https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kAGGvKKo36o
Welcome everyone to the Illusive Eye, the nature and function of the self. I’m joined once again by my friends and fellow interlocutors, Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastapietro. Can you guys both say hi? Hey, hey folks, we’re back. Hello. Nice to be here. So we’re continuing this journey together and this is a reminder that it’s not only the content that we’re making an argument for, but the manner of the presentation of the material that we’re making an argument for. We’re trying to portray, exemplify, demonstrate a new way in which we can tackle these issues both with rigor and hopefully with accessibility and in a way that allows people to participate in their ongoing generation rather than the more traditional academic presentation of the polished, finished, published product. That’s a lot of P’s. So what we’ve been doing up till now is we’ve been laying out the folk model of the nature and function of the self, making use of folk phenomenology, folk psychology. We went through a long feature list given to us by a famous article by Galen Strassen. I added two more to that list that I think were plausible. Greg and Chris seem to agree with that. And then we began to do what we have to do in science, which is problematize the obvious, problematize the common sensical in order to try and get below what is occurring to us in our everyday experience. That’s how science does everything. So we began problematizing the folk model of the self. We did that last time by noting that the folk model is a feature list and feature lists, and I’ve argued this elsewhere and published on this elsewhere, are famously inadequate to capture the, right, the, I don’t want to say complete because we never have it, a richer and more comprehensive. Efficient. Yeah, understanding of the phenomenon because they lack the structural functional organization, the logos, the gestalt, the IDOS. We keep coming back to this because it keeps being important again and again and again. And so that lack of a structural functional integration organization so that the thing behaves as a causal whole and it is appropriate to attribute properties to it as a causal whole, that is actually taken to be a central feature of the self. The self is an integrated unified thing. The fact that the structural functional organization that affords its unity is not actually in the folk model means the folk model is even by its own standards and criteria insufficient and inadequate. Okay, that’s, I think, a pretty good argument. The second argument we went into was the idea of the self is somehow a continuity, a permanent identity. We noted that the identity of the self though is very problematic because it’s not logical identity, right? It’s not categorical identity. It’s some kind of weird identity via narrative, but the narrative was also problematized, first of all, because narrative is incredibly biasing and also the powerfully demonstrated reconstructive nature of memory, which undermines the sense that something identical is going on. So, people often use the metaphor that the self is a self-writing story, but if we were to be really fair, the self is a self-erasing as well as self-writing story, and what remains, it’s not clear what we’re actually pointing to that would actually justify us when we do the bizarre things like point at a picture of ourselves at two years of age and say, there I am, which is a very bizarre thing, and we take it for granted. But if we open up this, we know that there’s tremendous problems and trying to use logical identity for things that are in continuous development is very problematic. We talked about Theseus’s ship and that our conceptual structures don’t actually track what we’re trying to talk about in a very clear or coherent way. So, there’s already two central features of the folk model that have been problematized. Any issues we need to address, guys, before I continue with the problematization argument? That’s a good summary. Great. I will say that the presence in priests that we brought in that resonated with me quite strongly in terms of just a feature to attend to. Yes. Thank you, Greg. So, I talked about the demonstrative indexicality of the self, the demonstrative indexicality of the self, and that sense of presence as one of the features that I proposed adding to Strawson’s list. So, thank you for re-emphasizing that, Greg. I think that’s very important and that will be pertinent to what we talked about today. We also talked about perspectival knowing and participatory knowing in connection with that sense of presence and that the self knows itself by being itself in some kind of participatory fashion. And Chris did some interesting initial variations on that. I expect him to return to this in greater detail and greater depth as the conversation unfolds. So, let’s continue the problematization. So, the thingness of the self, the self is a thing, right? And this is already related to the feature, the lack, the feature list, lack of structural functional organization, but the idea that the self is a thing. And Strawson emphasizes a robust kind of thing, like a thing that really hangs together and, right, what would have been called in Aristotelian terms a substance, not what we now today mean by a substance, but the unified thing that is the bearer of properties. And people go, yeah, yeah, and myself, we already said somewhere inside here, of course, we noted that that was folk phenomenology. It’s not academic phenomenology because cultures play with the self in different places and that’s where they feel it or experience it. So, people do clearly think that it’s a thing, even though they’re not consistent on where it is as a thing. And this is one of the things we’re going to talk about because we’re going to and I’m going to come back to this later. So, I’m just going to introduce the distinction because we have a notion of a thing as an object where we talk about something that has a definitive temporal spatial boundary and location. So, it makes sense to talk about being able to point to it or count it or individuate it. Now, for instance, there are three, well, there’s images, but you know what I mean? There are three bodies here. One, two, three. I can point to them and count them. Your body, your body, my body. Right. That’s right. So, that’s one sense of the thing. The thing is an object. That’s what I’m going to emphasize. What I want to come back to is to introduce a notion that was brought up by, created by Timothy Morton in what’s called object oriented ontology. And this is this is his notion. I’m actually reading the book right now with Dan Schape of a hyper object. A hyper object is a thing that forms an intelligible whole. Has it’s we could attribute causal powers to it as a whole, but we can’t point to it in a spatial temporal bounded way. Let me give you a clear example. Global warming. Global warming is a thing, at least for those of us who believe in science. Global warming is a thing. And it manifests itself in a multitude of effects all over the world. But you like it may, you know, it causes there to be more rain here and more drought here. And I get more of a sunburn here. Right. But no one no none of those events are global warming. It’s right. It is. And it’s not just an, you know, just the set of them together. We have an idea that there is somehow a unified whole that is taking place around the globe as a whole. That is the source of the problem. It was only happening in Arizona, for example, it wouldn’t be global warming. So somehow we understand that this is as a whole having causal impacts that definitely exist. So it’s actual it’s acting. It’s creating problems for us. But it’s very hard to say, well, there it is or there it is. Here’s another one. Evolution. Evolution is a real thing, a real process. And you might say, well, why call it a hyper-object? We’ll get back to that in a sec. And so it’s a real process. Right. It obviously, you know, doesn’t cause because it’s not agent, but it it affords things happening. It constrains the biological reproduction of organisms such that they change in a way that makes them more fitted to the environment, blah, blah, blah, blah. But where is evolution? Point to it. You can’t. OK. And I would propose that I think Jung understood what he called the self as a whole. The hyper-object of the psyche. And we can perhaps come back to that. That’s