https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T7XJFhWK2LM
What seems to be going on pretty reliably so far is finding relationships of complementarity and mutual correction rather than adversarial processing, right, an attempt to dominate or destroy. Right. That, I think, for me, not only what we’re talking about, but the exemplification of how we’re talking and how we’re entering into a relationship, how we’re reprioritizing, we’re moving off of the product and the position and trying to really move into process and participation. And that’s, well, that’s always been very important to me because, as you know, I aspire the Socratic ideal, but that is now even more so the case for me because I see that ability to enact functional as opposed to dysfunctional and adaptive as opposed to maladaptive collective intelligence and bring it into something like collective rationality so that it can effectively, so that we can effectively aspire to collective rationality and wisdom. That has become very, very central to me. So the process of all this discussion over the last year, meeting all of you guys and women and then engaging in the work on the After Socrates project has just, it has intensified and very dramatically deepened. It was already deep, I believe, but has intensified and dramatically deepened my commitment to the Socratic ideal, theologos. That has now become sort of very, very, I would say that’s sacred to me in the way I talk about in this series. Right. Okay. You’ve already breached on some, or not breached, you’ve already touched on some of the things that we were going to discuss. The first being rationality. And so you said, you said collective rationality. So that seemed to be an interesting idea. And dialogos. So what’s the difference between just ordinary rationality and let’s say collective rationality and dialog and dialogos? Right. So let’s, let’s, well, let’s do it first. What’s the difference between sort of ordinary or the common notion of rationality and the notion I’m arguing for. And then we’ll do that sort of individually, because that will give me an analogic basis for them talking about the collective. Is that okay? Yeah. So typically, and I know this because I teach, I teach on rationality. And so I get to see people’s, and these are bright, educated young people. They’re right. And so they’re sort of the best representative of what we call folk psychology. So within the COGSI academic world, folk psychology is the psychological, the implicit, largely implicit psychological theories that most people are carrying around. So people have theories, implicit theories about intelligence, about rationality. Right, right, right. And it’s folk psychology. They have implicit theories about how memory works. They have implicit theories about what concepts are. Now, one thing we should put on the table right away is, and this is what I spent a lot of time doing in introduction to COGSI, is most of those folk psychological intuitions have turned out to be wrong. They have turned out to be very wrong. And for a kind of important reason. Right. So, so let’s say, you know, our ideas about rationality, our ideas about wisdom, our ideas about intelligence, you know, all of them are very distorted or very skewed. Our ideas about memory. Let me give you an example of memory because it’s far enough away from our topic that will be a little less controversial, a little easier to just sort of establish. So many people, we have all these metaphors, in fact, that speak this. We think of memory as like a room in which we store things and we go in there and we retrieve it and we search through our memory. And so the metaphor we have is kind of like a library and we’re sending people in and they’re moving around. And why, and this brings me to the point I wanted to make. We have these folk psychological notions because we have to remember that in our folk psychological context, we are not primarily interested in explaining phenomena. We’re interested in primarily predicting and training. So right, there’s a language of explaining and a language of training. Now here’s what I want to say. If I want to train your memory, it’s a really good thing to use that idea of a room. Right. Here’s a, this is, you see it on Sherlock, right? You have your, you have your memory palace or your mind palace, right? You have this room. It’s called the method of loci. And let’s say I’m going to talk to Andrew and I’m going to first talk about rationality. So I, you know, I get a room, like a space, maybe this house that I’m in, I’m familiar with. The library is where I’m going to talk to Andrew about rationality. So I form an image of you in the library and there’s books and there’s knowledge and oh, right, right. And then I’m next going to talk to, you know, Andrew perhaps about transformation. Well, that’s the kitchen and I picture Andrew in the kitchen and he’s, he’s doing, and so what I do is I make all these images and they’re in different places. And what I do is I actually search. I go from room to room to room in my mind. There’s a powerful way to train memory. The ancient orators could use this technique to memorize speeches that will last like six hours. So it’s really powerful way to train your memory. And it goes very well with all those metaphors. The thing is our memory doesn’t work like that at all. That’s good language for training it. But you don’t actually have that sort of, you know, search, serial search because for example, can you please tell me Justin Bieber’s phone number? No, no, no, you don’t know. You don’t know it. No, you didn’t scroll through all of your phone numbers and realize that it wasn’t there. You just know. Is that like a heuristic or something or? Well, no, it’s it’s it’s it’s that it’s there’s a heuristic. There’s also a kind of parallel search. There’s a kind of memory probably in neural networks as opposed to located memory like in standard computers. And, you know, and your memories aren’t stable. You’re constantly reconstructing them. You’re constantly rewriting them. That’s why I confident I was confident eyewitness testimony. Forty nine percent of it is inaccurate. Forty nine percent of it is wrong. Because confidence measures how meaningful you find the experience, not how accurate it is. Or, you know, we think, you know, in a library, things that are, you know, that are relevant to each other are stored close to each other. But like in your memory, if I give you if I say color red, say another color as quickly as you can. So red, red or say another color. Red, blue. OK, now give me a word that rhymes with blue. True. OK, so red is close to blue and blue is close to true. Is red close to true? No, no. But see your memory. So although we talk about memory and we can train it with that, and it seems so intuitive to us that that must be how memory works. That’s not how memory actually works. You see that? I’m trying to show you just in these sort of pony, you know, dog and pony examples that your memory doesn’t actually work that way. In fact, it’s taken us a long and attention doesn’t work just like a spotlight and all kinds of. Yeah. So I’m jumping ahead to say that this is what you mean about wisdom. Right. Is seen through self deception. Right. Or or or these these forms can either lead to self deception or they can lead to a greater understanding, depending how we use them or how transparent they are to us. Right. So what I’m trying to get at. Yes, that’s I think a very appropriate way of reframing what I’m saying. If we don’t pay attention to the difference between our folk psychological language of training and our scientific language of explaining, we can equivocate. We can confuse them together and thereby deeply deceive ourselves. Now, I and get into all kinds of new age nonsense. Well, a new age nonsense, but also we could fail to more powerfully even use our memory when we’re studying for a test. So so people think, well, the best way to study for a test is sort of read the material over and over again and rehearse it because it’s like sort of, you know, writing over and over again on the same spot in the library to make it a deeper. But that’s not the best way to try and study for a test, for example, because you’re not actually using your memory for how it actually functions. Oh, can I can I just do a slight aside here? Because this is fascinating to me. I was talking to Zach Stein recently. Do you know, Zach? You know, yeah, I have talked. Yes. Yeah, he’s a brilliant guy. Anyway, he told me that his that he’s a high achieving dyslexic. Yes. And he described his mind and it seemed to be very similar to mine. And I’m pretty sure that I have the same thing that he has. Oh, you read the paragraph first and then you read the sentence and then you read the word. You don’t read from the word up to the paragraph like you’re too in the gestalt. And then it’s then you have to get to the to the to the detail to the feature. Right. So an ordinary mind kind of or most I shouldn’t say ordinary because nobody has an ordinary mind. But most people kind of build up from from maybe the feature to the gestalt. And then a person who is sort of has that kind of dyslexia, it doesn’t mean they can’t