https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=avTrkryqKsQ
Welcome everybody to another voices with Reveki. I’m back again for his third time. This is Ethan Kobayashi Siyah and he’s here to continue to discuss with me the intersection between his work and my work. Have you seen the first couple videos? You know that he’s been taking a lot of my work and translating it into a much more embodied, embedded, enacted practice, giving even more emphasis to the prospect of participatory knowing. And I think what he’s doing should be paradigmatically pedagogical. I mean, everybody who’s setting up and it calls you practices should be paying attention to Ethan’s work. And so that’s why he’s on again here for the third time. And we’re going to go through some more of his more theoretical reflections upon the kind of innovations that he’s been creating. So welcome, Ethan. It’s great to have you here again. Thank you so much. Always good to be back, you know, and really this pedagogical paradigm is something that’s been on my mind so much because it’s so much more about moving past the theoretical and getting to, okay, how do we make it work? How do we give it, you know, in as a tool? And so for a long time, I didn’t have a theoretical framework. But as you had so wonderfully illustrated over 50 hours, I had to, okay, try and consolidate that together into a framework from which I could build a practice off of. I don’t think I have it necessarily yet. It’s still a theoretical framework. But I think this would be a great opportunity to like pick it apart, really like troubleshoot it and see if there’s scientific plausibility behind this schema. So I will need to share my screen and show the… Let me just enable that for you. Thank you very much. Hi. Okay. Alright, okay. So I’ll just flash this on for now. And then I have some graphics to talk through. But this is the sapiential processing framework, which I’m proposing as a schema, at least just for myself to work with for now, which is a counteractive dynamic system to parasitic processing, which you and Leo Ferraro had wonderfully drawn out. So this is all very flowy. But I have a… I’ll go through each one of them. And then, like, please, by all means, stop me if you see a problem. I will have questions as well as we move forward. And then let’s see whether or not there need to be adjustments made. This is version 1.3. It’s gone through 1.2, two other reiterations. And I’m now working on a fourth iteration that includes all of the neurobiological stuff beneath it. So Alright, so let’s start here. Yeah, parasitic processing, as we know, begins with the interpretation of an event as bad or wrong. Yes. So my proposal here is not necessarily that we have to interpret everything as positive. I think that’s going to lead to narcissism and mania further down the line. Instead, what I’m trying to propose here is a recursive awareness of interpretive bias. Sure, sure. Yes. So just an awareness that there are elements that will make us look at something positively and will make us look at things negatively. I work with my clients on some of these and we’ll draft out a list of events. And then we’ll say, okay, how would you want to read this badly if you could? All good. So moving past an emotional probability assessment, it likely, hopefully can lead us to a rational probability assessment, which means it’s opening us up to having a little bit more room for raw data. Right. So where that raw data is going to come from is from our heuristics. Right. Now, I think you pointed out that we can’t do without them because otherwise we lose ability to be intelligent. Yeah, that’s right. You’ll hit call. Yeah, so the representative heuristic in terms of what stands out for us, I think that it is possible for us to build in structures and habits that allow us to categorize what stands out for us in terms of salience. Okay. Yeah. So what I’m leaning towards as a theatrical practitioner, somatic practitioner is that we’re leaning on perceptual imagery. So this is borrowed from the Masio perceptual imagery in terms of introspective imagery, our proprioceptive imagery, what the body is doing, and our exteroceptive imagery. And we can, we can layer those in and be clear about them. So basically, mindfulness. Yes, absolutely. And mindfulness. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. And somatic work has been very, very helpful as at being able to parse out what is coming to the fore most of the time. So then we still have to deal with the other bad boy, which is the availability heuristic. Right. I thought, I thought the Masio’s sensation of recalled imagery was really interesting in the sense that we are constantly creating our memories rather than retrieving them. That’s right. We’re constantly reproducing. That’s right. Sorry, inherently reconstructive rather than reproductive. I keep saying the opposite of what I want to say. It’s inherently reconstructive rather than reproductive. That’s right. I so want to make a joke there and I will contain it for now. So the availability heuristic, I think there’s something in there about being able to recognize recursively that it is being reconstructed. So it’s trying to be aware of this game of telephone that we’re playing with our memories. Right. That every single time is going to be some little thing that’s different. And that will depend on our specificity. Right. So the encoded specificity in terms of what’s going to come up for us as being salient enough to construct the memories with. Then we can start to become well, oh, wow, actually, I’m not in a great state. And that’s why all of these things are coming up to the fore as memories more. Yeah. Excellent. So. So far, really good. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, passing. Okay. So, okay, before I go into the transjective inquiry section, I want to throw in a little bit here that, of course, intersubjective community task does really help with this in terms of being able to be accountable for shared events. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I haven’t been able yet to read your article on predictive processing and relevance realization. I haven’t been able to get my hands on it, but I really do. And so far, this whole section I have marked out as predictive processing. Yes. I think, rightly so, we can’t get rid of them. Is that correct? We can get rid of them? How so? We can’t do without them. That’s right. We cannot. They’re indispensable. Because if we try to replace them with actual probabilistic calculation, we’d hit combinatorial explosion. I want to say, Ethan, that the idea is that sort of relevance realization and predictive processing are cooperative together. That’s what the new paper is basically arguing. It’s kind of like the analogy I use for people is it’s like the way Darwinian theory of natural selection and Mendelian genetics have been integrated into the modern synthesis theory of evolution. So it’s always Darwinian machinery operating on Mendelian genetics. It’s always relevance realization machinery operating on predictive processing, precision weighting, stuff like that. There are two theories completely interpenetrate. That’s, they’re deeply convergent. Fascinating. Okay, I’m going to email Research Gate and it’s like, let me in. I need to read that paper. I’ll send you a copy. Bless you. Thank you, sir. Okay, so when we look at parasitic processing, the next step that we get to is confirmation bias. Now, I don’t think we can have a binary opponent to confirmation bias. Instead, my suggestion is that it’s actually three-prong. So the first thing is that engaging in transjective inquiry. And that can be with the self, like solo, or it can be in a community. But transjective inquiry is absolutely necessary. What it affords is then it affords either problem reframing or insight, whichever comes first. Sometimes insight affords problem reframing, sometimes the other way around. Yes. But in that sense, that’s the only way that I can conceive at the moment to bring confirmation bias into a little bit more control. I mean, that’s what Mercer and Sperber argue in the Enigma Reason. What we’re supposed to do is basically do opponent processing between the way to deal with things like confirmation bias is through dialogical processing. Is that because in confirmation bias, a lot of the dialogue is completely intra-subjective, and so all it runs on is pretty much is limited data set? And the idea is that bias worked not only to help us avoid combinatorial explosion, it helped us do a division of cognitive labor. Each person can specialize in their viewpoint, and then they can do a point of processing and come to something that is better rather than each individual trying to survey all and keep inside themselves all of the different perspectives and viewpoints. So the idea is, the argument they make, there’s lots that I criticize in the book, but the core argument that we actually evolved for dialogical rationality, not monological rationality, I think that argument is well made. Yes, and I think this also touches a little bit on what we talked about the last time with the sensation of sophism. It’s not just that in dialogue I’m trying to get your propositions, I’m trying to embody the way you are processing the information. Exactly, you’re doing the indwelling of the person and the internalization of the person. Beautiful, beautiful. I’m so glad this is moving well. So where confirmation bias would take us to a presumed likelihood of similar events, and in fact it starts to hyper focus us in on the aspects of similarity, I’m suggesting that the transjective inquiry problem reframing and insight mechanism actually leads us to a differentiation of individual events. Yes. So the salience landscaping starts to move away from things which are immediately familiar and trains us a little bit more to pick apart their differences. Yeah, so far this is very plausible. Each one of these makes good sense in terms of existing scientific theory and data that I am aware of. Okay, great, here we go. So where presumed likelihood of similar events would lead us to anxiety, I think the opponent to anxiety is curiosity and fascination. And I think you talked about this with regards to horror or music and the symbol. Yeah, I tend to use wonder rather than curiosity, because curiosity tends to be from the having mode, whereas wonder tends to be in the being mode, and in that mode you’re much more likely to pay attention to process rather than product. Yes, yes, I think in my schema I bring curiosity and fascination also. There’s something about finding something infinitely interesting, which I feel leads to wonder. You know, it’s almost like we do this exercise, it’s kind of funny, go into a garden and find a leaf and just stare at it for the longest time, until you can’t pick out any more details and it’s just the gestalt sort of sticks out, and then it becomes, oh, it’s a leaf. Man. Yeah, that’s like state-spotted. So where we would normally go into local and specific processing if we’re under the parasitic model, the sapiential model encourages us to expand the frame to search for relevant information, which we would normally not consider relevant. That’s right. Okay, and as a result we engage in an exploratory cognitive flexibility. Excellent, excellent. So I think this is what I’m trying to get at with an ecology of practices, is that we can leverage neuroplasticity