Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation 3- the Cognitive Science Show (BWj_wtHXmos)

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

Welcome everyone to another episode, the third in Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation. And I am joined as always in this series with two excellent interlocutors and partners on this journey, Greg Enriquez and Zachary Stein. So I’ll let them both quickly introduce themselves. And then we’re going to turn things over to Zach, maybe pick up a few of the threads from last time and then take us into what we’re going to focus on today. So perhaps we’ll start with Greg and then we’ll go to Zach. Perfect. That sounds good. So as we’ve entered now to this territory, we’ve problematized transformation a bit. Last conversation was problematizing psychology and I got all fired up. But we were able to get calm down and get oriented. And I think that now we’re in a real excellent place to hand it over to Zach and start a process of a real sophisticated, deep, rich, developmental view. Thank you. This has been a joy and I’ve been looking forward to this. I used to have a lecture I gave when I taught actually at Harvard and it was everything you’ve been taught about PSJA is wrong. I’m not going to rehearse that entire one here, but you’ll be getting some of that. You know, it’s interesting because the problem of transformation first occurred to me and this specific problematization of it, which is to say that it demands a sophisticated meta-psychology. This first occurred to me before I really became a psychologist when I was just trying to look at education as a problem that needed to be solved. And it became very clear that education is such a complex human endeavor that you can’t use one discipline to think about it well. Right. Right. You can’t just use psychology. You can’t just use philosophy. You can’t just use economics. You can’t just use organizational theory. Like there’s many bits and pieces, so it demands a radical interdisciplinarity. Even just the philosophy of education, which I ended up specializing in, was forced all you couldn’t just be do ethics and philosophy of education or just epistemology or just aesthetics and philosophy of education. You had to do all of them in philosophy of education by demand. Dewey said something like all the problems of philosophy come into a head and the problem of education. And right at the core of this is the problem of transformation and specifically preferable transformation. And the distinction between change and learning and behavioral adaptation and increasing understanding and a whole bunch of complex issues which are entangled around this issue of transformation, which demand interdisciplinarity. Like in a very deep level. So that’s where it kind of first dawned on me that you can’t proceed in some of these fields without getting some meta theoretical apparatus in place basically. And this is what, in some sense, this is of course idealization, you know, broadly speaking humanitarian education would provide it would provide that sense of okay you’re a specialist here, but there’s all of this other stuff going on which is important to any problem you’re trying to solve. So, yeah, in particular, transformation. Then the scientific understanding of transformation. I was factored prominently in educational reform, like my what we’ve got modern education reform. So, you know, I became a psychologist in many ways because it was so important to understand psychology to get educational systems, working. Hopefully Zach will be back soon. Right. We’re back. Yes, we’re back. Sorry about that. I think it’s my internet. It’s happened before today so forgive me. I said I swear I hope it didn’t end up on the record. No it didn’t. It’s very judicious pause. So, I was going to say real fast as you pause, just the interface or circle or feedback between philosophy and education. Clearly has lots of parallels with what I found myself in relationship to the science of psychology, and the practice the therapeutic practice like there’s that feedback loop between theory and practice that I think in practice that is really, and seeing it in relationship the way you’ve laid out philosophy and the meta disciplinary knowledge of our knowledge and then how to convey that and cultivated in a way that fosters transformation is a, I’m just noting a very obvious parallel. And specifically like a form of practice that’s like an ameliorative humanitarian endeavor, where the application of science is different than in like let’s say other engineering fields, where you can apply science to build a bridge or a web. And so there’s a there’s a way that the science of psychology is applied in these domains like education and psychotherapy that that even even further great and the burden of interdisciplinary because it brings ethics and other things and, and so the better psychological burden is greater on you, Greg, than it would be if you were let’s say, just doing a narrow experimental paradigm, and they’re narrow experimental paradigm and an FMR eye scanner trying to produce science for science sake. There’s still issues there. There’s the complexity in the practice of education psychotherapy, where you’re recommending to people ways that they ought to be 100% you know and that’s what we’ll get to towards end of this is how do we actually theorize something like teacherly authority, which is complex construct that I’ve published about in my book, which, which is exactly that it’s a position, which has existed, a kind of social role relation which is existed in all cultures, which is the relationship of intergenerational transmission and even more specifically the normative relation of being able to advise one in what is right for them with vis-a-vis your greater knowledge and their recognition of your greater knowledge. So that requires a developmental approach, specifically, and so that was just a long way of saying that like this issue has been on my mind since I’ve been taking ideas very seriously I’ve been grappling with the fact that we’re not adequately equipped to solve some of these really complex social problems like the social problems trying to be solved by psychotherapists or educators. Or like a macro meaning crisis. Or a macro meaning crisis right which is, yeah, exactly. I just wanted to say something similar to what Greg just did, which is of course cognitive science is by definition an interdisciplinary practice, precisely because these issues of meaning and knowledge and cognition are taken to not be captureable by any one of the home disciplines. So I think we independently came to a similar conclusion. That’s why I ended up in cognitive science. And one of the things I want to put on the table, and I expect you’ll be able to respond to it in depth is, of course there’s a particular problem that’s, you know, there’s a problem in cognitive science which is And so they, I often liken it to different countries speaking different languages, or different religions. And so that I mean, there’s a there’s an additional problem that you’re facing. I don’t mean you particular I mean anybody who says this phenomena requires interdisciplinary approach which is, how do we create the bridging discourse between them that allows us to map between them insightfully without, you know, without, you know, papering over to the to the different countries, and so they, I often liken it to different countries speaking different languages, or different religions. And so that I mean, there’s a there’s an additional problem that you’re facing. I don’t mean you particular I mean anybody who says this phenomena requires interdisciplinary approach which is, how do we create the bridging discourse between them that allows us to map between them insightfully without, you know, without, you know, papering over to the different So how to complexify, if you’ll allow me, the problem of how to complexify the various disciplines together is a problem. I’d like to, I hope we can bring into at some point in this discussion because it’s a problem that’s very dear to my heart about this issue. And I think I totally agree with you. That there are the response, the, the attempt to understand, and also respond both pedagogically and therapeutically to trap the issue of transformation requires an interdisciplinary approach. I think that there’s also the possibility. And this might this, this is something that’s more nuanced and perhaps we won’t get to it that any, we can actually exemplify part of what we’re trying to examine. What do I mean by that, as I think where we exemplify complexification and how it can properly work. And that can give us some guidance about how we can understand the complexification processes at work within transformation itself so we can use that as I’m not saying as any kind of final authority, but as a normative yardstick by which we say, well look, this is how we do this well here when we’re trying to do this. In the practice of the knowledge, maybe that will give us some guide as to how we should make normative recommendations in the practice of the pedagogy or or the therapy that so that’s just something I wanted to put on the table for discussion. That’s wonderful. I’ll take the first issue. First, and I, it’s funny you directed right what I ended up studying and graduate I ended up studying interdisciplinary as an endeavor. I did quite a bunch of interesting empirical work done on the nature and dynamics of interdisciplinary at a very high level, I worked project zero at the Graduate School of Education. I worked at the Boyack Sponsala, the International Bachelorette there were several places where interdisciplinary was like being looked at as a, as an educational problem and I looked at it in terms of the, what are the cognitive and emotional task demands of interdisciplinary I ended up finding this amazing man who most people not heard of Donald Campbell, you guys may be correct. It’s an old school, completely prolific and kind of like, you know, pioneer in this field of evolutionary epistemology specifically and he looked at the problem of interdisciplinary from the inter, from that lens of evolutionary epistemology, and he identified what he called the ethnocentrism of the disciplines, which is a very useful phrase and so he identified that like, there are these kind of like no man’s lands between disciplines. And to get comprehensiveness we need to be able to communicate in a very different