https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_Fnmp6UVafM
Welcome everyone. I’m really excited about this. This is another series in the Cognitive Science Show. The series is entitled The Elusive Eye, capital I, the nature and function of the self. It’s somewhat of a follow-up to an earlier series that Greg Enriquez, who’s joining us here, and I did Untangling the World Not, which is about consciousness. Consciousness will figure in the discussion of the self because self-consciousness is considered a central feature of the self. I’m very excited about this. Of course, many of you know my ongoing beloved friend and partner in crime, Christopher Mastapietro, with whom I’ve done many a dialogue. We’ve written many things together. Many of you have, like myself, been astonished by the natural lyrical eloquence that Christopher brings to the expression of ideas. We each bring some different strengths and hopefully complementary strengths because we all carry, I suppose, our weaknesses to this. I’m a cognitive scientist with training in psychology. I’m also a cognitive psychologist. I’m a cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist, so emphasis on cognition. I also have training in philosophy, degrees in philosophy. I’m also a practitioner and educator in various practices in which people alter their sense of self as they alter their state of consciousness. That’s who I am. A bit more about my general background. As I said, I’m an associate professor at the University of Toronto. I am the author and presenter of the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. That’s probably enough about me, maybe too much. I’ll pass it over to whoever wants to go next and introduce themselves. Why don’t you go ahead, Greg? Okay. Hey, I’m Greg Henrikis. Great to be back in the Cognitive Science series. The other one was a blast and I’m really glad we’re doing this. I’m a professor in graduate psychology in the combined integrated doctoral program. I’m trained as a clinical psychologist. I consider myself a theoretical psychologist, so I like to bounce back and forth between the clinic room, working with personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy, and the bridge between psychology as this broad discipline and how it connects to the practice of alleviating suffering, well-being, and philosophy large. I think John is one of my soulmates from some other world that I finally found. Christopher now seems to be another one. Yes, of course, I’ve listened to many, many of your guys’ dialogues. It’s beautiful to be here with both of you. It’s great to be here for me too. Of course, John’s erstwhile and ongoing partner in crime, writing partner, partner in thought, and especially insofar as topics related to the meaning crisis are concerned and dialogue, more recently dialogue dialogos. I’m bringing something I think very different. The two of you are both decorated systemic theorists, I think, not to embarrass the two of you, but you both have very, very comprehensive credentials and bona fides that you’re bringing to this, and you’re bringing a kind of systemic way of thinking about this that’s very tutored by the disciplines that you’re both coming from, but of course both of you have a sufficient interdisciplinary orientation, and both of you are good polymaths. I think that what I’m here for is really the role that I find myself often taking, which is sort of like an observing scribe, which is sufficiently modest to make me feel a little bit more comfortable coming into this. I come into this with excitement, but also a little bit of trepidation given the subject matter, given its sheer complexity, and I feel an overwhelming concern to be careful and to be precise and to be as rigorous as I’m capable of being in the process. A lot of our dialogues are very free-flowing, they’re very generative, and they’re thrilling for being exactly that, but this is one area in which I think care and more of a methodical, incremental, perhaps a little bit more of a painstaking approach is required. I say this to remind myself, not really to remind the two of you, but for me, that reminder is going to serve a very important function for me, which is first, I think, initially, I think perhaps I’ll take a little bit of the substituting role of the viewer in some sense, just to try and mediate and to understand, to take a bit of a role of translation, and also because the two of you were bringing such a powerful cognitive, scientific, and psychological matrix to this topic. I think that the function, at least early in the process that I can serve, is to maintain, to be the living reminder of the existential implications of the questions that we’re taking on together and not simply the question of what is there, what am I to know, but what am I to do about all of this and my willingness to be oneself and that’s really the, I think that’s the spirit, at least, that I begin with here between the two of you. Yeah, that’s brilliant. Excellent, excellent, and I’m very excited to begin this process. So just to indicate how we’ll proceed, I’m going to proceed in a style very similar to what Greg and I do in Untangling the World Knot. I have sort of an argument I want to build and build it step by step, so for a while I’ll be sort of the central guide with Greg and Chris intervening to generate dialogue around it in the sort of respective roles they’ve already designated for themselves, and then at points it’ll shift and Greg and or Chris will take more of a center stage even though there isn’t a stage right now, and we’ll shift around in that, but right now there’s a sort of a course of argument I want to take us through, and that’ll be the skeleton which my two good friends will inflesh as they always do so wonderfully. So it’s very interesting if you look in like in psychology texts, one of the terms that is invoked more than any other term, perhaps even more than behavior sometimes or mind is self, there’s been some surveys on this that is just invoked all over the place in psychology, and Greg will appreciate this because he’s the genius about the problem of psychology. For all of this use and invocation of this term, there’s actually precious little until very recently that was done about trying to understand what this central construct and concept is and what it does. So first of all, there is a pressing scientific concern around this. It’s been called a conceptual morass, that’s a little quote, the conceptual morass around the self. How can something be so central and so enigmatically discussed or explained within a scientific enterprise within the scientific enterprise of psychology is something that needs to be addressed on one hand. But as Chris so aptly said… Can I pop in there? Just for a set up here for me, because you know this is that I get obsessed by this. I’m like a kid in a candy store. I’ll try to activate for him alone, but in this instance, I had to let it go. So a while ago, I was delineating the core problem of psychology and its core fundamental terms. And I identified five foundational terms, behavior, mind, cognition, consciousness, and the self. And so you and I obviously, you know how much I honor the way you tackle cognition. And I think you and I wrangled consciousness are adequately, at least into a back corner. So it’s a real thrill to be working on the self. And the book that I’m doing tackles behavior and mind. And if we nail those five domains, that’s an exciting thing, at least in my head. So I’d like to just jump out. Why I’m thrilled with this journey. That’s great. This is a lot of fun already. Yeah. And I think something that’ll come out, Greg, is that those five enigmatic terms are interdependent. They don’t just sort of hang free of each other also. And that’ll come out of the discussion. So there’s that. And that is just, I think, a bona fide central core scientific problem. But that might strike many of you as cold. Like, who cares? I mean, maybe, you know, I don’t care about it. It’s a rare person that gets excited about that. I’ll own that. Right. And that’s fine. Of course, science has a tremendous impact on our ontology and our technology and things like that. So it really should concern you, even if perhaps it doesn’t. But in fairness to you, Greg and Chris both represent important aspects of this topic. If you are going to enter into a therapeutic endeavor, a clinical endeavor, your relationship to yourself and your understanding of yourself, your Socratic self-knowledge, if I can be so bold, is often a crucial and central feature of a clinical or even a pedagogical project. And that, I think, overlaps as soon as we invoke Socrates, we bridge between those two domains. And that’s the existential. You certainly in some central way care