https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mAJyPPFm-CY
Welcome to Voices with Raveki. It’s my great pleasure to once again, this is his third time, my good friend and colleague, Greg Henriques. And I want to talk about a really core part of his work. It’s not the entirety of his work. Greg’s work is like Hegel’s. It’s this comprehensive, huge thing. I’ll take that reference. And so I want that, you know, clearly understood. But I think there’s a part of his work in particular that jives with a lot of my work, especially I’m finding it especially relevant to this whole project of, you know, trying to get back to dialectic, the Socratic way of life and the integration of sort of transformative psychology, psychotherapy and cognitive science. And Greg is very much a partner in that whole project. And so I’m very excited to have you here again, Greg. Welcome once again. It’s so great to be back. I really appreciate the invitation. It’s always a lot of fun. And I think, as you know, John, I just have such deep admiration for the work you’re doing and the changes you’re making in this world. Thank you. So Greg, in case people haven’t seen the previous video, could you just quickly do, you know, an audio CV really quick about who you are? Absolutely. Yeah. So I’m a professor of psychology at James Madison University. I’m a member of what’s called the Combined Integrated Doctoral Program in clinical and school psychology. It’s a program I directed for 12 years, but then retired so I could do more of my scholarship. So I’m really interested in theory and practice in psychology and organizing the field’s research in big picture ways so that we can generate a language of talking about psychology that’s actually coherent. And there’s consensus about it. And we have shared terms. We connect to cognitive science. I don’t think that psychology should be terribly split off from cognitive science and those kinds of things. And I’m actually very, very, as my last pedagogy psychotherapy video, I really believe we’re in a very important time. The Kairos of the moment, of course, there’s the pandemic, but I really believe, you know, if you track this thing I developed called the Tree of Knowledge, it says that we’re really in this very, very important time with the emergence of the digital age and all the changes that bring to bear. And we need good sense and meaning making systems help us to make a quick, I think really requires a pretty quick transition over the next three decades into new ways of being. And we need really good knowledge systems and we need wise values. And we need to mesh those together. So that’s what my big picture of passion is, finding ways of awakening to the meaning crisis and addressing those so we can find a path towards more wise living. That’s excellent. And I really recommend you guys check out the two previous videos with Greg, especially the one we did that was sort of centered around the COVID and what that is doing to people. So today, let’s not talk about the pandemic if we can. I know. I can definitely take a vacation for a little of that action. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of very, I think very good and in-depth and really richly reflective discussions with people about that. I want to now turn back to, you know, I’m working towards this project, the After Socrates project. Yes. And really trying to understand the functionality and the normativity that regulates the functionality of distributed cognition. Yes. And what’s called collective intelligence and ways in which we can analogously, like we do for individuals, can we get collective intelligence into collective rationality and collective wisdom. And I take it that there was a project in the ancient world that starts around Socrates and then it has a long history afterwards. Developing this practice of dialectic, which was both an intrapersonal and interpersonal practice. Yes. Chris and I, Chris Master Pietro and I have written a few, a couple of things on this already, book chapter and a couple other things. There’s been lots of discussions I’ve had with, you know, Guy Sendstock and Jordan Hall and Christopher Master Pietro. And you and I’ve had one around this whole idea. And then the thing is, I’m not anachronistic. I’m not trying to bring that back, but I’m trying to understand that. Yes. And I think that’s a really important point to make, in order to put it into, and I sort of intend this pun, into dialogue with all these emerging practices that are trying to tap in to distributed cognition and collective intelligence so that we can get, as you said, much more powerful tools of sense making. So structures are not made by individuals. They’re made by cultures, right? And so I think we need to get a very clear understanding of that. And what I wanted to bring up in particular, given that sort of context, was an idea that I have been talking about and developing also with the book I’m writing on the Collineum of Continuum with Daniel Craig. And I think the idea that we’ve got a shift into monologic reason, where it’s a, we get it, the classic example is somebody presenting an argument or a treatise, right? And even as late as, you know, Aquinas philosophy was still written in a dialogical manner, a dialectical manner. And so one of the shifts that happens, although you can also see it earlier on in the shift from Plato’s dialogue to Aristotle’s monologues, is this shift to the monological model of reason. And then we, and then of course that gets very strongly valorized by Descartes and Locke and ultimately by Kant, right? And the autonomy and the self-enclosedness, right, of reason. And the entire Enlightenment product becomes individualistic in a new way. Yes. And of course there’s some interesting ironies about that. You pointed this out in one of the things I read by you, that individualistic cultures actually tend to have a higher rate of self-serving bias, which is one of the primary drivers of irrational argumentation. So that’s, so there’s something that, I mean, you amass a lot of empirical evidence, but that’s, so I’m just taking that as a gateway. Maybe this model of the monolithic and also monophasic, you know, only one state of consciousness matters. So monolithic, monologic, monophasic mind, right? There seems to be increasing evidence that that’s sort of going, like it has taken us in the wrong direction. It’s actually the incorrect model for how we should understand the emergence, the functionality, and ultimately the normativity regulating what we call reason. And I want to point something out for the viewers. It’s important to do so. Greg has developed this around what is called the justification hypothesis and then further work and I’ll let him unpack it. Much more recently and independently, Sperber and Mercer have written some articles and a book called The Enigma of Reason. It is convergent, very convergent, almost identical to Greg’s argument. His was, has precedence, has clear precedence. But the fact that they have come to a very similar conclusion using very similar data argues very strongly. It’s a convergence argument for this hypothesis being very, very plausible. And so I just wanted to state that. And so, Greg, I mean, can you, I’ll be quiet for a while because I want you to lay it out, right? Yeah, because you have, you have, you have an account not only of the origin, right? You’re doing, you’re doing, you’re doing the design stance. You’re doing the classic move in cognitive science, the reverse