Rationality and ritual - Invited Cambridge talk. (rHwrV96bv84)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rHwrV96bv84

Welcome everybody to our first 3D meeting of the year. It’s wonderful to see you all. It’s especially wonderful to see some guests from Oxford. Joel, thank you for chauffeuring the Oxford contingent over. It’s a very great pleasure to welcome as our first Speaker of the Year, Professor John Vivecki. John was introduced to me virtually in 2D back in December, thanks to our previous Canadian visitor, and Jeremy Hildreth and Christina Coppell who are with us here this afternoon. Thank you for facilitating John’s visit to England but also to Cambridge. John, I’ve been learning a lot about John’s work online and reading a lot of the work that he’s produced and the work that has shaped him. It’s been quite remarkable. He is a stunningly wide-ranging thinker. He is actually best known as one of the early champions of the metaversity that we talked about in our meeting in November in Caius. This new platform, this new way of doing higher education. At the moment, you’d think of it as it’s sort of ancillary to what we get up to here in But for many people, it is a source of learning, access to the great traditions of wisdom that is unique, that they could not get anywhere else. It’s just a fascinating and I think sort of epochal development in the history of education that this new digital university is emerging. John is right at the forefront of that. You may have come across him in his stunning series of 50 lectures. 50 lectures. You couldn’t do that in any university. I think I’m allowed eight per paper. 50 lectures starting right back with Plato and coming all the way up through to the modern era. And it’s all of it animated by this thesis about what’s gone wrong. A fragmentation of meaning, a fragmentation of reason, a fragmentation of logos that’s been ongoing for a while but was catalyzed, was accelerated in the 20th century. And John thinks that we need to be piecing that back together and that the ways that we’ve been trying to piece that back together institutionally are not working. I’m reading into John’s ideas there but I think that would be a fair assessment. And so John is, I sort of think of him as a kind of walking antidote to the multiversity. Somebody who integrates so many different fields of wisdom and knowledge and so many different disciplines, not just sort of synchronically, that is to say he doesn’t just move across from cognitive science to philosophy to psychology and literature and religion but diachronically too. He’s very sort of sensitive to the historical hinterlands of all of these disciplines. And that’s very rare, very rare indeed. So it’s a great pleasure to have him, it’s a great pleasure to welcome him here, to have him give a lecture. We’re going to have conversation and questions afterwards and then we’re all going to adjourn and then dinner for those who can make it. Thank you all for coming. Professor John Vivecki. So thank you very much for this invitation and for that introduction I hope I can live up to it. So thank you very much. So recently Bo-Yang Chol-Han has published a book called The Disappearance of Ritual and in that he argues that rituals are disappearing from society and he says that this disappearance is a negative thing because it distorts our relationship to time. Ritual takes us out of productive time where we’re trying to produce and it ushers us into transformative time in which we are developing, transforming, etc. And without ritual we are ceaselessly trapped in productive time and this ultimately threatens the capacity for the kinds of connections to ourselves, to other people and to the world that are predictive of meaning in life so it threatens meaningfulness. Now I want to argue that I think Han is right about rituals relationship to time and especially to our sense of time but I’m going to take it in a much more developed direction than he does and I do not disagree that explicit ritual is in decline. The fastest growing demographic group are the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S’s, people who claim they have no official affiliation to organized religion. However I want to argue something a little bit different than he does. I want to argue that ritual is still implicit in the very fabric of our cognition and is to the cultivation of our rationality so that we’re not that far away from ritual if you wanted to put my thesis into something of a slogan. So recently my colleague Professor Dan Chiappi and I, we published three papers last year and we’ve published papers on something that for a while won’t sound like I’m talking like anything about ritual and I’m going to ask for your patience because I’m going to try and build towards an account of what ritual is and why it is so integral to rationality. So what did we publish on? We published three papers in important journals on NASA scientists and how the NASA scientists are using the robotic rovers on Mars. This is a really interesting test case because most of us are not in that situation. This is a very unusual environment and to see how cognition is transformed in that challenge is actually revealing some important features of it. So we were interested in how did the scientists do the field work on Mars and they were able to do excellent science. There’s been lots of discoveries, lots of things published, lots of well vetted claims about the presence of water on Mars, erosion, etc. But we have to understand that this using of the robots is actually very difficult. It’s very difficult for two important reasons and they have to do with time. The first reason is there’s no joystick control because of the distance of Mars is away, there’s too much temporal delay so there’s no joystick control. Secondly, they’re not getting video back. We’ve just got some video back from a more recent rover but they were not getting video back from Mars. They were getting flat, still black and white photos so no motion. So time delay and no motion and yet they’re moving the robots around and doing the kind of intricate field work you need in order to do significant science. So what was interesting about this is how the scientists undertook to do the robotic field work. How they selected people that were going to be part of the team. So Dan and I took a look at several ethnographies, the one I’m going to rely a lot on for my talk today is vertesses of the scientists. And one of the things that this, one of the ways of looking at this is in terms of two the scientists were looking for in order to allow people into their scientific community. One was a capacity for seeing like the rover. What does that mean? They perceive the Martian landscape not from our perspective here but from the perspective of the rover. And this is very much a sense of being present on Mars. People would get the ability where they say I feel like I’m on Mars which is very odd because there’s no joystick control, flat photographs, but they feel that they’re on Mars. Seeing like the rover, present on Mars. The next is seeing as the rover. This is the scientists become the rover. They go through a process of identifying and I’ll show you how deep this identification goes. They identify with the rover and they become the rover and they’re being as the rover on Mars. So you want to put this together. They’re looking for people that can do this, get a sense of being present as the rover on Mars from just flat photographs. Okay, obviously, right, none of the scientists think they’re literally on Mars. That would probably mean that we’d get ushered out of a job. But it’s also not the case that this is merely dispensable metaphorical way of talking. That’s our default. Oh well, it’s just a façon de parler. This is just being metaphorical, but we could dispense with this. That is not the case. That’s what I’m going to strongly argue. The scientists were looking for a distinct set of cognitive processes that were indispensable for doing the field work on Mars. Now, why were they doing this? Why were they doing this? Why not just use language and math? I mean, that’s what science is about. Just use language and math. Why look for people that have this particular idiosyncratic ability? Well, one way of asking that question is why don’t they just use propositional knowing? This is our standard model of knowing. This is knowing that, knowing that cats are mammals, knowing that two plus two equals four. This kind of knowing results in beliefs, and we can evaluate these beliefs, whether or not they’re true or false, and we can coordinate them into theories that attempt to explain reality. This is all very familiar stuff, or you wouldn’t be here. It has its own distinct kind of memory. Speaking psychologically, it has semantic memory. Semantic memory is your knowledge of facts, like cats are mammals, two plus two equals four, and that kind of memory is distinct, as you’ll see from other kinds of memory. And it brings with it a normative sense of conviction. How do you know you’re doing this well? Well, I’m convinced that this is a true belief. Now, obviously, that was insufficient. That propositional knowing was radically insufficient because more was being sought after in order for people to join the scientific team. So just pause there for a moment. Think about how much we are fixated on propositional knowing as the sufficient capacity for doing science. And what this test case shows is that’s not true. That’s not true. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Something more is needed. Well, obviously, there’s one thing that should come to mind quite readily. Doing the fieldwork requires acquiring skills, skills of observation, testing, and problem solving that they had not had before. Now, this is a different kind of knowing. This is known as procedural knowing. This is not knowing that something is the case. This is knowing how. This is knowing how to ride a bicycle, how to kiss someone you love. It doesn’t result in beliefs that are true or false. Procedural knowing results in skills that are appropriate or not in a situation. For example, is my skill of swimming true or false? That doesn’t even make sense as a question. Is it appropriate here to try and activate my skill of swimming? No, it’s not appropriate. My skills about public speaking, are they appropriate? Okay. It doesn’t result in a theory. It results in this capacity we call expertise. When it is done well, we don’t get a theory. Our skills are organized into what we call expertise, and we go to experts because they possess expertise. They possess the know-how. Now, the normative sense that goes with procedural knowing is a sense of empowerment. are sort of real to you in so far as they empower you to interact effectively with your environment. Now, think about this. Think about the relationship between procedural knowing and propositional knowing. Procedural knowing is the cognitive space within which we choose and transform our propositions so as to use them well. It itself is not propositional. It is where we develop the skills of how to select, coordinate, and use our propositions appropriately. Because of that, it has a different kind of memory attached to it. It’s called procedural memory. Semantic memory and procedural memory are distinct from each other. You can damage one without the other being affected. You could damage your ability to remember most facts, and yet knowing how to play the piano doesn’t disappear from your memory. What I’m going to try to show you, in fact, is these kinds of knowing can all be fitted into a very clear kind of taxonomy. But soon as I say that