodied and embedded and enacted and extended. So great. And I would just add an example level, I can recognize my wife’s behavior very clearly, but if you showed me a picture of her brain I would not recognize it. I wouldn’t say oh there’s my wife. So, let’s start with one of the basic premises of recursive relevance realization, which is that any system that is to be an adaptive sort of relationship with the world has to have the capacity to, on the one hand, be able to remain stable across time, and on the other, on the other hand to be able to change across time to fit right changes in its environment. And so, the, the basic premise put slightly differently is this that the kind of world that we’re tasked with contending with can vary on a spectrum from being highly stable versus highly dynamic. So if you live in a highly stable world, you. Yeah, yeah, both synchronically and diachronically. Right, so I just want to make clear that for people. It can vary from stable to highly variant diachronically but also synchronically, because you can equals MC squared is quite stable. So levels of analysis can also take you between the invariance and variance. So it’s both synchronic and diachronic, just to give people a rich sense of what we’re talking about here. Nice, nice. Okay. So, so, essentially if we hook that up with the theory of recursive relevance realization. The two constraints dynamical constraints that you propose john alongside your co authors were efficiency and resiliency. So, resiliency is the tendency to be very selective about what it is that you actually do, and what possibilities you enact. Right, so it’s it’s a selective constraint as you conceptualized it, which is put in an important processing relationship with resiliency, which does sort of the opposite, it enables it affords novel possibilities. And it’s kind of like the difference between somebody who, when they see a problem. Right. Let’s say it’s like connect the dots from point A to point B, they’re going to do a straight line versus somebody else who’s going to see all these other ways of connecting the lines. So, there are some possibilities that sort of go out outside of the box, in a manner of speaking. Yes, and people vary on their personalities and in terms of their cognition and their styles on this sort of spectrum. So, anything you’d like to add before we, we started moving on to personality. So that’s the exact analogy to biological evolution where you have some something in the brain is keeping variation alive. Pun intended. Right, keeping options open, because that maintains the availability of the system. If the system only relentlessly pursues efficiency, it will lose the capacity for availability. And it’s going to vary uncontrollably because then the system falls apart. And so the brain is constantly trying to get to that edge, the edge of criticality, the precipice of the precipice of criticality that precipitates relevance right now by constantly balancing And that’s exactly what happens in evolution you get for various reasons, you know mutation and geological separation, you get variation. And then because of scarcity of resources you get selection, and, and it windows it so variation, this. And then from that selected group, a new variation, and then from that selected group and so on and that’s how the species constantly is modifying its morphology, meaning both its shape and its behavior to fit a constantly changing environment. And the proposal is your brain is doing that just very fast. Yep, yep. And it has strong parallels to PSA right in terms of assimilation and combination with Leo and I, Leo for all and I talked about to you yet and one of our publications. So assimilation is a very selective process, accommodation as an introduction of variation and calibration is when there is a dynamic balance between them that is fitting the child to the environment. That we did not click in a sense we were the paper that Tim and Blake and I did him level clap Blake Richards we were trying to say, like, we were explicating a lot of stuff that was already implicit in a lot of places, you can see the same thing in deep learning and then it does rates variations and then does compression. A lot of things we’re converging on this is the core sort of thing. So, it’s interesting that the point there isn’t that a good system is one that does one or the other, but one that it’s this is good system is one that’s able to do both in a, in an optimal fashion, because obviously there right there’s a trade off, if you if there’s one pole, then you lose out on the benefits that the other would grant you and vice versa. And so what you want to do is when you’re in a highly right variable environment or world you want to be able to keep up and cope with the changes so you yourself want to be able to vary along with the world. Right, then if you’re placed in a relatively stable environment, then you don’t want to be chaotic right, you want to be able to maintain and sustain a certain mode of engagement. A style of expression, let’s say. So, that right in our paper in our, which by the way just finally got its issue. I know if you were keeping track john but our E5T paper, it’s anyway it’s got a page number and it’s got its own issue now. It’s finally real. Our main claim was that that process of optimization. If we conceptualize that and embody cognitive terms. Yes, we, we, we have to think of it as a kind of optimal gripping. Yeah, that’s what Merleau-Ponty talked about. Yeah, totally. So, optimal gripping is what recursive relevance realization does. That’s the basic right claim there. Relevance RRR does optimal gripping or is optimal gripping, something like that, when successful. So, taking this right. We, we took this notion of RRR as optimal grip. So, we plugged it into the big five theory of personality to make the case that at the level of traits, your trait configurations let’s say are essentially predispositions for styles of optimally gripping your world. Oh, the five major dimensions. Oh, that’s beautifully said. Excellent. So maybe we can get into the trade hierarchy at this point and just to just an acknowledgement of Collins work and how important it was to ours. Colin Young’s work. So Colin did a lot of preliminary work. Gary’s probably going to talk about it. I just want to flag this sort of put a little flag. Thank you, Colin. Your work was really important and inspirational for the work we’ve done, we’re doing. Absolutely. So, yeah, let’s actually talk about Collins contribution here or at least in so far as it’s relevant to our discussion right now. So, yeah, my understanding is that like Collins work has been at the cutting edge of sort of the cognitive science of personality, and also the neuroscience of personality he’s been everywhere in those domains and it’s like it’s crazy just seeing how prolific. His writing has been his work has been. Yeah. So he’s also one of your previous students. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s right. So that’s a cool connection. And essentially before, before Colin came along, my understanding of it is that the big five theory of personality which was, again, very well studied very highly esteemed and very widely used right as as a way of classifying people into different types right understanding individual differences, and also being able to predict certain types of behavior on the basis of those kinds of measurable individual differences that the big five theory was essentially a descriptive and predictive theory, but it wasn’t monetary. Yeah, in other words, although we observed that there exists these five major traits that people can vary along. Right. We didn’t know why exactly that was or what what may be the biological or functional underpinnings of these things were Exactly. Above and beyond being able to say that, given right that you scored at the 98th percentile on this trade that means that you’re likely going to be show up in such and such ways in such and such situations, there wasn’t much to say about that. Yeah, the origin, just to understand exactly what does that mean, and where would that come from. So psych a lot branches of psychology get obsessed with empirical investigation because the theoretical stuff is sort of such a morass so they start looking for ways just to map territory. And one of the things that they did that ultimately roots, the trade theory, big five trade theories what’s called the lexical hypothesis, the lexical hypothesis is that word descriptors should show up in vocabulary. And they should be clustered together potentially. And actually what happens is they search the dictionary for adjectives, and they early statistical techniques were able to be developed to show particular kinds of pattern relations in dictionary words. And those pattern relations in dictionary words are actually the source, arguably, certainly there are other sources but a core source of big five are actually just in the empirical description networks of vocabulary words. So at that level, yeah that’s not connected at all to the underlying neuro cognitive mechanisms of behavior that’s just sort of the languages that people are using. And that’s actually the empirical patterning that gave rise to trade theory. So that’s why we’re like, yeah, it doesn’t really have a causal explanatory mechanistic dynamic to it. It’s rather a descriptive predictive theory at an empirical level. It’s an aspirin technology. Yeah, that’s my name for those kinds of things. And psychology has several aspirin. Oh, God. Well, given that it fundamentally lacks a causal explanatory structure, John, he’s basically committed to that. I like that. Anyway, go ahead. So, yeah, I guess, what, could we then extend that analogy and say that Colin turned it from an aspirin technology to like an antibiotic technology or something like that? Yeah, Colin gives it turns it into a causal explanatory theory. And that, I think, is just a tremendous move. That’s why I wanted to flag. Right. That’s just, that’s, he’s, he’s, he’s on our side of the tracks. Yeah, when it comes to that. And I guess the other important bit is that if you, because the lexical hypothesis I remember there was another aspect to it that the point was that it was something like to the degree that words describe real things in the world. Right. If there’s anything real to be said about personality, then it’s going to show up words for personality, right descriptors adjectives things like that they’re going to show up in language and across languages across cultures. And as far as I know they’ve replicated the five factor structure across different sets of languages across different cultures and things like that. There are some problems with a couple of the traits, but that that depends on several things. But for the most part, we could, we could quite confidently say that the five factor structure is as universal as a universal theory of universal psychological theory can get. So we’re working with five universal things right traits. And when we encounter universals, there’s something to be said about the there’s at least something to get curious about the possible adaptive functions that these universals might be fulfilling. And that’s the question that Colin tried to answer with his theory, his cybernetic big five theory of personality. Right. Right. And the point was that, given that the five major traits of personality are human, universals, we can treat them as adaptations to classes of stimuli that have been present in human cultures across evolutionary stretches of time. Yes. And if we do that, then what did we, sorry, I just had a very plausible argument. Yeah. And then the question is if we do that if we treat the traits as adaptations and mobile, what do we get. And that’s really the answer that he fleshed out. So, do you guys want to add anything before we move on to the traits. Just, just in case people don’t know. Sorry, Greg, I’ll go first. Cybernetics is the study basically of feedback cycles, and how systems, a mechanical systems can self organize. It’s a precursor and overlaps with dynamical systems theory, just so people are aware of that and we became even more closely aware of that Gary and I when we were dealing with some of the reviewers of initial versions of our paper. All I say is basically I followed the exact same path in a different way, I contacted Colin DeJong I think it was 2013 when I first encountered cybernetic big five. The interface that he developed with that and the way in which I map the traits on the behavioral investment theory and its emergence created almost an identical structure where I had a cybernetic feature that would then give rise to the dispositional tendencies that were structured we may get into talking about some of those, but it was really remarkable convergent. Oh, and I just want to note something, since Greg spoke because Greg has, and which series was it Greg I can’t remember was it the elusive I think it’s the elusive I we did with Richard Maserrieto. So, I think that Greg wants it very clearly understood as it should and it very actually lines up with this argument especially about its epistemic origins that personality traits personality might be the wrong adjective, they’re definitely these traits. I think that’s indisputable, equating that giving them the ontological status of personality, especially now when you know how they derive the personality literally means the property that makes you a person. And I think it’s an inexcusable ontological stretch to think that these five traits capture personality or what I now call personhood, and right and especially how they’re not capturing a lot of the stuff we’re talking about, we’re talking about the psyche. So, one of the things you have to hear and this is, this is some subtlety. Right. These