https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rAnLbaFHYWQ
Welcome everyone to Voices with Hraveki. I’m very excited. This is the beginning of a series that I’m going to be doing with Leymann Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey. Many of you know that Leymann already because he and I have had several very powerful discussions. We did a series examining the deep interconnections between metamodernism, spirituality, etc. And so welcome again Leymann. This is my first time to meet in person, such as it is, Brendan. I’ve watched some of Brendan’s work. I was particularly impressed when I posted about it the discussion he had with Daniel Thorsen about the ecology of practices and at the monastic academy at Willow. And so Brendan, I’m very, very happy to welcome you here to this discussion. Perhaps each one of you, perhaps starting with Leymann, could introduce yourself, bit of your bio and sort of what we’re going to be trying to wrestle with here a little bit, just a little brief introduction. Well, Leymann Pascal, author, philosopher, meditation teacher, podcaster in metamodern and integral and game-B related spaces. Always a pleasure to be in John’s company. He has a singularly good mind for how an expanded, updated cognitive science can map and substantiate and chart pathways for domains that are close to my heart and that have often been called philosophy and spirituality. He’s also a notably kind and appreciative and exuberant interlocutor. Thank you. Brendan is somebody whose multimodal approach to writing I very much admire and resonate with. And he’s consistently one of the easiest and most rewarding people to speak with when it comes to the mixture of irony and sincerity and metacognition that’s needed to do a deep dive into metamodern spirituality. So I’m of extremely good cheer to be in this company. I think we’re standing together before a landscape of translations and aesthetics and pluralities and practicalities that would confront anyone if they think about how to scale up a science-friendly, philosophically sophisticated wisdom tradition in the world that we’re facing now. I was in a flotation tank yesterday trying to think about how to approach this. And the issues are so big that I am assuming this might be a bit of a series and that today we can best use our time establishing rapport and charting out the general questions that would need to be faced. One last thing is that it is the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, which is also not just remembrance day but also Hugh Everett Day. So I’d like to add that we remember today that there are multiple pathways and that along other tracks perhaps we ourselves are the fallen. Yeah, so to throw my perspective into that multi-perspectival mix, my name is Brendan Graham Dempsey. My background is in religious studies. I did my undergraduate in religious studies, classical civilization, and originally was exploring kind of a classic sort of historical, biblical studies kind of track. After that, through a series of sort of developments and thought, existential crises, etc., etc., moved to the exploration of art and aesthetics and how that how the interaction between art and religion opens up sort of different forms of engagement with different religious traditions, different forms of spirituality. So my master’s in religions from Yale University with focus in religion and the arts. So I’m particularly kind of interested in that nexus point of the aesthetics of the kind of material culture and the way that ideas get mythologically and and symbolically encoded and that sort of a thing, which I see as having profound kind of pragmatic significance and importance for discussion that I presume will be unfolding. I do a podcast, a Meta Modern Spirituality podcast, and I’ve just been having a lot of fun talking to folks like Layman and many others who are exploring the space of what a kind of post-postmodern spirituality looks like, formulations of spirituality that are post-rational and transpersonal, etc. So I think that’s sort of a little cloud of me, some of the more salient relevant points. And yeah, I’m just going to try to keep up with you guys. I’m pleased and honored to be here, so I appreciate it. And I think, yeah, this will be a lot of fun. So looking forward to it. Great. That was wonderful. That bodes well for our future discussion. So I’d like to give an initial and it’s very preliminary presentation of, I suppose I’ll call it the problem that we are going to wrestle with, but perhaps the way Jacob wrestled with God and became Israel, it’s something that’s hopefully going to transform us in the wrestling. The problem was brought to my notice by two different people before Layman and Brendan proposed a very deep dive into it. Jonathan Paget and Paul Van der Gley both have criticized my proposal for a religion that’s not a religion, precisely because of a potential elitism in it, or as it’s more perhaps helpfully posed, the scaling problem. How will this kind of thing scale to people who are not deeply philosophically educated, etc.? And I take that criticism very seriously. And I mean, I have been endeavoring to address it. I’ve been launching in a long-term project of building ecologies of practices and communities that can home them and networks of communities and a practice called dialectic into dialogos that is coupled to philosophical fellowship and circling and mindfulness practices in order to get people to be able to do the scaling in terms of the cultivation of skills and virtues. But nevertheless, there is still a considerable lacuna. And this is where Layman and Brendan proposed something towards something like what I like the title, I think we’ll make it title of the series, the artful scaling up of a new spirituality or something like that, or a post-postmodern spirituality. We’ll come up with a better title than that. That’s a little clunky. And here’s where my thinking is at that. I think I want to know how two directions. I want to know what the artfulness is that we’re talking about. There’s a lot, Plato talks a lot, the whole neo-platonic tradition talks about the artfulness of dialectic into dialogos. And I’m interested in that and how that bears on issues like collective flow and other markers of creativity that goes beyond just problem solving. So that’s one issue. The next issue is the one that Brendan put his finger on. I’m doing a bit of a deep dive now into the work. There’s been a recent in academic terms revival of a reinterpretation of Aquinas as much more neo-platonic than Aristotelian, Morello and Clark and others. And Aquinas’ discussion of the transcendentals has been very important, the participation of the transcendentals. For most of you, it’s like, what the heck is John talking about? One of the transcendentals is beauty. And in fact, it’s considered one of the most important pedagogically. And I’m also reading D.C. Schindler’s book right now on love and the postmodern predicament. I highly recommend that book. And I’m very interested because Plato also proposed way back when in the symposium, most prototypically, but it’s through a lot of his work, that the way we draw people into this way of life we’re talking about is via beauty. And what does that mean? And specifically, what does that mean about poesis broadly construed? What does it mean about the role of narrative? Is narrative essential for this? Do people need narrative? Do they need stories? I’ve been worried about, I have done cognitive scientific work on the importance of narrative and I presented that in the series, but I’m worried about the veneration that narrative is getting right now. I’m worried that it’s overplaying things and the dangers of narrative are not being properly addressed. I’m interested generally in symbolism and how that works. And so those symbols and stories are perhaps the two aspects of art and beauty that I would like to bring into discussion. I’m not saying we can’t discuss other things. I’m just stating what I’m interested in. I also want to bring out the dark side of the scale-up problem. Not to dodge because I haven’t tried to dodge Jonathan’s critique or Paul’s critique, but a lot of what passes for scaling up, if we are honest, is equivocation. The understanding of God by the 10-year-old in Sunday school and the understanding of God by Aquinas, to say that they’re somehow the same is a very significant stretch. It’s plausible to see that they’re just equivocating on a term and that there isn’t any scale-up. There’s something more like a con going on. And I’m not saying, I’m not labeling that as everything that religions are doing when they’re scaling up, but that surely is something that needs to also be brought up into the discussion. The fact that we might be attributing to religion a kind of success that it doesn’t completely have. I mean the existing religions. And can we do better if that criticism lands fairly? So those are some of the topics I’d like to talk about. And maybe each one of you could do also like a five to 10-minute blurb on what you want to bring into this. And then we’ll just let it go and we’ll hope that the logos takes a hold of us. Perhaps, Lamin, you could go first. Sure, yeah. The cluster of things that I’m interested in approaching definitely includes narrative and the ambivalence or double-sidedness of narrative because