way. But this, this ethnocentrism of the disciplines. It’s very deep seated. And isn’t, it’s an educational problem that has to do with the way we train disciplinarians in many ways. And it’s also a cognitive problem. This is, this is where we get to again towards the end when we look at the model of hierarchical complexity and the Neo-Pagetian models of, you know, adult development to get to your point of like to go circular, is that it’s actually very hard to do interdisciplinary work just Especially without shared scaffolds, and that’s what meta theoretical or meta psychological models like Greg’s or mine or like Wilbur’s or Washburn’s or yours, John, the help interdisciplinarians actually think about the nature of what they’re doing is it’s a scaffold to take the cognitive load off the shared language. And so, Piaget in his work in the 70s for UNESCO was trying to identify this, he was trying to identify a language of structuralism that could be used to bridge disciplinary boundaries and create a comprehensive field of knowledge that we could use to reform society. And that’s a very important work. And the idea there was that, and it, being articulated by some of the dynamical systems guys was that, oh wait, there are processes which are isomorphic across different levels of complexity. And that’s, so I’ll get there, I’m going to foreshadow that. So I’m going to rewind if that’s okay to the, to where I ended up in graduate school which was looking at the history of psychology, to figure out how it became so fragmented and trying to also get my chops strong enough in philosophy that I could do the interdisciplinary work I needed. And so I was looking at Charles Sanders Peirce, who I became obsessed with. And, you know, he, he is actually the first experimental psychologist on the North American continent, people don’t realize this but he performed the first psychological experiments on the continent and he was translating Wundt and in communication with Wilhelm Wundt, and was working in both psychology and the early psychophysics, and he was a mathematician and a metrologist so he set up very precise experimental apparatus. This is an amazing story to to test the logarithmic reliability of his eye as a differential responder to subtle variations in the intensity of light. So he set up like a chronograph or whatever it was called, which was, which he could set through measures showed light varied brighter less bright. So he’s like, is my eye reliable or not as a gauge, and it turned out it is very reliable to certain threshold and those are logarithmic just like all the rest of the psychophysical stuff. And so he did that to be able to justify his astronomical observations of stars, which are of varying intensities, because he had a hypothesis, which have been posited before, even by some Greeks that were in a disk. And he was like, I can tell these ones are brighter, these ones are less bright like mathematically this is a disk, and he ended up doing that whole thing but in the process of doing that he did this experimental work in psychophysics. First experiments done in North America, his good friend William James was also taking the experimental psychology from Europe and trying to build something with it. And what Perce found there was what Frege ended up calling the problem of psychologist. Right. Right. Which is that there are totally some processes that we would call psychical processes like psychical processes of the mind, which are like natural, like this logarithmic psychophysical things which are kind of shown and proven, but then there are other ones, which are not. And now we’re back to the space of reasons in the space of causes. Yes, Perce was like putting his finger on this very precisely very early in the psychological discussions, and it actually changed the tone of some American psychologists, not James, James didn’t really understand it. But Baldwin did, and George Herbert Mead did, and Dewey did. And that made American psychology for a time different. And so Baldwin in particular picked up on this notion that there were developmental processes, like the ones that Darwin had detected, but they were in your mind, they were in the culture, that there was a developmental or evolutionary process taking place when the child went from being unable to speak or do anything to being able to do mathematics and grammar and a bunch of other stuff. And so he articulated that as a form of interdisciplinary work that’s supervened on comparative psychology and psychophysics. So he had a much more complex stack of what psychology was, and said that stuff’s interesting, but we can solve that with naturalistic methodologies, kind of. Then there’s this layer of stuff, which gets us into the justification system and beyond, which we can’t, there’s isomorphic processes, so it’s not that we can’t study it and it’s not that it’s not bound by the lower level processes, but it is distinct, and it brings us into this normative domain where we have to do with what I called last time normative facts. So, you know, Baldwin’s work, Thought and Things, just like three volume magnum opus, which is completely forgotten, completely incredible, foreshadows speech act theory, foreshadows several other areas in like pragmatics and linguistics. Of course, it’s what inspired P.J. to do his work, specifically pulling from Baldwin. Baldwin was pulling from Pierre Genet and Tarde, who were French, and had a deeply grounded, intersubjective and normative approach to development, but completely respecting biology. Baldwin made contributions just like Peirce in multiple sciences. And so, he was, as I said, his Baldwin, his most famous for the Baldwin effect, which is actually something biology. So he was not as many people characterize him, taking psychology up into speculative domains, he was actually trying to have this full stack psychology and to position his work, specifically to what he called genetic epistemology, which just means developmental epistemology, and that’s exactly the phrase P.J. is using, that genetic epistemology or developmental epistemology or evolutionary epistemology is that notion where you apply that way of thinking about how evolution worked, and you transform it, you don’t bring it wholesale and reduce the emergent, right? But you transform it and start to do work in development. So that’s where this thing gets launched and loaded and then P.J. basically picks it up in France. I mean, this is not, this is my reading. I’m not sure if that’s useful. Of course, there’s more complexity because P.J. also worked with Pierre Genet. Baldwin ends up in France, exiled from the United States, ends up in France, given the Legion of Honor by France for his work in World War I. And so there’s a possibility that P.J. and Baldwin actually met. But in any case, so that was interesting. And that when I was looking at that, I was seeing that there were, before the psychologists that I was hanging out with were telling me how psychology worked, there was weird things happening in psychology. Yeah, that’s super. I just want to just highlight because this becomes super salient to me that basic comparative animal psychology is fundamentally different than human psychology. I mean, and that the proper lexicon and reference points for our language needs to accord that. And then I sort of had that and then I rediscovered a lot of the developmentalists. And obviously you’ve layered that with a level of specificity that far exceeds my own. But to capture that in the history, after I sort of like, you know, did my TOK thing, was like, well, shit, there’s obviously animal mental, behavior mental process, and there’s culture person behavior mental. And for a whole host of reasons. Those are two different fields of consideration. And the field itself sort of knows that and it sort of doesn’t know that. And it’s really been fascinating. And there’s a few people who picked up the lead like Thomas Sallow, I think, plugged directly into the story that I just told. Like he’s mead and purse even sites. And then he’s into brand them. And so there’s a recognition of what you’re saying, I think, which is, which is that, you know, to do psychology doesn’t mean to do one or the other. It actually means the factor at all. Meta psychological frame, which is, which is what I think Baldwin is attempting to do. First gave up on psychology, he was so bored by the psychophysics and thought James had just made all these mistakes and was trying to do philosophy, like meta architectonic work that would allow for psychology to justify itself at all. And he thought that it basically couldn’t. But what’s interesting about PJ is that like Baldwin, he’s also a biologist, like he’s fundamentally approaching human behavior as a as a biologist. And, you know, his approach to understanding behavior was one of looking for taxonomical organization, then transformative explanation between different positions in the taxonomy. So he’s, again, adopting the kind of Darwinian way of thinking to the kind of species and kind of, you know, the genre of the, of the, of the mind, as the mind evolves. So he’s, please. So, I just want to be clear that I make sure I’m on center that, like one of the things I hear both of you saying, I’m not that familiar with Baldwin, and I should be, given what you just said, I, I’m, I’m familiar with person and familiar with in Toronto, actually, I know that I know that the University of Toronto that’s where the first laboratory of psychology. Yeah. And one of my fellow grad students Christopher Green has done a documentary about how he was actually purged. He was purged. But what I hear you saying, and of course this resonates with Piaget is the. I’m not currently happy with this adjective, but just let me use it. The hard science that they’re looking to is biology, where I see people like Watson and Skinner, even though they’re working with animals, the hard science they’re trying to emulate is physics. Is that is that a fair comparison to make. I think what’s interesting here is that you already had back in those days and person was involved in this and Piaget was literally focused on this problem was you know, there are biologists who think biology should just be physics. So there’s this question of ontology basically and so I think that, you know, Piaget in particular was working with a way of thinking about biological processes that I think was probably more sophisticated than most of the biologists of his