https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nJPQhRuWjXc
Welcome everyone to Voices with Raviki. This is a great pleasure for me. I get to introduce you to another one of my former students who has become a good friend and collaborator, and it’s Gary Hovhanessian. Is that right? Right, that’s right. Hovhanessian. It’s Armenian and I’m so I’m mangling it, but most people got my name wrong until I anglicized its pronunciation. So Gary, it’s a great pleasure to have you here. And so I just want to turn things over to you for a while. You know, a bit of your intellectual, spiritual autobiography, how you and I came to meet and how we’re working together and what our projects are and so on. And then we’ll take it into the deepest aspect of your work. Excellent. Thanks, John. And it’s a great pleasure for me to be here. And just I, these sorts of moments invite me to reflect on my entire life narrative, just to situate the present moment in the broader context. And I guess I can do a bit of that right now as a as an introduction of who I am and why I’m here with you. So I’ve got a BA in philosophy. And a lot of my undergrad education was in the philosophy of mind. And now I’m a PhD candidate in clinical psychology, with the sort of specialization or emphasis in phenomenological approaches to psychology and psychopathology. So how we got from point A to point B is sort of the story that I want to tell right now. And maybe that’ll place us place us in a good position to discuss some of the intellectual work that we’ve been doing together. So it’s interesting, you know, I suppose the motif or the theme I want to organize this introduction around is that of circles, right? Everything comes and goes in circles of sorts. And I found myself in a circle of sorts. So the circle is this. I started my intellectual journey in philosophy and with deep interest in the philosophy of mind. I spent many years in my undergrad trying to study the mind body problem in the contemporary context. And you were one of the professors who sort of initiated me into that process. And the interesting thing is that as I learned more about the mind body problem, the more I came to realize that a lot of the basic assumptions that are there operant in the problem formulation, there are historical holdovers in a matter of speaking of times past, right? How it’s not necessarily the case that the mental and the physical should be opposed to one another. There used to be other ways of seeing the relation. Actually, the relation itself wasn’t as formalized before, right? It was more of an implicit thing, maybe. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that together. But I realized that the mind body problem had a historical dimension. And so I continued to study it from a more historical point of view. And I also realized that there’s different approaches nowadays to studying the mind body problem and trying to resolve it, most of which tend to be reductionist. And so I started to study the mind body problem in other words, the mental is either reduced to the physical as a way of bridging the gap. And those are physicalist approaches or vice versa. And those are idealist or panpsychist approaches, we might say. But then through you, again, I came across an approach in cognitive science known as inactivism, or just the inactive approach that promised to bridge the gap the gap between the mind and the body in a non reductionist fashion. And that really appeals to me, I thought it was cool to simultaneously be scientific, right in our approach to studying the mind and subjectivity, while also not reducing the subjective completely away to just physical processes. And what that means is still a kind of tricky thing to think about. But anyway, I got into I got more interested in the inactive approach and the phenomenological roots of the inactive approach would, which led to Merleau-Ponty and the other phenomenologists. And here’s what ended up happening in my philosophy, undergrad education, I ended up focusing mostly on the philosophy of mind and then inactivism near the near the tail end. But because of inactivism’s connection to phenomenology, right? By the time I got to my master’s, which actually serendipitously offered me an education in humanistic psychology at the University of West Georgia, one of Maslow students, Mike Aarons was the one who started our program at Georgia. By that point, I got more into psychology and the human sciences, again, and there was a kind of overlap between my interest in cognitive science and my interest in humanistic psychology, the Venn diagram, right? That was in the middle, the overlap was phenomenology, essentially. Right, right. And so by the time I got into my current program at Duquesne University in clinical psychology, I started to read more on important constructs in psychology having to do with personality and with development. Yes. And so on the one hand, with respect to the personality topic, I got interested in the big five theory of personality and ended up encountering Colin DeYoung’s work on cybernetic big five theory, which essentially took the five factor model and offered a sort of functional explanatory account of the different traits rather than the strictly descriptive and predictive model that the big five originally was. Where at the very top, the highest traits in the personality hierarchy, which is how this view sort of construes personality, there exist two meta traits, stability and plasticity, and we’ll probably talk quite a bit about this today. And at the same time, in my second year, I believe I took a course in the phenomenology of human development where we covered attachment theory in relative depth from a phenomenological perspective. And it seemed interesting how from the attachment theory perspective, there seemed to be two basic or fundamental human motives at play in a dynamic dialectical tension, security and exploration. Yes. And so I saw that there was a possible connection there between cybernetic big five theory, which stated that at the highest level there’s two meta traits, stability and plasticity, which seem to be fulfilling functions that are quite similar, if not identical, to the two basic motives that we find in attachment theory between security and exploration. And sort of circling back to the initial theme of inactivism, so the broadest circle that I found myself within was that on the one hand, I started out trying to more fully understand inactivism and the non-reductionist approach to human experience that it offered. Yet, it now seems that my inactivist wanderings have led me beyond inactivism itself and into the realm of the human sciences. And so in order to really uphold the very non-reductionist commitments that I myself as an inactivally inclined thinker hold, I have to integrate what I’ve been learning in the human sciences with personality theory and the development of personality through attachment. I have to integrate all that into my inactivist understanding of human experience. So I would say that that’s the intellectual context in which my work at this point is taking place. And one of the last projects that I worked on, I worked on with you on integrating Colin’s work on cybernetic big five theory with inactivism in order to initiate this back and forth circulation between inactive cognitive science and the empirical human sciences. So that was beautiful, Gary. Yeah, we’ll talk more specifically about this. I want to just fill in some sort of reminders and explications for people. So inactivism is one of the four E’s and you’ve often heard me mention four E cognitive science and the four E’s are bound up together. They are embodiment, embeddedness, inactivism and extended mind and all of those themes Gary and I invoke in the work we’re doing together. And so to give you a bit of a metaphorical way of thinking about it is that inactivism doesn’t, cognition nor the mind isn’t in the head or in the brain, whatever that would have meant anyways, right? Rather it is dynamically between, it is a dynamic coupling between the embodied brain sensory motor organism, right? And the world. And both of these are also dynamically self-organizing and the relationship between them is dynamically self-organizing. And so when you try and talk about mind, trying to reduce it to brain is to seriously misrepresent all of the dimensions and factors. Trying to hammer it into the Cartesian dichotomy between subjective and objective is losing this very transjective self-organizing for itselfness that is integral to the mind. And so when Gary’s talking about it being non-reductive, we’re trying not to reduce it to subjectivity, objectivity, we’re not trying to reduce it to brain and we’re trying to see it as inherently dynamical and self-organizing. And then soon as you say that, that brings up another point. When you’re invoking that cognition is inherently self-organizing, the function and the history of the system are not separable from each other. It develops by functioning and it functions by developing. And so another dichotomy between sort of the logical structure of the software and then the development of the hardware or the coding, all of that was sort of held apart in an older computational account of the mind, that’s also being rejected, that move. So there’s a lot in there and I tried to unpack it quickly. And then why that ties into phenomenology is because one claim of an activism, and the person that’s influenced both myself and Gary on this is Evan Thompson, is the idea that phenomenology is the discipline, and that is the proper way to understand it, the discipline that best articulates that transjective field. And I’m not using field in any kind of physical sense, that transjective field in which that coupling, that dynamical coupling is best observed and understood. So Gary’s nodding, so it looks like that we’ve got that in tow. And then I guess the thing that I would want to bring in is that Gary and I are proposing in the paper that we have published just recently, yay