The Elusive I 9 (nNC2Z_gcaro)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nNC2Z_gcaro

Three Welcome back everyone to the elusive eye the nature and function of the self I’m joined again as always by my friends and fellow interlocutors Christopher master Pietro and Greg Enriquez. Hey gentlemen, great to have you here again. And this this fantastic journey continues so last time we say we came to the core of The argument I wanted to make and I wanted to thank I take this time in a moment to thank Greg and Chris This is very much a work in progress. Not just the argument, but this what we’re doing here Trying to figure out how to recapitulate something or maybe at least reinventio what was happening in Socratic dialogue Where you had the integration of progressive argumentation and deologos And we’re trying to work that out. I know at times It’s a little clunky But at times it’s also jelling and the magic is there and it’s it’s very much due to these two gentlemen And their quickness of mind and depth of spirit. And so I just wanted to say thank you for working with me on this project I think I think we are in agreement that something here in the manner of what we’re doing is emerging and that’s important And so I just wanted to say thank you for that. John, thank you. Thank you for the same. Absolutely. It’s been fun. So we promised a couple of schemas last time and Greg has put his Well, I’ll be a little bit artistic here. He has put his brush to the canvas and has produced as always something brilliant. If I had done it, I’d have stick figures with arrows. Greg did something much better. And so Greg is basically prepared to and what’s going to happen is he’s going to put up the first one. I’m going to use it to give sort of a schematic summary Of what I think the whole picture looks like now take it as a schematic summary. It obviously doesn’t have all the nuances doesn’t have all the rigor. Right. But it has a lot of and this It matters as a lot of beauty in drawing it all together in a way that makes visual sense and then I will turn things over. Greg will now take over center stage. He’ll be the person doing sort of the progressive argument. And he’s going to basically show us, you know, some of the clinical dimensions and the clinical implications of this model of the self, which is very important. Because we’ve argued together that the model of the self is inherently dynamical inherently developmental always undergoing Transformation and of course the clinical therapeutic aspects of that are crucial and central to. I mean, one of the places where we have to turn to get a deep understanding Of the dynamic developmental transformative nature of the self is particularly the clinical setting. So Greg is going to take us through that important thing. I’m not going to go into that. I’m going to go into the I think Chris and I have enough experience and not knowledge we can do the deal logos with Greg, but that’s what’s going to happen. So I’m going to ask Greg to if he could call up the first of the schemas. And I’ll just talk us through Okay, so whenever I can I have them on a clicker so I can bring it all up if you’d like, John or Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So I can bring it all up if you’d like, John, or? Yeah, maybe, yeah. Oh, wow, choice and freedom. There you go, John. I can bring them up. I’m more than you’re burning for. Horrible, horrible freedom. Let’s bring it all up, Greg, because I’m going to, I think I want to emphasize the simultaneity right now, because we’ve done a lot with the sequence. And this is really wonderful. So the basic idea here is that this is an attempt to give an integrated account. So we could perhaps start at the top. And this is a part that seriously bridges between Greg’s work and my own. So we’re talking there about the eye and the hyperobject of the eye. You remember a hyperobject, this goes back to Morton, is any kind of entity that exists, it really exists, it forms some unified causal whole, but it exceeds human perceptual grasp. So evolution is a hyperobject. We can’t watch it happening. Global warming, Morton’s favorite, is a hyperobject. Although we can get bits and pieces of it, there’s nobody that says, and I saw all of global warming or something like that. It doesn’t make any sense. But it doesn’t make any sense to say, because I can’t see it all at once, it doesn’t exist. And so the eye is a hyperobject in that sense in that we can never get it fully in view. Because as we’ve talked about, when we try to bring it into view, we get its partial representation within the means. But one of the things that came out in the magic of the dialogos that then fed back into the theoretical argumentation was this discussion we had about the movement of the seat of consciousness, where the eye seems to inhabit. And I was seeing that eye, that seat, as we said here, it’s focal relevance realization. It’s the nexus point of adaptive, autopoetic autonomous agency. That’s where it is present. That is the place from which it is linking up. When we invoke place, it’s not a physical place. We’re moving around in imaginal space in some important way. And I see the eye as a hyperobject that could be captured, perhaps, the way we capture other hyperobjects, as an attractor within a state space. So there’s the state space, there’s the imaginal state space, and the eye is moving around that, but it’s not moving randomly, chaotic. In fact, it somehow forms a unity, an integration, a continuity through time. There’s some way in which it is structurally, functionally organized. And so that’s the eye part of it. And then what’s going on there, as Greg says, that’s the adverbial qualia. That’s the capacity to have the here now-ness, to be connected, the here now-ness, togetherness. You see that on there. And then that’s in relationship to the generalized me. And the generalized me models the self in relationship to the body, the world, and the other. Just to point down for a sec, if you remember the generalized me emerges out of the manifold of all the little me’s that are doing the cyclical, recursive, mutual modeling. So here’s all the mini me’s, and they’re doing the recursive, mutual modeling. And then you get the hyper object of the me manifold that gets generalized, compressed into the generalized other. That’s the me, the generalized other within the generalized me. And so the eye is in relation to the generalized me, and then the me is in relation to all the specific me’s. And as Greg said here, when you get the generalized me, you get the adjectival experience of the world, the world in terms of particular content, qualitative content. And then as Greg, in that amazing diagram at the bottom, the manifold of the me’s is basically plugged into and tracking the world in a complex, dynamical, self-organizing fashion. And the whole thing is powered top to bottom by recursive relevance realization, which sends up the fundamental constitutive relationship of the self, which is self-relevance, the way things are relevant to the self, both this way, world self, and also this way on the vertical ontology. And so that this gives us, I think, a very powerful picture. We talked about how we could plug it in to predictive processing models, a lot of experimental evidence, et cetera. And we went through the argument that I think this still allows us to talk about the self as something real, although it is not a Cartesian, homogenized, sorry, homogenous, not homogenized, a Cartesian homogenous substance. It’s very much a complex, recursive, dynamical system, but we have long ago abandoned the idea that realness inheres in homogenous substances and moved to the idea that reality inheres in complex and recursive dynamical systems. So that’s the argument, I think, and this diagram, I think, captures it beautifully. And I’ll figure out a way of making, or maybe help, as Greg’s help, making these slides also individually available as links for people. And so, as you already know, episode five, which was released, well, what are we on? I think we’re on eight or nine. Anyways, it’s a few back. Greg already meshed that with his more encompassing ontology, and he gave us the ontological way his work and this work connect together. And Greg’s gonna build on that, but he’s gonna build on it particularly towards the clinical aspects of things. So I’m now gonna turn center stage over to Greg. All right. Well, stop and just say, thank you, John. This has been a really brilliant articulation, I think, and building off of both the ground of cognition that you afford us in recursive relevance realization into what I think is a workable model of sentience that we joined together on. And now delineating the self in its relationship to that has been very powerful and it’s been an honor and I appreciate it. So I want to thank you, Greg. Thank you very much. When and what I’ve gotten store is basically for this time, what I wanted to do is see some of the connections that you’re the model that you are generating, has connected with the system, the UTOC system that I’ve got going. I’m gonna review a little bit about some of the things that connect from the past and then set the stage for getting into the more clinical side. So some people know me more as a theorist, in relationship to sort of the big picture or unified theory of knowledge. But when we get to the self, it brings up my clinical side. And obviously for 25 years, I’ve been a licensed clinical psychologist. So I sat with a lot of people, in a wide variety of different domains, struggling with life and who am I and what is myself and what are all the various parts of me and what do I mean in this world? Those are deep and powerful questions, sometimes fraught with enormous amount of suffering, sometimes fraught with a huge amount of hope. And so understanding what it is that sort of in the cognitive science of these dynamic processes and then bridging them over to clinical psychology and then at the end of