are universal in the sense they apply to all people, but they’re not universal in the sense that they completely explain your personhood. And it’s a mistake that, and the psychologists who call it personality theory, bear responsibility for that equivocation. Right. It’s a bad naming. We’re stuck with it because it’s just pervasive. We can’t do anything about it. And Greg has said a lot about it in the elusive I. Do these traits exist, undeniable, do they capture the essence of your personhood, very deniable, very deniable. And so, try to keep those two, just because something is universal doesn’t mean it’s complete. Right, so keep just, just put that warrant keep that warning in mind, none of us are going to be talking about these traits that I don’t equate them with personality, right. But, or if they’re equated to personality, then I want another term like personhood, I don’t I don’t know what people want to do with that. I don’t I don’t I’m not trying to dictate semantic policy. I just wanted to be clear that people generally over read what these traits are. So, just wanted to say that. And again I point you to the elusive I, where we talked about that in great detail. Greg, did you, did you want to add something? Yes, just traits are one thing personality is different. You can know what your trait profile is that’s useful. That is not who you are. And the real historical reasons, the term personality gets conflated and confounded with traits, and we see, oh the personality theory is trait theory, horribly erroneous at multiple levels. I really like that. I would actually extend that I might actually extend that into a deeper critique and say that anything about you is not who you are. There’s something about you right that that’s inexhaustible and irreducible to anything that can be said about you and any of these assessment instruments or tools that they’re going to be making right there they’re going to be sampling aspects of you at best, and this is just one way of doing that, the big five. And maybe this is also one of the gaps that the process of individualizing assessment findings tries to bridge. How can we use these kinds of finite right instruments of measuring certain aspects of you and compare right ways of comparing you to others to get a better sense of who you are in certain contexts. But okay so going back on track right we’re trying to link recursive relevance realization with the big five theory of personality. At this point let’s go over the five traits briefly, and then the, the two meta traits, and then maybe the 10 aspects. So the five traits. There’s a helpful acronym, or there’s two helpful acronyms to remember them by one of them is ocean. The other one is canoe. My favorite canoe because the way it looks at actually helps you to group the the traits better under the meta traits. So, with canoe right you’ve got conscientiousness, grableness and your autism on the one hand, and openness and extroversion on the other. So, conscientiousness is essentially a measure of how orderly and industrious, you are. Let’s say you are very high in conscientiousness you walk into a room, and you see that there’s a lot of clutter on the floor. You’re going to get triggered you’re going to be like things are out of place they need to be put back back where they belong. So, when you find yourself right trying to put everything back into place, you remember that you had an appointment so you quickly check your time and your agenda and you’re like I gotta, I gotta get on track. So, for the person who’s high and high in conscientiousness, the future is very present. Right. The future is very present. And we’ll, I think we’ll talk about how this, this relates to inaction and relevance realize a recursive relevance realization in a bit. But first let’s go through the traits. Then you’ve got trade agreeableness, right, which has to do with how you like to write its compassion and politeness those are the two basic aspects of it. Compassion is, it describes how likely you are to, like feel for another person take their perspective feel empathy and relate and bond with them and politeness describes how you can hold back any aggressive urges or impulses that you might have. So, you know, if someone might say something that you didn’t like to hear, and then you’ll just bite your lip. That sort of play or holding the door for others or yielding a lot of the time that that’s agreeableness and measuring law and agreeableness is really just the opposite of those things, you can come off as rude or arrogant, not very thoughtful or caring towards others. And then there’s neuroticism, which is a measure of what one easy way to think about it is negative emotionality. If you’re high on your autism you tend to get anxious, and you tend to be moody, for example, from situation situation things might trigger you and you have a very subtle style of expressing your emotions. If you’re low on trade neuroticism then you’re relatively laid back and not easily perturbed, they, they say that the low end of neuroticism is just emotional stability, so that that sort of speaks for itself. There’s only a very tenuous relationship between neuroticism and the big five and Freud’s understanding of that term. It’s a it’s, there’s a historical connection but it’s definitely not an identity relation, so don’t confuse those together. Thank you for that. Yep. Okay, so then you’ve got the two remaining traits openness and extroversion trade openness is the way Colin talks about it it’s your sensitivity to the incentive reward value of semantic information. That’s the technical definition. What that means is, you like to have intellectual conversations you like to talk about ideas you like to think through things a lot you’re imaginative, you like to listen to music, you enjoy novelty, you enjoy, right, cultural experiences you enjoy going to museums you enjoy thinking about things and you’re sort of heady and imaginative. If you’re high on trade openness if you’re not then you tend to be more conventional and your thinking style and more down to earth you stick to what you know. If you recall that basic example of right connecting point A with point B, you’re just going to find a straight line to point B. And you can see how both of these can be adaptive in different contexts, of course. Like for example if you’re if you’re performing open heart surgery you don’t want to improvise. You want to stick to what works. But on the other hand if you’re in science, you want to be innovative you don’t want to you don’t want to stick to just what works you really want to explore. And you can think of the last trade trade extroversion as the sort of concrete or behavioral version of openness. It speaks to your, your propensity or proclivity to exploratory behavior. So people who are extroverts they tend to be more opportunistic, they tend to be more enthusiastic excitable when they hear