https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aVpb4VvtZs0
Welcome to Untangling the World Nod of Consciousness, wrestling with the hard problems of mind and meaning in the modern scientific age. My name is John Vervecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Throughout the entire series, I will be joined in dialogue by my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez, from James Madison University in the United States. Throughout, we are going to wrestle with the hard problems of how we can give an account of a phenomenal-like consciousness within the scientific worldview, how we can wrestle with that problem in conjunction with the problem that Greg calls the problem of psychology that is pervasive throughout psychology, which is that psychology has no unified descriptive metaphysics by which it talks about mind and or behavior. Throughout this, we will be talking about some of the most important philosophical, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific accounts of consciousness. So I hope you’ll join us throughout. I will do a little bit of a role reversal and I’m happy to do so, in which Greg is gonna take the mic most of the time and I’m gonna act as the person being his interlocutor and commentator. So welcome, Greg. It’s always great to be here with you. It’s really fun to be here. Always look forward to this, John. So my hope is that the audience can see why I’ve been trailing you, and then I get to share kind of how your frame for relevance realization works like a lock and key in some of the systems that I’ve developed. So I really look forward to that. Yeah, and I appreciate that too. So today what I’m gonna be talking about is behavioral investment theory. And behavioral investment theory is a frame I developed over a two to three year period after I had built the tree of knowledge system, which you recall is a matter, life, mind, culture, and then it orients you toward joint points. I had already developed the idea of justification as really differentiating the primate from the person, giving rise to that culture, and then the tree of knowledge popped, but I didn’t really have a frame of reference exactly. I knew that it was neuroscience, evolution, cognition, and behavior, but it was kind of a cluster. And then over a period of two or three years, it got solidified into this thing I call behavioral investment theory. Right, right. So then I’ll share that with you, share what the key elements are, and then talk to you a little bit about how I made sense out of the evolution of cognition in four different stages. And then we’ll hone in on the two middle stages, and I think they’re gonna line up very nicely with relevance realization’s core and orient us to this thing we call consciousness in a particular way. Great, sounds great, Greg. Okay, so I’ll do my PowerPoint thing, and we’ll jump back and forth. That’s fine, that’s fine. My frame at some level, so I’m gonna share my screen here. Okay. Okay, so basically this then is putting two puzzle pieces together, John Simar III with my behavioral investment theory. And so what we’re actually, I’m really excited that John and I are lining up here, because I think of this as a cognitive behavioral neuroscience account of both mental behavior, for at least from the outside, and phenomenology from the inside. Greg, could I just make one point of order? Please. Although I’m lead author and developer on Simar III, I had a lot of help from Anderson Todd Richard Wu and Jeff Marshman, just to give them some appropriate credit. Thank you for, yeah, you’re a beautifully humble man, John, and that’s good to note at that level. So last time we kind of went through the map of mind, so I’ll just highlight that really quickly, so we’re just oriented. We had a differentiator, our epistemological frames of reference, and then we have the idea that the nervous system is an information processing system. I think we both agree that’s a complicated word, but that we have semantic, theoretic processing elements in there that we could potentially talk, that it plays a regulatory coordinating function at some level of the behavior of the animal as a whole, although that’s an embodied, enacted, four-e cognition domain. And then we have this emergent function that we need to understand the nature and generative elements about it, call it phenomenology, experiential consciousness, the experiential self, and where does that and how does that emerge, and that’s what I’ll be talking about, and you’ve made this, for me, very powerful distinction between adjectival consciousness, adverbial, and I realize that sits with a particular differentiation that I’ve made that I’ll be sharing later on. And then we talked about, as you know, my frame on propositional knowledge and justification, and then my excitement is seeing the linkages, and here are some, the four P’s that we discussed in relation, and indeed even transjective ways of thinking about instead of objective-subjective. So for me, one of the things that I’d like to do also is just locate the kind of work that we’re doing. This is what I call my metaphysical-empirical continuum, okay, which basically argues there’s sort of a continuum of abstraction ranging from empirical data, at least in the scientific frame of understanding, ranging from empirical data to hypothesis, theory and paradigm, you’ve recognized that from Thomas Kuhn. Of course. And certainly in psychology, I think in cognitive science, we have the multitude of different paradigms, and we can ask questions about, well, where, what about the relationship between the paradigms? And that to me is what I would mean by a metatheoretical, potentially transparadigmatic. And then also there is really the fundamental concepts and categories that we use. I wanna bring at least a descriptive metaphysics back into science, so because we need to know what our concepts and categories are. And along those lines, the four P’s and map of mine, what we just talked about really have this sort of descriptive flavor so that we have our proper epistemological, ontological reference points. But then the question is, well, what are those domains and how do they actually, how can we describe much more nuanced, causal, iterative dynamic interrelations between them? And I see behavioral investment theory, I see your SIMR3, and just as these metatheoretical systems. Yeah, yeah. And BIT really is sort of the foundation of the nervous system in animal activity, and I’ll talk about that. And then we have the evolution of the cognitive consciousness architecture. And then ultimately then on top of that, this talking, intersubjective, propositional justifying. And I think that this, and what I’m really excited about is SIMR3 then fits and builds a particular kind of metatheoretical understanding that I was lacking, but now with this, it connects and brings a tighter and more coherent picture together. Yeah, this is beautiful, Greg. So just a reminder. So here’s the tree of knowledge system, which is of course the cosmic evolutionary map I use. I considered a new map of big history. And the really interesting thing about