The Elusive I 8 (A5cU8LM_wjo)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=A5cU8LM_wjo

three. Welcome everyone to the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self. I’m joined as always with my partners on this wonderful journey, this amazing journey, Greg Enriquez and Christopher Master-Pietro. I’ll just let you guys say hi again. Myself, happy to be here. Likewise, very happy to be here. There we are, introduced. Right. And so what I’d like to do today with everyone is do a review of the argument, which is the crux argument in some ways. From last time, the argument made by Letherby and Gerans or Gerans, I don’t know how it’s pronounced, against the self being real and review their argument and the counter argument that I proposed. And then they were also already in debate with a view performed by Howie and Michael, also 2017, so they’re contemporaneous. And I want to go through that argument and their account for why it’s real and how that dovetails. And I’ll again remind you what both of them are presupposing is the case. They both admit to a lot of the machinery that we’ve already talked about here. And the difference is about whether or not the self model has the correct referent. And we talked about that last time. I’ll review that in a second. Then what I want to do is I want to go into sort of a final substantial challenge. Again, not because it’s exhaustive, but because it’s exemplary. This is the work of the philosopher, cognitive scientist Metzinger. And his argument for no self, which sounds like a Buddhist thing, and I guess he doesn’t deny that possible association, but his arguments are totally derived from cognitive science. We’ll get into some really interesting empirical work around the rubber arm illusion and out of body experiences and all that cool stuff. And then I want to look at a response made by a person named Gin, G-H-I-N, specifically to Metzinger, but independently and deeply convergent with the argument that I made last time. And that will sort of wrap up. Each one of these could be its own series. The whole self, no self debate could be a whole series. There’s an excellent anthology on there. We could have a whole series on just from primate to personhood. And Craig has been doing ongoing work about that. But that’s where we’re going to bring what you might call the core cognitive science argument to a close. The series is not ending because then we are going to move into more speculative, in the non-pejorative sense of that term, topics as we explore the existential and spiritual dimensions of the three S’s, the self, spirit, and soul, which we’ve already alluded to. And when that happens, the center stage will pass to Greg and Chris, and there’ll probably be four to five episodes around that. And then that will bring us to the end of the series. And forever and for always, human beings will never have to worry about this topic ever again. The structure and function of the self will be resolved. It’ll all be resolved. You guys can just go get a beer. We’ll have to take care. So hubris that is going to bring the wrath of the gods aside, let me try and do the review. So we are talking about this debate between Letherby and Durand, and I just want to remind you what Letherby and Durand acknowledge. They acknowledge all of this machinery, the important functionality of relevance realization, salience, adaptivity. They acknowledge and support all of the work done on self-relevance and binding. They admit the both sides, but Letherby and Durand specifically, admit the existence of a functional self-model that basically binds higher order agency together and to the world. So a lot of the machinery that we independently explored, yes, yes, which is good convergence, I think. Now what they do is they disagree with how we and Michael and all of the other people disagree with how we and Michael and ultimately with the argument I proposed and Greg and Chris supported. They argue that all of this functionality and the real self-model is insufficient for being a real self. And we took a look at this. What’s the main core of their argument? The main core of the argument, the model is real, okay, and all the functionality of the model is real. So the model really exists and it really functions to enhance agency. And let’s note that, right? But what the model refers to, what is modeled by the model, doesn’t exist. That’s their main argument, that the content of the model is the Cartesian substantial self, although they play around with Aristotelian and Cartesian notions, but I won’t go over that again, right? And they argued that the model, well-functioning, represents itself in an illusory fashion, okay? And that, you know, and that lines up with Hood who said when we talk about the self not existing, we don’t mean that it’s, there’s nothing there at all. We talk about it not existing in the way that we thought it did, right? Because when there’s an illusion, you know, the stick in bent water, well, the stick looks bent, but that doesn’t mean there was no stick at all. That’s the kind of idea there, right? All right. So we moved into that and took a look at their proposal that the model of the self model is inherently of something like a Cartesian substance, the Cartesian soul. This is a stable object thing, and to be fair to them, this does line up with a lot of the features that we saw way back when, when we looked at the folk model. So to be fair to them, right? A stable object thing made out of immaterial homogeneous stuff. It’s a soul thing, right? Right. And the key claim is that we not only experience the emergent, you know, we not only experience sort of, or what they call emergent endogenous integrative patterns, right? We not only experience all this binding and relevance realization and fittedness, we also give this a locus. We say this all is located in the model claims that all of this is located in a substantial soul thing. So all of these patterns are ultimately properties or predicates of the soul thing. And then they argue all of that is false. So I pointed out some issues that I think that are empirically backed and then issues that are, you can, are, are theoretically argued with, with this. So I’m not sure of their argument that this is the universal content of the self model. It might be ours, but they’re making a scientific and not a historical claim. They’re arguing that this is a normal logical, a law-like feature and a central property of the self model, that its content is always thus and this, right? And I think that that is undermined by a good historical review. We took a look at even within the folk model, people do have this homogenous thing, but they also talk of the self as a developmental system, something that has parts, something that develops, something that emerges, something that can fade away and Alzheimer’s, etc., etc. I talked about the Egyptians, right? And they even located it in their liver, right? And they had the bar on the car and other things and the body. We talked about, I believe we talked, we talked about staying, right? And the idea of the third, the second and third century, that we weren’t individuals, but the self is primarily individual between the spark and the divine, the divine double and the self was fundamentally in the relation between those two poles, an aspirational relation, and that was widely prevalent and dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world. So I think the claim that this is a normal logical necessity is undermined and it gets reduced therefore to being a historical claim that we in the culture, for historical reasons, might have internalized this particular model. But culturally internalizing this content is not the same thing as saying that the model inherently produces this content. Those are two fundamentally different claims, especially when we’re trying to talk about the cognitive science of the self. Secondly, I pointed out that the normative criteria here, the criteria for realness is kind of strange and I thought there was a performative equivocation going on here. I noted that we have increasingly moved away from Aristotelian and Cartesian substance view of entities. We don’t think of the table as a homogeneous extended stuff in space. We think of it as a dynamical systems of quarks and molecules. There are moves where people try to say it’s all an illusion, there are really no tables. The problem with that is the only thing that ends up being real is the very bottom of your ontology and then explaining how we do science on these illusory levels about the bottom level becomes incredibly mysterious and inexplicable. So that kind of what I would call ham-fisted reductionism is not the prevalent position in cognitive science anyways. That takes me to we have long ago in psychology and cognitive science given up the idea of the mind as a homogeneous Cartesian substance. We think of the mind as a developmental emergent dynamical system but we don’t thereby conclude you know what the mind’s an illusion. We haven’t done that. We think oh no what we thought we were referring to this, we thought we were referring to that but we were actually referring and that’s what we really meant all along. That’s what we’ve done and so there’s no violation of semantic propriety or theoretical construction here to say oh what we were referring to, what we were pointing at because that’s how reference works with this notion of self. Turns out it wasn’t a Cartesian soul. Turns out it was a developmental dynamical system that’s working at multiple temporal scales blah blah blah all the stuff we’ve already talked about and as we’re going to see that’s basically