https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XqpJ7fb_-f4
Welcome everyone to our culminating finale, the final episode of Psychopathology and Wellbeing. And thank you for your patience. But there was, well, fate intervenes as it’s want to do the lives of pathetic small human beings. But we are nevertheless here in our Promethean fashion trying to bring a little bit more fire down from heaven. And I’m joined once again with Greg Enriquez and Gary Hovinesian. So welcome. Welcome, my friends. Absolutely. So we have finished sort of the presentation of an integrated framework. And I won’t review the details of that. We did lots of review all the way along. You know, and Greg brought us home in a very powerful way. You know, something, you know, something like a grand synthesis for this topic, which I thought was elegant and beautiful. And what I had proposed to do and what I have done is prepare for a culmination, culminating sort of task, which is to look at a completely independent. I deliberately did not read the book until we were done. A completely independent proposal about what the good life is and therefore indirectly. But he does talk about it. Michael Bishop, the author, does talk about psychopathology. It is a book about well-being and also about psychopathology. The book is called The Good Life, Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being by Michael Bishop and very good book. I recommend it. I recommend it. I think it’s well-written, well-argued. I believe it came out in 2015. So what I propose to do is to present sort of what I think is the salient core and two the three, sorry, three or four of the main claims of the book. And then the three of us can enter into discussion with it. Does it pose significant challenges to what we do? Is it orthogonal? Does it integrate, et cetera, et cetera? So that’s the proposal, gentlemen. Shall we? Shall we? Absolutely. We can proceed on that line. OK, so the first thing I want to start with, and I’m just going to get one thing up and share my screen for a second. Um. Is. So can you gentlemen see this? So this is a model from work that Leo Ferraro and I did in 2013 as we were working on a process theory of wisdom. And that’s a theory about how people become wise, rather than a description of the wide the properties of a wise person. And one of the arguments we made about a process theory of wisdom is it had to have an independent processing account of what foolishness is. We proposed because wisdom is not about overcoming ignorance, it’s about overcoming foolishness. And we propose this model called parasitic processing. I’ll just quickly take you through this. This is this is this is an example. It’s not meant to be right. It’s it’s an example of the principle. The content will vary. And please remember that that’s an important point. So the idea here is you have an event, the event is interpreted as wrong. Then, of course, your brain and this aligns with the predictive processing stuff engages in the affectively laden, the emotional sense, the emotional assessment of the the probability of such future events. And what happens is that’s going to immediately trigger a couple of heuristics. One is called the representativeness heuristic. This is the degree to which you can remember something because of how much it stands out in your mind as an instance of that category. And this is interacting with what’s called encoding specificity. So if you are sad or anxious because of this event, you’re more likely to remember other sad and anxious events. This also interacts with another it’s not on here, another heuristic, which is called the availability heuristic. The more easily you can remember these things, the more likely the more the higher you will rate their probability. So because the event is more easily remembered and because it’s super salient in your mind that because it just happened, you regard it as more probable than you probably should. Pun intended. And those two things interact with another bias called the confirmation bias. We only we tend to prefer to look for information that confirms a belief rather than disconfirm it. That strengthens your judgment about the probability of the event that causes anxiety. Anxiety tends to narrow your frame to more local and specific processing. You lose cognitive flexibility. Your sense of being able to solve problems goes down. That is going to increase your ability to recognize the event. That is going to increase your sense of being ineffective. You are also just going to objectively fail in more of your problem solving, which will then reinforce your your your sense of low self assessment. You’re going to get frustrated and futile. The world is going to seem very, very alien and threatening. That is going to make you reinterpret more and more events as negative. This is a very complex process that becomes massively self reinforcing and self perpetuating. Now, here’s the idea we proposed is each one of these biases is individually adapted, is an attempt to avoid combinatorial explosion in your processing. And then the whole thing is making use of the adaptive feature of cognition, which is its inherently its inherent capacity for recursive dynamic self organization. The problem is both of those things come together into this very complex dynamical system that takes on a life of its own and starts to drain life away from you. Hence the term parasitic processing. I’ll stop sharing my screen for a sec and just ask if there’s any questions about that, because then I’d like to bring up another model, if that’s OK. No, I’m just actually it’s really nice to see that most the first time I actually really saw that schematic. We’ve talked about it so much. But I never. So anyway, I’ve just struck by I really use a lot of the shorthand of this triple negative neurotic loop. I’m finding it more and more just available. So that’s negative situations, negative feelings. And then there’s a negative reaction sequence. Use the term negative and maladaptive and just basically now lensing to all the arrows in the loop as the negative reactive structure. So we’re trying to create a metacognitive awareness, a psychological mindfulness awareness around all those secondary arrows to keep yourself from falling into a reciprocating narrowing parasitic process. It’s really remarkably parallel, given the independence of it. Yeah, I think so. Go ahead, please, Gary. Yeah. And I’d also like to highlight one thing about this model that it really illustrates how autonomous these kinds of processes can become. Yes. Yes. Irrespective of our own agency or volition or anything like that. And it’s interesting to again, in a kind of sort of mindfulness way to notice when this kind of feedback loop begins to unfold in your own experience, when it does, it might start the moment you. I don’t know. Here is somebody that you have like tension with, raise the volume of their voice ever so subtly. And then you might get a thought without even realizing it that, oh, shit, am I in trouble or something like that? And before you know it, it just takes on a life of its own. And part of I think what wisdom ends up being about is learning how to de-automatize kinds of processes by first and foremost becoming mindful, aware of their happening in this sort of way. And that’s where Greg’s comm MO becomes very, very salient. So Leon, I published this in 2013 and then. Shortly thereafter, in 2015, I’ll just turn my screen again. There was a study published at MIT doing this as a model of the as a model of depression, which, as you can see, is the same basic kind of thing. And now what’s interesting, of course, it was completely convergent. I knew nothing about this because we wrote two years before it was published. They did not read our article. And one of the things I want to note about this and this diagram is in some ways a little bit more helpful on this one point than the previous schematic. The complexity of this self-organization means that this these parasitic processings are very resistant to intervention. This goes towards something Greg was talking about, about, you know, you have to get all the layers and all the dimensions in, because if you try to intervene anywhere in this system, right, it can just reconfigure itself around your intervention. You need to have a highly complex, counteractive dynamical system in order to properly intervene in parasitic processing. And you can see things like the eightfold path of Buddhism represented by eight practices that are interlocked, like as the eight spokes, eight spokes of a wheel and the wheel, of course, revolves as trying to, I think actually quite well for the time in which those that model and the metaphor was produced, trying to articulate this central kind of idea. OK, so I’m just going to stop sharing now. John, one other thing that’s standing out to me right now, I had never actually thought of it this way, but if things like depression or anxiety disorders or whatnot can be seen as these sorts of self perpetuating dynamical systems that are self organized in such a way, then there’s a kind of autopoiesis that might be going on with the states themselves, such that the processes produce products that make the processes of production more likely in the future. Exactly. They are autopoetic in that way. And that way, and then now becomes more plausible. We can you can understand some of the I.F.S. and other modalities in which people can interact with these things as if they’re sub personalities. And even the mythological aspects of this and forms of Vedanta, Buddhism, etc. So this now, I think it’s a model that draws a lot of things into convergence. And if we just do the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology from a meta analytic perspective, you get the internalizing conditions. And so we talk about the neurotic internalizing conditions, these little sub personalities feeding off of each other in a parasitic process way is really, I mean, to me, this is sort of the essence of neurosis. And then the capacity to become mindfully aware, create a complex, adaptive, relational metacognitive system that tries to hold that stuff and calm, mo, reverse it. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. I don’t I don’t envy the job that you two undertake to do. OK, so I’m building this as a background to give us a way of talking about Michael Bishop. So let’s keep going. Another thing that I’ve talked about, we talked about here is Mark Lewis’s model of addiction as the reciprocal narrowing. And then we’ve considered the opposite, which is reciprocal opening, the Anagoga. And then you can take the notion as and Greg did it a few minutes ago, quite rightly. So the parasitic processing leads to reciprocal narrowing. And then you’re trying to create a counteractive system that takes apart the reciprocal, takes apart the parasitic processing and affords the reciprocal opening the freedom from the parasitic processing and the freedom to reciprocally open. Now, as soon as you get into that, that reciprocal opening, now we’re very close to Bishop’s notion of well-being. So his notion of well-being is what he calls a positive causal network. It’s exactly like parasitic processing itself, organizing, mutually reinforcing. But now positively, it’s a dynamical system that is mutually reinforcing and that is affording reciprocal opening. He even mentions multiple times Fredericksons, broaden and build model of positive aspect. So he thinks of well-being as that kind of dynamical system. He doesn’t say it as clearly as I’m going to say it now, but the dynamical system would both ameliorate any parasitic processing you have and afford any reciprocal and afford the reciprocal opening that we consider sort of central to human flourishing. And I think I’m clarifying it, but I don’t think I’m imposing on his text to propose that. So he says that well-being is, you know, to have a positive causal network that’s reliable. And he thinks it’s a positive causal network between feelings, accomplishments, attitudes, emotions, traits and behavior. I think the taxonomy that Greg provided us would be much better for filling in the content nodes within the dynamical system. So I think while he’s on the right track, I think Greg’s done a much better job of explicating the nodal points that need to go in to this dynamical system. And so I think it’s well, I think Bishop has the right model. I think it’s, and this isn’t too much of a fault for him. I think it’s a little bit simplistic in terms of the content, the things that are going into the nodes of the dynamical system. Just out of curiosity, since he references both emotions and feelings, feelings, subjective, qualia, emotions, energized actions, does he differentiate between those entities? Not to get into his… No, that’s fine, Greg. But that’s actually on point to my criticism. Your ontology is much more explicated and specified than he’s doing. Now, he’s engaged in a different project. So I’m not trying to slag the guy. I’m just saying that, like I said, I don’t think he’d have any deep opposition. It’s like, no, no, if you go in and you look at this and you’re going to actually, the entities that are going to go into the nodes of your dynamical system are going to be either or beyond, and they’re going to be more clearly differentiated theoretically, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what I mean when I think, Greg, your stuff would fit in and take the idea, but get us closer to what the dynamical system probably actually looks like. So he says that you get this positive causal network, this dynamical system. Right. And he says that what it does is it results in more of the following. And this is again, something where I think he’s got the right placeholder, but I’m not sure the content in it is sufficient. He says it results in more of states that have positive hedonic tone, states that bring about those with positive hedonic tone, states, the agent values and state the agents culture values. And I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. I think there seems like the fact that the eudaimonia is missing as an explicit thing here is somewhat questionable. The enhancement of the Ryan and DC thing about autonomy and coherence, autonomy, competence and connection, various models of flourishing, requiring the enhancement of agency. There’s a lot that I think, again, is missing here from the model. But again, that’s not too, that’s not too crucial that could be filled in. I also think he gives these I don’t like feature lists and here’s a list of features. And what’s the future schema that binds them all together? And some of these things are in trade off relationships and some of them are competitive relationships. That all needs to be worked out. But again, I don’t want to force too much on his book. It’s the first book that he wrote on this. And not too many people are doing this kind of work. But I do think, again, given a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about, we should replace, we should add to that list and then replace it with a with a feature schema rather than just being a feature list. As I hear it, I mean, we can put it right pretty much in the nested model. So basically he’s got the hedonic tone at the primate level, the anticipatory hedonic tone, and he’s got a reflective, satisfactory structure. And then he’s he jumps over the character functioning dynamics, then bleed into a you, diamonic, at least reflective normative structure. And then he interfaces with the environment, particularly a social environment, a feedback loop, and then ultimately puts it in a red layer of value so you can take at least the base feature list, put it in the descriptive model of well-being that we’re operating from and see it begin to jive that way. I think so. But I guess what I’m saying is that one of the things that’s missing and I keep explicating it on his behalf is the connections between wisdom, virtue and the good life. And so I just again, he’s trying to be fair to him. He is trying to integrate between psychology and philosophy. So he’s trying to imagine, choose an ontology that well, good luck with that. Exactly. And so what came to my mind when I was reflecting on this is he doesn’t seem to be that cognizant of the problem of philosophy as you have articulated it, Greg. So I’m a psychology. Yeah. Did I say the problem of psychology? You said the problem of philosophy, which might be an interesting flip. Sorry. Thank you for that correction. The problem of psychology. I backed into the unified theory and knowledge. I’d be happy to switch it around, use the Freudian slip and see where it takes us. But let’s continue. Now, I’ve made I think there’s a lot of value in this model. He makes some important claims that I think are well supported by his argument and the empirical evidence he reviews at the theoretical level. He points out and I think this is one of the greatest strengths of this proposal. He points out that this is multiply that positive causal networks are multiply realizable dynamical systems that organized right, they can have different sets of traits and right features and processes. As long as they self organize and I’ll amplify what he’s saying, as long as they self organize to reliably reduce parasitic processing, afford reciprocal opening and bringing about all the stuff that goes into a good life that we’ve been talking about. The content can vary considerably. That’s what multiply realizable means. And so what you have here. I think is an excellent argument for a genuine pluralism. Often the term pluralism is used to mean relativism, which is a mistake. I think we should keep these terms distinct. So notice this is not relativism. It’s saying, no, no, there are universal processes. There’s a universal theory of what a good life is. But it doesn’t mean that all of the instances of it form a homogeneous class that have a shared essence other than the functionality. And so you get, you know, you’re getting nice and cleanly between relativism and a kind of absolutism that says, no, no, the only good life is the Christian good life or the liberal democratic good life, et cetera, et cetera. And I do think that’s important because important thinkers in the field of wisdom, for example, Baltz and Staudinger, Baltz and Staudinger, I should say, and Sternberg often assert that a property of wisdom is basically either explicitly or implicitly a kind of, you know, liberal democratic tolerance. I think we should exercise liberal democratic tolerance, but that’s an ethical issue, the epistemic issue of whether or not people have to have that in order to be wise is a different issue. And I don’t think Socrates was a staunch supporter of liberal democracy. And yet I think he counts as a very good instance of a wise individual. Same thing with Sartor de Gattama. So I think being able to come up with a proper pluralism is a great advantage of this approach. So this is raising a couple of questions for me. One of them is that first, it sounds like something like regardless of what your five measures of the traits are, let’s say, or your religious background, your culture or your historical era, for example, or any of these things or your socioeconomic economic status, that it’s your capacity to engage in wise processes with yourself is independent of the particulars in some sense of where you’re located. But it makes use of the particulars. Yes. Right. In a particular kind of way that that makes wisdom more probable. It’s something like that. Yes. And so you’ve heard me use this analogy for relevance realization, the analogy of evolution, the process of evolution is universal. But what that process does is fit creatures adaptively to the particulars of their context. And in the same way, you’ve got this universal process and what it does is it fits people to the particulars of their context, both internally and externally, such that a good life is possible. OK, OK. And here what I mean by good life is a life of well-being. Did it feel transjective in terms of like, would you say that? No. So I was going to go through the rest of the benefit. We come back to that. That’s a criticism you foresaw, I think. So I think and just to pick up on Greg’s insight here, multiple realizability in this way, I think, is going to require well-being to be transjective the way adaptivity is transjective. I think that’s exactly right. And the fact that I would have liked to him to see him making more use of for and also predictive processing models. But again, not doing too much on the predictive processing is probably OK in 2015. But for I was pretty well established by then. So there could have been a little bit more examination about this. He situate either as a sort of epistemology or axiology in relationship to well-being. I mean, is he coming in with a particular normative position or framing this at that level of resolution or frame somewhat? I mean, he is he’s doing something like what we’re doing in that it’s in the subtitle of the book, right, unifying. And that’s what we’re trying to do, unifying the philosophy and psychology of well-being. So he’s very much trying to engage in what I’ve called synoptic integration and to find a bridging ontology and a bridging normativity. I do take and so I think that’s a strength of the book. I do take your point well, though, Greg. I don’t think he I think he doesn’t specifically foreground that enough and sort of deal with it enough. But again, you know, that’s fine. Yeah, no, I’m just trying to get it. I haven’t seen the book, so I’m going on and I’m trying my best to be very fair to them. Like I say, I one more time, I recommend the book like it’s a good book. That’s what I mean. I’m glad I chose it. I chose it because I knew it had been highly recommended. All right. Next thing, the way he’s talking about all of this, I think it’s easily integratable with RRR, a recursive relevance realization. And that’s where I said if he had done a little bit more integration with 40 cognitive science, I mean, he’s integrating philosophy and psychology. He should pay a little bit more attention to embodied cognitive science. So but I don’t see any difficulty. He’s relying on it implicitly in terms of these positive causal networks because they’re being ultimately held together by, you know, what he’s bridging largely into the positive psychology literature, probably. Is that there’s the positive psychology literature is there. He’s also reviewing the philosophical literature and he’s right. But positive psych is not very for a cock. No, no, it’s not. And it should be. That’s well, well, we definitely concur there. So I suppose what I would I would say he basically points out that the sort of purely psychological and purely philosophical projects are sort of grinding their gears. I mean, he he’s more careful. He lays it out. He goes to some. But his basic point is we got to try something new because the the these two, the older approaches are not getting us to a model of well-being and a good life. And for reasons analogous to you, Greg, he thinks it’s really pertinent that we come up with such a theory right now. So now what he does do, I think that’s really interesting in relation to positive psychology, is he makes a very, very bold proposal. But I think it is well placed. I think it’s well supported by his argument. So a particular instance of the problem of psychology within positive psychology, and many people have noted that is it doesn’t have any unifying. There’s not positive psychology is largely defined in terms of how it’s not the normal pathological psychology. The rest of negative psychology. Yeah, yes, yes. So you get and then what you get is idiosyncratic descriptions of what the positive project is within positive psychology, you know, from Seligman and other people. And he goes through some of the pivotal figures. And first of all, he notes the difference. And then he finds within their work a common thread that is actually integral to the positive, the positive psychology framework. And what he does is make this claim that what positive psychology studies. Now, this is a positive statement. Is it studies positive causal networks that that the so he posits this ontological entity as the proper domain of positive psychology, positive psychology, unlike other areas of psychology, is studying these positive causal networks. Right. That would give a kind of unit, an ontological and also epistemic epistemological unity to positive psychology that is currently lacking. And so I thought that was a particularly good proposal. I thought, oh, wow, that really makes a lot of sense. And it lines up with the broader move in for E. Cogs, about bringing in the ontology of dynamical systems as a proper focus of the ontological focus of the discipline. Yeah, I really like that, actually. So here’s what I’m I’m actually started some Utah psychoeducational mentorship. OK, sort of like how to apply this cultivate well-being. And basically one of the things I’m very early doing is I’m basically saying, hey, we want to put a basement on your suffering. And in essence, we’re going to pause the triple negative neurotic reciprocal parasitic process. And then we want to grow your potential, which I basically say, love, play, work with purpose in a relational world. So essentially, this is sort of like, OK, you want to break and grow. And now with this basic frame, it’s like, yeah, look at the parallels in relationship to that. And then what is this? What am I trying to do here? Well, in a dynamic systems way, I’m trying to internet, interconnect the positive causal networks across a number of different domains. So that’s got nice resonance. And then to see that relationship to, oh, OK, in a theoretical way to organize positive psychology to place in a relationship to clinical neurotic, at least neurotic pathology. I want to be careful about like pathologies complicated thing, but at least internalizing neurotic pathology, definitely. So that’s really I. Yeah, that resonates well. And that’s I am quite trained it that way. So it’s cool to hear that and pick that resonance up. Yeah, I thought that was one of the best one of the best gifts of the book in terms of an explicit sort of theoretical proposition. I thought that was great. Like I said, I think the the proposal that well-being is a positive causal network lines up so well with well, I’ve tried to show it. It just dovetails so much of what we’ve been talking about here. I’m recalling that a colleague of mine once and I know if this is something in the literature or if it’s like in the works right now or if it was just this idea, but so he’s into positive psychology and he was talking about how it might be possible to have like a DSM, but for like positive psychology, a whole set of what what would be the opposite of a disorder, not an order, but maybe like virtue systems or virtue, something like that. Right. And thinking about positive psychology as the study of or if we turn it into like a kind of logos of of virtues, psychologically speaking, then I imagine there being a whole constellation of possible virtues that could like float around and some people gravitate more towards some than others. And I mean, the way we’ve progressed through the psychopathology side of things, right, it hasn’t been so much to locate or to fix the problem of normativity in any sort of sort of plane of existence, whether it’s the cultural or personal or whatever. But it’s been to see all the different places in which the normative can show up and in the different ways in which it can show up. So maybe the methodological move here isn’t to have like a kind of product theory or a particular sort of account, a proper pluralism, actually, just as John has been saying, a proper pluralism of positive causal networks. Yes. And just being able to identify them and sort of locate them when and where they show up as a methodological sort of starting point. Yeah, actually, we just released. So I took layman Pascal through my well-being interview to show kind of the inner network of various character functioning domains. Great. By the way, great thumbnail, by the way. I know. That wasn’t me. That’s something to grab that. I thought it was hysterical, but it’s actually really indicative. Both of you, both really your points, as I heard them, Gary. So there’s one issue of pluralism. It’s like, OK, what kind of virtue profile would somebody develop? There’d be a lot of different profiles that you could then grow into depending on all sorts of different preferences, dispositions, etc. So you can play the notes in a wide variety of different way. Yet at the same time, there is a dynamic interplay organization for across a functional continuum on the low end versus the high end that carries a particular kind of consistency. And actually, as I characterized layman as a pretty healthy and robust character structure, and you can really see all sorts of flexible, counterbalancing, positive nodal networks across a wide variety of different aspects of this different character adaptation system. So it’s really actually a good in the flesh example of this process. So that’s great. So I have a couple of broader reflections or questions on this. And then but first, sorry, not in that, but first, I just want to say my best take on this and I’ve tried to be careful with it. And I’ve tried to to explain it in a way that I think makes sense to people who have been following the series, but I think the conclusion I’ve come to is that this is an independent but convergent argument with the argument we’ve been making. I’ve made specific criticisms, but they’re criticisms at the level of detail. They’re not criticisms about the overall structure of the argument or the specific proposals. And there, for me, the fact that we do have this independent convergent argument lends plausibility to the argument that we’ve been making and so I just wanted to note that. That’s really cool. I mean, and I think that, I mean, to me, the hope is that we can transfer for this chaotic, fragmented pluralism to a coherent, integrated pluralism and finding these lines of convergence, I mean, explicitly bridging psychology philosophy on this question, seeing its fragmentation, finding this sort of dynamic nodal network, flipping it around and seeing the parallels. Yeah. And a book that I don’t know his history. I don’t know. That’s really nice. That’s really that is a I think that’s a pretty strong piece of independent evidence, convergent validity evidence. Yeah, I agree. So we’ve at least got something like a preliminary theoretical construct validity going here, which is always good in psychology, that’s for sure. Right. And obviously you and I come from pretty independent places. So there’s now the multiplicity of convergent validity. You start to get a robust sense of something’s happening. Yes. Now, a couple of broader themes, like I said. So the Greeks make a distinction between Incrata and Saffrasen and Saffrasen was one of the cardinal virtues. It’s always it’s often translated by different terms because there’s no one term that captures it well. Moderation, temperance. Some people propose mindfulness as the proper translation of Saffrasen. I don’t know. I don’t try and translate it. I think all of those arguments or designations have value, but they all have deficits. But the difference is in Crotty is I force myself to do the good and Saffrasen as I’ve tried to get it more like you’re tempted to do the good. It comes naturally to you and you’re drawn to it. And so I was wondering, this isn’t well, as far as I know, this isn’t in the book. But picking up on something, Gary said, what if, you know, what if somebody got into a state you know, that was as complex as the depression model, right? But that was a positive causal network was very reliable, very cross contextual in its ability to diffuse potential parasitic processing, very reliable, cross contextual in its ability to afford reciprocal opening such that the positive causal network became genuinely autopoetic. Is this an enlightened person? One way to phrase it, one way I would answer that is I don’t know if it’s an enlightened person, but if the person doesn’t have this, they’re not enlightened. Yeah. Yeah. Right. There seems to be some axiological framing that we I mean, it seems to me. Well, I mean, what’s your sense of this? So there are aspects of psychopathy that may afford this kind of framing. I mean, we didn’t get too much into the core of psychopathy in a particular kind of way. But for me, although there are definitely different kinds of deficits associated with it, you can frame aspects of it as just a fundamental misalignment with good axiology. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. You know, there could be pretty functionality across at least some of these dynamic systems. But doing the doing in the world is different from a foundational value assessment. I don’t know what you think about that, but that’s kind of where I went with that. It’s kind of like, I don’t know. That’s tricky. Well, well, I mean, what I was trying to get, I mean, I was trying to give him the do, I mean, remember that the system, this system isn’t content free. That has to be all these positive states. Right. And if we add in the the transjectivity, the embeddedness, the participation and distributed cognition, I that would, I think, strengthen the case for this at least being a core feature of enlightenment. So the problem I have with the term enlightenment is generally it’s it’s it’s been elevated to mystique. And therefore it’s useless. Like, you know, I’ve asked Buddhists, how many enlightened people are there in the world and four? And it’s like, well, that’s not and what’s going on with your religion? Like, come on. Nine standard deviations out. We finally get you read the sutras. People are getting enlightened all over the place as the Buddha’s walking around. Right. Right. And so, you know, I don’t want to make too much about the difference between mythology and history. I get that. But right. What I what I’m saying more pragmatically is, you know, and I tried to broach this in Awakening for the Meaning Crisis is like I tried to reverse engineer. Enlightenment and say, well, here are core perennial problems that undermine people’s sense of meaning in life and anything that reliably can address them should be counted as enlightenment, but I want to modify that now. And here’s the modification that that the counteractive Dharma dynamical system, rather than the parasitic one, not only should reliably alleviate people from absurdity and alienation and existential anxiety and all the perennial problems that Chris Master Pietro and I talked about, I think it also should do this. It should reliably liberate people from parasitic processing that was in the previous model. But it also should afford this kind of the well-being that Bishop is talking about, especially if we add it. Like. What would like so you both nodded when I said if a person doesn’t have this, they’re not enlightened. And I don’t see the thing I don’t want to do is to bind enlightenment necessarily to a particular altered state of consciousness, because that’s going to be hard to move it to, you know, for example, between Taoism and Buddhism and Christianity. Right. And so I’m trying to really get something that has the proper pluralism that Bishop is talking about. So say more, Greg, you do think that something is missing? Well, I mean, you know, I always one of the things I go to is the well-functioning Nazi, so the well-functioning Nazis, you place it. Can the psychological system that’s embedded in a sociocultural context function pretty well across a wide variety of different demands? But then it is then nested in a system from an axiological wisdom outside view that’s deeply problematic. And so I wonder that’s I guess where I went is like you could manage that dynamics process at the individual psychological level and still be nested in a project that’s deeply problematic from a value perspective. And I do want to nest my concept of release of well-being in that larger, you know, be a good ancestor perspective. And so that’s all I was coming to. No, no, no, don’t diminish it. I think that’s an excellent point. I mean, I was dissatisfied and I mentioned it earlier with his list of what the agent value and what the agent’s culture value, the agent’s culture values, I think that, yeah, the problem you said, like, there could be the Nazi sage. I think that’s an oxymoron. But you know what I’m trying to do with that? Like, who’s within that culture, within that context? There’s a psychological functionality that could well be very present. Right. So I guess I guess my possible response to that is to is that I think so I’m picking up on an idea from Whitehead that evil is ultimately self-deceptive, self-destructive, and that this goes back to Augustine. It doesn’t have any proper existence on its own. Its existence is completely parasitic. And so I’m wondering if right. I’m wondering if there’s a response to saying, no, no, there are universals of the processing that would actually preclude that being a long term viable thing, because there’s going to be significant aspects of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. Now, and I can point to history. I mean, one of the things, one of the great things in please understand what I mean by great. One of the great things that helped us against Nazism was precisely that it was so self-deceptive, self-destructive as a as a worldview. Yeah, no, that’s exactly where I go when I zoom out and I say, well, actually, the thing is, you know, it’s a living on borrowed time precisely because the entire thing is consuming based on exactly these kinds of issues. So it’s just kind of like, well, what is the lensing function? And I guess all I’m saying is that lensing function, if we just look at the psychological level, at the psychological time, there’s enough denial inside of a culture you might get by. But if we zoom it out, you will clearly be present at a particular level. But I just want to be able to zoom out in a large scale system. Yeah, I agree. And so the the the the universal aspects of this theory have to be properly coordinated with other universal aspects of the understanding of humanity, biological aspects, for example, linguistic aspects, social, cultural aspects, et cetera. Yes, if we do it across those scales and then back up, I then think you get into the transcendentals. I mean, I think you get into goodness, truth and beauty. Yeah, I think so, too. And so I would I would add that to the list, a, you know, a proper relationship to the truth, the good and the beautiful that fits into the positive, causative network, et cetera. And then you would basically you’d be pretty close to you, diamonia with regards to the coordination across those scales, I would say. Yeah, I guess one thing that was that I was sort of processing in my mind was what it even means to be in a reciprocal opening state. And like. When I think of reciprocal narrowing, I think of a kind of locked in state where your response to your lived environment sort of shapes the environment in such a way that feeds back into your response and it stays locked like that. You’re losing degrees of freedom, you’re losing flexibility. So the world loses the possibility for the world shrinks and shrinks until the world can’t be any other than it is. And the possibilities for you shrink until you can’t get out. Other than the way you are. So when you’re in a state like that, you essentially become or you’re actually reduced to kind of dysfunctional special purpose machine. Yes. If you think about it like that. Right. And so like, like, that’s actually a really good way of talking about it. I like that. That’s a very good way. Because like there’s nothing wrong with being a special purpose machine. So then what makes a special purpose machine dysfunctional when it becomes dysfunctional? I think for human beings, first, you know, things like human beings, it’s the fact that you you lose the kind of capacity to generalize. Yes. And so to be in a reciprocal opening mode, it’s not that you’re constantly generalizing, but that that that’s secured as a possibility for you. Yes. So that you can come to realize that potential when necessary. And so reciprocal opening doesn’t mean like complete and utter opening. It means no, right. No, it’s not sort of a manic opening. I think the best model of reciprocal opening is platonic. And I know it’s like as the world opens, that helps me bring about justice in the psyche and as I get justice in the psyche, there’s less tearing apart. Right. My salience isn’t being skewed by the internal conflict. And so I see more deeply into the world. And it’s right. It’s not just like that. That’s what it’s very much that you you are progressively indwelling the world more and progressively internalizing the world more in a coordinated fashion that is consistently enhancing your agency. So let me let me ask you both something. And it’s really interesting how this loops back as well, because the first ever conference that I presented at, which is where I met Greg, was the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. And the presentation, they’re meeting in Italy this year. I should have gone next time. We’ll go the three of us. Yes. Yes. Let’s do that. That’d be amazing. Yes, that’d be awesome if we could put something together like that. The presentation that I held that Greg saw actually was on a paper that I worked on in your class, John, and I presented on what I ended up calling the Uroboros learning mechanism. And so if you remember, I’ll just briefly go over it because I think it applies right now. Yes, I agree. So the basics of this framework, let’s say, are this that when you’re engaged with the world, for the most part, you’re not actually engaged with the world. You’re engaged with your memories of the world. You need to rely on what you already know to guide your movements forward in the world into the future, because that’s the less metabolically costly, more efficient way of going about your daily affairs. Now, the problem is that what you know is virtually infinitely less complex than the world itself. And so whenever there is, which means that the functionality of your frames is prone to obsolescence, inevitably, right? Your frames become insufficient for reducing the complexity of the world sufficiently so that you can go about functionally. So what that means is when your framing meets that end, you need to break out of your frames and reframe. And so what I’m hearing right now is that when you’re stuck in a kind of reciprocal narrowing mode, oh, and by the way, just to bring the model to why the Uroboros learning mechanism, because the Uroboros is a self-devouring serpent, and it’s the serpent that bites its own tail. And so we can think about this kind of pictorially, that when the snake is biting its own tail, that’s when your actions are being mediated by your memory, in a sense, and eventually and inevitably, you have to release its own tail and grasp onto something new and metabolize something new. And so this is the same basic mechanism that Piaget outlined between assimilation and accommodation. And it plugs right into your theory of recursive relevance, realization, etc., etc. Okay. So how does this relate to what we’re talking about right now? Reciprocal narrowing, I think, indicates a certain kind of relationship with uncertainty that somebody finds themselves in, such that the snake bites its own tail and is devouring only itself. And if you imagine this again, just to extend the visual metaphor, if the snake keeps eating its own tail, it’s eventually going to be left with nothing but its head, something like that. Right. So the snake shrinks. So it has to metabolize other things in order to grow and expand. And what that means in the reciprocal opening sense would not be that the snake only eats other things. The world is too much for it to swallow. They can’t do that. They can’t devour the world. So there has to be a kind of opponent processing happening between paying attention to the world versus paying attention to how you’re paying attention to the world. Yes. Biting your tail versus opening, releasing and devouring something new. And so reciprocal opening, again, doesn’t sort of devolve into a manic sort of opening. No, no. Something else. And I think if we get a description of that something else, like a more fleshed out description, we might be well, not too surprised to find that things like patience, for example, and attentiveness, mindfulness, etc., etc. are going to be part and parcel of this process. Reciprocal opening because it takes time to really optimize this trade off. For example, there’s another thing in there that’s in aligns with you’re saying, and this is what I’ve been talking about virtue and virtuosity, there’s there’s a virtuosity about getting it so that it becomes, as well as Nietzsche would put it, a self rolling wheel, but not just a manic explosion. Right. And think about again, like being in one of this is the connection to the deal logos being in one of those conversation that takes on a life of its own. And you’re opening up and the other person’s opening up and the topic is opening up. Right. Now, that will be derailed if somebody goes manic. Right. There’s a there’s a finesse. There’s a virtuosity about, you know, I’ve got to really dance with the timing and the placement so that it keeps rolling. Right. It keeps unfolding in a fashion that is not going to destroy the people who are participating in it. And so I’m trying to understand what I mean, I think it has some of the components that you’re talking about, Gary, but but what that particular virtue virtuosity is. I think that Taoism has a lot more to say there than perhaps Buddhism does about how, you know, how to get into the way. So you start to follow with the Tao, the water course way, I think is very valuable. So this may seem super obvious, John, but I mean, is it just some sort of optimum optimal relevance realization relation? Well, it is. And so one way of thinking about it is like what it is, is is I think it’s like that we have various optimal grippings. And then what we can do is we can find the meta optimal stance. I compare the fighting stance from Tai Chi Chuan. I was just doing that’s what I was thinking. It’s like this meta relation between that’s right. It was a transjective dynamic. Right. It’s capturing that and it’s finding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In the flow of that process. Right. Yeah, exactly. It’s about how what what can be my cognitive existential stance, not the fighting stance, but right. And you don’t you don’t fight with the fighting stance. You choose the stance because it gets you sort of you’re at a nexus place where you can easily move to specific optimal gripping. I also think this overlaps with, you know, consciousness, that consciousness is the sort of meta optimal stance for attention and things like that. But we can we can do that another time. But that might explain why altered states of consciousness are relevant. But yeah, I do think there’s something about this. And it’s more like the Greek sense of errat to excellence. It’s this right. This ability to it’s a poisonous, you know, it’s a stance. It’s a way that a person has found. And I’m trying to what I’m trying to do is instead of have that static place, I’m trying to say, could I is there some sort of PCN positive causal network that holds that locus, something more like an attractor in a dynamical system or something like that? At the very least, you got a metacognitive awareness of the inter nodal networking that’s unfolding. You can be like, OK, here, as I’m achieving an optimal grip of reciprocal opening, there should be