it, if you look at a map of big history, they make no differentiation between life and what we would release, what I would encourage us to call as mind or the dimension of the animal conscious cognition. There’s no separation there at all, but I think the evolution of a nervous system’s a big deal. Yeah. And things change quite dramatically, even though plants are unbelievably smart, we’re learning more every day about what fungi can do. Something still pretty magical happens at the level of the animal. I agree, I agree. And so behavioral investment theory hones in on this and it is a frame, it’s a meta-theoretical frame of reference that says, hey, this is the way we can understand complex feedback loops that give rise to this new complex adaptive dimension or plane of existence. And what I’m gonna share with you here is what I had done long before you and I had met and just show how much correspondence I think that there is. And then we’ll get into the richer, more intimate correspondence in a second. Can I just intervene for one second here, Greg? Yeah. I think that’s an important point. I think what Greg just said shouldn’t go by without notice. Greg and I have worked until very recently, completely independent from each other. So this is a, I think this is what Greg is pointing to here is this is a powerful convergence argument, which raises the plausibility of the argument significantly. Completely. And what’s remarkable for me is both the convergence and the gap filling on both sides. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It’s just sort of like, huh, it’s a lock key function that creates a really beautiful hole. Right, it’s convergence to complementarity, which I think is brilliant. That’s a brilliant way of saying it. So, BAE-referral industrial theory is a meta-theory. It links Skinner’s behavioral selection with cognitive neuroscience built on an evolutionary foundation. Right. And to make this point, one of the things I noticed, I’m sure you’re familiar with, the modern evolutionary synthesis. The modern evolutionary synthesis happens in the 1920s to 1930s, where you have, before then, you have a number of different paradigms that are operative. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is shared by some. Lamarck is still around some. You have the mutationists that are working in the lab and looking at genetics. But we see over the course of a two decade period that really they can marry Darwin’s theory of natural selection with genetics to give rise to the idea of the modern synthesis, which is the idea that natural selection operates on genetic combinations to create a population genetic shift. And that synthesis then has an unbelievably important implication. And while I think many people today would say it’s definitely not complete or there’s a lot of some holes in it, it was a remarkable synthesis at the time and I think it’s a very important framing. So I point this out because the behavioral investment theory also is a merger of a selection science, that’s Skinner’s theory of behavioral selection, with an information framing on the nervous system. And so there’s a clear parallel between natural selection. Oh, I hadn’t seen that before, Greg. I just wanna appreciate that. So right, so you’ve got Darwinian theory as a selectional theory, and then you’ve got Mendelian genetics as an information coding theory. The modern synthesis brings them together and you’re doing the same thing with bit. Exactly. 100%. That’s beautiful. Exactly. That’s beautiful. And then you get cells and then you get animals. So in terms of, so then you have a physiological complex adaptive structure, but it’s being shaped by an information processing selection process on both accounts. So there’s a genuine parallel. So behavioral investment theory is sort of a modern evolutionary synthesis model for the emergence of mind defined as the animal behavioral pattern. Hey, yeah. And I see deep connections already with relevance realization theory. Keep going. So basically these are the three placeholder characters, sociobiology. I happen to be very influenced by the emergence of sociobiology, BF, to make sure that I understood a modern evolutionary framework and then of course BF Skinner. And really cognitive science is a wide, as you know, a wide variety of different areas. No easy person to put in there. Simon maybe. So the basics of behavioral investment theory says that when we look at an animal as a whole, it’s a kind of the vector of mind is a vector of investment. Activities expensive, it’s costly in terms of time and energy, actions must be spent. And really this becomes a whole mental behavioral plane of investment valuation. That’s the fundal idea. And actually at one point before he was, or he was always mixed about how much you’d look into the animal in 1938, Skinner identifies and references the exchange between the animal and the environment as a form of commerce, which basically was the animals omitting expending behaviors and it gets a return on its investment, which is then gonna create a selection process one way or the other. That connection to Skinner is really important. So this overlaps tremendously sort of with the whole bio. It’s a very economic approach. 100%. Yeah, very much. Using the same language, same conceptual structure very much. Yep and you’ll see that crystal clearly in the first principle of behavioral investment theory. Okay. So I’m gonna think about this here as the foundation of doing. And I wanna reference just the term doing for two reasons. Remember? So I often will try to make simple terms like feeling, thinking and talking. I often use those kinds of terms, but also it’s just sort of embedded this in the action. Which for a cognition, I think if we trace the evolution of cognition, it shoots off into a little bit of algorithmic processing that’s disembodied. Right? Okay and then a lot of cognitive science at least in the foree tradition is bringing cognition back down into acting. So that’s important for us to do. Very much, very much. So one of the ease is inactive. Yeah, literally in action. Right, very much. In action, exactly. And I also want to then connect it to the foundational comment about what makes animals so different than other organisms is that they’re they multi-celled organisms that move around. Okay? And the fundamental then problem of the nervous system basically is a movement doing system. How do you coordinate the whole efficiently and get outcomes because it’s risky and costly to do so. Yeah. Okay. And you can see this in the animal behavior literature. Okay, so one good example off of what’s called optimal foraging theory takes a look at the ways in which animals will spend energy in various paths to get say calories. So some ethologists, animal behavioral scientists were studying the behavior of crows that would drop welks which are these, you know, think, mollusks that have shells around them. Right. And you could then make a prediction or make an assertion that says, well, if you fly up a little bit and drop the welk, you have to drop it lots of different times. Right, right, right. But if you fly 500 