engineering. Absolutely. Now, what we might call reasoning emerges. And then you do something that’s unique to your work. I don’t see it as much in Sperber’s work. You, which is very relevant to Socrates and Know Thyself, you make some deep connections between the emergence of reason and self-consciousness. And this is, and then, and then you go on to, you know, explain how and why we should now re-understand and reinterpret our reasoning capacities in a much more ecologically valid manner. Is that a fair representation? That’s a wonderful representation because it hits the key aspects of the idea. So the set of idea that I now refer to is called justification systems theory. And it has three different components to it. Let’s start in the order that you offered. So one component is called the justification hypothesis. And I’ll say, if you look at my writings, I used to call the whole thing this, and then I changed about two years ago, Joe McColsky, a good friend of mine and sociologist helped me see why it just wasn’t a good name to call the whole thing a hypothesis. But the hypothesis is a good, because it goes right into Sperber and Mercer’s work and claim and the parallels, which I was making actually in 2003. And in fact, actually, I stumbled across this idea in 1996 and it changed into 1997. Really changed how I see humanity and humans and how humans went from primates to people. Right. That’s a really important point because you make that point about that. Sorry, I want to, I started for interrupting. I just want to put that in as another thing I want you to talk a little bit more about. You tie this to a specific in the biological sense, a species difference, right? A specific difference. Very clear. Very clear. And it’s deeply relevant to our notion of ourselves as persons. That’s absolutely true. Absolutely true. Okay, so one more theme. No, that’s great. And in fact, I need to acknowledge Peter Osorios. Many people don’t know him, but he developed his own model of psychology called descriptive psychology. And he was very concerned, very similar to me in some ways, at least an aspect of my concern about our definitional systems. And he was concerned with what our persons and what is behavior and the behavior of persons was what he was trying to develop. And I stumbled across this is way late, but he helped me understand. And basically what he argued is a person is an you learn to be a person. And that’s one of the things that only humans can do. And what that means is basically using my language a little bit is very congruent is an entity that has self-conscious awareness and justifies their actions on a social stage. Right, right. Okay. And he makes an unbelievably interesting point that although empirically the only kind of creatures we know to be persons are human beings, our capacity for imagining and science fiction is replete with persons who are not human beings. Right, right, right, right. Jabba the Hutt and Star Wars, you know, not a human being, but he’s a person. And that shows you the relationship between the concept. Okay, an operative concept of a person, a self-conscious actor who legitimizes their actions on the stage and takes accountability responsibility in certain ways, depending on the social dynamics. Okay. And that is what happened to us, because that’s what we do. You know, obviously soccer. Aristotle calls the rational animal, we have pride reasons, and we rationalize what we do. And that is what makes us very, very different. Okay. At least there’s analogs in very weak ways. My friend Joe McCloskey asked Jane Goodall, he was talking about the difference between humans. And, you know, he’s very aware of this and embraces this from a sociological perspective. And he asked Jane Goodall, so do the chimps ever do anything like justify their behavior? Jane Goodall is like, no, we’ve never seen anything like that. Okay. So anyway, so there’s this issue about what is it that divides us? And indeed, there’s the macro system, I have the tree of knowledge. And basically what it says is the person culture plane of existence, which is like a new complex adaptive plane, emerges. And it emerges as a function of a cyclical feedback loop of justification. All right, whereby individuals are justifying, propositionally justifying their actions on a social stage. And there’s a variation and selection and retention process of that process of justification that happens between dyads and small groups, and then emerges to create large scale systems of justification. Right, right, right. And that’s what gets us into what I call capital C culture is a way to understand the normative ecology that we reside in as a system set of interlocking networks of large scale systems of justification. For example, like the law, my daughter’s trying to study law right now and she comes in and tells me, this is what a defending can do and this is what you have to do. And I’m like, yes, this is the professional codification of our social rules of justification. So that’s just an example. So what the concept of justification does is it provides a framework that links the person defines what a person is relative to a primate and links that to the large scale concept of culture. Right. Okay. So that’s really cool. Maybe we could slow down on unpack that a bit because, yeah, into you, I understand you was arguing that, you know, justification, self consciousness, and language are all sort of co emerging and co facilitating each other in an evolutionary fashion. Is that correct? That’s exactly right. And this allows us now to come back. Thank you for that, because now we can then trail the argument. Okay, and we’ll go to Sperber and Mercer’s claim because this is parallel and then I’ll feed it my own thing. Well, their the title their books the enigma of reason. Where does reason come from. And basically they argued first that it was argumentation, and then justification and combination of those two is actually where our reasoning came from. So it is the problem and I love this and this is in fact this is the an idea that I had and I built it off of a number of different ways. But the argument basically is that once you as you start to talk and offer, you go from mimetic and broken language into propositional language. Yeah, yeah. So you have a propositional claim. All right. And what I think both, you know what we are saying what I’m saying and what they’re saying is really these propositional claims actually then they carry weight and investment because they’re claiming what is not to be. And now you have to negotiate that. Okay, and you have to justify what is not to be and argue about what is not to be. You make the point that language makes us especially exposed and vulnerable because right right because there’s other members access to what’s going on in our cognition and that that makes us you know vulnerable in a way in which other organisms aren’t vulnerable. Right. So right, right, right. So, so here we are. And so what Mercer. So what they’re doing is they’re given an ecology argument. Okay, so all of a sudden we have an ecology, which by the way is very relevant to the dialogos. Between, but what, as you mentioned with Socrates and the other ideas, there’s a vertical intro psychic dynamic as well as a horizontal between dynamic. Right, right. Now I’m going to get to that. So now what we’re going to talk about as well. Here’s what the key insight that I had because I’m a clinician I’m getting trained in psycho dynamic theory and look at a