read or anything. They just kind of do things in a different, you know, different way. It’s a little it’s a it’s a little bit more complicated. Everybody, I’m sure everybody actually simultaneously again, because you’re not doing things step by step the way we think in language. Yeah, you’re right. So that’s why we had to get neural networks to solve what’s called the chicken and egg problem, because when I’m reading, I need to read the letters in order to read the word. But I need to know what the word is in order to disambiguate the letters. So you’re simultaneously going from feature to gestalt and gestalt to feature. Sure. Right. So it’s in parallel again, which is not something that’s easy to put into words. Right. It doesn’t go well with sort of, again, our folk psychological understanding of how we do things. But it’s modeled well in neural networks, for example. Now, the thing is, of course, everybody’s sort of doing that. But there is variation on like how it’s skewed. Some people more skewed equally. Some people are more skewed gestalt. If you’ll allow it, rather weird. Yeah. So my main point of all of this, and thank you because you’ve helped me sort of explicate my point in this discussion we’ve just had, is we have to be willing to challenge our folk psychological notions of rationality. Because there’s right. It’s very plausible that like all of our other folk psychological constructs, while it has some important truth to it, it also has a lot of misrepresentation and misdirection with respect to the phenomenon. And so why that’s a little bit more challenging for us, I think, is that, you know, if you if you have sort of a memory that’s not that great, it’s a little bit affects your sort of status and your self-esteem a little bit. But, you know, not that much. But these terms, intelligence, rationality and wisdom, they carry with them a tremendous. We identify with those aspects of our cognition very, very powerful. So that’s why people get very, very sort of err about notions of intelligence, rationality and wisdom. So, again, we need to pull apart, right, our identification with these processes, which, of course, we should address eventually. But we need to pull that apart from our attempt to get our best understanding of them, because, again, our identity, just like all of a lot of our my side biases and our egocentric bias, our identification with these processes can actually deeply impede us getting a good understanding of them. I needed to say all of that precisely because I want to challenge two standard notions of what it is to be rational. OK, go for it. OK, so one notion of what rationality is, you know, it’s kind of the Spock version for those of you and I of that generation. We know this idea that rationality is logicality. And you see this in, you know, there’s a lot of sort of online forums that sort of that’s the model of rationality, that rationality is to be as logical as possible. And Mr. Spock sort of exemplified that. And the problem with that is it we have to we have to set into an overarching idea that ultimately we are goal directed. We’re we’re seeking goals. We’re seeking to achieve goals. And so one thing we have to note is that what rationality means method as a method for us is we’re looking for the most reliable and systematic way of achieving our goals. Right. So you say, wow, but that’s fine. Logic is the most reliable and systematic way of achieving truth. The problem with that is it’s not true, not because logic isn’t relevant relevant to rationality, but you can’t identify rationality with logic. And here’s the problem. Logic works in terms of certainty and a completely formal system. And what that means, and I’m trying not to try not to presuppose too much be presumptuous of what people have seen of the series. But what that means is you’re basically into a kind of processing that has to check all of the problem space. It has to check all of the information. It has to check all the possible options. You have to be comprehensive and exhausted. You have to be kind of like a machine, a machine of some kind rather than machine. You have no machine can do that. Like even our even our best chess playing machines can’t search all the possible options. It’s combinatorial explosive. They can’t search all of the like that. This is the problem of search is still the profound problem is that it is just too much, too much information. Too much. So if you and everybody acknowledges this, who is working within rationality, Herbert and Simon, you know, I think it was Simon’s book, I think it was a Newell and Simon or Simon’s book, I think, bounded rationality. Rationality is always bounded in terms of what’s actually possible for us. Cherniak talked about we’re in the finitary predicament. And this goes to the core of my work. We can’t reason we can’t make inferences on the basis of all possible options, all possible probability, all possible information that’s combinatorially explosive. So what we do is we bound it. We zero in on what’s salient here. You knew I was going to do this. Irrelevant. Right. And so that means before you can even use logic, you have to have pre logical processes of problem formulation, the direction of attention, searching memory. And those are not obstacles to being rational because they prevent you from being fully logical. They actually facilitate. They constitute you being a viable cognitive agent. If you don’t have that, you’re going to be sick. The next task I try to perform, I’m going to hit combinatorial explosion. And then I’ve committed cognitive suicide. So if we’re dreaming or something like that, a dream is we don’t normally think of a dream as being rational, but it could have a rational function or it could have. Yes. You know what you mean? Well, more than that, I mean, I think that what you see is one plausible account of what dreaming does is it’s a kind of optimization process on how your brain is operating. And so it’s not so much the content of the dream, but it’s sort of the way in which your brain is sort of practicing getting better, adjusting what it finds salient and relevant. So it does weird variations on patterns that you’ve sort of acquired through the day. And it sees which one of those sort of optimize its ability to track and predict and solve problems. That’s where you’re often solving weird problems in your dreams. Right. Right. Yeah. Right. And so that looks all sort of great. It’s all illogical, but it could turn out to be rational because it could be actually optimizing this process of relevance realization that is so central, especially. And here’s what I want to come back. If it systematically and reliably improves your ability to zero in on relevant information. And then I’m going to add something to that that is directly implied by that. It systematically and reliably improves your ability to overcome self-deception. Then I think that’s how we we should understand rationality. Rational practice is a practice that systematically and reliably improves your ability to overcome self-deception and to optimize your ability to zero in on the relevant information such that you are more and more capable of being a good general problem solver and achieving your goals. And that’s what rationality means. So it’s not logicality, but it’s also not just being intelligent. Because with intelligence is intelligence is basically Leo and I argue this Leo Farrar and I argue this. And I think you can make a good case that a lot of people are implicitly arguing for this, that what we’re measuring when we’re measuring intelligence is we’re measuring sort of your working memory capacity to zero in on relevant information. And the problem with that is this is the issue. Right. Very often, what I what I initially might find relevant or salient is actually a kind of bullshitting. It’s actually taking me away right from being able to solve the particular problem. I’m paying attention to the wrong things because my machinery is designating certain things as relevant or salient that actually will not help me to zero in on or track the patterns that I need in order to find my goals. Right. And this is where you need insight. When you have an aha experience, you realize, oh no, I formulated the problem the wrong way and I’ve got to change what I find relevant and salient. And that means if we have an account of rationality in which insight does not play a central role, we do not have a good account of insight because the machinery of insight is the machinery by which you optimize your ability to zero in on information. And it’s the same machinery you use to overcome self-deception. So the problem with that with the with the idea of it just being intelligent is rationality so intelligence is what you’re using. Well, there’s a lot of if I could just there’s a lot of very stupid intelligent people, right? They have the machineries all there, but they’re not using it correctly or that’s right. They’re not using it in an optimized way or in a in a let’s say ethical way or in a or an or a non-self delusional way, right? Okay, right. And so that’s exactly my point, Andrew. There you use your intelligence to solve your problems, but that can generate all kinds of skewed