feet up and drop it, that’s a lot of waste of energy. Right. And so they measured what is the optimal length of which to drop a welk that maximizes likelihood that it will break but minimizes the expenditure of effort. An optimal gripping kind of thing. Yeah, so gripping, right. It’s called optimal foraging theory to get an optimal grip on what you get to on the return. And so it was about four meters that they calculated based on trust. And then they went out and they measured what crows dropped it at. And with a plus or minus standard deviation, especially they could even calculate for the wind and they would demonstrate that the crows are tracking a particular work effort. Okay. That’s cool. So you can see this across the animal kingdom that this idea of investment valuation to avoid predation, to engage in territory, to seek out mates has an investment value function across a wide variety of different domains. That’s excellent. So that’s a big area in ethology and it really highlights what behavioral investment theory says. And so we really are trying to connect the body and how animals move as coordinated units. I actually think that what we really see the beginning of mind is the emergence of complex active bodies, which happens right around the Cambrian explosion. Yeah, right. So what you see before then, or it’s not super clean, you have to be academics and get technical, but basically you get a bunch of like jellyfish kind of creatures, okay. And then there’s a real shift into different kinds of body formation. So we wanna check the evolution of bodies and then into the evolution of complex animal behavior or across the dimensions of complexity. We’re gonna be paying attention to the organization of brain and nervous system with the hierarchical structure of cognition. If only there was such a thing that we really cross scale model that, okay. And also it’s very important to note that we’re gonna be paying attention to learning across the lifespan too, okay. Because according to behavioral investment theory, do very different evaluations if you’re early in life, middle in life, late life. Of course, you even see that at a phenomenological level within psychology when you get the shift of the temporal horizon, mid adulthood, where people go from living from their birth to living to their death. Yes, completely. That’s a great example of this process. As a meta theoretical system, behavioral investment theory connects a cognitive approach. And by that, I mean the broad information processing. So that is the nervous systems and it takes inputs, does some sort of recursive calculation computation and has output. It generates a semantic structural function that would be like the meaning semiotic and semantic element. And it’s gonna be functioning to reduce uncertainty in an information theoretic sense. Right, right. It’s gonna also connect to the behavioral science tradition. Of experimentation on animals and labs, initially identifying classical conditioning, which of course for Scholar Wagner and those people have updated brilliantly. And then they have the operant and vicarious learning traditions. And then when you merge them, in fact, I have a really cool book here. This book, The Mind Within the Brain by David Reddish, who’s an excellent behavioral neuroscience researcher who examines the ways in which animals make decisions under various cognitive loads and under certain circumstances and things along those lines. So you get a cognitive behavioral and of course founded on an evolutionary and neuroscience. So it’s a cognitive behavioral bio developmental systems. Right, right. And the ideas here is that there’s a way to consolidate this so that we can connect these into an assimilative integrative system while they have certainly different domains. And we can bring a lot more coherence as opposed to so much fragmentation, pluralism, excessive differentiation. So I just wanted to note for everybody, notice how Greg is doing two things at once here. There’s a content move he’s making where he’s explaining this phenomena by building this theory, but he’s also doing something addressing the meta problem of the problem of psychology and identifying a way in which you can bring about the integration needed to address the fragmentation. So I just wanted to really make it clear to people that you’re doing these two things in a really consonant manner at the same time. That’s 100% correct. And you have to attend to both of those if you’re actually gonna achieve sort of a conciliant point. And one of the things that makes salient if you pay attention to this is that, where is psychology? And one of the big issues is that when you take the broad view, you realize, okay, there’s these big domains of animal, which are all of this at one level. And then most people think of psychology as being human and that animal-human relations are really interesting one. What this does is it says that actually we can, and biologists overlook this. In fact, the whole discipline of biology makes the continuity from life. And I mentioned the big history people overlook it. They don’t, what this allows you to see is actually, no, there’s a really a qualitative shift that can be organized, that’s a proper at the level of the animal. And I wish we had stayed in the history of psychology. I wish we had called it comparative psychology for a while. I wish we had called this basic psychology and they had maintained coherence around this cluster of insights. I think we would have had a lot more coherence that way. I agree. So now getting more back into the contents that you and I can then riff off of. There are six core principles. So those are sort of the domains and there are these principles. The first is the principle of energy economics. So you mentioned, so we’re coming out and this makes a very important point that I think we’ve alluded to a number of different ways is that, well, philosophy kind of got stuck in mind versus matter. But both you and I can agree is actually, well, mind versus life is really, the issue is that it is emerging out of a complex adaptive system that’s engaged in all sorts of energy flow, information flow regulation systems. So it’s higher order in relationship to that. You then get the principle, of course, of evolution over time. We’ve already spoken about that. There’s a principle of behavioral genetics in that there’s gonna be individual difference in behavioral genetics which is gonna create propensity. And of course, this is the fodder of which evolution will operate that then gives rise to different individual differences. We then have a neurocomputational control principle which is basically how I would describe the neurocognitive fusion whereby essentially the brain is an information system and it’s understanding that hierarchical arrangement. We have the learning principle, which is that the fundamental process of the system is to coordinate the investment, gather feedback and make prediction and then be shaped by that feedback online across ontogeny. And then the lifespan developmental history principle which says you’re gonna focus investment values in