to you, well, what the scientists had to do is acquire the skill using procedural knowing and storing it in procedural memory. You should ask me, but how do we know what skills to acquire and apply? I mean, I have a whole host of skills. You have a whole host of skills. You’re not applying most of them now. Why not? Well, this goes to something that my colleague and friend Dan Schiappi has done work on. This is what is called situational awareness. Situational awareness. This is knowing what it is like to be you in a particular location doing a particular task. I’m going to call it knowing what it is like for short. And for those of you in the philosophical tradition, you recognize this phrase because it was made famous by Nagel in What is it Like to be a Bat? I can tell you all the sort of facts about a bat. I can even perhaps learn some of the bat skills. I don’t know why I’d do that, but anyways. But what I can’t tell you is what it’s like to take the perspective of a bat. What it’s like to be a bat in that location trying to solve bat problems. And of course, this was spun off into many questions about qualia and consciousness. And I’m not going that way. Consciousness is the holy grail of cognitive science. And I’m just not up to that task right now. So this idea of being able to take the perspective, knowing what it’s like, this is actually very relevant to what the scientists were looking for. They’re looking for people that can see like the rover, that can take the perspective of the rover. Knowing what it’s like to take a perspective, knowing what it’s like to take a perspective. And you’re all doing it right now. Results in your situational awareness. You’ve taken a perspective that is giving you the situational awareness that is telling you which skills you should apply. And when you apply those skills well, you will organize your propositions to get your beliefs. So this is called perspectival knowing. Perspectival knowing. Knowing what it is like to take a perspective, to be you in this particular state of mind, in this particular location. It has its own distinct kind of memory. It’s called episodic memory. So compare these three kinds of memory. How many of you know that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Hold up your hand. How many of you can tell me when and where you learned it? How many of you know how to ride a bicycle? Are you doing it right now? How many of you can remember your last birthday party? Now what are you remembering? You’re not remembering a set of facts because you can remember where and when and you remember yourself being there and what are you doing? What you’re remembering is the perspective you had. How you were sizing up that situation. What was salient to you? What mattered to you? And how you were oriented to it. That’s your episodic memory and it grounds your perspectival knowing. So perspectival knowing doesn’t result in beliefs. It doesn’t result in skills. It results in situational awareness. Now there’s two parts of this. There’s two poles to this. One part is what you’re doing. You’re sizing up a situation as Maitzen was arguing. What does that mean? You are right now foregrounding and backgrounding. I hope I’m foregrounded for you. I assume the walls are relatively backgrounded and behind you is almost completely backgrounded. Of course that will change if you got up and turned around. You’re sizing things up in that way and what that’s doing is creating what’s called a salience landscape. This is drawn from work by Ramachandran. Salience means how things stand like a bike. That grabs your attention. But you can also make things salient by directing your attention. Your left big toe. You’re now aware of it, aren’t you? So it’s this dynamic process in which things are standing out to you but you’re also oriented on them and they stand out and so it’s this dynamic loop. What you’re doing is, it’s called a salience landscape. You can think of it like there are peaks of salient. Hopefully I’m very salient and there’s valleys of salience like the floor. But it’s dynamic. It’s shifting, weaving salience landscape. So on one pole of perspectival knowing there is the cognitive agent. That agent is doing, sizing up salience landscaping. They’re taking a particular mental set and this is their present state of mind. That’s what we’re trying to point to. What’s your present state of mind? So we can do it right now. How many of you, if this is embarrassing, don’t answer it. How many of you are sober right now? Put up your hand. There you go. Okay. So you would know what it would be like to be here you if you were in a drunk state of mind, yes? And your salience landscape would be askew and you would be sizing up things differently. And you would form different episodic memories and some of them would be embarrassing. Okay. So that’s your mental set. Now we have to talk about the other pole which is how is the environment disclosing itself to you. So now what you’re doing with perspectival knowing because of the way you’re finding things salient is you’re altering how things are relevant to you. What aspect of them is standing out for you? So presumably you’re seeing this as a lectern and you’re seeing this as a chair. I hope none of you are right now seeing it as a weapon. But in different situational awareness you would, right? Right? So things are being aspectualized. So there’s many, many aspects for any object. But in your particular perspective only one aspect is coming to the fore. This is how things are presenting themselves to you. So you have a present state of mind and this is how things are presenting themselves to you. There’s a mental set and a situational setting and they’re the two poles that shape your perspective, your perspectival knowing. This perspectival knowing is the cognitive space in which you acquire, coordinate, transform and apply your skills. This perspectival knowing gives you the situational awareness that dictates which skills you acquire, which skills you apply and how you coordinate them together. So you can now repeat the question you repeated, used at an earlier stage. But how do you know which perspective to adopt? Well, you know that your perspective is relative to you being you in a particular way, in a particular location, solving a particular problem or set of problems. Now what do I mean by that? The being you. All of us are right now assuming an identity. Assuming an identity means to shape our agency into a particular role. So right now I am assuming the role of a professor or a scientist. I’m not assuming the role of father, friend or lover. Those would all be inappropriate. So that’s the agentic role. But I’m not only assuming identities, I’m assigning identities. You’re an audience. You’re students, you’re colleagues. Again, if I assign the wrong roles to you, things wouldn’t fit well together. So there’s a process of co-identification going on. I’m assuming identities and assigning identities such that they fit together. In a book that Christoph Maser-Pietro and Philip Misovic and I published a few years ago, 2017, we talked about an agent arena relationship. I’m assuming a particular identity, shaping my agency, and then I am casting a set of identities so this is an arena that is appropriate for my actions according to the role that I’m assuming. So for right now, this is something like a classroom or a presentation hall. If I tried to act as if this was a martial art dojo, things would be going wrong. The agentic role and the arena roles that I assign in that process of co-identification, both of them are participating in a shared way of being together. My agency, my agentic roles, and the arena roles are sharing in a way of being that we call giving a talk and making us be together, belong together, fit together. For some of you, you might be ultimately interested in what does that ground out in terms of underlying cognitive brain processes. That is a lot of what my work is and a process I call relevance realization, but I’m not going to follow that right now because I am, if you remember, a long time ago when the talk began, going to talk to you about ritual and rationality. This way in which the agentic roles and the arena roles participate in a shared way of being together, this I call participatory knowing. This is knowing by being together. And remember, you do not have to know that you know in order to have knowledge. That’s one of the great arguments of the past 30 years in epistemology. So what does this create? This mutual shaping between the agent and the arena, this process of co-identification. It’s not creating beliefs. It’s not creating skills. It’s not even creating perspective, states of mind. What is it creating? It’s creating, and this is from, this is one of the key ideas from Gibson, one of the key ideas of what’s called 4E cognitive science. It’s creating affordances. This glass is graspable. It affords grasping. Now is that a property of the glass? No, many creatures can’t pick that glass up. So the graspability is not in the cup. Is it in my hand? No, I can’t grasp Africa or Saturn. An affordance is a real agent arena relationship that makes possible a kind of action. It really makes possible grasping the cup. Before being here by an assuming identities and assigning identities, there’s a whole network of affordances, most of them you’re unaware of, that are available to you. This floor is walkable. Were you thinking of that right now? So participatory knowing generates affordances. There is a normative sense, just like the other kinds of knowing, to participatory knowing. This is the sense of fittedness, of being well together. And you take it for granted, but you know when it’s missing, when you’re homesick. You know when it’s missing when you go to another culture and things just don’t seem to fit and your agency feels akimbo. It has, like the other forms of knowing, a specific kind of memory. It’s not semantic memory. It’s not procedural memory. It’s not episodic memory. It is that weird form of memory you call yourself. It’s a very odd kind of memory. It’s a memory that you know by being it. Notice how this fits into the, right? We saw this, the scientists are looking for seeing like the rover, that’s perspectival knowing. But the scientists are also looking for participatory knowing. They’re looking for people that can see as the rover, who can become the rover, who can like the rover is, like an agent within the arena of Mars. They’re looking for scientists who in a kind of creepy sense can become the self of the rover. And before you think, oh that’s really silly, wait till I read you some quotes from these scientists. So participatory knowing is the cognitive space in which we acquire, coordinate, transform and apply our perspectives. That’s what decides which state of mind you will take in. So think about it. You’ve got all these affordances laid out for you and then your perspectival knowing makes certain of them salient to you and that’s your situational awareness. Your situational awareness tells you which skills to activate. As you’re activating your skills, you are gathering the evidence for transforming and coordinating your propositions. Now here’s one of the devastating things that’s wrong with our culture. We are fixated on the propositional level. We are in a kind of propositional tyranny. And so we have a largely silent relationship to the procedural, the perspectival and the participatory knowing. And that’s bloody dangerous because most of the ways in which we get the sense of connectedness that is predictive of meaning in life come out of our procedural knowing, our perspectival knowing and our