Rationality in question and dia logos - Voices with Vervaeke (suwJgFpBVOM)

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Three. Welcome everyone to a very special Voices with Verveki. This is going to be, I hope, a really powerful dialectic in the dialogos about rationality, a topic that many of you have heard me speak about and get into deep and rewarding discussions about. And I’m here with a bunch of people that I think are going to really afford such a conversation. And I’m going to turn it over, although this is on Voices with Verveki, it was actually put together by somebody who’s very familiar to many of you on Voices with Verveki. That’s my good friend Greg Enriquez. So I’m going to turn things over to Greg. He’ll sort of set things up and then we’ll go into it. He’ll introduce everybody, et cetera, et cetera. So take it away, Greg. Thank you so much, John. It’s wonderful to be here. I’m here with my good friend, Alexander Bard and Alexander Alung. Hey, yep, this was sparked by conversations on Alexander’s listserv, the intellectual deep web, actually where Alexander Alung started talking about Mises and rationality and rational action theory and economics. And then I popped in with some thoughts about the unified theory and then Bard, surprisingly enough, Bard had a few things to say. And then Bard thought that, hey, we could develop a four part or really a quadrilog as it were on saving rationality for the digital age. So Bard, do you want to say a few things? And then I know we’ll come right back to John and we’ll start talking about rationality. Yeah. So Alung and I are both Scandinavians. So we speak Germanic languages. We actually speak more than one language. So we speak more than English. Yeah. Yeah. What’s that like? It makes you more intelligent, apparently, as all the French Quebecois Canadians know. Okay. So I’m just a dumb American down here. So yeah, but you know, in Quebec, they do all the AI in North America. So there’s something to this magic about speaking two languages. But what is interesting to me is for us speaking Germanic languages is that if you take Hegel’s terms for it, in Hegel, there’s an enormous difference between Verstand and Vernunft. And what is so frustrating is that it’s very, very hard to translate Verstand and Vernunft to English. They’re distinctly different things in Germanic and Scandinavian languages. So for me as a Swede, I’m sure Erling agrees for him as a Dane. When we talk in our local languages or speak German, it’s just very, very easy for us to make the distinction between that actually Verstand, the closer it would be to understand something. So it’s just like, yeah, you get it. You get what it is. But then to actually process that understanding and put it in motion and throw it back into a life full of changes and process and everything requires you to actually do something with it. And that whole process ends up with the Vernunft. And there’s no proper word for Vernunft in English. This has been like a major issue among translators for the last 200 years. And usually the rise of the word reason. Now what struck me was that I was, of course, like many of us loved it, John, when John was doing Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and you had to go through the entire series, highly recommended, great work. We all do. Yeah. So when John tackled this issue, obviously he had the same frustration from an English speaking perspective when he had to go through and really discuss what rationality or ratio and rationalism is or could be. And there are different takes on this in the world of philosophy. There was this Spinozist version of it. There’s certainly Hegelian version of it. Then Nietzsche deals with it as well. So I would love to have a discussion on this. And we just thought having discussed this on the intellectual deep web, that this could be a great forsoom or a quadrilogos for the four of us tonight to actually discuss the ratio and why this is so damn important to understand what in simple English would be the difference between reason and understanding. Right. I think that’s great. I’m meeting the other Alexander for the first time, I think. How are we going to distinguish between the Alexanders? Are we going to use the last name? Is that how we… We call each other the Bard and the Elung. The Bard and the Elung. The Bard and the Elung. That’s how it is on the deep web. But Elung, why don’t you present yourself to the audience so they know who this young Danish genius is. So here you go. Please do. Take it away. My name is… Thanks. My name is Alexander Elias. I’m a screenwriter based in Denmark, in Copenhagen specifically. I have a background in law and legal philosophy. And me and Bard met each other through IDV and through some common friends. And I’ve been very focused on rationality, mainly through economics. And in economic theory, rationality has a different meaning that we would associate with the idea of rationality. We would associate rationality with in other schools of thought. So that’s basically what I’m going to talk about today. So it’s the subjective view of rationality and not necessarily utilitarian or consequentialist or let’s say a version of rationality that’s based on logic. So it’s more based on the idea of rational action. But I’m going to talk more about that later, I think. Yeah. And I’ll just say very quickly that it was actually a conversation between an economic version and then sort of a psychotherapeutic angle about what is adaptive. So those are just some background things. But I think if we get into John first, then we can see where the maybe tangles of the conversation. Yeah, I could just add that this was a discussion we get on von Mises and Hegel. And both von Mises and Hegel are German speakers. That’s exactly what we ran into this frustration. Again, we tried to translate what they were working with because they’re actually very similar in this department, I think. But John, why don’t you basically go back to what you discussed in your lectures on Ratio? Sure. Thanks. Thanks, Bard. I’ll do that. As long as we understand that, you know, my thinking is ongoing, and I’d like to talk about more recent developments. But let’s do the common background perhaps. I’m sorry, that’s under potentials. I didn’t mean it. So I mean, I was basically making an argument that we have a seriously within what my, the fields I understand, you know, academic cognitive science and cognitive psychology, predominantly Anglo American, although increasingly, especially in 4E cognitive science being more and more deeply influenced by continental philosophy, which I think has been generally a very good thing. But nevertheless, given that is sort of the the milieu within I’m working, I was making the argument that the notion of rationality that has become predominant is seriously truncated and is misrepresenting human cognition as well as misdirecting the aspirational projects of human beings in a fundamental way. And so the point I, that I tried to make is we have two parasymmonyms that we use when we talk about rationality. We either say, we either equate rationality with logicality. And then I make extensive arguments, having to do drawn from the work of machine learning and problem solving, etc. I won’t go over all of those again, that we can’t be ultimately comprehensively algorithmic in our processing, we can’t be comprehensively logical or mathematical, because that would be to commit cognitive suicide, we’d hit combinatorially explosive search space all the time. And that the key, the key process that we’re actually talking about is the capacity that you talk about a lot, relevance realization. And this lines up with some of the work of Czerniak, where he argued that we can’t have an algorithmic standard of rationality, it’s too high, but we can’t allow, we can’t adopt an arbitrary standard. And what we’ve had is we’ve typically created this conceptual exhausted dichotomy, it’s either algorithmic or it’s arbitrary. And the point is, it’s neither one of those, it’s in between. So a way of stating this is rationality is not equivalent to logicality, rationality is knowing where, when, in what degree and under one context, one should be logical, which is a very different thing. And the other thing that people equate rationality to, and they do it all the time, is to intelligence. And that’s problematic in another way. Because intelligence is again, how we’re doing all kinds of things to avoid, I mean, I take it, I agree with this argument, Stanivich and others, is a convergence argument, that what we’re measuring when we’re measuring things like general intelligence, psychometrically, etc., is we’re measuring a capacity to do relevance realization, to avoid combinatorial explosion. And that sounds, oh, well, we’re on the right track. Well, actually, we’re not. Because there’s two different things we can be talking about, we can talk, we can talk about the adaptive ability to avoid combinatorial explosion, commit cognitive suicide, but a second order adaptive ability, which is the fact that these very processes that make us adaptively capable of zeroing in on relevant information, make us perennially vulnerable to complex patterns of self deceptive, self destructive behavior. So the very use of our intelligence as in general problem solving, also creates pervasive kinds of self deception. And that what you have to think of rationality as is the capacity to use your intelligence to learn various skills and virtues, even with identities and roles, I’ll get back to that in a sec, that allow you to systemically and systematically address, ameliorate the self deception. And that’s why if you take our best measures of intelligence, measures of G, and you take our best measures of our ability for people to overcome self deception, what you’ll find is both sets form a strong positive manifold. All the subtests of intelligence strongly predict each other, all the subtests, even within something like reasoning, and I don’t want to reduce rationality reasoning, I’ll come back to that. But even within there, you’ll find a strong positive manifold. People who are good at overcoming self deception in this test tend to be that predicts like strong positive manifold, they all predict each other. So you have these two strong positive manifolds that are reliable and robust. Both of these areas are not being subject to any of the replication crisis in psychology, they’re robust. And what you find is the measure for intelligence is only weakly predictive of the measure for rationality. It’s about the correlation of about 0.3 on average, which means at best, intelligence is a necessary, but insufficient condition for rationality, which means we can’t identify rationality with either logicality, or intelligence, and we have to get back to a notion of rationality, ratio, ultimately logos, as our fundamental capacity for self correction, for self transcendence, for overcoming self deception. Then I have one more thing to add, because this is another way in which it’s truncated. Once we think about it that way, we should then think about, I have an argument, a theoretical account, and I think Greg is in agreement with it, that we have also truncated our sense of what knowing is to just propositional knowing, and we’ve lost these other kinds, procedural, perspectival, participatory. And the idea is, it’s not only in propositional, inferential reasoning that we fall prey to self deception, we can fall prey to it perspectively, we can be overly egocentric, for example, we can fall prey to it in a participatory knowing, we can fall into the reciprocal narrowing of addiction. So all these knowings are all capable perennially, pervasively, of being vulnerable to self deception. So not only do we need a rationality for inferential propositional self correction, we need a rationality for procedural, for perspectival, and for participatory, and then we need something like a meta rationality that coordinates