different domains. So those six principles and those six principles should all be things that contextualize recursive relevance realization. Totally, totally. Very constant with all of this. So what you can see with John has done, John has developed the core framing of say the neurocomputational control sensible embedded in this system. Like what is the mechanism, the process that allows across scale that it’s actually doing. And what these do is just say, yeah, and it should be doing these based on these kinds of contextual domains. Right? Wow, really cool, really cool. Okay, so the other thing that it says is that if we take a zoomed out view, and we say, all right, let’s look at the evolution of animals. The first thing I’ll say is, okay, initially we have animals that really don’t have a, we have a distributed neural network without even necessarily a bilateral symmetrical body plan. That’s what a jellyfish is. In other words, it’s got distributed neural necks, doesn’t even have a brain. What it does operate on, and of course, some people like Eric Kandel, the famous neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, who really started to show at least with slugs, a particular type of neuro reflexive habituation sensitization element. And this is what I call the reacting phase. And essentially what you have here is basic, like he studied the withdrawal reflex of a slug, which would be one of the earliest ways in which you would coordinate behavior in relation. So the reacting phase is essentially reflexive. You get a stimuli input, and then you act a particular way. It’s designed to predict various kinds of stimuli. That’s really what it’s learning. And then it does that. And basically the way it predicts is to either sensitize, say, oh, this is indication of bad, so I’m gonna then engage in this reflex, or this is not a problem, so I’m gonna habituate. Right, right, right. So those are the two. And we see the emergence of this in basic nervous systems. I’ll note here that’s a nematode. A nematode probably models one of the earliest bilateral plans, meaning that there’s actually a head and a direction that it moves, like a jellyfish has a pretty loose direction. But this will have a head. And I’ve been reading some stuff on the evolution of this nervous system that I think is really interesting. The argument is that there may well have been a centralized sensory system that was like detecting light and toxins, and a movement system. But these two things were totally different. But when you get a bilateral symmetrical plan, what then happens is that there’s a fusion with the sensory detection system. Oh, yeah, cool. That then gets plugged on top of the motor system, and that’s actually now gonna become the brain and peripheral nervous system connection. Right, right, right. So it’s two brain, like a two different nervous system may got pancaked together as the requirement to control the or coordinated movement of the animal. That’s very cool, very cool. So then we get, and this is what I’ll be talking about in a bit, an operant learning phase. We clearly. That’s fine, by the way. What’s? Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Thank you. So now we can get an operant learning phase. This actually happens in a wide variety of different animals, certainly by vertebrates, but even happens in insects and mollusks, and we’ll talk certainly some lines of those. And then now we see the evolution of much more responsibility and dynamic interaction. And we’re gonna then, I’m gonna anchor the emergence of this, the base of this in a particular way, and then we’re gonna watch it evolve and become increasingly complex where you get increasingly online modeling system, both in dynamic relation with the environment and then extending that relation in time. And then as you extend it in time, you see increasingly cortical development of capacities, especially in the vertebrate lines, whereby you see an emergence of a system that is integrating, mentally manipulating, inhibiting, regulating, and anticipating consequences that are not necessarily immediate, but down the line. Right, right. And so now you’re extending the path of behavioral investment from the immediate interaction into possible futures, okay? And in order to then do that, you then have to pull up possible domains of relation and then see what might you be able to infer and make predictions around, okay? And to do that, that’s gonna require a lot more cognitive, mental manipulation kinds of issues, and I think you’re gonna need to develop some sort of workspace to determine what’s relevant and done. And then ultimately, there’s another layering of that symbolic and then symbolics and tactical propositional stuff that we’re doing now that launches us as primates into the domain of persons. Right, right. So now what I wanna do is I wanna then say, I wanna take this basic evolution, and now I wanna bring it into the domain of a human, and I then wanna get a model of a cognitive architecture, meaning the information processing architecture that’s consistent with this model that also then is consistent with what we know about the way humans solve problems. Right, right, right. So this then gives rise to the architecture of mind whereby we have, okay, we have the idea that there’s sensation and reflex, that’s sensorimotor reflex. I’ve also put in here the idea that you can layer down what ethologists call fixed action patterns. Right, right, right. And these will become habituated procedures in us as humans. Right, right. And they can emerge when we have basically a pretty, after practice, we realize what are the stimuli that we’re tracking, and you don’t even barely need to do this consciously. That can then be followed through in a pretty algorithmic way. So Greg, the idea here is making kind of a use of Michael Anderson’s ideas across speciation that there was machinery developed at this level of problem solving, and we didn’t dispense with it. We preserved it, and we’ve also exacted it up into our cognition. That’s a secret reuse kind of idea. So that there’s gonna be elements of our cognition that are operating analogous, or maybe even in some ways identical to these more primitive organisms. Completely. Okay, great. Yep, and I wanna make a key point here is that there isn’t that much in the way of consciousness that’s required when you’re basically releasing complicated behavior patterns. Yep, yep, exactly. Okay, as opposed to these next steps, which I believe is when consciousness, and we can then talk about the parts of consciousness, but I’m talking about perspectival and participatory dynamic knowing here. Okay. This goes towards the Bor and Seth thing. Remember where they were talking about what distinguishes when we need consciousness from when we don’t need consciousness. Yes, exactly. Right. Right, and so now we are inhuman, and you and I can then relate, and like, oh yeah. Well, once we learn how to do stuff, we bring it into consciousness, we don’t understand it when we’re getting lots of surprise, when there’s lots of ambiguity. If we start to crack it, we then download it into these other systems, and