how it’s going to be relevant. I want to talk about some people have said to me, well, why not call it a process? And then what what people like Morton will say is, well, what’s a process? Well, it’s a relationship between objects that are doing things, causing events. And then can you say, well, can relations between objects themselves be objects like my body, for example? Oh, yes. And it’s like, so what’s gained by calling it a process? Right. What like what what what is gained by that? Well, you well, it unfolds through time, but don’t objects persist. So we have this distinction. But typically what people try to emphasize with process over object is that a process isn’t primarily a material entity because it’s also a causal. It’s not just matter. There’s relations and causal relations in time and structural functional organization. But then what that does, people like Morton says, that prejudice us into thinking that objects are material things where we now think we don’t think that they’re solid, inert masses anymore. We actually think that they are processes, processes of atoms, et cetera. And so they say they’re I think they’re correctly arguing that the distinction is pretty much disappeared. And so calling it an object is the idea there is to emphasize its objectivity in the sense that it really exists independent of our conception of it, like global warming, like evolution. So I hope that was sort of helpful. So there’s I want to talk about the first sense of thing here, the sense of a countable object. But I wanted to introduce this distinction so that later on we can come back to the possibility that the self is a hyper object. It really exists even though it’s not a delimited spatially bounded thing, because I’m going to argue that many of the claims that the self doesn’t exist are rejections of the self as an inert sort of Cartesian substance, a bound spatial temporal bounded thing. And we don’t actually define most real things that way anymore. I don’t even think the table is an inert Cartesian substance anymore. So I need to introduce this distinction now so that when I bring it back later, right, it won’t come out of left field. Is that OK, guys? Does that make sense? And like I said, that will open us up to talking about the extra dimensionality, the hyper dimensionality, perhaps of the self. Again, ala Jung and post Jungian notions of the self. So I’ll just I’ll just chime in. I really like that. So there’s the you know, there’s the concretized thingness of a particular object in classic matter and motion thought. OK, I think we need a more complicated ontology for science. You know that I’m a fan of the concept of behavior, which basically introduces at the raw metaphysics, objects, fields and change as sort of the basic conceptual grammar. And I believe that that conceptual grammar actually is what we sort of the metaphysical structures we look through scientifically from an exterior epistemological perspective. And what that does do is it will provide a frame for these kinds of entities like you refer to as object process over time, hyper objects across stratified layers. And so that’s a very important distinction. Excellent, excellent. So let’s go now to the more standard notion of a thing, a robust thing, a spatially temporally bounded thing. Although what I’m going to say does will have impact on the discussion of the reality of the cell. So I want to invoke a distinction made famous in Western psychology by James. But this distinction is perennial. You will find analogies to this distinction or, in fact, isomorphically identical distinctions in different cultures at different historical periods. And like a couple of researchers, I’m going to say I think this is a I would almost put it on the list of features, but I’m putting it here because it problematizes the folk model. So it doesn’t properly belong in the folk model, but it seems to be a central feature or property when we try and talk about the self. So the distinction I’m going to use and I’m going to use, I said, I’m going to use the person who introduced it in Western psychology. This is James distinction between the I and the me, the I capital I and the me. By the way, this is where we get the title for the series, the elusive I. It’s from James’s distinction. So let’s talk a little bit about this distinction and what it means. So the me is everything about myself that I can be aware of as an object. I am an object to my own awareness. I can note things about Lee, like I can note things about my body. I can note things about my mind. I can note things about my what we called character last time and or temperament. I can note things about my memory. Right. And these are all things that I know. And often the noting of them also comes with an identification marker. Like, that’s me. That’s me. The clothes aren’t that I’m that are really close to me right now. Aren’t really me. Right. The glasses, maybe they’re part of me. Right. Right. Right. Because of the meme. Right. So the me is the self as object. It is something that is you can definitely identify with. That is you can definitely point to it. You can at least for some of these features, a little bit more difficult with memory, but you can point to sort of bounded spatial temporal things. And that goes without, you know, probably. Oh, well, right. That’s it. But then James points out, but wait, wait, there is always something that is doing the act of observing. There is always an eye and you can pun on it with I. Right. There’s an eye that is observing the me. And this is I as the subject. And the and you say, OK, that’s kind of weird. And first of all, let’s notice that the self is already not a monolithic singular thing. The self is already a relationship between a concrete empirically observable, the me and a not. And this is the thing, a not concrete observable, because it is always the observing and never the observed eye. When you say, but I can step back and look at that, we’re going to come back to that. The problem is when you step back and look at you looking. Now that’s part of the me. The previous act of looking, which you’re tracking, is part of the me because you’re aware of it. You can point to it, but you’re not you’re not pointing to the eye. You’re pointing from the eye to the me. And if you step back to look at that eye and you can never step back and look at the eye because it is always that which is observing. So Dyckman, in fact, his version of this, another psychologist, his version of this from his 1982 book, The Observing Self, is to make a distinction between the observed self and the observing self. And the observing self is never observed. You say, notice how already how weird the self is. It’s got these two, this very thingy aspect and this very not thingy aspect. And yet they’re bound in an inseparable relation to each other. And the folk model is not really handling that very well. I wanted to I want to go on a little bit more about this. And this is what Dyckman emphasizes. And you can see it even in people as diverse as Sartre. You can see it in the Upanishads where the one Upanishad says, it is not it is not that which the eye sees that is Atman. It is that by which the eye sees. It is not that which the ear hears by that, but that by which the ear hears that is Atman. And Atman is often taken translated as self or soul. Right. So this is perennial. And like in Vedanta and in Sartre, being and no thingness and in Dyckman. Right. This is this is what would start would call being for itself. Right. And the title of Sartre’s book brings it out, Being and No Thingness. The eye is a no thing. It is not any kind of thing because you cannot attribute any properties to it. Because it is never observed. It is always the act of observing. I use I also use this language. Right. Right. I’m my awareness is always framing my experience. It’s bounding it, putting limits on what I pay attention to, what I ignore, what I’m aware of. And that frames my experience. So my experience is now frame, but the act of framing is that by see, I’m not aware of it. I’m aware through it. So I’m going to use a metaphor that I use frequently and analogy. My mental framing is are like my glasses frames. I’m looking through this lens. I’m looking beyond it and by means of it. And because of that, I’m not seeing it. It is transparent to me. One of the things we can do, and we’ll talk a little bit about this in a few minutes, is to do this thing with our