them together in a fundamental way with the requisite changes, the requisite transformations in the acquisitions of skills, virtues, roles, identity, character that make all of those properly coordinated and possible. And that’s what I think wisdom, that’s a good candidate. To my mind, that’s a good candidate for what wisdom is. One more thing, and it goes towards the Hegelian thing, there is a rising, it’s not the same distinction, I’m not saying it is, but there’s a rising distinction that I think should be put into discussion with this Hegelian distinction. It’s arising both in the philosophy of science and in psychology, largely independently, although they’re now talking to each other, which is the distinction between knowledge and understanding. And so typically the distinction goes, knowledge is where you gather evidence to justify a claim, or to appropriately apply a skill, etc., etc. Whereas understanding is to grasp the significance of what you know, either the significance for other things you know, or the significance for states of mind, for states, traits of character, for particular actions you’re trying to undertake. And so I would say that wisdom should also properly incorporate understanding. So we think of wisdom as this meta rationality. It’s not only overcoming, so this is a negative, it’s not only freeing us from self-deception, it’s also should be affording profound understanding. What’s the significance for all these kinds of knowings for each other and for our character, our virtues, our very notion of self? And so that’s sort of, sorry, I’m talking for quite a bit, but I’m trying to give an overall gist of what the argument is I’m presenting. And so I think the truncation of rationality, the logicality or intelligence is a mistake, the truncation of knowing that is propositional knowing is a mistake, and the forgetting of the affordance of understanding as something other than and beyond just the avoidance of error is something that’s also a truncation we need to address. So those are sort of the three dimensions of truncation I’m trying to address in a coordinated manner with this proposal about how we should reconceive rationality and being reasonable, what that means. Because reasonable to me is a term, at least in English, that connotes integration of rationality and understanding. So when I’ve talked to people in law, the reasonable person is somebody that sort of rationally construes or understands the situation in an appropriate manner, that what can be expected. So it seems to at least implicitly integrate those two notions together. There’s a strong sense of conformity added when you talk about reason, at least in contemporary English, that it’s completely lacking in fennel. If I’m looking for here, the German word does not care at all what you think, what others think or what you’re considering. It’s just like completely ignorant of that. And with reason comes this idea that reason is actually some kind of a social behavior involved in that. That is problematic. That’s how the everyday English-speaking person, we’d understand that, would say reasonable, that is often very geared towards the status quo, some kind of equilibrium, some kind of equilibrium of ideas. And that’s not at all what fennel is about. Well, it can be. I agree with you. It has that often, I guess, in legal situations. But I’m interested in where it’s used also elsewhere. Because people will often invoke reasonable when they’re talking about plausibility, where plausibility is not the synonym for high probability. Plausibility has two different meanings. There’s also the meaning which is it makes sense. And so it can be an innovative new idea. And it makes sense. It’s reasonable because it has this plausibility. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I could go to an art gallery, White Walls. And I can be reasonable as I like, but I will not get art being reasonable. I will not get art. But I can certainly go to a gallery. That’s why there’s so much more oomph to the Hegelian fennel than there ever could be to the word reason in English. Because I can go to an art gallery and I can contemplate art and music and I can use my fennel to really get the pleasure out of it. Okay. There’s the added value to it. The oomph to it. It’s a pathic value, I would say. Nothing to do with logic. It’s a pathical value that’s added to the logical that clearly is like from another realm altogether. It’s supposed to logical. It struggles with logical and enjoys the struggle. So it’s like the logos of the pathos are struggling with each other in Hegelian fennel, which is exactly what Hegel’s misunderstood because he’s really a philosopher of process and change. And that’s what so many English speaking people are missing with Hegel. They don’t get that he’s obsessed with change, change, process, process, because fennel is his most central concept. Okay. But this goes directly towards the more cutting edge stuff. Everything I said before was right. And this is the fact that understanding overlaps also with appreciation in English even. You can use appreciate. So when I do music appreciation, I’m coming to an understanding of it and also a valuing of it and identification with it that I didn’t previously had. So it’s a transformative notion. Agnes Callard calls this proleptic rationality, right? It was where you’re aspiring to come to an agent arena relationship that you’re not currently in or capable of. And she uses it. Okay. Let me put it this way then. And then I want to have Greg’s presentation nailed in the circle as well. But a term we’re using in our philosophy is the term antagony. And antagony spread like wildfire because the kids love it. Because to kids today who go online, they either end up in echo chambers or silos. Clubhouse is the worst one ever. It’s just like you end up with people of your own opinion and you keep on trolling with them, whatever, you get more and more stupid. And they realized if you’re going to use social media at all and become intelligent or be stronger in their self-confidence, whatever, they realized they need to look for challenges, actively look for challenges. So there’s also in the fennel term here an element of antagony, antagonia, meaning not antagonistic, that’s just having an opponent. Antagonic means you’re literally looking for somebody who will challenge you with their opinions and they will make you uncomfortable in the process and you will enjoy the uncomfortability. And that is what might still be lacking though when we go all the way for fennel theory is that where is the enjoyment of the challenge of the difference in that process? Is that included in what you’re talking about here, John, or is that still lacking to get all the way to the beginning? Well, I think the prolific thing is an attempt to bring it in because the main argument of people by Callard and even more by L.A. Paul and transformative experience is that these kinds of changes are not ones that we can even reason our way through. She gives the example, the Gidonkin experiment of your friends come to you and they give you incontrovertible evidence that they can turn you into a vampire should you do it. Well, the problem you face is prospectively, you don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a vampire and participatory, you don’t know what your identity is going to be because your preferences and character are going to change. And so you’re in this position where you’re ignorant in both ways. You’re ignorant of what you will lose if you make the change and you’re ignorant of what you will miss if you don’t make the change. And once you go, oh yeah, and so what that means is you don’t have probabilities and you don’t have utility. You can’t infer your way through this. And then she says after you agree with this fantastical example, she says, but that’s how many real life decisions are made, like having a kid deciding to enter into a romantic relationship, joining a new career. Like you can talk about a lot of things, but it actually won’t give you like what you need because once you only get the needed information after you’ve made the commitment. And so, right, right. So this is paradox. It’s kind of like Kierkegaard’s paradox. Yeah, well, I was just going to say Kierkegaard because there’s also in that the challenge of the impossible or the jump into the unknown or the jump against the odds. I’m not saying that is necessarily for no if that might be beyond for no, but that’s certainly a part of the fundamental human experience. So I give an example before the other guys come in because I guess I don’t. Yeah, okay. But I give an example. What we had to do working on the new book, Yeltsinic and Steyr, we had to go back to Nietzsche and split his will to power and realize that Nietzsche’s product is not fulfilled at all. So will to power had to be split into the will to intelligence and the will to transcendence. And here’s what’s interesting. When you talk about the intelligence is not enough even to get to rationality because it’s just a strictly logical operation. That’s not what it works. You have to be much more, you have to be much more alive than that to actually work the whole system. And that is probably where we get into the transcendence part. And I would say the for noon though, understands both those things, I would say for noon is certainly something a machine can never be part of. For noon is something exclusive human and hagel. That’s what it’s called the subject within the system. And that subject realizes that all life’s complexities with is within its grasps and can be considered different ways without necessarily calculating rationally what the outcome would be. Well, I promised to be quiet, so I’ll let other people speak. Yes. I have a question if that’s okay, because we know how to test for intelligence, but how would you test for rationality in a clinical setting? So in an experimental setting, you mean not necessarily in a clinical setting. Well, what you do is you give people various capacities to judge if they can step back and look at their processing independent of their cognitive process. I’ll give one example. This is not exhaustive, just so I can explain what I talk about. You get people to pre-rate their commitment, for example, to a particular proposition. Abortion is right, abortion is wrong. Okay, doesn’t matter. It’s not about that. And what you do is, for example, you give them two arguments, one a valid argument, a well-constructed argument, and one an invalid, poorly constructed argument. And what you do is you have the poorly constructed one lead to the proposition they like, and you have the well-constructed one lead to the proposition that they hate. And then you measure, you ask them this question, how good is the argument? I understand, yeah. How good is the argument? And you get reliable differences, so people can step back from their fixation on their belief in the proposition and actually evaluate the process by which they’re coming to their belief. Now, that’s just one example of many different kinds of things you can give people. And then what you find is they’re all strongly predictive of each other. And then because intelligence is insufficient for explaining that capacity to step back and come to a different valuation strategy and orientation, you have to ask what is it that actually accounts for most of the variance. So in some sense, there is some trade openness to this because people have to step away from their own confirmation bias. It’s one part of the openness. And I was thinking of that when Bart was talking, because Colin, former student of mine, has basically argued that openness, the trade openness breaks up into two subcategories, intellectual openness and sort of experiential openness. And so insofar as intellectual openness, not the best term, but you know what he’s trying to get at with the distinction. If it’s predictive of a particular trait, which is called need for cognition, need