the argument that is being made. We’ll see this is the argument being made implicitly by Howie and Michael and being made explicitly by Gin. I made a comment I think just at the time just to reiterate this is a very easy thing for people to get confused about I think. Yeah and I argue that basically Skinner does this with sleight of hand and in mind essentially. Yeah he basically says oh because there’s some not weird causal thing in mind then it’s behavior and then actually in several quotes he says well mind is behavior that’s what I’ve been saying all along and it’s like well is that what you’ve been saying? Yeah mind was behavior. Yeah anyway I’ve actually seen ever since we had this conversation I’ve even seen a few other examples of where people are making the contrast and then the reference switches and then you get a lot of confusion in relationship to the argument. Thank you Greg. I think that’s right. I think if you look around I mean I just gave a couple of examples but I think if you look around I think this kind of confusion does recur is somewhat pervasive in the history of science in general and also in within the history of psychology. It’d be interesting to see how that kind of performative equivocation is matching up with propositional equivocations around things like information and epistemological stances so there’s a lot going on there while you well know. I mean the conceptual morass of the self is but a species of the conceptual morass of psychology as you have made very very clear and we you know and you’ve drawn out that those two morasses in our discussions they influence each other in profound ways. So thank you for that. So then we took a look at the central move made by Letherby and Durand to try and really push for the illusion is they say and they say something that again stands on the horizon of equivocation they say but the self disappears in these experiences of self transcendence and they port to all kinds of work to which I heartily agree that you know from the flows from insight through the flow state to full-blown mystical experiences right people report a loss of self right and so they we took we took a look at that so the the sense of the narrative self disappears and we’ve and we keep returning back again and again to the topic of the connections between self narrative and the phenomenological experience of being a temporally extended morally responsible agent and how narrative may be indispensable for that but that doesn’t mean it’s indispensable or necessary to to selfhood and we talked about animals and and then Greg did his amazing thing where he said look you can get this far up without narrative and then once you go into narrative and then once you get narrative going and within a cultural context justification problems open up and then we have to move around the justification space etc and and and Greg has already provided that in detail I am requesting that well I’m requesting that Greg because his pictures or his diagrams are so bloody beautiful he’s going to do a schema of that I sort of think is the emerging gist of what I’ve argued for with their help and then what he’s argued for and then put the two together and we’ll get we’ll provide that for all of you as a as summarizing schemata that we can consult as we go forward Okay so I made the point that what might be happening and this was speculative although I think it’s rational speculation that in those experiences right because human beings are not just are not just considering importance how things are relevant to them but because they for the reasons Greg articulated they are social cultural and they they really are not just how they matter to others beyond their egocentric concern is crucial to you know to cultural agency and I think Greg made that clear there’s the inversion in which the the the binding glue of self-relevance changes its orientation from this way if you’ll allow me metaphorical reference to that way and the gluing is the gluing of the world the oneness of the world and the and the sense of identity is found there and so all of the machinery is going the basic idea is that the hyper object that is the self is used to give us a participatory knowing of the hyper object that is reality and whether or not that’s ultimately a real self I think is something that the previous argument says you know it’s read it’s it’s not irrational to think it is okay and then we like I said we did sort of some summary around that and I just wanted to pause now if you guys wanted to interject about that summary before we move to the new material no I think that that’s a that’s a good rich summary I mean I think that we’re building the stacking of the aging arena relationship and the layering upon that in a particular kind of way that clarifies what the models are clarifies what the structural functional properties are and now we’re getting ready to make the kind of final crescendo argument yeah so thank you for that um well about this part of it I mean we keep coming back to some central and important points that Chris made about the that all that all of this is important but I don’t know quite how to refer to it but the existential identification that’s at the core of the self needs to be and we’ve done things to try and situate that in but we need to keep discussing it which is why I why we not I sorry why we are going to just discuss the three s’s self soul and spirit as a way of trying to unpack that as much as possible well let’s finish as much as we can right now with self right one way of thinking about where we are at least you can you know when we think about this issue uh what in personality theory sometimes you approach it I teach it and I’ll say hey personality theory is sort of like how we’re like everyone else how everyone’s alike yeah how we’re like some other people and then we have to hold how we’re like nobody else how we’re completely unique okay so we’re creating my estimation what we’re doing here with the cognitive science we’re trying to create the fundamental architecture of the self that would be for all typical individuals you know this is the basic architectural structure then we can actually talk then about some individual different stuff and then maybe get into some unique uh aspects uh down the road but that would be one way of framing it and that ultimately dovetails with your work Greg because I mean and this is a kirk or guardian point right because morality is ultimately well not it’s not exclusively but it is often ultimately unique to me right I bear unique moral responsibility and and that’s part of kirk regards point about the existential um and we’ve already we’ve always said from the beginning that one of the things the self has to do is explain both your our shared personhood our shared selfhood but also our unique selfhood um and you know and I should shut up because that’s chris’s point uh did you want to say anything about that well yeah yeah only that only that when we talk about when we talk when we talk normatively or or existentially about what it means to um consolidate a relation with oneself usually I think what is meant certainly in in the kirk a guardian sense what is meant is that is an integration of what is transpersonal and what is personal yeah yeah yeah and I think what chris said there is that’s a that’s a really important point that this relationship between the personal and the transpersonal it’s not identical too but you know there are deep importance between the transpersonal and these more essential and universal aspects of the self that the cognitive science can disclose and and so there are important bridging points that can be made here and we’ve already started exploring some of those uh I think it was two sessions back okay so I want to go properly now into the howie and michael’s argument uh and again I’ve already laid out what they share with let there be and gerand’s um and then why they come to the conclusion that the self is real and that everything in that model is sufficient for itself and then like I said I want to give that one more challenge from a big voice on the no self side metzinger and then a response to that and again I’m not claiming we’re not claiming this is anyway exhaustive but I think I you know it’s it’s it’s at least doing due deference and due diligence to exemplary positions in this all-encompassing debate that spans civilizations and cultures so what’s their model okay so the core of their model is something that I’ve mentioned along the way and something that’s becoming very prevalent and it it’s a it’s something that both Greg and I have advocated for first independently and now convergently and cooperatively which is an attempt to get an integrative big picture framework in within which you do psychology or or even broader cognitive science and that’s the work of Carl Friston and then it’s been developed by people like Andy Clark it’s been developed by a former student of mine and the co-op somebody I’m collaborating with right now on a paper Mark Miller the importance of Andy Clark’s and especially to Mark’s work is Mark moves it from sort of the original computational framework and Friston has moved with this he’s not resisting this he’s agreeing with this from a computational framework into an embodied interactive framework like we have been arguing throughout so most people now talk about embodied inactive what’s called predictive processing so predictive processing is the model and man is it gaining traction it’s it’s gaining theoretical plausibility through extensive argumentation and gaining empirical probability through extensive empirical confirmation and so I