Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation - 2 -Cognitive Science Show (UMsYLS8L5i8)

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Welcome everyone to another voices with for a Vicky. This is episode two of the series I’m doing with with Greg and rickis and Zachary Stein, and I’ll have them just introduce that we’re we’re we’re tackling the issues around finding a meta psychology that is true to transformation. So last time we covered the problem of transformation, we problematized it. And this time Greg is going to take us into the problem of psychology. He has written literally written the book on this and he’s going to take us through it. Some of you are familiar with some of this and some of the other work that Greg and I have done together and some of his blogs on psychology today that are very they’re they’re exemplary for how briefly but yet concise, you know, concisely but nevertheless fully they present these often complex ideas. And then we’re going to start to see the connection between this quest for a meta psychology, at least in terms of the problem of psychology and the problem of transformation. So I want Greg and Zach to both reintroduce themselves and then we’ll turn it over to Greg, who’s going to take us through things today. So perhaps we’ll start with Zach and then Greg, you can introduce yourself and then begin. Perfect. Oh, yeah. So Zach Stein, just honored and just joyous to be with you guys in this endeavor. And yeah, we’re discussing transformation and I’m a developmental psychologist. So I’ve studied these things for years. And then the issues of meta psychology are near and dear to the way I think about psychology. I think it’s it’s hard to be a good psychologist if you’re not also doing meta psychology. And I think Greg will make that clear. So, yeah, it feels like a perfect conversation to be in. And yeah, and I also don’t know where it’ll go. So that makes it exciting. Sweet. All right. Great. Thank you both. I am thrilled to be here. Let’s talk about a problem that’s haunted me for a long time. And I get to share some of that richness and detail. So Greg Enrique is here and, you know, you folks know me already. So I’m just going to jump in. And so, you know, last time we started to, you know, that we are developing a theme here, we problematize stuff, we problematize consciousness, we problematize the self. Now we’ve started and John led us through a really, I think, rich articulation of some of the philosophical empirical problems associated with transformation. So we’re going to start scratching our heads about, OK, what is this? I think we wanted to undergird learning and developmental in relationship to that. So it’s learning, development and transformation and then transformation from what to where and who says and why. I mean, these are just these are really, really complicated questions. And I want to put it both at an individual level. And I also think we can all agree that we want to think about this at a quite a broad level. I mean, Zach, you’ve coined us as being in a time between worlds. You know, I think we all, John, you’ve talked about the need for sort of a new Axial Age kind of revolution. I sort of fifth joint point as a sort of thing for me. And it’s all this like, wow, we are in a weird space and we have to get from where we are to where we need to be in a very, very scary, hopeful, confusing, chaotic way. So this is a very fascinating idea of transformation that we have, I think, opened up. And I really look forward to us diving in and getting entangled with. So so there’s that concept. I know I don’t want to connect it more to my own professional identity and frame and then be like, well, OK, I’m going to give you a little metaphor, a little sort of visual here of five concepts here and put transformation learning development right here. And now we’re trying to say, well, how would we approach this? What would be the way in which we would want to think about the science of transformation, sort of the ethics of transformation, all of that? And I want to then anchor the concept of psychology to that. And of course, that’s what we are brought together in terms of this deal. Logos is fundamentally around those two concepts. I want to put five concepts in the middle for just a second. And John knows a little bit about this, but this will be new to you, Zach, a little bit. And that is that a meta psychology at one point when I was developing sort of the unified theory, I identified five key concepts that were very ambiguous, that if we were going to have a coherent psychology, it needed to be about or we needed to tackle these concepts. And there is follows behavior, mind, mental processes, cognition, consciousness and the self. OK, so and this was before any of my work with John. There was a period in which I was delineating. I almost sort of delineated this when I was working on my books, like, what are the five fucking nightmare conceptual problems that are disciplines all tangled up in behavior? Mind, cognition, consciousness and the self afford actually a really interesting map of the core concepts that our field is entangled up with, especially and I’m going to be emphasizing the field in terms of its institutional identity as a science. And I’ll be talking about our history there. But if we put those five concepts, I just want to have this as a visual sort of like, OK, we’re actually really confused about what actually these concepts mean on the one hand. Meaning that we unlike say what is a proton, we psychologists and all the other disciplines that would be interfacing with this don’t have clear definitions about what we mean by behavior, mental process, cognition, consciousness and the self. I also then want to say that that’s syncing up with John and now maybe and I feel certainly synced up with you also, Zach, is that actually there’s maybe an emerging opportunity here to get much clearer on what these concepts are. And of course, John, the first series we did was on consciousness. And I certainly feel like we’re synced up on a naturalistic version of what that might be. And then the self. And I’ve made a case, as you know, that your frame on cognition, separating out knowledge and epistemology into information processing, that 4P3R frame is a brilliant articulation of what we actually can mean by cognition. So I think that we’re at a place now where there may be an opportunity for framing of these very, very abstract concepts. Transformation now is in reach, perhaps, but it also loops back to the topic for today, which is, well, what is the disciplinary framing that we bring to bear on the term? And at the root of them is then psychology. So there’s this thing called psychology that as an undergrad, even a high school student, I thought I knew what it meant. And then I realized, oh, my God, and graduate school. And so anyway, how does that sound in terms of sort of, OK, hey, there’s psychology, there’s transformation, there’s this concept of psychology, there’s this interesting relationship between these concepts. I’ll come back to especially behavior in mind quite a bit, because I’m going to focus on these and get clarity about them. But just in terms of juxtaposing, hey, psychology of transformation also involves these other concepts. And we need a meta framework that at least affords us the opportunity to sense make or at least know how we’re not sense making if it is the case that we’re sort of engaged in a lot of incoherent tangle. That was great, Greg. Could I just these are just sort of clarifications. So in philosophy, when philosophers are the ones that invoke meta, that’s metaphysics, I just call on metaphysics. Generally what I’ve been influenced by Collingwood and others in the idea that when you’re talking about meta, you’re typically talking about presupposition and presupposition are assumptions that are shared by multiple, even competing or disagreeing theories. So an assumption is belongs to a theory, a presupposition belongs to many different theories. And that typically what you’re trying to do in any kind of meta is you’re trying to get at the fundamental concepts within the fundamental presuppositions in order to clarify those presuppositions. So those five you laid out, they’re pretty much presupposed by many different theories within psychology and they don’t belong to any one theory. They’re presupposed by many, perhaps even all, post behaviorist theories in psychology. And and therefore by trying to examine them and clarify them, what we’re doing is meta psychology. We’re not proposing a particular psychological theory. We’re proposing, as you aptly put it, a framework of those presuppositions. We’re trying to excavate them, explicate them and clarify them. And that’s why it’s a meta psychology. I just wanted to just in case that the language we’re using isn’t clear, was that helpful or? It’s that’s dead on it. And I hope it makes sense to me that it might help the listeners get their coordinates of understanding, you know, well, better tuned than what I was saying. But yes, that’s exactly resonant with where I would frame this conversation. Thank you, Greg. And then I put one more thing. The argument, well, the problematic last time pointed to how profound a. Profound a feature, a process transformation is part of the argument that we considered. It was more of a proposal than right was that the standard non developmental computational framework was inadequate. And we went through the the arguments for dealing with transformation. But then if we move to a dynamical developmental framework, we’re going to we’re going to see that transformation and function, history and function can’t be separated together. The reason I’m saying this is, again, the developmental dynamical framework is exactly that. It’s a framework that can pertain to many different, even competing theories of learning, etc. Right. And so that’s because it is such a fundamental framework, it needs the fundamental examination of a meta psychology to get it right. That’s why the two have to be aligned together. Does that land well, too, with what you’re proposing? Oh, absolutely. One hundred percent. And I was going to actually begin with and I alluded to this last time and certainly and I think we can all relate to this. But for me or my own professional identity, it relates very directly because not only do you have the kind of the question of is and developing the proper framework, a complex dynamic developmental systems framework, but I got an acutely tossed in the deep end of the pool as a clinician that I want us to be aware of. And Zach is an educator and, you know, John in the meaning crisis, which is then the ethical layering that gets layered upon this, which is what ought transformation be oriented toward what it would be about, who has authority to make any particular kinds of claims about what kind of transformation is good or bad. And then I’m a healer. I see somebody who I at a particular place. How do I decide that they are the problem? OK, or how do I decide that society is the problem? And what kind of transformation should we be engendering? So I’ll give you an example that somebody asked me about in a conversation, which is exactly this. So on the one hand, we have wisdom traditions like the stoic tradition that really emphasizes, hey, be in control of what you can be in control of. OK, don’t exaggerate. Be tough. You know, that’s simplistic. We know that’s but there’s a lot of that in stoicism. And now we also have a social justice movement that is orientalist to be very sensitive to any possible inequity and arguing that your obligation socially is to be anti-racist in a particular way. OK, now, without getting in any either or, those are actually very different messages for how to be in the world. In fact, Jonathan Haidt argues, hey, we should look to stoicism and we’re creating victimized mentality on the one hand. On another hand, you have, hey, there’s a massive systemic racism that we all need our consciousness erased on. OK, those things are affording us visions of the kind of ways we ought to be and the kinds of transformations our society needs to make. How do you know? You know, what is is what? How would you how would you even be positioned to have an is ought framework that would afford you the capacity to be up to the task of engaging that with a level of sophistication and depth that could do justice to its complexity? That’s that fundamentally is the issue. And I will argue what I’m going to do is that psychology isn’t up to the task. My meta analysis and what I hope to walk you through. And I know that many of you offer both of you offer similar kinds of critiques, so it’s not going to be a hard audience to convince. But it is the case that mainstream American psychology, I will argue, is woefully under equipped philosophically, theoretically, psychologically and scientifically and positioned in its place in society to do justice to the kinds of complex questions that we