for cognition is a trait in which people, they do not just passively receive problems, they actively problematize their experience and their environment. They seek out problems from themselves. They find problems and they try to solve them. That is predictive of people getting a capacity called active open mindedness that accounts for most of the variance. Sorry, was that too technical? I hope not. No, no, of course not. Is that from their own definitions or from some external definitions? Let’s say if a person really wanted to be an alcoholic, would that be accepted as a, like, if their actions then pointed towards that, would that be accepted as rational? Because that’s where- Great, great thought. Go ahead, Greg. There’s two different issues there. There’s the assessment of this as a trait that then refers. In fact, I work with Rich West, who worked with Keith Stanovich in building this stuff. And I consulted with him on building on how do you assess the measurement that would then yield a particular skill ability so that you could then decide whether or not this rationality correlates with intelligence. So there’s that. This issue of what actually is rationality from a philosophical perspective based on the values that people have. Well, that’s a different kind of question. This really is a metacognitive or metarationality, or that’s one way of describing it. It’s the ability to step outside your ego investment and your normal process of justification and essentially correct for self-deception or correct for self-hias. At least that’s one way to interpret the function and how people are, whether or not they’re trapped in their structure. One of the things that was interesting as I was listening to this conversation, both what Bard was saying and then what John was saying was I was going in two directions and maybe this was… So one, and I think about this now, especially if I’m embedded in a clinical scenario, and how do I relate to somebody? What is optimal functioning in relationship to character adaptation, development? What do I hope for in people’s growth? And so a couple of things that I would look for is one of the things would be the capacity to step outside the ego function and develop a metareflective, metacognitive observer. So that I can step back and ask the question, what are my values and how do I want to be in relationship to the world relative to that I am? How do I understand that? So this is actually, I think this is pretty close to what John was saying in some of the capacities, which are being like rather than being in it, it’s a capacity to wonder about it, wonder what’s important, wonder what the essence of it is and how to construct that back reflective state. And then what Bard was saying was really talking more at the core of sort of the energy of the more primate side of the embodiment of the self, that basically the perspectival participatory in the moment, this is what I am, sort of what Carl Rogers called the all-organistic valuing process, the intuitive true self ability to connect. Ah, that’s what makes me alive and energized. And indeed, one of the things I try to cultivate is a reflective narrator that has value-based grounding and a capacity to energize the core true, that’s a little cheesy, but there’s something to be said for the foundational bottom-up energy seeking process about what is good, true and beautiful for that soul as it were. Yeah. Where does the word comprehension come into this? It’s obviously a Latin word and this is the English language we’re talking about in very important details. It comes up directly in Stenovitch and West’s article 2000 because one of the problems with these experiments we’re talking about is they are from the standard framework, they are intrinsically ambiguous. Here’s why. So you give somebody this thing and this goes to work by a Scandinavian, Smedtland, which is excellent work because Smedtland said, well, you actually have to have, before you interpret the data, you have a categorical distinction between a misunderstanding and a fallacy and a fallacy is the person has understood the argument, for example, and has engaged in fallacious reasoning where a misunderstanding is, no, no, they have misconstrued the premises even though their reasoning is sound and the problem is the experimental results equally support both interpretations because you can equally say, you know what, here’s good evidence that you really poorly designed these experiments, that all the participants are misunderstanding them because they’re coming up with different implications and different contradictions and different identity claims than you do. That means they clearly don’t understand the same meaning and then Smedtland just puts that out there. And Stenovitch correctly, although I think inadequately says, that’s right, which means I need a non-inferential account of construal to break out of that circle and then he says, oh, but we don’t know what that is and that’s where that sits. I would argue that we do know something of what that is, that’s this capacity for relevance realization and if you look in Smedtland, in addition to all the inferential stuff, he says an important aspect of comprehension is you and I realize the same things as relevant and he says that’s different from all the logical things. And so, and the reason I talk about that is we know about that capacity for construal and relevance realization and problem solving. Like when people realize that they’re trapped in the box of the nine dots and they break out of it in insight, that is a non-inferential reconstrual that’s happening with dynamics of self-organization that has nothing to do with inferential competence. And so if we want to talk about comprehension as something other than being able to track the logical implications of the semantic contents of our propositions, which is what I think you’re getting at, Bard, that’s exactly where I think we can find it and this goes back to a lot of work that’s being done right now, I think, on the Aristotelian virtues of apprehension and comprehension which were different than the virtues of argumentation and I think that’s also a very important thing. The fact that Stanovic gets there and realizes there’s a placeholder there but he can’t place anything in it shows you how much he’s locked into the propositional inferential framework. He can’t consider machinery other than that as vital to rationality even though the argument inevitably leads him there and I think this is a really important thing to take note of. So if you just, if I’m the sophomore student here asking the sophomore student question, that’s we got knowledge, we got understanding, we got comprehension, we got rationality. Can we just summarize those four before we go further how we use them in this conversation? Knowledge, understanding, comprehension, rationality. How do you use those four terms? Are they overlapping or are they identical synonymous? Well, I mean, I think they’re analytically distinct but I don’t think that in any way predicts that they’re causally independent from each other. So as long as we don’t make that mistake, I’m fine to sort of offer operative descriptions. I think knowledge is the gathering of evidence and by evidence I mean other like arguments or evidence in the empirical sense. The gathering of evidence for justification and we have different kinds of justification. They’re not all logical justifications argumentative. You can justify your expertise by being able to bring about a certain kind of result etc. So I’m using justification very broadly here. Understanding I think is different. It is to grasp the significance what I think is relevance or importance of what you know for other things you know or for your actions or for your character or for states of mind. I think comprehension if it’s to the degree to which it’s distinct from knowledge and understanding is that act of fundamental construal by which we formulate our problems before we ever undertake to resolve them. We can see how important construal is in the event of insight. Insight is where we get our most phenomenological access to the act of reconstrual. I’m trying to remember was there one other term? Comprehension and rationality. Rationality and I think rationality like sorry thank you for doing that. That rationality is our capacity to overcome self-deception and to afford enhanced understanding and ultimately enhanced meaning in life. Because I think what Greg was talking about is we have this fundamental drive as auto poetic beings to be fundamentally connected to ourselves to each other and to the world. I think that’s because it grounds our cognitive agency and our existential presence. We not only want to ameliorate self-deception, we want to afford flourishing. I think rationality has to do with both of those. I think we operationalize flourishing in terms of meaning in life and subjective well-being, etc. Can I be a little un-American here again? We’re going to have our Jordan Peterson moment soon. I’m going to bring Chak La Khan into the conversation. Apparently according to Jordan Peterson it’s absolutely useless. I strongly disagree with Jordan on that one. I find his position on Chak La Khan quite embarrassing. Let’s see if you can bring Chak La Khan into this just from a different angle. I have to say I’m relatively ignorant about La Khan. I’ve read a little bit about La Khan but I don’t know much about La Khan. The way we work I think if we dare to add La Khan to this conversation, take a La Khan angle to it, is that to begin with the whole worship of the self and the auto poesis goes out the door and we bring in what I call tribal poesis and discuss the fact that human beings are social creatures. That means that we always orientate ourselves towards the tribal and actually also our own self-experience is just something we make up at the end of the game that we have to put something there because we are really many different selves at conflict with one another constantly. The proper deletion way of describing the human condition is think of it as fields and forces that then outside the outside society through language and other methods forces into you there and I’m here and things like that but in reality these are just a lot of different things that are struggling with each other all the time which is the fun of being human by the way but if you go for tribal places first and then move to the human condition the way La Khan would describe it is something like this. So we live in a fantasy world and this fantasy world is in a constant feedback loop in our heads. It’s also the constant feedback loop among other human beings that live together with us and we construct what we then call a society, a group of people in a social gathering of some kind, having a communication with each other through language where they reinforce a fantasy world. What then happens though is that this is where La Khan is not the postmodernist. What this happens is that constantly we walk into walls. Boom! Things happen to us that we didn’t plan that weren’t part of the fantasy and he doesn’t call this reality even he calls it Le Real in French, the real. It means it’s our fantasy about a reality external to us. It’s not even a reality. It’s just something external to us. It can be something that’s completely wrong or completely a lie or whatever but it’s just something that forces us to rethink the fantasy and this is called traversing the fantasy in La Khan. What we then do is that we reconstitute our fantasy and we try to include the more of the outside world as we learn to know about it as we grow older. Obviously as a child you walk into walls all the time, you hit yourself all the time because you know nothing and as you then grow older you know more and more and more and more and more what to expect. You find certain patterns in the world around you and you learn from other people what to expect when you go to a foreign country so you