think it is a very powerful and emerging framework okay did you want to say anything there because your your sense of the scope of sky of psychology as a whole is some is better than mine right I would I want to put cognitive science under it John but anyway we can certainly agree that predictive processing right and and I would say with the twist of a recursive relevance realization formulation that embodies it in an agent arena environment has an enormous integrated possibility across many stacked levels of processing and that’s the point I was going to make so thank you for doing that so I’m working with Mark Miller and Brett Anderson to actually integrate the predictive processing model with recursive relevance realization that’s explicit and to try and use that to explain a broad framework for cognition that’s already convergently being proposed by multiple people between sort of represented and don’t put too much on these but between sort of there’s an autism schizotype continuum that all individuals are found on and this may help to integrate a lot of stuff together in a powerful way so what’s the core of the predicting processing model there’s the one idea goes back way back and you can see it in Pavlov and then you can see it in Raskorla especially in 1988 Pavlov in conditioning it ain’t what you think it is I think he’s tries to be really something like that yeah and he basically criticizes the behaviorist model of understanding Pavlovian conditioning as what he calls willy-nilly associationism and he argues that the empirical evidence actually undermines that and the what what is more the emerging consensus and then predictive processing plugs into this is that even at the basic levels of conditioning you’re not seeing association what you’re seeing is anticipation the organism is trying to predict the world and prepare for it and prepare for the world so it’s always an act of adaptive agency of prediction and preparation so when I say anticipation I mean that bi-directional thing of predicting and preparing and so the idea is the way organisms are adaptive or sorry the way in which organisms we might properly want to call cognitive or adaptive is the way in which they can learn right and Greg has pointed out that that you know that is a that is a pivot point on ontology when organisms can learn and then they increase their adaptivity by being able to anticipate the world okay so that sounds all wonderful but for a long time there’s been problems with that because you seem to get into these weird homuncular loops and let me try quickly to explain what that might be so when we when we when we move from computational models we move to things called neural networks and what you would do is you you get the neural network to try and you know predict the world and then and then to get neural networks to learn we did what was called the back propagation of error but what that meant is the network would produce some output and then we would say what output it should have produced what was called the target value but let’s say we’re trying to get the network to distinguish between dogs and cats okay so we show pictures of dogs and cats and initially we hold up a picture and it goes click anywhere and it says dog and that’s wrong and we say no you should have said cats right and then what we do is we we take that we take the target value and and because you can turn this all into math so that’s not problematic we take the target value and we subtract the performance value and then we get how much of an error and then what we do is we propagate back through the network and we adjust all the connections between the nodes and we slightly adjust it you don’t want to do it rapidly because there’s good reasons for that and we’ll go into that and then you try it again and you try it again and that’s called the back propagation of error and most neural networks in commercial functionality use back prop because it trains networks up really fast and so it’s a powerful technology but it is shit science why because it depends on something independently having learned the target value so it’s homunculator because it says you know how learning works something else has already learned and then gives me the correct value and then I correct myself so that cannot be an account of how we learn and don’t say my parents teach you because you have to be able to learn from your parents yes some stuff might be innate but you can’t make enough stuff innate to account for all of human learning and I’ve got extensive arguments about those points in detail and I’m not going to go over them right now okay so this has been a big problem which is how do you get networks right to learn without making them homunculator without giving them the target now what happened is both from work within machine learning from Hinton and then stuff that comes out of Friston you have this really really good idea I want to sort of point out that in 2012 the work I did with Blake Richard Tim Lillicop and Blake Richards we sort of predicted this as a strategy we called it internalization and this has turned out to be convergent with what’s coming what’s emerging in predictive processing and here’s the basic idea and notice how this tracks with everything we’ve been talking about with the self the basic idea is the brain doesn’t try to predict the world the brain tries to predict that part of the brain that is in is it that is causally coupled to the world the brain and we talked about this the brain is modeling itself in order to model the world and as it’s modeling the world it is inherently modeling itself this is the internalization strategy and that’s at the core of predictive processing and the idea then is what you do is you have layers right of this so let’s say here’s layer one this is the part of the brain that’s directly coupled to the world and then layer two is trying to predict layer one and in trying to predict layer one what it does is it models not in any pictorial or propositional sense but it model it creates a model an anticipatory modeling of the causes that are causing the patterns that are showing up in the sensory motor level of the brain right and then you have a level three that’s trying to anticipate level one and a level four and what you have is higher and higher orders of modeling right and notice these are more and more hierarchical modelings of the self or at least of there’s at least the recursive modeling of the modeling of the modeling and modeling itself in order to model it the world all that’s going on and notice and then the idea here is as i move higher up i’ll use it this way deeper as i go into deeper levels of layers i’m going into more and more abstract more temporally extended models of the world and so we we’ve got what we’ve been talking about throughout we have right different levels of relevance realization and adaptive anticipation i’ll get to that in a sec right at different temporal scales you know an immediate scale more and more and and the self reaches within all of them by by it’s modeling itself in order to model the world and in modeling the world is it inherently modeling itself notice how this lines up with everything we’ve been arguing for and so you get this right and what’s happening is it’s it’s also it’s it’s as much procedural as it is modeling it right because what’s happening is the brain is also practicing at getting better at modeling because what layers so what you can do within the brain is you can give corrective feedback within the brain that’s that solves the back propagation one can tell you can tell two this is what you should have predicted because one is there it’s in the brain there’s nothing homuncular there one can feed this is what you should have right oh i’m being anthropomorphic to speed up and then two goes oh and then two gets better at modeling one but in getting better at modeling one it indirectly gets better at modeling the world and so you get this ratcheting up that’s very procedural in nature okay can i give you an example just uh maybe let me let me offer an example and see if this um and so all of a sudden i want to have breakfast okay um so would it be fair to say then that there would be a hierarchical arrangement of goal states that i would then be could break that structure into and then be like okay there’s i got to go over to the fridge i have to get eggs i have to get out the pan i have to do all of that there are certain levels in which that’s going to be modeled at various levels of abstraction right and then at the very lowest level you’re getting things like the brain is trying to reduce the surprise that’s going to happen right that you can think of all of this as an attempt to reduce the practice so it’s going to it’s predicting that you’re that there’s going to be certain sensory motor patterns that indicate your arm is reaching that are going to correspond to the sensory motor patterns that correspond to you seeing the inside of your fridge and if you open your fridge and there’s no food in there you’re surprised right and you have to update your model exactly and then there’s two ways you can update your model you can you can well there’s two ways in which you can deal with surprise you can revise your model and you think about how sort of science and engineering correspond to these you can revise your model to better fit the world and notice the language i’m using or you can revise the world to better fit your model yep and that’s the sensory motor loop the sensory right revising the model the motor revising the world and they are interpenetrating and bound together that’s funny because i actually came to mind