it’s obviously important. And yet there’s a way in which the people who think about it tend to be the people who are the most invested in an academic and literary and communicative training procedure, which makes them inherently biased towards favoring the importance of narrative. And I worry that very often the notion of narrative gets translated into the idea of a kind of top down communication where we’re going to come up with the right narrative for those people as if we were institutional political tacticians, rather than seeing narrative and even symbol sets as perhaps emergent from the proper kinds of practicing communities over time. I’m very interested in, I think, what I would call a Vedic model, which is a historical example of a system in which many different types of cults and gods, so to speak, were organized into the same system. I’m interested in the possibilities that might be suggested by esoteric lineages in communities, which whether truly or part of their own self-mythologization, they’ve put themselves forward over the centuries as an elitist cabal that is in resonance with elitist cabals within other existing religious traditions and languages. So it sort of solves the problem of elitism by saying the elitism is okay, it just can’t be the whole thing, and that there will be an elitist core within each system that can communicate in a shared language and mediate into the different language occupied in each of those niches. I’m very interested in the way in which colloquial forms might be reimbued with sacred quality of beauty and awesomeness, and that very often we exaggerate the degree to which the languages to accomplish wisdom practices need to remind us of esoteric and exotic traditions from other lands and times, when in reality we could get a lot of that experience out of the depth of our own symbols and terms as we use them in everyday life if we understood them more deeply. And I think this relates a little bit to the equivocation problem, because on the one side we’ve got this enormous difficulty, which is if you scale it up to a lot of people, do you lose depth and do you essentially supplant the religious and spiritual with the social? And on the other side, are there a lot of things that don’t seem spiritual and religious, but if we just took them into a deeper form, they actually would operate in that fashion and work very nicely with sets of wisdom practices. So that’s maybe a third of the issues I’m concerned about, but that’s enough to pass it off to Brendan. Thanks. Gosh, this is so rich. And these are the conversations that I’ve been just dying to have for so long, so I’m really excited for this. I guess the way that I would find a way into this is I think that the religion that’s not a religion that you’ve talked about, John, is, and really, your whole series on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is sort of a perfect kind of diagnosis, as well as a prescription. You’re saying very clearly, what’s the problem? How did it happen? Where are we? And I think you answer those questions very effectively and very, very clearly. And then you also begin to provide some clear steps forward, like what do we do about that? And how do we move forward? The next step for me then becomes implementation, sort of taking that leap from the theoretical. We formulated the problem. We’ve even formulated the solution. How do we convert this formulation into real world instantiations of this and embody it and realize it in all of the most important ways so that this is actually efficacious? And for me, that means that we’re looking at culture. We’re looking at religion, which in some ways is both kind of a subset within culture, but as you’ve talked about in other contexts, it’s sort of the meta-cultural tool that sort of provides this leverage point that can kind of do a lot of heavy lifting in a kind of meta-cultural way. So it’s a very specific and important kind of intervention into the culture. And of course, your whole notion of stealing the culture is where this all kind of begins to come together. So how do we do that? And in order to do that, I see we need cultural production. We need cultural artifacts that can actually be doing this, which is for me where the artistic aesthetic angle comes into all this. Because when I use that word in art and aesthetics, I’m thinking of the materialized forms that these things take. Of course, there’s the kind of classic range of fields of arts from literal painting and design and architecture and things like that to narrative and other forms of that. But the whole kind of swath of cultural production that takes ideas and theory and instantiates them and makes them accessible. It’s sort of the bridge between the kind of cognitive framework for something versus the bringing it about in the world and doing the changing work. So for me then, and this kind of gets at the whole thing too, is there needs to be this sort of translation process. And so I see that translation process as needing to take into account the different demographics that exist for whom the translation needs to occur. There will be some people who can watch a 50-hour YouTube series and kind of download that. There will be a lot of people who can’t or won’t or aren’t able to or what have you. And I think, I don’t know, this isn’t even an interesting question. I wonder if you would even say that that is sort of, there it is, that’s all you need. I think that even you would probably presume like, okay, here are the ideas now, let’s kind of put them out there. So by taking an approach that this material, these ideas need to be translated and they need to be translated into different dialects that are appropriate to different demographics in society, then that opens up questions of what are the demographics? How do we begin to slice that pie? How do we think about who we’re engaging with? What are the different communities of people and the different sorts of cognitive styles and operational systems that they’re working with that would be most sort of easily, I don’t want to say easily either, but maximally or optimally digestible or communicable, translated into the language that different people need. And so this then leads to the question of, well, how do we begin to think about these different ways that this material needs to be translated and for whom? And I feel like we could talk a lot about that. I will just as sort of a, you know, foreshadowing, I do think that there is a demographic for whom narrative is very important and is the way to, well, you were talking about the way that the transcendental beauty sort of is what draws people in. And I like that, right? And in the kind of, you know, will bury an idea of the conveyor belt, there’s something about what you come for versus what you stay for. You show up for the cookies at the church, you know, meeting hour or something, and you stay because you get drawn into whatever the message is or something. So I’d love to talk at greater length about what those sort of conveyor belts could mean, what they could look like, how they would be best sort of organized. And then sort of all that kind of within the context of thinking about broader infrastructures, thinking about the institutional elements of how these things could be incorporated. Thinking about, you know, the big thing that you talk about is we know where to find knowledge, but we don’t know where to find wisdom today, because the whole monastic tradition has sort of disappeared. So thinking about is there a way of being able to bring in these ecologies of practices to new monastic contexts, to new, if not monastic, then maybe, you know, the kind of Durkheimian notion of a church, right, there needs to be a community element in a meeting place, in a way, an area where these practices can be performed, and people can come together and live it out. And currently, obviously, that infrastructure doesn’t really exist in this context. So, and then there’s finally, for my last thing to throw in there, I’m very interested in and concerned by these dark sides that you’re both mentioning, particularly layman’s notion of the sort of political strategist top down sort of Faustian approach, you know, and in my own writing, I literally actually have a character named Faust, who’s doing something like this, who’s sort of thinking about religion as sort of a tool to, to, you know, in a sense, control people, but where it becomes so ethically fraught is, is it for their own good, right? And then you get into the sort of grand inquisitor sort of dynamic, and there’s a lot of dark stuff that can come out of that. So I think that that needs to be really upfront, and really shine a light on all that. So again, that’s probably a third of it for me. But those are some things that I’d love to get into. So let me try and draw a little bit of a summary. Others. So when one one issue that I hear from you, Brent, well, two issues I hear, perhaps. One is sort of the pedagogical pluralism problem, which is to make any, like to make a thing available to get people to learn, because that’s ultimately we’re talking about here, you face a problem in pedagogy, which is you have a pluralism of audiences. And how do you address that? And what does that look like? And how do you, how do you complexify? How do you differentiate enough, but maintain integrity, so you don’t