Psyche-pathology and well-being 3 (WFeJSFr9F74)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WFeJSFr9F74

Welcome everyone to the cognitive science show. This is episode three of psyche pathology and well-being. You’ll know if you’ve been following the series so far why we’re calling it psyche, but that will instead of psychopathology and that will become even more disclosed. I’m here again with my good friends Gary and Greg and Greg is going to take the lead today. He’s going to give us a bit of a summary from the second episode and then we’ll go into the argument of the third episode. So take it away, Greg. Wonderful. So actually last episode I really enjoyed. We ended up doing a lot of under laboring that’s right bash garter for the philosophical problematizing and then restructuring to be clear about what kinds of issues we’re facing. Okay. So last time we really got into, I was claiming that psychology, starting with John’s point about hey the problem of what do we mean by mind, that all that rainbow of reference as it were. And then I was arguing that you talk fundamentally is about that. And then we were also arguing about the whole problem of normativity and descriptive, and we meant that both there’s a philosophical refined definition of normativity and descriptive and descriptive and causal explanatory. There’s also then psychology sort of punts on it and just says oh what’s normal typical, and then what breaks down from that, but that’s certainly not sufficient. We dialogue about those kinds of issues and set the stage then for what I’m hoping we can achieve in this is a clear descriptive language system, what I would call a descriptive metaphysical system that clarifies the ontology of our concerns, and then does so in a way that’s up to the task of psychotherapy. Okay, that’s also grounded in the science of psychology, because if we’re going to do psyche and well being and disorder. We’re in this field, and my point that we got to last time is actually if we’re going to be in this field of health promotion, where our fundamental task is prescribing what ought to be relative to what, unfortunately, is IE people are suffering in the dysfunctional. And I’m going to position myself in a way that minimizes suffering and increases functionality. I have to know what that is an in deep normative sense, and I have to be aligned with that in a particular kind of way. And that’s a very, very tricky problem for sort of epistemological justification in this day and age, I would argue. So, that’s a that’s a kind of summary anybody want to pick up on anything that you recall from last time that would be perhaps useful to just tell that that put us into sort of the deep fissures within modernity, you know the is odd and the fissures between the normativities, what’s true what’s good and beautiful. And that any model of human well being has to somehow deal with the fact that we have to, we have to cross the gap between causes and reasons in some fashion. And I was proposing that meaning and related terms like relevance realization actually sit below the is ought gap in a fundamental way. Stitches are transjected together. Yes, exactly. And that, and then I remember Gary, like really wanting to open that up phenomenologically and explore that and that’s what I wanted to add in. Gary, what would you like to add. Yeah, and just to situate that back into the broader problem problem or historical problem formulation of how the problems of normativity and all these things that we’ve been talking about might have like a very strong link to the historical situation, out of which the mind body problem itself arose so in some sense this might be a kind of version of the mind body problem that we’re trying to tackle. Yes, it might be a frame it as well. Oh, that’s a beautiful way to frame it. You know, my, you know, my placeholder for the enlightenment gap is this intersection between mind body sort of metaphysics ontology and epistemological knowing, coupled to epistemological justification of science as it emerges as a modern empirical science at least, and then what is that in relationship to subjective and social knowledge that’s our modernist versus postmodern problem, and the inability to synthesize that with coherent intelligibility explodes into us chaotic fragmented pluralism that is a current meeting crisis, and if somebody could stitch it together, John, we might. Maybe I’ll put a video series or something. Somebody could like right away from this crisis. That’s impossible. I don’t know. You guys go do a Google search on it and see if you buy. All right, so that’s that to me so yeah so I think they’re completely in it is subjective social and science knowledge over here at sort of epistemological, and then the ontology of mind matter over here. We get into issues of well being psychotherapy. What the hell are we talking about in relationship to it’s a tangled mass, we’re going to have a lot of confusion. Just want just to add one more thing about Gary’s point that I wanted to make explicit, which I didn’t last time was this sort of mind but and you see this classically in Descartes, the mind body problem is also an identity problem for the individual, and it’s also the problem of other minds. Right. And so it’s, we have to think of the fragmentation isn’t just sort of a mind body, which is enough to become a fragmentation, but it’s also your inability to have a coherent identity is seriously undermined, and then your ability to pick up on other minds is also deeply problematized by this framework and all of that undermines any, any stable framework of intelligibility from which you could justify your psychotherapeutic practices. Totally. Exactly. And you talk fundamentally is then situated to address that problem, afford a descriptive metaphysics and ontology that clarifies, and then a meta the clarifies descriptively the phenomena, and then meta theoretically stitches together causal explanatory frameworks. And now that it’s merged with rather cursive relevance realization, especially a meta theory of cognition. You know, that affords that. So that’s the that’s the setup, let me then talk about so. After I built the unified theory, which basically says hey, if you take this tree of knowledge system gives you descriptive metaphysics, and then behavioral investment theory, which is a meta theory that allows us to go from living organisms into mental animals and basically says the nervous system evolves as a path recognition of behavioral investment for the whole, which now I can specify is actually recursive relevance realization structure to find that path. Okay. And then we get so we get an animal that’s moving around in a complex active body in a sensory motor looping system. So, the animal moves in our lineage at least up through the vertebrates into the mammals. Okay. And I will argue that it’s going then from valence qualia into a global neuronal workspace that is actually stimulating behavioral investments across the path and gives rise to the inner mind’s eye that we can then pretty well document empirically. Then you evolve that into a primate system that has much more self other agent arena implications and our hominid primate system infuses our attachment structures like in parent, our competitive dominant structures and our cooperative structures in an influence matrix arena that tracks with participatory delicacy, the self other processes of engagement. Okay, and then affords a self other we space implicit intuitive we space that is going to allow us to hunt together, it’s going to allow us to music together, it’s going to allow us to do radically different Inter subjective shared attention intention structures 500,000 years ago. That’s the that’s the bill so now we’re a unique kind of primate that’s in building an implicit inter subjective coordinated structure. Okay. And then ultimately then we’re going to get a symbolic tagging. And then finally propositional semantics and tactical structure. 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We have a new powerful problem of vulnerability that has to be addressed, right? So there’s a massive increase in both degree and kind of access to people’s minds and that is a new problem and therefore it requires new mechanisms and new processes. I think this is one of Greg’s brilliant insights. It’s not in Sperber and Mercier, by the way. They just talk vaguely about reputation management or stuff like that. Whereas Greg says, no, no, look, this is an epistemic even in some sense, an ontological difference because there is now a new state of vulnerability for these organisms. And I just wanted to flag that because I think it’s brilliant and I think it’s important. Wonderful, totally. I appreciate that. And it was the first key insight that led to Utah itself. So it’s in 1996, this happens. And basically it affords a very clear reverse engineering dynamic on the ego self persona relation. So it basically says the ego now is faced with this task. And if you’re wondering, what are you actually saying it affords? So you remember when you were kids, you’re like, how do you know that the red you experienced is the red eye experience, right? Everybody’s had that kind of it. Well, that’s the container of what I would call mind to subjective experience. But you’re having the entire conversation, your propositional thoughts go right through your head without changing at all. You can’t get your experiences, your perspectival experiences can’t get out, but the head and not only does it get out, it gets out with the exact same informational content. And I have people just imagine it. So imagine yourself saying a conversation and then just say it privately, okay? And then say it out loud, it’s the same God damn sentence. It lives in your head and it lives out here in the same information. So that shows you how it just flows through your skin completely. And then that means that all propositional language-based stuff is now in essentially like an extra sensory perception highway. I mean, we talk about, oh, is ESP exists? I’m like, yeah, it’s called language. It’s like, yeah, we got our thoughts right into each other. Super easy in a way that animals, they certainly communicate intensely, but it’s a radically different kind of issue. Well, I was just gonna say, think about trying to pick up on the mental states of a non-human organism or even, because I remember this, when you’re raising a small child before they have language and you’re just saying, I wish you could speak. Why are you crying? Why are you crying? What do you want? What hurts? Don’t let it. Exactly. So, and then as you tell, then of course, now you ask, does that really matter? And people are actually, hey, does it really matter? So I’ll ask you, I do the liar-liar experiment. It’s like, that’s the Jim Carrey show where all of a sudden every thought that’s privately in you is broadcast to every individual. Okay. That’s now, if you didn’t have a filter, everyone could see every thought you have and how many of us are comfortable with that state. Okay. If that immediately is like, oh my God, I’d be totally naked, embarrassed and horrified. Well, then you actually have a public private filter that’s regulating a hell of a lot of very important information, right? That just tells you right there, it’s like, no, that would not be good. Everybody knew every thought I had. So anyway, that’s the dynamic. And what that shows is that we have a primate mammal-animal structure, okay? What I used to call the experiential self, but with John’s help, I really now differentiate it in these various domains as I get clarity about the evolution of recursive relevance realization across stage. And now you have a person self. And