lens of psycho dynamic theory, you see the self conscious ego as a rationalizing function. That’s the lens that you get and that there’s these underlying demands and drives, both from your sort of primitive child animalistic and from an internalized parent and self consciously trying to navigate all that. Right, right, right, right. Right, right, right, right. And you’re trying to figure out why you tell people what they do and what you should tell them. And in therapy we create this very private context, right, that’s very confidential, and I’m very giving so that I can get to what’s all underneath the layers of defense. Okay, so, and then basically I stumbled across this justification idea. And there’s the interpersonal emergence of culture dynamic but now here’s the real issue. This is what really separates the society. Okay, it’s a reverse engineering idea. Right. So everyone like Swerver and Mercer and so many people see human language is so different than other and gosh what was all the capacities and then it does allow us this cognitive widgets and unbelievable. Right. And then maybe it’s argumentation justification interpersonal here, but here’s the issue, intracyclinic. Okay, John tell me the worst things you’ve ever done in the world and tell it publicly to everybody here. So, you don’t want to do that. Right, you know, you don’t want to talk about your unbelievable weaknesses or the times that you were selfish and all of that. And yet what language does with its questioning is it allows me to highway into your subjective consciousness in a way, it’s just totally different than, you know, I have a dog, my dog just unfortunately did not unfortunately but he just got neutered and he’s in a lot of pain, I presume. Right. But I don’t know what’s really bothering him. I can’t ask him what he’s done and blah blah blah and he can’t ask me why did you do this to me. Yeah. But Bertrand Russell once famously said, no matter how eloquently a dog barks it can’t tell you that its parents were poor but hardworking. There you go. Right. Right. Or betrayed him, and then struggle with whether or not you throw your parents under the bus. Right, right, right, right, right. And then what would that mean. And if you do throw them under the bus they’ll come back at you and other people might see you and at the end of the day, you know, you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a situation where you’re in a moment. Everything that’s happening in any negative way related to social рай 구독 do you think is going to ! Ermm So and perceptual awareness and the social environment. And you make very clear predictions about the kinds of structures we would expect that reporting system, that logic system, that narrating sense-making system to say about oneself. And like, for example, self-serving biases. It would make the prediction that, depending on the social context, but if you generally wanna take credit, something goes well, you get an A on a test, hey, it’s because I’m smart and study. And an F on the test is because you’re a lousy professor, John, and you gave me a neutral to be unfair, right? That’s a natural why, because that kind of justification narrative preserves my influence and investment, my worth in a particular way, and I can narrate that to myself in other sort of contexts. Of course, I have to be careful because nobody likes a narcissist. So now you have the whole dynamic about how you create a justification system, which by the way, I would argue, welcome to yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I look at myself and I’m like, well, yeah, that’s actually a good description. I’m a lot of the dilemmas that I’ve had. Yeah, I like this notion because it’s very much like what Moore argues in Socrates that you don’t discover the self primarily through introspection or by just sort of stating what you believe, you discover the self by what you will commit to within a social context. Right, exactly. Because then you obviously, one of the things that this thing, that’s part of the larger system is that we’re very motivated, and this is pretty common sensical, but I do it to maintain our social influence, our sense of relational value, our place in the social matrix. So if the crowd is going one way, and you stand up and you say, well, I think you guys are all full of crap. Well, that’s good luck. I mean, that’s a dangerous thing. Some people certainly, depending on all sorts of factors, can do that, but almost everybody, say, look at the teenage years, what the crowd is doing, I mean, I work with a lot of teenage troubled individuals, and we see trouble, psychological trouble, really exponentially jump in the modern world in the teenage years. Why? Well, this provides a very clear understanding that what happens in adolescence is the emergence of a stabilizing identity self-concept. For kids that are five, it’s contextual. They certainly have a sense about how to justify. Did you eat the cookies? No, mom, absolutely not. Because they don’t want to get punished in a particular way. But by the time you’re 12, you’re carrying around an image of yourself that you can extract formally across a wide variety of contexts. Now you have to think about, well, who are you? How do you get influence? Who are you really relative to who do you present yourself as? And you get all sorts of imposter syndrome, self-critical kinds of issues, and things along those lines. Well, there’s two points I want to, there’s one that seems the evolution about the interpreter, and then the second point is this idea that, I think you have it too, but it’s clear in Sperber and Mercer that individual reason sort of doesn’t work very well, but collective reason works very well. So let’s go to the first one, because it looks like, I mean, you do go in and you say, you know, there are organisms, there are few in number, and they have very developed brains, and they’re social creatures like us that do have evidence of self-awareness, and we have some evidence of them having some minimal awareness of the perspective of their cohorts, like they’ll hide things, right? Yeah, absolutely. Turn their backs, right? They’re not being left like that. I know, boy, you got it. All of that sort of thing. And so, and then Proust, in her work on the philosophy of metacognition, she said, we have to be careful to distinguish two kinds of metacognition. There’s the one in which we’re doing something like self-narration, there’s a procedural form, which is, I’m self-modeling so that I can monitor and manage myself as I’m moving around my world, right? Absolutely. And so it’s very plausible that many organisms have some, because we’re even finding this in robotics, if you give the robot, if you get the robot to model itself before it models the world, it does, so you get self-modeling, and then you have that sort of procedural metacognition, and then it looks like what you’re suggesting is that can get exacted into being something like this interpreter. Right, absolutely. So certainly you can imagine, right, why there would be a metacognitive functioning to feed back and afford, say, a more optimal grip on the environment for other non-linguistic animals that have cortical and special structures, okay? And you see, you know, mirroring awareness and other kinds of indications of self-reference, okay? But it’s just a radically different environment when you have the narrative linguistic highway open up. Yeah, very much, very much. And so now not only do you have to think about yourself