https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ms3Strk8—s
Welcome back everyone to the fourth episode of Psyche Pathology and Well-Being. The first three episode links will be in the notes to this video. And today I’m again joined by my fellow dialogosers, Gary Hovinesyan and Greg Enriquez. And I’m going to turn things over to Greg. He’s going to review what we did in the last episode and then he’ll lead us into this one. So take it away, Greg. Thanks so much, John. Great to be back. Good to see you, Gary. Yeah, so last time our task was to sort of lay out sort of a descriptive metaphysical map of well-being. That was the sort of central task. And I offered the nested model for that task. The nested model identifies four nested dimensions and then posits that their alignment can be construed as one way of framing well-being in relationship to kind of what’s our overarching conception. So we walk through those real fast and then we’ll kind of get into it, see if there’s any summary questions we want to add to it. But we created a lot of philosophical underlaboring to set the stage for that. And then we dropped the model. The center of the model from within is the subject’s conscious experience of being. I’m going to connect us to the term psyche in a little bit. But the basic map of that is sort of from the bottom, the affective system, positive and negative affect. And then in evaluative structure, there’s a generalized overview and then specific evaluative domains like my relationships, my finances, my job, et cetera. And that is a pretty good empirical model of what’s called subjective well-being, the felt experience of being in the world and whether or not it’s going well. We then nested that in the context of sort of psychological functioning broadly defined. So this would be all your cognitive functioning, things like memory, using that colloquial, the personality structure of an individual, sort of the nested functional aspects. And I’ll be coming back to some of those and talking about those throughout the series. That psychological mental functioning system is then embedded in a biological system. So then to use them in Thompson mind in life. So life is the complex adaptive system around which mind is functioning. And we can then think about the psychological doctor handling the psychological functioning and think about the physician handling the biophysical functioning of the organism. So then we have the center of that. Then the next line that has these two layers to it, a biological, psychological, if you want to call that, then we drop that agent into an environment, an arena. Then we differentiated that arena in terms of the biophysical organization of it. That’s technology, toxins, sound, et cetera. And then place that also in the social arena in terms of specific dyadic relations, triadic group relations nested in a cultural context, roles, finances, which is kind of in between social and sort of technological and other material resource kinds of domains. So this third environmental domain, then we have so in this way we sort of have a causal explanatory structure between a subject embedded in a psychological and biological functioning system as an agent organism that’s embedded in an environment. And then we wonder about the structural functional flow of that. But that’s not quite it because there’s a normative structure that needs to be brought to bear inherent in the concept of well-being is that there is an evaluative function as to whether or not this is those complex descriptive into causal explanatory structures are actually doing what they ought to do relative to some normative frame. So the nested model says, hey, there’s subjectivity nested in a biopsychological agent organism nested in an environment. And all of that’s got to be contextualized in a normative worldview structure of the evaluator. If we align all of that, we can then see sort of a summary of that in Kant’s understanding of well-being, which he defined in terms of happiness as the worthiness to be happy. We can take worthiness both in a functional sense like the causal explanatory descriptive elements and worthy in a normative sense and then tie it to that subjective experience of contentment and fulfillment. That’s great. OK, so there we are. So now we are now we have a sort of a well-being, OK, as a way of sort of saying, OK. And now what I want to do is I want to come back to this, utilize this perspective framing to give rise to what I would now I’m using more and more as the difference between psychology and psychology. Right. All right. Good, Gary. I’ll be here all week. I’m glad you like that. Funny. It’s actually really interesting, OK, because historically psyche and mind and soul are all kind of equivalent, but they don’t actually get equivalent to behavior. Exactly. And yet the science of psychology comes along. And I’m going to argue that actually science of psychology is actually has to be committed to behavior. And I’m going to talk about this relationship. And I actually think it’s a really important one. And it pops pretty clearly in relationship to this nested model dimension. OK, notice the nested model structures its picture either from the interior out, which is the vantage point of the patient epistemologically. So the epistemological position of the patient is, hey, my subjective and then I’m nested and then I’m nested. And then there’s the evaluator looking back at me or the evaluator looking at the patient as a nested into and then sort of has to imagine what the subjectivity would be. OK. I’m going to position the argument that me as a psychological doctor from the outside, that’s anchored to psychological science, is arguing for a conception of what I see as human mental behavior when I’m watching my patient. OK, so if we were just and that’s available for if you want to sort of its epistemological availability, if you feel like what’s available on a Zoom call, if we hit record right now, each of our human mental behavioral patterns can be observed. And if you had the training, you could then watch and see and have inter-rater reliability about, oh, Greg’s moving his hands right now. Greg’s justifying his actions this particular way. And there is this influence dynamic between John and Gary. And you can track that pattern in the dimension of an exterior epistemological behavioral analysis. Is that fair? Mm hmm. OK, inside each of us is our own epistemological portal onto the world that affords us the capacity to observe, but itself cannot be observed as behavior. OK, and that fundamentally is the psyche position. So I’m basically going to say that there is the scientific exterior epistemological position of the scientific psychologist into then a psychological doctor. The psychological doctor uses human mental behavior, but also uses an intersubjective participatory capacity to at least dynamically bridge to the subjective experience of the patient as the psyche. In fact, this is the fundamental argument of what Carl Rogers argued in his sort of phenomenologically oriented client centered or then person centered point of view. OK, OK, so now we actually have and what that does is it basically emphasizes that the psyche position is epistemologically tied to the first person. I also want to emphasize this now tied to the historic contingent real. So consciousness or whatever, we might have a generalized nominative category for the field, but it’s my psyche in the world. And then from a perspective of the psychotherapist, that’s what I deal with. I don’t deal with theoretical entities. I deal with a subject put in the real. I’m going to use the term psyche for that. So this is really cool. So can we slow down on this? Because this is an important move. I think this is very important move. Very much so. So the last time we talked about, you know, again, trying to get to a point below the is ought and how relevance was putting us there. And I know we talked about this both in untangling the world, not on consciousness and the elusive eye on the nature and function of the self. So I’m going to try and maybe use a little bit of that language and see if it lands with what we’re doing here just to get a more overarching convergence. I was hoping you would, John. So I was hoping you would. Always hungry for synoptic integration. Hey, man. Lurking in the epistemic corners and alleyways. Yeah. OK. So. We talked about, you know, that relevance ultimately ground, like you said, Evan Thompson, my relevance is always relevant to an autopoetic system and that there this sets up right, this particular salience landscape field, right, the here in this and the now, but it’s also centered on me because relevance has its ontological grounding in relevance to an autopoetic being. And then that gave us this sort of centeredness. And then we talked about something like that, that center being the eye that can look at or look through various means, which are these sort of which are these roles and identities that can be can be seen behaviorally. Right. And so the media, the media is mediate between behavior and then the center of the perspectival knowing of the eye. But the eye has this weird capacity to move through imaginal space. And right. And you can center itself here in the head or the heart or behind these means and gestalt them together of those means. Right. And it has a weird no thingness about it that because it’s never observed, it’s always the act of observation. And so is that eye in the way I describe it functioning, that that’s the here now, this centeredness togetherness, right. On and the fact that it is observing, but never observed and it can move around in imaginal space in order to reconfigure how it’s gestalting the means and seeing through them. Is that mapping on to what you’re calling psyche? 