The Elusive I - Part 7 (SR6DWJebD2w)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SR6DWJebD2w

Welcome back everyone to the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self. And I’m joined with my, my colleagues and friends on this journey into the depths of what is simultaneously perhaps most familiar and most mysterious to us. We try to hearken to Socrates’ ever enigmatic but ever alluring call to know yourself and what does that mean? And so I’m joined as always with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Massa-Pietro. Welcome gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to have you here again. Thanks so much. Thank you. So I wanted to review a bit of where we got to and then try and give us a bit of a scaffold for the, the, we got, we had some amazing theologos last time and it was very generative. But I’m going to try and give something a little bit more linear here, gather it all back together and then we can proceed again into the theoretical argumentation and then always I invite you guys to jazz with me and jazz with each other wherever the spirit takes you and whenever the spirit takes you. Right. And if we get through and we might not and I’m fine with that, if we get through what I’ve sort of planned for today, we will again come back to the topic of soul because part, what I’m going to argue is part of what’s going on in the self no self debate is an implicit identification of the self with an implicit but long-standing definition of what the soul is and that what people are really denying is they’re denying sort of a Cartesian soul when they’re denying the existence of the self and then the question that will emerge out of that is do we actually care about that denial because do we have a Martin Bailey here thing going on is it sounds like radical there is no self and then it turns out well what I mean by that is there’s no Cartesian soul it’s like that’s not the same claim and so let so and let’s not jump into that right now that’s where I foresee we might get to and so what did we do well I wanted we basically built together what I call a schema of emergence and what we did was at the biological level I was talking about you know autopoiesis and the kind of self-relevance right that is appropriate to a biological system and then we moved into the level of temperament and character and with something more like niche construction the self-relevance that allows the agent arena relationship to really start to come into a more longitudinal framework and then we moved into consciousness and the self-relevance there was that that reflection ability we have the I-me relationship and then it gets taken up into culture the socio-cultural self-relevance where internalization and then Greg did his masterful journey right taking us from the primate through to full personhood participating in the justification arena and so we got a schema of emergence that makes it plausible how we can use the relevance realization machinery integrated with the well-established version of that called self-relevance which is the grounding of relevance realization in relevance to an autopoetic system we can make use of ideas of you know mutual modeling and exaptation to get the emergence to be plausible and that’s sort of where we got to and then Chris brought up a very important question about I don’t want to misrepresent it Chris but you were basically trying to talk about the way how does this model of emergence fit in with what seems to be phenomenologically and existentially non-deniable which is this differentiation but relating back to its self-function that seems to be so central to the self and Greg and I agreed as always your question was I think pertinent and bordering and I mean this is a compliment bordering on profound it’s like right so we’ve got this third person and I think valuable theoretical scheme of emergence but what how does that gel with the first person process of individuation differentiation and then differentiation and then that led us pretty naturally into the discussion about the the dysfunction of identification and we took up the topic of narrative we came back to Strossen again and I talked about why narrative is central especially for the upper layers especially where Greg was talking that narrative enables us to be it’s indispensable I would say to becoming temporally extended socio-cultural moral agents capable of full personhood and then I talked about how narrative seems to be able to do that because it gives us it allows us to it helps us do that upper level of emergence but also the the self-othering that Chris was talking about because it you know that’s how narrative works and I talked about how narrative is interesting because it gives us an identity that is neither logical nor categorical and then we got into the discussion about Strossen about that given right like Strossen clearly seems to be a moral agent and then I brought up the question of well is narrativity necessary to being a self and we all agreed that that can’t be the case given that we have animals that pass self-recognition tests we have complex you know organization amongst chimps and primates but we did say that perhaps what we can’t get is a full-blown moral agent existing within the justification arena because with only with language do you get the propositional framework and then I brought up the question of well there was a part of this I was trying to put together that and then everything and then everything Chris had said and and it was and this was good dialogos because you know you’re doing theorizing but you’re also doing theory you’re also seeing what you’re exemplifying in the very act of doing the theorizing and what I noted I was exemplifying and I saw it in both of you in both of you was this weird capacity we have and I think it’s a it’s a trans-narrative capacity of we just we move around the the seat of consciousness and the center of identification in a very fluid manner but it’s it’s kind of when you step back and it’s so transparent to us but when you if you can step back and make it opaque it’s like really kind of mysterious and how does that gel with our model of ourself as some sort of solid substantial entity and then in the mix with that was the fact that we know that agency and narrative can come apart from us we are capable of entering into a trans-narrative state the flow state the pure consciousness event etc in which people don’t lose agency they don’t even lose you know a sense of being they don’t slip out of consciousness or anything like that but they lose narrativity completely and so we sort of left it there but I was wondering if there you know if there’s potential connections between this trans-narrative shifting around of I don’t know what to call it the the the center of the projection of consciousness and identity identification I should say and the the trans-narrative imaginal space we can find ourselves in in things like the flow state altered states of consciousness the that whole spectrum of alternative states of consciousness that Yaden talks about in which people lose narrativity and they lose the standard egocentric sense of self so that’s where we sort of got to did I represent everybody’s ideas fairly does that capture the line of argument and discussion beautiful I thought that I think that’s a really clean linear summary to something that was quite rich I’ll simply state that yes I found the dialogos at the end of that quite meaningful at a personal level and what was sort of integrated apparent and then very you know perplexing or opening was the frame shifting the person what I would call a you know sort of adverbial perspectival frame shifting that that at least I was seeing in myself as a much I guess I I always look through it John and now I was looking at it yeah yeah I know so I I went through the evening and then I’ve been watching my frame shift I’m just more conscious of that and and see that more as sort of this central juxtaposed perspectival shifting and and I think that’s a really fascinating thing that I feel more aware of over the last week Chris I think you’re muted yeah sorry thanks yeah I agree Greg I had a similar feeling by the end of it and I think that in some sense we’ll have to qualify this properly later on and probably not today but I think that what we stumbled upon accidentally in the course of that dialogue toward the end was a recognition of and an experience of self as spirit I think that is what disclosed itself by the end in the theoria and as a consequence of the theoria into the theory of the argument yeah that’s that’s well said yeah we talked about if you remember I well sorry I proposed that the self gluing function can go from an egocentric to a to an allocentric even ontocentric situation in which the gluing is no longer of the sort of egoic model of the self or something like that but instead it gets the identification is with and through sort of reality and the world sort of a kind of profound kind of self-transcendence because people of course report that in the flow state they report this tremendous sense of at one minute and the narrative sense of self that self-conscious self-narrating function drops away and instead it seems to be right it seems to be and I don’t mean this in the usual pejorative of sense of the word it seems to be projected onto the world because the world is in is integrated and intensified and shines the phenomenon right it shines with more intelligibility and more presence than normal so kind of how how how we have that phenomenological salience preference for the self is shifted outward and I’m wondering Chris if that also is part of you know the what you’ve put your finger on as the spirit function so the translocational capacity of this right can also ultimately be directed to something that transcends the agency of the organism in some fundamental way definitely yeah something like its full potential for being sort of that it somehow comes into recognition not necessarily an egoic or a narrative recognition but some kind of ontological recognition of its potential for being and we talked a lot last week about the idea the sort of the Jungian idea of the self the atman right to which it corresponds roughly speaking and I think that that there’s an interesting and necessary paradox I think we’ll probably have to talk about in that the shift to the ontocentric perspective which is phenomenally could be perceived as a shift from the inside out is also by the same token shift from the outside in yeah Heraclitus the way up and the way down in the same way yeah and I was I proposed and we had some good discussion around it this idea of that ground to ground identification that