https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z0QgaQ_v5cU
Welcome back everyone to episode four from the Cognitive Science Show of Transcendent Naturalism. And I’m here with my ongoing partner in all of the COG SciShow projects, Greg Enriquez. So welcome, Greg. It’s great to be with you here again. Thank you, friend. It’s good to be back. So I’m going to recapitulate what sort of happens in the past as we’ve been building the argument. And we’re going to try and wrap up it being just you and I today in the fourth episode and then get to having other people come in and reflect. So the first, I laid an argument out for a structured ontology and conformity epistemology that gave us a strong transcendence within extended naturalism. And then in episode two, you laid out very, very clearly and comprehensively what those levels are. You filled in the content for the structure, I think is a good way of putting it. Episode three, we wrestled together about how can we get a rich and deep notion of sacredness and the sacred within a transcendent naturalism. And then that’s we and we came to, I think, a good convergent place around that. And then I wanted to pick that up in terms of, yes, at the theoretical level. Fine. But how does that cash out in these three domains of ritual? People have these transcendent experiences and sort of worldview, to meet finding a home within the cosmos. And these are sort of three dimensions of spirituality, very broadly construed. And so Greg and I aren’t going to review. I’ll do a little bit more on ritual because that hasn’t been part of our previous series, but it’s part of some of my other videos. We’re not going to review all the because we went over a lot and a lot of videos. Right. So our goal here is to try and do the following to show that transcendent naturalism has a way of explaining these without explaining them away. Giving an explanation of them that shows why they afford strong transcendence in the way that we’ve been talking about it here and therefore can ground a profoundly transformative, existentially relevant spirituality that is nevertheless completely conciliant with a science that has been situated within extended naturalism. And so that’s how I see our project. Did you have anything you want to add to the overall framing, Greg? No, that’s exactly right. And so I love the explaining but not explaining away. I love we, you know, we want, you know, a religio for the nuns in relation. And that’s got to have a logical architecture that’s conforming with science on the one hand. At the same time, it’s got to be embedded in practices and communities and ways of being. It’s got to connect to the wisdom of the wisdom traditions, right? At some level, what’s happening to those kinds of things. So I think what we’re doing now is sort of made the theoretical argument for sacredness in relation and now like, well, what does that actually mean on the ground and issues of ritual, issues of transcendent altered states, issues of worldview and transcending identity. These are all real instances and I know we’ll focus mostly on ritual today, but I think what we’re doing is we’re really filling in sort of the practice side and really and then articulating that embodiment bridge between sort of science spirituality in this emerging worldview we’re gripping. Excellent. Okay, so I’d like to start with ritual and ritual of course has been something that has been put into question. Even before the scientific revolution it’s put into question by the Protestant Reformation, and then as it put under more pressure as that reformation fragments, and then of course the scientific revolution comes in and seems to push us into a kind of propositional tyranny, and then ritual becomes very, it just seems like irrational belief formation within that framework. And then, of course, you have the increase of the secularization project under the Enlightenment, and then ritual, it gets slotted largely into superstition or things that so called primitive people do because they don’t have science. And then, of course, it’s wrapped up into all the problems of imperialism and colonialism. And then you get a final knock in which Freud, you know, sort of discovers the unconscious this at least the psychodynamic unconscious and finds that it right seeks out ritual, but he can only understand that, given that in that whole stream of development as something deeply psychopathological and so ritual behavior is an indication of neurosis or perhaps even the onset of psychosis. And then, so you have this, this ever widening golf between rationality which is grading increasingly understood as computation and ritual which eventually seems to be neurotic or even psychotic behavior. So, we can and and and then anything that does anything other than that is, you know, superstition. And of course that’s a, that’s a somewhat nebulous category as well, although it’s invoked frequently. So, I think that what, go ahead, and I just sort of like okay so for those of the scientists out there who are maybe how it used to be or whatever in a particular kind of way. Why don’t we at least note that we still have funerals births and marriage ceremonies. Yes, we do. Okay. And, and why, you know, what what are what’s happening there so let’s just point to these that the still vestiges of particular kind of community ritual structures. And if we can’t to lose that, you know, I’ll just just throw out there, that wouldn’t have a dramatic to lose those right that they bind us in a particular