https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h8FqDg_K4t8
So welcome back everyone to the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self. This is part two. If you have missed part one, I strongly recommend going and seeing part one. Before you look at part two, each episode is going to build on the previous one within a continuous argument. I’m joined here again by my good friends and co-interlocutors, Christopher Mastropietro and Greg Enriquez. I’ll give them a chance in a second to briefly introduce themselves. I’ll give a very cursory overview of what we did last time. Last time we talked about getting our language very clear. We’re going to talk about this very difficult subject, the self, its nature and its function. We talked about distinguishing folk models, sort of the implicit cultural models we carry around, folk phenomenological models and folk psychological models. We can put them two together. The self has these psychological aspects and these phenomenological aspects. We call that thing the folk model. We noted that one of the things that science typically does is it calls common sense folk models into question. It problematizes them in order to try and get a more profound understanding of them. I proposed that we use Galen Strossen’s seminal article on the, but he basically lays out the characteristics of the folk model of the self. We started working our way through them. I made a slight mistake last time. I said we had a couple more to do from Strossen. We actually finished Strossen first. I’m going to propose we continue by adding two more on and that will launch us into our discussion. But first, like I said, I’m going to give Chris and Greg a chance to say hello and briefly introduce themselves and then we’ll continue. So maybe this time, Chris, you can go first. Hello, yes. So, yeah, Christopher Mastro Pietro. So, of course, I’m one of your frequent writing partners in crime, John, especially on the meaning crisis and and and issues of sacred symbols and so forth. And yeah, I think I’m here to find out how I’m doing at being a self. I think that’s I think that’s what thinks that that’s what draws me in here. I think this is just a monitoring of progress. No, but I mean, in all seriousness, I think this is to me, this is I think I’m I think I’m here in a bit of an auditing capacity to try and trace out some of the existential phenomenology that maps over and runs alongside some of the more functional machinery that the two of you are going to be homing in on. So I think that’s my value at least for the moment. Well, I think in connection with that and extending that, I mean, the self is a sacred symbol and we have sacred symbol words we’re going to talk about spirit and soul in relation to the notion of self. And you’re here because that’s your particular area of expertise. Yeah. Amen. Yeah, I think I think one thing I’ll be interested in. Sorry, Greg, go ahead. No, I was just going to say in the fluidity that you have with language, it’s why I’m happier here. Go ahead. I was going to say, yeah, the the question of the symbols, just to kind of look ahead a little bit, I think one thing it’s too early, I think, to pose the question. There’s a right time for right questions require the right timing. That’s something I’m going to be very attentive to as we go forward, because I don’t I certainly don’t want to come off half cocked. This is a very methodical, very systematic, very careful argument. So I want to follow it properly. But yeah, as we I think as we get a little bit further down the road, one question I’m very interested in looking at is the question of understanding the self as a symbolic mechanism, as a symbol in and of itself, or potentially and or potentially as a as a symbol that generates symbols, which I think is perhaps one way of understanding both descriptively and normatively how the self functions optimally and some of the phenomenology there. So, yeah, just sort of casting that question ahead a little bit just prospectively. We’ll get to it. We’ll get to it. And Greg, great. Yeah. So Greg Henriquez, you know, partner in crime and consciousness and now in the cell. So, you know, I appreciated the summary. You know, I as you know, you’re deepening my analysis of cognition and consciousness. And I can feel the rhythm building on the self. I generated a blog on sort of the steps of consciousness and evolution. And some of that was sparked or at least tweaked a little bit by some of the self-organization and self-modeling stuff that we were alluding to in the last session. Excellent. Excellent. So we are also trying to do something different in not only in content, perhaps, but especially in manner. Greg and I found the process of dialogue around the argument concerning the nature and function of consciousness to be tremendously helpful and fruitful. And Chris and I had similar experiences in multiple what we call the logos. And then the last time that was also the case, part one of the elusive eye. And so that’s also something we’re trying to model a new way in which we can bridge between the academic world, for want of a better word, and the sort of social media and actually not just report on what’s going on in the academic world to social media, but actually be generative, be actually participating in the process itself. And so that’s the third sort of feature I want to emphasize with what we’re trying to accomplish here. OK, so one more point, and Greg alluded to it. We always have to be careful about the two uses of the word self. One is an entity use in which we’re pointing to a thing of the self. And one is just a function of grammatical recursion when we say the tornado self-organizes. Although there is self-organization in a tornado, there is no self that has been organized in a tornado. So do be very careful. One of the things we can ask and we’ll repeatedly ask, is there anything to the self above and beyond very sophisticated self-organization? And as we saw last time, the folk model of the self gives a very strong yes to that. There’s the self is a thing, it’s a unified thing, it’s a single thing, right, et cetera, et cetera. So I want to add two more things that I think belong on Strossen’s list, but he didn’t put there. And as always, I’m going to go, but you guys interrupt me as you see fit, because that looks extremely well. And so just for clarity, John, you’re adding things that you think should fit into our everyday conception of the self, right? Yeah. And what I’m doing is because, you know, it’s easy to run sort of experiments on people and they will report these dimensions quite, quite readily. They might not report them some of the theoretical language we’re going to use here, but there’s a- God help them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. But there’s a phenomenon we’re trying to point to. So the first one is relatively, it’s not that long, but it’s important and we can hopefully touch on it. And again, this is a member in phenomenology, we’re trying to determine what are the invariant structures of our experience from those that are just contingent or culturally generated. And so I have to use metaphors and the metaphors might be culturally misleading. But people say that the self is inside of them. And Hood reports an experiment, the Hood book I’m referring to is called The Self Illusion, and he reports an experiment in 2012 and you ask people to point where the self is and what they do is they sort of point the third eye and the temporal parietal junction and it’s sort of the intersection of those two points pretty reliably, pretty generally. And when you ask people, people will sort of say, yeah, that’s sort of where my self is. And you go, really? Like, does that does that ultimately make any sense to you? But and what we have to remember in order to make that even a little bit more questionable is other other cultures have placed the self and felt it elsewhere in their body. Famously, Aristotle thought the self was the closest thing to the self in his psychology was located in the heart. And it looks like and the Egyptians are even weirder because it looks like they have two selves and they both live in the liver. What’s going on there? Right. And I’m sure you asked Aristotle where he felt himself. He would say he felt it here and not without reason. Right. Because where do you feel a lot of the self relevant emotion? You feel them here in your chest. Right. And so, again, I well, I doubt that it’s invariant, phenomenologically invariant that the self is here. Right. I think there is a sense in which people somehow feel the self is inside of them somewhere. And that isn’t just sort of a reference. They sort of they’ve created an enacted and here’s something Chris could show on later. There’s an enacted symbol here. There’s an there’s a felt. I’m you know, I’m here, I’m here. And so I think that’s an