day, which is to say he was following Wattington’s work and looking at self organizing dynamical systems and processes of canalization and chaos, like way before that stuff was cool. And so there’s a way in which the notions of biology that Skinner and Watson were working with were biological but they were that simplistic biology that seeks to reduce biology to basically physics, we still have biology of that. I would say that’s definitely true of Watson. Skinner’s tricky. Skinner, it took me a while to crack what radical behaviorism really is about. And it’s not easy if you read Skinner carefully, he’s like I’m not a stimulus response reductionist at all. In fact, he’s actually a holistic empiricist who wants to eschew explanation and just engage in inductive control of behavior. He actually doesn’t really want to reduce anything to explanation even. He wants to control the flow of behavior is actually what he thinks. So essentially for Skinner, science really is an engineering project to generate a feedback loop of prediction and control of what you see, which is a fun, which is a weird thing but it’s not, it’s very different and in some ways way more sophisticated than Watson. Watson was completely, he was a physical reductionist. He believed in the natural science, the physics as the exemplar for psychology both epistemologically in terms of experimentation and ontologically in terms of its billiard balls, neuro reflexes bouncing in front. Skinner was radically different in the way he approached behaviorism. Skinner, I’ll get you because he’s ultimately utopian. Yeah, he’s a weird, I mean he wins humanistic awards. He’s a fascinating character. It took me a while. I was frustrated with him because I was on the cognitive side of the equation. And then I got in this huge entanglement and then actually learned how to speak radical behaviorism, and it’s fascinating. Interesting. It’s helpful to know. So the sticking point then, right, in the biology, being reduced to physics is precisely Darwinian theory, which is one of the two grounding theories of biology, because it’s ultimately a dynamical system theory. It is not right, a standard Newtonian kind of theory. So, is Baldwin picking up on that aspect? Is that what he’s focusing on? Definitely. I mean, Baldwin is, so the Baldwin effect specifically, is a biological mechanism that can account for Lamarckian style evolutionary advancing, the Darwinian style explanationary mechanisms, explanationary mechanisms. And so that’s kind of interesting. So he’s thinking in a very complex way about how dynamic life is when it’s in adaptation, and what PSJA called equilibration, which I believe was a concept that applied across all layers in the strata ontologically, that you can think about physics in terms of equilibration, you can think about biology in terms of equilibration, you can think about psychological process in terms of equilibration. And then, yeah, of course, then you get that disequilibration, accommodation, triplicate up in the psychological theorizing that that that PSJA does. So, so yeah, so I think there’s, there’s a way of looking at the kind of meta psychology we’re proposing. And I think this is kind of what’s in your question, John, or maybe not. But it’s that it also involves a re understanding of biology. Yeah, like that if you hold some, for example, if you don’t believe Darwin is actually a kind of like Evo Devo guy ultimately, but you think Darwin’s ultimately more like a Watsonian billiard balls, causal randomness guy, which is not like Darwin writes about love, a lot, incidentally, and about natural selection that phrase specifically very little. But if, but if you don’t believe that if you’re a simplistic Darwinian, then it becomes very hard to have an adequate even biology to do an adequate psychology. And so one of our arguments here is that the meta psychology forces us into metaphysics, which has to reconfigure many of the adjacent disciplines to psychology, which is what, which is what pissed people off about PSJA. So he would study a problem like causality. And he would study little kids, and he’s at the Rousseau Institute for genetic epistemology in Switzerland and he would invite all he would invite physicists, he would, and like philosophers car nap would come. And, and so they would both study how little kids were developing causal reasoning and they study the most sophisticated scientific forms of causal reasoning and the most sophisticated epistemological basically reflection on what causality is so that would be like the summer, and then they would publish all of these things most of those haven’t been translated, we get this little trickle, and it hasn’t been systematically translated, whereas Furnin Young’s work are like super systematically translated. So there’s something weird about the ebbing agents that’s paid to PSJA’s corpus is French, it’s not like that. It’s not hard to translate. So and it’s weak some of the translations are bad that we do have. So that work was radically interdisciplinary, and was actually PSJA’s work with children was forcing epistemologists and physicists to be like, Whoa, that’s pretty interesting. You know, because it’s just bizarre how different children think from adults, and yet they turn into adults pretty reliably. So there are these really stable states that most children pass through and thinking about causality, which can be reliably seen detected like it’s like a species in the woods that you discover. Like you know that that way of thinking about causality is there. And so what’s interesting is that many of those early species of the mind linger into adulthood. If you take a sophisticated Neo-Piagetian view, this is where it becomes with the kind of like straw man PSJA, we just have to get rid of. And we have to take development as this very complex thing, where under certain conditions of duress. You can start thinking about causality super magically. And that’s pretty much like a kid thinks about causality and that’s a stable predictable kind of almost archetype of psychological functioning, that way of thinking about causality. And so, so it was a long way around of saying that yeah there’s something implied here in our meta psychology that we’re kind of building, which can handle transformation that forces us to rearticulate other aspects of other fields of biology I think most importantly. So, so Piaget gave us this kind of approach which was trying to bring psychology into resonance with the other fields that were next to it, instead of in some weird disconnect. And so he did this work I already mentioned for Inesco, this three volumes on interdisciplinarity, and then the, you know, the place of the science, the place of the human sciences and the system of sciences. And then structuralism which is the most famous of those three, which were all attempts to articulate a transdisciplinary language of transformation across life, mind, and culture. Very very ambitious, very interesting. And so the work that I was doing in my medicine, I didn’t call it meta psychology then I called it meta theory, but I was taking from from Piaget, and he was seeing that there were, as I was saying, isomorphic structures across these three categories he didn’t name them this but I named them this retrospect, the natural, the normal, and the normative. Yep. It worked for us basically. And so, natural processes are not biological processes, but they’re pretty causal. Right. So like, not simply causal so like let’s take my blood sugar. Right. Blood sugar is complex. Ultimately, it is a natural, my organisms should be naturally functioning, my blood sugar regulations and the domain of the natural. If it’s not working and I have hypoglycemia, let’s say, or diabetes, then there’s a dysfunction, right, in a system which is predictable can actually be measured using causal mechanisms. So, it’s different, the normal supervenes directly on that, but interfaces with the distinctly human realm of the cultural which is in the normative. Right. Yeah, so I like to use the example of dyslexia. Right. Like, so I’m dyslexic. So I have a, I have a typical neural visual setup, like, which is genetic. My dad was also dyslexic. So, in a culture that doesn’t require me to read from the kind of alphabet we have this nervous system is not necessarily a problem at all. But in a culture that does, I get I have a disability. As a category is interesting, which has to do with what’s normal and the way what’s natural fits into what’s normal. And so there’s a whole range of categories there especially in educational psychology which become very interesting about, you know, what is actually not unnatural, which is to say that’s what the organism does. Sometimes with this genetic variation in these contexts that’s going to do that. That’s natural in a context where, well, that’s not normal here. Right here we sit in desks for six hours a day and focus on meaningless work. But if you put a 10 year old kid, if you put a 10 year old kid in that situation, it’s natural that he’s going to be restless and not be able to focus. Right. Well no, that’s a disability or maybe actually a dysfunction. Right. Therefore, how do we intervene. So, and then there’s. So there’s this, there’s dysfunction there’s disability, which has to do with the interface of the natural normative. And that’s what I would call disagreements, right, which are not disabilities or dysfunctions. And you see in some psychiatry, and even in political propaganda, the reduction of disagreement to disability. And more dangerously the reduction of disability to dysfunction. And so, to say that you hold a view that I disagree with means you’re basically broken, or disabled, or stupid, or worse, deeply troubled and perhaps have a dysfunction. And so we talked last time about the medicalization of educational underperformance. And you also see the medicalization of political deviance. The medicalization of political disagreement is actually going on in our culture right now. When you’re looking at Piagetian comprehensive structuralism we’re looking at a structuralism that has language that’s relevant to psychology across those three broad categories of the natural, the kind of causal regulative self regulating organ, like neuroscience and the hard sciences, and then you get this, the kind of normal, which studies bracketing cultural normativity studies with the sociologically predictable, which is where we get a lot of our psychology. You take a sophomore