kind of way and embodied way. So for the skeptics either there that are following that time we still have, as though we lost a huge amount, we’re still doing rituals of marriage, birth and funeral, and and that speaks to I think something to what we’re going to articulate in terms of the, the nature of these rituals and why these kinds of practices may be absolutely central. Yes, so that’s well said. And when I gave the talk at Cambridge I tried to make an argument about how ritual, there’s a lot of implicit ritual and a lot of what we are doing without actually properly recognizing it. I’ll quickly review arguments, I’m the arguments exist elsewhere and will probably put extensive notes for. I’ve been building what I think, and I’m not I alone other people, Yadin, and of course, she’ll break and a whole bunch of other people. What you might call a philosophy or philosophy psychology a cognitive science of ritual. And I’d like to try and lay that out. But I’d like to start from the side of rationality. First, and I’m going to, for each premise I introduce here I’m going to ask the audience the listeners to trust that there is extensive arguments, and I can point them, but if I do every, if I do the argument I’m going to get huge. So the first premises, there are important kinds of knowing associated with important. There’s different kinds of knowing, associated with different kinds of memory associated with different kinds of normative standards, the four P’s of knowing. And so, and for ECOG Psy and a lot of the work that I’ve done and you know Greg doesn’t work on it. We’ve, we’ve been pointing to all the non propositional knowing and how important that is to cognitive agencies. First of all, let’s invoke that if we look at ritual only through the propositional lens we’re probably missing a lot of what it’s doing, because the first premise is that ritual is although there’s propositional content in ritual, I just came back from an Eastern Orthodox monastery, right, although there’s propositional content that’s not there, it is totally in service of non propositional kinds of knowing. And so that’s the first so if you if you come in and you’re skeptical and all you’ve got is, this is just bad inference for bad belief formation, then I want you to step aside and think about, well, you have, in addition to your belief you have your skills, and you, in addition to your skills you have states of consciousness perspective taking states of consciousness, and into in addition to those, you have traits of your character your identity yourself. And these are all different ways in which you know and understand the world. And so that’s the first premise the first premise is ritual should be more properly understood as addressing the non propositional, it will, it’s more about developing skills perspectives and identities. So that’s the first. The second is, we have to understand that there is a aspirational dimension to rationality. And this goes for the work of LA, Paul, and Agnes colored, and then some experimental work by Hirschfield and others, and this argument goes basically the following. When I, whenever I go through a transformative experience a genuine transformative experience until I undergo the transformation. I don’t have the perspectival and the participatory knowing, I only get it once I go through it I don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a parent, and how I’m going to change until I become a parent. And so you can’t infer your way into it. I can get all kinds of, I can read all kinds of books about being a parent and everybody will tell you who’s gone through this. They were helpful but wow, so much more that I didn’t write and you can’t. You can’t sort of reason your way into it. This goes with Jerry voters argument that you can’t compute your way from a weaker logic to a stronger logic that arguments out there so the point is you can’t infer your way through transformational experience. And then the question is well how do we do it. And my, my answer is we engage in what we see all intelligent creatures engage in we engage in serious play in serious play we put ourselves into this liminal state where we’re getting a sense of the perspective on the participatory change, but we haven’t completely committed to it. So before having a child we might get a dog and see what that’s like right. Serious place so serious play. Next aspiration this is Agnes Callard and aspiration that serious play extends to a development in which you are trying to become something other than you are. You have a current self that is related to a future self that is considered normatively superior to the self that you currently are. But how could you possibly do that. Right. Right. And of course, what she says is she doesn’t really answer the how question so I still think it’s a kind of serious play I’ll come back to that. What she says is that notice that aspiration is a proper part of rationality, because if I like to be more rational is to properly aspire it is to become somebody that is more normatively valuable than who I am. And so, you if you say that the aspiration to rationality which is a non influential serious play project is not part of rationality then you’re in a performative contradiction, you can’t ever recommended somebody that they become more rational, because the process would engage that would be they would be have to engage in would be a non non rational or even irrational process. So what what what she’s arguing for is there has to be a non influential