for us, in phenomenology and cognitive sciences on the inactive big five theory of personality. And the current work we’re doing on attachment theory makes a strong use of relevance realization theory as a kind of glue for getting all of these integrations to work together. And then my grand, almost maniacal hope is that that integration will integrate with the work I’m doing with Brett and Mark on integrating relevance realization theory with predictive processing models of cognition and development, and perhaps give us the possibility of something that is both humanistically and phenomenologically rich and scientifically rigorous overarching framework of human cognition. And then hope, and that would ground the work I’ve done with Greg Enriquez and with Zach Stein and with Christopher Mastapietro on the development of the self and personhood and consciousness. So it’s a very ambitious project and I’ll probably die before it’s completed, but Gary will live on. And so Gary and I have known each other for quite a while and I’ve said this before, it’s very gratifying to see your students go from, it’s almost like your children, and I mean that as a compliment, and they go to going from being your students to being your friends and collaborators and you can start to see how they are going to surpass you. And I clearly see that in Gary. Gary is taking my work and other people’s work, not just my work, but he’s doing stuff with it, he’s taking it in a direction that’s really impressive. Just to peek behind the curtain for one sec, one of the reviewers, we were put through the wringer as we should be on the review for our most recent paper, but in the end after all, after we had responded to all the criticisms, one of the reviewers called our paper profound and I attribute a lot of that profundity to Gary. You should also know that Colin is also, I’ve worked with Colin, he was a meditation student of mine and he was also a COGS ITA for me and so Colin and I have a connection to Colin Dion. So that’s all just framing and Gary’s side of it and my side of it and how we’re working together and what’s coming together. And so maybe we could talk, let’s go in and open it up a little bit in more detail, perhaps quickly review for everyone Gary what the big five are and what Colin was doing was his basic approach, which was basically the first important move was which was to turn it into a cognitive scientific theory as opposed to just a descriptive trait theory and then how we wanted to bring in both the phenomenology and the functionality of Reuven’s realization theory to unpack that and I know you’re having some ongoing discussions with Colin, very current, the three of us are going to talk very soon and we could sort of just, let’s unpack that recent publication and then why people who aren’t academics should care about it. That’s the thing. So let’s first explain it and then provide an understanding of its relevancy and its currency. Excellent. Okay, so in order to understand EB5T, our theory, which is an activist big five theory, we need to harken back to CB5T, cybernetic big five theory, which is Colin’s framework. But in order to really understand Colin’s framework, we have to harken back to the basic model that it built upon, which is the five factor model or the big five theory of personality. So let’s start with that and then work our way up. Excellent. So the big five is one of the most widely researched and used models for predicting human behavior in all of psychology. It’s empirically validated, it’s cross-culturally validated, though there are apparently some limitations there to account for, but we can just conveniently ignore those for now. And essentially what it says is that you could understand human personality along five major dimensions. The five major dimensions are the traits, hence the big five. The traits are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. We’ll unpack what each of those means to an extent, but the way the big five were derived was by essentially subjecting very, very, very large sets of descriptors to a statistical procedure called factor analysis. And what that sort of does, a sort of conceptual metaphor there is imagine taking a bunch of flour and then adding water to it and then you see different clusters of dough form. And so the traits are kind of like those clusters. So what do these traits do for us? Well, let’s use another sort of spatial metaphor actually. Think about how, and this is what Google does do as far as I know. Imagine we sort of track your location on a map and sort of traced the lines that you traverse on the map throughout the course of a day. What you’re going to see is different lines and certain patterns form. And then imagine if we scale that up to the to the course of like a week and then a month and then a year. And so what you’re going to see eventually is if we keep tracing your path along the map, there are certain regions on the map that are going to be more densely populated with these lines than others. And so what we can then do is take the map of your movement that we’ve produced over the course of like a year or a long period of time and then we could use it to predict not deterministically but probabilistically where you’re likely to be found at any given point in the day. So the five traits are kind of like these density distributions on a map, right, that’s meant to represent something like your psychic space, your patterns of thinking, feeling, being, etc. And so each of the five traits is there to describe and predict different types of patterns or styles of patterns along these five major dimensions. And so the question really was that they derived this five factor model, the five traits, and they found that it still applied, it was still valid cross-culturally. And so the question came up, what does this mean? This seems to be a human universal of sorts. And just as you always say, right, whenever we encounter universals, we have to pay attention. Something important is going on, something deeply adapted. So before we link that to Colin’s work, is there anything you’d like to add to my characterization? I think when Gary’s saying descriptors, he means descriptions of human beings, descriptions like that we would even find in a dictionary, like he’s happy, he’s often upset, you know, these kinds of things. She likes to explore her environment. They are often quiet and by themselves. So you can take all the ways we describe human beings and, contrary to what you might think, that they might be either just purely random or just idiosyncratically specific. You find in that space of descriptors, you find these clusters, you find these areas where a lot of descriptions all cohere together, all mutually predict each other. So if I describe you this way, I’m likely also to describe you all these other ways. And that’s how you get these clusters. And then we could quickly go over them. I want to make one other point, which is tipping my hat to two of my colleagues, Greg Enriquez and Zachary Stein, but especially Greg. Greg is very critical of the reduction of personality to trait. He thinks that we should remember that personality was supposed to describe those set of properties that make you a person. And the five traits are considerably inadequate for doing that. They leave out a lot of what gets left out and put aside into this other not explored as well notion of your character, which is all of your virtues. And then we also have yourself, which Greg and Chris and I explored. And all of those go into… And so I now use a different word. I use the word personhood when we’re talking about what makes you a person. Greg wants to try and capture personality back for describing all of that. I don’t know if he’s going to succeed, but I think his point nevertheless is very well taken. And Zach Stein makes a similar point in his pedagogy. I think what I would like you to do, Gary, before we go into Colin’s work is maybe give a quick description explanation of each one of the five traits. What do they look like in people? Excellent. Okay. So an easy way to remember this is through the following words, either canoe or ocean. And each of these stand for the big five traits. So I like canoe because the way it sort of groups together, it neatly falls into the two meta traits. Oh, yeah. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism. Those go under meta trait stability and openness and extraversion under meta trait. Plasticity. Plasticity. There we go. Thank you. So conscientiousness, which is one of the traits. Essentially, according to Collins and I forget who else. Quilty and Peterson. They did work on. Yep. Jordan Peterson. Yep. Their model breaks each of the five traits down into two aspects. So we could sort of talk about the traits in terms of the aspects, which can give us a finer grain sort of understanding of what the traits are describing and what they’re about. So conscientiousness breaks down into two aspects, industriousness and orderliness. Trade industriousness, essentially, and I don’t have definitive descriptions of these things because I’m still trying to understand them, and especially from a phenomenological point of view. But it’s something like this. People who are high in conscientiousness, they tend to be very orderly and they rule abiding and they like to keep things in their place. Right. And they’re also hard working. That’s what the industriousness aspect sort of right. Capable of pursuing long term goals. That was part of my understanding of industriousness. So where you would not describe them as impulsive. They instead they like to pursue more long term goals. I want to just say something about this and this goes to work done by Jordan and Colin and others. If you control for general intelligence and for conscientiousness, you can explain away a lot of the constructs that other people are trying to invent like grit and the various kinds of intelligence and things like this. So once we take these two, so you’ll hear a lot of proposals in the popular media