just give something that falls apart when it goes out into the world, if I can put it that way. And then there’s the con versus conveyor belt problem. How do we know, how do we distinguish between the conveyor belt and just conning people through a clarification and manipulation? I’d like to add two other problems to those that intersect with this. We’re not heading into a neutral field. Heidegger has made a very powerful argument that the main thing that is translating our ontology into our lives is technology right now. And technology is this. And this is one of Heidegger’s great distinctions, the distinction between between technology and art, the place of the work of art, etc., that kind of stuff. And so it’s not only that we have these two problems that would be intrinsic if it was just people teaching and people receiving the pedagogical pluralism and the con versus the conveyor belt. We also, we have a very powerful competitor that is seeking to deeply embed an entrenched ontology into people’s lives and minds in a very powerful way. And it has worked out, I’m almost anthropomorphizing it, but has worked out a way of insinuating itself into the moment by moment living of people’s experience in their lives. And so that is something very significant. What’s the relationship between everything we’re talking about here and the challenge that this space is consumed and dominated by a technology that is not concerned generally with human well-being or flourishing. And then that problem for me overlaps with the problem I’ve talked about before, which is, I guess I’ll call it the negotiation problem, which is I don’t want to simply speak to the cultural cognitive grammar that’s in place, because I see that and I’ve argued as being deeply problematic and causing suffering and distress. And how do you speak to it? Well, in both senses of the word, maybe perhaps I speak to it, addressing it, but I speak to it to challenge it. And this is an old problem for when religions go and they meet other existing cultural, like the classic model is Buddhism going into China and meeting Taoism. And how are those negotiated together in some fashion? So maybe initially we could try and deal with this sort of set of problems as doorways into, because I see them as running through everything we’re talking about here in a profound way. So if I could just list them and then we could use them as reference points. We have the pedagogical pluralism, we have the con versus the conveyor belt, we’re competing with ontology in the Heideggerian sense. And finally, we want to be heard by a cultural cognitive grammar, but we want to fundamentally transform that cultural cognitive grammar. And that’s a profound communication problem, because we can’t just speak to the code, because we’re trying to change the code, if I can put it that way. So what do you think about that, at least as a preliminary starting off point? Just some four core meta problems, if I can put it that way, that we need to address. And hopefully we’ll explore these issues of art and beauty and narrative and esoteric versus every day, as we try and address these issues. Because as Lehmann said, I’m very interested in sort of deepening our understanding of the problem we face before we immediately jump in with things we want to say about addressing it. Now, Brendan, I hope that that covers what you’re sort of addressing as the implementation problem. I was trying to unpack it into some variables that we could make distinctions and address perhaps a little bit more in a more articulated fashion. I hope that didn’t- No, that’s great. That’s really helpful. And I’m taking notes. I’ll be able to refer back to these. So it’s good to have some shared language around these things. And I’d just point out that these things aren’t hard and fast distinctions. They all interweave with each other. Yeah, very much, very much. Thank you for mentioning that. I’m not proposing these as causal distinctions. I’m proposing them as analytic distinctions in order to try and get- I have argued and I still stand by it. You’ve got to spend a lot of time on getting a good problem formulation before you address the problem. Yeah, it seems like a reasonable set to begin with. And one particular interconnection stood out to me, which is there’s an interpenetration between the problem of the adversary, whether that’s technology or capitalism or the infrastructure, modernity, or however we’re thinking about that, and the problem of the con versus the conveyor belt. Because there’s a question about what is it that makes us conable? And that’s also the thing that the anti-flourishing momentum of the world is taking advantage of. So we have to think about how we can adapt and move around and outwit that system so that whatever we produce doesn’t get co-opted or shut down by it. But the on-the-ground place where we have to fight that battle is in the very things that the wisdom practices are trying to change about us that are making us available to that kind of manipulation. And then that’s problematic because a lot of the things we associate with spirituality and religion were taken in in the form of that same manipulation. So we need to distinguish between like when have people actually absorbed wisdom teachings and wisdom practices and when did they just absorb something that looked like it that actually reinforced the vulnerabilities to being conned that are in fact the very thing that the meta system around us is preying upon. There’s a weird tangle in there. That’s excellent and there’s a specific phenomena that I’m just starting to learn more about within cognitive psychology and cognitive science. You’re probably both familiar with it though but it’s now sort of a bona fide academic topic which is spiritual bypassing. And to my mind that’s a clear instance of what you’re talking about Lehmann. So you know in spiritual bypassing people seem to be taking in these traditions but what the research shows what they’re doing is they’re avoiding reality in an important way, they’re avoiding problems, they’re sort of Peter panning themselves, sorry keeping possibilities open and never wrestling with their shadow and getting into actuality. And then once they finally come out of the bypass their lives are much worse because of this because as you say they have actually set themselves up for political and economic manipulation because of the way they have made themselves sort of willfully ignorant of the power structures of reality as they’ve been bypassing. And this has been noticed quite a ways back. Trungpa wrote cutting through spiritual materialism as kind of the opening of this literature, this oeuvre. But it’s now taken into you know people are doing careful empirical investigations around this real possibility and one of the things that concerns me about this post-postmodern spirituality is the degree to which the prevalence and I don’t have any clear evidence but I can point to this evidence but I don’t myself have it but anecdotally the prevalence of this spiritual bypassing occurring in people that are sort of taking up this discourse. And that to me that’s a particular instance of the thing you’re talking about where the adversary that sounds very satanic right yeah but the powers and principalities technology and capitalism etc that insinuate themselves into people’s lives and inculcate and maintain a particular cultural cognitive grammar. They have found a way to bullshit a lot of the artistry and the spirituality we’re talking about so that people take up spiritual bypassing. A prevalent example this concerns me is what’s been called McMindfulness which is the adoption of a very simplified form of mindfulness that’s ultimately not about transformation but about making people accept the status quo, make them very very amenable to fitting within a particular bureaucratic or capitalistic structure and that’s actually not what mindfulness was originally supposed to be doing. So and so layman what I’m saying is I like I think this is a very important this what you just put your finger on I think I think this is a very important phenomena right now and I’m wondering to what degree the old that sounds sorry that sounds really pejorative but I don’t know what to call it the old world religions did to try and address this problem. There’s an element of it that I think shifts over to Brendan’s concern for demographics because yes to argue that the zero level of spiritual bypassing is simply to identify yourself as spiritual or identify yourself as being part of a religion before you’ve gone any further into it right so when it comes to the demographic groups of let’s say we were going to do a pluralistic pedagogy who are the groups Brendan is asking to whom we might translate the material and if we go by people’s self-identification as being part of particular religious traditions we run back into this problem of essentially them having bullshitted themselves into being part of a group or a practice that they aren’t really doing. Yes yes I very often think about the you know the Pure Land sect of Buddhism behaves very much like Christianity and the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart behaves very much like a Zen Buddhist monk so are we looking at functional subdivisions of types of spirituality or are we looking at broad social self-identification trends which