notion of rationality that merges with la Paul. And then you also have the idea that rationality often requires a kind of self control, so that we can undertake the aspiration so that we can prioritize long term goals over current goals this is about overcoming hyperbolic discounting temporal discounting and And Hirschfield does all this work showing well what you what if you give people all the inferential and empirical evidence they don’t do they don’t say for their retirement, for example, but if you go in and ask them to imagine their future self as somebody that they love they’ve always loved they’ve always taken care of they’ve always felt responsible for right people will save and they will save dependent on how often and how intensely they do the imagination. Right now, this brings us to enough so first of all rationality requires right aspiration Right aspiration it requires on one hand serious play and now the imagination but here’s the sense here. This is the imaginal not the imaginary right imaginary is when you picture things in your mind and you’re, you’re cutting yourself off from reality, the imaginal is when you’re using Right the imagination, but in the sense of a child playing what you’re doing is you’re trying to adopt the like the identity and the perspective of somebody and your true so it’s imagination that enhances your ability to perceive or conceive it puts you into contact with reality, it makes you more aware of subtle patterns in your In your body and mind, etc. And again, this is more developed so we have serious play and the imaginal are actually needed for rationality in a profound way. So, just like you can have sort of virtually augmented perception you can have imaginary augmented perception. And I won’t repeat the arguments imagination is crucial in this way the imaginal is central to deep learning where fantasizing is part of what the system does in order to improve its ability to recognize the world to generate to recognize function. And so all of this has converged on rationality requires an activation of non propositional kinds of knowing, specifically those involved in serious play in which people are relying on imaginary augmented perception and conception. Now we turn the week turn that around as yet but can we evaluate that can we hold it to a rational standard. And so this goes to all the on the cognitive anthropology around ritual around where ritual is basically seen, and the language is actually used as, you know, fitting you to the situation. Right, it’s it’s it’s it’s well it’s deeply dripping in relevance realization. Right. And then it has an anticipatory sense to it, which is precisely how you can evaluate its rationality so it’s an enhancement of relevance realization, in which whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re training and cultivating in the situation, if it transfers outside of that situation, broadly and deeply, it’s a very deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deeply, then you can evaluate it for being more rational. If it right. If it keeps you trapped within the context of learning, then it’s deeply irrational. standard. So not only does rationality depend on ritual, you can see how ritual is rational. It’s enhancing your relevance realization and it does so in a way that transfers broadly and deeply. So transfer in that way is of course one of the ways in which we can go from individual insights or solving problems to discovering a system of problems and having a systemic insight like we talked about in the transformation course and thereby bringing about a significant form of self-transcendence and aspiration and then it gets all tied together. You get why rationality needs ritual and how ritual can be rational, how it affords aspiration, how it affords transformative experience and how it can do that in a comprehensive person identity changing manner and then that is how ritual can fit into a transcendent naturalism. That’s the argument in a gist. All right. I mean I think that what that does from my vantage point right is that it orients us into you know I mean a four-e cognitive way, it orients us into embed and act and body. Yeah. Right and recognizing and I’ll pull a little bit young here or often orient is to archetypal patterns and relationships of the world and to accelerate our capacity to shift perspectives around four archetypal patterns and of course that’s going to get into multi-perspectival orienting in relation to value that’s going to place rationality in relation to wisdom and it’s going to bring some communal opportunities not just in the individual but it’s going to then pull systems together for distributed cognition, distributed rationality in this regard. Yes so one of the things that McNamara makes this you know religious experience but rituals typically involve is they involve decentering in which you’re shifting off of often a first-person perspective and trying to take you know a God’s eye perspective or the you know the future better self perspective and that of course overcomes a lot of cognitive biases. It also triggers the Solomon effect, the thing that Igor Grossman found that just shifting from first person to third person perspective can give you tremendous insight into your problems and then exactly you’re right the thing about a ritual in fact Yaden proposes that we should use practice when it’s individuals and rituals for when it’s shareable precisely because what it does is it puts people into you know distributed cognition gives them