100 percent. The only thing I would add is that I would now then you given a generalized description of the function, I simply want to then place it in an idiographic reel. So it’s my psyche. Right. And so that and this is something that ties in because you cannot experience my relevance because my relevance is absolutely specified to my autopoetic being. So you can you can understand it. You can even generate something analogous for yourself. But in order to have that relevance realization, that self-relevance, you have to actually be this particular autopoetic being because that is its ontological grounding. You can’t get out of that or around that or outside it. And so that gives it an idiosyncratic specificity that can’t be captured by a nomological description. We can have a nomological description that it is specified in this way, but we cannot have a nomological description of that specification. That’s how I would put that. Is that is that land with you? Lands with elegant precision. Right. So could I ask three things if I don’t forget all three right now? One of them. So here’s a question. What does that mean about the nature of empathy? That’s the one question that’s coming up for me. Another is, is the argument you’re making about the. Is the argument you’re making kind of like the knowledge argument that you could you could have a scientific theory of perception, but that doesn’t mean Jackson’s knowledge argument, is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, sure. Yeah. And the third one. Yeah, I forgot the third one. It’ll it’ll come back to me. This happens. Well, I need a little background on Jackson’s. Oh, Jackson is Mary, the super neuroscientist. She’s a model. Oh, of course. Yes. Yes. See black and white. She studies color vision. She she she somehow I know that I know Mary. Let me tell you about it. And for maybe people who don’t. Right. So Mary, Mary, no, this is Jackson. Mary knows everything about color vision. She knows she can describe all of the processes that are going on in what happens when somebody’s seeing red. She becomes the world expert on it. And then they perform an operation on her. And now she is no longer monochrome and she sees red. And she knows what it is like to see red that is above and beyond. For me, that’s handled, Gary, I would say, like the distinction between propositional knowing and perspectival knowing. Right. And part of what consciousness is, is the participatory knowing of and through perspectival knowing. So that’s I think. Yeah, I think very much because consciousness, because consciousness is bound to participatory and perspectival knowing that gives us a way of understanding and is distinct from propositional knowing, I think that gives us a way of addressing the Jackson issue. Well, I try to remember what your first question was about empathy. And my other question was going to be about actually Jung’s distinction between the self psyche and then the ego. Yeah, what I was wondering if that figures into your it does completely. Yeah. So actually, all of this can be specified. So the first thing I will do, actually, I’m working on maybe an extended blog called The Hard Problem of the Psyche, OK, which is going to get into this knowing problem, because I don’t think that people appreciate all of the features. There’s the ontological mechanism problem of, say, neurobiological brain field, electromagnetic field systems that actually give rise to epistemological portal subjectivity. That’s a hell of a problem with specific mechanism that we’re missing or at least, you know, mysterious at some level. Then there’s the epistemological problem that you can’t observe it. And then there’s the ideographic situated contingent problem of the real. OK, and the nomenthetic dynamic that we were just talking about. And I don’t think that people have really put together all of those and then place them in proper relation to what I would consider a meta theory of psychology, which is now we’re going to get to, which is going to go right back to John’s point, OK, which is like, hey, I’m going to argue very quickly that we’re going to go inside and out between the interior and exterior perspectives with transjective meta theories. Right. Right. And that’s so I’m about ready to make that argument. And, John, you were setting me up for that just the way I hope you would. OK, so one of the things I’ll just drop here in response to you, Gary, is say, hey, this there’s a very important set of arguments like David Chalmers and many people have made about this hard problem. And there are many facets of it. I actually want to now claim that actually the hard problem of the psyche is a better way of framing this issue as the hard problem of consciousness, because it’s actually going to line up the ontological mechanism, the epistemological gap and the ideographic. And it’s going to ask, is there any meta theoretical structures that afford clarity about the psyche? And if I compare John and my meta theory, scientific, nominative meta theory with a proper dynamic transjective relation of inside and out. That affords clarity about psyche that then drops you into how to do psychotherapy, for example. Well, now, all of a sudden, you’re stitching together a whole swath of different places with a high degree of coherence. And that’s exciting. OK. So that’s that’s kind of the the last thing I’ll say is when John talks about the eye, I want to yes, I want to be clear about there. I would argue this and I think we talked about this. There is the framing of the adjectival, adverbial, epistemological witness function system that gives you rise to perspectival knowing that’s present in mammals that does afford an IME relation of a particular kind. Right. Right. And is exactly the epicenter of the psyche, as I would frame it, because it’s organized as the subject of epistemological perspectival portal through which you can’t gap somebody else’s observation of its situates, observation, but can’t be observed. OK. Yes. At the same time, there’s the ego, you know, and the first thing into you talk was a theory of the ego as an interpretive, justifying structure. OK, that sits above and can transcend through the whole language problem that gets out. So you have actually much more direct access to my ego. And I can argue that from within my ego situates in the psyche. But actually, the ego transjectively and intersubjectively pops into the dynamic space of justification. Right. Right. So this is a bridger in relation. And indeed, what I’m going to argue is actually through behavioral and now I’ll just go into this. Behavioral investment theory situates us both in terms of the description of the kind of behavior we’re interested in, sensory motor looping, behavior of the animals as a whole. It grabs ahold of Skinner and behavioral economics and evolution says, hey, there’s an energy economic investment system that’s operative. I then was cognitively situated historically and then got pulled into the skinnerian worldview, not that I adopted it, but I afforded myself the capacity to see what the world was like from a pure epistemologically grounded instrumentalist view that was afforded by radical behaviorism, which I initially dismissed, but then found is really actually quite elegant. It’s important. OK. And so then behavioral investment theory actually bridged. It’s a weak cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary and skinnerian view. OK. And then it afforded a basic architecture for the behavioral investment system. Then I find John and John’s. Well, I had a weak neurocognitive functionalism and John’s recursive relevance, Yokes predictive processing, active inference, and then pulls the stack together and puts it in a transjective agent arena relation. Which is like that’s why I was like, holy shit, that’s unbelievable. OK. And then we stuck that into the influence matrix. OK. Which then says, hey, there’s a self other relation and the self auding that the system is doing as it grips a hold is tracking things like social influence, relational value in a recursive relational process of relevance realization. Right. And then ultimately you put that in a person plane of existence of justification. OK. And the cool thing about all of that means that those four ideas, behavioral investment theory, recursive relevance realization through the entire stack, transjectively organized influence matrix and justification, create a transjective meta theory that I’m arguing that could go from psychology out in and psyche in out. That’s elegant. That’s elegant. That’s elegant. That’s beautiful. So then you have the problem of psychology, scientific natural science, which is this exterior objective behavioral epistemological view. Right. And the whole problem of psychology is only that we have, but we’re really actually concerned with