important aspect of the cell, which means there’s something at the phenomenological level that binds the sense of self to the body in a phenomenological fashion. And that’s something that we need to get clear about, because people look like we talked about last time, they don’t identify the self with the body, but the self is also intimately felt to be located in a particular place in the body that has some kind of central functional significance. Actually, that’s exactly what I was going to ask in terms of, do you know if that felt certainly for me at some level and just if I just say it’s some epicenter of central control. But I mean, obviously, it’s not the epicenter of my body. But at some level, if I were to layer my body up, it would somehow be imagined as to some epicenter of that center. Does that is I think that’s right. But I know that it’s relative to sort of systems of practices you get involved in, too. So, I mean, in fact, when I’m teaching people to Tai Chi, I often tell them that they’re a triangle, they’re an upside down triangle. They’re mostly in their head and then they go like this. And that’s why they’re easily upset because they’re like a triangle. And one of the things like, for example, when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, the sense of self shifts from here to what the Dan Tian down there. And you move everything is moving and perceiving from there. So I do think it’s functional, but I think the functionality is also malleable to being a functional epicenter. I think at least phenomenologically moves around. And that makes sense because we’ll talk about it in a second. You can, of course, project your set your sense of where you are also into avatars and other things like that. So it’s yourself has to be located and you’re right. Right. I think it has to have some sort of functional centrality to it, but it’s extremely malleable. And how it’s inside is also extremely malleable. So I don’t have much more to say about that right now, but I think that that that what’s missing from Strauss and list, he sort of if you read his list, it sounds like there’s not much of a connection between the self and the body. And I think that’s even at the folk model level, I think that’s problematic. I think people experience the self as in the body some way, but in this extremely malleable way. So anything you guys want to say about that right now? Or I’m prepared to move on. That that makes sense. OK, so the next one is going to take us a little bit longer to go through. And this is the self has a sense of presence. The self has a sense of presence. And what I mean by that, and this goes back, of course, initially to Nagle’s seminal article and what’s it like to be about your your sense of self has with it a sense of what it is like to be me here now in this state of consciousness. So what it is like to be me here now in this state of consciousness. But it’s not like there’s the me here now in the state of consciousness, the me here now, in a state of consciousness, are completely interwoven and interdefining. And so there’s a what’s it like to be me here now in this state of mind. in this state of mind. And one way I talk about this is people report that sense of presence, again, I mentioned it a minute earlier, it can move around. So sense of presence, in fact, is something that’s sought after in virtual reality, video games. And I need to feed two birds with one scone here because I need to set something up for the rubber arm illusion down the road. I’ll just allude to that briefly. So the idea here is, right, what you look for in VR is people say, I was in the game, right? That’s a sense of presence. And I was, you know, it’s really in the game. They have the sense of, I hear now in the game, right? And that’s highly sought after because that sense of presence makes the world of the VR real, makes it real. So actually what we’re talking about is a kind of co-presencing. You have this co-determining co-presencing. You have the I hear now presencing, and that’s interwoven with the world is presencing to me, and those are woven together such that it’s real. And notice that that realness is not based on verisimilitude. You can have virtual realities that have a high degree of verisimilitude and do not give this sense of presence. And you can have games like Tetris that have very low verisimilitude and generate this sense of presence. Now, what’s interesting about that is, like I said, is this sense of presence seems to be very central to an important dimension we talked about last time to the self, namely your capacity for self-consciousness. But the thing about it is, as you can see with the VR, it’s very malleable where you are. We’re gonna talk about some things later on in the series, like the rubber arm illusion, where you sense that basically what the illusion is, you have your arm, you cover it with a rubber arm, so your arm is occluded, the rubber arm is on it, and I stroke your arm and the rubber arm at the same time, and you feel yourself in the rubber arm, the rubber arm illusion. And in a similar way, you feel yourself in the game. And what people like Metzinger and others are doing is they’re using a combination of sort of VR and things like the rubber arm illusion to try and create, they’re close to creating out-of-body experiences, out-of-body experiences. And this again gives us this, well, what is it? And of course, when we do that, we’ll have to talk about, because Metzinger proposes that sort of the phenomenological origin of the idea of a soul, and we’ll have to come back to all of that. But we have to take that into account precisely because people do have out-of-body experiences. They do experience the rubber arm illusion. They do project into VR. So this sense of presence. Now, I wanna say a bit more about it. And I wanna talk about that it has what I call, so here’s a bit of multi-syllabic stuff. It’ll make it sound like we’re saying something really important. It has demonstrative indexicality. So first of all, we have to contrast demonstrative from categorical nouns. So if I say pencil, like it has to refer to an entity like this. But if I use the demonstrative, if I say this, or this, or this, there’s no categorical identity. All that’s happening is a here noun is standing out to this salient landscape, this state of consciousness in this world. That’s what’s happening. That’s what a demonstrative does. And similarly, these two terms are related, indexicality are things that only refer to the here nounness. Like when I, and those are two indexical words. When I say here, for me it’s pointing here, for you it’s pointing there, same thing with now, et cetera. And so what I’m pointing to is you have, it’s very hard to put into words, but you have for your sense of self, you have this here nounness, I-ness, what it’s like to be me in this state of mindness. Right, it’s that, and I wanna, instead of constantly saying that really clumsy phrase, I wanna call that the demonstrative indexicality of the sense of self. It has that sense of presence, the demonstrative indexicality. I wanna also point out that demonstratives and indexical, they fall below categorical identities. They fall below conceptual thought. In fact, the ability to create a category depends on them. So when I’m forming a category, what I have to do is I have to mentally group a bunch of things together, right? Let’s say, well, this and this, right? And then once I group them together and then I go this, and then after I do that, after I’ve grouped them by demonstrative indexicality, then I can start to see what they have in common and then I can form a category. Which means if the self has an important, and this will come back later, if the self has this important aspect of it, of demonstrative indexicality, it very much falls below conceptual categorical experience in an important way. So when I’m talking about that co-presencing, that brings up what Chris and I have talked about as perspectival knowing. Perspectival knowing is precisely knowing what it is like to be this here now-ness in the way the world is presenting it to me. We capture that with the metaphor of a perspective, because a perspective is how things are standing out to you, how you are present to them, how they are present to you. And Greg and I also talked a lot about this in Untangling the World Moth. We talked a lot about perspectival knowing. And the thing about a perspective is it combines exactly that the two poles of what I’ve been talking about. It integrates the part of the pole that has to do with my state of consciousness and the part of the pole that has to do with how the world is disclosing it. And when those are co-present, I get the sense of presence, of the sense of realness. I know what it is like to be me here now in this state of mind, in this state of world. Now, what we get into a little bit deeper