attention and you do it mindfulness. Meditate. You can meditation. You can step back and look at that framing. But when I’m looking at that framing, that’s not right. That is not the framing that has that what I’ve done is framed a previous act of framing. And my current act of framing is unobservable to me. It is transparent to me. I’m looking through it. I’m looking through it. So this is now here’s what we have to use our language very carefully. Right. And you see, by the way, the same moves being made in the Kyoto school, the Shittani, right? The no thingness of the eye is a phenomenal logical mystery. Now, a mystery is not just a problem we haven’t solved yet. Mystery novels are not mystery novels. They’re just problem solving. There’s problem novels. And when the problem is solved, you go, yay, if it was never solved, it’s a mystery. Yay. If it was never solved, that would be horrible. Right. Now, Gabriel Marceau makes a distinction between a problem in which we frame it and through the framing, we solve it and a mystery. This is what a mystery looks like. I have something and I try to frame it to make it clear. But then that frame itself becomes problematic. So I step back and do a more encompassing frame. But that bigger frame becomes problematic. And I step and then I get this realization. Oh, no, no matter what I do, I’m not going to. I’m not going to stabilize this. A famous example is time. I used to go into my stepson’s bedroom and write things on his whiteboard to try and perplex him into in a Socratic fashion of the thought. And I once went in and wrote on his whiteboard, does time take time to happen? And that sort of blew him because when you try and get outside of time to frame it, you realize, oh, no, oh, no, because I’m all right. Right. Or or right. Your own your your your own death is a phenomenological mystery because you can’t imagine it. This is what it would be like to experience not experiencing. You can’t do it. You can’t do it. Now, notice that. OK, notice that last one. OK. So let’s let’s start before we do notice it in the sense of remember it, because I’m going to come back to it in a sec. Notice how the self is the eye, at least is like that. I try to frame it, but all I get is the meat. Oh, I’m going to step back and get the eye. All I get is more me. Oh, I’m going to. Oh, no. It’s a phenomenological mystery like time or my own non-existence. Now, it’s a phenomenological mystery. Now I’m going to ask you to remember what I said about your own death. Right. This is Epicurus. Where I am, death is not where death is. I am not. Right. So your death is a phenomenological mystery, but you don’t take that as an argument that you’re immortal or you shouldn’t. Right. It doesn’t follow because I’m sure of this. First, I’m going to I’m going to assume that solipsism is false. And I just have lots of good reasons for that. I’m going to agree that Chris’s own non-existence is a phenomenological mystery to him. Right. I couldn’t then stab and kill him and say nothing to worry about because his own non-existence is a phenomenological mystery. He cannot possibly die. You’d go, wow, you’re insane. What does that mean? We have to make a distinction between a phenomenological mystery and a theoretical mystery, even though I cannot phenomenologically experience my own non-existence. That does not prove that I can you know, that that doesn’t prove that I’m immortal and that non-existence is impossible to me. We cannot. And I see this happening a lot in sort of popular discussions around these topics. There is no deductive identity between phenomenological mystery and theoretical mystery. OK, they can be related, but you have to do work and argument to relate them. You cannot just assume identity. OK, let’s go back to it. So what does that mean for us? The self is a phenomenological mystery. That doesn’t mean that it’s a theoretical mystery that we can’t get a good scientific account about. But what the no thingness of the eye indicates and the fact that it has this weird non-logical identity framing framed relationship to the me really undermines the idea that the self is a concrete, countable, point added kind of thing. It doesn’t have a lot of the characteristics that are needed. The me has that. But a me without a relation to the eye is not a self. And the eye is also not a pointable, countable kind of thing. Now, I want to bring up where can I ask a question on that? Oh, sure, Greg. So let me pop in. So I’ve had this conversation about death and here’s at least in terms of the phenomenological. So every night I go to sleep and my phenomenology disappears. Yes, yes. OK, so you’re actually bringing up something I’m going to go into in a second. OK, well, then. All right. Why don’t we just go with that? Well, what I was going to do is I was going to put together the phenomenological mystery of the self of your own non-existence phenomenologically and the reconstructive memory of nature to really. And this is a little bit this can be a little bit off putting to people and this can happen to you at 3 a.m. Right. This is like when you wake up at 3 a.m. and realize I’m just made up of trillions of little animals. You have those kinds of weird realizations. But so, Greg, you were right. Right. I goes right into this. It’s like there are clearly periods where I’m completely unconscious. Right. And that means that all of that completely goes away in a way that’s phenomenologically phenomenologically inaccessible to me. Right. I don’t know what it is like. I have no perspectival ability to know what it is like to be unconscious. Right. So I cannot know what the I and the me are like when I’m unconscious. I cannot know that. In fact, that disappears into the mystery of my right non-existence. Because, as you said, my consciousness probably goes completely offline. And then you get the Star Trek problem when you wake up and you reboot all that phenomenology with your reconstructive memory. Is that you or a newly made copy, reconstructed copy that’s very similar to the you that went to sleep last night? Because what what is the continuity that goes through there? So now it’s oh, oh, and then like it. Don’t think about that too much. This this perhaps this this this series should come with a mental health warning because you can like you can like, oh, no, we think about this shit all the time. Like if I go to sleep, but but now this is a thing that’s Evan Thompson wrote about it in his book, Sleeping, Waking and Creaming, I believe, because this was a deep problem in sort of Vedanta philosophy. And they thought your true self was the self that was actually in existence while you were asleep, which is right. So wow, it is really problematic stuff. So now modern cognitive science problematization of it. You have Thomas Metzinger and Thomas Metzinger is also Thomas Metzinger uses the same language I use. He talks about transparency and opacity. Transparency is when I can’t see something because I’m looking through it, like my glasses or my mental framing. And opacity is when I can step back and look at it. And what he basically argues, he calls it the ego tunnel, the self illusion. He argues that there is no self. What there is, is there’s kind of a fundamental framing. Right. And the fundamental framing. But there is nothing behind the fundamental framing. The fundamental framing, right. Is a way in it is completely transparent. And because of that, we because we can’t see the transparency of the mental framing, we are cognitive system. I have to be very careful. I’m stumbling because I’m trying to avoid homuncular language. Right. Our cognitive system makes a model of an entity that is doing the framing. But there is nothing behind the framing. There is just the framing. There is nothing beyond it. Another way of putting it is, remember, we made the distinction between an entity notion of the self, right, and just a recursive notion of the self, like in the way a tornado is self organizing. For Metzinger, the framing is a self organizing process, the recursive sense. But there is no entity behind it. But our cognitive system, because of language and stuff, posits that there’s some kind of entity doing the framing, but there is no entity doing the framing. And it is just transparent to itself. The idea is when you get to the sort of most fundamental framing and you can’t step outside of it, what’s left is a purely transparent self organizing process behind which there is no self. That’s Metzinger’s