in action, you have to think about giving your accounts to other people. Yeah, with the story. And that’s the story of the self is what, yeah. So the metacognitive piece of the story of the self, it really becomes the human person, private, public narrative. I wondered if your argument, I think it could be strengthened if you integrated it with Daniel Couto’s work on the narrative practice hypothesis. Narrative actually really enriches, it’s a particular way of using language and imagery that really allows us to pick up on other people’s mental states, because he said, the problem with trying to determine your behavior is, I actually can’t do, I can’t just, you know, the old model, belief plus desire equals behavior doesn’t work. Right, right. How do you tell if somebody’s eye’s twitching or winking, and how do you tell if the wink is lewd or, right, so I need to know, I need to fill out a lot of history, I need to know the character, I need to know the context, I need to know what everybody’s intention is, I need what possible outcomes you might be, I need narrative structure, I need plot, and right, he says it’s horrible. Narrative practice, and he said, that’s why cultures practice narrative and practice it. Absolutely, absolutely. Powerful way of building our mind sight abilities. Brilliant, brilliant, and yes, and in fact, actually, I talk all the time about, well, actually, what was framing us socially in the socio-cultural context is the justification narrative. Right, right, right, right. Okay, which is the story of the self because who I am and what I’m doing and legitimizes are not you and what you’re doing. So it’s absolutely along those lines, and I agree that that lineage could be strengthened and informed by that work, and there’s an enormous amount of detail. In fact, that’s why I love the idea, it’s a hub of idea that takes lots of other people’s ideas and those ways in which their brilliant work can be built upon it and then create a hub that then ties a lot of that work together. I mean, this is one of the reasons, and because there’s a lot of work now on how the Platonic dialogues, we’ve been misreading them because we have this enlightenment perspective of the monophasic, monologic, monolithic mind, right? And while we would track the arguments, right, and what we’re leaving out, a lot of people, Drew Highland and lots of people, Drew Highland comes to mind immediately, but lots of people arguing, no, but the drama, because a way of life is being justified and made attractive to people, and the drama has a particular narrative structure, right, and dialogical, and that’s just as important, and you can’t actually get Plato’s philosophy if you just extract the argument. So, and that’s exactly, I mean, so what I call the problem of social justification is essentially what gives rise to this reasoning dynamic, which means that it evolves in a social relational context, right? And so that’s, and it is that iterative process, and think about every one of, you know, what was it, James Mark Baldwin who said, ego and alter are born together, and that’s both because we have an intuitive social relational system, our attachment system, our mirror neurons, our tracking others, the importance of our place in the social world, but as humans, then we are born into a socio-ecological thicket, okay, and then it is the process of negotiation around that thicket that gives rise to the collective intelligence, and the opportunities of things like emergence of a wisdom in the crowds, and all of our intuitive perspectives and relationship to being able to see what none of us can see individually, and the process of creating context, and this is what I think your wonderful project really is about, is creating a context to maximize that, to take advantage of that, as opposed to, say, our current, in the United States at least, so, you know, not to get political, I would argue our current political context is absolutely antithetical. Because of its polarization, it’s creating stupidity across collective stupidity, basically. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. So then, what we need to do, the transition that we need to make right now over the next 20 years is create a collective intelligence system, a distributed network, a collective intelligence system that maximizes wise justifications, and that is an interpersonal dialogical process. Right, yeah, I’d say two things there. I think what we’re primarily justifying is not beliefs, ultimately, but we’re justifying ways of life, and identities that we take. We’re ultimately trying to justify personhood, not our particular conclusions, and I think we need to bring that back as central. So this brings up, this is a perfect segue to the point that I wanted to come back to, which is this idea that individual reason, that model is actually fraught, and we have just overwhelming evidence. This is the other enigma, right, that Sperber and Wilson, not Sperber and Wilson, Sperber and Merced talk about. Why have we, we seem to have this superpower, but it seems to really not be working very well. There’s all the evidence of all the bias, all the self-deception, and I go on a lot about this in my work, and then they have the idea, and I think you do too, but if you take these individualistic things, these things that look like they’re malfunctioning individually, and you put them into the dynamic system of distributed cognition, you actually get really powerful and wonderful results. I agree, absolutely, and indeed, I mean, if you look at the structure of the way hunter-gatherer systems organize themselves, they hated dominance, they were really anti-dominant hierarchies, right? Why? I think the reason they were doing that is because they’re cultivating a distributed collective network, so of the various roles of hunter-gatherer intelligence to be brought to bear along those lines, and I think that we have grossly erred on the idea that one person, we have the iconic Newton solving for F equals NA, and that is then the idealized transcendental ego of Kant and all of that stuff, and that’s just, I think that’s grossly mistaken on many, many levels. I think it’s grossly mistaken at the level of value, first off, I think fundamentally, we seek relational value in networks. We wanna be known and valued, and wanna matter to other people, and matter to ourselves. That’s actually at the core of our, as a psychotherapist, I’ll tell you, what do people really worry about? Not mattering and relational value at the core. Totally, that’s in the meaning in life literature too. Very cool. Absolutely, and what do we really wanna do? We wanna participate, this is like in a religio fashion, we wanna participate in what we think ontologically matters and tell ourselves metaphorically matters and create mythos about that collectively. Right, right, yep, yep. That’s what we wanna do. So, and we do it the best when we do it together. I think that’s what the, these are massive transformations that need to hit from modernity and its idealization of self-interest in the individual to a meta-modern modernity that actually embraces the collective. And does so wisely, and I keep coming back to wisdom, it’s just fundamental meta-values that we need to be framing. What is it that makes a flowering, eudaimonic picture of a person and the polos, the collective group? Well, I mean, there’s two things that come out of that right away. One is the, our capacity for person-making is right, and making the conditions of