access to the collective intelligence but also it lets them to shape it and educate it to improve the fittedness of collective intelligence to a complex environment over time and space so I think that that’s all right and so notice what we’ve done here we’ve said ritual is we haven’t explained it away we’ve not said it’s silly superstition now there are things that can be and we’ve said well this is how you can evaluate them here’s a standard a normative standard or standard of rational evaluation right but ritual is not intrinsically superstitious it’s not intrinsically neurotic it’s not in those are pathological versions of a process that has a rational adaptive function to it and that when it’s properly understood can be normatively guided but we’re not telling anybody like you know that rituals don’t belong we’re saying exactly the opposite we’re saying no no you should be you should be finding the rituals that best trigger the non-propositional knowing get you into serious play have you doing imaginal augmentation of perception cognition and action trigger distributed cognition get you right get that going right fits you well to and transfers broadly indeed like find rituals that do that and then practice them right and so not explaining it away but explaining it in a way that actually a lot encourages you to participate in them but also gives you the tools by which you can rationally evaluate candidate rituals so i’m just coming back from the meta modern spirituality conference yes first night we were there first official night of the conference um they set up uh five different stations uh associated with the core elements earth air fire water and ether uh and each one had a ritual leader uh i happened to go with fire with brendan right and we were in a fire hut um and he had set up he had actually painted it one of his all-seeing eye and was holding that as a mask um and invited us with no words just music and gesture we sat around the fire and there were and he had set out we didn’t plan that i didn’t know what was happening but it was obvious just by what was intonated by what we’re doing and you had piece of paper and he was taking actually uh paper from his emerge book and burning them okay and it gave them the key and then i went up and uh i drew wrote out some core words that were associated with where i was in various identity places and then wrote them out and kissed them put them in the fire right right and and felt the process by which i was bringing in and releasing um into the heat and light uh of of fire in relationship to okay what is heat what is light who am i what is the world um all with no words but it was a very very meaningful and then we got together uh and then we all came together on the fire up on the top of the mountain and talked about why we chose those of us you know why you got off on one of the particular elements and what was the feel of that element in relation uh so for those of you that are wondering kind of like hey what i mean i would have 20 years ago this was not the kind of thing that i was engaged in but when you do it and you see it and you feel that’s it opened up a participatory perspectival structure uh in in me and i think in the group in a way that was pretty fascinating so that’s just sort of an example of yeah of to be explored in relationship to this kind of space now that’s great because so you did something in which there’s sort of an emerging ritual uh right but it’s being very carefully crafted to have a lot of these dimensions that we’ve talked about and it’s it’s you know it’s apprehended and appreciated for its meaningfulness i’m at uh an eastern orthodox monastery and i’m participating in a tradition right long-stamped dress and drenched in ritual and just like and for me this was personally healing uh because i had grown up in a a version of christianity that was very much propositional tyranny uh very antithetical to to ritual to symbol uh to the right uh to you know even even sort of accessing in any direct fashion the understanding of distributed cognition um and then i i was in a form of christianity that was exactly the opposite in so many ways of course people were speaking but the speaking was just in service of the you know the the icons that in that and the lighting is changing they’re even they even will move the the chandeliers and the lamps so in your peripheral vision right there’s and like the spirit is moving through and you’ve got the icons and they’re alive in that candlelight and then the incense and there’s rhythmic movement and then there’s singing and chanting and people are moving and taking up different positions and gesture of course is part of how we do imagine this is gesture is imaginal augmentation uh perception and cognition that’s why you’re doing it all day long and why all the research points to its efficacy and i found it i found i found it so um well like like i said healing for me because it was able to like give me i of course i have always had it intellectually well there are other forms of christianity i’m not saying i’m becoming a christian that’s not what i’m saying here but what i’m saying is at the non-propositional level my whole embodied and embedded cognition got oh there are other kinds right and so i found that um i found that profoundly healing for me in terms of giving me you know part of getting out of ptsd is it can you reframe the the reality right and absolutely and that was very much what happened for me right to get that sort of proximal association and