may or may not be bullshit. Yeah and that’s I feel like being able to parse out what these what these functional groups are and seeing the the kind of more structural connections versus the more superficial you know relationships then I feel like then you can then you can be more surgical in your approach to well what is what is this form of engagement with spirituality what does it need to move to a more deeper richer engagement to avoid that bypassing to avoid the the kind of yeah the the avoidance of the actual content right and and that’s going to require a an analysis of of how the material itself is being engaged with versus just intensity or you know showiness but but to really get into how is this material being used and to what end and that sort of a thing and and and that’s where I found you know these these more developmental approaches to be really useful in terms of locating certain ways cognitive ways that that religious material is interpreted by by different people because for me all as all this is coming up so much of this is hinging on this pedagogical issue it all kind of is leading there if I could kind of put it this way like to to jump back to the con conveyor belt idea I kind of wonder I think well what is a con what what distinguishes a con and for me it’s sort of well who does it benefit if if I am offering you a medicine and it works and it makes you better then arguably no one’s being conned it’s a win-win situation if I’m offering you snake oil and I take your money and nothing better happens to you I’ve conned you so because all that all that all that existed in order to benefit myself versus a conveyor belt approach which which is actually one in which there is still a kind of differential but it’s mutually beneficial or even if not mutually beneficial then there’s still an impartation of of of knowledge or wisdom or something that’s that’s that’s happening that’s benefit benefiting the person engaging with that and so I think about you know Zach Stein’s work and this idea of teacherly authority right I mean you know he says in his book at one point you know some people for various reasons but certainly I think when you’re talking about children it’s it’s the most obvious example they don’t know what’s good for them and and this of course obviously can very easily tie into some of these darker ethical sides but that’s why it’s so important to locate instances where teacherly authority does exist in such a way that there’s a developmental imbalance but not for the conning and for the person who is sort of has the upper hand as it were to sort of you know milk the other person but actually to to help help this pedagogical you know development occur and so in terms of trying to make that distinction of figuring out what is the con versus the conveyor belt I feel like that’s the issue which ties into this whole competing ontology with the salesman with all this technology and stuff because who’s benefiting from that right it’s not arguably humanity writ large it’s a small kind of group of people who are lining their pockets essentially and so I think this also ties in in really real ways with this whole idea of kind of the pedagogical pluralism element because you know you’ve got this idea of the lie to children right and and Wittgenstein talks about the latter and that you throw away and all that there’s something very real about the way that pedagogy needs to you know transform content in ways that loses something crucial to what’s actually trying to be conveyed in order to begin the process of conveying the information so that ideally you set up a an unfolding process whereby even what was initially maybe mostly untrue will end up with you in a an engagement with truth that could have never emerged had you not begun with that kind of initial most mostly fallacy position if that makes sense so so for me all these things are are deeply rooted in in this pedagogical framing of it and it actually also makes me think of one of the crucial issues I think that you were talking about in that meta psychology discussion which is what it’s the problem of transformation yes how does this occur so so I’ll throw this last point in and then see if this is resonating at all but but I think that one of the challenges right is that if something is is is transforming well what is it once it’s been transformed is it still the same as it was what is what is the continuity right and arguably what I would propose maybe this isn’t the case but a word like say god and or a word that we’re using in these kind of contexts that you’re worried about equivocation right you know a sunday school versus equinas what if that’s the continuity point what if that is what is allowing that that pedagogical process to unfold that the sunday school use of the word god is sort of the equivalent of something that might be so far removed from what you’re actually trying to ultimately communicate but it’s the yes equivocation point but it’s also the point of continuity that as you move through a deepening of understanding that is actually what’s what’s shifting are these these shared terms and so rather than say oh well are we just equivocating if equinas and the sunday school child are talking about radically different things rather than say that what if we say well yes this is the whole method and necessary means by which you get an equinas you know you got to start out in sunday school presumably he had some form of that so um i’m just trying to bring just yeah kind of interweave all these things because for me they’re so they really are so interwoven um but i don’t know problem of uh the legitimate con will come up to haunt us more than once here i’m thinking about teaching meditation to people and there are people for whom the word emptiness can be a very useful word in terms of the pedagogy of the instruction but at the same time if i’m talking to a philosophical friend i want to say look this is a an overly reified non-concept that might smuggle cognitive nihilism into your mind and slowly destabilize you over time we can’t really think about it as emptiness but there’s a sense in which i can use that small version of the noble lie as an instructional tool and i think there’s also a sense like brennan is saying that there might be um right you have a bright light and you have a fringe and the fringe might be an almost ephemeral or empty version of the material that’s in the bright light so we could say that the distribution of the what we would call false or superficial versions of the terminology and the ideas might be evidence of it working in a general sense but there’s also a huge risk there which is like let’s say i’m an islamic cleric and i’m making a very good argument about what jihad really means is is zealous self-overcoming practice or something like that but the very fact that i’m using it may be triggering other people to think more of the word jihad and go down rabbit holes into very destructive forms of behavior so that same thing you’re describing that might be a normal part of the extension of the teaching and its integration in the society can also be a setup in which perverse and pathological forms of those teachings emerge yeah and that’s i think that’s very well said layman i find that those two seem to be in a in a kind of almost a trade-off relationship and so i want to probe that further so i that idea that you know you let’s put it we’ll use spatial metaphors we can talk about sort of transformational truth in and we need to talk about that how is transformational truth different from our normal notion of truth we can have transformational truth in but we can also have transformational deformation flowing out if i can put it that way i think that’s a very important thing secondly if i agree with you brendan about this elgin talks about this in true enough where she talks about how we you know we open we start physics and we give people the you know the bohr model the solar system model of the atom it’s mostly false but it gives people the skills and the perspective of understanding so that they can then appropriate the next level of information and so on and so that that’s you know that’s the bigotskin notion of internalizability and scaffolding and i agree but when you do that and this intersects with with layman’s point to my mind you come up on a pedagogical issue that i’ve i’ve worked on and i can i come back to again and again which is the contrast between the language of training and the language of explaining the bohr model is good for training people into physics it doesn’t ultimately explain the empirical data or to use a more hackneyed example that i’ve used a couple times we we can use the method of locations to train our memory which is wonderful but memory does not work in that spatial that spatial manner at all so for training memory it’s excellent for explaining memory it’s deeply misleading and similarly when we we use spotlight metaphors of attention to train meditation those are great but they actually misrepresent attention in powerful ways and i can multiply these quite a bit so this is a pervasive problem in pedagogy that the language of training and the language of explaining that you can’t you can’t just transport from one into the other they work according to different principles different goals and if you equivocate this is sort of a it’s not