though, as we, right? And Greg and I also talked about this. And it was actually kind of important to the discussion about consciousness. You see, when I say the I here nowness, I’m having the perspectival knowing, but you can also say, but how do you, like, what is the knowing in which, what is the knowing of the perspectival knowing? And so the way to think about this is, if I ask you this question, are you conscious right now? And people go, well, yeah. And I say, well, how, right? You are conscious, you know you’re conscious in the same act as being conscious, right? You know you’re conscious by being conscious. So normally the subject and the object of knowledge are distinct from each other, but in things like consciousness, they are not distinct. They participate in each other. And so we call, I call this, Chris and I talk about this as participatory knowing, where it’s knowing by being the thing that you know. So you don’t just know yourself by having beliefs about yourself. You don’t just know yourself by having skills about yourself. You don’t know yourself even by knowing what it’s like to have perspectives and states of consciousness. You also know yourself by being yourself. And I don’t mean that in sort of an authenticity. I mean, the act of being a self and the act of knowing the self are coterminous with each other, coextensive with each other. They’re not semantically identical, but they are coextensive with each other. And that’s a participatory knowing. And so there’s an important relationship between participatory knowing and perspectival knowing in the self. Greg and I have also already argued there’s an important relationship between participatory knowing and perspectival knowing in consciousness. And of course there’s an important connection between self and consciousness in self-consciousness. And so it’s no surprise that we find that we’re converging on this sort of, we’re triangulating on the set of properties that we’re talking about. I’ve been talking a lot. I’ll open up some space for you guys to offer some commentary. Well, I guess my sort of this question of like whether I’m holding off on this or whether we’re gonna do this now. And that’s adverbial versus adjectival framing. And I wasn’t sure, to me you were screaming. Now that I speak the language, you’re screaming adverbial qualia here at one level that I could loop in, but I wasn’t sure about the script. So I think it’s appropriate to bring that up. But I think the place to bring it up is when we moved to James and we talk about the distinction between the I and the me. I think that because you actually did that mapping spontaneously when I brought that up in Untangling the World Not. I did. Right? I think there’s a good reason why that spontaneous intuition should be a saver. But let me, if I can, I’ll just, I will say this in relationship to the self. Okay, so if for me, what you’re describing here, I’ll sometimes use the term epistemological portal. I use the term epistemological portal, epistemology, of course, how we know. I do not mean this propositionally, but I mean this through the senses. Okay. So this system is directing the perspectival and participatory grip or groove in the agent arena relationship. Right, right, yeah. No? Yep, very much. And one of the things that’s interesting when we put it in relationship to the self, right, is that if I shift over here, all of a sudden what’s on the screen shifts, but this thing, this thing has a continuity, okay? And if this thing starts to have extended working memory and any kind of self-aware memory kinds of processes, that connection to this fundamental kind of architecture of self, the window into the world, that’s what that’s speaking to me. I think that’s great. I was really sparked by, in fact, the first part of what you said about the self as kind of this finding a groove, an optimal grip in the agent arena relationship. And I think that’s gonna bring out something we’re gonna need to discuss. Like we talked about it last time, when we talked about sort of features of the self, but we’re gonna come back to it in more depth when we talk about, you know, when we did last time, come back, when we talked about agency and adaptive, autonomous, autopoiesis, remember we went through that as one of the criteria. And so the relationship between the self and the agent arena relationship, which of course has to do with something that Chris cares a lot about, which is your existential mode, I think that’s gonna be central. And then like, and then what you said, that continuity, right? That there’s some continuity behind the eyes of the perspective that we need to try and talk about, because it’s a very strange continuity phenomenologically. Did that respond enough? Yeah, I’ll put one other thing on this and then Christopher review. So I’m a clinician, right? So I attend a lot to this issue of presence, okay? In the core, okay? So, and the relationship to that system has either two powerful memories or two powerful events. And certainly one of the things that we look at is when people get what’s called derealization or personalization, right? Yeah. Is when the presence is bumped off. Right, right. And so, you know, you get traumatized or other things start to happen in relationship to the co. So I’m always looking for the coherent organization and integration across levels, vertically and horizontally, and then trauma and other things will break that, dissociate that, and then boom, hey, I wasn’t even there. And right, yeah. Okay, so this idea really has, you know, jumps into that, even though we’re not at full human person self-consciousness yet, we’re still seeing the beginnings of where that would go. Oh, that was beautiful. I don’t mean the phenomena, the phenomena I imagine is horrifying, but the theoretical move the connection just made was great, Greg, thank you. That’s really good, that’s really good. How that sense of presence can be lost in depersonalization, right, and derealization. And again, we get sort of the poles of the agent in the arena being lost, yeah, I should have thought of that, sorry, I don’t wanna take anything away from you. That’s just really, really good. I mean, that is something that is something that you, I guess you have to develop clinical antennae for, you know, how that sense of presence is, you know, coming on or going offline. It’s a big deal, actually, the degree of coherent integration through what I call through the heart into the body, which actually, by the way, goes into sort of the primate self and then the felt valence. And then are you centered? And like when I have my kind of freaky wisdom energy, essentially what’s happening is an opening up all the way down and a present scene, like I literally said, my cells are online. Yeah, right, right. So anyway. That’s another good point how in mystical experiences of varying degrees, you get an intensification of the sense of presence. It’s part of the, what I’ve called the auto normativity, the real realness of these experiences. Yeah, very much. People even talk about the intensity of the sense of presence becoming something like a sense of eternity, a sense of timelessness. Right in the moment is forever. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Chris, did you want to offer any reflections at this point or? I have one that might actually be very confluent with what you just brought up, Greg, bringing the agent arena relation into the mix. And this idea of derelation is really interesting. So one of the, so speaking from now, the folk phenomenological perspective, not the functional, but just the phenomenological. One of the experiences I think that is, that’s aroused by the perspectival enclosure that is indexed by this here nowness that you keep talking about, John. One of the, I think one of the formal experiences that seems to be entailed by that is the experience of extending the sociability of the self to the features of the environment, regardless of whether those features are inherently social or not. So one of the things that Mead says, for instance, is that we take the features of our environment first to be social objects before we take them to be physical objects. And what that means in concrete terms is that we characterize at any given moment, the perspectival enclosure that worlds us at any given moment is adorned with a cast of characters that are made from the features of our environment that present themselves to us. So I think that there’s an experience of the self’s sociability extending into the environment and then feeding back on itself recursively. Right? So, think of, for instance, think of the way you are, well, actually, I think we use this at some point in our writing, John, as an example. Think of the way you interact with your bedroom when you’re a kid. The features of your bedroom speak to you. They represent yourself to you. They reflect and