that there’s a party happening next door their initial reactions can be that sounds like fun let’s go. Why is that their reaction because they’re actually attuned to the possible opportunities that lie in that situation. And that’s what they’re going to seek out, which means that if you’re low on trade extroversion. And you’re thinking something like there’s a party going on next door. You’re not going to be as excited about all the positive possibilities that are actually inherent in the situation. You’re going to be a little more indifferent. So, together, the idea is that these five traits. They give not an exhaustive but a kind of comprehensive account of the different. First of all, the different ways in which you’re likely to act but more than that the different ways in which you’re likely to act with respect to certain domains of experience. And that’s where it starts to get a little more thematized right with neuroticism. It’s the problem of threat. How do I cope with threat in the world. Am I going to fight or am I going to flee. Let’s say, with extroversion, it’s the problem of reward. How do I want to position and orient myself with respect to possible rewards in the world. Every time I see a possible reward do I just want to pursue it, or do I want to hold back. What’s the right answer. There really isn’t one the right answer right it’s it’s a moving target, but people aren’t infinitely flexible. They have to be predisposed to some sets of strategies, more than others that will work at least enough of the time, right. And the same sort of logic, the, the opponent processing logic applies to the other traits as well. We’ve got conscientiousness which has to do with ordering and and organizing and prioritizing goals across different timescales. Do I want to care about what I want to do I want to care about the future I want to have or do I want to care about what’s in the here and now. Yeah, actually, with trade agreeableness Do I want to care more about what other people want them need or do I want to care more about what I want to need. Let’s say with trade openness. Do I want to care about what right novel information and new ways of looking at things even if that means not actually being successful with my approach or strategy or do I want to just stick to what I already know, given that I might be missing out on possible rewards that might be there right to go outside of my box, let’s say, and I’m missing something conscientiousness agreeableness new autism, open it no I covered all of them. Before we go up to the Mediterranean level. No, I just noting how each one is when you state it the way you did Gary you there’s an implicit opponent processing in there in some fashion. I just want to add for neuroticism we now talk about least trying to encourage people to talk about three F’s. It’s fighter flea or freeze. And I think that’s relevant to psychotherapy fight or flea or freeze. Right. Because freezes and freezes a biological strategy you see it a lot of prey animals. They’ll, they’ll, they’ll often the preferred strategies often freezing, rather than fighting or fleeing. Because most predators track motion, things like that. So I just wanted to just throw that into the, the just put the three F’s into the neuroticism. Great. Great. Yep. Yep. I mean, there’s a lot that I can say I’m not sure exactly when. But, yeah, I did I certainly did a fair amount of work on this that I may enrich in this relationship a little bit. In particular, I’m going to invite us when we reflect at whatever time to consider this evolutionary phylogenetic perspective of layering of behavioral investment tendencies and that’s going to organize the structure in a particular kind of way that may be useful. Excellent. I’ve been anticipating that actually, and looking forward to it. Let’s just cover the the meta traits now that and then move into that. I think that’ll lay the ground for connecting triple R with with what we’re talking about with personality. Very well. And then when you fill in the phylogenetic dimension there, that’ll enrich it in just the way you’re saying it. Okay, so. So for a while, we were working with the five factor structure personality. And eventually they found weak but reliable correlations between, as I mentioned earlier, the first three traits, conscientiousness agreeableness and neuroticism on the one hand, and also the set of openness and extroversion. And they inferred on that basis to higher order structures factors, which they refer to as meta traits stability and meta trait plasticity. And now it must be getting clear how this ties back to the basic premise of recursive relevance realization that the world with which we’re contending. It varies right on a continuum of highly static or stable and highly dynamic or even entropic. Any adaptive organism, that’s to realize relevance recursively must be equipped with the basic capacities to right adapt to each of these poles, irrespective of the other. And the idea here right, this was our one of our main insights in the paper that you see, well, triple are happening at the level of personality between the meta traits stability and plasticity right stability which includes conscientiousness agreeableness and neuroticism allows you to fit yourself in it right it’s a selective constraint it improves or enhances stability, stable modes of engagement over time. It’s something like that versus plasticity which is, it’s the exploratory impulse manifest at the level of personality. And so, it’s about consciousness right it’s exploration of information and novelty of right thoughts ideas, things like that. And an extraversion it’s behavioral exploration. That’s, that’s how Colin also talked about it. And so, a personality that’s optimally gripping right between stability and plasticity is realizing what’s relevant in the world that it’s situated. That was the main claim that we made. And then here’s the last thing I’ll say and let’s get into the phylogenetic question that individual differences in personality therefore are essentially differences in the manners of optimal gripping right that people are predisposed to with respect to their particular worlds. And so, I thought that was cool. I thought that was cool because it situates personality within embodied cognition, and it demonstrates the continuity between personality and cognition as well or embodied cognition, and I think that’s useful especially for psychotherapy. So, yeah puts personality traits back into a problem solving framework, and therefore connects it makes deeper connections between traits and intelligence. It’s just we’re talking at a different longitudinal scale than we are when we’re talking about like for a back fluid cognition. So stability basically exploits invariance and plasticity basically explores variance. And that’s how you can think about it. And notice that, as Gary was describing, there isn’t an, like