about yourself and care about the kind of self you are. And Socrates comes to mind with know thyself. How would you know yourself if you don’t know what kind of thing a self is? That’s a very, and this is Socrates’ point, well, you don’t really, you can’t really answer that question well. And do you want to live your life in ignorance of this, you know, center of gravity for most of your existential endeavors? And here comes self-understanding. Presumably not. So this, of course, is also overlaps with the way the nature of the self, the nature of the subject, the nature of identity, are seriously in contention in our culture right now due to sort of political and postmodern critiques. And so all of this makes the elusive eye a very, very central topic. Now, here’s why I’m calling it the elusive eye. Here’s what I want to build an argument towards. In one sense, there’s nothing more familiar to you than yourself. Really? And then what I want to show you in another sense, there should be nothing more mysterious to you than what the nature and function of that self is. And pulling those two apart and not conflating and confusing your experiential familiarity with your epistemic understanding is one of where I want to start. I want to start, I want to give us some terms to make some distinctions so things that are not confused together in an inappropriate fashion. So I want to start with a couple of notions. One is folk psychology, F-O-L-K, folk psychology, a term made very popular by Jerry Fodor in cognitive science in the 1970s, no, more than 1980s, but in the 1970s as well. So what is this? We all have it. There is no escaping psychology. Greg will be happy to hear that. There’s no escaping psychology because you either have an explicit psychology or you have an implicit psychology. Namely, you have a folk psychology. Folk psychology are largely implicit theories that you have internalized from your culture about what minds are, how cognition works, what selves are. So we carry folk psychology around. And one of the main jobs, as we’ll see in a second, of explicit psychology is to bring folk psychology into question so that we can improve upon the defects that folk psychology has. Now in a similar way, I want to coin a term that isn’t as prevalent, and that’s why I’m coining it, but I want to coin a term called folk phenomenology. Now, first of all, what’s phenomenology? And you’ll get some- Actually, I’m sorry, I’m gonna pause you real fast. Just, so if folks out there want to just think about folk psychology, a real easy shorthand is belief desire. If you impute, hey, why did he go to the store? He believed that there were groceries there, and he wanted to fill his fridge. So those big intersections of motivational desire and beliefs about the way the world works is a quick map that people use for folk psychology, and it may be relevant as we get into folk phenomenology. Yeah, that’s very good. Yes, belief desire psychology is often considered one of the central things we do when we’re doing folk psychology. There are other ones that the mind is a space and things like that. So what is phenomenology, first of all? So although phenomenology involves introspective attention and awareness, it’s not identical to it. So what you’re doing in phenomenology is you’re getting some interpretation of your experience. You’re trying to determine the structures of your experience of the world. So let me give you a folk phenomenological. So we tend to divide our experience up, and notice we’re often using metaphors in folk phenomenology, into an inner and an outer. And we carry that around, and then there is a particular cultural slant to that. We’ve tended to think of the inner as subjective and the outer as objective. And we can talk about these contentious terms later. But folk psychology is, again, ways in which we have developed interpretations of the structures that make our experience meaningful. Now, what academic phenomenology would be is a more rigorous and critically reflective activity upon the structure of our experience. Well, why can’t I just settle with folk phenomenology? But the problem is we often conflate what is perhaps essential or universal to human phenomenology with what is culturally specific. So it’s plausible that this sense of inner and outer, and those might not even be the right terms, but I’m just using them to point, is a universal feature of human phenomenology. But the idea that it’s an inner subjective world and an outer objective world, that is not a universal. You don’t even have to go to another culture. You just have to go back in the history of the West. And that’s not how people interpreted the structure of their experience. They had different interpretations for it. So one of the things we’re doing in phenomenology is we’re trying to find the invariant, potentially universal features that meaningfully structure our experience. And so we have both academic phenomenology and folk phenomenology. We have academic or scientific psychology and folk psychology. Now, here’s the thing. Why, like again, why do we have both? This goes towards an argument made by the cognitive anthropologist and cognitive scientist Scott Atron about how science is the inversion of common sense. So in common sense, we use the familiar to try and understand the unfamiliar. We use something that we already know in order to try and understand, explain something we don’t know. Well, this is how it worked for me now. This is how it’s going to work then. That’s the basic move of common sense. And this is a valuable thing. I’m not here to besmirch it. We have to live our daily lives according to that kind of common sense. But science does the opposite. Science does the opposite in that science proposes very unfamiliar entities to explain the things that we are familiar with. It’ll say, you know that table over there? That table is actually made out of really, really, really small, invisible to the eye particles that aren’t really particles that are sort of in a location but aren’t in a location and have invisible fields of force between them. And psychology is no different than that. And so part of what science does is it problematizes our folk understanding, our everyday common sense understanding. So what we need to do here is also reveal the folk psychological and folk phenomenological model of the self. And for short term, I’m going to now go forward and say the folk model of the self. It’s both the folk psychological and the folk phenomenological that is so familiar to us and that we use to try and explain things. And we do it when we anthropomorphize. We use that folk model of the self when we anthropomorphize or personify things. The tree is weeping in sadness and things like that. And that’s fine. And I don’t want to take away anybody’s poetry either. But the thing we need to do in order to do a science of the self is we have to do the inversion. We have to problematize that folk model. We have to deeply problematize it. And that’s what I mean by we’re going to take something that at the folk level is so utterly familiar to you. And then we’re going to do the scientific inversion on it and problematize it. Because only by doing that can we deepen our understanding of it. So what I propose to do is go through some of the central features of the folk model of the self. That’s all we’ll probably get to today. And then set up how we will begin to problematize that as a way of bringing a scientific framing to bear upon this very crucial topic. So how does that sound so far, guys? Great. Maybe we can clarify a little bit about what folk phenomenology means for folks. So have you ever had the conversation, let me just throw this out there and see if we’re tracking. So when I was a kid, it dawned on me, hey, how do I know, John, if you see the same red as I see? Right? Have you had that conversation? Right? That’s a folk phenomena. That’s like we start to problematize, but we’re starting to become aware that I have an inside here, you have an inside, and there’s something about our inside relative to the outside, and we’re trying to map that up. So that’s an example of a folk phenomenological conversation. Yeah. Whenever you can extend that, it’s a great example. Whenever you are claiming to know what somebody’s experience is for them, then you’re doing that folk phenomenology. Like, oh, I really know how grief feels. Right? And you say, oh, right. And you’re doing that folk phenomenology. You’re saying that there is a structure to your experience that you attribute to the other person, and they also have the same structure of experience that makes that experience mean grief, what we mean by grief. Yeah, very much. Now, what we could ask when we do this, pick up the example, when we pick up the more academic phenomenology, are all of the structures in grief given to us by our humanity, or are some of them culturally inflected, or even particularly idiosyncratic to us? And so, we may experience grief more as pain. Other cultures may experience grief more as a sense of loss, being at a loss. And so, we have to be careful, again, to be more rigorous and critically reflective. So, we’re not just introspecting. We’re trying to do this process developed by Edmund Husserl by which we try to determine, but what are the universal, generalizable features? Yeah. Yeah. What I’m understanding is that there’s a certain sensible experience, an order of appearances that process from the condition of being a self, if we can take as a starting point, that there is such a condition, and that that condition is something that we’re going to call being a self, and that the condition that we’re going to call being a self is generative of a category of experience that seems variable, that seems both invariant in some ways and highly variable in other ways. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to correlate and correspond the order of appearances that we might call our sensible encounter with our selfhood. We’re trying to correlate and correspond that back to the machinery of the condition of being a self to determine which of them are essential, which of them are perhaps not essential, and trying to close the gap. I don’t know if I want to call it a causal gap, but close the conditional gap between one and the other. I think what you’re going to call the self model, John, and the kind of dynamical machinery that from which the self model emerges. Is that fair? That was excellent. The two of you, I think. This is already working. This is already, you know, the mutual explication and induction of the intelligibility. That’s great. That’s really good. So yes, so I’m taking as my sort of exposition of the folk model, a very influential paper by Galen Strassen, who’s a philosopher who’s written a lot about the self. And this is from 1999. It served as sort of the linchpin article for an anthology called Models of the Self that became quite influential. And so I want to use that. I’m going to add to it because I think there’s a couple more. I’m going to explicate and develop some of these features more than Strassen does. I’m also going to add to the list and justify why I’m adding a couple more features to it. The first thing I want to note, and we’re going to come back to it as what’s problematic about what Strassen is giving us, is that he’s giving us a feature list. And that feature lists often lack some very important properties that we’re going to have to come back to. That part of what we need to do is turn such a feature list into a feature schema. So put a pin in that. We’ll come back to that. So I’m going to give you the list, but I’m going to critique it both in terms of its specific content and also its overall structure. I’m going to critique for it being a feature list. Okay. So what’s the folk folk model of the self? So the first core feature is the self is a thing, and Strassen says, in a robust sense, as if that’s terribly helpful. A fragile and vulnerable thing. Sometimes John, trust me. So what I think Strassen means by that, which is a little bit ironic given that he’s providing a feature list, is we can distinguish between a thing and just a conglomeration, like a pile of stones. What’s the difference between a stone and a pile of stones, for example? And so what we typically want to, I think what he means by robust thing, as opposed to, I guess the contrast is a weak thing. The stone is a more robust thing than the pile of stones because the stone has a structural functional organization that unifies it so it behaves as a causal whole and that there are properties that therefore can be attributed to the whole, like the stone broke the glass window. So there’s a structural functional organization that unifies it so it behaves as a causal whole so that properties can be attributed to that whole in a plausible manner. And I think that’s what he means by the thing. And so what he’s suggesting is our sense of the self is that it’s not, as Hume famously suggested, we don’t just have a bundle of properties. They, for our sense of the self is something that is much more integrated, acts as a whole, and it’s appropriate to attribute properties to it as a whole. And sort of underneath the robustness is that that sense of the unity and its causal wholeness is persistent. It persists through time to some significant degree. So you have this persistent structural functional organization that unifies, right, something unifies features or components into a causal whole so that we can attribute properties to that whole. And I think that’s what he means by the self is a thing. And unless you guys have any more you want to add to that, I’m going to take it to mean that that’s what I think he’s talking about. I think that’s a good, very good description. I’ll do my history of psychology thing first. Two big branches. We have vunt and structuralism. Well, he doesn’t call it that. It later gets called that. And Jamesian functionalism. Yeah, we are in placing those two together more naturally these days, but they haven’t always been in these kinds of concepts. Exactly. To intersect. Okay, what’s the architecture of that thing? And then what’s its functional form? And how do these things interrelate to create a thing? Well, that’s kind of, you know, we’re more used to thinking in those terms. And I think it’s just worthwhile to that you just sort of naturally fuse them together, but it’s good to kind of remember some of that history. That’s good, Greg. And yeah, I do want to caution us that if we’re going to be respectful to this folk model, we shouldn’t be satisfied with merely functional or merely structural models of the self, given what you just said. Chris, so on the heels of that agreement, then on the heels of a convergent definition between structure and function, would it be appropriate then given that we’ve argued elsewhere for this very definition for logos, would it be appropriate then to call the feature of thingness, the structural functional arrangement of intelligibility that comprises the integrity of this whole, would it be appropriate then to call that the logos? Since that’s precisely the definition. Since logos- Or one possible definition that we’ve argued for elsewhere. I think that’s good. And it might be a useful and resonant term to talk about that, because logos, leg-on means to gather things together so they belong together. And logos meant structural functional organization. It meant what made something intelligible, both be the kind of thing it is and be knowable as the kind of thing it is. Yes. And of course, it goes into our words where we have psychology, where we try to find the logos of the psyche. So we’re trying to find the logos of the self. I think that’s completely appropriate, Chris. I think that’s completely appropriate. Okay. So the first feature of straws and lists is it’s a thing. And I remind everybody, we’re going to problematize all of this. Right. But I think he’s right that if you would ask people what the self is, these are the kinds of things that come out. Second, he says it’s a mental thing and he doesn’t say too much about that. He’s wonderful at being really oblique and cryptic. He’s a good writer in other ways, but what I think he means by that is he’s pointing to what I’ve already discussed. He’s pointing to that the most appropriate categories for trying to understand the self are the psychological and the phenomenological. The self is largely a folk psychological, folk phenomenological function. And he’s trying to distinguish that that whatever that psychological phenomenological thing is, it’s not equivalent to your body. That’s what he’s trying to get so that people know their bodies change, but they think that they somehow have an ongoing same self. You know, people will, I lost my arm, but I’m still me. They’ll say like, and so I think he’s trying to get at that. Although we shouldn’t completely dismiss the physical aspect of our selfhood, we prioritize the phenomenological and the psychological. So I think that’s what he means by a mental thing. Of course, we have to be careful here because we don’t want to slide into some Cartesian dualism or something like that, but I think that’s what he’s trying to point to. Any comments about that point, guys? You’re asking me to comment on the definition of mental, John? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I’m not. I’m not asking you to define it, Greg, because I know that’s like a chapter from your book. I’m trying to get at what I think he’s trying to prioritize. I think he’s trying to prioritize. Why don’t we just go with, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, well, I appreciate your charity. Okay, I think that does make sense. Okay, so he now moves to the next feature, which is that it’s, and this is important, and I need to expand on this beyond what he does because I think here’s an instance where he’s, well, and all of these has been too cryptic and I’ve been expanding it, but he says it’s a single thing. So the idea is you have better, you are one self. You’re not, like, there isn’t sort of seven selves here. When I point at John Vervecky, I’m sort of pointing at one singular self. Now, there’s some important, there’s two dimensions of this singularity to the self. One is synchronic and one is diachronic. One is, as I just said, I am a single self here now, but a problem, just to start introducing the problematic, the problem that comes up with your synchronic singularity is where are the boundaries of the self. If you’re a single thing, you should be able to show where the boundaries of that are because that’s how we, so where are the boundaries of the self? And we’ve already said it doesn’t, it’s not, it doesn’t share quite the boundaries of the body, and I speak and my words leave my body, and yet I’m responsible for them. They are somehow part of myself in at least a moral and a legal fashion, and so, and when I’m using my sword in Tai Chi Chuan, is the sword part of myself? My brain starts to map it as part of my body. Is it an extension? I mean, martial artists will say, make sure that the sword becomes an extension of yourself. Is there anything beyond poetry in that? Where are the boundaries of the self? And it’s really interesting when you ask people this, they think they, and then they pause, they pause, they think they, like, well, I’ve done it, and the phenomenology is really interesting because people think there’s a ready answer, and you can watch them do it, and then they, because then they realize anything they’re going to say is they’re not going to quite believe, right? And so that’s a very interesting question. Now there’s, of course, the diachronic singleness, and this is the idea of your, these are both your identities, the the synchronic boundary aspect of your identity, and the diachronic through time, because you do weird stuff like this. You will pick up a picture of you as a two-year-old and go, there’s me, there I am, and it’s like, what are you doing? What, how is it that there’s an identity between you here now with the body and the mind you have with this two-year-old that does not have that body, doesn’t even have a single atom that’s in your body right now, definitely doesn’t have your knowledge, doesn’t have your memories, doesn’t have most of your memories, right, doesn’t have most of your skills, what, and so we face something very odd about this identity, precisely because it’s non-logical. For things to be logically identical, they have to share all properties, perhaps except space and time, right, for two things to be, for two pennies to be logically identical, they have to share all the properties that they share, for example, and you’re not logically identical to your past self, that’s clear, that’s readily apparent, it’s readily apparent. The other thing about you is you’re not categorically identical to yourself. What do I mean by that? Things have an identity, things can be identical because they both belong to the same property. Well, you know, both of those are apples, they’re right, they’re right, they’re not identical apples, but they’re identical as apples, they’re both apples, but of course you’re not categorically identical with anything else as a self, because your self is what’s supposed to pick you out as a unique individual distinct from any categorical identity. So the identity you have is not our normal logical identity or categorical identity, it’s a weird, let’s say it two more times, weird, weird identity. Like, what is the self such that you can without question claim an identity to this two-year-old? What’s going on there? There’s no categorical, you don’t belong to any shared category that constitutes yourself, and there’s no logical identity there. What is going on there? That is deeply, deeply problematic. So I wanted to bring out that the singularity of the self, well, I agree with Strauss and it’s clearly part of the folk model. There’s a synchronic aspect that’s problematic, and there’s a diachronic aspect that’s also very problematic. And when you put the two together, wow, the identity function of the self becomes already extremely problematic. Any reflections on that, guys? Yeah, well, actually both of those, and then it’s sort of like, well, are we probabilizing the everyday conception? Are we going to probabilize this in a minute or later? You know, so I don’t want to like unfold it too much when we’re going to unfold it. But let me just ask, when you talked about the singular, okay, so there are lots of different ways, of course, you can think about a singular thing. Like is the Atlantic Ocean a singular body of water? Right, and that’s the boundary problem. That’s the boundary problem. Boundary problem. Does he, and I’m actually now just kind of curious, in terms of people’s folk conception of the singular self, you know, how different, I mean, I guess it would depend, of course, depending on culture and individual, but the differentiation of that singular self, in fact, I actually really do run into this all the time in the clinic room, where we’re enriching self-knowledge and all they’re becoming aware of all the different parts of themselves, right? You know, it’s like, and part of the whole, a good therapy is like, wow, I got a much more differentiated view of the various aspects of this. Excellent, I want to respond to that. So when we’re talking about singularity, we’re not talking about homogeneity. We’re not talking about a thing that does not have component or parts aspect to it. So we’re not talking about homogeneity. We’re not talking about some sort of monad. We’re talking about something that can be have a very complex internal structure of differentiated parts integrated together. As long as there is a structural functional organization that makes it behave as a singular causal whole, that’s what’s meant by the singularity of the self. So Strassen is not implying that we should, the folk model can’t carry around, you know, Freudian ideas about the conscious or the unconscious or platonic ideas about the man, the monster and the lion. No, that so we the folk model is a model of singularity, but not homogeneity. Very much, very much. Does it deal at all though, with the levels of awareness? If self and awareness are well, we can get into this. Yeah, we’re going to come back to that, because we’re going to come back to what, because it has a special role, and I’ll use that really unhelpful word. It has a special role. Self-consciousness has a special role in the constitution of the self. And so I think that, Greg, might be the appropriate place to talk about the levels of the self. So if we come in there, and I’m going to talk a lot about that as we go on about how the self is an inherently leveled and layered entity, not just in the psychodynamic sense, which I’m not denying, but also in a very powerful cognitive structural functional. Definitely. Okay, so the next thing, oh, Chris, I didn’t, did I? Okay. Go ahead, John. So the next thing he says is the self is a subject of experience. Again, wow, because the word subject is not something that has been constant even through the history of whatever the West is, right? If you compare Descartes’ notion of a subject bound up with subjectivity to Aristotle’s notion of, right, a subject is a substance, which doesn’t mean stuff. It means that to which predicates apply, but is never itself a predicate. Wow, like the subject of a sentence, right? Then the notion of that, like, that’s very vague. It’s very vague. What I think he’s trying to get to, again, like, I’m trying to, I’m trying to both give him credit, but not over attribute to him. So I’m trying, I’m walking a pretty fine wire here. But what I think he means by that is something like we are a, we are the center of a prospectile field. We are the center of our conscious experience in some important fashion, both a receptive center and a generative center. We are the center of, like, and I’m leaving this vague, but this is, this is a folk phenomenological structure. We seem to be at the center of our experience and we be, seem to be the originary center from which our action occurs. And I think that’s what he means by we are a subject of experience. I think he should have said we are a subject of experience and action, but I think that’s what