https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wZKV8uVe8lQ
Welcome, everyone. I’m very excited about this new series. So we’re working on this project together. I’m going to introduce my interlocutors in a second. This is both for Voices with Vervecky and the Cognitive Science Show. And it’s towards a meta-psychology that is true to transformation. How do we understand human transformation in a way that is true to the reality of this very profound and important process and very much something that needs to be better foregrounded and better clarified given our current situation. And so the two people joining me on this journey, one of them is very familiar to you. It’s Greg Enriquez and Zach Stein. And I’m going to let both Greg and Zach introduce themselves, say why they’re here, what they’re hoping to get out of this. And then we’ll come back to the topic of meta-psychology and transformation. And I will introduce an initial set of problems that we’re going to try and address together. So Greg, please. Thank you, John. I’m super psyched to be here for my third round of Extended D. Logos, first on consciousness, then on the self, now on transformation. That’s a hell of a lineup. I’m super thrilled to be joined by Zach, who actually got me thinking about the concept of meta-psychology. And I’ve been obsessed with that to turn ever since. So I’m indebted to him for that. I’m really excited about this series. And because it brings together for me things that really go to the whole root of my sort of professional career as a clinician. When we work with people, we look to see where they are, where they’re wounded, how they might transform into a more optimal state. That’s certainly a background question we clinicians have. And then my question was, well, how the hell do I know anything about that? And what can I bring to ground that in a way that’s both scientifically rigorous and wise? And I really feel like actually the field doesn’t necessarily know how to do that very well. But maybe things are happening so that we can advance that. And I see this conversation is very much about that. And I’m super psyched. And I really look forward to diving in with both you and Zach. So thanks for having me. And I’m super psyched. I’m excited too. This is the perfect conversation for me to be in. I think about these topics. I have, I guess, a couple decades now just studying developmental psychology specifically across all the sub-branches, including the stuff that’s quasi-clinical, including the stuff that’s heavily cognitive, including the stuff that’s emotional, and broadly speaking, kind of like a neo-Piagetian. I cut my teeth on Piaget, studied with Kurt Fisher. And so this question of transformation or development is actually central to the way I think about the psyche. Just that it’s been my main problem with existing psychological models is that they tend to be static or horizontal. And not talking about the fact that at one point that was just a single cell in the mother’s womb. And the entire nervous system unfolded over a course of epigenetic growth. So I’ve been very fascinated by these topics. And of course, they’re widely misunderstood. I worked for a decade doing psychometrics in the field of cognitive development. So looking very specifically at microdevelopmental patterns with very precise measurements. And yeah, so I’m like, this is very core to that. And then as an educator more broadly, I started to understand that process of individual transformation as nested in a broader sociocultural process of transformation, essentially, which would be something like cultural evolution or cultural transformation. And education being a critical catalyst in whether society transforms or whether society actually doesn’t transform. And so yeah, so I think I’m really curious where this is going to go. And yeah, fascinated to hear both of you. And thrilled, kind of honored to be invited. So yeah, thank you. Well, I’m thrilled that you’re here, Zach. I’m glad I finally get to do something. We’ve had some very good recorded discussions, but I’m doing something more long form with you like this is very exciting to me. And I should let everyone know that this idea for this course is not mine, it’s Greg. Greg was really inspirational in getting this together. So the enthusiasm you’re both bringing to this is reciprocated completely. So we’re going to slowly unfold what a meta psychology is. But just a preliminary idea is meta is the Greek word above and beyond. It’s a reflection on psychology. It makes use of things like the philosophy of psychology and philosophical psychology to give us extended reflection on what is psychology and also what should psychology be. Because when you’re talking about a discipline, you’re not just talking about a phenomena, you’re talking about human endeavor. And therefore it is right to talk about, well, what are we endeavoring for? What are the goals? And what are the methods? So it is properly to talk about it not only descriptively, but normatively. So that’s all an initial first pass on what a meta psychology is. As I said, that will become clearer as we wrestle with the problem of transformation. And Zach is exactly right about the prejudice in a lot of psychology towards development. I’ve got a video out there called Dynamical Developmental Psychology of Powers and Terrors. And it relates, and I’ll just relate it again. I was a participant in said prejudice. So when I was doing my cogsci on the graduate, it was very much, and I’ll mention his argument in a few minutes, a fan of Jerry Fodor. This was the predominant model in cognitive science. In cognitive psychology, still the predominant model. I’m going to use a standard term for describing it. It’s called the computational paradigm of why that’s important. And we don’t have to get into any AI technicalities. I just want to see what’s going on there. And the basic idea here is you study the mind, the brain is the hardware, and it does biological development. But what do you care about that? Because the mind is the software, and you don’t have to study the origin of software. You don’t care how the software was produced in your computer. What do you care about? You care about its functionality. And how do you understand its functionality? By understanding its logical structural form. You understand basically when you figure out the programming code, you’ll have figured out the mind. And so I, like most of my fellow graduate students, had disdain for developmental psychology. We had to, of course, take some obligatory courses. I remember once, I don’t know, I think it might have been me, it might have been somebody else. But I said, you know, you can reduce all of developmental psychology to this. Baby plus Delta baby equals adult. And that’s all it is. And there’s nothing going on there. I was having a bad bad. I met guys like you. I met guys like you in graduate school. Yeah, yeah. That was just a little underdevelopment. So first of all, I mean, I don’t want to just demonize Fodor. Fodor was astonishingly brilliant. I want to try to give you his argument. And it’s an argument explicitly directed against Piaget, who’s already been invoked. And part of what I want to do is I want to present the problem. I want to also say that I am now very critical, extremely critical of that earlier version of myself in that position. I would now. It’s like you’ve developed, John. I would now say I’m exactly the opposite. And this is coming out of what’s called 4E cognitive science. I argue explicitly for a dynamically developmental model of the mind, or if we want to be more comprehensive of the psyche, such that I think you cannot separate its functioning from its developmental history. So the idea in the old computational model is I don’t have to know anything about something’s history or how it’s developed. All I need to know is how it functions. But as I’m going to partially argue today, and I think it’ll come up in some of what we’re saying, it’s obviously in Piaget. If you see the mind as inherently self-organizing, in a self-organizing system, there is no way to separate function and development. It functions by developing and it develops by functioning. That is now my stated position. But I want to tell you, I want to start by problematizing the very issue that would have made me see development as like I did in such a dismissive fashion. So first of all, is this an OK place to start for you two gentlemen? Sounds like a good place, Sareem. OK. And so what I want to do is I’m going to start with Fodor because of the historical connection I just made. And then I’m going to move to consider two more recent important arguments that make transformation problematic. One is L.A. Paul. And she literally wrote the book called Transformative Experience. And she’s one of the great philosophers out there right now talking about this stuff. We’ll get into Agnes Callard’s related work later. The other is another important philosopher about the self that was mentioned in the elusive I quite a bit, Galen Strassen. And we talked about this before, but I want to foreground it. The Strassen has what he calls the paradox of self-creation. And I think and he means this very broadly, any kind of process