ground to ground participatory knowing you know that we can get some a sense in in terms of that imaginal space that the that seat of consciousness moves around in that that that’s kind of a nourishing function it I I’m sorry it’s a metaphor but what if there’s some kind of the our ability to be integrated within the psyche is somehow empowered by our ability to be integrated without the psyche and there’s something going on there and I think therapy taps into that kind of nourishing in a powerful way and we also talked in connection with that because we talked about that that nourishing and then we talked about like when you’re doing like internal family systems theory that weird thing where you’re moving around that that locus of of of of framing and identification so this is all just fascinating stuff and let’s make it even more perplexing and enigmatic by entering into where this takes us I think pretty pretty readily which is the current it’s for its perennial and it is also current and cutting-edge debate called the self no self debate things like you know Vedanta atman and Brahman right and that the ego is ultimately an illusion but there’s something like atman right but then buddhism comes along and says no no even no atman right and we have people coming out of that tradition with dykman trying to locate the self or identify it with consciousness we’ve seen that we’ve seen this all along and I want to get into this debate and it’s at the cutting edge of cognitive science right now so I like this debate precisely because it resonates so deeply into the past and cross culturally but it also brings us into really imminent contact with you know some cutting-edge cognitive science and neuroscience and psychology about the self so that’s where I propose we go right now beautiful I think we’re set for it okay so we already saw you know we got flow we got the pure consciousness event we have this idea that people report we have we have you know what’s her name I think it’s Bernadette Peters who wrote a series of books no self right people report a loss of a sense of self and Yagin has like a continuum people report a loss of some important sense of self the narrative self-conscious egoic self in flow and then you can get full-blown pure consciousness events you can get a so what what we have a whole family and a whole continuum of altered states of consciousness in which people phenomenologically report things but they do it in a way that is all is going to provoke debate because it’s it’s pretty damn well paradoxical because they’ll say things like I remember that I didn’t have a self it’s like what’s doing the remembering and what’s doing the reporting and what’s establishing the continuity between the person speaking and that that state and it’s it taps right into this this thing we’ve been talking about about this translocation of right of the framing and identification function and and and the weird imaginal continuity that exists there so I think what we can take it as we can take it as we have bona fide tons of independent converging reports of people claiming that they’ve had experience of no self and but there’s paradox because the paradox they just I remember that I had no self and what’s going on there and do you mean all of your functions all the self like what does that mean and then the paradox is worsened is that the right way because we have we have you know people going into this and coming out and saying I realized my true self and that’s more like a Vedanta Ottoman with Brahman as opposed to people saying I realized there was no self and it’s again who what’s the agency of that right so this is a tremendously provocative paradoxical and mysterious thing but I do take it that we have good reason to believe that people are right that this is bona fide phenomenological reporting going on and that at a minimum I’m not saying at a maximum because that’s what we’re discussing at a minimum the folk model of the self is somehow being seriously challenged and undermined in these experiences and perhaps maybe not perhaps that’s all that’s being challenged we don’t know okay so that’s the basic framing now what I propose to do is take a look at a recent 2017 debate within cognitive science between two groups of people so one is represented by Hoey and Mitchell from 2017 and they have a predictive processing model of the self and they’re going to argue that the self is real I want to I want to do them second though because it turns out for sort of explanatory expository purposes having them second in the debate is better so I’ll be referring to them but I won’t probably be getting to an explanation so on the other side are Letheby and Gerans also from 2017 this is a live debate and they are they are using psychedelic and mystical experiences the whole the whole Yaden continuum in order to make a claim that the self doesn’t exist now again let’s remember way back when we talked about hood they mean that the self doesn’t exist in the way we think it exists they’re not claiming that every aspect of everything we’re talking about here is an illusion in fact I noted this very carefully these are the things they assert exist like without question they exert or they talk they invoke throughout the paper what I would call relevance realization they invoke relevance they invoke salience they invoke adaptivity this is central to their argument so all of the machinery that we designated as real as we built the emergent schema they designate is equally real secondly they explicitly refer multiple times to the reality of self-relevance and how could they not all the empirical experimental literature so that’s all there and so I mean I think that brings with it an entailment that there’s an autopoetic being involved because self-relevance makes no sense until unless it’s relevance to an autopoetic system so we have autopoiesis recursive relevance realization we have self-relevance they also admit something that we’ve talked about repeatedly both with the mutual modeling and with the robots which is the existence of self-modeling the agent is empowered by a self-model a model of its own biological and cognitive agency and in that in that sense they agree with how we how we add michelle but so all of these are real all of these they and they can’t really deny it because the empirical evidence and the theoretical argumentation I think are pretty solid so what is it that they’re doing what is it they’re what they want to claim on the basic basis of the altered states of consciousness continuum well they want to say that every all of that is real but the self is not real and that these I’ll call it the psychic to mystical continuum is evidence for that fact and here’s what here’s the here’s the nub of the debate because it’s a question of whether or not all of that previous stuff including the self-model and including the very sophisticated version of howe and michelle which we’ll take a look at later right next time hopefully is that sufficient for a cell is that sufficient for selfhood right so howe and michelle I keep mispronouncing his name I’m sorry say it’s sufficient let there be in jaren say it’s insufficient so let’s be very clear what’s going on here all of this machinery is agreed upon all the machinery that we have relied on in our discussion is agreed upon and the debate right is about whether or not it’s sufficient for selfhood that’s exact so and and what let there be in gerunds want to argue is that the psychedelic to mystical continuum shows that all the reality of all of those things on the list and even the coherence of that reality is insufficient for selfhood does that make sense as where the argument is I’ll stop talking I’ve been talking a lot go ahead no I’ll just say that actually as we if we sit with that for a little bit we spend a fair amount of time problematizing the folk self right yeah but this fact in and of itself that you have individuals delineating this list of attributes and coming to sort of diametrically or whatever opposed conclusions that well this list means there is no self this list means that there is it just speaks to the elusiveness of what exactly is the reference and it speaks to it not just so it’s problematized I guess we want to say we’re having this conversation part it’s clearly problematized amongst the academics and and you don’t go you know one of my critiques is you know you go to physics you know I mean of course there’s edges but you go into psychology you learn all of these different kinds of perspectives and there really isn’t a a a coherent agreed upon consensus and that debate you know speaks in some ways at least to that kind of fact so I’m going to make a meta point which is like I’m going to go through the debate and like I said I’m going to do start with let there be and rands and then move back to holy and mitchell but I’m going to make a meta point which neither one of them make so it’s a presupposition a shared assumption in the debate which is this whole discussion about the realness of the self is bound up with a set of criteria for realness that are never explicated elucidated or justified in any way and so the debate is fundamentally a debate about not only the self and its realness but I think what the debate needs to be which it wasn’t a reflection on the standard of realness that is being used and I’m going to argue that there’s equivocation around this and there’s actually a kind of a mott and bailey thing going on it says they sound like they’re saying I don’t want to be I don’t want to trivialize them because they’re I respect what they’re doing so I’ll try and do this I hope as non-derogatory as possible they’re saying oh the self doesn’t exist and that sounds profound but remember they’ve already given all this other stuff right and it’s like wait and then what they’re going to say is well the self isn’t real the way a cartesian soul is real and it’s like we haven’t thought of cartesian substances as the standard of reality for a very long time I did learn that in my psychology classes like let me give you a quick analogy nobody that I well that’s too strong almost everybody that I know in psychology neuroscience cognitive science thinks the mind is a cartesian substance very few people the churchlands aside think that that means the mind is not real we have we have all these disciplines that are in existence precisely they because they take the mind to be a real entity they don’t think it’s a cartesian substance but they don’t there thereby conclude again the churchlands aside and I think a limited materialism is pretty has fallen on pretty hard times right that aside right everybody goes yes it’s they simultaneously say yes it’s not a cartesian substance