that epistemological portal, subjective qualitative experience of being. And we don’t know how to get there across many different domains. Hence the freaking problem. Right. But I’m actually thinking that that problem now, if we have if we have the psyche versus the mental human mental behavior as appropriately categorizing the epistemological and ontological reference, and then we have these four systems that can align a meta theoretical coherence that’s then transjectively available to inside and out. That’s that’s a lot. That’s powerful. That’s very I’m looking forward to the way this unfolds and the way you’re drawing all the other stuff we’ve done together. I’m wondering about Gary’s specific questions like does the like you first. First of all, there was a great moment where you popped the ego out and said, like, you know, when we’re into language, you gave this we talked about this. You can there’s this deep vulnerability. And I have to get this other function. And that function is is is both an interface function, but it’s also internalized. Right. Because I’m managing the transjective relationship in a very powerful way. Do you think there’s anything analogous? So you clearly there clearly there’s a way the ego fits into that, I think, very beautifully, very eloquently. What would that that sort of internalized interface thing? I think that’s excellent. And like I said, I think your version of it is better than Spurber and Mercy is. I’ll just keep saying that whenever I can, when I meet people on the bus or anything, I’ll just I’ll just mention that as a point. It’s always a conversation. But I’m wondering, is there anything is there anything like Jung’s notion of the self, which is so this is what I might argue. I might argue that what Jung was trying to point to with the self is the whole multi-leveled recursive dynamical system, right. That’s running and and giving rise to the psyche and the ego. And that the self is the entire dynamical set that I get that that’s something like what Jung seems to be talking about, that there’s a principle organization for sort of the entire functionality. So here’s the way I would do it, especially based on our. So to me now, psyche is this epistemic meaning making container structure. I totally get that. I think that’s great. And then the self, OK, the self is going to be very tied to the witness function a little bit. That’s going to give rise to then the two streams we talked about in the elusive eye. So the witness function captures then the general agent arena relation. Right. And then as that general agent relation gets extended across time, the self modeling grabs it. OK, so now it’s self relevant model. Yes. So now the self is coming out of that awareness function. Right. Right. So that and then I’ll say one more thing. And then when when we get into this unbelievable capacity for intersubjective relating, the matrix takes hold for the internal working models of self other relation. And now when I used to talk about the experiential self, what I meant is there’s a line of experience and then the self is grabbing a hold of what’s relevant to this. I care about this. I care about my power. I care about my attachment. I care about my injuries as I think about myself going forward. Yeah. So the psychic structures here that’s driven rise to the epistemic field. And then the self experiential self is here. Also, we said that relates to but is also different than the witness function. Then the ego pops out and then the persona comes along to regulate the self, the interactions, transjectively. Right. So you basically making use of the model that you and Chris and I argued for in the elusive of the way of the self emerges out of self relevance and self modeling. Right. And then extended over time and then extended in relation over time to give rise to what clinically I always saw as the experiential self, which mapped by the matrix. This is a fundamental sense of myself in the social arena and whether I’m known and valued, what kind of power do I have? How do I the ego then judge myself in relationship to other in the world? And that becomes that for the psychotherapy perspective, that’s like an epicenter of attention. The internalizing conditions are experiential self and an ego regulating a persona in particular ways. You talked about the interface there. What happens to so many from internalizing is the interject where you anticipate criticism, loss, threat, and then you stick the filter, the public to private filter here in the superego harsh parent on top of the animal child experience of being judged the hell out of it and create a little family system that is attacking itself in a critical child, critical parent child dynamic that’s like, oh, my God, what’s going on with myself? So I agree with that. I mean, we argued it together. Right. Right. Right. In the don’t abandon me now, John. No, no, no. The nature and function of the cell. And I think that I think that’s the proper way, you know, self-relevance into self modeling into temporally extended and then motally extended because we all we also extended into possibility space. Right. And we do all that. So that’s the nature and function of the cell. And I agree that that’s a good that that is what we I think are pointing to. I don’t like the fact that that young used the word self for what he’s talking about. But there’s another he’s trying to because I don’t think he’s talking about what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the self. Yes, I agree with that. Because there’s going to it’s something like Atman. It’s something like the ground of the of the psyche, just like, you know, we talk about being as the ground of the universe. I think that’s what he’s talking about. And so for you, your read of young and maybe and I’m not a young expert by any such, but your read of young is that self contains psyche as opposed to psyche contains self. I guess I had young as having psyche containing self, but maybe. No, no, no. This is like many people. And this is why the word self is so infelicitous, because the word self points to that functionality, that structure that you and I were just talking about. And I think that’s the proper use of the word self. Right. And and that and that. But the most the closest correspondence is something like Atman. And the idea is that why why young uses self is because they’re supposed to be an identity relationship between Atman and Brahman, just like Brahman is the ground of the cosmos, Atman is the ground of the psyche. And those two have a kind of participatory identity. And right. And I think that’s a different notion. And I think there’s a that we should have a word for that, Gary. But I do not think we should use the word self precisely because it doesn’t explain this very important thing that Greg and I were just talking about. And right. And it confounds what’s the relationship between the self, the psyche and Atman, which I think is, I think, a valuable thing to ask in some way. Totally. So right. And when I last thing I’ll say, and then Gary just go. So for me, that’s the whole wisdom energy loop. Ah, yes, yes, yes. That’s the whole yes. Some energy. That’s the mapping. That’s the that pulls out the self, the ego and the persona and gets both above and below. Yes, yes. Yeah. What is it included, but not enclosed beyond, but not excluded and that kind of thing. Yeah. Gary, does that does those does that address your concern? Yeah, I think so. What I’m hearing, at least from like a very like the phenomenological sort of insight here might be that whatever the normativity around which my being is organized is, it’s somehow prior to and maybe even transcends my egoic understanding of what my normativity is, in a sense. And that’s where the mismatch for young came right between how the ego binds you up. Right. And you shouldn’t identify with any one particular thing. You should sort of follow and listen to the tune of being in a sense, because that’s the intrinsic teleology that you sort of want to orient yourself around in order to move toward optimal being something like that. And I know how that sounds to you. If we bring it back to the normativity problem from before. All right. Go ahead. Well, I just I did what you said, that Heraclitus is a fragment. You know, this the suke, the psyche has a logos which always outgrows itself, always transcends itself. And now the when you try to find the boundaries of the psyche, you can’t. So right. And so I was thinking that like there another way. And this goes into ancient tradition. And I think it lines up perfectly with what Greg just said is what the I think the term young should have used was something like the logos of my being. The logos of my being, the way it gathers and orders and renders intelligible and gives rise to and is ultimately underneath the logic of my speech, et cetera, et cetera. And I think I would propose that as a better term. And then I think that is right. And when we start talking about things like that, we’re getting to again down to that that that point right from that that deeper point from from which both the is and the art co-emerge. Total coordinated fashion. That’s what I would say to that. Totally. And that’s exactly. In fact, then sort of the transjective flow across time in relationship to the vertical stack of my psyche, say, and the horizontal stack of the agent arena relation, in particular, agent other relation. Right. In terms of meaning like, OK, so what I’m about ready then get into the opposite of well-being. OK. Illness and suffering. All right. And I’m going to argue then that really, you know, the coherent integration of sort of the normative value inside the flow, the social material environment, inside the biological flow, inside, you know, psyche psychological and then psyche flow. Right. That alignment. Oh, that’s well-being. Well, what is its inverse? Its inverse is going to be a fundamental breakdown. OK. In relationship to what then could be considered the coherent logos potential. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Violating the particular coherent flow of the whole potential or that it attempts to seek that flow in a particular way. And at the same time, it’s constantly threatened at the broadest sense of it in an entropic sense, threatened in relationship to breakdown. So that that that would certainly line up very, very cleanly. That’s that that’s I think helpful, Craig. I mean, the the like I say, the connections between logos and wisdom energy, the connections between logos and dharma in Buddhist traditions, the many people have said the best translation of Dharma is logos and vice versa across and all of them. And and then also the the connections between logos and the generativity of meaning and intelligibility. I think that’s a better way of putting it than Jung does. I think Wilbur is right about Jung is guilty of a pre-trans fallacy. He doesn’t adequately distinguish between sort of those parts of us that are, you know, pre egoic and those that are trans egoic that are outside consciousness. And I think your model clarifies that in considerable detail and specificity. I’m wanting to actually now bring in just a little bit of Judeo-Christian mythos here. Yeah. Yeah. And in the beginning, there’s the word from John. Yeah. Right. And then the whole gospel of John, by the way, gospel of John. Sorry. The gospel of John. Thank you. But yes, that’s how the gospel of John opens. OK. And if we use some of Jordan Peterson or other people’s mythic frames around the Bible and the Old and New Testament, we start with Genesis. You know, the awakening of eating from the tree of knowledge is essentially a self-conscious, justificatory situation. Yes. You know, of good and evil. OK. And then we could say sort of the logos of how to align the good and evil at the level of logic and justification at the down into the primate and ultimately circle it all way back so that it is aligned, you know, across the stack. You can really then potentially see that kind of structure, I would say. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, we can pick up on that mythos. The first thing of the logos is the right, the light, the possibility of intelligibility, the the the real the realization of intelligibility that makes everything else, all these other structures, phenomenon makes them capable of shining into being. And so I think that I think that’s right. I really like this idea, right, of a vector description of the psyche. Right. I think right. Right. Like the psyche is this way. And then psychology is going this way. I think that’s really, really good. And then I would I want to do another Heraclitus thing, which is but I’m going to I’m going to shift the axis because he said the way up and the way down are the same way. I want to say the way in and the way out are somehow the same way. Right. Well, yes. And indeed, they are found that on the stitching of the transjective. Yes. Yes. I told John the other day or whenever we were talking at some point, I was like, John, I heard you were describing recursive relevance realization. You know, and then I did my deep dive into Skinner. I was like, John, you’re the inner Skinner. OK. Right. And if we afford that particular perspective of us, of a hey, from the outside, a variation of investment, selection and retention of particular pathways. That’s the way I was basically coming at it, because I was situated in the natural science view. You’re situated in a cognitive science view that appreciates phenomenology. You get a recurrence relevance realization. Well, that’s a variation selection retention model, clearly. Yeah. You know, from within. So, yes, as without. So within. So from within. Yeah. There’s this. Go ahead. There’s this quote, actually, that comes to my mind that I I remember from one of your classes, John, I think it was 2013 or 14, the science of mindfulness meditation. It was one of the last lectures you quoted DT Suzuki. The path of purity opens when the eye turns inwardly as well as outwardly and this simultaneously. Yes. Prajna Prajna is exactly that. And then he relates that very clearly to Eckhart. The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me. And I and then St. Paul, I seek to know as I am known. So that’s all around. I mean, isn’t that sort of what we were talking about when we’re talking about transjectivity? Yes. And trying to, like, untangle the relationship that is around under the subjective objective. Exactly. And notice even in the depths of nihilism, the transjective is still there. Nietzsche, if I stare long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare back through me. Totally. And at least in the in the Utah structure. OK, what gives rise to the ultimate, the I quad coin, which I’ve shown some of the time and then becomes the human identity function, which then is the architecture for the psyche, is a thing called the equivalency. And the equivalency is actually utilizing theoretical physics and a particular structure of epistemology that basically creates an equivalency between observed observer relations at a foundation. So it’s an observer behavior relationship that resides at the fundamental logical architecture of Utah that gives rise to the I quad coin. So, again, there’s a transjective observer behavior relation that I elucidated in a particular way by studying the architecture of quantum mechanics, general relativity and knowing. So that and then gives rise to the placeholder of the subject of nowhere that bridges the phenomenological field to mathematical concepts of real numbers and imaginary numbers, actually, which is, I mean, we don’t get into that. But the point of it is, is that there’s really profound, I think, stitching across subjective objective to give rise to a transjective depth. So if we go ahead, John. No, no, I just was like that was just I like this. That’s all that was like. That was working. I’m enjoying the I’m enjoying listening to the music. Yeah, yeah, it tickles my brain. And I like that sensation very much. Right. Well, that’s a transjective sensation, right? So I was thinking if we link this back to mental illness, actually. Yes, I’m wondering if this could be fashioned into a kind of critique where essentially what was now being said is that the transjective is irreducible no matter where you look, even in the depths of nihilism, you will find it there. Yes. So could we fashion this into a kind of critique where we say that any models or understandings of mental well-being or illness that are predicated on this might be a very strong critique, but predicated on anything other than a transjective sort of understanding of what the psyche and the world are, let’s say. That they’re they they commit a sort of fallacy, right? And they necessarily end up leading to misunderstandings or misapprehensions of not only what mental well-being is, but also how to seek it or facilitate it or cultivate it, etc, etc. And I got to say something stronger. I think you have you explicitly are committed to that. I am. I am. Because I think phenomenology properly understood is the continual argument for the prioritization of the transjective. I’m wholeheartedly committed to that. I just don’t want to scare any of the people who aren’t already committed to that. I want to come in a little slow. That’s ultimately the way I see it. Well, that’s a wonderful segue, because I think I do want to it does a behoove us to get us to move us into the argument I want to make. Story about where this is situated, because it’s actually going to bring us to a critique of a standard operating system for understanding what mental disorders are and then open up an opportunity for us to come together and then start to then elaborate on exactly the proposal that you were making. And hopefully then by the time we’re here at the end of this, that will be crystal clear why that’s an absolutely justifiable position. Can I can I say what I think that may be elaborate and that I don’t think is properly. Although I think Marla Ponte was moving towards it was is not properly recognized within phenomenology, which is right. The identity, the participatory identity between the way in and the way out is can never be rendered monologically. It’s inherently dialectical and even more so. And now what I given what you said, but it’s inherently dialogical in nature. Right. It’s inherently exactly. Which, by the way, is one of the great challenges and debates of the science versus practice, the science of psychology, which is then especially if it’s situated in a traditionalist, empiricist, naturalist frame versus the practice of