about different learning styles and multiple kinds of intelligence and emotional intelligence and grit and willpower. And the thing is very often when if you control for general intelligence and one of these personality factors, very often it’s conscientiousness, you can explain all the data without having to invoke any of these new constructs, which is why well reason why myself and other people like Jordan are very suspicious of these other constructs because they do not carry any independent explanatory value. And therefore, that means they fail as the inference to the best explanation. They are not the best explanation because they add no explanatory power. Now what that says going the other way is that these personality variables, they really matter. They really explain a lot. So keep going please, Gary. Excellent. That’s excellent because if you think about what you just said, the idea of being able to pursue long-term goals despite short-term distractions, let’s say, then that sort of reflects one of the defining features of what it means to be human, which is our capacity to make the future present. Yes. Act out things in service of bringing about a particular kind of future in the present. And so we’re structuring. So essentially our lives are taking place not on the time scale of minutes or days, but on the time scale of years and decades. Yes. No other animal is capable of doing that. Right. So at least not as far as we know. Yeah, there’s no good evidence for it. To go back to Greg’s point, one of the things that’s not covered by the big five, but it seems central to us being persons. And if we mean by a person, a temporally extended moral agent is the role of narrative and all the work that’s going on in psychology, but how much narrative contributes to our personhood and therefore our personality. And so to give it a mythological framing, the stories that we choose to identify with have a huge impact on our personhood. Now they’re influenced by our personality, but narrative and the stories that we are given to us by our culture and that we take up also have a huge impact on our personhood. So there’s a cool claim that we can draw on that basis that says that individual differences in personality are going to be predictive of the kinds of stories people identify with, but the different ways in which it becomes possible to act out the same types of stories. Yes. And I was doing that as a potential bridge later to when we talk about how this comes into therapy, but we’ve interrupted the progression. So after conscientiousness, agreeableness. So how would you talk about agreeableness and its aspects? Okay. So whereas conscientiousness is something like about the prioritization of goals across different timescales with trade agreeableness, it’s about the prioritization of one’s own goals versus others goals. And the two aspects here are politeness, which Colin conceptualizes as a kind of top-down regulation or down regulation of aggressive impulses. You’re suppressing them to some degree. Yeah. You’re suppressing anything that could disrupt the social harmony between you and others in relationships. And the second aspect, compassion, which is about the bottom-up sort of spontaneous flow of things like attachment and empathy and whatnot, which act as the cohesion. Right. So when we talk about this, everybody note that we have to use one of the two terms and we tend to use the unmarked term. So when we talk about agreeableness, it doesn’t mean everybody’s agreeable. It means people vary on this. So people low in agreeableness would tend to prioritize their own goals over others. They would be low in compassion, et cetera. And you might say, well, that just makes them a horrible, horrible human being. You have to be careful. And this is part of what we’re going to talk about because these are adaptive. Typically, leaders are fairly low in agreeableness because a leader often has to get other people to adopt their goal structure. And when they can do it, that makes them good leaders. So you have to be careful. Now, obviously, they can’t be sort of dullards and have no charisma, and charisma isn’t the same thing as agreeableness, by the way. But I just want to be clear that although we’re using these positive terms, consciousness and agreeableness, people vary on them. And it’s really important, other than perhaps with neuroticism, not to think of one pole as inherently good and the other as inherently bad. OK, so that’s conscientious. Gary, I hope you don’t mind me interjecting to try to bridge to that. OK, so we’ve got consciousness, agreeableness. Now we’re into neuroticism. Great. OK, so and one other quick comment before we move on about your point. This is very important because a lot of the sort of folk hermeneutic way of interpreting online personality test results is I want to score high on, let’s say, extroversion or openness. And if I don’t, then that’s bad. The important thing, actually, is precisely to realize that each of these traits, whether you score high or low, it’s not necessarily maladaptive. But there’s going to be different contexts in which, depending on how you measure on the spectrum, on the bell curve, your measures are going to be predictive of the kinds of contexts that you’re going to be most adapted and adaptive in, adapted to and adaptive in. And in the assessment context, when we’re doing personality assessment in psychotherapy, what we try to look for is precisely those mismatches that people are experiencing between the types of contextual demands that they’re facing and how their traits have predisposed them to be. And when there’s a mismatch, when there’s a breakdown, that’s when we typically experience psychological dysfunction. And an example of this would be someone who’s very high on extroversion, who has a strong need for socialization and social interaction, things like that, at the time of a pandemic, for example, they have to be alone. And so you’re going to wind up with something like a lonely extrovert. And that’s extroversion making someone maladaptive. So that directly refutes the intuition that we might have that it’s good to be extroverted. So the same logic applies to each of the traits. Traits are situated and they’re world involving. They’re always adaptive in relation to context. And we have to keep that in mind when we’re making sense of what our traits are doing for us. So is that okay? That’s excellent. Thank you. That was great explication. Yeah. Please move on to neuroticism. Okay. So trait neuroticism. Now, this is really cool work that Colin has done on psychological entropy. And essentially looking at the psyche from a sort of cybernetic point of view as an open physical system that’s contending with entropy, right? Whose organizing principle is to stave off chaos and to keep it at bay and to maintain its structural functional organization. So there’s a kind of autopoiesis going on. Trait neuroticism is essentially the set of constraints on your personality that predicts how much uncertainty you can tolerate until your defensive systems are triggered. Right. Right. So how chaotic can an environment that you’re in get before you start feeling anxious or angry or irritable or depressed or depressed? Exactly. Yeah. Were you wanting to add something? I just wanted to note that so very often Gary’s explanation is better and it’s deeper. And so I’m not trying to preclude it. I’m trying to say very often you might come across people describing neuroticism as a tendency to negative affect like anxiety, depression, anger, things like that. But again, that’s descriptive. And with Colin’s work, you see Colin is actually trying to give an explanation for the negative affect in terms of this tendency in how one responds to how uncertain or chaotic one’s environment is. Yes. No, that’s great. Because what they end up finding in the literature is that measures of trait neuroticism are positively associated with all sorts of different forms of psychological disorder. Yeah. That’s what I said about neuroticism is one of the ones that might not where it might just be bad to be highly neurotic. Yes. And I don’t know exactly how to make full sense of it. But if I were to make a counter argument, it would probably be that these findings, they presuppose the different categories of the DSM, which themselves aren’t explanatory. Yes. That’s a good point. They’re descriptive and they really what… But the point is that the DSM is in a pathological framework, not a positive psychology. And that might be biasing neuroticism to a more pathological interpretation. That’s what I’m hearing you saying. And I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s a good… That’s actually only a part of what I’m thinking actually, because I find that even our understanding of psychological disorder, right, it’s rife with all sorts of presuppositions that we might not necessarily want to commit to. Like think of Viktor Frankl, for example. He wasn’t a positive psychologist. He was an existential humanistic psychologist. And his whole thing was that it’s possible to suffer meaningfully. And so it’s taking that way of thinking about it, right? Each of the disorders, each of the disorder categories in the DSM, if we don’t take it pathologically, you can think… You’re doing a cooker guardian spin on neuroticism. That we might… Tillich says we need to distinguish between pathological and existential anxiety. And some anxiety might be reflective of the confrontation with a kind of fundamental uncertainty, like our mortality, that we need to confront and wrestle with rather than avoiding. And that can wake us up to a spiritual journey. That’s a very good point. Is that a fair sort of take on what you’re saying? I think so, yeah. So, I mean, when patients in the clinic sort of… When we do the big five and we see a high measure in neuroticism, I ask them, how do you identify with the score? Where do you see it in your life? And then we end up talking about all the worry they have when they’re, let’s say, in a social interaction