and yes it’s real and we need it’s a real phenomena it’s a real function and we need to really explain it so we’ve already for a long time where we were willing to abandon the substantial model of the mind without abandoning its claim to being real and so it’s unclear to me why the same strategy of ontological acceptance is not available to us when it comes to the self that’s going to be the vervecian proposal I’m going to make to you gentlemen I think that’s a beautiful proposal I’ll give you a little aside when you mentioned eliminated materialism just as an aside I was at a conference about the self with Patricia Churchland and Roy Baumeister and a few others and we were having dinner lunch or whatever I pulled out the tree of knowledge and she said hey that’s what I think so you know I don’t know what to help people think half the time so anyway that was her let’s say hey that’s my model it’s like I don’t know what we’re talking about anymore if that’s your model because yeah it’s not a limited materialism you know that’s not what it is but I just want to speak to everybody the amount of epistemological ontological terminological conceptual confusion is high and I think your meta point is brilliant John and I think it’s exactly why this journey is so important good because thank you for saying that Greg and I think Krista speaks to what concern you’ve repeatedly had and you’ve voiced it in various incarnations last time again that you know the relationship between self and reality they should always be considered together and they shouldn’t be considered in isolation and the presupposition that I mean the the presupposition that the self can be conceived of in isolation actually bespeaks the very intuition they want to challenge which is that you know the self is some sort of Cartesian monadic substance they seem to be falling prey in their presupposition to the very thing they want to challenge which I think is a little bit of dramatic irony perhaps yeah I don’t want to sound dismissive of this because it’s it’s rigorous in its way and it is important to go through but I can’t help feeling that this is the debate is premised on an improper framing that it’s much ado about no thing don’t trouble yourselves but you know I think you know what I mean by that yeah that was brilliant thanks so I want to take it that they are they are saying the self doesn’t exist the way the folk model says it exists again I think I agree with Chris that’s not like yeah yeah I don’t know of any scientific view that says the folk model is the right model I can’t it’s hard to find that I mean we did enough to problematize that so I’m not going to return to that I take it that that’s been made plausible so they want to say something stronger they want to say that we have a self model but the content of that self model is something like the Cartesian soul now there’s difficulty around this because they invoke the notion of substance and they seem to want to invoke both the Aristotelian notion of substance and the Cartesian notion of substance because and they they because then why why I feel fair to say this is they explicitly talk about Aristotelian substance but then they move into Cartesian language specifically invoking Descartes and it’s like that’s problematic because an Aristotelian substance there’s a lot of historical change between Aristotelian substance and there’s a lot of historical change between Aristotle’s notion of substance and Descartes so just a quick history recap an Aristotelian substance is like an ultimate subject that cannot be a predicate right that’s the so substances in Aristotle are kind of I don’t mean it metaphysically but methodologically they are grammatically defined a substance is something that of which things can be predicated and itself itself sorry he cannot be a predicate so Socrates is a substance for aerosol many of us would find that language weird Chris is a substance Greg is a substance I am a substance because while we have predicates we are not the predicate of something else and it’s it’s not clear it’s not it’s not quite clear well maybe it is it’s not quite clear how that’s being reputed by these psychedelic experiences because it seems like people still want to say there was not maybe a self but there was a substance of which there were predicates like there was no self and it was in bliss right and like and so in that sense like the experiences don’t undermine a Cartesian sense of substance now there is the sorry an Aristotelian I should have said sorry but then there’s the Cartesian sense and the Cartesian sense is much more like ours our Cartesian sense is the underlying stuff in which properties all in here the famous example from Descartes is the wax right I when the wax is solid it’s white and solid and when I melt it it’s transparent in a liquid but it’s still the same wax and so that notion of substance is much closer to our notion of matter or something like that right in the in the Cartesian sense and then for Descartes what you have is you have the idea that there are two kinds of substances matter and mind and that we have an immaterial unified single substance which is identical with right the soul and so and what what Descartes meant by that was what we’re talking about here when we talk about he meant both the religious sense of soul and what we’re talking about here with the sense of self and you all know this because of Descartes most famous line called pito ergo sum right I think therefore I am right there’s an identity the thinking substance is also the locus and basis of identity the identity of the cell and that that is the thing that gets saved the soul in Christianity and that’s your essential identity etc etc now I think that I think that uh uh Moran’s Jaren’s at Lethady and Jaren’s have a much stronger case when they’re talking about that the Cartesian soul is undermined by the psychedelic to mystical continuum because it seems clear that something like that Cartesian entity doesn’t line up with the phenomenology of these of these experiences so I just wanted to get clear about that and I don’t want to be so strong as to say they equivocate but I think there’s ambiguity and they’re they’re trading between sort of the Aristotelian notion which I it’s hard to see how that’s undermined because we still make predications of whatever’s happening in the no-self right so it’s like I think what they mean is insofar as that subject of predication is also a Cartesian soul that’s what’s being undermined and I think the weight of the problem is on the Cartesian aspect of substance not on the Aristotelian does that strike you guys as plausible as an argument very yeah I mean it certainly strikes me as plausible and certainly as I with my own you know schematic for these various parts and domains so I hear them and I hear certainly the folk model or at least the standard folk model is my self-conscious personhood narrator is some you know epicenter of my being what I take responsibility for etc that’s going to relate to a Cartesian you know frame I think therefore I am right and then when we drop into you know the transcendent grip uh you know world-changing grip of our phenomenological experience of being that self-consciousness dissipates and this is what’s lost so all of that sort of lines up as far as I’m saying in terms of what at least the facets of various angles are being seen here and how that would cohere thank you greg um and I and I want to thank listeners for hanging in because this is pretty technical stuff but we have to get clear about I mean and to be fair to this discussion this is a very hot topic even in the general public right now about self and no self and part of what I’m trying to show is even people who are are deemed to have the the responsibility of being very rigorous about this and this is not again meant to be an insult you can see that there’s a potential for confusion in this we have to tread these we have to tread this path very very very very carefully uh very be very precise in what we’re talking about I want to read a quote from them just to make clear uh this this is quote so quote our argument then turns crucially on the claim that the content of the self-model notice they’re not denying the existence of the content or the self-model our argument that turns crucially on the claim that the content of the self-model is that of an enduring substance which is distinct from all the mental emotional and physical activity of which it is supposed to be aware so the idea is there’s some substance just like the wax is behind all you know the different experiences we can have of it there’s the there’s the substance of the whack there is this particular mind substance that is behind it all and in which all of these experiences ultimately in here and then the idea is the self-model is has as its as its referential content that so it’s modeling itself and it’s modeling itself as that and what they’re claiming is although the self-model exists and obviously the content exists the referent doesn’t exist analogous to this sentence uh you know uh the music of the spheres obviously the I’m I’m the there’s a modeler here the speaker and there’s content but that doesn’t mean there’s spheres making music out in space right that’s the basic model so we have a self-model it’s making a representation of itself in the recursive sense right but that representation is actually false the content does not refer that’s the basic move that’s being made here is that okay yep it’s clear yep okay so the first thing is again there’s a claim now notice what the claim is they’re making the claim they need to make here is the claim right that this is the universal content of the self-model because they want to universally pronounce that there is no self and so what we can ask is does this map readily and easily and coherently onto the content of people’s self-model and that’s already where I find it a bit problematic the idea of an enduring substance perhaps but we also note that people talk about a self that is continually developing they also talk of themselves as a developmental system they talk about parts of themselves that are changing and growing and some are disappearing and some are coming into emergence and it’s it’s difficult to see how all of that lines up with no no but the self is actually the enduring unchanging substance behind it just like Descartes thought the matter was the enduring right unchanged enduring unchanging substance behind all the phenomenological present appearances of the wax so I I would propose to you that I don’t think the self-model is just prima facie insofar as it’s also the folk model it’s what I’m trying to say is doesn’t our folk model give