basic argument in a nutshell. And it deserves to be taken seriously. And it deserves to be taken seriously because there’s a sense in which the ultimate level of stepping back is the eye, which is no thing. OK, so some people, you know, we’ve talked about different traditions, right? But even in current cognitive science, it’s a fairly prevalent view that there is no entity, the self. There is only very complex, sophisticated self organization that is ultimately at its most fundamental level, transparent to itself. And so it in a diluted fashion posits a homuncular entity behind the transparent self organization in order to try and stabilize it conceptually. But there is nothing there. It’s an illusion and it’s a delusion that plugs into the illusion of our experience, the phenomenological mystery of it. Does that make sense, guys? Yeah, no, I’m so my word for this is this is your epistemological portal. Yes, epistemological order, the process by which you know the frame of that portal. There’s an epistemological gap, which means that you never gain direct access to somebody else’s epistemological portal. Although I learned when I looked into this, there’s this incident of Siamese twins joined at the head that are connected through a thalamus. And so, yeah, nature is sometimes even stranger than our ability. So they do say they see through each other’s eyes, but it’s like they’re talking in their heads. It’s a very fascinating. Oh, I would like to if you could send me the link to that. I will. I will. I very much like I was in the process of making because even if you engage in telepathy, you’re still seeing the world through this epistemological portal. Right, right, right. And then I found this and I was like, well, actually, that’s good. If you actually join neurologically, then that’s interesting. That’s very interesting. And that would parallel hoods point about building on Ian McGilchrist and other people, we actually have sort of two minds and two potential awarenesses in the two hemispheres and somehow they are penetrating in the self. Yep, I’m I’m I can dance with some of that frame. But I guess one of the things I just want to say is, yes, so I think it’s a brute, almost maybe brute fact with this asterisk, you know, this epistemological portal. Yeah. And thinking about it. And I use the word epistemology because then we have the whole issue of what’s the ontology of this thing, right? What is this thing? And of course, that’s what we’re really dancing with. But one of the things I’m very convinced of is that we don’t have our ontology. And epistemology is not especially in psychology, is not nearly as crisply defined as it should be. We need definitely a little successful precision along those lines. So it’s kind of a this is a brute fact of epistemological gap portal, the ontology of that frame. Huh? Yeah, no, but that’s good that really. And so if we put together the no thingness of the framing, if we put together the least remember the distinction between object and hyperobjects, I could then re explain and I think this is maybe clarifying Metzinger’s point. So Metzinger agrees that there’s there’s the function of the epistemological portal. He calls it the ego tunnel. But he thinks there’s no ontological entity behind that. Right. Right. That’s a good that’s a good way of thinking about it, Greg. So absolutely. And then remember, we were talking a little bit about propositional knowing and narrative. Yeah. Yeah. And remember, I stumbled into this thing called the mental organ of justification. Yes. Yes, actually, they’re going to narrate this epistemological portal in a social world, and so we’ll come back to we’ll come back to that when we do. Yeah. When we do that. And that’s the self is just the center of the center of narrative gravity. It’s a useful fiction like centers of gravity is our useful fiction. OK, so yeah. So just so we’re tracking one, we’re seeing very clearly, right. At least if we ontologically, there’s going to be one portal that goes into our primate self, because obviously primates are wandering around with this vision. Yeah. Yeah. Clearly presume that. And now we’ve got a person add on, you know, so we can come back to that. But, you know, that’s we’re piecing this together. There’s no real thing. This but there might be a hyper thing, not hyper hyper thing, maybe modeling itself and certain. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s getting very interesting. Yes, Chris. Yeah. So the identity seems to persist somehow. So there persists a kind of self division, a non identity of the self to itself expressed in the relation of these dialectical elements that are not that are that relate to one another, but whose relation is nebulous and is unclear. And it seems to have something to do with the interaction of the thingness and the no thingness and the alternation therein and the and the taking of one and the custody of the other. Yeah, respectively. And I think to me, to me, that refers back to the distinction that you brought in with James, which is to me is very pivotal because it poses not only a sort of a focal problem, but also a focal point of phenomenological intervention when it comes to how the self relates. Yeah. So one of the problems you talked a lot about the eye, John, but but I think we need to talk a bit more about the me because the me is like so one way of thinking about the me, I think this comes mostly from the pragmatists, is that one way of thinking about the me, it’s sort of like a compressed sign of the self’s social predication. Yes. Right. We haven’t talked about self relevance yet very much. But when you do, I would call it something like a semiosis of our self relevance. Yes. Representation of social situation that encompasses and and gives direction to our relation with the world. But it’s subject to a tension between the eye and the other whose whose force of necessity confines and constrains it. So, you know, we think of we think of. So when the eye relates to its me, there’s a sense in which the eyes relation to its me is aspirational. Right. It has a tendency to want to subject its me to spontaneous fantasy and rarefied it, abstracted away from its concrete necessities that are provided by its social standings, but at the same time, you have a series of social forces that are actually confining the me and confining its necessity to make it much less mutable and much less, much less subject to that spontaneous fantastical impulse of the eye to want to bring the me closer to itself and closer to its pregnant sense of possibility that always persists in its perceptions. So that that tends to sort of like the me is is being pulled by these by these opponent forces selectively constraining it on the one hand and enabling on the other hand. I’m foreshadowing that because I know you’re going to talk about that at some point and the way in which the formal manner in which the eye takes me as its object and treats it accordingly seems to be a pivotal question for how it relates to itself ultimately and consolidates that dynamical process that we keep describing. That that was all beautifully said. And yes, I’m actually about to go into that part of the argument, which is the social constructed nature of itself, and you’ll hear me all through this meeting. Vygotsky are the two people that are most prevalent in the argument I’m going to make. But before I do, I want to I want to I want to emphasize that. Yeah, that I think is an important addition. First of all, the point that the eye me relationship is somehow central to the cell, that’s going to be a consensus point that other researchers have come to. Right. But then the point that you’re making is the the me is very much an interface. Right. So it’s really I mean, not me. That’s been internalized into me. So it is this really odd. Right. We’re not really individuals. We’re individuals in a very important way. We’re individuals in really profound ways. And yeah. And the fact that the me is often organized around what Goffman and others have called the self image, which is exactly like this. We it has this Jena. It’s a Jena space mirror that allows the eye to sort of do this. But it also is how the self is is reflected to the world and also how the world is taken into the cell. So all of that. So we’re already seeing that we’re talking about like this three term entity. We’re talking about the eye and the me and the way it’s embedded in dynamically in a social context. And, you