psychotherapy. Right. Which is invariably in the real dialogical process. So that’s another so embedded in that kind of how. And then we have failed to have a proper synthetic philosophy that holds that in relation. And that’s all again what we’re saying. And we can build one that puts those relations, which then situates the science and practice of psychology and psychotherapy into a much, much more harmonious relationship. Right. And this puts me into what I’m saying is I guess what I’m sorry, what I want to emphasize is that right that. And this is again a deeper version that then what you see in the enigma of reason that our attempts to get at reality or what we could call contact with reality ultimately could not be carried out monologically. They have to be dialogical in nature so that there’s something like we like we tend we tend to. Here’s the way the world is. And then we’re doing this dialogical thing over here in therapy. But I think and this is the Socratic platonic point. No, no, no. This is a species, a version of the dialogical way of being that ultimately grounds intelligibility and reason. And that’s you know, that’s Regina and the late Christian Neoplatonist, et cetera. But when you’re saying dialogical, you mean so deal logos, but that’s not an individualistic process. That’s necessarily an interest objective one. Not just interest objective, it’s inter objective or better. What we’re trying to point out as inherently transjective. I participate in I participate in truth. I participate in goodness. I participate in the transjective with that, with that. Well, or just transjective. What I yeah, but but yeah, in a way that like because think about the way the body for Marle Ponte is exactly that way. It’s chiasmic, right? It’s it’s both right. It’s it has that it has a psyche aspect to it in that it is my here now centered togetherness of my intelligibility. But it’s also a body like all the other bodies in the world. And that allows me to cross between the subjective arrow going this way and the objective arrow going that way. And the body is right. But you can’t the point is you can’t you can’t you can’t speak these two at the same time. Right. That’s that’s that’s part of what Marle Ponte. You’re always doing this. You’re always doing that. You have to you have to participate in the unfolding of the logos in order to actually speak that properly. If you try and stabilize it from one pole and say the view from nowhere, for example, or the view from my true self from within, you will not be able to speak it. That’s the platonic claim. That’s how deeply I’m meaning the the the dialogical nature here. And so what you what we have a potential here is for a fundamentally deep grounding of psychotherapy by saying, no, no, no, this isn’t just a dialogical practice. Being is inherently dialogical in a deep and profound way. And that would ground it, I think, in a profound manner. I that’s what I’m proposing. Yeah. So so here’s another way that I think would be very congruent with this in terms of emphasizing its depth. So if I take a tree of knowledge, metaphysics, OK, the matter field is really an object field relation. So and that has to then be conceptualized as that, meaning that there are positions of the object positions of the field and the transjective, if you want to put it in that kind of term. Yes, I can. We jump up to the biological and you get a cell as an agent called cell agent environment relation. And then you move through into multicellular creatures, you know, and then you get an animal agent arena relation. Then you get into the social animals, you get an animal other agent really in a relation, which now is sort of a transjective, intersubjective field of minds. And then you get the person dimension, the culture person dimension, which then has an explicit intersubjective, transjective, justificatory layer on top of that. So that that stack can go all the way down. And at the same time, there are differentiations within it, at least from a T.O.K. perspective that would afford that transjectivity that brings in different layers, say, of intersubjectivity at various places. Yeah, I would say maybe we put the two together kind of like this. We participate in culture. We participate in intelligibility. We participate in life and we participate in being. And the upper levels and the lower levels all participate in each other in a deep way. I’ve never thought about about any of this this way. This is so interesting. I’m also thinking about how because the way you’re trying to theorize about the logos is as the as a kind of circulation between the sort of inner psychic, right? Let’s say point of view and then the outer, let’s say, objected cosmic point of view. I would say this again. Don’t listen to me. Listen to don’t listen to my words. Listen to the logos. Yeah. OK, so I was thinking about how this might actually show up in the neurotic speech and the neurotic in the psychoanalytic sense, not in the big five trade sense. And if you think about like the critical self-doubt monologue that takes place, it’s sort of a constant back and forth, right? Between I I I feel this way. I experience an impulse within myself, but then I immediately distance myself because I check it up or check it against the objective. Right. Some sort of objective standard point of view. And that’s essentially the way I tend to understand that. That’s a process of right. Circulating or trying to navigate the tension between my own subjective self and culture, my ego and myself and culture, something like that. But that seems to be like a dialogical process gone wrong. And so the therapist’s role ends up being to help to facilitate the dialogue, to disentangle the knots. Right. That’s crimes. That’s crimes. And it’s yeah, it’s also the epicenter of my argument about what psychotherapy is centered on, both in terms of its pathological process. You know, so my the theme of my presidency in the Integrative Psychotherapy Society thing is the common core of psychotherapy. OK, and the problem of psychotherapy, and this is what I will get to. But the problem of psychotherapy are entrenched maladaptive patterns. OK, entrenched maladaptive patterns are going to be flow states across stacks, interpsychically and interpersonally that are blocking things and reacting. And in fact, the general model that I give is what’s called triple negative neurotic looping. OK. Character adaptation sense as opposed to a trait. Although trait neuroticism is going to make you vulnerable to this. OK, so triple negative neurotic looping is bad shit happens here. You’re transjectively interacting with the world, something bad. You get bumped by the world. That explodes onto your system with some negative affect reactivity. OK, then you get a secondary either a secondary learned emotional response to that, like I fear fear. OK. Oh, and then inhibits this in a particular way and or very commonly you get an egoic reaction, particularly an interjected egoic reaction, which anticipates the persona consequence of my negative emotional reaction into the field, internalizes the parental authority judge to preempt the judgments of others and then bring that super ego, harsh, interjected, critical layering onto the negative action and the negative event itself in a way that creates more problems. OK, and then predisposes you to more negative events and more negative feeling states, which only irritate the critic itself. And hence is a positive feedback loop in a cybernetic sense, meaning that this thing generates more of this thing, which generates more of this thing, which now spirals you into a reciprocal narrowing space of frustration, irritation and trying to do harder to control these fucking negative events or negative feelings. And what is wrong with me? There’s something fundamentally profoundly wrong. But the more you believe there’s something wrong with you, the more your emotional system is reacting, vulnerable, hostile. Defensive and creates that really egoic self, neurotic loop inside. And then the psychotherapist is like going to come along and try to relate to that looping. OK, and afford a fundamentally different kind of relationship and flow between the core of the experience and the narrating justification as to why I’m experiencing what I am. OK, that really is that I hadn’t quite made that connect. This sounds very convergent with with the stuff I do with Leo on parasitic processing. Oh, it is. And the reciprocal narrowing. I mean, when I’m hearing so I always thought you get you get your justifying experiential system drives you to a dead end. Yes. And then you loop around in that. That’s parasitic processing and reciprocal narrowing almost exactly. Yeah, I heard you say that, John, when I was walking on things like, yes, at a recursive relevance realization, cognitive functional view. That’s exactly what’s happening. That’s amazing. So that would then I mean, I think this is sorry. I’m not I don’t want to do a backwards criticism. I think so Grimes does, you know, the pathy logos thing. That’s pathology is actually the path of the logos, which right. But I think this way of talking about it here, the, you know, the parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, that loop you talked about, what did you call it? The triple. It’s a triple negative neurotic