there is no absolute solution to all these appointed processing and various styles are going to work. We’re going to work comparatively well or worse different during different kinds of environment. So if you’re very high instability, you’re going to really thrive in a stable environment. You’re very high instability, you’re going to really be challenged with an environment that’s in flux, etc. So, this also maps on to what’s called a no free lunch theorem, no one personality. And again, I dislike using this term but we’re forced just because the language no one personality structure is the right one. That’s first of all to realize. Secondly, there’s an implication about the relationship between individual and distributed cognition, having a wide variation of styles of optimal grip within a population actually allows distributed cognition, right, to get a more comprehensive optimal grip on its environment. So, like, if you have people that are more stable and people that are more plastic, they are going to play off against each other, also with variation and invariance in a way that’s going to give distributed cognition tremendous power to fit the group the population to the But also links individual cognition to distributed cognition and helps to explain both the functionality of personality within the individual and also between individuals within distributed cognition. So it’s like this is a theory that is trying to give a lot of explanatory depth to the traits. Lovely. Yeah. So we can definitely see this intersection them between a dynamic conception the cybernetic conception and then this cybernetic conception informed by recursive relevance realization that places the agent arena relationship in a structured way, and then And then navigating the conservative elements of control relative to the expenditure and exploratory elements that then require some sort of plastic, and then, you know, enable the individual to accommodate to new possibilities to use a PGA term and behavioral So this investment theory actually comes out the variation selection retention through Skinner, just from the outside, and basically says that the environment affords a wide variety of different affordances that the animals going to expend work effort towards and then return get a return on its investment. Okay, and then anchored to all that operant conditioning research and then arguing that there’s a cybernetic neurocognitive cybernetic system that’s regulating that. And then he uses that in the emerging evolutionary framework the big history framework afforded by the tree of knowledge system and says that what’s happening with animals is that they’re emerging out of complex adaptive biological systems that then are afforded an opportunity for a new vector of behavior, i.e. the behavior of the animals a whole, and then it has to navigate the movement of the animals a whole. And that’s expensive and risky. So all actions are expensive and risky, and at the same time they afford you to acquire various elements. And so you then have to do engage in what would be arguably the emergence of the principle of least effort relative to return on that effort. That’s actually the first principle of behavior investment theory, which is a principle of energy economics, whereby you’re basically going to expend effort to acquire resources, but do so with a minimization of risk and cost relative to anticipated threat. Okay, and other opportunities. So it basically gives a gas and break system gas toward the good break away from the bad. Okay, and then the management of the breaking away from the bad is freeze don’t do anything. Escape, or fight if need be, or pursue a prey pursue a mate and pursue a territory. Okay, so if we place an animal in this particular way and if we go back to some of John’s and my conversation there’s going to be valence assessment. Positive negative valence assessment, and then positive and negative balance systems that are going to be gassing toward the good and breaking away from the bad. If we structure that in the basic agent arena, arena raciochip where the Cambrian explosion happens, 520 million years ago, and you get prey predation relations, as well as make competition relations that’s what happens in the early animal phase, you now have these systems that are moving around and having to navigate the other around, get prey and avoid being preyed upon. Okay, and I, the argument then is that what emerges then is a positive and negative affect system embedded in a pleasure plane jolting system. And what that would then say is that the way you described extraversion and neuroticism at the ground of the animal level can be then framed as the emergence of a regulatory negative affect system that’s a checking out threat, managing the three F’s of freeze, and fight, okay, and an extraverted system that’s engaging in behavioral activation to seek reward to expand plasticity wise. The fourth F. Yeah, fighting the fourth F, feeding and well maybe a fifth F. Okay, but yeah, so now you got to go pursue the food and the other F, okay, and manage the territory, we’ll have to come up with an F for, you know, territory acquisition. But fundamentally you get this dialectical balance right of pushing the horizon exploratory outward to acquire and then regulatory threat. And that then places the neuroticism and extraversion in exactly this dynamic relationship that we’ve talked about, and is framed by recursive relevance realization in the context of the emergent animal. Okay. Is that the origin of stability and plasticity at the level of traits, would you say? That’s what I would say. Well, I’d say nature solves this dialectic through the emergence of neuroticism in animals, and a sense of threat, okay, to management control conservatively, and extraversion in animals to manage exploration plasticity and engagement. That’s what I would say. And I would say you could see this in fish. All right. But what you don’t really see in fish is agreeableness. Why not? Because actually fish are not terribly social creatures. All right, they heard in schools that they don’t hang out with each other, they don’t parrot, and they don’t crave long bonds. Okay. Now, wolves and primates do. Okay. And I would argue you never see emergence of this other trait agreeableness in this dimension. And that’s actually where I’m going to actually find a little bit of potential disagreement, okay, at least for the lens of the unified theory, which is this agreeable this dimension, okay, is going to be least specifiable through precisely the exploration plasticity versus conservation dynamic. And I can explain why, but actually the self other dynamics that emerge to give rise to the pattern behavior of agreeableness are actually embedded in both exploration and conservation. So the influence matrix is going to map that dynamic. And it’s going to say the dispositional tendencies towards other oriented