he’s talking to. Now, there’s some things that come in here. There’s the notion of perspective and I want to get into later. Perspectival knowing and participatory knowing. And for those of you who did the untangling the world knot with Greg and I, we went into that depth. And, you know, many of you have also seen that Chris and I have done a lot of work on the four kinds of knowing. We published some work on it, et cetera. So I want to get into that. So I’ll leave it right now as a promissory thing. We’re going to come back to what does, what does this being in a perspective mean? And what it does do is it connects, as I said, and again, I’ll be gestural here, it connects selfhood to self-consciousness, connects selfhood to self-consciousness, which is where I need to pause and do another clarification because of this very problematic word self, because the word self has two functions. The self has an entic function. It points to an entity, the self, and it has a recursive function. What do I mean by that? A tornado is self-organizing, but it does not possess a self. There is no self that is organizing the tornado. There is no self that is the center of the experience of the tornado or the or origin of the action of the tornado. So while the self, while the tornado is self-organizing, it is not organizing into a self. And so we have to be careful that when we’re, where are we using the entic sense of self? Are we pointing to an entity, the self, or are we merely pointing to the fact that a particular process is recursive and reflexive upon itself? I just did it, right? Itself. So we have to be very, very careful to not equivocate between the two, and we have to differentiate them. One question we are going to seriously ask, or I’m going to propose that the three of us consider, is is there a self ultimately beyond self-organization? There’s no question that we are self-organizing things. We are living things. We are conscious things. We are cognitive things. Those are all dynamically self-organizing process. Is there anything, is there any sense of self, any entic sense of self beyond the recursive sense of self-organization? I’m not going to say what I think the answer is there, but you have to distinguish those because if you simply identify them together, you engage in all kinds of confusion and equivocation. So saying that we’re self-conscious is not identical to saying we are conscious of a self. We have both of those experiences. I’m not denying it, right? But saying you’re self-conscious just means that your consciousness is recursive. For example, you are conscious of your consciousness. That’s self-consciousness, and there are states of self-consciousness which claim to be states in which you realize you have no self, the pure consciousness event, for example. So you should not equate self-consciousness with consciousness of a self, that you will get into all kinds of confusion, and you will miss important differences in the phenomenology that we’re going to unpack here. So I think that’s what he means by it’s a subject of experience. It’s the center of a perspective, both experientially and in terms of action. Right, so we can just put this in everyday terms. Okay, so please, if my wife woke up and said, oh, I had a nightmare about something, and I said, no, you dreamed of something different, right? That’d be a really weird way of thing to say, right? Yes, yes, yes. I’ll tell you what you dreamed of, right? And immediately you’d be like, what are you talking about? And that’s because in our everyday, we obviously have access to some aspect of our perspectival, what I sometimes call the epistemological portal of our being, at least the perspectival knowing, right? And that is a feature, and probably at some level, a universal feature of dialoguing humans at some level that says, hey, I had the dream, and I get thrown into my world, and I have access to my red in a way that no one else does. There’s some acquaintance I have with that. That is just the nature of the structure of the epistemological frames that we live in this world around. Yeah, I’m going to argue a way of talking about that, we’ll have to develop, is that you participate in yourself in a way in which nothing else participates in yourself. So to try and use more phenomenological and less metaphysical, more phenomenological and less epistemologically, or maybe ontologically loaded terms, I like Stephen Bachelors idea that there’s some way in which we are always alone with others. There’s an aloneness to us that we can never get beyond, no matter how much we are together with other people. By the way, the reverse is the case. There’s a togetherness we can never get free from, even in our deepest moments of solitude. That idea about, and I think Greg puts it really well, there’s an aloneness to you as a dreamer that no one else can ever have. You and you alone are the center of your dream, and I don’t just mean egocentric, I mean in the way that Greg is talking about here. So I think that’s right. I think that’s helpful. Now notice again how tempting that is to confuse that just with self-consciousness or just confuse that with consciousness. And that can be, why might that be problematic? Because if I say that consciousness is only something that I have completely alone, then I get into what’s called solipsism. I have no way of knowing that you have a consciousness, and that would be very problematic. I don’t even have a way of knowing that this body was conscious five minutes ago. You get into all kinds of, you don’t want to get into all kinds of confusion that way. Okay, so the next one is a very important one, and this is something Chris and I have done work on. So the self is an agent. Now I want to unpack that, because he again doesn’t. He just, oh. I had one of my students do his entire thesis, PhD thesis, on the nature of agency. But anyways, so this is what I’m, therefore what I’m indicating, is what I’m going to say now is in no way exhaustive, and it can’t possibly be exhaustive, but I’m trying to pick out some central criteria by which we can identify agency. So everything behaves, everything, and Greg, Greg knows this. If you want to talk to somebody who psychology is the science of behavior, what the heck does that mean? Everything behaves, and he’s right. Everything behaves. You hit a stone and it makes a noise. That’s how it behaves. Water makes a noise when it ripples. It reflects light. That’s how it behaves. Everything is a behavior. So what you want to do, and perhaps psychology should have talked more about agency rather than behavior, but that’s another thing. And if I say too much of that, Greg will go crazy. So I’m holding it down, John. Yeah, I can see it. You’re doing a great job. So an agent differs from a behavior in that an agent can determine or detect, and I’m not saying aware, but an agent can determine or detect the consequences of its behavior and adjust its behavior according to the goals it wants to achieve. And so by that definition, a paramecium is an agent because a paramecium can detect poison in the water solution and alter its behavior so that it swims away from the poison so it maintains the goal of staying alive. So it’s an agent. And notice I’m not doing that by attributing awareness to the paramecium or it has a sense of self or anything like that. But it’s an agent. Go ahead. I will argue that actually. So at least in the way I hear, so I call that functional awareness and responsivity available from the third person. Okay. And it’s very different than the way even a tornado behaves. Yes, yes, yes. So and that’s why on the tree of knowledge you jump up into a different dimension when you’re doing with cells at the life level and then paramecium, which is right at the base of mind, not quite complex active bodies, but right in there you get this functional responsivity. Yeah. And the awareness is you can, behaviors can determine their awareness. You just change the variables. They behave completely differently depending on the field in relationship to, and then you can track the neurocognitive processes that are tracking whatever activity is out here and then their responsivity to that is all within a third person scientific frame. Great. So I wanted to, thank you, Greg. I wanted to bring out the things that I think are needed for agency. Again, I am not making a claim of exhaustivity. I’m trying to point out what I think are some important central features. So one follows it directly from what I said that the agent in order to do what I said, which is right, adjust its behavior so that it can change the consequences of its behavior. So it’s more likely to achieve its goals. We are now invoking that agency is bound up with adaptivity. So an agent is adaptive. They