equivocation on terms this is an equivocation on how you’re using your terms so it’s sort of kind of a meta equivocation right but right if you equivocate between those two you get into all kinds of trouble and layman i see that happening in the deformation wave that at the bright light you’ve got something that’s very well perhaps an integration you know well thought out integration of the explaining and the training and then it fragments as it goes out and the things that are only properly for training have get translated into explaining how the world’s i mean that’s that’s for i would argue that that’s one thing you see in sort of the way you know the the deformation out of jihad within the islamic tradition right is because you you get something that was really a core training thing and then it gets deformed into explaining how the world operates in a very powerful way at least that’s an analysis i think that’s plausible for that so brendan i agree that the pedagogy is the core problem and i agree the pluralism is the problem but i want to say that also bound up with that is this issue of the proper relationship between understanding training and explaining because those are not they’re not identical things elgin says we use these models because they help us understand and then the understanding trains our skills so that we can then get into the deeper explanation and we go through these cycles pedagogically and see why this matters to me is because i think you can give a very powerful account of the training power of narrative the way it trains us to be temporally extended moral agents that’s different from it being the fundamental explanation of the nature of our personhood and so that’s something i think that i would want to like that’s an example of what i’m talking about about we give these narratives and they train people but then people forget if like in a heideggerian sense and these narratives are now taken as being explanatory of you know the fundamental essential nature of things and i’ll say one more thing well and this points to when people when they when they slide between these things they start to equivocate also between things being individually or even for specifically specific group cognitively culturally indispensable and then being metaphysically necessary so my example that i use is i’m pretty much monolingual i did enough french and german a thousand years ago to get my phd but right but i’m basically monolingual so my cognition at least my communicative cognition my reflective cognition is deeply dependent on english it’s cognitively indispensable to me if you’re to take english away from me i would cease to be the cognitive agent i am but i would be ridiculous for me to claim that it’s metaphysically necessary for every cognitive agent to speak english so when we when we blur the training explaining we also tend to blur the indispensability with the metaphysically necessary narrative may be indispensable to get people to a certain stage of development that’s not the same thing as saying it’s metaphysically necessary to personhood or what often is happening in some of these discussions i’m having to the very structure of reality i’m i i seriously question the idea that reality has a narrative structure i think for some very good reasons i think though they at least should be addressed those concerns so i just wanted to put that out there as a way of gathering what i saw both of you saying and then trying to further problematize it by bringing in more problematic aspects of it because this is part of what i’m i’m working on a book with my son on pedagogy and problematization like we’re doing here right now is the key to i would argue the key to good pedagogy yeah for me it raises the question of sort of these parallel tracks then right of there’s the training and then there’s the explanation and you could build that into a pedagogical model from the outset being always saying this is the training it’s not the explanation and always reiterating that so that’s sort of enforced pedagogically and i think that that could be maybe a very fruitful thing to explore i’m also so though kind of intrigued by the ways in which if you do that too much you might lose the the student might lose interest if they think that they’re only learning training and not explanation as a as the writer who’s done some kind of long projects if i realized how much they would have required of me going into them i i’m not sure if i would have begun them but there’s sort of that continual sort of self-delusion of like oh this draft is the best one and then you rewrite it you’re like oh no this one’s so much better and so there’s sort of like if you if you see it all up front about how how much of a disconnect there is between the training and the explanation it might almost be you know prohibitively steep for and there might be a kind of overwhelming and maybe i’m getting ahead of so many other issues but i think it’s an important one but yeah yeah i think we should come back to coherence and artistry and the things that might make a person stay turned on in a particular framing of their wisdom practices in order to get benefits from it but two things have been coming up for me when you guys were talking the first relates to this you know pluralizing the training and explaining problem is an interesting way to go because you have you have sets of practices that will be differently appropriate for different groups and differently amenable to them and then you also have all kinds of different types of translations that need to go on within explaining because explaining is relative to who’s hearing it and what the niche is right maybe you want a very technical mechanical explanation maybe you want a very poetic explanation so we obviously need some kind of elite that can manage plural trainings and plural explainings and the space between those things hopefully will be able to hold itself open and remain stable over time the other part of it when we were talking about the you know the the problematic element and the beneficial element of a broader usage of the terms is that there needs to be some kind of verification process right like our bodies are constantly taking in things good for us and things bad for us and we have an immune system we have a verification and vetting process so you asked this earlier joe how did the old world religions handle the problem of doing this because it’s it’s not problematic necessarily that people believe things that are technically correct it’s problematic if those things lead down the wrong pathways yes so adjudicating between that what did they use right obviously zen has this tradition of interviews where the master has to establish peer resonance with you and also problematize your state change experiences for you i think they had a lot of practices of social isolation of transgression of situations that sort of took a person outside of their normal social framing and experience of reality many of those obviously might have been too ascetic in certain ways they might have been damaging or unhealthy i think if we go much farther back we find a pattern of the ritual humiliation of political and religious leaders where there were things done to make fun of or take them outside of their context so that we don’t mistake what’s going on in the local practical structure for some kind of reified status and you know we could take all of those things and more because we could make a bigger list and we could add to them a contemporary notion of a therapeutic adjunct to spiritual and religious and wisdom practice training i think so that’s very good even and and and the topic of the elites and then the practices by which the elites did not become reified or deified i think that’s important so connection i want to make to that which is again to deepen the problem we had three interlocking institutions right where we had the university the monastery and the church and they were all trying to manage the training explaining and the elite versus the laity relationship like one of the functions of the church was to presumably right manage between the elites and the laity i’m just using that as neutral a term as i can and the monastery concentrated a lot on training for wisdom and the university concentrated much more on explaining for schiancia i don’t mean just science but i mean knowledge in general yeah so you had knowledge you had wisdom and you had something like you know i don’t quite know what to call it maybe it’s not quite understanding but it’s this maybe it’s the social integration social cohesion thing you were talking about layman and i’m wondering is that just happenstance or it because you can see similar things right even in the zen situation you have the zen monastery but you have also you have the zen temple and then you have things like the kyoto school where zen is taken up and within a basically an academic setting and developed in powerful ways i i i might be just seeing a taxonomy because i’m just imposing it because i’m overly platonic in my orientation to reality uh but i’m wondering if that’s happenstance or if that’s like if that’s part of the have institutions to some degree worked out an ecology of institutions in order to address the pedagogical pluralism problem and the con conveyor belt and the explaining training problem that’s and does that