person-making agape is very important. Yes, yes. Which, yeah, a broad interpretation of Christianity, as you know, basically, is to give the love to allow the other person to flower. I mean, there’s a garden behind me because I take a lot of that metaphor in relationship to, how do we shower relational value or love agape onto each other and actually neutrally maximize it? That’s actually the socioeconomic, problem that we should be, in my opinion, focused on. I agree with that. Yeah, I mean, you present research and other people have presented research that the individualistic cultures, ironically, they tend to have much more of self-serving bias, which is at the core of a lot of how people do poorly in reasoning tasks and argumentation tasks. So where you’re highly individualistic, you’re actually much more likely to give into confirmation bias and other things like that. Whereas if you’re in a collective culture, that’s much, I mean, there’s difficulties there. I’m not saying collectivism is the answer or anything, but I’m saying we’ve got this weird idea, I think, that somehow individual reason is the pristine case, but the empirical evidence really cuts against that dramatically. Absolutely. And trying to, therefore, create a value system based on the individual, sort of the individual atomically, individualism, what that was, I think is, is deeply mistaken because it’s just sort of misrepresenting anything. I think that’s also part of why, and I’ve had some really good discussions about this with Rafe Kelly and he’s helped me moderate what I’m saying, but this is why I’ve been a little bit critical also of the hero archetype being so valorized in our culture, because it tends to be aligned with that whole individualism thing, that it’s actually very detrimental to rationality and overcoming self-deception and, and I think that’s a very important point. Overcoming self-deception and affording, collective intelligence, the kind of collective intelligence, which is the only place in which our norms are created. This idea that we can be self-normative, that we can create norms purely for ourself, I mean, that has been subject to so much devastating criticism that- It barely even makes any sense. Yes, it does. I mean, the entire normative culture is to create a large-scale system that coordinates us in relation to our collective values. I mean, that’s what it’s doing. I mean, creating a normative system, if you lived on a loan on an island, I mean, really what you would be doing is creating an, and we know this clinically, is whatever projected interjects that you’re carrying around. Yeah. I don’t know if you’re familiar with like internal family systems, but there are therapeutic approaches that basically say that my personality, like Freud obviously decided and argued there would be sub-personalities. Well, in the therapy world, that people have taken that, and I think very, very legitimately, to the internal working models of the roles that we internalize about ourselves and essentially carry around a family of multiple selves. Yeah, well, I mean, that’s because how the brain, how various parts of the brain are modeling each other is not actually very different from how one brain tries to model another brain, right? So that’s of course important. I was thinking of Tom Hanks and Castaway, how he has to fit Wilson. Yeah, I mean, he even puts Wilson up there, right? Just to have a mirror at an intuitive level, right? A self other positional self and somebody to talk with. And then certainly for myself, every time I try to do a paper, okay, or try to come up with a new idea, I bounce. It just intuitively comes to me to bounce into all the positions of the critic, positions of the supporter, positions for people on the sidelines. In other words, you jump into the roles. So you play out a multiplicity of different dialogues, argumentations, justifications in your own head. That’s how you see how you would reason. And when we do it well together, that’s what’s gonna generate the best collective intelligence. Which means therefore that the mimetic abilities and how they in here within our perspectival knowing are much more integral to being rational than we’ve previously given appropriate credit to. Perspectival knowing is doing a lot of heavy lifting that we have really marginalized and backgrounded in our current understanding. Well, I know you’ve had some really stimulating conversations with Ian McGilchrist in relationship to this whole point. I mean, the Western logos, the Western idealized individualistic rational logos is completely imbalanced. It’s great at one level, but it needs to be contextualized. And there’s so many other different aspects of human context, right, that we’re out of balance around. And so if we’re gonna move into the 21st century in a right, more holistic and sustainable way, we’re clearly getting imbalanced in relationship to perspectival knowing, recognizing our phenomenological needs and how crucial those are to meaning making and harmonizing. I mean, go to a rock concert and everybody’s jiving together around music, which is all intuitive participatory perspectival. Not logos. All salience manipulation. Yeah. It’s that serious play. So I mean, your point there that converges with, again, with independently generated work by Balthus and Staudinger, that you give people a sort of a wisdom task, which they’re trying to decide what the right thing to do. And you ask them to imagine talking to somebody else. They do much better than if they just stay in their own head or Igor Grossman, a colleague and friend of mine, all the work on the Solomon effect. People, tell me one of your worst problems and people describe it in the, they say, now describe it as if a friend was describing the same problem. And they get insight and realization, right, just by taking that other perspective, right? And all that sort of work just that keeps coming and pointing to how dialed out it. Well, and I’ll tell you, I’ll say at a clinical level, it’s unbelievably important because what happens to people is when they get vulnerable inside, they feel neurotic. They then don’t generally wanna share that because then it makes it look weak. So they create a public out here and then hide what’s going on to here, right? And then they become not in a narcissistic way, but in a perspectival way, in a parasitic thought way, they become completely self-absorbed. Right, right, right, right. Meaning they just talk into themselves about what it is that’s going on. And then we know from like a cognitive therapy perspective, they develop rigid and absolutist beliefs about their feelings, about who they are, and a dialogue that allows them to actually engage in a process of wondering about it. In fact, that’s what cognitive therapy is about. It’s like bring it to somebody else, start to get out of your head and begin to analyze this in other ways with other people. Right, right, right, that’s really cool. I mean, and there’s therapies that bring in the perspectival. You know this better than I do, like sort of emotion-focused therapy and right. Totally, well, and specifically actually mentalizing therapy. I don’t know if you’re aware of Peter Fein, he’s finally- No, I don’t. But it’s specifically, it’s for individuals that have personality problems and it’s called mentalizing. And what you do is you explicitly put yourself in the role of other people. I mean, that’s why it’s called mentalizing. Right, right, right. So yeah, that’s absolutely. So let’s just be