from undergrad, who’s from a Western democracy, who’s probably white. Weird. Remember the weird category. Put him in an fMRI scanner and you see what he does and you bracket all the normative stuff that actually requires the creation of the experimental paradigm where it actually makes sense to him like that that image is disturbing and that image is not disturbing, for example. Right, you just bracket that you’re looking at the normal responsiveness of someone enculturated in this culture and then you sometimes universalize that as if it’s, that’s another conversation and then the normative, which is where Piaget was operating, had to do with, what about these normative facts, right, what about the fact that the kid who’s 16 thinks better about causality than the kid who’s four, full stop. Right, like the kid at 16 will build a successful operating causal mechanism. Without much instruction, the kid at four will never build it without a lot of scaffolding. Right now there’s exceptions and this was like the, let’s take out Piaget with a sniper rifle by setting up experimental paradigms that don’t actually respect his assumptions. But that’s just the truth and so there’s a normativity built into this way of thinking about the normative facts in the domain of the normative which is you don’t find in the normal or the natural, and this is where we get into psychotherapy, education, specifically, forms of human development beyond adolescence, where you’re looking at this hierarchically structured system of justification. And the dynamic of teacherly authority, which says, often, and when it’s most profound, not just that I know more than you quantitatively, but that the way I justify my beliefs is actually better than the way you justify your beliefs. Right, right, right, right. That’s a deeper claim. It’s not just more quantitative knowledge, like, come to me and I can give you responses, which is how we think of like quiz show, you know, like, yep. But in fact, the real stance of teacher authority is one that hits deeper thread, which we can unpack in terms of Greg’s work on the justification system and the model of hierarchical complexity, Habermas and of course Piaget, which is where this whole thing is going, which is that now there’s a nested system of justifications, each of which is valid. And yet each of which gets increasingly valid. Right, which is what’s so interesting is that four year olds are not dumb at all. Four year olds are actually way smarter than we think they are right now in some specific areas they’re obviously as advanced as a 16 year old but they’re doing a lot, and there’s horizontal at the right at developmental levels, which gets lost when you go vertical, which is say there’s stuff for you to know that we do not know. Because we’re not down there at the at the four year old level doing four year old things building that rich knowledge and sensory motor representations and things. But there is this vector of normativity and power and a few other things, aspects of psychological power meaning like just the ability to focus attention on things. So, great. I’m sorry, John. That’s okay. I mean, this is ultimately. I don’t mean reductively but this is ultimately a view of education goes back to play dough, because when you start moving into. I, it’s not just that I know more but I know better than you’re invoking wisdom as something distinct from knowledge because And then I assume, given what you’re saying that the, the way you justify the better. The way you do it in play dough is the 16 year olds model of causality is better than the four year olds because it’s somehow, and I’m going to put this in scare quotes because we need to talk about it is somehow truer. It somehow gets at a deeper. It’s a deeper account. It’s more in touch with the reality of causation than the four year old. And so, and so I hear a lot of play dough and even the higher the hierarchical complexity very neoplatonic way of trying to understand how we How we move up the ladder of intelligibility I’m hearing all of that also in what you’re saying. Is that a way in which is that one way, not trying to be exclusive is that one way in which you know the philosophical discussions about education can connect to what we’re doing here. Yes, yeah no precisely I mean the source text is probably the me now. Yes, like, because the 16 year olds understanding of causality is is better than the four year olds. But it is also implicit within the four year olds, which is to say that under normal conditions the four year old will get there there’s not an exclusivity and this is an important dimension of teacher the authority, which is that I know better than you. Ha ha ha is not teacher the authority or I know better than you and I will control you right that’s propaganda education is I know better than you and will bring you up and lead you right pedagogy lead you down the path to the be in the position that I am that I’m in. And so the me knows that great one where he gets the slave boy to draw in the dirt and basically gets out of him complex geometrical theorems from a kid who has never even heard of geometry, just showing that built into the structure of experience and relationship is enough to to move people through these, what what PGA would call these natural stages of deepening into reality. So that’s, you know, and PGA refute talked to like that it was like the subject depends. And as the subject deepens reality expands simultaneously so you get this, like, deepening in touchness with reality and it’s complex because it seems like you’re becoming more abstract and complex. In some ways you are in some ways you’re becoming more abstract complex but you’re also becoming more of a container for more of reality and see more interconnections between more things and importantly to and this is again a neglected aspect of PGA, you’re feeling more. You know PGA believe that cognition and emotion were two sides of the same coin. One good work which was translated called the grasp of consciousness was basically to this point, you know, very much like your relevance realization notion that is active process and evaluative process and, you know, yeah so so there’s there’s many rich threads into it. Well, I’ll just say then, you know, I’ll bring the Aristotle view. My friend Blaine Fowers, you know, is an scholar in this area talks about the evolution of functional forms and the way in which Aristotle thinks about the proper entity a knife is good because it’s sharp and it cuts and we should be thinking about functional forms in a particular way, and we can generate ideas about the functional form of humanity and utilize that say on the you diamonic continuum about, well how do social animals get together and produce a you diamonic state a wise state of being that becomes a particular functional form which you can then use to reference and he argues that creates Blaine Fowers argues that creates a lot of is ought complexity. And perhaps a very sophisticated way that we can upgrade that the modern enlightenment sort of with its rejection of Aristotle’s metaphysics, I think perhaps you know extreme reduction of its metaphysics in relation to final formal causation things along those lines. I want, I want to make one more point on that the history because the work of Mark Taylor and others. Right so modern modernism is not only rejection, Aristotle, right, which it is. It’s also rejecting Renaissance neoplatonic magical theory. Because in platinus, you get the synthesis of Aristotle and Plato and you get this idea that cognition is always, it’s always fitting itself to the object of cognition, and the deeper, the deeper the reality it’s trying to it has to transform itself. So there’s an input in this, it is at, it is a thoroughly inherently transformational epistemology, there is no way that the mind can relate to a deeper reality unless it has undergone a fundamental transformation. But the problem is the neoplatonic magicians and philosophers are, they’re trying to talk about self organization they didn’t think that matter was inert think of inertia, they didn’t think matter was inert. They didn’t think that matter was inert, they didn’t think that matter was inert, they didn’t think that matter was inert, they didn’t think that matter was inert, they didn’t think that matter was inert. I hear Zach saying, you know that there’s this, there’s this process of scaffolding cognition via, which is right, a scaffolding of intelligibility, which is also a scaffolding of reality. Is that a fair way of understanding this. Yeah, I mean it is a hierarchy of knowing and being. Yes, that’s a beautiful, co evolving hierarchy of knowing and being. Yes, yes, yes. Love it. Exactly. I spent a lot of time studying Plotinus for this reason. It’s like Ken Wilbur loves Plotinus and there’s James Hillman, you know there’s a there’s a there’s a reason to look at the neoplatonists as the first psychologists maybe or something like that. And so that notion of, yes, the rejection of Aristotelian thought by modernity. And also the rejection of the neoplatonist chain of being by modernity. Both of those things were things that PJ really wasn’t willing to throw away, and it was trying to find a way to somehow preserve in the context of of modernity specifically. He has a, as a youth, wrote an autobiography as a kid, which is hilarious but it was not a biographical novel where he struggled with the problem of science and religion, and he identified this notion of an evolving Aristotelian science of forms as a way of resolving the crisis between science and religion so he was always kind of working secretly as a neoplatonist mystic trying to preserve. That’s so cool. He says that, like he says that. And then Chapman’s book the great book, constructive evolution probably the best book on PJ Chapman. He there’s all these quotes from PJ where he says as much he’s like when I’m studying the child coming to know more and coming therefore into more being he’s studying kind of the evolution of God and that kind of neoplatonic way there’s, there’s that kind of neoplatonism where you just take the platonic stack and you just knock it on its side and unfold. And so PJ was very much plugged into that discourse reading Bergson, and when I read, when you read biology and knowledge, which I think is maybe PJ’s most interesting book. It’s very hard to say that though. It’s a very, it’s a scope of like a TLA or Deshardon or something it’s a sweeping scope