participatory knowing. So now I propose to you that I have given an argument as to why the scientists look for people who can see like the rover and see as the rover. I think that this case discloses something deep about the way these kinds of knowing are related to each other. Propositional knowing depends on procedural knowing, which depends on perspectival knowing, which depends on participatory knowing. So if you don’t have scientists who can transform the participatory knowing and be the rover, who can’t take the perspective of the rover, they’re not going to be able to develop the right skills. And without being able to develop the right skills, they’re not going to be able to do the testing, do the observations to gather the semantic content for making their propositional claims. Now, let’s remember, they’re doing all of this because there’s a time delay and they’re working with black and white still photographs. So now I can turn to my second question. So how do they do it? How do the scientists do whatever they’re doing in their head so that they see like the rover and see as the rover? So they feel like they’re present on Mars as the rover. Now, that sense of presence is important because that’s a key feature of perspectival knowing. We know this from virtual reality work. So the cognitive science of virtual reality. So what are game designers looking for? They’re looking for sense of presence. What is that? That’s your sense of being in the game. And here’s the thing to remember. What that research shows is your intuition about what drives that is probably false. Because most people think it’s the realism of the virtual world that contributes to sense of presence, verisimilitude. No, it doesn’t. You can have significant verisimilitude and no sense of presence, and you can have a game that has virtually very low verisimilitude like Tetris, and you get a terrific sense of presence. So much so that people start dreaming in Tetris world when they’re asleep at night. So how do they do it? Well they do things that manipulate the participatory knowing and the perspectival knowing. How do they manipulate the participatory knowing? They do this. Vertesi talks about this loop. They anthropomorphize the rover. They don’t talk about the cameras. They talk about the rover’s eyes. They don’t talk about its mechanical manipulation. They talk about its arms. And they talk about its asleep and it needs to wake up and we have to make sure the rover doesn’t die. And they’ll say things like, they don’t say the rover needs to go there. They’ll say we need to go there or I need to go there. So they’re doing that, but they do this. They also, and I think she coined this term, but it’s a great term. They technomorphize themselves. So what does that mean? Well it looks like this. So you’ve got one of the scientists and she’s trying to explain how the rover should be moved. So she’s sitting on a chair. The chair has, it’s one of those office chairs and it has wheels underneath it, which is kind of like the rover, right? And then she does this and she sits down and she says, look, look, I can’t explain it. This is the rock. We need the little T. And I need to move like this. And she enacts the rover. These are the cameras, by the way. She’s swiveling around on the wheels and then she’s pivoting and trying to be pivot near the axis where the pivot is on the rover. And she’s doing this. She just enacts the rover. And she doesn’t do it, oh, maybe I should. It’s just, that’s how she does it. They’re doing this to transform their participatory knowing. They’re trying to become the rover. And they’re trying to do it from two ends. They’re trying to make the rover more like them and they’re trying to make themselves inactively more like the rover. What else do they do? Let’s go back to those black and white photographs. Brutessi coined a term, drawing as, and it’s sort of isomorphic in structure with Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing as. And we already did that earlier. Perspectival knowing. I see this as a chair. So you know those beautiful pictures you get from the Martian landscape and it’s a vista and the Americans love it because it reminds them of the West they think they once had and stuff like that, right? I’m a Canadian, so I’m allowed to do that. Those pictures are largely scientifically useless. Their primary function is funding. The scientists prefer to work with the black and white photographs and what they do is they take colored markers, different colors, and they draw upon, that’s one meaning of drawing as, they draw upon the black and white photographs. They’ll color this in, they’ll put an arrow here, they’ll put dots, they’ll just spontaneously do so. And what are they doing? They’re manipulating their salience landscaping. The drawing as, his part is drawing upon, but it’s also drawing from. Because when they manipulate the salience landscaping they get that sizing up. They’ll do this and they’ll do this and then things will pop out and they’ll go, oh, oh I see it now. That is a, right, the topography, that’s a gentle curve there, and that’s rough terrain and the rover, and they do this thing where it pops out for them and they see things that they couldn’t otherwise see in the picture. They manipulate the salience on the photograph and that alters their sizing up, it pops things up and then they’re starting to see as the rover through these still black and white photographs. I want to read you just a couple quotes, there’s more, to show you what this does to them. And you’ll start feeling the first tickling of talking about ritual when I say, read these quotes. This is one scientist. I was working in the garden one day and all of a sudden I don’t know what’s going on with my right wrist. I cannot move it. Out of nowhere I get here to the planning meetings and Spirit, ironically one of the names of the, one of the rovers, and Spirit has its right front wheel stuck. Things like that you know, I am totally connected to Spirit. This one’s better. Interestingly I screwed up my shoulder and needed, this is another scientist, and there’s many of these. Interestingly I screwed up my shoulder and I needed surgery on it right about that time. Opportunity’s arm started having problems with a stiff shoulder joint and I broke my right toe just before Spirit’s wheel broke. So I’m just saying maybe it’s kind of sympathetic. I don’t know. Person laughs, nervous laughter I imagine. I don’t know. I mean I don’t think there’s any magic involved or anything, but maybe it’s some kind of subconscious thing. I don’t know. These are literal rocket scientists, right? And again, although there’s a little bit of embarrassment because they have the official persona of a scientist, they feel somewhat okay about talking about this because they know being able to do this is essential to using the robots to do the science. So I want to talk, I’m going to introduce a term and then I’ll unpack it. I want to talk about imaginatively augmented perception and cognition. Imaginatively augmented perception and cognition. So you are all aware of virtually augmented perception. You know you do things where you have your, like Pokemon Go, was Pokemon Go here or did that ever happen? Right? And you’re looking at the game, you’re projecting it onto the real environment or you’re doing it, right? What you’re doing is you’re augmenting reality, you’re augmenting your ability to see things by looking through a virtual lens. Is that okay? Another example of it is a heads up display for pilots, especially fighter pilots. You project on the windshield all kinds of information and the pilot is looking through that so that they can see and track patterns that they couldn’t see with unaided perception. Is that making sense? Okay. But I’m not talking about virtual augmentation, I’m talking about imaginal augmentation of perception and cognition. So the notion I’m using here comes from philosopher Henri Corbin and it was deeply affected by the Islamic philosopher Ibn Arabi, for those of you who want sort of a philosophical provenance. And the point that Corbin made in a very quite famous essay, he said imagination is actually a quibble term. There’s two different meanings. One is imaginary and the other is imaginal. And remember I was invoking imaginally augmented perception. What’s the imaginary? So this is our more prototypical understanding of imagination. This is internal visualization. We can do it right now. So picture a sailboat in your mind, did it have its sails up or down? And you can answer me. So you know what I’m talking about. Okay? This disconnect, you go offline to use the cog-sai lingo, you go offline, it disconnects you from your perception, right? It disconnects you in a way that can be disastrous because when you get into this kind of imagination, the imaginary, when you’re mind wandering, you can actually be attentionally blind to your environment. So it is imagination that takes you away from perception. Is that okay? The imaginal is the opposite. The imaginal is externally projected, seeing like and seeing as. Almost and this is the analogy to the projection onto the heads up display. What do you mean externally? Okay. So think of a child picking up a stick, tying on a cape and I’m Zorro. They’re not forming a picture in their head. They’re not disconnecting from the world of perception. What they’re doing is they’re assuming an identity to see what it tastes like and they’re trying to see as Zorro sees because perhaps that might be some important skills or virtues. Maybe this is how I can become, this is what it feels like to be more heroic, perhaps. Let me give you another example. I’ve also been a professional Tai Chi instructor for a couple of decades. When I have my novice students come in, I first have them just stand. This kind of pisses them off because they want to be doing really cool stuff. But they have to learn first how to stand. So I say stand as if you’re in a shallow stream. From your knees down is sinking into the mud. You want to have that feeling that you’re not skimming along the surface of the floor but sinking into it, rooted. From here up, this is the water flowing by in the stream. You want this to feel like it’s got the flexibility and the force of water. And here, this is in the air. You want it to feel as insubstantial as air feels. And why is that important? Because normally our attentional configuration is like an inverted triangle. We’re all up here with our attention and we’re very little down there. And when you’re like that, it’s easy to push you over. When you do this way of imaginably augmenting your perception, you get properly rooted, you reorganize your attentional triangle, and now you’re ready to fight. This is not imagination that takes you away from perception. This is imagination for the sake of perception. I’m imaginably augmenting their ability to detect very subtle patterns of sensory motor coordination, make them salient, and realize the affordances that are available to them. That’s imaginably augmented perception. I want to now try to show you a little bit about how your life is filled with imaginably augmented conception. Actually perception conception. And I’m just going to do it by just saying a few things to you and then getting you to realize what you’re actually doing. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you see my point? I hope you get it. You grasp what I’m saying? What are you doing there? In fact, try to explain to me what understanding is without invoking a sensory motor metaphor. Well, I comprehend. Oh, you mean from the French, to grasp. Your life is filled with these kind of perpetually enacted metaphor. By the way, that sentence was such a metaphor because I said your life was filled as if your life is a container and you’re pouring stuff into it. I’m more than halfway through my talk. You think, thank God. Halfway through my talk. I hope it hasn’t been too hard for you. You’re constantly doing this and when you’re not speaking it, you’re doing this other thing that is an enacted metaphor. It’s called gesture. Have you ever realized, caught yourself, you’re talking on the phone and you’re gesturing? Do you know why you do that? It’s not because of habit. Well, it’s partially because of habit. It’s because it’s actually doing independent cognitive processing at the procedural and the perspectival and perhaps the participatory level outside of the propositional stuff you’re doing in your mind. We know this because if I take you and I get you try to explain something to me and I want you to squeeze this pole so you can’t possibly gesture at all, your cognitive performance will decline. You’re doing imaginal augmentation of conception moment by moment. Now, this ability to imagineally augment perception cognition is very important for your capacity for self-regulation. A bunch of work done by Hirschfield within 10 to five years, multiple experiments, not only Hirschfield but other people, but he was the leader. You go into an academic setting because academics like to believe they’re the smartest people and we’re most responsive to argumentation and evidence. That’s at least what we claim so we can have the jobs that we have. You go in and you give really good arguments that people there acknowledge. That’s a really good argument. Really good evidence. Yes, that’s very good evidence that you should start saving now for your retirement. People go, yes, excellent talk. Well done. You come back six months later, none of them are saving for retirement. None of them. Why? What’s going on here? You can’t do this propositionally. What they found and what the theory emerged was people don’t save because they don’t want to enter into a relationship to their future self. Why? What’s your future self like when you’re retired? Well, you’re out of work. You’re not that important anymore. You’re older. You’re more likely to get sick. You’re not as sexually attractive as you used to. I don’t want to. This is what they did. They taught them, think about imaginal argumentation, I want you to imagine that your future self, and this is a real relationship because you do have a future self because if you don’t have a future self, again, I don’t know what you’re doing here. Imagine that your future self is a beloved family member that you’ve always cared for, you’ve always loved, and you want to keep loving them, and you have a moral responsibility to take care of them. Enact that, like being the rover. Enact it. People start saving. In fact, the more vividly they’re capable of doing the imaginal identification, the more they save. Your capacity to self-regulate and pursue long-term goals is dependent on your imaginal augmentation of perception and conception. This is an imaginal time. This weird, how you and your future self become somehow contemporary in a relationship. Now, this transformative relationship to one’s future self is what Agnes Callard talks about. She calls it aspiration in her book entitled, appropriately enough, Aspiration. Now, to explain to her what you, to explain to you what that means to her, I need to first explain the work that her work was based on, which is the work of L.A. Paul, who literally wrote the book on transformative experience called Transformative Experience. I’ve got to meet and talk with Lori. She’s a wonderful person. I’m going to try and summarize some very sophisticated and complex thought by sort of zeroing in on one of her Gdankin experiments and then expanding on it. So give me a moment here on this. So your friends come to you and they give you incontrovertible, indubitable evidence that they can do the following. They can turn you into a vampire. Now, should you do it? Now, notice you can have all kinds of propositions about vampires and maybe you have a few procedural skills. I don’t know what that would be. Maybe you could lurk well in dark alleys or something. I don’t know. Right? But notice what you don’t have, and this is L.A. Paul’s point. You are completely perspectively and participatorily ignorant. You don’t know what it will be like to be a vampire. And you don’t know who you will become because your preferences, your virtues, your values, everything is going to get skewed. Your identity is going to change. So you have this profound ignorance. And the propositions can’t generate the missing knowledge because it’s a different kind of knowing. And notice, well, then I won’t do it. But then you don’t know what you’re missing. Oh, well, then I will do it. But you don’t know what you’re going to lose. Like, you can think about it, but it’s unthinkable in the sense that Harry Frankford talks about in his book Reasons for Love. So I live with my older son, Jason, because he’s in graduate school. He’s almost done and he’s going to become a high school science teacher. I’m very proud of that, right? Another teacher committed to science. Right? But I notice one way I can think about kicking my son out. I can run the proposition. Wow. If Jason was no longer here, my apartment would be so much cleaner. I can make all these inferential deductions. But that doesn’t get me anywhere near starting to activate the skills that I would need to make him leave. And why not? Because I can’t take that perspective. I can’t see him that way because I love him. And why can’t I see him that way? Because I ultimately don’t want to be that kind of person that would kick somebody out of the dwelling that I love so deeply. So although I can do all the propositional manipulations, and I can even run mental images imaginary in my mind, I can’t get to the place where I can kick him out. That’s the kind of ignorance that we’re talking about here. So you say, okay, I kind of thought philosophers just did weird shit like that. What is this? Right? But here’s the point of a good Gdansk experiment. It triggers intuitions in you that you can then transfer to a situation in your real life. It’s a way of imaginatively augmenting your current perception and conception. Because she says, you know, you face these kinds of transformative choices in multiple key points in your life. What’s one example? I’ll just pick one of many. Having a child. Having a child. Being a child gives you no perspectival or participatory understanding of what it’s like to be a parent. You’re going to see things in a way that you’ve never seen before, and you’re going to change as a person. Or else you’re a really bad parent. So Laurie sort of leaves it there, and that’s fine. But, right? Because she’s trying to make a point, an epistemological point. But I’m a cognitive scientist, and I want to understand the mechanisms, the processes by which people do this. So how do people do this? It was funny, because I was making this argument, and somebody actually came up to me, and we started talking, and they actually instantiated the very example I’m going to give you. Because they said, oh, I didn’t have any problem with L.A. Paul, and they started talking to them. Because this is what people do, and this is what this person came up. They get a dog. They get a dog, and they give it a name, they put it in the family portrait, they sometimes even take it on vacation. It might even get its own room. It certainly gets its own bed. And when the person came up to me, he said, I don’t know what, I was able to, I just had a daughter, and I was, that wasn’t a shock to me. And I was aware of non-egoic love. And I said, well, how were you aware before you had your daughter? Oh, I had a dog. That’s exactly it. Now notice what they’re doing. Right? They’re going into this liminal space, where they’re getting a taste of what the perspectival knowing would be like. They’re getting a taste of the participatory knowing, but they’re not so committed that they can’t back out of it. Because you can give a dog away in a way you can never give a child away. There’s lots of these. Entering into, you’re going to enter into a romantic relationship with somebody, should you do it. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what you’re missing. If you do do it, you don’t know what you’re going to lose. So what do people often do? They go on a trip. Did your friends ever give you this advice? Go on a trip with the person. Travel with them for a couple of weeks. Because you’re sort of like living with them, but you’re not really. So what we do is we do this enacted analogy. And it’s this imaginal augmentation. So now, this enacted analogy is what I call serious play. And it’s exactly what the child is doing when they pick up the stick and put on the blanket and say, I’m Zorro. It’s exactly what you do if you happen to go into therapy. And the therapist has you talk to an empty chair as if it’s your father. This is serious play. What do I mean by serious play? I mean the play that drives development, not play for the sake of entertainment. So we have imaginally augmented perception and cognition happening within serious play. So now back to Agnes Callard and aspiration. Agnes Callard relies on a central point that should be familiar to you now from this argument that L.A. Paul makes. You can’t infer your way through a transformation. The propositional knowledge is inadequate. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. It’s inadequate. Just like the scientists can’t do the science without making those other transformations. So she argues, I think plausibly enough, that we are subject to the normative demand to become more rational. We are all continually subject to this demand, become more rational. So this is a summons to aspiration. You are trying to enter into a transformative relationship that bonds your current self to your future self. And you’re currently not very rational. And so you don’t know what it’s going to be like to be more rational, how you’re going to see the world. You don’t know who you’re going to become, how you’re going to change. And you’re bound to this in the way that we’ve been talking about. So let’s retrace our steps again. We’re subject to a normative demand to become more rational. This is a summons to aspiration. But aspiration is non-propositional. It’s non-inferential in nature. Do you see where she’s going? There must be a non-propositional, non-inferential form of rationality. Or I could never rationally recommend to you that you become more wise. She calls this proleptic rationality. Rationality, insofar it is something that we are constantly aspiring to do, is inherently aspirational in nature. There is a form of rationality specific to the aspiration that we need to engage in, in order to become more rational. Now, I would note that aspiration inherently makes use of imaginatively augmented perception and cognition within serious play that affords self-regulation and self-transcendence. Trying to become more rational is an act of self-transcendence. And now, and you probably haven’t been realizing it, I believe, or at least I propose to you, that I’ve been talking about ritual. I want to propose that this is a good way of understanding ritual. Ritual situates us in imaginal time in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns. To enter into right relationship with our future selves. To empower our self-correction and our self-regulation and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire. I’m arguing that that’s what ritual is. And