clear, all that an idealized individual rationally deducing what truth is, is an unbelievably bad model. Right, right, right. A community of individuals that have some collective shared framing, but then allow for distributed network and emergence of toward whatever would be good in that context. And so this means we have to bring in, we have to connect to the perspectival and the participatory. We have to have things that connect, symbol on together, the collective and the individual. So a lot of symbolic, enacted stuff, and it’s gonna be collective, and it’s gonna be, and it’s a prototypical thing that bridges between that is ritual behavior. You have an individual doing something, but it’s often from a third person perspective with other people around. So what I’m saying is, it sounds like reason is going to be situated within all of this machinery and you explicitly bring this up, that has typically been called religious. Right? Yes. Because religion seems to be the software that runs distributed cognition for managing all of this kind of stuff. Completely, completely. And what it does is it provides you just a shared identity and set of practices that cultivate collective meaning making together. Which is what we’re engaged in. I mean, I love, I don’t know if it’s true, the idea of Aslan’s God, a human history. He speaks to the, that the idea basically was people are building more and more temples 10,000 years ago, like the temple at Gobekli, 10,000, I don’t know how to say it exactly, it’s in Turkey, 12,000 years ago. So, you know, why did we build architecture? I mean, agriculture. Agriculture sucked at first as a way of life. You know, he argues, it’s because we start building these temples. Yeah, the temples are built before the Neolithic Revolution. Exactly, that’s what the idea is. And what happens is if you’re building temples year round, then you gotta live there. You can no longer be nomadic. They’re too big, and so you’re gonna have to create our agriculture as a necessity that emerges out of the function of the size of the temple. What does that actually translate into in terms of the modern age? I love telling the new atheists, either way, I used to be a new atheist, but I love telling you, it means that the concept of God gave rise to modernity. Modernization, you know, was birthed by the concept of God. So for me, I believe in the concept of God. I don’t make any supernatural claims about theism, but I believe in the concept of God. And I think if we flip it around and say, what do we need? We need Tillich’s ultimate concern, right? A eudaimonic ultimate endpoint that gives us heaven on earth, to use the Jordan Peterson frame. I mean, you know, that’s, and that, and the, you know, one of the things that modernity did in its materialistic flatland is set the stage for us to, you know, dissociate. And I know you know this more than anybody, but it’s, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, I’m actually putting this in my book, and not a friend, but a nephew of mine, came back his first year of college. It’s like, oh, what did you learn? Basically that I’m a bunch of chemicals. You know, so he had a neuroscience course and a reductive sort of analytic philosophy course. And, you know, he learned that. And so he’s like, yeah, all of this stuff is just brain based. And I’m like, you know, my brother, you know, paid a lot of money for that conclusion. That’s not, you know, materialistic flatland is not ideal. So yeah, we got the 21st century’s got to reorient our collective meaning making systems, absolutely. And I’m now at a place to embrace calling that religion. Yes, I mean, so this is wonderful. So I mean, it’s providing a very powerful context, a context of justification, in fact, for the project that I’m engaged in, which is, well, what is the psychotechnology, or maybe Jordan Hall’s term is better. What’s the meta psychotechnology that we can recover? And also maybe, I like the word inventio. It’s Latin, right? Because it means both to discover and to make. And it sort of, and Kerry does this wonderful thing is he talks about how Augustin basically inventios the inner psyche, right? The inner soul, the inner soul. She sort of discovers it while inventing it. It hangs between. Right, well, obviously you are the absolute genius of that, right, with your point of realization. Yes, yeah. So inventio, realization, I mean, when I dawned on me, but you made both the Janus face, two sides of the point of realization, I was excited about that the whole damn day. I mean, that is one of the most brilliantly placed words. I just need to say this on, you know, it’s one of the most brilliantly placed words that I’ve ever seen in terms of a name. Thank you. I was saying yes to the double faced nature of realization, not to the attribution of brilliant. But thank you for saying that. So yeah, I think that’s really, really important. And I guess what I’m trying to get at then is the inventio of dialectic as a meta psychotechnology that will curate and constellate feed from and feedback to, you know, in ecology practices, but this meta psychotechnology, its job is to, as you say, optimize all of this. Optimize it as much as we possibly can. Right, right. So, and then the question is sort of what we need to do to bring together to create that meta frame and create sort of the lattice for the participatory vines of dialectical exchange to grow around. Yes, yes, yes. So that’s the way I would, you know, I think about it. And in fact, so inside of my system, the way I develop what are called ultimate justification. So the ultimate justification is the justification of justifications. Right, right. Okay, and that creates the load star or, and for me, what that is is B, that which enhances dignity and wellbeing with integrity. Right, right. So these become big three meta values, dignity, wellbeing and integrity become meta, and I mean meta cultural, meaning that I see them as moral relational universals that transcends culture and then create a sort of a wisdom complex, as it were. Right, right. And why these three ideas and what they, how they interrelate, but it’s just an example. And I would say that what we need at an attitudinal level around this is what I call an integrated pluralism, meaning somebody might bring a gap, for instance, a beautiful value, of course, love or freedom, you know, of the individual, any number of kind of potential meta values, and you’ll see like all the universalist kind of church and wisdom traditions, they’re integrated pluralistic, meaning that they emphasize different aspects, but man, if there isn’t a center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s very much, yeah, I’ve said it, that’s why I reject both perennialism, which says they all say the same thing, and relativism, which says they don’t say anything in common. And it’s more, I use a model that’s like from deep learning, like you can see, you can see like, there’s sort of, you can extract what’s invariant, but you also have to pay attention to what varies between them. And if you move back and forth, you actually get, you know, you get a deep learning from all of them. So a procedural relationship to them, rather than trying to grasp the final propositions from them. Right, and so pluralism is what’s variant and integrated with what’s invariant. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Ying yang dialectic around that concept. So, and so I think that’s exactly right. You have to try and figure out what that, you called it all about justification, and you also said it’s sort of your bedrock normativity. Yeah, exactly. I’m, and I think that’s totally important, I’m not dismissing it. I’m trying to also do the reverse engineering of the practice. I’m trying to figure out the best model we have from our own past, which is dialectic and that whole history. And it had both these dimensions, and Chris Master Pietro and I are doing a lot of work on this. I’m also doing work with Peter Lindbergh, and I’ve mentioned that, and also the guy. I was on the Stowa Thursday. Great, I’m gonna take, I’ll watch that. Great stuff Peter’s doing. Yeah, great. So, dialectic has this interpersonal, interpersonal and then ultimately transpersonal dimensions to it, the three dimensions, right? Yes. Trying to put that, get that as clear as I can, because we can’t go back there. We don’t live in ancient Greece, but then put that into dialogue, right, with all these emerging authentic discourse practices that are all springing up because there’s a vacuum. And there’s a vacuum. And that’s right, top down and bottom up is to talk to each other as deeply as possible. I mean, that’s a brilliant description. You know, that’s a brilliant description. I’ll add a couple of pieces, especially since we’re on a justification dynamic here. Oh yeah. So, according, if we follow justification systems theory, what emerges first is the problem of justification in general and social justification in particular. Right. So, if I’m making propositional claims, it’s easy to ask questions once we have that argument of architecture. Just hang out with a four-year-old, all right? And there’ll be a why are you bald? Why is sky blue? Why is this? And now essentially, it is, kid. You know, it’s like, and so, so we have the problem of justification, the problem of social justification. How do you explain? And that gets rise to, now we’re involved, okay? And then we see the evolution of culture, 100,000 years, you know, 50,000 years, it’s definitely exploding, right? But what happens with the ancient Greece, in ancient Greece is unbelievably different and important. And really, I think you can locate what happens with Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato as a fundamental transition in processes of justification. Right, right, right. What does Socrates really develop? And from my view, he basically develops formal epistemology. And what we mean by that is, well, justify your terms. Right, okay? So he basically realizes that social pragmatic justification doesn’t necessarily stand up to absolute epistemological truth justification. He sees the difference between those two in a fundamentally different way and builds the dialogical technology that helps us become aware that maybe we’re all just a bunch of bullshitters. Right, right, right, right. And then how do you know when you’re not? That’s what he basically is asking, right? In a very, very powerful way. And then trying to create this ecology of trying to detect bullshit. Now, if we keep that going, okay, then we realize, all right, we get into, ultimately, I think that gives rise to science eventually. In terms of puricism, the empirical add issue to that. All right, and I’ve got, I love science, and I am a scientist, but I have my critique of modernist science in what it did, okay? And ultimately, what we need, and the whole enlightenment modernist way of thinking, okay? Which prioritize objective, analytic, reductive truth and individualism in a way that needs to be recontextualized, both in terms of systems thinking, big picture systems thinking, and we’re gonna need to bring the relational social pragmatic back in, right? Take away and create a scientific humanistic philosophy or macro religion that informs how we educate our children and informs how we relate, how we go across the various lines. So, what I’m basically saying is, I can take the concept of justification, I can trail it through the evolution of culture, right? I can then think about culture as large scale systems of justification, and I can trail up sort of then, what are the ultimate justifications that would ideally organize a large scale system at the level of value that cultivates wisdom, and that’s where I get my big three. But that’s, if you’re architecture, what you’re seeing about what it is that we need to do, and I take this idea of justification, you put those two kinds of things together, you can really see a lot of. Yeah, yeah, we have to keep working together, that’s very clear, that’s very clear. I think, you know, we’re running out of time, but I wanna give you the opportunity to put up that wonderful diagram you have. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m gonna take it, take us through it. I should be scaring my screen, here it is, okay. Great. Okay, okay, so let me just orient you to this, okay? Orient the viewer to this. This is a map of human consciousness, that’s what it’s designed to do. And there are, it argues that there are three key domains of human consciousness. One is your perspectival phenomenological domain. I often now refer to this as mind too, but it is your integrated sense of being in the world, and John is an absolute expert on what consciousness might be, and I’m learning greatly from him, that’s just a side note, okay? So this is the emergence of, say, whole brain activity, gives rise to a global neuronal workspace, that is our experience of being. Then this is, you have a private narrator, okay? Is this the interpreter you were talking about earlier? Exactly, so this is the self-consciousness interpreter, and in fact, we can see, anybody that’s familiar with Michael Gazzaniga’s work, the left hemisphere interpreter really shows, at a very mechanical way, the left hemisphere just generates justifications for what it is doing, when it doesn’t even know what’s going on. But so this is, the problem of justification in the mechanics of self-conscious narrative reflection. And this is what you actually share when you talk to other people, what you decide that you will allow them to see. Right. So now, if we go to your articulation about, well, what is the dialogos? When we talk about horizontal, we’re talking about in between right here, okay? And we each need the vertical work. Yeah, very much, very much. Down from the self-consciousness into our subconscious, and you see this thing called the Freudian filter. The argument is that we want, our narrator wants us to be good, we want to be important, we want to be intelligent, okay? That creates a bias of desire, so we can tell the story of ourselves in a particular way. All right? Now we know for clinical reasons, lots of reasons why people will get trapped almost in the opposite of that, and all sorts of dynamics that go on. But fundamentally, we know from a basic psychodynamic perspective, that there’s a vertical alignment of the self-consciousness system into the phenomenological experiential, and then into the dynamic unconscious, like in other words, your shadow, right? So the Freudian filter is very much like what would be hiding behind your personal shadow. Is the attentional filter what I’m talking about a lot when I’m talking about like all the relevance realizations? It’s exactly what that is. So this is how does the collective representations that are non-conscious jump onto the screen of experience? Right, right, right, right. And then you basically have, you have the emergence of one representation, and then if you do a Rosenthal model that I was just