and they can’t help but keep going back to, right? Am I being perceived as incompetent or am I… All these self-critical thoughts come up, which then harken back to ways that they’ve learned to relate to others in their earlier relationships, possibly. And that sort of takes us back to attachment theory. And then with attachment theory, what you’re basically contending with is very, very fundamental motifs of security and exploration. And so then bringing that back into the present, you start to think, wow, this person’s literally doing the best they can to contend with whatever it is that they’re dealing with. And so their psychological suffering isn’t… It’s not that it’s not a problem, but it’s more primarily a form of problem solving that’s taking place. And that’s what introduces the meaning back into the equation. And so the categories themselves from the DSM become secondary in importance at best, to our efforts at trying to understand the dynamics inherent in the traits. That’s good. Okay. So you’ve made it, I think you’ve made a good case that we shouldn’t even polarize even neuroticism. So keep going. So these three traits, they’re subsumed by meta-trait stability, which essentially… Okay, maybe we can get to the two meta-traits after actually. Yeah, yeah. Finish canoe. Finish canoe first. And then we have traits openness and extroversion. Trade openness is essentially the way we talk about it in our paper. It refers to cognitive flexibility or something like that. So people who score high in trade openness, they tend to really like exploring new ideas. They tend to be intellectual and they also like aesthetic experiences and they’re very imaginative. So people who land positions in academia, for example, or become artists or hover the space in between, they’re likely to be high in trade openness. And that predisposes them to thinking about things in non-conventional and outside of the box ways. And people who are low in trade openness, they tend to be more concrete and conventional in their thinking and imagination. And you can see how being high or low on this trade can be adaptive in different ways. Yeah, very much. You don’t want to be working a job that requires the repetition of the same technical knowledge. Let’s say you’re working in a grocery store and you’re at the cashier. You don’t want someone who’s like hyper high in trade openness and come up with all sorts of new techniques to scan the barcodes, for example. You just want someone who can just do the same thing over and over again. Versus you can’t be an Einstein in your field if you don’t think outside of the box about serious intellectual issues or whatnot. So the last trade is trade extroversion, which essentially, contra trade neuroticism, they talk about trade extroversion as our predisposition to positive affect, things like excitement and enthusiasm and the way we present ourselves as gregarious, for example, that’s charismatic. I believe charisma sort of fell under. And people who are high in trade extroversion, so the functional explanation here is that trade extroversion essentially predicts our sensitivity to the incentive reward value in uncertainty. So maybe the broader framework in which to understand this is, again, the framework of psychological entropy. Whenever you’re confronted with a situation that’s high in uncertainty, there’s two possibilities. Either it’s dangerous because you’re in the unknown right now and it’s in the unknown that all the threats and dangers actually reside, the things that can harm you, or there’s the possibility for even greater reward. There’s the promise for even greater reward. Because when you’re in the unknown, you might encounter something that you haven’t before that’s just great. And there’s evolutionary reasons for why uncertainty has this sort of bivalent nature, which we don’t need to get into. But the idea is that trade neuroticism is our adaptation to the inherent threatening value of uncertainty, because we need to be sensitive to that when we’re confronting the unknown. And extroversion is our adaptation to the inherently rewarding value of uncertainty, the incentive value. And so people who are high on trade extroversion, they tend to be very opportunistic. You put them in a social situation like a party where they don’t know anyone, and that excites them, that interests them. They want to go and start conversations. They want to explore these social spaces. People who are low on trade extroversion, they tend to be a little more apathetic toward these sorts of possibilities. And you could also imagine how being low on trade extroversion, it’s not necessarily maladaptive. Because when you’re in a situation that’s likely more threatening than promising, then if you’re low on extroversion, then you’re likely not to go out and explore and get yourself into trouble. So there’s pros and cons to each again. So those are the big five. How’s that sound? That was excellent. Excellent. And we were already indicating along the way criticisms of big five and also starting to bridge between big five, which is purely descriptive. And we were already with Colin, we were already starting to bring in Colin’s work and starting to go from, well, this is a way we can describe people accurately universally, but what’s the explanation for why these keep showing up? And so let’s move properly now right into that, into Colin DeYoung’s work on this, the work he did with Jordan and others, and the idea, two aspects of that, the shift to the cybernetic model, what that means and why that’s explanatory, and then the meta traits. Excellent. Okay. So I would like to, if we could talk about the cybernetic framing of it together, actually, because I spoke with Colin and it seems that I don’t understand cybernetics as well as I should, so I’m a little hesitant to spread those grounds. Do you want to get us started with that bit? Well, I mean, part of what’s happening and part of what the email that Colin sent to me is, you know, that cybernetics has been an evolving field and it’s very different from where it was. For example, when I was introduced to cybernetics in the 80s, a book entitled Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind, and the basic idea of cybernetics was the first attempt, and I mean, in the seminal sense, attempt to understand self-organization in terms of ideas of feedback loops. This was one of the core ideas in cybernetics, and that’s why it’s been around so long that it’s become part of our language. So when you had sort of linear models of causation, A causes B, B causes C, C causes D. It’s like the billiard ball model of causation one, right, but in cybernetics, A causes B, B causes C, but then C has a causal impact on A, and so the system, right, circles on itself. It feeds back onto itself, and that feedback pattern makes this, gives the system a capacity to adjust its own behavior. In fact, it’s one of the things that starts to turn it just from a sequence of events into a system, is the presence of feedback. So cybernetics was a very strong attempt to, I mean, it’s remained. It hasn’t been sort of overturned in terms of some fundamental ways in which we try to understand self-organization. There have been moves to try to integrate cybernetics with communication theory and the idea of signals being sent to a system. So one of the things a cybernetic system that’s doing this feedback loop can do is it can take in signals from the environment and adjust not only to causal interactions with the environment, but to predictions about the environment in terms of signals. And so one of the things your feedback, you can have, say, here’s a huge feedback loop, and then it has sort of an epicycle, trying to represent the spatially gets complex feedback loop. And what that little feedback loop does is it’s a system that tries to track signals that are predictive of the environment, and then it acts as part of the feedback of the overall system. And so you can get nestings of loops, and you can also get, you can think of it not just being causally bound to the environment, but also having a predictive relationship to the environment. So you could incorporate more current work around things like predictive processing. For those of you who’ve seen the videos I’ve done with Brett Anderson and with Mark Miller. And so my understanding is that the line between cybernetics and dynamical systems, complex systems theory is very blurred, and trying to separate them cleanly is no longer a wise thing to do. Okay, that’s very helpful. So I’m glad I asked you to do that, because my understanding of cybernetics as we were reading Colin’s paper, actually, and trying to build on it, it sort of cast it under a cognitive as like computational functionalist framework. And that’s not what this seems to be. Well, to be fair to you, I mean, Colin is right to point out that there are people within the camp that are moving to a non representational, non computational view. However, the same can be said of predictive processing, like, like the work that Mark Miller does, there are, there are people in predictive processing that go the 4E way of doing it. But there are nevertheless many people within predictive processing, Howie is an example, who are strong representationalists, strong computationalists. I think it’s fair to say that the predominant model for the in the history of cybernetics has been computational. For the reason that the two, the computational account and the cybernetic account came online at the same time. And it meant that they get, they got taken into psychology together, historically. So while our target might not have been Colin, I do not think our target had no reference. I think there’s a huge reference of people we were addressing. Okay. Okay, cool. So that both legitimizes our approach that we took in our paper and also adds a subtlety there that, you know, if we’re going to be charitable to Colin’s approach, which presumably we are, then it’s best not to assume that it’s strictly a computational sort of- Well, even with