us evidence that the self-model isn’t just the Cartesian self it seems that our folk model is perhaps not even even consistent we’ve seen that and it’s our self-model might not even be consistent itself which is an interesting idea so first of all I wanted to challenge that claim and I’m going to keep coming back to it because they need to claim that that content is universal in order to claim that it’s universally false and therefore it’s universally the case that the self is an illusion is that is that is that is that follow as an argument yeah and I’m saying but lots of people have had lots of different ideas about what the self is maybe you’ll be getting into this but yet we have cultural theories of the self and they certainly don’t always conform to the Cartesian version of reality and I’m going to go through a version of this I’m going to go through steng’s book on the divine double okay right which just completely undermines the idea that this is an intrinsic feature of the self-model because I think you can make a good historical argument that that’s just simply false and then and then what happens is the claim see this is what I mean about being Martin Bailey the claim is shrinking to well there’s no Cartesian self but the Cartesian self model is universal oh no it’s not it’s culturally historically located and then we’ve got the culturally historical Cartesian model is false and that that doesn’t sound the same as there is no self and so I want to keep going so what this is the this what they’re after for is the following this is another quote diminution in that what they think all of these experiences show all of the psychedelic and mystical right diminuendo diminution in the sense of solid self would shows that this sense of self right so the diminution that occurs in this sense of a solid self a Cartesian monadic self that’s happening from the psychedelic to the mystical shows that this sense of self is ultimately just one more conscious experience rather than a transcendental precondition of all such experience so what they’re saying is the self is just that this is like a humian move right from David Hume the the sense of the solidness of the self is just another conscious experience like the experience of heat or the experience of blueness it’s just another qualia that we might be having and instead what they claim is that that so what they seem to be claiming claiming is there’s no transcendental precondition of all of the experiences now that’s a little bit odd all of the experiences now that’s a little bit odd because they’re walking a very thin line here because it could be and I think they’re in agreement with how we and Mitchell that the self model and all of that machinery we’ve laid out is a transcendental precondition on extended cognitive agency of the reflection ability the ability to enter into moral relationships the ability to enter into narrative identifications etc that’s all there and so again it’s not clear what transcendental transcendental here by the way I should mention for people who are listening it doesn’t mean like supernatural transcendental is a specific category term which means a necessary condition for the possibility of something right that’s what it what it stands for and so they’re claiming that the self model sorry the content I got to be really careful the reference of the self model is the referent to a transcendental precondition but then again it’s unclear are they talking about the transit the function of a transcendental precondition on agency which must be the case because agency exists right or are they talking about the transcendental condition for this particular Cartesian reference you understand what I’m what I’m trying to Mike my worry is which they seem to want to say we think we have a transcendental condition on the possibility of our conscious experience having the unity it has our agency having the unity head it has but there is no such transcendental precondition and I’m saying really we just outlined it and you all you agreed with it here’s a set of necessary conditions for the emergence of all this stuff and you agree all of those exist so again what it seems to be saying is we agree that there is that transcendental precondition on agency and the unity of consciousness but you are the the image you form in your conscious experience actually doesn’t point to that in any kind of accurate manner again see what I mean it’s it’s I’ll stop go ahead right so they’re implicitly kind of confining the ambit of their definition of selfhood to the to the to the sort of phenomenological content that is represented by those preconditions rather than the transcendental conditions themselves right exactly so on that basis they’re rejecting its existence right they’re saying that the phenomenological experience of solid selfhood is right essential to the existence of the self and it’s unclear that this that that is a that that’s a fair claim already because like I said they’ve had they’ve acknowledged all of this other stuff as the transcendental precondition on agency the unity of consciousness you know etc etc they have to do that because then they can’t rely on the psychedelic to mystical experiences that they’re invoking right so that you know and we’ve already argued remember with Searle right that the mind has to intrinsically exist or else you get just an infinite regression so they can’t deny any of that transcendental precondition what they want to deny is that our sense that there that somehow grounds in a solid self is an illusion and that means that the self is an illusion and again that’s that that strikes me as very problematic a very problematic claim is it your sense of selfhood that you’re saying very problematic claim is it your sense john that their audience I sort of get the feeling that if this audience was directed at you know a cartesian populist folk psychology version like hey folks wake up then then there’s no self in that sense like for that that feels like it resonates more than say to the psychology cognitive science community the meaning of the claim no self depends on the audience and so it just I don’t know if you have any reference right I haven’t read it that’s my impression too Greg yeah yeah no no no I think that’s right I think it now to be fair to them I think what they’re saying is there’s a presupposition of a kind of platonic Christian framework behind the notion of the self and that that framework’s model of the self is false that’s what they’re saying and that would be provocative I think to at least our historical cultural context so that is something important but that is not the same thing as making what they want to be making which is a claim about they’re trying to make a scientific claim to my understanding they’re trying to make a universal claim about a particular entity from a scientific standpoint rather than a cultural historical claim about a particular cultural historical model somehow being inaccurate and again this is what I’m saying I find that it slides between those two without clearly distinguishing them and I want to show you this in their analogy they give the analogy they say you know they use perceptual binding they say you know what we have is we have all the and Kant used this argument and it’s like they must have read Kant because they invoke him but you know so here’s the perceptual binding right so you know and you know and and yet you bind this all together you bind all the features in the digital and you you bind all the different spatial temporal location and all the different spatial temporal aspects into a unified object so they’re right and you do it with the the sight and the sound and the touch and they’re all that’s all perceptual binding by the way we already know that self-relevance goes into that glue in a massive way now the idea so what they say is we think that there is an object behind all the binding right all the perceptual binding and notice we’re right right right unless they’re claiming that all of perception is illusion and I’ll come back to that in a sec why why that will be that’s going to get them into a self-refuting position then they say by analogy we have all these aspects and things and we think there’s something behind them bound together but that’s false so they say in the case of perceptual objects the binding points to something doing the binding a process by the way we don’t think that behind the right sorry let’s be very careful here there’s a process of binding and then there’s also the object right that is bound and now and then what they want to say is well we have all of these like you know experiences all these aspects of the self and they’re bound together for us and we think therefore that there is an object behind the binding now the problem I have with that right away is it is basically Kant’s argument which is well if I’m going to bind the object together right I have to all all of the aspects of the knower have to be bound together if all of the aspects are going to be bound together to have the object and then the idea is when the object is really bound together Kant said well a condition is all of these things that are to bound together so once again we come down to this division the very argument points to the fact that there has to be something that binds all of my acts together a process like the binding and perception and right and there has to be a unified integrated process in order for that to occur so again there is something there in the binding they can’t really deny that it’s presupposed in the very analogy they’re using but what they want to say is uh but it’s not a real it’s not a real it’s not a real thing the way the object is a real object and that strikes me as problematic that strikes me as problematic because it’s like well why does it count here and not here and what they seem to be saying is well you know we’ve got good empirical evidence that there’s this object here well I mean we don’t other than we think all of these things are bound together in an object right like what what what evidence could we bring that there’s objects beyond my perception other than we believed at the binding point you see what I’m saying they’re they’re they’re they’re saying well don’t question that that of course yeah there really are but question this over here but the analogy is much stronger than they realize it’s like wait right you know you know and idealists have been willing to make this argument right it’s like like wait maybe maybe objects don’t really exist either and and and and what I want to say is that correspondence should always hold so for example none of us think that this is a cartesian substance none of us think that this is a