if the argument is a sound argument, that means it’s inherent, it’s woven through your perception, your cognition, and it is intrinsic to you, cultivating rationality. There is a deep connection between ritual and rationality. But this is of course implicit ritual. But there’s no justification for it remaining so. How could there be, given how pervasive and powerful implicit ritual is through all of our perception, cognition, agency, and aspiration? Thank you very much. John, thank you so much. Have a seat. We’re going to just start with a conversation here. I thought I would just open things up and turn the microphone on. There’s a sort of crowd of questions filling my mind that I’d like to raise with you. Just fascinating. I’d like to just start off by trying to connect your brilliant lecture this evening to your other work, the work that some people here might already know you for. Sure. The question of meaning. And I suppose one thought that came to my mind as I was listening to you is that whatever else, there’s the old Oxbridge Don question, what do you mean by mean? Well, we know it’s clear what meaning might mean, but one thing we know, it does plausibly involve, is propositional knowledge. Sure. Your answer to the question of what meaning is, or your claim that something is meaningful, there seems to be a claim that it’s true. Yes. It has propositional content. Yes. But I think you probably want to, do you in your work on meaning or lectures on meaning, would you want to expand the notion of what meaning is? Very much. Something that might involve embodied cognition, aspirational knowledge. Thank you, James. That’s an excellent question. So people invoke meaning when they talk about meaning in life. I want to first of all make a distinction between the meaning of life, which is some claim about a cosmic design or something like that. I’m not talking about that. I don’t know how I would study that as a scientist. Meaning in life is that, and what we’re doing here, and this is sort of acknowledged, is we’re using a metaphor. We’re saying there’s something about the way our minds and our character and our lives are organized that’s analogous to how a sentence coheres together and corresponds to the world so as we have semantic meaning. So once you realize that the word, when we’re talking about meaning in life, is being used metaphorical, you can say, well, what are the metaphors for? And then you can do actual empirical work to investigate what is it people are talking about? And this is important. This is really important because meaning in life is terrifically predictive of a lot of outcomes for you in your life. So low meaning in life is predictive of higher rates of suicide, of being more prone to depression and anxiety, all kinds of things. So meaning in life matters. So meaning in life in the literature is fundamentally about this sense of connectedness that I was trying to articulate with first procedural. You can’t activate your procedural knowledge unless you’re interacting with the environment. And then I was really talking about the connectedness in perspectival knowing and participatory knowing. So it’s this sense of connectedness, right? This sense of presence, this sense of belonging together, this sense of empowerment. And when people have this sense of connectedness to themselves, to other people in the world, they will reliably rate their life as more meaningful in this sense. And that’s what I meant when I said being locked into a propositional orientation, exclusive propositional. I want to say one more time, I’m not excluding this. People have attributed that to me. That’s ridiculous. I’d be involved in some performative contradiction, right? But being fixated on this silences these other kinds of knowing. And this is where most of the meaning in life is being made. And so one example of this is you can get sort of stuck on ideologies trying to fixate people’s beliefs. And the reason people are often doing that is because they’re trying to generate this meaning in life, this sense of connectedness. But no matter how much you weave the semantic webs of your propositions and alter your beliefs, you’re not properly engaging these other kinds of knowing that have distinct kinds of memory, distinct kinds of phenomenological criteria. And so you are cut off from the meaning you’re hungering for. And so you’ll spin, for example, that ideological worldview faster. You’ll make it more complex. You’ll do more. You’ll overlay more narrative onto it as you desperately try to trigger these missing kinds of knowing because they carry the burden. And so the connection I’m trying to make here is we have sort of from the late Middle Ages on when we shifted how we read, we shifted from transformational reading to informational reading. And we started to get into and then we get normalism and I won’t do the whole history. But we started to we started to lose the sense. And this is what I think Han is talking about where we’re ended up. We’ve lost the sense of the value of ritual. We have it has even become identified through Freud’s hermeneutics of suspicion with some inherently irrational, obsessive practice. And what I’m trying to say is, well, that can’t be the case because most of your perception and cognition is ritual in the way is ritual, at least implicit ritual in the way I’ve been I’ve been arguing. Thank you. The book, by the way, that John’s been referring to is The Disappearance of Ritual. Yes, The Disappearance of Ritual. Who’s Korean origin, but a German philosopher. Well worth reading. I read it last week. It’s superb. Just one more question for me. And you opened that answer in a very modest, but I think quite slippery way as well. You said now look, I’m a cognitive science. I’m not going to step into the question of cosmic. Right, right, right, right. Now, I wonder whether you’re allowed to get away with that so quickly. No, I’m not. So the question would be something like. Meaning may well be may well involve something that is intrinsically perspectival. That is to say, it’s situated in the self, Foucault’s notion of the care of the self. I know you’re a big fan of Ado’s philosophy as a way of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But whatever else meaning is, it’s got something to do with me. Yes, yes. And my place in the world. Now, ritual as it’s typically been understood in the Neoplatonist tradition, which I think we’re both fans of. The urge of Yamblichus and others. And I think in just sort of traditional, you know, even song here in Cambridge. Those sorts of more standard religious rituals that we think of does have an element of cure of the self. That is, it’s good to go to church. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But what’s good about it is that you’re aligning yourself. You’re not sort of situating yourself. You’re not, as it were, doing sort of therapy on yourself. But you’re aligning yourself with the way the deeper structures of reality actually are. Well, I did slip that in. OK. The imaginal augmentation of perception and cognition so that you could discern real patterns. OK. Right. And those patterns are given, and they’re not simply part of the physical fabric of reality. No, no. But are contentful, but are meaningful. Yeah, so. And the meaning is independent of the meaning that you would impose upon it through cognition. Yes. And it’s propositional meaning. That is to say you could articulate, a religious person would say. Yeah. The way, the reason that this, well, that I’m attuned, I’m doing this ritual, I’m enacting it, and what I’m actually remembering or what I’m actually attuning myself to are facts, historical facts, or things that God has done, or ways God has structured. Sure, sure. So, excellent. And I suppose when my men came to Roche, I should talk about God. But I tried to point to something which is intrinsic to 4-E cognitive science, which is this is not just inwardly directed care. It’s not just care of the soul. It’s care about the world. And remember, I took a moment to argue that the affordance is not in the world, and it’s also not in me. It’s a real relationship that binds, religio, binds me and the world together. And remember, I talked about co-identification. The world is participating as much as I am in the creating of the salience landscape, in the disclosure of what’s relevant. So, and this is a defining feature of 4-E cog, I’ve coined the term transjectivity. It is that which binds subjectivity and objectivity together and is actually more real than the polarity of subjectivity and objectivity. And so, I think, and that’s why I kept saying also connectedness to the world. So, it’s connectedness to yourself. That has to be there. But also connectedness to others, that has to be there. But connectedness to the world. But I was really trying to get the sense that it’s like the two poles are creating together. They co-create this bond. And that’s wonderful. And what I found so thrilling about the lecture was the way in which it was presenting a story about meaning and ritual that did get past that rather crude subject-object split that’s been with us in different ways since Descartes and Kant and moving much more into Heidegger and Moloponty. And as I understand it, sort of cutting edge sort of artificial intelligence. I know that the two attempts to come up with the best robot, that you’ve got a kind of a robot that’s designed on biophysical principles, that is to say, trying to get close to, I suppose, like the rover. And ones that’s just to do with informational processing, just loading up a machine with propositions. And the first does far better than the second. Exactly. Exactly. So, we really tried that cognition is propositional knowing in what’s called GoFight. Good old-fashioned AI. It’s dominant in the 70s, 80s, into the mid-90s. Then neural networks come in and we realize that dynamical self-organization is important. And then we get to third generation for e-cognitive science where it really is, cognition isn’t in your head. It’s in this dynamic looping between you and the world. And the world is much a part of your cognition as your brain is in a very real sense. This goes to the heart of my scientific work. Fascinating. Love to hear more. And I suppose that there’s a trade-off there too in the sense that we’re struggling to produce machines that can understand certain propositions. And it seems because they are not situated in the right way in the world. I was reading an example last week that it’s very difficult to program a robot to understand the sentence, the box is in the pen. Yes. Yes. Now, we don’t have any problem with that. We think the box is in the pen. We immediately will think of a big pen like a cow pen or something. But it sounds extremely difficult to get across to a robot. They can register it propositionally. Yes. They’ve got no way of assigning the correct truth value to it or semantic content to it because they don’t, as it were, they’ve not moved through the world and come across bumped into pens. I’ve hogged John too much. So now it’s over to you. Jack has got the microphone. And please do speak into it so that we can pick it up for the recording. But it’s now over to you. Who would like to go first? Sebastian. Hi. Thank you. As you were talking, I was thinking about a problem that I ran into in a previous job. I was employed as a church official trying to train up catechists. And what I found was that there was just a sense that people needed to know the propositions of the Christian faith better. And faith induction and faith retention was failing because we didn’t have good enough catechetical courses. And