i just say so i was making eggs what is it over the weekend and i knocked the thing and i was just doing it normally and then i hit it and i dropped the damn egg right so the surprise of hitting the egg and then the feedback and then draw my attention then i say shit and then i got to clean this up interrupt that little behavioral mode and all of a sudden i got my little self-modeling from our conversations going like oh i’m starting to jump around my little perspectives here so anyway so that um that that’s sort of the gist of the model um and notice how it’s you know you’ve got all you’ve got this recursive self-organization and its self-relevance and different temporal scales are being integrated and modeling itself in order to model the world and modeling the world it models itself and it’s practicing on itself in order to improve its ability to practice in the world you’ve been talking about all of this right now a couple things that might come to mind is well sometimes i like to be surprised and then that brings up some important questions with processing and then something else which is right when you try and use sort of mathematical formalisms things like bayes’s theorem to try and mathematically formalize how you reduce the surprise you get into computationally intractable it becomes computationally explosive you can’t do it so what we do is we typically this this brings up the question the the recursive rr questions but what do i model and what aspects of my model and how temporally deep do i model and how much should i revise it and you know what where’s the insight and where do affect and caring fit into this and so what’s happening now in predictive processing is there’s a place in which where you have sort of a higher order thing it’s called precision weighting and it’s coming to dominate more and more uh the predictive processing account is well how do i wait certain kinds of models how do i give my how do i basically prioritize and that immediately gives you well what’s the main function of attention prioritization right and so and what does it do it alters salience and then salience binds and you can see you need relevance realization this is rich for relevance realizing they originally tried reliability as what’s going on in precision weighting but reliability is like a vacuous either you mean numerical reliability and then i would be tracing all kinds of horribly reliable and endlessly irrelevant things which i don’t do right or and then they tried you know clark said well it’s task relevance which is like oh right and then and now they’re moving much more into this affective caring self-oriented which is just rich and dripping with the juices of recursive relevance realization so all of that sits together uh very well and so i think i i i’m i’m i’m getting growing confidence in sort of a pp you know triple r integrated framework that with also really grounds um that this model of the self that we’ve been developing together okay one of the things you can also see right in this hierarchical model is it’s all it’s also implementing some of the machinery of relevance realization uh like we talked about you know that you know just just for those of you know what like you you compress information as you go up the stack you particularize as you go towards generalized other you you know the generalized me you come down to the particular means all that sort of stuff right it’s all there and this is what howie and michaels make use of now one annoying nuance um is howie is still he’s kind of defends a purely propositional model theory of the modeling that’s going on at work um i think that’s becoming progressively just indefensible and and so i’m not gonna i’m not gonna hang anything significant on that i think there are by fristen and clark and miller and others the embodied inactive version of pp is going to dominate and is is dominating the field and this lines up with all the rest of embodied coxswain michael anderson has done work on this too and you know we talked about him with except just a lot of convergence on this so i’m not going to spend a lot of time on this okay so what do we get out of this there’s three points i want to take first the system models itself in order to model the world and as it models the world in order to take care of itself right and it’s fundamentally taking care of itself in anticipating itself right as the system is forming deeper more hidden causal model of the world it correspondingly is needs to form deeper models of itself so because it’s prediction and preparation right and those are always bound together right as it makes more causally deep predictive models of the world it has to get deeper and deeper models of its own causal potential in order to have better and better preparation for the world and those two are bound together so as the self becomes temporally extend extended in prediction it becomes temporally extended in preparation is that okay yeah not not only that i want to just interject and maybe say to conceptualize this a little bit more easily to me the functionality is not unlike that of a large institution both in the sense of generalization and compression as you get further up the hierarchy but also in the sense that more and more and more of its own resources need to be dedicated to its own self-modeling in order to sustain itself across time and large institutions whether they be you know large bureaucracies for instance tend to function very much in that way right or even entire cities if we go back to the republic so harkening back to some of those representational models of selfhood and the machinery itself but as analogous to large organizations i think yeah yeah thinking about it that’s very good the multiplicity of the self the selfless society as minsky once wrote but you’re right because it goes back to play dough as everything does everything does right and we can we can take that we can take that analogy to all kinds of different places but at least for this moment even just the functionality you’ve just described seems appropriately mapped no i think that’s good and let’s remember that when we talk about uh because i want to get into you know the multiplicity of the self you know in you know basically what i would argue are ultimately photonic practices like ifs and things like that especially the imaginal versions of ifs so that’s more for soul and spirit okay so i think that’s a good point i want to point out that there and this is just a quick sideline that means there is a finite limit on intelligence so you have what’s called complex system theory which is and you study this in societies so you can like in the roman empire or and some people propose this also for the bronze age world but the idea is the system complexifies in order to deal with the complexity of the world but it has to be modeling itself more and more and more and what happens is it has fewer and fewer resources that it can devote to the world because it becomes itself a complex environment and then eventually it collapses so there’s actually a finite limit on intelligence and then some people you know argued that there’s your point about bureaucracy makes all that much more sense there’s definitely diminishing returns um and so and then there’s an open question about whether or not we are near that point te chiang the god the amazing science fiction writer actually wrote a really you know really penetrating essay arguing that you know we the predicted explosion in artificial intelligence is likely not going to happen precisely because of these kinds of inherent limitations and that we might be close to as smart as smart can be now that sounds terrifically arrogant and anthropomorphic and anthropocentric but you know it’s a viable question that we might be near the we’re certain there are really good arguments that we’re biologically near the limit that you can’t get something biological made out of you know carbon-based single cells to be much more intelligent than us there’s good arguments about that so we’re at the biological threshold and then the question is how much similarity is there between the biological threshold and the sort of a priori threshold that comes out of complex systems theory that’s a that’s a reasonable open debate um that i think people should take a look at okay that aside um because it maybe there can’t be angels i don’t know but anyways the third point um so that model of itself of its deep causes need to include its modeling behavior so because the self is primarily modeling when it’s modeling itself it’s primarily modeling its modeling behavior right and so so the three points again it models itself modeling the world right and this is the way it takes care of itself as it forms deeper models of the world it forms deeper models of itself and in modeling itself it has to be modeling its modeling function because that’s what it primarily is okay and so that means that in a very real sense right it faces this problem we’ve just talked about which it needs to be able to modify how transparent it is to itself now let me try and explain what i mean by that and we’ve talked about transparency opacity already along the way so remember right now my glasses are transparent to me because i’m looking through them but i’m also looking by means of them they are a lens that focuses what is you know available to me as an analogy to what’s salient and relevant to me in the same the self model in modeling itself has to be able to model through itself onto the world right and if it gets too focused on itself and modeling itself if it becomes completely opaque to itself it hits the collapse i just mentioned