this is what we get socialized into, an ego-persona relation, which is, oh, what am I holding out here in this field of impression management, identity, my role and the ego that is then justifying and managing the relationship between my public identity persona and my primate self experience. And that’s the basic. And it’s a reverse engineering question. And it says the ego then should be concerned with the justifiability of self in the social field. That’s what the whole problem of justification says it should be concerned with, a priori predictive wise. And then you look at the design feature of the fucking ego and it’s like, oh, that’s exactly what I do. That is definitely what I’m situated, my I self is situated to do. So the point of this is that this is a meta theory and I’ll say one other thing about metaphysics. What it says is when we use the term mind, we have to realize that there’s a base of this, which is mental behavior. We see animals act. There’s a brain nervous system, neurocognitive system that’s regulating that. So that’s one definition of mind. There’s the emergence of experience that I call that mind one, mind one A on the inside, mind one B between the animal and the environment. A on the inside, that’s the neurocognitive stuff within the nervous system. Then it emerges as a somehow hard problem of consciousness emerges as a subjective epistemological portal or experience of being. That’s your mind’s eye, subjective conscious experience being, which is contained and only observable through the first person. And then we get this, that’s mind two. Then we get a mind three space, which is the justifier on top of mind two, the private one mind three A inside of you and mind three B what you would produce in a transcript. And if that’s the case, now what we’ve done is we’ve taken all those reference that John laid out and everybody has all these different national mind and be like, oh, there are epistemological reference from the inside and outside, and then there are ontological layers. And then we need to actually have specification about what is our onto epistemological reference. Mind one, A or B, mind two in the inside, mind three A or B. And now we can actually have a much more specified descriptive metaphysics of the ontology of the mental. Could you please just go over minds? So let me try to reiterate what I heard. And if you could please fill in the gaps for me. Cause sure. So mind one is the sort of pure raw experiential sense of eye. No, I misspoke then. No, mind one. So this is coming out of from a science perspective. And then the best way to I would say is think evolutionarily. Mind one is what emerges in totality at the Cambrian explosion. And so what happens at the Cambrian explosion, you get jellyfish with distributed neural networks. They get planaria worms, basically bilateral creatures that are actually moving. This is before the Cambrian explosion, about 520 million years ago. Then there’s this unbelievable three, 30 million year period where we go from essentially worm-like creatures on the one hand of it pre, all the way up to intense crab-like creatures running around, engaged in predation. Now they have complex active segmented bodies. They have fused their sensory and motor nervous systems together in a centralized location of the brain. They engage in coordinated singularity. The behavior is what the behaviorists mean when they say behavior. That’s the shit you observe the animal doing. Okay. But they should, that’s a bad word because everything behaves. It’s mental behavior. It’s a particular type of sensory motor looping that produces a functional effect. That’s actually mind. Sensory motor, the sensory motor level is mind one. Yes, exactly. And I don’t mean, we don’t know when the conscious experience of being actually emerges because that’s still quite mysterious at the sort of the ontological mechanism level. Sentience. Exactly, it’s mind two. Although a little bit of advertisement, Greg and I do our very, very best to close that gap as much as possible in untangling the world knot where we tackle that consciousness. Exactly. So if you wanna see that, we’re not dodging that question. We’ve addressed it, but like we, what was it, 13 episodes or something, Greg? At least, yeah. We can’t recapitulate all of that argument right here. But it’s super, it’s actually pretty simple. Okay. We at least box in the basis as far as I’m concerned. What we argue, I think we’re totally together on this, is when you get pretty early movement as the whole, complex, the system has got to approach and avoid. That’s the fundamental, it’s a behavioral investment system that’s recursively relevance realization, moves towards the good and away from the bad. If we then say that’s the fundamental task and we look at phenomenology, I think you can argue for many good reasons, and we’re not the only people who make this, that the base of this is sentience. The base of sentience is pleasure pain. Pleasure and pain serve broadcast functions to the entire system. That’s good, do more. Actively expend pleasure. That is bad, get away. Either shut it down or run away. Okay. And so we argue that the base of qualia will be valence qualia. Okay. These distributed broadcasts that tie sensory motor stuff together in a basic broadcast function and organize movement toward our way. Then you’ve- Yeah, notice how that’s giving you like a very, the very, it platforms the very possibility of a kind of here-ness, a now-ness, things fitting together. There’s a global togetherness of that relevance realization. Exactly. And that creates the adverbial framing. So there’s an adverbial framing and has a weak adjectival framing initially. It’s just this felt sense, okay? And how differentiated is pleasure pain? You kind of nail it and you have its little features. But then the felt sense of the screen of the adjectival, especially if we now take global neuro in a workspace and just jump up to mammals, okay? Now we can say, actually, the here-ness, now-ness, togetherness then frames a sensory perceptual awareness screen function that gives us adjectival qualia, which is like when we open our eyes and are aware and see a red apple in front of us. Now that’s been collected and organized to a spectralize a particular frame. So now you have a adverbial adjectival mind’s eye, as it were. Could I ask about the adjectival sense or the adjectival qualia? Whereas with the adverbial, we could say that that sort of denotes the here-ness and now-ness and togetherness of what’s being present. Could we also say that the adjectival qualia refer to the how-ness of it all or what? I don’t know. It’s more the what-ness, maybe. I mean, it’s like the adjectival refers to the properties of the thing that we’re modeling and whether it’s good or bad. So this is redness and good, okay? So for me, and John, obviously, jump in, but for me, here-ness, now-ness, and togetherness, the adverbial framing is the binding process that is then gonna yoke the agent-arena relationship together and collect essentially a witness-function portal. John, you wanna jump in? Yeah, I just wanna say about the adjectival. Note what disappears in the pure consciousness event is all propositional conceptual content. All the adjectival qualia go away. The adverbial qualia remain, the here-ness, the now-ness, the other-ness, and the valence qualia, because there’s a general sense often of kind of a bliss or diffuse goodness in that. So it tells you what is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And I don’t think if I gave you just disconnected adjectival blips that had no valence and were not bound together in a here-ness and a now-ness and a togetherness, that that would constitute consciousness. So what we do is we give a principled argument for bracketing the importance of adjectival qualia and saying, well, we can’t explain those, but we shouldn’t hold all of our epistemology and ontology hostage to them because they’re neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness itself. And so that’s how we sort of bracket and reduce the hard problem. Is that fair enough, Greg? Oh, totally. And then I would also, yeah, and I’d also say we’re, there is, again, it’s sort of loose and metaphorical, but I think we are giving rise to a neurocognitive, phenomenological framing that would hold the kind of neurobiological field, hierarchically arranged neurobiological field functions that we could at least imagine afford the screen for adjectival in a way that, it’s a hard problem, don’t get us wrong, and why the hell certain things give rise. But it’s, and I think we box it in some, John, I really do. Yeah, and so the final, yeah, thank you, Greg. The final point, Gary, is that, and you know enough of it, the relevance realization machinery, intelligence, intelligence is bound up with the capacity to approach and avoid, right? And so relevance realization can give you the basics of the valence qualia, right? At least some core aspect of it. They can give you the adverbial qualia, so we can get a lot of the bridging there of some of the, we can bridge quite a bit of the hard problem and bracket the hardest part of the hard problem and reduce the way that, notice what we’re not doing, we’re not claiming to solve it, but we’re removing its claim to hold our epistemology and ontology hostage. And that’s all the move we need right here for this argument. Totally. We’re actually gonna even use it more than that, I’m gonna argue, because actually what this is actually setting the stage for, I’m gonna make the case that the fundamental subject matter of psychotherapy is the psyche. Yes. Okay. Not of science, but the fundamental subject matter of psychotherapy is the psyche. And actually what we are arguing for is a phylogenetic, ontogenetic functional container system, an understandable container system that sets the stage to place every unique individual idiosyncratic psyche. Yes. And then that is what I deal with when somebody comes in the clinic room and the psyche then is gonna be that reference. So- Well said, yeah. And if we afford a behavioral, scientific, nomenthetic framing that can then place the psyche that does justice to the psyche itself rather than like eliminate it, well, now we’re actually, now we’re not only saying we’re being held hostage, we actually can jump over to a humanistic enterprise, a normative humanistic enterprise and demonstrate the utility and complementarity of this. And when we remember that the language game of science essentially is by virtue of the rules it plays blind to the subjective, idio-graphic qualia variable. Okay. Meaning it says, no, just don’t pay attention to that. Okay. Now we can flip over to a humanistic enterprise that pays attention to it, gives it justice in its own terms, and then connects with conciliance back and forth. Now we’ve done more than just being like, oh, we don’t hostage by it. We’re actually now have a scientific humanistic coin frame, two sides of a coin frame that actually may, you know, really box it in, be like, ah, we might have better start to deal with this hard problem with the psyche. So is it like, what we’re trying to do is find a way to make sense of and explicate the ways in which which adverbial and perhaps adjectival, but more primarily adverbial qualia factor into subjectivity and psychotherapy. Yes. Actually, let me flip this around for a second. Okay. And see if I can come from a different angle and then watch this thing get tied up. Okay. So, and I really want to move in this direction anyway, we’ve advertising psyche and wellbeing. Yeah. And now I just want to tell a story then of me and wellbeing. All right. And then we’re going to come back and show what I did with wellbeing. And then go back to write to your question, Gary, and basically be like, okay, we built this thing from this complicated scientific, philosophical, ontological argument. All right. Now I’m going to come back. I’m going to look at the concept of wellbeing, give you an almost silly, obvious answer about what wellbeing is. And then I’m going to drop that context in here and we’ll connect, see if that works. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead, John. I would like when Greg does that. Anyway. No, no, no. Yeah. No, I want to do that. Greg, I want you to do that. I’m just saying at some point, this is a request. And this is also addressed to Gary. I think the adverbial quality and the relevance realization machinery and the valence qualia give us a way of talking about meaning that again, gets us to the touch point between the is and the odd. And I think that is the main move that we’re making. And so, say if psychotherapy is about meaning, you can bring in all this functional stuff, but then you can slot it towards the idiosyncratic specificity of the existential meaning of a unique individual. Beautiful. Yes. Then we’re going to have the architecture do all that by this thing. And so if I set up this background and then hand this back over to you, then you fill in, stitch that stuff together, and then we flip it back around. I think we’re going to get a pretty cool, whole cool picture of this thing. So please take it away, Greg. So yeah. So let me just ask you guys, when you think of the term well-being, Okay. what are some of the things just come to mind that would be constitutive of this concept? Like what does it think, what goes into this concept? The yoga mat. I’m kidding. The yoga mat itself is well-being. Hey, that’s a… I published on this. So I’ll say what I published with Leo. We talked about the 3M dimension, meaning mastery and morality, a good life. So well-being is understood as a life, is a way of being that affords a good life. So that’s the functional definite. You have well-being if the way of being affords a good life and a good life gives you mastery, not in the sense of political dominance, but you have, your agency is effective within the arena of the world. Morality, obviously, right? Your life, and this ties to your work, Greg, on this dimension at least, but certainly on the other ones, right? Your life is morally justified, even morally admirable. You’re virtuous in some fashion. And then meaningful. All the dimensions that go into meaning in life. And if those of you who have been following my work, I’ve been trying to unpack this notion tremendously. And I’ve just said, I think it plays a pivotal role. So I talked about, we, sorry, Leo Ferraro and I talked about those three dimensions of mastery, morality, and meaning. As the constitutive dimensions of the good life and then well-being is the way of being that we can most rationally claim is most reliable for affording a good life. That’s what well-being is, you could say. Here’s good reasons for claiming this way of being is highly reliable for realizing these three dimensions in an optimal fashion. Love it. Gary? Now I’m curious how my answer actually factors in with that. And maybe it’s a matter of, like that’s a positive approach to well-being. It’s an attempt at giving a positive answer to what well-being is. And I think I’m inclined to give a negative answer by pointing to what it’s not. And then actually this is a distinction you started with in your cognitive science of wisdom chapter with Leo, I think. Yes, yeah. So I would say that one way that I tend to approach the question of well-being is by pointing to all, I think at one of the central things that well-being is not a life that’s organized around self-deception. So it’s extremely difficult not only to not lie to yourself but to even tell when you’re lying to yourself or being dishonest. And I think one of the, maybe this actually lines up quite well with everything that we’ve been talking about, but one of the main reasons that people tend to fall into self-deceptive patterns of behavior, both cognitively and behaviorally across all those levels. And in terms of their feelings is, because they’re far removed from their experience. I think it, at least in my experience, it boils down to a problem of description again, which going back to that example. Description by whom? Description by a person or description? By oneself. Okay. By oneself. And not only, but I mean, that’s a part of it. Remember that example of the ghost when your friend comes and tells you about the ghost? I often wonder how often we actually don’t take our own selves seriously because the kinds of things that we are inclined to think or utter to ourselves in our own minds, let’s say, right? In privacy even, we immediately go and invalidate or disqualify as lacking either metaphysical or epistemological validity. And if we could orient ourselves more phenomenologically toward our own lived meanings, maybe we might learn something new and see ourselves and our experience a little differently. And maybe that might be a necessary step to take to circumvent our tendency towards self-deception and toward being complicit, right? In other people’s self-deception as well. That’s what I meant by, I see it as a kind of problem of description, but yeah. Could I just- Great. Then, because that’s, since you brought up the chat, the wisdom thing, that was precisely it. We saw wisdom as dealing the way in which self-deception undermines meaning, it undermines morality, and it undermines agency, mastery. And that’s why wisdom is the ability to overcome self-deception’s ability to erode the three dimensions. And it also enhances the optimization of the three dimensions. So I think what you’re saying fits very much with what I’m saying. I mean, so I think, and I say this, I think wisdom is not optional for well-being, right? Right. Good. Nice. Wonderful. Okay, so you guys are giving that a more functional and normative, and I mean that in a philosophical sense, Aristotelian kind of sense, okay? And this falls under what would become a eudaimonic approach, at least in the psychological literature, to thinking about well-being. Eudaimonic’s an old term from Aristotle, who basically was concerned with the good slash virtuous life with an ultimate sort of meta-value of wisdom that organized the values appropriately and afforded a frame for the ultimate endpoint upon which all other means would be justified, and then to be aligned in relationship to that functionally, virtuously, then you would be living the good life if you maximized your capacity. And so well-being and eudaimonic functioning, the virtuous capacity to live the good life and afford the maximization of fulfillment in that regard is what we’re sort of after when we mean the term, okay? Now, when you do that, okay, and then you go to standard empirical epistemological psychology with its methodological behavioral commitments, you fuck everything up, okay? At least if you come from the methodological perspective, and that is, how do we know what the hell all that is? Okay, my framing is I need to measure stuff and I need to have pretty clear reference about what I need to measure. And there’s a subset of individuals that are applying the empirical methods that give rise to a pretty ironically straightforward approach to well-being, which is essentially the self-report hedonic subjective approach to well-being. I’ll say that it’s a subjective hedonic approach. And this gets into well-being then gets empirically defined by how happy people say they are, and in what ways they say they’re happy, okay? And this becomes the subjective approach. Ed Diener and actually Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman adopts this approach. It’s variously referred to as the subjective well-being approach or the hedonic approach. And it’s just the empirical evaluation of people’s reports about whether or not they’re happy or not, okay? In more or less terms. And that then becomes the empirical indicator. Wait, there’s one more thing going on there. The definition of happiness is also being truncated. And truncated to in different ways that in different people will then say, cause you can ask questions. Are you satisfied with your life? Are you happy emotionally? Are you sad opposite of happy? There are lots of different ways to frame this, okay? And I’ll give you a quick example as to whether or not, is this really sufficient for society to think in terms of wellbeing, okay? I’ll give you two quick examples. One would be the example of really effective happy Nazi, okay? So he’s super ace climbing up in the right ranks in 1942. And, hey, I just got a job at Auschwitz. You know, it’s like, oh, there’s some problems there. I’ll give you another example. When we went down to Western State, our long inpatient mental facility, and we had a pretty questionnaire where we asked people how happy you are. Two out of the 10 people scored 100 out of 100 on their happiness. So how sad is it? Huh, 10, I’m 10. How’s my life going for you? 10, it’s great. Okay, they gave us instantaneously, gave us 10 answers, okay? And then you would ask, well, would we believe this individual then is living the best possible life in an inpatient or would we wonder that their ego functioning was placed in a particular way that was essentially reactive responding that was not really rich in texture and they were saying they’re happy, but it’s not that meaningful, right? Now, you don’t have to reflect too long and be like, oh my God, just subjective wellbeing indicators. The researchers basically say, yeah, that’s a problem, but we’re committed to data. And they build this model of subjective wellbeing. And then you have the Carol Riff, most notably, but there are a number of people that are taking the eudaimonic approach and inside positive psychology, which construes wellbeing as one of its fundamental concepts in the empirical academic psychology tradition, you get a battle between the eudaimonic functionalists, an Aristotelian normative sense often, but then there are other kinds of issues like, well, do you have a personality disorder? Are you self-deceiving, sort of a psychiatric functional dynamic, descriptive causal with some normative element versus a moral normative element, as core. That I’ll call that the functional dynamic while there are elements to them, normative and descriptive causal. And then there’s the subjective element, which is basically, we’re just gonna measure people’s levels of distress in various ways. And then the debate as to, are these different? Are they two sides of a coin? How do they put together? And there’s no answer. Okay, so that’s the, so one thing I will say is the short answer is I would argue that there’s a continuum of mental illness and really illness writ large up to health that entwines at some level distress down here. Like if you’re miserable, even if you’re high functioning individual, your wellbeing is probably not great. You could probably argue that. But there’s then a distress and dysfunctional level up to fulfillment and optimal functioning. So there’s some entanglement in relationship to there. And I noticed that pretty early on. And then I just applied the basic logic of the Utah system to see what they were seeing and then show that actually, I think you could argue very clearly that there are, we can build a descriptive metaphysical map of the human from their first person perspective that affords us clarity about what wellbeing is. And I’m gonna argue that I can actually summarize it the way Kant summarized it, which he considered it to be happiness with the worthiness to be happy. Which notice that it ties together. There’s a subjective