another catechetical course would solve the problem eventually. But what I realized was that faith retention, faith induction was successful where people prioritized the devotional life, carrying out ritual, as you put it, daily gathering for prayer, attending the liturgy, et cetera. This embodied knowledge of the religion. And maybe to adopt the terminology you’ve been using, it seemed to me that this was, instead of a God saying this is the knowledge you need to have, it was a God saying adopt my perspective and see with me what I see to be sacred, so to speak. And it seems to me that Christian pedagogy, Christian androgyny could benefit enormously from some of the work you’re doing. I know you’ve had some dialogue with Bishop Robert Barron. But have you seen people within faith communities attending to what you’re doing and wanting to apply it? Thank you. First of all, thank you for that excellent example. And the short answer, which I want to expand on, is yes, very much so. In fact, I’ve received compliments that are disconcerting to me. One of my episodes is on the Christian notion of agape, and I take exactly this perspectival participatory that God is not calling you to assert propositions without evidence. He’s asking you the way I’m devoted to my partner. It’s for faithfulness. This doesn’t mean I have adequate propositions about you. Like you said, it’s about I try to take her perspective and I afford her to take my perspective. And we thereby afford each other self-transcendence. I can transcend through her as she transcends through me. And we reciprocally open the world and each other up. By the way, if you want somebody to fall in love with you, that’s what you engage. You do what’s called, I’ll just call it reciprocal opening. I forget Aaron’s term for it. Mutually accelerating disclosure. Scientists like to take something that’s beautiful like love. Mad, for sure. Okay, so what it means is if I come to you and I open up a little bit, I disclose something, and you respond not by propositionalizing, but respond in kind by opening up, and then I open up more and you open up more and we reciprocally open, you will fall into a kind of love with a person. It can be friendship love, it can be fellowship love, it can be romantic love, it can be agapic. So religious people, I have a lot, not just with Bishop Barron, with Pastor Paul VanderKlay, with Jonathan Pageot, he’s a fellow Canadian, he’s doing work on the symbolic world, he’s an Eastern Orthodox person, JP Marceau, Catholic. In fact, it’s been a little bit disconcerting that that has been a significant, I mean I also get a lot of interest from scientists, but there’s been a huge interest from religious people, and they often say things to me that I don’t know what to do with. I’ll have people saying to me, you explain agape better than any Christian I’ve ever heard explained. I’m not trying to be self-promotional, I’m trying to tell you how weird it gets. Or they’ll say to me, I think you’re an excellent instance of a Christian, and I’ll say, but I’m not a Christian. And so what I’m trying to convey to you is that they don’t just sort of agree with what I’m saying, they feel a kind of connectedness to me that somehow goes to the root of how they undertake their identity. And so that’s what I mean by how deep the response has been. Thank you. Thank you, Sebastian. Jack, and then, yeah. Yes, I’m holding the microphone so that’s helpful. If I understood you correctly, I have a question about the sense of self in relation to interaction with the environment. Do please correct me if I misremember. I think you said that through a, it’s only in our, is it in our action, in our relating to our environment, that we acquire a sense of self, that is what it is like, which is constitutive of the sense of self. And you spoke briefly, there’s a small allusion to the dictations of propriety in the terms of what kind of relation to the environment is appropriate to that sense of self. And I wondered if you might press on that. And there’s a notion in Hegel, for example, his master slave dialectic, that only if we treat others as ends do we, as it were, are we not alienated from ourselves, which is a sort of a kind of Hegel form, I guess, of do unto others. But there’s the notion then that what are the constraints, how can we know the constraints of propriety in relating to the environment in order to gain an appropriate sense of self? Sure. And I think that’s an excellent question. So I have a video series out called The Elusive Eye, capital I, The Nature and Function of Self. So answering that question is like, and I did it with two other people, and answering that question is very hard. But this is where I, this is a bit of a long answer because your question is very significant. So I think at the core of your cognitive agency, and it precedes your, any capacity you have for sense of self, and it exists in animals that, as far as we can delve, do not have a sense of self. Some animals do. We have good evidence for it. They pass the mirror test. They show empathy. They mourn for their dead, things like that. But for many organisms, they fail these tests. And so if we’re going to use the test fairly, some organisms have to be able to fail the test or it’s not a test. Right? And so, but what even organisms that don’t have to have a sense of self is they have to have a capacity for relevance realization. And this is, and James alluded to it, this is the capacity that is missing in what’s called artificial general intelligence. So AI is just the project of making machines that can do things that human beings used to do. Artificial general intelligence is making, trying to make a being that has the same kind of intelligence that you have. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. Now, why is relevance realization central to that? Because here’s the problem you face. The amount of information that you can pay attention to is combinatorially explosive. It’s astronomically vast. You can’t check it. You can’t go through each particular thing and say, that’s what I’ll pay attention to. I’ll pay attention to that. I’ll pay attention to that. You can’t check everything. Also, the amount of information you have in long term memory is also, and the ways you could connect it, combinatorially explosive, vast. The options for potential sequences of behavior you could produce, combinatorially vast. I could move this finger, then this finger, I could move like, tsssht. You can’t check all of what’s called all of these search spaces. You can’t check all the things you could pay attention to. You can’t check all the things that are in your memory. You can’t simulate all your possible courses of action. But here’s what’s really fascinating and frustrating for people in AGI. You’re doing it right now. You just did it. You somehow, I’ll pay attention to that. I’ll remember this and I’ll do that in response. Now, here’s what you’re going to say to me, and it’s right, but it’s totally unhelpfully right. You’ll say, well, it’s obvious. Obviousness is not a property of physics or chemistry or even biology. So all you’ve done is change the question. How do I make a machine that is capable of generating obviousness so that it does appropriate actions and reliably solves a wide variety of problems and a wide variety of domains? So relevance realization is absolutely crucial. Now, relevance realization is initially relevant. Relevance is relevant to an autopoetic system. Autopoetic means a self-making system. Just slow down on the words. Things literally matter to you because you have to put them in your face hole to stay alive. What? It’s food. And you’re different from a computer because you are constantly taking care of yourself, you have to care about this information and not care about that information. Computers don’t care about processing this information or that information, and that’s exactly what James is talking about. So your cognitive agency is initially how things are self-relevant, which is not the same thing as relevant to a self. It just means, you know how we use self as a recursive function. So relevant. And what we have is increasing evidence, good evidence. This is what Sui and Humphrey called. This is the glue of cognition and perception. Self-relevance is how you glue things together and how you glue parts of yourself together so you start to become a self. But here’s the thing. You’re also a mammal and you’re a primate. You also are not, once you’ve got that basic thing going, you also have to do the inversion. So not how things are relevant to you, but how you can be relevant to others. And so what you start to do is you start to coordinate self-relevance and relevance to the others. And the idea is that that is the matrix within which a sense of self develops. That’s what I’m trying to argue for. I’m arguing at this level that I take it Hegel to be arguing at. Although you used examples of roles, I think that ultimately that role realization grounds out in this kind of relevance realization that goes self-relevance and relevance to others. And then within that, sense of self is born. And that’s why the markers for sense of self track capacities for social intelligence. Animals that pass, except for the octopus, which is freaking weird, except for the octopus, all the other creatures that pass the sense of self are creatures that have high intelligence, and the octopus has that, general problem solvers, and are in complex social situations. And that’s the argument I’m trying to make about that’s the matrix in which the sense of self emerges. Fascinating. Thank you. There’s a question here at the front, Jack, the microphone. Oh, yeah. Okay. Good. I didn’t see them. Yeah. Good. Thank you very much. I really like. So the definition of ritual is a sort of presentness or transformative experience. But I do wonder a little bit about how you propose to differentiate then between rituals proper or ritualization, or just whether or not everything we do qualifies as ritual, because the sort of historian in me starts to wonder if we take a ritual event like a coronation from the medieval period in a different cosmology with different assumptions, rights or contexts. And then you compare it to a modern ritual, which is a sort of invented tradition, as it were, of sort of anachronism that makes the ritual operate. I start to wonder if the transformative experience is the same between those two identical ritual circumstances. And so I wonder a little bit whether or not the ritual can be made too broad by defining it as primarily transformative. Well, it wasn’t just transformative. There was more specification. It was imaginal augmentation of perception, cognition, self-regulation, aspiration. And although I argued it’s pervasive, there’s many instances of it in your daily cognition. I’m clearly not arguing that most of your cognition is engaged in that kind of imaginal augmentation of perception and cognition and aspiration and self-regulation. Now, if you did something that was doing that in this context, I guess the medieval coronation is your example. And then I sort of went through the motions. But that wouldn’t be the same thing, because I don’t see how you would possibly have the same perspectival and participatory engagement. That would be something, again, that was trying to work, I would argue, probably just at the propositional level and maybe a few similar skills. I mean, one of the things that your history does for you is exactly give you sort of a repertoire of roles, a repertoire of perspectives, a repertoire of relationships between perspectives and identities. And if that isn’t available to you, then