mean that the the religion that’s not a religion would need something like that and layman that’s important because what it means is we actually have we have kinds of elites if i can put it that way and and then and they have oh this sounds ridiculously american but they sort of have checks and balance relationships with each other as a way of managing some of the issues all right so the monasteries tend to home people are much more mystically oriented right and the church was people are much more sort of missionary oriented if i can put it that way um and then the university is people who are much more sort of philosophically oriented and they’re all sort of acting as checks and balances on each other and what you i mean they put terrific strain in the history of christianity on the institution but it seems to me that’s one of the ways that the old world religions i like that metaphor by the way layman the way i said old religions and you change it into old world religions which is really wonderful um uh thank you for that that’s beautiful it’s really good um is that one of the ways in which they address this problem right because i’m trying to get back you know this is brendan’s question is like how do we structure this um and and is it is it that each one of these is doing different things maybe the church concentrates on narrative and maybe uh the monastery concentrates on trans on something like transcendence or or right uh and and then the university of course concentrates on theory um i’m sorry i’m i’m really waving my hands because i’m trying to look back and trying to address what both of you are saying and see if i can draw anything from that history that might be helpful here well i let me throw this out there i mean one of the things that’s interesting about uh the sort of american experiment historically is is the um is the way that the checks and balances system that you’re kind of talking about that maybe was implicit in the old world kind of becomes explicit and actually kind of made an object of awareness to be intentionally sort of built in yes and one of the things that that does is sort of a release valve it’s sort of a built-in self-correcting mechanism and i wonder if um if on the topic of you know whatever sorts of institutions or institutional or translations of this religion that’s not a religion whatever those might be um one of the things that’s sort of uh that could be vital in in how they do what they do is if there’s a built-in understanding that these things are um they are amenable to self-correction and self-transformation right so like the difference between say the american constitution and you know like a hobbesian sort of uh yeah monarchical theory right is that like it’s an awareness that this is a construct that we’ve put this together and there are built-in mechanisms to reinforce its self-preservation through adaptation and in the process you know it’s really hard to kind of take the president as seriously as the monarch because of this whole infrastructure that’s sort of built into it self-aware this isn’t the whole thing right so um i wonder if if uh similarly there’s a way of both articulating whether that’s narrative logically or you know these ecologies of practices but but built into that um maybe probably on the explanation side which is always where this caveat should sort of lie which is sort of you know the map isn’t the territory or the the training isn’t the reality a notion that this is something that is constructed in order to do these things um and if that is sort of there it kind of precludes or obviates or kind of makes less likely the people that people will reify these things as being metaphysically the case yeah there could be a deep continuity between ecologies of practices and ecologies of institution because the whole idea behind ecology of practice was try to explicate something that i had seen in wisdom traditions where they set up these you know check they set up opponent processing and complementary practices so you get this self-complexification self-correcting ability and yeah if we could yeah making it explicit as a part that we want an ecology of institutions uh to best implement ecologies of practices yeah i think that’s that that that that strikes me as a plausible proposal um now the the thing that we we would then need to do is is to start to like what are the analogs that we’re talking about and how do they map on to you know different i don’t like doing taxonomies of people because i think the only way you can do it is either scientifically or not at all but uh that’s uh that’s uh that’s another debate we could perhaps have but we’re basically proposing something like that we’re saying like like what what what groups of people are we appealing to with these different institutional structures and also what sort of domains of presentation you know narrative theory transcendent experience or something like that what like what is what what sorry i i’m stumbling here but do you do you get the gist of what i’m trying to convey i’m trying to bring a bit some initial order to the posing of i like by the way that what’s happening here this is genuine dialogous this is kind of stuff emerging as we’re doing it which is really ah that’s so cool so so that was very vague and very hand-wavy and that nevertheless but i mean i like it like we there’s a bit of a solidifying idea around ecologies of institutions that are in deep continuity with ecologies of practices and then the check the the checks and balances on elites the humiliation of elites as layman said and there’s something about these different institutions could be designed to appeal to different uh i don’t know what to call them different types of spiritual appetite it may be or something like that um does that strike you as a proposal a good proposal i think that’s excellent uh and my mind goes to uh the problem of too much diversity or too much homogeneity within the institutions yeah exactly so we um and that’s something again that was maybe worked many times in the past but it wasn’t clear when it was working when it wasn’t working we need to make it more explicit today yeah uh because one of the things you go well how are we going to figure out which mode is appropriate like even if you’re like these are the ministers and these are the theologians and these are the mystics or we have these different kind of still which form is good for you and right now if you whip out your phone you can find 50 versions of anything so you can find the one that you will actually engage with and that’s something which although technically true in practice our ancestors couldn’t really do right they could they you know there was there was a wise man in the village that was it you couldn’t sample a hundred wise men from a hundred villages yeah yeah if you could you would probably be more likely to find one that keys into you even if the theory explaining what type you are in order to be keyed in that way is insufficient and may be insufficient for some time well that that is a good point and that lines up with that right is in is also in tension with we don’t want people to just be i mean you can’t do this in education you can’t let people just sort of follow their interests you have to appeal to it but you have to challenge that i mean this is you know agnes kellard’s point about uh about aspiration um part of what people you have to challenge them to take on values and interests that they don’t currently have um and this is one of the criticisms and jonathan peugeot has made of my work and all of this he says you know one of the great things about church is you have to meet people you don’t like which which is like that’s a very good point right um and that goes to words again this that like i don’t want to hang out with just a bunch of people i don’t like because that’s not going to work but if i just hang out with people that i really like i’m there’s a real danger of echo chambering this is again what you say in saying layman right the diversity uh right the the sort of getting optimal optimal grip on diversity um and so again how do we get it how do we we we have to face the reality layman’s right that self that uh self-selection is powerfully uh um present now available to people it’s it’s it’s empowered by technology and the internet and and our you know our socio-cultural and political structures right how do we do that you know the problem with self-selection is autodidactism echo chambering right part of what all of these institutions did in the past was make you be with people that you didn’t like that don’t appeal to your untutored and uneducated preferences and therefore afforded you considering the possibility deeply considering the possibility of taking on preferences and perspectives you don’t currently have which is a crucial part of transformation um yeah there’s a sweet spot there and you know and i’ve often argued that the the phenomena of religion is kind of a an overflow of different types of people different genres of activity within the society being adequately integrated yes you’re not if you’re not mixing with people who have different perspectives and come from different areas of the society it’s plausible to argue that that’s not really religion then it’s it’s not transcending those categories yes yes however you’ve got to get it just right right it