right the collapse of the roman empire because it gets enamored into itself kind of a horrific epistemic narcissism or something that’s so much so that it becomes blinded to the world and so there has to be a transparency or at least a translucency it has to be capable of transparency opacity shifting again that now makes sense with the phenomenology that we’ve talked about and how that has an impact on our phenomenological sense of self that transparency opacity shifting i’m trying to show you how we can fit a lot in it’s consonant and we’re getting some of these major conclusions coming out okay now that leads me to a point i want to make let me just make a quick side you know just very quickly please so if we think about this in terms of flow versus neurotic self-consciousness so just exactly yes you know sort of like the grip of the self other world and ease and efficiency with which that modeling of the self modeling of the world in the feedback loop and then the the lack of like self-conscious awareness at least in relationship to that flow versus the errors the awkwardness the failure of participatory knowledge and then the constant self-conscious what the hell’s going on with me in the world and as a clinician i can say that people start developing very narrowly reciprocal modeling and then actually get into maladaptive feedback loops that you know create mismatches between self and world so that’s just throw that out no that’s no that wasn’t the throw that was a good point greg that’s a very good point yeah i think that’s why i think that’s why the concept of the the concept of translucency between transparency and opacity is so important yeah precisely because you can’t lose consciousness of the self model altogether but it has to be sufficiently diminished as to allow for genuine participation in the arena and i think that that that equilibration seems to be the seems to be the dilemma oftentimes well and the point i want to make there which is not going to surprise either one of you is there isn’t sort of a median mean in which we we stabilize the transparency in which we stabilize the translucency that is constantly moving around relative to you know relevance realization all the time and of course that then maps on to a particular way in which because we’ve already talked about when we’re talking about brain we’re really talking about brain body right the embodiment and again autopoiesis all of that so again i’m not bringing in something that we haven’t discussed and so i’m going to make i’m going to make sort of a claim here that what we can see is the self model is identified with the body but it’s not identical to the body right so this identification process is that translucency relationship it’s identified with the body but it is not a model of the body it’s it’s not identical to the body because it precisely has to afford seeing through the body to predict the world and seeing into the body in order to prepare it so identified with the body but not identical to the body and i think john if i may that identification with that co-extension that you’re talking about is then conferred on to the world when you talk about the transition from ego centrism to very much then the world becomes the world becomes the body of the self right in that yeah in that sense in the sense we’ll get back to that but you already mentioned that so i wanted to map that over again no no i think that’s good i think that’s very good and that shows up mythologically even in things like you know the body of christ and and things like that so i think that this gives something that um isn’t explicitly talked about by hoey and michaels but so i’m doing it to sort of strengthen their case uh this gives us the sense of ownership but it’s not the way we own an object like my jackknife our ownership of our bodies is this we identify with it but we’re not identical to it we identify with it and through it but we are not identical to it and that sense of ownership of a body right but not in the sense of ownership of an object marlo ponti made this really clear to us right is central again to the way in which we are a self and i’ve noticed i said are a self rather than have a self because i don’t know what what what entity would be having this self that that doesn’t make any sense to me um so that’s the uh the hoey hoey and michael model i’ve added i’ve i’ve i hope i’ve strengthened it by showing how it just is convergent with everything we’ve been talking about you guys have been adding points and i you know also this additional point that i think follows from their model it’s implied although they didn’t explicate it it gives us an account of ownership of the body as this identification with and through not but not identical to all of this fits really really well so this is what they then claim uh they argue that all of that is sufficient for being a self that’s the that’s the main claim that’s the main difference and the point they and and let there be in gerands really don’t have anywhere along that way where they jump off and say no no because they agree to all of this machinery and all of this argument in a fundamental way as we’ve already seen so what how do they argue that it’s sufficient they argue uh now they don’t quite use these terms they don’t use these terms but they they they describe things that map onto this quite well i would argue interpretively exegetically uh this gives them an account of prospectable and participatory knowing and the relations between them that i think is very convergent what we were talking about it gives them a way of talking about an i-me relationship as i’ve argued on their behalf they they point to but they don’t really develop it ownership of a body in this weird sense of ownership that we’ve talked about um it’s it’s autopoetic it does rel recursive well obviously recursive relevance realization all those levels it does self-relevance because it’s predicting for preparation right it has non-logical identity through time it’s inherently self-organizing and self-defining and self-evolving and uh and so they then say of course this is not a cartesian soul thing but they think that it is nevertheless sufficient for uh selfhood they they sort of say well why isn’t that enough for a self and that’s where they’re where their argument basically stops and then the let there be and gerands came in and say made their their argument we agree with all of that but what it models is the cartesian soul and we’ve already responded to that which means we get to this position where like why isn’t that enough it like unless you have some independent argument for privileging the exclusive identification of the cartesian soul thing with the self and i think it’s going to be hard pressed to come up with that it’s not clear to me why that isn’t sufficient for a self so i’ll pause here because that’s sort of where we where we i just want i wanted to show how like where we’ve gotten to they have one the translucency issue one thing they talk about the fact that part of what the self model has to do is render parts of the model transparent let me give you a non-controversial example so i’m constantly blinking and saccading which are actually creating moments of blindness but my brain has learned to edit those out right and when i’m touching things my brain has learned to edit out to some degree my self-touch right that’s why you can’t tickle yourself right because your brain predicts what’s going to happen and it prepares so that you can’t right and so again there is an inherent degree and this this is just a specific version of what we’re talking about this model in order to function has to have a significant capacity for transparency or it can’t function but that is part of its functionality and maybe that should not what i’m arguing is that should not be used as a basis for claiming it doesn’t really exist so although it’s phenomenologically has to be transparent that doesn’t mean that it’s theoretically transparent and that doesn’t mean we should conclude that it doesn’t exist and then we’ve already looked at the let there be in gerand’s argument but i want to go in now to an argument that really focuses on this transparency issue and tries to argue for there not being a self on the basis of transparency and that’s the work of met singer in in being no one and the more popular and therefore accessible book the ego tunnel and of course a host of a host of papers okay so met singer has done some really really powerful stuff and so let’s talk a little bit about transparency and illusion and some of the empirical work that he’s done and why it’s creepy and fascinating and interesting and has to do with this aspect of ownership that i tried i explicated it not only to help howie and michaels sorry howie and michael or i think it’s michael but also to prepare us for met singer’s argument so he argues that we have what he calls a phenomenological self model that’s also almost completely transparent to us and because it’s almost completely transparent to us that means we come up with fictional accounts of what it is so it’s basically because it’s phenomenologically transparent it is empiric we get no empirical basically evidence about it and so we generate basically illusory and fictitious fictitious accounts of what it is right so he thinks we to use some of our language he thinks we we ultimately have an ultimately we have a final ultimate layer of framing that is completely transparent and there’s nothing beyond that there’s no self beyond the self organization of that fundamental framing but we posit something behind it in a homuncular and illusory fashion because we that