I would argue you couldn’t have the ritual. So that’s the historical point I would make. It wouldn’t count as a ritual unless it was doing all of these things. Now, your point about semantic drift, if we extend it to everything. Well, as I first said, you can’t. You can only extend it to this very sort of specified definition. But if I said a lot of your behavior was like at least implicit ritual, does that make ritual a meaningful, meaningless term? Well, let’s do parity of argument. Does that show you that a lot of your speech is conceptually metaphorical in nature? Does that mean that all speech is metaphorical and there’s nothing literal? No, it doesn’t have that consequence. So semantic drift doesn’t necessarily need to lead to semantic emptying. And so that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say, well, see ritual as very, and that’s why I invoked it, very analogous to conceptual metaphor. So ritual fills our speech, but that doesn’t mean, it fills our thought, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve now emptied the idea of metaphor meaning. In fact, what we’ve now realized is that metaphor is not primarily a linguistic thing, but it’s a deeply cognitive thing. And I would say that ritual is not primarily just a performance or a sequence of actions. It’s a deeply cognitive thing in a way that we’ve perhaps not thought of before. Thank you. I wonder if the notion of habit might come in at some point. Hexis for Aristotle, which seems to be doing an awful lot of operating in similar ways, kind of non-cognitive, non-propositional dispositions that attunes us to the world in different ways. Could I say one thing, Jim? Yeah. Part of what I’m trying to do is to separate cognitive from propositional. Right. That’s part of what I’m trying to do. Okay, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. That’s controversial. But yeah, you’re right. That goes right to the heart of it. Because the claim would be, I can already hear my philosophy colleagues saying non-propositional knowledge is not knowledge. Yes. Because it’s not a cognitive state. Riding a bike is kind of a habit. It’s a disposition. Yeah. Thank you. Right. Who’s been? I can’t get a view of everyone. Who’s next, Jack? Down at the front. You’ve been waiting. Yeah. Hello. I was asked by a group of students at the Royal College of Art a few weeks ago, what would I redesign? It was a design course. And I said I would redesign thinking. And the reason I said that is because I’ve been spending probably 30 years as a social activist and now in parliament as a member of the House of Lords trying to get the government to rethink the fact that governments and politicians normally fail because they never get right into the reasons why we have so many people in poverty and so much crime. And the reason for that is because they inherit the government structure. It’s something that’s hundreds of years old. Anyway, so I’m looking for the practical redesign of thinking. And so that’s why I’m here today. A lot of what you said is fascinating and I’ve got many notes and I’ll be thinking about you for a long time, but I won’t necessarily understand you. So but I’m here. So there’s two things I really want. I want you to unpack ritual for me, maybe not for somebody who understands Immanuel Kant. So I would like you to unpack ritual for me because I’m a devout ex-Catholic who has become a Catholic again and goes through the ritual. And the ritual to me is connecting with my early childhood and things like that. So ritual is another thing. But I would also like you to explain what you mean by propositional fixation in the period that we live in because I think I understand what you mean there. And it’s very exciting to understand some of the stuff that you’ve said. So let me try and give you perhaps a way of unpacking ritual through an example. So I play Tai Chi. By the way, the verb is to play Tai Chi. You don’t do Tai Chi. You play it. It’s the same verb as playing music. It’s serious play. So it quickly falls under that. And what am I doing? Well, I tried to show you I’m trying to imagine, augment my perception. I’m trying to imagine, augment how I’m binding myself to my future self because I’m aspiring. I’m aspiring in a powerful way. And so I’m doing this behavior that is nonproductive in sort of I do this. And how has the world changed? Nothing has happened. I haven’t done any work because I’ve been engaged in serious play. I do it every day. And initially when I was doing it, I was having all these amazing experiences that you read about in the Tai Chi class, the times where you’re as hot as fire and you’re just sweating and the times where it was cold as ice and you’re freezing. And then you’re getting into the flow state and all that. But that’s not what really hit me and kept me going. I was in graduate school and my fellow students came up to me and said, what are you doing? And in graduate school, we’re all we are all beset by imposter syndrome. Oh, I don’t really belong here. I hope they don’t find out. And so I was like, oh, no, no. And I said, well, what do you mean? Which is a good way of putting off an answer. Right. And they said, well, you’re so much more balanced in how you approach a problem now. And you’re so much more flexible when you’re talking with others and you’re able to take their perspectives better. And I realized that I hadn’t seen this, but I realized that somehow the ritual of Tai Chi Chuan had percolated through my psyche and permeated through my life and was transferring into cognitive behavior. I was more balanced. And that’s what I mean again by enacting a metaphor. We’re taking sensory motor balance and I’m exacting it into how I’m interacting with people, how I’m formulating problems. And that’s what I mean by ritual. I mean that kind of engagement that is done in a way that percolates through the psyche, permeates through your life, and affords this kind of transfer between what you’re doing in the ritual, the way you’re altering perception and cognition, into viable ways of seeing and being in the world. That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m unpacking by ritual. And the other question you asked me is, what do I mean by propositional fixation? What I mean by propositional fixation is that we have gone through a long historical process of removing the faithfulness from faith. The metaphors that were used for faith were originally sexual metaphors. Sex is pretty perspectival and participatory. And so we’ve lost the belief is from the German beleben, which means to give your heart to. We’ve lost and what and we’ve even we even use system. Listen to the language. What’s a religion? It’s a system of beliefs. No, it’s not. That’s a ridiculous claim. And then we have secular versions of that is, well, what is a person is just the system of their beliefs. It’s their ideologies. And all I need to know from you is what you believe. And if I want to change you, all I have to do is change what what you believe. That’s not true. You can’t become a parent just by changing your beliefs. You can’t become faithful to somebody just by changing your beliefs. That’s what I mean by propositional fixation. We are fixated on this level. We have reduced knowledge. We have reduced our sense of self. We have reduced faith to the assertion of propositions. Thank you, Tom. Well, we’ve had one question from a peer of the realm. And we’re now going to have a question from a member of parliament to John Hayes. Thank you. I was I was fascinated by your by your comment about people being unwilling to enter into a relationship with their futures. Yeah, that may be true personally. Yes. But sometimes people will imagine a future communally as escaping their personal future. Yes, yes. Because there’s an anonymity in doing so. And I’m really interested in your views about people escaping their relationship with the past, both personally and communally, because it seems to me if you can’t remember, you can’t imagine. Mm hmm. So, I mean, first of all, before I reply to the question, I want to I want to I want to agree to the presupposition, which is the presentation I made was from an individualistic perspective. That was just useful for the argument. Part of four E cognitive science is the idea that cognition is extended, which is that most of our problem solving. And that’s how I’m defining cognition is the ability to solve problems as opposed to the ability to assert propositions, by the way. Right. That most of our problem solving is not done by individual cognition. It’s done by what’s now called distributed cognition. It’s extended through people. So who who here invented English? Oh, well, which one of you is modifying it and making it change? Oh, do you know any single individual who runs an airline? How about this institution? Is there one person doing it all? So most of our problem solving is destroyed, is done by distributed cognition. And what now we’re now getting increasing evidence for is that there is a property. There is what they’re now calling what I’ve argued. And this is another part of the paper I couldn’t get into. We agency, there’s no one person driving the robot. Ed Hutchins did this a long time ago in the early eighties. He’s one of the founding figures of 40 Cognitive Science. Who navigates a ship? No one person. It’s a system of people and machines. And that distributed cognition, that system has a collective agents, has a collective intelligence and a we agency that navigates the ship. Here’s another idea that many of the things we’re trying to deal with, the kinds of problems we’re trying to deal with now are not objects. They’re what Morton calls hyper objects. Objects have a specific location in space and time. So let me give you a non-controversial hyper object. Evolution. Is evolution real? Well, where is it? You can’t locate it and bound it in a particular location like you can as an object. The hyper object that Morton talks about is global warming. So you need distributed cognition to come into relationship with hyper objects. Spoken like a true Hegelian. I don’t know if that got towards your question. You’ve read my mind. It was the direct relation of weather. I was thinking about the way that people’s direct relation to the climate is a way of anonymizing their own future. And the disconnect between that and the personal relationship with the future. You didn’t answer my question about the past. Was that something you were interested in asking? No, no, that was just the shortcomings of my working memory. So before I get to the past, that was an odd sentence. But anyways, yeah, part of what ritual can do is to bind. There’s an important part of, I gave sort of individualistic examples of participatory knowing. But of course, a lot of participatory knowing is that you participate in a language, you participate in a culture, you participate in a history, which are ways and dimensions of talking about how we all participate in distributed cognition. And one of the things rituals should do is to help link perspectival knowing and participatory knowing and link individual cognition to distributed cognition. That’s that was something I wanted to talk about, and I couldn’t for reasons of time. I might go back to the gentleman’s question at the back, but you’ve got synchronic distributed cognition. And then what ritual can do is have diachronic distributed cognition so that we’re going at the next coronation. We are, as it were, participating in a continuous, continual historical thread that stretches right back through coronations all the way back into the Middle Ages. That’s an essential feature of distributed cognition. We