salience landscapes capacities for acting immorally for acting in a self-deceptive manner. Rationality is what you use in order to deal with all of that, right? All of those negative side effects generated by using your intelligence in an adaptive manner. So rationality is a practice rather than something you’re just born with. That’s very important to think to know that right that something you’ve worked on and it’s you said it was aspirational, right? It’s something yes. Yes, become a rational person even though it seems like an ideal like it’s not a very likely scenario that you would become 100% rational. Yeah, I don’t I don’t even know if that’s possible. Yeah, I don’t yeah, I don’t even know if that’s the correct way to frame it. Because it brings with it a sense of an idea of completeness or finality. And because your intelligence is a self-organizing evolving dynamical system, and because the world is a self-organizing dynamical system, there’s no sort of final state you can get into where you can say where you can pronounce now I am forever free from. Yeah, so it’s all process sort of it’s all process. Well, this is how I interpret the first noble truth of Buddhism. I’m not a Buddhist, but like even though you know Alexander says I am but right. But I interpret it as you know, not that all of life is suffering because that makes no sense, but that no matter where you turn there is no place in which you can be free from the threat of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, no matter how smart you are, no matter how intelligent you are. Yeah, you always be missing something wouldn’t you you’d always have a blind spot somewhere. Or I would have a lot of blind spots. A lot of them. So, you know, if you take a look a lot of psychology is going through the replication crisis results are getting replicated well, you know what is robustly getting replicated time and time again all this stuff about cognitive bias, all this stuff about self-deception, all this stuff about how intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for rationality. All of that is very very robust. It is not going through the replication crisis. It’s an aspect of our cognition that we should have very strong confidence in, which means given these two points we should not think of rationality as identical to either logicality or either to our intelligence, our sort of our innately given problem solving capacity because that’s what I think intelligence is. And I think this would actually ameliorate a lot of useless debates. People don’t like the idea, you know, that IQ is fixed because then they think they’re doomed, right? They think oh no, right? And then there’s all these objections and right and but and this is I think this is an argument I get from Stanovic. We shouldn’t be caring so much about intelligence. Yeah, G is a good predictor. It’s one of our best. G is measures of general intelligence. You know what I should all I really care about about you? How rational you are because that’s going to predict how moral you behave, how you could overcome egocentrism, how you’re less self-deceptive. Your mode. What about the whole effective world, right? Because I was thinking about how when I was talking to Guy last night, he kind of lives in that kind of a realm. He’s very rational as well, but he doesn’t swim in rational arguments. He kind of swims in something else. But again, I guess I still have this narrow definition of rationality when I’m talking. No, but that’s great. That’s a beautiful segue for me because two ways in which the folk psychological notion is too narrow, it either identify and it often does it both in a contradictory manner, but it often identifies rationality with being intelligent, right? Right. Therefore fixed like intelligence, but it’s not rationality is not intelligence and rationality is developmental. You can get better and better and better. You inspire and it’s not equivalent to logicality. Just being good at logic is not the evidence is clear. It does not make you very rational. Actually rationality is about knowing where, when it’s about rationing. It’s about knowing where, when and to what degree to be logical. Now, this brings what you just said brings me up to the third way in the folk psychological notion, ours, not cross culturally, but ours in the West is deficient is we limit rationality to just inferential processes about belief. You say, oh, we limited to use some of my terminology, we limit rationality to just propositional knowing and that the goal, the sole goal of rationality is to get true beliefs, which of course is ridiculous. I could get an indefinitely large number of true beliefs in my room by noting correlations between how many paper clips are in the room and how many cups are in the room. The amount of information in this room, the amount of true information is overwhelming. What we actually want is true information that’s relevant to us, relevant to our problem solving tasks, relevant to our moral undertakings, et cetera. Yeah, I was listening to somebody who was talking about intelligence. I put that in the article I write and he said that wisdom is when you can say, so what? Like you’re you could discard all that information, which is important. You can narrow in on what really matters. In a deep existential way, not on, as you say, products or. Yeah, I mean, sometimes our goals are genuinely epistemic. We want to know the true causes of things. But and this is the point I want to make. But if we bring in the many other ways in which we try to couple ourselves to reality, our procedural knowledge, well, then our procedural knowing. Well, then we want systematically and reliable ways of getting and improving our skills. Our prospectival knowing. Well, then we want systematically and reliable way of improving our salience landscaping and our ability to generate a sense of presence. Our participatory knowing. We want systematic and reliable ways of getting into the best right kind of existential mode. For example, should I be in the having mode right now? Should I be in the being mode? Should I be treating you categorically? Should I be treating you individually? Like all of those kinds of things. And how am I appropriately set? You see, and the thing about guy is guy is swimming, right? First of all, relevance is not cold calculation. It’s not logic. Relevance is about an act of commitment. I am committing my precious time and resources in a gamble, a risky gamble that this, I care. I’m caring about this information rather than that information because I’m ultimately trying to take care of myself and take care of the one. Well, this word care seems very important because, you know, one of the reasons some people would, you know, want to be trans-rational or have, you know, post-rational experiences or have experiences that were not what they would consider to be rational is because rationality often seems like a cold form of analysis. But you’re saying exactly the opposite, right? I’m saying exactly the opposite. So if you, and this goes back to Socrates. So the Socratic Platonic tradition, right? All of this, you know, this argumentative stuff, the inferential stuff is bound up with also abilities to change perspective, to cultivate softness, you know, a kind of salience lens. That’s what we, that’s one of the cardinal virtues. We usually translate it very poorly as moderation, but it’s much more like your salience landscaping has evolved so it spontaneously self-organizes to tempt you towards what is more true, towards what, right? It’s basically your perspectival knowing has been trained so that you’re much less subject to bullshit, right? This is something you said in the series. Usually we’re tempted to bullshit. But I like you say, what if we were tempted to the good or whatever that might be? And wouldn’t that be part of what a wise person has? They would come into a situation, right? And before they’re getting into perhaps any specific inferential processing, they’re sort of drawn to what’s not only what’s relevant, but what’s, you know, in a problem-solving sense, but maybe what’s also relevant in a moral sense, what needs to be addressed. You see, that’s the thing about Socrates, right? And the Platonic tradition, right? All of that argumentative stuff is bound up with love. It’s profoundly. So we see these, you know, post-romantic tradition, we see these as, you know, spirituality is about love and science is about reason, and the two are opposed and they’re separate. But no, in the whole neoplasocratic, neoplatonic tradition, they’re bound up together. In fact, Socrates, you know, Socrates claimed to know Taerataka. He knew what to care about. There are some things he actually did claim to know. That’s a good definition of wisdom, isn’t it? To know what to care about. Yes. He was seeking a rationality of appropriate caring, right? Now, that caring can be caring for the truth. It can be also caring for, caring about what’s right. It can be caring about, right, what’s beautiful. You see, and a lot of the Socratic dialogue is not about coming to an argumentative conclusion. It’s about trying to bring in the perspectival and participatory knowing, right? And that’s why