or self oriented will be the predominant strategies, okay, compassion and style. Okay, but actually both of those in different contexts may be exploratory or conservative. Okay, so the last thing I’ll say is the human dimension. Okay, so in this dimension, the human person evolves into a culture context, which it must be socialized into. Okay. And I would then argue that conscientiousness and openness serve exactly as this structure in relationship to navigating the complex dynamics of culture, as it were, whereby conscientiousness is the internalization of achievement standards across time to conservatively manage the control of resources and achieve orderly in relationship to that. Okay, so you get a core achievement order dynamic that conservatively organizes the structure and internalizes it. So you get connections to like the super ego and your conscientiousness, which is internalizing standards that are good that you can then know will exist across time and then order. And then explore the rim of culture, become high culture, become look into the possibilities of feelings of novelty of exploration. So then the openness culture domain, conscientious dimension of the person level, human person level, becomes exactly once again, this plasticity resilient dynamic there. So for me, I see the animal level, I see the primate level at the influence matrix, and that gets complicated. And then I see the person dimension being well captured by the conscientiousness openness. Could I could I jump on that for a moment, john, I don’t know if you have thoughts, but I really want to jump on this because It’s interesting how you said that conscientiousness and openness are sort of the proper traits of right of like socialized human beings, let’s say, of modern human beings, because As our social structures complexify the demands right on how to coordinate ourselves together in large groups that they get more and more demanding, in other words, and so I was just thinking about If conscientiousness is sort of the strategy or the strategy that we use to improve our coordination capacities with one another across time scales, then I was just thinking about how culturally the the experience of time over time changed from john you’ve talked about this from kairos to chronos actually yes because right our phenomenal logical sense of time time as it’s lived It’s not chronological objectively measurable time it’s timing right it’s our actions in relation to events in the world in order to optimally grip, for example, but we can’t just have that sense of time as lived if we want to live in the modern world, we have to be able to coordinate ourselves with each other across larger right longer time scales. And that’s sort of what pro knows chronological or objectively measurable linear time is really about, and it sounds like to me I see a relationship there between the evolution of conscientiousness right that the achieve the cultural cognitive achievement of time, and that’s sort of the way that we live in the modern world. And that’s sort of what pro knows chronological or objectively measurable linear time is really about, and it sounds like to me I see a relationship there between the evolution of conscientiousness right that the achieve the cultural cognitive achievement of time as objectively measured and So before numeracy way way before numeracy way way before literacy we have colendrix colendrix the use of calendars appears in the upper Paleolithic transition, and it is the so we the one of the first things we try to do, one of the first powerful side of psycho technologies we do is we try to standardize time, and it seems to go, it is coordinating with its co emerging with the cognitive complexification of the upper Paleolithic transition, which is plausibly connected to the complexification of trade networks and and of the social demands and pursuing more long term goals. I think that’s exactly right. And I think great proposal about conscientiousness and openness, at least as the state’s the traitor standardly defined. I mean, great, there were there of course there’s precursors at the animals levels there’s quite a bit delayed gratification for long term goals even amongst animals curiosity even among animals so there’s an expectation process happening. Yeah, totally. All I would say is that the dimension of expanded cognition across time symbolic networking across in the inner subjective and then the propositional network and the evolution of culture, you know, as the launches us into this new dimension of And the prediction is pretty clear and it’s, I would argue, we see it that we should in animals be able to see extraversion neuroticism and agreeable us and social mammals. Yeah, the pretty high degree of specificity reliability as behavior patterns, or conscientious And I think that the difference in animals should be significantly less reliable in terms of his capacity to detect them, because they’re more mapping onto these more human person culture traits in relationship to the extension across time, the justification dynamics And the ordering of that internalization from a conscientiousness perspective, and the desire to explore and engage in it so it just gets absolutely we’re taking dispositional tendencies by definition, if we take recursive relevance, real estate and behavioral And I think that’s a really important investment seriously. This goes to the core of cognition. Yes, dynamic so we’re going to see precursors, but they’re going to take on their own features so that conscientiousness and openness. I mean take openness openness still is one of the hardest traits to all the traits it’s hardest to define. I would argue, it has the least, it’s valid but it has the least robust specificity. And its characterization in animals apart from just curiosity and exploration which you can get a lot out of in terms of just extraversion. It’s a very very, you know, it dissipates in terms of what we’re actually grabbing a hold of at the animal level. I was thinking of tool construction as perhaps one of the markers at the animal level of openness. Be a really interesting one. Yep. Yep. And so there’s precursors there at that level. Definitely precursors. It just, but the precursors with, you know, I had a really neurotic doll. And people know what I mean by that, you know, very, you know, reactive irritable at times very very nervous those kinds of issues. That’s not hard to see in the mammal kingdom. Right. That’s cool. That’s good. So the issue around agreeableness is you think it shows both plasticity and stability aspects to it. Well, I mean, basically, to me then of course I built the influence matrix, right, which now john I would basically argue is, oh, what I was mapping was recursive relevance realization in relation. Yeah, no, totally, totally. And your, your theory is a bio economic model and so is rather recursive relevance realization at its