continuously extended inert non-structured thing we have given up we do not have the cartesian notion of matter and we haven’t had it for for centuries ago say millennia we haven’t had it for centuries again why people are critical of materialism they don’t know what they’re talking about right we know we think of this as a process we think of this as a process we think of this as atoms in motion and things moving and electromagnetic thing and late like lattice functions and monocular interactions and gravimetric stuff and all we think of this as a process and notice we don’t go and therefore while some people do in science let’s look well let’s be careful some people say therefore there’s no object there the problem you have with that and this is a version of netblocks is a version of netblocks this is a vervekian version of netblock netblock netblocks famously said well if you start down that path right the only thing that really exists is the thing at the very bottom of your ontology which is something like probability waves and then everything else is an illusion now verveky then asked and and where is that illusion occurring right right well where does the illusion like there’s a difference between saying the what the illusion about isn’t real but the illusion itself has to exist for your very explanation and yet where is that because there’s no illusions at the level well it’s in your mind oh so you’re actually a cartesian dualist oh no i’m not okay so what is it what you’re saying is i have real science about that down there but down there the particles and the forces are all identical in order to do the science i need people with that can make statements that must be real using machines and instruments and measurements that must be real and picking up on informational patterns that must be real in order to get to the conclusion about down there and if all of that is an illusion you know what else is an illusion the science that claims that it’s all down there right so let’s put a side reductionism and let’s say which many people do for a lot of arguments similar to that and greg and i have done some work on this it’s going to come out in his podcast that’s right baby on thursday yes that’s right so the fact that this isn’t an inert continuous homogeneous substance doesn’t lead us to claim it’s not real now notice what can happen i can take it that my perceptual bindings point to something real but that doesn’t mean that they give me all of the facts about its reality or its internal structure similar way all of my experience of the binding of the self point to there’s something right something there but that doesn’t that doesn’t commit me to what it is and if i discover that what’s behind all this binding is a system or process like we’ve been talking about here so what that doesn’t undermine its realness one wit what i see happening is a double standard of realness being applied here in an unjustifiable manner and and i keep seeing this and people will say well all i experience are you know like i’ll get this often when i’m sort of arguing with buddhas and remember i’m a very sympathetic to buddhism they’ll say but all you get are the this experience of this and you don’t actually get the experience of the whole thing and i’ll say well you don’t get the experience of the whole thing of anything you tell me when you’ve ever experienced all of a table all at once and i that also means all of its temporal differences all of its temporals well i can’t right you can’t is that your standard for realness and no no and sometimes they do this and this is legitimate they’ll say well if everything is on ottman right and that and that is a classic buddhist move and you go okay then what i say to you is realness is a comparative term real things are always real relative to a shared standard a shared comparative right so saying everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall doesn’t make any sense right and so then i say what’s the standard you’re comparing if everything what’s the real that you’re comparing it against and it’s like what what’s and then they’ll come and basically what you find out is consciousness really exists and it’s like what you don’t experience all of your consciousness we have all kinds of evidence for an unconscious blah blah blah blah and if you if you’re willing to attribute consciousness to something whose properties you can never grasp as a whole many of them are you’re ignorant of blah blah blah blah why won’t you make the same move for the self so sorry i i hope you guys know i’m not trying to refute buddhism here or anything pretentious like that no i’m i’m trying to challenge what i feel is an unfair argument at the expense of the that we for everything else we have these these other standards we’ve acquired over centuries and like the mind exists consciousness exists like tables exist scientific instruments exist science exists right england exists we do all of that but no the self is not a monadic cartesian substance and therefore it’s not real it doesn’t exist i think this is just unfair i think this is an unfair argument and so is it true that we’re not a cartesian substance yes does the self model sometimes refer to a cartesian substance yeah well day carton lots of people is that a universal intrinsic feature of the self model no and then that takes me to stang stang has the book right the divine double where he argues in the third century you have a cultural consensus and i’m using this because it’s in western civilization you have a cultural consensus in gnosticism hermeticism early christianity neoplatonism that we are not individuals we are individuals there’s a spark of the divine in us right which is not our our full self and it is inherently relate it’s inherently dialogically related to right to the divine the divine double so our self is actually an inherently relational thing that’s in constant development as we move to reunite what is in here with what was up there and i’m not saying that’s true either that’s not the point i need to make the point i need to make and this is stang’s point we have overwhelming historical evidence for a period of time significant and actually generative of a lot of our current ideas in which people the self model that was current was not of our cartesian soul oh the christians had it from the beginning no they don’t no they don’t they do not that is not in the literature and and technically when what i mean by this in terms of orthodoxy christians don’t believe in a platonic or cartesian soul because they believe in the resurrection of the body like they believe in an inherently embodied sense of self and so and they and they also believe that their identity can be bounded it’s not i who live but christ who lives in me they don’t have the cartesian sense they came to later but to think that that was a continuous and unchanged idea within christianity i think is is historically anachronistic so what do we have what we have is that for some people at some time the self models content was of our cartesian soul and that turns out to be false when i go okay great agree yep what does that tell me about the self and if you keep the historical argument separate from the scientific argument like i’ve tried to do here repeatedly i don’t think it tells us very much about the self at all right well i mean i think that’s a very you know powerful and and certainly convincing argument to me the one of the things that you know i don’t want to sound like any kind of broken record here but i’m very convinced that the ontology of this mental domain that we try to struggle with i’m more convinced than ever that we break off we psychologists break off behavior for epistemological reasons that we can study and then we leave ontological questions of the mental yeah to the research programs and there’s no reference for cognitive or mental and of course if there’s no reference for cognitive mental in a coherent way consciousness self all of this stuff gets enormously fuzzy and then you start your justification system about whatever you’re claiming and then all the networks of the positions of the arguments that you’re making are then very very potentially ambiguous and i think you basically you know laid out all sorts of ontological moving parts all sorts of audience and contrasting moving parts and and allowed us to get a very clear frame about what where we are and where we need to be locating our argument in relationship to you know other positions so thank you greg i mean i’m recommending that we basically do with the self what we did with lightning turns out lightning is electricity we don’t thereby conclude oh you know what there was never anything lightning lightning doesn’t exist so don’t worry about golfing and carrying the rain in a lightning storm because there’s no such thing as lightning it wasn’t the finger of god after all so no worries yeah so right so when we discover what it is that does the binding through the self model and the self relevance let’s call that the self and we we might at some point in our history have thought like we thought lightning was the finger of zeus right we we had you know incorrect models but right but so what we’ve had multiple models and they could all be incorrect right and let’s say okay well let’s just let’s just shift and let’s let’s say tables aren’t cartesian substances they’re actually you know systems of atoms you know right okay there’s still tables yeah it turns out that that’s what tables are turns out that that’s what matter is well while matter doesn’t exist because matter isn’t an inert continuous substance no no you know the word remember this what did the word atom mean you couldn’t cut it it had no parts turned out the atom had parts we didn’t go hey you know what there are no atoms because atom means no parts and there we go we said oh the atoms exist you better believe they exist because the atomic bomb right but it turns out that they’re not uncuttable right and then it’s like well maybe there’s something down there that’s ultimately uncuttable and that’s of course an ongoing debate because you’re trying to reconcile quantum with relativity and i won’t go into that morass the point i’m making is we have ongoing i’ve given you several examples of we we realized our particular model right right was pointing at something and then we made false claims of what we were pointing at but then we didn’t come to the conclusion that because those claims were false the thing we were referring to didn’t exist we instead said oh we have to make different claims about it was we’re pointing to and that’s what i that’s what i in fact that’s what i think is happening uh right now absolutely let me um i’ll just double