we have virtually no awareness of them, if at all. Yeah, exactly. Well said, Greg. So then what happens is that the first layer is fairly fixed, as you certainly can learn, you habituate, you sensitize, but the motor patterns are not dynamic, and if the environment is changing online and you have to change with it, like you’re really moving around, and you’re moving around, say, in relationship to other animals, like predators and prey, and you’re competing for territory, what’s a much more dynamic, iterative response emerges in what I call the operant learning effect. Right, right, this is really good. I like this. And so what happens here is that there’s an opportunity, I think, for the integration of different sensory modalities that may or may not be very well integrated, but now they become integrated, and then there is the emergence of a more integrated interior sense, and that’s gonna then evaluate both where the animal is, but also where it wants to be. Right, right. And you see motivation here, which I’m gonna argue, has two broad domains, approach and avoidance. And we can put this in evolutionary terms, but basically what you have, the idea here is that you start to have templates. I had the pleasure, pain, parallel fitness principle. What positively correlated with survival reproductive success, okay? And what negatively correlated with survival reproductive success. Generally, you’re gonna wanna avoid the things that negatively correlated with survival reproductive success, and approach the things that positively correlated. And that is that intergenerational selection process is gonna then shape the templates, and then the learning process fills in those templates. And indeed, the emotional system, emotion, energized motion, is going to be basically a set of likes and dislikes that then charges the animal, by said, gets it ready for action, prepares it, a perceptual response set, to respond to appraisal and to take necessary action. Right. And I’m gonna come back and I’ll talk more about this as what’s called a control theory equation. But we’ll move up and now we get into the third domain, where we really have the emergence of a cortex that’s running simulation, okay? Now we’re pulling up, so this area then is going to become ready for reason, and then you can operate on it, okay? And develop mental manipulation, all right? But of course, as soon as you do that, you then have to plan in sequence, as you’re engaged in much more, inhibit possible reaction. So now this is a holding environment, all right? That’s running behavioral investment simulation patterns. Okay? And this is gonna be key, and these two layers are gonna be key, at least the way I start to interpret and heard, when I first heard you describe the different domains of consciousness, I’ll share that in a second. Right. So, and then finally, we have the domain of justification, whereby you have a symbolic syntactical element. So, I’m gonna then now, I wanna now place this in the context also of, the classic memory, Atkins shift memory model, okay? Whereby you have a three-stage memory process, whereby, which is gonna tie in to a cognitive functional consciousness way of thinking, in the sense that we assess this this way, you have a very fast one to three second sensory memory, you then have a much longer three to 20, 30 second working memory, and then you have long-term storage memory systems. Right, right. Which we now know can be effectively classified into these three different domains. We can do a little further, but for right now, we can just say, yeah, there are procedural memories, episodic memories and semantic memories. Right, right. First one is generally implicit and contrasted or to explicit or declarative memories, because when we see in the human, you ask people about it, an episodic memory is your point of view, your motivational, experiential, perspectival, and your semantic is much more propositional. Totally, totally. Of what you learn in relationship to that. That’s partly how I came to divide the three kinds of knowing, along the procedural, the perspectival, and the propositional. So we can see now what we’re doing here is we’ve layered this through evolution. We can then look at the nervous system and see a hierarchical arrangement. We also see a depth arrangement on the continuum of memory. So we can see procedural here, and I’m gonna argue for perspectival and participatory in these domains, and we already talked about propositional. Propositional is clearly there, yeah. Right, okay. And this basically now for me, what is the scaling function that’s coordinating across the domain? See, these things have to communicate to each other. They have to be tied together by some fundamental thread. Now for me before, that fundamental thread was behavioral investment, but it wasn’t specified. It didn’t really cohere in a particular way. But for me, what you actually see, then we can flip over into John, your idea, which is basically what’s the fundamental information processing architecture of the nervous system? Well, it’s scale and variant multi-level modeling because they’re talking to each other, so they say appropriately conformed to where they are to reduce error and maintain coordination so that they can perform recursive relevance rules. Relevasation, that’s beautiful. I also love your icons, Craig. Like wow, they’re so well done. This is really beautiful. I really, it’s really good. This is really good. Thanks. I like the idea of this V, obviously for Vagachy, but V for recursive. This is what the nervous system is doing inside of itself. Okay? And then it’s then checking what I called salient control. So if you go back here, the bottom here is what I used to call salient control variables. Okay? Now here’s another super important thing that I think you and I can appreciate in the history of psychology, and then it becomes cognitive science, or at least the branch, is because the behaviors and the cognivance have such a long standing arm wrestle. Okay? And Skinner breaks it off and he has all of these, but actually what we see here is the, from the third person perspective, we can check what are the independent control variables that animals are engaged in as they engage in functional awareness response, right? And then we have, boom, what’s relevant to them? We can see it from the outside, and then from a human, we can introspect and see from the inside. So this is a, when we talk about a cognitive behavioral, this is like literally taking the systems and really bringing them together in a particularly coherent way. I think so. I think the synthesis between your work and my work is really, really, sorry, it sounds self-congratulatory, but I’m just really impressed by it. I think it’s really, really powerful. Absolutely. You know, it’s just striking. When I listen to you narrate this, I’m like, oh my God. So this is our neurocognitive functional model, but it’s gonna be congruent with phenomenology. Okay. And so now what I wanna do is I wanna talk about, all right, so let’s get rid of, we’ll come back next time, we’ll talk about justification, all right? Well, which is