potentially also refract that sense of presence. But the sense of, one of the ways in which that sense of presence is alluded to us is in the form of an ostensive social interaction with the otherwise inanimate features of that environment. And the speaking to us of our environment is, I think, one of the fundamental things that countenances the presence and makes us feel a self as felt, even if we’re not in social company. And one of the things that sometimes, I think people can lose, and this is what, I wonder if this is connected to the derelation concept that you’ve introduced, Greg, you can tell me. But one of the things that can sometimes happen, sometimes the environment seems particularly pregnant with ourselves and sometimes it seems that ourselves are nowhere to be found in our environment. And I’m speaking right now in solitude. So just take the situation as a solitary one for now, although I think it’s also true of properly social company. So when you go back to your bedroom that you occupied as a child, the bedroom doesn’t speak to you anymore in the way that it did, right? It doesn’t present yourself, and it doesn’t present itself to you, and therefore it doesn’t present yourself to you in the same way that it did, because there’s now a discontinuity of participation, there’s a continuity of participation with the environment that represents yourself to yourself and thus presences it. And that’s something that’s, I think, at least phenomenologically, it’s probably functionally as well, part of what the perspectival enclosure entails. Fascinating. Sorry for interjecting, Chris, I just got excited. That was brilliant. That was really good. That was really good. So. Let me just drop a few pieces of thought and relationship. I loved the way in which the environment, a couple of things. One is I perceive us as unbelievably social in ourselves. Yeah, yeah. I think, and I mentioned that in terms of the consciousness is sort of like, I think consciousness upgrades when we have mothers and offspring and the attachment relation, and I think it completely upgrades when we get an intersubjective space. Thomas Sello’s shared attention. And I think we then just, and then as ourself then as social agents, that when we then construct something, like a room, a tool, and participate in it, the extension of that to ourselves and the presencing we’ll feel with that, I thought the way you articulated that was very, very powerful and gets into the extended self. We can talk some about that in terms of how the self, how the self wears its boundaries in relationship to time and space. Yeah, excellent. So that’s one piece. Right, right. The other piece from a clinical perspective that’s really interesting is that a number of people will put a continuum on essentially the presencing of animation in the environment, okay? Whereby certain disorders are, have enormous difficulty with this. Like many people will interpret autism as having a particularly difficult structure to impute social attentionality into the environment and place oneself in relation. And things like paranoid schizophrenia and other kinds of things impute animism everywhere. Right, right. And then see themselves as sort of actors in the world and the world acting upon them in this very stage. You know, you feel on stage, everything is this interactive presence of the social dynamic. So that’s another, when I think clinically about what can go on, how do you balance the various sort of self other, self animate, self inanimate projections and keep the optimal grip dance in that flow? Yeah, yeah. Wow, right. That was excellent. So then this introduces some like some real normative questions then when it comes to the management of the self and its correlation to the spatialization of your experience. Right, cause you hear people saying all the time, I feel most myself when I’m here. I feel least like myself, right? You lectured about culture shock, John, right? One of the things that you lecture about is that the dislocation of oneself from the home that structures the phenomenology and the perspectival features of the experience is precisely what we mean by culture shock, a place in which yourself is no longer present. And yet on the other hand, we also hear and it’s ritualized or at least once was ritualized within our culture is that you have to actually venture into new places in order to find yourself or remember yourself because there is a correlation between the self inside of you and the different environs that can reproduce what is implicitly present into more of an explicit presence, a discoverable presence that you can then interact with and relate to. So this idea that the relation of yourself or the relation to yourself is structured by the sense of place that lends character to the experience of being oneself. And I think that’s a, and how that relates to memory and so forth. Anyway, so I look forward to getting more into that question. That’s a real important thing for us to ask or so we’ll really start to talk about the human development or current state, what’s a healthy structured self. So anyway. So I think, I mean, this is not a summary. It’s just a criterion to mark what you said. I think the way you brought out, well, the two of you brought out the existential dimensions of the sense of presence and how that helps to explain things like derealization, depersonalization, homesickness, loneliness, all of these things that, and these are all important ways in which the sense of presence and the sense of self and the sense of the realness of the world are bound up together in a mutually interpenetrating fashion. And Greg, you’re right to bring out that, when you replied to Chris, I’m agreeing with it. I’m not right, I’m just agreeing with it. That normativity really challenges, and we talked about this, this synchronic problem of the self, where its boundaries are. Where, like if you’re only yourself in your familial room and familiar room, then like, where’s the boundary of the self then? Because they are, right? And what happens when your body is still all there, but your self is being derealized? Where’s the boundary of the self now? So already we’re seeing where we’re heading, which is the move I’m gonna make, which is as you start to more rigorously unpack the phenomenology of the folk model and the functionality of the folk model, you start to see the problems about the folk model, that it doesn’t, the features don’t hang together in a obviously coherent fashion. They seem to already be undermining each other. And then, so note that, that’s apparent. And that leads me to a related issue from what Strassen gave us. And it’s an ironic kind of issue. So Strassen has presented the folk model, and I think he’s correct to do this because we have good evidence that most folk models are like this, as what’s called a feature list, which is this feature and this feature and this feature and this feature and this feature. Now, the problem with that is that’s how all that most folk models run this way, but what, you know, the work of Medeen and Murphy and others way back in the mid-80s showed is that’s not, that actually doesn’t carry our understanding of a phenomenon. It’s not adequate to it. Let me give you a quick example of what I mean. My favorite example, and these, both these gentlemen have heard it many times, so they have to suffer through it again. But, you know, well, what’s a bird? Well, it has wings and it has feathers and it has a beak and it has a talon and it flies. I’m gonna get a couple of wings, I’m gonna get a beak, I’m gonna get a pile of feathers, gonna put some talons in it, sort of mush it all up and then throw it in the air and it’s flying. That’s a bird, right? You go, no, it’s not, it’s not a bird at all. And this of course- It’s a mess. Yeah, it’s a mess. And this is a point that goes back through Aristotle to Plato, right? And Chris and I talked a lot about this with the logos, right? But, and remember that, because logos is in all of our words where we claim to be understanding something like psychology, the logos of the psyche, right? That’s, so what’s lacking in my bird mess, the birdiness is lacking. What’s lacking there is a structural functional organization such that those features fit together, belong together and act as a causal whole such that it is appropriate to attribute properties to that whole as opposed to the parts. Like the bird is flying. You don’t say the wings are flying or the feathers are flying, right? It’s the bird as a whole is flying. And not only is that a function of how it is, and that’s what I meant when I pointed to logos and ology, it’s a function of how it’s understood, not only how it is, but how it’s understood. To understand a bird is to grasp that structural functional organization that actually makes it be a bird, which me, and this is why it’s an irony, because the feature