know, and Greg also has a lot to say about that, too, because that social context also brings in the whole justification system, machinery around personhood. And that’s also part of the self. We’ve already talked about that last time. So if that’s OK, I’d like to proceed to exactly that next point. If that’s OK. So I’ll just for you’re watching, just I’ll just say, think about how different you are with in all the different arena relationships, even with different people. And then in different modes, like when you’re really on fire with somebody that you love versus in real intense arguments, these are the different self states are enormously powerful. So that just sets the stage for it. Yes. So let’s proceed, John, into the social. Yeah, there’s just to give a term that might be helpful for that. And it’s sort of Goffman Goffman because he used the sort of play, the idea of play as a as a dramatic action, that we have various self images that go to various roles. And part of ourself is the way it manifests in, as Greg just said, a multitude of roles that can be very, very different in their perspectival and participatory agent arena relationship. Yet somehow the eye binds them into a coherent me, which is like, whoa, how does that happen? Especially since the role is inherently a relationship between you, whatever we’re pointing out with that word now and other people, as Greg just indicated, right? Oh, wow. So this is already getting we’re getting very, very fast. We’re getting very far from the folk model that we all took for granted as obvious and beyond question. So I want to just make one more little point before we move on to that social, the social, interactional nature of the development of the self, which is this point, notice that we’ve got sort of we’ve got conceptual bound issues on that self. We have the no thingness of the eye, which it’s really hard to try and get our normal kind of language around it because it’s not a normal spatially, temporally countable thing. Right. It’s a no thing. And then we also have this others about our presence that, you know, demonstrative indexicality, that presence is supposed to be something that’s ultimately demonstratively indexical about us and unique and therefore beyond categorical interpretation or understanding. And so we when we’re talking about the self, we have these two dimensions. In which the self seems to readily and reliably evade our conceptual grasp. Hence the title of the series, the elusive eye. OK. So. I wanted to emphasize that because later on, we’re going to talk about mystical experiences and the way in which people get to a state that is touching on both of those, that that intense sense of presence and the no thingness of the eye are fused in experience that right is. And people have these diametrically opposed metaphysical interpretations. They come out of it saying, I realized my true self or famously Buddhism. I realized that there is no self. See yourself. OK, so we need that machinery in there. OK, so I want to pick up on the point that Chris already foreshadowed in such an eloquent manner and who makes this point from in his book, The Self Illusion from 2012, he argues for a couple of features of the self that further, further problematize it, but we can sort of put them together. He argues that the self dynamically emerges out of the coupling together of processes that mutually constrain and afford each other. So he uses the example which I’ve already alluded to, right, that the left and right hemisphere, right. They they couple together and they somehow make a self. But I want to I want to go beyond that. But before I do, I just for those of you are unaware why that argument is sort of important, there’s been I think it was originally Sperry, wasn’t it, Greg, that did the brain experiments? Yep. And what you do is you cut the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres and you’ll find that the person often is literally of two minds. So you have things like the alien hand syndrome, which is the person is trying to do their shirt up with their right hand controlled by their left hemisphere and their left hand controlled by the right hemisphere is trying to undo it. They have opposite goals. Right. And we already know that the left and the right hemisphere see the world very differently. You want a dramatic impact, sorry, a dramatic instance of what loss of the integration of the hemispheres does to the sense of self, read Jill Boltey Taylor’s book, My Stroke of Insight. She had a hemorrhage in her left hemisphere. The thankfully the left hemisphere wasn’t killed. It was just traumatized. And her awareness, whatever this means, and her sense of self moved exclusively into her right hemisphere. And her sense of self was dramatically undermined in a very horrific, terrifying experience. And the whole Agent Arena relationship was changed. Right. It was just it was very much like she’s called it a stroke of insight because insight is also an activity shift. Well, at least it’s claimed with good evidence shifts dramatically from the left to the right hemisphere. So if you reverse it, we think there’s this nice, stable unity. But it’s just underlying the surfaces. If these two hemispheres just become out of sync to some significant degree, that unity just dissolves and goes away. This is what hood means by it dynamically emerges out of the coupling of other processes together. Couple things about that that I think at least folks may be familiar with. One of the things that’s really striking about it was how limited of an impact that the Corpus callosum actually had on people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not like all of a sudden everyone was behaving weird. No, no. Right. But actually you had to be subtle, subtly analyzed, and certainly sometimes there were dramatic alien hand events. Yeah. One of the things that was really weird and scary. And for those of you that want to be taken down a notch on yourself. Yeah, I think you have to pay attention to these studies. So for me, Michael Gazaniga’s work. Yeah, Gazaniga’s work. Yeah. Follows this. And basically what he does is he shows that you can instruct the right hemisphere like you can flash it a command or whatever, then the person will do what they’re going to do, like go up to the water fountains. OK, so you can and then you go get it. And then you ask the person, what are you doing? And then the left hemisphere confabulates. Yeah. An explanation says, oh, I’m thirsty. Hold off a second. Yes. Yes. And the person has no awareness that that dynamic system somehow it just brings it into OK resonance. OK, and I will say that certainly the implication of some of my work is that, yep, you have this what we feel to be this center is this sort of post hoc rationalizing just right aspect. And that’s those split brain stuff really does problematize this sort of epicenter of awareness and free will and decision that you have to pay attention to. That was excellent. And bringing this in his work, I mean, the one that the confabulation, I remember the one of the ones is he shows sort of a naked woman to the right hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And then he shows a shovel to the left hemisphere and the person burst out laughing, right, because of kind of a nervous laughter. And he says, what are you laughing at? And they go, oh, I thought of this really funny thing that happened once when I was using a shovel. And that’s the thing you people and its confabulation and why that should send the shiver down your existential spine is we talked about we have such confidence in our narrative. But what if the narrative is post hoc confabulation a lot of the time that is, as Greg said, getting these two hemispheres back in sync when they’ve gotten out of sync for some reason. And that’s all it’s really doing, that there isn’t a real integrated centered narrative at work. What if it’s post hoc confabulation? So thank you for bringing that in, Greg. And that really strengthens Hood’s point. That’s interesting. So if I’m getting you right, the same the same the same psychotechnological mechanism, namely narrative that would allow us to interrogate the functionality of ourself can also mask dysfunction to such a degree as to exacerbate it. And so there are some neuroscientists and scientists who talk about sort of a part of the left hemisphere that’s the interpreter that’s always taking credit for no matter what happens. Oh, I