Socrates often doesn’t use analogies to argument. He often uses analogies to skills, because procedural knowledge is a little bit closer than propositional knowledge to perspectival and participatory, right? And so he’s trying, you’re bringing in the perspectival and the participatory knowing because you’re trying to shape it. Again, often the dialogues don’t end in any kind of inferential conclusion. They also often leave you out. We don’t have any clear conclusion about what it is. May, it’s like, I guess it’s like good art or something. It doesn’t wrap up the whole story. So you’re satisfied with your product, like a Hollywood movie. It kind of opens a new vista for you. It opens a new vista and it also launches you onto aspirational transformation. So what you’ll see at the end of a lot of these dialogues is there’s no argumentative conclusion, but you’ll see that so like there’ll be like there’s a dialogue on courage and there’s two people arguing. It’s interesting because they’re arguing about courage and they represent these two positions I’m talking about. There’s a general and he thinks just his common sense notion of what courage is. That’s the correct. Oh, yeah, I’ve read that. Yeah. He’s full of psychological and then there’s a guy who’s a sophist and he has this sort of technical sort of logical definition, right, that he’s heard from somebody else. Right. And Socrates rejects both of those and then you get to the end and there’s no conclusion as to what courage is other than the fact that these two approaches have been shown to be inadequate. But what you see is both of the generals say they want their sons to come and learn from Socrates to spend time with Socrates because that the process has maybe because maybe perhaps courage is not something that you can define. It’s something that it’s not something you could define in any absolute sense. No, I mean, maybe think about Heidegger and what he talked when he talked about thinking and how how you know concepts a true concept is something that doesn’t have any kind of finitude to it. It just reveals itself more and more over time, more and more truth over time and you can never pin it down or. That’s what I that goes back to what I was saying earlier about you have to get away from models that seek completeness and being a finished thing. And I think that’s exactly the right. So Socrates, the point of the dialogue is you have to step back and this is why Plato writes dialogues as opposed to just straight arguments. The point is the you can’t get a definition of courage, but as you watch Socrates move between these two positions, the skill and current this of going wrong, you get a sense of how to get on the track, how to aspire to courage and that Socrates is reliably on it. So you develop a kind of trust in following Socrates because he has exemplified even though he can’t explicate courage. So the idea that I would like to bring into a lot of current practices like guys circling is to not always just be participating in the process, but also to step back and look at what we’re exemplifying in the process. So like, you know, in circling, you’re doing all these things to maintain the flow of the distributed cognition and everybody’s feeling that it’s very meaningful. But whatever you step back and say, yeah, but what is more meaningful? What is meaning? What is meaning in this situation? What and not just abstractly because you’ve got the phenomenology, it’s active, it’s engaged and you have multiple people there that have multiple perspectives on it and you can start doing something like a Socratic dialogue. But what is it to be meaningfully connected? And then and then what you can do is check with, you know, are we still exemplifying the phenomena we’re trying to explicate? You try to keep the two like tightly coupled together so you don’t you’re constantly moving. Chris Master Pietro and I talk about this in the chapter we wrote on the dialogos. You’re constantly sort of you’ve got you’re constantly moving, but in an integrated fashion between theory and theory, between theorizing and then going back and really theory, really testing it out. And yeah, yeah, yeah, really, really, really experiencing it in action. And so rationality, again, it would be for collective intelligence would be to try and find systematic and reliable ways of getting that kind of pattern of communication and connection between people in place. Very, very interesting. Yeah, it seems to me that that’s very important now, especially because we’re in a very anti rational time or something. Everything is about sensation and feeling and I don’t want to be, you know, say that feeling is bad, but but everything is about everything is based on, you know, clicks and likes and experience and salience. Yeah, right. Yeah. So that seems to be very important to to yeah. Okay. That you know, there’s the ocean of experience and then there’s also stepping out and coming back in and going in and out of that. I think it’s very needed and I would want to say that let’s use the Socratic model we just had and also some of the points we’ve made. I think our time is irrational or lacking in rationality in two senses. In one sense, we’re like the general, the one general who just let’s go with my intuition and my impulse and whatever just sort of comes to me. And then we have no, no, let’s be rational. Let’s be technical. Oh, yeah, exactly. That’s what I was going to say as well. I mean, it’s this this hyper rationality, which is is I don’t think it’s rationality at all, which you would say is not rationality at all. Right. Yeah, I still have this. I still have the folk definition of rationality in my head. So it’s almost hard for me to have the conversation until I redefine the term rationality. I completely understand. You know what I mean? And like I said, you’re struggling against not only just sort of the familiarity of your folk psychological conception, you’re also struggling against the fact that we have set up all these cultural patterns of identification and evaluation around these terms. Right. And we reward people and we claim this and we claim that. And that’s also, I think, acting as an obstacle to trying to get back to a notion of rationality that actually starts to overlap with wisdom. You see, that’s what these two these two, this notion of rationality is just being sort of practical, you know, intelligence problem solving, or the notion of rationality is just being sort of good logicality. It tells me nothing about wisdom. Basically, it doesn’t really help me. It doesn’t help me with that systematic and reliable way of cutting through bullshit, getting to what’s relevant, and then also aspiring, right, properly aspiring so that my development is constantly evolving with reality in it. Yeah. In a sort of continuous coupling. None of that is given to me by those models. So you talked to Ian McGilchrist recently. Oh, my gosh. So I, you know, I’m very interested because, you know, your story is almost the opposite of his, but you’re probably saying the same thing. You know, because he talks about he talks about left brain, right brain, you talk about opponent processing, working together. Those seem to be kind of analogous. Whereas he says that rationality is just cutting the worlds up into bits and turning us into bureaucratic monsters. And we need to get more into the right brain world of, you know, so a feeling and, you know, or context and the lived experience, the embodied experience of life, you know. And so how did you how did your conversation go? How did you you? We’re going to talk again. It went so well. We really clicked really deeply. So, you know, rebel wisdom, they recorded it. It will be released at some point. So a couple points on that. First of all, because this goes to what we were talking about earlier, perhaps a more helpful way to think of right and left is to think. And I actually brought this up with Ian in person, and he said it was completely convergent with him. So I have good reason to believe I can speak sort of something that we are agreeing on because we have in-person evidence. Right. So you can because I came at it. I hadn’t read Ian’s work until about two weeks before I met was going to meet him. Oh, OK. Yeah. Because I came at this stuff and I came to similar conclusions from all the work I do on insight. Right. Insight problem solving. So a good way to think about the right hemisphere is it’s it works more in terms of the gestalt. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so it likes wide open attention and it looks for like for for it’s sort of pursuing pattern completion. Right. Whereas the the left hemisphere is more featurely oriented and it does things in a step by step matter. It’s doing it’s doing something more like a pro running a program than trying to complete a pattern. It’s sort of building features up step by step by step. Right. And so think about the kind of attention it needs. It needs very narrow focused. It looks for clarity. It doesn’t like ambiguity. Now here’s what the folk idea of rationality would live in the left brain but not the next to you. And that’s I think part of our Cartesian heritage. That’s to identify rationality with analysis. And Mary Cohen has brought this point up. And I think to identify rationality with analysis is a mistake. I think it’s well for all the reasons I’ve already articulated it truncates what rationality should mean especially because rationality is about ratio finding the patterns rationing. Right. Getting the proper context. It’s a much more logistical notion. So why do we have these two? Well the left hemisphere is very good for well defined problems problems in which you have a really good representation of your initial state your goal state. What the actions and operations already know it tells you what you already know about what you already know. Yeah it’s familiar to you in a deep way. So a multiplication problem would be for many people a very well defined familiar problem. Now compare that to the problem of avoiding predation. Yeah. What does that look like? Well I’m avoiding you know well you know what’s my initial state. I’m not sure. Right. Right. You don’t get a notepad and start to write. What about the goal state looks like. Right. Very clearly. And this is the thing Andrew most of our real world problems. This is why that that notion of rationality of analysis are is so limiting. Most of our real world problems are actually like the problem of predation. They are ill defined problems. You and I are trying to have a good conversation right now. What’s the initial condition. Well we’re not talking. That’s not very helpful. What’s the what’s the what’s what’s the goal state look like. Well I don’t know. Does every good conversation look the same. No they have some feature. What should I say. What should I do. Should I raise my hand. Should I raise my voice. Should I like watch it. Like right. You see what I mean. Or go on a successful first date or tell a joke. You can’t draw a picture to tell somebody this is how you go on a successful first date. You can’t give up. You can’t go from A to B. Yeah. You can’t give a program. There’s no program. Yeah. Right. But you can’t. That doesn’t mean it’s useless. We get better at going on dates. We get better at conversation. And think about that. Think about that. What I just said. How that goes back to what Socrates is doing in the dialogues. Right. You get better at becoming courageous. Right. But that doesn’t mean I can give you a formula or a program for courage. Yeah. Right. Now when I when I was talking to you like I said we really. So Ian makes a distinction. It’s kind of the reverse of the distinction I make. So I think it was largely semantic. He actually makes the distinction between rationality and reason. Yeah. Right. Exactly. That’s what I wanted to bring. Yeah. And I picked up on that. Since reason is great because reason is holistic. And it’s how you you put everything together and we should be reasonable. But but but we’re overemphasizing rationality and cutting right. That’s now here’s what I can say then very clearly. I’m using rationality the way Ian uses reason. Exactly. Using reason. Right. The way I use rationality. Right. Right. So what he rejects is what I consider to be that truncated folk psychological notion of rationality that I think does not represent anything that will help facilitate our aspiration towards wisdom. So although. Well there is a problem. Maybe the problem I’m seeing is that that that notion of rationality is so deep. It’s like. It’s Cartesian. It’s woven. It’s woven into the scientific worldview. It’s woven into our epistemological models and those that worldview and those epistemological models get woven into our psychological models. They’re woven into Freud. They’re woven into Jung. They’re woven into many. That’s that and you that’s why you that’s why you. That’s why Guy is so attracted to Heidegger because Heidegger is like he’s profoundly trying to break out of that whole Cartesian way of thinking about belief and truth and rationality and he’s trying I think to get us back to a way of understanding rationality. Huh. So maybe what he calls thinking is what you call rationality. Totally. Totally. Heidegger calls thinking and what Ima Gilchrist calls reason. Yes. Yes. Just in different semantic areas here or. Yes I agree. Uh huh. I agree. So the the argument that I have sort of why I think rationality is actually an appropriate word is reason tends to be associated with reasoning. The problem with reason it’s equivocal. It can go to reasoning which means inference and argument or it can go to reasonable which means this kind of thing we’re talking about. So that’s why I’m a little bit whereas the etymological origin of of rationality is ratio. It’s finding proportion. It’s it’s putting things into proper relation. It’s getting the proper perspective. It’s more about relationship. Yeah exactly. It’s more about pattern completion than then running a program to completion. Those are two very very different things. Also we need to be unreasonable at times. What do you mean by that? Because I well we need to as you say break frame right. So for trying to be trying to be reasonable all the time if you know this is why there’s shaman is there you know there were shamans and you know as you talked about in your series. Break out of the the nine dot problem or. Yep so but this brings me to this brings me to an important point. I would want to say because I actually I actually have brought this argument up. I presented at a conference at a couple conferences. This idea that disruptive strategies are actually important for optimization. In fact they’re systematically and reliably important for optimization. So if you’re running a neural network for example you just let it just sort of run right it’ll overfit to the data. It’ll it’ll find patterns in its sample and really pick up on those patterns in its sample that don’t actually generalize generalize to the population. You know this is sampling bias right and so because the machines are so powerful and your brain is way more powerful than any neural network. So think about how you can really zero in right and get bound to you can overfit. To your particular sampling of data. So what do you do in the neural networks will you you actually disrupt the network you shut off some you shut off half the nodes or you throw noise or static into the system. And what that does is it makes the neural network we self-organize. Right and that we self-organization actually allows it to now generalize in ways it couldn’t generalize before. Yeah so you have to throw disruption in. Well I recently done some groff breathing techniques. These like that and I don’t do psychedelics but but but that kind of experience just it throws you into these wild sort of spaces right. Right and it’s wildly and that and then you come out the other side as if you’ve gone into Alice in Wonderland and you come out the other side sort of like and you have to reassemble your ordinary existence and hopefully you’ve got some insight after doing that. Yeah and what what happens is your perspective and participatory knowing have been shifted and so a new course of development is actually available to you. Yeah think about think about like when you’re in that when you’re in that space it’s like what happens in dreams a lot of variations are being thrown at like sort of generated. Options are being created that open up what’s called the state space it opens up the possibilities that that your brain can actually get itself into like so your brain is a machine that’s constantly making itself into a new kind of machine and you want to periodically like with an neural network you want to open up the the options it can consider not only the options in the world it can consider but the options for what kind of machine it can be. It’s those two together at the same time right and so if it and you can see this even in insight problem solving if I give you an insight and I get and I moderately distract you or even throw some static into the picture some noise that will actually help to trigger your insight. Of course yeah okay so get better at the game right if you’re tripped up but you have to do it in the right way it requires finesse right so there’s an there’s a kind of expertise here you have to do it in the right way right there’s no formula you have to do in the right way but there are systematic and reliable ways of getting better at doing that disruption now here’s my argument this disruption is really indispensable to optimization there are systematic and reliable ways of doing that wouldn’t that therefore be integral to our account of wisdom that these disruptive processes and that means that although they’re non-inferential they have actually no propositional content whatsoever because they’re basically oh yeah zero propositional content right but nevertheless they move you towards a more optimal that optimization of you know I have more options in what kind of cognitive being I can be yeah and where more options about what kind of world I can dwell within and that is making you more rational yeah well it’s yeah again it’s counterintuitive yeah well I guess the rational world that we live in often feels like a kind of prison right yes we’re trapped in conceptual models of things and that’s one of the reasons why you would