element, a felt sense of, and I mean happiness in the deep, rich, content, meaningful sense, not like, but then with some worthiness to be happy and some functional referent component. So I’m gonna drop by and share my screen real fast and just walk you through what becomes the nested model, which affords a descriptive metaphysical mapping of domains in the relation that’s gonna allow us the subjective element. And why does it look the way it does? A descriptive causal explanatory element that says, oh, this is how things unfold for better or for worse in certain regards. And then ultimately the placeholder for a normative element. And then it’s actually the alignment of all of that that we need to consider in relationship to the concept. So I’ll do that real fast and then we can go back and talk about it and see. And I know it’s funny, I almost didn’t get this published. It’s a revised and resubmitted, it’s a 2014 article. And the feedback from one of the reviewers was, let’s just make so much sense. What is new about it? And I went back and said, remember nobody knows what well-being is. So if it’s something that makes so much sense, let’s not just reject the article because it’s like common sense. So this is, I want to encourage the idea that it’s actually kind of common sense and then we’ll flip common sense to say, and then we’ll tie it to all this really refined stuff that we were talking about before. Okay, so by share screen here, if I go to this thing, all right. So the nested model then starts with the idea of a subject, okay. This is actually, I pull this or cite Sam Harris in relationship to his bridging from science to well-being and starts, well, actually in terms of value, we have a subjective experience of being of goodness, okay. And that is a referent when we’re dealing with a number of things. And so I would argue that if you’re a full zombie and have no sentience, then the idea of well-being, if you’re a complete zombie is not very meaningful because you do not have the subjective distress or happiness dynamic at all, obviously by definition present. And so that you need that as constitutive, okay. In terms of the nature of the concept. Now, when the subject of well-being people got together, okay, and did a factor analysis on subjective well-being, four factors repeatedly emerge in Ed Diener’s work and others that says, hey, we can actually map the variance in subjective well-being in four different domains, okay. The first domain is the affective domain, which then divides into two domains. And in fact, you’d be on your points and then Gary’s points actually speak to this and our whole approach avoidance. There are two real systems of contentment, of desire, of excitement, of positivity. And at the same time, there is anxiety, distress, depression and the layering of those particular systems and their salience and frequency in various states and traits then gives rise to one key aspect of well-being that we can then say has two factors. And this is the affective component and it’s got two factors, okay. Then you get an egoic function, okay. That is more reflective memory narrative across time. That’s more propositional and conceptual in its value to structure. And it also has two factors that are in a slightly different way. One is a generalized factor on scale of one to 10, how satisfied and fulfilled are you with your life? That becomes a general because this system abstracts, conglomerates and then places in a generalized view. And then what it does is it affords specific life domains of satisfaction. So it runs through the categories of your investments, your identity and your connection in the problems you’re trying to solve and the things that you’re trying to do. And then that gives rise to a whole other set of components. So you get a generalized life satisfaction from the evaluator or reflector, the ego, I, justifier on top of a self that’s feeling positive and negative, but then that splits into domains, okay. So the four domains that the subjective well-being people find are the affective, positive, negative and then the evaluative, general and specific. And what I’m showing you here is an example of a way in which that would then look from the inside. So at the core here, you have positive regulative to negative, which I would say your core of your primate self because it’s engaged in perspectival affective overall evaluation. Then you have a meaningful life satisfaction justifier that lives at the person level. And then you wonder about how you’re doing across specific life domains, like your occupant, hey, how’s grad school going, Gary? Okay. And then, oh, you got trauma loss, you got spirit. And people will divide these specific domains up in different ways, but this is the factor analysis map of the felt subjective experience of being of that, sort of what I’d say at the ideographic level, a psyche, its own evaluative process. Does that make sense? Is, so is the life satisfaction, well, I’m trying to ask what you’re asking people. Are you asking them how much their goals in these domains have been met? Well, like what are they using to give a value to this? That’s a great question. And I think most of the people would say is that you have capacities for abstract summative functions that will be influenced by lots of different things like recent events and memories and moods. It’s not a precise thing, but if you, the actual descriptive data criterion, most often is a particular kind of question that puts on one to 10, tell me your overall life satisfaction. That’s essentially what people are responding to. And there is a factor analysis that you can generalize that say, hey, this accounts for certain kinds of variants. Right. Does that make sense? So people are doing just some sort of inner grok. An inner grok of how you’re doing. And that’s pretty reliable and pretty clear. People can do that. Hey, how are you doing on a scale of one to 10? And you can kind of summarize. Now what’s happened recently and recent memory events and those kinds of things will get weighted and then things will change. It’s not like it’s like a systematic updated thing. If it’s raining outside, people find that your overall life satisfaction. But that’s what I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask how contingently variable it is. Like if I asked Tom this in the morning and I asked him on the same day in the evening, are the numbers skewed? And then- The numbers are skewed with, like with so much, the numbers in my estimation, again, you want somebody that’s a lot more like refined and to give a detailed answer to exactly what level and what does it actually mean. My short answer is the numbers are definitely influenced, but there’s also, you know, there’s something there that it is meaningful to say that people carry a generalized abstracted life satisfaction frame for them. So there’s some range of stable replication is what you’re saying. Totally, exactly. And folks can just think about this in terms of their own life. If you were to every week, you’re able to say, hey, okay, my life’s an eight and eight and eight every Friday and then, oh shit, I went through this health period and I saw three and a four, you know, and then they would be clustered. After my dad died, this happened and blah, blah, blah. And then, right, got the divorce and then everything went good and people will be able to identify that. There’s a reliable, valid, generalized function of self-life reflective evaluation. And then clearly also very specific things. Anybody that’s gone through, you know, an academic catastrophe or work catastrophe or, you know, and then had a trauma, got raped or something and then all of a sudden this carries a particular dimension of influence that spreads but it also has some containment within that domain. So the four things, positive, negative, you sit on a primate positive or negative affective system that’s doing both state and trait stuff. You have a generalized egoic function and then you have a specific domain egoic function. And that is the way they map your subjective wellbeing. And indeed, from a psychological perspective, I mean, some psychotherapeutic perspective, when I ask, hey, what brings you in and how are you feeling? This is actually pretty congruent with, here’s my overall life, how do I feel about that? Here, tell me about these domains of your existence and how you feel about each one of them. In fact, I encourage people to, you know, take this little wheel of wellbeing and look at their psyche of the individual across from them through it. So you start to ask questions about these particular domains and get a map of what they’re experiencing from that first person perspective. So one more question, Greg. What degree has this been tested cross-culturally? I mean, like… Pretty good. I would certainly say the four domains, whole, I mean, this is, yeah, this exploded and is pretty well confirmed as of say, when I was really researching this in 2014. And there was be enough robustness, at least in terms of my read of this cross-culturally that this would be not something that’d be too vulnerable to a replication crisis or things like that. Whether they would add certain elements or weaken them. But I felt like it was a pretty robust model. I’m not, you already said, don’t get tied to the particular pie chart because you said different researchers cut it up. I was asking about the four domains. I think the four domains have a pretty robust framing for them that’s available. And they certainly sit with my experience as a clinician and they sit with my model of what the psyche is going to be tracking for its own evaluative structure. So the basic idea here would be that the psyche needs to have some kind of internal metric for determining how well it’s doing. Totally. And John, all of our elusive eye stuff, basically now you’re carrying around a default mode network of what’s relevant for the self across time and then referencing how things are going. And this is just a collection of that basically. Exactly, exactly. That’s exactly where I wanted to map it. This looks like it maps onto self-relevance in a very powerful way. Exactly, exactly. And I would say, yeah, we can then slice that in two different ways. There’s this intuitive perspectival primate kind of felt sense of how things are going and then the narrative sense on top of that. And we can get into dual processing models, whatever, but that’s basically a way to frame it. And that pops at least in terms of variance accounted for from a subjective wellbeing research perspective. Right. Okay. But of course, as we talked about with a person that came up to me and gave themselves tens out of tens, that simple presentation of an egoic and say I’m happy kind of presentation is not what we wanna end our life with. The empiricists might be okay with that, but those of us theorists and philosophers are not happy with that at all. And we wanna contextualize that psyche in a system. Okay. And what this basically says, the outer blue line is that I’m gonna conceptualize that system as an agent. All right. So now that psyche sits inside of a complex adaptive dynamic network. Okay. That is an organism on the one hand. Okay. And that’s the outer layer here. So you’re an organismic body. Okay. And then when you think about the organismic body, we’re gonna basically be like, hmm, when you go to see a physician, what do they actually care about? They ask you if you’re in pain, right? And then they see how are you doing in relation and what are they actually seeing how you’re doing? The biophysiological organization of cellular structure in the organ system structure and the holistic system structure given where you are