intended to do that. I did that because of that. And what it’s doing is it’s doing a lot of confabulation. And you see how this plugs into Greg’s idea about justification. The idea is that actually it should it should be calibrated for particular kinds of social influence and consequences like you take credit for certain things that is ego consonant. So you actually have your basically what the knobs and tunes of the narrating is as a justified state of being. And then cognitive dissonance is really all confirms a lot of that. And so it’s like the system is not it’s not randomly generating propositions. It is fine tuning that interpreter system. And as Michael Gazaniga said, it’s almost as if it’s designed to construct a narrative. And I’m like, well, actually, if you put it evolutionarily in a propositionally emerging context, that’s exactly what it’s right, right, right. So this is sort of your parasitic processing model, John, and very, very much deception that adheres it. Yep. It aligns with that. Yeah, Gazaniga’s book, I think it’s Who’s in Charge is a very good one for sort of a general lay audience if you want to get a good how his work as Greg has brought in really points to, you know, that there’s a lot of confabulation going on. And that would support Metsinger’s argument. Maybe all you have is an ego tunnel with a confabulator that’s generating a post talk narrative about the ego tunnel, but there’s nothing actually there. There is no agent doing the ego tunnel. That’s another way of thinking about what Metsinger’s proposal actually is. And in fact, we’ll look at other people who actually say that what’s happening is there’s just a confabulation function about the phenomenological mystery of the eye, of the framing, and that’s all that’s really happening. It’s an entity. There’s the confabulation of an entity, even though there’s no entity. So all of this. Confabulating all this right now, John? Well, yeah. It’s a confabulated circle. I can’t get outside the frame. Right. So that and that’s that that’s like again, where I’m not proposing conclusions here, I’m proposing the stuff I think about. I keep backing up and I fall into the abyss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you start too long into the abyss, it begins to stir back through you. So now I want to take that point, that dynamical developmental idea, and then link it to Chris’s point. And then there’s also the possibility of layers of confabulation going on. But here’s the idea. The idea comes from both Mead and Vygotsky, and I’m sort of going to unify them together. And the basic idea is, well, where do we get that meta-perspectival ability? Where do we get the ability to take a perspective on our previous perspective? Where do we get the I-me relation? Well, here’s the proposal. And we’ll talk about how it’s functional in a second. The proposals in this you see it in one sense from Mead. You see it also in Vygotsky. They’re independent, convergent. And here’s the idea. What I do, basically, is I’ll use I’ll use Vygotsky’s term because it’s the one that I think is really crisp. We internalize other people’s perspectives on us. So what kids start to become aware of and kids do this way before they have introspective ability. And this is the point. They do it way before they have introspective ability. So they around 18, 18 months, they will start to turn pictures around. Contra Piaget, by the way, you know, they’ve got a picture and they want dad to see it and they’ll turn it around. They get that dad’s perspective is not theirs. Or you can, you know, you know, you have broccoli and goldfish and you put it in front of the little kid. And the little kid takes the goldfish and gives the broccoli to the dad because that likes broccoli. I like goldfish. Right. So we pick up on other people’s mental states very soon, way before we can introspect. If you ask a three and a half year old what’s happening in your head or your mind, they’ll say things like blood. They don’t have an introspective inner space. Sure, they’ll know. No. And we’re going to talk about different kinds of metacognition in a minute or no, probably next time, actually, because we’re coming to we’re coming to the close here. But. What the idea is, I start, let’s say I’m a young child and I have my father or mother and I have my perspective on a problem and my dad has a more encompassing perspective because he is trying to help me to solve this problem. So his perspective includes my perspective. And what I do is I imitate him. I imitate how he right. I imitate him. And I even talk to myself about what that would say this to me because I remember what dad says and I start practicing imitating, taking dad’s perspective on my perspective when I’m engaged in practices of self correction. And so I do that more and more and more until I don’t need dad to be around at all. And then I can just do it on my own internally. And what I can do is I can take a higher order perspective on a lower order perspective, just like dad’s higher order perspective included mine. I internalize other people’s perspectives on my perspectival knowing. And that’s how I get this meta perspectival ability, which is, by the way, in the consensus paper we we just released last year, that is a central capacity for wisdom. The meta perspectival ability is one of the things that we think is working really well in people we deem wiser than us. So that ability to internal and this is why Socratic dialogue is so important. But that’s other work that Chris and I are doing. So I’ll just put that aside. We internalize other people in order to get a meta perspectival, meta cognitive capacity. That is where the I-me relation comes from. It comes from internalizing other people. And eventually that starts to have its own phenomenological experience, because it’s just like my external perspective as a phenomenological experience. I start to get the introspective perspective on my perspective. I start to get access to my working memory, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, why is all of that important? Well, because it is so go ahead, Greg. Yeah, just kind of a quick reference. So to me, this is a really, really important point. OK, so this is a foundational point. I think what we’re seeing here, and I mentioned this before, but I’ll just reiterate it, Michael Tomasello’s work is very good. Yes. Yeah, very much. Very much. He’s making a very good case that we get a primate upgrade. The human gets a primate upgrade in this ability. Yeah. Meaning that our shared attention and intention capacity comes online so that my ability to switch frame and back and forth and then create what he calls a we space. Yeah. Of course, it means I need to take your perspective and mine and do that frame shifting. And by the way, this is, of course, all preverbal. I mean, this is not before propositional knowing this is a shared intentional attentional space. And that is a very unique human cognitive ability, at least at the upgrade level. I mean, certainly some other primates have some of this action, but it’s a very powerful capacity. I think the Tomasello book is what Becoming Human is that a new theory of ontogeny. Yeah, which I highly recommend. I think I think the two figures we should be paying a lot of attention to as we try to upgrade our developmental psychology is Tomasello and the work of Michael Anderson in his idea of cognitive acceptation. You take those two together and we are very far from traditional models of development. But that’s something again, maybe Greg and I will do something on that. We’ll talk bits and pieces of this through this series. But let’s come back to it seems to we got this I-me relationship and Chris already foreshadowed, but it’s embedded in sociality. Right. But this I-me relationship seems to be central to the self. And yet it is constructed socially. It is socially constructed. Now, here’s the thing. Right. And social constructionism is a big idea right now. So we need to make it we need to make use of this distinction that John Searle made. So John Searle made a distinction between intrinsic and attributed properties. Intrinsic things are things that exist intrinsically. Attributed things are things that only exist through social attribution. So I have a coin. It being steel is intrinsic. It would be steel if there were no human beings anywhere. But it being money is attributed. It’s only because we all agree to treat it that way that it becomes money. Now, there’s