respect to Colin, what we can say, yeah, we shouldn’t assume it, but we could presume it because he did not do anything in his paper to explicate the connections to 4E cognitive science. So it’s still legitimate that we undertook that task. If we attributed to him that he wasn’t committed that way, that was a mistake, but the presumption was an innocent enough presumption on our part, I think. Okay. Okay, cool. Okay. So sort of bringing this back to the question of the function of the traits, given the way you put it, we could say that what Colin did was he said that now that we have these five traits, each of the traits is essentially a kind of nested system within the broader system of the personality, which is doing adaptive self-organization with respect to a particular class of signals. Yes. Right. Well said. Well said. So you’ve got, and I won’t repeat this because that’s what we were talking about this entire time, but extroversion, it’s self-organization as attuned to the incentive reward value of uncertainty, let’s say, the broader system as it’s attuned to the threatening value of uncertainty, etc, etc. And so you’ve got a cybernetic system, right, which is the human personality from Colin’s point of view that consists of these five subsystems, each one breaking down in the two aspects, which are doing self-organization in a sort of holistic, right, global manner with respect to, and this is my language here, or phenomenological language, with respect to the life world context of the person. Yes. What people might, making connection to some of the language in this corner of the internet, the agent arena relationship, the patterns of co-identification between agency and arena, that’s what we’re talking about here. Nice. Okay. So what did our paper add to? Well, you didn’t do the, you did the cybernetics, you want to do the two meta traits, which you’ve already invoked a few times, but see, take the five, let’s do the two-way mapping. Let’s take the five and map them up into meta traits, then we can do the integration with RR, and then we can show how the RR mapping also goes down into the aspects within the big five. Okay, cool. So, oh, I love this. Okay. So part of what’s implicit, or actually, it’s actually explicit in our paper, is that any, so if we were to use Colin’s language, it would be that any cybernetic system that’s like in a viable relationship with the world has to have the capacity to adapt to a continuum of environmental conditions, vary from highly static to highly dynamic or entropic, we might say. Yes. And so there’s a continual, the environment is dynamically textured in terms of variance and invariance. Nice. Okay. Our way of sort of phrasing that from the inactivist point of view would be that all adaptive autopoetic systems have to have some set of capacities that allow them to cope with and adapt to this continuum of environmental conditions. Yes. So on the one hand, if you’re in an environment that’s relatively static over time, then you don’t need to be doing anything different than what you already are in order to stay adapted to it. So the idea here is that meta-trade stability is sort of the part of you, right, if we think of it in those terms, that accounts for you staying as you are across time. Yes. Yes. Whatever you means in that case, I guess it means your goals, your ideas, your feelings, your patterns, everything, right? That’s going to pick up on a fair, like as you said, that would be adaptive in an environment that’s stable to a significant degree. Yes. Yep. And so what happens when you’re in an environment that’s in relative flux all the time, that there’s a lot of chaos to contend with, you can’t afford to just be stable yourself. You have to be capable of, right, evolving your fit to the environment. That’s what meta-trade plasticity is meant to account for, the evolvability of your relationship to the environment itself. Yes. Yes. Yes. So then you can think about, right, under meta-trade stability, right, you’ve got the traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which by the way, if you inverse it, then it becomes emotional stability. Right. Right. Right. So people who are low on trade neuroticism, they tend to be relatively unperturbed by spontaneous changes in the environment and they’re able to maintain their manner of fit. They’re cool. So you’ve got, yeah, you’ve got these three traits that if you’re, they’re essentially what accounts for what makes you stay stable across time. Right. And you’ve got the two other traits, extroversion and openness, which would account for how, right, evolvable your relationship to either the social landscape or the landscape of ideas and thoughts and imagination. And also the physical landscape and also the physical. Yep. Yep. And so that’s the plasticity where plasticity means the capacity for a system to evolve, its adaptive fit to the environment. Now either one of these in extreme are going to misrepresent the environment. The stability, right, the stability trait is going to over represent or over rely upon the features of the environment that are not changing. And it’s going to lose, it’s not going to properly track the way that the environment is changing. And the plasticity traits are going to pick up on how the environment is changing all three kinds of environment, but they’re not going to track very well the invariant. And this is why, by the way, you tend to find people that are high in openness or sometimes described as flaky because, and what do we mean by flaky? Well, they’re not stable. They’re constantly going hither and yon and they just, right. And it’s because what you’re pointing to is, but there’s important features of the environment that are unchanging and the person high in openness is not picking up on them. So notice one of the classic problems for the academic. The academic is attracted to the academy because of high and openness, but when they get in the academy, they find this huge bureaucracy that is really resistant to change. And so they get, they, and you get all the stories of the absent minded professor and all of that, because the people that are high in openness, they’re there because they’re generating research, but they don’t really fit in very well because this, there’s this, the university is actually a very slowly changing environment. Sometimes too slow, but that’s my prejudice as an academic. So just to give you an idea about this. So we’ve got the meta-trait of stability, tracking invariants. We’ve got the meta-trait of plasticity, tracking variance, and the environment does, the environment is always a mixture of those. And the mixture itself is constantly shifting around at varying degrees of rates of change. I love that. I never thought of it in terms of how each of the meta-traits is tracking variance versus invariance. I think that’s really cool. We should talk about that more. Actually, because that’s the main idea of the relevance realization theory, that what you’re doing in relevance realization is you’re playing off between tracking what’s invariant across contexts of time and space versus tracking what’s variant and therefore evolving new forms of fittedness to meet that novelty. That’s amazing. Maybe we should then, do you think we’re ready to link this with relevance realization then? I think we just, we just began it. So you go first, but. Okay, so because you’ve already done all the technical conceptual work, maybe we could just talk about it in terms of a conceptual metaphor here that we use in our paper, right? Merleau-Ponty’s notion of optimal gripping. Excellent. I think that is the place to go. Exactly. Let me make one potential bridge. Notice how throughout a lot of the description of the big five, we were talking about what a person will prioritize. And you can think about that in terms of two things, both within the current cutting edge language of attention, what you pay attention to. You even have theories that what attention is, is prioritization. And so that’s the active part of attention prioritization. And then the receptive part is salience, how things stand out to you. Salience is a demand on you to prioritize something. You can resist the demand, but you can also make something salient by deliberately prioritizing it. I can focus on this and it becomes salient, right? And so notice how this has to do with your, what you’re paying attention to, your salience landscaping and all how, in a lot of other videos, you’ve heard me talking to people, how that translates into this ongoing optimal gripping of the world. Amazing. Okay. So there’s this, okay, my mind’s going maybe because of my high openness, it’s going in like 13 different directions. There’s that saying, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but the, what was it? The fox that chases both rabbits at once catches neither one. So I better prioritize one rabbit. I think that’s a good way. So what you can do is you can take the, the system is trying to resist entropy and it has these two meta strategies, right? Of stability and plasticity. And then you’ve mapped them into the big five and then show how, and they’re in a trade-off relationship. That was the argument we’ve just, you don’t want to, you don’t want to, they don’t want to lock in because the environment’s doing this. Right. So I guess the basic assumption of what we were saying was that whenever adaptive self organization is taking place, it’s always taking place in terms of a kind of, as a kind of optimization process of a trade-off relationship between two competing, but complimentary problem-solving strategies. Opponent processing. Yeah. And so it’s kind of like this, the metaphor we used was that of reading a book, right? If I pick up a book and if I hold it too close to my eyes, I won’t be able to read the text. It’ll be blurry. But if I keep it too far from my eyes, again, I won’t be able to read the text. Instead I’m supposed to optimize the distance between my eyes and the book so that it’s not too close or too far. Let me just interject because