you know you would you would want to break frame or you know do fasting or you know or go into nature and you know have all kinds of let’s say of those kind of experiences well this brings me to another point and you know I think Ian’s bang on about the left and right stuff but there’s another there’s another opponent process that we need to bring into the discussion here which is the relationship like because we’re constantly toggling between being task centered and mind wandering right um and the the and the point of mind wandering I would argue at least one of its functions wondering is to break frame it’s to it’s to it’s to bring in some mild distraction take you into a weird so that’s Guy again our guy sorry I keep saying because I’m in France but uh I think that’s that’s what Guy does well see Heidegger was about wandering so what he’s trying to do is I think what Heidegger is doing is you know if you just stay on the path that’s like the machine that’s going to overfit right and what you need to do is you need to wander a bit right you need to go off almost like in mind wandering and what that does is allow you to you know introduce some noise introduce some variation break some frame so that so but you keep moving forward but you’re now actually improving your connectedness to the world rather than just getting to your destination on your path yeah and that that also speaks to the pathology of modernity right um is that we don’t maybe we don’t wander enough we don’t we don’t wander enough Han says we don’t we fill up the space too much with with with uh you know information yeah and salience and um and we like that’s why I also pointed out Han’s notion of lingering it’s not only that we fill up the space we right we we well take Heidegger being in time that your being is inherently temporal right and so your weight your perspectival and participatory knowing of time because you don’t know time in any other way right Augustine famously said this I know what time is until somebody asks me what it is because right you only know time by being in time right by being a temporal thing but so your existential mode with respect to time how you’re experiencing that’s the wrong word that’s the only word I have how you’re participating maybe let me let me use that word how you’re participating in time existentially has a huge impact on the kind of being you can be and so Han’s point is we are moving into a culture in which we can’t linger we can’t we can’t we can’t flow with things we everything is atomized we’re going down like minutes and seconds uh is uh is um cut up that’s exactly the idea elements yeah and so you you don’t get any flow you get you get the um you you get sort of the salient second right uh you know um so a lot of people have met uh talked to me about this and you know we’re seeing we’re seeing this consistent trend towards the death of melody in popular music that we’re losing melodic complexity and that well we have to compress sound all the time with mp3 this extreme compression of sound it streams compression of sound and salience and salience and intensity are taking up the place of right complexity and development right so you don’t have to follow a long piece of music and go through all kinds of transformation you can instantly without effort get sort of hit by the same product right yes exactly yeah that’s and so what that means for us is that uh like i said it’s also that we can’t linger we can’t stay with things in a way that affords us remembering the projects of aspiration yeah i think of like going to the galleries like i live near paris and um there’s all these galleries and how many people look at a painting you know how many people go into and actually just stay with the painting and look at the painting and find out a valuable experience right yes most people would would would would sort of you know look at the painting and like take a picture snapshot of it with their iphone and say i’ve been there and i’ve seen that painting but but uh but that that goes to just what i said the point is to collect atoms to collect moments that are atomized and are removed from a flow of development they’re just snapshots yeah i think i think the remedy to that one of the remedies i’ve seen is is probably meditation in some sense because yep for for our modern times you know because it’s how else can you how else can you because there’s so much stimulus all the time how else can you take a break from that and um i think i think i think i think both meditation and contemplation are are needed sure because you have to break frame and make frame um i i think uh being able to enter into dialogos to enter into a conversation uh that’s a new thing for me like that’s like i’ve been meditating for years but but you and guy and that’s a that’s a new kind of possibility for me i hadn’t really thought of that so much well i mean this is the this is part of the platonic notion that um training your rationality in the sense i’ve been arguing for and training your sociality are deeply interpenetrating things that’s why he presents his philosophy in a dialogue because you’re not you’re those two those two things our ability to connect to distributed cognition and participate in collective intelligence and collective rationality or dare i say collective wisdom it it’s it’s in resonance with our individual project of aspiring to rationality and wisdom these two things mutually afford and depend on each other awesome yeah yeah yeah um and also i was just sort of thinking about how how um why this sort of conversation is compelling to people and stuff which it’s kind of a weird thing it’s like a homeless we’re like homeless here or something i was saying that to uh to guy last night it’s like we’re putting in these videos on youtube it’s not part of the mainstream culture um but it seems to be there seems to be a need for for that kind of kind of oh totally i think the the online world i mean it has it has sort of it has some of the greatest magnifiers of the things that exacerbate the meeting crisis yeah but you know heidegger talks about where you know where i think he’s uh holder lining quotes where the danger is there they’re also all right the future grows i think it’s a translation i might have mis-translated but the basic idea is you know because it’s it’s a it’s destabilizing the system it’s also it also it can be an affordance of the system going through self-transcendence rather than disintegration you can even say death and rebirth of some yeah kind of thing i know i’ll do a shamanic kind of idea and um so what what i think what’s happening with the chris and i talked about the meta conversation you have all these conversations and then what youtube is doing is setting up this thing where people are having conversations but they’re doing them with the awareness right the connectivity to other conversations so there’s not only a dialogos within a conversation there’s this deal logos that’s taking place between all of these conversations and the way they constrain and impregnate and engender each other in this kind of complex self-organizing dynamic which is really really important because you see the same thing again at least analogous in the platonic dialogues you shouldn’t just ever read one platonic dialogue that’s a mistake you should read because you should read all of the ecosystem again of yes all of yes exactly all of the dialogues are speaking to and influencing and changing and affecting each other in powerful ways and we’re doing something analogous to that here’s a dialogue and then you’ve got one with guy and then they’ll talk to each other and speak to each other yeah that will inform me to speak to you and then somebody else might get a little something out of this and bring it yeah yeah yeah again to bring a uh uh uh socratic platonic thing and there’s the possibility for adagio that’s that reciprocal opening that you and i have talked about before so a good conversation when it when it moves into dialogo so you’ve got the reciprocal opening that’s happening and that of course is again a kind of love right because when people get into a typical opening the experience they have the experience of the uh affective state love isn’t an emotion it’s a higher order affective state but it’s a it’s an affective state right of love and that’s again how the rationality and the sociality and the love are all bound together we should put them all back together uh-huh gotcha yeah they’re they’re all sort of in little islands over here and they need to come into one one place exactly exactly that’s why that’s why i’m as critical of romanticism as i am of empiricism because both of them keep all of those things apart but for different reasons for different positions that they hold and different epistemologies and metaphysics and i think all of them are therefore equally at fault for keeping those things apart uh now i mean i’m doing a bit of a you know a gloss that was my other question actually i wrote that down it’s like what what can we what can we take from romanticism because romanticism is so powerful it’s so uh you know but that’s the thing so it’s so you know we need that and on some level especially in our um