https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rkBqTO747a4
Welcome to Voices with Raviky. So I have a very special guest today. So my guest is Jinsung Kim. Let me tell you a little bit about Jinsung. I first met him teaching him a high school class on classical civilization a long time ago. And then he came to U of T and did cognitive science with me. And now he is a TA in at least two of my courses right now. On RA. He’s also a collaborator where we write papers together. We make presentations together. He’s also my lab manager for the consciousness and wisdom studies lab. So Jinsung is currently a graduate student working with Michelle Ferrari as his official supervisor and with me as sort of an unofficial supervisor. He refers to Michelle and me as his mom and dad. I think I’m the mom. I’m not quite happy about that. But nevertheless, it’s great to have him here. And Jinsung’s career is just taking off right now. He recently got a major publication in a premier journal. I’ll let him talk about that in a sec. But he has taken up the torch, if that isn’t condescending to him. I mean it as a compliment of doing the cognitive science of religion and spirituality. And his own research is just taking off. And so I’m just really excited to have him here. So welcome, Jinsung. Thank you. It’s good to be here. So yeah, I’m Jinsung. I have worked under, for, and with John for nearly a decade now. Jeez. Let’s not think about that too hard. And yeah, as mentioned, my particular areas of specialty are the cognitive science of spirituality, of religion, of lifespan development. By and large, my own area of research can be summarized as the study of intentional growth. So my focus is on ways in which people can change and develop on purpose, as opposed to psychological growth being something that just happens to you as a result of fate or circumstance or accident. My interest is in the ways that people can take charge of their own development. So this has of course led me through research in mindfulness, research in spiritual practices, research in magic and mysticism, a little bit of research in the martial arts. We do need to finish that paper. Yes. And so that’s where I’m coming from all of this. I think my thinking is I’d say 50% John’s fault and 50% the fault of myriad other influences who I’ve had the good fortune of being able to study with over the last 10 years. I mean, like I said, I think of Jinsung Moore’s family. So what I want to talk about, which is in the purview of Voices with Reveke, is the work. So you mentioned a paper you and I are working on, which we need to finish a naturalistic account of the key phenomenon or the chief phenomenon within the internal martial arts and related healing modalities. You’ve done some work with Michelle, I know, on people’s use of the I Ching. And you’ve been recently doing quite a bit of work on what you call the cognitive science of magic. You don’t mean by magic anything involving supernatural forces. I know you have a paper that’s under review right now. I forget which journal it is. So that one’s the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. I think the seeds of that line of thinking. So sure, let’s jump right into it. What do we mean by magic here? The seeds of that line of thinking can actually be found in another publication that Michelle and I just got accepted in the humanistic psychologist, which is on the history of the psychology of religious experiences. So what we do in that paper is we track the phenomenological study of religion as compared to the sociological study of religion, which is a little bit more constant through history, to, shall we say, three separate waves. You have the original wave at the kind of end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century with William James, Edwin Starbuck, and some of the actual great original luminaries in the history of psychology. Then it fades away a little bit as experimental behaviorism becomes a dominant paradigm, because as we reason, it is very difficult to induce a religious experience in the laboratory. We’ve had some success recently with psychedelics inducing mystical experiences, but as we get into in the paper, the extent to which those are religious experiences under a strict definition is not clear. Then there’s also the, ironically, increasing development of psychology as a science leading to a lack of careful familiarity with philosophical tools, religious and spiritual literature, and the just general toolbox you would need to actually study a religious experience. So ironically, as a Watsonian vision of psychological science becomes dominant, your toolbox to study certain phenomena degrades rapidly. We then find that this comes back in the post-war era with the work of Young and Maslow and the kind of great humanistic existential psychologists who start to become a little bit more interested in individual experience. Actually, there’s somebody points out in one of their books, and I can’t remember who it is off the top of my head, unfortunately, that the psychology of religion and the psychology of sexuality almost switch places over that 30-year span. Oh, interesting. Where, you know, William James writes an entire classic on the psychology of religion and two pages on human sexuality at the dawn of the 20th century, but then Kinsey, who’s writing in this kind of 40s, 50s, and 60s period, writes text after text after paper after paper about human sexuality, and nobody’s talking about religion. So, you know, that is yet another boom of the psychology of religious experience. And here you start to see the beginnings of what I think is important to understand in any sort of cognitive science of magic or spirituality, which is a decoupling of the theoretical from the practical. I’m especially using those terms to harken back to James Fraser’s distinction between theoretical magic and practical magic, where you have your underlying metaphysics and ontology of the entities at play, your explanations of how things work, you know, what you would call the language of training versus the language of explanation. So, and you see this earlier in John Dewey’s work, he starts to mention this, but it really starts to get taken up by especially Maslow, this idea that religion and spirituality as practices do not require the supernatural as a theory to function. Right, right, right, yes. So, that’s where you start to see these things kind of peel apart, and then we kind of characterize the current era of research on mystical experiences and religious experiences as really being defined by that final cleaving between the experience and the interpretation. Right, right, right. You know, we do get into, well, is this really the right idea? Can we actually distinguish experience from interpretation? You know, I think one of our recent experiments demonstrates pretty handily that that’s a really tough nut to sell. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Right. But, you know, this is kind of where the field is going. So, when I am talking about the cognitive science of magic, what I’m interested in is essentially looking at how much of the practical side of spirituality, of religion, of magic, of mysticism, of all these practices that have traditionally relied on the supernatural, can we replace their theoretical side with good cognitive science? Right, right, right, right, right. With, you know, this approach almost gives us a sort of a touring test, right, where if the idea of a touring test is a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence, excuse me, if a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence should be able to perfectly mimic human interaction, then practices derived from a cognitive scientific interpretation of magic should be able to replicate the practices of a traditionally trained magician. Right, right, right, right. From what I’ve seen, that might be a tall order and we might be 40 or 50 years out, but I think it’s manageable at some point. So I like this move you’re making because it’s obviously about deeply trying to bridge between cognitive science and the part of that family, mysticism, magic, religion, and spirituality that is often the one that is held up as the exemplar of irrational behavior, kookiness, superstitious supernatural metaphysics, etc. And so, if I understand you correctly, and I read some of your work and you’re talking about the I read some of your work and participate in it with you, so I hope I do. You’ve marked some. Yeah, yes, yes. You know, and you’re doing something analogous to what I tried to do, and it’s in the Awakening for the Meaning process around shamanism, and try and say, without adopting the shaman’s metaphysical view, can we understand both the phenomenology and the functionality of shamanism? What’s happening in the altered states of consciousness? Why that might facilitate healing? Might improve hunting? So I take it that you’re doing something analogous and like that and extended from that. Is that is that a fair? Yes, I’d say that’s a pretty accurate interpretation, especially because I think the work on shamanism was kind of the seed idea for this. Right, right. Where, you know, if you look at the history of human spirituality, shamanism is kind of the the art, the proto art, right? It is magic, it is spirituality, it is mysticism, it is religion, it is science, it is mindfulness, all wrapped into this singular bundle of kind of original human psychological technologies. Yeah, and as you know, I agree with Matt Rossano and Michael Winkleman and David Lewis Williams that, you know, shamanism is probably the psychotech, the ecology of practices that really drove the huge cognitive leap happening in the upper Paleolithic transition. So even though that does not in any way give scientific evidence for the truth of shamanistic metaphysics, it does say that the phenomenology and the language of training within shamanism is doing very, very powerful things. So can you can you give me an example, several examples, just go crazy Jimson, of how you’re bringing this work to, you know, various practices that have been called magical and some of the cog-sci around that? Sure. So, oh boy, where do we want to start here? I think it might be good to start historically, actually, to kind of give people a bridge from shamanism into magic and mysticism proper and then go from there. Sure, please. So, you know, something that I’ll occasionally say to people when they ask me why I’m studying magic is, you know, my argument is that magic is a human birthright. It is, I would say, the oldest faculty we have that really distinguishes us from other very complex tropic animals. Right, right. You know, if it is true that shamanism was the driving factor in the upper Paleolithic revolution, then magic is why humans are the dominant species on earth, which is going to be a very strange sentence for a lot of people listening to this. Yeah, yes. But hear me out. So there are direct lines to shamanism that you can find throughout history that evolve in one way or another. And actually, I would say you can characterize the axial revolution as essentially the filtering and formalizing of certain aspects of shamanic psychotechnology relative to the culture that the revolution is occurring in. Ah, well said. So in ancient Greece, for example, you know, the sociological pressures, I think, are very well laid out in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So I won’t go over them here. But you get the powers of watching the natural world of looking for fixed points of abstract reasoning and symbolism just condensed through Pythagoras, through Socrates from the Thracian shamanic tradition. Yeah, just kind of almost as a series of lenses focusing sunlight into something more concentrated and powerful, not quite as broadly applicable. But you do get this very, very powerful psychotechnology that is excellent at picking up the constants in the natural world. Right, right, right. Now, if you go to India, what I think the Vedas represent is another concentration of shamanic practices. But these are the shamanic practices for, shall we say, internal phenomenological manipulation. Right, right. You know, the consciousness. Yes, basically, the manipulation of one’s own consciousness is kind of the filtered ability. And you could even argue that what you get in the Abrahamic tradition is kind of the concentration of the power of narrative from the shamanic tradition. Yeah, right. And China, I would say, is, you know, they’re a little bit more manifold, I think. But the psychotechnology that I would say is par excellence in China is the capacity for tracking change. Right, right. You know, you get this through the classic of changes, you get this in a very biodynamic approach to medicine. You get this in, it’s very interesting to track the evolution of Chinese science versus Greek science, because Greek science is very focused on constants in the natural world, whereas Chinese science is very focused on dynamics. All right. So you see that even in like the sort of the flow within Tai Chi Chuan and things like that. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I would say, you know, the ability to track and effect change is what really goes on in the Chinese, the Chinese, the axial revolution in China. Right. So, you know, the reason why I’m going through all of this is because you do kind of see this splitting of the original shamanic psychotechnology, right, into forms of psychotechnology that become, shall we say, mainstream, you know, shall we say mainstream. Right, right, right. Now, this especially becomes clear in ancient Greece and Rome and Europe. But we get the word magic from the Greek word for Persian, especially Zoroastrian priests. Right. So the term magic has its origins in a word meaning the psychotechnologies of the other. Right. Yeah, the significant other for Greek culture, too. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, the in Chinese, for example, the word for magic and the word for shaman and pretty much the same thing. You know, it depends on who you talk to. There is this word for magic that largely means otherworldly. There’s also a word for magic that means shamanic. But, you know, basically the shaman’s toolkit fractures depending on where you go in the world. And especially in, you know, Greece and Greek intellectual descendants, the non-kosher parts of it, shall we say, become magic. But they’re still part of this same toolkit. Right. Okay. That’s well argued. So when I am referring to magic, I am essentially referring to the entire toolkit. I don’t use the word shamanism because I would reserve the term shamanism to refer to a very raw form of this toolkit in its original integrated context. Right. Because in the thousands of years between shamanism and magic, magic gets complicated. Right. The symbolism becomes incredibly diverse, incredibly rich, incredibly complex. The rituals diversify and specify. You know, if you look at medieval grimoires, for example, they are complex instruments. Right. Right. And, you know, the classic grimoire, and this is the case no matter where you go in the world, there are Chinese grimoires, there are Indian grimoires. Currently taking a look at a Hebrew grimoire, which is an interesting lark. And, you know, this is kind of why I want