have expectation when you go to Mexico so Mexico will not surprise you. Things like that and this sort of world that we create this sort of tribal poetic fantasy the way La Khan uses the word is then constantly knocked off and on with the real and this is why in this world we create an imaginary idea of how the world operates and a symbolic world and the symbolic world is exclusively human that’s through language. So anything that’s linguistic we can put in the symbolic realm anything else we fantasize about is the imaginary realm and this is the La Khanian triad. The human world is a world of imaginary and symbolic it’s a deeply social world it’s close-knit with our closest friends and family it’s more loose with the community congregation around us it’s even less so with the society around us and when it comes to the entire world we probably don’t care less what people believe inside a planet fake but that that is the tribal poetic world that we actually create all the time and this is where I think it rhymes with your work John in that La Khan says that the real knocking into both on an individual level atomic level the real can happen to you all the time but the real can also happen in society give you two fresh examples September 11 completely knocked us out it even exposed that George Bush was sitting reading fairytales to children nobody was in control nobody knew what was going on that’s how vulnerable the world is that’s the real that’s the real right it’s now the shishak is written extensively it’s thanks about because it’s an obvious example of a major global social the real breaking into our fantasy and another one is of course the COVID-19 pandemic we should have been prepared for we all know that but we we weren’t prepared for pandemic with smartphones so it was different from previous pandemics and we still don’t know what to make of it it’s a perfect example of a new world and there can only be post-corona world that would definitely be different from the pre-corona world these are examples of the real and this is why Peterstone is of damn wrong in La Khan I think because I think La Khan ties perfectly into your work John well that’s interesting I want to comment on both of those it’s good food for thought first I I would push back a little bit on the idea of autopoiesis being the same thing as sort of a self-centeredness most of the oceans of autopoiesis are you know like like the work of Evan Thompson my work and others you know this is inherently embedded enacted it’s extended it’s it’s it’s often most more properly seen also within distributed cognition than individual cognition there’s a lot of work going on right now and that like you know the work of Sperber and Mercier Greg’s work that rationality should be seen we are much more rational in general when we’re in distributed cognition there’s a very platonic argument I know you have problems with Plato but at least maybe a Socratic argument that we’re much better with multi-perspective dialogue at trying to overcome self-deception than we are individually so I just want to say that that’s the framework I’m working from yeah that’s why we’re working with the term tribopoiesis as an alternative because autopoiesis makes sense in nature especially when you work with minerals and physics and chemistry but as soon as you’re moving to biology and especially when you’re moving to conscious or subconscious beings like humans it makes a lot less sense we’re we’re born with biological programming obviously and and that biological problem is so geared towards the tribal that I would even argue I’m radical here I would even argue that anything that operates a human being tends to be tribal poetical in its origin rather than autopoietical that’s the only argument I make okay well I don’t know if I want I would there’s I don’t know if there’s enough of a difference there to explore it right now right in fact John and I I think for me one of the things that I would speak to in relationship to this is that you know I bring in what I call the influence matrix the influence matrix basically positions ourselves in social spaces around the vertical horizontal relational matrix world and an enormous amount of our relational value barometer is then embedded in the our role-based actor place and and we certainly as a psychotherapist what do people bring it brings their attachments it brings their power structures in other words the network web of the tribe and their place in it with isolated and then their language-based justifications about what the hell happened and who’s to blame and how to make sense out of that so so certainly I can hear a lot of resumes in relationship yeah I think it’s just an historical thing here because we are fighting against a lot of blank slate ideology at the moment I think that’s why it’s necessary to return to the idea that the human beings are incredibly biological program when we’re born and that actually what helps us survive to begin with so that’s probably done we can leave it at that and John please return to where you were at well I was just gonna say I think there’s a bridging point and Greg helped facilitate it you know I think the Vygotskyian notion that our capacity for self-transcendence that is presupposed within individualistic models of rationality it comes from internalizing the perspectives of others into our cognition so I think of our metacognitive capacities for rationality as inherently socially constructed in an important way so I think that’s an important bridge between what you’re saying and what I’m saying and I’m interested in that potential connection between self-transcendence and a capacity so I often use this word realization precisely because it trades on these two different meanings realization means to become aware of you know and it also means for something to become real and that moment if I understood you correctly and Lacan seems to be right that moment that Socrates talked about the moment of wonder the the horizon of intelligibility see I like Fuller’s distinction here’s another truncation I want to object to a foolish distinction between curiosity and wonder I think it’s very appropriate here curiosity is largely like from within the having mode there’s a gap in your knowledge and you want to fill it in that’s why if I prolong your curiosity you find it aversive but wonder is the opposite wonder is a moment of realization it’s where you come to the horizon of your intelligibility you can look backwards into what you understand and outwards into what you don’t and you’re willing to call everything into question this is why wisdom begins in wonder and and and and the thing about that is it is like trying to understand how we how we can bring in a notion of I want to bring wonder back into playing a central role in rationality and wisdom and this again is Socratic I think precisely very head Gaelian it’s the vermouth you’re getting close now we’re getting to vermouth well well yeah because because I’m feeling it Bart but what’s going on here is right genuine self-transcendence that proletic rationality is not possible unless you can get to the horizon of intelligibility and and notice how if I prolong wonder it’s not aversive it can move into awe and the thing about awe and we’re doing experiments on this right now is that awe tends to make people more humble it makes them more open it makes them more open to um to self-correction and notice it tends to start to train them right the experience of awe tends to train them in the virtue of reverence and the capacity to revere right to have a reverential relation to something beyond you in that way I think is central to the kind of rationality that I’m talking about we call we call all the infinite now in our work like a meaningful meaningful ecstatic experience that is so fantastic you can’t stay there but you want to be stayed there for as long as you can but you got to get out of it and learning how to get out and memorize it is key that is why we love old people not because you’re just wise and lived a long life we love them because they’ve had a lot of awe experiences in their lives I agree I agree that’s why they have that loving smile that we love about old people right actually bringing back laconic to this again whipping Jordan Peterson for being a bad boy uh the relevance realization is actually what the traversing the fantasy is about in lacan so what it is is exactly what you’re talking about so you live in a fantasy world is perfectly okay there’s no moralism in lacan that’s not the point at all but suddenly the real comes in and the real kills the fantasy you have to traverse the fantasy and create a new fantasy and the new fantasy you experience is much more realistic than the previous fantasy obviously because it incorporates this experience of the the disturbance that just happened with the real brought into your fantasy so it can also be collectively used it could be somebody who came back from the hunt and said I had this horrible experience today the story is perfectly credible everybody integrates that experience and therefore the real can also be collective even if you weren’t there when that happened and that then becomes the new fantasy and it’s lacan who says it’s just another fantasy it’s not just another fantasy obviously a fantasy with more wisdom in it than the previous one because it includes the experience of the real hopefully also some truth but the relevance realization you talk about the relevance is that the real is always a kick in the butt that’s what it is primarily and then the realization which for you also has a positive connotation it wasn’t obvious to me when I heard it first the realization this is actively this is actively enacting you to start acting on it is what’s called the traversing of the fantasy into the creation of a new fantasy that follows afterwards sure I mean yeah I think that’s great what you just said because what what you’re getting is the idea that you know the kick in the butt I like the way you put it it can also be metanoia it can reorient you and you can become aware of affordances for action and identity that you were previously unaware of you even see this in machine learning and you see it in human cognition so you get you get powerful machine learning and then they get locked into a part of the state space and they can’t get outside of that part of the state space and so what do you regularly and reliably do in machine learning you throw in noise you throw a noise that breaks up the structures and that allows them to jump out and explore parts of the state space that they couldn’t get to before and you even see this like in human cognition and attention you’re paying attention you’re trying to task focus and then you get the default network it takes you out and it moderately distracts you from your problem and if it moderately distracts you that will actually afford insight if you are blocking your previous problem we are self-distracting entities there’s a negative component to that but it’s there for it’s there it’s evolved I would propose to you for good functional reasons so I think the kick in the butt is like it is destructive Bart I agree with you about that but like you know the way like in self-organizing criticality when that when that when the what when the sand pile collapses it actually affords a deeper base that a new sand pile a higher sand pile can arise on there is the possibility if I’m not saying it’s inevitability I’m not saying that right I’m saying if you if you disrupt the self-enclosure enough you can you can convert it into a self-organization that affords a new and more comprehensive structure and that’s partially partially what I mean and I think you’re right about it that’s what I’m trying to point to that there’s this component of realization at the heart of of rationality that’s the part that I really like in Plato Plato’s idea that there is a reality that transcends us that can continually challenge us