that’s including human, and specifically human science human knowing human ethics, human normativity in an understanding of the universe as a whole, that it didn’t just kind of parachute out of nowhere in this meaningless causal void and now all of a sudden we create value out of nowhere like, is like no no no value runs deep way back, and the hierarchy of knowing and being runs deep. Knowing and being before there were humans. Right. And that was very important to PJ, like he was studying he had a little till the end till he was very old, experimenting with succulent plants and mollusks to try to like get evolutionary behavior to take place in closed environments. And so he was, he was very much interested in the problem philosophically even more than psychologically, like he was really finding he was looking for those threads that are metaphysically cutting through all of those strata. And just like he wanted to be in touch with, you know, mind of God or something like that. I think that’s a remarkable. So, so, so is that like you’ve talked about structural isomorphisms is that I’m sort of trying to prod you to also to talk about hierarchical complexity, and maybe, maybe talk about it in terms of complexification as well. Is that is that you know Evan Thompson talks about it as the deep continuity, but I think it is ultimately goes back to a neoplatonic sort of framework is that is that right. Is that a basis for that like for the. What’s the term use the ethnocentrism of overcoming the ethnocentrism of the disciplines to try and get that sort of, if you’ll allow me neoplatonic framework in place, brought up to modern speed with dynamical system theory etc. I’m trying not to commit this in a oversimplification but I’m trying to make a connection. Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s the direction we’re, we’re heading in, you know that there are these certain patterns. And hierarchical complexity being one nonlinear dynamics of growth, being another self organizing self transcending trout self transforming systems being a third. And these are things PSA was identifying in the 70s. Yes, as possible common languages across these disciplines that are relevant to the for him the human sciences, but relevant and I would think to other interdisciplinary work as well. So yeah, when you’re looking at the way patterns of human growth. Look like the patterns of growth and biological organisms, you get for example those nonlinear. We all know the growth spurt to the physiological, or like in a couple of days this kid grows inches and like literally hurts. And Kurt Fisher, the great neo pH editing he demonstrated that through behavioral data that kids will do this for a long time. And then relatively in a short time, like, boom, drop up to a new level like they’ll be not using any first person pronouns, and then And that happens in like, like a matter of a day or two days. That was a, were the great people who applied dynamical systems theory to human development. And then when you look at Van Geert, this was Van Geert dissertation, look at his own kid in terms of pronoun uses and saw all of these nonlinear spurts. And when you look at other types of biological phenomena, especially in very complex systems. See similar perturbations and jumps, jumps and drops and jumps and drops and then stabilization. And then the other type of dynamical variability and complex systems was what Kurt was studying and was where the neo pH editing approach ended up going, looking at patterns of variability in growth. As opposed to what PGA did was look at patterns of stability. That’s why he got stereotypes as just like, oh, there are these four universal stages, which is actually not correct. And then in the book, he’s like, oh, there’s a lot of different stages. And sometimes there’s many, many detailed sub stages. So the gross textbook characterization is not generally true when you go to the original source texts. Like the way it’s been reduced to the high, the hierarchy. Yeah, very much so, very much so. And what’s interesting too is that he would get into what we ended up calling an electrical learning sequences where you, you, you don’t just lay out. The four stages and be like, it’s great. You want to get to the top. You like you, you look at how the argument actually progressed. Like, oh, actually, if you think that way, but the primacy of life over laws, the classic Colbert example, like you always follow the law, no matter what, even if it costs you your life. And if you think that you follow that you’ll hit these cases at the edge, which force you about what if the laws unjust? Oh, whoa. And then you have to flip back and then so he’s tracing out the actual kind of learning logic, if you know, logic of the learning progression. And he’s doing that in his work on moral development. So instead of just being these inexplicable magical stages, which people like you blow out the candles on your 12th birthday and you’re a formal operator. It’s in fact he sees through again, fieldwork detailed fieldwork basically as a biologist just talking to kids and the pathways through and up. And that gets us back to this hardest issue of hierarchical complexity, this nested system of justifications within adult development, and all of these various learning sequences through that state space state space of possible justifications which expands as you get increasingly complex. And that puts us in a really interesting situation, theoretically, basically, this is where PJ kind of left us, which is like, okay, if we understand that there are these patterns that apply across nonlinear patterns, jumping patterns self organizing patterns right. Those apply somehow in the domain of the normative somehow in the domain of justification systems. What is the nature of, for example, major shifts in cultural zeitgeists of value or major shifts in personal zeitgeist concerning value, like, how do those work, specifically. And so there’s a there are certain tools of PGA gives us to help us think about that which the PGA and tried to tinker with and I, which I tried to tinker with when I, when I got in there. And some of it requires separating those things which are clearly isomorphic from those things which are emergent and normative. And so, you know, like, for example, when you’re looking at someone’s arguments. You know you want to be able to identify the complexity. Right. Of the argument which is like an objective measure. This is what we do electrical objectively measure hierarchical complexity of verbal performance or written performance. And that’s a separate question from how good is that argument. And I think this is where the developmental literature again very confused after Kohlberg they conflated these. And so you end up seeing that the power that comes with increasing complexity and cognition doesn’t necessarily correlate with increasing absence of mistakes. Right, or increasing absence of bias. And so, you end up with a more nuanced view of development, then the simple developmental lists would give us, which is a simple growth to goodness model, PGA falls into this trap quite often as well. One reason I think PGA falls in the traps because he mostly studied children, and he mostly said the development of necessary knowledge, which was like basically hard to avoid. If you were growing up as a human. But in adult development. You’re basically in a, you step into the simulation of education and culture and language and things become much more, much more complex. I think it’d be good just to pause or double click on growth to goodness, because that really does capture a lot of the dilemma, the intuition basically being hey, why don’t you climb up that’s better that’s more power, and that’s more sophistication. The line of what is better at the level of say competence sophistication, the line that is wise the line that affords, you know, the most growth towards you diamonia that’s those are not necessarily the same line so I just want to say that for people that might It’s a beautiful phrase that’s used fairly regularly and for listeners I just wanted to make sure we sort of catch that because it’s a beautiful way of capturing the dilemma, or the presuppositions that need to be teased apart. I’d like to pick up on that too and I talked about it in a different way but a way that I think it’s convergent, especially around ideas of wisdom. And yet, there’s no complexification to be coupled to the complexity of reality. Right, so, right. There are many ways in which a system can complexify. I talked about parasitic processing that disconnect us radically from, and they can build be built out of completely adaptive machinery. And yet that that that self organizing complexification that’s built out of, you know, adaptive machinery can nevertheless massively right disconnect us from reality and imagine, Greg you hit this all the time and therapy people often have these very complex ways in which And so if you, and that’s, that’s why I fundamentally agree with what you’re saying that you can’t take simple complexification as a measure of right normal. I guess I’ll call it normative improvement, but the standard I’m using here is right something like, well, how, how is the neoplatonic. Are you disclosing, is this complexity, actually reliably helping affording you to disclose real patterns in the world. That’s what I take to be something that’s missing. If you just measure that complexity and by its or appear sort of mathematical metric, is that I feel like that’s a great, is that why I know that’s not absolutely I just I just wanted us to be clear that sophistication and goodness in various can be differentiated. Play that famous the sophists right were the target of it because he disagreed with their educational program. Let’s remember that they were teachers, precisely because being sophisticated and even the etymological origin of the word is not the same thing as becoming wise. Right. And that’s basically what we’re talking about. And so there’s a few nuances here which are important so developmentally, again, the way the reason that PSA didn’t resolve the growth goodness problem. The reason is that when you are developing sensory motor systems and getting proficiency with understanding how gravity works and how your body relates to space and how time and all this things like There’s a certain amount of hopefully barring crazy bad upbringings just reliable differential responsiveness of the environment to the