of self-transcendence development. All right. He has a problem with it. I want to go through that. And now let’s start on that. But let me be very clear that I’m using the word transformation to mean not just what we typically mean by transformation, but also what is called qualitative learning and qualitative development. Let me just give a brief thing about that. And I’ll use two different figures to contrast them. Locke and Piaget. So Locke was one of the first people to propose a developmental theory in sort of modern science, the post-enlightenment period. And Locke has a purely quantitative model of learning. So what that means is for Locke, all you do is acquire more information. And once you’ve acquired enough information, you’re no longer a child. You’re an adult. If I could somehow cram more rapidly the information into a five-year-old than it normally takes, I could within a year, turn a five-year-old into an adult. That’s a direct implication of Locke’s view. So all you’re doing is amassing more information. Qualitative learning and development says no. And Piaget typifies this, right? But you can also see it in people like Bogotsky, another great developmental psychologist. It’s the idea, no, no, there’s not just the acquiring of more information. There is the development, the emergence of new functions that allow you to acquire new kinds of information. That’s why it’s qualitative development. It’s not just more information, but new kinds of information. Let me give you a quick analogy to allow you to distinguish. Think about how much information I could amass with English. I’m amassing a lot. I could write a lot down. I could do a lot, right? But notice there’s certain kinds of information I can’t capture because it doesn’t have a certain function. Now, suppose you taught me Cartesian graphing. There’s a reason why we use graphing so much because it’s very hard to convey in English what a graph is doing. And graphing allows you to discover new kinds, and especially when you start to move into multi-dimensional graphs, you can discover new kinds of information that you’re not processing directly via English. I’m not saying that all development is through math or anything like that. I’m just offering an analogy. So notice how much I could keep learning more and more with English, but that’s different from the new kinds of things I can learn when I get the new function of graphing. So staying within English would be sort of purely quantitative learning and development, but acquiring the new function of being able to graph, that’s qualitative. That’s meant as just an analogy as a helpful example. So the issue we’re interested in is transformation, which broadly construed to include qualitative learning, qualitative development, the kinds of things that Piaget, Bogotsky, other developmental psychologists talk about. And then it become very important again with the current work of people like Michael Anderson and Thomas Seller. Okay, now all of that, why was this neglected for so long? I’ll try to take a break after, oh, first, take a break there. Is that okay as an analogy to help people get a sense of what we’re concerned with and what we’re talking about? Sort of the distinction between Locke and Piaget and quantitative and qualitative development? I think it’s a good, it’s a wonderful place to start. And you’re right about Locke and Piaget, absolutely. It’s worth noting that the Lockean blank slate is such a, it’s not just quantitative, but it’s also just like passive, just literally pumping it in. Whereas the Piagetian qualitatively developmental thing is active and metabolizing the environment. And so it’s the environment organism interaction that yields development in this very complex way. And then, yeah, your analogy is great. I would say also it’s like you can learn vocabulary in English and then you can learn the rules of grammar in English, which are still, are still about English, but they are now. That’s good too. So that’s an actual developmental sequence before you teach a K grammar, you just kind of have a bunch of words and use language. And so he’s learned English, but he can be qualitatively more advanced in his capacity with English with a totally new kind of knowledge, kinds of words, parts of speech. So that’s an example on the same vector. But you’re right about, yeah, that you need English to learn graphing. So you use English to make this whole qualitatively new leap into, you know, representations, quantitative representations, which are extremely abstract. So yeah, so that’s a wonderful segue. It’s very important. Amen. I’ll just add a quick point just in relationship to when we’re thinking the whole person, of course, there’s the cognitive capacities in relationship to think. And then of course, there’s also the whole motivation, emotional elements. Those of you that remember puberty may remember a transition that wasn’t just a function of learning, but all of a sudden something happens in relationship to both the body, the emotions, the drives, and that we all have. So there’s that whole multi-layer, if we’re talking about the human psychology, of course, which I know, but I just figured so folks can have that in mind. Thank you. That’s excellent to point out. Yeah, we want transformation to include like learning and development, but we also want it to include, you know, as Greg said, the whole person and all the way up to what people often mean by transformation, something that has a spiritual existential connotation to it as well. So we want to use the word transformation to cover all of that in a comprehensive manner. Yeah, so now why is that? Why is it problematic? And why was it neglected or dismissed as I previously did? So let’s start with Fodor and his critique of Piaget. And then we can talk a little bit about the response. So Fodor has a very famous argument against Piaget. It’s called the specificity of learning argument. Now the argument runs off of those presuppositions that I mentioned, the computational model. So the dominant, and it’s still the dominant model, although it’s very seriously being very seriously challenged, but the dominant model of the mind is the computational model. The mind is basically a very complex computer program software. The brain is the hardware. I could run the same software on different hardware. That’s the whole proposal of artificial intelligence as a computational project. And so Fodor said, okay, well, a program is what? Well, a program is basically a logical structure. That’s non-controversial, right? And so what I mean is it’s a computational program. And then Fodor says, okay, well, notice something about logics. So what Piaget is proposing is a change in the function, what Fodor calls change in the competence of the individual. The individual has new functions, new things they can do that they couldn’t do before. And we’ve all agreed that’s a good way of understanding what Piaget means by qualitative development. That’s clearly Fodor’s understanding. And then Fodor says, okay, but if the mind is a program, the mind is a logical structure, and changing the logical structure means changing the functions of the logic. You go, okay, well, what that means is going from what’s called in logic, a weaker logic to a stronger logic. So you go from something like predicate logic to modal logic. Which predicate logic is I can represent subjects and predicates, and I can do things about that, and I can do all or some. So I can do an argument like all men are mortals, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. But I can’t do arguments that involve necessity and possibility. I can’t do, it is necessarily the case that, or it’s possible that. For that, I need modal logic. Now, the thing that Fodor is right about, and there’s deep reasons for this, so, but he’s absolutely right about it. If I’m in predicate logic, I can make all possible moves within predicate logic, and I will never get modal logic. There is no logical way to manipulate a weaker logic to get a stronger logic. Does that, first of all, just make intuitive sense, right? And so Fodor’s argument is qualitative change would be movement from a weaker logic to a stronger logic, but there is no computational way to go from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. So qualitative change is an illusion. That’s the argument again, and it’s explicitly directed against Piaget. And when I was a Fodorian, I thought, yeah, that’s right. Because what do human beings do? They step out of the logic, and they introduce axioms. And then Fodor says, oh, axiom introduction, that’s this abduction process, and, right, that’s the relevance realization, which he was very much aware, but he had no solution for, and he throws up his hands. So what that means, if we stop and think about it, is this is going to be a little bit bold, but there’s no, there’s no in-parential logical way to go through qualitative development. Now, you can do one of two things with that, and Fodor did both, and he did them at different times. You can either say that qualitative development is an illusion, or, and he did that, he also did this, everything is already there innately. There is no development, it’s just some sort of super platonic innateness, and