learning, and then you have a second representation, okay, a top down, bottom up, you’re gonna use those terms, of awareness, and then that pops into your global workspace of awareness. And what you’re doing is you’re hunting, the attentional system is hunting for salient variables, or relevant variables in relation, to see what kinds of problem, information it needs to solve the problems of what I would call the problems of work effort, which is how do you direct your time and energy to solve problems in living? And then what’s the Rogerian filter? Exactly. Rogers, the Carl Rogers, is that the? It’s an exact reference to Carl Rogers, okay. And what this is, is that there’s this highway of information, and we want other people to be a particular way, and we judge them accordingly, okay. So in other words, you say, hey, you know, I want you to think this way like me, and I want you to like me, and I want this on the other. So we put pressure on other people, and creates a pressure to then share what we publicly wanna share in relationship to social influence. Right, right. All the Rogerian filter, so if you’re familiar with Rogers at all, his central insight is that people have what’s called, he argued, people had an organist big valuing process, that’s actually would be connected right into the experiential heart, okay. And then if you let them grow in a non-conditional and loving environment, they will reach their potential, that organist big valuing process knows what’s good for them, and they will find out full flourishing. What happens is other people judge them, okay, and because other people judge them, that creates a social split out here, and a private true self split in here, they become imposters. So it’s the, the Rogerian filter refers to the tension between the judgments of others, and how the contingencies that others will place on me, if I share what my thoughts are. Right. And so that’s when you’re saying, hey, I don’t want people to know this about me. It’s managing that transparency that we were talking about. It’s managing that transparency. When anyone puts a, and this filtering process can be done inside, but actually we create a lot of extent, and an extended mind around this. Right, of course. If you put a lock on your diary, a lock on the diary is an example of the Rogerian filter in the public private. Why is the lock there? I’m gonna talk to myself, and I like writing because that helps me process. I don’t want anybody to see that diary. Right, right, right, right, right. That’s a filter. Right, that’s a way. And so this is, so what the, the cool thing about this is it both describes the various domains of mind, and it shows their dynamic interrelation, inside and interpersonally. And you were talking about, well, we’re watching all of these, sort of to use Peter Lindberg’s term, we’re seeing a culture 2.0 multipolar war. Yeah, yeah. Peter do with those 35 little mean plexes. He recognized that, he did a brilliant job. He diagnosed them in my term as these emerging competing systems of justification. Totally, I think that’s completely accurate. I think that’s right. And they have a core idea, and then they have a core opposition, and they have more peripheral things, and then they’re major players that have influence in relationship to the Trump they’re trying to advocate for. Right, and our danger in this environment is we’ll create such a more chaotic multiplex that we will get, that will blow ourselves up because of chaos. Right, right, right, right. Or the other danger is a nightmare in 1984, one gets dominant, and then they control the internet, and then they press everybody. Right, so there’s an order chaos dialectic that we actually have to manage. And so what we need to do is we need to create the right socio-ecological set of practices, ideals, values, right, to network these things together so that they benefit from the dialogue rather than tear each other down like in a bio- The formal processing rather than the material processing. Exactly, exactly. You know, and that’s what the whole game be at least, you know, I don’t know how to explain it. But basically what that is is so that you and I can sit here and be like, gosh, John, that’s a great idea. Let me see if I can riff off of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As opposed to, hey, my tenure is dependent upon ripping your shit down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a nightmare. Yeah, very much, very much. Wow, Greg, well, we’re coming to the end of our time. This has been really, really, really exciting to talk to you and your work and really unpack it. And, you know, one of the markers I make of Dialectic, Dialectic is working and it’s creating dialogos. Two people can get to a place where they couldn’t get to individually on their own. And I very much felt like that was happening. Oh, absolutely. And that’s, you know, I’ve been having a dialogue with you ever since I started the awakening of the meaning crisis. Yeah. And sort of like, and that, just the framing on that, you know, is exactly, you know, in terms of, so if you look at like the tree of knowledge, okay, so it goes matter, life, mind, culture, and each one of those things, life, mind, and culture are new complex adaptive planes of behavior that emerge as a function of information processing and computational cybernetic control systems, okay, cells and genes and neurons and animals and people and language. Right. Well, I’ve always been like, oh my God, as soon as I saw that, I knew that the 21st century would be relayed the groundwork with the internet and artificial intelligence, and the digital landscape is gonna be upon us, okay. And that’s novel information processing system. So I’ve always had the intuition ever since 1997 that the 21st century is gonna be unbelievably intense, right? When I listened to the meaning crisis, I paired that aspect with the struggle of people trying to justify and the kairos of where we are. Yeah, exactly. That’s well said. And it just woke me up to the, in a totally new way. So your synergy of that history, right? And the bringing us to the moment and the framing of it in relationship to the meaning crisis. And what the entire tree of knowledge system really is is actually, hey, here’s a sense making system. We need to update the way we think about science. When you think about science, certainly there’s the method. We also need to think about science as a structural thing to be used to get an optimal grip on the world. Yeah. And that’s basically is about that. And so it’s a sense and meaning making stuff riffing off of that. It’s very, very synergistic. And it’s been great for me ever since I discovered your stuff there, brother. Thank you. Greg, if you could email me links, two or three quick links. Yeah, absolutely. That are focused on what we were talking about today, the justification hypothesis, the justification systems, all of that. Absolutely. That would be really wonderful. Because I’d like to try and get this video up soon. This one I want up really, really soon. Wonderful. I’d love to do that and be happy to show this. Okay. Well, we will obviously talk again and keep up your excellent work. And I highly recommend Greg’s work. And those of you who have already taken an interest in Sperber and Murciero’s work, the Enigma Reason, I strongly recommend you look at Greg’s work. I strongly recommend it. So thank you. Hey man, appreciate it. It’s been very, excellent dialogue, lots of synergy, lots of fun. Yeah, very good.