can, again, they can adjust and restructure themselves and their behavior in order to differences in the environment so that they can alter the consequences of their behavior so they are more likely to achieve the goals within that particular environment. So agency is bound up with, I’m going to argue three things that are bound up together. One is adaptivity. Now to say that is to invoke the distinction that we have already invoked, the distinction between the paramecium and the tornado. The tornado is self organizing, but the paramecium is autopoetic. Notice we got a self word there. That means it’s self making, which isn’t to say it’s making a self. It’s a recursive sense of self. It’s a self making thing. See the tornado self organizes, but it’s not self organized so that it functions. It has a structural functional organization that will help it seek out the conditions to maintain its own existence. But a paramecium is self organized so that it will seek out the conditions that maintain its existence. So it has right, it is autopoetic. It is a self making thing. Now to be autopoetic also means you have to be adaptive, but you’re only going to be adaptive if you’re autopoetic. Now notice what the autopoiesis also implies and then that will go back to the adaptivity. Autopoiesis means that unlike the tornado, the paramecium sets goals for itself. It is auto, and here’s a self again, autonomous, self-lawing. It creates, there out of its self organization emerge norms that actually constrain and guide its behavior. So it is self organized to stay alive, which is a norm that guides its behavior. So it’s autonomous. And of course, if it’s autonomous, it has to be both autopoetic and it has to be adaptive. So I’m going to always understand by the term agency, this interlocking of these three things, adaptivity, autopoiesis, and autonomous. Not in the sense of just being bounded unto itself, because that’s how we too infrequently, so we too frequently think of autonomy, but more the sense that it creates laws or principles for itself that bind it, that govern and regulate its self organization. So to say the self is an agent somehow means, now see I’m putting a lot of pressure on on Strassen right now, somehow means that the self is an adaptive, autopoetic, autonomous thing. And how is it that kind of thing? Right? How is it that kind of thing? And so we’re going to have to ask that question very, very deeply, but by really unpacking the, this triple dimensionality of agency and by attributing agency to the self. In fact, we think of our agency as basically like located in and from the self. That really brings out well, what kind of thing is the self such that, because I know what it is to say that a living thing is autopoetic, it makes itself out of the matter and energy. What’s the self making itself out of? And I know what a structural functional organization is for an organism such that I understand what autonomous is, but we already said like the self doesn’t even seem to have boundaries. How is it autonomous? What does that mean? And then finally, while the self is adaptive, what environment is it adapting to? And what does that adaptivity look like? So these are questions we have to bring up even from the folk model itself, even before we try to directly challenge it, although we are already beginning to problematize it by doing this kind of work. Okay. We’re also studying, so that’s actually, this is a very, let’s just push pause on this for the audience. Okay. Cause I think that, you know, if we’re going to foreshadow a little bit, yeah, we’ve just landed a really interesting, I’ll bring up my little TOK lens, okay. And we’ll say, hey, all right, you got matter down here and that’s just moving around. Okay. And yes, some cool things like whirlpools are happening, but there’s really a flow function, but that’s, there’s some self organization, but it’s not autopoetic. Now you get an agent arena relational environment, right? That’s moving as an autonomous autopoetic agent. All right. That then is doing some sort of, it’s interesting to use the term norm. I’m not sure I would have used that term, but whatever. I certainly was tracking in relationship to how it’s creating a subjective track and that guides the system forward and away from certain things. Right. Right. Right. Right. And then somehow there’s going to be like a self emerging out of that inner relation. Yeah. And that somehow is continuous with it, with all of that, but isn’t identical. But isn’t the same to it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yep. Just a little, put a dot on that. Chris. And it’s, and that’s good. And it’s, so it’s also somehow has something to do with this equivocal feature that’s persisted between the, the idea of it being an agent and the idea of it being a subject, because you were talking about the idea of, you invoked the idea of being, of thrown this Greg earlier on that, that there’s something about the condition of the self that has to do with a natural response to the conditions that are constitutive of Vitzerina and that the response to which is somehow productive of this emergent function. Right. So take, take the earlier feature of it being a subject subject implies both being the center of action, but it also implies being subjected. Right. When I think of being a subject, I also being subjected to conditions that constrain the number of pathways that are at my disposal to fill a specific goal state. For instance, I’m anticipating some of the, our machinery you’re going to introduce John as we go along. And that, and being an agent, of course, you can’t separate the notion of being an agent from the notion of being ensconced in a particular arena. And so it’s the co-constitutive relationship between the agent arena, just like the subject and the predicates that attach there too. That seems to be, that there seems to be a dialectical tension in that, that is visible, very, very apparent to me in both of those features as the two of you have just explained it. That’s excellent. Beautiful. I’ll give you a, I may have talked about this in the other series because it was meaningful, but I’ll drop this in as a folk example. Okay. So if you’re in the, so this happened to us, my wife and I, so she’s coaching my son. He’s about nine, a good soccer player, but tripped and fell and broke his arm nastily. I mean, I’m completely, you know, I get to the ER and he’s freaking out, you know, and we got a lot of consultation. Okay. And it’s like, we got to, and the ER team comes in and looks at it, we got to set this thing and it’s not going to be pretty. Okay. So that’s what they tell us. And they say, well, we’re going to put them under and you guys need to leave the room. All right. I said, well, if you’re putting them under, why do we need to leave the room? And the body reacts. Okay. And my wife was like, we’re not leaving him. So I was like, okay, we’re not leaving him. So we stayed there. Okay. So here’s what they do. They put them out, you know, put them under and boom, you know, within whatever it is, a minute, 30 seconds or whatever, it goes out, lying there asleep. Okay. Then they gather around him and they hold him down and the physician grabs his arm and starts moving it. And guess what he does? He starts wailing. Okay. He cries and moans and pulls. Okay. And they have to do that three times. It was like 15. It’s like, this is a bad break. Okay. And then boom, they finally get it good enough. And then, okay, five minutes later, 10 minutes later, it’s like a fast act in anesthetic. You see his leg shift a little bit. He’s totally out. His legs start shifting and then all of a sudden sits right up. I’m alive. Okay. So that in terms of everyday experience, we have to sort of, you know, that’s what we saw as parents, you know, what happened there, you know? Right. Right. Yeah. I’ll just throw that story out there and then we’ll come back to it at some point. So. Well, let’s come back to it, especially when we talk about, you know, memory and reconstructed memory and how that impacts on the purported identity of the self through time. So that’s very good. Yeah. Okay. So the next is, and here’s where I think we’ll probably won’t get through our list because we’re going to pause here because there’s some important things that Greg wants to say. I’ll introduce it the way Strossen talks about it. And then some of the things I want to say, but I want Greg to chime in here because he’s done a lot of work on this. And so Strossen says that, and then he invokes two terms. Oh my gosh. He says the self has a particular character or personality. So this is, again, we’re trying to point to a uniqueness that is determinative of its agency. So it doesn’t just act as any generic agency. It acts as