to say, like, magic is everywhere. Magic is just the complexified historical descendants of ancient shamanic psychotechnologies. So is it fair to say then that there are still sort of broadly, given the way you’ve described the origins, sort of three domains in which we could see sort of psychotech for altered states of consciousness kind of come in, you know, and in that sense, technically, mindfulness practice would be a kind of magical practice. Right. Yes. In fact, I think McClellan in his book, the wisdom of Hypatia says that magic is the art of being able to change consciousness at will. Yes. Yeah. That’s not wrong. Actually, if you’ll allow me this comparison, the core disciplines of stoicism, of logic, ethics, and physics, actually, I think make an excellent framework to split magic. Right. People have to understand that logic for the stoics means much more, not just what is now logic today, it means much more like psychology. Yes. You know, just basic reasoning skills. Like, if you twisted my arm a little bit, I would say that from original shamanic magic, the Greco-Roman tradition inherited logic, the Vedic tradition inherited ethics and the Chinese tradition inherited physics. Right. But what I was going to do, that’s great. I was going to say, there’s sort of domains where you’re transforming consciousness, yes, and domains where you’re trying to pick up on what is most constant. And unless people think that’s only a scientific practice, one way of understanding mysticism is to try and get at, you know, the ground of being the ultimate reality, which is the most constant. And then you also have the ability to try and track changes. And, you know, this has been picked up more recently, you know, in 40 Cognitive Science, where, you know, Alicia Raro talks about the use of narrative, right, in order to turn your cognition into something like a dynamical system, so you can better track the dynamical systems of the environment, the ecology. And so, is that a fair way of parsing it? So you could look at sort of psychotech for sort of tracking dynamical systems, psychotech for transforming consciousness, and then psychotech for trying to get at sort of what is most constant in reality. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah, I’d say that’s fair. And, you know, you find forms of magic that work for all of them. Like, every magical tradition contains a meditative tradition in terms of just trying to kind of ground out your own issues. But then, you know, you get divination for tracking patterns. There’s this fantastic project going on at Harvard that they call Prediction X, which is an attempt to correlate and systematize every way that humans have ever tried to predict the future. And it goes all the way from Babylonian Haro Spicci, all the way to modern stats. Right, right, right. And I just love seeing the things just put on the same graph, because they’re completely right. That’s all we’re doing. This picks up on sort of the predictive processing. Yes. And you and Daniel, you have been talking about that. Yes. Work you’re doing. So the way that I would kind of build on that other definition of magic as the ability to kind of change consciousness at will, is magic, by and large, is using techniques of imagination to bootstrap powers of cognition. Yeah, that I think that is very well said. And that goes well with the predictive processing model, because it sees imagination basically as the top-down predictive aspect. And sensation of perception is sort of the bottom up. Yes. Well, and you know, and this is why I think we’ve had this conversation. I think we need to go back to a more Aristotelian way of looking at the imagination. Yeah. Where, you know, the senses do not integrate in and of themselves. You have this, what they refer to as the common sense. Yes. That sticks them all together. But you have control over that common sense. So you can stick senses together in all sorts of ways. So that, look, getting disciplined practices that you could train to be able to transform that common sense would then impact on the kinds of patterns you were able to pick up on within yourself, within others, and within the world, and make, and sort of couple to the world in more powerful ways. Is that also a way of understanding what we’re talking about here? Yes, absolutely. And you’ve heard me talk about this before. You can only process things you can imagine. Right. Yeah. So the more limited you are in scope of your imagination, ultimately, the less rational you are. Yes, I agree with that. And, you know, people like to rag on practices of imagination as being irrational and fancy and things like that. You know, it’s a little bit like saying going to the gym is an artificial recreation of tasks you will actually have to perform in the world. Yeah, that’s true. You still go to the gym because it expands your base capacity to do things in the world. Right, right. So that, that’s a very, yeah, I like the gym or the dojo analogy. So, well, that sort of segues into what I wanted to ask you, which is, you know, there’s a lot of people who are probably watching this, and they have knives out, and they’re looking for any way. I mean, there’s two groups. There’s the people who are sort of self-designate as being rational. And then you said there’s an important relationship between imagination and rationality. And like I said before, I think both the Calvinist and the Romantic understanding of imagination are defective by being different kinds of extremes. So I can see, right, that the rationalist coming in and saying that this is all just superstitious crap. And then I can hear religious people coming in and saying this is all just heresy, etc., etc. So let’s do the first group first, because I think that’s where, like, a lot, I mean, I know you’re respectful of religious traditions, but I can tell in a lot of the work you’re really wrestling with those who come in, like I said, self-designated as the defenders of rationality and say, why are you doing this? This is all just, there’s a simple explanation for all of this, which is people are just superstitious and irrational. And if they were just rational, and usually the implicit thing is rational like me, then we wouldn’t need to do any of this. You’ve been trying to show, first of all, how pervasive it is and how functional it is, and that, like you said, it’s possible to understand the functionality without committing to the metaphysics. So like I said, can you give us some of those arguments? So I think my first argument to the skeptic as far as rationality goes is it’s not going away. Yeah. You know, this is, if you read the works of Rosano, of Winkleman, of Tanya Lerman, you know, actually most of whom I’ve met and are all fantastic people. Sorry, just at a weird point in my life. This is just part of human makeup. And if you read Jason Josephson Storm has a fantastic book called The Myth of Disson Chin. And I will yet again say Jason Josephson Storm has one of the best names I’ve ever heard. It’s a fantastic name for a guy who studies magic. Anyway, his point is that, you know, we like to pretend we are living in this world of disenchantment, you know, post Weber’s whole point about the great disenchantment and things like that, which I would argue you refer to as the disembedding because they’re functionally the same thing. And Josephson Storm’s point is, no, we’re not. If you look at the statistics of who believes in the supernatural, who believes in ESP, who believes in aliens and things like that, proportions have not changed in over a hundred years. Right, right. You know, science is great, but, you know, magic has always existed in the