click on one point you made because this is certainly something that i uh we actually in our uh podcast we basically said well i don’t know if anybody’s a materialist anymore you made a reference out today um but i want to just make a plug here certainly from my vantage point the ontology underneath the matter dimension as i would represent it on the tree of knowledge really points to an energy information field basically yeah um and and if you allow that you actually do to me you start to at least allow for a language that’s a lot more cool with mental than sort of billiard ball mechanics i mean energy information fields i mean now all of a sudden uh the basic language of this whole matter mind you know polarity that can’t be put together actually the cool thing about what’s happening in modern science as far as i’m concerned and i’m not making any woe quantum mechanics claims i’m just talking about the base structure of reality could be argued to be an energy information field and if that’s the case if that’s really the binding web of of what we’re inside of that’s actually you can play around with mental uh constructs a lot easier in that field i agree and that points towards deep continuity and one more analogy i want to do so there was a debate um in the end of the 19th century around whether or not we could give a naturalistic explanation of life and there were people uh some of them very gifted on reberg song comes to mind who argued that we would not be able to give a naturalistic explanation of life instead life had a special stuff inside of it which he called the alan vitale which i always think of as a great shampoo name the alan vitale the vital spirit right the alan vitale and this by the way alludes to i could use a little bit of that yeah and then what what we’ve come to realize is no no life doesn’t have that special stuff in it life is a very uh if you if we want to keep the adjective a very special way in which things are dynamic dynamically self-organizing and evolving and and we notice we didn’t conclude and therefore because vitalism that’s the doctrine is false there is no such thing as life we said instead no no there’s life and it’s this process rather than this substance again right this right we think there are biological organisms or biological i you see what i can i can do this repeatedly repeatedly repeatedly and it’s like we are willing to do this here what hangs over what’s what the burden of proof is on the people making this argument about what is specifically different here than is different from all these cases where we saw cartesian substance didn’t capture the referent and yet we didn’t think that therefore the the the the reference was an illusory reference i make the point about behaviorism that i think behaviors basically made that error they basically said no there’s not some godlike mind cause and then they were okay well just call it behavior as if mine doesn’t exist that’s basically what they did uh and so yeah and it was disastrous it was disastrous so we have examples of people trying to eliminate the underlying cause and then try to eliminate the phenomenon by once they realize the underlying causes there and that doesn’t work at all for an ontology because now you’re trying to pretend something that isn’t real that is real that’s excellent great that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s the example on the other side of people who did the elimination strategy and it was a disaster it was a disaster that’s very good i hadn’t thought about that thank you for bringing that in that’s excellent so i mean that takes us to some really really interesting stuff uh because as i said i mean given what we said earlier about sort of the fault model and its associations with i think a particular perhaps misinterpretation of of the christian framework and the platonic christian framework you know you know we are telling people that they don’t have a soul in that sense um and it’s but given what we’ve already talked about the weird phenomenology about this weird imaginal translocation of of of of framing and identification that’s really the the cartesian model just doesn’t even sit with our some of the fundamental features of our experience in powerful way but that doesn’t lead me to conclude that there isn’t a binding process that is autopoetic and that is essential to my cognitive and biological agency so that’s sort of that’s sort of the sorry this was a bit of a monologue but there was that there was some really some very good fleshing out uh that you guys brought to it but that takes us now into uh the deeper question of is there any i’m proposing that we can change the meaning of self without without without it being some tricky semantic move and say no no what we were actually always talking about was that right because we keep doing that i gave i’ve given enough examples i think to make that clear right can we do that with soul or is soul bound to the christian cartesian framework in an in an irreducible irreplaceable fashion oh well i don’t know that’s the problem i’m gonna answer that one right now hold on go ahead in the skull no actually i i that the soul was a slightly right term there um actually what i would say though it’s right i thought when i was sort of in my predictive processing was moving more in relationship to consolidating the model of the self to jump into the cell so so yeah no we’ll definitely yeah no that whole that whole soul thing is another uh yeah right anyway oh sorry i think i was being unclear about the move i did want to give space in the conversation but i i could see how that would carry with it the conversational implicature about blah blah blah let’s go into this and solve that problem what i meant what no the next move i want to make is to go to the other side and look at the howie and michelle thing and then and draw that out and do the consolidation exactly great but what i wanted to do is point out right that we’ve got we got to a place that right i can hear people saying okay i buy what you’re saying about self perhaps but like i don’t want to lose the notion of soul but and so is there a way of bringing those two together and why might you want to so this what i’m saying is i’m foreshadowing what i call the three s conversation the spirit the self and the soul and can we give a naturalistic account of them like we’ve done like we’ve potentially done for self that legitimates their functionality and the phenomenology without necessarily committing them to committing them to a christian cartesian ontology now that’s still going to piss off a lot of people because people want that christian cartesian ontology because it gives them the immortality of the soul and stuff like that i think that commits them also to all of the problems of cartesian dualism and the mind body problem and so for that question i’m not going to bring that into this because greg and i tackled that as best we possibly could on untangling the world knot and so if you want to defend the immortality of the soul you have to go and confront all of that argumentation if you still want a notion of soul as something you say yeah i get this self but i want to point to something deeper more existentially relevant i’m in a lot of sympathy with that and i want to bring out the question about what you know the issue about whether or not we can reorient the the the three s’s so they recohere together again within a naturalistic framework so to maybe broaden the elusive eye at least dimensionally that there are sort of there’s a self dimension a soul dimension a spirit dimension of this and can we can we can we draw that out and unpack that in a useful manner that we don’t have to do that right now i want to flag that as something that needs to be done that’s what all that’s all i meant to do i’m sorry really i was misleading i didn’t mean to no i didn’t mean like that i was yes i look forward to the three s kind of conversation and certainly i’ll throw this out there right away clinically and and humanistically in my embodied for net for nices world i want those concepts i think it was an interesting concept another conversation as well in our scientific logos world do does the soul do work that then other systems wouldn’t do that’s a great conversation to have i certainly want to reclaim it as you know i mean as you do and other soul and spirit i think we need to reclaim from the modernist scientific claim that you can’t talk about this unless you’re going to jump off into some dual worldview i think it’s just grossly problematic at so many different levels and i absolutely believe that we can embrace that those concepts at multiple from multiple angles good now i feel that i’ve been talking far too much and i would like to give space and at and chris you can leap off from any point you want from because it was a lot said here and i laid a lot on the table greg has put quite quite a bit on the table too and i want i want i want to i want to open up space for you to riff in any way you want about what the discussion has been yeah this is like a multi-story edifice now so leaping off of the top might mean death so i won’t do that but you know it’s funny this is kind of an orthogonal point i have nothing to add to the argument you just made you made it very convincingly and i was disposed to be sympathetic from the beginning so it’s not so much that but there’s something interesting that’s going on to me maybe this is more of a sort of a meta perspectival point about the exercise that we’re undertaking right now and its existential import but there’s it’s kind of interesting so the process of the process of succession between one representational model of the self and another let’s say if we were to obviously this is this is historically inverted but let’s say we were to succeed from a cartesian model of the self to something like a christian neoplatonic model of the self there’s something very powerful that happens when we substitute or transmute one representational model to another yes yes yes and it it seems to me that maybe disabusing us let’s say there was someone who was completely beholden to the cartesian model of the self for the soul and then you know in a process and the process like this became disabused of that internalized model and then needed to go off in search of a new model and and there’s something about that for me that’s kind of analogous to the idea of having to discard a noble lie and in the process of succeeding from that noble lie having to undergo a kind of perspectival shift that made that initial model something of great efficacy and great usefulness that’s so not only are we trying to interrogate different models of the self qua their own merits but