it, moving then to existential reflections, I think is a really, really nice balance. I’m really super glad to be here with the two of you and have that juxtaposed perspective taking. Great. So I do my slide thing because I like to kind of create frames for individuals. And I think very visually, so I’m gonna jump back into the slide thing. And my goal really is in sort of walking this through is to see, just show how that model of the self plugs in like a key into a lock. And then with the key lock and with my background in architecture then plugging around it or through it, I think then sets the stage for a lot of conversations to be had and we can then generate a lot of dialogs in relation, that’s my hope. Great, great. So, all right, so if we go back here, it’s always a good idea for me to share the screen first. I did that all the time. So if we’re here, here’s the John’s model, okay, of the self. And what I wanna actually suggest or at least I’ve nudged John on this at a couple of places that I’m actually really thrilled about the synergy between what’s happening, at least what I feel is happening in relationship to John’s Integrative Cognitive Science View and what I was building in sort of a theoretical map of psychology. At some point, I remember maybe 10 years ago, I listed and I said, hey, there are really five unbelievably powerful concepts in psychology or unbelievably broad concepts that we don’t have a handle on at all. And I’d like to suggest that John’s Recursive Relevance Realization, if we plug it in relationship to sort of unified approach, gives us a frame for these. And the first is behavior and I’m gonna offer a comment or two about that. And the second is whatever we mean by mind and I’ll offer a few comments about that, but not many. But it’s really, John, your Recursive Relevance Realization, especially as it merges with predictive processing as far as I’m concerned, and your analysis of the four P’s afford us both a general understanding of cognition as epistemic process, a specific definition of various kinds of epistemic processes, and then affords us a real functional embodiment of what is actually happening in the nervous system and as it guides behavior. So we actually now have an opportunity to really think seriously, broadly, and deeply about what cognition is. So damn, that’s a big deal, right? Thank you. And I think we then were able to generate through that, through your leadership on that model, a plausible and pretty comprehensive view of the emergence of sentience and adverbial, legitimal consciousness. And then now we set the stage for a delineation of the self. And these actually were, one day I’ll find that, I scratched these letters down, but it’s like, hey, these are five really unbelievably broad concepts. And if we do have two meta perspectives that actually fit and juxtapose so that they afford us this perspective, that’s a big deal. And so the excitement that I feel in relationship to this journey on the self, which is similar to the consciousness, is it just sort of is rounding out some really important territory and affording us an opportunity of a new kind of cognitive science psychology map. So that’s my sense. In relationship to behavior, I listened, actually, I was saying, listen to your Bernardo Castor talking. And Bernardo was like, hey, actually, science really, it’s not what science does, it maps behavior. And I couldn’t agree more that actually science, and one of the things that actually we, I think we’re really confused about, and psychology is to blame for this, is what the hell is behavior? The tree of knowledge suggests that, hey, here is actually a map of behavioral ontology. And why do I want to mention that? Well, for the same reason, your insights in relationship to perspectival, participatory and procedural knowing relative to propositional, create a transactional view of knowing and cognition, and recognize that actually a huge amount of what we know is agent arena relation. In a very similar way, I think that the behavior mental process relation has a very similar kind of dynamic in terms of it. And if you learn to really think like a behaviorist first, I actually learned to think like as a cognivus, didn’t like the behaviorism, and then I actually really learned how to think, especially as a radical behaviorist. And that’s a very unique angle, and ultimately affords a particular kinds of both transactional view from the outside kind of perspective. And if you’re also a cognivus, then you get the epistemic insight processes as well, and that’s a nice balance. So anyway, one of the things that I’ll suggest in relationship to this is if we have a container of behavior, and we can position it from the vantage point of one of the things that science does is orient us to as observers of behavior. It’s one of the arguments that I’ll make. And the periodic table of behavior basically says, hey, we can take the tree of knowledge, organize it into these different levels, as well as dimensions of analysis. So I’m not gonna go into any detail, but what I will say about this is that the periodic table of behavior allows us to do something that John’s talked about a lot, which is understand the lenses by which we see the world. So John, we see through the lens of science here, and science is really seeing the world through behavioral glasses, I would argue. And science then maps the different nature in terms of its levels and complexity. So why is this really important? One of the things that it says is actually there, from a scientific perspective, I would say, the epistemological position is behavioral broadly. And then there are different classes of behavior, like mental behavior, the dimension of mind, and cultural behavior. And this is gonna play a very big role because the nature of the human self, I think, has to be seen, well, first, actually, it’s gotta be seen grounded in biology, as you articulated. Then it emerges at the dimension of mind through the animal. And if we’re talking about human, we also need to understand what the dimension is of the human person. For me, I needed to be at a position where I was tracking these different dimensions, and actually, that’s totally, as far as I can tell, exactly congruent with the analysis that you’ve been given. And I’ll show why I feel that that’s the case. So also, just in terms of our backdrop, if you didn’t see it, untangling the world knot, we talked a lot about cognition and consciousness in the different domains of mind. And so we synced up on a descriptive metaphysics of mind, whereby we recognize that there’s a big difference between exterior epistemology, behavioral from the outside, the interior first-person perspective, and then we can map the different domains of mind, the overt activity, what you would see an animal do, the neurocognitive processes. Then you have this really funky thing with a subjective conscious experience, which may be the root of all things, we’ll see. And then narrative. And one of the things that I’d like to say about the root of all things is actually, I would propose, at least as a question for, say, if we’re adopting a, you know, we’re engaged in individuals that have an idealist view, I’m going to argue that actually information interface is a really key concept, OK? And what this map shows is that there’s actually different domains of information interface, like neuromuscular, OK? That’s activity. And information interface at the nervous system level that doesn’t necessarily activate global workspace or consciousness or whatever. And particularly for us, this conversation, right? So verbal dialogue is now engaged in our subjectivity. As humans, we’re engaged in, you know, transjective reporting on each other, and that moves through the skin and obviously at some level is interfacing with our interior in a particular way. So I think that that’s a view from a naturalistic cognitive science view. And of course, your four P’s, we talked about how they seem to line up. Yeah. So this is sort of a bottom ground that we, as far as I’m concerned, have already sort of, you know, Roy Bashgar talks about unphilosophical underlaboring. This is sort of like meta-theoretical underlaboring that actually is already, in my estimation, is already available to us. And then that sets the stage, what we did in the untangling the world not sets the stage for what we’re doing here. All right. So when you get to me as now moving more into my clinician stance, this is an organized frame of reference that I have for the human consciousness, okay? And what you see here is basically, when I’m thinking about the human consciousness system, I see it in three different domains, okay? And then mediated by three different filtration processes. But for our purposes, right away, what mostly I was looking at is this is a model of what I would have labeled, or still am actually now comfortable still labeling the experiential self. At least this is where we’ve been attending. There were a couple of key concepts I needed if we were gonna, you know, have say ontological, epistemological congruence, one of which is this model of the experiential cell, and it has to kind of connect to some primate person duality. Right, right, right. And that’s fundamentally central to my system. And basically one is mediated by animal behavior, okay? And then the other is mediated by these systems of justification, as we try to explain what the hell we’re doing on this planet. Right, right, right. So, and ultimately then that brings us back to my experience of why your schematic resonates so brilliantly with what it is that I’m seeing, because what it does is it creates then a much more textured cognitively science grounded picture of the experiential self. And, you know, I was like, yes, it has to come out of biology and that’s a complex dynamic adaptive system. And then there’s neurobiology, which sets the stage. And that is basically mind one in terms of our frame of reference. Then we talk about how, hey, maybe the intersection of sensation, interoception, and movement gets coalesced in a unifying perspective of care that gets organized in relationship to valence qualia. And especially as that gets extended over time, you can imagine a global workspace of consciousness that affords recursive relevance realization. And then the emergence of mind too, as layered modeling, both of the animal agent arena relationship. But then as we get into mammals, we also then get a specially a generalized me. And in particular, we get to get into primates. We have this really dramatic capacity for intersubjective judgment of cooperation, competition, and distance. These are the elements that we talked about, the influence matrix, which then really are the internal working models of how do I see myself in the world in particular in relationship to the other. I will say as a clinician in relationship to the dimension of attachment, the dimension of attachment and the sense of competition and cooperation in the social field, and in particular, whether an individual feels known and valued and secure in the social space that they find themselves, or feel rejected, devalued, lacking in social influence and insecure in relationship to the social space is unbelievably crucial to your felt sense of being. So there’s a cognitive sort of mapping modeling here, and then there’s the affective meaning of that in relation and what it motivates one. And so when we see people all the time, one of the first things I’m wondering is like, well, what’s the history of attachment here? What is their felt sense of being in the world, both currently and historically, and what does that mean? And so this place basically is where I would find, this is where I would go to think in terms of sort of the cognitive science architecture of attachment. That’s fantastic. One of the things I’ve noted both theoretically and also personally, existentially, theoretically is I have not done any good work. I think that’s the best way of putting it, integrating attachment theory with all the other work I do. And that’s a big mistake. I mean, after sort of measures of G and some of the measures of personality, attachment theory is robust and reliable and so predictive of so much of human behavior and so relevant as you noted to human suffering and distress. So I’m in the midst of working with Chris and through a lot of literature and a lot of practice to try and get a better understanding of that. I mean, I’ve always known it, like I teach intro psych, but I know it the way Tolstoy says, Ivan Illich knew about death. Illich always knew that he was gonna die the way two plus two equals four, but today he realized he was gonna die. I’ve always known that I’ve had an attachment style, but over the last three or four months, I’ve really realized that I have an attachment style. And then my colleague is Jeff McDonald, who’s one of the world authorities on this stuff. And so, good friend. You plugging it in there is exactly like a lacuna that needs to be addressed. And so I’m so grateful that you’re doing this. Great, wonderful. And from my vantage point, so the clinician inside of me tends to focus developmentally, motivationally and emotionally. And while we certainly attend to social cognition and perception, the mechanics of that modeling are less salient. But I do believe really the combination of recursive relevance realization, let me go relational recursive relevance realization for a self other model that both is just determining what is modeling what can be, and then engaged in care, and then settling in particular tractor states is a very, very powerful combination. So, and we can certainly, this comes up over and over again when we’re listening to somebody’s story. The other thing that’s been super powerful, and this has happened several times, is this distinction between adjectival and adverbial conscious, perspective. And we both were, or all three of us were engaged in this, wait a minute, that framing is jumping around and what the hell is that? And that was a moment of murkiness that then was then followed by some elaboration. And that jumping around of the frame is really key. And I see also the various attention and default mode networks really plugging in here. So I definitely see a model of the self as a default mode networks. It’s just constantly tracking and update. How am I doing in relationship to the world, often offline, because you have to pay attention to something, but then you drop into mind wandering and you can update in relationship to that. So this model holds that very nicely. And this is all basically the architecture, although of course it’s enormously influenced by what comes after, the basic architecture is this is all the primate architecture. This is all the hominid, primate architecture that would have been present a million years ago in hominid ancestors. So then in the last whatever, 200, it’d be interesting to dialogue, get your sense about the timeframe. For me, sometimes in 200,000 and 50,000 years, we get the real, the culture person, self-conscious narrating big bang shift and the justifying person dynamic and the evolution of culture. This tracks my understanding of a more neuro cognitive functional view from behavioral investment theory. And then the blue is the culture person, mental behavioral dimension, as opposed to just the primate mental. And we call that, I call that mind three. And so my point of it is, is this is, we come at these things, although obviously now we’re blending our systems, but we come out these, we’ve climbed up this mountain in different ways. To me, that’s a remarkable overlap of consistency and convergence in relationship. I’m more clinical, I’m maybe a little more phylogenetic. You’re steeped in the cognitive science, also the philosophical history of it. And it’s, I’m very pleased not bad at how much. So I’m gonna pause there. I don’t know if Chris, if you, if this elicits any reaction in relationship to you or what you’re in terms of this, but this was, this was certainly something I wanted to share in terms of sort of the connection between the systems. Yeah, the convergence is really striking. I mean, that’s my first reaction. I was, I mean, I looked for it and I knew it was coming, but all the same, the way that you’ve outlined it is very comprehensive, Greg. And yeah, lock and key indeed. I’m interested in the, so I don’t wanna ask you to go back to one of your previous slides, but you had the separation of the cultural and the primate and the self that straddles the boundary between. And one thing that’s interesting to me is the way that the cultural forms mediate the individual’s realization of their primate nature. And it strikes me that one of the things that we’ve been talking about of the self is as the realization of that bridge, that not only is the self the host of the realization, but to some degree, it is the realization of cultural’s information of the primate nature and their interlocution for lack of a better word. And that’s one of the things that jumped out at me from that diagram. Well, I mean, from an existential perspective, I mean, I think that, right, well, Chris, you have to sort that out. I’m like, right. Well, I mean, and I’m joking, being joking, but ultimately, what kind of philosophical relation are we going to have in this domain? And I really believe that actually, I mean, if you, there’s a, I’m thinking in particular sort of our own Western history, I’m sure you probably have heard there was, and I’m blanking on who it was, but there was a relatively famous, somewhat histrionic woman said, oh God, if Darwin’s theory is true, please let it not be true. And if it’s true, let it not be known. Okay. Right. And so one of the things that’s interesting, I believe about our history at an analytic level. So this is the clinical level, okay. The clinical level is I wanna teach people, I don’t need to get into theory at one level, but I wanna teach them to get in touch with their body and their heart. That’s the, these are, this is what I frame. When I’m working with somebody, I get in touch with your body, your heart, I’m usually aligned with your mind. There’s an ego part of your mind and a shadow part of your mind, and the thing goes out, okay. And also I wanna get in touch with your existential values or your spirit. But how we culturally understand that is unbelievably key and how each of us in our own journey understands that. So Chris, thank you, Greg. I’m really interested if we can take a moment, Greg. I get a sense that there’s something you wanna unpack about that a bit more, Chris. The idea that, cause you were emphasizing that the self is not just the locus, but also the process of this. The process, yeah. Right. Yeah, the process of that realization. Can you say a little bit more about that? Cause I’m not in agreement, but I’m not quite sure what I’m agreeing with. Yeah, well, I’m not, I mean, I’m only vaguely certain of what I’m gnawing at. I mean, it’ll take a little while to sift through this to be frank, but for the moment. So let me maybe just give an example of this. One of the things, so contracting the scope of this back to the level of the individual for just a moment, right, back to the ontogenetic lens. One of the great formative experiences of oneself that seems to inform, especially in early adulthood is the experience of one’s personality as an a priori necessity, right? Now, one thing I’m interested in knowing, Greg, is how this, so I’ll say what I’m gonna say, but then I’m interested in your take based on your refined definition therein and your refined categories of personality that you introduced a few sessions ago. Cause this applies, I think, more to the traditional model and traditional definition of personality, as opposed to the one that you reintroduced. But one of those four very formative experiences is, and people come to it, I think, at different times, is the experience of one’s necessary personality when it’s at quits with one’s aspirational aspect of self that projects an imagined object into the world, prospectively, right? So to boil that down, I imagine myself as one thing. I stumble into a series of experiences in the course of my life. I made to realize this is usually an experience of great disillusionment for many people, and it can be very difficult. I come to realize that I am not, in fact, the person that I thought I was, because the set of traits that I came equipped with were not, in fact, what I supposed them to be. And all of a sudden, I’m facing a constraint that was unknown to me up to this point of realization. And suddenly, I realize that the tangle of wires that are nested inside my gut don’t, in fact, comprise the same kind of circuitry that I thought they did. And all of a sudden, I’m facing the reality that I have, in fact, some very, well, I have limitations that are only partially known to me. And that comes into conflict with the aspirational, projective sense of self that up to that point that I’ve cast ahead of me onto the world. And so that’s part of what I’m getting at is that the sense of the kind of necessity of oneself that we have to face that I think based on your model, we could say is essentially the primate self, mediated through a kind of cultured, expectation of what we ought to be to ourselves. Those two things, there’s a perennial tension. Perennial insofar as I think each person, I’m not sure of this, but it seems likely to me that each person somehow comes into contact with that tension. And then the resolution therein has something to do with how we confront the necessity of those constraints that are endogenous to our primate nature by somehow accessing ourselves via the cultural forms. Beautiful, beautiful, love that. So the aspirational angel and the biological primate somehow come into a relationship and that relationship is also constitutive of the self as well as the two components that went into it. Is that, am I getting it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, no, so much to say there, but that’s a beautiful articulation of the tension. It’s also a beautiful articulation of the dynamic process. It also gets me on my critique of personality theory and I’ll go into some of that in the sense that personality theory as it’s handed to people now is so strongly associated with traits in a way that I think is deeply misguided. And the reason that it’s deeply misguided at one level is because people think that they learn about their personality in fixed terms. And precisely because of the way you articulated this relationship, the dynamic positioning of what you are relative to what you can be is very, very crucial in what unfolds. And it’s crucial that we get honesty about constraints and at the same time, it’s crucial that we don’t foreclose on what is possible in relation. So this happens all the time as a clinician, for example, I’ll do assessments. So to give you an idea about how this may work, not necessarily in personality, but in a similar kind of complicated trait, we’ll talk about intelligence, at least as it’s measured by say the waste. I’ve been in situations where somebody comes in is having some learning disability, wants an evaluation, thinks they have ADHD, but they also want to go on and get their medical degree, become a medical doctor. And you do an IQ test and their IQ is 105. Right. So now what do we do with that information? So you as the clinician, what do you do? The average doctoral level training individual has about an IQ of 120. Well, but if you have a growth mindset and you learn, okay, right, but at the same time, are you gonna set somebody up in relationship to real world constraints that says, hey, just buck her through, you’ll be all right. Just try hard, be flexible. The dynamic tension, the real world dynamic tension between delivering that information in a way that does justice to the actual constraints of whatever that reality is. And at the same time doesn’t foreclose on whatever would be inevitable in a way that would be unnecessarily fatalistic and judgmental is a very, very delicate balance. And I say that then clinically, and I would say that the same basic balance applies across many different existential domains. That’s a really helpful example, actually, Greg, that one you’ve just given. And it strikes me that that kind of tips us into a discussion of character a little bit. I don’t know that that’s where we should or need to go right now, but I had been thinking about character as our existential response to the constraints of our own personalities, personalities in the traditional sense of the term. I think that’s very much in line with Aristotle, I think, very much. Totally. And so I was thinking character, Chris, and then I was also thinking of the difference between intelligence and rationality and how intelligence is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition for rationality. And then at the deep connections between cultivating our rationality and cultivating our character, as for example, seen in Aristotle. And so these I think are all like they’re, yeah, I hope we get a chance to talk about that. I don’t wanna divert too much from Greg’s line of argument, but I think that’s really important. My hope, so what I have laid out here I’m gonna lay out some of the architecture of how I, I mean, when you’re a clinical psychologist, when you’re in a psychological doctor place, this is much, I’m really glad the way you laid it out there, Chris, because this is much of the task, okay? And what I mean is the task is now you’re sort of the parent looking at the loving child and they are the expert on themselves, that’s totally true. But we are trained ideally to have basically, I would argue the experts on character adaptation, development and functionality, and have some capacity to gain insights into what is potentially possible realistically, what are genuine constraints, and then how do you cultivate the best understanding of oneself and position, you know? And of course we’re not God and we’re not placed in that, but you certainly find my own quest for the unified thing was I wanted as coherent of sort of wisdom frame or reference that’s grounded in science that I could then draw on to afford my clients the best opportunity to have the most realistic picture on the one hand, but one afforded the most possibility for growth on the other in a dynamic interrelation. I like this idea of character as a dynamical mediation between, well, realism and aspiration. I hope we come back to that at some point. I think that’s a really powerful idea. Well, I think when you correct me on imagine and imaginal space, right? And I was like, yes, because I’ve internalized that. Because I see that all the time in relationship to, cultivating what I would call realistic hope and living in that aspirational space is one of the things that, or I guess to reverse it, many individuals get reciprocally narrowed into the bitterness of the dead end, that is the life that they see and the way in which they react to the dead end that they experience unfortunately drives that dead end deeper. So it’s almost the reverse of that. So there’s very much a frame shift in relation. Wow. Right. This is so fruitful, Greg, keep going. Yeah. Cool. So what I’d like to do then is I’d like to then, elaborate a little bit more and then we’ll come back and talk because essentially then I’ve laid out through my work as a Clint, laid out a map of character adaptation and a wheel of development that allows us to then create many different angles to our specialized aspects of our temperament and character and hopefully both be accurate or realistically accurate, but then afford imaginal wonderings in a growth promoting way. Right. So I’ll share the screen here and we’ll jump back into this a little bit. So some discussion points that may, may be worthwhile is if we come back to this and we see that, okay, the experiential self, I think now has been filled in in a particular way. And it’s certainly the, I think there’s a lot to say about especially maybe the influence matrix attachment and the self other models, but then there’s this private self, which really is the egoic narrator. And we can talk about what I would consider to be the relationship between this narrator and the experiential self. When we talk about sort of the internal dialogues and vertical arrangement of the various voices of the internal family that we have, salient among these voices is the relationship between that narrator and that felt sense of being in the relational world in particular, and then the affective consequence of those relations therein. So that’s worthy of a possible conversation. And then the other one is realizing that as we sit in a social world, the presentation of self in everyday life and the ways in which we manage what is available to people and what is not, okay? Like for example, the clinic room. If you ever sat in a clinic room, the first 15 minutes is this is confidential, this is confidential, this is the limits of confidentiality. These are the voice systems that we put outside so nobody can hear. All of that, by the way, is part of the Rogerian filter. And they’re all the structures in which we try to imagine who can see us and under what context and who can’t. The lock you put on your diary is a Rogerian filter. And so this dynamic tension between the ways in which we navigate our presentation and what we think we are, what we think other people should see us, how other people actually see us, so identity will bleed of course into the world that we’re in, and then navigate that and then what it means about how we then navigate our relationship with the experiential self is ubiquitous clinically in relationship to concerns and confusions and conflicts that people have. So those are some areas of possible consideration. And then there’s this whole issue about how, so for me, the information interfaced between these domains gets very keen about sort of like, these are domains of systems that they are talking to each other, not unlike when you call somebody on the phone or you do a Zoom, there’s an information interface between various domains and then the filtration between them. So the Freudian filter, we talked some about the shadow, even the golden shadow, there’s the dark side of the shadow is the standard. And we can talk about what it is that, the best way I described this is that this is the backside of your Freudian filter is what you fear you’re not or hope that you’re not, but fear that you are. So this is the kind of thing you’re like, oh, maybe I’m this way, no, I will rationalize and press. And in terms of the Rogerian filter, this is the who is judging me, how do I anticipate that? So basically, this is this getting clear that there’s a narrative public self relation that we could possibly discuss some, there’s these filters between the domain. I also wanna make a couple of comments about personhood, human persons and the culture person plane of existence. So before I talk about personality and character, we’ve already alluded to this, but I just wanna echo. For me, a person is a particular, and is an entity that can do something very remarkable, which is self-consciously reflect, take accountability and justify oneself on the social stage and have the opportunity to be held accountable on that social stage. That for me is the definition of what a person is that gets into moral responsibility, it gets into law, it gets into a whole bunch of other domains. But I think we’re in agreement that that is, that that conception of a person is, I don’t know, but that’s my sense is that we- Yeah, I know, I agree. I think what you just said overlaps with the notion I had about a temporally extended moral agent that, as you said, can take responsibility, moral responsibility, ethical responsibility, existential responsibility for themselves in some fashion. Yeah, very much. And interestingly, one of the things certainly for me is that if we define a person this way behaviorally, then at least in science fiction, we realize there are other creatures that are persons that are not humans. So I’ll often say human persons, but Jabba the Hutt we can talk about his morality, but clearly he was a self-conscious being that justified his actions on social stage in a particular way. So that affords an interesting thing. People often wonder, you say human persons, Greg, why would you say that? It’s because actually I want to capture human beingness, which is grounded in the primate, and culture person, which is then grounded in the socialized process of narration, which I think is elaborated perfectly in John, in the model. There’s a historical precedent for this. I mean, we’ve had religions and mythologies that have told us about non-human persons from a lit- Totally, yeah, right. Absolutely, absolutely. So Greg, it seems to me one of the things by that definition of personhood, it seems to me that based in this model, the integrity or the, not sure what adjective to use here, but the Rogerian filter is pretty pivotal then to that definition of personhood, because if it’s a dialectic between the private and public selves that requires a sufficient degree of differentiation between the private and public selves, then that filter is pretty pivotal to the maintenance of that status, right? Because I mean, one of the things that happen, I think that happens, I think, when people become, let’s say, quite ideological or susceptible to ideology, is that that distinction, that capacity to differentiate between the public and the private self starts to erode. Right, right. And it’s also one of the things I think that’s happening with the mass digitization of our personal avatars is that that filter, to me, that strikes me that that filter becomes more permeable when we’re ensconced in what we might call a digital self or a digitally social self. So I don’t know, do you have any response to that? Does that strike you as right? Well, it certainly strikes me as, yes, it absolutely strikes me as right, as foundational to navigate these different domains. And the process by which they are navigated speaks a lot in my bias nation to whether or not you’re gonna have grounded integrity and health in particular ways, okay, or all sorts of different potential kinds of conflicts and difficulties. If we go to the digital, okay, if we go to the digital, what does the digital afford if you can then drop into a completely different position, like say a troll or any kind of anonymity, with no immediate feedback in regard to what your identity is? It disconnects, we’re designed, evolutionary design for an oral, indigenous relational space, okay, with enormous intimacy. And then the capacity, and I would argue, this is a fascinating question and I don’t think we have a, I don’t have enough knowledge, I’d like to talk to anthropologists and whatever, but I would argue the cultivation of the hunter gatherer tribe around this issue would very much afford much more opportunities for long-term congruence between these different domains, okay, because of the nature of the oral indigenous relation. The capacity that we have to jump out of different perspectives, okay, on the one hand, affords us a lot of flexibility, so in some ways that’s good, and maybe different cultural systems will afford more multiplicity of role in self. I think that that flexibility and diversity could be great. At the same time, I think that it’s gonna pull on coherence in particular kinds of ways that may really generate or engender certain kinds of dysfunctions of the self, clinically, what are those and what do those look like? Does that get at what you were, I’m not sure if I tracked that 100%. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m wondering though, I mean, I think that was great, and I’m actually, I mean, there’s growing evidence that we work better for rationality when we’re in groups that have that sensory motor intimate coupling, because the my side bias is one of the most powerful, bias is warping all of our rationality, and I mean, Socrates long ago discovered, well, the best antidote to that is somebody else with a countervailing my side bias, and the two of you have to work out a position that transcends both of those, and that’s at the heart of theologus, and I think that’s important, and so everything was said was great, but it seems to me, Greg, I don’t think this is contradicting, seems to me that each one of these filters impacts on personhood in different ways, I mean, yeah, there’s the social identification role sense of personhood, but I mean, there’s also your relationship to yourself or your soul, which has been a defining feature of personhood, and then I think ultimately the way we, I mean, this is Heidegger, right, and our being in the world is also something that has to be woven into our personhood in some important ways, for example, not to use your language, Chris, a necessary feature of our biology is our mortality, and man, our personhood better deal with our mortality and incorporate it in some realistic, but also aspirational fashion, if we’re going to be genuine persons, I mean, an old term for human persons was the mortals, right, we were the mortals, that was the term for our personhood, and funnily enough, right, it was almost always exclusively towards human beings, even though the animals, of course, die, and so I think all of the filters in different ways have to be somehow appropriated by and into personhood, does that seem fair to you? 100%, yeah, and so, I mean, the attentional filter, because that’s just primate stuff, that’s primate getting conscious, then once you layer a self-conscious agent, okay, Dan McAdams puts this in a developmental context, and so it’s first important that these things do develop because they’re navigating different attractors, a three-year-old doesn’t have the capacity, they’re just narrating, okay, so the narrating for in relationship to the capacity for perspectival taking, what happens at three, four, and five for precocious kids is guess what, they start lying, okay, so lying now is the capacity to have some theory of mind and start the process of justifying a different narrative to maintain your interests and see what happens, right, and so this dynamic about how this is held, okay, now what if you were to say, you slapped your kid upside the head, you never lie to me, okay, what kind of filtration, right, does that bring to bear in relationship to something else that says, oh, that’s very clever of you, but there are lies that are problematic, and what we try to do is tell the truth because of this, okay, so one’s an authoritarian parenting style, one’s the other authoritative parenting style, but we can just imagine the developmental sequence of both the experiences of contingency in the social environment about what you’re praised for, what you’re judged for, how that’s justified, and then what happens as you begin to develop your capacity cognitively to self-model and narrate those self-modeling, you know, and then it’s on really then, Carl Jung’s got a great line, and actually John Horgan also did this, there are a couple of people will have their moment of adolescent awakening that are actually phase shifts that they remember, okay, so both Carl Jung and John Horgan, I believe it’s John Horgan in his book on mind-body problems, talks opens his mind-body problem with this narrative, and apparently he was 10 or 11 fishing one day, he’s wandering along, and the recursive strange loop of self-realization dawns on him that he is me, and then as he says it, it completes the loop, and he apparently woke up to his friends, and he was like, oh my God, I’m me, and his friends were like, what are you talking about, right? You know, we’re just, of course you’re you, we’re fishing, you know, it’s like, and then he freaked out, and then that had a really phase shift, you know, kind of aloneness for him, Carl Jung reported the exact same thing, but he had a sense of agency in relationship to it, it was like, oh my gosh, I’m now me, most people don’t have this phase shift, but adolescence is the period upon which the narrative system now consists across time, and just like we talked about the development of the perspectival knower, and the working memory into the longer term memory that can extend the generalized me self in the image and modeling, the narrative self does the same thing, comes online, and then by the time your identity is adolescence, then all of a sudden you’re an agent of some sort, a self-conscious agent across time, and then you start taking responsibility for yourself. How the architecture of that emerges, and then how that is held is absolutely crucial, absolutely crucial, and I think that we’re, our modern day society, in terms of a meaning into mental health crisis, is not doing a great job of figuring out the right architecture, social setting, et cetera, there are lots of different reasons that we’re operating in a way that is not developmentally conducive to a coherent integrated relation between the three levels and proper filtration between them. All right, so what I’d like to, Auguste, kind of continue then on this little journey in relation. So, you know, in my earlier, you know, I have this crazy tree that for a unified theory of psychology, and what I’d like to do then is, because for me, this self then brings me, like I said, into the unified approach, and I’m happy to say we just got a publication, came out today on unification being a valid way to approach psychotherapy integration. Congratulations. And what, you know, the eight of us on the paper basically argued was that the unified review can be taken in which you see the landscape of different approaches with degrees of coherence. And that actually really hasn’t been articulated yet. And we’re, you know, justifying that, hey, actually there is a way to see the mountain, the paradigms as mountains and see the landscape of mountains before us, or use the blind men and the elephant or whatever. So the unified approach then basically has four different ideas. And what these get into is some of the key concepts that we already talk about. And I’m gonna allude to psychology’s great branches, and this is gonna be relevant, but it’s gonna shift me from the science side of the equation into the practice side. And I don’t think that people always have, we wanna be very clear about the different tasks of a scientist relative to a practitioner. It requires different epistemological and ethical considerations, and you’re actually given different roles. So, and that changes the relationship. And we’re gonna then give you my map of not so much personality as almost anonymous for me with character, and that’s in part because I critique personality theory as being sort of captured by traits. And then the reason why that’s important gets back to what Chris was saying was because a rich and textured model of the self that both is validating it and it affords us an understanding of the domains in their inner relation is exactly the kind of thing we need to be doing to nourish the soul and spirit in the 21st century. And I don’t know that we’ve done a good job of that. And part of the meaning of mental health crisis is part of that. So I’m gonna be giving you a framework, Chris, to how I map out different systems of character adaptation means then of development. And then what does that mean in relationship to functioning? Prior to do that though, I’m gonna give you a quick model of wellbeing. And so that because the angle will change a little bit in relationship to, from a clinical perspective, we wanna think in relationship to wellbeing and functioning. And so what I’m gonna be like, when I come in, sit with somebody, I’m like, hey, what’s your wellbeing from your perspective? And then here’s how I’m gonna map your character functioning and development. Very much like you would go to a physician and say, hey, this is how I’m feeling. Okay, give me the subjective experience of your pain and symptoms. And then now I will bring my analysis of your physiology and the various organ systems, how they might interrelate, how they go wrong, and then how we would put those two pieces together to create an assessment and a plan for how you might embark on a journey of healing. And then the other concept that I wanna have access to in some of those conversations is the ideographic self. I’ve alluded to this a couple of different times, but we’re generating a nomenclatic model of the self. But that is radically different than the ideographic experience of being. So this is the difference between me as Greg, Chris is Chris and John is John. And we all have selves that correspond to the model if that model’s right. So we’re all part of that, we’re all examples of that. But we’re also ideographic different. And when we are talking about the embodied experience of being existentially, when we were talking about our own life satisfaction and meaning, this positionality of ideographic self is absolutely crucial. And antithetical are essentially opposite to the stance that science takes, I will argue. Okay, so it’s a very different epistemology, just like science in my estimation is pretty blind when it comes to saying moral claims, like what is good science, it’s not a great epistemology for determining what is good. It’s not really well adapted to historical contingent ideographic perspectives in the world. And that’s an important point that I think many people get confused all the time because they want a theory of everything as if it would then explain my ideographic contingent subjective experience. I’m not sure that science is really up to that task and we can talk a little bit about why. There’s the big difference between explaining things in terms of a causal law and explaining things in terms of a non-repeatable causal pathway. I mean, there’s a different explanation for why salt dissolves in water and why Napoleon lost that water loop. Those are very different kinds of- 100%, exactly, exactly. And much of our lives is what is just sort of this idiosyncratic, from a science perspective, idiosyncratic contingent causation that you need details around. And then you turn around and like, Napoleon lost at Waterloo, like that’s what’s important, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna give you a Napoleon. Okay, so much of what’s important to us is error from the vantage point of science, which is an interesting thing for us to keep in mind, at least from my vantage point about what kinds of, if we’re gonna develop a coherent knowledge systems, we have to understand what unto epistemology is appropriate when to be explaining certain features that we wanna specialize. That maps into a distinction I often make, and this goes back to the self-relevance issue, between a universal theory of the process of relevance realization, and there being no universal theory of what people particularly find relevant. Totally, exactly. Which is when we put that in the clinic room, and I say, you’re the expert on you, much of what I’m doing is I’m dropping the ideographic, contingent position in their beam. And then I will say, here’s a model of character adaptation and functioning that we might be able to draw on that allows us to contextualize some perspectives in your folk understanding that may get now enriched. You will then bring what’s important to you from your perspective. And so those two perspectives are very similar to the clinical. I hadn’t seen that before, Greg. I hope I’m understanding you correctly. Part of what you’re doing is mediating between these two epistemological modes. You’re mediating nomological models and the ideographic, right, particular self-relevance. Wow. In the clinic room, I would argue, you have to do that in the clinic room, in my estimation. If you wanna honor, I mean, the fundamental, for me, all good therapy begins with Rogers. It positions you to honor the first-person phenomenological point of view and to create a context in which you would allow that to grow, which means you honor the ideographic relevance realization of the uniqueness of the individual. And so then maybe to the extent, but to the extent that that is unreliable, unrepeatable, and unique to them, it’s now out of our abductive science behavioral description of the world in many ways. Or it’s just, so it’s a, yeah. So I wanna get a generalized model and then I wanna afford them the opportunity to interact with that model relative to their own. Right, right. Yeah, it seems to me what you’re doing, Greg, is you’re sort of clinically creating an arena out of the generalized model in order that they might develop their, sort of the quiddity of theirself by exercising agents in the arena of that model. Oh, wow, that’s pretty good. Exactly. That’s pretty good. That’s exactly what I’m doing. So now let me show you some of the arena then, what we can then see. So very quickly, in terms of my map of the institution of American psychology, I see there are three great branches. So one of which, I’m sorry, one’s basic psychology and other’s human psychology. What we have been doing here with the cognitive science of the self is jumping from animal into that. And then there’s this other whole, I train, I have my JMU shirt on. We’re combined integrator, which means we cut across clinical counseling and school to generate a combined integrated unified approach to health service psychology, which then falls under the licensed practitioner. And now we’re making that connection in relation. And then there are these other domains of psychology, but I wanna get into the architecture. So let’s get into the architecture. So when a client comes in and I say, hey, so what brings you in today? What I immediately start to do is I then start to think about them in relationship to their psychology, through their wellbeing overall. The overall wellbeing can start with their subjective. So I wanna empathize with their perspective, may experience then subjective wellbeing. And this you can actually divide with our consistency. The empirical evidence is pretty good on this. There are really four broad, if you do factor analysis on subjective wellbeing, you can divide it up into four different domains. So two are affective in nature. The affective domain is the state and trait relation of positive to negative affect in terms of subjective wellbeing. So this is your hedonic tone. So if you’re really high state negative and trait negative versus really low positive state and trait, well, then you’re miserable. And then on the flip side, at least in terms of your hedonic tone, then you’re really positive. You also then have a cognitive evaluation of life satisfaction. This is the narrative part, extending across time, thinking about identity, say, how are you? It actually can be then, this can be divided up into two domains, a general sense of life satisfaction, and then specific domains. And this then can be then mapped this way. So what you have here is in the center of this is the level of a meaningful engagement and reflective life satisfaction. So this is the narrator saying, hey, I’m really engaged in life and I’m really satisfied and I find it meaningful, or the converse, like I’m disengaged, this is all meaningless and I’ve got no life satisfaction. And I’m anchored then to an affective structure. Well, hey, how much of depression, anxiety, shame, guilt, anger, frustration are you experiencing? Okay. Versus joy, pride, love, awe, things like those ones. And then we look about, okay, now tell me a little bit about your relationships with your family. Tell me about how you’re doing in the world of personal functioning. If you’re a student, academic, what’s your economic situation? And what you see here then are the various domains of functioning that I will then be eliciting as the person narrates from there. In terms of the overall system I built, I have this thing called the iQuad coin. And this serves as an actual placeholder for this unique, ideographic experience of being. So then this is a symbol that then represents whatever the person’s unique self is, their named unique, ideographic position in the world. And actually then the architecture or arena or justification then that I’m using is this unified theory, unified approach that informs me about the theoretical structures of human psychology and then gives me a map that’s relevant to psychological healing that allows us to then be informed about what it is that might enable an individual to achieve awareness and then acceptance and active change in a positive direction. So around the life satisfaction, then you reside as an organism that has health and functioning domains. And we can divide this into two domains. So one of them would be what you would go to see with a physician. So the physician manages your biophysiological health. As a psychologist, I’m then looking at core domains of your character adaptation and functioning. And what I will show you is the whole system of the two branches, the fifth and sixth branches of the tree that can afford us a map of these domains. And I’ll get into more detail of that in a second. The other things I’m looking at is yes, hey, if you have, one of my big challenges in the world in 2012 was I got a cyst in my back and I had chronic back pain for four months. Although I learned, chronic actually doesn’t start until six months. It feels, if you’re in a lot of pain for four months, it feels chronic guys. But technically, I didn’t quite reach chronic. I’m not like it, yeah. This is just intermediate. It’s like, no, this does not feel intermediate. Four months, it is goddamn things a nightmare. But I mean, clearly my entire life, I couldn’t really work all the things I took a lot of pleasure and had a lot of difficulty in. Obviously everyone that’s gone through serious health issues know unbelievably crucial. The biophysiological world is, and there’s an enormous amount of interface between our psychological cognitive worlds, relational worlds, somaticizing is this very murky territory between stress and distress and all of those kinds of issues. But fundamentally are, as John has pointed out, this dynamic bio-energetic ground is absolutely crucial for this. And then the person is then placed in a particular context environmentally. So they should reside. If you’re drinking lead in Detroit, that’s no good in terms of biophysical ecology. What are the natural resources and technologies that are available? Your financial economic situation, relationships with other individuals, the overall norms and values and how you fit into that as well. So what this affords then is a picture of the person in context and I see here then time and development. And you can think if you have knowledge of Broffenbrenner, he’s a social ecological theorist. He places people in these kinds of domains. For me, I also then wanna be very clear that I’m engaged in analysis of my own values that are operative here. So one of the things I’ll tell my students at a role play to give them, imagine me coming in as a client and say, you know, I’m kinda anxious. I almost went out and little trigger warning. I almost went out and raped a woman last night, but I got really nervous. And then I felt really bad about that. Can you help me overcome my anxiety? So immediately the proper reaction is, oh my God, what are you, we need to talk. And the answer of course is no, I won’t help you overcome that anxiety. But if it was, hey, I really wanna go to a party and meet up with friends, then my answer would be, oh, of course. So embedded in what we see as dysfunctional is layered with all sorts of values about what is good. And this is absolutely crucial when we’re now in the applied side and we’re interacting with people about trying to affect change towards some valued outcome. So we have to be very clear about what those valued outcomes are. And the interface between our valued outcomes as a psychologist, other outcomes, what are society’s valued outcomes? It’s a very, very tricky and requires a lot of philosophical reflection. Sometimes I think the field in trying to emphasize its empirical outcomes doesn’t do quite enough in relationship with one of the ethical, aesthetic, philosophical implications of all the worldviews and values about. That was great. Could I ask a question around just that? Please. So, I mean, I only touch on this literature from one direction and there’s a growing distinction being made between people who use the term subjective wellbeing, Ryan and DC, people like that. And as you put it, the hedonic tone. And then people who talk about meaning in life and the eudaemonia. And that these two shouldn’t be identified together because they can vary independently of each other. One can go down while the other goes up. Exactly. And so, like I see subjective wellbeing on there, but you seem to also have eudaemonia. Like, I just wanna get clear about how this model stands in relationship because I do a lot of work on the factors that contribute to meaning in life. And they’re very different from the factors that contribute to sort of the standard model of what we’re referring to when we talk about subjective wellbeing. The autonomy, the connectedness, all that stuff. Those things really increase subjective wellbeing, but they don’t do much for eudaemonia, which needs things like significance, coherence, mattering, purpose, et cetera. Totally. Yes. So, when I, the paper I did on this on the nested model articulates the dispute between subjective wellbeing and hedonic tone and the eudaemonic approaches that various individuals have taken. And it delineates what the fundamental differences are. There is debate about whether, how much they vary and how broadly you look. If you look very broad and at a non-brush stroke view, you actually do see an enormous amount of overlap. At least Todd Castian makes that case. But depending on what, how fine-grained analysis, then you see enormous amounts of difference. So, it really does depend on the level of lensing that you engage in. So, whether you’re a lumper or splitter, I think they’re crucially different. Here’s, I’ll give you an example of why I think they’re unbelievably different. We developed a self-report questionnaire and this I actually built and could share with people a wellbeing screen and checkup system, a real elaborate analysis to cultivate the assessment of an individual. And we were developing the screener and we went, we gave it to a number of people. We also went down to Western State, which is an inpatient hospital. We gave it to like 15 people there. Three of the individuals there scored as high as possible on their own self-judgment of their subjective wellbeing. So, how happy are you? How’s seven? Seven out of 10. How well are things going here? Seven. They’re basically in little hypomanic states and their ego state in that state is they wanna be pleasing, they wanna be happy. There it is. So, then we ask anybody, well, okay, should these individuals be considered as high, well-being completely? And very few people are willing to say, hey, no, that’s not high wellbeing, right? You’re an inpatient. Now, we can certainly appreciate the importance of subjective wellbeing, but there’s an enormous amount more to wellbeing, certainly when we reach it out from a values protected. So, the eudaimonic approach then asks us, and this gets into this issue about what is a clinician? I mean, what is our values, clinical psychology values? One of the very, I just did a you talking with Greg with my long-term friend and psychological theorist, Steve Quackenbush, and he was always troubled by the fact, and he’s not a clinician, but there’s good evidence that individuals, there’s a correlation between a bias and rosy glasses of interpretation and say how control you are, how attractive you are. There’s a bias towards self-serving, sort of engendering a rosy positive illusion, okay? And that’s associated with positive wellbeing. And in fact, in relationship, there’s also this depressive realism is the other way to look at it, is that people that are mildly depressed actually are more accurate on how attractive, how effective, and how likely things are gonna turn out well or poorly for you. So, well, wait a minute. If you think that you’re just going into the thing, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna increase people’s accuracy and their happiness, right? Okay, well, actually the data suggests that, no, very often those things may not be in the same ballpark. Now somebody comes to you and says, well, I’m actually pretty attractive. And you were like, actually, no, you’re not that attractive. Do we say that? Correct. Okay, so this whole issue about what we should hold people accountable to, what people do grow into, what do we consider to be optimal? Is it the struggle to enrich one’s life with wisdom, knowledge, and meaningful reflection on how to be a good ancestor in the long-term? Or is it to, hey, have a lot of fun and have a lot of toys and play around while you’re here and then you die? These are powerful questions that depending on which one you ask specialized and which one you decide to ground, leads to a lot of different kinds of conclusions about what we should do. So it’s a very, very rich discussion and complication. The nested model itself, I think, affords us a way to see at least some of the primary concerns of the eudaimonic people, at least in terms of optimal functioning. That’s what I’d like to get into next is because what I will then show is how I map then the character adaptation systems and functioning. And then we can see then how this brings to life how the psychological doctor sees the individual from the outside kind of perspective and then sees their different systems, if that makes, if that is reasonable. No, that was good. I was just trying to get it. I mean, for me, the eudaimonic stuff ultimately plugs into Socrates’ claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. Totally. That you can have a life in which, and Socrates regularly confronted people who had, what you could, I think very readily call sort of subjective wellbeing. They were sort of contented with themselves and thought highly of themselves and they were enjoying their life. And he was basically, maybe, his job was to sort of smash that because the dimensions and parameters of meaning in life were not being addressed at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Go ahead. In the- Sorry, great. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, very quickly in the paper, I give the problem of the happy Nazi. Okay. So, you know, it’s like, hey, it’s 1942 and he’s climbing the ranks and he’s really, you know, but he’s leading Auschwitz, you know, it’s like, so his subjective wellbeing’s good. Even his relationships are good. His status is good. But as soon as you hear that he’s leading Auschwitz as opposed to, you know, helping the good guys, however we might define it, then all of a sudden our flavor changes dramatically. And that’s, we at least need to attend to that. And that’s what this red circle, at least, captures the variables along those lines. So anyway, Chris, you were gonna say? Well, I know. Before, I was thinking also of the opposite because I’m convinced that Susan Wolf is right, not the opposite, something separate. It’s not just the morality that we’re, meaning in life is not reducible to either subjective wellbeing or to moral issues. So she gives you like the example of the heroic noble but soldier, he’s living life by all standards of subjective wellbeing is horrible. He’s got lots of negative affect all the time, right? He’s suffering harm, physical harm, deprivation, yet he, like maybe he’s an American soldier on the Western front and he really believes that this is important and this is meaningful. And so he’s willing to put up with all of this because of the meaning, how meaningful it is and stuff like that. Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that, one of the reasons I really like your nested model, Greg, is that it shows how each of these levels can become the normative framing that surveys the other levels. Oh, right. And one of the things that Socrates, so to pick up on your point, John, one of the things that Socrates does frequently in Plato’s dialogues is what he’ll do is he’ll actually take something very similar to this and what he’ll do is he’ll just trade the frames, right? So he’ll work his way between the levels and he’ll have his interlocutors undertake a self-examination through the prism of their affluence or through the prism of their notoriety, through the prism of things that we might call more idolatrous aspects of self-concept. And he’ll alternate between them and he’ll scale up and he’ll scale down. And what he’s trying to do is find the right normative level of resolution to calibrate the framing for that particular discourse. Brilliant, Chris, that’s brilliant. That’s a wonderful articulation of what I’m often trying to accomplish. Because I’m often trying to, and this gets actually back to the eye framing and the ways in which you try to multiple perspectival, mentalized considerations across a wide variety of different aspects of angling. That’s a brilliant articulation. That’s what I was thinking, Greg, exactly that. Like I was thinking about how there’s the Socratic exaptation of the hyper-object of the moving seat of consciousness, right? And how nevertheless, there is a continuous identity throughout that and Socrates is playing with that beautifully. Wow, that’s really good because I hadn’t put that ever together in my thinking. Thank you for that. Well, it speaks to the efficacy of the model and the way that you’ve put it together, Greg, right? It becomes multi-apt. Yeah, no, thank you, yeah, absolutely. Totally, I mean, what you’re doing here is doing exactly what you’ve foreshadowed. You’re just affording rich discussion and reflection. So I’m actually, let’s do a check-in. I noticed that it’s about 727 or so. I didn’t get quite as far, but I’m happy to keep going, but I wanna check in and see where you guys are in terms of whether or not we should kind of summarize or continue because I would like to put the other two pieces, I’ve got two other pieces I’d like to share them together. So I was thinking maybe we should put a hold on it. I don’t know, let me just check in and see where you guys are. I think we should keep to sort of a standard expectation for the length of an episode. That’s what I was thinking. And so, I mean, and however many episodes we end up needing to finish these other dimensions that you and Chris are gonna bring out, I’m happy to keep meeting and keep doing this. And hopefully our followers, our audience will be happy to keep following us. I think, yeah, perhaps here’s a good place to summarize and sort of gather together, but I really like, I like, like this is again, like you’ve got the progressive argument, but there’s lots of dialogue with spinning around it. That’s really wonderful. So yeah, I think if we close off for today, that would be good. Great, great. Yeah, so I’ll just summarize, let me just summarize then why I find myself so intrigued and encouraged by what I’ve seen, John, in terms of what you put together. And then of course now, including Kristen relationship, this dialogue, and I’m really excited about making this bridge from my work as a clinician and then thinking about the axial age transformations and what kinds of meaningful large scale considerations we need to engage in as well as the existential implications for ourself. But bottom line is, is that when I think about what the experiential self was, I basically had a model of a thing, but what I didn’t have was really the specific way in which that model now grounds in the emergence of a system of consciousness, how that would work in terms of focal relevance realization, how it might emerge out of valence qualia, but then definitely get differentiated into adverbial and adjectival. And then how that creates a context for the many me’s to be then generalized into the generalized me, and especially then this self other world relationship, which then the emotional valence of that in terms of attachment history, in terms of competition, cooperation, and autonomy, the felt sense of being in the world. We can talk certainly something next time we’ll be into some of the more character domains and this relationship system is domain is key. And by the way, we then place that observing eye in relationship to domains that are, hey, just age and arena environment, the whole model of the self, how it jumps around, and then how that would then correspond with the justifying ego in context. It’s a really, really powerful, much richer articulation of the experiential self than I had. And at the same time, it fits with a lot of the other pieces that have been put together. Well, I feel the same in reverse. Like I had this thing, and then the way you’ve situated into this and your model of beautiful and the way you’re articulating and so rich and beautiful. And I mean, like I said, it’s really affording just powerful reflection back on where we’ve come from, but also reflection forward on where we’re going on also reflection outward onto these broader domains where we will eventually start talking about, you know, spirit and soul and the Socratic self and things like that. This has just been wonderful, Greg. I don’t have anything more to say, just thank you. Thank you. Likewise. Fantastic. All right, well, I look forward to picking it up next time. And then we’ll like, we’ll lay some of that out and then we’ll really get into some critical stuff. And then that will set up the transition over to Chris. Oh, we’ve got a cliffhanger here, which is great. Okay, so we’ll see you all next time on the Elusive Eye.