everything is there, and it’s just being been made explicit. And both of those, and then there’s, you know, sort of these arguments between these two. Now, I want you to consider that if all you have is the computational paradigm, that argument, I think, is very powerful. I took it to be a powerful argument. I took it seriously. I took it to be, wow, yeah, I guess. But the problem I progressively had was it was not gelling with my own practices. It was not gelling. So if you look at the, one of the first and earliest responses, almost the same year that the, well, no, same decade, Marshall and Schultz came and they said, yeah, you don’t do development that way, you don’t do it computationally, and they proposed a neural network model that invokes a cyclical form of dynamical self-organization. And when I saw that, I went, yes, that’s it. And that makes sense to me because the dynamical self-organization is already there insofar as you’re dealing with a living organism, and living organisms are dynamically self-organizing things. And I’m going to come back to that theme, but right now I’m just setting up a problematic. So the first problematic is there doesn’t seem to be any computational way of accounting for qualitative development. So this now leads into the second argument, which- John, can I ask you a quick question? That’s not so much- Please, yes. Yes, I know. Anyway, John, I’m asking a question. And the reason I was slightly hesitant is because it’s only, it’s loosely related, but it’s more of a technical theoretical question that I wanted to run by you in terms of how to frame the computational theory of mind and whether or not, in your experience, is that always framed in sort of what I would call sort of the strong AI version? In other words, to be a believer in the computational theory of mind. Because I sort of came at it because outside of cognitive science, but with my looser, but framed, but weaker version, so that computational neural networks would be in a weak version of computational theory of mind. And so I’m just, that’s, that bumped into my head in relationship to- No, no. And so this is a pet peeve and I will try not to grind this act too finely. I think calling it computational is a way of saying it’s some kind of information processing mechanism, which is irredeemably vague and useless because then nothing sort of stands against it. It’s like saying it’s made out of stuff. It’s that vague. If you take computationalism to be something that neural networks saw itself in direct conflict with, that’s how I want to use computation. Computationalism is the idea that the mind works in terms of propositional representations that are manipulated according to some logical mathematical set of rules. Yep. I struggled with that for a while. Actually, that helps. Okay. So, I mean, to my mind, the computational framework understood that way, which is properly how the AI framework ran for a long time. Certainly the strong version. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Now, if you mean, like, but you mean, now there are people, one of my colleagues, Brian Campbell Smith, he’s trying to go back to the properly, the ontology of computation and say, we need to rethink what we mean by that. That’s fine. But I would also say to Brian, that’s not how people like Fodor were using the term computation. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So here’s LA Paul. And this is much more recent work. I’ve gotten to meet and know, interact with Laurie personally. Wonderful person. Wonderful person. I highly recommend her work. So LA Paul introduces a problem. And you’ll see how it’s related to the Fodor, but it’s more specific because it has to do with the idea of transformation and development at the moments of decision that we make. So she brings in the aspect of decision, which I think is very important. And she does it with the Gidonkin experiment. Because that’s, you know, this is one of the tools of trades of philosophers. She says, so while I need to imagine this, your friends come to you and they give you irrefutable evidence that they can do the following. They can turn you into a vampire, should you do it. And then she says, notice that you can have all kinds of beliefs about vampires and knowledge, but notice there’s two kinds of things of which you’re ignorant. And I’ll use my terms and I have mapped them onto Laurie’s terms in front of her. And she was happy with that. And one is, I think, very good. So she says, first of all, you will lack, you lack your perspectively ignorant. You don’t know what it’s like to be a vampire in the way that Thomas Nagel is. You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat. You don’t know what that will be like, what that salient landscaping, what your conscious, your state of consciousness, you don’t know. You don’t know. The only way to have that is to be a vampire and you are not yet a vampire. So you’re ignorant of that. You also have participatory ignorance. Your identity, your structure of preferences and the things you identify within yourself and disidentify are going to change. So you don’t know who you’re going to be. You don’t know, right? So you don’t know yourself is going to change. So the values you have now and the identity you have now are not the values and the identity you’re going to have there. So you can’t judge. And then you may, then you will, when she says, well, then you’ll say, I just won’t do it. But she said, there’s a problem here because there’s an exact symmetry of ignorance. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what you’re missing. You deeply don’t know what you’re missing. But if you consider doing it, you don’t know what you’re going to lose. You deeply don’t know what you’re going to lose. And notice what she’s done. She said, you have no information about the requisite probabilities and you have no information about the requisite utilities because you’re absolutely ignorant of those. So you can’t use standard decision theory. Well, here’s the probability of the outcome and here’s the utility. You can’t calculate your way through it. You can’t infer your way through it. And then you go, who cares? I’m not going to ever be a vampire. And then she says, but notice you face exactly that kind of decision in these kinds of situations, deciding to have a child. You don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a parent. Being a child gives you no clue what it’s like to be a parent. No clue at all. And your whole set of structures, your egocentrism is back going to be challenged in a way you can’t foresee. I’ve had children. She’s that. All of a sudden you’re up all night like a vampire. Right? You don’t know what it’s going to be like and you don’t know who you’re going to be. Decide to enter into a long-term romantic relationship with somebody. You don’t know what you’re going to, what it’s going to be like and you don’t know who you’re going to become. Should you do it? Should you not do it? As soon as you realize this, she said, you realize that most of the decisions we consider the important decisions in our life, the ones that will involve a transformation, where there is a deep change in our perspectival and participatory knowing, these are some of the most important decisions of our lives and they’re exactly the ones in which the standard decision theory models that we’re given are useless. They can’t help us. That’s our argument and she goes over and over again in the book. That’s powerful. So notice again, you can’t infer your way through this. So what do you do? Well, I’ll come back to that in a bit. What do we do? What do we do? If we don’t decide our way through, we don’t will our way through and we don’t infer our way through, you know, these are some of the standard scholastic faculties. We don’t will our way through in the sense of making a decision and we don’t infer our way through. How do we go through it? Can we go through it? So now I’m hoping I’m making transformation even more problematic. Any questions about just the, any clarification questions about the LA Paul argument? I mean, she must handle the fact that you can empathetically imagine what it would be like to be a parent. Like especially if you have close friends who’ve become parents and you have long intimate conversations with them, you can predict your financial situation. You know yourself pretty well. So you know the traits in you that are unlikely to change. So I guess I’m saying I don’t think it’s total ignorance and in developmental psychology, there’s the enduring versus transitional structures issue, which is to say if I enroll in the army, I’m doing so because I trust myself to behave in certain ways under certain really complex conditions, which I can’t predict those conditions. But if I do it correctly, if I’m committing to something correctly, it’s actually a trust in the ethical continuity of my decision making irrespective of context, which means I do know a little bit about what it’s going to be like for me to be a parent. Now I can’t predict it precisely. And I see your point, but I also think that it’s a problem with decision theory more than it’s a problem with transformation as a theoretical construct. Yes. And that’s that first