normatively I agree with you about rejecting the perfectionism but the idea that reality calls us to realization because it always transcends us and yet normatively puts a demand on us I think this is even born out experimentally you have the work of Yaden and others when people have these experiences of the really real and I’m putting it like this because I know that’s contentious but what they do is they experience onto normativity they feel strongly called to fundamentally transform their lives and what we find reliably is by their own measures and our measures do their lives get better their lives get better and that seems to be something that we should be incorporating into our models of rationality that we’re not incorporating well today if you’re not if you’re not already using the word multi-perspective a little bit yeah to give those who follow this conversation a perfect example from their everyday lives take ketamine right why does ketamine work as an antidepressant because ketamine very common problem among depressed people is that they’re stuck yes you’re automatically stuck and return to the same point and they can’t get out of it that’s what’s a hell hole to be in depression is like a repetition of the same in a really negative destructive way and they lose it and they just fall down into that hole what ketamine does it’s not in itself an antidepressant that’s why so interesting what ketamine does is just boom it dissociates you yeah yeah so you can do surgery on somebody with our ketamine that’s why it works and you can cut up their foot yeah yeah and and you ask them does the foot hurt and they go yeah it hurts like hell and you go but you’re not screaming and they say it’s not my foot yeah i don’t i don’t care it’s just it’s not it’s like i don’t care it’s not and that’s exactly why it works and i’ve seen it in laboratories when you give esketamine it’s not called when you give esketamine to people who are stuck with depression they be treated with everything else they’re highly intelligent people and you just give them the ketamine and finally they can see the world from just a slightly different angle than the usual one exactly yeah and you yeah i think even called it i i don’t know what greg used the term for that was like meta something again meta cognition well meta cognition yeah i would just probably refer to that as a multi-perspectival meaning that if you can look at the world from different perspectives you get more intelligent in the process so you throw noise in there for that to happen that’s what ketamine does to you when you take ketamine the other psychedelics have similar kinds of functions too uh but what they typically do is they create new patterns of connectivity in the brain that are initially noise for the brain and then the boy the brain basically says wait there’s these new connections i should see if they fit if they work um and what and more importantly and i think this is what’s coming out of the griffiths lab not so much the psychedelic experience but a minority of those people reliably have mystical experiences which actually does something that is not supposed to happen you get a measurable and long-standing change in a personality trait which are supposed to be stable openness is increased when people have those mystical experiences and that’s and that’s a personality trait that’s supposed to be stable or or if it changes it’s supposed to decrease with age and what happens it opens people up and again if what we mean by realization and our wonderment and the ability to aspire to a greater contact with reality to overcome self-deception these let me say mystical aspects have to be incorporated into our notion of rationality in a fundamental way that’s what i’ve been that’s what i’m arguing for if if you can’t incorporate insight and self-transcendence into your notion of rationality i think it’s massively insufficient and i think it’s not talking about what plato and aristotle and platinus were talking about when they were talking about logos or when you know or the when the latin people were talking about ratio it’s not incorporating what they were talking about the interesting thing is that the economical definition of of rationality is very much different because you could make the argument that self-deception can be extremely rational if that’s what you’re aiming towards so if you have a specific ideology or belief then you want to choose the argument that suits that belief so in that sense that can be rational in order to achieve what you perceive as your goal so i think that’s where i think like when you’re talking about rationality and correct me if i’m wrong but i sense that you are you are placing some form of external value which is like the platonic and aristotelist values of the good true and beautiful on how what rationality should be but from a purely subjective point of view if i want to sit on the beach all day and drink instead of building a shelter that can be seen as rational because my actions are moving towards what i intend as my personal goal well i would push back on that because i think the idea of of a subjective generation of meaning is probably false i think meaning is ultimately about a transjective relation a connectivity you know this bottle being graspable is not a subjective idea in my mind nor is it an objective feature of the bottle it’s a real relation between me and the bottle and i would say that coming into real relations are intrinsically valuable for human beings so i would move to a meta level and say well the person wants to be drunk all the time but i bet you if you ask that person do they want to experience a lot of interest in a conflict as they satisfy their desires they’ll say no i don’t or if you say to if i put you in the experience machine and give what why don’t you just take coke right now and then kill yourself oh well i don’t want to do that well why not well because i’m losing touch with reality i i reliably do this for students but i think there is uh there’s there’s some wisdom to that which is not only purely rational so there’s also like a meta like you’re talking about a meta perspective on rationality and it also has to do with like societal standards and a lot of things with which are not necessarily confined only in the rationality itself well i love this i love this is exactly where i said we started so uh it’s like it’s like ellen is trying to keep rationality where germanic speaking people are putting words like rationality so the rationality there is because they got the fornunft and it’s very confident it’s the austrian definition austrian definition austrian definitions are in german that’s the point yeah yeah absolutely so this is what’s so interesting because in the hegelian fornuft there is much much more than there is in any german rationality whereas what john is trying to do and which i love that john is trying to do is try to stretch the meaning of the world of rationality in the common sense use in contemporary english language to include something more and the way john obviously does it is an old philosophical trick it’s an epidemiological journey back to ratio so you go to ratio and from russia you build yeah some external ideals which i think are really really good and i’m not disagreeing with them right but i i’m not like i i i accept that there are more than one definition of rationality but i would say that all evaluations of value happens at the subjective level prove relationalism so i’m the problem was subjective is it doesn’t distinguish between the things we value intrinsically and the things we value arbitrarily right because they’re in one sense they’re equally subjective but you know you let’s do subjectivity subjective well-being reliably goes down when people when people have children measurably absolutely yeah absolutely why do they have kids because they say although their subjective well-being goes down meaning in life goes up which means yeah what it means an investment right yeah well it’s not just an investment because the problem is as we move into late capitalism children are much more of an expense and it right and that’s why you get the plateauing of population right because children go from being an investment to being a liability economic then you’re also to but when you make that argument you’re also saying that let’s say like monetary gain is more important than like personal fulfillment so i would say but okay but if we move to personal fulfillment when nazik talks about when he talks about symbolic utility rather than financial or economic utility right then then you’re into well what do people mean by this and then what the literature tends to show is that we have these like pretty universal cross-cultural cross-historical things people want inner peace and they want to be connected to other people they want to touch their relationships and they want they want to be connected to reality i know that’s a contentious term and we’re talking about it here but they they don’t want to be in a pure fantasy they will not like i was going to give an example i do this in all my classes i asked how many people are in really satisfying romantic relationships and they put up their hand i said i’ll keep your hand up i want you to keep your hand up if you want to know if your partner’s cheating on you even if it means that relationship is totally destroyed 95 percent of the people keep their hand up yeah absolutely why because there’s these meta desires that whatever else is satisfying my desire i want it in some sense keeping me connected to reality and whatever else is satisfying with a desire i want to have some inner peace i want some yeah but they’re still they’re still 10 percent who who uh doesn’t want it right but but but you ask them why that is what they do is they they give you a short-term long-term exchange exactly but but then when you press them they say they give in and they say no no right long-term i should go with finding out uh that i’m being deceived but this is a question of like the late the late verification basically so like like the psj-ish experiment so you get one marshmallow now or 10 marshmallows away five minutes yeah the initial yeah but my my argument would be that both are rational because we can only define rationality in terms of value and the only way we can define value is purposeful behavior towards a goal otherwise we are placing an external definition of value which which which is fine and i agree that we have societal cultural biological values which are in great denial in a epigenetics but i would still say that eating the marshmallow immediately or let’s say if you have a partner that’s cheating on you and you don’t see that as a long-term relationship it can be a rational decision not to have that information because in the short term it would hurt you well i suppose that i i don’t disagree with you in the sense that i don’t think there’s any permanent final definition of what makes particular kinds of information relevant i don’t think there’s any permanent definition of relevance um but i what i i worry about the idea that all of our motivation grounds out in this this this notion of value well yeah value uh i mean i just think we should distinguish between like a meta a meta narrative on rationality where we take biology society culture into perspective where we have these eras platonic and eras italian values and then like the economic understanding of rationality which is that every action is purposefully aiming at satisfying a need and that could be rational as well even though that even though it might not seem rational from let’s say a consequentialist perspective right and so what is in your ontology is the notion of value is ultimately parasitic on the notion of need and need commits you to a particular ontology which and a need like needing like needing food the chemical isn’t food in and of itself and the need isn’t just a subjective state it’s a real relationship between the