the top of this thing, right? But now I wanna then talk about what I saw in relationship to when I heard your distinction. So here’s how I would make sense out of, actually, I wanna explain the control thing. So let me tell people that I had an idea about pleasure and pain basically serving as broadcast signals to approach and avoid. Right. And I’m not alone in that. I mean, I built on that, but behavioral investment theory allows me to put it in a context where I can pull a number of different seers and theories together, okay? And I’m gonna argue that, is it possible that this broadcasting function emerges? Okay. And then as it emerges, there are processes that are required, all right, that give rise to the analysis of it, okay? So if it starts to become a thing that’s coordinated the whole, all right, then what is the process by which it gets coordinated? It gets held and then gets analyzed, for example, in the emergence and stored in working memory. And this is what I’d like to propose to you and riff off of, okay? Is the idea here about the relationship between whether or not there is an emergent broadcast function, okay? And then whether or not that broadcast function could then be the witnessing function comes along and then is a way of contains it, creates a screen for it, and then as spectralizes it with here-ness, now-ness, and togetherness, and then allows that to be manipulated in simulation. We always talk about making ready for reason, being ready for simulating, and then storing from a point of view that actually, I believe, becomes really the core self of the animal as a lead-in potentially to future episodes, okay? And then what the animal then is carrying around is the stored dynamic inter-regulation that it has with perspective on the world. And then what that does is it creates this stepwise function. So I know that there are questions about sort of the primacy and development and possible ontology of that, but I’d like to get your take on just that kind of possible difference, or how does that stick? I think it’s really cool. I think there’s something going on here that I do wanna unpack. I will bring up some of the questions you alluded to just a second ago. But I think this idea, I didn’t give enough thought to it. So this is a bit of riffing, which is what you requested. Name it. Pain and pleasure are really interesting qualia. Sorry, that’s probably one of the most obvious sentences that anybody could have uttered. But I mean, theoretically interesting, because for me, and I think you have this intuitive insight, and the way it maps into bit is so central. Because pain and pleasure really stay, I see them as almost on the border between adjectival and adverbial. Because pain and pleasure have a tremendous indexicality to them. I hear now in this salience, that’s clearly adverbial, but you’re right. Pain and pleasure also have the first initial proto-adjectival aspect to them. Right? It’s not adjectival about the world, like green or blue, right? But it’s adjectival about the organism, which I think is your point. Totally. Good, bad. I mean, ah! Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so this is interesting also, because it goes towards Brandon’s idea that some of the initial content that is eventually gonna be taken all the way up to become part of conceptual content is ultimately normative content, because that’s what you’re saying, right? It’s not, you see, because there’s nothing normative about green or blue, but bad and good are normative, but they’re not the same as here and now. Do you see what I’m trying to do? Yeah. I’m trying to get, you got the adverbial, and then you’ve got the beginnings, like I think there’s a, ah! Right? You’ve got the beginnings of a bridge between the adverbial and the adjectival in terms of this normative kind of quality. Totally, totally, 100%. So let me show you this real fast, and we’ll come right back and riff, okay? More. So here, and there’s the vSim R3. Okay. So here, this is what I wanna suggest, and that is that we can then, what I believe happens, okay, is basically as this broadcast function, I believe there’s a layering of the witness function on top of it, and the reason why is because it’s the intersection of a lot of things that need to be aspectualized together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay? So you have to pull where you are, and where your body is, together with where you want to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Because that’s, you have to solve both of those simultaneously to find your path of investment. So this is actually where relevance realization has to touch autopolisis. That’s what you’re pointing to, right? It’s, yeah, exactly, exactly. So you’re actually specifying the way in which, well, to my mind, how relevance realization is actually grounded in the autopolisis of the organism. That’s what I think. Exactly. Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly, okay. So we can see this, and then we can put this in very basic cybernetic terms. Yeah. Okay. Which then, cybernetics, I think, got bumped off the sidelines, and we don’t pay, I mean, I ask my students, doctoral level students, how many of them ever think about their behavior in control theory terms? And I would say maybe 10% have even heard about how to reference their behavior in control theory terms as doctoral students, okay? It’s much bigger in areas of cognitive science. Right. Because of the connection, the direct connection to the design stance and trying to make machines that are actually intelligent agents, right? But I’m gonna show here in a second about why this is such a basic formulation, and then set the stage for how it sets the stage for understanding our primate heart as persons. Right, right, right. So here you have a basic, you’re familiar with this, you have an input function, a perceptual signal versus a comparator that then generates an error, okay? And I don’t need to get too much into this, but here is a, we can now translate that basic control mechanism into this first two layers of the schematic that I have. So now perception is the input function that determines where you are. Motivation are the goal states about where you want to be, and it’s a complicated one, it’s also where you want to avoid. And then emotion energizes your action, okay? So where you perceive yourself, where you wanna be or not, and emotion energizing that action, okay? And a classic example is you might have an idea about, you know, what you want for breakfast, I want an egg, I have an idea of a perfectly formed egg that will create actually a comparator function. You’ll then break up your goal states into a wide variety of different little goals, I gotta go over to the fridge, okay, I’ll reduce discrepancy to that, I’ll then hit pull out the egg, I start frying it up, and now I’m reducing discrepancy between where the egg actually is and where my ideal is, okay? For me, if I get some crazy thought and I wander around for a little while, and I come back and I burned it, I say, oh, you idiot. Right, right, right. Because now I’m away from my goal, and then I’ll feel a jolt