this particular agent because it has a character and a personality. We can characterize it to perhaps pick up on the term. So what this brings out is the self has this very problematic relationship with its near neighbors. So I’ll introduce one of them is character. And then another that Strossen invokes is personality. And like I said, I’ll talk about what that sort of generally means. And then I want to give Greg the floor on this, but I wanted to introduce at least a third thing, which Strossen doesn’t talk about, which is personhood. Because the word personality should be the things that make you a person, but that’s not what personality has become in psychology. Personality has been basically reduced to sets of dispositional traits for how you’re likely to behave in sort of stereotypical situations. That’s what personality means. And character is not your set of sort of constitutional traits the way personality is. Character is your system of virtues with which you identify. So your character are the virtues that you take to exemplify the best aspects or features of yourself. Like I’m an honest person or I’m a kind person. So your character is to some degree acquired through habit, but, and this is Aristotle’s point, we can transform the habit and we can deliberately cultivate our character. And so the problem, and again, I’ll shut up in a minute so Greg can talk. The problem is what we’ve divided this into the character that is completely sort of acquired and cultivated. And then personality, which is largely sort of just G by E, genetics by environment, and it’s given to you sort of, it’s congenital to you in some fashion and it’s constitutional to you. And then we also have this third thing, which is personhood, which are the set of legal and moral properties that make you inherently valuable. So when we say, don’t do that, that’s a person, we mean that has a personality, we don’t mean that. Don’t do that, it has a particular character. We mean no, no, that is the kind of entity that has legal and moral properties that say, and say it should be treated as something that’s inherently valuable to us. And so we don’t want to, and the self somehow touches on character, personality, and personhood. And of course, they all touch on each other, personality, personhood, and character, and it’s all a pretty confusing mess. So go Greg. Actually, Christopher, there’s, you know, since as you hear that, I certainly would welcome, you know, if you have any, if you have any thoughts you want to share, I could certainly, I have already prepped John a little bit, I wanted to say a few things about these words, but you know, if anything comes to mind. Go for it, Greg. All right. So yeah, I’m sure it will. A couple things that frustrate me by some of the terminology. And so one of the things is that, if you understand the history, it makes sense, but personality gets co-opted by trait theory. Yes. And so trait theory most commonly is big five. And these are the, they’re really an interesting set of findings emerge that there are these five clusters. And of course, not surprisingly, there’s some debate, but there was reasonable amount of consensus that these five, and that’s extroversion and neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Okay. And these became clusters and then their facets underneath them. And they provide a powerful dispositional dimensional angle on what’s called individual difference. Okay. Individual difference. It’s really important to understand that when we’re trying to understand people, we really want to understand them at three levels, at least one is people in general. This is like human nature, like what is the basic structural functional architecture of humanity? Okay. Human nature. Like, and then one way of saying this, how are we all basically alike? Okay. What’s the basic architecture? Then what are the key dimensions upon which we differ? Okay. The individual differences. And then also what is it that makes us ideographically unique? You know, what is it that makes us particular? So that’s an interesting thing to have in mind. Personality gets co-opted by these individual difference dispositions that can then be surveyed and found. It’s an interesting history about how they came across this set of ideas. But here’s the problem. Because it gets researched and then it becomes, hey, your personality is this. So if I tell you, hey, I’m high on openness and high on agreeableness, I’m kind of low on neuroticism, high on extroversion, high on conscientiousness, do you know me? In fact, what I just listed, what’s called a role model personality, there’s a pretty good subset of individuals that have exactly that profile, really about 20% of the population, at least if you do certain cluster analyses. And there may be good reasons why that clusters together. So now 20% of the people have the exact same personality, if trait equals personality. That just doesn’t sit right with me. So that’s one concern that I have. Another concern is if you go back before traits dominated, the people like Freud and many of the early 1950s, Alport had two broad clusters that they took the structure of character, they refer to it in terms of their temperament, that actually becomes traits. This is the dispositional tendencies of the architecture. Like you’re born as a sensitive temperament or an easygoing temperament, and then you develop into sort of the dispositional mood architecture tendencies versus your character. Like the ways you adapt your identity, what you learn, how you function in situational context. So it used to be character and temperament made. So it’s a character and temperament made personality. Which I like much better because you have dispositions and you have character and personality should be key. Then as John mentioned, you have character as this other concept, like do you have a good character or do you have a lousy character? So now we infuse this with this moral dimension. Now the science of personality, oh gosh, we just deal with facts, John, we don’t deal with any values. Trust me, we have just the facts. And so they pull personality out and separate it all from the moral character because they don’t want to impute any value. Okay. Well, let me tell you this, if you were irresponsible rather than conscientious, closed and defensive rather than open, a disagreeable SOB rather than agreeable, high neurotic and shy and introverted, is there any values about that character? Okay. That’s the exact opposite, by the way, of a role model personality. All right. You’d have lots of problems. So you can’t get away from the idea that you impute value. Right. Right. Okay. And that’s a myth. That’s a scientific myth. And the fact of the matter is if we’re in the human sciences, the iterative feedback loop between what we claim and what comes back to us is just something we need to deal with. Okay. People care what we call them. People care if you say you have ADHD, you care if you’re high extroverted. We just need to be aware of that. So what am I saying? I prefer the term character functioning overall. Okay. There’s character functioning that speaks to the way we adapt. There’s dispositional tendencies that we can be mapping with traits. Okay. We develop ideologies and values in relationship to that functioning. Okay. And yes, there’s a moral angle. So for me, the term character functioning and character structure are better descriptors than this. And the last thing I’ll say is yes, the concept of personhood is yet another feature that fits but is different. I love Peter Osorio, the descriptive psychologist, did a lot of work on what sort of is the fundamental elements that go into persons. For him, I’ll use my language, which is basically a person is a self-conscious entity that justifies their actions on the social stage and can take account and responsibility for what they do. Right. That’s the basic. So there’s legal and moral elements, but he narrowed it down to say, what are the behavioral patterns? In fact, he’s got a book called The Behavior of Persons. What is an exemplar of when we say that person behaving as themselves? Oh, Greg decided, hey, he had a great time. The first time with John, he decided to engage in a second, the elusive I discussion. That was an exemplar of the behavior of a person. And because I am, and indeed, I would argue our entire culture, person, plane of existence is really contingent upon our justifying, given accounts, offering accounts, deciding who is accountable. That’s our legal and moral structure all fuses in relationship to that. So we can come back to some of these, but this is the way my system disentangles some of these complicated concepts. So, I mean, I think your system is better. I mean, I’m glad I presented the traditional