of all, to be fair to Lori, and I might have misrepresented that the point you just said, Zach is Lori’s point. She takes it and that’s what I tried to convey with. No, these are the most important decisions we’re making and decision making theory isn’t covering it. Now to back up a little bit, one thing Lori would say is, well, you can’t use your history of previous transformative experiences to explain how you do it because you’re getting into an infinite regress issue. You need, right? Now, so that’s one. So you built up a trust. She would say you built up a trust because you’ve gone through it successfully. But I would still need the question of, but how did you get going through it successfully? That’s still, she’d want an answer to that. The first point you made about the empathy is going to touch on something that I’m going to come back to about this idea of serious play as a way in which human beings actually, they play. And I mean that seriously, that’s why I call it seriously, but they seriously play as a way of getting that kind of empathetic understanding you’re pointing to. And that’s going to involve us, you know, bringing in also as you, some mechanisms like from Bogotsky about internalization and things like that on identification. So I think your, what you’re saying is actually deeply consonant with what Lori’s trying to put her finger on as a problem. The problem isn’t with the issue. It wasn’t with the phenomena. The problem is how we have claimed we make these transitions. That’s what she’s challenging as deeply as possible. One of the things that this also highlights that I know will be woven through is how do we make value judgments on various sides of this transformation? And that relates to decision theory in terms of like, how do we understand, is it good to have children from one vantage point to another, or even more naughty, or at least that I’ll bring us back? Or what kind of transformations are good for people? So I think the second question really needs to be addressed very carefully. Very carefully. But, and we will. Well, I want to, and I imagine both of you do too. My thing is, you first, before you could, but here’s an Aristotelian move. Before you ask what’s the good of something, you have to know what it is. Right, you have to know what the phenomenon is. Just a foreshadowing, 100%. Yes. And I want to say that, that just to foreshadow, I’m going to propose that why play is so fundamental to qualitative development and why you see it across species is precisely because it allows you to get to that liminal place where you can get a perspectival and participatory case of the other possible you and possible world, while not having fully committed because the problem is the irrevocability of these decisions. If the decision is revocable, then who cares? Just try it and back out of it if you don’t want it. Right. I’m going to ride a motorcycle. Well, then I’ll stop riding motorcycles. Nothing, but you can’t do that with a kid. And it’s really disastrous to do that in a romantic relationship. It’s really disastrous when you decide to take up a new career or move to a new country. Right. So, it’s, I wanted to, I wasn’t quite pointing out one that one other aspect, it’s the irrevocability of these important transformations that is also at issue. I just wanted to make sure that’s clear. And so you got to get people, you’ve got to get a place where they can invoke the perspectival and participatory knowing of what it could be without having moved to the point of no return. And that’s going to be what serious play allows us to do. Sorry, Zach, I just wanted to bring that in as a further sort of point of the issue. Okay, and then that takes us to the third problematization argument, which is Galen Strassen. And Galen Strassen says, you know, whenever you’re talking about self transcendence or self creation, and he uses them pretty much interchangeably. And I think that’s fair in this context. Because every every act of every act of self creation would involve some self correction and self direction involves self transcendence, and every act of self transcendence involves creating some new functions of creation, blah, blah, blah. So, I don’t think anything hangs on that. So here’s the paradox of self creation self transcendent. If myself makes it. It’s not transcendent. Just me. Same me. Where’s where’s the newness where’s the novelty come from. And if there’s genuine novelty, then it is literally unfamiliar to me, it’s not part of myself. And so it’s heteronymous. Right. And so it’s imposed on me, and it’s therefore right not self creation. Notice what he’s done here. If you preserve the autonomy of the self, there’s no creation. And if you preserve the novelty of creation, there’s no self because the self has lost its autonomy. And he says you’re locked into this. This paradox of self transcendence, and this is what Agnes Callard tries to propose with her model, a solution to in her model of aspiration. Now, before going into that because I want to stop soon and let you guys riff on all of this. Before going into that. I want to I’m sorry, before going into all of colors with I want to point out the calendar is an argument, why you can’t just step back into sort of a kind of romanticism about all of this and say well then it’s, there’s no rational aspect. There’s no inferential, there’s not, it’s all you could be sort of wildly romantic and it’s, you know, all these irrational forces and, and right and it just happens and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Right. And, you know, I, and I’m being a little bit cruel to romanticism, but nevertheless, there are versions of that out there at least in popular culture, right, it’s just, you just let it go and, you know, and you’ll get through intuitively. And so, I want to point out. Well, that’s not going to ultimately work for you. Because we typically want to recommend to people that they become more rational and they become wiser. You know, yeah, we do. Right. And by rational she doesn’t just mean more logical she means more comprehensively self reflective overcoming self perception, things like that. And notice how we have words that bridge between rational and wise words like maturity, which is a normative term and a descriptive term within developmental psychology, and we’ll have to come back to that. What is it when we recommend to people that they should grow up. Well, you say well why that’s problem, because if I tell you, or me, who is currently foolish or irrational, that you should become more rational or wiser, I’m actually asking you to go through a process of transformation. And if that process is itself foolish and or irrational. I’m caught in a performative contradiction. I’m telling you and to engage in a foolish irrational process in order to become more rational and wise. And she says that doesn’t make any sense. And let’s go to a sort of open laissez faire romanticism, we have to somehow integrate rationality and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue into our developmental picture, or we are going to get caught in this self contradiction. I think that’s a powerful argument. And she proposes this, the process of this, she calls proletic rationality that’s a technical term. And the term she uses in general is aspiration human being aspire, and they do this in a way that we find justifiable. We find no no that made good sense that they did that. Right, that was a good thing for them to do. And so, for me, that argument means we are response to the photo argument and the LA Paul argument, and the Strasse argument can’t be, like I say, a kind of loose romanticism. We properly have to situate the development of rationality with and wisdom within any any model of development that and transformation that we are proposing. I would also add to that color doesn’t say that but in response to Greg I would say, if we don’t incorporate rationality and virtue and wisdom into our developmental model, we will have no normative basis by which to propose some transformations are good, and other transformations are noxious. So, that’s the overall problematic structure. I wanted to set for us. Now what I’m confident of is that we have with with between us. We have powerful resources for resolving and moving beyond. But I, I think it is a pedagogical principle that the solving of problems clarifies any theoretical claims you want to make in a way that’s epistemically valuable and also, you know, it’s valuable for people knowing that’s also valuable, actually for people growing, because they start to see oh right, right, right. So I want to say two things, just to invoke two things. As I mentioned, I think the problem of the, the, the sort of problem that LA Paul, but as specified here, as I’ve already indicated I think that’s solved by what I call serious play. I’ll just quickly given an example of what I mean by that. And it’s not meant to be exhaustive, and then I’m not going to be able to do what I want to gesture with that. So, I asked myself, Well, what do people do. And I think Zach was alluding to this in like, but then I wanted to, I wanted to think about it, and I wanted to something that would generalize to, you know, kids because they go through these