are facing individually, collectively about the kinds of transformations that we need to be making. So could I could I send say I think that was excellent. That’s a very good point that the job of meta psychology is not only to explicate and clarify the presuppositions of psychology to write, to make it a better science. The job of meta psychology is also cultural, ethical critique of that framework. So that would also be part of the meta aspect. Is that is that a fair way of representing what you’ve said? 100 percent. So for me, a meta psychology would do the justice to putting together what I would call basic psychology. That’s animal behavior psychology. You talk a little bit about that human psychology, trying to describe and explain human mental behavior at particular levels and the profession and its applications, which is then, hey, this is what you operate as a health service provider. When you offer, I mean, Thomas Zahs calls us called psychiatry, psychology, secular priests at one point. And I and somebody, oh, you know, totally. I mean, actually, you know, the correct response is not to freak out in relationship to that. The correct response is exactly. That’s the point. And that’s why it’s woefully under equipped to actually dress what it’s trying to do, right, right, because it’s not even grounded in a proper wise theological position or philosophical theological. I mean that broadly. I don’t mean to all ideas, but I mean, wisdom, tradition, understanding that would then say, hey, this would be a wise way of going about the world. It’s like it doesn’t even have a framework for actually being like, hey, how do we well, let’s reduce it to empirical numbers and then I’ll tell you what your answer is. That’s ultimately is the punch line. It’s like, fuck, you know, that’s not going to cut the mustard. So I’ll say one more thing and then I’ll let that take over with his replies, which is I that that that the last thing you said really makes clear to me the pivotal linchpin position that wisdom has in our dialogue together because it obviously is trying to wisdom needs a framework of human nature broadly understood to encompass the five things you said. It obviously is about profound transformation and it’s also about normative improvement, virtue, ethical life. So wisdom is very much the right like it’s a it’s a concept that points to a phenomenon in which all three of those dimensions are bound together. One hundred percent, I believe that. Yeah, I mean, this is very, very interesting. And I’m agreeing with everything that’s being said here. You know, metapsychology, I like to say, is where metaphysics and psychology meet, you know, and in the upper reaches of almost any discipline, you get the meta-discipline, you can imagine a meta-biology. And but what’s interesting about psychology is that you’re so you’re you’re circumscribing the limits of what psychology could be and the kinds of questions like psychology is allowed to ask. So you’re looking at what are the conditions for the possibility of doing a psychological science. And what’s interesting is and back to Piaget, Piaget identified the thing that psychology is working on is what he called a normative fact. So like two plus two is four. This is an example of a common psychological operation. Yeah. What’s interesting about two plus two is four is that it’s not a causal fact. A causal fact is like if I hit this ball with this velocity, it will hit this other ball and that ball will go in the pocket. All right. It’s a causal fact. A normative fact is different. It occurs not because of causal necessity, but because of a normative entailment. You say two plus two is four, not because you’re caused to, but because it’s correct. And so that’s a very interesting phenomenon with which Piaget believed put psychology in a distinctly different stratum of scientific activity, where some of the disenchantment and reductionism that came along with the scientific paradigm in the natural sciences had to be limited, basically. And so that’s kind of like to get to this point about when we’re doing psychology, we have to traffic in the normative and we actually expand scientific metaphysics to include value and entailment and a few other basically facts about the mind. And so, yes, psychology is interesting in that respect, that it challenges the assumed scientific metaphysics of a kind of humane reductionist world. And so if you look for a comprehensive metaphysics that can handle both psychology and biology and physics, then you look for something like this complex, dynamical systems view of life, as it were, which is a lot where your meta-psychology, as all do, Greg, expand out beyond psychology to include these conversations about big history and the full stack of the matter, life, mind, culture, that continuum. And so, so, yeah, I think it’s foundational. And then in meta-psychology, you’re concerned with things like the realism of our psychological constructs, right? Which is to say, do they exist or are they basically forms of folk psychology that have been reified through statistical technique? Like, for example, grit. Grit doesn’t exist in the mind the way, for example, a cognition like broad little strip, cognition exists. Grit is not real. But you can reify it statistically. And so that’s a result of the misapplication of certain forms of scientific practice to domains where they don’t apply. And this is rampant in psychology and based on a basic, I would say, metaphysical misunderstanding or category error in deep in philosophy of science. So, so, yeah, so I’m right there with you. And of course, transformation, learning, all of these things, as we talked about previously, and as you alluded to, they’re normatively loaded as an educator, a psychotherapist, an individual trying to become better. This question of what does better mean really is not simply a scientific question. So insofar as psychology claims to just be scientific, it can’t tell you what’s better or worse. Now, it can tell you what’s healthy or unhealthy, but that’s a different question. And that raises more metaphysical issues that include even philosophy of medicine and things of that nature. So, yeah, we’re in very deep waters. And so back to you, Greg, in terms of where you want to bring us up. Yeah. So, so then that’s exactly right. I mean, is that, you know, sorry, it’s a clusterfuck. I mean, it’s just it’s an amazing entanglement of confusion. And I believe that we’re actually able to disentangle a lot of entanglement that that is that but you’re bringing to bear exactly what scholars for a long time have wrestled with. And so what I want to do is I want to now give the history of this thing and offer the way I parse it and then see its evolution and where it lands. Basically, tell you what the justification of where mainstream institutional American North American psychology lands. Be clear about why it lands where it does. Be clear about what it’s inadequate around. And then thus problematize. And I want to elevate the understanding of the problem of where it got institutionalized. But anyway, John, you were going to say I just wanted to. Just before you begin, I just wanted to chime in with what Zach said, the distinction of and of course, it is well attributed to Gage, but it actually goes back to Plato and it’s been made famous in a debate between Dreyfus and McDowell, but there’s other philosophers who talk about the space of reason versus the space of causes. Sure. Right. So what I’m talking about, why the rock will down the hill, I just have to give the causes. But when I talk about why you ran down the hill, I will give the causes, but I will also give reasons for your behavior, not just causes of your behavior and reason, of course, and reason is this weird thing because it’s supposed to describe what you’re doing, but it’s also inherently normative. Like Zach said, the normative facts and even saying a normative fact is a is a weird page is, I think, on purpose, putting two things together that we normally don’t put together. And I know and Piaj coin this term normative fact, I’m referencing Piaj, but no, it’s a longstanding philosophical issue, I think, of Wilford Sellers in particular and the space of causes. So, yeah, and that’s that’s very subtle. And he was just trying to point out that, hey, all you psychologists, you’re trafficking in an explanadome, which is fundamentally different. So I just wanted to do that so that I could shamelessly do some self advertising here, which is I have focused on a problem that a process, a problematic process, perhaps that I see at the center of cognition, which is relevance realization, the ability to zero in on relevance. Now, the one motive for that is just that it seems to be this fundamental process that’s being presupposed in all these theories and published on that. The other motivation, and this goes to the work I’m doing with Dan Chiaffi, is the notion of relevance sits between cause and reason. In a very, very important way, and that’s why any of you have seen untangling the world knot or the elusive eye, this is why relevance is playing such a pivotal role. And so I think bringing in the dynamics, the developmental dynamics of relevance realization is going to be pertinent to trying to get like to mediate between the space of reasons and the space of causes. So sorry, that was a little bit of saying no, that’s a very we were definitely connects. We were trying to also take points where we could connect to the two previous series. And so that’s the one on consciousness and the one on self. You can see a deeper connection running right now into this. So I just wanted to get that point out there before you began. And in both in relevance realization, you do some very beautiful, subtle moves with that language, especially realization also with in terms of to become aware of and to make happen. And it’s the juxtapoint between perception and action in a particular way that creates a dynamic participatory flipping. It’s beautiful. And I want to argue that that’s that’s an exemplar in my estimation. And I do try to do certain kinds of similar things ultimately down the road. And what I’m going to share and so I get a little bit to the punch line, but then we’ll come back and we’ll be able to. So right now, the science in America and North America, I’ll just be saying psychology, but is the institution of North American psychology. And it is that’s the biggest institution in psychology. So it’s OK to frame it that they produce the most textbooks. They do the most things. The science is defined as the science of behavior and mental process in about 80 to 90 percent of the textbooks. Right. OK, that’s the science of what it is. When you ask what psychology is, that’s the science. I’m going to actually take those two words and rearrange their order and talk about the science of mental behavior at a particular time. Right. And that juxtapose is subtle, but it actually is going to afford us a wide variety of different clarifications down the road. And I just use that then as an example of, yeah, actually subtle twists on our language with clarity about their history and then the move in relationship to why you would do that can open up lockages in systems where before we’re not. So when we just focused on relevance, we knew Yoke relevance to your creative realization. All of a sudden, boom, you get an explosion of intersection between a wide variety of different perspectives that then afford intelligibility, plausibility and coherence. And that’s that’s that’s good. Those are good indicators to be drawn towards. So so the bottom line is so that I’ll just tell that I’m not going to get into too much detail. People generally know the story, at least in these circles. You know, I get stuck in starting to do psychotherapy and I grow up in the idea that science is the bomb. You know, science. Oh, well, you don’t know what your problems are. You apply scientific method that reveals you. Hey, just cognitive behavior therapy. We know cognitive behavior therapy works better than psychodynamic therapy. And so now you’re going to go and you’re going to learn that you’ll justify that and you’ll go out there and become a practitioner of empirically supported truths. That’s how I entered my graduate training in psychotherapy. A I got into that and realized that’s actually bullshit. There’s very limited, you know, that’s a very narrow and empirical brand based argument about the nature of psychotherapy, even in the narrow confines of, well, psychotherapies job is to reduce symptoms. And that’s by the way, that’s that’s the whole setup is like it presumes that if you’re suffering, that’s bad. And if you go from I’m kind of miserable to I’m really happy, you have just improved tremendously. OK, but any thoughtful person can be like, wait a minute, if I if I told you right now, oh, by the weekend, my entire family got killed in a car accident, but I’m cool. I’m happy. You guys be like, what’s wrong with that guy? Get him