i think what we’re also doing is showing perhaps i don’t know if we’re actually showing this but it would be interesting to to explore what happens developmentally and i mean ontogenetically within the individual psyche and within the individual’s developmental project to become himself herself etc what it means to have to transition your perspective and migrate it through different models different representational models of yourself and in the succession attain a kind of a kind of maturation a kind of psychic maturation so i’m i so i guess what i’m saying is i’m wondering how necessary it is or at least how useful it is if i were to weaken the proposal that having to undergrow a kind of a perspectival gauntlet through different representational models of oneself we find a way of becoming oneself oh wow that’s an amazing proposal so the idea is we might we might to some degree i know i know you’re not claiming you know phylogeny ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny or anything like that but the idea that right that part that part of what develops the self is actually the process almost this paradigmatic shifting through various representations of the self is it do i do i understand you correctly yeah yeah i i when when i when you put it back to me like that i don’t it strikes me as something very almost almost pragmatist but yes yeah that’s what i’m proposing that’s very interesting that’s very interesting and i and i’m wondering i’m wondering and again i want i want to be careful of any recapitulation theory because the biological version of that turned out to be false um but um yeah because i mean another model i didn’t bring i brought up i didn’t bring up was like the egyptian model the egyptians seem to have there’s your name and to speak the king’s name is to make him live again right and then there’s your ba and your ka and then there’s your body and you need your body to be yourself like it’s a very it’s a much more fragmented uh and and and it’s somehow located in your liver right and then we move to something like you know something that we got in the i’m trying to i’m trying to do something chris and i think it’s constant that as we shifted from the continuous cosmos to the changes in cognition and consciousness that happened because of all the stuff that i talk about in awakening from the meaning crisis that and i’ve seen these two things now in in tight correspondence our model of the world and our model of the self had to change in order to make us uh functionally fit and we have the two worlds mythology which gets internalized as a two worlds right entity we have this car t ultimately the cartesian immaterial substance and and the material substance and so what i what i’m seeing is historically across civilizations we can see the need that that the change in the model is reflecting what do i want to call it a pragmatic existential need to resituate emerging functions and phenomenological experiences into the world did that make sense as a proposal yeah yeah i yeah exactly i think that’s it i think that’s it’s like a like these are exercises in semiotic approximation of the realism of our of the preconditions for being oneself right and and i propose of relevance realization there is a co-constituted process of both the epistemic knowing and mapping and the ontological claims that we make about what is in the ontic nature that evolves as it happens so i’m so this is you know for me what i was getting is yes it i’m this is i’ve always been really fascinated about how how the self uh evolves based on the attributional structure that we are situated in you know what would it be like to be the egyptian cell and then what is the constitutive factors of that ontological epistemological claim set that carries the content and then how does it actually feed back in its in its evolution so what i heard with you christopher is really and then picked up on uh by what you were saying is john is that that developmental dynamic feedback process is absolutely something to wrestle with and it speaks enormously both to the psychological levels of our um the context that we find ourselves in and then the inner relationship between that development and what is the socio-historical context that feeds back on it totally and i believe that that’s you know that’s fundamentally the meaning crisis right is that in the in many ways we have now created the socio-ecological context of the self in which it is emerging we’re very very vulnerable in creating a particular type of epistemic ontic processes fragmented chaotic disorganized and the system can’t get a hold on an a proper developmental structure that allows for that consolidation and growth through the various lenses but then returns itself to some sort of coherence or some sort of functional adaptive robustness that’s very good greg and we did talk about throughout repeatedly the the the social constru- there’s the socially constructed aspect of the self as being you know uh you know an essential feature of the self the ability to internalize a world into the phenomenological structures of the self is one of the features so this is what i would be led to say drawing these things together i want to say something like the self is that which makes possible all these different historical instantiations but is not reducible to any one of them just like life and evolution make possible all of the various species but is not reducible to any particular species that’s the analogy i would try to draw here i want to know what it is that affords us like having these the many different kinds of self and i want to say that’s that that’s actually the question that’s getting us down to the on the fundamental ontology of the self um and and i think that that’s at many scales it’s historically but it’s also what we’re talking about at the end of the last session what is it in me that is binding together all of these aspects all these agent arena relations such that like that i’m i’m here now i’m right and now i’m here in my heart my like what’s going on and it’s there’s something that is a there’s an imaginal space that is pointing to an underlying function and i would ultimately argue a system because we’ll talk about it later we can talk we know there are ways in which that process can come a rye can malfunction and i’m saying the features of that system that i really look forward to you’re really fleshy now or what so here are a couple of features see that you know this catches so one is this adjectival yeah you know perspectival lensing yeah framing process which can jump around right it seems to me there’s also sort of an episodic you know self modeling across memory in a particular way that has both then pictorial and it has the person narrating function element um and indeed when i was popping through it there definitely was a perspectival shift and a narrating shift and and and a memory shift and and i’d be you know the self at some level is going to have facets or aspects of those kinds of components it’s like a phase space in which those are dimensions through which right some attractor is being realized like you can you can you can get the the shifting between right which does link it up to conscious you know focal consciousness too in some ways right uh you know bounces around and somebody’s different but it’s definitely there’s anyway that yeah there’s these are all the puzzle pieces they’re starting to come together yeah and and i’m of the suspicion that what we might want to be talking about when we’re talking about the self is exactly that attractor space in the multi-dimensionality of our auto onto autonoetic shifting in memory that this phenomenological shifting right of framing and identification right and then and the narrative shifting we do and we do these all seamlessly and interchangeably in a way that is a sophisticated core coherence and that keeps maintaining itself in some auto poetic fashion and that that requires explanation and and um i i think the idea that that what we’re pointing to in the self is exactly that uh that deep functionality that’s what well that’s what i’m proposing i’m proposing that that’s what we’re trying to refer to when we use these terms all right and i think there’s precedent in it uh i mean uh i don’t know if you guys would agree but i think you know there’s precedent in the youngian model of the self is distinct from the ego where the self is a function of the psyche as a whole and is not right the particular autobiographical identity of the individual and things like that um and obviously similar you know similar moves not identical not identical but similar moves in vedanta between you know and ottman which is the ground right and and the illusion is that the ego is the ground but the ottman and ottman is ultimately one with brahman which really goes with what we’re talking about here about the self and the world being these inter-defining identification processes so uh you know we were i think we’re out of kairos we we have a choice to make here i i don’t think the argument uh of uh let there be and rand commits us to their particular conclusion we can we can just as readily say no no i choose to go with you know the standard and model of realness that’s working at large in my world and that will be the standard i use for the self and that standard will actually refit the self naturalistically back into um the the the world view that we have and so that’s what i’m proposing the move we make i want to be very clear and i like i mean you know evan thompson and i forget who else they put together the self no self anthology you should definitely read that i mean we can’t in this series canvas all of it i decided to take a cognitive science exemplary example of you know current example of the debate and because i thought it was an exemplar of the kind of moods that are made it certainly resonates with a lot of discussions i’ve had with other people who propose from other perspectives and no self conclusion and and that then that’s what i chose to focus on again for you know largely because that’s what we have to do we’re constrained by time and space i recommend people read that anthology but i think what you’ll find is you’ll find a lot of the moves that we’re talking about and exploring here are at work in many of those arguments and presentations yes i think that the to me absolutely the um don’t mistake some feature of the thing for the thing when you discount it to then cause the discount the discounting of the thing itself let’s not make that mistake let’s let’s get clear about what it is and then refit um what the ontology is that we see with a particular vocabulary as long as it has integrity and i think it does right