of negativity, all right? And then I either start the process over and say, screw it, I’ll just eat this lousy egg, okay? This approach is really tightly conciliant and integratable with, you know, the work that Mark Miller and other people are doing of effective multi-hierarch, like, effective recursive, hierarchical, predictive processing models. Yes, absolutely. And what it does is it brings in, see, a lot of those predictive models, I think, sometimes don’t always understand the connection between valuation and emotion. Totally, totally, totally. Okay, and what this does is then that embeds the valuation and emotion about, when you think about the whole investment as an investment value system, and you think about the control feedback loop as a perception mode of emotional feedback, and you think about emotion as being charged off pleasure and pain at some level, and there’s good evidence for that, and it’s just energizing action approach void. If you’re familiar with Lisa Feldman Barrett’s stuff on what the foundation of sort of the Affect System is, and then how it gets tied into language, she actually uses this basic model herself, in terms of, and then differentiates it at the level of language. So, two more things, and then we can riff, okay? One is that if you get into the clinical world, you’ll actually then see, you differentiate pleasure and pain, there’s also, since it’s an investment thing, there’s active passive, and you see a circumplex model of emotion, which is very important for us in the clinical world as setting the stage for understanding. Oh, well, you go ahead, I’m sorry, Farron. I was just gonna say, so that means there’s other simultaneously errors of commission and omission in this model, right? Wow, absolutely. Yeah, right, right, right, okay. I guess what I’m, here, my emphasis is sort of in, just because I’m a clinician, I wanna then say that I can now plug in, who tracks so much of what people feel, and ask questions like, well, what is depression? What is anxiety? When are people content? This system allows me to connect to some core models. This is called the circumplex model of emotion, which allows you, basically, argues that our emotional systems are on these two axes of pleasure and pain, and active and passive. And the last thing I’ll do, and I know we can then start to wrap up, and just riff and wrap up, is just put a nod here that this formulation, this PME formulation, can then get applied to the social world, okay? And that’s what I do with the influence matrix, whereby it pulls out the motive, and it says that we have motivational states for self-other relation, like, I want you, John, to like me, okay? And I’ll feel injured if you don’t return my calls, okay? That’s low relational value. And the blue line suggests there may be some competitive dynamics. The red line suggests how we might compete, I mean, cooperate, or be attached in particular ways. The green line suggests our distancing, and we can connect our emotional responses in relation. This opens up a self-other dimension. There’s a famous theorist by Theodore Malone, who argues that the core of our motivational, emotional, are on three different axes, pleasure pain, active, passive, and self-other. And what this does is it enables us to see these connections. So I knew we didn’t have a huge amount of time in relationship to that, but I wanted to then show, hey, when we get into the emotion motivational world, okay? And then I can then take that model, and basically be like, oh, look at all the stuff I’m doing clinically, and look at all the underlying structures that are driving people, and they’re having conflicts about, and things like that. That’s amazing, yeah. And so you’re gonna get a good bridging between the sort of cognitive and clinical psychology. Exactly, exactly. So especially, and then what happens is when we add the person consciousness, self-consciousness narrator, that has to be also then available to public, we’ll see that all of those power, love, freedom drives can set the stage for a lot of conflict, and some shadow work, and self-deception, and bullshitting, believe it or not. Yeah, that makes sense to me too. So that’s cool. So there’s a couple of things that I wanted to riff on. One, I mentioned a minute ago, and I just wanted to put it in there. I’m glad it didn’t disrupt you too much. But then when we’re moving, I think it’s important to note that when organisms move from commissive adaptivity to also including omissive adaptivity, that’s a huge advantage. If I can also take care, if I can take, if you can only take note of your committed, the errors that you committed, the errors that, sorry, the errors that occurred because of commission, but I can take note of the errors of both due to my commission and my omission, I’m gonna outcompete you. The problem is, of course, I’m now gonna hit a much larger search space. Comminatorial explosion. And that’s why I’m gonna need this enhanced relevance realization machinery in order to do that. So I just wanted to make that connection. Completely. And then the one issue, and we were sort of talking about, first of all, I like, at some point I wanna do zero in on just do this, adverbial and then adjectival and pain and pleasure. Like you’ve got it in between with this normative content that hangs between the adverbial and the adjectival. I think that is bloody, bloody brilliant. I wanna try and expand on that. So then the one question I had, and you alluded to this, and we don’t even have to necessarily resolve it. I just wanna put it on the table is, I like how that model unfolded, but we have this other argument that from events like the pure consciousness event, which people report that they are still in consciousness in a participatory and perspectival way. And there are clearly no adjectival qualia there at all. And so adjectival qualia do not seem to be necessary for cognition. And the thought experiment of having disconnected, adjectival qualia seems to say adjectival qualia are not sufficient. So we’ve got that they’re neither necessary nor sufficient. So they’re not part of the essence of consciousness, yet they are, and I’m trying to get these together because I don’t think they’re inconsistent with each other. But according to your proposal, although they’re neither necessary nor sufficient, they are causal precursors, necessary causal precursors to the existence, the emergence of consciousness. Do I have it correct? 