child that’s extremely predictable basically across cultures, like most kids know that if you throw something, they can predict where it will go right and almost all cultures and things of that nature. And even when you get up into early language use in what Kurt called representational tier, we can do a lot of complex language processing but you’re not doing a lot of abstract thinking so you’re tied to the specifics of your immediate environment and what your family can tell you and stories and things of that nature. There’s also only so much complexity that can accrue which is out of touch with reality. But as soon as you get up into abstraction which can begin as early as 10 or earlier. We don’t, the point is not exactly when the point is that there is an onset. There’s a before and after. When you get abstraction, then you enter something that’s much more like a socially constructed simulation of reality. And that’s where you get all the forms of that’s where you get the emergence of super ego, and the forms of abstract internalization of social code and a whole bunch of stuff sets on with abstraction, which is, again, I think unique to humans. That level of socialization that can be cloistered from reality. And so what that means generates a propositional system that knows that at a level of symbolic abstraction that’s radically removed from all participating, you know, perspectival modes of being in the world. Right. Yeah, exactly. So that. And so that’s where you end up having to say yeah just because someone’s becoming more complex. And they’re actually learning more about specific stuff and they’re able to make complex arguments. You know the Darth Vader move is always possible. Which is that you can get really abstract and complex really strong cognitively, and sometimes emotionally, but making errors, I think very, very profound errors of various kinds, and I’ll say even the board move is even to me more sort of what science does you know in terms of next generation right is basically turn it into an algorithmic machine. I mean, rather than evil per se but it just, it factors out everything that subjectively, oh well whatever. And now I will just, I will just turn it into an algorithm machine. That to me is those are those are two, hey get power and control the shit out of stuff for selfless interests, be blind to shit, and just go algorithmic reductive at a particular type of metabolic danger, at least I would see that clinically sometimes. There’s a. I had something recently that really made brought this home to me. I’m reading Spinoza, and then right and Spinoza is the ultra rational logician and there’s lots of this is also deeply mystical influence probably through Kabbalah about the neoplatonic Jewish, but he basically said he’s so I think it’s in one of his letters he said, you need to understand God doesn’t have abstract ideas. And I think, so yeah we go through abstraction to try and get up to this, but we have to remember that that’s not right that doesn’t actually that’s not what God is right God is right. Somehow, we go all the way up, like, but but it also comes all the way back down and meet like God, right. You see what I’m trying to convey with that. So that’s a wisdom energy for me at that level is totally up and down, you know, simultaneously. Yeah. When I got that I got, you know, I’d already got some understanding of Scantia Intuitiva but when I got that I go, Oh, when I get like that, where I do all this propositional abstraction, and then it drops and that’s your language break when it drops into the perspectival and the participatory right transformational coupled immediacy. That’s actually Scantia. I think that’s your language, John. Hey, actually we now have language together. It’s like we’re building a meta psychology. That’s very interesting. And of course the the Neo Platonic, and the Taoist are called the macro cosmic orbit, right. Yes, very circulation up and down the great chain of being, and the individual being a microcosm of the great chain of being also run that circulatory process. Yes. This is what’s sometimes pointed out, like, Kurt was always very interested in all of this talk about the higher stages he thought it was foolish, like he thought that basically wisdom has a lot to do with graceful degradation, which is one of the ways to think about it and There’s different forms of consolidation that come precisely from the exhaustion of abstraction and complexity as a solution. And this gets into the broader meta psychology, which is all I’ve been talking about is development. There’s also what I call it in solment and transcendence, right, both of those also have transformative processes in them, which look like developmental processes but aren’t there. They’re different. So like the way a kid goes from being in the crib and not speaking to be able to solve math problems is different, but related to how the kid in the crib goes from not being able to fall in, in love and give of himself to others to be able to basically give of himself to others for, you know, basically, soul, reason, spirit reasons, and then transcendence again the kid who has no awareness of self no ability to control his attention, no ability to relate to living symbols of immortality, as I refer to it, turns into someone who can do that. Different from cognitive development and different from installment, which is like personality or character development is the development of capacities in the domain of transcendence. Well, we definitely want to talk about that but I wanted to go back because I think we be paused because you were in the middle of an argument, you’re saying look development has this pretty tight coupling and error is quite diagnostic through all these levels. That’s what I heard you say. And then you move into this other domain where abstraction becomes possible. But it’s also, it’s like I’m thinking about this and bounded rationality, right, it’s also uncertainty becomes much more an issue complexity becomes an issue. And from the problem solving literature ill-defined this becomes an issue and you see Plato wrestling with all these, when I’m asking what a virtue is when I’m asking you know what’s honesty, like, this is an ill defined problem. There’s, there’s always uncertainty, right, there’s tremendous complexity. And so I’m wrestling with a much sloppier, right, if you’ll allow me that metaphor through the state space feedback loop that I don’t have when I’m trying to figure out how to throw the rock, or I’m trying to figure out the syntax so that mom and dad will understand me. Is that a fair way of like, especially, especially in a modern or postmodern culture. You build on that point, please. Well yeah there are some so there are some cultural contexts, and there’s a whole spiel about Margaret Mead’s notions of cultural evolution but there are cultural context which are usually called prefigurative, where the environment of socialization is so predictable from generation to generation and the requirements of life change so little that when you move up into the abstract realm it’s just very clear. That the norming of the way you think about the world is controlled, and that level of norming is always what, like the worst modern politics, political theorists have tried to recreate. And that’s another way to stabilize personality that you can in open societies. So, so, does that map on to in any way, like Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity versus, you know, the complex solidarity. I mean, I think the division of labor, because it’s, I mean one of Durkheim’s point is social coalescence is very easy. Right, within mechanical solidarity it’s much more challenging when you have the division of labor and society, right you have complex, you have a complex or. So the system is held together by complex interdependence, rather than mechanical solidarity I’m just wondering if I don’t I don’t know the distinction well enough to speak to it, because like I would understand the kind of culture I was imagining was almost like an indigenous culture or a culture like a medieval village or something. Yeah, yeah, very much. Yeah, so. And so what you get is cultural evolution coinciding with educational systems basically putting individuals in unprecedentedly complex situations of justification. Like, not only are we on the option of deciding which justification system to adopt as an identity structure we’re in the situation of being able to claim that one does not adopt a justification system. And so it’s a there’s a deep added confusion to this in current conditions as part of the educational crisis. Right, right, right. Authority. Okay, I was just gonna say one way that I would think about it so the oral indigenous you are face to face, embedded, like you are in a family so you have the whole history of actual real interactions with rich traditions that are completely woven in, where the awareness is, you know, pretty much what you have actual contact with. And then to build the systems of justification that are required in the transition into civilized societies where you have thousands of people that live in a city that then need to be regulated by rules, industry, there’s a techno social economic environment that you have to oblige for. So you then that system of in requires a level of abstraction and formalization and relationship that is qual puts on turns on psycho technologies that are required for that is a radical shift in relationship to what, you know, is required to for everyday Yeah, I think that would map on to what I’m saying to that’s you what you’re getting is when you have to live with lots of strangers who have roles, different than yours and you have fundamentally no expertise or knowledge in their roles you become dependent on them in a different way than you do within an indigenous community where people are generally they they do multiple roles they’re much more similar to each other. I’m not trying to be reductionistic but the point is, like, it’s easy actually john your point about the way we identify identify self identify So basically the societal socialization at that level then creates this whole matrix right of identification of role that is not personal, but is abstract in a particular way. Yeah, I’m thinking of it in terms of sort of George Herbert me the idea. It’s easier to sort of data compress a generalized other from a society that’s mechanically complex than it is for one in which you have all this