to a hospital. Right. So there’s no way that we just look at somebody and it’s like, oh, they’re happy. That’s not that’s not valid. So there this idea that we want people to be happy or that we want reductions in symptoms without any philosophical richness is deeply problematic. OK, you cannot just apply the empirical methods without an enormous amount of assumptions about human nature, about social context, about values and virtue. And that that’s what I was told was happening. And then when I actually saw people do the work, they could come from a wide variety of different orientations and very tremendously in terms of their skill and efficacy towards the virtuous outcome. And and they could the best of the best were good and the lousiest of the lousiest suck. And it was like, wait, what’s up with that? And why don’t we have a framework that affords us to understand the capacity, the validity of the insights of each of the best of the best? That’s what my intuition was. And then when I when I took that, I did something that actually no one else has really ever done, which is which was basically naive. If I had asked the questions that you guys have asked like a priori and had sort of the philosophical insights, I would have probably just been like, oh, fuck it. I can’t. This is this a nightmare. But what I did was I said, well, I’m a psychological doctor over here and I see all these different approaches. Why isn’t it just organized by the science of human psychology? If I go down a level, I can see that medicine is organized by the science of human biology and engineering is organized by physics and chemistry in a particular way. And so I sort of like, well, why aren’t these different schools of thought organized by the science of human psychology? OK. And so what I didn’t realize at the time was I was had been socialized as an empiricist, and now I’m going back and then basically asking the system is like, well, why don’t I just look at the forest of what psychology is? And then that forest would then afford me the opportunity to organize the various schools of thought. OK. And then it was in that. And at first, I thought that that was going to be available. I fell into evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychology. It’s the mid 1990s evolutionary psychology is coming along. You know, Steve Pinker and Lita Cosmone’s John Tooby, really interesting kid. And now it’s anchored to an evolution, broad evolutionary view in the natural sciences that sort of made sense. And I was excited about that. But what ultimately happened was two things simultaneously, I started to see that it’s it itself, I don’t know what they mean by their terms. OK, we’ll get into what these terms are like mind and behavior and how they frame stuff. And then ultimately, I had an insight about the concept of justification, which, by the way, relates to reasons and causes and is going to create a very clear dividing line in what what becomes a dividing line through the tree of knowledge lens between the culture, human person dimension of existence and the animal mental dimension of existence. OK. And as I develop that line, I looked, in fact, I told all the evolutionary psych people about it when I was at the conferences. They were not too thrilled. It was really fascinating. They didn’t find it to be useful at all. I’m like, actually, hey, we can bridge the social constructiveness. You can do this in this regard. Those folks were not terribly keen on those bridges, it turns out. And it was a very interesting disillusionment in relation. And then it was at that time in part where I was sort of both building my system and then became very aware of psychology is not like biology in its fundamental organization. OK, what do I mean by that? If you ask every biologist what biology is, it’s the science of life. There’s no real debate about that. And while there’s tremendous debate about what is the criterion of life, what’s a virus alive, where does life come from exactly, how does it emerge? Great. All sorts of questions there. But no one really disputes that the general center of the circle that biology tries to define is life. It turns out that there is enormous disputation and fundamental disagreement about the epicenter of the circle that psychology tries to box in. And it’s that discovery that is the fundamental essence of the problem and deciphering what those areas are is key to solving it or at least creating a metapsychological frame that’s up to the task of sorting out the radical confusion that resides in our field in terms of this. So and as I started to explore this, I got more interested in theoretical psychology. And here’s the thing, folks, that haunts me as an educator. Everyone knows this at one level, knows there’s a problem. OK, I mean, so and I mean, this has been known in psychology by 1899. The crisis in psychology had already been diagnosed. It’s a pre the turn of the 20th century that does scholars. So let’s talk a little bit about what this is and how to frame this. OK, it’s complicated as shit precisely because the first thing about psychology in a common layperson sense is its everyday life. I mean, folks, I call it right. It’s like, hey, why the hell did Andy go do this when she said she was going to do that? Is she seeing my wife? If she pissed at me, is she doing this? Why does she do what she do? That’s a fundamental question ever since we’ve had this capacity to talk and have shared inner subjectivity. Why you do what you do and wait a minute, how do I do what I do and what are my beliefs, desires and what are your beliefs and desires and how the hell do we get along is, you know, that’s the nature of being human. So folks, psychology, if the subject matter has to do with, hey, human action, belief, desires, how they negotiate and what they do. Well, obviously, everybody listening to this has been involved in the belief, desire analysis of the people around them since they were socialized to be persons at a very early age. So folk psychology at one level is ubiquitous. Everybody engages in it. You get to become a person. You have to learn belief, desire, narration. And that’s and so it’s a it’s very intimate at one level, which makes it interesting and very ubiquitous then. So then that’s one definition for us to at least box off. So like, well, this thing called folk psychology, then you get into philosophy. And so you get the deep history of if you do, I have a book, The Story of Psychology by Hort, Morton Hunt, Hunt. Yeah. And it just starts with the Greeks because it starts with very simply Western education and Western education in terms of its course, our friend Alexander Bard will bitch about this, but we go back to the Greeks and you sort of, hey, the first formal questions about epistemology, about human governments, about the good life, the intersection here for philosophers between what is the mind? How do we know? How do we get along? What are we? There’s a huge, complicated and not well segmented differentiation between philosophy and psychology. And certainly somebody like Plato and Aristotle build models of what they call the soul to be ways that obviously are overlapping enormously between what we mean by modern day terms, mind, behavior, cognition, things along those lines. So so this is a longstanding concern. Now I want to update us and basically then bring us to what I think is a crucial point about the discipline, which is its intersection to talk about. That’s the problem of psychology, as I mean, I have we have to talk about science, because the nature of the problem intersects deeply with the nature of modern, empirical natural science and its evolution. And so so modern psychology really gets its identity, and at least the identity that we need to struggle with is what’s its proper relationship with this thing called science. The actual term psychology officially dates to the mid 16th century and is probably the most common cited sort of usage of the term. It’s interesting to note this guy, Rudolph Goklin, the elder. I’m not sure exactly how to say this, but in an academic book in 1590, he gave a book title that translated English is psychology. That is on the perfection of man, his mind, and especially its origins. That’s the that’s the first 1590 book. It shows up in poetry by this other guy, Italian guy, 50 years earlier or so. But in terms of scholarship, so just to give us a location, you know, this is Galileo Descartes time period, right when the Renaissance enlightenment is doing its thing. Psychology appears in a particular way in this regard. And certainly there are some developments along these lines. Obviously, Hume, the lock, these kinds of characters philosophically have a lot to say about the human mind. But I want to go from 1590 jump up into the really the 19th century is really where the field of psychology gets its rooted modern day character. This is where so it’s from 1800 or 1900 or 1800 to the 1900 period where you see really all of its founding fathers, you know, that’s what they were, fathers, but get sort of identified. And and so what happens then is during this century, you have a number of different developments whereby the science, of course, Newton and the development of the physical sciences and the emergence of the Enlightenment, the industrial age, the modern sensibility about reason, rationality, science, technology, liberal democracy. That has now exploded onto the scene, of course, by the 19th century. Right. So, I mean, and then what you have then is people basically saying, huh, that epistemology of modern science, modern empirical natural science affords us a particular way to try to get truths about the world. And people basically then put the modern science epistemology with the question about what is the mind, psyche, soul of human subjective experience? Essentially, it’s the marriage of that. And what we’re going to see, though, is that that never gets clarified about how to take what becomes a very successful system for mapping matter in motion quantitatively, does not actually utilize. It’s not easy to then impute upon the subjective experience of being. And the basic intersection is all the different attempts to do that. So I’ll pause there and say, basically, so my point is, is that there’s folk psychology, there’s philosophy and psychology works are coming back to philosophy and psychology with a meta psychology view. But modern psychology actually has its historical roots in the intersection of this topic area, which is then going to try to be jammed into a modern empirical natural science epistemology that jive with folks frames and references and history or any questions about that? I mean, I would I would say also, yeah, the the late 19th century, at least in the United States, when you’ve got William James, Charles Sanders, purse, James Mark Baldwin and a few factors just thinking institutionally about what occurred with Baldwin leaving the chair of psychology, the first chair of psychology at the first graduate institution, John Hopkins, him being replaced by Watson. Ah, yes. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, you take out someone who had a broad, structuralist, comprehensive meta psychological orientation towards psychology that was developmental and included very strongly this reasons versus causes. And, you know, it was the great, great grandfather, you know, inspire of Piaget, incredible psychologist, removed and in his place, you put a reductionist who ends up basically working in advertising. And around that same time, you got the reification of psychological measurement as a field specifically wedded to institutional bureaucratic power. This is a thing that’s often overlooked, which is that measurement in the physical sciences, especially with the metric system and the international organizations for the codification of measurement standards internationally, which Charles Sanders purse was involved in. He actually instantly codified the length of the meter through wavelengths of light. Oh, fuck. You know, I mean, I didn’t know. Anyway, so the point was that there’s major advancements in metrology and the physical sciences, which allowed for a lot of the industrial scientific revolution and gave us the hubris of thinking like the Brooklyn Bridge and these other incredible feats. And then we make this thing called the IQ tests. The Americans steal it from the French and the industrial strength it and they tie it to World War One and they do a whole bunch of other things, which basically give us the illusion that we’re measuring the mind the same way we’re measuring physical realities when we were not even close, like not even close. And when I mentioned about the mongrel concepts and the reification of folk psychological ideas through statistical technique is just a continuation of that form of irrealist, metaphysically naive, psychological theorizing backed by certain forms of naive measurement practice and statistics. And that became early and it was institutionalized and it was bureaucratically institutionalized. And it became the one place where the field of psychology was able to contribute to the war effort and to industrial psychology and a whole bunch of other places that gave the field itself a sense of like we matter where psychoanalysis is like, yeah, this is a little actually more complicated because you’re kind of making people unhappy and making them leave their marriages and their jobs. And it’s very expensive. And so the massive move towards reifying a certain form of psychological measurement is part of this. And it led to, I think, the fracturing of the field and building consensus around certain techniques for measurement and even certain constructs, which pulled the legs out from the field, getting actually a more robust approach. So I like that. I like the way you’re characterizing the story. And where we’re at now is one where every time someone gets a new dissertation through this, create a new measure, that measure measures a new construct. And now the mind is just populated with all of these different constructs and all of these different measures and all of them can be marketed. And now you can come into an organization and sell this thing. And so it’s hard. You can’t lose the institutional incentive structures that have actually directed the science of psychology in particular directions as part of the historical narrative. Well, that’s a beautiful thank you so much for that. It’s totally makes a couple of key points. And indeed, ultimately, what my critique is going to be is precisely the institutionalization of what I call the Sandcastle production machine, Sandcastle meaning research production like on grit or whatever, not to criticize grit in any particular way, but knowing what it doesn’t mean. So you should criticize it. It doesn’t exist. I mean, and willpower similarly doesn’t exist. Well, I mean, I witnessed front hand the branding of cognitive psychotherapy on something like how you treat a suicide, individuals with suicide and the entire production of what was called then the founder and father of empirically supported treatment is essentially a production machine for a brand. That’s what it was. It was a production machine for a particular brand and a technology that was actually that was for the elevation of this horse race, not grounded in what we any normal scientists would basically say, well, start with observation, build models, will gather additional data and correct models accordingly. That’s not what this is about. It’s about fundamentally here. I build a dissertation, then I build a research program and then I build a brand and that brand then sits in an industrial complex that needs dominance and competition relationship. So this is why I named the first chapter of my book from racing horses. I’m going to race the back band brand against the psychodynamic brand to see in the elephant, be like, what are we actually even looking at here in relationship to these phenomena? And actually, are we actually interested in making sense out of them? Are we interested in promoting technologies that get publications or whatever the currency is in relation to the academic structure? It’s actually kind of horrific. I would in order to add to that and converge with Zach, I think in addition to the rise of measurement, which was an aspect of physics envy, you also have the idea of experimentation as the primary way in which you do psychology. Right. And it’s an odd move. Again, it’s physics envy because the science that actually starts the scientific revolution is not an experimental science. It’s astronomy. It’s a mathematical theoretical science that uses mathematical theoretical argument in order to overturn the Aristotelian worldview. I know experimentation becomes prominent with Galileo, but the idea that science should see. So one of my criticisms and I know you both share it. That’s why we’re doing the meta psychology is that until very recently, psychology understood itself as just experimental psychology. Whereas in other disciplines, you have experimental physics, theoretical physics, you have experimental empirical biology or theoretical biology. We even have well established philosophy of biology. Yet psychology seems it has a very truncated view of science in terms of, as I agree with that measurement, but also that all you do to do science is you measure things and then experiment on the things that you’ve measured. Right. And that is such a limited, both historically and philosophically view of science. So I just wanted to to strengthen what you said, Zach, that it’s not just sort of physics and the measurement is also physics and the unless that all we’re doing is measuring things and running experiments. Please note, everyone, I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to measure things and we shouldn’t do experiments. That’s not what I’m saying. Is that but that’s not how you that’s not how you do science. Right. That’s a that’s a that’s a really grotesquely inadequate understanding of science. So I just wanted to add that in. Well, and this is to Greg’s point that the problem with psychology is a deeper problem with the way we conceive science. And so that same critique could be made of medical science and technological science. It’s like, guys, if you were really doing science, you wouldn’t do it just in this narrow area that directs us in the in the arena of profits. Right. You would do a broad search and all kinds of other things. And so, yeah, there’s a there’s a deeper issue which has gotten into psychology and kind of distorted it and made it impossible to put one foot in front of the other in many conversations. This linkage between measurement and technology is unbelievably key to understand the mechanisms, the institutional mechanisms that generated that pull, by the way. I mean, as you know, Zach, very well, I just wanted to re echo. I mean, it’s not just IQ like the DSM, for example, is by one conception, a massive measurement apparatus that interfaces psychological practice with bureaucratic control mechanisms. Essentially, it’s what it was created for. And again, if you’re a realist, which of those constructs actually exist as disease entities? Right. You get into the fact that where this is a massive simulation of the mind. And yeah, when I started to realize this about the field, as you did, Greg, I became a little bit concerned because the other thing that happened was just like the other sciences, which we were so triumphantly wielding in government and military and other places, we started to triumphantly wield psychology in government and industry and military. But it wasn’t at the same caliber of other sciences like engineering and physics and stuff, for example. And so we created a lot of a lot of problems we’re still dealing with, basically, especially looking at information warfare, which is an example of that. So, yeah, I don’t want to back to you, Greg. So so anyway, and this affords me an opportunity so I can accelerate this because we’re hitting a number of pieces that I was going to hit. But here’s the point. Your point about Johns Hopkins is really the issues of history and what could have been in relation. But John Watson is absolutely the epitome of the physicalist reductions, both in relation to basically what he does is we’re going to turn. He adopts his initial behaviorism, which, by the way, is very different than B.F. Skitter’s behaviorism. But his initial behaviorism is both is a neural reflexology. In other words, it’s a physicalist flatland with an experimental methodology that he then basically is going to pull and pare it off of what he sees as the success of the experimental physical sciences. That is what originally behaviorism is. And it’s more different from James Mark Baldwin. I know that’s amazing. Like, you know, in terms of it was it was largely professional jealousies and other things as you got both Baldwin and purse out of the American Academy. That’s so that would really be. And of course, yes. And if you know what kind of person Watson was, although I mean, his kids end up killing themselves, basically, it’s a fascinating, complicated story in relationship to what this means. He also I mean, he thinks he’s applying. But I think from the score onward, we have understood that he massively misunderstood the work of Pavlov and completely. Yeah, he takes the methodology. And this is the whole ultimately here’s what the take home point, folks, is that what happens to the institution of psychology is the application, the parenting simplistic application of psychological method to the discipline as its core identity that they embrace and wave out in front of the young undergraduates like myself to says, science is so great. We take this thing and we apply it in a way that helps you understand common sense. And at first, that’s a swallow bowl. Hey, OK, great. And then you actually get behind it. And now you can actually see that it’s a complete corrupt at its large scale. Of course, there’s brilliant examples and I love lots of psychologists, but it’s large scale institutional infrastructure is essentially a corrupt methodological application. And if you follow its history, this is why the crisis is so important from my vantage point is that there was potentially opportunity seers like Pierce and Baldwin, who could have actually navigated the scientific humanistic virtue complexity and afforded us a rich synthetic view of the world that enabled us to appreciate this discipline as an unbelievable intersection between the natural sciences, social inquiry, humanistic application. And instead, what happened was the paradigm wars unfolded in the first part of the 20th century. So you get a paradigm war. You have this it’s useful just to know the history. So out of psychophysics, Helmholtz and the idea of yoking a sensory experience with absolute just noticeable, different actual thresholds, Weber’s Law shit. Then you get the Von Tien German idea that we should look and but was a fascinating character. I think people over underestimate how sophisticated he was. He actually divides psychology up into, OK, the experimental analysis of introspection, of what subjective experiences and then Volcker psychology or folk psychology out here. And then he tries to bring into the lab the analysis of his definition of psychology, which is human subjective, conscious experience of being. And the struck Tichner, his student, picks that up in the United States. Structuralism gets instituted. Now, the point I want to make here and this goes back to all of our conversations, John, about what is consciousness? The subject matter here, what is psychology about is actually very well defined in structuralism. It’s about human subjective consciousness that you keep that no one else can see. That’s the topic of what it is. OK, what I would call mine, too. But it’s very it’s actually well defined. It’s not about animals. And it’s a science and it’s science of training people to look at the structure and then delineating the parts that make of qualia that he would use that term of the qualia that make up the term. Forty four thousand different things are identified. And apparently these are the Lego like ingredients of qualia that make up the capacity for human experience. At least that’s the enterprise of Tichner. OK, that’s structuralism, the evolution that comes off of psychophysics. Then you get the evolutionary functional view that gets embodied by James, which is by far the most sophisticated, in my opinion, holistic potential view that really psychology should be about mental life and the ways in which complicated conscious organisms or animals of all sorts and, of course, humans functionally adapt to the situations they find themselves over and over time. And James affords us a very I think the richest, you know, if you’re going to read one book in the history, Principles of Psychology coming off of James, it’s probably the book you choose, in my estimation. But functionalism, notice the difference. Functionalism can be tracked from the outside, although James did anchor it to a conception of the mental tightly wiring to consciousness. But it’s certainly the way animals adjust. That’s very different than the inside view of that’s only accessible through introspection. So structuralist and functionalist didn’t agree on the basic domain of subject matter. They might have been able to get along, but then what happens is you get an infusion of experimental methods, OK, people like Ebbinghaus, you get an institution of behavioral stats methods from people like Galton. And then that becomes the behavioral science industry of statistics. OK, so you get that methodological development. You then get two other, at least they’re really more, but for simplicity, two major digital paradigms that are actually two to one of behaviorism. We already talked about that, which is basically, hey, there’s stimulus reflex in a physicalist environment that experimentally analyzes. And