our temptation there is to be Canadian and think, well, then there’s, I find the median place and that’s where I always stay. No, because it depends on your task. You might think there’s a misprint in the book and you want to zero in on one of the letters. And so you’re going to bring it closer. You might think, wait, but this page is, the printing on this page is askew and you’ll pull it back and go, yeah, it’s slightly tilted. Nice. Okay. So it’s not just the average. Optimization isn’t just the average of competing. Yep. Yep. It’s supposed to be contextually fitted and sensitive. That’s what you’re saying. So it’s a dynamically self-organizing process that’s trying to achieve a kind of optimal fit between yourself and your worldly conditions. Yep. And one of the cool ideas here is that, the basic metaphor for cognition, it shifts from cognition being just in the head, the skull-bound process to cognition being a matter of embodied skillful contact with the world. And that’s the inactivism, by the way, that you’re enacting your cognition. Keep going, Gary. And essentially what we’re saying here is that at the highest level of personality, the kind of optimal gripping that’s happening is between the competing demands of meditrade stability, which are to track what’s invariant in the environment to maintain a stable fit on some level of analysis and meditrade plasticity, which is tracking variance and trying to maintain a tight fit or coupling with evolving worldly conditions. And that is the guts of relevance realization that it’s constantly shifting between these, like a virtual engine between a selective constraint and enabling constraints. And it’s constantly evolving how you’re paying attention, what you’re finding salient, what is calling to you. Yes. And if I’m recalling correctly, the argument we made was that any dynamically situated system that’s doing optimal gripping between efficiency and resiliency, between stability and plasticity is, what was it, John? I remember, let me actually pull up the paper because we’re going to quote ourselves and it was written well at this point. I don’t want to, okay, here it is, here it is. So our argument is that optimal gripping entails relevance realization since optimization, which is a necessary condition for the optimal grip, technically requires and emerges from trade-off relationships, which are the basic building blocks of relevance realization. As we see it, only a system that’s doing opponent processing between efficiency and resiliency, between stability and plasticity, can be said to be optimally gripping in the technical sense and thereby realizing relevance. Any dynamically situated cognitive system that is doing relevance realization, in other words, is constitutively aimed at achieving an optimal grip over its role. And that’s what personality is doing, which is what our argument was. At the highest level of analysis between the meta-traits and between the trade groupings, right, of conscientious agreeableness, neuroticism, and then openness, extroversion, and within each of the aspects under each of the traits too. In a way, what we’re saying is your personality, not in the way Greg talks about it, which we should talk about, but in this particular way, your set of traits is kind of the deepest parameters on your virtual engineering of your relevance realization. And so, you know, why did I find this relevant? You’ll do all the contextual stuff, but one of the things that’s putting, you know, parametric constraints on that process is your personality. But we have an additional move we make. We say that while that, right, and that will skew you in your relevance realization, and that will perhaps be adaptive or maladaptive to your world, and you’ll have to compensate with your character. Part of wisdom is to cultivate a character that compensates. You get another virtual engine that compensates for the deficits of your personality, of your traits. So you want your virtues to complement your traits in an important way. So there’s that. But, and this is another thing that Gary and I said, but you have to think about, and this is another E from 4E Cognitive Science, Extended Mind. Personality, it’s not only helping sort of give you the largest constraints for your individual cognition. What it means is that, right, you get different distributions of these trade-off relationships in distributed cognition. And so what happens is you have, people are paying attention in different ways and prioritizing in different ways that at a larger scale enable distributed cognition to be adaptive to its environment. That’s excellent. I think that was one of the really cool insights of our paper. Yeah. That if you have, if individual differences sort of correspond, if you think of like your personality as a kind of special purpose machine, yeah, then if you had no individual differences within a population, then the group as a whole would be a special purpose machine. And so it would be brittle, right? It wouldn’t be able to cope with, again, the varying environmental conditions. Yeah. But if you have individual differences within a group, then you could turn the group not into a jack of all trades, but a master of all trades. Yes. Different special purpose machines, different personnel, different people with different personalities. And which ones are getting prioritized in your culture would shift around. Now, the problem we have, and this is part of our political problem is that people to get prioritized at one time do things to try and maintain their priority, even though having them in charge might no longer be adaptive. And so we tried to create self correcting systems, science and democracy so that the elites would shift around. But what we’re hitting right now, I do not think the main differences between left and right, other people, even leftists like Peter Reich are saying the main differences between authoritarian and non-authoritarian. That’s the main political, because what we’re really struggling with is we need to get new kinds of elites in here. That’s what people in general are all converging on from left and right. But we’re unclear about what that should look like and how we should pursue it. I won’t get into the politics, but I’m just trying to show that personality, and then you take it into distributed cognition, and you can see the distributed cognitive machinery wrestling with changes in its environment in a way that are very similar to how you can see a personality wrestling with its environment. Amazing. So there’s a continuity there between relevance realization at the level of cognition, and relevance realization at the level of personality, and relevance realization at the level of society and culture. Exactly. And so part of what we want is we want the wisdom at each one of those levels to be properly coordinated. How am I getting the phrenesis of my interaction with the environment? And then how am I getting the Sophia so I develop a character that counterbalances my trait? And then how are you and I doing dialectic so that we get the collective wisdom for our culture as a whole behaving wisely? And one of the things I love about the platonic tradition, the neo-platonic tradition, was the explicit discussion about trying to integrate these levels together in an appropriate manner. Interesting. So it’s like a scale invariant optimal gripping process, right? Exactly. And like all optimal gripping, it is reliably adaptive. It does not give you certainty. It does not guarantee anything. In fact, part of it, it’s raised on detre, is that no such certainty or completion or finality is actually possible. Okay, so uncertainty is irreducible. I just read it. I can’t remember the name of the author, and it pains me right now because I’m reading it with work I’m doing with Anna Rydell on rationality and trying to move into what’s called an ecological, integrate the ecological model and the bounded model of rationality using relevance realization theory. But I read a beautiful paper, like I want everybody to read it on uncertainty, and that most models of rationality do not actually respond to uncertainty. And everybody out there is going, yes, we do. And the point that the author makes is no, you don’t, because what you do is you transform uncertainty and risk, and risk is when you can assign a probability to a certain outcome. But genuine uncertainty is when you cannot do that, when you cannot assign the probability. And you say, when does that happen? And for those of you who’ve watched some of my other videos, when you go through a transformative experience and you don’t know what your new perspectival knowing is going to be like, you don’t know what your new participatory knowledge, agent arena relationship is going to be like, there’s all kinds of things. And that’s at the guts of development. And if everything we’ve been saying should point you to is you’re inherently developmental, that you can never get rid of that problem ever. And that takes us into Gary’s important work. As you can tell, he’s a great theorist, and we do great theory together. But he’s also a therapist, and he’s training to be it. And therapy is very much making use of all of this machinery in which people often are confronting two things that are not necessarily separable, the way in which they’re maladaptive and a way in which they’ve encountered a kind of fundamental uncertainty that they can’t properly process. So Gary, how would you use the work we’re doing and take that into therapy? And then, you know, and because this is your bailiwick, this is going to get into the phenomenological and existential dimensions of therapy. And then they start to very properly and prominently touch on what people often call their spiritual life. Right. Okay, so I’ve got two sorts of responses to that question. One of them, the second one is quite speculative so far, because I just started thinking about it, which is about the relationship between relevance realization and attachment theory and attachment formation. Yeah. So