developmentally in your age range, et cetera, to evaluate the functionality of your biophysiological structure. The outer rim of the blue line then represents that. And then the inner rim represents the developmental psychological functioning. Okay. And we’re just gonna throw some terms out here, but basically what this represents is me as a psychological doctor tracking your adaptive structure. Okay. And then thinking about whether or not you are organized in a particular way from a psychological functioning perspective. So for example, Gary, if we are concerned with personality disorder functioning, how much self-deception, attachment issues and confusion about affect given historical trauma, are we actually looking at here as the ego reports stuff? What are the defensive mechanisms of activation that the self is not gonna be able to report on? What I’m throwing up here are five different terms that come from the sixth wheel of development, the six key idea in the matrix. And these are just reflective of large domains of the psychological organization. And actually they stem out of the fifth, which are the domains of adaptation. So with this, whereas your physician, your doctor looks at the outside, me as a psychological doctor, I am tracking your psychosocial functioning, your adaptive animal mental and human mental behavioral patterns and what they infer with regards to your developmental trajectory, how you’re fundamentally organized, what kinds of success do you have? And I’m gonna use a descriptive causal explanatory framework that says, okay, there are different kinds of functionalities both within intra-psychically and between interpersonally. And I’m gonna track those and see what level of functioning that we are operative at, okay? At a most, yeah, go ahead. So I’m just trying to track the normativity. So it sounds like the good in the purple core is feeling good, right? And then the next ring. The organismic ring that has a mental and living layering to it, a life and mind layer to use like an Evan Thompson frame, if you want. So this is adapting well. This is something like being a very good problem solver within the environment or niche that the organism is within. Something like that? Very much so, exactly. And you can apply a very simple model of what’s called Wakefield, Jerome Wakeford for disease, a harmful dysfunction model. It has, we can use normative functionality from like evolutionary perspectives, like how the heart is supposed to function, okay? Like we have a frame for what a good heart is. And I would argue we actually got a frame for certain kinds of relations of psychological functioning. Certainly we could know, for example, that if somebody starts to exhibit real memory problems so that they cannot transfer short-term into long-term memory, we’ve got a dementia functional problem in terms of that would fall under like cognitive ability sets that would basically be like, oh, we have a cognitive functional problem here, the person can’t remember, okay? That would be an example of a psychological doctor making an assessment of a functionality, which obviously if you can’t remember short to long-term instantiation, your adaptive capacities are dramatically reduced. So that makes a lot of sense. So what I wanted to pick up on was, I can understand identity traits, absence of psychopathology and abilities being functionally described and understood. I think I know what you’re gonna say, but I could also anticipate pushback from people saying, but why are values and virtues put in that functional domain? Certainly those are relative to culture, moral systems, history, et cetera, things like that. And that’s gonna show up exactly here, okay? That point, what it’s done here is if you’ve ever entered anybody that has an existential crisis, okay? We know that, for example, if you are tied to a particular religious system growing up and then all of a sudden you have an existential crisis, the relationship that you now encounter with your values and virtues within the functional system itself carries all sorts of implications for how that individual is gonna operate. So we are thinking about the idea of, is this individual aligned and what is the reciprocal feedback alignment between their own values and virtues and how they’re operating within the system, okay? So it’s a causal functional reality within the system itself that I am now attending to here. And then I will bring my broader view about what are we actually evaluating in terms of the normative structures from ourselves as evaluators to also bring to bear into this equation. Right, so does that, so I understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about how values and virtues can cause dysfunction within the individual in some way. So is there a meta norm? I’m thinking in Plato here. Is there a meta norm at this level of something like the individual is seeking sort of the optimal harmonization of all of its functionality, something like that? Well, that’s exactly where we’re headed. Okay, okay, okay. So, but we’re just not there yet because I’m layered out all of the stuff yet. But ultimately, if you think about happiness with the worthiness to be happy, ultimately the intelligibility of the whole thing at least backs up into that resonance, which then creates that particular kind of. Right, but I was trying to map that onto a functional model because of the idea that to the degree to which our different functions are acting at cross purpose, regardless of the content of those functions, we are undermining agency. So the degree to which we are uncoordinated in a functional sense, we are disintegrating as an agent. And regardless of the content that carries with it, a negative content that carries with it. And I’m gonna say that there’s a way in which we can interpret the word worthy or legitimate to actually then say, yes, you are hitting your worthiness in that dysfunctional intersection, meaning they’re diminishing the worthiness to be happy in particular ways. Okay, okay, okay. So I mean, that’s a twist on the word and the meaning, but I think you can, if I’m trying to pack everything into that sentence, there’s a causal explanatory functionality aspect to it. And then there’s a normative virtue aspect to it. And we can tie worthiness to both of those actually. That sounds right, because I think there’s a difference between sort of a constitutive requirement for agency and then being able to morally evaluate. Like it could be possible for an individual, for example, to be harmoniously functioning, but engaged in sort of trivial products throughout their trivial interactions throughout their, they have deep inner peace and they’re not doing anything immoral as they endlessly collect their porcelain cows for 60 years. And that’s a life that, so I see what you’re trying to do with worthiness. You’re trying to bridge between that internal functional harmony and then some valuation about whether or not the function is directed towards a greater good or something like that. Is that how I’m under? Okay, okay. That’s a hundred percent. And I’m actually gonna punt on what the answer is and only basically give you the shell of the variables that then say these are the variables you’re gonna wrestle with to generate an answer. In other words, I’m not going to necessarily, I have my own answer. I don’t know that there will be the answer. The nested model tries to tell you, these are the class variables that you’re gonna have to wrestle with if you’re actually gonna get an answer that’s up to the task. So the first thing is the subjective experience. Now you nest that in an agent. The agent has a living dimension, biophysiological dimension. It’s got an animal mental and then human person justifying dimension if we’re talking about a human. And then that agent exists, there’s your biophysical functioning. That agent then exists in an environment. It’s situated in an environment and we can specify if we’re now talking with human wellbeing, we could specify that environmental context as having biophysiological material aspects to it and then sociocultural role relational aspects to it. So I’m now gonna situate yourself in a physical environment. Hey, if all of a sudden a toxin’s released, okay, in one of our apartments, that would be bad in a pretty quick environment at a biophysiological level, you can go down, right? Okay, so we’re gonna then situate what available resources do we have for our needs and functionality? We have to consider as humans that make and surround ourselves with technology, what’s available, what is technology doing to us? And of course, I’ve made many people argue and we have a massive crisis kinds of ways in which technology are integrated with our development. There are financial, given the structure of flow of resources now that are mediated by economic structures. There’s also then the social role context. What’s your identity as a persona? How are you received in that regard? Are you a member of a majority minority population? What are your particular interpersonal relations? Did your parents love you? Do you grow up in an attachment system? You have a best friend, you have a romantic partner. How does that feed back on your sense? And then in your structure of normative value, how are you arranged in relationship to your own values and virtues? And how are you then situated and what is legitimized in that context? So now we have a subject that’s situated as an entire of its organismic and psychological mental agency. And then that’s then situated inside of environment that has material and social features at various levels of organization. And for wellbeing to work, you have to have an agent arena, transjective developmental relation. We’re not seeing it as a slice of time. We’re seeing things in relationship to dynamic, interactive, iterative recursive processes of agent arena relations. And so that then these become sort of the core elements of a description that we’re gonna need to align to basically capture the area of sentience and the evaluative level of distress or fulfillment. And then the causal network of functionalities, causal descriptive network of what’s gonna actually unfold and what are the variables in that. And then finally, this gets into a, put that on time in development, so you have the transactive developmental view. And then finally, we then situate that inside a normative reference because the nature of wellbeing itself, I will argue, the whole work that the concept does is exactly what both of you said in the sense that it organizes ourselves on some kind of optimal normative structure so that the evaluator is going to be bringing to bear some ought dimension. This is what’s normatively good. The nature of being well is going to bring for the conceptual evaluator. And then that’s gonna depend on the generalized notions, metaphysical, ontological, epistemological structure of the evaluator and his or her axiological commitments. So you get a worldview and you get fundamental values about good and bad, good and evil, optimal, less than optimal. And those then have to be then included. This is why wellbeing descriptively is a prescriptive concept. The argument is, it’s the nature of the concept to be utilized has to be prescriptive. And that’s a descriptive claim, at least in terms of just its functional utility and the ways in which it’s gonna play itself out in a language game. Okay, so ultimately the nested model says, Kant essentially gets this right, that it’s what is the highest level of wellbeing? And by the way, I’m basically Aristotelian too, but it’s essentially like descriptively happiness, there’s that subjective experience with the worthiness, causal, functional, descriptive in