paramecium and the sucrose molecule right so needs if you take a naturalistic ontological perspective on it but i would say that need and value is framed purely in the phenomenological so i would i would i would basically say that you are reducing needs to a chemical perspective with if you’re using that argument well i what no my point is exactly the opposite my point is the paramecium is making sense of the chemical as food but that that that need is you can’t explain what the need is by just looking inside the paramecium you can’t determine what the need is just looking at the chemicals in the world it’s a real relation between them and so what i’m saying is i think the ontology of value commits you to a presupposed ontology of need and then need commits you to an ontology of real relations and if you have to acknowledge there are real relations then you’ve given me everything i need for the platonic and the aristotelian arguments because they are committed not necessarily well why not okay so let’s say we we make a trade so i i trade you this pen for your couch yes let’s say you’re really it’s not a good trade right now but let me make an argument because my couch is in pretty bad shape but that’s well you have to we have to send we both have to send it across the world so but my argument would be that if this was like john lennon’s pen or something like that you and you are a giant john lennon fan you might value it higher than your couch and i might i might hate and value your couch higher so the only reason we can engage in trade is because our internal value structures are different that’s why interactions work but but but can’t we actually trade precisely because we are both committed to need structures that neither one of us is the author of i could even get you to like the pen uh because it meets certain needs that you might not have recognized how do i change your values if your values are just objectively generated because i can do that we do that can’t change right what changes them what changes them can’t be other values or you’re just in an infinite no it’s a direction right so real interaction real need real relations change value and i think human beings have a sense of that fundamental connection and that’s again what i think playdo and aerostle are pointing to that’s what i’m trying yeah yeah no no i i completely agree i would say that uh like the exchange itself means that values are not fixated so like in that sense so while we can see that there are some platonic astrotelian values that we see as maybe the most common values in our society that doesn’t mean that they are fixed no i wasn’t saying that i wasn’t no no i agree no but the trick here if can add that is that if you take this sort of very calculating concept of rationality you and you then have to admit that the values are not fixed you haven’t really explained why the values aren’t fixed because to a computer if your computer computer will follow you all the way it would just calculate and it would love for rationality to be a process of a calculation only okay that’s the easy part for the computer but the computer would then not understand what the values would change and of course no no but it’s sort of basic economics they therefore end up with these ideas that okay but it’s a it’s a game of some kind that where you get tired of something where you eat too much of it therefore it has lower value for you and at the end of the day we know no that’s not how trade works at all actually and that’s why economics had to move on from that sort of very simplistic understanding but the question here is though are we saving the word rationality we agree of course like all these abstract terms they have many different meanings yeah okay john is obviously fighting for a new form of rationalism that could make sense to us that is much more complex much richer much more human i would say than the commonly understand contemporary understanding of rationalism where it belongs with the great philosophers used in the same way but is john here out on a totally hopeless mission everything everything were pulled back into some stupid turing machine doing calculations and nothing else it’s just like no human is more than that you know me right i am a defender of if you talk about narratives here talk about logos mythos and pathos yep it is the pathical narrative more than ever that’s distinctively human mythical narrative happens to be how humans unify logos and pathos which means it’s also the human realm because path was just as far as we know completely unfathomable for machines they don’t get it the machines are stuck with logos but they do logos really well really fast and they can compute like mad and we’re probably going to leave the logos of interest to the machines whereas we humans then will do pathos and the interaction between also machines will be the mythos now if we take these three terms and look at is the word rationality even applicable on the different narratives and in what sense is then a human rationality understandable from the three narratives in that case i would say that the traditional economics use of rationality which is the common day everyday use is a strong case for it is stuck with the logos it doesn’t discuss pathos and mythos well i would say that that would be true for like cost production theory of value and a labor theory of value but we’re going to like subjective theory of value where like this pen i get took less time to make than john’s couch but it can be worth more so that’s the subjective theory of value like the labor that went into it doesn’t explain it who used it doesn’t necessarily explain it so i think that how do you how do you explain it then i want to know how you from pathos okay i would i would say that value means nothing on from unless the subjective is making a choice between what it wants and what it doesn’t want and then when we take that and put it in a let’s say a larger matrix of interactions then we go from the subjective to the interpersonal and through eons of interpersonal interactions then we come to some type of locus which is that certain values emerge which is like the the platonic values that john are describing like the true beautiful and what’s the third one good good good yeah but that’s that’s that’s not necessarily that wouldn’t necessarily be present it was just like kickstarted new society which is there which have never been in contact with us and had a maybe a different biological early humans for instance they would maybe value violence higher than peace for a period of time then they would die out so what you are talking about is predicated on the culture and societies and epigenetics through eons of time so so i guess i don’t want to be i feel i’m getting too harsh uh but ilan i want to ask you do you think that pathos acts operates arbitrarily or does it act in a principled and normative way this is what i was trying to get that with how do we get is it responsive to reality does it which is the argument well that that means that there’s a normativity then higher or more primordial or more like right more grounding than the normativity given to us by our values because there’s that by which our values are governed and that within which the normativity within which we think we can rationally change people’s values by talking to them and pointing out aspects of reality but i think you are would you agree i think no no wait wait time would you agree that that happens over time now but if you speak about pathos if i gotta say the word pathos here pathos is dirty and nasty it’s definitely part of the shadow and the subconscious so don’t throw logos and mythos into the pathos term term because then you destroy the whole idea that the three that’s what i’m asking i’m not saying that i’m saying like could you have a theory of pathos you clearly think you do which means pathos is not arbitrary and chaotic there are ways of understanding it and ways of coming into right or incorrect relationship to it why it is it’s arbitrary and chaotic but within hopefully some kind of a container and that container is the operation of logos and mythos where logos is the real it’s the contact with the outside world and mythos is the stories we make up in between a path is also just an extreme tantra so it’s just like violence like poor pornography like every like radical expression of feeling ties into pathos and if you look at like people’s needs they can be purely directed by pathos and usually then they are corrected by our locus and our mythos to some degree but if we take if we take like a society or early humans that didn’t know anything about these structures it’s something that happens over time and you could argue that locus has always existed but it’s something that we have to get to know through interactions you guys both really think that pathos is unintelligible how do you even have any reason for believing it exists then because i’m using a lot of us to understand it wait a second wait a second okay pathos on its own cannot be turned into a narrative without the other two it’s very dialectical here so for example if we have a person in our society that is completely obsessed with pathos and has a really weak logos and mythos we lock them up we put them in mental institutions precisely consider them insane or deeply deeply dangerous to the rest of us right that’s what we do we lock them up because the path is taken over completely but the pathical what the pathical is needed is we end up with a very this is against player again we end up with a division of logos and mythos logos and mythos logos and mythos the easiest thing in the world logo essentially science and myth essentially theater so if you go to theater it’s a story about human beings the human condition well you can’t just have science in there we’d be banal right so it’s mythos but when you look at pathos the west way to describe it today says there’s a reason why you can’t throw pornography into a good movie and it’s a reason why pornography we try to make a move out it becomes a terrible movie because pornography and a movie theater piece or pornography are two very clear examples of pathical and mythical narrative now these there’s of course their borders and be infused with each other so the intelligibility is that the pathos in itself if i try to understand it’s inonteligible to me it’s just a force inside of me that wants me to fuck or maybe at best i crack jokes or i go ironic or i want to destroy things because it doesn’t make sense to me so i take chances for example we discussed the kk guardian jump into the unknown for example that that would be that would be pathical gone yeah okay did we uh along are you there do you have a ghost in the machine that’s his path oh the pathos hit us i hope i hope we clarified it but what i’m trying to get at here what ellen gets what i’m trying to get on here is that i thought that john your your cause of rationality hits the nail with the hegelian for nupt and that definitely includes this pathical element that we’re talking about all right more than logos this is kind of i don’t mean that’s insulting it’s kind of shocking to me that at the core of economic theory is an unintelligible chaos driving everything no no economic theory does not have pathos that’s the problem oh i thought i thought he was much in the logos okay economic theory has been built up by mathematicians over the last 150 years so very platonist most of them and eventually with mesas and the other guys to get more as to tell you and they get wider in the scope and eventually they’ve arrived at behavior stuff that greg works with and these days they understand all of human complexity has to be understood for you to take on all this problem okay well then i want to make sure i’m not misunderstanding yeah i thought elon was saying that the source of subjective value is pathos and pathos is arbitrary and that that sounds to me like that sounds to me like you don’t