one because that’s what people are going to encounter when they read any of this material. But I think your system is better. What’s ultimately sorry, not what’s ultimate. What I wanted to come back to is that there is some process by which the self identifies with its personhood and its character, the way you’ve explained it, I’m happy with, that is somehow central to the self, but doesn’t mean that character and personhood are identical to selfhood. Right? So there’s some process of identification with these things that are proximate, but not identical to the self. The self can’t exist without them, but they’re not components of this. It’s very, very, again, it’s very, very problematic about how do all of these three big things, let’s use Greg’s going forward because I like it. And I think it’s very good. You’ll allow me self, character, and personhood. How do these three hang together in any mutually intelligible fashion? And how the heck does that ramify into us being agentic centers of experience and action? What is going on there? How does that all fit together? And notice you do this in bizarre ways. You’ll say, I was acting out of character. Who’s the I? And what is it to act out of your character? What does that mean? We say that and we sort of know at the level of common sense what that means. But if we want to try to understand, well, what is it we’re ultimately talking about when we’re talking about a self? And how are we going to decide if artificial intelligent machines become selves or become persons? Right? Like we can’t leave it at that common sense level because the common sense level, as the common sense level often is, is very confused and very conflated and very confounded. Again, that’s not to say it’s not highly functional. It is. But the language by which we train our behavior is not the same language by which we explain our behavior. And so we have to be very, very careful to not mix those two together. So we got about five more minutes and I don’t want to go into the next couple of features. We have a few more features to do, but they’re not quick features. But what I wanted to do was give the last sort of two or three minutes to you guys to just see how this is going for you. I’m finding the way you guys are playing off this extremely valuable. You’re both bringing in really important dimensions and really helping the explication and the elucidation of what’s going on here. But anything more you guys, like anything, like any riffing you want to do right now, now is the riff period. Riff period. Riff it up. This has all been very clear thus far. I don’t know what more there is to say for me, except that I’m interested in the adjustment you’ve made to the definition of personality, Greg, and trying to especially, particularly trying to accommodate the role of agency and responsibility in response to respond to the given traits that are predisposed in the everyday use of the term personality. And to me, it just comes back to this idea that selfhood is a being in response to certain a priori conditions that seem to provide constraints to how we are to dispose ourselves in relation to the environment. And so I find it interesting, this idea that character is in part a response to the predisposed traits that we typically call personality, and that’s somehow the synthesis of our reflexive response to our own predisposed traits is part of what consolidates perhaps, I say this prospectively, but perhaps is part of what consolidates a working definition of selfhood is the reflexive response to the givenness of certain predispositions that condition how we are able to respond as agents in the first place. The idea that we we’re starting from within an embodied context and that somehow the other thing I keep thinking as we’re talking is that in all of these different features, the being of the self in all of those features in every case, it seems to me involves a being with whether it’s being with right because you were saying this, John, right? It’s not like I am my body. And it’s not quite true that I have my body. It’s not quite true either. It’s somehow that the being of myself is a being with my body, just as I’m sure as we’ll get to discussing when we talk about the social arena and the social interjection of anticipating a little bit of what I know we’ll go into later when we talk about mead and folks like that when it comes to the socialization of the self object and how we then relate to it. It seems to me that the expression of how we relate to ourselves is a kind of being with and that that being with to me persists in all of these features. There’s a kind of there’s a kind of see I’m struggling to even put my finger on it. Perhaps I’ll just leave it at that for now. But that harkens back to be alone with others, but now emphasizing the, you know, yes, right. Yes. The width and you know, and so that’s what I’m going to come back to this. It doesn’t fully discharge that existential dimension you just brought out. I can hear Kierkegaard in what you’re saying very profoundly. All the time. Well, of course, and that’s one of the reasons why you’re here. But what I mean is, I mean, I think you participate in your body. You don’t have it and you aren’t it, but you part there’s a place with and through it, right? And then we, yeah, that, but that’s a really good point. And I want to keep coming back to that part of what a self is, is this capacity of being through and be or better the way I like the way you put it being with maybe both being with and through is kind of what’s going on there. I think that’s an excellent point. Yeah, that’s a great observation. So if I just pull off that a little bit, as you were reflecting and piecing this together, I’ll take a third person view because I do this so I’m a clinician, right? So I’ll bring people in and say, Hey, so how was it today? Right? And so what they’re then doing is they’re being with their thoughts, they’re pulling their epistemological portal. Okay. And what am I doing? I’m being in relation. So we’re going to create a participatory dynamic relational space. And I’m also a psychological doctor. So I’m like, huh, here’s your character functioning. Right? This is how you relate to the world. These are your defenses and this is your temperament. And then this is your history and these are your stars. And I’m seeing this from the third person. And my goal is to dance with your first person in a particular way. And so we can use that kind of like, ah, as a way of sort of modeling, what is this character? What is the self? What is your personhood? And see if we can put those things together. I was great. I was really good. I was really good. Okay. So next time, what we’re going to do is we will continue with, uh, strawsons list with me expounding on it. Like, um, and then I will propose that there are two other core features of, uh, the folk model of the self that we will, should we, we should include again, it’s probably still not exhaustive. I’m not going to claim that, but they’re, I think they’re worthy of being on the list with the other ones. So more exposition and then some, some addition. And then what I want to do is start making use of a lot of the work. It’s now very fashionable, both within spiritual circles and scientific circles to say that the self is an illusion. Before we leap to such a radical proposal, how and why is it that this folk model of the self has become so problematic? Why is it we’re going to problematize it? Uh, because that is how we will be able to address the scientific concern. And hopefully also, and that’s why Greg and Chris are here to help me also the spiritual dimensions of this, um, because I’m particularly interested in, I didn’t do this in, in some of the coursework that you guys reviewed for the series. I want to talk about the connection between the self and soul and spirit. And what does that mean? Because part of what people mean clearly, and this is in the scientific community mean when they say there is no self, they also often will say there is no soul and they have a particular meaning there by what they mean by that. And to say that the word soul doesn’t have any spiritual implications strikes me as a bizarre thing. And so at some point I, and again, this is, this will be a space of more open, dialogue. What is the connection between the self, spirit and soul? Do those other words mean anything anymore? And if they don’t mean anything and the word self is just an illusion, what’s going on? What, who, like, who are we then? And so that’s all to foreshadow what’s coming next. So I want to end by thanking all of you who are watching. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you always Greg and Chris, and I look forward to us doing this next week. Amen.