terms of, hey, how are you structurally placed as a biological organism, as a mental functioning organism, then inside a context that’s going to have capacities for you to interrelate over time. And then ultimately with the fundamental worthiness to be happy, given the normative worldview structure of the person that is determining where this individual is on a wellbeing continuum. So that’s a descriptive metaphysical map of the variable domains that need to go into the concept of wellbeing to afford us clarity about what we mean. Can we jump on that? Did you wanna add anything or can we jump on that? That’s it, that’s the summary of the nested model in a nutshell. Amazing, sorry, I know you just unshared your screen, but we can pull the bottle up just for a few moments. So I really, really like this actually. Part of what I’m seeing here is that at any given point in time when I’m interacting with the person, especially in the clinic room, all these different layers and aspects of each of these layers are implicated at some point or another. And if I were to even, I guess, paraphrase some of this language and try to approach it from an existential sort of perspective, I see the, so the very first circle, right? The purple subjective wellbeing one, that’s essentially their descriptions of what’s going on and what’s counting as relevant in as it relates to their sense of wellbeing, their own self evaluations. What is it that brings you here? Well, I have these persistent problems in my relationships and I don’t know what’s happening, help me figure it out. Okay, the second layer, right? The blue one, that’s sort of, it’s interesting that how you divided it into the health and functioning layer, the outer layer and the inner one that contains things like identity, values and virtues, abilities, et cetera, et cetera, where I see this as like a historicity layer actually. I don’t know if that intuitively makes sense to you, but if we think of medical conditions, for example, or questions having to do with identity or personality traits, virtues versus vices, let’s say, whatever it might be, that ends up situating, or maybe not situating, but giving a kind of structured sense of what the person’s general tendencies might be. So the kinds of things you would expect them to do in certain contexts or not. So someone who’s high on extraversion, for example, you might expect that in certain contexts where there’s uncertainty and they feel safe enough, they’ll be very likely to approach, right? So it’s the approach machinery that’ll take over. And that’s really a historicity dimension. And then you’ve got the outer layers of, so the yellow one, which is broader context. So that’s like the embeddedness aspect of 4E cognitive science, the way that I’m seeing. We’re embedded not just in a physical context, but a meaningful context, right? Of social, cultural values, things like that. And then at the very edge of it, maybe that’s the one that I’m trying to grapple with most. Because to articulate and explicate what goes into the red layer, I think that’s red. What else is red, right? It’s red. It’s red. For me it’s red. Okay, cool. It’s very hard for you to see what I’m seeing, but I’m telling you it is red in my experience. So I’ll take your word in good faith. So I guess to explicate what really goes into that layer is really to explicate the kinds of values that inform the kinds of intervention that as a psychotherapist, I try to implement in my practice. And those aren’t, I would say that those aren’t always explicit. That there’s something very, very implicit and participatory and intuitive going on. And so that’s the one that for me has like most of the question marks around it. Well, I think we do a bad job in our field of owning the red layer and being clear about it. I believe that psychotherapy is a deeply value laden enterprise by its essence. And I think the system doesn’t know how to justify its own normativity across the individual’s normativity, across complex adaptive function normativity and across big picture ethical moral systems. I don’t think it does how to do that. And so it doesn’t know how to train people to do that. And so I think what’s basically gets operated for the vast majority of psychotherapists is an implicit ideological value about good and bad that is rarely brought explicitly questioned and then held to be accountable is very then vulnerable to self deception, ambiguity, and all sorts of elements. And certainly one of the messages of the model for psychotherapy is let’s be clear about our normative commitments. We might not be able to say what they are. We might have differences, might have pluralistic views. I would expect us to have pluralistic views but I think they’re unbelievably crucial in the entire enterprise. And we undervalue, we undervalue our, these normative value hierarchical structures in our training and education. So could I just say, let me just say one more thing. And I’m curious how both of you might take that up because I see the frame problem being very, very important to take into consideration here because this map essentially identifies several domains that would count as relevant with respect to the problem of wellbeing, right? And I guess what I’m thinking is that the concept of justification needed to justify the, right? Why it is we do exactly the kind of work that we do and not anything else when we’re doing it. I’m not sure if they can be exhaustively captured in propositional terms. It’s kind of like, I’m thinking about like the Tao for example, right? Right, John, you’re sort of the quote unquote Buddhist here but- I’m kind of a Zen neoplatonist. I combine Buddhism in order to frame my uptake of neoplatonism. And I just wanna say, you’re not doing any error right now but I caution you not to fall into confusing properties of our theories with properties of what we are talking about. The Tao Teh Chen is a bunch of propositions, right? About what we can’t express in propositions. But your properties of your reference aren’t properties of your theory. I want a very clear, I can have a very clear theory. In fact, I want a very clear theory of vagueness, right? Right, right, right. So like- Yeah, thanks for that. I guess where I was going to go is that maybe the kinds of justification we’re seeking aren’t simply representable in propositional terms but they necessarily require certain kinds of practices to get their sense. Well, that might be- That’s something I wanted to say. And I wanted to reply to both the relevance issue. I follow Shanahan in calling it the relevance issue because the frame problem was broken into two separate problems representing time with a logic which is largely solved, largely by Shanahan. And that what remains is what the philosophers had always called the frame problem, the relevance problem. But this is a way of not pissing off the computer science people who will yell at you and say but the frame problem has been solved. And they mean what, but Shanahan who is part of the solution actually very clearly distinguishes. And I think as you move towards the core of the concentric circles, I think you’re moving towards an emphasis on self-relevance as you moving out, this is what I’m seeing. And I don’t know if this will land for Greg that you’re starting to talk about relevance. See, because we are cultural beings and because we’re embedded beings, it’s not only ultimately how things are relevant to us but secondly, how we can be relevant to others and then how we, our culture can be appropriately fitted to relevant to the environment, right? And you’re moving from self-relevance to relevance to others, to shared cultural relevance to the environment, right? Because cultures, I think you’re totally right ultimately justify themselves by their historical continuity, by the fact that they can say we are obviously appropriately fitted to our environment because we don’t self-destruct as a culture. That’s sort of the implicit thing that’s running through cultures, I would argue. Does that map onto what you’re talking about in some ways? 100%, yeah, no, completely. I mean, this is a, you know, it’s a fill in the blank of the various domains and then it affords you the capacity to move around in a wide variety of different, you know, places. But what you just described is a wonderful articulation of the network that I would want people be able to track. Yeah, and the thing is we have meta, we have metacorrective relations between these, right? So we can challenge self-relevance in terms of other relevance and vice versa. We can challenge other relevance in terms of self-relevance and we can challenge all of those in terms of we-relevance, of how we are relevant to the world, like the we-world relevance kind of thing. And what are the things that I deeply struggled with and saw as fundamentally underdeveloped, this gets both Gary and your point, is okay, I’m a psychological doctor. This gets into, I think I mentioned the whole point about somebody comes in as anxiety about raping people, you know? And I’m like, I’m not gonna help you with that, right? You know, I’ll help you go to a party and I’m not gonna help you, that’s like, I’m gonna call the cops, right? But they’re here for me and my whole job is to be a psychological doctor for their interests, okay? But when does their interests stop and my interest as a member of society, my interest as a psychologist, my connection to the larger web of moral goodness relative to their positionality and my own idiographic beliefs and my then beliefs as an ethical psychologist that’s then nested in an institution, the whole point is that there’s webbing all over the damn place, you know? And we have to be responsible and afford lensing that honestly allows us to see that webbing and reflect on it, even if we’re gonna get pluralistic answers to it, we better have the right mapping. And I got a lot of training, especially in the rigid scientist side that basically was like, well, we can’t really deal with normative shit, try to follow the ethics guidelines and here’s all empirical research. And it’s like, that is totally inadequate to the task that I’ve been given in relationship to dealing with the real and wondering prescriptively what it is that I’m trying to optimize in my role as a psychological doctor. I think that part of your, and that’s not the only part, but I think that part of what you’re doing here is immensely important. Challenging the implicit individualistic Cartesian framework that all we need to measure is subjective wellbeing in order to assess wellbeing. I think that’s just ridiculous. I think it borders on being stupid, to tell you the truth. And maybe that’s why your challenge of it seemed so obvious to the reviewer, but that doesn’t mean that what you’re not doing is exactly relevant. I guess, so first of all, just to pause to appreciate that. Like our culture is messed up because we’re first of all, we confuse wealth with subjective wellbeing and there’s not an identity relation there. There’s a function that looks like this. And initially changes in wealth make huge changes in subjective wellbeing. And then you need large changes of wealth to make very small changes in subjective wellbeing. That’s the first thing. And then subjective wellbeing is equated with happiness. And that means it leaves out all this other. Because I think when we, I think that meaning is a way, just put it out there as a proposal, meaning is a way of coordinating these three kinds of relevance, self-relevance, relevance to others, and we relevance to the world. Nice. What meaning is trying to do is say, I’ve got a way of relating them so that they are harmonically functioning together, mutually supporting each