and i think i i want to i want to i want to remind people like that they’ve been willing to make again one more time which most people will say well that doesn’t feel like myself well your mind doesn’t feel like what your mind probably is right and your and your body doesn’t feel like what your body probably is um like when you introspect into your mind you have no awareness of your brain that doesn’t in any way prove that your mind is not a function of your brain right right that that’s that’s an actual fallacy um it’s equal to this fallacy lois lane is looking at clark kent and she believes she’s not looking at superman therefore clark kent is not superman you buy that argument no it’s obviously a fallacious argument somehow the the star reporter of the daily planet can be fooled by people putting on where’d john go i don’t know oh he’s back right but nevertheless all of that aside right that’s a fallacious argument the fact that it doesn’t feel that way that that that that doesn’t mean that that isn’t the way it is but it also right you have to steer between these two things your inner feel might not be accurate metaphysically complete but you shouldn’t jump to the other conclusion therefore because it fails the the the the entity we’re talking about is an illusion that doesn’t follow either yeah i that that that’s a that’s a i think a perfectly um that’s a perfectly coherent i think position i want to just i want to just caveat it slightly though to say that that one of the things that so there’s a difference between someone saying this doesn’t feel true this doesn’t feel right and this isn’t useful to me and you know one of the things that um now if you’re like you’re setting out in in part john to give a naturalistic sort of scientifically according definition of the self and all of this trying to at least afford that to emerge right right so you know that’s a project that has its own integrity based on its own aim now one of the things that i think we’re going to keep checking though as we go along is that you know uh one of the one of the features of a theory of self whether it’s the feature that we’re after or not one of the important features of a theory of the self is how useful it is to fostering the thor the theoria to use your language john of experience that actually help us to attain the project of refining and deepening our connection to what that notion actually means a scientific account can be perfectly plausible and elegant and and be useless yeah useless and and i think that we are we are consciously i think we’re all conscious of this tension and we’re i think committed to the idea of trying to equilibrate this account with with both as much as possible but there are degrees i think there are degrees to which they do some they can come into conflict and they can operate across purposes so the idea of you know the idea of providing an integrated scientific theory of the self is its own project with its own integrity but that doesn’t necessarily make it existentially useful but existential usefulness i know for me existential usefulness is the goal it’s not a subsidiary goal it’s for me the principal goal it doesn’t mean it has to be for the two of you that’s no no one of the reasons that we’re doing this is that there’s a consonance between our goals and we’re able to negotiate between them but the goal of offering a scientifically elegant account of the self and the goal of offering some an existential a model of the self that is existentially invigorating and prescriptive and normatively instructive are different things and and just because we offer one doesn’t mean it does the other and the second thing i’ll just say that’s kind of on a similar vein is that we talk a lot about the um the importance of trying to map accounts of the self over top of one another right i mean for instance we spent we spent the last session largely talking about how your recursively recursive uh um your your recursive relevance realization model of of of the self’s functionality john maps over top of the union model of the self and found some very salient correspondences therein and it’s not a one-to-one and we know it’s not a one-to-one um but it’s a very useful exercise yes you agree that mapping that also doesn’t mean though that achieving some kind of perfect symmetry is necessary or desirable right just like a topographic map does something different than a demographic map we don’t necessarily have to make a kind of master blueprint here there are it’s very useful to have separate models that that um that are directed to different to different t loss so anyway i just wanted to you you both know this already but i know i think it’s a very for the benefit of of folks who may be watching this maybe called to question from time to time what is it that we’re actually trying to do here right i think it’s important to split those hairs a little bit and actually i just i’ll jump up on that on for a second because i i my reaction to that is that’s exactly right and there’s a hopeful thing to say about that and what i mean by the hopeful thing to say about that at least from where i’m sitting and the bridge that emerged in my own life between working clinically and then having sort of in many ways i would argue basically a naive view that a coherent model of science would be helpful and in retrospect i see that as way more naive but i also think i backed into a particular view of science that does afford that and then what happens in relationship to the finding of that is to be to achieve a particular kind of understanding that affords an integrated pluralistic view of lots of different maps that give us then like maps do a wide variety of utility depending on their purpose and then do so in a way that can nourish the spirit and soul in the 21st century i mean it sets that up so i i think that that’s a crucial point and i also think that’s partly hopeful for what this whole deal logos is about agreed agreed thank you thank you great i think that’s right and uh i i think chris is bang on and that’s one of the reasons why he’s here um many reasons that’s just one of them i mean for me i i would regard the project i’m engaged in as a failure if it purchased the scientific at the complete expense of the existential um and and i’m going to strengthen chris’s point whatever model of the self we come up with has to incorporate the fact that there’s an aspect of the self that is inherently self-defining that the central claim of the existential framework is exactly that that there’s something about the self in which it is a self-defining thing now i want to say yeah and we we you know typically people have tried to ground that in narrative and and we’ve had some excellent discussion about that that and that that was last time and the mapping and non-mapping into you know the union stuff the internal family system stuff the ifs stuff and i think that’s all for kind and so there that that is part of the answer i want to give to you chris is i i think that’s going to be an ongoing thing i think it’s very much the case that this dynamical system model that’s inherently embedded and enacted transjective of the self is actually a better location for the self-defining um nature of the self and this that the self actually exists existentially and not internally um and that it’s also a better location for the socratic notion of the self is something that is inherently aspirational um uh in nature and i think i think whether or not you agree with the truth of those claims i know you’re open to them actually i think you’re in some agreement with them about those dimensionalities of the self uh i think what you would agree with is if this model loke like homes those in an effective manner it’s homing some pretty important existential features that should matter to people existentially um and if if that is also conjoined with a revivification of making it a live option again to talk about the soul dimension of the self and the spirit dimension of the self and how those plug into our deepest aspirations and our deepest self definition i think that would go a long way to addressing the concern you just brought up um so that’s what i’m hoping we continue to do as we go forward uh i do want to state and that’s promissory so can’t do it right now we’re running out of time but what i do want to state is it is is one of my goals to we do exactly that i if i mean i’m a scientist and i would care about this just as a scientist but as as john vervecki i care about this ultimately in a way can we do this in a way that will help us respond to the meaning crisis like great xe and my my claim is going to be my for my for forward-looking intuition is yes it’s going to help us do that yes it’s going to help us do that i don’t know that won’t go all the way towards what you like you what you claim because by your very argument they won’t completely merge into each other and then i don’t need to do that i don’t need to do that yeah no i just need to say this scientific theory that we’re going to be doing this scientific theory can home legitimate you know enable enhance empower these existential projects and there’s there’s great valor to that yeah great value and great valor to that absolutely yeah that’s um i’m glad you brought that up because um i’m very glad you brought that up because that should be more appropriately foregrounded that above above and beyond our scientific curiosity the reason i did this and the reason i did the untangling the the world not with greg is consciousness self self-consciousness i wanted to rehome all of those in some fundamental way so that we were no longer estranged from our ontology so that our practices and our phenomenology could once again be rehomed in a significant and empowering way so that is one of my goals yeah okay i think that’s a good place to end and next week we’ll come back and look at the other side and that will serve to sort of also you know what greg said you know fully or fully cohere and clarify the alternative position that i’ve been only arguing in in a debate style right now next time i can present it more coherently making use of the predictive processing models of which i now given the work i’ve been doing with brett anderson and uh mark miller i think can be integrated quite readily into or with sorry not into they can be integrated together relevance realization theory predictive processing theory and so um yeah i think this is very very exciting so sweet any final words gentlemen before i i bring uh i push the button and bring it to a close no i think for me i feel uh that i’m glad we laid this groundwork i have a vision and i’m feeling uh feeling the ground and my self is excited about it likewise