list, that the first line in the feature is the self is a unified thing, right? But what we’re not given is the structural functional organization that unifies it as this thing and provides for an integrated explanation of it as a thing. So the structural functional organization, the logos of it is fundamentally missing. And that means we are already significantly hamstrung when we try to think about the self from the folk psychological and folk phenomenological model if it is just a feature list, because feature lists perennially lack an ability to represent this structural functional organization, the logos, the Gestalt. You should use Greek or German when you can, because it makes you sound very philosophical. And so, and I take it that that irony is telling the fact that the unity of the self is emphasized, and yet it is not exemplified in the description or the explanation of the self, is a telling glaring gap in the folk model of the self. And this is a deeply problematic thing that needs to be addressed. So I’ll stop there for a second. You guys wanna riff on that at all? Yes. Yeah, okay. I’ll riff on that for a second. I have something to say about that. Yeah, so let’s just, let’s, all right, I do try to stay contained, but the audience know what I am. So here’s my basic, you know, I’ll come back to the basic pitch. The enlightenment gives us Newtonian ontology of matter in motion. You get a Kantian phenomenology view, and they sort of jam them together. You can go German idealism with, with angle, but certainly European into American psychology, and then the folk model of what it is that we are, at the level of human psychology is broken and devoid. I mean, the scholars can’t put the structural functional model together. Yes. People can’t, they sort of know that it’s there, but they don’t know how. So we get things like, and you’ve heard me say this, you know, I’m hanging with my nephew after 50,000 for your first year of college. That’s a nightmare. Right. Okay. And so we would get to the meeting crisis, how the hell is modernity with all of its scientism helping us actually understand the metaphysics of what it is that we are, and it hasn’t, and that’s a problem. I think that’s an excellent point. The fact that we have a worldview framework that gives us no metaphysical tools, no conceptual theoretical and meta theoretical tools by which we can try and bring about a realization of that structural functional organization of the self. I think that’s an excellent point. I think that’s something that we should keep in mind. Chris, did you wanna say anything about that point about the lack of the logos in the folk model? I don’t think so. Maybe except for the fact that it’s simply relating the bird metaphor, the example that you give about the features of the bird, relating it back to your question before about the locust of the self and the body, I think is a helpful thing to bear in mind, right? Cause no more can the self be found concretely in the body than the logos of the bird can be found concretely in the breast of the bird. And I think that we, correlating those two, I think it’s just a helpful reminder to us. And it’s also just telling that the feature list of the self as you’ve recited is still presupposing a fundamental transparent unity through which the features are being observed and not actually accessing it or explicating it, which is just, I think you’ve said that already, but that’s just one way of thinking about it. Yeah. So yeah, the presupposed unity is never explicated or explained. And that means there’s a way in which the folk model is fundamentally self-undermining in a profound way. And then what Greg said is when we turn to the sort of the psychological scientific worldview to try and help ameliorate that, we don’t get the resources by which to address it, or at least until very recently, perhaps, we don’t have the resources to address it. So- They may be found somewhere, John. Maybe found somewhere. So that, how it all fits together will slide us into a very important topic that is often associated with the folk model. But Strassen doesn’t put it in, and that’s because he sees it as inherently problematic. So I wanna talk about it as a further way of problematizing the self, because one of the ways in which people think the self is bound together is through narrative, right? Through narrative. But as soon as we say that, we have to be very careful and we have to make another distinction here. And I know people are going, all these distinctions? Yes, all these distinctions because, and this is a direct quote, right? The psychological work on the self is a conceptual morass. That’s a direct quote from pivotal figures in the field. And we all sort of know this, right? That’s Greg’s point. We all know that our sense of self is fragmentary and it’s not hanging together properly or well for us. So what’s the distinction? The distinction is in narrative between the language of training and the language of explaining. So let me give you just outside of the self, although it has to do with memory, which relates to the self, a clear example of that. So we can train, and as somebody who teaches Tai Chi Chuan, and other things, and my meditation, the language I used to train people and the language I used to try and explain these phenomena are very different languages indeed because they’re directed towards different goals and they presume different contexts and they presume different shared languages. So let me give you an example though. So one of the ways I can improve my memory is I can use what’s called the method of loci, the method of locations, the ancient orders do this. I take some space that I’m familiar with, like a building that has all these rooms, and I put a salient image that I associate in this one room, and there’s a topic there, and then another room, and Sherlock did this, and I can’t remember, did he call it his memory palace or his mind palace in Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch? And in this, like I have to have notes here for this, what I’m doing here, but these guys can use the method of loci for speeches that last in six hours. So the idea that memory is, right, it’s called the spatial metaphor, that memory is laid out spatially with stable objects in stable locations and importance is captured by proximity is a powerful way to train your memory. It will improve your memory, it will extend its powers, but as Isaac and Keene famously pointed out a long time ago, right, 1990, the spatial metaphor for memory by which we train memory will terribly mislead you when you try to explain memory, because you don’t do a search through memory the way you search through a palace, because I can ask you, what’s Meryl Streep’s phone number? And you go, I don’t know. You didn’t check all the locations and go, nope, that’s not Meryl Streep, that’s not Meryl Streep, that’s not Meryl Streep, that’s, have you ever been to Bangkok? No, you don’t go, well, that’s not Bangkok, that’s not Bangkok, that, you know, like that. And also the idea that, you know, things that are close in association are somehow close together in memory. So if I say, you know, blue to you, you’ll say yellow, you know, as an association, or if I say blue to you, you’ll say new, because it rhymes. So when I say new to you, you think yellow, right? Well, no, of course not. Although blue is somehow really close to yellow and really close to new, that doesn’t mean that new and yellow are somehow close to each other, they’re very far apart, right? And we know, and I’m gonna talk about this in a few minutes, memory doesn’t, memory is not a stable object, memory is massively reconstructed. This is one of the most sort of robust findings we have about how our memory operates. So what’s the lesson? And I can give you many other examples of this. I’m just, I hope this is satisfying, because I think it’s pretty powerful. The language we use to train memory, to extend it, to make it more powerful, should not be transferred in an uncritical manner to how we try and explain memory. In a similar, and I think strong analogy, we have very good evidence that narrative enhances and extends the self. This is situational-interactional theory, this is the work of Daniel Hutto on the narrative practice hypothesis. Narrative is not natural to us, and I keep getting into debates with people about this, yes it is, I’m sorry, no it’s not. And you have to even look at the work of Thomas Selle and others, we have to practice narrative, we have to give children terribly simplified narratives compared to how we don’t have to simplify our language around them, because they are naturally linguistic, but we have to practice again and again, and the Teletubbies, I had to sit through it twice in my lifetime, oh, Tinky Winky wants to go to the market, Poe wants to come along, but Poe isn’t finished the dishes, what will they