to be able to train these into a cognitive style. They become a set of learned heuristics. I think this has to do kind of with my fascination with creativity, that we’re kind of always looking to voluntarily change something’s aspectuality in a way that often defies its function. That’s interesting. Yeah, so I’ve been doing this experiment. That’s one of the actual tests of cognitive flexibility, multiple use. So you give people an object and they have to come up with as many alternative uses, alternative uses, what it’s called, sorry. And people have to come up with as many alternative uses of an object other than its normal function. I’ve heard about this and they write it on a list, right? Yeah, and they have like a minute to do it. And then the other test is figure of fluency. You give people a bunch of dots and they have to connect the dots with lines and make as many different figures as they can within one minute. Has there ever been experiments with people where you actually give them the object? Give them the physical object. You actually give them the dots for the figure of fluency. I don’t know if they’ve actually given people the material objects with the alternative use. That’s a good question. Because I’ve been doing this, I don’t know if you know this, but like all the guys in Singapore have to go to, they are conscripted into the army for like a couple of years. And so when we have actors come over and train, we have this nice big garden. And so what I get them to do is I get them to stand in front of the garden. And I say, okay, well, what do you see? And they go, oh, you know, it’s a tree there. Or it’s like there’s a bush here and whatever. I say, okay, great. So close your eyes, lean forward into like a forward stance, put one foot in front of you. I go to my room, I get a Nerf gun and I put it in their hand. And I ask them to open their eyes and like, look at the garden. What do you see? Cover. Yeah. That’s cover. That’s cover. And it’s kind of amazing the way it shifts. So yeah, that’s cool. That’s very cool. I was talking to the actors and they’re like, why does that happen? So I suggested to them that I feel like what’s happening in rehearsal and in performance actually is we’re trying to dial back the material itself. So being able to replace the Nerf gun with a stick. And then from the stick taking away, just use the forward stance and then just the mindset. Ah, excellent. Excellent. Very good stuff, Ethan. Yeah. I think that’s what’s happening. At least that’s what I do. Thank you very much. So, okay, moving on. What happens upon this exploratory cognitive flexibility is that there is starts to develop a sense of problems being independently solvable instances. So not necessarily related to previous instances, unless voluntarily called upon. You could also be applying something at this stage, which is called the notice and variance heuristic. This comes from Kaplan and Simon 1990. You could look back at your past failures and see what you weren’t changing in them. And then this insight into something that you’ve been hanging on to that you need to change, because it’s probable the reason why you’re not solving your problem is there’s something that you’re not changing in your failed problem formulations. So you can see them as unique, which can be helpful, or you can see, or you can, and this requires cultivation of humility, you can say they were all failures. And what was in common? What was I not changing across all these problem formulations? And then that can often bring you a very powerful insight. Does that, that’s fascinating. So, okay, so in order to dig into past experience, does that presuppose that they are, how do I say this, is it presupposing that they were aware that there was a problem to begin with, as opposed to be affected by failure? They might notice it. And remember, we’re not considering here accuracy, we’re considering transfer appropriate processing. So if they reconstructed it’s a problem. We’re not on a court of law. If they reconstruct something in the past as a failed problem, so be it. That’s not the issue. The issue is, and that string of memories give them a sense of what they’re failing to change and that transfers into their current failure so that they gain flexibility to reformulate. Okay. Yeah. And this helps to see, this is a, what’s interesting about this heuristic is this is not a, so normally you have your problem space that’s given by your problem formulation and your heuristics help you to move within the problem space. This is a heuristic that operates on problem formulation. It operates on the meta space of possible problem formulations. What it’s doing is getting you to compare problem formulations to each other in a helpful way. It really helps focus your relevance realization machinery on the problem formulation. And this is why it, right, this is obviously that’s perspectival. Yes. And it’s participatory because it requires humility. It requires the character trait of allowing your identity to not be bound up or threatened by your failures. And so this is, I argue this helps to explain the long-standing, one way in which it helps to explain the long-standing deep association between the cultivation of wisdom and humility. Humility is the character trait, the identity assumption that affords you applying the notice invariance heuristic that can empower your transformation. Without it, one is pretty much running reactionarily and completely unconsciously across these instances of bad problem formulation. That’s right. It renders the heuristic completely null because they can’t even figure out what was wrong in the problem formulation process. That’s right. What a lot of therapy is about, I