layer and i agree with him has to ultimately be transparent to us phenomenologically is that does that did that make sense as an argument for you guys i mean we prepared everybody for that we talked about this we talked about framing we talked about transparency we talked about the eye that you can never see the eye you can only see through the eye right and we and we’ve carefully distinguished but tried to relate self organization from organization into a self and we try to so none of this should be novel to anybody so john you want to say like to me certain when i hear that i hear adverbial i mean if we shift into some consciousness yeah there’s an adverbial framing that has analogous parallels to this yeah and i think that’s what he i mean he talks about the ego tunnel he talks about and i think what he means by the tunneling is you know salience landscaping ultimately and relevance realization and and that that they’re yeah that there are that um and this is a subtle point greg and i’m i’m hesitant to be definitive in my exegesis i’m not definitive on my argument but like because i think we’ve pointed out no there is content but it’s adverbial rather than adjectival and and we’ve talked about that here you know in the demonstrative indexicality and that there is phenomenological access but it’s not adjectival or conceptual access but that doesn’t mean that it is there is an access to the adverbial are you pointing to something like that something like that i guess what i’m saying is the the framing of the self to look through as uh certainly analogous to when we’re talking about consciousness the adverbial framing of the adjectival right right um so but they’re not not necessarily the same but i’m just actually one of they both feel like you know there’s a self-modeling top-down organized model self in relationship to the world right and then there’s the attentional consciousness screen frame that affords adjectival qualia they’re not exactly the same because ones more you know intentionally grounded in sense remotor and ones more self-modeling but when i am seen through my epistemological portal you could see that actually adverbial and self-framing would at least you know that would be an interesting thing to parse perhaps right and so the analogy also i think is helpful because we argued that you get to states like the pure consciousness event which go back to the the kind of states that let there be endurance or making use of in which all that are left are basically the adverbial qualia and the valence qualia the adjectival stuff is completely gone but nevertheless right we still have phenomenological access to consciousness and we don’t conclude that consciousness doesn’t exist because it there’s this layer of ultimate transparency to it um so that’s good i hadn’t thought about that putting those all together um sorry this i’m hesitating here because i think what you said was was was pregnantly insightful it was an awkward phrase but what i mean by that is well is he right the fact that it’s transparent might mean that we don’t have adverbial and valence access and those are that’s a phenomenological content it’s not conceptual it’s not propositional it’s not adjectival but it’s still right um so there might be you know some degree of translucency at the adverbial and valence level and secondly when we have an analogous situation of consciousness we don’t conclude that consciousness isn’t real we just say oh it’s not interesting it ultimately exists in this right sort of you know more purely perspectival and procedural manner yeah i just i just thought that was good greg i just thought that was good i just wanted to bring that out uh yeah no i think when we come back well why don’t we go through his argument and then maybe we’ll come back and see but i just wanted to draw that parallel for some reflection okay so he argues that we fall prey to naive realism naive realism is the is the boogeyman of all philosophers uh this is uh this is the the basically the folk model of reality that we all have naive realism is that’s just the way things are like the way i see things is the way they are there really are x’s there really are y um it naive realism isn’t quite as clearly the boogeyman as we thought it used to be because we used to use it to say well we think there are tables and chairs but there really aren’t tables and chairs and in terms of social objects maybe they’re not maybe they’re only attributed but that level of existence as i’ve already argued has to have a reality to it or we get into all kinds of epistemological and on and metaphysical difficulties so he argues and i and i agree with him that if we agree that naive realism is the model of the world that comes out of the folk model and that science challenges those i agree with him science in that sense challenges naive realism but i’ve tried to point out that doesn’t leave us with illusion it just gives us sophisticated realism rather than naive realism but what’s the naive realism he says well we the naive realism posits a cartesian soul thing as the homunculus behind um the the the ultimately transparent framing and we’ve seen this move already made by letharby and gerands now why does he do that well unlike letharby and gerands who make use of psychedelic experience he has his own experimental work that he’s doing with other people and it’s really cool and there’s a whole bunch of research on this and uh my colleague and ra uh and th and kim has has done some work on this so this is the rubber arm illusion and this has to do with the the the self is identifies with and through but is not identical to its body so what’s the rubber arm illusion so the rubber arm illusion is so you have a table like this laid out and you have sort of people can can look at it in sort of a controlled fashion because you don’t want to allow people to sort of explore uh we’ll get right uh i can’t get into details why that’s the case now what you have is you basically have people slide their arm under right underneath the table they don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing and as they do that you basically have a rubber arm come out uh superimposed so here’s my arm under the table here’s the rubber arm exactly on top superimposed then what i do is i strike the rub i stroke not strike i stroke the rubber arm with a feather and at the same time i in synchrony i stroke your real arm with a feather and what people will report and not only report they behave they this they feel that this is their arm such so so like if you bend the rubber arm finger they will flinch and they’ll experience a bit of phantom pain which is really kind of creepy so it’s an illusion because of course the rubber arm is not their arm but their sense of self and what i just said they identify with and to some degree through the rubber arm although they’re not identical to it and here the fact that they’re not identical to it comes to the fore because of that now um because of the way the experiment is like now what they’ve been able to do is you can get this with empty space we ask people to imagine an arm and think about what this means for the imaginal world you can get them to imagine an arm and you can create the rubber arm illusion with an imaginal arm right which is like holy crap right so you can do this imaginally uh so remember what i mean by imaginal i don’t mean an image in your head i mean a pretended image projected onto the world right um and then what you can do is you can get more sort of full imaginal full body illusions and then what you can do is you can use virtual reality to augment that and you can get something that is getting closer and closer to a full-blown out-of-body experience um so so what the classic out-of-body experience and the fact that people have this is no longer contested in fact met singer has you know gathered work and other people so this is the experience people have reported of you know and it’s often associated but it doesn’t have to be with near-death experiences people report floating above their body and and their the center the locus of their perspectival and participatory knowing is not in their body anymore and they can witness and look at their body um and and this is not this is not just like imagination in the view from above this is uh this is the phenomenological field and they have an out-of-body experience um and what what what what seems to be progressing is that we are getting closer and closer to the point where we can induce that experimentally in people and then and so met singer then makes a historical claim and then he he makes a really um um he makes his his basic no self-argument the historical claim is he argues that these out-of-body experiences are um the sort of cross cultural cross historical source of the idea of something like a soul a soul that is capable of moving independently from the body and we might think of Pythagoras and soul flight and shamanic soul flight and things like this and you know this becomes a plausible proposal whether or not those things map onto the cartesian soul i think is a much more contentious issue um i you know the the people in the in the mediterranean in the second and third century that that experience the self as individually they seem to have had out-of-body type experiences and so i’m a little bit hesitant of that uh but but the idea that this has been a contributor uh at least potentially to you know the integrated thing like nature of the soul that’s at least if we modify it the way i i suggest i think that becomes a a plausible hypothesis but if you give him that i don’t give him his stronger version and maybe his argument