have a theory at all you don’t have an economic theory at all because the ultimate explanation of human behavior is this unintelligible mystery well that’s how we started that’s nothing now thanks to the capital capitalism presents its own theory to us very very much that’s exactly what the capitalism is the real in its most obvious form in contemporary society right well capitalism is a constant kick in the butt that’s that’s for sure me this would say that that the actions are aiming at alleviating immediate uneasiness so that’s that’s where like and and all eggs from me why that but but why that is the sole thing we have good evidence solving not as not as the sole thing not even immediate or can be explained that way we do we would say not even immediate action actions can be explained just by trying to reduce uneasiness not from a psychological perspective but we have to understand that mises wasn’t a psychologist okay so so so maybe i apologize if i am i i’m ignorant so i’m talking from what i know i’m i’m sorry it’s complete it’s completely okay and you have to understand that i agree with you more than that appearing to be i get that i get that this is fellowship we’re in friendship we’re trying to work something yeah i know i know i don’t i hope you don’t take it any other way for me no no no of course not of course not but so so mises tried to make an a priori theory of value so he didn’t it wasn’t an empirical theory of value which like cost production theory from adam smith uh yeah and and like the labor theory of value marks right or yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly so so the idea was that how but what is value it clearly doesn’t exist in the object itself so it’s clearly based on an exchange a relational relationship with the uh i know bad hates hates this word individual and and whatever the object of the sire is so in this sense value is purely subjective because if we look at an object like air it is valueless right now but if you’re underwater it’s worth everything so this is like determining value in objects it’s completely relational and if somebody wants to die then then the air doesn’t mean anything to the person who is dying that doesn’t mean that so so if we then try to understand actions then all actions in this definition of the word are rational because they are aiming at fulfilling this basic need but then i understand your definition as well that well we have to also understand that there are things such as self-deception but maybe i want to deceive myself so the only thing i’m saying is that there are two definitions of rationality and maybe we have to distinguish between them i i just want to add that to add to from mises credit here is that it is also with from mises that economics understands that the profane of the sacred are very different things for example so you move things out of the market and say there’s a value to this that is so infinite to me that i will not put it in the marketplace in the first place i don’t even want to know what other people value it for and and that that is of course a very human trait as well that adds to it and this i think is also absolutely key to the to the fervor kyan rationality we tried to explore here or the hegelian fernove is that it has an understanding that profane and sacred are totally different categories there are things you don’t put out there on the market at all and it’s a rational in this deep says a rational exercise to say that this is not something i put out on the market that was also more or less unheard of that somebody actually took that into the calculations and that happened with from mises so i would probably say here there is a difference between the the dopass based rationality that i think you’re describing and maybe and i completely agree with that i believe that exists i believe is very important and then the pathos based rationality that i’m describing which is just an understanding that every person who acts are acting towards a goal no matter how irrational that goal might seem from a dopass based perspective does that make sense well it does except i would want to say that i think it’s uh i’m worried about two things there’s an oversimplification i think people are never acting towards a goal i think people are always acting towards multiple goals because we are general problem solvers we are not special purpose machines like coke dispensing machines or something like that and so and that means we are inherently subject to constraints having to do with the relation the real relations in the world between the real conditions between potential goal states right i don’t burn down my house to cook my lunch because that’s a really stupid thing to do well but but let’s say if you did burn down your house in order to cook your lunch it would still be rational no no trying to no no this is the point i’m making is it because i don’t want to cook my lunch but i also want to protect myself from uh the the the elements and i want to store myself i want a place where i’m safe yeah right but let me read my argument so when you cooked your lunch that was your goal so you did the best thing you could with the knowledge you had and the wisdom you had at that time so even though the outcome might seem irrational the actions you took from the knowledge you had were rational in order to yeah but this this is this is very autistic ellen because you could have i’m tribal again i’m not individual remember this is why i’m your worst enemy and then you have for example comparative rationality so you’re just saying that you’re placing you’re placing if you’re going to use hypothetical examples which i hate in the first people have very hypothetical people okay so if you’re going to use that if you have comparative rationality that it’s also rationality in that sense and it’s much closer to the sort of for new food trying to work ourselves towards to see if that can work at the end of the day i think john is up for a really hard struggle to extend the term rationality english language you might need to import the german for new ones or for all or whatever uh but but i think if you play around with idea that we could take rationality to do something beyond knowledge and understanding that there’s more to it than that then for example when you use your example you got the idiot who burns up his kitchen to get his damn lunch then you’ve got another guy who’s a bit smarter than that and will not cook his kitchen just to cook a lunch and that is compared to rationality and then there’s a certain rationale that beats the other one but because the overall effect is one external ideal you’re placing an external ideal into an individual yes because no because not exist we’re all tribal we’re always then the individual your altis is not the subject is subjective okay so the subject of after them but you’re placing you’re placing an external right what do you say about justifications here i mean yeah i first off a couple of different things certainly rational actor theory basically by definition identifies whatever action is taking place add sort of a principle of least effort that has to be the maximizing function from the perspective that’s a a priori definition that then you know creates a certain kind of metaphysics that has certain sense making but it creates all sorts of problems also from a multitude of different problems so so i’m hearing you sort of advocate for that aspect of rationality that my side of does and rational actor theory and economics does there are certain utilities to that kind of definition that is not i one of the questions i will ask john john i know you have to go but but one question that i had for you um so what is the relationship what is i here’s what i think along is getting at and this is my question and this is where they were trying to what is the relationship between sort of rationality and wisdom and morality and ethics like so for example maybe this gets to what along is saying let’s say i’m a sociopath okay and as a sociopath what i do enjoy is inflicting sadistic evil onto people because that is subjectively what gets me off and so what i’m trying to do is i’m trying to learn how to hide so that my victims are more likely to be available to me and i’m less likely to get caught right and then so my decisions in relationship to that can be certainly be identified as a certain form of intelligence right um john right you would say clearly somebody could be problem solving oh these are very intelligent criminal we would say that with a lot of clarity would we say it in relationship to rationality that’s a very rational set of moves that the person makes and when for you and i don’t know about this myself i deal with this psychotherapeutically all the time when does the frame of rationality blend into the frame of morality ethics world view the macro meta level values um that is a to me there is some work to be done perhaps in delineating the ethical moral uh frame of reference is that is there is that a reason no i think that’s right and i i i i’m trying to i guess push on the idea that normativity grounds out in value because the problem i have with things like that is i i think we lose the capacity to define anything as irrational and then if you lose the distinction between rationality and rationality that to me counts as a good argument that your definition of rationality has failed okay right like right and so that that’s part of what now to go towards your point i mean i think that from the youth of fro on we have we have been progressively abandoning the idea that norms are given to us by authorities right because ultimately we have to either we acquiesce in them because they’re good or or we acquiesce in them because we’re afraid of the authority the second thing is just for sink offense the first is we’re committed to some kind of agency so we’re committed to agency in our morality and our rationality and they’re both normative things we’re committed to this that we implies can right that i i’m ultimately bound to the source of our norms is our is our competence and is there variation in that yes and i don’t think that’s the same thing as the variation in in subjective value of preference because people’s people can value things outside of their competence this is how people get messed up in a lot of ways in fact right you can describe a lot of pathology that way so what i think we hold ourselves to are sort of idealized models of competence let me give you an example of what i mean okay grammaticality you know not not in that queen’s english but in the chomsky sense in the sense of what i say to you is syntactically intelligible to you right where are the norms for that coming from right well they’re not given to us from the gods right we have an underlying linguistic competence but we never actually need it right we can’t because i’m capable of understanding and producing way more sentences that i’ll ever hear or speak and if you pay attention to all of our speech we are making mistakes all the time we’re doing ellipses we’re stumbling and we we we ignore i just did it i just did it i did we ignore all that crap because we hold people to their competence not to just their performance errors and the issue with the psychopath is we make all i think we make a lot of these judgments relative to some understanding a shared kind of competence and i take it that the psychopath is precisely lacking in some fundamental aspects of that competence such that it is not capable for he or she to meet the demands of the art and that means i think technically and please don’t jump on me for saying this i think psychopaths are not immoral i think they are amoral beings because they are not capable of morality and therefore they don’t fall under normative things our normative strictures which means they don’t count and i’m not trying to pull a fast one here they don’t count to the issue here because if they’re not normatively accessible and responsible