do? Oh, right, and stuff like that. And Hutto’s point is we practice narrative all day long. And the point is, Hutto argues that what narrative does is it improves our ability to pick up on other people’s mental states. Situational-interactional theory says, what narrative does is it allows you to become a more temporally extended self, because what you can do is you can link different tenses of the self by narrative. Dan Siegel argues that what narrative does is it helps you get better at attaching to your attachment figures. So one of the things that predicts how well your primary caregiver can attach to you in the psychological sense is their capacity for autobiography, right? And all these things go together. So narrative is something that massively allows us to empower and extend the self. But does that mean it’s also intrinsic to the nature of the self? And here’s where Galen Strassen comes back. And in another famous article, he says, everybody talks about this, but I don’t experience myself narratively. I’m a moral agent, I’m a professor, I think, I write, I career. But I don’t experience myself in a fundamental narrative fashion. And we know that when people get into even, maybe Strassen is statistically abnormal, but statistically normal people, when they get in the flow state, the narrative sense of self completely disappears, but their sense of agency and their sense of presence doesn’t disappear, it is actually enhanced. So there’s a lot of reason for not immediately assuming that simply because narrative trains the self, that the self is inherently a narrative entity. So I think what I’m trying to get at with that is, narrative is an attempt to try and maybe generate a sense of continuity and train it, but it might not actually be able to explain it, because I think there’s something, if you’ll allow me, fictional about our narrative sense of identity. Why do I say that? Now I’m gonna invoke what I’ve talked about before, and Hood and many other people talk about this, which is the massively reconstructive nature of memory. So Locke had the idea that, this is how it works. Here’s your accurate memories of when you’re a five-year-old and then they overlap with your accurate memories of the six-year-old. So the six-year-old can point to the five-year-old memories and they were accurate, and it’s all layered. And it’s like a computer file and everything’s layered and everything is stored and it’s stable. And as I’ve already told you, that’s just not the case. So your memory is not like a computer file. I like Hood’s example that he uses in the self-illusion. He says your memory is like a compost. The stuff at the top is very accurately distinct, but as you sink down, everything is dissolving and merging and getting all confused and mixed up together. And what we have is we have a host of evidence. Elizabeth Loftus made this famous, all of this famous way back in the 80s. Clinicians still have trauma about this, John. Yeah, I’ll give her one story, and it could have been a traumatic story, but I guess it wasn’t. So she carries around this- I’ll believe you regardless. She carries around this cherished childhood memory of this wonderful day when their whole family was in a car and the car broke down and the dad had to go and try and get some gas and some help, right? But fortunately, it just happened to be, it was like a gift from the gods. There was this amazing ice cream store there and the whole family went and had ice cream and it was a beautiful day and they went, wow, this could have been a disaster, but look at how wonderful. And Loftus carries around this cherished childhood memory that was such a great event in my life. And then when she told this, she carried it around for years and then she finally sort of shared it with her family members at a family gathering and they all started laughing. And she was kind of hurt. Like, don’t you guys value this experience? This is one of my cherished childish memories. And they said to her, you hadn’t been born then. That happened like two years before you were born. She had heard this story multiple times and then she had internalized it. And then like the compost, right? The boundaries between the self and other and the world had dissolved and that had become part of her identity and her cherished narrative. But that of course isn’t actually capturing something that is been persistent through time. And this to me reminds me of Wittgenstein’s criticism of the search for an essence. We think that because we use the word game that there’s an essence running through them, but instead, and finally, he uses the idea of family resemblance. He said, it’s more like a rope. There’s no one thing running through it. There’s all this interlap and interweaving and merging. And so the evidence for the reconstructive nature of memory is very prevalent. And this makes sense because your memory is adaptive. Remember we talked about adaptive agency. Your memory is not trying to be an accurate recorder of the past. It is trying to be an adaptive anticipator of the future. It’s trying to predict and prepare. That’s what I mean by anticipation for the future. Let me give you an example of how this works. So this is what you can do. You can give people a bunch of sort of dot diagram, just random dots on a page, a bunch of them. Like here’s five or six of them. And you show them to people, say, look at this. I want you to remember it. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Here’s another one. Let’s say there’s five or six. Then you stop. You say, now I’m gonna show you. You turn around. You’re not gonna see. I’m gonna show you one. I want you to tell me if this was one of the patterns you’ve seen before. And people are sort of okay at that. But you know what I can do is I can take all of those different patterns and I can calculate the arithmetic average of them, the mean. And I’ll get a pattern that was never presented to them, but it represents the arithmetic mean of all of those patterns. And you know what people will say? They’ll be very confident they saw that picture. Yes, I saw that picture for sure, even though they never did. Because what is the brain doing? It’s doing data compression. It’s like when you do a scatter plot and you take all the points and you draw the line between them. The brain is doing data compression. It’s taking all of this and trying to predict what’s the most likely pattern I’m gonna see next. And that’s what it remembers seeing. It’s an adaptive anticipator of the future, not an accurate recorder of the past. And that massively reconstructive nature of memory undermines the claim that what we’re doing in narrative is anything other than training the ability to extend the self into the future in an adaptive fashion, as opposed to finding some essential feature of the self at its core. Now notice what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that narrative doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is we have to be very careful about whether or not the sense of the security of the continuity of our identity that is given to us by our folk phenomenology and our folk psychology actually points to something in a clear and definitive manner. And what reconstructive memory shows is we can seriously problematize the idea that narrative gives us some guarantee, some continuity. I wanna make it even worse, which is narrative is a practice in non-logical identity. We talked about this last time. There’s a weird thing where you look at a picture of a two-year-old and you say, there I am, right? Or you think I need to save for when I’m 85, right? Or something like that, or 65, I should say. So 85, I’m gonna probably be dead. But anyways, maybe not. My dad lived to like 90 something, so maybe I’ve got a chance. Anyways, and the problem with non-logical identity is a famous problem, which is continuity. So I want you to listen to me very carefully. Continuity, even if you’ve got continuity, remember I said narrative may not give us the continuity we think we have, but continuity doesn’t guarantee identity. This is Theseus’ ship. So Theseus is a wooden ship in ancient Greece and he’s got a cargo full of wooden planks and he’s sailing from Syracuse. And as he’s sailing, one of the planks rots and he has to replace it from one of the planks in his ship and he’s cursed by the gods and this keeps happening. So that by the time he gets to Athens, every single plank in the ship has been replaced by the wood from the hold. Now is the ship that comes into Athens the same ship that left Syracuse? There’s definitely continuity. But people go, and famously, that’s why it’s a famous example, people famously go, I don’t know. And then you can make it really even more confusing that as Theseus, right, what Theseus starts to do, well, let’s do the Star Trek version. Star Trek, it was a famous original series. If you guys don’t know