loop, which is the negative event. Yeah. By the way, I got it because my daughter, a biomedical engineer, she was looking into cancer treatments for triple negative breast cancer. And we were just talking about it. It’s like, oh, I can do it’s actually a triple negative neurotic loop because she was actually talking to a biological system. There’s a negative thing. And then this activates this negative. And then all of a sudden there’s a cascade. And I was like, actually, a negative situation, negative feeling, secondary, negative feeling and justificatory negative response is which essentially creates a psychological immune response that actually then drives the system into a maladaptive, you know, precisely narrow place. And so, yeah. And then and then the deep continuity between biological processes and psychological processes, that’s right. This is beautiful. This is turning out to be really beautiful, really beautiful. So actually, with the deep continuity, I’m also going to say there’s an important discontinuity. So actually, I’ll pick up on that because actually this is what drove me into my initial analysis. The first thing I ever applied the theory to, which wasn’t fully developed at the time, was a concept of mental disorder in the literature. Right, right, right, right. So let’s talk a little bit about that. And then, yes, so if we can move into that structure here, even though I’ve loved in this conversation, but it gets to Gary’s point and it really makes it a crucial point. Societally, folks, we’re in obviously a mini mental health crisis. What the hell do we mean by mental disorder? Yes, unbelievably important concept. Yeah. And I believe we’ve gotten it horribly wrong as this, you know, as like, as if obviously implied by this conversation, if not explicitly stated. But here’s the deal. If we go back to the nested model, okay, nested model is the alignment of the subjective into its psychological, into its biological placed in an environment, social material placed in a normative value to construct. You get the alignment of that. Okay. Now let’s just invert it. Okay. And you get a pretty good model of broadly feeling illness. Okay. Or dis-ease at least broadly defined. So you’re miserable rather than subjectively fulfilled. Okay. In the high negative affect relative positive, felt sense of dissatisfaction in general and horribly on dysfunctional in different domains. So that’s the psyche position breakdowns in the way in which you engage transjectively from a cycle, human mental behavior perspective breakdowns in the biological field system. Okay. Breakdowns in the environmental context. Okay. Burning toxins, et cetera, cold, whatever is threatening you there. And then breakdowns in the social order. Right. All of which is then deviating from some normative structure. Okay. You know, so it’s misery with no worthiness, right? No functional worthiness, right? That we’re then going to try to bring health systems to bear around. So then you have this whole problem that we’re going to build healers. So healers then enter into systems to look at misery with no worth. Right. And then bring to bear the capacity to fix that, to turn it into happiness with the worthiness to be happy across biological, psychological, and social dimensions of existence, which by the way, is the mission of the world health organization, which is actually its mission. Okay. So that’s the structure. Now let me get into this kind of issue about, well, what do we mean by mental disorder? Okay. And the first sort of, I came across an argument for what a mental disorder was by Jerome Wakefield in the 1990s made a very strong and a well-known case for arguing for what he called the harmful dysfunction analysis of mental disorder. He made a number of arguments and then a journal of abnormal psychology featured as a special issue in 1999. Okay. And so there was the target issue, many different critiques and supports, and then a summary issue. What I’d like to do then is just dialogue a little bit about Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis, and then put it in the context of what we’re doing and show why it’s fundamentally inadequate, why I pointed to something that would be different and now why we may be in a position to articulate with much more nuance of my initial pointing, what that new and necessary piece is, i.e. these transjective notions of mental functioning. Okay. So what Wakefield argues is harmful dysfunction is actually pretty simple, although it’s a very, very rich argument that he makes. It’s got two components as suggested. One is a normative evaluative structure of harm he believes is necessary. Okay. And then a second is the evaluation of a dysfunction. Okay. And by dysfunction, he uses the evolutionary theory and evolutionary biological and psychological theory to argue that we can infer complex adaptive design from evolution to infer the proper structural functional mechanistic organization of systems. Right. So what’s an example of that? Your heart has clearly, or the human heart say, has a lot of clear structural functional, organizational aspects to it that we know have been designed by evolutionary processes to achieve certain kinds of ends. And then we can use the model of a heart and then wonder deviations from that model. Okay. So for example, it’s got four chambers and they’re supposed to beat in a particular rhythm that circulates blood so that the blood energy that it carries runs through the system at a particular rate. Right. Well, obviously then that functional organization, if for example, the musculature of one of the ventricles gets twisted. Okay. And then all of a sudden that thing begins to beat in a radically different way so that the pumping shifts very dramatically, the structural functional organization, the heart deviates. And then all of a sudden causes all sorts of other systemic functions. You have myocardiac infraction, I K a heart attack and boom, we see that as a harm that deviates from a function. And this becomes a classic articulation of what he would call a disease. Okay. That pairs a particular structural functional breakdown that we can refer to again, a biological place and then brings the social evaluation of harm. Okay. And he then argues that yes, diseases are different than just complex adaptive functions, which can be specified in surely a descriptive causal explanatory way, but diseases do require a grabbing of some kind of normative evaluative structure to make that judgment. And we can do it in pragmatic terms to say the reason that we have physicians and the entire justification of what physicians are is that we have an applied structure that we care about. So we want to reduce harm and we want to then identify the breakdowns that are harmful and then develop interventions. So the harmful dysfunction analysis then became an argument for what diseases in general are now interesting. He’s a social worker. There wasn’t, there were certainly few theories of disease, but actually biology. I mean, medical doctors really don’t have a generalized theory of disease. He actually at least argued that, but he was then utilizing this to ground what quote unquote, real ontologically, real mental disorders work. Right. Okay. And then basically the justification of a real mental disorder was then would be something that deviated from the biological evolutionary design that resulted in a clear structural functional breakdown from that design, which would then be done as harmful. Okay. And he deviated, differentiated that from mere problems in living, which were certainly of concern, but not properly constituted as, you know, real natural biological problems. And therefore we’re of a completely different domain in the world of concern. So you might have a law problem, but that’s not what physicians and real health professions deal with. So mental diseases, the harmful dysfunction analysis of mental disorders essentially applies this model and says, Hey, so that constitutes, so we can then say some clear examples of this. The clearest example that I come to immediately to mind is like an Alzheimer’s condition, right? Okay. Alzheimer’s condition would be very argot. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s, you know, one year here, he looks this way. He does all sorts of things. He interacts with you, knows who you are. Eight years later, he barely recognizes you. Can’t remember what he’s doing three years later. And he’s about ready to die as a fundamental functional breakdown of what appears to be a pretty essential cognitive capacity for retention that has dissipated a month of a whole bunch of other cognitive capacity. Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay. And the explanation for that is that the clearly to be a cognitive being requires a particular neuro cognitive structural functional organization, and we can hypothesize say there’s tangles and plaques in the hippocampus that’s necessary to drop short-term memories into long-term memories. If you have a system that is broken in that regard, we clearly have now a serious problem and that’s a real disease. And that’s an example of a mental disease. Okay. Wakefield said we should differentiate like depression based on this model, because some people get depressed and it’s just a matter of problems in living. Okay. That that’s not real depression. Real depression is a biological breakdown. Okay. And that’s the, so that’s the essence of the argument. All right. I came along and I started this conversation by saying, Hey, yes, there’s deep continuity between life and mind. But if you use a tree of knowledge version of reality as a lens, there’s also a deep discontinuity. Okay. And that is that mind exists at a higher order of dimension. Okay. There’s another layer of complexification. I argued that the layer of complexification could be contextualized as the process by which an animal builds behavioral repertoires through experience. Okay. Now, certainly there is an ontogenetic aspect to plants and cells. They have to, they get, you know, they get germinated, they grow, they have to reproduce, but the jump up to moving as a whole creates this entire lateral dimension, okay, of behavioral repertoires. Those behavioral repertoires are designed to be designed by experience. Okay. They’re designed to be to what meet, what that means is, is that there’s a capacity for behavioral flexibility that is designed into the system, which then is by definition, not preordained with structural functional mechanisms that state what it is that you’re ought to be doing, but rather are situated with certain kinds of capacities, call them transjective adaptive capacities to adjust to particular environments. And those processes can go awry and we can systematically determine when they go awry, but cannot reduce them to broken structural mechanisms that are shaped by evolutionary processes, but rather are developmental trajectories that channel people and fund or animals in fundamentally problematic domains. Okay. And so the argument then, because mind is that way, what you actually have in many instances that are not systematically describable in a, just a loose problem of living, but there are entrenched maladaptive patterns that are deemed harmful, that are not reducible to the biological structure, okay. But instead can be clearly identified by the structural functional organization of the behavioral investment recursive relevance realization system. I didn’t use those terms, of course, back then of recursive relevance realization, but behavioral investment. Okay. Now I can pair that, right. And then we can see with a much greater specificity. So we can see a psyche psychology developmental trajectory into dead ends that cause people misery. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And if they’re entrenched in clinically significant, they warrant health concerns and they’re not just reduced to dismissible problems in living, but they warrant a particular kind of health concern. Okay. And the last argument I made was an institutional argument. Remember I said, Wakefield said they had to be real. Okay. Well, the reason he argued they had to be real was because psychiatry had to be attached to medicine and medicine had to be a particular profession that identified naturalistic events, scientifically as opposed to socially constructed realities. So he is ontology and metaphysics was you basically had two things. You had physically real entities that medical doctors suffer and then socially constructed realities that we all got along with. These were two different categories. Medicine was tied to this real mental diseases needed to be tied to this. And psychiatry was the owner of mental diseases and they were a medical discipline. And I came along and said, well, yeah, that’s true. But that means just means that psychiatry is attached to medical. You were missing the entire mental dimension of complexity. We can have psychological doctors that are institutionally identified with this maladaptive pattern. In fact, the entire process of psychotherapy, if we now go to the common core, really can be constitutively organized and identified as identifying and treating the trench maladaptive patterns that may or may not that certainly have biological implications and vulnerabilities, but certainly are not etiologically reduced to structural mechanism breakdowns that can be identified from a reference point of natural selection. That was, that was amazing. So that’s so the bottom line is mental disorders. Some of them do like Alzheimer’s, probably certain cases, schizophrenia, lots of reasons this whole system can structurally functionally break down. But there are lots of reasons that this flexible, adaptive behavioral investment, recursive relevance realization gets entrenched in deeply problematic patterns. And those of us that are trained as psychological doctors can be positioned to help people. So there’s two things that came up for me in that really elegant, even eloquent presentation. One, just to to to maybe make clear something when when Evan is invoking continuity, he’s invoking is something that contains both identity and differentiation. That’s how that’s how continuity is different from an identity theory. So the mind is continuous with biology. It isn’t identical to it because the notion of continuity is is you hold equally identity and differentiation. Nice. Right. Fair enough. So and then the. First of all, when you said when Wakefield published this, even in my for Dorian go fi days of the 90s, I would have said you’re kind of making a stupid mistake because I know the difference between something wrong with the hardware in my computer and something a bug in the software, the that doesn’t reflect anything wrong with the hardware. It just means the information processing is not right, is not to use some of your language is not properly aligned, it’s not properly organized. Right. It’s the reliability of the functionality of the transformation of information has broken down in a way that has nothing to do with the underlying hardware. So even back in the 90s, it would be like, what? Surely, surely, just like surely for me, just like the right, just like a computer, there can be software bugs that are independent from there being anything wrong with my motherboard. I mean, like even in the 90s, I can’t believe he made that. Remember, he does have the category of problems of living. This came up in part of the discussion. Okay. But generally he would the argument was these can become instantiated software problems that need to be identified and treated. He was essentially arguing, jumping those into a general problem of living category. I’m not making the case. I’m simply saying it did come up and it was, but that then is to confuse the implementation with the operation distinction. How I implement a program is very different from how the program is operating in the world. And I can write and I, a problem is you’re trying to operate with a particular program, but a software bug is the way the program is implemented is misaligned. He’s then making a nut. But again, this is, this is, this is even at the go. I’m a neurocognitive functionalist, John, against the reductive mechanistic neuro, the neuroscience people. So I’m not criticizing you at all. I know, I know, I know. I think you’re being prescient. I just, I find even at that level, like a first generation cog Psy, he’s, he’s just collapsing, he’s collapsing the distinction between implementation and operation and he’s collapsing the distinction between software and hardware. And I think that’s, that’s just all that’s problematic. And then if you move beyond first generation cog Psy into all the stuff we’re talking about here, right. And how the software and the hardware like are self organizing and also the relationship between them is self organized. Like that just becomes, I think, I don’t want to be insulting to somebody that’s not here, but I find that like, like it was very bad when it was proposed and it gets worse as the field unfolds. So I, I’m just wondering, this is me from an outsider. Did the two of you face this kind of reductionist bullshit still when you’re trying to talk about mental disorders? Like, I mean, there’s no, well, certainly Gary, I’d be interested here, you know, if you just took a class on, you know, certainly when I’m teaching psychopathology, you know, it’s a chaotic, fragmented field with no clarity in relationship to what we’re referencing, you know, so it just falls into the, this thing tried to get some traction, definitely, but actually as, although he argued that many people have this as implied as the only issue that the only people that really have this as an underlying structure is the psychiatric commitment. No, no, like actually the vast majority of psychologists do not. And so it’s not really that influential, but it was an influential set of arguments for a soft subset of theorists essentially for a while, really, rather than any institutional, but it’s super interesting at a generalized institutional world. We don’t know, there’s no agreement, John, as you know, about what we mean by mental disorder. No, I get that. I get that. I get that. But, but I think, I think what I’m hearing you argue, and I think again, both elegantly and eloquently is the way to get that is not through some simplistic reductionist ontology. Right. To the extent that there’s anything that’s been institutionalized, it’s that, and that’s a trauma and a tragedy to many people. Right. Right. Right. Right. So, sorry, I didn’t mean to be so strident. I just found that I was almost sort of