100%. So here’s, let’s remember, right. I think that you can, when we talk about a pure consciousness event, we’re basically, right, you’re talking about meditating human beings. Learn, I would argue, it’s a process by which they’re, here’s my understanding, and you’re a meditator, I’m not, so help me, help educate. I’ve never actually, I can’t say that I can empathize exactly with what a pure consciousness event is. So I’m limited in that regard. But my understanding of meditation is the capacity to cultivate attention on the witnessing function of the mind. Yeah, and even as you said, I think in a private conversation, moving the locus of identification to there. Yes, exactly, exactly. And what happens to that system, to me, what happens is there’s a will to attentional loop into the witnessing function. That’s what meditation seems to train. And what seems to operate at a pure consciousness event, at least at a descriptive level, is that that becomes what is. Mm-hmm, I don’t know. And so it is a trained capacity, and I believe that in many ways, this is your core epistemological system. I mean, it’s like how you know. And when people think about the essence of your soul and consciousness, that internal knowing function is what I think that people really, even, and that’s what your adjectival, so it hits our intuition that this is its essence, this is its necessary, this is function. But it’s also the case that it’s like something that people have to train themselves to isolate. Right, right, right. And so to me, and then what we’re saying, especially this goes right with Descartes, that something was starting to happen that then needed to be consolidated and used. And what I’m suggesting is that there’s a broadcast pleasure pain bridge that then needed to be used and witnessed and manipulated, i.e. ready for reason for all of that. And then once you get on top of that, that becomes the center of the perspectival participatory dynamic because it can track. And then that becomes the center of a human. And then when you learn to meditate, that becomes the center of the experience and advanced meditators can actually train themselves to hone, to hum at that level. I think that’s right, I think that’s right. But I’m wondering then, I think all of that’s good, but I’m wondering if maybe what we want is something, like maybe we should reserve adjectival qualia for things that feed up into what you call mind three, that have a conceptual content to them, like green and blue, and then have something below the adverbial, which is something like the, almost the normative qualia, right? That may be, that may be. Yeah. The idea that, I mean, because that’s, and, huh. Yeah, I like the idea of it. Because relevance realization is ultimately a normative evaluation. It’s about caring about this rather than that. And then you could have the normative, I think, I’m very excited about this. I think, sorry, I’m riffing on your idea in a way you might not intend, but I think- Go, John. The normative qualia emerge first, almost directly out of relevance realization. They are gathered by the witnessing framing function of adverbial qualia, and then that makes them ready for reason. And that readiness for reason is the more prototypical adjectival qualia of greenness and blueness, and things like that. Brilliant. What do you think about that? I think that’s brilliant. And I think that when, there’s a big debate between early and late consciousness, and I think that these people are talking about the pleasure pain as a thing. And I think that people like Global Neuronal Workspace are talking about that second pulled in and working memory function. So I wanna think about this. I love it when, this is real dialogos, right? When an insight co-emerges from the participant. Well, and when you hit normative, it’s like, oh yeah, there’s another line, right? Cause then it lines right into emotion and all that other stuff. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so, yeah. Cause I think you could give a very good naturalistic explanation of the emergence of the normative qualia from relevance realization. We’ve already, I’ve already unpacked the argument of adverbial qualia out of relevance realization. And then you’ve got a lot of what you need in the readiness for reason. I think, yeah, I really like this idea. I’m gonna think about this a lot. And you seem to think it’s got something. Oh yeah, no, actually, I was, that whole pleasure pain thing, I was not, I put them under adjectival, but they do have a slight, clearly pleasure pain is a different flavor than green. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So you’re catching that discrepancy, which I didn’t catch, but I really like it. Cause then it’s like, oh, of course. And now that starts to line up with even more differentiation. Yeah, exactly. And it gives, I mean, it gives you an even more complete, it’s not complete. Notice I said more, I said more. And even more. He did. And even more complete, right, continuum from relevance realization up into the normative qualia, into the adverbial qualia. And then the readiness for reason is when we’re getting the bridge, that’s the adjectival qualia. I think this is very cool. And I love, love, love the integration between SIMR3 and bit. I think it is beautiful. I think it’s beautiful. Sweet. All right. That’s great. So Nick, so that summarizes sort of the, from the bottom. Next time, what I would like to do is I’m gonna, I’m gonna riff a little bit off of that influence matrix. And then I’m gonna say, here’s why I think that propositional language yoking us together created a particular shape and function of our, and then we’ll dialogue us off of that. And then we say, hey, you know, if bit really does fit, and then we have a cognitive consciousness, normative generative function here. That looks good. We put propositional knowing on top of that. That’s, that looks like a pretty comprehensive model. Yeah, it does. It does. I think it’s beautiful. And so I’m gonna now reveal something, which is Greg and I are going to do a follow-up series. We’re gonna be joined by Christopher Mastapietro, and it’s gonna be called the elusive I, the letter I for first person perspective. The elusive I, the nature and function of the self. And we’re gonna try and build a similar kind of biological, well, it’ll be triological arguments about the nature and function of the self. And then we’ll have, you know, an account of consciousness and account of the self. And both of those, of course, as some of you have seen from my work and also from Greg’s work, both of those consciousness and the self impact tremendously on the kind of meaning that is at risk in the meaning crisis. And Greg and I are also gonna talk about that. I’m super excited about this. I laid out five crucial words that we need to get at least some framework, behavior, mind, cognition, consciousness. And the fifth one, the self at one point. And so the idea that we can dive into that, network this and see what’s, you know, what emerges in relationship to this and bringing Chris in for a trial log, I’m super excited about it. Great, great. Well, this was beautiful. And we were free of any significant technological. Right, sorry, yep, it was my damn motor. I slapped it upside the head like I do. And I turned it off as a bad motive. But then it came back and was all right. Right, so very, very cool. Okay, so I think we’re, I think unless you have anything you want to say, I think we’re done for today. I think that we have accomplished what I hope to accomplish. Thank you so much for being a wonderful interview. I’m glad we were able to riff at the end. And that does seem like something we’ll both metabolize. Yeah, there’s a really cool insight there that I really like. It’s very, very tasty. And I want to explore it more.