then, of course, there’s Freud, who separates off of James and basically is like, oh my God, we are concerned with neuroticism and suffering. We’re concerned with massive philosophical big picture views. And there’s an entire domain outside of consciousness that appropriately gets labeled as mental and drives the shit out of people to do crazy things. And that’s would be our focus. OK, so look at so consciousness only available through introspection, the function of behavior in particular from an evolutionary adaptive route that’s consciously driven, the underneath of that that drives psychopathology and the observable behaviors that we can create stimulus response relations with. OK, so at the paradigm, those are the tools, the assumptions, the language of the territory, the arena that people are trying. So there are specializing radically different things that then that cannot commute into the point by 1899. People pointed this out in German. I don’t have an actual translation of Wheelie’s book, but I have by Gotsky. And in fact, by the mid by to 1920s, this is well known. I’ll just read you a quote from by Gotsky. So I think it’s fascinating. So 1927, the crisis of psychology is lately more and more voices are heard proclaiming that the problem of general psychology is a problem of the first order. What’s most remarkable is that this opinion does not come from philosophers who have made generalization of their professional habit or even theoretical psychologists, but from psychological practitioners who elaborate the special areas of applied psychology. And then he goes on to say they they completely are pointing out that we’re talking about different things to take the mind, meaning he means conscious mind, the unconscious or behavior as the primary complex concept implies not only to gather three different categories of facts, but to offer three different ways of explaining these facts. We need a coherent path forward and ultimately engenders the but what would become Russian activity theory and a whole nother theoretical structure. OK, but and that’s actually Russian activity theories by Gotsky is unbelievably fascinating in terms of its own view. But American psychology has these schools of thought. 10, 15 years later, what you get is the crashing of behaviorism and the emergence of the cognitive cluster. OK, you get cybernetics into. So by the 1950s, you get the emergence of information theory, artificial intelligence, these kinds of issues, and you get a weak computation, weak computational version of its mind is some kind of information processing system that gives rise to what will become the cognitive sciences. It undercuts the behavioral view, all right, in the sense that the behaviors are trying to dominate. And then what you get is an eclectic empiricism, whereby the field then says, hey, what are we? Here’s what we are. Where the science of behavior and mental processes defined as follows, behavior is what’s accessible via the external observer. That’s actually how it gets defined. In other words, the epistemology, the position of the observer, the position of the observer affords you the way to define what behavior is. And then mental processes are essentially inferred. And that’s what called methodological behaviorism, technically. And what it is, it’s an institution of the methods of behavioral science to try to decide what the mind is, which, by the way, by definition, you can’t observe. I mean, there’s a wonderful quote here. Here’s the last thing I’ll do. Quote and I’ll shut up. The word psychology is coined at a time when concepts of soul and mind were not clearly distinguished through ology, denote scientific study of scientific psychology refers to the scientific study of the mind. Since science studies only observable phenomena and the mind is not directly observable, we expand this definition to the scientific study of behavior and mental process. OK, so I mean, so there you go. Basically, we’re going to carve behavior based on an epistemology of accessibility, infer mental process and make very interesting claims like, hey, you can’t observe mine. I thought that’s all I could observe. OK, and with no then qualification about what we actually mean from a scientific third person epistemological perspective, as opposed to a first person experience of being in the world, right, phenomenologically, you could argue that all we see is mind. And then what it does, all the institutional textbooks then go, hey, what makes our game crucial is that we learn to play the rules of science. We learn to objectively study and measure things. We learn to experiment on things. And that affords us a transformation in knowledge away from your folk understandings of the world. And that that is what the mainstream academic psychology gives us and tells kids that this is the way we’re going to advance our knowledge. It was great. So so anyway, to me, the issue is this is like OK, so what’s the proper frame of reference in regards to this? That’s that fundamentally is what I want to be clear about. And what I want to be clear about is that what we have done is we’ve taken the epistemology of science, a third person exterior view that tries to create intersubjective agreement through quantification and have then decided that that is the definition of our field, when in fact, that’s actually just the definition of empirical epistemology. That’s you can’t really define a field that way. So that’s the that’s the position that I want to problematize psychology. I certainly can then dialogue and can articulate my own framing on this. But what I want to say is that I think that for psychology to be coherent, it needs to be connected to the scientific enterprise. People have basically tried to do that. There were all sorts of competition. It fell apart. It created empirical eclecticism. That’s basically a methodological behaviorism. When you look out at the knowledge that it’s supposed to produce relative to what it’s producing for the citizens, for the time, I think we can do a hell of a lot better. I think there’s a foundational fundamental problem. So, Greg, I heard you saying, I mean, I’m trying to make sure I’m getting the like you pointed. I heard clearly at least two fundamental problems, but they’re bound up together. One is look at this is fragmented. It doesn’t have an integrated ontology. It’s like these are like this is like different cultures. They have different entities. They use different measurement methods, right, etc. They talk about different things. Right. And I’m very familiar with this. This is also the problem that cognitive science takes as its central problem, the fragmentation of our discourse around what the mind is. Right. And so that I mean, I knew about that problem as the fragmentation of of psychology. So that’s and you put your finger on that. But then you’ve also said towards the end, but there’s a category mistake that psychology attempts to solve the fragmentation problem, not by providing a unifying ontology, but by by latching on to a generic methodology that is in no way specific by its own admission, by its own project is not specific to the mind. It’s the same methodology we use for physics and chemistry and meteorology. But we’re just applying it to this thing, the mind. But that’s we don’t have an ontology of the mind. But what holds us all together and that is that we use this method. But your point is that’s a category mistake. That is a generic method that can in no way specify what psychology is as a distinct science. And those two problems. So there’s a fragmentation problem and there’s a fundamental category error problem. Am I hearing it correctly? 100 percent correct. No, and I’ll add the thing that frustrates me is that this is not hard to see when you learn how to see it. Many people have actually seen it and the field hides it. Yes, it doesn’t it doesn’t come out. Like I said, how many people know about quantum mechanics versus general relativity? Well, anybody with a first initial understanding of history of physics and anything, oh, the first thing you learn in the 20th century and over. And actually quantum mechanics and general relativity, they’re really kind of incommensurate. That’s a great problem. You can decide whether to work on it or not. But let me be clear. The system actually doesn’t make any coherent sense when you actually put these together. OK, yeah. Every movie’s about that shit. OK, we know that the system is completely incoherent. And what do we do is read every textbook. They’re super excited to sell you the method and shuffle the actual problem completely underneath the sheets as though the method supposed to solve the problem. The methods is generalizable thing. So it so you add to what you said is the argument of problem exactly that I’m making. I just want to add the energy problem that haunts me is like the institution knows this and then it hides it. It shuffles it away off the side to maintain rather than being honest about what the hell it actually is doing. So that brings in then this the issue, right, again, that if we’re trying to understand and afford transformation, which is the thing we are all deeply invested in as human beings and especially at this time, and we turn to psychology to give us right and a way to it in frame to frame that problem so that we can study and understand it. What we get is a discipline that is inherently fragmented and is therefore consistently speaking equivocally about the mind. If I can use that as a reference term and when it tries to deal with that fragmentation results, resorts to a purely methodological category error in order to resolve it and therefore can’t provide us with any because when we’re just spinning in a circle, we’re just spinning in a circle. And this is what’s so different about quantum mechanics and string theory and all that stuff, which is that the public’s view of that is kind of like, like, like, like, like, it’s interesting. It’s like some weird mystical conversation, but the downstream impact of that on their everyday life is negligible until some technology comes out that the physicists create, which they don’t understand, but psychology is a language of self description, a language of self understanding. And so there’s something very interesting about the tolerance we have in the culture for incoherence at the level of what is the person, right? Totally. That level of disconnect between what’s being scientifically stated is the nature of the human and what we’re running on the kind of like the last fumes in the gas tank of the pre-modern life world, which are almost completely degraded by the processes of disenchantment and scientization. And so the perpetual and increasing fragmentation in that domain, specifically in the humanities is one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen as an educator. And now what’s interesting is that some of the resistance we have is a res still again, something else left in the gas tank from modernity of a resistance to religiosity. Cause as soon as you start to, as soon as you start to articulate a comprehensive enough psychology, someone’s like, dude, that’s sounding a lot like religion, Greg. Totally. It’s like a religion. And, but it’s true because you’re like, Hey, we are part of this evolutionary process, the, and this is the, you left out something in your historical narrative, which was the Piagetian tradition, which is the bald, which is the Baldwinian tradition, which is actually was that sleeping dark course, which has re-emerged as the dynamical systems evolutionary view. Right. Which was saying, which ends up being a kind of religious sounding story. It’s saying, you know, what do you study when you study psychology? We’re studying evolutionary patterns that are universal to all of life and matter, which manifest and make themselves explicit in the human mind and then something new emerges through the human aspect of evolution. And so, yeah, there’s something about the resistance to a comprehensive story. There’s something about the resistance to emergent meta-narrative that could unify I remember Habermas, I think quoting Adorno saying like, listen, it used to be that ideology propaganda work to solidify one view. Everyone had to kind of like agree in, and there’s still some that works that way. You haven’t picked up the message. The way it actually works is that now the ideology is the absence of that. The ideology is the continual fragmentation and the inability to learn and transform about who and what you are. And so you’re left in an identity structure that’s, that is fragmented and confused about very basic questions that humans haven’t been confused about when they had basically a common story about the nature of the soul. Now we can take issue with, was it a good story? A bad story. But the point is everyone in the city, everyone in the city, basically thinks the same thing, no one’s thinking like drastically different things. One person thinking that, well, the way I