then shift the flavor of it right and then all of a sudden you open up a different kind of meaning structure in relationship to it yeah and a whole and a whole a whole new possibility of relating to one’s own past in my in that case so i think what we’ve done uh is you know and there’s a lot more work going into this and and there’s a i mean the the pick stock stuff on liturgy is also just opening this up profoundly a lot of convergent argument and evidence for the intertwining of ritual and rationality and rationality and ritual um which i think is a very practicable way experiential transformative way john do you want to i mean you’ve done this a lot uh but do for folks that you know do you want to give it just a quick summary of like intelligence rationality wisdom or oh sure rationality in relationship to oh yeah yeah yeah term yeah and used here yes so thank you so intelligence your general intelligence is your capacity to be a general problem solver solve many kinds of problems and many kinds of domains and of course this is why the the the gpt people are talking about sparks of a gi artificial general intelligence it’s a machine that is not just good at playing go or doing this it seems to be much more general and there’s controversy around that i’m not going to get into that but i’m just saying that’s why that concept is invoked so i’ve been making an argument uh with the help of a lot of other people one of them being you but of course tim lilla clap rake richards leo ferraro uh brett anderson mark miller right that recursive relevance realization integrated with predictive processing which i’d like to think of more as adaptive anticipation rather than just predictive processing affords us an account of what that general intelligence is uh there’s lots of specific arguments the core argument is general intelligence should solve the some of the meta problems that are required to solve any particular problem one meta problem is zeroing in on the relevant information and the other one is how much can you anticipate that relevant information rather than just reacting to it and those are two things you want to be doing across your problem solving um so while you’re engaging in these processes the very same processes that make you so adaptively fitted to your environment and it’s a conformity theory uh make you perpetually prey to self deception you will ignore something is irrelevant it turns out to be relevant you will not properly anticipate because you haven’t captured the right factors in right all that sort of stuff because you’re always in a generalization discrimination problem when you’re trying to predict and anticipate and again we’ve gone into a lot of these in more detail than other places so the idea is well what rationality is is you can learn you can use your intel your general intelligence to learn strategies skills shifts of mind that help you overcome the self-deception that arises from the use of your intelligence so these can be attentional strategies like in mindfulness they can be inferential strategies like active open-mindedness etc and so rationality is the suite of virtues because if you integrate skills and states of mind and traits of character right you get virtues that allow you to overcome the self-deception and also allow you to enhance that fittedness to your environment and that’s how you can see right ritual fitting in the way it’s enhancing like remember the relationship to your future self anticipating your future self transforming your future self all that stuff now of course there’s rationality for each but you not only want rationality within each of the kinds of knowing you also want them to be ratio you this is playdoh’s idea you want them to be in the best proportion relationship with each other so you reduce as inner conflict as much as possible you get as much cooperation so you you see more deeply into the world and that allows the world to open up then you can learn from that to better see into yourself and then that depth inward allows you to even more properly align in proportion so you see and then you get this reciprocal opening and so wisdom is that sort of rationally self-transcending rationality that is aspiring to a ratio religio a properly proportioned connectedness that is constantly orienting us this is what sopherson is towards a reciprocal opening that would be great so wisdom ameliorates self-deceptive self-destruction foolishness it enhances flourishing by enhancing ratio religio and then that plugs into all the stuff you and i’ve done about enhancing well-being flourishing etc lovely is that enough i just said oh plenty uh at the level of uh just yeah that’s a wonderful since we’re using that as a as to bridge into ritual that to make sure that’s uh yeah in center and folks’s mind i thought that that’s a wonderful summary yeah i think i think um i think yeah ritual is one of the bridges between rationality and wisdom given that it’s it’s it’s pushing on the transformational aspirational identity changing dimension of rationality and then we’re starting and the cultivation of virtue and then we’re starting to shade into wisdom and i think there’s a continuum so turn intelligence on itself you get rationality turn rationality on itself you get wisdom absolutely and then there’s the possibility to now segue into the next thing that we can enhance intelligence along this line and get something like more wisdom but we can also transform consciousness along another continuum the insight flow mystical experience