would argue, is very sophisticated techniques that humble the person in a certain way so that they can apply the notice invariance heuristic. So what happens in therapy is people finally realize, because they’ve been able to state their problem propositionally for a long time, but then they finally realize the hidden presupposition, the hidden constraint, the hidden way in which they were gestalting the information that they now have to let go of. What that typically means is they have to let go of a particular identity they’re assuming. That’s why it’s a humiliation in the old sense of the word, the destruction of the sense of self that has been binding one to the past, and it liberates you. See, it’s the opposite. See, what’s happening with the people you’re giving them the Nerf gun, they’re assuming the participatory knowing, they’re assuming the identity of a soldier, they’re assigning the identities of the arena, they’re noticing affordances. There’s cover, there’s cover. That’s a perfect instance of how participatory knowing then informs perspectival knowing, and then they’re bringing up the skills they need. So what you’re trying to do is, in some ways, you’re trying to reverse that when the identity assumption has been actually blocking people from assuming a different identity that allows them to actually apply the notice invariance heuristic. This is, again, why there’s all kinds of trues that are not available outside of undergoing significant transformation. So you could have a profound set of even metaphysical presuppositions that are actually blocking you from fundamentally understanding the world, and you have to disidentify with those so that you can apply the notice invariance heuristic and come up with a fundamental transformation. I’ve heard of the dark side to that, and I think that leads to, I don’t know if it’s a real thing. I saw it come up, narcissistic spirituality disorder. Yeah, spiritual bypassing, narcissistic. Yeah, spiritual bypassing. Right, yeah. So what you do there is, right, what’s bullshitty about that is you take the catchiness, the vibrancy, the super salience of spiritual experiences, and you make that the primary thing. This is why I’m so cautious of people who are only talking about the phenomenology of their spiritual experiences and not paying attention to whether or not there’s been real transformation, real functionality in there. Yeah, it’s exactly that. And I would actually like to add to that as well. Thank you for bringing up this point because I think there’s an element of timing as well. Because I was sharing this schema with Alexandra and Jonas, and we meet up for art fellowship, and so we shared this, and this exact question came up. So I suspect that it has something to do with being able to take or hijack this process halfway down. So maybe someone has really, really clean proprioceptive information, or they’re really embodied and they can feel that, oh, my heart is pounding on this thing clearly, or like, oh, or they see synchronicity in something that is external in their environment, right? Like, oh, this snake came up to me, for example. And then when you have a person who is not grounded in virtue but has authority come in at the right time to feed in some kind of narrative that has to do with, you know, something that is deeply personal or whatsoever, you can hijack that machinery and take their agency. But if it comes too early, then I think it becomes like, ah, you know, I see what you’re doing. You know, it’s kind of like a salesman and it’s like, sorry, bye-bye. Yeah, I agree. So, okay, great. This is the neo-Gnosticism issue. Yeah. What’s happening, I would put to you, is you’re actually trading between those because the notice and variance is trying to get you to notice what’s similar but in a transformative sense, right? Rather than a preservative sense. And the sense of problems being independent, you also do that in therapy. Things get clumped together and are getting identified that shouldn’t be. And so you’ve actually probably got something like a powerful possible opponent processing between the two. Well, first of all, see how they’re different so you don’t group them together inappropriately. Now go back and see what’s the same but what you might not have been noticing was the same. Do you see what I’m suggesting you can do? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah, you can get the differences. Yeah, yeah, go, go, go, go. Yeah, you can get the differences, right? You break up the easy identification, the automatic similarity by right, fixing the problems being independently solvable. You get that. And then you go back and say, okay, now go back and try and find what was the same between them that you hadn’t noticed before. Notice what you haven’t been changing. And then you apply the notice and variance heuristic and then you can get an even more powerful transformation. That sounds very similar to what they’re doing in shadow work. Yeah. Like shadow work practices do that? Yes. Okay, okay, okay. Notice the difference. Great, great. I think because we’ve touched on a few things which are further down the line and now I’m super excited to move forward. Do you mind? Can we go? Can we? Keep going. Keep going. Great. So after you get to a sense of problems being independently solvable instances, I think what starts to develop is an awareness that the existential mode is changeable and fluid. Yeah. So one becomes… Really that falls upon everything we’ve just been talking about. Yeah. Yes, yes. That I might be feeling like absolute shit one second and then I’m not going to be like that for the rest of my time. Okay. And then this is where I will… So this is actually what I’m proposing is I think the awareness of sati. So not sati itself, the awareness of sati. I see. Does that make sense? Why not just make it sati? Because you think sati is the ability to remember the being mode where this is the awareness of the affordance of sati or something like that. Is that what you mean? Is the awareness that sati can occur. Right, that’s the importance of sati. Right, right. Yeah, because I don’t want to clump the phenomenology with it together. So I’m trying to pull it apart. I see. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. That makes… Yeah, that’s reasonable. I will do the same thing for flow here. And I think this is where I would like some pushback if any. So I think there’s this idea going around that flow is really helpful for learning. And I was sort of questioned that like, why is that? So I’m here suggesting that… So if this shape is one domain and this is one domain and this is one domain, flow presupposes that one has procedural skill in some domain. Yes. Yes. Now you can have meta skill. Like you can have the meta skill of optimal grip on reality. I talk about that in higher states of consciousness. Yes, exactly. And again, that’s further down the line. Wow, okay, good. So we have some kind of skill. And then I see what you’re doing. I will propose. This is good. This is good. Keep going. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. I think we’re on the same track anyway, but let’s say… So okay, I have a friend, philosopher, you’ll like him. He does bouldering. And because we don’t have proper rock walls, like mountainous regions in Singapore, we have bouldering gyms, right? So I was talking to him and I asked him, what’s it like to climb? And then he says, well, climbing the mall really sucks. It’s nothing compared to climbing the actual mountain. So what occurred to me is that, okay, you’re training the procedural skill in the mall, but then when you go to the actual mountain face, when you go to the actual rock face, it’s actually a different, slightly different domain. So you have heat, you know, you got to deal with the community, you got to go hiking. It’s actually quite much more complex, but it’s pushing that skill, right? Into a different context, into a different domain. So within that difference comes the affordances of skills like hiking, comes the affordances of skills like camping, right? So my proposal here is that if we do this over time, and we’re getting to that meta-skill bit, is that the domains in which one is able to enact said skills become increasingly complex. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I think this leads into your exactive cognition. That’s right. And this is also going into the work I’m doing on ritual. Ritual is to find a place, a way of training in situ that transfers as broadly and deeply to life as possible, while percolating through the levels of the psyche, the skills, the traits, etc. Okay, good. So this is cool, huh? I like the diagram especially. I like the diagram. This is really good. This is really good. Yeah, you should find some way of making your slides available. Yeah, I’m going to put them up on the website and socials. I want to make all this zero-cost information. So even as we’re talking through it, I want the troubleshooting of it to also be zero-cost. Yes. So here’s where we start to… Or at least I’m trying to create a schema for the self-organizing criticality and doing a lot of work on DST. So let me see if I can articulate this as clearly as I can. Okay. Circular causality cannot become self-organizing criticality without deliberate critical reflection. Yes, you have to introduce noise. You have to just rust. You have to break the structure up. Yes. And so what we’re trying to do here is to have the skills and the domains that we found in the flow mutually afford each other to get to this kind of well, to get to meta-stability basically. Right. Where they become… Driving meta-stability. Yes, absolutely. And then they are much more able to handle perturbations that come without completely losing integrity of the system. That’s an interesting idea. Again, I’m taking this and I’m translating it back into the stuff I’m doing on ritual. The meta-stability, yeah. Then complexification. Good, good. Okay. Yes. Can I offer… I’m convergent with this. Keep going. Can I offer something on the back of this for ritual? I’m not sure if I spoke about it the last time, but this is what’s happening in a rehearsal process in any theater production. Yeah. People come in and then we say, okay, here’s a base level set of parameters. The stage is this big. It’s going to be this long. Some chaos occurs that informs the next set of constraints that are going to come forward. We keep doing this process over and over again until it’s like, okay, show day. We know how the show goes, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t react to a cough happening in the first row. We still listen to it. We still have timing for it. Excellent. That make sense? Yes, it does. So, yeah, meta-stability, formation of higher order patterns that come together. And then they are much stronger than the lower order primitives that created them in the first place. Yes. This is where I also have a little bit of a hesitation here because I feel like this leads to general domain intelligence. Leads to it or is actually developing it through application? What do you mean? I think it’s developing. Well, you phrased it much better. You’re developing it through application. So, say for example, you have one line of meta-stability, and that’s tied to a particular identity that you might have as an educator, for example, and that’s very well-versed. But then there are also other identities that form