https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aNo2fQWEgvQ
Welcome. This is a short video to answer the question that David Svedlo posed to me on the recent Q&A. And fortunately for a technological problem, technology is the god that limps, we were suddenly cast out of the technosphere. And I’d like to now take this opportunity to answer David’s question. David’s question again to remind everyone is participatory knowing seems the hardest lens to pull away and look at rather than through, but this seems essential. Perhaps shamanic practices do this. Thoughts or clarification on this? And I began by saying that I think this is a really important question and also the connection to shamanism is something that we should talk about. I went into the idea of participatory knowing as this mutual shaping between an organism and its environment. And I used Wittgenstein’s famous phrase enigmatic like many things that Wittgenstein says, you know, even if lions could speak, we wouldn’t understand them. And he means, you know, utter syntactically correct sentences, etc. And why is that? Well, here’s the idea. Through what’s called niche constructions, you know, organisms act in their environment and that shapes and changes the environment, which then through natural selection shapes the organism. They mutually shape each other so that they come to be fitted so that affordances are generated between the organism and the environment such that an agent arena relationship is possible. So because of my evolutionary history, I am shaped with this kind of dexterity. And so this becomes, you know, graspable and manipulatable by me in a way that a dog can’t do, for example. So because of that biological niche construction, that biological mutual shaping, lions have a different form of life than us. So that coupling and the set of affordances that it opens up, of course, then skews the salient landscaping of the perspectival knowing and their situational awareness is in a fundamental sense very different from mine. So in that sense, I don’t know what it’s like to be a lion. And that means their that’s so their perspectival knowing is different. And then that means, of course, given that that that shifting or skewing of their situational awareness, the skills they can acquire and the skills they can apply are very different from mine. So their procedural knowing is different. And then if you then were able to talk propositional, you know, speech on top of that, right, I wouldn’t I couldn’t make any sense of it, because it that the sets of propositions would not connect to my procedural knowing, to my perspectival knowing down to my participatory knowing. So even if lions could speak, I wouldn’t understand them. Wittgenstein called this a form of life. Now, the point I want to make is that, of course, we are different than lions in that we don’t just have biological mutual shaping, we have cultural mutual shaping. And that fact, that’s what culture is. Culture is this, you know, organization of distributed cognition and meaning systems and behavior, such that the environment and the and the agent are being mutually shaped to each other. So I’m in a particular culture in Canada, and notice the environment has been shaped around me this way. And I’m shaped in certain ways, both my behavior, the clothing I wear, etc. So culture is also this mutual shaping that creates all kinds of affordances. That’s why you when you go to a culture that is foreign to you, you experience culture shock, not because you don’t have, you know, sort of biological fittedness to the environment, but because that mutual shaping between you and the environment that is done by culture is not available to you. So you can lack that kind of participatory knowing. And then of course, on top of that, you have cognitive mutual shaping, in which, you know, your relevance realization machinery, below the level of your ego awareness is shaping your processing, and it’s aspectualizing the environment so that it fits to you. So things come out to you in the moment, cognitively. So and I, of course, I’m presenting these analytically, and that’s for purposes of understanding. But of course, the biological, the cultural and the cognitive are all right, right, mutually interpenetrating and affording each other. And I’m trying to when I talk about participatory knowing, I’m talking about invoking all of that. And what’s interesting about shamanism is I think shamanism, and this is I think why David brought it up, shamanism is very much an attempt. Sorry, attempt sounds too weak. It’s very much a practice that what it’s doing is it’s of course, because of the and this goes back to a question I answered in the Q&A about mimesis, because the shaman, for example, is right, enacting the deer, the shaman is trying to use his or her altered state of consciousness, which has loosened up their salience landscape so that they can get closer to what it’s like to see thing to the way a deer does, to salience landscape the way a deer does. And then what they’re doing is they’re actually trying to move their body and, you know, and enact, through sort of an inactive transformation, even get down to sort of transforming a bit the biological niche construction, what kind of body, and that’s why you wear the mask and they sort of hunker down and move in certain ways. So what you’re trying to do is the shaman is trying to alter consciousness, trying to alter their biological, their biology in terms of their behavior, and even their sort of morphology. And of course, trying to, you know, pick up on certain skills that the deer might have, and I think what those practices do is they really do give you a sense of participatory knowing insofar as you can move between them. If you’ll allow me world to mean agent arena co-configuration, right, as the shaman moves between the human world and the sacred world of the animals, for example, that capacity to move between them is going to bring to awareness, as David said, the normally transparent lens of our participatory knowing. It’s really interesting that how this comes up. I gave a talk recently at UTIZM about, and I’ve mentioned this before, about the scientists working with the rovers on Mars, and you can see them sort of having to create this nice construction. They anthropomorphize the rover and they sort of technomorphize themselves like Versace talks about. So they’ll talk about the rovers to say, like, I or we need to go there, but they’ll also say, you know, they’ll enact being the rover. They put their hands out like a camera like this, and they move around how I need to turn, right. And so they do this mutual shaping, because they also shape the photos that they’re getting. They draw on them and they alter the salience patterns. So they shape themselves and they sort of aspectualize and identify with the rover and they shape the photos that the rover’s sending back, because they’re trying to create that participatory knowing. So they get a sense of being on Mars, because when they can get that sense of being on Mars, then they can do the best field work on Mars. They can train and apply the best set of skills. So you can see rocket scientists behaving in ways that are kind of like the shamans. They’ll say things like, you know, I was working in my garden and my right hand got stuck, and when I got to the lab, the rover’s right front wheel was stuck, and, you know, I don’t believe in magic, but there’s some kind of connection, you know, and that’s, it sounds very much like they’re exacting that shamanic machinery within us. I think we do have, Matt Rossano argues for this in Supernatural Selection, that we probably, shamanism has probably been around since the Upper Paleolithic transition and was a set of psychotechnological practices that exacted our capacity for altering our state of consciousness, our perspectival and our participatory knowing, as I’ve just described, and that that’s been around long enough, and there might have been something like a Baldwin effect, that those individuals would enhance the group that they belong to surviving, much more likely for those kinds of individuals to be, to reproduce, etc., and that you sort of, we might be genetically disposed towards shamanism. This is one explanation why we seem to have something like the placebo effect, why we seem to be hypnotizable, things like that. So I think what I’m suggesting to you is we have these capacities from our shamanic heritage, if you’ll allow me that turner phrase, that can get exacted even by the scientists who are doing this, having to confront this very new and bizarre way of doing their science. So that shows me that I think there is something, I think David’s question is really sort of powerful on how it points to the way shamanism gives us access to becoming aware, much more aware of our participatory knowing, and yet nevertheless how you can see it spontaneously, or something at least that’s been exacted in an analogous fashion. You can see it in the work of sort of literal cutting edge, literal rocket scientists working with some of our hyper technology on Mars and NASA. So I think that’s a really great question, and I’m glad I got this opportunity to answer it more fully. So thank you David very much for it, and thank you for those who tuned in to my Q&A, we got cut off before I could thank you all. Thank you all so very much, and thank you for watching this video as well. Take care everyone, thank you for your time and attention.