right. That’s exactly right. And that was just I was like a parenthetical to your point, but in general your points correct that there are the lower levels of development, the feedback loops for learning or direct from the environment, barring, you know, abuse or When you get into abstraction, then you get a whole bunch of other things happening where you can continue down certain abstract roots that are erroneous or without value or an ethical injury and so another but there’s one moment where the growth to goodness model is actually And so, if you can identify the task demands required to make certain decisions, like so for example if you know that to think well about that problem you need to be able to do at least abstract systems which means multiple abstractions related and nonlinear relationships That’s right. That’s how complex that problem is, which is like most of the problems people need to solve in fact many of them now are way beyond that. And this is to my point. And you look at the people trying to solve those problems and you never see evidence that they’re able to do that level of complexity. Yeah, then you can basically, they’re disqualified. Now those people who can do that level of complexity, right doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to solve that problem but at least they have the necessary capacity to solve that problem. And so that’s where you do get a growth to goodness something built in and also an ability to use this form of thinking about development to to think about solving problems in our society because I think right now we’re in a situation where the problems that we’re attempting to solve are demonstrably more complex than the capacities of those people attempting to solve them and I think we’ve seen that in the past couple years like grossly in evidence. And so there’s a there’s a way that that’s like a stark reality so by saying you know it’s not growth to goodness we haven’t diffuse that problem, which is the problem of competence in the face of sheer complexity and needing to be very realistic about how complex the problem is and how complex our capacities are to meet it, not pretending we can put ourselves in a position to be able to and so that’s, that’s mostly what we’re seeing that’s why politicians, politicians need to wake up and exit the stage and allow actual leaders who are complex enough to solve the problems that they’re attempting to solve, because what they do is they downward assimilate the problem to a simpler problem. Yeah, yeah, getting which is the problem getting reelected. Not the right fucking problem to solve. And so that you know the global problems of existential risk for example. Right now that’s true. That makes me think of Morton’s argument in hyper objects. Right now in the age of like there’s always been hyper objects but we’re now in the age of oppressive threatening right hyper objects like local warming. Right. Right. Now that brings up a question and I might be guilty of this so right you obviously know Piaget deeply but one of the standard criticisms of him, and how he differs from like Bogotsky is Piaget tends to concentrate on the individual mind world and not as much on collective intelligence. Here’s why I bring that up here’s the connecting idea. It’s an idea that Dan Chappie and I are exploring that what humans typically do to deal with things that get that hyper object complexity is they not only develop themselves, but they create, you know, distributed cognition that has a collective intelligence that is powerful enough, and itself distributed enough that it can do the kind of work that is needed. This is, this is people all over the world, taking measurements for global warming, right and coordinating that with computational machinery and all kinds of stuff in order to be able to track this hyper object that no individual, no matter what their development would be, would give them access to. Now that’s correct you know one of the main capacities missing in leadership circles is collaborative capacity, right, which is a cognitive capacity for perspective taking and emotional capacity. Right, right. That’s grossly absent and yeah no that is again one of the things people have thought about Piaget which is just simply incorrect and in part it’s an error of mistrans. It’s like just not enough translated. Les Smith, a great Piagetian scholar translated some of the most important work there. I think it’s called studies and reasoning, and there you see that Piaget understands reasoning ultimately as a collaborative activity. And one does not reason alone and when one is sitting alone you’ve internalized your communication community is very George Herbert Mead way of thinking. That’s Meadian, right, right. Yeah, yeah, very much. Right, there’s a, he actually identified isomorphisms of like social logic with philosophical logic that, again I’d have to revisit these texts but it was almost like he was arguing that logic emerged out of our making explicit what is implicit in the social field of human relationship. That’s somewhat like justification hypothesis. Yes, it’s very similar to Habermas. Yeah. So, and it’s also similar in some ways to the work that Sperber and Mercier are doing right now. Enigma reason about reason is ultimately, it works best dialogically rather than monologically. I just asked you to say the name of that book by Piaget that does that. I believe it was called studies and reasoning, but the translator is Les Smith. So if you look for Les Smith you’ll find that I haven’t been in touch with him but I knew him back in the Jean Piaget days. I mean, I’d like to, I’d like to, I’d like to read that book that books is very relevant for the whole dialectic into the logos project. I’m working on right now. Yeah for Piaget the normative was very very social is very very social and the Piaget Vygotsky like feud was was inflated was, it was interesting because it generated a lot of, I think important ideas, but had Piaget been more socially handled. I don’t think it would have emerged. Yeah, so this question, like to return to this question of you get this stack of justification systems and there’s all these different routes through it and some of those routes through it are better and worse, and different positions in that yield teacher the authority or not. So the question of transformation as being related to questions of teacher the authority is where I ended up kind of with this, all the work was kind of directed towards that the end of the day, which was, how can we theorize teacher the authority in a way that’s interdisciplinary. In a way that allows us to kind of like reconfigure the social field to assure for ongoing collective learning, you know, because no one, no one can solve the problem alone. Like literally the main thing we need is is unprecedented collaborative capacities. And so, and can I connect that to another one of your ideas because now I see them connected in a way I hadn’t before. Right, because the the collaboration is not only synchronic it’s diachronic across generations. Yeah, and so one of the, one of the ways distributed cognition complexifies and attempts to couple to the complexity of the world is the cultural ratcheting effect. Right, and that intergenerational responsibility. And so, right. And so I’m seeing a connection between what you talk about and teacher the authority, and the idea that the collaboration is also intergenerational not just in chronic in nature. Yeah, that’s exactly right and the cultural ratcheting effect is that’s really the way I model that usually coming from Tomasello where you see how critical those fulcrums are in the transformation of culture, and the nature of those, where there’s a normative moment that is not inherent from the past and yet make novel for the future. Right. And we talked about this in previous conversations it’s like okay am I still Zach, you know, though I’ve been through all that shit, because it’s like, I am right so there’s continuity in the past, and yet I’m not I’ve changed in a way that prepares me for the future. And so that ratcheting effect and cultural revolution. It’s a similar it’s that the basis of transformation is this like social nexus of evaluation it’s like this. Yeah, there’s a there’s a task that takes place something like there’s a choice, which is made. And so, the, we have this to use by God’s key then the zone of proximal development of handing off across time and across above and proper relationship to maintain the continued of all ability. And then if we’re like oh shit, teacher the authorities breaking down institutions are breaking down the digital world changing all reality very quickly, and you don’t have to sort of put too many more variables into the mix to be like, fuck. That’s a big real world problem. It’s a big real world problem. And, like, it’s getting so bad too because of the digital overlay that even some of the lower levels that we discussed which seemed to be not a problem. Exactly, exactly becoming a problem now. Yes, the digital. The, the, the, the imposition or the replacement of the physical world with the virtual world is undermining the reliability of even the more basic levels. That is fundamentally, I think, important, and I think, not enough attention we’re running this grand experiment with these devices on our children, and we don’t know what it’s going to do although we’re starting to, we already know it’s making them much more depressed much more anxious that some of their social skills are building being truncated important ways. Some of the data for that’s already coming but I expect we’re going to find much more cognitive alterations that are not yet apparent to us. And adults, adults to. I mean like I think it’s affecting adult development profoundly as well and it’s precisely with that digital overlay, like there’s that French theorist, go to yard, right, who had the theory of simulation, and it was ultimately a theory of civilization or collapse. And so they said like civilizations, create information, and they control behavior through that information. And then eventually they create a simulation that is so convincing that the reality dependence of our ideas become irrelevant because all we have to do is relate to the simulation society and we succeed in society. So, but as soon as societies get thrown into a state where the simulation is broken and you’re confronted with actual reality again. Like, this is what this is the problem. And so