that’s the more speculative side. I’ll start with the more concrete side. Yes. So one of the things that we study here at Duquesne is what’s called the collaborative approach to assessment. And so what’s the collaborative approach? Well, in contrast with the standard approach to assessment, which we can call the information gathering approach, right, which basically gets people to answer questionnaires, and then it calculates scores at the end, and then it says, Okay, well, it seems like based on how you’ve answered, this is how you are, right, and you’re in a unidirectional sort of flow fashion, just telling someone what their personality is like, let’s say. With the collaborative approach, what you’re saying is, what’s primary isn’t the data gleaned from the instruments, but the life world data that the person themselves brings in. And what you’re supposed to do is use the instrument data as a way of exploring the life world dynamic. Right. So its value is not final, its value is instrumental. Yes, yes, exactly. So that you can elucidate, right, the underlying dynamics of the person’s suffering that has brought them into the clinic room to begin with. Right. And if you do that, the hypothesis goes, then it becomes possible to engage with the person suffering more directly, and more effectively and therapeutically. And the assessment process itself ends up being therapeutic, because the person is, you know, reflectively and in a novel way, engaging with their own experience, and doing that in the presence of another who actually seems to be listening and giving them the space to do that. So what I’ve been trying to think about and develop is a way of applying the Big Five actually, in a collaborative fashion. And what that I think ends up looking like is you sort of get a sense of what the person’s general themes are. Yes. And then you use their Big Five measures to see if there’s a way to thematize or to conceptualize their themes in terms of breakdowns happening along the five major dimensions of the Big Five. So for example, you can imagine how someone who’s and I’m speaking kind of from clinical experience, like that, someone who’s very high on trade conscientiousness, on trade openness and trade neuroticism, right? And very low on trade extroversion, let’s say, they’re going to be, when confronted with uncertainty, their imagination is going to take over and they’re going to right produce a plethora of possibilities because of their high openness. Yeah. And their high neuroticism is going to tilt their attention toward the negative possibilities, right? Right, right, right. And their conscientiousness is going to bring them in. I got to do something about this. I got to get a plan going. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So essentially, and their low extroversion would write its high neuroticism, low extroversion. So they’re really biased towards the threatening value of uncertainty. And they’re also because they’re low in extroversion. They’re not going to be predisposed to reaching out to other people. Yes. Yes. Yes. So you can imagine how, you know, someone who comes to you into the clinic and says that I have been having anxiety and panic attacks. I recently graduated from, let’s say, university and I’m looking for a job. I haven’t found anything, right? You can imagine how they’re going through a transformation in their life that’s bringing along a whole bunch of uncertainty, that the way they’re contending with that uncertainty is reflected in their measures, that they’re seeing it as very negative, as very threatening, and it’s very overwhelming. And they’re trying to contain it all, right, desperately. And when they’re failing to do that, that could really manifest itself in the form of anxiety and panic attacks. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. That would maybe even match into some of the work that Leo and I have done on parasitic processing, where the adaptive self-organizations, just like the way you said, you’ve got these constraints, these parametric constraints, like acting as your virtual engine, and then put into this environmental context, it sets up the self-organization is actually organizing all this parasitic processing, right? Self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior starts to kick in in a very powerful way. Yes, because when that very same person ends up being in an environment that’s relatively well-structured and well-defined, they’re actually on top of their work. They’re able to find problems before they’ve even happened and prevent them and manage uncertainty on the go. And they tend to be very good organizational individuals, let’s say. Again, you see this world involving nature of personality, right? This contextual dependence of personality traits showing up in a context like that. And so- This is a clear example, instantiation, in fact, of what I talk about when I talk about participatory knowing, right? The way in which your self-organization and the world’s self-organization call out or fail to call out a network of affordances for you. So people go into the therapeutic situation because they’re starting to suffer affordance famine, right? That’s what they often mean when they say they’re stuck. There’s no affordances for them, right? So the agent arena relationship, the co-identification process has fundamentally broken down. Okay, so I want to- If it’s okay with you, so I guess we’re at a crossroads here. Either we can talk about the attachment theory stuff from a theoretical perspective or extend this and link it to the notion of inaction itself, practically. Oh, boy, that’s good. I think let’s do the attachment thing because I want to put attachments in the title to this video. So let’s do a little bit more about attachment. Okay, cool. So this is kind of speculative and I sent you the draft to the paper recently. So you know where I’m going with this, but essentially the work that we’ve done with inactivists big five theory, we’re trying to show how attachment theory could benefit from the same sort of synthetic work between inactive cognitive science and the empirical human sciences as personality theory did. And also integrate personality and attachment theory together thereby. Yes, yes, exactly. So it’s several birds with one stone, with one heavily theoretical stone. Okay, so you’ve got from the personality theory side, the two meta traits of stability and plasticity. Our claim is that stability, it promotes patterns of enactment that are organized around security. Yes, yes, literally. Like it’s the securing part of the optimal gripping, but you also optimal gripping is also the opening of the hand to the world. Like you need both for optimal gripping. You have to open the hand, that’s the exploration, but you also have to grip. You have to secure the thing that you’re trying to grip on and you’ve got to be able to move between them. So you’ve got security and exploration. This is amazing. How about we use this metaphor then you’ve got two hands. One of them is primarily disposed to latching onto things to tether you to the world, to keep you grounded. Whereas the other is there touching and grasping and trying to find. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. This hand, if you latch onto something important, don’t let it go unless you absolutely have to. This hand, every time you reach out, you might get punished, but you might also pick a fruit that’s special. So those are the two meta traits. We can think of them as that. Within attachment. Attachment, you can see all of attachment as trying to give you a virtual engine that regulates your behavior, very broad scale, around getting the best trade-off, given your environmental history between the securing and the exploration. That’s what all of attachment theory is. Here’s the thing you have to remember. I’ve talked about this before, and this goes towards Socratic self-knowledge, where it doesn’t mean your autobiography primarily, but your owner’s manual. Attachment theory is like personality theory, and it’s like G. It’s one of the well-validated, powerful predictive models. If I wanted to know three things about you, this is what I want to know. I want to know your G. Well, actually, I want to know your G, but more importantly, ultimately your R, your rationality, not just your intelligence. I want to know your personality, and I want to know your attachment style, because your attachment style is going to predict how you’re going to interact in all of your social relations, and where this comes out and causes people’s ignorance of their attachment style leads them into so much suffering and distress within their romantic relationships. Yes. That’s the grand synthesis that we’re working towards, integrating our R, making our R more deeply embodied and inactive by talking about it in terms of the structural functional aspects of personality that EB5T and CB5T have tackled, and also the important developmental aspects of personality that attachment theory is trying to talk about. Right. So the idea in attachment theory is your relationship to your primary caregiver and how they are attuning to their environment, which is dictated by their attachment style and their personality, how that’s going to affect the relationship, the dynamic coupled relationship between, for example, typically the mother and the small child, and attachment theory is the way the child’s, right, the way those two people couple or fail to couple together, and the way that sets the child for how it tries to optimally grip the relationship between security and exploration. Yes, and individual, I guess, to that point, individual differences in attachment styles are really what they’re describing and predicting, are individual differences in the kind of optimal gripping that’s happening between security, right, staying where you are grasping, right, grasping, clinging, right, your secure base, versus reaching out and testing things in the environment and exploring. So the original typology of attachment that