cracks. Actually, I think my favorite finding of his is that who believes, like the proportion of the population that believes in one thing versus another thing has not changed in the last couple of hundred years. But what’s funny to him is that the belief systems are mutually exclusive. For example, people who believe in psychics do not believe in witches. I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting. Well, because basically the argument is that, these people have constructed a coherent system to explain how these things work. And I’ve looked at the ESP kind of framework. You know, I prefer the magic framework because it’s older and has a little bit more generalizability. But yeah, if you believe in people who are psychokinetic, you don’t need magic. It’s all psychokinesis. Meanwhile, if you believe in magic, you don’t need psychokinesis. It’s all magic. So the reason why I start there is because, you know, let’s be honest. You know, humans are not born inherently rational, at least not the way that people tend to use that word. What people are born with is a capacity for utilitarian pattern. Right. So, you know, basically what all of these people who believe in some supernatural thing or another are doing is they are having experiences that science does not do a very good job of explaining or addressing. And they are attempting to patch them into a worldview. Because I’ve even encountered scientists who are like, I don’t know, man, I found this thing and it’s weird. You know, part of scientific training is the ability to sit with doubt and mystery. I’m not knocking that. I’m not knocking scientific training. I think it’s important. I’ve got 10 years of it. 10 years of it under a very good teacher. But this isn’t me saying that superstition or the supernatural is necessary. It’s me saying that it’s an understandable part of people trying to figure out a way to actually live and work and act in the world. Because one of the things, you know, you can’t just have pure language of training. Right. You have to have some sort of a language of explanation. Right. Right. And, yeah, I’d say the biggest issue is, is, you know, Michelle, my, you know, supervisor on paper, he’s a big believer in what William James referred to as radical empiricism. Yeah. If a human can experience it, you must be able to study it. Right. No, there has to be some sort of underlying systematicity to the human experience, even if the way that a human experience something is completely non-replicable. Right. Right. Like, you know, the uniqueness of identity being a thing, it could be that there are, there is no plausible way that anybody else will ever have this, like, one experience. It’s a little bit like my dad was telling me a story, because he’s a big baseball fan of this guy who, he hit the ball and it lined up just perfectly so that a bird flew in front of the ball right as it was going down the pitch. And you just see this explosion of feathers as the universe lines up just right for this ball to hit the bird. That’s never going to happen again. But under the laws of physics, it can happen. So James’s argument is that even if it’s never going to happen again, under the laws governing human experience, it is clearly possible for it to happen. So therefore, we must be able to understand it somehow, if we want to assume there’s some sort of systematicity. And I do have to say, mainstream science does a terrible job at cleaving to that kind of a thing. A lot of academics, a lot of people who claim to be rational, and I will say claim to be because, you know, I do believe that you need to have a sufficiently powerful imagination in order to be properly rational, because otherwise you’re looking at the world with one eye shut. Yeah. So, you know, and you know, we know this, people are not good judges of their own rationality. Yes, yes. So, you know, I guess my rebuttal to the pseudo rationalists is twofold. One is the practical consideration of people are having experiences that systematically track something, you know, like all the wiccans that I’ve talked to, like, you know, they do the rituals and something happens, right? And, you know, I’ve been hanging out with a Sufi group for part of the last year, and that’s a very powerful experience. And yes, you do experience something. Yes. And, you know, they need to have some sort of system to put it all in, because otherwise, how do you share it? And the second part of my rebuttal is, if your argument that something is not rational is that you have not personally experienced it, nor can you conceive of it happening, that is a poor argument. Yes. The world is huge. People are diverse. People are capable of having all sorts of experiences that you will never have. So, that’s good. So, a third argument I’ll want you to apply to is, yeah, but the only reason this persists is just because people are persistently stupid and irrational. And I get it. That’s still question-bending because of the Afriz II arguments. But I think you also have an independent response to that. You want to say, well, there’s another explanation for the persistence. I don’t think you deny that there is some self-deception going on in these things, and people are playing power politics and doing all kinds of stuff with- Oh, absolutely. People do that in science. People do that in science. People do that in art. People do that in politics. So, let’s just say you acknowledge that self-deception is random. Okay. Putting that aside, you say, yeah, independent of that, I think you say, there’s another important reason for the persistence of what you’re calling magic, namely is it has important functionality. It transforms people. It enables them to learn. It enables them to aspire. It enables them to access aspects of the psyche or their own body or psychosomatic interaction that they can’t- Sorry. I apologize. I might have left that implicit in my previous answers. But the bottom line is this stuff works. It may not work in the exact way that the metaphysics that they’re holding up says, because we’ve known since the 1950s from Arthur Reber’s work that people cannot explain their own pattern finding. Yeah. They cannot. It does not matter how rational you are, you cannot explain your own pattern finding. I am sure with a sufficient amount of time and training, you might be able to do it, but people are just bad at it. So, let’s forgive that as just part of human psychology that’s unfortunately slightly unavoidable. And let’s be a little charitable and point out, people do not keep things that do not work. Right. Or at least let me rephrase that. People do not keep things that do not perform some sort of a function. Right? Even if that function is just nostalgia. So, and we’re finding increasingly, we’re cleaving off pieces of shamanism and magic and turning them into clinical psychology over and over and over again. We’re taking psychedelics, we’re taking ritual, we’re taking mindfulness practices and things like that. Right. Every time we have taken something from magic and changed its metaphysics into science, suddenly it works. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hear me out. It’s not the change in metaphysics that’s making it work. Yes. Yes. Very well said. Very well said. Although perhaps the change in metaphysics, and this is going to be a segue to my last next question, allows you to bring science to bear and perhaps reverse engineer or improve it to some degree. Yes. And so, you know, I’ve joked about this for years where my entire tagline is sufficiently analyze magic. So, this brings me to the question, which is, it’s out, I mean, I know this from your work, but just to give you an opening here. Like, so cognitive science, especially for e-cognitive science, plays a special role in doing that, in, you know, in re-situating these practices and explaining their functionality and perhaps supporting, enhancing their functionality. So, can you talk a little bit about that, please? So, this will actually require me to backtrack a little bit because sometimes it is the change in metaphysics that allows it to work. Actually, the first publication that I was ever on was on the influences of the prosperity gospel on risk-taking behavior. Right, right, right. And one of the findings particularly sticks out to me. And, you know, I thought this was clever on behalf of the first author, Nick Hobson, who he studies ritual. He’s a good guy. Anyway, the finding was, so, you know, we, well, I helped mostly with the theory bit. So, during data collection, participants were exposed to a clip of Joel Osteen preaching the prosperity gospel. And, you know, lo and behold, they found that, okay, you know, exposure to hearing the prosperity gospel makes people indulge in risk-taking behaviors as, you know, tested through a gambling task afterwards. Now, does that mean that they have to explicitly believe in the So, here’s the thing, right, is they did this in a follow-up study where they split it into atheists and theists, and then made two versions of the recording. One of them was the original recording, and the other was the recording scrubbed of any mentions of God or the Bible or what have you. Original recording was, you know, preacher giving a sermon, and the scrubbed recording was designated as motivational speaker giving a talk. Here’s the kicker. If you scrub everything out of the, you know, if you scrub God and the Bible out of the recording, it works on atheists. There was an amplified effect for the prosperity gospel and theists suggesting that there is more of a buy-in effect the more you buy into it. Right, right. But, you know, this is where I do kind of have to backtrack on my own. It’s not the change in metaphysics that makes the thing work, but it is the change in metaphysics that makes the thing accessible, which is what allows it to work. Ah, that’s better. That’s much more precise and helpful. Thank you. Precise and helpful. Thank you. So the metaphysics, you might even think, this is just occurring to me now, the metaphysics has sort of an explaining function, but it also has this new function you mentioned. It gives you an accessibility function. It allows you to access the practice from your particular worldview. Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that. So there might be three languages. There might be a language of training. There might be a language of explaining, and then there might be a language of accessing or making it accessible. Yes. That’s interesting. Well, there’s a there’s perspectival language, right? Right, right. Yeah. Perspectival language. Yeah, right. Because underneath all of this, you have to have the basic way in which you’re looking at the world that allows certain things to be possible versus impossible. Right. Just the basic filter of relevance realization needs to be set up in a particular way. Right. Now, granted, you know, it’s one of those things where I know Anderson does this a lot, and I’ve gotten into it, you need to learn to play with your own metaphysics of what’s possible versus impossible. Right. You know, if you don’t have certain grounding practices, and, you know, unfortunately, not to get political or anything, but not interrogating your own worldview is what allows people to be manipulated. Yeah, yeah. Especially through conspiracy theories and things like that. Right. Because if you look historically, part of the proper education of a shaman or a magician or spiritualist or anything, is learning to warp your own field of possibility and find your way back. Right, right. You know, it’s especially the find your way back bit that’s important. And you know, this is why you find a meditative tradition in every single magical tradition, because you need a grounding practice to be able to find your way back to reality, or at least whatever reality you’re working with. So that’s good. Can you give another example, perhaps to the work you did with Michelle, like on the I Ching or the work you’re doing with me on on Chi about science can explain these phenomena that explain both the phenomenology and the functionality in an integrated fashion? Sure. So actually, let’s let’s do the I Ching one just because that’s top of mind. And because it’s a classic example of magic that everybody wants to dismiss out of hand, that they can’t dismiss out of hand for two reasons. One, they don’t know what it is. And two, they don’t know how it works. Right. So the I Ching is probably going to be heard properly. The I Ching is going to be familiar to most people as a manual of Chinese fortune telling. Very famously translated by Wilhelm and Baines and commented on by Young. The Youngian commentary is terrible. You know, I say this with all due respect, he was a psychologist bound to a certain place and time did not have certain resources available to him. But, you know, I speak like kindergarten, first grade level Mandarin and read classical Chinese decently due to having an education in Chinese philosophy. One of our co-authors, my lab mate, Anne, is fluent. So we were able to actually access the classical Chinese sources and Young’s commentary does not hold up if you look at the classical literature. Anyway, so but the operative, you know, we kind of use the I Ching, the I Ching is a lens because it was convenient and interesting and that’s what we had access to. But the argument works for all forms of divination. So first things first, fortune telling does not do what you think it does. And, you know, this is I’ve studied with the Wiccan Church of Canada for the last year as well to kind of get the emic understanding on magic as well. And they are also very clear on this. Divination does not tell you the check is going to be in the mail next Tuesday. What divination does and this is this is a difficult thing to explain outside of either Chinese or Neoblotonic metaphysics. But most magical systems look at the natural order of life, fate, the universe, the planet, and things like this as kind of an ongoing river. Individual human choices can vaguely shape the flow of the river. But, you know, ultimately a river flows one way. What divination practices allow you to do is gauge what’s happening downstream. Especially practices like tarot card reading or yiching divination are essentially acts of I find myself at a crossroads, I could act this way or I could act this way. Assuming I act in one particular way, what kind of consequences am I looking at downstream? What do I need to avoid? What could possibly come up? Things like this. Like the yiching is especially full of this because a lot of its readings are things like, you know, well, a superior person would do this. A foolish person is going to have this happen to them. Don’t do this. Right. So and the Wiccans especially are very clear on never ask divination for specifics. Never go fishing in a divinatory system. It doesn’t work that way. So, you know, that’s so how does it work then? Like, I mean, in cognitive scientific terms, but that’s what we’re trying to do. Yeah. So let’s go back to that Reber stuff that we were talking about before. Right. Right. So we know that people are terrible at, you know, gauging their own pattern recognition. You know what people are not terrible at? Pattern recognition itself. Right. People are fantastic at finding hidden patterns. And, you know, unfortunately, this