needs a stronger version but let’s just give him this uh then he says and look that’s an illusion because you’re not above your body there’s nothing there above your body that’s his point and he says if there’s nothing there above your body then there’s nothing there inside your body what’s the difference what’s the ontological difference that’s his argument that’s a good argument it’s a good argument it deserves to be taken seriously right um it it’s the Well, first of all, I should stop. What do you guys think about that? What do you think about the proposal? I mean, I think it’s very interesting because there’s an independent debate, you know, about how NDEs are evidence for immortality and the fact that we can’t get any confirming evidence and the fact that we’re starting to be able to generate out of body experiences experimentally that really undermines that sort of move. So I think independently, his research has significant scientific merit to it. But what I’m interested now is the sort of core move he’s making in this argument, right? The naive realism is apparently, I think non-controversially illusory in the out of body experience. And so why is it also not equally illusory in the in body experience? That’s basically, he shifts the burden of proof and he says the burden of proof is on you to show what the significant, when the model’s in here, why is it real? And when it’s out there, it’s an illusion. That’s the basic sort of move that’s being made. Right. Both are naive realisms that, in which the brain is just, you know, generating a model to deal with its experience that ultimately is illusory. So where do you sit on that? The naive realism that it’s trying to disavow still seems to be of a very Cartesian variety. Yes. And that’s gonna be the core of Gin’s response. And that’s convergent with the argument we’ve already made about Letherby and Durant. And Gin is not, I can’t tell if Gin is aware of Letherby and Durant. I don’t think he is because he can’t because he publishes before, right at the beginning of Metsinger’s work, 2005. But it’s convergent. I know that Letherby and Durant, I don’t think, do they cite Gin? I don’t think so. Anyways, it’s a very convergent argument. That’s basically the argument I wanna make too. But he made it better. One argument that maybe that’s related. So I’m not, it’s kind of, yeah, I think we’ve covered it. So I don’t have, but it did jump me into dissociative identities sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know if he, does he make any comments about that in relationship to what it says about- I mean, he does, he does when he points to depersonalization, derealization. And when he talks about the various syndromes like Cotard and Cabras, where people think, other people are robots and they don’t, right? Which is interesting, because that’s regarded as an illusion because we are failing to attribute a self, which I think is actually problematic to his work, but we’ll come back to that. And I can’t remember if I’m mapping this right. And then there’s one where people are convinced that their arm, like doesn’t, that’s not my arm. It looks exactly like my arm, but it’s not my arm. They lose ownership and they insist on having that arm surgically, like they want that arm surgically removed. So he does point to at least things that overlap with dissociative disorders, right? Okay. So, you know, this body image self locus is malleable and it is subject to error. But, and that means I think he’s right. I mean, the way you show that naive realism is false is by showing that your perceptual and conceptual systems are prone to error. But we don’t go typically into complete skepticism and say, well, there isn’t a world, there isn’t a world. We say, no, no, we have to come up with an account of the world that preserves the reality of the world while taking into account the fact that our perceptual and conceptual systems are prone to error. And it may also be worthwhile to preserve some sense of, or at least preserve the question as to whether those representational models, illusory though they might be, however unequal they are to the realism of their referent, doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have efficacy or that they don’t have some kind of developmental potency or existential import, right? I think the question, like saying that they’re illusory isn’t the same argument as saying that they’re completely epiphenomenal, right? And to me, I would wanna infiltrate the gap between those two arguments. Well, let me help you infiltration because it’s something I wanted to bring in before we turn to Yuen. And this is Geiger’s work on the third man factor. And so this is reliably reported. And again, and I’ve experienced this and Julian James actually talked about this a long time ago and when he did that really annoyingly provocative book called The Origin of Consciousness, he means self-consciousness by the way. And it break out by, I remember one anthropologist saying to me, that’s a book that contains a hundred beautiful insights and a thousand powerful errors. And so, but anyways, so the Geiger book, the third man factor is that people will often experience a sense of presence. And this can be shared. Shackleton had one, although it’s actually the fourth person. I don’t like the game called the third man factor. There are people that they were Shackleton’s expedition and they all had this sense, shared presence of another person going with them. And sometimes it’s just accompanying, but sometimes as Chris says, it’s deeply functional. I wanna give two accounts of this and how they’re on the continuum with the out of body experience kind of thing. So there was an individual who was ice climbing. I don’t know why people do this. I guess it’s even more powerfully inducing it to the flow state. And as I would have predicted, they fell off. I don’t mean to be crude. And they seriously hurt themselves and they were with somebody else and that person died. So they were suddenly alone and injured in a snow wilderness. And the person relates he was laying there, seriously considering, I guess I’m just gonna die. And then he had a sensed presence coming up to him. And the sense presence said to him, stand up. Your nose is bleeding. And he was like, what, who cares? He said, your nose is bleeding and it’s not that bad. Use the blood in the snow so you don’t walk in circles and that will help you get out. And he went, oh, that’s brilliant. And that’s how we got out. Another instance. Notice how these are creepy. They feel like ghosts, right? So there was this husband and wife team and they did, again, I don’t know how you get this job. They did, they do, these are just two examples, by the way. They do underwater cave mapping. I guess this is needed and I guess somebody has to do it. And they used to work as a team. And what used to happen is they would have a rope and she would hold onto the rope and he would take the flashlight and explore. And then he would come back and she would shine her flashlight and they would orient. And she dies and he’s in grief. And he foolishly goes back to work as people often do when they’re in grief. The fact that he’s in grief is probably also relevant, by the way. And he goes under and without thinking, he lets go of the rope and swims away. And then he goes, oh crap, there’s nobody here holding the rope. And I’m in a big cave in the dark, where’s the rope? Because he’s been swimming around and he’s like, and he gets a sense presence of her saying, I’m over here. And he turns and shines the flashlight and there’s the rope. And that’s how he gets out. Now, you can either go all supernatural and spooky or you can talk about implicit learning and intuition and the insight machinery, the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about all along here, which I think explains this quite well. And the fact that we always are doing this kind of sense presence, when we do it in figures and literature, we do it with our avatars in video games. And we even talked about sensed presence and sense of presence in video games. So we’re really good at this. And what that points to is the outer body experience, is on a continuum with this kind of bifurcation of the self and consciousness that is terrifically powerful for generating intuitive insight that can often be deeply adaptive. And of course, this fits into all kinds of ways in which imaginal entities might be efficacious for us. And we can talk about that perhaps later when we do IFS, if we talk about IFS more. And so I think you’re right, Chris. I think that they’re not epiphenomenal. The fact that his experiments end up that way I don’t think points to a correct mapping between the phenomenology and the functionality. There’s something going on there that I think is on a continuum with the Solomon effect. If you get people to talk about their problems from third-person perspective, rather than first-person, they get insight into their problems. Igor Grossman has good experimental evidence for that. Other people have replicated it. And we all know that. You’re really good at giving advice to your friends about their romantic follow-ups, but you’re crap when you’re being aware of your own kind of thing. So all of that, I think I wanna put that in, right? That again, it’s not as cut and dry as Metzinger makes it seem because his particular version of this is very epiphenomenal, but as Chris said, it’s on a continuum with stuff that it seems to be actually highly functional and doing something important. Okay, if that’s all right, just because I think that’s an important point, I wanna now turn to Gin. And he gets, he says that Metzinger is basically making this equation. The soul is an illusion, and that’s equal to the self as an illusion because the soul models itself as a soul thing. And that’s what the OBE, Out of Body Experience shows, right? And Gin argues, he argues that the self is a process, not an object. I would say something like a hyper object that’s a temporally extended process, but we can get into that later. And he argues, and I came across this after I come up with this argument, so people ought to trust me on that. I’m giving him full credit, by the way, and he has precedence, I’m acknowledging that right now. But he argues, science has shown that most objects are actually processes, but we do not conclude that they are not real, and we actually conclude that they might disclose a functionality that we didn’t realize with the idea that they were sort of homogeneous lumps of stuff, right? And we still think these things as existing, and we tilt that to be legitimate, right? And then he says, what kind of process he basically says, it’s an autopoetic, self-sustaining system. It’s convergent with this whole argument. The self model, in order to gain access to itself, coordinate and correct itself, so as to basically enable the system to sustain itself. The ultimate reason for all of this is a process of self-access, self-coordination, self-correction, that is part of the autopoetic nature of agency. And that enhancement of agency, which we see even in the third man effect, is the reality that we’re ultimately pointing to when we’re pointing to the self. Because trying to say that your agency is an illusion, I think is deeply performatively contradicting. Who’s making that statement, and what’s going on? They have to do it very effectively, and with a lot of agency to make the argument. So, he talks about grounds, content and valence. It ultimately, it is ultimately convergent with the whole recursive relevance realization, self-relevance model that we’ve built. And so, we basically get an independent argument against Metzinger that repeats the argument made against Letherby and Jarenz. Yes, insofar as that experience is of a homogeneous soul thing, it is an illusion. But that doesn’t mean that the self-embodied is that, it doesn’t mean that. It could mean a bunch of other things, and what it could mean is what people often also talk about the self as a developmental process that basically enhances agency. So, I think we’ve come full circle. We’ve circled back to the folk model, and I think we’ve done good science because I think the science really undermines that. And it undermines a particular folk model of the soul, if I’ll put it that way, a naive, common sense, realistic model of the soul. But I don’t think it ultimately undermines the self. It changes what we are talking about when we’re talking about the self, just like science always does. And I’m happy to make that change, and I don’t see what is threatening about that change to things we’re gonna talk about, like meaning and moral responsibility, et cetera. None of those seem to be lost. Agency and ownership are certainly not lost. And so, I think we have done good science, good cognitive science in that we have undermined common sense and explained the familiar with something that’s unfamiliar, but is both theoretically well argued for and is experimentally well evidenced. And so, that’s where I’m gonna close the cognitive science argument. All right, beautiful, all right. No, that’s a great summary, John. I mean, I think that I really look forward to then picking up the cognitive science baton and sort of adding in a clinical theoretical baton, and to show bridge both, I’ll be bringing some clinical stuff to bear. So, what happens when people come into the clinic room in relation, and what do we see in true self and defended self and these kinds of issues, and then the cognitive dynamic ground and the development of a relevance realization and then into a self model and then the author’s agency, that’s the kind of cognitive ground that I would be looking for to help guide me if I were doing clinician work. So, I think it’s a beautiful setup, and I think that there’s lots of then elements that may actually jump back over into the folk psychological experience of being that we can sort of flesh out, and then I can hand it over to Chris some and talk some about sort of the existential implications of all of that. I think you’re muted, Chris. Chris, I think you’re muted. Chris, can’t hear you. All right, yep. I said, that sounds great, Greg, and what I’ll do is simply bring all of my existential problems to bear, and hopefully all of this rigorous theoretical work can solve them. Right, that’s what it says outside my door. We solve all existential crises, right, as if. No, that sounds good. I think we’re really well positioned now, and that was excellent, John. Really, really tight, really rigorous. And I’m hoping along the way, in unrecorded conversations with Greg and Chris, I’d like to at least make some connections to the work Greg and I did at Untangling the World Not on consciousness, especially because of this weird central phenomena for the self, which is self-consciousness, and try and put those two together, because both are built out of recursive relevance realization machinery, and perspectival and participatory and procedural knowing. I think there is good grounds for such an integration, and that might help also to bridge between this more, I don’t know what to call it, mechanical, that’s not quite the word, one word, dynamical account of the self, and developmental dynamical account, and the existential and clinical aspects of the self that are so central to its existence. Absolutely, so like when we did the consciousness, we talked a lot about sort of, okay, subconsciousness from a cognitive science view or non-consciousness into what would then afford the stack layer from valence into adjectival and all of that. And when we actually get into the self, certainly for me, especially the self-conscious person, justify ourself, then we’ll then pull in, and I know you’re amenable to this, but pull in some more psychodynamic thinking in relationship to what that self or maybe the self-consciousness system really wants to see, relative to what its felt modeling is, and then the dynamic tensions between that and then how that starts casting shadows in relationship to aspects of the self. Yeah, I’ve been reading some work inspired by sort of, you know, the IFS edge of the psychodynamic, this sort of post union, and reading multiple minds, right, single self, and then try to argue against the model mind, and that the self isn’t really typically, actually the integrated, homogenized, mono thing, that, and then that’s a particular, and they even argue that we’ve, even within the West, even within psychology, the unified and the multiple view keep swinging around each other. And so again, that undermines the claim of Metzinger and Lethebie and Durant’s that we always, we always inevitably, you know, model the self as a Cartesian, homogenous, unified substance, and that’s simply not true. And I think things like IFS, the internal family systems therapy, you know, are bringing in the tremendous functionality of not thinking of it that way. But what’s interesting is that there’s nevertheless, there’s something they call the self, but it’s not what we typically mean by the self. So we’ve got all that, and that might be more towards soul and spirit. So it’s just rich and juicy with potential to talk about them. So I’m really looking forward to that. Beautiful. So I’ve talked more than enough, and I thank you guys for your patience and your support along the way, and your reflections and refractions, those were very helpful. But I now wanna turn it over to you too, if there’s any sort of final things you wanna say at this point before we wrap things up for today. No, I think you allude, certainly for me, I think we’re now ready to make a bridge. I think we can talk some about the schematic that you have laid, then the jump over to some of the schematics that I have in relationship to that, put my particular spin on that, and then we’ll see how that dance comes together and then sets the stage then for the next phase. And I mean, there was already a good integration in episode five, and so I’m expecting you’re gonna build on that and explicate and elucidate it more. That’s the trunk. I think we’ve got a structured trunk, then we can fill in some tree leaves on it. I like this metaphor, so. Yep, good. Thank you, Greg. And Chris, is there anything you’d like to say at this point? I’m just gonna try and throw wind through the leaves, see how they wrestle. Well, that’s good. I mean, you made some very, well, you both did. We both made some very excellent points. And we got, like there was things that emerged out of this that I didn’t foresee. And already the schema that we’re working on, it already, it’s born out of our dialogos together and was not originally in the argument. And so that dynamic of self, you know, the way the model is being reformulated because of the dialogos around the argument. I think, again, I’m just pointing to the manner of this is also very exciting to me. Like running a progressive argument, I sort of think of it like a line with the dialogos, you know, circling around it. It’s doing something that the monologic, you know, argument doesn’t do. And I just continue to be more and more impressed by that. I’m totally supportive of that, 100%. So thank you both of you gentlemen, as always. And thank you one and all for your time and attention. Look forward to meeting with you next time on the elusive eye. Amen.