Bowlby and Mary Eynsworth proposed made a distinction between secure and insecure attachment styles, and the way they measured this, maybe it’s too much to get into, but I’ll just describe the outcome of it, was that infants who were securely attached to their caregivers, they were the ones who were most likely to go out and explore their environment in the presence of their caregivers. Right, and I just got to stop right there, because this is an important point that people like Sue Johnson and others are making about attachment. We have got this notion in our culture, you know, don’t be dependent, but the attachment paradox says, no, your capacity for secure attachment and dependence is actually what affords you being good at exploring the world. Your notion that, oh, I don’t need anybody, and that’s the stance that empowers me to go out and explore the world, that is cultural bullshit. It is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, that is not backed by all the empirical evidence we have. It is ideological bullshit that is imposed on us. Your capacity to enter into committed dependent relationships with others is exactly what empowers you to explore the world in an adaptive and creative manner. I just needed to say that, because this is an instance of where our culture is harming us in a pervasive manner. I emphatically agree with that, actually, and I would say that thinking about all the best things that I have achieved in my life and all the exploratory endeavors that I have gone out and done, there have always been important support systems in place that have afforded these kinds of exploratory activities, whether it was leaving my home to go to grad school, or I remember, especially in your classes, so you were kind of like an intellectual attachment figure for me very, very early on, because I remember a time when I felt like not a lot of professors and people in general really understood, so I wasn’t as clear or eloquent back then as I am now, so I’ll just semi-confidently, arrogantly put that out, but I remember you would let my papers go beyond the word limit, and you would let me explore freely and playfully, and that really gave me the confidence. It encouraged me to believe in my ideas and in my capacity to… But I didn’t just indulge you, though. I also gave you lots of critical feedback, too. Of course. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. There was that balance, actually. While this hand was grasping onto something that gave me security, this hand was being molded and shaped through supervision by people like you, mentors, and that’s what allowed this hand to become better and better, and more multi-apped to, again, borrow your language and do what it does. And so that’s very important. So, Gary, we have about five more minutes, so let’s try and get… We’re very close here. Gary’s going to have to come back, so I’m making a request, because I want to do a part two. We’ve sort of concentrated on properly the cognitive and psychological here, and we’re right at the place where we can bridge into, we might want to call it, the phenomenological, hermeneutical, spiritual dimensions, and therapy is a good place in which we can make the transition. But what you were basically saying is people’s attachment style develops, again, within a relationship in which they’re trying to get the most appropriate trade-off relationship between… And then that carries forward into their life in powerful ways. And then, I agree with you, this is very speculative, although it’s plausible speculation. We’re building a lot of argument based on a lot of empirical data. The idea is you can see sort of personality and attachment meeting together in terms of the mapping you did, personality doing the stability plasticity, and the stability is mapping onto the security of attachment, and the plasticity is mapping onto the exploration of attachment. And so there’s a possibility of a potential theoretical integration of personality theory and attachment theory. And the psychospiritual side of it actually, we might argue together, might be that there’s a whole region within our own psychic space, our own inner feelings, emotions, memories, and things like that, which we’ve learned it’s not okay to explore, that it’s scary, frightening. In the therapeutic process, what ends up happening is the therapist acts as a kind of surrogate attachment figure that provides the kind of security that’ll afford and encourage the type of exploration that we need to deepen, right? Through self-examination, a person’s understanding of what it is that really moves them, what it is that has been moving them. And by doing that, they’re bringing into consciousness, they’re disclosing into consciousness, styles and patterns of enactment that have had their own autonomy in important ways that have been robbing them of their agency, of their sense of agency. That’s beautifully well put. Do you all see what Gary’s doing? He’s saying that that pattern of exploration in the external world is mirrored by patterns of exploration within the internal world in an autonomous, self-reinforcing fashion that can become very maladaptive for the person. And if you want to change out here, because out here isn’t working, the important thing you have to do is you have to do the same thing in here. And when you’re working with attachment issues, for example, so I’ll be a little bit vulnerable here because of my personal relationship with my parents, my upbringing. I have an anxious attachment style, which means I find it very hard to genuinely trust that other people will love me and things like that. But notice, it’s taken a while to get there with some therapy and doing attachment work and emotion-focused therapy and internal family systems therapy work and right to get because it and the thing is often these inner things are so easy to say, right? But they’re so hard to enact. Part of me deeply believes that I’m unlovable. That’s kind of a core thing within attachment, that there’s a kind of unworthiness for love at the core of an anxious attachment style. And the reason for that is you have inconsistent patterns from your parents. And so you can’t get that sense of that there’s a stability that I can secure onto in love. And so you’re constantly exploring, but because you don’t have the stability, that exploration is actually truncated and you’re only looking for threat. They’re going to leave me. They’re going to leave me. Right. That’s the thing that’s constantly running through the people who suffer from it anxious attachment in their romantic relationships. This person’s going to abandon me. They’re going to leave me. Often tragically, it’s because these people were to some degree either emotionally or even physically abandoned in their youth. So like I can’t just change my romantic relationships. I can’t. I have to go in there and I have to explore that inner space and look at those places that hurt and that are hard and that provoke anxiety and disruption and cause me to rewrite in the positive sense, my understanding of my past, reinterpret is a better way of putting it. That’s hard work. And that’s right. I’m trying to give you a concrete example of the deep point that Gary just made. The deep point you can’t like, and by the way, I also happen to think in therapy is picking up on this. The reverse is the case. Also, I can’t change in here unless I also start changing my relationships out there. I have to do it like this. And that goes with everything we’ve been talking about, everything we’ve been talking about together. Thank you for making something that’s otherwise so abstract and impersonal, concrete and personal. It really helps to embody the spirit and the essence of the kind of theoretical work we’re doing and the kinds of values that it’s meant to ultimately secure and to afford for people in their daily living. And I mean, you actually went where I was wanting to go there too, that this harkens back to Merleau-Ponty and to your notion of transjectivity, which in different shapes and forms has been talked about by same Merleau-Ponty, by Husserl, very much by all the homologists that self and world are mutually inseparable. They’re mutually interpenetrating. And to quote one of my professors here, Will Adams, they’re mutually interpermeating, which sort of changes. And so your attachments are always embodied in the intersubjective space that you’re a part of and that you’re participating in. And the intersubjective space, it connects to your own internalized patterns as well and pulls them out in certain ways too. And I agree that you’re supposed to work on both at once in parallel, in conjunction, in tandem. So I think that is a good place to bring to closure, but notice what we’re prepared for for our next dialogue. We’re prepared for talking about therapy on one hand and what I call dialogos on the other and how they relate to each other and how they relate to that stacking of wisdom we talked about earlier. And as soon as we’re doing that and talking about the stackings of reality and the stacking of wisdom and the therapeutic and the dialogical, we will properly be within the home of the spiritual. And so that’s what Gary and I are going to, all I’m inviting him, and he seems to be agreeing, we’ll take up at our next conversation together. So first of all, Gary, I wanted to thank you so much for coming. Send me some links that I’ll put into the description so how people can get to know you. Maybe put a link into our paper, we’ll do that. And I look forward to our next one. Hopefully we can do it not too far in the future. And so that these two videos will come out relatively close to each other. So thank you very much, my dear friend. Thank you, John. This was really fun for me and I really appreciate all the time that we get to explore in this sort of fashion together. Well, there was genuine dialogos. There was stuff that was coming out here that wasn’t even in our paper. And it just comes out here, which is just wonderful. So thank you so much for that.