beings they don’t count in as data when we try to understand how we are normatively accessible and responsible beings that’s an interesting i’m using i’m using archetypology for that because it actually extends the the possibility how you can work with it so archetypology removes morality altogether so what it says is that if a sociopath is around it just found him he probably had a function sometime in history so in some kind of society where somebody probably an old wise woman was aware we’ve got a young sociopath here let’s use him for the tribal purposes so the overall tribal construct that i’m always working with would say that at certain points in time probably this genetic makeup was actually very useful and then if somebody asked me what about the sociopath for himself and i said well i couldn’t be a philosopher and i could talk to polar bears all day long and every fucking polar bear i’ve ever met is a sociopath so it’s a survival strategy for polar bears they’re by the way individuals if you want to find individuals going me to polar bear they eat their own kids and they don’t care like they’re totally non-moral our moral evil beings right compared to humans because we set our polar bear trigger warning yeah polar bear trigger warning yeah they got they got first but they’re nasty right but the tribal poetical helps me in this sense that i can then move on to archetypology which what greg and i’ve had this discussion is that i would prefer if psychology instead of being general and trying to constantly move towards the same ideal of what it means to be human if psychology started working first with archetypology said there are many different types of human beings and by the way the many different types of humans each inside each one of us that it would be a lot easier to actually comprehend something is sociopathology and be less morally upset about it but actually be more pragmatically able to handle it it helps it for example when i work with addicts it helps enormously just to teach a young alcoholic who has problems alcoholism 23 years old to teach him that for example in the past you know when you were a kid and you went fishing with your dad and you know the kid who waited the longest of the most patients yeah the kid who waited the longest patient got the biggest fish yeah yeah you know who becomes an alcoholic when he’s 23 the kid wait the longest yes that means alcoholism is tied to the capacity for monotony if you start studying monotony we discover that many different human archetypes actually especially male ones have monotony as a talent for activity and then the healing process these young alcoholists can go through realize it oh so it’s just that i live in a society this is no longer appreciated or needed but he was needed in the path explains why have this genetic condition yeah it makes it a lot of the issue for them to deal with alcoholism so that is why i’m a strong proponent though before we do morality i do ethics i work with archetypology precisely for that reason well i certainly support the idea of affording individuals narratives in relationship to their place their tribe that we understand sort of the frequency dependency like around sociopath so we can treat it pragmatically definitely things yeah i never i never have to use the word normalcy in my work at all and that to me is a great relief so i’m just saying that okay uh we have are we back at rotsil or finishing over rotsil i don’t know that we saved the digital age i was trying to think about what ever and what uh how i might want to respond to it um yeah that’s i mean i there’s a difficulty in i mean this is there’s an analogous difficulty in biology right you you have to have some universals or you can’t do biology so you have you have universal processes but that doesn’t mean that you think that all life is homogeneous in fact the very process of natural selection produces wide variation according to context and you try i see science is trying to integrate those two together i think that’s why i try to use the term pluralistic rather than universalistic or relativistic because like the like if we can’t do any inductive generalizations then we get locked into kind of a specious solipsism i’m not accusing you of that bard but i’m saying that that my concern is like to try to get the appropriate balance uh so that i can make the legitimate inductive generalizations that i need to do um if i’m going to gather knowledge because i have to i have to i have to i have to connect things across time and space and context or it’s not knowledge and i have but i have to i have to and this is again your laconic point i have to constantly make that open and permeable to being hit by the real by being hit by the real in the sense the real differences the real differences that are out there that have to constantly be and i see science as a process when it’s done well and let’s let’s let’s be fair let’s not compare bad science to good philosophy right but when science is done well right that that’s what it does properly often it’s not behaving well and i criticize it when it doesn’t um and i try to at least be responsible so i guess that’s what i would want to say i would want to say yeah i get that but i i also want to understand i want i want to understand that there might be ways in which things happen that are churned out that are not functional i mean so we have non-controversial examples like phineas gage who gets the shaft of iron through his frontal cortex and he becomes a bastard and that wasn’t functional or evolved that’s just because something got messed up and he became irredeemable you could not appeal to him normatively anymore he had lost his character in that sense that’s how i talk and i want to be able to understand phenomena and i want to consider the possibility that some psychopaths and sociopaths are also individuals who have because i don’t like the idea and i’m not accusing you of this i’m just expressing that you know that everything that emerges in evolution is sort of teleologically functional i don’t think that’s the case right i think lots of stuff gets turned out in the variation machinery that just dies off um yeah but yeah yeah but that that’s that’s really really extreme because actually we’ve been around for you know millions of years and human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and we’ve lived in settlements that tried to make sense of that for the last five thousand years and we’re not struggling with loving people outside of our own closest neighborhood which is like the hardest thing ever for human beings yeah no i get i i think what i work with is a very sort of humane philosophy that starts with one assumption what if you don’t change human beings at all what if you allow human beings to be as informed as they possibly could be as rational because of that information as it possibly could be to then make up for themselves whether we want to go through any form of transitions or not it’s a it’s a it’s a very very radical starting point ethically starting points ethical starting point to start from but actually it forces me to go into dialogue your dialogs go to dollar people and present my case and of course love to be wrong changed my mind having the real coming in from all sides so i could go into further explorations and read more books and study more stuff and go into more dialogues and just see a richer more colorful world grow up you know grow out of that process and that’s what i love that’s what wakes me up in the morning cup of coffee and i get started and i work and i love life but it’s it’s for me a very good i’m of course an ethicist because philosophers are never moralists we leave that to theologians to take care but the ethics has to start and i think my radical starting point with serekeis was that let’s not change human beings at all meaning we’re forced into a very radical descriptive philosophy we’re basically describing the possible metaphysical deepest sense of what it means to be human doesn’t work okay and then those who like to dig into that they’re welcome to and that’s all we do but i this when i then go for example do men’s work and i stand in front of hundreds of young men who want to know what is mean to be a man what does it mean to be a father we’ve lost it we don’t know what these things are then of course giving them electron archetypes and i don’t mean doing i mean proper archetype ology there are many different types of men and the reason why there’s so many of you different types of men is because the tribe is strong when men are different and admire each other for each other’s differences i get that i get that i like that i mean i i think you would acknowledge that human nature is not static though that it’s changing and therefore it is reasonable to act ask to what degree should we try should we let that change happen haphazardly or to what degree should we try to i disagree i disagree on that human nature changes that’s what i actually do i think i think humans have been the same for at least the last five thousand years a very little change at all i think technology is what changes and our environment changes because of technology um see i think we probably disagree in a very interesting way well because i think human beings is inherently developmental like i’m very into the flint effect for instance the flint effect but i would agree with bar that like at some fundamental level we are still perceiving our surroundings in relations to the tribe so like we can’t take that that’s basically i think that’s part version of the archetypes it’s still embedded in us and all our evaluations happens in a relation to these like external structures we have literacy that massively empowers us to do kinds of problem solving and access things and reflect on ourselves and come to metacognitive awareness that we cannot have without literacy that’s interesting but we’re cyborgs look at us yeah we are yeah sure human nature is to be cyborg and if we agree we agree but that’s the logical paradigms yes so there’s a feedback transactive feedback loop so we get then if we are born into a radically different culture with a radically different technology from sperm to death sperm and egg to death the form that we take as a function of that transaction well when it’s radically different than somebody that was grown in a different petri dish of yes society greg of course that’s exactly why we’re studying cultures from 4 000 years ago that mountainous cultures and river valley cultures and discover enormous differences and we discovered for example the peru and iran are much more similar and messapotamia and southern china much more similar because the landscape itself it would radically take marshall mcclellan’s ideas of media and interface radically into everything like into topology i’m totally for the landscape we grew up in shape us and yes human beings obviously we wouldn’t be all over the planet in all these different climates and cells and everything if it weren’t adaptable but adaptability in itself was there already and if you speak about human beings 5 000 years ago they weren’t that different as i always stress our ambition is to be more intelligent and smarter disagreeing now i’m not sure how much i think we are agreeing we’re just expressing it in different ways yeah i i agree with that i’m in meta agreement with you guys i’m 20 minutes past we all are rational for the green rationality i love this conversation big love to you guys i would invite you guys to come back i think we should do more of this uh yeah i mean genuine dialogus never comes to a closure because it’s constantly on the edge of emergence so i’m not trying to close this i’m just giving in to the real i have to go i have to go all right good conversation guys good talking all right thanks for putting this together nice meeting you great to see you again yeah you too all right always big love to you guys big john will be in touch okay bye bye bye