huge transformations. And so what I, what I put my finger on and other people have to is this idea of serious play. And then we go back to having a kid. Well, I looked around, and this became really the case and told it by the way, people who were considering having a child but you know, that’s irrevocable. What did they do, they got a dog. They get a dog, and then they interact they get pictures with the dog and they name the dog. Right, and they, and they, and they say, they do this thing they do this enacted symbolism, where they’re like they’re not imagining in their head. They’re not creating a mental picture of a pictures child. They’re doing what Corbin calls it the imaginal. They’re interacting with this as if it is a child. And it has enough of the properties of a child and here’s where I think Zach’s point comes in, where they can trigger the empathetic machinery. The dog is a living thing it has emotions it has needs it wants attention it wants love. Right. So, you know, you look at that and you can, there’s a sense in which you can start to like take the dog’s perspective either and start to anticipate what the dog wants and needs to start to internalize the dog. And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting. So let’s note that the imaginal let’s just give you a quick differentiation. The imaginary is like picture a sailboat in your head. The imaginal is, and I’m using this deliberately when a kid picks up a stick. Right, you know ties a blanket around them to be a cape and stands on the porch and the porch is a ship and they’re a pirate. That’s the imaginal. They’re enacting it. And notice the difference they’re enacting it and they can start to acquire some of the prospectival knowing some of the procedural knowing some of the skills, and a bit of the sense of the identity of what it would be like, but the kids are aware that this is a liminal space. There’s work that I forget the experiment, you get, you know, here’s, here’s your, here’s your, you know, your, your teddy bear, and the teddy bear needs to be fed. And, you know, and here’s you the plasticine cookie, and you’re doing this and the child doing all of it. Oh, it’s Lerman who talks about this. But if you suddenly pick up the plasticine cookie and go to eat it, the child will stop you. So it’s real and not real at the same time. Right. And so you get to, so, and if you notice, and it, and other people have pointed this out that the need for play is correlated with the intelligence and the sociality of an organism. You can be highly social like dance but they don’t play, because they’re not individually intelligent. You can be individually intelligent like an octopus but you’re not social, you don’t seem to play very much. But if you’re both highly intelligent and highly social, you play a lot. Because when you’re both highly intelligent and highly social cognitive complexity, prospectival knowing and social role participatory knowing are very important to you so you have to play. You have to play a lot. And I want to, I want to say for me, and I don’t mean this in insulting terms. I don’t I mean this in really respectful for me that’s that’s the domain of the spiritual. That’s the, that is how people, people engage in serious play, whenever they want to engage in self transcendence. I think most of religious ritual and religious symbolism is there. So that’s the spirit of development, the spiritual dimension for us. The other thing, and this goes back to the Marischal and Schultz, and the neural networks and dynamical system, neural networks and dynamical systems have a complete answer to Porter it’s like yeah it’s not complicated, it’s not complicated. And as I said, when something is self organizing its development and its function can’t be separated from each other. And, and what they did is they made a neural network that implemented the dynamical system that was able to go through some standard So there, there’s the answer. And it’s back in 96. So one of the things we can do is we can submerge and submit ourselves. You see this emphasized in Eastern wisdom traditions like Taoism and Buddhism, we can emerge, we can immerse ourselves, we can immerse ourselves in the inherent dynamical self organization of our psyche and our bodies in order to afford emergent functions. I want to call that and here I’m tapping into Michael Washburn from transpersonal psychology. That’s the dynamic ground of our being. And I think that’s a good way of thinking of the soul dimension of us. Now, those are, I would be, I think, a little bit more in the sense that we can immerse ourselves in the inherent dynamical self organization of our psyche and our bodies in order to afford emergent functions. And I think that’s a good way of thinking of the soul dimension of us. Now, those are, I would be horribly pretentious and suffering, the hubris punishment of the hubris if I complain that that was comprehensive or complete. That is just my way of trying to introduce the spiritual and the soulful because I know these are important to Zach’s work, and I know they’re important to Greg. They can mesh with a different way of understanding the psyche, and it’s, it’s embodied nature that would get us out of the problematic of the problem of transformation as given to us by Fodor, by LA Paul, and by Strauss. So there, I’m going to shut up now for a very long time. Yeah, that was a great, you know, infrastructure for what, you know, defines the parameters. I’ll just offer a new thought. I know a few thoughts. Zach’s got a lot to say, but I’ll just offer a few things. So, I think you have problematized the basic issues associated with development very well. You’ve clarified them in transformation. For me, what the issue that I keep coming back to just because of my own development and anchoring is what kinds of transformations, shall we seek and how shall we seek them, and when. What does it mean in relationship to cultivate proper transformation to do what to higher levels of functioning. And what does that mean. And I want to wonder whether or not we could develop a picture of the human condition that’s grounded in science and advanced ethical thinking and theological reflection that would afford us capacities to reflect on that with wisdom and sophistication And so, to me, the issue is, well, what is this? How does it happen? We problematize it in a particular way, get a particular angle on that. And then the issue is, well, yes. And then what are the lines of development, the processes of transformation that might undergo this, and then what are the collective systems that would afford that kind of unfolding in a way that would be wise, ethical, toward the good, etc. And if that to me is essentially vacant in relationship to at least what I was trained as, as a clinical psychologist. And in retrospect, I find that to be pretty traumatic as a trainee, because actually that is essentially what you’re asked to do as a psychological doctor. It’s also what you’re asked to do often as an educator, as a parent, as somebody with teacherly authority. And yet, do we have actual frames that afford sophistication along those lines? So I deeply appreciate the problematizing. I see the framing begin to emerge and I see enormous amounts of things to be built off of and as specialized in relation. So I’ll just give a brief. This is not a complete answer because I want to hear from Zach. I agree to take the one two things. First is the normative cannot be separated from any of this. And I mentioned that a couple of times. We can’t. It has somehow we’ve got to bring that properly in. One of the things is if we talk about the psyche as a dynamical developmental system, we immediately have to move. And this is a way which fundamentally different from the computational model. We have to move outside of the head. Right. So the way in which it is coupled to the environment is important. When what that means is when we’re asking this question, the normative question about transformation, we’re not just asking a question about the psyche. We’re asking a question also about reality. Right. In an important way. So that normative question. So I’m not giving you an answer that would be pretentious. I’m just saying if we see this dynamical developmental model as what will get us out of the problematic, and that’s what I’m proposing. Then we are committed to write that not only is cognition broadly construed, right, you know, embodied. It’s also embedded. It’s enacted. It’s it’s coupled to the world. And so the normative questions have to be. And now we’re back into like ancient Greek. Right. Philosophy, where we’re asking not only like, what is it to be a good person, we also have to ask, what is reality such that we can develop within it? Right. A model of reality. Right. How is reality intelligible? And what is the really real? Because part of the answer almost always smuggled in inappropriately in psychology is, well, this is good development because it’s putting the person in touch with reality. But if you don’t bring that explicitly into the question and have a model that directly incorporates it, then I think you’re just smuggling in a normativity. And it’s often like an unquestioned sort of liberal democratic normativity with