you know online world people are so blasé and stuff we need that we need i don’t know i have a feeling that um that we need we need grander sort of experiences and emotions that that that that we’re being too uh polite and timid and it’s like being in a cage of some kind and romanticism is like trying to break that cage a little bit it is i mean so again i was going to engage in some self-criticism and you’ve actually uh allowed me to do so so thank you for that i mean i i i try to make a distinction between what i call decadent romanticism which is sort of our folk psychological version of romanticism right and sometimes i have not been careful enough about that and so i do apologize to people um because you have to take a look at like just like i don’t think you should talk about post-modernism it like oh sure you should zero in on particular thinkers and particular arguments because there’s variation and so um here’s what i want to say and especially the i don’t even know i want to call them romantics the the early uh the you know the early post-conference like schlegel and people like that um i i think are actually saying things remarkably similar to what i’m trying to argue for and but the romanticism that you get especially rousseau’s version of romanticism which is a prototypical version of it is it seeing about romanticism and i want to say this i want to try and say convey something and i’m going to say it carefully and hopefully provocatively it’s closer to the truth than the empir and then empiricism and therefore it’s it’s more dangerous it’s more dangerous is that because it’s not contained in the same way it’s not contained in a collective experience it’s it’s sort of okay there’s that so you’ve got rousseau’s um glorification of individual subjectivity okay you know that’s clearly in rousseau right yeah um i mean he does have stuff about the general will but when we’re talking about how he’s a father of romanticism that the the glorification of individual subjectivity is there the idea that you come with a true self that you must be true to which is antithetical to the idea of aspiration so it’s antithetical to the socratic ideal of aspiration the idea that um this subjectivity should be thought of so how am i trying to what when rousseau’s talking about it he he’s he does not express enough worry about the problem the problem of self-deception sort of separating all of this from rationality as i’ve tried to describe describe it right the socratic notion of overcoming the ways in which we deceive ourselves and bullshit ourselves this exploration and expression of your individual subjectivity in your capacity but through imagination and will for imposing an order on the world well think about how that could just be filled with self-deception right like you know the other thing you i like projection and bias and prejudice like all of those things right and so romanticism doesn’t it’s it’s separated itself off from deep concerns about um human uh the human proclivity for self-deceptive self-destructive behavior which is why we we get the almost the romantic trope of you know how living romantically ultimately is kind of self-destructive of the people who try to help to live that way you can see that in you know sort of weathering heights kind of stuff right oh yeah yeah yeah my mother read that book like 20 times you know so some there’s and it’s so appealing to people yeah i guess there’s a self-destructive element in that or well there can also a hatred of civilization or a hatred of our efforts to to to you know um you know build things and yep yep so there there is a lot of so it was a terrific and i i want to catch both senses of that word it was a terrific terrific strategy for breaking the frame of empiricist enlightenment for breaking the frame that john lock gave us of the tabular rise of mind and the world imposes itself and the finger of the world writes on my mind it was a great counteractive to that yeah but i think it it generates its own frame that needs to be broken and broken beyond oh that’s well said you know that’s great that’s why heidegger is so interested in being because right and in challenging the idea that we should impose our will on the world right that the world is just a standing reserve because part of what heidegger is trying to get us to remember is you know lock has the mind as a blank slate but russo has the world as a blank canvas upon which we paint our subjectivity and heidegger is trying to get us to remember no no it’s not a blank canvas it’s a world it is deep and profound and beyond us yeah yeah yeah that’s great and it discloses itself you know as it will who’s feces i’ve heard two pronunciations and i keep getting corrected by both camps on how i should pronounce uh the greek term i i was i was in my intellect in my undergrad everybody pronounced it as fuses but i’ve now been told no it’s not more like feces or feces or something or fizzes right that’s the word disclosure and hiding well it’s the word that we get physics from but it means it means the way in which nature blossoms from itself uh blooms from itself but also the way in which nature loves to hide itself ah yeah yeah yeah right right yeah yeah yeah yeah heidegger is another subject yeah that’s yeah and i mean i’m having um uh excellent conversations with johannes about this and uh i think it’s up on his channel i’m going to put up the dialogue that i had with him excellent we’re going to have another and he and guy and i are going to talk shortly about sort of heidegger uh but i’m going to put up the the dialogue i had with johannes i’m doing it i’m doing a couple new series right i’m doing the minding media series but i’m also doing this series i haven’t titled it yet but what i’m having just i’m trying to exemplify dialectic which is the psychotechnology of engendering dialogos i’m trying to exemplify that and get into these like these discussions where we’re exemplifying and explicating what does what does spirituality mean within the scientific worldview and the meeting crisis what does that mean for us right and he we had an excellent conversation on heidegger and science and technology yeah i loved it i i saw i saw about half of it and i was always up on his channel i guess yeah i’m going to release it online later the other uh do you think you’ve said what you wanted to say about about about wisdom and and uh and rationality and intelligence is there is there any is there i want to say one here yeah i want to say one more thing about sort of clarifying a bit the relationship between wisdom and rationality i think that we should think of ecologies of practices for each one of the kinds of knowing that make us more rational so you know ecologies of practices for propositional knowing ecologies of practices for procedural knowing ecologies of practices for perspectival and participatory so that’s some examples um well i think the ecology of practice for propositional knowing we’ve we’ve we’ve got i mean that’s what we and we think we know what we’re talking about when we use this term i’m going to use but if you do any philosophy around this we don’t actually know what we mean and this is the term science science is a whole ecology of practices and it’s bound up with history right and it’s this way of trying to get to be as rational as we can because the scientific method it’s actually a family of methods is not about coming to certain conclusions it’s about really trying to reduce the influence of self-deception on our inferential processes and our propositional knowing that’s what actually is going on the science is largely about trying to set things up so that we can break through our patterns of self-deception right now you have similar things right in your procedural knowing and this is where you know i think the martial art traditions give us fantastic examples of how to cultivate ecologies of practices and this is where rave kelly is just doing some amazing and important work right on on this kind of thing right um the way he’s using parkour and integrating it with martial art practice and mindfulness go and see some of the his videos see some of the dialogues i’ve had with him um the prospectival knowing well that that of course that’s where all the stuff on attention and awareness the mindfulness practices right the flow induction practices are really important and the participatory knowing that’s where the theologos that’s what this is yes yeah okay yeah participatory knowing we’re trying to we’re trying to we’re trying to alter our not just our our thoughts but our identities the way in which we’re mutually shaping each other the way we’re being the way us and the world are engaging so i will i’m entering into reciprocal opening with you but together we’re also trying to enter into reciprocal opening with the world right and so yeah great great so here’s my point there let’s say there are reliable systematic and reliable kinds of rationality for each of the kinds of knowing there’s propositional rationality procedural rationality prospectable rationality and participatory then you need something that optimizes the relationship between all of those rationalities that’s wisdom so wisdom is about the