are the only organisms, as far as we know, that are capable of cultural ratcheting. So we do not have to learn from scratch. We can participate in history and culture so that we don’t have to learn from scratch. And this goes to Zach Stein’s work about how we have lost the cultural function of education, which is intergenerational transmission for the affordance of cultural ratcheting. And we have oriented it towards training people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t train people, but if we lose that, if we lose that religio, that being bound to cultural transmission, to cultural ratcheting, we actually lose a lot of our capacity for significant problem solving. And so that is my way of trying to get the past into what I’m saying. Thank you. Peter, Peter Day-Mill, visiting from Hertfordshire. It’s great to see you in 3D, Peter. Thank you, Jason. Thank you very much for what you’ve said so far. You’ve talked a little about how adopting a ritual, broadly construed, involves a commitment in the sense that we don’t know how a ritual will change us. So we don’t know what kind of person we’ll become when we become a parent. But you’ve also tried to suggest how we need ritual to form a picture of the world. It’s an essential part of our understanding. If I could put it like this, the right rituals make our minds more adequate to the world, if you’re happy with that phraseology. So we need ritual, but in a sense, we can’t trust it. So that invites a question. How do we discern what kind of rituals will make our minds more adequate to the world? Are there any hallmarks? And if I may, one of the reasons I ask this is because I noted that you said that you couldn’t kick your son out of your house because you wouldn’t want to become the kind of person that you would have to become to do that. So that does suggest that we can have some kind of foreknowledge of what a ritual will do to us there in the moral sphere. But in your work, do you see hallmarks of rituals that will increase our adequacy of our mind to the world? Yeah, I mean that is actually for me the most prominent issue. And I don’t want to fall into an infinite regress because I’m proposing ritual as the serious play that puts us into the liminal place so that we can get that foretaste before we overcommit. So I don’t think we need rituals to engage in rituals because then I’m just going to get into sort of a Wittgensteinian infinite regress kind of thing. I’m sorry, I’m just trying to make sure I can maintain eye contact with you. So I suppose that what I want to say is I don’t know if there is a way ahead of a ritual, of seeing if it’s capable of allowing you to keep a foot in one world and place a foot in another world and do the serious play that’s in between them. How do you, how does a child, I mean, and I don’t mean this facetiously, I’m like wondering aloud, how does a child know when it’s playing well? And so my answer would be something like that there is the progressive enhancement of your capacity for relevance realization. If you get better, like I was trying to do that with my Tai Chi example, it’s a good ritual because I start to zero in on the relevant information in a situation more reliably. I get less distracted by superficial salience and I’m able to better discern real patterns. And so I don’t know if there’s a way of getting sort of like a projective foreknowledge, but you can get what’s like very prominent in predictive processing models of cognition, which is you can get the reliable reduction of error and the reliable enhancement of your capacity to do relevance realization. And I think that’s how we do it. Because I don’t know what we would get behind that in order to determine if that was working well. I suppose that Laurie Paul’s point is that that doesn’t work with transformative experience because if you’re saying, well, I’m playing quite well, but I know I could play better, there you’ve got a kind of quantitative scale where you can say, I know, you know, I’m not there yet, but I know that if I keep doing this, I’ll have more of it. Whereas her point is that transformative experience so transforms you as a person that you are no longer able to appeal to justificatory grounds for having made the decision prior to the transformative experience. Because you’re a different kind of agent. It’s a qualitative break. That’s her point. Pregnancy or marriage or whatever. Totally. And that’s what I tried to invoke. And so maybe I was misunderstanding the question. I was answering sort of how you do it. And it sounds like you’re asking more, how do you justify doing it? Well, her point is that you can never make a rational decision about those experiences that are most important and transformative. That’s the paradox. Right. The more important and significant and transformative the experience is, marriage or pregnancy, the less rational the decision to enter into it or to refuse to enter into it becomes. Yes. Although I will point out that in one of the end points, she says that we may be using something like recursive Bayesian nets, predictive processing to actually go through this process. And so I guess what I would say to that is that in the idea of the ritual, the serious play, like getting the dog or going into therapy, because that’s what therapy is, a serious play, is we’re ultimately making an argument by analogy. We are saying, right, this somehow, it’s reasonably similar, it’s relevantly similar to how I currently am, but it’s also plausibly relevantly similar to who I’ll become. And then that is my justification for remaining in the ritual. And if you say to me, well, you know, arguments by analogy are not deductively closed, I say, of course not. But that’s not what you could offer. And like the answer can’t be anything that actually would challenge the constraints of the problem as Laurie poses them. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I suppose her point would be that analogy presupposes the kind of continuity the transformative experience breaks. No, I don’t think so. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that’s what she would say. I’m hogging you again. Well, I just want to answer that because I mean, so one of the hallmarks of relevance realization is the aha moment of insight when you realize, oh, my framing of this, the perspective I’ve taken. So you do the nine. How many of you seen the nine dot problem? Connect all. Wow. Wow. This is a North American phenomenon. I. OK. So you get you get nine dots like three rows of three and you have to connect all four. You have to connect all nine dots with four straight lines. And most people so I can easily do this and they draw the square this way and then they realize they can’t do it. And the solution is you just have to go outside the square. Right. And people say when you show people that they go, you’re cheating. You went outside the box. And I never said box or square to you at all. By the way, this is where think outside the box comes from. Right. Here’s something you should know from the experiment. Weisberg and all with 1981 telling people think outside the box doesn’t help them to solve that problem. It is not propositionally driven. What you have to do is you have to break a frame. This is massive discontinuity. Throw yourself into the dynamic self-organization of your relevance realization. And then a new frame emerges. Insight is a prototypical instance of the evolution of relevance realization. But it is radically discontinuous. Fascinating. Fascinating. And I gather that’s a huge problem in AGI. Yes. Yes. Intuition and insight is the one thing we can’t seem to get computers to do. And so another way of talking about this is one of one of the way rituals afford a kind of insight that transformative Lee bridges. Fascinating. We’ve got a little bit more time. Can it pay soon? Any more? Yeah. Rob. Rob Henderson. Final question. Thanks for this fascinating discussion. Earlier you read those fascinating quotes from those scientists and how they experience these injuries that mirrored the glitches or the impairments of the Mars Rover. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about what you think was happening there and just how that reflects and how that falls under your larger point about ritual. So what they’ve done is they I was basically arguing that they had formed a way of identifying with the Rover and taking its perspectives. So here I would invoke somebody else that I would like to have brought into this talk, which is the work of Michael Plain. How attention is actually a structured relationship. So I was going to I need a pen or something. Can I thank you. So independently, Marla Ponte and Michael Plain, he converged on this example, but they did it of a blind person using a cane. But this will still work. So I’m tapping on this right. I’m tapping on this. And notice I’m not aware of the pencil. I’m aware through the pencil. I’m aware of the glass, but I’m aware through the pencil. So Michael Plain, he talks about this is indwelling. And you and by the way, you can indwell patterns. You can. I’m just using an object here. And you actually what’s interesting and mindfulness works with this is you can you can switch around the locus. So you can do this and you can switch so that you’re actually aware of the pencil and then you’re no longer aware of the glass. And then I can switch and now I’m aware of my fingers moving the pencil, but I’m no longer aware of the pencil. I’m aware of my fingers and then I can become aware of my sensations in my fingers. And that’s like a deep meditation. Right. So attention has this this weird layering structure and you can actually indwell and perceive through things. And I think what they’re trying to they’re trying to grasp is they’re they’re indwelling the rover and they’re seeing and by indwelling the rover, they’re becoming the rover and seeing through the rover. But they do not have the ontological language for representing that to themselves. They do not have the phenomenological articulation. So they look for a narrative that somehow is similar to this sense of bonding and a narrative of sort of magical sympathy is the one that comes most readily to mind. That’s my speculation. John, thank you. I’ve just seen my seen the time and I think we have just broken the record for the longest continuous forum. Catherine’s nodding at the back Trinity Forum ever in nearly 10 years. And it’s a sign of what a riveting tour de force you’ve treated us to that I had just completely lost track of time. It’s been a wonderful evening and superb questions and interventions as ever. I was just thinking as you were closing there, John, of a wonderful exchange on the courts of Trinity College between GE Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein who’s come up at a few points at a few junctures and more famously worrying about the nature of the external world. How do we prove? How do we how do we defy deal with the skeptic who says that maybe we’re brains in a vat or plugged into a matrix and Wittgenstein’s response is a kind of a vacuums response. It’s some external to what? External to what? And I think you’ve shown us brilliantly now something that I think the continental philosophers in their rather mysterious opaque way have been on to for a while. I mean, try reading Heidegger. It’s not that easy, but it seems like he might have been on to something in that great opening to being in time where he’s bringing down Descartes and the subject objectified. You’ve just done that so elegantly and lucidly and winsomely. And I want to thank you on behalf of all of us for such a splendid evening. Thank you. Thank you.