a very, I don’t know, a very superficial truncated ontology. I’ll make this very quick and real and pass it right over to Zach. So my daughter, we just moved her off to Nashville, going to Ph.D. in Vanderbilt. Hey, hey, go dad in biomedical engineering. And and as I told her and talk with her some about as my own reflections as a father, I’ll tell you this, that now five years later, sort of like, have we done enough to cultivate her spiritual development? Frankly, and and I’m actually and, you know, and so my point on relationship with the religious community is that we have to be able to develop. And this is part of a N Schritt work to involve the various approaches to the study of and what are the lines of development and domains of development. And I hope we touch on that aspect as well, which I know we will, but that’s a lie for me. Totally, yeah, I mean, those are very deep waters. And so I’m gonna try to say a few thoughts. So one is that, yeah, I of course encountered voters’ arguments in graduate school because I was working with a Neo-Pasietian, Kurt Fisher, who in the 80s had a dynamical developmental model and the 90s was doing, you know, dynamical systems modeling to show the Piagetian stages. And so that response to voters’ argument was, of course, Piaget’s own response. He was deeply organismic thinker. But it was actually the engagement with voter and a couple other cognitive psychologists that made me realize that, and Greg would agree with this, the problem with psychology is actually a deeper problem with the ontology of modern science. So if you have a kind of flatland humane ontology of disconnected entities bumping into one another, then it’s hard to explain transformation. Forget human psyche, try to explain a seed, right? Try to explain things like evolution and other processes like butterflies that emerge from caterpillars. And this question of like, is it still itself? Is it not itself? Has it changed? Where does novelty actually come from in a universe where everything’s now? So this is actually a deeper ontological question which is being smuggled weirdly in and problematizing psychology, but it’s actually voter and company’s inability to adopt a more comprehensive and adequate ontology of what the world is. And so this is what, and I was there with Kurt and Howard Gardner and others reading Whitehead. Yeah, Whitehead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And published a paper with Kurt about Whitehead and the way he performs basically an ontological underlaboring for developmental psychology. Very much. I deepened that story with bringing in Roy Baskar’s work and others. And so you actually, it’s hard to talk about any of those issues which are identified with the psyche in any other field, if you don’t get your ontology right. And once you get your ontology right and you put your finger right on it, John, then it’s not individual entities relating. It’s the relationship that’s actually primary and the temporal processual dimension that’s primary. So that’s question of like you, the atomistic self interacting like billiard ball with other objects. How the hell does that change? Well, that can’t change. But a self that’s inextricably tied to a metabolic relationship and coevolution with environment, then yeah, it’s not an either or. You’re getting both this very complex dynamic of interanimation of mind and world basically. And that is auto catalytic through developmental stages. So that I think is very interesting way to resolve some of those problems. But what it does is it ends up undercutting the computational paradigm pretty fundamentally. And you end up having to work with an organismic paradigm instead of a computational paradigm, which I think can transcend and include a computational paradigm. Because there are some types of things that can be explained pretty well in terms of modeling. But then you fit those into the broader organismic model. And so, yeah, that’s very much, it’s funny because that was P.J.’s view. People don’t realize what a, he was one of the greatest epistemologists and philosophers of the 20th century. So he was doing basic ontology to read on Berkson and Bertrand Russell and taking these questions seriously. Massive untranslated stuff that’s still in French, which deals with foundational ontological problems. Waddington in particular, and the work that’s being done in self, at the time, back before it became cool, the work in self-organizing, it’s self-organizing systems. So yeah, all of that I think is important to get, but none of that handles the normative question that you raised. And this is about continuity and discontinuity in terms of the psyche in nature and the distinctness of what has emerged with the human. And again, so this question of like, well, how did mathematics emerge out of an evolutionary stream of biology? Right, certainly. Like mathematics, you can basically, universal truths, quote unquote, we can get to girdle and incompleteness, but universal truths basically, emerged out of completely contingent, random evolutionary process. This was P.J.’s question. How the hell did necessary knowledge emerge out of contingent developmental processes? And so that leads some people, Platonists in particular, to be like, oh, this is just the frickin’ discontinuity. Humans are just so different from nature. And, but in fact, there is points, and this is why P.J. looked at little kids, there’s points where these things actually come online in development, where you get, and this is the qualitative emergence of a form of normativity that’s distinctly human. And it’s most obvious in things like mathematics and logic, but there’s also an ethical or moral form of normativity, which is not completely discontinuous from, you know, what we see in pack animals and things, but there’s a distinctly normative dimension, which means that psychology can never be merely descriptive. We’re always in the game as ourselves, needing to be justified in our behaviors, and never just taking as an object the normative field. And that is, again, I think something that is neglected, but it can’t be in fields like education and therapy. So you get to crypto normative move, which is what you described, John. You skip the deeper epistemological, ontological questions and take as a given, kind of the conventions of one’s culture. These are the telos of individual development. And so that’s a few reflections there about kind of how that works. And I think this question of, in my own life, when you think about your most important decisions, how do you weigh those? And how do you give someone advice about preferable directions for their own transformation when it’s hard to do the imaginal work of transposition and you don’t know if the world will support their development? And so these are really deep questions that educators and parents and therapists and anybody basically has to face about their own life. And so I think that’s actually a really good grounding, because I think there is a tendency for us to want to kind of contain and control our own development. Like, as I see this in the human potential movement, like as a logic of self-instrumentalization, you have a fixed kind of almost neurotic control over your own future. And if you’re doing that kind of decision procedure, then these paradoxes will completely bother you because you’re trying to make the most rational possible decision for optimal health, optimal income, you know, like so that sense of self-perfection, self-instrumentalization. It’s very important that there’s a way to think about your own future without falling into that trap of needing to so radically create it and control it that you’re basically creating some kind of commodity of yourself. So there’s some stepping back when you take a dynamical systems view, and this is where I’ll get into the spiritual bit, there’s some stepping back into the faith in the self-organizational process itself. So this is the faith in the dynamic ground of being, which is necessary if you’re gonna take a more comprehensive view of transformation, because you don’t know what’s gonna happen, but you have to have faith in the dynamic ground of being. So that’s interesting. I think we’ll have to get more into the soul spirit terminology because I’m using that differently, but I completely resonate with what you described when you described the phenomenon you put those words on. So we’ll get into that. So I’ll pause there, I said a lot, yeah. That’s great. Yeah, and so I think one of the things I was trying to provoke and I know neither one of you has thought of this, because I’m also interested, because this also gets left out of most accounts of development, and it’s a travesty with respect to most of our history and then the rest of the world. The role religion plays in development, for good or for ill, just pretending that it’s not there, I mean, in my own life, I feel that there’s whole parts of my own past that are just ignored by mainstream developmental psychology. But why is this phenomenon universal across time and across cultures? Why is it universal? Why do people dedicate their lives to it? Often at great cost. And also, why does it have such power, again, for good or for ill? It can transform