other so that I can justify the overall thing. Because outside of those, I don’t think we have a frame from which we can judge things. Like, because even people who postulate sort of a, I don’t know what to call it, trans-oncological, maybe God perspective or something, if you talk to them and say, what they’ll do is they’ll talk, oh, it’s what matters, no, but then when they actually justify it, they’ll justify it by in terms of self-relevance, relevance to others, and our relevance to the world, our connectedness to the world. Totally. Well, why are you a Christian? But what does that mean? Well, connected to God, I’m connected in the way in which we should all be connected to what’s ultimately real. I love other people because that’s what Jesus taught me, and I feel peace inside me. They will point to those three. And I think of meaning as a way, that’s why I talk about being connected to yourself, connected to others, connected to the world. That meaning is all about trying to coordinate and accentuate those three kinds of relevance. And if we juxtapose that, which is just the end of schvitz exactly, so my language on that is, yeah, the enlightenment gap blew up sense-making and coherent intelligibility across those domains of matter, mind, and then scientific knowledge, oh, that’s the world. And actually the only thing that’s real is the world through some objectivist epistemology that then kills the no or subjectively in social. And now we’re actually in a place to say, wait a minute, no, that’s actually disastrous at the existential in life meaning level for the psyches, and there actually is a way to afford coherent intelligibility and move towards a coherent integrated pluralism that then juxtapose self, other, world relations in proper order that is coherent and intelligent. I think that’s very well said. I wanna bring up one question then. So I think, I think- I’ll pull this back if anybody needs it. Yeah, like I said, I think this, like I said, you can see the continuum of relevance realization running through that model, Gary, and then mapping it onto the way we talk about meaning in life as those three kinds of connections. I think that addresses some of your primary concerns. Now I have a concern if I can erase it, which is one of the things that Plato does is he jumps above that, although I just said a moment ago, you can’t, but you’ll see what I mean. Because what he does is he asks for sort of the, he asks for meta principles. And these are constitutive principles. And I see them as trying to point to how can you tell when you’re getting the self-relevance, the relevance to others and are the we relevance to the world going well. And he talks about, right, he talks about two meta things. He talks about, right, the reduction of inner conflict, right, a peace of mind in some profound way. And he talks about a sense of being connected to reality. And then that they are looping and reinforcing each other. This is his anagogy. And that can be the case regardless of your particular cultural historical system, right? And then there’s one that’s in the Platonic spirit and he doesn’t have it, but it would be anachronistic to attribute it to him, which is, there’s a, I think, so there’s a meta thing of, there’s three so far. There’s the meta thing, there’s the meta thing of inner peace, there’s the meta thing of contact with reality, and there’s the meta thing that they’re mutually affording each other rather than pulling apart or undermining each other. So those are the three that come clearly from Plato. And then in the Platonic spirit, I think you can make clear arguments for why meaning, right, meaning in life, how do I wanna put it? Because we have to reproduce, we ultimately have to be willing to sacrifice the subjective wellbeing for our connectedness to others and our connectedness to the world. And so that is why, this is one of the things that’s always bothered me about the subjective wellbeing people, is they can’t explain why people have kids, which is a Darwinian thing, because you know what takes a huge hit in your subjective wellbeing? Like on every of those measurable things you put up there, have a kid, all of those will go down dramatically. Well, why do people do it? Because given the right context, they need to reproduce, they, we have an inbuilt capacity to sacrifice subjective wellbeing in order to be properly connected to others and to the world, because that’s what reproduction requires. It requires that I’m at least connected to one other person and that the we of us is situated in an environment in which children are viable. So that’s a fourth meta I see running through these. And that for that reason, I think those are properly universals, and that makes this a pluralistic model rather than a relativistic model. Pluralistic model says that our universals running with through the variations, whereas the relativistic model says, no, each variation is encapsulated and incommensurable with the others. Yeah, so I can agree essentially with all of that, all of your thoughts, certainly Gary, obviously you wanna chime in. So I divide sort of moral, ethical value claims into three broad categories, and this is gonna relate directly to what you’re saying. So there’s some moral views that afford a moral absolutist view, okay? This like a Star Wars ontology, inside the universe there’s good and evil, the light and dark forces, they exist like electromagnetism, and many ontologies live this way, many religious ontologies live this way. That’s what I call moral absolutism, it has nothing to do with anybody’s evaluation, it’s being in proper touch with the actual ontological structure of the universe. I’m not a moral absolutist in that way, but I’m not a relativist either, meaning that they’re saying that everything is contextually situated, imminently historical, and then the variable are always gonna be either just subjectively recursively defined or only evaluated in the context of what they are construed. I’m a universalist, which is basically what you said, and that is that through transjective development, we can see crystal clear that there are universalist tendencies to evaluate certain states as valued states of being, you can pragmatically judge those in relationship to other states from a universalist kind of position, and that is trans-cultural. And the evidence for those kinds of things is like with- And trans-historical. And trans-historical, and you can look at it in relationship to the United Declaration of Human Rights, and this is what I did with my own red layer, and this gets back to my own ultimate justification of being, that which enhances dignity, and that’s the United Declaration of Rights, which then confers the justification of justice, which is absolutely essential for self other world culture stuff, well-being itself, which is basically the opportunity to be fulfillment, and then affording its integrity, which is honesty, coherence, and soundness in relation, and that’s the World Health Organization and science, which are all in terms of at least their basic values can be argued to be trans-historical, trans-cultural, contextual, universalist, that humans everywhere, when given the free opportunity say, yeah, those are good things, with enormous amount of reliability and consensual agreement. And the last thing I’ll say, and then get back to, so I was basically a neo-Aristotelian, and John is Yankee me to be a neo-Platonic person, and then that’s happening to me in terms of, as John knows and other people know, my own experience in this whole expansive pullback, afforded what feels to be another layer from the big three of dignity, well-being, and integrity, I developed the wisdom energy experience, and the wisdom energy experience felt more transcendent, both above finding the ultimate pinnacle of wisdom across the three, and then really below, all the way back down to energy in terms of work effort in a physics sense, and the experience of being is that my energy information flow is metabolizing physical work energy into living work energy, into mental work energy, into cultural work energy, into the epitome of what would be wisdom, as above, so below, my justificatory system sort of like VAPS out, and you’re like, damn, this is all right, then whatever’s Nirvana or Chi, or whatever the hell, I think that’s what this is. I’m just some sort of beam of wisdom energy, and I’m loving it, so that’s what happened, and so that’s at least my experience in relationship to that. I think that’s well said. So what did- Gary? What did you think, Gary, about, first of all, I replied to you, and then Greg did too, but also I raised a platonic point, and then Greg responded, what do you think about all of those? Yeah, I’m really trying to sit with it. I think what I’m thinking is, I think in both of your responses, there’s a, if not an explicit emphasis, then an implicit tendency toward coherence, and like a movement toward coherence in terms of justifications and things like that, and I was thinking of, I was trying to think up counterfactuals, actually, where, and maybe this is self-defeating in a sense, but there’s also a value in being able to tolerate uncertainty, especially since uncertainty to a degree is irreducible from experience, and so there’s, at least for me, in an existential sense. I wanna push back on that point right there. You made a Hegelian move that I wanna resist, which is coherence doesn’t mean completeness. The platonic move is we are always lovers of wisdom, and we can be coherent lovers, which doesn’t mean we have removed uncertainty from, so it’s virtue in response to fate, and we acknowledge fate as beyond our capacity to be conquered by virtue, but nevertheless, we have to be virtuous in our response to fate. Yeah, I guess that makes sense to me, but I’m thinking of the person who has, lost someone, let’s say, and their entire world has been plunged into absurdity, and any theoretical or pre-theoretical notions of life making sense have sort of gone out the window, and then it becomes a matter of tolerating and bearing with and patiently enduring the suffering that they feel like they’ve. No, no, see, I wanna challenge you on that, because I think bearing with is exactly what we do in grief. We don’t offer propositional solutions because we can’t because of the fundamental uncertainty of fate, but what do we do? We emphasize and we try to reinforce their connectedness to themselves, to other people. That’s the whole point of the funeral, and funeral rites are universal, and then we try to emphasize their connectedness to reality, and we talk about give it time, eventually you’ll grow into another person you’ll fit, and you can see universal responses to death, nobody denies the grief, but what they say is in the grief, what you’re gonna do is we’re gonna remind you that you have not lost the connectedness yourself, the connectedness to us, and the connectedness to the world. I like that, I like that. Right, but there’s nothing you should, I agree with you. If you think you can say something, then you’re forgetting. I mean, this is what’s wrong with our political system in my mind, right? It’s virtue in response to fate, the right forgets fate. The fact that we are little tiny beings and we get crushed by reality, and we have to exercise tremendous compassion and cooperation with each other, and stop pretending that we’re gods. That’s what the right forgets. The left forgets that yes, but nevertheless, people are responsible for cultivating virtue in response to fate. They’re not allowed to be vicious, they’re not allowed to be sort of maladaptive, they’re not allowed to run around being like a loose cannon in everybody else’s life, right? So could I ask you