an issue. When we look at things that are socially constructed, we have to ask the question. Because it’s socially constructed, there’s a real possibility that it is just an attributed entity. It is like money. It exists the way money does or the nice day for a picnic or a bathtub. You say, well, bathtubs really exist, not as bathtubs. They exist as objects with mass and electromagnetic radiation and a molecular lattice. But as bathtubs, there have to be human beings that use them for the social purpose of cleansing in order for it to be a bathtub. You have to be really, really careful here because we can conflate and confuse the socially attributed identity with the intrinsically existing entity. So here’s the question that now we can ask. Is it the case that the socially constructed self only exists in a socially attributed way? Is the self like the steal of the coin or like the coin being money? Is it because we all treat each other in certain roles that we have that there’s the self only exists in a socially attribute? There’s no denying it’s socially constructed. And that lends initial plausibility that it might just be purely socially attributed and not in any way intrinsically exist. Now, let me show you the difference. You know what has to intrinsically exist? Consciousness. And this is Searle’s point, because you have to have something that does the attribution process, right? It can’t be that consciousness is attributed because what’s doing the attribution? Right. So consciousness has to intrinsically exist or else you get an infinite regress of attribution. So, but the self. The self might only exist in as a social attribution. And what makes this a little bit more plausible, not convincing, but at least preemphasia plausible, is when we have individuals. Now, I’m going to talk about the problems with interpreting the data, but acknowledge that, but let’s just bring it up as a possibility. When we have individuals who, for example, have been isolated from proper socialization, they’ve feral children and they haven’t been properly exposed to language, the case of Jeannie, we get individuals that don’t seem to be capable of selfhood in the right way because they can’t do the social construction. And then we wonder, like, do we and we’re hesitant to attribute selfhood to them. And we also do something opposite. Before I do that, the confounds, the problem with this is feral children and Jeannie, there’s trauma, there’s neglect, there’s now an attrition. So we have to be very careful about that data. It’s not like rock hard evidence, but don’t totally ignore it. Because notice we do the opposite. We treat beings who are not selves in any kind of I, me, self-awareness, self-identifying, self-attributing, as if they are selves. We do this with our newborns. We treat them as if they are selves and then they become selves, which brings up the possibility maybe a self is only a socially attributed thing. So, for example, and I want to speak really carefully here. Personhood is socially attributed. Personhood is something that is bestowed upon you through moral and legal attribution. That’s why we can and we have to be very careful about this. We can take personhood away from individuals. That’s evil slavery. That can be evil because we shouldn’t be taking personhood away from people because we’re thwarting them from becoming persons and we shouldn’t do that. But we do it in other contexts that’s not immoral. Right. So even though in one sense we talk about small children as if they’re persons, we don’t give them the legal and moral rights of persons. They can’t vote. They can’t get married. They can’t own property. They can’t own a gun. They can’t drive cars. They can’t go on there. They can’t leave their house and wander on their own. Right. Right. So I’m not concluding anything here. I’m just piling a lot into really problematizing this. It’s like maybe the self only is socially attributed like money. Maybe it doesn’t intrinsically exist. And that would be a way of saying that the self is an illusion because we have to we have we notice like in the Weimar Republic, we sometimes remember that money is a consensus illusion. We all pretend that it has a value in properties that it doesn’t. And when we realize that it doesn’t intrinsically have that, we sometimes panic and freak out, right, because of hyperinflation or other things like that. So. What I’m doing is saying the socially constructed, the dynamically emergent, socially dynamically emergent nature of the self really raises the question that it might not intrinsically exist. It might only exist as an attributed entity like money, like a bathtub, as a bathtub, et cetera. Any questions around that problematization argument? When you say socially attributed, how much of this is mediated by the compositional language versus the relational participatory? Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question. And I don’t know if there’s kind of like a universal answer. I like, but I do think that things like money and being a bathtub are probably propositionally mediated money certainly is. I don’t know how you could possibly do anything like money without having legal and moral systems and sort of shared pretense between people going on. That’s a very good question. Because I mean, I think you and I sort of agree that the propositional stuff is needed to make a self a person, to lift it into full personhood, because if it can’t belong to the justification system, it doesn’t. And I would want to mean that in two levels. One is the legal moral. Yeah, like, you know, kind of confer. And then there’s the behavioral, which is a self recursive, justifying sure, we’re system, you know, sure. And both of them there should be and are related, but they’re not clearly related and as clearly as they should be. But so I guess I’m just saying in terms of, well, if we apply that, you know, me, I’m always jumping from persons and primates. So I then jump. Well, look at chimpanzee politics. They are in a network of relation. Right. And they and they give each other status and they form alliances in particular type of way, so they’re networking a feedback group of relation. Is that social attribution in the way you were referring? Yeah, I would say that because I would say status, just to use a key entity status, it’s completely socially attributed. It’s not intrinsic in any way to the being, because if the group agrees that your status doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s the defining feature of a socially attributed thing. So you can all agree and remove my person. And we do that. And it’s evil. We can do that with status. But you know what you can’t do it with? You can’t do it with my consciousness. You can’t all agree that I don’t have consciousness and that makes my consciousness cease to exist again. Right. Because we need consciousness to do the attribution process. OK. So what I want is one thing, John, just before you go on. Yeah, which is that you say you were talking when we were talking about narrative before we were talking about how narrative, two ways of understanding narrative is as you applied without without using this language, you applied the same dichotomy to narrative, right? The possibility that narrative is intrinsic and the possibility that narrative is a language of training, a phenomenal, a phenomenal language of training that’s fundamentally attributed and one can’t necessarily be mistaken for the other. And I think that we can take that same question and apply it to the sociality of selfhood in this case. Right. So the people like me were fairly decisive about the fact that it was the interjection of the social model that provided the kind of inner plurality that allows us to attain ourselves in dialogue and discussion and contemplation. Yeah. But the question of whether that that that the import of that social model is in fact necessary or not. I think poses a similar question as it did for narrative, because even when a person because a person can carry on a kind of inner interior sociability and have what we might call a relation with themselves, even outside of the social context. Now, a pure social constructionist could say, well, all you’ve done is you’ve just interjected the social dynamic and accepted it interiorly to your to your intrasychic life and fair enough. But there’s a sense in which those two things are also not identical. They’re clearly not identical. The social relationships you have with others that determine the the push and pull of the me that’s observed by others and the relationship you have with yourself is are not identical modes of relating. And so I think that this sort of this raises a question then about the dependency, the social dependency of identity and the and the existential internalization of that dynamic and how the two are actually to what degree those two are simply to whether there’s whether there’s a difference of degree or perhaps a difference in kind between those two different arenas, the social exterior arena and the intrasychic arena, even though they seem to be running off some of the same processes. There’s a sense in which existentially and phenomenologically, the experiences are not altogether comparable. So I think that might it might to me that poses a challenge to the purely social constructionist view, at least one, at least one, maybe a more robust version of it. Well, I think so. But let me reply on their behalf. They would say, well, the fact that it just said and you acknowledge the possibility doesn’t remove the attributed nature. So take the person who is stranded on the desert island and keeps fondling the gold coins that happen to be there and fondling them and loving them because their money. And so they’re still running the process of attribution. But there’s no there’s no value. It’s not money. I mean, you could say it’s money to them. But the fact that it’s isolated to them doesn’t mean that it is intrinsically become money. Right. It still is a completely attributed entity. So I get what you’re saying and what I how I would then come back and doing this and strengthen your position and say, yeah, but there has to be something. You keep saying consciousness, John, but that’s really slippery. And you and Greg did a whole series on how slippery that is. But there has to be something that actually is not just consciousness, but there has to be something intrinsically exists that allows for this full internalization process. And maybe that’s sort of the intrinsic aspect of the cell. That’s how so I would steal man, the social constructionism, and then I come back and steal man your position and say, yeah, but there has to be an intrinsically existing something that is actually makes that internalization process possible. Right. Because we have we seem to have the capacity to imagine or image a presence that is external to us, even within our interior psychic life exactly. And that’s where the sort of the social constructionist view and the more proto existentialist view start talking to one another. Right. Because even in the isolated context of the individual, the individual, there is a sense in which the individual seems to relate to herself before a presence that is without and socially in the social arena. That presence is literally without. But in the interior arena, that that without presence still has there is some property to it that gives it that that allows it to persist even within, let’s say, in the context of the internal dialogue. I agree. And so a person that might be helpful here is the Stephen Batchelor and his existential interpretation, it’s explicitly an existential interpretation of Buddhist phenomenology, and the title of the book actually captures this. It’s alone with others. There’s something about us that’s alone that notice what I’m doing here, the place to which we internalize things and where from where we can run them on our own and that is accessible in some sense only to us. But we’re always but the title of the book is alone with others. Because when you do that, though, what you’re doing is the imagery of the other person. Or if you’re talking to yourself, you’re using English that you did not create. You’re using cultural idioms and structures that you did not create. Even in the very guts of your aloneness, there’s the there’s the others. But even when you’re with others, there’s the place that you can withdraw to. And so we’re always alone with others. And so I want to emphasize that I think that that alone with others is almost as paramount as the relationship and they interpenetrate and affect each other. But notice how individual the self is now becoming. It’s it’s it’s it’s both individual and not an individual. It’s a really, really mysterious entity in a lot of ways. And I think that all of that’s absolutely right. I think we want to for me, at least I always want to do the zoom back, put this on file, a genetic evolutionary term, obviously everything that we’re navigating as social primates is in a particular social world or survival reproductive success. You know, we come born. We’re tracking mother the entire attachment system that we have. Then you then put it in the individual developmental track to become a functioning individual. It’s all of this relational perspectival shifting so that I internalize all the others. Then I create a conglomerate of them and reference myself in relationship to that. So that intrasychic interpersonal line both has strong features like the epistemological portal and then has all blurred features from the developmental evolutionary vantage point. This has been amazing. And we’re now really getting into the guts of the machinery, of the nature and function of the self, this very elusive eye for sure. So what I want to foreshadow is we’re going to take up this proposal that maybe all we’re talking about when we’re talking about the self is consciousness and self-consciousness and what that means and what’s problematic about that. And then I will start to turn to, well, how does this all connect up to agency and what’s this integrating function and what’s this internalization function and all? So we’ll start to get into some of the recent and good work that’s been done on all this functionality that we are now pointing to a lot. So that’s what we have going forward. As always, I want to thank you guys for the amazing interactions that and the way like, again, like the way things are, you know, fleshed out by you guys and drawn out is extremely valuable. But I wanted to now stop talking other than also say goodbye to everybody. When we’re done, because I want to give both Chris and Greg the chance for any final words they want to bring to what’s happened in this session that we’ve shared together. The only thing I think I would say and very simply is that one thing that keeps recurring thematically, which I think is important to keep our eyes trained on, is that the is that despite the fact that we keep talking about the self as an independent and autonomous and not a poetic entity, there is a there is a there is a dependency that persists even through that definition that seems to require the beholding presence or witnessing presence of another before whose vision the self seems to emerge or consolidate or otherwise become itself. That there is a that that dependency on another. And however we conceive of that other, I think is something that we’ll get into, whether it’s socially or perhaps perhaps something of a higher order when we when we start talking about it in a more spiritual sense, that somehow there is there is a metaphysical dependence on the presence of another before whose before whom I don’t mean to I’m personifying it just for the sake of putting it this way, right. But before whom we we realize the dynamic that that you’re that you’re otherwise describing. So there’s something about that I think that we need to keep keep keep keep track of because I think it’s going to it’s going to start taking some interesting forms. Well, I like who these friends for that, you know, who inspired me to looking glass self. Right. So, yeah. For me, I liked, you know, I like the both the problematizing and the foreshadowing, I think that’s coming together. You know, I’m these days I’m engrossed in a subjective, objective, intersubjective and transjective, right, right. Sort of epistemological framing of this reality. Yes. And so I was getting flashes of, you know, and I really do believe that this is at the core of some of the philosophical conundrums of sense making and, you know, we’re handed from the enlightenment. So I felt I really do feel the emerging, you know, through the fog of a of a potential framing of a self emergent modeling in relation. So I very much enjoy it. Great. Thank you, guys, and thank you one and all for your time and attention. And we’ll see you next time on the elusive eye, the nature and function of the cell. Thank you.