people into angels or into demons. How, why? That’s also something. And for me, again, and again, I’m not trying to be reductionistic, but you can at least see that a huge part of religious behavior is serious play within this imaginal realm, and having faith in its capacities for dynamical self-organization and to produce emergent phenomena. I just did with Guy Sandstock and Christopher Amas-Depietro. We did the whole program over a weekend of circling into dialogos, and we taught them some basic meditative practices, an anagotic contemplative practice. Then we taught them circling. Then we taught them philosophical fellowship, and then we taught them dialectic. And then at the end, the people are, they’re like glowing because they get into a place where they create a dynamical system of emerging, co-emerging intelligibility between all of them, very much what Plato’s after in the Socratic dialogues. And they get, and they come out of it, and the only language they see seems fit to describe this experience is religious and spiritual language. And that is not a coincidence, regardless of their background. They can come in atheist, secular. That’s one of the reasons, in fact, why people come to these practices. And yet the language they start, and you can hear the hesitancy in their voice, and I understand why. There’s horrible history. But on the other hand, Stan, on the other hand, it brings up a real question that I think is also seriously neglected, which is, well, what, it looks like some of the most profound transformations people have are deeply bound up with religion and spirituality. So, let me give you one empirical example, not just like these anecdotal historical examples. The Griffiths lab, you give people psilocybin, and everybody has a psychedelic experience. That’s given because of the mechanics of the drug. But, and this is not given by the mechanics of the drug alone. A significant proportion have mystical experiences. And then you track those people, and you find, contrary to established doctrine, that they have longstanding increases in openness, which is a big five personality trait that is supposed to remain stable and even decline as you move more and more into time. And yet you get reliable, the opposite. And what do people say about these mystical experiences? Well, of course, they use very spiritual language. They talk about the really real. They talk about, some of them, even if they’re religious or not, they start invoking God. And I’m not trying to push any particular thing here. I’m trying to point to a phenomenon that we need to bring into this account in a deep and profound way that is seriously neglected. You know that my department, although I’m trying to change it, my department, the psychology department of the University of Toronto, it is one of the great psychology departments. I’m biased, but there’s objective evidence to support that, right? I’ll support that. It doesn’t have a psychology of religion course. I’m with you, John. I mean, it’s worth noting a few things just on this line. One is that religion has been aware of transformation and about transformation and build its rituals around those key nodal points in human life that involve transformation like birth and death and adolescence and marriage and childbirth. And all of those, those are all places where there are religious rituals. So there’s that stack of necessary, inevitable transformations, which religion just layered right on top of. And then the other thing I’ll mention is that the experience of the qualitative change we’ve been describing, the experience of the Piagetian qualitative change. Like the birth of, like people always talk about higher levels of development and kind of like that’s all spiritual, but Piaget talked a lot about the birth of the semiotic function, which is distinctly human way of using signs and symbols and things. And that gateway into this, imagine while you’re discussing, Jonathan, where you lay on, John, where you lay on top. And that, although the kid can’t describe it, the power of the word when it first emerges as a possibility within the nervous system. So there’s a sense that whenever you move up or scan, I’ll get into scaffolding when I talk about the Neopagetian model, which doesn’t say you’re at a level. It says you’re moving all the time between them. It could be scaffolded up in a kind of peak experience by others into seeing from a higher, both cognizing and feeling in a more complex, more nuanced whole way. Like it’s hard to not have, it’s hard to have that experience and not feel a religious sentiment, which is a sentiment that something of ultimate importance has happened. Yes, ultimate concern. Yes, ultimate concern. Zach, you’d be, so while we were doing discussions with people about what they were going through, Guy brought in Helen Keller’s story about, right? Right, she’s deaf and dumb. Water. Water, and I forget the name of the therapist, right? And keeps doing the sign into her hand. And then she said, and then she got it. She just got it, right? And it’s like, I talked about this as like, not just an insight, but a systemic insight. It’s not an insight into this problem, it’s an insight that changes how you find all problems, right? And how like a world opens up to her. And of course, and these two are not separate. I only separate them because language is in time, right? A world opens up to her and the self opens up within her simultaneously when this happened. And she, right? And she, luckily she was past childhood so that she didn’t suffer childhood amnesia so she could actually relate the memory of that experience. Exactly, no, that’s, and that’s, and you see it, and this is what, this is one of the reasons developmentalists study children, but it’s also one of the reasons that parents love their children, is that over small time scales, you can see these types of world opening experiences. And this is what we want from higher education and other things. And true higher education, you have that experience. A good book will give you that experience, you’re scaffolded up and you see. And so, yeah, I think there’s multiple ways that the religion comes in. And this question, and I use this phrase, it’s Haber-Ross’s phrase, the untapped semantic potential of religious language, meaning that there are some qualities of experience he was particularly concerned with, the way we protect vulnerable forms of community life. This is what I’m saying, like the only language we kind of have for that is religious. And he’s, Haber-Ross, he’s not a new age guy, but he’s saying, it’s like, we have to be careful, but we need to find a way to get this untapped potential into the field or else we’re gonna lose our ability to protect these vulnerable forms of life. And we will be left with a kind of a language that is too weak to actually describe the fullness of our experience. And that’s a very difficult situation to be in. So the same state, which could be, if well interpreted, change your life, if not able to be interpreted or talked about, can be a deep source of confusion. And so the psychedelic research, reintegration into life becomes extremely important for stabilizing that. And that same work with, working with meditators and others, the language around religion has to be rich. And there’s so much of life that can’t be described with other forms of language transformation being one of those witnessing the transformation of someone else, experiencing the transformation of a community or even historical epoch. And I’ll talk about that when I have more space, but this question of how thinking about the development of the individual psyche can apply to thinking about notions of culture, things of that nature, very important to end up discussing at some point, because the same normative issue, the same issue of how do we propose for the development of a culture or civilization normative trajectories, analogous parallels, things of that nature. Yeah, and that’s exactly right. I just, I wanna riff on that last point for one second and turn things over to Greg. Yeah, that point you made about, not only do we wanna talk about the normative dimension and the religious dimension, we wanna talk about how they are deeply interpenetrating and interrelated in work. Well, and this, I mean, for me, this is right at the heart of so many of my concerns. What I’d like to do maybe next time is problematize psychology of it in relation. So Zach mentioned this whole, what’s the ontology that we’re operating from? And I’ve over the years have come to realize that that was a core question that I was grappling with. Although I initially early framed it as epistemology because I was actually confused about those terms. But I think a lot of psychologists are as they try to reduce knowledge to scientific epistemology. You actually get trained as that as a scientist in a particular way. Roy Bashgar points this out as an epistemic fallacy, but it’s essentially, I got trained in my undergraduate coming into graduate school, oh, the scientific method reveals particular truths. And the scientific method has revealed that if we apply cognitive and behavioral strategies to people, we make them healthier. And then I got into the world and realized, oh