can’t be everything you like and it can’t be everything you hate and that’s not just social it’s also with the practices right because one of the problems we get with cult-like behavior is people come into it and somebody says to them listen you’ve got to really overcome your tendencies i know you want to feel secure but you’ve got to let me dominate you because this is what’s going to overcome your egotism right the very fact that you don’t like any of these practices is the reason you have to commit to them so there’s a danger on both sides and so we have to find the sweet spot in order to find that sweet spot it’s almost like we need a preliminary education right if if society and schools were having a discussion about what to look for for you to find your sweet spot then it would be much easier for people to engage in healthy self-selection well and i i also think about this is sort of the the very work that these various communities would be doing is formulating these sorts of conversations in in in various communities where like i’m thinking about this where this where this gets instantiated and arguably i mean i would i would i would put my money on whatever these institutions wind up being they are going to exist sort of online in digital spaces as well as material spaces but certainly there’s going to be and this gets also to the scaling issue too i mean it’s it’s i don’t think we’re just going to see nor should we just a reduplication of sort of the the medieval cathedral and the yeah yeah exactly right so like we need the functionality using the scalable technology in a way that is you know edifying actually and so then i guess one of the ways you could look at beginning to solve a problem like this is like well what proposed solutions have existed in these in these debates around echo chambers and and stylification and all that right what are people doing right now that that are actually interrupting those negative feedback loops and creating genuine you know ecological diverse communities online and things like that and i think that there’s probably already a set of tools that could be used in that space but it also does bring up the whole issue of like when we’re talking about these institutions hypothetically what of what sort are they you know and because if we’re going to start to try to you know theoretically engineer how this might be most efficacious and edifying for people it’s important to root that in the actual current technologies and material kind of reality that they would be instantiated by i think that’s very well said and so we we do need to do some work research even and getting the sweet spot is that that’s i like that the diversity sweet spot and our culture is doing a bad job our culture is wrestling with that problem but doing a bad job about it to my mind so our culture has a sort of incoherent awareness that this is an issue that is fundamental and needs to be addressed but i don’t think it’s doing it in a particularly thoughtful reflective or wise fashion it’s very impulsive and wanton and erratic in a lot of ways so well can i throw out a thought real quick it’s just um so one of the ways this ties together with these you know with these i don’t want to i don’t know what the right word would be because a word like elite is so laden with all these connotations but in lieu of a better word um you know layman what you’re talking about if there’s only one you know wise man in your town right there’s a constraint there that is that forces certain kinds of undesired um you know uh mingling or connection with people that are of that are different and that’s what there’s a forcing of diversity in a in an interesting way that’s brought about because of constraints and arguably what technology has allowed people to do is remove those constraints so i just we’ll just associate with the people that we choose to and choose not to associate with the people that we don’t want to because they are different or they don’t think the way we do or have you and so i wonder if there is sort of a salutary constraint system that says no uh this sort of um enmeshment is good and and it’s not going to be something that’s going to be just automatically kind of come from within for many people but if there’s sort of a some kind of top-down pressure to say or some kind of constraining of the system to say this this is required this is necessary um which again is is interesting because anytime you’re you’re talking about forming institutions or forming these kinds of stratified ways of translating and conveying information part of what you’re building in is a system of constraints in some ways for for from things that are coming kind of top down as it were and again this is all implicated in and tied up with all sorts of dominator hierarchy problems too so it’ll bring up the dark side of things but i guess i’m just to summarize that point what if built into these institutions is a sort of a set of expectations or a set of constraints where this sort of um you know enmeshment is is facilitated and the word enforced is not the right one either because it shouldn’t obviously be about you know imposition in that way but it’s it’s all this pedagogical problem stuff of if this is what’s best but it doesn’t arise spontaneously then how do you how do you create a system of constraints where these things do arise and you know facilitate growth for people sometimes even in ways that they wouldn’t themselves initiate i agree any self-organizing process needs a virtual engine it needs it needs constraints it needs selective and enabling constraints properly coordinated and if if there wasn’t constraints so one of the problems that the the university has faced as an institution is the lack of such top-down constraints and what you’ve got is you’ve got diversity without integration you’ve got the endless proliferation like protestantism the endless proliferation of disciplines that don’t talk to each other cognitive science is an attempt to address that and so i i agree absolutely that there has to be a virtual engine i would propose the word that regulates a self-organizing process rather than enforces a particular dominance hierarchy or something like that because we can see even in sort of dynamic so dan shep and i published a bunch of papers about the nasa scientists manipulating the rovers around a mars and they have a much more fluid structure it’s like it can sort of structure hierarchically when it needs to much flatter when it needs to it’s just it’s kind of a dynamical small world network that’s constantly reconfiguring itself but it is definitely constrained right it’s constrained even though it’s not statically hierarchical and so so i think there’s some models there we can pay attention to because it’s interesting because the scientists are trying to write basically inhabit the the body of the rover on a completely foreign environment and so they adopt much more flexible forms of social organization and problem solving in order to address that and i think that’s a pertinent example now it can’t be generalized because they they often rely on consensus and we you know you can’t use consensus once you get beyond sort of dunbar levels right because i can’t get into consensus with people i can’t there are complete and utter strangers to me on an ongoing basis i don’t even know what consensus would mean other than some lower lowest common denominator but i do think that there are you know there we we the idea of constraints and both enabling and selective virtual engineering is very very important because let’s say we have an ecology of institutions we we we we have to we have to come we have to prevent them from doing what the university has done which isolation by specialization right we have to we have to keep them enmeshed and then with and that has to scale in it’s almost like a small word network within each institution we have to how can we constrain them so the the people are i’m tempted to say like a vagatskyan thing people are are affording each other’s zone of proximal development i think that’s the sweet spot that uh at least i would propose that’s the sweet spot that layman’s often talking about right vagatsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development that that what we’re trying to do is get people in there on a reliable basis but once again we can take brendan’s advice we now have vagatsky and other people’s work we can make that we can this has been explicated and we can make it an explicit design feature of what we’re talking about here so constraints and i would argue that instead of a constraint on belief what we’re trying to do is a constraint that keeps complexification going and constantly replaces people into the zone of proximal development i’m proposing that as some design features here yeah i think there’s a process constraints and then there’s social constraints in terms of who are we trusting and why in order to be a source of these regulators like if you’re you know dealing with the surface of mars it’s obvious the surface of mars is a viable source of constraints in that process when you come to other human beings who might be trying to cultivate some kind of process in you there are like we were saying at the beginning the kind of bullshit con things where you go well a lot of people are saying nice things about this guy he’s got celebrity