different meta-stable states, like being a parent, being a martial artist, etc. So now all of those things, all of those domains come with their problems, come with their situations. And it is often in the most trying of problems that we have to reach into other domains to solve those issues. That’s right. That’s right. And it’s into other identities and roles when it’s getting existentially the most profound for us. Yes. And that’s kind of my argument around how numerous meta-stable states, diverse meta-stable states, can develop general domain intelligence. Yes. Because I think, as I’ve argued, general intelligence is recursive relevance realization, to the degree to which you evolve the evolvability of relevance realization through appropriately developing complexification is the degree to which you will enhance your relevance realization capacities. You’ll become more insightful, for example. You’ll become more capable of transformation and going through transformative experience. Yes. What you’re basically doing is you’re evolving the instead of… So relevance realization is like evolving particular traits. Recursive relevance realization is evolving the evolvability of relevance realization. That’s what wisdom is. Until relevance realization realizes that it’s irrelevant. Yes. Until it gets… Oh, you saw that. Yes. It gets to the point where it realizes that it itself is irrelevant because it is now not dealing with any set, no matter how indefinitely large of beings, it is dealing with the ground of being itself, which is absolutely one, and therefore should not have relevance realization applied to it. Yes. And also does not lose the integration of the systems that… No. …led to that. It is the grounding of all possible integrations, because it’s the grounding of all possible intelligibility. Yes. I’ll make a flow chart for that. I went a little bit haywire. Okay. So this is where I think we get cognitive agency. The world seems… I think you’ve articulated already, the world seems super salient, it’s full of options, and there is a sense of capability despite difficulty. But this is just the emergence of reciprocal opening, right? So the world is opening up and your agency is opening up reciprocally, and they’re doing that in an accelerating fashion. I think the earlier chunk with the flow and the sati, that triangle was, for me, I think where the voluntary reciprocal opening begins. It begins, for me, with the expanding of the frame. Sure. But it’s not going to be genuine reciprocal opening unless it’s also moving into reframing the person’s identity and agency. That’s true. See, that’s why I use the model of falling in love for reciprocal opening. It’s not just the world is opening up, you’re opening up to the opening up of the world and vice versa. Okay. I think where this is coming from, it just hit me, is that the context we were speaking from about this, I think is slightly different because at least in the theatrical context or in the performative context, we’re kind of looking for the ability to jump into something, to hunt for something, and then to let it go and let it surprise you and to allow that thing to emerge. But I think we’re on the same page here, would you agree? I think so. I think so. That sounds right. Yeah. Okay. Very much so. I think this is really good, by the way. I’m really enjoying this. Thank you. That warms my heart to hear really. I’ve been banging on about this for so long. But this is exactly what I want people to do with my work. I want them to take it, I want them to think about it and think about it deeply and profoundly on how to turn it into ritual in the proper sense of the word for transformation. This is what I want people to be doing with my work. You’re exemplary. Thank you. I’m getting emotional now. Okay. An actor agency. So I think there’s a lot of discussion around the word presence and what that means necessarily is we still haven’t really found a word for it, which is why I hesitate to call it presence. It used to be, but I think that presence extends beyond mindful awareness of somebody, of a person, of being. It feels to me like in an actor agency, one’s cognitive agency is so ingrained that one is co-creating arenas by existing alone. So I think what you can do is you can break up. So I think part of the problem is people are treating presence, and this goes to some of the work I did with Anne Schiappi, as if it’s a single thing. What you have to do, you have to understand it as presence is how I am presenting myself, how the world is presenting itself and how we are bound together in the same present moment. And when you put all the three of those together, then I think that’s what, and that only works when you have exactly what you’re talking about. So presence is a sense of dynamic coupling to the world. And that’s what we’re talking about. Yes, I agree with you. It’s like, is that same idea of somebody who can like walk into a room and, you know, like lights go on and it’s all sun and it’s beautiful. So they present themselves in a certain way that draws out things and how people are presenting in response to them. And then people get locked together into the same moments, right? That same psychological timeness, and that’s presence. Yeah, and actors chase it for decades. There’s this sense of like the stage presence as being presence, which is contextualized. And I think to a certain extent, it’s led. So even if the actor might not have presence off stage necessarily, or does not have the strength that strong of dynamic coupling, what the theatrical context does or the performative context does is it says when this person walks in, turn around and look at them, or open your senses to be open or open your senses