Psyche pathology and Well being 8- The Cognitive Science Show (SSRXKZBZjas)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SSRXKZBZjas

Welcome everyone to episode eight. Yes, we’re still going on psyche pathology and well-being. I’m here with Greg Enriquez and Gary Ovanessian and I’m going to turn things over immediately to Greg. All right. Well, thank you. So today I’m going to pick up the ball from where Gary has been guiding us. And just to give us the structure, what we’re trying to do is kind of bring a big picture of metapsychology perspectives and stitch together a field that is, you know, it’s sort of incoherent, chaotic and fragmented. We talked about well-being, we talked about psyche, we’ve done psyche psychopathology relation. And then we bridged sort of three domains as we handed off to Gary. We’ve got this big picture of sort of cognition around stability and plasticity, which recursive relevance realization and predictive processing together in a particular type of vision that says, Hey, the agent arena relation is managing order and chaos in particular lands, a sleet spot of complex adaptive structure. And we should be able to see that across a wide variety of different domains. And then Gary was grabbing that and placing that in relationship to the structure of traits on the one hand, and then attachment on the other. So we saw dynamic relations and traits, especially if we put a little bit of opponent process around things like conscientiousness versus openness, extraversion versus neuroticism, and then solve those things in relation to stability, exploration, plasticity kinds of elements. And then with attachment theory, we see a very similar secure base, cultivates secure base, go out to explore, keep that dialectic operative. Okay. So we have this kind of like high level picture of sort of cognitive process on the one hand, and then these, you know, more different aspects of personality, if you want to call them that personality theory. All right. And what I want to suggest is that we can build more into this picture here, and do it with richness and specificity, and also completeness and coherence. And that’s good, because it means that the model, you know, if this is a Lego piece system, we’re pulling the Lego pieces together and creating a coherent whole that’s got some functionality to it. Okay, so that’s what and what I’ll be doing then today to do that is going to be talk a little bit about personality and this emergence of this thing called character adaptation systems theory. It’s the fifth branch on the tree, the bridge right between the unified theory, which is this side and then unified approach. And what it does is it creates a particular kind of bridge between personality theory and psychotherapy. And it’s going to then create that bridge in a way that’s really interesting to connect to what we’ve seen so far. So that’s where we are. Let me talk then very briefly about personality. We covered this in the elusive eye, so I don’t want to spend too much time on it. There’s the whole issue about what is a person versus what is personality, what’s personality theory, try to describe it objectively. I kind of like the term character. I think it’s a broader and better term. But so look to the elusive eye for some of that. But let me talk a little bit about at least two really broad central ideas in personality theory that over the history of kind of the field, the field is waffled back and forth in between. One of which is character and the other which is temperament. Character refers to the really the dynamic relation of the agent and arena or person situation in the moment and the learning and developmental characteristics that are associated with that. So psychodynamic theory is a very character driven theory. It’s like, okay, you have these different points and then you drop them in, you put them in a developmental line, and this is how you adjust to your mother. You then get temperament. Like kids are born, hey, they’re really reactive or they’re easy to soothe or et cetera. And then there are these individual differences that are cross situational tendencies where we can put people on continuum and say, hey, you’re really high extroverted, high agreeable, et cetera. Okay. The history of the field is sort of first on character. And then it dissipates, we get the behavioral revolution, personality theory almost dies. It gets revived by trait theory, the big five get coalesced. And my argument is they got so strong that people started to conflate personality with traits, which is a horrible error in my estimation. Okay. And I made that critique. And there are a lot of problems with the big five. First, it’s an empirical theory, not really a grounded functional theory. And we need to bridge it with character in a particular way. Okay. And then we have Colin DeYoung’s work. So Colin DeYoung’s work in relationship to a cybernetic big five brings the cybernetic, which is a dynamic agent arena relation regulatory structure. Okay. And then ties that to a dispositional trait kind of structure. So that’s a theory that would afford you a character temperamental bridging function. Okay. And I’m going to suggest that actually then my path also affords ways to make sense out of this. And now that it’s syncing up so closely with recursive relevance realization, okay, we now really have an opportunity to build a personality theory that affords us clarity about character and temperament in proper relation. I just wanted to comment what Greg is doing here. First of all, I’m in complete agreement, no shock here, I think, with what he just said about the inadequacies, a big five theory to be a theory of personality. In fact, I don’t even use the word personality around that anymore. I want to talk about something independent, which is personhood, what makes you a person. And then we’re into Greg is plugging into, of course, he’s got innovation because of his knowledge of the current science, but Greg is plugging into a well established continuous thread through ancient philosophy of a deep connection between living the good life and cultivating, and that’s the right word, cultivating a virtuous character. And that also connects to the current meaning in life literature, both within philosophy and in psychology. And to have these three disconnected from each other is a travesty. Imagine proposing that you’re going to talk about well-being without having a good account of the cultivation of character as a way of affording a good life and how that also affords the meaningfulness of life, the eudaimonia that is central to a good life. Greg’s work here is absolutely pivotal in getting those two dimensions back in, the dimensions of virtue and the dimensions of meaning. I just wanted to really reinforce that this move that he’s making is really, really important. Without it, we leave these huge domains that we have good argument and evidence are crucial to a good life out of our account of well-being and psychopathology. And so I just really wanted to reinforce it, like those dimensions need to be in any account of well-being to my mind. Thank you, John. I really appreciate that. It is the desire of psychology to be a science and then it’s confusion on the is-ought problem and the capacity to then generate personality is just a description. We’re just going to create a descriptum of patterns that we can empirically identify. We wouldn’t want to put any values or normative structures on those kinds of things, but unfortunately that’s not an option and we need better metaphysical, ontological, epistemological structures that actually afford us ways to put the normative, axiological, and proper relation to the descriptive causal explanatory. And that’s what I think we’re trying to do here, friend. Yes, exactly. And indeed, that’s certainly been part of the journey and indeed it’s the especially if you live at the epicenter here of psychotherapy, psychological therapy, and psychology, you’re going to really see the need for at least a proper interrelation between these sets of concepts, because therapy itself is an inherently valued, laden enterprise where we’re actually having to say what’s normative and good in particular ways. All right, so I’m going to now sort of bring together a couple of different pieces here and to try to stitch this in a way that affords clarity about how a holistic view is going to place harmony with this idea of character and the broadest sense of cognition. Then I’m going to then say, hey, they’re going to introduce these mid-level concepts, character adaptation systems, and I’ll show you where they come from, and then show that this character adaptation system bridges between some modern developments in personality theory and psychotherapy. And so doing it gives us sort of a stack picture of the structure that then also can theoretically ground our understanding of both traits and attachment theory. So we can then do that, then we can really see a synergistic architecture, and that’s what I’d like to suggest that we have available to us. And actually, the first thing I’m going to do, I’ll pull up some slides here, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but this is really important to understand the architecture of where we’re going, and that is the synergy between behavioral investment theory and recursive relevance realization. Right, right. Okay, so behavioral investment theory in Utah, that’s the third branch on the tree up there, or at least it’s represented by a particular diagram, is the idea that fundamentally what’s happening in the animal kingdom, especially around the Cambrian explosion and the nervous system, is an intersection of a nervous system and a complex active body, okay, that then creates really predator-prey relations, probably is really one of the big structural changes in the world that happen in the Cambrian explosion, where you really then get movement against movement in relation, and then this gives rise to this idea that you have to move the entire system with a complex active body. And the argument is at the broadest level, you’re getting a structure of behavioral investment, behavior meaning I’m going to move as a whole and coordinate the relationship between the agent and arena relation. Okay, I just wanted to emphasize, right, notice what Greg is pointing out here, that you know the creation of the predator-prey relationship is an instance of how a change in the environment makes a significant and ongoing impact in the evolution and functionality of cognition. This is what we mean about the agent arena, right, and the way Gary is talking about how the transjectivity enacting a world, this is a clear undeniable case. It’s called the Cambrian explosion for a reason, right, that change in the environment just to life, and especially cognition. Please, I just wanted to emphasize that. So you get the emergence of the neuroticism extraversion of potency there? Well, hey, that’s where we’re going to be heading. Absolutely. Don’t jump to the punch line, Gary. But I did want to emphasize that point about what Greg is saying here, like we’ve been saying throughout, right, this is always between the organism and the environment, right, and this is an example of the, you know, that niche construction and the way it accelerates and the cognition evolved to work within that milieu. It’s not computation in the head. Exactly, exactly. That’s the expanded version of Fourier cognition that forces an embedded enacted, etc. So, and I’m just, I’m coming at it more from a behavioral and evolutionary vantage point with a weak neurocognitive functionalism, and I basically then said that actually if you pay attention to what the evolutionists are saying and ethologists, you know, people that do science animal behavior stuff, if you pay attention with the nervous system, people are saying, hey, it’s the organ of behavior. If you pay attention to behavioral science and cognitive science, you get this in developmental systems theory also, you get this implicit behavioral investment theory that hadn’t been made explicit, okay, but the unified theory says, hey, we should make it explicit because there is a fundamental shift in complex adaptive behavior from organisms to animals because they have to then create a collective singularity that moves against one another in say predator, prey, or mating relations, and it is that cognitive problem that then, or adaptive problem that then fundamentally shifts the processes by which, well, animals go from living to minded entities. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so I’m going to share screen real fast, and then I’m going to then, what I want to do is I want to remind some of the people the work we did in untangling the world knot into the elusive eye, okay, that’s going to set the stage then for ultimately making the jump from this broad view of cognition, okay, into then these things that become character adaptation systems theory. Excellent. Okay, so let me share the screen, bring this up. Okay, so behavioral investment theory is this joint point between life and mind, it’s a descriptive metaphysical claim that says there’s continuity between mind and life, but there’s also a fundamental discontinuity. The fundamental discontinuity is the emergence of a nervous system that’s coordinating the behavior of a whole in relationship to other animals, so you get an information processing communication network, whereby animal-animal action is a fundamentally different thing than plant-plant action, and if you see that, you hold it, you can actually pull together the mind-brain behavior sciences before persons, okay, at the animal mental level of existence here, and you can get a basic cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, neurodevelopmental systems view, okay, that ties this together, and then at this time, I had what’s called a weak neurocognitive functionalism, okay, weak neurocognitive functionalism basically says, hey, the nervous system is an information processing system, like what the hell do you mean by that? Well, does this input output with recursion, that’s one thing I mean by it, okay, it’s an information processing system, two, it creates a semantic network structure, meaning it creates subjective meaning construal inside the system, it’s an information schematic system, okay, and then three, it functions to reduce predictive uncertainty, okay, and those are, that’s information theoretic, information semiotics basically, and information processing structures, that’s what I meant when I would use the term neuro information processing, then I met John, okay, and then I found this 4p3r frame that takes the basic structure of neurocognition, and then specifies it, what I would say, anchor it to a say, an active inference predictive processing model, and then build the structure into an ontogenetic, phenomenological account of things like intelligence and consciousness in unbelievably brilliant way in and of itself, and then does that affording clarity about what we mean how did the term cognition relates to the old cognitive to be aware and know, and then bridge the 4p3r structure, so my whole frame is John basically figured out a meta theory of cognition that we were missing, okay, and then what I saw in relationship to that is like, holy shit, I can take that key and place it into this architecture and have it explode with a lot more richness, specificity, and depth, okay, so that’s what, you know, that’s what’s been happening ever since, I don’t know, 2020 or whenever we started connecting. I just wanted to say what the 4ps are, everybody knows the 3r is recursive relevance realization, the 4ps are the four kinds of knowing, propositional, procedural, respectable, and participatory, I won’t go into them into detail, take a look at Untangling the World Not, take a look at some of the work that, you know, Greg has published, so just so people have a sense of what’s being talked about here. Yeah, I’m going to reference them very quick as I go through this too, okay, that’s good, I appreciate that, so behavioral investment theory basically then grounds out in the six foundational principles, it starts with the principle of energy economics, okay, your biological system that’s expending work effort, behavior, and by that I just mean the action of what it’s doing, it’s expensive, it costs time, it costs energy, costs opportunities, it’s going to reference on that, there’s a principle of evolution relationship to natural selection, adaptation, whatever multilayer levels of connection, there’s a principle of behavioral genetics, which the idea that systems are going to be vary as a function of the individual genetic pool, there’s the broad neurocomputational control principle, which is weak neurocomputing functioning, there’s the process by which acquired behaviors emerge, i.e. learning, and a life history developmental structure, like depending when you’re an adolescent or adult or an infant, you’ll be organized differently and that will evolve over time, so those are, and I’m not here to spend a lot of time on those, more relevant for us where we’re going is the recognition of four broad mental stages, okay, sort of an acting reacting phase, okay, right at the base of mind you basically get sensory motor reflexes, okay, and fixed action patterns whereby there’s a stimulus, a releasing mechanism, a movement mechanism, and an action mechanism, okay, and that’s basically the sensory motor looping function, then we see really with the Cambrian explosion, I would argue, we see the emergence of the ground of qualia, we’ll talk a little bit about this, there’s a capacity for pleasure and pain that create a much more dynamic iterative process about whether things are going well or poorly in your behavioral activation and engagement, okay, and this sets the stage for a much more nuanced operant system of conditioning that’s then probably regulated by pleasure pain structures, we then get a thinking and relating phase down the road, okay, in relationship to the capacity to simulate over time, hold the image, and then simulate over time in relationship to important others, and then finally at the human level you get this justifying phase, so you get this doing, learning, thinking, talking frame of reference, okay, and there’s a particular sensory motor input pattern that we can track in relationship to these structures on the nervous system, and we can build from a sensory motor more reflex fixed action pattern system into a perceiving approach avoidant energized motion structure, okay, that would give rise to an organized perhaps felt experience of pleasure and pain at the base, and then we get more cortical distance planning simulating structures extending the time horizon here, okay, and this is going to give rise to the emergence of working memory, okay, and much more complicated relations, and then finally you get a talking structure on top of that, so there’s you’re noticing here, and if you know John’s system, you know recursive relevance realization across a scale invariant multi-layered modeling, okay, and what this is basically saying is here’s at least here’s a relatively simple way we can layer the processes that are operating in a hierarchical structure, tracing the evolutionary function, and also tracing your human developmental function, okay, and then we have memory structures that are storing these, and this is like a badly love memory system where you have a sensory motor memory, a working memory, and a long-term potentiation before it’s that integration, okay, so I would argue that if the broadest definition participatory really it’s the embeddedness of the identity of the agent in the arena, this is the deepest level kind of of knowing we get procedural, perspectival, and propositional exactly exactly knowing in relationship to that, yeah, exactly, so I think that we can place recursive relevance realization across the stack, and think about it in terms of scaling variant multi-level modeling, right, across the hierarchy, that’s where so we have this massive synergy of like okay here’s behavioral investment there’s this sort of general thing, and it’s got this weak neural cognitive functionalism embedded in it, and then you place recursive relevance realization on top of that, and get then a much more refined analysis of exactly what is this information processing really doing, and how does it connect to phenomenology, how does it emerge in development, what’s actually happening with insight, etc., and all the really things John talks about, so yeah go ahead, I just wanted to say I mean, yeah, yeah, I want to recognize, you know, Greg is complimenting me, and I want to compliment him on the complementarity, I’d always from the beginning, Tim and Blake and I, and then Leo and I, we’d always argued for relevance realization theory, recursive relevance realization theory, being a bioeconomic model, and that we were talking about the bioeconomics, and we were talking about that with relation to an autopoetic or living system, and then Greg’s model takes that, those very sort of, you know, abstract and somewhat vague ideas, and he specifies them, what do we mean by bioeconomics, and what do we mean by, you know, a sophisticated autophotic system, and this is what Greg’s work is doing, so you can see how the two theories complement, and they articulate and specify each other in this really powerful synergistic fashion. Thank you John, absolutely, and what we were just looking at there, I would argue, is sort of, we can think about as a neurocognitive functional broad view, another way if we put in philosophy of mind terms, those are sort of easy problems, okay, in the sense that they’re really just, what is the input-output functional relation and brain behavior, but they don’t necessarily specify phenomenology, but of course, if we’re going to be doing psyche, pathology, and well-being, we got to struggle with untangling the world knot of consciousness, okay, we have to understand what, we’re using the term psyche from the inside out view, but we’re going to build a model of consciousness that needs to be able to hold that, and I believe that we’re sitting on that here also, and John and I’s work in untangling the world knot argues that you can then basically trail consciousness, perhaps, through the base of valence qualia, this fundamental pleasure-pain structure that’s doing this procedural participatory thing at the bottom, and then at a mammal level, you’re getting this adverbial witnessing function, okay, that then is framing adjectival, its property experiences in relationship, and then out of that becomes a self-other relational participatory dance structure, by the way, it’s where attachment fundamental is going to come online, and in the mammal structures of taking care of young, and then in particular into the primate line, and then the pre-person hominid primate line, we’re really able to sync up into a shared intersubjective we space, and track each other very, very carefully, and then ultimately set the stage there for that tracking for shared symbolic network, and then shared symbolic network, and then we get propositions, you get the problem of justification, boom, the thing takes off in terms of the evolution of culture, okay, but why is this relevant? Well, for the psyche then, what we want to do is we want to understand what we’re looking at here is the organism into animal structure, and the belt, somaticizing the felt experience of the body in relation, are you sick, Gary, are you healthy, right, okay, you have energy, you want to approach motivation, okay, this structure, and then where is the attentional structure getting organized, where’s task consciousness in the global neuronal workspace, how does that get structured, how is it embedded in a relational field, a felt sense of known and valued, felt sense of attachment security, okay, and then fundamentally what am I justifying in relation, all right, and I would argue that you would, the invitation there then is for the first person inside out view of the world, okay, to afford yourself, can you see this sort of felt sense of layering, can we get resonance in relationship to it, and I think that the stacked layers of the psyche, and when I sit with somebody therapeutically, okay, I have a lot of, I mean, there’s a lot of resonance consistently with somebody’s capacity to be like, oh yeah, I feel this in my gut loins, I can see my mind’s eye, I feel my heart, and I see my head, and trying to get transpersonal spirit on top of that, I don’t mention this here, but that fundamental stack, and of course you look at some of the eastern traditions and chakras and a whole bunch of other stuff that sees this pop pretty clearly. That’s fine. It’s elegant, really elegant, Greg, really elegant. Thank you, friend. So, I mean, with stuff that we’ve worked on together, so why am I sharing this, okay, so what does this have to do with where we’re headed, all right, well, I’m going to stop sharing the screen for just a sec, and now basically be like, okay, so what we did, what did we have here, remember, talk about personality, okay, and this whole issue of temperament versus character, well, the models of cognitive are really what we’re arguing is agent arena relations over time, and it is about that adjustment, so we have this broad model of character and relation, okay, and we want to try to then situate that, so we understand that, we’re going to try to situate that in relationship to the traits, okay, and indeed this was what we’ve been doing, and Shone, especially Gary, you took us on and like, hey, if we have this broad model, and I laid it out slightly differently, but if we have this broad model recursive relevance realization, it’s got this whole problem of how does it organize stability, how does it explore plasticity and regulate that relation, and when we looked at the traits and saw them in relation, okay, and not afford it, because that was right, it is true, and the traits work that way, we’re able to afford some real clear lineage, my argument then is that what I just showed you gave rise to a whole other set of insights, or was in parallel to another set of insights that we’re going to put together, and then we’ll see something that pops with even more richness, okay, so I’m going to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about the whole where I come from as a psychotherapist, okay, so the Utah journey begins in the therapy room with the problem of psychotherapy, okay, and the problem of psychotherapy is, well Gary, you’re learning it, it ain’t easy, you know, and what the hell do you do, you got all these different models in your head, and all of these different points of various things that are relevant, and all these different normative value structures, okay, and then you bring them into the room, and it’s like, oh, do science, or oh, be a good humanist, and oh, tend to the client, and oh, get good outcomes, and oh, watch your ethics, and all this other stuff, and it’s like, okay, but who am I actually listening to, like, what, where is there a fundamental set of authority grounding this system, and it’s like, there’s a lot of professional craftsmanship and sort of credo, but in terms of what is it actually that’s really grounding this system, for me as a big picture coherent guy, the answer was not much, yeah, okay, so, and I wanted the systems, all these different notes to sing, like, as part of an orchestra, that’s what I was after, okay, and instead what I was getting was a lot of noise, all right, but what I, early in my system, early in my journey, before justification systems theory, or the tree of knowledge, this is 1995, okay, I’ll share my screen again, 1995, I developed this biopsychosocial RFSB approach, okay, well, what is that, well, first it says, hey, we sit in a biological field, okay, and neurophysiology is going to be particularly relevant to the psychological structures, okay, and we sit in a socio-historical context, okay, so, both above and below, there’s operating structures here, systemically, okay, from biology above, I mean, below, and socio-cultural systems, and now I’m dealing with, at the human individual level, so, my object of analysis, okay, is a human whole patterning themselves in the world, and then it was like, okay, when I look at the human individual, there are four major psychotherapeutic paradigms, all right, that afford themselves, that pop pretty clearly, so, if you ask most knowledgeable people about history of psychotherapy, what are the four big individual therapy programs, you can represent them, iconically, with white men, let’s make a note about our, where we’re coming from, weird people, let’s do that, okay, but, you know, that’s also the history, and you get a behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, and cognitive view, okay, and what I noticed in these over time, is they actually afford pretty clear, you know, afford pretty different lenses to different parts of, say, the psyche, okay, and as I looked at the lenses over time, I built a particular layered structure, all right, such that there’s a grounding of habits in relationship, you know, and in the proper, the relationship between somebody in a rhythm of a stimulus response chaining, okay, that seems pretty consistent with the way animals behave pretty basically into their structure, we can identify a ground of habits, okay, and Skinner affords us that, the organismic valuing process, all right, that’s, that Roger’s focused on, that then becomes what’s called emotion-focused therapy, very clearly centers itself on the felt experience of being, the center, affectively organized, organismic valuing process, think about valence qualia, okay, think about grounded in phenomenology, the felt sense of being as it seeks to grow and acquire its growth potential, okay, and we can see Carl Roger’s attention, and this becomes especially clear, like I said, when we move it to Sue Johnson’s work, or Les Greenberg work in emotion-focused therapy, okay, where there’s a real emphasis on this emotional heart experience, there’s also a relational structure, okay, that emerges in the psychodynamic world, it’s actually called the relational turn, it clearly has roots in Freud, although Freud, the psychodynamic turn of people like Karen Horne, I, Eric Erickson fundamentally result in a shift really from sex and aggression to power, love, and attachment, okay, in terms of what it is that’s really driving people, and then we get a verbal cognitive narrative structure, you could put back here, you could also put Viktor Frankl and existential perspectives here if you’re thinking big picture justification and meaning-making structures, okay, but in relation, I was like, hey, I can hone in on these different domains, and when I taught, and then in 2000s, when I was a doctoral professor and organized my integrated approach to psychotherapy, okay, I said, hey, these lenses afford different lenses of different mental systems that people are engaged in, and we can track them and become aware and accept and actively change them, but they essentially speak different kinds of languages, okay, I also would argue there’s filtering and defense, and I called them component systems, the components that grow into the mental systems in general, okay, so this is what I was operating with up until 2010, say, and this is the way I would approach sort of an integrative approach to the human individual in the context of psychotherapy, people come in with particular types of problems, and then I utilize these different domains to lens into the kinds of adaptive problems that they may be having, are you having a behavioral habit problem, are you having a core emotion problem, are you having a relationship problem, a verbal identity egoic narrating justification problem, you have infiltration and defense kinds of problems. Greg, can I ask a question? Yeah. So is it like that, because I’m, the question, it’s a question, I don’t know, is it like that that people are genuinely skewed to one of the four, or is it frequently that all four of those are involved in the, like, which is more predominant? Right, the people aren’t skewed, John, the field is skewed, so what happens is the field specializes one or the other, people come in as complicated messes. But certainly, they can, you can often frame them, if I want to quit smoking, okay, you can frame that pretty clearly in terms of a behavioral habit perspective, if I want to get in touch with my feelings, because I have feelings that are split off, and you have a defense and feeling structure, if the way I talk to myself in a particular kind of way is excessively self-critical, you can get a cognitive therapy kind of structure. So you can certainly pull out these patterns, and at the same time, they do behave as a whole. The analogy that I use in relationship to the field is biology, okay, and you’ve heard me say this before, but modern medicine is pretty well organized. We have a theory of biology, physiology, anatomy, and then gives rise to pathophysiology and intervention. And we have a structure, a medical institution that I think basically reflects that. Okay, so you get generalist practitioners that you enter into the field with, hey, you get a checkup, you have a sickness, and then it gets weird, they’ll send you off to a specialist, okay, like a circulatory doctor, okay, osteoporosis, bone person, okay. The field of biology doesn’t say, or physicians say, hey, hey, the key to health is the gastrointestinal system. Now that’s where it’s all, you know, screw those guys that worry about the nervous system, you know, where are the keys to health here? I mean, they don’t say that, okay, but we, with the schools of thought, essentially imply that, hey, the key to health is thinking cognitive. The key to health is behavior. Beautiful analogy, right? The key to the health is your psychodynamic defenses and insight. The key to health is being in touch with your feelings and expressing them adaptably. Now the key to health is all that, and living within you and between others across a developmental trajectory in a social system and biological context that affords well-being. That’s the key to all of it, and the idea that you would specialize just one part of it, okay, and imagine that that’s the root of psychopathology is just deeply misguided from a vantage point. So the imperialism of these various schools is very strong, that’s what I hear you saying. The imperialism was very strong up until the 1980s, okay, in the history of the field, and it’s very strong in terms of its educational inertia. It’s just the way the field is taught, okay? Everyone now, in the 1980s, you had to be a believer, and you had to submit. There were these very religious schools. You were either psychoanalytic or behavioral or humanistic, and then became cognitive, and you couldn’t believe in all of them. You had to decide which one you were. In the 1980s, it changed, and ultimately, the attitude of eclecticism basically now pervades, okay? It’s like, oh, yeah, we can pull from all of them, but of course, if you’re a big picture coherentist, you’re like, no, it still doesn’t fucking make sense. We still got a problem. We got an architectural logos problem. You can pragmatically maybe get by, but you can’t actually explain what the hell you’re doing with any coherence. So yeah, that’s where the field is, and that continues to where it is in relation. I’m president of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, so there’s a sort of edge, and I’m trying to say in that role, I’m trying to say there’s actually a way to advance this ball, but even this is the cutting edge, and it’s the exploration of psychotherapy integration. That’s in the title, not the Society for Psychotherapy Integration. It’s the Society for the Exploration. That’s how tentative. That is where the structure is. So we see this, all right, so now we have, here I am doing this thing, okay, with these component systems that come off of psychotherapy, and I stock them in a particular way. Then in 2011, all right, I’m in the midst, I get sent off, and I end up reading this very interesting article by Dan McAdams and Jennifer, I think, Pals, I get her name wrong, sorry, Jessica, maybe Jennifer, I think. Anyway, McAdams and Pals in 2006, in an American psychologist article that I missed initially and then saw in 2011, made a call for a new big five, an integrative approach to personality theory. So now I’m changing, I’m shifting a little bit, and now I’m going to tie my little thing to this thing in a second. So Dan McAdams, a social psychology personality guy, got a big picture view, and I’m going to share my screen again, came up with this idea, or this argument in 2006, for a call for a new big five. And you can see where this is going, because I didn’t put the animation in right, so there’s the punch line. All right, so here it is. What does he mean? So he makes this argument, what we’ve been making, and that is, hey, trait theory is totally dominant, and we shouldn’t think about personality in terms of trait theory. We should think about it in a much more holistic integrative view, and he lays out five fundamental principles that give rise to five fundamental categories. And he says, hey, we have to think about how all people are alike, and in order to understand how we’re all alike, we do need to understand this evolutionary genetic human nature context. And indeed, that is something that personality theory should answer, like how are humans all alike? Okay? And then the second thing is how are they alike on individual differences, but also different, meaning like how are you like some other people? So how are you like all other people? And then how are you like some other people? And this just gives rise to individual differences on dispositional traits. And then the question is, how are you really unique? Like what makes you really special, specific, etiographic, particular? Okay? And he argued that there were systems, that there were character adaptation, things that you learned. Okay? This is just basic strategies that you engage in the environment with. And by the way, the big five trait people talk about this. This is character instead of temperament. And they divided character both into the character adaptations and then identity. The identity, John, this is where your personhood would really come in. Self-conscious, justifying, account-giving system that gets socialized and can legitimize what it is. And they argued that this takes place consistent with that in a sociocultural historical context. So this is McAdams and Pals are coming along and saying, hey, personality should not just be the yellow here. But it should be this stack of a new big five. And that’s where we, when you open up a personality, modern integrated personality science book, this is what it should look like. Okay? I think they missed a developmental context. So I’ll put that in there. Okay. They don’t explicitly say that, but it’s implied. Obviously this has taken place on a time category. So here’s what’s it, here’s one of the things that’s interesting. So I’m reading about these character adaptations that they’re talking about. And I knew about them, but they’re basically always thought about just the little behavioral repertoires that you would learn. Like how do you shoot a basketball? Okay. How do you write? Okay. How do you do in the context of just a description, these are the behavioral repertoires that you learn in specific situations to adapt, tie your shoe. Okay. They argued, they said, hey, there is no definitive big five like list of these constructs. Okay. You don’t just list out, oh, you tie your shoe, you know how to shoot a basketball, you know how to adapt. Okay. And that makes sense at one level in the sense that you wouldn’t necessarily think there’d just be a taxonomy of behavioral repertoires that we could give that because they’re so different. But then what I was, as I was reading about the character adaptations, I was like, there’s not a taxonomy of specific kinds of adaptations like tying your shoe, but there may be a taxonomy of different kinds of systems of adaptation. Okay. And these components systems that I developed, I basically were like, oh, these are the systems by which now I’ll use John’s term, a stack system of recurrent relevance realization emerges. And there are different processes that have evolved structural processes that are ingrained in the hierarchy of our nervous system. And that I was delineating these systems of adaptation, go back to the behavioral investment thing. And you will then see what emerges in relationship to this are five systems of adaptation that can be summarized. We like canoe and ocean. Here I’ll give her DJ like her DJ played cool music at the wedding. Okay. So you get a habit system. All right. This is a basic procedural system. It’s going to tear pair a particular stimulus with a particular action pattern. You’re going to get instincts or close to them in the animal kingdom in relationship to this. It’s going to tie very closely to simple procedural knowledge. Okay. So procedural knowledge. And we know that we can differentiate procedural knowledge from other systems in our neuro behavioral structure, lots of evidence for that. Okay. We then get an experiential system. Okay. This is going to be then really pulled from the valence qualia into a global neuronal workspace on a task-oriented structure that connects your perception of the awareness of the situation to the interior drives that you have to then energize emotional responses. Okay. That’s the experiential system. And we can track it from the animal into the mammal that gives rise to a fundamental, at least in mammals, then a global neuronal workspace of perception, motive based on the interior feeling structure, and then the proprioception response set, energizing motion. Okay. That’s what becomes the experience and super key for psychotherapy is really the emotional motivational organizational set here. That’s in the felt experience of the body. And this is what the organismic valuing process of Carl Rogers was after. All right. Then we get a stacked relational structure on top of that. It’s not just age and arena relation and preparation and mating, but it’s actually long term relations, attachment structures, okay. Cooperative competitive structures in a social network that grow from social animals like wolves and killer whales. And then in the primate structure, and then the hominid primate structure of say 5 million to 500,000 years ago in our particular line, a real rich intersubjective we space. Then there’s a defensive structure, which I’ll come back to in a sec. And then you get the person justificatory structure. Okay. And the justification structure then is the verbal network of socialization. And then if we understand that the verbal network of socialization is trying to socialize us to be persons regulating our animal, okay. If it’s regulated now, we just take a little bit of a psychodynamic lens and say, oh, you have an animal primary process system on top of a socialized justified person system, and you get conflict between those. How do you regulate the conflict? Well, then you get a defensive system that’s got to manage your justified person on top of your animalistic impulse. Okay. And so basically what this gives rise to then is a structural view of systems of adaptation, systems of character, okay, that have evolved over time. And when we place these mid-level constructs of the habit, experiential, relational, defensive, and justification, I’m going to argue that we can then structure attachment theory and the traits in a pretty clear way that affords us the bridging between the core of our cognitive architecture delineated by stability, plasticity, recursive relevance realization, okay, and the trait dispositional patterns and things like attachment theory that we see. Wow. This is really good, Greg. So the ultimate map then that comes from this is called then that emerges as character adaptation systems theory, okay. And this gives rise to the right here is what depicts the core vectors, okay, in relation. So you’re a biological entity that has a genetic beginning, sperm meets egg, okay, and then all of a sudden that hits the dynamic physiological and anatomy process. In the language of the tree of knowledge, this is the life dimension of complexification, okay. Then you become an animal, okay, that’s then regulating the behavior of the animal as a whole to adjust the age and arena relation, which is at a distal level, you get laid down structures like attachment and then more recent structures like your current relations. And we can consider this the animal mental dimension of complexification. And of course, as a person, you’re born, you’re named before you’re born, okay, meaning you automatically live in a particular kind of justificatory context that’s macroscopic. I mean, you know, if you’re born right now in Ukraine, right, okay, macroscopic, meso and microscopic. This is a socio ecological layering then that is the culture person plane of existence, okay. So the tree of knowledge gives us clarity about why we would have these biopsychosocial vectors and then place that individual then as adjusting to the environment across five systems of adaptation, the habit system, the experiential system, the relationship system, defense and justification, her DJ. And the habits just gives the daily routines and expectations of the procedural system. We can download automatically and also say from a clinical perspective, I want to do habits and lifestyles. I could explain what lifestyles are in relation, but the pattern regular activities, I identify five major ones, okay, represented by the acronym C’s, okay, which is sleep, S E E S S, sleep, eating, exercise, sex and substance use, okay, from a clinical perspective, these are the regular habits I’m going to check out. We get an experiential system, the valence quality into the emotions that are tracking motives relative to what’s happening in the world, okay, and where the attentional system is driving itself, the relational system, the felt sense of being known and valued, and whether you feel secure in that fundamentally, okay, and then your interpersonal style of whether you’re tough minded or tender minded, polite, want to go along, get along or say, fuck it, I’m going to take the car of my own path, okay, and then you get a defensive system, which is around cognitive dissonance, maintaining an egoic justified perspective, and then finally, your language based system privately for your ego and publicly for your persona, the way you’re going to justify what it is that you highly make sense out of the world, okay, and then you place that in the current and future of the system of stressors and affordances as you navigate passive behavioral investment across time, and then what we can see with this map very quickly, we get out of the schools of thought or go back to the schools of thought and say, hey, they’re focused not on, we shouldn’t like have gurus like, I follow Skinner, I follow Beck, it’s like, no, what are the aspects of humanity that these systems are really atoning to, and the behavioral perspective shokes on the habit, the emotion focused perspective, experiential system, the psychodynamic actually bridges the attachment and defense, and we get a cognitive and cognitive narrative perspective focused on the justification system. This is very powerful synoptic integration you’re doing, very powerful. So from my vantage point, what this does then is it sets the stage then to stitch together, so really a high level cognitive, okay, and then we have, and then the last thing I’ll say and then we’ll pause is sort of like, if you bring this lens, and Gary alluded to it earlier, and I’ve already alluded to it, but I’ll just say it here, if you bring this functional organizational lens to the traits, okay, something very clear pops in relation, okay, and that is that extroversion and neuroticism as the gas to approach extroversion reward dependence, okay, and neuroticism as threat avoidance are the core animalistic emerging out of valence quality or the core dispositional tendencies to be structurally organized around pleasure seeking, risk taking, energy expenditure, the extroversion dimension, versus threat avoidance reactivity defense. We see this at the core of the animal structure and you should be able to even see things like fish, okay, should be able to be detectively differentiatable on things like extroversion or it’s a similar kinds of concepts, behavior activation maybe, okay, in the fish world. Then you get an emergent social mammal, okay, system on self other regulation. So how much do they invest in care, how much compassion, how polite are they versus how competitive, disagreeable, irritable, and aggressive, all right, we should see that in mammals and primates and in fact, as I mentioned, the empirical data sorts this out. You can actually decide, see in dogs, primates, these three traits, okay, and then finally at the level of person justification, we have an openness and exploratory dimension to ideas and then a somewhat conservative organized structured order industrious socializable function and conscientiousness that’s going to be have elements of those in the animal kingdom but fundamentally become qualitatively shifted and more developed in the human, okay, so then what this does then is it affords us clarity about where these dispositions are, stacks them evolutionarily, puts character adaptation and temperament in proper relation, and then does it stitch together with a cognitive neurocognitive model that can go across the stack and afford us clarity about intelligence, cognition, and consciousness, John, so that’s great. That’s fantastic. So that’s what I wanted to share and walk through and see how that popped for you and see what was clearer, see what maybe needs more explication. Well, first of all, I just wanted to say thank you, Greg, that’s I know, I mean, we have similarities in this way, that’s decades of work that have come together to build a synoptic integration, a powerful big picture that’s really integratable with other big pictures like relevance realization, like attachment theory, like big five, like predictive processing, and I think unlike all the other ones, including my own work in relevance realization, this does a lot for how to formulate a big picture that can be taken into psychotherapeutic intervention. And then also, I would hope, and Greg and I have been talking about this, outside of the psychopathological context, the general, the response to the meaning crisis, the cultivation of wisdom, so I’m very excited about all of this, and I think the convergence between the more specific stuff that Gary and I are doing and what you’ve been laying out in your model here is really, really powerful, and so I just wanted to thank you first. Of course. For that. I was, and throughout, I’ve just been, so we’ve got to figure a way of getting this taught more. That was my first thought coming through. I mean, I have enough trouble trying to get, I have to be careful here, I don’t want to make it sound like there’s any cabal or conspiracy, but there is trouble trying to get psychology to turn its eyes towards big pictures, big picture framework, even though all of success we’re seeing in predictive processing, etc. I mean, as we’ve talked, and the institution got sucked into a methodological behaviorism, and as a function of that methodological behaviorism, the representatives of the institution are anchored to research programs, and if you’re anchored to research programs, that’s a very different view. So that’s where we’re in trouble. There’s a lot of inertia that you have to be overcome to make the transformation. I didn’t realize that when I was young, but when my dissertation advisor said you can never do theory in this field, he was pointing to something. Gary, you got a? Oh yeah. I just want to say one more thing. Nothing is done yet, but the predictive processing RRR paper got very good reviews back. I mean, there’s good revision process, but even one of the reviewers said it was an inspiring paper. So I think the possibilities of integrating recursive relevance realization and predictive processing is also on the horizon. I think there’s legitimate sort of peer reviewed. I mean, it’s not a done deal. I want to be very clear about that, but it’s looking very good, and I think that would only contribute to everything we’re talking about here. So I mean, the predictive processing can get into fine grain nuance around a particular structure. Recursive relevance realization to me, it grabs a hold of that and then places it across the stack, of course, and then affords us. So to me, just whatever, we’re talking preaching to the crier here, but when I take recursive relevance realization, and then I especially put it through the lens of the matrix. Predictive processing doesn’t grab me. Recursive relevance realization in relation, and then understanding what is actually happening between, say, a mother and an infant or two lovers. And then you do recursive relevance realization on especially the variables that elicited the matrix. People are tracking the extent to which they’re seen, known, and valued should be the indicators of relevance at a process level that people are tracking, right? And then they’re going to adjust their self-other relations across the blue line, red line, and green line accordingly to those particular dynamics. And then to me, you place that stuff in relation, it just pops in a particular kind of way. The predictive processing is stuck in, it doesn’t afford the qualitative, phenomenological, ontogenetic developmental structures that is much more rich in nuance, especially for me, say, as a human psychologist trying to do psychotherapy. Yeah, thank you for saying that. That’s exactly the argument I’m building with Brett and with Mark. And the paper did a case study on sort of the autism psychosis spectrum. And the core argument I would be making is that what relevance realization does is it bridges into phenomenology and behavioral functionality. It specifies, it helps to specify behavioral patterns and phenomenological patterns in a way that predictive processing doesn’t have the theoretical richness to do. And so when you plug the two together, you can get this very generalizable. And that’s a powerful thing, right? Predictive processing thing. But then what RRRR does is it says, but then we can get, we see typologies of behavior and we see taxonomies of phenomenology. And RRRR bridges into that very powerfully. And I think that’s exactly what you’re observing. And I think that’s exactly the argument I would make. Yeah, no, it’s totally right. And then of course, for me, then that’s a meta theory of cognition that synergizes and fills in huge gaps and structures that I was building does so complimentary. And then you’re like, oh, you got a meta theory, meta theory synergy. That’s a whole nother layer of utility. Yeah. It’s a very exciting time. Very. Yeah, I’ve been wanting to say that, like everything you’ve shared today, Greg, I’m just so in love with it. I think it answers so many important questions, especially at the phylogenetic level, but also the way you stack everything up so elegantly like that. The several big fives that sort of emerged from this picture. I think that’s really neat. I also think that this act as a kind of conceptual map for triangulating where normativity goes wrong in a person’s psychological life without necessarily finding it in any one of these regions within the psyche. You laid out the ontogenetic, like ontogenetic, biological and genetic sort of dimension of it at the very bottom of that schematic that you shared, right? Now the genetic factors come in from the bottom and then the sociocultural vector comes in from the top and anything can go wrong or right on any of these levels. That’s right. You don’t pre-specify it though. So this is kind of like you sort of correct or through the schematic you offer a corrective to the ideological sort of attitude that the psychological sciences and psychology in general has had with respect to siloing off in whatever tradition you’re a believer of. You don’t have to just be a behaviorist or a humanist or a cognitive therapist or whatnot. You can just track where, you know, how things are coming together, what might be going wrong and it offers a very flexible and open-ended way of doing that. Which I think again, theoretically or at least methodologically it is very, very convergent with the phenomenological approach which doesn’t pre-specify what’s problematic for a person. It’s really about letting the phenomena reveal themselves and so you can approach psychopathology in that sort of manner while using this map to guide your processes of diagnosis and prognosis. So I think that’s very cool. That’s very cool. Good. I really appreciate that, Kerry. That means a lot. I’m glad you, so yes, I’m doing something subtle here with some normative thinking. The choice of character adaptation, systems adaptation. If we talked about what is the ontology of problems, right? And then what is the actual bridge between a descriptive explanatory structure and a normative structure? So the unified approach to psychotherapy is grounded in the adaptive living equation, okay, where you’re basically, the argument is essentially trying to maximize adaptive states relative to the person, the situation, and what’s available. And it creates a particular frame. And what that does is it creates a set of associative identities between descriptions of say, agent arena relations, okay, and adaptive trajectories and adaptive systems, the process by which the agent arena transjective elements emerging and then embedding that in a particular structure, and then affording me as a psychological doctor, a frame of reference that is consonant with that descriptive causal explanatory network, but also subtly shifts the focus to, well, what’s healthy adaptation, okay? What’s valued adaptation? What are the kinds of them problems that would then be maladaptive, okay? And so one of the things that I’m doing there is I’m trying to create as tight a continuity between the causally descriptive is structure, okay, and then blending us nicely in an ought normative structure. And the concept of adaptation, very much like concept of recursive relevance realization, is a kind of concept that would afford, I think, that is ought transjective because it places it in a dynamic developmental structure that affords you, okay, well, here’s a trajectory one direction, here’s a trajectory another direction. So that’s embedded in the structure is that there’s a bridging, and indeed why it’s on this side of the tree a little bit, is that there’s a bridging function into explicit normativity. And also, what are the reasons I use the word character instead of personality? So I think, like I said, I think this is elegant and highly plausible. Yeah, I do think when we’re bumping into terms like adaptivity and relevance, and you and I and Zach Stein talked about this, we’re dropping below sort of the enlightenment version of the is ought distinction, because relevance is simultaneously explanatory and normative. So is rational, by the way. And so we’ve got a lot of these terms that but relevance is like, I think, it’s constituted relevance realization is constitutive of cognition, but it’s also the grounding of normativity in important ways, although I think that we have a separate thing for truth, but relevance is clearly a premier, you know, mother of virtue in very important ways. So this leads me then to a question. And a brief proposal, which is, again, taking this out of the so this is an addendum, because the proper context for this whole series has been the psychotherapeutic context, and I don’t want to trespass on that. So this is an addendum, which is right, you know, that there’s a sense in which do we want to be I mean, who did this? Was it from somebody else? I think, you know, we also want to think about do we want to make people sane in an insane world, that that sort of question, right, which is the broader context of the meaning crisis and the wisdom famine. And so, right, there’s a shift, where we try to take this very powerful and elegant structure and say, well, instead of issues of individual psyche pathology, how can we respond to the pervasive issues of the meaning crisis and the wisdom famine. And so one thing one thing that one one term that I think bridges is the notion of virtue, which has been strongly associated with character, character, I don’t want to call them traits, I don’t know what to call them now, character dispositions. Let’s call them that. I think character traits actually, if you go with my the way I talk character traits actually work. Okay, if you’re fine with that, I didn’t want to I didn’t want to conflate with now. I mean, it’s a little confusing. But now that I’ve backed up and taking character, okay, so then anyway, that works. Okay, there’s character adaptation and character traits. That’s what it becomes. So that the old character now becomes character adaptation in context versus character dispositional traits. So character traits, character adaptation. So very broadly, and I mean, this is a compliment, and I’ve said this to Greg before, his model is, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s an updated, reformulated, improved version of Aristotle’s model in a lot of powerful ways. Of course, Aristotle is the classic figure talking about the virtues and character. And he shows up in positive psychology in that role, he shows up in, you know, meaning in life literature, eudaimonia, etc. So I’m not I’m not bringing in something obscure to psychology, right? So this is appropriate. Now, one of the things that I’ve been proposing is to see virtues as an instance of what I call virtual engineering. So if you take a look at Aristotle’s model of the golden mean, you have excess and deficit. And so you’re putting, you have habits that act as selective constraints that limit, right? So, right? And then you have other habits that are enabling constraints that open up the possibilities for the system. And the golden mean is about getting them sort of systematically related and creating a virtual engine that then, you know, evolves the sensory motor loop to and then the sensory motor engine gets bound and cultivated. And Gary, I was thinking this is right, this, this notion of a virtue as virtual engineering ties in nicely with the kind of arguments that we’ve been making about the big five and attachment, because you can see that all of the virtues are trying to get the right, they’re trying to get basically hone optimal gripping, right? And then I was thinking, and then Aristotle has that and think about Greg’s work at all these different levels, virtues for all of these different levels, from the very, very, you know, you know, almost habitual virtues, up to the most spiritual contemplative virtues, the intellectual virtues, right? There’s a possibility of taking the theoretical machinery we’ve used for traits and attachment relations, broadening it into virtue, seeing virtue as virtual engineering that gives us a virtuosity of optimal gripping, and then just plug that into Greg’s stack, and Aristotle goes very nicely with that stack. And then we could start to talk about, well, no, no, no, we can extend another dimension, right? We can extend this out beyond the pathological human beings aspiring to the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, and that would give, that would just get, you know, I don’t see how this in fact is problematic. I think we could just build this cleanly into the model that’s going on here and start a discourse about, and then there’s this, the virtual virtue dimension that we need to bring in here, because, I mean, you know, I know there are a few, I mean, there are problems. First of all, the golden mean is not a mean. Everybody says that, because, and Aristotle Impact says that. I was talking to Dan Schiappi about this other day. He doesn’t mean a mean. He doesn’t mean an average. He doesn’t mean a compromise. He means this, he means, I think the best argument is, he means a virtual engine that, right, constrains you from excess, but also impels you from deficit and tries to get you, and he also says it’s constantly shifting because being courageous for here and being courageous there and being courageous as Milo and being courageous as blah, right, and I think it fits in very, very well with that model. I would want to put in an additional platonic dimension of self-transcendence, but that’s another question. So anyway, that’s a proposal I’m just putting up. Yeah, no, it’s actually, I mean, there’s a lot to immediately draw on, so I’ll just say a few things. So for example, if you look at the influence matrix, okay, the influence matrix says you’re trying to seek to be high, seen, known, and valued by important others, okay, and then it basically says what you’re, to do that, you need healthy opponent process, okay, constructive, useful opponent process, very much along the green line, okay, is a healthy interdependency autonomy balance. Right, right, right. So it’s like be yourself and know you can rely on others, okay, as opposed to a deconstructive or meaning a destructive opponent process. I’m going to, I don’t need anybody. I’m going to be avoiding the counterdependent, or I totally need you never leave me again. I’m going to be hyperdependent, or worst of all, I’ll be vacillating between a disorganized borderline structure, okay, so you get, then you may, you’re trying to manage the opponent process destructively. I love you, I hate you, okay, as opposed to I felt since I’m connected to you and I’m frustrated, no, and let’s see how do we navigate this particular thing, and so just right there with the influence matrix, you see the fundamental distinction between navigating a construct, the other one is competitive and cooperative, yes, yes, yes, you navigate, I can be assertive and friendly simultaneously, okay, as opposed to excessively passive or excessively aggressive, right, right, right, right, over and over again, you see the, what is successful is a constructive dynamic opponent process for adaptive, right, as opposed to a breakdown in extremes where individuals either get locked rigidly in one strategy or vacillate back and forth in non-complimentary ways that ultimately, you know, that are trying to keep the thing on the ship, but to keep driving it into one guardrail and then back into another guardrail, and that is across the adaptive stack, so at a psychosocial adaptive structure, you can see those patterns and then you can put those in the context of wisdom, I mean, Boisdain-Bertreux thinking of Aristotle, I think, super readily. So I’m also curious here because what I’m wondering about is the scope of how we want to define and end up thinking about virtue to begin with, I think, Greg, what you were just proposing, it’s very much in line with at least how I imagine virtues to be and what they consist of, and I think like the big five sort of schematic and the character adaptation systems theory that you laid out, they give a nice little map again of how we can think about and position virtues conceptually with respect to the different dimensions being articulated by these theoretical frameworks, but I’m also thinking, for example, let’s say about the four different kinds of knowing, the four Ps, like an athlete, for example, who’s very much functioning and behaving at the procedural and maybe participatory level and also perspectival level, not the propositional level. The way in which an athlete is virtuous, how different or similar is it to the way in which a philosopher might be virtuous when talking about virtue, for example? So, John, this goes back to your question about optimal, optimal gripping and how it might look different actually on, like optimally gripping this bottle is a different matter and yet in some ways the same. For us, post-enlightenment, but the Greek notion of a ret, excellence, that’s why you keep hearing me say virtue and virtuosity, and there’s a reason why those terms are related to each other etymologically, but we’ve lost it and we’ve reduced virtue to moral rectitude, right? And we’ve lost the fact that no, no, no, right? Even the moral virtues require virtuosity. This was something that Aristotle made very clear. They require phronesis. They require the education of phronesis. You can’t be con, you can know, and this is, you know, Schwartz and Sharpe’s criticism of con. You can know all the bloody rules you need to know and you’re still not going to be, and you can be committed to them with ultimate duty and some sort of Protestant superhero and you’re still an inept clumsy idiot who does not behave in a kind fashion or a courageous fashion, right? And this Aristotle saw no, no, no, virtues ultimately are in a continuum with habit. They’re in a continuum with skill and so I am making it a habit, pun intended, right? Of always talking about virtue, virtuosity to try and recapture the Greek notion that said no, no, no, we need to see moral excellence and intellectual excellence and psychological excellence in the sense of having to do with the psyche that we’re talking. We have to see them as deeply interrelated and interpenetrating. We have to broaden. Now a lot of what’s happening with virtue ethics and virtue epistemology is people trying to broaden the notion of virtue in exactly the way I’m talking about right now. We had a, I just happened to, was engaged in a coaching session with somebody who exemplifies this and what I mean by that is she’s now started to really download awareness, okay, of particular structures and how she wants to be, but when she’s hungry and stressed and irritable and she’s high trait neurotic, she drops right in, boom, you know? And so the whole like comm MO, which is my basic principle for cultivating sort of a psychological adaptive, interpersonal, intra-psychic system that affords coherent integration toward valued states of being, MO is metacognitive observer on the one hand and then doubles as modus operandi, okay? And I tell people modus operandi as a mode of operating that is hard as hell to do, especially if you’re high trait neurotic, haven’t practiced a lot and you’re hungry. In other words, the virtuosity of affording your capacity to be curious, accepting, loving, motivated is a skill and the capacity to enact that skill is tightly whined to embodying it itself. It’s just not just Sophia, it’s Phrenesis. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. So what do you think of that, Gary, as a response? Yeah, I hear it and I think it’s in line with also what you were saying and with how I’m also thinking about virtue. So could we say then that our task might be now to start recovering, at least in our series, such a broader definition of virtue and try to understand how to like feed it back into the question of normativity and psychopathology and well-being? Yeah, I think that’s right. I think our notion of virtue virtuosity should reach down Greg’s stack and it should reach up to our highest spiritual aspirations. And also I really like the other part of what Greg was saying about talking about virtue. Which part was it, Greg, that you said that it’s something that you have to enact, it’s a skill that you have to enact. Were you referring to the virtuosity itself? Yeah, so you can understand the virtue, that would be like you asked about the philosopher. So the philosopher and that’s like Sophia, what is knowledge that affords us wisdom and how do we understand that? And then actually, how do you embody and enact it? So Sophia is more propositional. Furnissus is the embodied wisdom, which would be a perspectival participatory procedural system that would afford you the capacity to be it. And then you see these different people like, oh, that guy knows a lot of shit, he doesn’t really know how to enact it and that guy just does it. If you ask him, he’s not really necessarily clear. I mean, we obviously would, you don’t have to make a strong, there’s fundamentally different modes and wisdom in relation. So you have to, in order to excel at enacting a wise way of being, you probably should know what your big five measures are as well. Well, this is, that you and I will agree tremendously on this. I mean, like I said, my skill in the therapy room, okay, is to bring a logos to the psyche. It’s like, and so I can help the person through the Sophia dimension. And then I have to try to like, you got to train yourself to be Furnissus. I don’t know how the hell you’re going to do that. Maybe other people can be more, you know, procedural skill based. But what I can do is I can give you that map. And that’s, you know, that’s what I think what you’re doing with the whole big five thing is like, Hey, here, here’s a notion about these constructs that you can bring to bear to see your dispositional tendencies to place yourself in a particular way. So you can gain understanding about what you’re doing. I mean, at a super simple level, people think that negative feelings are bad. It’s like, no, they’re not bad per se, like we need to eliminate them. They’re like, they’re negative valence. That’s not badism, like I shouldn’t have them. Okay. I mean, that’s just a super simple example to give people richness in relationship to that is a key aspect, I think of guiding them, particularly in the current world where we’re unbelievably confused, overloaded with information, but not well guided, educationally, or schematically with a big picture view that can help us sort it out. So you get people are unbelievably confused. They don’t know what they’re doing. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not doing virtuosity is a really, really big trick. Yeah, people are defaulting, especially those without a religious framework. People are defaulting to popular culture market. And they’re basically deeply integrated now, a popular culture market forces for trying to get guidance on it. And they’re doing this largely implicitly. And they’re saying, I’m not doing that. Well, yeah, you’re subjecting yourself to hours and hours of entertainment, advertising, social media structures that are really, really shaping you. And especially now when we’re doing it from childhood on, like this is where you’re getting, and I’m not, this is not me wagging my finger. This is where we’re all being pressured to get our implicit normativity structure from. And they’re not good ones, right? Because they’re not organized around human flourishing and wellbeing. They’re not organized that way. In fact, if you take a, this is sort of an Eric Fromm kind of point only put on the relationship. If you look at this through the lens of the influence matrix, okay, the black line is the nourishing part of your relational system. And it’s called the RVSI line, relational value and social influence. And what it says is we’re tracking simultaneously the extent to which we’re really known, seen, known and valued by important others. And we’re tracking our instrumental capacity to move others and others capacity to move in. That’s the influence. So there’s an instrumental capacity of movement and a felt experiential, which is very, very similar to a being doing kind of Fromm thing only in relation. Okay. If we grant that and we grant the system is really tracking fundamentally nourishment for being seen, known and valued, not just moving. Okay. It means that our whole shift to a capitalistic mode of being where the bottom line is fundamentally instrumental. So I mean, ask Aristotle, what is the most obvious means and relationship? Fucking money, right? We then place the obvious aims rent relation on instrumentality to move people around in the world. Okay. Which means that from this vantage point, the heart is going to basically be eaten off of empty relational calories. It’s fundamentally going to be felt seeking the capacity for instrumental control through a capitalistic structure. Even as it gets that it’s going to be, if it doesn’t get it, it’s going to feel starved. Oh my God, I wish I had more power, popularity, fame. And even if it gets it, it’s going to be empty calories because it’s not being seen, known and valued. Okay. This is why we need particular types of theoretical structures that are in form. So we can make a very, you know, if you don’t know how the heart is structured, you’re going to screw it up. What I really like about this, what I really like about this discussion, and maybe we could really develop this in whatever time we have left in the series together, but not just what it takes to be virtuous, but what is currently in place in our social, sociocultural context that prevents or obscures the path to being virtuous. All these implicit confusions about normativity. We just sort of cover two of them right now. One of them about our attitudes toward negative emotions and how there are somehow bad things, things to experience. And the second being about our attitude about power and power relations. And the- A little confusion. That’s what Greg’s picking up on from. I just want to be clear with somebody who might be irked. We’re not sort of crypto Marxists here. We’re not talking about that. You know, the market in capitalism. No, absolutely. Anybody knows me knows that. Yeah, it lifted people out of poverty. But that does not, acknowledging those truths does not legitimate, well, we shouldn’t ever criticize the psychological impact, the existential impact, the spiritual hunger. And so that’s what Greg is putting his finger on. And I think that’s very important. And I think Fromm’s critique about how we have deferred by default to a monolithic market mentality is really causing profound modal confusion, commodification of relationships, all kinds of things that many people are noting. So I think I’m trying to articulate that. I think is a lot of people are trying to- I mean, one of my lines that I take from my life is from The Plague by Camus, one of the main characters, the one I ended up identifying with. He says, I’m trying to figure out how to be a saint without God. That’s the whole problem I’m up against. And there’s an analogous problem we’re posing here, which is how does one become virtuous in a culture that is not oriented towards virtue? And so, and it’s really, really interesting, because if you go back to Adam Smith, Adam Smith had a lot of hope that there would be an intertwining between the development of virtue and the development of the market. Of course, that has not actually unfolded the way he had hoped. So I think that question is a really, really powerful one. I want to bring up maybe that we’ll do that in concert with what we’ll do next. I believe we’re at the stage where I’m going to sort of take over again as center stage and look at a proposal, a very big picture and integrated proposal for well-being that comes out of Bishop’s work and put it into a discussion with the very powerful proposal that we have collectively made together. And I think, Gary, within that, we can bring up these, I think, really relevant questions. One of the concerns I have with Bishop, but I haven’t finished the book, is whether or not these issues ultimately of virtue broadly construed are being properly addressed. So. All right. Lovely. Thank you so much both. This was a really, really juicy episode. I loved it a lot. Thank you guys. I really appreciate