act is because of how we were in the Savannah 10,000 years ago. And someone else thinking the way I act is because of neurons firing in my brain that are ultimately driven by quantum mechanics, which we don’t understand. So am I acting at all? And so there’s this like, whoa, that’s a lot of diversity and neither of those views are in a coherent story themselves. They’re factoid reinterpretations that fragment identity. So it’s a deep issue. And I, so I’m not, I, I’m not optimistic that the most coherent meta psychologies we’re going to get in the near future will come from academic psychology. I think that the most coherent meta narratives we’ve been getting have come from, from outside academic psychology, because that’s where you’re allowed to do things that smack of religiosity, which is what they, which is again, one of the reasons Baldwin was kicked out of the academy. Yep. And I, you know, as you know, I’m underdeveloped in that developmental truck, even though my starting point is with Piaget, but then I get my own history is I got pulled out into these different paradigms in a particular way. And I actually am sort of thankful. I have the developmental complex of dynamic system sort of broken into me. And then I’m looking at these and then I back into the tree of knowledge in a particular, you know, stone night in 1997 or whatever, but the, the fact of that, that I need that development is so why I’m so nourished when I talk to you, Zach. So it looks that in addition to given what Zach said, given other things I’ve heard you say Greg, in addition to these interconnected problems of fragmentation and a deep kind of category mistake, there’s it’s not just a lack of unity, a lack of clarity. There’s also a third problem, which is this, there’s a sort of self deceptive, self destructive aspect of what we’re talking about here. I, it pains me to talk about this way. I mean, I, I, I, I’m a cognitive psychologist. I love my colleagues. I love the institution I work in. And I want to make that clear. It’s precisely because I love it. And also because I have training in cognitive science that I, I, I, I’m concerned about these issues. But what I heard both of you saying, you know, like Zach, I heard you say, you said, you know, there’s a resistance, but there’s also, you know, this weird hunger right for an overarching frame. And then you have to play this, this duplicative game of double speak. You’ll allow me to bring in an Orwellian reference here. Right. I heard that. And then, you know, what I, what I heard, I’ve heard you saying this too, Greg, in the, you know, just at the end, you said that there’s also that the institution is caught up in a kind of pretense that is bound up with this. I don’t know what to call this self-destructive ambivalence. So that I think that’s, if you draw what you both said together, that’s a third related problem. There’s a fragmentation problem. There’s a category mistake problem. And then there’s a self-deceptive self-destructive pattern at work within the, I, what to call it, the field of psychology. So does that, is that fair? Yeah. I’m trying to schematize the problem. Yeah. Right. So, and then the reason I told this particular history, I think it’s a fair history that I’m a specializing current slices of, but if you understand the history, at least the way I would see, then you understand actually the system gets institutionalized, it says, Oh, well, there’s nothing that really can do this. Okay. The best we can do is apply the methods. So now we’ll double down on this justification and we’ll push this to this annoying little thorn in our side to the side, and we will build, we’ll connect with things that need behavioral science methodology, we’ll do all of this. In other words, we’ll create a cognitive, justificatory narrative in relation that pushes this to the side, creates institutional growth and inertia now. And it’s fundamentally resistant then to something that would then come, it’s already sort of inoculated. Hey, wait a minute. You guys forgot about coherence. It was like, well, only go pat your head off on a little head. We know that coherence is not really that big of an issue. The key is that you’re doing science. So in other words, it fundamentally created a narrative already then defending against what is an obvious critique from the outside. But the point is what you just said, you know, the fragmentation and that the categorical, the categorical worship of a method that actually doesn’t specify the discipline and then the self deceptive thing. I mean, think about, think about how this, right. You said you don’t see coherence. Think about how this privileges innovation, right? Right. It privileges innovation over integration. It privilege, I want to say that again, it privileges innovation over integration. And what you have is the jingle jangle issue in psychology, which we really wrestled with when we tried to get it. And we did it by the way, get it. Let’s try and get a consensus on what we mean by this term wisdom. Let’s get, let’s do something. What a radical idea. Let’s get all of the researchers who are sort of publishing on this in one room. And they have to stay together for 10 hours until they try and come to come some consensus about what they’re talking about, right? But the jingle jangle problem is because of innovation, right? Jingle, I can’t remember which is jingle and which is jangle. Jingle is, one of them is where you have two names, two different names for the same phenomenon. Right. And so people can study it in multiple domains, right? Or the jangle problem is you have the same name for actually two different phenomenon, right? And so you get, you get, and this is right in psychology. This is well understood, the jingle jangle problem. But I want to point out that the jingle jangle problem is a species of the generic problem of innovation over integration and the jingle jangle problem and the innovation over integration, independently of your stats and your lab policies. I’m not denying those aren’t an issue, but independent of your stats, independent of your lab policies, those two things drive the replication crisis in psychology. They power it and power it and power it. So what I’m trying to say is the self-deceptive, self-destructive pattern isn’t innocent, right? It is finding expression in the replication crisis in a profound way. Yeah. And it’s not unique to psychology. I mean, no, no, no. I only know about psychology. Right. But it’s, you know, if you, if you look at the philosophy of science, especially since Kuhn, right, you see paradigms protect themselves, you know, the sciences protect themselves, especially bureaucratized institutionalized science. I think medical science is an example of this. They have the jingle jangle problem too. And disincentives to create, you know, market niches for innovation, which are really repackaged prior invention. Same thing happens in psychological measures. So there’s a, there’s a similar issue in a lot of fields, which have them locked into basically bad habits. And then there’s these heterodox voices on the outside and then eventually things roll over, but usually it requires institutional change. That’s pretty significant for that to occur. So yeah, it’s, it’s quite a vexing problem, I think at this point. Thank you, Zach. What I was trying to emphasize, maybe I didn’t foreground it enough is that compare how much of an integration problem physics is facing because they will foreground at least to some degree. I’m not saying physics is perfect. I’m not saying that I’m just making a, a, a relative comparison here, but notice that integration is heavily being sought after and that, and theoretical innovate integration is being sought after because there is no duplicitous attempt to conceal the fact that there is a deep fragmentation within physics. But psychology, I’m trying to show you, I’m trying to argue these two are the same, but by trying to keep the fragmentation secret, it therefore has to Right. Stop people from looking for integration and entrench them with the salience of innovation and it simplifies their careers, right? Well, what are you doing as a graduate? All I’m integrating these things together. I’m producing grit. Yeah. So if you, if you, if you, if you, if you come up with a new effect that nobody else has, then your career is set. But if you take existing things and you put them together and say, Hey, I want to show theoretically that these things don’t fit together. You won’t get a job. You won’t get a job. That’s changing just recently, but it’s very much the case. That’s exactly what my dissertation advisor said, Harold Lightenberg, God love them. And I ended up having to do a totally different dissertation, but I had the tree of knowledge. He’s like, you’ll never get a job. So what I’m trying to say is there’s a deep connection between this third thing. So we’ve got, right. And they’re all, they’re all interconnected. You see, I’m doing the philosophical thing here. Sorry, but I’m trying to get clear. Meta-psychology, John. Yeah. There’s fragmentation. There’s a category mistake. And then there’s self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And what that does is it, it backgrounds and marginalizes when I’m here, I’m even thinking in Derrida’s sense, it marginalizes the need for integration and does that actively by privileging innovation over integration. And that is a powerful factor driving the replication crisis. That’s the argument I wanted to make. Yeah. I wanted to get that out. Thank you, by the way, for the patience. I think that’s a, it’s a crucial point. And it says there’s a deep problem that’s self perpetuating and creates a feedback and is inoculated, but we can diagnose it by things like the replication project crisis for exactly exactly. Exactly. That’s the argument I’m trying to make. Thank you, Greg. You articulated, you articulated further in a clarifying way. Thank you very much. That was helpful. How does that land to you, Zach? What, that argument I just made. No, it makes, it makes perfect sense that the replication crisis is probably the most well-known place where this is just like, you know, being reported on basically people are being aware that there’s a replication crisis, you know? And I mean, I was, I was thinking about the, how confusing it is if you are trying to make sense of who you are in your place in the universe and you turn to the psychology, then I was thinking that the mental health crisis could at least in part be driven by the psychologists working to try to stop it. And this is an example, this is an example of my autrogenic spiral, which I write about, which occurs in a lot of places where you keep doubling down on the same way of trying to solve this problem, but it’s actually that problem solving technique that’s causing the problem. So you have reductive psychology, psychological theorizing, confusing people about the nature of their identity. And then as they try to get help about their identity, they go to that very science that confuses. The primary response to replication crisis has been what? Larger ends and better methods. I mean, that’s been by far, and it’s been definitely, it’s not like, huh, maybe we’re on the wrong, you know, it’s like more of the same doc, just keep digging. There have been, I mean, I want to be fair, there have been two or three really good papers published for people that stepped back and said the replication crisis is not just a methodological crisis. It is a theoretical crisis. And our lack of an integrating theoretical framework is a significant factor driving the replication crisis. But the point that you both just made that the response to the replication crisis has been a methodological, by and large, a methodological response and not a theoretical and ontological response just shows how deeply problematic the replication crisis actually is. I will predict that we will institute all of these practices and we should do them by the way, pre-registration, you know, lower P hacking, all that. But the problem is this, then this is why I’m making, I predict that that won’t make the replication goal crisis go away because of this deep logical reason. You can always you can you can always find more empirical confirmation for a vague or equivocal or conflated construct. The fact that you acquire more empirical confirmation means two possibly two different things. You’re on the right track or you have a theoretical mongrel and just getting more does not distinguish between them. I want to say that again, just getting more empirical data does not distinguish between those two. We are entranced by, well, I refuted the null hypothesis. Big deal. You have another hypothesis you have to worry about, which is, is your empirical confirmation pointing to a truth or is your empirical confirmation pointing to a very poorly formed theoretical entity because it could equally be both? Sorry, but that’s just why people will not step back and we’ll gather more data is not going to be the answer. The replication crisis is not. Again, one more time. I’m not saying don’t do this. Do this. Pre-register, improve your staff, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do all that. What I’m predicting, science, I’m predicting that will not ameliorate the replication crisis on its own. That’s what I’m predicting. Amen. We need metatheoretical, metapsychological analysis. So because the logical point is just like it’s undeniable. Yes. One explanation for why you’re getting more data is you are actually confirming something. The other explanation is you have an equivocal, conflated or vague construct, and that will always acquire more and more confirmation. Yeah. Well, and I mean, it’s that’s also the case that doing the same study again with a measure that isn’t well built, you can get the same result and not understand why, because you don’t understand really what you’re measuring. You’re just measuring a proxy. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons and not to mention the normative issues which we’ve been addressing, which are basically not even handled by the vast majority of psychology and aren’t amenable to scientific, I mean, empirical or let alone experimental. So, yeah, the the situation with psychology, I think, is interesting. Like, I believe that current technological trends, trends with the pandemic and geopolitics, are going to put increasing pressure on the field and to prove its worth. And the concern is that we’re going to end up seeing, as we are already seeing, partnerships between very large technology companies like Google and people who innovate constructs like grit. This is what’s happening. And so what you end up getting is the codification of these ridiculous scientific, excuse me, these ridiculous psychological constructs get codified algorithmically within the back ends of the technologies that end up driving a lot of our behavior and create the educational and socialization environments. So as abstract as the conversation seems, it’s actually the case that right now we’re taking psychology as it exists and interfacing it with the most unprecedented information technologies ever created. And most of the people making that interface are naive about the things that we’re talking about and take a construct like grit at face value. Because they only look at the amassing of empirical data. We have no bohemister and other. And by the way, bohemister is in many ways a good psychology. Right. But his notion of will and he and his students were able to amass all of this data about willpower. And it fits in with a whole Christian idea. And it’s everybody. And then it turns out it completely disappears in the replication crisis. You can’t replicate it like and people. Right. They’re like if you look carefully, first of all, you know, given the fragmentation of psychology, the replication crisis is not equally distributed across the sub-disciplines. So you look at it, the areas that suffer. The most are the ones that treat theorizing is something anybody can just do on their own, whereas the areas of cognitive psychology that are not suffering, for example, and I don’t think this is a coincidence, the replication, the way they’re being suffered in social psychology is precisely those areas that have a more explicit and richly developed philosophical tradition and therefore have much more theoretical debate going on in them. And that’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence. Again, I’m not saying cognitive psychology doesn’t have issues. I’m making a comparative point. No, not an absolute legitimate. I’m saying, look, look for where it is. And I guarantee you it’s not because the you know, the stats and the method, a logical experimentation in social psychology is rapidly inferior to what’s going on in cognitive psychology. That’s not the difference. That’s not the difference. It’s because the way the construct like, you know, you know, cognitive psychology, you’re doing work on rationality. They have to read philosophy. They can’t not do it. And so you get you get like the rationality debates, significant, huge debates within psychology about rationality and experimentation and theoretical debate are woven together. You don’t get that in other areas of psychology. And so, again, we have to be more like sorry, I just wanted to I just wanted to be clear that I wasn’t touring all of psychology with the same brush. Right. I want to say that there’s like. There if we if we could make this meta psychology, if we could make the discipline more self reflective and say, stop pretending this is and actually carefully look, where is it worse? Where is it better? Why? Why? Nobody’s doing that. I have not seen a single paper that has said, have you, Greg? Have you? Replication crisis where they say here’s differences within psychology. I’ve seen it alluded to. I haven’t seen it analyzed. Systematic. Yes, exactly. Everybody has to control for funding. You have to you have to control because like neurosciences, cognitive sciences get a lot more money than, for example, developmental psychology, which would be my field. And then there’s also fields that don’t do experiments like observational clinical study. Yeah. So like there’s but I’m completely I completely agree with you. But it is it’s not clear why the terrain of science is the way it is. And again, and I’m biased because I’m a developmentalist. When I’ve spoken to cognitive psychologists, I’ve been surprised, for example, that their inability to theorize rationality developmentally and there’s a whole literature there. I was saying I wasn’t speaking. Absolutely. I did want to qualify that. I like I think, for example, we’re going to just to just to bring to your point, we’re now going through what’s called the second rationality debate because people from cognitive science are bringing in the embodied, embedded, dynamically developmental aspect and said this was not being discussed in the first rationality debate. Right. That presupposition is now being actively challenged. Right. And so again, again, I’m not trying to say that cognitive psychology is perfect, but I’m saying is I can see these moves, even a theoretical debate and then a theoretical debate about an earlier theoretical debate happening here. And I don’t see it in other areas. And and and I could be wrong. OK, first of all, I could just be wrong. But I know and Greg backed me up. Anecdotally, people are saying there’s different areas are going through the replication crisis to very significant degrees. And just looking at it as I’ve looked at it, it seems to map on to how how self-reflective and how theoretically oriented that subdiscipline is as opposed to how much it’s about amassing empirical data and coming up with innovative new effects and constructs. That’s driving the discipline. I could be wrong. I’m willing to admit that right here. But my point is whether or not I’m wrong or right. Why isn’t that being investigated? Fascinating. Why isn’t that being investigated? What seems to me, isn’t that a reasonable response to the replication crisis? Is it is it is it univariate or is it multivariate? Is it happening homogeneously or does it happen? What? We’re not even doing that. We’re not even doing that. Is someone replicating the work that was done on the replication crisis? Because I don’t know if I trust that work. It is a bit of an infinite grass at one level. All of this, all of this, all everything I just said, by the way, again, I want to make it clear and I’m sensitive to your point, Zach. I’m not trying to say that cognitive psychology is not problematic. It is what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to make an argument for why we need a meta psychology. And one of the things that meta psychology does is exactly this kind of deep, reflective self-criticism. Amen. So I know we’re getting near time, so I’ll just offer a few kind of final thoughts, at least, that I wanted to bring to bear on this and then we can see where our next moves are. But I think we, you know, I really appreciate the passionate dialogos around this issue. We obviously all feel in our hearts this methodological solution to the problem is clearly inadequate. So so what I would like to say then, yes, the field is committed to a methodological behavioral approach. At least 90 percent of it, 95 percent of it you have over here, this radical behavioral approach would be of Skinner. You know, it’s five percent of the discipline or whatever. But that’s where the mainstream is. I would like to suggest a meta psychology, you’d say, wait a minute, what are the metaphysical issues that we are dealing with? OK, and that’s not highfalutin. That’s like, OK, what are the concepts and categories and generalized worldview? I think we could all agree that, hey, science has laid out a naturalistic, emergent evolutionary picture and a big history kind of style. At the very least, there’s some big bang. There’s some simpler dimensions of existence or less complexified systems that then get built upon in relation. And then so I would argue that, hey, we need to start with that kind of descriptive metaphysics into an ontological view. The tree of knowledge that affords the argument is that it’s an updated map of big history. And what big history misses is the proper cleaving of complexification across the information processing communication lines. So everybody gets the difference between matter and the chemistry and the life, where that’s a gigantic jump. But systems don’t hone in on the emergence of the nervous system, at least big picture systems and the shift in the living kingdoms from the animals that have distributed neural networks like jellyfish into complex active systems. At least many don’t. Some certainly do. But I would like to suggest that the dimension of mental, consistent with William James’s notion of mental lives, that dimension of mental emerges out of the living world at the animal level. And we can specify that it has key ingredients, complex active bodies, brains and nervous systems that afford exemplars of complicated animal behavior, which I then want to describe as mental, which is another layer of adjectives on top of the living. So that if we had categories of things like, OK, three cats in a tree, one’s dead, it falls, hits the ground. That’s physical behavior. An anesthetized cat falls, it hits the ground, doesn’t move, but inside is biophysiological behavior. A living awake cat drops, hits the ground and takes off. OK, the complicated actions of that animal behavior are the way I want to frame a third dimension of complexity that comes out of life and call that capital M mind as a technical neologism that other people sort of use, but to make it clear that animal mental complex, active bodies of animals behaving on their environment, mediated through the brain and nervous system in a particular way, affords us a particular way of thinking about a particular kind of behavior that’s not well described with the term behavior. OK, so behavior becomes a turn in psychology that actually, because of Watson, is confused ontologically, it’s physically reductive. Epistemologically, it’s from a Wilberian perspective, we can say it’s from the exterior as opposed to the interior. That’s the epistemological difference. OK, you realize that actually the concept of behavior stretches all the way throughout science. OK, behavior is used in by the physical sciences, the chemical sciences, and actually it’s different kinds of behavior in nature. And I map that through the periodic table of behavior, arguing that there are these different dimensions, matter, life, mind and culture, different part whole group relations across scale. That’s particle, atom and molecule across the scale all the way up to galaxies. And then you do gene, cell, multicellular organism across colonies and then neural networks, animals, groups of animals. Ethology is in comparative psychology is this column cognitive behavioral neuroscience at the animal mental level. And then finally, you get us at the primate into hominid into human culture, person level. And because we add the dimension of justification, language, propositional knowledge on top of that. And what that affords then is what it says is, hey, behavior and mental processes is horribly complicated to find epistemologically through science. This affords us a descriptive metaphysics that identifies the ontology of the mental first at the level of mental animal behavior. Then that grows from things like crabs and insects all the way up to primates. And then we jump into human culture, person behavior mediated by propositional language and the evolution of culture. If that’s accurate, it means there’s a radical field difference between animals and their mental behavioral processes and humans and our mental behavioral processes, which I don’t think is too terribly radical. But what it means is behavior and mental processes that are fundamentally different at the