to be aware of their existence in such a way that it almost accelerates that dynamic coupling, right? We see everybody turn to, you know, somebody who just walked on stage, and then the whole audience, all eyes go there. This is very helpful. This is very helpful, because I’ve been arguing for a long time that the way truth is the goal, the normative standard of propositional knowing and application power effectiveness, the goal of procedural knowing presence is the normative standard and the goal of perspectival knowing. And this is really helping to articulate it well. That’s why they’re seeking it. They’re seeking it because it is the thing that says you are doing perspectival knowing well. Okay, please send me the recording of this straight afterwards so I can write down all of these notes. I don’t want to forget them. Okay, so, okay, I’m just aware of time, so we’ll move through. I think what happens after general domain intelligence is that there is a particularization of psychic symbols, each governing a particular domain. Oh, that’s interesting. So you go from, oh, this is like the epitome of relevance realization. You go through this very powerful, you know, integration move to domain general, and then you re-particularize into your psychic symbols. So you’re actually really making powerful use of the relevance realization machinery here. This is really interesting. What do you mean specifically about this? I mean, I have a sense. Okay, so, for example, you know, I’m, okay, so I have an amalgamation of identities, right? So I’m an academic, I’m also a husband, I’m also a best friend whatsoever, right? And the way that I identify with myself, but also with the people in these domains and the relationships in those domains, they’re going to have some similarities, they’re going to have some differences. But what I can do is that if I’m sitting by myself, I can take that perspective and say, okay, well, if I look at the situation as a best friend, what is that going to look like? If I look at the situation as a husband, what’s that going to do? And it all has to do with something to do with Tamaki. That’s right. Right, right. You know, and the idea is to try and get these domains to talk to each other. Excellent. Excellent. Amicably. Yeah. Yes. Yes. So this is part, I talk a lot about this in, after Socrates, which is coming out January the 9th, by the way, about this inter-dialogical nature of the self. Yeah, this is really, really cool. Keep going. Wow. You’re doing fantastic participant experimentation and theorizing from it. Thank you. I think what’s good- Everybody, everybody. I mean, to read you can. This is the kind thing I’m, sorry, I’m interrupting, I want to talk directly to the audience. So what Ethan is doing here is exemplary, right? Right. You know, there’s the shared body, my work, for example, but it doesn’t have to be just my work. We’re just using it as an example. Here’s a shared body, but he’s taking and he’s applying it and developing it, right? And, you know, really doing some amazing participant experimentation and reflective theorizing about it. This is really exemplary. Intrasubjective communitas. Right. Yes. One person internalizes not just the sage, but has also particularized the sage-ness of their own psychic symbols. Right. Right. I’m not going to go to the best friend part of me for advice on how to deal with my wife’s issue, you know, with anything, but I will talk to my husband part and then, okay, maybe from then on, he’ll give an opening. Right. Right. And then we can, okay, we can start to really have an understanding of how are all of these different perspectives that exist within me communicating and are they moving towards the sensation of a good life? Are they moving towards and mutually affording each other character? Because I don’t know about you, but I’ll have like, I had situations like that. I think this is what Jung calls personality regression, but it’s like, there’s, you know, part of like how I hang out with my best friend is like, we’ve known each other for years. Yeah. I’m married now and I have responsibilities, right? That sometimes we’ll have to sit down and go like, maybe that’s not a great joke to crack. Maybe that was a bit, you know, something or other. So we have to adjust that intra-subjectively. Yes, very much. And I think what happens over a longer period of time is that that becomes the default mode network. Right. So we encounter embodied multi-perspectival situational awareness. A situation occurs and immediately six different perspectives within the self, not just generated by the self, but also in communion with other people, which is why there is an intra-subjective community task up in the flow chart. Coming back again to this idea of sophism that is not just about I’m even, you know, intra-subjectively dialogical. As a person, I also have to be inter-subjectively dialogical with everybody else’s perspectives. Yes. So you have like, if you have 16 psychic symbols and I have 16, we have 32 perspectives to look at one issue and we can guess for days. Yes. That’s really good. That’s really good. This is very overlaps a lot with ally work and especially with internal family systems theory therapy. This really, oh, I’m so glad we did this. I mean, this is exemplary. I mean, the work you’re doing and then the work that Iris Timberger is doing with the wisdom project, where she’s trying to take the ideas about wisdom and break them up into a pedagogical program of simple, like these are a lot of things, but the thing that I’ve just, this has to keep happening. This is so cool. I mean, you’ve already done this, but this just deepens my appreciation for how there’s something about the dramatic, the