like pandemics are an interesting example of that. It’s like you can create as much simulation as you want, but at the end of the day, it’s, it’s, well, or not. Yeah, so it’s like it’s happening, something’s happening. And I think where we are at a crossroads with our relationship to reality as a culture. So, so that brings up then, like, sort of another dimension of this problem we’re wrestling with. And maybe we can sort of wrap up with this, and then it will also I hope platform us for the next discussion which I want to go into the insolent and spirit dimension. And I know Greg does too. But here’s, here’s the problem and here’s what I think it leads into that. There’s a way in which you can see religion as doing imaginal augmented, imagine augmented reality that nevertheless has the opposite effect rather than disconnecting you from reality, when it’s working so we’ll talk about the best religion, right, not the worst right It’s actually getting people like Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, Plutonic Christianity, for example, it’s doing that thing where it’s, you know, it’s got this imaginally augmented like the great chain of being there’s an image, there’s an image. It’s not in here, it’s right, it’s imaginal, and it’s augmenting like you know virtual augmentation like Pokemon Go, it’s augmenting reality so that you can see patterns that you could not otherwise not see or hold in mind. So how is that fundamentally different from Baudrillard’s problem of the simulation that becomes so convincing that it cuts us off from reality and I think the answer to that question has to be woven into when we’re, when we’re talking about insolent and transcendence in some fashion. Very, very nice question. Because of course Baudrillard is the cynical French person would say there’s no difference your religion is a complete simulation as well and those are the guys who invented it, come on man. You know Christianity is the greatest Psy-op ever. But I think he’d be wrong, like the main place where Baudrillard makes mistakes is actually in his psychological modeling he under theorizes the individuals who are exposed to the simulation, because the other thing that happens, and this is where we kind of have a built in corrective measure at the higher levels, you move through these levels of abstraction if you’re lucky enough to get beyond certain points of abstraction you get certain capacities for self reflection, which allow you to have a conversation like this where you’re like dude we’re like in a simulation or something because this news story doesn’t fit with reality and there’s a disconnect and so like what are we, you know, so that level of reflectivity is one of the human psychological limits on the extent to which a simulation can work. Now if the simulation puts a ceiling on people’s capacity. Yes. Then you can actually have that self terminating through overwhelming simulation and reality disconnect civilization collapse scenario right like that happens. But if you have an open enough society where enough people pop out and want to get in touch with reality again, not by going backwards into the sensory motor, but by going up and out and into which is also by the way why people crave the sensory motor in deep simulation, because we’re like, give me reality. I don’t care if I have to go like in a sweat lodge or do what I need to feel some reality, but you can also pop out through and start to reflect back on. And so, what that means is that there is a way to, you know, reality test simulations and from a developmental perspective, then you get that notion of like this conveyor belt and teacher the authority works with that dynamic, which is that listen. When you’re at this age, you explain it like this. You’re not going to like that explanation when you get older. I mean, you’ll understand why I gave it to you, but you’re deepening. Now you can argue that those lower levels are like lies and they’re part of a simulation that you’re creating around the kid to make happy and not depressed or something, but if they’re attached through the learning logic to increasingly adequate views, which are increasingly, you know tested etc. Then you get this, this conveyor belt notion of moving up into increasingly adequate conceptions, which each, each one is a simulation while you’re in it, because it’s not completely true, but you’re not deepening into deeper simulation you’re getting out now. So this is me being super fast and loose with both your heart and stuff. But I think, I think we’re in, I think we’re, it’s safe I think what we’re doing is pretty, it’s pretty safe to speculate on now. There’s always this problem with these kinds of arguments, which is that it’s very hard to know, like back for example in the during the 30 years war, like a lot of the 30 years war looks to me like a Baudrillardian problem, like it was precisely that they had, they were simulating hell, and like my version of hell is way scarier than your version of hell and you better convert or you go to a hell that’s like this and so that sense of like weaponizing simulated information warfare and this is what you get in those days. So, I think we have to be very careful so I know it’s this kind of religion. Under these conditions, I was doing that. Yeah, I really, I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the relationship between reflection and religio and how those are brought together in the notion of wisdom. And that’s what that’s what I want. And I wanted to set that up as sort of a bit of a problem, a platform problem that would allow us, and maybe you can take it with the lead again next time Zack on the topics of in solment and spirit of transcendence but maybe, you know, it’ll be, I suspect that one will be much more dialogical when we when we move to those topics. How does that sound for going forward. That sounds good. Yeah. Yeah, no, that sounds perfect for me nice bridge. Okay, so that’s what I wanted to sort of point to help close. I always like to give both of you a chance if there’s any spinal resummative or cumulative thing you want to say before we bring the session as a whole to close. Well, I mean, for me I’ll say that I mean just reliving this history through PGA the sophisticated developmentalists, I’ve certainly looked into this but it’s, it only just reaffirms the need for an adequate framework of is an art that’s actually up to the task. And of course we need that for education in general, but we need it for an education and a time between worlds where we are seeing massive amounts of well deep concern about collapse with good justification. And for me the issue is shit. There really were there really is an angle on this that does afford us a good conformal grip on the evolution of complexification over time. We can get much more specific about it. If we had that architecture we could build a lot more interdisciplinary, we can then the little necessary collective intelligence conversations to afford us an understanding of the hyper objects, and then get rightly oriented in for us and so I just feel that very passionately and I felt that in this conversation deeply get anchored today. Yeah, this is great. It felt really good to let my PJ and hair down, kind of just put out and, but again this is a third of the third of my way of thinking about the mind, like everything that was cognitive and about true and false and didn’t talk much about emotion or mommy and daddy and death or any of the stuff that actually mostly occupies the mind, because a lot of the cognitive development, you know, is kind of built in and often takes care of itself so so yeah it’s about a third of the third of the picture and as Greg was mentioning like, as john you said like there’s a, you know, the merger of reflection and religio as you were saying, and that represents the possibility for the self transformation of the culture. Yes, that’s notion of how do you pop, how do you get out of the simulation, without having to have a collapse back down to actual hard reality, well you have to somehow self transform the culture through reflection in the modality of the religious I would argue And that’s again a theme of my book is that we’re not doing education in the future without dealing with the overwhelmingly religious forms of human thought that basically we need to do that to do precisely that to deal with the top of cognitive development when we pop out into reflection. It’s fair to then think about what we’ve been really talking about can translate loosely into the doing competency domain or mode, whereas the being becoming mode will be if we do sort of a from an overlay on this of since solvent and transcendence there’s the whole being becoming And then the being would be transcendent and the becoming would be in solvent, the doing would be cognition. I think we also need to talk about the fact that that the is art economy is also another dichotomy in high inherited from the Enlightenment that is seriously under attack right now. You’ve got putnams you know the criticisms of the fact value distinction. You’ve got case fears, you know, very devastating argument that you know you can’t derive is from what well yes you can if you put in the missing premise, x is good. And then you have to rely on Moore’s argument that well, whenever I try to defend. Whenever I say x is good I can undermine him by saying but is x good right. I think that Moore’s argument depends on a very clear analytic synthetic distinction and quine has said no no that distinction is absolutely blurred and interpenetrating. And so is an odd are not like the way, you know, modernity put them as this chasm, and you can’t ever go from I mean they’re not identical. There is a difference, but it’s much more again this sort of continuum deep continuity relationship rather than a strict economy. I think we need to bring. I think of Kohlberg’s work and then the the Bascarian work on the is dialectic, which is extremely important. And then the case here in the platinum and we can enter that into two because I think that’s another. Because again as I mentioned last time I find when I try to talk about relevant, it sits on this boundary that’s supposed to be a chasm. Yeah, right. It’s always bridging the polarity that’s really most interesting stuff. Thank you gentlemen that we’ve all got to say our final piece this has been excellent, as always, and I look forward to our next time together. Thank you very much. See you then. Thank you.