has ruined a lot of research in the past, right? Like if there’s any sort of pattern in your randomized scheme, people will find it. We found this with the blind site research, you know, all sorts of things. Humans are fantastic at implicit pattern recognition. I doubt there is anything on the planet that is better than we are. Right. Implicit meaning that they can detect, and this is what Reber showed, they can pick up very complex patterns without being aware that they’re doing so or knowing how they do so, even if they become aware that they’re doing so. Right. You know, this is just a thing we do as humans. Right. Now, let’s say we’re back in the day and you don’t have modern statistical software or things like that to do your prediction. Right. The human faculty for implicit pattern recognition is your best tool for predicting the future. In fact, arguably, that’s what it’s for. You know, the two hunting strategies that humans developed both necessitate the capacity to predict the future. Right. Because our hunting strategies are chase something until it dies of exhaustion. Right. So we need to predict where the thing is going or throw rocket moving target, which also requires our ability to predict where the thing is going. So basically, this thing is very, very well developed for predicting future events. Right. You know, this is hypotheses, this is telling this, you know, predicting the weather, this is basic if this then that. Right. And what Reber showed is that we do this on a level so implicitly that we can’t actually figure out what the heck we’re doing. Now, skip to the work of Keith Oatley, which is he looks at narrative as a sort of modeling software. Right. Right. So, you know, you read fiction and allows you to, you know, practice that kind of predictive ability. Right. So fiction, I mean, in that sense, is part of what you’re talking about. This training of the imaginable faculty. I mean, one of the reasons why we read great literature is it trains our imagination. So we’re much better at understanding other people picking up on patterns intuitively about how they’re moving around in the world, what they’re thinking, what they’re seeing, what they’re believing. But people don’t just people don’t just, they just don’t label that as magic. No, they don’t. They should, but they don’t. Right. You know, especially because if and here’s where we’ll get into things. The purpose of a divination system is to create an artificial grammar. Right. You know, and this is one of the reasons why I rag on astrology a little bit because it requires a reach to construct an artificial grammar, because part of the point is that needs to be randomized and astrology is a closed system. I kind of treat astrology as the magical equivalent of genetics. Anyway, so what you’re doing when you’re casting lots or drawing cards or things like that is you are creating an artificial randomized symbolic grammar. Right. Which allows you to, you know, when I’m describing this in layperson’s terms, I describe it as flypaper for thought. Right. You know, this is a fantastic instrument. Unfortunately, it is notoriously fickle. It is, you know, this is why people meditate, right? Like, think about pink elephants and think about nothing but pink elephants for the next five minutes. It’s not possible. Not without massive powers of concentration that take decades to train. So, what you’re doing with a divination tool is you are creating a structure out there in the world to project your imagination onto so that you can bootstrap the association game that your brain plays with everything to project narrative order onto your implicit pattern recognition. Right. And then Aliso Urarawa talks about how narrative gets our mind working in a way that’s very good at picking up on complex dynamical systems because of the way narrative, you know, layers things and has them, you know, feedback and small differences and context sensitivity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes. So, you get to use, basically what you’re doing is you’re bootstrapping a few different things here. You’re bootstrapping basic complex pattern recognition. Narrative processing, which allows you to massively accelerate the complexity of the information that you’re dealing with. Right. And symbolism. Right. And I think as you’ve discussed in other videos, symbols are very powerful because they allow you a very complex multi-app thing to stick pieces of cognition to so that you don’t have to carry them around in your head. Yes. Right. So, and, you know, there’s a ritual element to divination as well. Right. And, you know, this is where traditional Wiccan literature and Nick Hobson’s work overlap is the thing that ritual is fantastic for is regulating emotion and shaving intent. Right. Which also then impacts on the, even the bio-energetic aspects of cognition and consciousness. I wanted to ask you about the randomness because, I mean, you and I have done related work on this too. I mean, this reminds me of, you know, and Daniel talks about this too, and I talk about it too. You know, the disruptive strategies for inducing insight. Yes. Or in neural networks, how you throw noise into the system. So, you prevent it from overfitting. So, to use your kind of language, you open up the space of patterns that you can use. Yes. Yeah. It’s, you know, there’s, basically there’s both a selective constraint and an enabling constraint going on in the process of divination. There is an enabling constraint that massively expands the number of patterns that you can possibly be processing once. Right. And, you know, there’s certain, like certain forms of meditation, they teach you to kind of like let go of the grip that you’ve got in your reasoning. So, active imagination essentially gets massively accelerated. You know, the symbols having qualitative fluid meanings rather than strictly defined fixed meanings also has an impact on this. Pheniotic drift. Yeah. But the randomized element and the ritual setting creates a selective constraint on the divination process. So, it’s basically kind of one of those like, you know, let’s say that you could normally come up with three patterns, select one, right? What divination allows you to do is instead of going, you know, draw three, pick one. It’s draw 10, pick four. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So, it’s, you know, a basic strategy for massively expanding the number of patterns that you can hold at once and artificially constraining the selection process so that you don’t go, essentially, you know, essentially so you don’t go into choice paralysis. So, I mean, using sort of the gilthus language, you’re doing a lot of, you know, really enhancing a dynamic shifting between left and right hemisphere. Yes. And, you know, we know that that happens with literacy anyway, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, tarot cards are words. Let’s put it that way. Or at the very least, they are both under the subset of symbol that require and, you know, you read tarot cards in a very similar way that you read words on a page, right? And, you know, you read the I Ching the same way where you do have to kind of do this dynamical back and forth between individual symbolism at an individual level and symbolism at a contextual level. So, this reminds me of stuff from the Neoplatonic tradition, like, you know, you’ve read it too, Gregory Shaw’s work on theurgia. Yes. Right. And the symptomatic practices where they would be given sets of objects and then they had to try and find the symptomatic, the pattern that they all like they all symbolically belong to. And so, yes. And then you what you do is increase