performative, the theatrical in the proper sense of the word. And you know that Victor Turner wrote a book on theater and ritual, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Good, good. And so, this is, and also I’ve been talking to people who do improv, right? That overlaps with this a lot, right? And like this whole domain, we need a great single name for it, but this has got to be one of the domains in an ecology of practices. It is part of a meta-curriculum, I would say. And so, just as a, I suppose, a teaser, this is, I’ve also off the back of that sapiential processing framework built in all of the exercises in Tiamat and where they intervene. So, all the exercises do specific things to highlight and scaffold. Excellent, excellent. So, you have a, yeah, you’re counteracting the dukkha parasitical processing with the dharma, right? The dharma self-organizing processing. That’s fantastic. But there is a reason for doing this. And this is kind of where I’m at a block. It threw me into depression for like three days the other day, which is that I see a lot of similarity and maybe this is good to talk about next, but I see a lot of similarities between the cognitive mechanics at work in performance and parasitic processing. It’s almost as if the act of performance itself is voluntarily entering into the process of dhugga. Right. That’s why the traditional performance practices actually developed pedagogical structures that were counteractive to that. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m going to dig more into this. I don’t want to talk too much on my ass, but that’s the current prevailing sense that I’m getting. So, let me make the proposal. You’ve got the idea that there’s a deep conformity in the platonic sense. The dynamic structure, the dynamically self-organizing structural functional organization right is very similar to the structure, the structural functional organization of parasitic processing. So, it has an optimal capacity to sort of intervene on parasitic processing because of that isomorphism. Is that what you’re proposing? If I think very close, it’s that the pedagogy of performance, the actor training part of it is designed to create that safety buffer because without it, the actor performance is very, very commensurate. Yeah. Let me make sure. You’re saying no, no, the art of performance is to put a safety buffer so you don’t get overwhelmed by parasitic processing. Yes, the actor performance itself. Right. But I was extrapolating from that, which means you can then take it and then say, look, this has the tremendous potential to conform us to parasitic processing, but we can appropriate and appreciate that and therefore, use it to get an optimal intervention on parasitic processing. That was the conclusion. Maybe I leapt to it a little too quickly. I’m sorry, but that’s where I was going with it. No, you are absolutely on the money there. And I think that it’s not just performance, it’s creativity as a whole. It’s the ability to expand your cognitive flexibility at will. And this is so I’ve been talking to Kevin Bowers as well. Same thing. Yes. And I have a video with him that’s coming out soon too. Yeah. So Kevin Bowers, I also talked to Ryan Barton. I was chatting with him on Friday, actually. Yeah. And very, very insightful conversation. Very mutually affording expertise. Well, Ryan is on the new board of the foundation and he is basically the helmsman of the reorganization and he’s the author of the strategic plan. Ryan is now deeply integral to everything moving forward. So I’m glad you’re talking to him. Yes, he mentioned you and that he wants you more involved with my work. And so this is also fortuitous that you and I are talking right now. This is wonderful. Things are moving. Things are moving very, very well. Okay. That’s all I have for you. Now I will come back with more flow charts. Well, psychologists love their flow charts. I’m going to try and release these the second, the previous video and this video close together. So if you’re watching this one now, presumably you’ve already seen the previous one. And so the way this argument is building, it’s like I say, this is really good and really exemplary. And I think you’ve made a very convincing case for, I don’t know what to call it, theatrical performance or something being a proper domain within any ecology of practices. So thank you so much, Ethan. I’d like to give you the final word. Anything you’d like to leave us with before we end the recording? So I’ve been doing this thing recently where at night I would write down something for my kids in future. It’s called thoughts for you before I die. And I think there is one here, which is really, really wonderful. You did not evolve to become a mindless reactionary creature dwelling in a hell of your own reflexive making. Even an ape, a dolphin, a child of three is aware of its own mind. Though simple, the seed of complexity lays nestled in the cranial soil. Of what condition is this soil? Is it tendered or left to dry and crack? Be content in the chaos of life, but be aroused against the absence of pursuit of contentment. Fight hard to lay down arms. When one can be jostled by the breeze into absolute paralysis at the possibility of a falling leaf grazing one’s shoulder, then it can be said that hell itself has infiltrated the mind. And you have armed its numbers, garrisoned its troops, and set them forth upon yourself. Seek to understand the soldier’s plight, and in doing so, make farmers of devils poised to harvest the simplest contentment. Well, thank you very much. And I just reply to that to remind everybody that Socrates was an excellent soldier. Please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes.