Psyche-pathology and well-being 2 (P7v2fnoPqKo)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=P7v2fnoPqKo

Welcome everyone to the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode two of Psyche Pathology and Well-Being. And if you don’t know why the title is that way, that will become clear as we’re going through the series. I’m here again with my friends and collaborators, Greg Enriquez and Gary Hovenician. And this is episode two. The link to episode one will be in the notes. And what we did last time, I primarily took the lead. And the general format of this series, like other ones I’ve done with Greg, is one person generally carries the role of proposing an argument or a theoretical framework and the other two circle around it in dialogos, asking questions, reducing clarification, etc., drawing out the argument. And so we’re trying to, as a method, integrate argumentation and dialogos. And Greg and I have had, I think, we would regard it as considerable success on this. And we’re going forward with that format. So you’ll see Greg, for example, will take center stage today. Last time I took center stage and I presented some arguments problem-avotizing the issue of psychopathology and well-being. I won’t review, there’s a big discussion there. I suggest if you haven’t seen the first episode that you go back and look at it. But I problematized the whole thing. Why is it difficult to talk about the psyche, psychopathology, well-being? And I went through several points. But now what I’m going to do is hand things off to Greg and Gary. I’m going to ask each one of them to introduce themselves. And then Greg will lead us into the second episode. So let’s start with Gary in the introductions and then Greg, you can introduce yourself and just roll. Fantastic. That’s great. Okay. So I’m Gary Hovnissian. I’m a PhD candidate at Duquesne University in clinical psychology. I’ve got a background in philosophy and cognitive science. I’ve worked with John both as a student and as a collaborator. And I’ve known Greg since 2015, where we met at an academic conference. And I’ve been in dialogue with these two giants since then. So really looking forward to bringing some of my own training and theoretical knowledge to bear on these conversations to see where they go. So beautiful. Yeah, Gary, it’s been a joy and thanks, John. So yeah, Greg Henriquez, professor of psychology at James Madison University, theoretical clinical psychologist and pretty well known, I guess, in the cognitive science corner, you know, and founder Utalk, Unified Theory of Knowledge, which I’ll be talking a little bit about today. So I’m super excited about today to kind of share with you guys to see if we can kind of grok two central concepts. Okay. So my goal actually in these next two is to provide a framework that may be up to the task of addressing what John brilliantly problematized in the first episode. And so my hope is to try to put some outline puzzle pieces together that actually afford us intelligible coherence that is up to the task of delineating what we might mean by psyche pathology and well-being. And then we can kind of go from there and then get into some of the other things that you guys talked about, about attachment, personality, centrality, recursive relevance realization, and then build off of that. So that’s what my goal is today. So what is, I’ll just say a little bit about Utalk. So what is that? Unified Theory of Knowledge is a meta-psychological system between, that exists between the space of philosophy and psychology. And what it tries to do is coherently tie together a natural science worldview. It says there is a world, ontological worldview of natural science that has emerged, scientific psychology, and then bridge that to subjective experience and the social construction of knowledge and do that with coherent intelligibility. It really situates itself, Utalk does, around three foundational problems, which I’m not going to delineate in great depth, but the first problem is very relevant today. It’s a problem, well, all these problems are relevant today, but first problem is a problem of psychotherapy. And Gary, as a doctoral training student, you will know the problem of psychotherapy and that is, what the hell do you do when you get in the clinic room? And it’s nutshell. And then the issue is, what are the ontological, epistemological, research, practice-based notions that actually ground your identity as a psychological doctor? Put more basically, you have a person in front of you, enormous numbers of schools of thought that tell you different features of what kind of issue you should attend to, how you should think about the problem, what frames it, how do you enter that? My frame was there are a lot of really good mid-level perspectives. Behaviorism offers a really interesting thing. Humanistic, I certainly identify five major psychological perspectives and the behavioral tradition, the humanistic tradition. In fact, I argue that Carl Rogers, really good therapy begins with Carl Rogers, in my estimation, the psychoanalytic to psychodynamic tradition. And then you get the cognitive tradition and those are big four traditions that afford individual level. And then you can jump up to a systems level, you get family systems. And then you can bookend that or the social systems and psychiatric view. And of course, within there’s a multiplicity of plural perspectives that have specialized different features. And essentially, it’s rich, but it’s a jungle. In the sense that, well, is it really the best you can do to simply see what you prefer based on your own sense and personality and struggles, and then pick from there and who your mentors were and be like, okay, I’m going to now just identify that way when somebody else is going to identify that way. And there’s nothing that actually really then foundationally grounds that decision. In the sense that it’s a chaotic fragmented pluralism or just a jungle. And the sense making capacity with any kind of specificity is not good. Craig, is it primarily because I’ve heard therapists say this and they say it almost as a point of pride, but I find it a critical thing to say. They say that their method is eclectic. And that strikes me as that’s problematic. Well, if you care about coherence, John, yes, eclectic is essentially the death knell of coherence. Yeah, there’s no way to compare even within your own practices year to year. So how would you compare? How would you know if you’re making a mistake? How would you track progress? Like if you’re an eclectic, I just found that statement always, you know, I would often hear it in a social setting and then I’m usually useless in those settings anyways. So I would just nod politely while thinking into my mind, isn’t that a problem? Like, why are you happy about that? Like, I wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who was eclectic, right? You know, sometimes I use surgery. Sometimes I will get the, I’ll rattle the beat, I’ll do rattles and, you know, chant like, and sometimes I’ll pray and like, no, I don’t want that. Right. That’s not what I want. Right. So I’ll just give it, we can contextualize that term. Okay. And it has some value, as we know the history, but it’s also carries a significant limitation. So what I’ll quickly then just delineate evolution of psychotherapy, and at least from where I sit in four potential phases, meaning the last one’s potential. So the first is the single school approach. Okay. So up to the 1970s, you basically have these fundamentalist factions, and you really don’t have a choice, but they’re so divergent. The languages are so different. They’re anchored to so many different things in terms of training and everything else. And the gurus that you follow, you either follow Carl Rogers or the Freudian tradition or the behavioral tradition. Okay. And then you get basically a fundamentalist attack zone, which itself, given the limitations of these systems, is not ideal. Right. Okay. So you wouldn’t want, or you could certainly then see, and I would argue that the evolution of the single schools and their diametric opposition to an eclectic view is not necessarily bad. Okay. In the sense that you can then say, hey, all right, I see that these each have key insights and I want to try to draw from them. And I’ll be open rather than force myself inside a box. I’ll be open to sampling and have an eclectic attitude in my estimation, and it’s actually a proper evolution. Okay. But the eclectic is not a place from which one can construct any kind of coherent, intelligible framing for your identity. It is simply all of the things that you said then in relationship. It essentially then is very vulnerable to embracing and being satisfied with a chaotic, fragmented, pluralistic knowledge system that can’t be then held in any particular kind of standards and of epistemology and clarity. So that’s a big, okay. So then the field evolves. And in fact, I’m president right now, president of the society for the exploration of psychotherapy integration. Right. And psychotherapy integration takes this eclectic attitude and then adds or attempts to add academic intellectual refinement to what would be meaning about a systematic approach that can then ground the processes by which you form these interconnected notions that then allow you some ground to say, it’s not like I just, you know, hodgepodge it. I’m systematic and I have a particular framing and identity upon which I’m going to now approach this. Okay. The society I’m president of is called the exploration of psychotherapy integration. That was as far as the pioneers wanted to go. Like, hey, it’s a big deal that we’re exploring this issue. Right. It’s not the society for psychotherapy integration. They have to add the exploration. Okay. And I’m actually part of a group of individuals that came along in 2010s mostly. In fact, we all got together and we were like, actually the exploring is now out of time where we may be done. Meaning that there actually are opportunities to have found grounds to afford coherent integration and to build cumulatively off that coherent integration. Okay. So that actually there is systematic ways to place the single students together in a way that affords complementarity and coherence to give rise to a cumulative picture that can then do the job that is necessary. That’s up to the task to hand a psychological doctor, the framing to walk into a clinic room and be aware of the holistic person in front of them, be aware of the value dynamics, be aware of the notions of psychopathology, wellbeing, and enter that system with a degree of sort of an identity and a skill task that’s up to the task of actually doing this very, very difficult thing. Right. And so in doing that, which is, I think, what needs to be done. I mean, then you are having to confront the problems we talked about last time. A hundred percent. And certainly jump in at any time, Gary. But the problem of psychotherapy was that, and then I did this really weird thing, okay, that no one else has done. I then said, well, medicine is relatively well coherently organized, okay, Western medicine. You can critique the hell out of it, all sorts of, you know, hot supply, blah, blah, blah. But if you look at its basic organizational structure, you have the path, biophysiological pathologies, breakdowns of particular organ systems, interventions that are done, manage those malfunctions and ease suffering at that level. Where does that organized knowledge come from? Oh, there’s a thing called human biology. Okay. The science of human biology as humans, as organisms made up with genes and cells and organ systems that live in an evolutionary history, we have a clear ontology and a scientific organization at the base level of what we mean by human biology. Okay. So it’s a basic scientific understanding of human biology that’s up to the task of affording us clarity of an applied discipline that then engages in prescriptive, pun intended, prescriptions for how you ought to be to cure malfunctions and harm at this level. And so you get a correspondence between biological doctors, medical doctors, human biology and the breakdown. And then, so what I did was, well, if psychotherapists call it psychological doctoring, okay, then what we should then have is we should have the basic coherent organization of human psychology, okay, that should then afford us the capacity to then organize the various psychological systems in proper relation, and then at least provide the basic scientific ground upon which we then prescribe psychological health interventions. Okay. That’s what should happen. At least that’s the way my mind thought about it, coming from a sort of grounded and natural science perspective. And then I went and asked, what do we mean by human psychology that would afford us the basic, and now I would say, metaphysical ontological framing of that topic? And that’s when I discovered the problem of psychology. There isn’t one. I mean, there’s nothing here. We don’t know what we mean by the term psychology. We know what we mean by human biology. We don’t know what we mean in the sense that there’s just with all the schools of thought around psychotherapy, they essentially borrow, well, at least some of them certainly borrow from the schools of thought inside psychology, and you get the same basic problem at the science level in the sense that it’s a multiplicity of different paradigms, okay, that really just ends up, if you know its history, and I’m not going to get into it, but basically, the schools of thought compete, none of them win, and then the system defaults to methodological unity. They become experimentalists in the application of the scientific method and commit to whatever the thing is ontologically, well, what we do is we look through the epistemological lens of science, and then we’re going to grab our identity through a methodological, epistemological science of behavior, what we see scientifically, mental processes, which you’ll never define, and voila, we’re a science because we apply the methods of science, which is of course my whole critique, that methodological behaviorism organization, I mean, every science applies the methods of science, that’s what’s in science. Why is the science of a particular kind? What do you mean by, what’s the ontological reference of psychology? So, and you talk then, then tackles the science of the problem of psychology fairly directly, and then I backed into, well, why was this such an unbelievable problem? And the final problem you talked about is the enlightenment gap, and this is the argument basically that what happened with modern science, okay, and if philosophy in the 17th whatever century, 18th century, etc., is that deep metaphysical philosophical problems emerged that never got resolved, that we can see as two broad features. One is the mind-matter relation, okay, un-crystallized in mind-body problem with a hard problem of consciousness, okay, and then you have the kind of thing scientific knowledge gives relative to social and subjective knowledge, okay, and that’s the modernist, which says, oh gosh, we can read transcendent realist arguments with reason and deduction that tells us truths beyond culture versus the postmodern critique that says, no, you’re always embedded and contextualized in a system of subjective or social justification, and you’re always entangled in that, you can’t transcend that essentially, okay, so the enlightenment gap is you can’t solve mind-body, you can’t solve modern versus postmodern framings, and then you get the explosion in the modern state of a chaotic fragmented pluralism writ large, okay, if we come back, if that’s the backdrop philosophically, then you come back to the problem of psychology and we’ll say, no shit, how could you have a science of whatever mind is or whatever that would afford clarity if the backdrop of the enlightenment gap says matter mind is impossible, science subjective knowledge is impossible, you’re obviously already going to be, no wonder you couldn’t solve the problem of psychology if that’s the conceptual backdrop, okay, so that was great, Greg, that was great, good, so that’s what I just, what I’ll point you to on other series that Greg has done, Greg and I have done together, he goes through that history in more depth and detail, so I’ll put some notes in the description of this video, so if you want to hear that argument, I think Greg summarized it brilliantly, but if you want to hear it more at length and more discussed by, for example, me or Zach Stein, right, then there’s other places where I can, I’ll point you to with in the links, I just wanted to let the viewers know that, Greg, yep, good, and certainly Gary, I know this is the first time we’re dialoguing about it in this kind of depth and certainly feel free to chime in, obviously, so let me just sort of then say, so what UTOC says is that actually can achieve, with the right backdrop, you can actually achieve coherence in these issues, that’s possible, ontological, metaphysical, and meta-theoretical coherence, let me just say a little bit about what I mean by those terms, so it, what UTOC is is a descriptive metaphysical system, okay, what, basically what I mean is I’m going to be clarifying my concepts and categories up front, that’s what I mean by descriptive metaphysical, and then I’m going to network them together to define the relationships between them, that’s what I mean by a system, so it’s a descriptive metaphysical system, and the strongest or most clearest articulation of the core of the descriptive metaphysical system is called the tree of knowledge, okay, and this is a new map of big history that says, hey, we can track the evolution, like there’s a general shared understanding of evolution from big bang to present, that’s the time axis, okay, and some kind of complexity, although I prefer complexification, okay, from things like particles to atoms into cells and multicellular organisms and to then finally people in society, okay, and there are a huge number of big picture systems, you know, Wilson’s conciliance, Sean Carroll’s big picture, Eric Kiezon’s cosmic evolution, then go on and on, big history itself, these are all basically have these two axes, okay, and I would say this is just the common sense, weak naturalistic emergent view of evolution, and it does afford a particular ontological framing of reality, meaning it says, hey, our theories of reality seem to map this, and I’ll use a Roy Bashkar term, in a TINA sort of way, TINA stands for there is no real alternative, T-I-N-A, give me another alternative, okay, that would actually account for all of our data that doesn’t essentially have these basic time by complexification features, now what does this mean in terms of ultimate reality and consciousness and our knowledge, okay, but you basically get this two axis picture should be part of the overall ontology from a natural science viewpoint, okay, tree of knowledge comes in and says, grease with that completely, okay, but it says it’s missing something foundational when it comes to the nature of complexification, okay, because what it says on the complexification axis is it says that there are these one kind of emergent jumps, threshold type jumps, okay, you go from particles to atoms, oh, that’s a new levels of organization, and we can debate whether it’s ontological, epistemological, but the particle to atom, atom to molecule, there’s one, and then you map a molecule to cell, and the cell to multi-cell, and then up to humans, okay, tree of knowledge says no, it’s four different cones, okay, not just one cone of complexification, it’s four different cones, okay, so it’s not just, oh, a cone of material complexity, so that everything is material complexity, basically with somebody like Sean Carroll and really E.O. Wilson, and many of the big histories essentially are, oh, it’s just a component of complexification, okay, tree of knowledge says no, what actually happens is there are these aggregate pieces, okay, that do create emergent properties that have probably both epistemological and quite honestly like object orientology stuff, ontological reality features, okay, but there is a radical different kind of shift that emerges when we make a jump from a molecule to a cell, okay, and the argument essentially is that the cell has an epistemic looping function, okay, which I call originally the information processing, then it was information processing communication networking function that gives rise to the autopoetic complex adaptive self-organizing features of cells that is simply absent in molecules, okay, and I would argue that we can network that stuff together through basically information processing communication, sort of an internal epistemic function, it’s a knowing function, a cognitive function at a biological level if you want to call it in the broadest terms, you know, if you use some of like Evan, you know, Evan Thompson’s conceptions go right into that kind of basic structure, and the tree of knowledge says that actually what’s happening then is that these epistemic organizations give rise to a new complex adaptive network that can be thought of as a totally new plane of existence that does have fundamentally new ontological, as in epistemic, processes that are different and non-existent and non-reducible to the plane beneath them, okay, if you buy that and then you say well what kinds of epistemic language systems emerge, the tree of knowledge says there are three, there’s this genetic cell one, okay, and then there’s the nervous system animal one, and then there’s the language person culture one, okay, so it’s gene cells, brains, animals, and people language basically, as then new plant emerging epistemic information processing systems that give rise to the ways in which complex adaptive systems can communicate with each other, and then that creates a whole other higher order narrative, okay, so to the extent that that is true, it basically then says, oh, we need to be able to identify these transition points between these different dimensions as central, okay, and the tree of knowledge says that we missed two crucial, we are ambiguous as hell about two crucial joint points, well first it says the old mechanistic shit is like we got to upgrade our matter and motion both underneath it at energy information like quantum theory and above it at life as complex adaptive systems, so and that’s basically happened in the 20th century, okay, it then says the similar jump has to happen at the animal Cambrian explosion, there is a sensory motor looping function that gives rise to mental cognition, if you want to use this, I’ll say that’s not redundant right now because I said bio cognition down here, we can talk about the use of the term, but now we’re at mental, and what is that, that’s that sensory motor looping function between the nervous system, I got my dog right here, okay, this goes all the way down to crabs, but he’s engaged in an animal mental relationship with me right now, okay, complex active body, brain, behaving as a functional whole, which is organized internally, I will argue by recursive relevance realization, what would be the proper cognitive term for the stack, okay, and then it functions to operate with the environment to cultivate paths of behavioral investment, which from a skinnerian perspective you can say okay there’s a selection process from the outside that we can map with a selection process on the inside, and that affords you a particular mapping of the mental evolutionary plane, okay, the animal mental plane of existence, that says there’s a joint point there, and the argument basically from the unified theory is that’s actually the bridge between biology and basic psychology, okay, basic psychology, which is what we’re going to argue at the mental process level, what do you mean by mental process, well some people do mean this neurocognitive functional system of a very, you know, maybe a crab or whatever, pretty simple structure, and other people mean the Cartesian notions at the highest level, we talked last time, oh my mind is totally shaped by my culture because my language frames the world in a particular way, and I believe in gender, okay, and that’s what my mind is, well that’s not what I’m meaning down here, we talked about the reference, the rainbow of reference last time, well that’s a reference, okay, so the argument is that a whole basic psychology with the predominant ontological reference of animal mental behavior, and the tree of knowledge introduces a new term, capital M mind, to capture this dimension of evolution, and it corresponds very much to life, okay, and now basic psychology is the science of mind, capital M, which is the set of this animal mental behavior, which evolves at a different dimension of complexification in exactly the same way life does, okay, and if that is true, if that’s valid, now you actually have a clear ontological reference for the base of psychology, animal mental evolution, and my dog walking away is a good example of the kind of behavioral patterns that I am interested in as a basic psychologist, okay, so that’s one thing that Utah says is the first thing we got to get is life to mind, okay, and mind is animal mental, the second line it draws is that my dog is not following this conversation, we can test them, okay, and the words that I am offering coming out through my face hole, okay, are being absorbed by the two of you in just a qualitatively different way than he would ever be able to absorb it, okay, he cannot participate on the person culture plane of existence because he does not have access to a language-acquisition device, and whatever capacity for intersubjective relating that affords us the capacity to download shared narratives, normative systems, nomenological systems, at the propositional network level and allow us to justify to each other what the hell we’re doing and why, okay, so that’s a whole other kind of mental process and it’s got its own evolutionary history, the evolution of culture, I am a particular way because the socialized networks of justification of me being born in 1970 in northern Virginia versus 5,000 years ago in Egypt or whatever, just a totally different network, okay, similar hominid structure, radically different, socially constructed structure, okay, so now you get the two big domains of mental process, ontological domains that the unified theory says you better separate if you’re going to be talking about behaviors and mental processes, all right, there’s the animal mental and culture person, one corresponds to basic psychology, the other is a totally different field, human psychology, okay, and the human psychologist concern from a scientific perspective of mapping human mental behavior, all right, okay, so I’ve given you the scientific frame that says psychology at the science ontological levels two things, it’s basic and human, all right, I argue that the field of psychology has got to be divided up into three different domains, basic psychology human and then how I started remember with the problem of psychotherapy, which is I’m like I’m a medical doctor, I’m not about describing, well a person comes into me, my task is not give me the most general nominthetic analytic description of this person that is justifiable through deductive reasoning, that is not what my task is as a psychological doctor, right, you just did that and all you did was some sort of not to be pejorative kind of a quasi-autistic just reporting of analytically this is what your behavior pattern should be a function of, it would be horrifying, right, okay, your task is to enter a unique individual context, a real who subjectively experience an enormous amount of distress, at least just a traditional psychotherapy relation, and figure out a way to reduce the dysfunction and distress and enhance a reversal, okay, toward more optimal functioning, more positive growth, more valued states of being, to the extent that you’re able to do that you’re a good psychological doctor, so the goals of psychological doctor are about moving stuff prescriptively, that’s your goal, not analytically describing stuff descriptively and because it has a fundamentally different goal and a different skill set and a different function, it’s got a totally different metric that needs to organize its identity, all right, I’ll pause there because now I need I needed that structure so I’ll just then say two fundamental concepts that are at the epicenter, I mentioned animal mental behavior, human mental behavior, what’s at the epicenter of professional psychology, psyche and well-being, I’ll pause there and see if that jives with folks, I mean I went a little long on that, I’m sorry. That’s fine, Craig, I’m keeping my mic off as much as possible right now so that was actually good because they’re doing renovations apparently above me without having given me any notice which I’m kind of upset about but nevertheless it was fine for me that you were taking a lot of time because I’m hoping they’ll end this particularly noisy patch, I wanted to ask maybe one thing which is there’s a similarity, so in the psychology of reasoning and this goes back to Baron, Jonathan Baron, he distinguishes between three kinds of theories, sort of a descriptive explanatory theory and then a normative theory, not in the statistical sense but in the way philosophers use the word normative which is okay here’s a behave, so here’s how people are actually making inferences and here’s the explanation of why they do it, here’s a theory of how they should do it which is your normative theory and then a prescriptive theory is the theory of how do I move people from here right from the descriptive explanatory theory to the normative state and so he makes a distinction between descriptive explanatory normative and prescriptive and so I’m wondering does that help, does that map on to what you’re doing in any way because that makes sort of that does that that taxonomy makes sort of an a priori sense to me, we have descriptive explanatory projects, we have normative projects in which we try to describe optimality or perfection or whatever however we’re giving normative standards and then we have a prescriptive theory which is a design theory for what kind of interventions will move people from this to this, love it, yeah and that’s absolutely let me just because I want to be move us along because I’m really that prescriptive idea shifts us very much inside the mindset of a psychological doctor okay so that’s psychological the task of the psychological doctor is to grab a hold of the proper descriptive explanatory normative relation and indeed I’ll actually just grab that and I’ll just say okay my formal descriptive explanatory good theory you’re going to have a I’ll just put it in folk psychological normative theory of the person in front of me okay so I’ll twist this around this isn’t exactly what it means but let me just play with it a little bit shift it slightly and then say hey the person in front of me is going to have a folk psychological theory of being in the world if I’m now in a psychological I have my refined descriptive explanatory theory of human mental behavior in general the intersection then is that I’m going to bring if I’m a good psychological doctor I’m going to bring that an interface with them okay and then that interface then requires my task is to afford that interface participatory interface in a way that sets a potential for us to leverage a prescription to a shared understanding that moves them toward and ought to be okay so that’s not exactly remapped but if I just twist it slightly it will map okay in that regard and that is what my task is psychological doctor background understanding wounded ideographic folk normative description shared understanding to prescripted outcome okay that’s essentially the dynamic that’s helpful I wonder if I can bounce back on that a bit sure because I was seeing I was sort of mapping it this way but I think it resonates I was saying like we ultimately want a descriptive explanatory theory of the psyche and then we have a normative theory of well-being because well-being is enormous right and then what we’re trying to do is like not only I’m trying to pick up on what you said not only bridge between those prescriptively but bridge between those ideographically like I’m right right and you can see a parallel in biological medicine right in which people are trying to complement the you know you have this do this and this which is a normal logical approach with a narrative approach which is yes but I need to involve the patient in their own healing I need to involve the patient in their own healing or they won’t heal as well right and and so you’ve got you’ve got you’ve got current attempts in human medicine to marry a normal logical and a narrative approach together and I think that I think that is a good analogy for what what you’re talking about is that fair totally and so now we can just add the other dimension which I was going to add so I’m really glad you put that so as a psychological doctor I’m I’m required and you’ll see this in the way I’m well-being to be committed to a normative frame as a psychological doctor okay I’ll give you a quick example about what what do you mean you’re committed to a normative frame okay somebody comes in and says hey doc Henry because you know I got a real problem here I’m anxious okay I’m trying to interact with people in a particular way and I get really anxious I say oh yeah what’s your problem now imagine these two paths hey I like to go to parties and hang out with people and I feel really anxious and I then run home okay my normative structure says oh that anxiety probably is dysfunctional it’d be good for you to be able to interact okay what if he said actually I really want to be a rapist okay and my anxiety prevents me from actually effectively luring women into my car and if you afford me the capacity to overcome that anxiety I’ll be more successful in my goal state and obviously that should create a little in your stomach right you’d be like oh my god I would of course never want somebody to overcome their anxiety to afford them that kind of behavior all right well what is the structure that affords me the justification for totally supporting one and totally not supporting the other okay a descriptive explanatory network no but a descriptive explanatory network that’s embedded in him for me a normative framework that then is interacting with their subjective folk normative framework and that’s what I so that’s where it made the twist and then I was going to come back and add that dimension right so that’s that’s great that’s a great example so let’s refer to it I think that’s very good so what that says to me right away is that our normative theory of well-being is not simply sort of efficient functioning or something like that because you know we’re not enabling that we’re not a lot we don’t take a purely utilitarian in the mechanical sense not in the ethical sense attitude towards this person’s like well they want to go to goal x my job is to get them to goal x right and to to sort of lubricate the psychological machinery so they can get that’s an insufficient account of well-being that’s what that example immediately says to me exactly and that therefore and this is one of the great problems of the field is that actually then you have a professional identification that actually requires you to commit to some kind of normative field okay but what justifies that what normative field are you actually going to now how do you ground a particular justificatory framework on a normative field that relates to both values and functioning in any way that’s coherent especially when you interact with the descriptive explanatory problems that we were talking about you can’t even get the ground of what you’re talking about clear and now you have to get the ground of what you’re talking about also anchored to some kind of normative by virtue of the fact that your task is to move people in certain value directions so you’re a prescriptive system you can’t do that with just descriptive explanatory stuff is completely inert to tell you which way you want to move a system so one more thing then and i really hope gary will say something soon which is so this leads and and notice i had to i had to do something a few minutes ago this leads to the normative normative equivocation in psych in psychology where we go from the original meaning in philosophy normative meaning a theory of how you ought to behave what should be the case to normative means oh on a gaussian distribution what is the most prevalent tendency and that’s what we mean by normative and and so what we do is oh and we just those are somehow equivalent which is normative means a sort of statistically normal and that’s the standard that we’re holding ourselves to and then how do we measure statistical normality well how well people participate in you know post-industrial capitalism and leaving aside the possibility that like we talked last time that this might be a very you know decadent you know dysfunctional social organization and fitting into it well may not be a marker by some other normative theory but this nor and you know my whole career i have to i you know every third lecture i have to say i’m not i’m not using i’m using normative the way i think it should be used notice the pun right and not just mean the you know the the statistical mean i don’t mean normal by normative i mean excellent by normative i don’t mean normal i mean excellent and why normal becomes excellent is a big big problem and so i think the normative normative equivocation is something that we need to start we have to explicitly call out and say well notice that greg is not it where i don’t think he is i don’t think he’s just defaulting what do what would the average person do in this right i don’t think that’s what greg is doing definitely not what i’m after yeah so the thing is what is greg doing and presumably that model i mean greg is and this is a compliment greg is an Aristotelian perhaps of neoplateness but i’m not quite sure if i’m pulling me they’re pulling me down certainly blending half so but greg’s model would be something like this kind of standard Aristotelian argument good is good for x and what’s the good what’s the x and good for x for our normative theories in the way i’m using it good for human well-being right that’s the normative standard and part of the argument is it is not good for well-being for human beings to behave immorally right that’s a standard Aristotelian argument about virtue and so i’m just trying to say how your normative theory and your theory of well-being are intimately and deeply connected so if greg is right and psychology has no good coherent theory of well-being it can’t possibly provide a justification for any normative structure and it hides behind the normative normative equivocation to paper over the fact that it can’t actually justify the normative theory that it must rely on that’s how i would put it how does that land for you greg oh it lands brilliantly uh one thing i’ll say is if it hasn’t been clear the extent to which the basic animal mental psychology as a task and the human psychology scientists as a task are committing to certain normative implications and all of that is a very interesting one okay what i and whether they have zero which i don’t think or at least have one dimension and maybe the basic has one kind and the human has another that’s actually what i believe okay but what i’ll still say is there’s a whole another layer of normative commitment to the psychological doctor okay so psychological when the psychological doctor is given the task like your function of being in the world is to make prescriptive change you are then committing yourself to not only operating in the backdrop of a normative structure like i want to be an ethical scientist but you are actually saying every action that i’m engaged in here is designed to orient toward a valued state of being that’s why i’m here and so it’s entirely clouded or formed by and then what happens is exactly right they’ll equivocate on normative and normal distribution now often they’ll equivocate on normative as the subjective experience of being oh you tell me that this is right that’s right okay you know that’s what they’ll do too uh because they’re trying to make sure we’re not oppressing from who am i to say with a power-based structure so the emphasis is there on power-based issues so they grant enormous normative legitimacy to the subject which believe me i’m not denying but that’s a whole nother line that’s why i use the rapist example it’s like hey that’s good for me it’s like uh no that is no way are we going to subscribe to a particular normative structure effectively as psychological doctors if that’s going to be the simple ground that we’re going to try to do it it’s just completely unworkable that way So maybe this is an appropriate moment for me to jump in actually i’ve been thinking i’ve been really thinking about um the story you offered Greg the the way it all started for you with the problem of psychotherapy which then led you into the problem of psychology which then led you to explore and articulate the enlightenment gap and everything that it entailed I guess I’m wondering if you could flesh out a little bit the connection between the enlightenment gap and the problem of normativity as we’re talking about it because right now what seems to be center stage is the question of what is normativity in the axiological sense to begin with how can we define it where can we locate it where is it where is it not and the sense that i’ve gotten so far is that if we sort of follow along the the the story that you told us right the the enlightenment gap and how it became deeply problematic and in the ways that it sort of mess us up messed us up or let us astray let’s say epistemologically and methodologically with respect to studying the mind as a part of nature rather than as a part from nature how how exactly did the enlightenment gap make it difficult to stay in touch with or to define or to articulate normativity as such could we spend a little time on that sure connecting those bits right uh i just want to make a bit of a joke here you know i have this video series that takes like 50 hours to tackle that and i’m going to be talking about it in a minute but i’m going to be you know i have this video series that takes like 50 hours to tackle that problem obviously right there’s a thing called a meaning crisis if we can axiologically ground our experience in meaning and proper recursive relevance realization we’d be able to address that problem and launch it into another enlightenment right um so yeah uh i mean the bottom line is that the the there’s a fundamental failure of a synthetic philosophy around the enlightenment and we’re epistemologically captured by physics matter in motion in a particular kind of way that’s one way of saying in other words like oh my god the knowledge systems that we grant with newton and the mathematical mapping of matter in motion and the power of that okay this is a ken wilbur argument the power of that then creates an imbalance in our philosophical grounding okay we we can now see that we have deductive analytic logic in a particular way that stands up to epistemological rigor and and affords a kind of justification about gravity or whatever we want to say and our axiological standing is is i think in comparison felt weakened deeply okay like and then and the institutions begin to emerge to become much more pragmatic instrumental and grounded in descriptive explanatory knowledge and then the axiological stuff of value you know it’s like well whatever okay like so that now i mean it used to be that you know character education built on kinds of things in northern europe and whatnot but it’s like okay our goal is to teach you how to be a good person okay well now we lost that i mean we this thing got obliterated in many ways and there are lots of different reasons i would certainly say that my diagnosis of the enlightenment gap focuses on a couple elements the nature of knowledge what science is and subjective social knowledge you can place axiological or value-based or normative confusions very clearly in relationship to that as part of the fuzz okay and the other thing i’ll say is is that my beginning in psychotherapy okay and my deep concern about humanistic being okay situated myself to be actually axiologically grounded prior really to my analytic explorations what do i mean by that yeah you know it’s like i’m i i am at one point i was like jesus if the unified theory was true but disastrous in the way it impacted people i would shut the hell up okay i’ll throw it in the trash can in other words i there are certain kinds of axiological commitments that intersect with my epistemic truth commitments okay and ultimately i then ground the unified theory in an axiological set of commitments okay in fact i have an ultimate justification which is b that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity okay so what that does is it creates a and indeed this is my normative problem as a psychological doctor what are the backdrop value structures axiological commitments that will afford me the capacity to be in this world and feel value-based normatively in the in the philosophical sense justified that i’m optimally organized and in an interstitial sense those three actually i see in sort of a pyramidal sense i like a eudaimonic ultimate endpoint which serves as a value-based lodestar with regards to reflects back to my imaginal double divine double and ask me questions about whether or not i am being in the world actually relative to i might be ideally in relationship to value considerations in the short and long term so and i believe that we have to have philosophical systems that engender those kinds of considerations kerry could i respond to your question too so just complement what craig said this is amazing yeah so so for me uh the the the the pivotal figure of the enlightenment the guy who wrote the essay what is enlightenment is conch um and conch represents of the way its particular history unfolded uh the late middle ages so right and normal and the rise of nominalism and the flattening of the ontology um with scottis and occam and and the pure nature of philosophers etc um again more more in detail in awakening for the meeting place but the point i want to make is um and this is this is a point that habermas makes too what happened is uh we got the idea of the autonomy of reason and what that did was that uh it broke a structure apart we used to have the three transcendental three transcendentals the true the good and the beautiful and they were thought to be completely interpenetrating interdefining interreliant interaffordant and that they were transcendentals because they they applied to being per se not to anything and what that meant was there was an inherent normative structure to being and then what you did was you figured out what kind of being you were and then how those transcendentals became instantiated and what it is to be a human being or what is it to be an angelic being or what is it to be a horse being etc etc and so with caunt and the nominalism and the autonomy of reason you the transcendentals break apart and you have the you have these autonomous normative zones you have the true and the good and the beautiful and they’re all autonomous from each other which initially was thought to be very liberating and it is in some sense but what it meant is all the interconnections between them broke down right so there’s no relation between being true and being good and being beautiful and you have caunt three critiques right that and he doesn’t he doesn’t write the fourth critique which is how do the three critiques go together how does it critique a pure reason a practical judgment right etc right so he he gives us ethics and he gives us epistemology and he gives us aesthetics but no in the contian framework and this is Habermas’s point they can’t possibly integrate right now what we’ve come to see I would say and the postmodern critique has done a lot of this but also phenomenology has done a lot of and a lot of work actually going on right now is that they the autonomy of those has been completely undermined we know as Greg said we no longer think that reason is completely autonomous and can sort of float transcendentally above everything and look you know so we are in a place where officially science grew up within that right that those three autonomous and incommensurable spheres of normativity what’s happening right now is the real possibility of interconnecting them together and interconnecting them with a rich model of being I see that’s what Greg is trying to do by the way a rich enriched model of being an enriched account of how the transcendentals do interpenetrate and rely on each other I think my work on relevance realization is about exactly that by the way I agree and then how that plugs into a richer model of being so I think that’s what the enlightenment the enlightenment basically fractures fragments normativity leaves it uses Greg’s word unsynthesized and also like leaves it disconnected from an account of being because being was thought to just be an it becomes just an empty term right it doesn’t stand for anything so that’s how I would answer that as quickly as possible yeah so I’ll just then synthesize that so be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity was my backdrop now that connects to the three transcendentals and in fact I’ll just share my screen real fast oh if you John if you could let me share my screen just for a second and I’m going to show you just a picture of the seed so in the garden there’s there’s a all these symbolism all right and the seed underneath the tree is it’s part of the garden and so the the thing called the to a seed is right here okay and there are three core symbols here there’s this thing which I’m not going to talk about there’s this thing and then there’s this which is a mitochond what it symbolizes is a mitochondrial energy production system okay and the big w is wisdom okay and then when I say b notice b which now is going to pull together dignity well-being integrity that’s the d wbi that’s what that means and the d I argue aligns with aesthetics because actually dignity fundamentally is about valuing and it’s about elevating value in a particular way well-being aligns with goodness that’s what the g stands for and integrity aligns with truth okay so in relation and ultimately then the wisdom is the u-diamonic endpoint that is synthesizing the transcendentals of which I then interpret through dignity well-being and integrity but argue that that’s one kind of pluralistic view that’s a coherent integrated pluralism I’m seeing the transcendals here’s how I’m aspectualizing them through my particular journey as a psychotherapist into a psychological theorist into a particular kind of human on the planet at this time there will be lots of different ways in which you might do that but my point basically is there is a tight knit connection here between and by the way well and well-being actually then what we’re trying to get to here the concept of that and what we’re trying to map in relation then connects so we’re trying to map it descriptively but it’s also that embedded in a fundamental normative framework that grounds the entire well-beingness of there are bees in the garden the bees in the garden express the bees of sophia and the bees of phrenesis which express the particular how do we know about wisdom and how do we embody wisdom in particular ways yeah I want to reply to that too because I think that’s great so the term that I think points most to the longing for the resynthesis of the three trends and dentals is meaning because you need meaning for truth you need meaning for goodness you need meaning for beauty and beauty is a particular way in which things are meaningful goodness is a particular way in which things are meaningful truthfulness is a particular way and and you know the collapse of the the value fact distinction and what I would turn that w upside down john and then it becomes an m and then it’s meaning yes and so so gary something that I think you would resonate with is that the work of marlo ponti on this and embodiment and all the work in 4e cognitive science about meaning and how it it is actually right what we do not find these things autonomously separated and incommensurable within our meaningfully structured experience we find the true the good and the beautiful completely deeply interpenetrating many people are acknowledging at least the phenomenological perspicaciousness of the ancient view well yes in our phenomenology they are deeply interpenetrated but then they’ll sort of cough but enlightenment robot but it’s like wait wait like all of your theories this is marlo ponti’s point they ultimately all ground down in your phenomenologically meaningfully structured experience your theory can’t get to the place where it says oh and by the way all that down there that that interest that interpenetration of the true the good and the beautiful that’s all an illusion because everything you build from it and everything that is everything is grounded in it that’s part of the deeper critique and I I I thought if I connected it directly to phenomenology you can see the point that I’m trying to make the way our experience is meaningful is not a purely epistemic or I would say propositional thing it’s not a purely aesthetic thing it’s not a purely moral thing it is a chiasm of all of them that’s one of the great arguments made by marlo ponti could I could I extend that a little bit actually and make two points there one of the points is that um I guess when we’re talking about developing descriptive explanatory theories of whatever it is that we’re trying to talk about um there’s a methodological point here about what it is that we even can mean by description and one of the great contributions in my understanding of the phenomenologists is precisely in their definition of description what what’s meant by description so um let me give you an example uh and and maybe the audience will enjoy this as well let’s say a friend comes to you and tells you that they saw a ghost the night before at a graveyard you look at them and obviously or most likely let’s let’s just assume here you’ll uh whatever they said to you whatever they shared with you will come it will it’ll be at odds with your ontological and epistemological commitments that ghosts are supernatural entities and as a good old-fashioned scientist naturalistically minded person you don’t believe in such things it doesn’t quite fit into the naturalistic worldview or maybe you’re not even a scientist maybe you’re just you know a lay person who doesn’t really believe in things that he doesn’t see and so it even uh comes at odds with your common sense assumptions so from those two perspectives right the common sense attitude let’s say or the naturalistic attitude whatever your friend said doesn’t really make sense and therefore there’s hardly any real meaning to be found in what they’re saying however this is what the phenomenologists would say that there’s a different kind of attitude you could adopt with respect to what the uh what the friend is saying you could take your ontological metaphysical epistemological assumptions and you can suspend them temporarily you could bracket them and then you could try to see what it might be like to be having the type of experience right regardless of its ontological and epistemic validity of encountering a ghost and then very quickly you might realize you will realize that there is a lot of meaning to be found there to encounter a ghost is to be petrified right it’s to be encountering something that leaves you in fear in fright you you imagine an elevated heart rate immediately right fingertips and palms getting sweaty and your your body freezing your lungs stopping and you wanting to run away there’s a lot of meaning there to be found right that’s that has much more to do with your manner of relationship to the world or some worldly aspects that can’t be captured or even accessed if the attitude that you’re inhabiting to begin with and exclusively so is that the natural scientific attitude and so what the phenomenologists meant by description is look at experience as it shows up while suspending your ontological and epistemic assumptions and validities right forgetting about the question of whether or not it’s really true what’s happening or whether or not what what you’re seeing really exists and just see what what it says about your manner of relationship to the world and then you get access to all sorts of different meanings that you otherwise didn’t and if you do that this is the last point I wanted to make about normativity to bring it back to that if you describe experience in the phenomenological sense as it shows up while suspending or bracketing your your scientific prejudices let’s say then what you come to also very quickly realize is that normativity is not the the thing to be inferred it’s the ground from which you infer even things like object of truth so then there really is the problem of normativity gets redefined if you take that turn because you’re no longer trying to explain it objective but anyway yeah I’ll stop there yeah well I wonder what you think that’s a great example I mean uh you know you get that you get the discovery of the category of the numinous and then and then what you might do um is you might say well maybe I need to I need to make space in my ontology it doesn’t mean I I I don’t just say oh there’s ghosts but I might need to make room in my ontology for the numinous that maybe there are genuinely mysterious aspects of existence that supersede my capacities for conception or experience and that nevertheless I can somehow enter into a relationship with them and then they can have deeply transformative me yep and you get and so what you get is what I call a reciprocal reconstruction rather than a simple reduction you get you so you you move out of the naturalism you go into the phenomenological you enrich the the the the grounding meaning and normativity and meaning is a normative and descriptive term at the same time so is rational by the way right and then and then you reciprocally reconstruct your ontology in order not necessarily to agree because that’s not what this is about but in order to enter into right relationship with the phenomenology that has been disclosed by a I thou relationship to the other person and I so that’s why I keep talking about reciprocal reconstruction rather than reduction that’s exactly what I mean you do so much richness here and so I’m going to make a couple of comments and then build off them so one thing that I try to frame you talk as is an endo naturalistic approach so let me drop into science real fast and then I’m going to drop into an onto epistemological set of commitments and remember when I started with big history it’s an endo natural approach that gets the map of big history right so I’m going to take the physics and biology science ontology epistemology on its own terms say they don’t get it right fix it so that we can get to us as humans in the world with a proper realization of say complexification emergence not as just a single threshold thing but as thresholds within a dimension and then jumping between dimensions and delineating these complexity building feedback loops called joint points and if you don’t have that you’re going to get a bad natural science and they’re bad because they don’t understand metaphysics and ontology really well and so they just throw labels on shit and then we get confused because of the matter so there’s that and you talk then endo naturally then fixes that it’s under it’s agnostic in terms of its ultimate claims it’s not foundationalist in a cycle in a I’m technically foundational so I don’t know what the hell’s going on in the world I know what science tells me that’s pretty and I’ll drop my science hat on I’ll make certain claims and ghosts when I’m in that particular frame of reference yep I know I’m gonna make certain ontological commitments but I’m agnostic and so is there an exonatural frame hey I’m agnostic about that but now let me bring it back to the clinic room okay remember I said all good therapy for me begins with Rogers what does Rogers begin with unlike the behaviors and unlike the psychoanalyst Rogers begins with phenomenology Rogers begins what I’m going to call the psyche here okay which is the unique ideographic experiential meaning-making system of that particular person in the world so the psyche for me then refers to the unique particular epistemic organizing observing function okay and my task I mean could you imagine a therapist I would be like oh my god I was out there my friends we saw this this light I’m sure it was a ghost and this is blah blah blah actually the science is pretty clear you obviously have just misconstrued completely your experiences and let me tell you analytically what’s going on you would be I mean if I were supervising somebody that did that immediately it would be oh my god you don’t know how to you don’t know what you’re doing as a psychologist what am I doing I am entering the phenomenology of being across the psychic functions of core organismic valuing process which is the epistemic function of the individual at its ground or from where you’re framing it for humanistic and then understanding the systems justifying to me and worried about its public or social self and the contingencies of judgment and the organization of that from a humanistic perspective is absolutely central so therapeutically the foundational task is not those kinds of concerns but fundamentally to enter into the phenomenology of the other you have to do that to do good therapy so that in terms of the whole process by which we absolutely need different kinds of onto epistemological frames for different kinds of tasks and the task of the psychotherapist okay to me the task of the psychotherapist is actually to relate to the psyche the scientist can’t even can see the psyche the scientist sees human mental behavior okay so the one way to frame it the scientist sees human mental behavior and then it’s like well whatever about that that’s tricky because the language game limitations epistemological limitations of the third person modern empirical natural science enterprise is almost by definition blind to the unique ideographic qualitative experience of being from the first person that’s essentially to get rid of primary secondary get rid of secondary whatever okay that’s a to get rid of it too far look at what watson did that’s a that’s a talk about twisted but it is tricky to bring it back in okay what i am arguing is that actually the scientific language game commits you to basic animal mental behavior which you can then study as fundamental behavioral investments you can understand the neurocognitive functional system as a recursive relevance realization and the environment is selecting in a skinnerian sort of way and you can yoke those together with the concept of mental behavior it’s an inside outside hierarchically arranged stack of selection variation and retention okay that affords the capacity of building behavior of rocketeers you have to ignore yeah go ahead could i could i clarify it’s a clarification question it sounds like at least from the uh for e-cogsci literature this sounds akin to what neurophenomenology tries to do it tries to dialogue right the third person and first person perspectives together and to converge right um somewhere in the middle from from two opposing angles almost and for the phenomenologists that nexus point is embodiment it’s embodiment that presents itself right as phenomenon on the one hand as an objective physiological phenomenon while on the other hand as a subjectively lived phenomenon um and i guess i’m not a party that’s that’s the main argument uh-huh uh-huh yeah totally we are bodies among bodies but we are also a lived body that is only that is me and those that’s evan’s the body body problem that’s the issue yeah but i just wanted to say for me a place where i’m trying to do exactly what gary just said and and greg and i have been in ongoing discussion about this is the whole idea of relevance realization there’s like within the project of being a mechanistically functioning intelligent being you have to do relevance realization but relevance realization generates qualia of experience that you i think provide a good account of what meaning in life is and therefore it helps to bridge between the mechanistic and the existential i think in a coherent fashion and gary and i have taken that up too in the paper we’ve published and so i’m not saying this is the only theory i’m pleased that’s what i’m saying it’s an exam and relevance realization is deeply dependent on autopoiesis on embodiment in order uh in order to perform its explanatory roles that’s epistemically and ontologically in order to function the way it does um so and that’s what and when notice notice you never pursue the truth you pursue the relevant truth there is no place even in the guts of your science where you are i am just in relationship to the truth i’m not saying truth and relevance are identical i think that’s a mistake of of that james made in pragmatism because we use the two to correct each other but they’re interpenetrating and they’re interdependent and so for me that’s exactly the i’m trying to say that’s exact i’m trying to say this is a specific instance of a theory that’s generated in exactly the way gary is talking about that’s exactly oh and i constantly i’m trying to do that i’m and greg is constantly helping me to try to do i’m constantly trying to bridge between the phenomenological and right the naturalistic and do that reciprocal reconstruction relevance realization theory is an example of exactly that it’s like no no this is your functionality as an information processor and this is your sense of connectedness to the world that gives you meaning in life and they are just two sides of the same thing and and what happened to me just in a parallel world is because i situated myself in the problem of psychotherapy both as a therapist and humanistically relating to a phenomenological psyche in front of me in the unique ideographic real the entire project was to build look out at science and ask whether or not there’s a framework that’s up to the task okay to do justice to this given okay this is so this is a given that this is real okay if this isn’t real nothing is this is more real than science because this is the embodiment of being itself in relation my epistemic ontic is awareness itself and that will always have to be part of whatever ontological structure the fundamental question though is can natural science afford us in its own language game a system of understanding that’s actually up to the task to bring this is what john does i mean john then you know me behavioral investment theory the influence matrix and justification systems afford a meta-theoretical structure that feels up to the task i can see myself as an investing agent trying to influence my relational value around competition cooperation and then i’m a justifying human being that learning to legitimize those constructs do justice to me from a descriptive causal explanatory network when you film this and you record it and you say what’s greg doing well he’s investing he’s influencing and he’s justified i can use that and then i can use that to track my psyche okay my psyche is much more than that from its own embodiment but we’re have science in proper relation and recursive relevance realization when i find that that tightened the grip the neuro-phenomenological grip with a level of depth and precision well that’s why i love john so like oh my god i can now take all that and stitch it together with a level of precision that now brings those things as two sides of a coin okay together in a way that is just absolutely brilliant and beautiful i liked the noise greg that was wonderful i’m stitching recursive relevance realization across the hierarchy in relation to you guys and then finding coherence and intelligibility john thank you greg gary i interrupted you but i wanted to put that in as a as a specific example of exactly the neuro-phenomenology approach and i i anticipate that we’ll get there right into relevance realization later on in the series and the only part that i was wanting to sort of extend that into was that the reason why this phenomenological solution even came up as a solution was in response to a different kind of problem and i’m not sure how you see that fit in the current discussion and i just want to share it and see what you think but the way hustl talks about it and merlot ponte takes it up as well and um actually uh yoke panksa also talks about it in the introduction of his his book affective neuroscientists right over there in the corner i know them book well uh so you’re you’re familiar with the problematic then that um right there’s this paradox where he and evan thompson talks about this this is like this sorry not just thompson but also varela thompson roach in the original publication yeah yeah the embodied mind yeah where um you know here i am i awaken to a world that seems to be already there prior to my being aware of it and yet every attempt to describe or understand the world necessarily and eventually leads back to my own self as observer there’s a sense in which i’m simultaneously part of the world i emerge from the world if we take the third personal perspective like the big history point of view right that we were talking about well at the same time the world as i experience it i constitute right i bring forth through my manners of being in it that are culturally mediated etc etc but nevertheless there’s a kind of kind of enactment or constitution taking place and so what comes first the chicken or the egg the world or the self and so um i i suppose the way the heidegger that’s marlo ponti and heidegger the answer is you’re looking in the wrong place if you’re looking at the self of the world you have to look for what real relation what grounds the possibility of a relationship between the self and the world being what the self and the world share our being and we are a particular kind of self in which our being is in question to us and that gives us a particular access right and then marlo ponti takes that and says okay but uh what you know uh what’s the locus of that and he calls it the de-hiscence of the body right that the body the body we live that the body is both because i’m a body there is no mystery in how i can know bodies that gives me access to the bodies in the world but i am also right that’s whenever i’m touching i’m being touched right i’m also right i’m also i’m also making meaning for me out of that encounter and so for me right um i take i don’t think that hustler will solve that problem but i think marlo ponti and heidegger did and for me that’s exactly the transjectivity that i keep talking about that what we we have to put into our ontology not only the subjective and the objective but being and body which are both transjective entities and the grounding entities for all both both self and world right in sense emerge out of being and subjective and objective experience uh emerge out of the body now getting the relationship between the body and being right yeah yeah that’s that that’s that’s that’s greg’s work right exactly uh and so i know we’re gonna wrap up here uh you know and we did not we may have to get another uh episode guys this is great but you know i don’t know i answered psyche and well-being but i’ll say this uh and we can sort of jump off this so in utah utah gives you can learn the utah language it’s tree coining garden okay the tree of knowledge that’s our new map of big history we take the natural science view of behavior and then contextualize individuals as epistemic knowers inside that behavior from a third person nominthetic generalizable view okay that’s in the tree of knowledge and grances there’s a thing called the coin okay the coin is your human identity function in the world i.e. your psyche okay and it represents the architecture of each of our embodiment in an identification process as an observer embedded participatory perspectively in the world phenomenologically that’s your core and it’s ideographic psychic and the relationship then between a natural science behavioral third person generalizable and the ideographic personal is framed by tree and coin and then ultimately an axiological collective structure that’s grounded in where we ought to be is then framed by the garden okay and so the the the task i think of all of these effectively structured enlightenment 2.0 or whatever new axial age frames is going to come back and afford certain kinds of resolutions to the enlightenment gap that stitch together the fracture that conch engendered and ultimately that’s what we’re trying to do i think fundamentally here when we get to psyche and well-being quickly in the next one that’ll jump the mental disorder if we have time or whatever we’ll figure out their structure that’s a great for me i’m really glad we got into a lot of backdrop because it sets up what i think it will become a pretty clear argument when we get to behavior psyche what well-being is and then mental illness and the structure of that that we might be able to you know work in a much richer way than is currently being worked by any systems yeah and uh i i think one final thing in response to gary then i want to hear what gary wanted wants to say um i’m sorry greg just said a bunch of really cool stuff but i’m trying to just stick to this one point because we’re running out of time um you know the self world you know the chicken and egg problem we know that the the standard answers right the self is first idealism in some fashion right uh the world is first physicalism in some fashion they’re both first dualism they’re all bankrupt to my mind and that’s where i think husrull gets that right you see that in the crisis you see that in marlo ponti he keeps rejecting both of them he rejects all three of those sorry uh all three not both he keeps rejecting all three of them consistently same thing with heidegger and that’s what i think what i think that’s exactly the game our ontology has to play what i now i’m not claiming to have fully resolved the problem you’ve posed gary i think that would be pretentious i don’t think greg is doing that either but what i’m saying is i know that i built the theory of relevance realization within that frame within that language game of i’m not going to go i’m not this isn’t going to lead to idealism it’s not going to lead to it’s not going to at least go for reductive physicalism whatever that’s supposed to mean and it’s definitely not going to be dualistic that’s what right and and for me relevance realization requires an additional ontological dimension of commitment which is the transjective as right the grounding relation and affording ground of subjectivity and objectivity beautiful and i do think that object-oriented ontology is trying to say there’s transjectivity between things not only between people and things and i think that was its crystal crystalline insight i think there’s something deeply right about that that sounds very intriguing i don’t know what that means i want to know what that means so let’s talk about it at some point yeah yeah i know we got to bring ourselves to a wrap i think you have a heart so uh what i’ll say i actually i’m gonna go a little further you john i think that we’re actually for me at least okay i think that we’re well when i say unified i basically think that there are the edges of the box or the puzzle pieces you know your kid you dump out all the physical get the edge pieces yeah i think we’re looking at the edge pieces in relationship to this issue that can actually hold a metaphysical ontological metatheoretical structure that is actually up to the task of doing that and do it in a way that is pretty revolutionary so yeah i would agree i think there are i think there are good reasons to be optimistic for being able to uh make a plausible account for well i’m dispositionally grandiose john so people should take that with that backdrop i think i think we can really improve on and on the morass that the enlightenment uh put us in and i definitely think we can deal we could we’ve got i think we have answers that should be taken seriously to the problem of psychology to the reconstruction of our ontology the reciprocal reconstruction and i think to the chicken and egg problem of the self in the world i do think that that is very much um the why i say that is to my mind i think gary would agree with me these are these are central questions within four e cognitive science this is not something that’s just being done um you know by sort of fringe intellectuals or something like that this these are the key issues and i think it’s i think a very reasonable appraisal of not only my project and greg’s project but everybody engaged in that project is we’re making really good progress and we’re saying things and disclosing things that were not possibly said or disclosed before and so for me i’m optimistic in that way lovely all right so we pick up this conversation gary you want to summarize and we’ll yeah anything you want to say gary hey yeah i mean last time i i i threw this question in like where is normativity where do where do we find it i guess now i’m um what’s the question i’m left with i suppose we took a detour from the original question which was about problematizing and setting up the parameters around the question of normativity and we went into the historical philosophical theoretical questions about what happened to what happened to our world view at the level of ontology back during the enlightenment that led to this rupturing that we now looking back at it in hindsight that’s what the first episode was sort of pointing out all the different problems that we now face um right when trying to understand normativity psychological normativity and so i guess we could link this episode with that one together in the following way that right we sort of went backwards today yeah this was part of the philosophical historical backdrop of why those problems the problem of equivocation etc etc are are now there and so um the the questions that i’m seeing now are in order to work our way through to solving the puzzle of normativity we have to spend some time discussing the the ontological and epistemological issues that we started discussing today and fleshing out um and what i also see as important is phenomenology uh sort of non-reductionist stance whereby you reject both sorry not both all three positions of dualism idealism physicalism but look for some sort of other way and that’s where transjectivity comes in as that plausible or tenable other way um and then to keep following that path to see where it takes us with respect to the problem of normativity and one more point sorry one more point instead of maybe this is like a kind of heideggerian point to make but when we think about normativity we think think about a thing or maybe there’s that sort of implicit prejudice there that we’re trying to locate something that’s static something that is definite or definitive but maybe that’s a wrong way of looking at it and maybe and i’m literally drawing from my experience in in clinical practice so far that the normativity that i’ve been in touch with i’ve connected to by way of a certain kind of process or certain sets of processes and so thinking about what it might be like to think of normativity as a process rather than as a kind of product what might that do to our conceptions of it or intuitions about it that’s all super yeah that’s plato’s problem right plato’s problem is normativity has to be beyond us so we don’t properly know it but if it’s not within us at all then we possibly can’t possibly we can’t possibly be touched or called by it so somehow it’s in us and beyond us and i think that is something that i’m going to exist in a transective space john yeah and that yeah exactly and that there’s something inherently aspirational about both normativity and reason this is where my thinking is right now so i would very much like to go to that topic yes okay so i’m gonna i’m gonna draw this to a close yeah this has been amazing we’re already really digging deep and we i i suspect we will dig deeper and into richer richer ore so thank you very much my friends all right take care