friends people are bowing to him i’m hearing a lot of good things he’s up on a stage talking and using aspirational words those are social signaling devices that we often go for as if they were indicators of some kind of wisdom and very often they are not on the other hand there’s a kind of at least in a lot of the esoteric versions of traditional religions the notion that there’s something like depth or something like beingness or some abstracted idealized quality that we’re telling each other to look for in people to go ah person with more of that than i feel like i have yes it was legitimate indicator of constraints to some degree to me in my process of development yeah and i think that’s exactly what zack stein is trying to put his finger on with the idea of teacherly authority right that i i recognize there do you you potential mentor i recognize in you that you have more of the this feature this right the criterion of of wisdom and therefore i’m going to align with you in some fashion try to conform to you i think that’s exactly right but again i you know one thing that we can encourage ourselves with is we are much more aware of the evolutionary heritage of the salience triggers in us and how they can mislead us and we can more much more actively uh you know counteract them and propose more viable criteria and that’s what they are we can’t give a definition but we could propose you know maybe constantly self-correcting evolving sets of criteria for what to look for in the people that we will entrust ourselves to and i would suggest that those are largely also the same tools and skills needed to create a wisdom space protected from what we called the adversary earlier yes yes yes one way to argue that is is wisdom is essentially the assimilation and use of an awareness of cognitive biases yes the education plus an understanding of cognitive biases that’s very good that’s what makes us hackable yeah yeah yeah yeah and that’s that also goes then to start to distinguish between back to brendan’s point about you know how we can in depth start to distinguish the con to the conveyor belt uh right it is uh um trustworthiness right the the marks of trustworthiness in individuals and the marks of trustworthiness in practices and the marks of trustworthiness in institutions and i think a lot of what we’ve been talking about here is based on the proposal um that’s something that’s uh self correcting and responsive that those are some of the marks of trustworthiness and part of part part of what we could be doing is maybe now zeroing in on our next discussion because i’m going to propose we’ll draw to a close here but hopefully this is a segue what are the marks of trustworthiness and i mean that in a really philosophically profound way both at you know the individual level well you know trustworthiness of character trustworthiness of process and practice trustworthiness of institution we’ve started i think what we’ve been doing is zeroing in on some of the marks of trustworthiness um you know we’re also talking about other functionality but right now i think we’re zeroing in on exactly this as a key problem and we should talk about what it is what is trustworthiness um what’s how does it relate to understanding because there’s overlaps between them both of them make use of sort of plausibility as opposed to just superficial superficial sign stimuli like you know you know so i’m thinking you know the classic problem around the halo effect we trust people because they’re they’re sort of physically attractive and that’s often a bad mark of trustworthiness and so how do we how do we distinguish the the um largely maladaptive evolutionary heritage markers of trustworthiness from the sort of the best we can get from you know science and philosophical reflection about what are the markers of trustworthiness i propose that as our central question to start our next our next episode in this series how does that sit with both of you that sounds great i think there’s a a lot to be inspected around whether or not the markers of trustworthiness are the same now as they used to be relative to our desired outcome because it might be within a certain historical evolutionary niche and with no better idea than trusting a person who looks good i mean maybe they know something genetically about how to survive that i don’t know but if you grow if you want a higher goal then you go well that’s actually not a very informative marker at all yes yes so that’s sort of that relativity evolutionary relativity of the heuristics of those markers excellent i think i think it’s really important how we trust an institutional procedure and then that’s a bit of a segue into politics there is at what point do you think a vote actually indicates something sacred from the will of the people that you should accommodate yourself to versus just thinking it’s a piece of nonsense artifact emerging out of a bureaucratic system that does nothing for you so when can we invest collectively in the sacredness of our practices and i think this will be an area of great interest to brendan which is when are signs trustworthy when is a word or a symbol or a myth something we who’s a lure is actually something we can count on to make use of rather than something that might be delusive so before i let brendan speak i want to say that for me there’s connections deep connections i want to explore between the marks of trustworthiness and and what rusher calls plausibility and what frankfurt calls taking seriously this is a normativity that is much needed right now because we we we we hung on to the normativity of certainty until it absolutely collapsed and now we have nothing in its place and what we’re talking about is when should i these are not identical but they overlap in some very important way i want to discuss like when you know when should i take you seriously and when should i trust you and how are those related to each other because for me layman the second point when should i take it seriously start to get into the trustworthiness of the sign because taking it seriously giving it my attention getting into that doesn’t mean believing it’s true but it means taking it seriously sorry i just want to put that in there as something that that makes they could help bridge now i’ll stop talking so brendan can yeah no and uh that’s good and and to to kind of continue trying to bridge this all together the way that i see this as being so critical is um if we’re positing let’s say that there is uh there there’s a there’s not a homogeneity in the demographic of of the audience for for the religion that’s not a religion and therefore there’s going to be differences there’s going to be different groups of some kind and i think also would be um yeah as you say it’s it’s the taxonomy of of of people is uh in groups is a is a challenging topic and requires a lot of nuance and time on its own in its own way whether or not we get into that doesn’t necessarily uh matter either way but just to assume that there’s some kind of uh different differentiation amongst amongst the audience then the question becomes um how does this form an integrated uh whole where as i love the idea of institutions being regulators of integration i think that that’s a really uh powerful idea to work with and then the question then is sort of um how trustworthiness establishes the basis for uh you know one uh sort of form or level of articulation of an idea amongst one group to look to another group in its level or form of articulation and say you know what can i gain from this why should i listen to you uh and because this this is the kind of conveyor belt potential of you know oh maybe what i’ve been working with is a training model and you’ve got a better kind of explanatory model and so by you being able to convey that in a way that’s like yes this is a meaningful distinction and i trust you and i can then i’m able to sort of level up if i can if i can hear that and take that so all this is kind of for me again wrapped up in this pedagogical problem and the uh teacherly authority so i think trustworthiness is a good a good way to kind of continue tackling that problem Great. Also i think we’ve done very well in terms of DIA Logos because i’ve certainly felt like the conversation was uh swept along by momentum of its own into places i didn’t necessarily expect to go and i also at least personally found myself drawn again and again to the edge of what i think i know about what i think. Yes, wisdom begins in wonder if we not we do not get to the horizon of intelligibility we’re not doing a good we’re not doing a good practice. Brenda do you have any final reflective words before i close the session? No that that was uh that was pretty much my spiel so i’m really uh other than just appreciation i’m loving this and i’m really excited to see where it all goes and um yeah to kind of continue exploring these topics in in ways that um hadn’t necessarily originally occurred to me and hopefully open up or break new ground with some of them it’s exciting. So gentlemen uh let’s wrap it up for today i my final word is thank you i agree with layman this was genuine DIA Logos it was emergence we’re on the horizon of intelligibility and it’s it feels like it like it’s very fruitful um and i’m just i’m really looking forward to more fruition of this and so uh i’ll i’ll end it here right now.