relationship it’s about between between all it’s about it’s kind of the the whole or the yep okay okay i see it’s kind of it’s wisdom is very much a kind of meta rationality right yeah at least that’s how i would argue i think that i think that it’s not identical to what is that like gnosis that the word gnosis came to me to me is that um i think i kind of think of each one of them i tend to think of episteme for propositional techne for procedural noesis for perspectival and gnosis for participatory and then i think sophia and fronesis describe the two aspects of wisdom the bottom up aspect that’s from nises and the top down as so when i when i’m coordinating those four kinds of knowing i need a powerful i need a lot of bottom up and i need a lot of top down i need for nises and i need sophia uh-huh awesome awesome wow that’s that’s a whole structure you well you know it goes towards the work i’m doing with uh daniel craig on the cognitive continuum by the way i i just want to mention i have an indigo go campaign uh for uh and i’m not getting any money from that campaign or from the book the money is i’m a university professor i get a salary i’m fine daniel is a student and he’s committing to working on this book with me and it’s not just writing he’s generating art he’s putting he’s basically like the movie producer as well as a co-author so this money is to help to support him as he’s doing all of this work but that what we’re talking about in the cognitive continuum is exactly this because i think and i try to argue that in the series i think we can get also instead of like instead of building a mystique around these terms and this is where uh like evan thompson’s work i think is really important also uh steven bachelor both of them are now post-buddhist because they object to buddhist buddhist exceptionalism the idea that buddhism is somehow a special or pervaded religion compared to all the rest because it’s somehow scientific um and i agree with yeah i object to that as well i i knew you would i knew you would and you have to remember that both steven and i know i have met steven had dinner with him and evan is a colleague and friend of mine they’re both deep they’re deep friends of buddhism these are not hostile yeah outside right and so right they pointed to the fact that what’s happened is this let’s take a term like enlightenment it’s bound up with entire cultural projects and world views and it often has this mystique around it i remember let me tell you how this frustrates me you know i’ve asked buddhas you know how many people in the world do you think are enlightened right now and they’ll say well probably no one and then it’s sort of in my mind i go well what the heck is it for them right i mean the term is meaningless right and so so i think instead just like i tried to if you’ll allow me i tried to reverse engineer wisdom i tried to build it up out of right and in terms of what we want it to do and how we’re well i think we should do the same thing with enlightenment i think enlightenment is we should reverse engineer it oh it’s a terrible word isn’t it it’s just it’s a terrible word and what i think we should do is right this this is how i want to use the word and maybe we should use a different word because because of the critiques that steven and especially evan are making but i want any so once i have wisdom the two are going to be bound together i want a wise ecology of practices that helps me transform cognition consciousness character and communitas so that i can systematically and reliably overcome the perennial problems of self-deception and self-destruction and afford enhancing all of the connections what i call religio that are so constitutive of meaning in life for me that’s enlightenment because i don’t i if it if it has to be some other deep metaphysical thing i don’t care because i want to be able to help people alleviate you know the suffering of the perennial problems and afford the flourishing of enhanced connectivity to themselves to each other in the world yeah so you want to stay within in the real i guess i want it and i’m going to stipulate how i’m going to use the term and i’m trying and so there i’m i’m saying i’m not using it ambiguously i’m trying to not use it in a way that is loaded into a particular uh i mean i can’t be completely free of a cultural worldview but i’m not trying to bind it to a particular cultural tradition instead i’m trying to pick up on what science gives us access to is universal features and principles of our cognition and then build a notion that is pragmatically engineered for a specific set of what badly and widely needed goals yeah so i guess the reason this this term is so offensive is that it kind of i was just thinking that it kind of it implies a an end product or something it so i’m deeply critical of that i’m deeply critical of sort of the perfection completion aspects of the term enlightenment i’m deeply critical of the the people refuse to acknowledge that they’re sliding between something that’s explaining the world and something that’s evaluating the world right it’s to use sort of technical language and this is one of evan’s criticisms like you don’t want to you don’t want to confuse your best description of how reality is with your your best sort of normative claims about how things should be those aren’t those aren’t the same and so for example why does that matter well science isn’t doing that second thing science is not in the project of this is the way things should be this is the you know this is moral this is moral excellence this is aesthetic excellent science isn’t in the it doesn’t have the machinery for doing that science is about trying to give the best explanations it doesn’t really afford us in our aspirational projects and so i think buddhism is an aspirational project and therefore to pretend that it’s sort of like it’s it’s it’s also deeply scientific ah that’s a category mistake yeah it’s a category mistake for sure it’s not you know so it’s just one way of knowing right and then buddhism might be another way well and i think buddhism is addresses something that science doesn’t address which is an aspirational project of transformation and self-transcendence and right and that it’s going to have a historical cultural aspect to it right yeah so i think what we should do what we’re trying to do what daniel and i are trying to do is well let’s look at different cultural models and then let’s look at this engineering this pragmatically engineering sense of enlightenment that i’ve just given you and let’s put them into dialogue and try and get some convergent thing that maybe has less of the off-putting mystique of a lot of because you know when you when you talk to people about enlightenment it’s it verges on the you know the supernatural and the person is becoming godlike and it’s like well if that’s what it is then and i don’t mean this disrespectfully to buddhists but i’m not interested in that i’m really not interested in in godlike people are yeah yeah i mean i’m interested i you know i i’m interested in the aspiration to becoming more and more at one with sort of the sacred depths of reality but that’s very different from it’s a that’s a question of growth not a question of some ultimate state or yes some ultimate state and some and some ultimate transhuman state so there’s a bit of a Nietzschean critique in in my head here about stop like yeah you should be overcoming yourself but you should never be abandoning your humanity in that project so i guess i guess i’m going to say something a little bit provocative here i i find humanity ultimately good enough this is why i love Conrad so much the heart of darkness you compare Marlowe and Kurtz Kurtz takes on the hubristic past of becoming a god right and then he suffers the horror the horror the horror Marlowe makes conscious decision to act to exercise restraint and stay with his humanity right that he will not even though he’ll follow the journey he’ll go all the way to seeing Kurtz he will never abandon his humanity that’s why the heart of darkness i think is such a powerfully important myth well that seems to be the bodhisattva vow if i’m defending buddhism a little bit okay sure uh-huh is is is to do just that isn’t it it’s not it’s not to accept yeah i think the bodhisattva it might have been a bit of a corrective then in mahayana for tera vedan uh the because the bodhi vatsa is therefore right much more different than the arhat in some ways yeah that’s that’s a good thought i hadn’t thought about that but yeah because there’s a there’s a commitment to staying with humanity yeah okay you know and and that every being is your they call it mother being it’s like every being is your mother and and you you have to liberate every being it’s a wild sort of idea but it’s it’s a sort of wild heroic idea that’s but but it’s not very rational certainly or not well i think it’s rational in the way i would say here we go again it’s just i can’t get the folk rationally idea out of my head but i like that i’m sorry that was a way of deeply binding the enlightenment project to humanity yeah that’s a good point that’s a good point andrew that’s a really good point i hadn’t thought of that