like affronted by this. It’s like, what? Even in the nineties, cognitive science would have said that’s a, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a confounded and confused proposal. And then cognitive sciences is like, that’s, that’s two generations back. And it’s like, that position like, is like really untenable now in a, in a very powerful way. Um, so I’m sorry, maybe I overreacted. I just wanted like, I was like, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always seen your, you know, that there’s no coherent thing here. It’s a mess. Right. And in that argument, but then you made a, I saw this with particular clarity. I spent for the first time. It’s like, really? That’s how they’re trying to do this. That, that, that can’t, that won’t work. It’s just making a whole bunch of fundamental mistakes at like a cybernetic computational level. Um, and so I guess I just wanted to voice that. I wanted to, I wanted to know how much you had, both of you had to struggle again. D is there a snobbery from the psychiatrists that they somehow do the real work because they’re ultimately dealing with the biology and you are doing some sort of frou frou thing with just talking to people and it’s like, yeah, really? So like, you know, have you ever got a computer virus? Do you think it’s a frou frou thing in your computer, even though your motherboard has not been smashed or anything? Come on. That’s just a ridiculous move. Do you face that? Do you face a kind of snobbery from psychiatry? Um, the, the short answer is institutionally yes, but not from psychiatrists in general, cause they’re floundering, uh, and real people. So there’s an institutional structure, John is that science is that there’s a physical biological real reality and the rest of it is a social construction. And then you have that authority that manages that. So the history of our modernist institution grants that physicalist mechanical thing, a particular kind of authority and an NIMH and other kinds of esters that echoes out, uh, my individual dialogues with psychiatrists. They know they’re like basically mental alchemists. They sprinkle shit onto people’s things and hope symptoms go away and they don’t want the fuck they’re doing like the rest of us. Um, so then they’re, you know, most of them are humble and aware of that. Okay. Okay. So fair enough. I don’t, I don’t. That’s a very good point you made. I don’t want to be pointing fingers at, you know, specific individual psychiatrists, I know some, and I agree with what you’re saying, but you, but it is fair to say, if I’m hearing you right, there is this institutional bias that you’re confronting. Well, let’s put it this way in the United States. And I know there’s, there’s a time issue we ought to be aware of. So if we wrap this up here, but in the United States, how do you get reimbursement for mental care? Gary, what’s the, what do we use Gary? To decide whether somebody is justified in getting institutional reimbursement, reimbursement. I should, uh, insurance. And the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual is the dictionary of lexicon legitimizing what it is, who puts it out the American psychiatric association. So, and that’s part, so the entire institutional identity of psychiatry is a medical doctor, mostly medicine commits, at least at its hardest, tough minded science to a biomedical model of what it is that they treat. So already institutionally, the legitimizing function for all categories is embedded in a mental disease model that I specified. And that is, so it’s, that’s what I mean in terms of the authority of the institution, it is actually baked in at that level, even though people know it’s completely inadequate. I’m just astonished at that. I, and I’m glad you’re doing your project then, Greg. I really am. We’re doing the project. I mean, we’ve got to wake people up to this whole, it’s the enlightenment gap all the way back, John. I mean, so people don’t not know how to think about the mental in any particular way that is up to the task. And the implications for meaning and insurance and why we think about the human condition and existential considerations and everything else is just pervasive. I’m wondering if we could tie this maybe in the next episode or in a future episode, if we could talk about the DSM as well, and, um, cause the, now if we tie this back to the critique that we’re trying to make right around the irreducibility of the transactivity of all this and how anything that strays from that sort of an understanding is going to commit a series of fallacies, which will lead to, which will necessarily lead to misapprehensions of the realities that we’re talking about. Um, that was well said, Gary, just, I just want to pause. That was really well said. Wow. Thanks. I practiced in the mirror earlier. So, um, is right next to me. All right. You’re learning. That’s what we do. Um, so to, to, to tie it back to that critique, um, I guess we could say at this point, we can make the claim that, um, like if we use the biomedical model as the basic metaphor for understanding mental disorders, then we end up objective, right. It we’re importing one kind of conceptual grammar into a domain that it’s not quite appropriate for. Uh, so for example, and this sort of shows up in the software, hardware distinction as well, right. Because, um, to, to think of the mind as just the software that runs on the heart of our means that it’s a level unto itself, but it’s not quite because that’s what we’ve, we’ve been seeing, right. Through the phenomenologists or through Jung that everything is infused with the psychic, every, every level, it shows up wherever you go. Right. And, and the psychic isn’t totalizing or absolute, but it’s sort of everywhere. It infuses, it imbues everything right with it. So, um, the, the fallacy that I’m sort of seeing, and this is what I think ends up leading to the DSM problem, um, is that you look at a mental problem and then you see, you see it as a static sort of classification category, kind of like an object, like here is a chair or here is a desk, right. Here is depression. Here is anxiety. And that really de contextualizes and de historicizes and be what de socializes, um, the phenomenon itself. And so that leads to confusion. And then any attempts to demarcate the boundaries around each of these categories in an absolute sense ends up failing literally because we see the DSM, right, releasing new additions, um, every once in a while and every time they update the parameters. So I guess the critique here, right. If we fashion it and target it, um, toward the DSM and the biomedical understanding is that we have been treating or mistreating these phenomena as stable categories, as though they’re objects that aren’t alive in a sense. Whereas something else is really happening and to be psychologically attuned and sensitive to the, to the phenomena themselves is to be, uh, to, to cultivate a kind of attunement, a kind of ear that’ll listen to the dynamic interplay that gathers together the social, the historical, the personal, the interpersonal, the, the sociocultural, et cetera, et cetera, the political and all these sorts of things. And that’s not easy to put into words or to, because that’s a process. That’s a participatory skill in a sense. If we can situate this in a transjective psyche, psychology patterning, that’s going to be a very different and more effective model. Uh, I’d love that Gary, very, very nicely said. So, um, that, and I think this, I’m excited about this. I think that’s what I’m really looking forward. I want to, I want to, uh, I want to pose a question, sort of problematize this move, I think it’s the move we should be making. So that’s not the point. The point is there was a functionality to the DSM. Um, I think it’s illegitimate, but the DSM carries an authority because of its reductive ontology, which because of the authority that physics has, um, and, and right, et cetera. And so my question would be if we agree based on the critique that that a reductionist ontology is not what grounds our authority, the question, because that’s, that’s, this is, I mean, analogous to Zach Stein’s teacherly authority, you, you gentlemen need psychotherapeutic authority. What grounds your authority if it’s not a reductionist ontology, because that’s the, that’s why I think people hang on to the DSM because like, you know, because it basically gives people, it’s like, people call it the Bible and it’s, well, why should I believe this Bible? Because it’s grounded in physics and physics is analogous to the word of God. It is the way things really, and you have to say it with a deep sonorous, but the way things really are right. And that’s the, that’s, that’s the grounding. I agree with the critique, both the negative one of see how this doesn’t work and the positive one. This works much better that Greg is going to take us on, but what I would like addressed at some point in the next episode is, okay, but what grounds psychotherapeutic authority if it’s not a reductionist ontology? Wonderful. I wonder if we could possibly generate a coherent naturalistic ontology. That would be fantastic. Yes. Yeah. On that note. So thank you very much, my friends. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody who’s watching for your time and attention. Amen.