it as a science fiction show, Captain Kirk, it really ages me, but some of you probably. I know it. And they rebooted it not that long ago. So it should be back to some degree in common parlance. But there was a device on it called the transporter and you could get into it and it would turn you, basically turn you into energy, beam you to someplace and then reconstitute you. And a famous philosophical question is, is that you? There’s causal continuity, but is that you? Or is it a really good copy of you? And you say, oh, no, it’s me. That’s what the show thinks. But what if, what if you start out here and instead of one copy, it makes four copies of you? Are they all you? And if they’re all you, can I kill two of you and yet I haven’t killed you because you’re still here? And you get like, so continuity and identity, don’t, they don’t, like one does not necessarily guarantee the other. So the sense of a persistent self is not only undermined because the sense that narrative is evidence for that is very questionable. We know that we don’t have, you know, categorical and logical identity. We think we’ve got a continuity that points to persistence, but continuity doesn’t guarantee identity in any unnecessary fashion. And so the self is now, I would argue, extremely problematized at this point. And then what I’m gonna do next is, is the self even a thing? But before I do that, chance for you guys to riff as you might be want to do. Do you wanna go ahead, Gregor, shall I? Sure, I mean, I’m flexible. If you have something on the tip of your tongue. Okay, I’ve got two. One is just a question though. So maybe I’ll just throw in a question. It’s just a clarification question actually. You might not be able to answer it, John, because it’s attribution to another person, it’s Strossen. But when you say that Strossen makes the claim that he does not have a narrative sense of identity, I don’t think I can fully understand what he means by that. Like, does he give concrete examples? For instance, does that mean that he doesn’t, when he brings to mind certain individuals in his life or certain events that he doesn’t think of them in an episodic sequence? Ah, so that’s the question. How does he, like, what does that mean in concrete terms for him? Okay, but let’s come back to that. And let’s go to situational interaction theory, right? Episodic memory is natural to us. But if you ever talk to a four-year-old, they have episodic memory. And they’re like, oh, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do that. But ask them what happened in their day. They’ll give you their episodes, but it will be like an acid trip. It was like, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, right? And the idea is you have to practice with narrative a lot in order to turn that into a, a coherent, interpenetrating sequence of episodes. And what Strossen argues is, no, he just has sort of the episodes and he has, right? And they sort of, they bunch in places, and he’s just running from beginning to end throughout. And he doesn’t find that that is like really undermining of his agency. And on the other end, you will read people, you know, within deep meditative practices who claim similar things. They’ll claim that they’ve lost the narrative self, but they are able to function in the world in a completely normal fashion. In fact, this is one version of the claim to being an enlightened individual, that, you know, you know, you’re a tathagata, right? Always coming, always going, because he wasn’t, like he was never here. Sartor de Gautama was no longer ever here. It was just sort of his agency. And so, yeah, yeah, that’s right. You do this. And Strossen, Strossen, and I take him at his word because we shouldn’t bully his phenomenology. He says he has exactly the same quizzical thing between us. He doesn’t see what we’re on about. Like he really doesn’t see what we’re on about. So, I mean, I feel I might be doing human injustice, but I recommend reading the article. I mean, as an argumentative thing, it’s hard to say, yeah, my account trumps your phenomenology. And he says, no. Sure, yeah. Yeah, no, I don’t wanna presume upon him, certainly, if we have to take him at his word. I do find it to be a very, very curious statement. And I think that it’s one that, I’ll read the article and maybe I’ll resurface this again. Because I find that that’s a statement that for me needs a little bit more qualification because we can think of it at so many different levels of resolution, right? We can think of it in the gestalt form of an overwhelming autobiography. And then we can think of it in a much more segmented fashion, something more periodic, something that’s more time-bounded within specific contexts such as the span of a particular day, as opposed to the span of an epoch of life or the span of an entire life, right? So saying that he doesn’t have a persistent sense of identification of an overwhelming autobiography that arcs throughout the course of his life is a very different thing than him saying that he doesn’t, let’s say, rely on narrative in order to access the episodic memories that unfold over the course of a week. Like, those are very different things to me and I’m still not sure what she means. So anyway, maybe I’ll just have to. No, no, no, I mean, let’s talk about it for a sec. I mean, so in order to try and support him, what about the three and a half people that you can talk to? They’re an agent, you can talk to them, they have a facility with language, they’re starting to even become capable of moral behavior, they start to have a sense of what’s right and wrong, but they, like even what happened today, like, can you try and get them to relate that to you? It’s not there. Now, do we want to say that there’s no self there? That’s a very problematic thing to say. No, of course we wouldn’t say that, but what I would say is the example of the three-year-old, we would see that as some kind of developmental, like that there was something developmentally insufficient about the fact that the three-year-old was not able to compress and revise the course of the day within a structure that accounted for it more comprehensively than just a bunch of discordant events. You know what I mean? On account of the three-year-old, I think we would say that there was something lacking in terms of the overall coherence or integrity of the representation, but I presume the same is not true of Strassen. So I don’t know how those two examples fit together. What he claims is he has a kind of more of a logical and epistemic structuring of those episodes together that do not represent the standard defining features of what a narrative is. To my mind, it sounds like what’s holding the episodes together is something more like an argument than a narrative. And he thinks that functions sort of perfectly well. And again, I don’t see how to challenge him. Again, so as an adult, here’s where I’m not defective. I have been in extended periods of the flow state. I have been in deeply extended periods of the flow state. And the narrative self is gone. That’s one of the defining features of it. But my agency has not become defective because of that. Instead, it has become precisely enhanced. So what I’m saying is if you consider both of those together, then Strassen’s, again, I agree with you. I can’t sort of get phenomenologically what this is other than these experiences I’m relating to. It’s not my sort of sustained sense in the world. But I have extended periods where my agency and my sense of presence are heightened and functioning at their best. And the narrative self is gone. Yeah, so for me, what I wanna do is, maybe along Christopher’s line, let me just ask a few questions just to get clear about what we mean by narrative. Because it’s like so many. Like so one of my first questions is, how much narrative do we have without any linguistic propositional knowing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and thank you, Greg, because I wanna answer this. And I wanna say that trying to get narrative without propositional language strikes me as an impossible thing to do. But we have very clear evidence for a robust sense of self in non-linguistic animals. Totally. Which would be clear evidence, again, of a functioning sense of self that is happening outside, not depending on narrative for its existence. Totally. So yeah, I mean, for me, or what I’m gonna say is, narrative is an add-on. I mean, you get a mental organ of justification that’s gonna get added on to the perspectival participatory system. That is the core. And that’s why, and when you’re in flow state, you’re a perspectival participatory machine and you may be tracking semantic knowledge. But the self-conscious narrator is not double checking what the hell’s going on. It’s just like, go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, this is golden. Basically. The other thing