the variation and then people and this reminds me and you know where I’m going with it. This reminds me of sort of the deep learning strategy in neural networks where you introduce variation and then you try and find the underlying pattern that’s invariant and then from that you introduce it and this is how the brain actually learns and how artificial intelligence. So, yes. And this is also why if you look at medieval grimoires, right, the section of the text that is not specific spell formulae, which by the way, I once heard spell formulae described as synesthetic equations and that is essentially what they are. Right. There is somebody, yeah, there is somebody in the I Ching literature who has described the I Ching as qualitative binary notation. I see. Which I think is correct, right. Basically what you do is you form a synesthetic association between symbols and certain qualities and the symbolism allows you to rearrange, especially if you have a particularly powerful imagination, allows you to rearrange, you know, certain qualities, sensations, emotions, feeling so that you know, okay, based on the grammar of the symbol, this is the state that I need to be in in order to achieve this thing. But it will disclose itself in different ways. Is that the idea? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. But what I was originally saying is the section of spell books that are not those formulae are giant correspondence and associations. Right, right, right, right, right. Because they’re basically they allow you to make more and more and more and more associations based on increasingly subtle or occulted symbolism. By the way, if this sounds like a children’s game, you know, we’ve had this discussion before. There is a reason so many tests of cognitive flexibility look like children’s games. Yeah, yeah. Because children are way more flexible than an adult is ever going to be and you need constant practice in order to maintain that flexibility. So the I Ching then using this language uses sort of multiple intervention psychotech to massively increase cognitive flexibility. Right. But in this, like you say, in this systematic fashion, and this allows people to better like tap into their capacity to tap in exact and improve their capacity for picking up on implicit patterns. And that’s how they sort of divine, like the course of events or something like that. Yes. Now, of course, it is kind of one of those things where you know, you talk about an ecology of practice a lot. Yeah, the reason why, like even within a divination practice, there’s a bunch of things going on, right? There is, you know, you’re usually supposed to meditate a little bit before you engage in divination. The wiccans especially have a code of ethics where there is no divination without contemplation. You do not employ magic until you’re at the end of your cognitive rope. Right, right, right. Because, you know, if this sounds like a recipe for potentially going insane, that’s because it is. Right. You know, as you’re talking about, I just want to do your slogan, because I think it’s a really good one. You talk about how magic is a tool. It’s not a toy. Yeah, you know, I’ll say a lot. Rule number one, magic is not a toy. Right. Rule number two is magic and money don’t mix. Yeah. But, you know, rule number one is magic is not a toy because you are playing with very, very old, very, very fundamental psychotechnologies for manipulating your ability to perceive and predict patterns in the world. Yes. This can very readily either essentially paralyze you for life with choice paralysis as you see everything, you know, or you just start seeing things that aren’t there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, one of the, and I mentioned the Theologia from the Neoplatonic conditions, is you see this, I mean, so the pairing between Theologia and Philosophia, you see this, you know, that you have both these ritual practices and then you have these practices that are designed to train rationality in more comprehensive sense, I argue for, of systematic ways of overcoming self-descension, enhancing, you know, the religio coupledness to the world. But you see, you see the Theologia, especially after Iambicus and Proclus and Demacius, right, you see the Theologia and the Philosophia always deeply inter-defined, interdependent. Yes, yes, they have to be. Right, right, right. They have to be. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I get angry at people in the science versus spirituality debate. You can’t have one without the other, right? Right, right, right. You know, like, something that I desperately want to write a book on at some point is almost the spiritual ethics of curiosity. Right, right. Because, I’m sorry, you can’t be an uncurious scientist. You know, there is deep, deep moral and existential import to being able to look at the world with awe and reference and the woodruff line of things and just say, this is so much bigger than me. But the spiritual practices are what allow you to relate to that in an important way. Yeah. Right. Rather than just referring to it as well. Exactly. Like, they’re what let you tie yourself into the world. You know, it’s, Michelle and I have another paper on the way with Monica Ardell, which looks at the kind of relationship between wisdom and well-being as mediated through spirituality. Yeah. And increasingly, what’s becoming clear is what the sense of spirituality tracks is your sense of connectedness to something bigger. Yeah, which is something I’ve been arguing for a while, as you know. And actually, funnily enough, I was at a, I participated in a roundtable through the Wiccan Church of Canada a couple of weeks ago, kind of on the topic of what is magic. And something that came up is magic is both craft and feeling. It is the feeling of connectedness, of pattern, of things clicking together and something happening, as well as the craft of being able to bring about that feeling. Right. Right. Right. That’s very interesting. I was just going to point people to, and I’m going to have Brian on it sometime, but we’ve been doing work with, discussion with Brian Ostafan, and he’s been doing some experiments about how awe really improves sort of your cognitive flexibility, your ability to pick up on patterns. Yes. Yes. You and I, with Jennifer Steller and with Michelle, we’re crafting an experiment to see what we’re predicting that we’re going to see that awe has important beneficial effects, which makes sense, because we experience awe as a tremendously rewarding experience. People often designate it as one of the most significant experiences in their lives. And this is, if you’ll forgive me for interrupting, one of the things that so frustrates me about scientists in general is if you look at the original intention behind the study of physics in the Hellenistic world, and let’s do my favorite thing and hop continents because this is how you see that something is real. Neo-Confucians had the very similar practice. The entire point of what the Neo-Confucians called the investigation of things or physics in the West, the thing that eventually turned into science and natural observation. The point is awe. Right. Yes. The point is not to do in the wizard and not measure the marigolds and things like that. The point is to encounter the sheer size and scope of everything and just let it open you. And this is why I would say there can’t be science without spirituality. I think if, and this gets me in trouble with colleagues sometimes because I do treat science as sacred in a very old sense of the word. Yes, I wonder where I got that one from. So this is really interesting and I mean, I