an emerging distributed network of causal causal, yes, causal structure. So as opposed to the reverse, you could be like, all right, am I on the right path? Well, the right path will have this kind of dynamic growth can be constituted by these kinds of processes. And this kind of path will basically end up in this type of path. You’re eating your tail pretty fast and you’re going to narrow yourself down. And we want to be on this and we don’t want to be on a manic path. But it really there’s something here that I’m trying to metabolize that affords greater specificity, maybe than I had gripped before in relationship to recursive relevance realization and the reciprocal opening dynamic and then nested in a causal causal positive causal network. I like that. The the point about the well-functioning Nazi, which I really, really like that example, actually. It’s so funny. Let’s try to plug this back into that, actually, because this might be a way to more finely differentiate some of the language we’ve been using around framing as well, because so I’m thinking, like, what is the problem with the Nazi mindset? And it’s like there’s a kind of interference happening that’s caused by how right? The propositional note, by how the Nazis relationship to propositional knowing, which tends to be very, very totalitarian in a sense, right? It’s an attempt to reduce or eliminate uncertainty when it can’t be reduced in such a way. It’s a complexity reducing ideology. That’s the main thing it’s trying to do. Yeah, I agree. That feeds into and really warps the participatory mode, actually, in important ways. And it makes them stupid. I mean, you know, and I’m glad that they were stupid. So don’t misunderstand what I’m going to say. But, you know, if they when they invaded the Soviet Union, if they had turned the Ukrainians into allies, right, they would have done way better, right? And if they if they didn’t drive all the Jewish scientists out of Germany, they would have done way better. I mean, I’m glad that they were so stupid. But this is what I mean. I think Whitehead’s right about there being this inherently self-deceptive, self-destructive stuff that ultimately, right. And the point is, of course, it’s not just individuals. There’s parasitic processing is possible at the level of distributed cognition and collective intelligence. There’s just. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I did, which I mean, I don’t want to take us too far afield, but one of the things I notice is really interesting is that evil can be this opposite of the transcendentals. We’ll just say it’s both false as an anti true and bad as not good. Yeah. And yet at the same time, the justification system can never operate believing that it’s both what is operating is both false and bad. In other words, from the position, from the inside, is you cannot say this is not true and believe the bad consequence. Follow me. You can’t justify that. And so what in order to actually operating then is the self-deception mechanism, essentially by definition. And then when you have your self-deception mechanism, then you can’t optimally grip over time by definition because the flow of age and arena relations is now going to be increasingly broken, fragmented, compensatory, your bar living on borrowed time in many ways. So anyway, that’s a no. I think that was brilliant. I think that’s exactly it. I think that’s exactly it. I suppose one thing that so I think we’ve been we can show that at least we can address the well-functioning Nazi. But the other thing that I heard was that in addition to reciprocal opening, there’s a normative requirement for a rate of reciprocal opening. Right. You don’t want to you know, you don’t want to blow. You don’t want to drop people into the middle of an overwhelming psychedelic trip. Now, to be fair to the notion of reciprocal opening, I think the notion of reciprocal opening is an inherently constrained constraint is reciprocal. Yes. The system will become if it comes so open, it looks so completely chaotic and will not actually be able to grip anymore. Yeah, exactly. At one level, by definition, it would be constrained. But what that rate is, I guess that’s what I was really trying to play it around with in terms of this whole issue is like, yeah, you know, it’s that zone of proximal development and what is the proper recursive relevance realization that affords this metabolic, almost epistemic metabolic growth process? It’s an interesting thing. Maybe that’s also very individualized, actually, if you think about it. Oh, there’s going to be considerable variation around. Definitely. Yeah. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t come up with, you know, again, perhaps universal features of the process. Well, like when you look at Riff’s model of well-being, you know, personal growth is one of the six dimensions, and it would be certainly then in the sense that your description of a reciprocal opening relationship to the world is a felt sense that you’re growing. So the sense I the way I tried to articulate this is cognition is complexifying in a way that keeps it in coupled to the disclosure of the complexity of the world. So the complexification of the cognition and then the disclosure of the complexity of the world are constantly coupled together. And that that would be sort of the the processing feature I would propose. But the rate issue is really interesting about that. And again, presumably the rate would change, given sort of the rate of turnover in the complexity of the environment. I’m wondering if Greg has any thoughts on this, because this is where my mind went, especially when I look at this in the clinical context, where, you know, when you when you apply emotion focused techniques and methods or helping people to process like latent meanings and what they’re experiencing that are going unnoticed. Right. So, for example, just for the audience to illustrate this, a patient of mine once we were talking about this pattern where he would present as depressed and like sad and kind of like he would feel like he’s being a victim in the situation. When, in fact, through therapy, we learned that when he presents like this underneath those feelings, he’s actually feeling quite frustrated and even angry. But these underlying feelings are aren’t finding for lack of a better word, honest expression. One reason or another and are instead being transmuted and finding this kind of a form. And so there’s this idea in emotion focused therapy that in order to further and this is more broadly from the humanistic traditions where in order to more effectively articulate the meanings of your experience, you have to turn to embodiment of your emotions and to notice and pick up the subtle, fine grained distinctions between what you feel when and when not in response to what that’s happening in your world. And there’s this weird again, it takes me back to the Ouroboros, where there’s a kind of self referentiality here, where if you listen to your emotions, which in a sense aren’t yours, there are responses to the world as is being lived pre reflectively by you, by your being. Right. If you listen to your emotions, they can guide you in a particular way that might actually help you to further articulate yourself in the world. And then the one critique that I’ve heard against this sort of view is that emotions are, I mean, they’re within you and it becomes a total sort of self referential process. And that’s a problem because you want to be connected with the world. But I don’t think that’s the case because the phenomenology of emotional experience shows us that emotions are also transjected and so they, by definition, connect us to worldly meanings. And so by referring to your emotions, you’re inadvertently referring to meanings in the world and therefore you learn to listen to the world better. So I’m curious what you think about that. Well, I mean, so here’s what I would say, then, is what’s happening is you get a secondary and instrumental emotional response initially to a felt sense of anger. So the primate experiential self gets angry. OK, but unfortunately, the learned adaptive relationship between how to wisely express that anger to the right person at the right time that affords adaptive living is not available and indeed then because then that blocks the individual’s capacity for that kind of behavioral investment, they get trapped. And then often that will turn inward and then they’ll manifest in particular sort of ways as passive aggressive. I’m a victim. I can’t really do anything. But then that justification and felt sense of response then blocks you in terms of what is it that you’re actually going to be able to manifest and you’re now not really in contact with key aspects. So I think your semantic associated network theory is basically saying, hey, these energized motions are signaling to a particular relationship you have to the world and what I would say what emotion focused therapy is fundamentally about us in relationship to this whole process of the proper coherent integrated network that we’re trying to get so you flexibly respond in a reciprocally open way is the ability to essentially orchestrate the various facets in a coordinated way. But if you’re basically saying, hey, you’re playing this instrument over here and it bugs the rest of these instruments, so you have to shut up and we’re going to manifest what you’re saying in a different sort of way so that actually you’re a victim rather than you’re angry, OK, then the capacity to coordinate inside and then the capacity to coordinate horizontally with individuals is much, much greatly reduced and indeed then you create this basic sense of fragmented vulnerability where there’s an enormous amount of static in here, an enormous amount of static in between, and that doesn’t reciprocally open you to adaptive processes. But it actually is very likely to then essentially cause you to double down, turn against yourself in a particular sort of way and narrowly trap you in a parasitic process and be a parasitic process. So if we can open up to the emotion, it’s hard to do because emotions are animalistic in some ways. They lead to impulses. You know, I’m going to punch the guy in the face. I don’t have access to how to metabolize it, which why you’d inhibit it potentially. But the whole point of emotion focuses that we can wisely integrate that with a narrative on the person plane of existence in a particular sort of way. Then we can hold and metabolize that. And then that affords us a lot more a coherent integrated psyche that’s got a lot more flexibility in responding and adapting. So the implication here is that, well, one of the implications here is that the different modalities of psychotherapy actually offer pathways to making reciprocal opening more possible for individuals, different versions or varieties of it. Exactly. That’s exactly I mean, I’d say behaviors and by a particular response set of maladaptive trapping into safety behaviors, et cetera, want to open that up. I would say the emotion focused stuff, I think the psychodynamic, the typical like Paul Wachtel cyclical, psychodynamic, relational view, the defense and relational system, the way justifications work in both cognitive and existential perspectives, they all can be, I think, paired on this adaptive, maladaptive, narrowing up particular parts of the mental adaptive character systems and we can look at them and then stack them and then really characterize with this reciprocal opening dimension. Whoop, go up and down through these different adaptive modalities and then create that coherent integrated pluralistic stack. Did you like that, John? I did. I did really, really well. That was good. Yeah, that was different varieties of reciprocal narrowing and closing that can happen when considered from the point of view of the different modalities of psychotherapy. I hadn’t thought of that before. That’s really cool. That’s very cool. That’s very cool. Definitely cool. Well, I think that’s if we can end on the cool, that’s good. Right. That means we’re moving towards reciprocal open relations. It’s just about being cool. So I wanted to thank you both, my friends, for this long, but very, very wonderful journey we’ve taken together. As always, I’d like to give each one of you a chance for a brief final word before we shut it down. Maybe we’ll start with Gary this time. Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you both so much. I feel like I’ve I’ve learned quite a bit and grown as a both as a clinician and as a person because this is really cool stuff and it’s really fun for me. I would say if there’s a takeaway from this that I could sort of echo for the audience, it would be this that when people are suffering and when you’re suffering, it’s all too easy to experience that impulse to make it all go away and to resort to anything that you can and to turn off that part of you that can rethink things and reconsider things from different possible angles. But I think what theory is really good for is to keep reminding us time and time again that it’s complicated. This is something that one of my mentors, Mark Kunkel, always would say in our classes that remember, it’s complicated and just to bear that complexity in mind and to keep reminding yourself that, man, like the questions are really complicated. The problems are really complicated. And so although we want good answers to these questions, we want to produce our answers with all that in mind. And that requires us to be very patient and very tolerant of the uncertainty that we have to face because it’s very easy to slip into very unethical ways of going about the sort of business having to do with the human mind and soul. So this was a great sort of instance of that for me, the last 15 or so hours that we spent together, that it’s complicated. So thanks for traversing the complexity in such an elegant and fun way together. Lovely. It reminds me, I had a mentor. It’s like you’re going to get your doctorate. You’re going to learn two words. It depends. Basically, then on a complicated network of possibility and how to stay open to that and keep learning. So that’s cool. Yeah, no, it’s been a wonderful journey. I really, really benefited from it. So for me, I really felt good about the whole psyche psychology. You know, early on, we caught the epistemic vector of the psyche inside out and psychology outside in. I’ve been playing with that and resonate with that, especially as I finish up my book on what psychology is, I might try to end on and then just think of the psyche, by the way, that’s different. That’s fun. This whole continuum of the well, first off, there’s the integration that I feel like we see the trait theory, the cybernetic, the recursive relevance realization, the moving cast, and you get that that structure felt very tight. And I really like how we’re sort of ending now. And like I said, sort of like in terms of my own mentorship, it’s like somebody comes to me and I’m looking at their functioning. It’s like, OK, how do I put a basement? Essentially, how do I put a basement in the reciprocal narrowing processes? And then give them this triple negative neurotic loop. And it’s that third negative of negative reaction. We want to hold China, common flashlight on, hold that and put a basement on that. And then what can we explore? What are your potentials? What you might what are the areas of love, a play of work, of purpose, of meaning, of transcendence that you might be engaged in? And wow, could you network a puzzle, positive nodal structure there and do that and then hold the dialectic that I’m glad we’re ending on that for it’s a particular level of resonance. And yeah, I mean, I think that there’s an emerging model of psycho psyche pathology of well-being that actually has some ontological, metaphysical, metatheoretical coherence, and that’s kick ass. We’re missing that. And that’d be a big deal. Thank you so much, my friends.