core. Totally. So then you get the then what the influence matrix does it says oh us as human primates are tracking the self other dimension, it maps the specificity of it, and then says there’s a core dimension about whether or not you’re going to be other oriented, which is going to have a motivational element that’s compassion. Okay. And then a stylistic element that’s, you know, tender minded or polite. Okay, and then you’re going to have, or the reverse disagreeableness you’re going to either lacking compassion, or be grumpy, inner personally. Or if you’re going to then extract the most general patterns of tendency of the self other or other self orientation that’s what it says. Now then we, if we want to put that into plasticity resiliency dynamics. Okay, I don’t think I think the traits just capturing self over other versus other over self tendencies, which is going to then we can put that into say okay yes you’re going to be, you’re going to want to have a conversation with the environment. Okay, so I can certainly see why we would put agreeableness along with neuroticism and conscientiousness. Okay, and I would certainly guess that it would organize that way. But at the same time when you really look at the specific dynamics of what it’s getting at the others live in opponent process conscientiousness lives against openness and extraversion lives against neuroticism agreeableness disagreeableness then may live in a relationship to each other, and it’s defined by a self other dynamic that isn’t quite as specifiable as the just agent arena exploration. As a function of that they’re going to be other layers that need to be disentangled to get the clear relation, but certainly inside of agreeableness, there absolutely is going to be this recursive relevance realization dynamic of plasticity resilience or exploration and conservation. And I think that’s the key argument we made actually that each one of the traits, not just the real bonus but each one of the traits, because of recursive relevance realization in terms of the sub traits also has a stability, the city play definitely, and they would, but at the macroscopic level at least one of my greens there’s an animal dimension here at neuroticism, extraversion. There’s a person dimension here, and then there’s this primate dimension that inside of this we’d have to disentangle the self dynamic that would afford more layering inside of agreeableness than inside the others. I see what you’re saying. So, maybe there’s like two things to piece apart here one of them is that within traits agreeableness, the kind of opponent processing that’s happening is with respect to the higher order goal of social harmony. And that’s sort of the key loss or the normativity of that trait if we were to make a claim like that, the way I see it, especially from the cybernetic big five theory perspective right and he takes that on for itself. So, the way that they’ve done this through the opponent processing of compassion, right, which enables pro social possibilities, right through bonding and compassion and empathy and politeness which eliminates or reduces anti social possibilities. The higher you are on trade agreeableness, the more your tendency toward social harmony, the lower you are the less the further your tendency from social harmony. That was the that was the key loss, but you’re also talking about. I think what I would say if I were to guess actually that you’re talking about is the kind of normativity that emerges out of a relationship. Right. When you get something like participatory sense making john maybe you can like pitch in here and elaborate a little bit on this. Well, I have a proposal about this. I think there might be a way of stitching these together with our. I mean, Greg might be onto something. I’m not sure. I’m sure that Greg is probably onto something because he’s always onto something but I mean I’m not sure about what I think about it yet so Because we talked about, there should be an aspect of this theory that is mediating between individuation and participation between individual individual cognition and group cognition between individual cognition and distributed cognition. That’s part of the theory. And if I understand, Greg right, that might be so I do think what you’re saying is also the case. Agreeableness is showing the recursive relevance realization machinery, but it might have this dimension of individual of relating individual cognition to distributed cognition that isn’t as pronounced in the other traits. And so you could see it as an intersection if you’ll allow me a graph of sort of relevance realization machinery but also individuation participation machinery and that would help. I think that would actually resolve the tension between the two claims that’s that I’m proposing that right now. And there’s that I’m making an empirical prediction. I don’t really know this you guys may, but in terms of the factor loading structure. Okay, I would certainly make the prediction that O and E are loading more clearly and N and C are loading more clearly and a should load the least clear in relationship to the macroscopic structure. That’s something we could just check out. You can just check that’s an empirical prediction that falls immediately out of the argument. Yep, we should, we should definitely do that. I mean either either result would be interesting. Right. That’s what makes it a good empirical prediction. If you’re wrong, Greg, then that means some adjustment has to be made. If you’re right, then that would blend credence to what I’m proposing that we should see at least one trait trying to manage the optimal grip between individual and group and distributed cognition. And self other as you put it, Greg, that would be an important dimension that needs to be in this needs to be in this theory. I mean, Gary, we’re kind of bound to that as an entailment there has to be something, because we talk about this working at individual cognition and distributed cognition, but we actually need something that is performing the optimal grip between those two between self and other. What I’m hearing right now is that maybe what agreeable this is doing isn’t helping you to prioritize other people’s goals over your own but to prioritize the norms of the relationships themselves. I’m not doing this for just you but for our for the sake of our relationship. Yes, I think there’s a kind of Yeah, yeah. You can think about, I’m almost the metaphor that’s coming and don’t push the metaphor too hard because it’s an initial metaphor, but agreeable miss is like an interface function and think about what in where the word interface comes from, like thing but in facing each other. Right. And so, that’s very powerful. Like I say, first of all, this is genuine deal logo something’s emerging here. I think, like I said, I think, I think Greg has done the really responsible thing he’s made an empirical