could, you know, there’s connections here to the work that Daniel’s doing and the work that Anderson and Todd’s doing. We talk about this regularly. Yeah. And so, I mean, we’re just sort of, you know, just the tip of the iceberg kind of thing going on here. So what’s next for you? I mean, you know, what’s supposed to be next for me is finishing my thesis. The PhD thesis. Yes. Yeah. You know, this kind of ties in here because, you know, Michelle called me on this because one of the things that I want to do. So the core of my PhD thesis is on, you know, Callard’s notion of aspirations. Right. And the development of wisdom and essentially, you know, are things like wisdom and self transcendence, things that you pursue on purpose, or does, you know, having a more coherent, purposeful approach to living life predict the development of these things? And of course, can we affect that in the classroom? Can we affect that in workshops, things like that? But, you know, the goal kind of going forward is, okay, but, you know, how does the sense of realness fit into this? Right. Like, yes, yes. You know, if, because what we’re finding is, you know, the first wave of my thesis research kind of found actually that the 3DWS Monica’s version of personal wisdom and the SWIS Igor’s version of wise reasoning seem to be tracking two different narratives regarding wisdom. Right. If you consider wisdom as, you know, freedom from pain, freedom from anxiety, and a very Buddhist kind of notion of, I wouldn’t even say Buddhist notion because the actual Buddhist notion of progeny has very little to do with this. Yeah. But if you do kind of view it as a very, like, you know, the cessation of worldly suffering, you know, to be wise is to not suffer worldly pain. That’s one narrative of wisdom. And Monica’s measure seems to be tracking pretty much of that. Right. What Igor’s measure seems to be tracking is wisdom in terms of the pursuit of active growth. Right. So we kind of described it as the negative narrative and the positive narrative. There’s the, I don’t want to be this way narrative, which is tracked by the 3DWS. And there’s the, I do want to be this way narrative, which is tracked by the SWIS. Oh, that’s interesting. They track different things. For example, the 3DWS, the negative wisdom tracks, you know, freedom from stress, I think a little bit more sense of control, things like that. Whereas Igor’s measure tracks more things like meaning, you know, like what you get out of this kind of thing. It’s kind of like the Epicureans and the Stoics. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I would say that, um, yeah, that Monica’s view, the negative view of wisdom is very much tracking the Epicurean form of enlightenment. Whereas the positive form of wisdom is very much tracking the Stoic form of enlightenment. Now, of course, I’m going to argue as always, you need both. Yeah. You know, you need, and you know, we’ve had this conversation elsewhere, you need to both be able to dial back your own cognitive biases and reasoning and things like that. And, you know, basically hold yourself at bay, which is more the negative view of wisdom. But you also need to have the, shall we say, you know, intellectual and existential courage to reach out into the world to try and change. Yeah. Sort of, uh, sort of meta assimilation and meta accommodation strategies in a sense. Yes, pretty much. Um, so then, you know, my interest is, okay, well, how does the sense of realness play into this? Like, especially realness of the attainability of future states of view, you know, realness of certain practices and things like that. And then the hope is to essentially take the branch of my research that looks at aspiration and wisdom and future states of you, as well as your motivations behind why you’re doing this and stick it together with my research on wisdom and spirituality and magic to essentially say, you know, if we give you a coherent system for growth for self-transcendence and, you know, um, despite my, I think infamous among our colleagues, dislike of Jung, I think this is why people grab onto him so tightly is he gives you that. He gives you that in a slightly irresponsible, scattered and occluded kind of way, which is why I don’t like him. Um, but he gives you a narrative for growth and development. And unfortunately, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, so do conspiracy theories. So you need both. And so I was going to ask you, maybe that that’ll be my final question for you that we can wrap it up because I’m just playing a little bit with the etymology, the word wizard, which is supposed to be, you know, is an archetypal name for some sort of magic user also means wise person. And I believe there’s also connections between the word Wiccan and wisdom in some fashion and the logical fashion too. They all go back to the, um, to the Indo-European word for site. Right. Yeah. And, and this is why, um, now this is why I don’t think wisdom is an effect of quality. Wisdom is ultimately a capacity to see possibilities and see the ultimate, the optimal route. So sight in the sense of insight rather than just visual. I think we’ve had this conversation before where you can, you know, wisdom seems to kind of be an emergent function of insight, hindsight and foresight. Yes. I agree. Um, where there’s your ability to look deeply into a situation to see how it came about and then to predict the multiple ways in which it could unfold. So I’m a little bit more interested, you know, I think, um, you know, Nick Westrade and, uh, Judith Gluck and, you know, Michelle, to an extent have the hindsight aspect of wisdom on the walk. And I think you and Igor are steadily getting into, and you know, the lab in general, steadily getting into the insight portion of wisdom. Right. I’m kind of more interested in the foresight. Oh, this is brilliant. I hadn’t seen it that way before. Oh, that’s very good, Jimson. That’s really beautiful. That’s elegant. Oh, I like that. That’s, oh, that’s very, very, oh, wow. That’s very helpful. Thank you. Oh, what a jump to end on. That’s really beautiful. Yeah. So, you know, this is where my interest in like human ability to predict the future, sense of realness, the imagination and things like that go because I’m more interested in the aspects of wisdom that have to do with the actualization of possibility, shall we say. Yeah. Yeah. That’s very good. Oh, I like that. That’s really wonderful. Well, this has been fantastic. And I wanted to thank you for this. Oh, no, thank you for having me on. No, I mean, you and I, uh, it’s hard to pull apart our work because they’re so interwoven. And, you know, and people have heard your name in so many videos and, you know, episodes of Awakening from the Media Crisis. Yeah, it’s made conferences interesting sometimes. I can imagine. I can imagine. I think I’ve made this joke with you before, but, you know, people come up to me at conferences and say, oh, you have John Vervecki’s name on your poster. What’s he like? And he says, you realize that this is the guy who throws boxes of chocolate at me to get it out of his apartment, right? Like, you know, we have a very different working relationship. One I deeply value. So thank you very much again. I probably would like to have you on again. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, maybe even a three-way dialogue with you and Dan and I, or you and Anderson and I. I think that would be wonderful. Oh, absolutely. I think that’d be a hoot. I welcome you. I welcome you back. But thank you very much for today. It was most excellent. Oh, yeah. No, this was fun. This was fun. And it’s good talking to you as always. Thank you.