comparative animal level. That’s one ontological field of mental and then the human justifying socialized creature that’s reflecting on where the fuck we are and what does it mean to explain ourselves in this particular way? That’s a whole nother dimension. If you buy that basic economy, what it means is psychology is completely split then across those fields and it needs to identify itself as either just being with the human and leave ethology to some other discipline or in my profanion is, hey, comparative psychology is really the base of psychology, basic psychology. It blends into the natural disciplines in a particular way. And human psychology is where we need to create a particular cleave. And then human psychology becomes a sub branch. Human psychology is a radically different field. And that interrelation between basic and human. As a way of categorizing from the natural sciences, then getting situated into the human and recognize that the human is actually a radically different category. Reasons, causes, things like that. And psychology then is a forwards a bridge, but also needs to be broken or separated in proper relation animal to human. So that’s what the tree of knowledge suggests institutionally, that if we’re actually going to have mental animal, mental behaviors, human culture, person behaviors that are on top of that, you differentiate those fields. They have different causal effectual relations. They weren’t different vocabularies, different methods and different identities in relation. That’s part of what the unified theory says about what psychology, the institutional identity of it as a science needs to engage in. Greg, I’m wondering about if we can make a bit of connections to the elusive eye here because one thing that a conceptual confusion that I think I could map onto what you just did that we talked about in the elusive eye and I think is pervasive in psychology is the so mind. Like when when people are looking for mindedness, how sorry for that, but right. There’s three things that often get completed and they’re very carefully being now pulled apart and then theoretically integrated in 40 cognitive science. Which is agency. So like, as you said, everything behaves. We’re talking about behavior as something picking up. Psychology is ridiculous. Everything behaves. That doesn’t do anything. So there’s a distinction now that people are really pressing on between being a behavior and being an agent in that an agent in some sense, in some sense can determine, right, the consequences of its behavior and adjusted adjust its behavior to privilege some consequences over the other because it’s ultimately a self-making thing. It’s an autopoetic thing. So paramecium is an agent because I call that functional awareness and responsivity. Right. That’s the way I would frame that kind of behavioral pattern. But but the problem I take it is that if we pick that out as what we’re talking about, what we’re talking about mindedness, we get into really like because we say that a paramecium has a mind. Right. Right. So there’s agency. Then there’s something else, which is a level above it. We talked about how this right when you start to move into the machinery of the cell where you can start to talk about an agent that is capable of I want to introduce this because for obvious reasons, capable of self-transformation within its lifetime in order in order to improve its agency. Right. There’s a difference there. So paramecium can’t do much. It can modify its cell membrane a bit. Right. Right. Compare that to an animal that can learn and develop. Right. And therefore, in some sense is as the beginning of this, what we are giving you, survive has the beginning of self-worth. Right. Transforming itself in a fundamental way. But then we had this third category, which we sometimes mean when we say mind. So sometimes we say mind, we mean agent. Sometimes when we mean mind, we mean a creature that is, you know, is on the, you know, the other way you tend your track. This is self-track. They have used a procedural sense of self and then you get an actual reflective sense of self. And then, but you also there’s a third thing, which is person. Now notice you can’t be a person if you’re not a self and an agent. Right. And you can’t be a self if you’re not an agent, but those are not all equivalent and we’re not pointing to the same thing. So this comes up in psychology. Psychology can’t tell if it’s if it’s talking about agents, selves and in their very broad sense of things that transform themselves and learn in order to be better agents or persons. Totally like look at abnormal psychology that doesn’t you drop below the personal level doesn’t make any sense. What’s it talking about? All these people are abnormal insofar as they aren’t persons. Right. They’re still selves and they’re still obviously agents. Right. That’s at that level. But when we’re talking about neuron pumps and dopamine levels and schizophrenia, are we talking even at the level of agency anymore? You see what I mean? We’re talking about fundamentally different kinds of things in a very, very confused manner. And it seems to me because you and I with you know, with Chris, we tried to map sort of the levels of agency, selfhood and personhood onto the levels of your of your framework. And essentially what you get there is one other I just want to add one additional division. And then there’s biological agency at one level, meaning that biological like my body is constantly engaged in some kind of functional awareness, responsivity mediated through cells, organ systems. OK. And then there’s a unique my argument is that there’s a Aristotelian sort of sensory motor way. There’s a unique thing that happens when that biological system gets yoked together by a neuro information processing system as a complex active body. So the thing that’s mediated through a brain and nervous system at the Cambrian explosion gives rise to it is that so there’s agency at the level of biology. Then there’s this animal we can see from jellyfish to insects. You see a jump in sensory motor, complex adaptive behavior. Now, whether and then I would argue this is actually emergence of valence quality, as we talk about in this space. And that actually is the complex adaptive joint point behavioral investment theory. What’s actually happening is the emergence of a nervous system to coordinate the behavior of the animal as a whole. So the behavior of the complex segmented animal as a whole that exhibits a functional motor response on the environment, that’s a different kind of behavior, different kind of agency than we see in. And then you get all you get to just wander around like I take my dog and I’ll see the birds and the bees and the squirrels and they’re behaving differently than the trees and the flowers. Although trees and flowers are exhibiting all sorts of complex adaptive structures. The emergence of that animal behavior is a is a is a line in the agency that’s worth noting and where I would say is where biology meets psychology is actually it’s in there. That kind of that’s the line that at least I would afford offer as a potential dividing line and gray space in between the disciplines. I agree with all of that. What I was trying to do is say that there like reductionism is an identification that upper level is nothing but lower level. We’re not talking about reductionism. We’re talking about what Evan Thompson calls deep continuity. Yeah, right. Where there’s a deep continuity between being a biological agent and being a sensory motor agent. But they’re not the same. You can’t reduce one to the other. And then what I was trying to say is each time we move along the continuum and we can’t we can’t like do this. We we we but what we can do is say what’s what’s happening is a nonlinear right increase in the importance of development to this kind of that’s a beautiful argument I was making. But as you move up, what you’re doing is, you know, it’s a continuum and we can draw lines because we have to for analytic reasons. But what I’m saying is it’s a deep continuity and the continuity is a continuity that is expressed in a nonlinear the nonlinear importance of development to that entity being the kind of entity it is. That’s why trying is all back to development and growth and self-transformation. That’s what I was trying to put. I appreciate that. I was oriented more on the fine grained definition of psychology biology. But absolutely in relationship to now to pull this back 100 percent and orient more towards the Zach and all of these other things that we’re about. Right. This idea of as these agents emerge, in particular, this hierarchical level, the centrality of development and shaping what it is that you see in the structure, functional relationship. The self-shaping becomes unbelievable. Evolution of of availability. All of that has to be taken into deep consideration. Yes, exactly. It’s not just a quantitative increase of the self-shaping dimension. It’s a qualitative in the whole nother. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That’s what I’m trying to put. And the fact that we can’t write that that the fact that we can’t properly situate development and transformation into our ontology. I think that’s that’s what I’m trying to. That’s a wonderful point, you know, for to wrap up in terms of what why psychology is not adequate to the task, why we need a new meta psychology, how it might afford us a proper framing and ontological framing situate us to be able to talk effectively and wisely about human development transformation. I think that psychology has to be centrally about development, dynamical development, self-transformation, self-shaping. I mean, that’s that’s what it needs to be about. Maybe we can rediscover the path that could have been through Baldwin and Pierce. But it has but it has to do it. It has to do it properly. It has to do it neither. It has to do it in deep continuity with with with this whole. I mean, you’ve got you’ve got basically and I mean, this is a compliment. You have an Aristotelian ontology or you have to do it in the light of the continuity. Right. Sorry, I’m just repeating myself. I want to hear what Zach has said about the argument I tried to make about these entities. What we’re what we’re what we’re actually talking about is quantitative and qualitative importance of development in in specifying the nature of these entities in an Aristotelian fashion. Yeah, I mean, the whole time you’re speaking, I was thinking of, you know, the root of so much of the developmental tradition and psychology in the epigenetic processes of embryology in particular. And what’s interesting about the embryology is that you’re naming all these different layers and strata of ontology ontology in mind. You were and are all of those levels. Yes. Yeah. Like, yeah, we’re a single celled being. Yeah. And then you differentiate it. And in the process of embryology, you see the kinds of differentiations of function and then reintegration of metafunction and the kind of hierarchical integrative structures that you see in epigenetic processes developmentally in general. And then all those lower forms of knowing are within the human body now. And this is, again, when you get back into the kind of like a good psychology ends up having a religiosity, you end up saying that you’re set in the religious traditions, which is that you are one with everything that the mineral, the plant, the animal, the mind are all contained within the human body. Is correct and kind of an esoteric truth that we are every age the universe has ever been. All right. We’re also we’re also every age we’ve ever been. Like little little Zach is still in there, as is the basic responsiveness of each single cell in my body to sunlight, for example, which I don’t control that reaction, but I benefit from it and I organize it up into agency and personality. So, yes, so next I think next time I will take the reins and I’ll be looking basically at this tradition of thought. So I’ll bring in some of these meta-psychologies from the developmental tradition and then segue into the conversation about transformation, specifically this problem of teacherly authority, which is what comes to my heart and allows us to reframe a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about, I think, and especially bring things to bear in some really concrete situations where we need to figure out how the mind works so that we can advise somebody about a preferable or not preferable course of action, basically, which is at the end of the day, what we need to do with psychology in many ways. So, yeah, this is I enjoy this, guys. So great. That’s a that’s a wonderful. Thank you, guys. I appreciate you guys were beautiful interlocutors, as always. And I appreciate it. So. So thank you very much. And I’m going to end the recording and look forward to seeing the rest of you on the next episode. We’ll in exactly take the lead as you have foretold. Yep. Next week. Same time.