prediction. And if there’s confirmation of it, I think this theoretical proposal needs to be needs to be made, and needs to be sort of well put in somewhere. Obviously we can’t do it in the thing that’s not published, but we could do it going forward. That makes sense to me. And like I said we are argument entails that there is such a function somewhere, there has to be. Lovely yeah I’d love to flesh this out and see where the details are I mean I think we’re certainly starting on such an outline like I said I’ll make the prediction in that regard see if that unfolds. Yeah, just, yeah, just have people think about it in terms of, to me, if I think exploration and conservation, extraversion and neuroticism fall very clearly openness and conscientious fall very clearly the concept of agreeable this or disagreeable this falls a lot less clear, at least at a semantic level. That’s one way another way of framing that but yeah this is let’s do let’s deconstruct this at some level that’d be really fascinating. Well usually when there’s lack of clarity there’s, it’s because there’s confounding variables and that’s what I’m proposing. Exactly, right now I’m in total agreement. And the influence matrix that’s what it maps it’s sort of like a, there’s a self other really really recursive relevance realization dynamic that’s embedded in this, that has to be layered on top of it to gain clarity about what these things are. Right, right. Right. This is cool. And a good theory should be doing this at all times. Excellent. Excellent. I have, I have some thoughts on this and maybe we can link this to attachment theory next time. But, and I know we don’t have too much time left. Yeah, we should be wrapping up we should be wrapping this up. Let me make just one or two more claims about how how this links to the question of psyche pathology and well being, because, right, we’ve been talking about how recursive relevance realization as optimal gripping is at the core of personality. When taken up from the trade perspective right, you see relevance realization taking place within the traits. We didn’t elaborate on that today but for anyone who’s interested just read the paper or look at the com or whatever. So, we’ve got recursive relevance realization happening within the traits. And recursive relevance realization happening at the mediterranean level between the mediterranean stability and plasticity, and recursive relevance really realization itself gives us a criterion of the normative. That’s the argument here that when the situation that you’re contending with, right. When the traits meet the demands of the situation that you’re contending with your in an optimally gripping relationship with your world. But when the when situational demands exceed, right. The capacity of your traits to adapt or cope with such situational variables or conditions, then you lose your optimal grip and your fittedness to the world. And so, there’s an interesting way to apply this to psychological assessment, actually, which is sort of what I’m exploring right now which is, you start by literally asking people, what is it that brings you here, right, what’s your presenting concern in other words, and usually it’s not something like I had a bad day. It’s more like I’ve got, I’ve been having many bad days. And there’s been some some sort of thematic thread weaving through and tying together all the bad days that they’ve been having, whether it’s been disagreements with other people or problems with their mood or uncertainty and anxiety around the future or what have you. Then the question is, if you can find what’s the magic right in their descriptions of what their problem is that maybe that could implicate a trade situation breakdown that’s happening, a sub optimal gripping that’s happening at the level of traits, because what traits describe is styles or patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, etc, etc, across longer time scales. And so, if the kinds of problems that patients are dealing with, that they bring into the therapy room are problems taking place at longer time scales. And if traits are descriptions of patterns of behavior and cognition and feeling that take place across longer time scales, then you should expect there to be a strong relationship between the two. You could use the big five to assess for breakdowns in person situation that might be implicated in why people are struggling with what they’re struggling with. And that leads into the question of, well, it’s a construct that we sort of just named in our paper, but that I’m going to be elaborating on in the next one, world enactment, right? And let me say this too, and I’ll conclude my part, but you know, when we think of personality traits, we think of properties that are intrinsic to the person. You have this trait inside of you, right? You’ve got this amount of extraversion inside of you or this amount of conscientiousness inside of you. But that’s not the inactivist way of taking it up at all. And it’s also not at all the way traits show themselves in our lives. Traits are world involving. You can’t have trait extraversion, except in relation to possible rewards in the world in which you’re embedded, in which you’re situated. You can’t have trait openness if there’s nothing to think about, if there’s nothing to imagine. You can’t have trait neuroticism if there’s nothing to worry about or to fear or to be anxious about. So traits are fundamentally world involving. And so the phenomenological hypothesis here is that if you want to know who a person is, don’t look at their trait measures only. Turn to their world. What’s the kind of world that they’re inhabiting? What’s the kind of world that’s being enacted, brought forth, lived in, experienced, that’s being participated in? And so if you write the whole question is, how can we think of traits as denoting styles of world enactment? Yes. Yes. Good. Maybe we could explore some of that next time before we get into attachment theory. I think that’s excellent. And I think that goes right back to what we said at the very beginning about the ontology of problems as being inherently transjective. I think of the traits, the way you’re describing them, as longitudinal constraints on the problem space for people. And the problem space is always co-created by the individual and the environment in which they are within. So I think this is a great place to bring it to close. Does anybody have any final words they want to say before I press the stop button? No, I think that’s a really nice summary, Gary. And I think that’s an excellent also bridge to set us up both to continue this sort of transjective analysis and then to set us up to attachment theory, which fundamentally is going to be a self-other participatory dance structure. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you, gentlemen. Great deal logos. Great argument. Great logos and deal logos.