my God, that is not, the world is 10 times more complicated than that across multitude issues of both empirical questions about what we mean by mind and behavior and interpreting the literature at an aggregate level to an individual level to create a relationship to understanding transformation through all those empirical questions, John. And then the whole issue of, well, wait a minute, what are the values that we’re engendering here? So like there’s a phenomenon called depressive realism. Depressive realism is that people that are mildly depressed are far more accurate in terms of their abilities and what they can control. So if we don’t wanna foster insight, do we want to make people more accurate about how attractive they are and effective they are? Or do we actually wanna create rose-colored glasses that are not accurate, but makes them feel happy? That’s actually a really complicated question. And the empiric, that is not an empirical question to determine what it is at. It might tell you what you might get if you apply the technique. There’s no way that the empirical task. And I encountered the Thomas Zazian critique that, hey, as a clinician, you guys are secular priests or psychiatrists. And at first, oh my God, the deep undergraduate world of view is, oh, I just apply science and solve that problem. Then you realize you grow up and you’re like, oh my God, that’s exactly what we are. Or vacant, not up to the task piece, who has shoe normative value cultural questions and pretend that we can either reduce them to counseling or reduce them to science. The clinical psychologist go science route and then the counselors go another route. And it’s really, and I look out at education, I look out at parenting, I look out at the meeting crisis and I’m like, this is a pervasive interlocking network of concern and confusion. And so what I’d like to do then is say, well, all right, this is a, I had a transformational experience back in 1997, stoned, the tree of knowledge fell out of me, literally in 30 seconds. And it upgraded my- That’s a great sentence, Greg. Just sorry for interrupting, that’s just a great sentence. That’s just a great sentence. I make sure that one’s on the transcript. So, and it transformed my cells. I mean, literally, I couldn’t stop. I went to sleep, barely that night woke up, just everything metabolized in a self-organizing way in that relationship. And 20 years later, or 25 years later, whatever. But the point of it is, is that we certainly, I’m 100% certain that psychology is tied up in empiricists and inadequate philosophical knots that render it fundamentally confused in its capacity to deal with profound questions that we’ve laid out on the table. So what I’d like to do is explain that, some of the issues that I bring to bear in relationship to a complex, dynamical, adaptive systems use scientifically of the unfolding wave of behavior, and then a humanistic, wisdom-based, religio-based kind of concern that can be brought to bear in relationship to that as we intermingle the is ought questions that we are wrestled with. And then see if that sets the stage for addressing the kinds of theories of transformations and practices of transformations we might be able to cultivate. So that’s great. I think that’s a good, or I think we should definitely move to that for the next session and you can take a center stage. One request I have about that discussion, something I’d like to bring into it, is I wanna also look at the reverse, if I can put it that way, not the reverse of your proposal. What I mean is, we’ve also inherited within the Cartesian framework an attitude towards transformation within epistemology. What I mean by this is that, before, like if you look before sort of Occam, right? There was this proposal that there are many truths that will not be disclosed to you unless you go through significant transformation. So that transformation had a proper epistemological role. There were dimensions of reality, truths that could not be realized unless you realized yourself, unless you went through transformation. And then what you get with Occam and then develop very explicitly in Descartes, no, no, no, you don’t need to go through transformation. All you need is an inferential method. You get the emergence of method that gives us universal access. And so I also want it, like we’ve been talking about, changing things to understand transformation, but I also want to understand the proper epistemological ontological role of transformation that it affords. Can we make sense of that such that it is intellectually legitimate to say things like that? People say that and they’re generally dismissed as that’s granola, that’s new age, right? I made a term for this actually. I called it in a paper. I don’t think it’s actually come out. It’s gonna be an essays of books about the debate between the Wilbarians and the Bascarians. Wasn’t a debate, it was a collaboration. I called it the cognitive maturity fallacy and it plagues modern epistemology specifically. And Pige was constantly pointing at it. He’s like, that’s interesting. That’s your theory of knowledge. But there’s a whole bunch of stuff that people have to go to to get up to be the kind of person who thinks that way. And by the way, you can keep going. And there’s more advanced ways of thinking epistemologically beyond that. And so most of modern epistemology just says, here’s the knowing subject, full stop. And they’re like, but you’re assuming, for example, this knowing subject had nutrition, education, language, mathematics, socialization, like a whole bunch of stuff. Like just assuming that your knowing subject is a fiction, this is Pige’s point. And the growth into the knowing and the growth beyond that form of knowing into higher forms of knowing. Yes, exactly. Exactly, this is what’s necessary. And it’s been shown in the terms of like the history of science in terms of paradigm shifts. That’s what’s so remarkable about a contemporary epistemic hubris. Is that’s like, haven’t you guys studied science? Like this shit’s gonna change. Like the thing you’re hanging your hat on now, five years from now could be completely dismissed. And so that sense of like, yeah, we need to have a theory of learning more important than the theory of knowledge. This is person’s view that learning is primary to knowledge. Yeah, I think that person’s view is important. And Zach, if at some point you, cause I’ve read a bit of this literature and it has an influence on the work I do on wisdom. I know there’s, you know, some of the Neo-Pagetians talk a lot about post-formal operations. And if we could bring that in at some point, cause I’m very interested, especially one of the terms used by Cummins and others is dialectical and they don’t mean it in the Hegelian. You mean it a little bit in the Hegelian sense, but they also mean it more in the Socratic sense. And you know, what does that, cause I’m interested in to dot about dialectic and theologos and all of this. So if we could- We can absolutely get into that. Yeah, the work of Mascolo and Cichus is very, very good in that respect. Excellent. Yeah, the dialectical thinking, post-formal operational thinking, all of that’s in my field. I’m a good friend with Mike Mascolo. And I can second that definitely that. So that’s great. So thank you, both of you. It looks like we’ve got our marching orders for what’s gonna happen next time. So next time we’ll continue to do this. We’ll summarize and then- Yeah, we’ll summarize. We’ll also shift as to who takes sort of the progressive argument baton and the other circle around it. Next time we’re gonna shift to Greg and he’s going to bring in the important connection to the problem of psychology. And that’s also where we will come to the other part of the title. We’ll start to talk more about what we mean by a proper meta psychology and try and get these two more in connection. So I was the host today. I’m gonna end it, but as always, I’d like to give the other two people here an opportunity for any final quick words they want to say about what happened today or foreshadowing, and then we’ll bring it to a close. I’ll just say quickly, as I sort of mentioned, and I feel very alive in relationship to the conversation and met expectations, and I really look forward to the continued growth and development of this conversation and the transformations that ensue. But the intersection of these questions of transformation and a adequate meta psychology is really at the core of, I think, the meaning crisis, certainly at the core of my own work and the mental health crisis that we see. So I couldn’t be happier than to engage in this, and with the two of you guys, it’s just a real honor and sight, so I’m good. Yeah, I would just echo the enthusiasm that succeeded my expectations. It was a blast. We got really deep really quickly, which is, I think, what this topic demands, and I’m looking forward to how it unfolds. I think Greg, with Greg, I think we’re all gonna transform as a result of this, and we’ll see where it ends up. That is my fervent hope and my strong expectation that this is gonna happen. I can already feel the presence of the logos in what we’re doing. So thank you very much, gentlemen, and we’ll see everyone next time.