something? Yeah, sorry, I get passionate about this because- No, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is an amazing topic. So does it even make sense to ask the question what’s the proper relationship one might have or built with respect to uncertainty? Yeah, I mean, so the first- Without succumbing to the very problem of trying to reduce- So I do wanna reply to that too, because I was gonna say to you, I think you have an implicit normativity of coherence because if you invoke moving away from self-deception, you’re moving to, and we don’t mean sentential coherence, at least that’s not what I, that’s not what Greg and I are talking about, Gary. We’re talking about existential coherence, right? And if you- I could also- Pardon me? Just say, go ahead, go ahead. So self-deception, the need to overcome, because self-deception severs your connection to yourself, to other people, and to the world. And so if you say we should be moving away from it, I think you’re invoking that existential coherence. I wanna question my own assumption though, because I can also imagine some cases where movement away from self-deception might harbor greater risks existentially than movement towards. So typically what happens there, and I’m not accusing you of this, is people equivocate on short-term, long-term. That’s almost always what happens, is they say, well, if you do, if you tell Peter that Agnes is cheating on him, he’s gonna be so upset, so don’t tell him. But the thing is, what that means, that is a presupposition, right? That you have, that you are in charge of, you have a grasp of all the relevant variables. And that turns out to typically be problematic. Because if you ask people regularly, would they want to know if they’re being cheated on, even if it destroys the relationship, they’ll say, yes, I want to know. Because the contact with reality supersedes. So, and there’s an argument you might make here, I’ll make it on your behalf, which is Trader’s argument, which is one of the ways we protect ourselves from being too mind read by other people, is we deceive ourselves. This is like the rabbit has noise thrown into its running, so it doesn’t do tells. The problem I have with that is, as a position is, it seems to equivocate between noise and self deception. I don’t think the rabbit’s deceiving itself. I don’t think that makes any sense. I think we do lots of stuff where we throw noise into our own processing, and that is, I mean, you even do that within neural networks. So that’s the problem I have for that move. So let me lay my cards out on the table. My position’s a little different actually. And maybe Greg, you might help back up, or chip in on this actually. Because from a clinical point of view, one of the things that I’ve been learning about is differences in character organizations that make a difference in, not just diagnostically, but prognostically, and also as to what’s contraindicated, what types of treatment are contraindicated. So for example, Freud originally believed that you can’t do psychoanalysis with psychotics because the structure of their unconscious and their relationship to their unconscious is such that the regular sort of psychoanalytic stuff that you do, like free association, for example, or sort of sitting back and being that good projective surface that you want to be to let their conflicts come to the surface, that’ll trigger them into a breakdown, and that’ll cause more harm than good. And then Lacan came around sometime after and said, no, there is a way to do psychoanalysis with psychotics, but it’s different. And I can’t get into that. I don’t think I have the understanding to really articulate that. But one thing I have noticed is that the kind of reflective work that we tend to associate with psychotherapy, which say the union tradition, right? It’s like, let’s think about all these arc and complexes and how you’re unconsciously acting out all these stories that you don’t even know you’re acting out, et cetera, et cetera. That might actually, in the literature, or in some of the literatures that I’m familiar with, at least, that kind of exploratory self-investigative work is actually contraindicated. And the emphasis is on doing that, which will achieve a kind of psychic stability in the person so that they don’t lose their sense of self, so that it doesn’t get disintegrated. And so that’s where my concern is coming from. It’s a clinical concern, really. And it comes with its own set of theoretical assumptions, such as the difference in character structures, et cetera, et cetera. But quite frankly, I don’t know exactly what to do with that problem, but I’ve seen it as a problem. I wanna make sure I understand the problem first and how it might be an objection. And we’re getting too close to being over time. So we may, but it seems to be saying, well, there are situations where I don’t want people to engage in self-reflection or self-examination. Pardon me? Certain types of people. Certain types of people. Well, presumably because of the, yeah, the situations they’re in, et cetera. I guess the boundaries blurred, but it has more to do with their character organization. Well, what I meant is you don’t try and do trauma therapy when you’re in duck out, right? Because of the situation. So I think there’s situational, as well as type limitations on when you would intervene. Like, you don’t, right? Maybe you do logo therapy, right? Or something like that. But it seems to me that our, our, it seems to me your justification for that was because you’re trying to do the best to bring the coherence within the individual that’s possible and that self-examination might disturb the coherence. So you’re still invoking the normativity of coherence. Then I would say to you is, is that, is those set of conditions, is that coherence short-term or do you promote it long-term? And here’s where I’m gonna say, no, no, I bet you’re promoting it short-term. We do this. And so the person can get to a place where they can deal with the deeper issues, right? That are only being held in a container by this pro tem coherence. In fact, I’d be worried, speaking from the outside, I’d be worried about you as a clinician that just sort of kept people in that pro tem coherence because I’d be worried like, cause then you could be their, you could be their therapist forever, basically. And that would start to get you into sort of, I think, I mean, this was one of the classical arguments made against Freudian psychoanalysis is it doesn’t bloody end. And at some point- Five for five, John. Five days a week, five years. So I think you’re still, my initial response is, I still think you’re invoking a coherence and I still think you’re invoking a pro tem in order to afford the possibility of moving into a long term. Coherence. Great, I like the sound of that. Yep, yep, I understand. And I’m curious what Greg. Well, there’s just a wide variety of things that were thrown out. So there was lots of different possible threads. I’ll pick up one thread, Gary, certainly as a psychological doctor, I’m running diagnostics on the various domains of what I’m perceiving as human mental behavior from the outside that then affords me the capacity to construct a character adaptation system. And then what you saw on the outside were the wheels or domains of development in which I’m now assessing as a psychological doctor. And certainly if you’re telling me somebody’s got borderline personality disorder, that tells me an enormous amount right away about the structural organization, the identity, the relationship system, the nature of defense, how they’re gonna then relate to me in a particular way. And the strategies that I would begin to emphasize as a intra-psychic coherence versus a more solution-focused element versus all sorts of different possible, I’m applying the realistic, I have an adaptive living equation that actually affords a particular type of specification about the kinds of weights as to when I will enter this kind of structure. I often will reflect about what it is that I think their limitations are that are realistic, that then bind me in particular ways to not try to press, but then how do I not be fatalistic because I label them and then become self-fulfilling and I trap them. I see that as a chronic dialectic in many, especially with low functioning individuals. Well said. And that’s a, you know, but it is the case that the person who I was in the inpatient unit with, who then gave me all 10s, who’s impaired across so many different levels. I mean, we’re talking about an individual in this case who is, you know, 65, demented, super long history of abuse, physical abuse, super long history of substance abuse. If you work in these, like I’ve been, in the sort of the bottom of the barrel, what you have is these chronic developmental disordered individuals, you know? And yeah, I mean, let’s face it, if you’ve been around people, there’s an enormous amount of limitation and then you place in proxy the zone of development, what’s an adaptive move towards optimal functioning that’s reasonable or realistic, given at least my estimation of what is in the domain of possible. So that is true, at least where I am. The other thing around coherence, I don’t know, Gary, I feel, I mean, I feel like I built a lot of coherence. I don’t know what the hell is happening in my own personal life. You know, the last two months, I’ve gotten some curve balls in my own life. I don’t know what’s going on. The idea that I’m like, I have so much certainty that I don’t have uncertainty. I don’t even know what that would be like. So I’m certainly not in any position to have enough coherence in the world to be like, oh, well, everything’s clear. And that’s somebody who’s coming from a unified approach. My unified frame, and this goes right to John, is dropped back into what’s E.O. Wilson called conciliance and what we can then call coherent intelligibility across systems that afford clarity. And it’s not clarity so that I no longer have any uncertainty about how the world works. It’s clarity in relationship to the chaotic, fragmented, pluralistic structure of knowledge and the problem of psychology and the enlightenment gap, meaning that we basically have said epistemologic ontologically, but you’ll never know and you’ll never achieve coherence at really any substantive macroscopic level. And it’s like, no, actually we aren’t answering any of the questions with level of precision that would be like, oh, we now know. And so we can go have a cigarette and be done with it. It’s like, we can answer it at the level of frame so that we have a descriptive metaphysics and ontological reference so that the three of us know what we talk about when we mean mind or psyche or wellbeing. That’s what I mean by coherence. Like the minimum criteria ontologically for what a science is. And we don’t have that. And the difference between not having that and having that is coherent intelligibility. So I’m all, if we can achieve that, that just seems common sensually good. Not like I’m committing to like eliminating uncertainty. I’m just committing to trying to make sense out of the world. Yeah, I have an analogy here and it’s stronger than just an analogy because of deep continuity hypothesis. Life does not eradicate entropy. It figures out ways of dissipating it. And that’s exactly what the kind of coherence I’m talking about is, right? All right. I think that’s it. We went much longer than we normally would. All right, so that’s wellbeing. We’re gonna drop it in the center of the psyche and then we’re gonna talk about how it goes wrong next time. Yes. All right. Okay. So thank you very much, gentlemen. This was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.