I’ll say is when I, and certainly nothing was straw-some, but as a clinician, the disruption of the normal socio-emotional narrator is not uncommon. Like in autism or in other kinds of structures. I mean, this is a propositional socio-emotional skill that develops in participatory roles and people are more naturally inclined to this kind of dance, or not depending on all sorts of potential variables. Yeah, so thank you, Greg. And I’m not, Chris, I’m not trying to make an absolute argument here. I’m trying to problematize. Yeah, so I guess I’m just agreeing that absolutely that especially narrative at the structure of the self from an evolutionary perspective, I certainly wanna say that 500,000 years ago, if we’re engaged in dance and broken symbolic language in an intersubjective space here, but don’t necessarily have a woven autobiographical religious meaning I am self in the world, and this is my purpose kind of deal, that’s an add-on, I guess it’s, Seth. Yeah, I would be, yeah, I think that’s, that’s what I’m, yeah, that’s what I’m suggesting at least. Okay, then I think we’re, okay, yeah, I just wanted to be clear about that. Again, I’m not even clear that I’m gonna sort of make that a final claim. All I wanna do is suggest that as a intellectually and plausible possibility and therefore the folk model of the self has been problematized therein. That was what. Absolutely. So we’re sort of at the limit of our time. I’ll just foreshadow what’s gonna come next. I thought we’d get to it this time, and I sort of promised, but we’ll get it to it next time, which is I wanna move into the thingness of the self and go to the work of two psychologists, William James and Arthur Dyckman, and really problematize the thingness of the self and talk about, well, there’s a core aspect of the self that seems to be no thing at all. And I promise you that when I do that, that’ll tell you why we’ve entitled this series the elusive I, capital I, because the I in contrast to the me doesn’t seem to be any kind of thing at all, at least not phenomenologically. And so the no thingness of the self is going to deeply challenge the claim that the self is a kind of thing. And again, this is pervasive, it’s cross-cultural. You see it in mystical traditions. You see different psychologists coming, it’s from very different angles, James and Dyckman, lots of convergence on this. And so again, what does it tell us about the self? So that’s where we’re gonna go forward. But as always, I like to try to sort of shut up and give Greg and Chris some space for reflections, riffing, any final summative things they want to say. I would say just that the problem, so the disruption of the integrity of the narrative form and its essentialism is a really, really interesting thing. And we’re gonna obviously keep talking about this. But one thing I maybe wanna foreshadow a little bit is that the discovery, the very significant discovery, that narrative and memory, I’m gonna speak of them synonymously. They’re obviously not the same thing, but I’m gonna speak of them as a pair for this moment. That the insight that there is no necessary continuity, no literal or actual continuity to the narrative structure that is perhaps metaphysically necessary seems like something that’s very threatening and disruptive to the notion of the self. But in fact, I think we’ll, I think we’ll be, I know you make an argument for this already, John, and I think I may have one or two of my own in the offing, that in fact, the discontinuous structure of narrative is an affordance, its pliability and its mutability is not something that need be threatening to the self, but simply threatening to a certain conception of the self. Exactly. Namely, the Cartesian conception of the self. I know you’re gonna talk about that, so I don’t wanna take away your, I don’t wanna take up the air of that argument in advance. But I think that one thing I think that’s gonna be very important is understanding the pliability of narrative as a virtue of that form, of a virtue of the psychotechnological function rather than something that disarms it and robs it of value. And I think finding the value and the virtue in the pliability of narrative and the reconstructive nature of memory has everything to do with understanding the self as a symbolic entity rather than a literal one, because I think it’s the mis-categorized actuality of the narrative that makes its discontinuity threatening. And that’s something I’m very much looking forward to talking about. That’s beautiful, Chris. Deep consonance with what you said. And perhaps along the way, I mean, that’s the resources to give a kind of deeper reply to Derrida Foucault and the way they’ve problematized the self in the subject. I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s definitely beautiful. We might talk about Schrag at some point, the self after postmodernism and what he’s been trying to do around that. So I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s, yeah. I think that’s beautiful and I look forward to that. Greg, any gatherings you want to draw? I felt present during this, John, and the present scene was very real to me. So I think for me, there’s a grounding of the non-verbal, perspectival participatory primate. And that is going to be a core anchor epicenter for me in relation. And I think we’ve sort of set up what we can problematize and also what we can retain sort of in that frame. And then this add-on, this late crazy evolutionary add-on around this justificatory narrative aspect. And that relation, I will tell you, of all the things that I pay attention to as a clinician, over and over again, is essentially the narrative relation with the experiential presence or not present scene self. That dynamic relation has everything to do with whether I’m looking at character functioning or- Exactly. The structure of somebody, that’s the epicenter. So I’m really fascinated about how we’ve structured this and how some of the clinical angles emerge. And really, as we get to this nexus point of iteration between present scene and narrative, I’m very curious as to see how this will unfold. I think that’s great. And I think you brought out something that we talked about last time, and you did, I think, a really valuable reformulation. But we talked about the non, they’re not identical, but the deep interpenetration and interdefining of self personality, which I like the way you reconfigured it in terms of its dispositional aspects and its character aspects. And I encourage people to go back and look at that section because I thought that was really good. But also personhood, which is this moral legal thing. And I would say that I’m very, I’m very more than comfortable. I’m sort of confident that, and this is where I think Greg’s work in mind converges, Chris, in a way that I think you’d find appropriate to what you’re trying to put your finger on. I think that narrative is necessary for a self to be a person. And that’s something important. And again, like you said, there’s this symbolic non-literal, and maybe we can play with the neoplatonic idea that between the literal and the metaphorical is the participatory, which is neither literal nor metaphorical. But yeah, the connections between selfhood and personhood, I think are really a key to what’s been going on in the last sort of 15 minutes of our tri-log. Amen, amen. That dynamic nexus, a lot of gold to be mined there. Well, of course. Yeah, there’s weird things. Like we think one of the justifications for the moral protection of personhood is precisely because selves are somehow intrinsically valuable. So you see this in a lot of the movement in which people are trying to extend ethical rights to non-human animals, precisely because although they’re not capable of the moral and legal responsibilities of personhood, they are nevertheless selves, and therefore they should be drawn under the umbrella in the same way we draw a four-month-old human being under the umbrella precisely because we think that a self is an inherently valuable thing. But we’ll also have to talk about that because another problematization that Hood is gonna bring out is the self isn’t sort of self-subsisting. It is socially emergent and constructed. And does that mean it’s only socially attributed? And oh no. So we’ll talk about that too. There’s lots to do to provide the three of us to continue to do. I once again, once again, wanna thank the two of you again. This, the way this always exceeds my expectations and the argument that I’m presenting and things get drawn out and developed. So I just wanna thank both of you again so much. Thank you, John, that’s great. Thanks, John. And thanks, Greg. Yeah, this was fun. This was fun. Really looking forward to where it goes. Okay, everyone, take good care and we’ll see you next time. On part three of the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self.