higher states of consciousness continuum and we get something like gnosis i’m not a gnostic and people who keep accusing me of that stop doing that right how could somebody who advocates so strongly for embodiment and embedded mint like be a gnostic that doesn’t make any sense right um so anyways um you have wisdom sort of on the intelligence side and then you have gnosis on the consciousness side but consciousness and intelligence are intertwining and when gnosis and wisdom mutually afford each other so individuals can see through messy complex situations and can reliably and systematically address perennial problems of self-deception of anguish of absurdity of anxiety of alienation of despair and can enhance people’s sense of connecting to what’s more real that’s my proposal of what enlightenment is that um and so that takes us into the next stage is well what role do higher states of consciousness have in there well we made an argument greg and i that and we’re not going to repeat that argument about the both consciousness and we did another one with chris master pietro about the self so and what the the basic argument is you know consciousness its function is this higher order recursive relevance realization and now i would add in the adaptive anticipation and when you get these kinds of transformations in consciousness like you have an insight and flow you get an enhancement of religio connectedness you get a diminishment of self-centeredness you get all of this stuff and so higher states of consciousness i argue and then and greg and i talked about this and there was convergence um is when you’re taking consciousness’s function of giving us a meta-optimal grip an orienting stance on the world and that’s where you’re flowing that’s where it’s not the flow state of how to play hockey or how to play tennis but it’s the flow state of how to orient meta-optimally grip and take an appropriate stance for navigating the complexities of the world that’s a higher state of consciousness that’s gnosis you integrate it in so not explaining it away but in fact explaining how enlightenment is possible how those higher states of consciousness can have a function how that function can be integrated with the educating of intelligence through rationality into wisdom and then that can all be integrated together into an account of enlightenment that is reverse engineered to solve the perennial problems that confront human beings and i take it that that explains again without explaining away lovely uh i’ll just summarize that from sort of my utah vantage point please so let’s divide human conscious stuff into four different dimensions we got a pure awareness state uh open your eyes okay that’s a sort of a beam of recursive relevance realization active inference that’s base okay and you have an adverbial frame okay that is then pulling adjectival sensory perceptual stuff so you open your eyes you see your apple the standard mode of every day is that that comes into your primate self we talked about sort of a carried self an animal mammal self and then a primate self that’s a particularly relevant for things like how do you feel in belonging what’s your status so you see this hey does this person like me they don’t like me what are the power love and freedoms that’s the normal intuitive self other matrix response your ego is just justifying hey is this you know try to stay maintain a justified state of being you’re tracking your persona and your identity and that’s how you’re getting through the world okay so you have a a being an organizing structure of adverbial adjectival consciousness and then gripping structures that were of the primate self the private person ego and and that’s how we go through the world yeah excellent um and then what we can do in transcendent states ultimately things happen where the normal self-world grip of that everyday experience of who am i and what’s relevant to me and how is this gonna can be broken can be melted can be transformed and the transcendent ultimate experiences is when that standard self it goes through an evolution a transformation there’s some kind of shift in an accommodation you use piaget in terms and transformation in the new self-world grip and the transcendent experiences are when that light cone of possibility where the self-world grip both and then re-establishes itself in a new relationship and then affords this capacity for a broad need a minor ego death or whatever a sort of like okay hey and a transpersonal perspective a transcendent perspective along those lines and then of course you laid out sort of a continuum of process when you get inside flow etc but basically that enormous amount of convergence there and about why we should be sort of cultivating that and if you bring your rational perspective angling well what is rationality well it’s breaking some of the parasitic grips that are maybe creep is vulnerable to self-deception and to maintain a particular narrowing of the worldview well that’s completely concordant with why then transcendent states would be part of this whole equation so and i think that’s amazing it sounded better i think when you said it than i did but okay i mean i think we’re saying the same thing we are we are we are now i think we brushed on it last time but i wanted to bring back you know the the sort of more recent thesis i’ve been playing with and i’m seriously playing with the idea that relevant recursive relevance realization anticipatory adaptive anticipatory right processing that relevance realization machinery can come to a place where it realizes its own irrelevance because it’s always interested in itself because it’s always self-corrected and it can fall into a state where it’s irrelevant and then because you’re not trying to deal with beings and the combinatorially explosive relationships with beings you’re trying to deal with the utter simplicity unity of the ground of being it’s right and that and that that experience and you can you can hear all the heideggerian but also also the telekian and other thinkers saying you know there’s a state and then of course there’s similarities of course in buddhism and daoism not identities similarities where you get to this place where there is this profound letting go so that one can come into a ratio religio with being or the ground of being itself or the one if you if you wanted to be you know platonic which i would be and so i think that which is which is you know kind of an ultimate uh uh transcendent experience mystical higher state of consciousness can still be readily like integrated into the framework we’ve been talking about here we’re not violating the framework we’re not explaining it away we’re actually saying you know this is how and why it could bring you into relationship with what is ultimately most real get allow you to exercise ultimate concern for what is ultimately real as tillick would say and therefore again explaining it but not explaining it away and but nevertheless not having to invoke anything that stands outside of extended naturalism totally lovely so the last thing um and i was also just in chino at the conference for the quest for a spiritual home i gave my talk there my talk is already on paul vanderclay’s channel i suppose by the time this video comes out the talk will be out on my channel soon too and i i i did a lot about i made use of john allen’s work on the evolution of home and kellyann allen both allen’s work on the psychology of belonging to argue for sort of what like the cognitive science of home what are the what’s the what’s the dimensional structure the phenomenology the functionality and i talked about sort of three stages that alan john allen talks about um he talks about first how we’re moving towards a notion of niche construction in evolution the animal isn’t just being pressured by the environment the animal shapes the environment and the environment shapes the animal and then the culture of course is distributed cognit is distributed cognition just putting that whole process on speed right just right um and so you get you get what’s known as the home range and i argued that this is the the the sort of grounding of the sense of belonging that alan kellyann alan talks about uh that the function that produces the sense of belonging and the function is the fitting in function is is our capacity for for niche construction um a quick side note uh i talked about your work uh because to me the belonging literature is as far as i see exactly identical with the mattering dimension of the meaning and life literature but these two parts of psychology are not talking to each other not comparing their research so greg henriquez comes in and says the fragmentation of psychology and i i reference that yeah definitely the case uh jingle jangle all the way um but um you can see why uh belonging would matter and then we moved into the idea of the home base that what starts to evolve is a is a shared space and you know you can use a little bit of prospect and refuge where refuge isn’t so much hiding but a defensible or a place you can escape from if needed right and so you can bring stuff there and you can right you can go out you can distribute and then you can gather back together and do distributed cognition on processing food and butchering and protecting the food stores and all that so you’ve got this sort of relevance realization machinery working and you’ve got an origin place for it um and then so i talked about that in stegmeier’s work on orientation this is a way of giving you a like a origin to horizon relationship that right and right and as soon as you do that instead of just having niche construction in which you wander between you now what you do is you now you now have a map that allows you to interpolate and extrapolate your exploration instead of just happenstance habit and repetition so you get the power of orientation coming in and then once you have that it becomes relatively easy to right uh to get the hearth and then the hearth becomes also the hospital and in the hearth you have a place remember you invoked fire you have a place that can be the center for uh ritual transformation serious play all of matt rosano’s work you have the hospital in which we’re doing shamanic stuff to heal people and you’ve got that at the home right so you get all this ritual uh core so you’ve got the hearth hospital situating within the home base which situates within the home range and you get all of these functions and why they’re all condensed together um and then that’s home and then i said what we’re looking for is actually can i just jump in yeah please please all right um so yeah let’s just put this uh let’s think of our sources as a stacked phylogenetic ontogenetic you know organism animal mammal primate person right so our animals are we’re going to build a little niche we’re going to you know carve out a little cave we’re going to build our little beaver dam we’re going to create the ecological feedback loop so that our our approach avoidance structure of safety and behavioral investment what’s conserved and predictability what’s the range that we’re going to get to explore so you get sort of that openness into the range back into the conservation right and it’s a space time you know uh things have affordances things have dangers and then we become social right and then we take the influence matrix with you know our attachment systems our placement in the hierarchy and emplacement in connection to each other in relation we actually do co-op the space time structures then we yeah yes yes in nested into the belongingness of the relation where it’s relational value and connection in my loved in my so are you homed by the physical environment and then are you homed by the relational environment and then we can be pointing to this well we’re going to get homed by our propositional justificatory environment our shared narrative of where we fit yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and we can then see sort of that stacked and what matters to us is to be homed and then to explore and to uh you know carry across that dialectic in a healthy way excellent excellent again really good and so and then you already said we we we reuse it we exact it we co-opt it and so the quest for a spiritual home as i was saying okay what people are looking for is they’re looking for the these homing functions but they’re not looking for it on you know the within the physical environment they’re looking for it within the cultural uh you know and ontological environments they want to be able to level up they want to be able to do everything we’re talking about so they want a place that gives them the belonging but also orients them and that also you know affords them to go through ritual transformation and none of this is in any way inconsistent with transcendent naturalism in fact it’s uh you know it’s something that’s entailed by transcendent naturalism in a thoroughgoing manner and so the feet the things that in some ways it’s it feels almost like the point right i mean yes yeah what we are missing fundamentally is god is dead right and we’re in this place of the meaning crisis and and we’re looking around and there’s no world homing worldview that creates alignment across the wisdom stack that’s right and that and that’s you know one way to describe how what is that worldview that affords clarity about our participatory perspectival stack in historically and currently within the world and i think we addressed that uh uh last time when we talked about you know fundamental orientation and homing in the in the sense of the sacred that can be within so within uh transcendent naturalism so we’ve got we’ve got we can fit ritual in a deep sense into this we can read that you know the whole continuum of the sapiential and the mystical into this and then we can fit the homing into it and it’s it’s it’s like it’s not clear what remains right uh uh like i i sorry i want to be clear obviously there and i mean i want to i want i’m in good faith relationship with people who think there is more and and i i all i can say is i believe that you’re authentically believing that but that’s not something i can i can i can come this far and i and they’ll often say you’ve come so far and i appreciate that that’s really valuable um but what what so i’m not going to try and decide that issue uh but what we can say is how you frame this from the beginning if you’re a nun n-o-n-e-s this can work for you profoundly if you’re in a legacy religion we have lots of feedback that this helps people go back into it or deepen their appreciation and apprehension of it affords them to aspire more profoundly within it so transcendent naturalism really is in james’s term a very very viable option right now amen amen i mean especially when we talk about what we did with all the classic you know you make the difference common theism classic theism right yes um and and then you look at the embodied traditions and as we’ve talked about you know i think we’re both in agreement that this is a pretty chirodic moment in the world yes right uh and so in relationship to uh the sacred if we think about this in terms of well what are the extended gripping functions that are going to afford contact with the real oriented toward the one it to me it calls for a very experiential like um i mean existential meaningful spiritual orientation and and all embedded in the like collectively like it’s like wow this is really important we got to wake up to the meaning crisis we got to wake up to chat gpt and the digital medical true point um so it even to me it all it both homes and houses and also orients us and then places us in a chirodic moment that calls forth uh particular elements and to me they’re like man that’s a that’s a lot at the level of right of spirituality of of core mattering of these kinds of issues it seems to hold that very very nicely as far as i’m concerned excellent i think that last point was a really excellent amendment yes that it also resonates chirodically very well i think thank you for that that’s a very good point that’s excellent so i think that you and i have with these four built i think a good explication exposition elucidation of transcendent naturalism and we should now enter into discussion with our chosen and cherished interlocutors about this proposal absolutely i think we have done a good job laying the groundwork and i think bringing more voices more perspectives will enrich it in a particular in many different ways thank you very much my good friend hey man thank you deeply appreciate