https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qZ7tkPQfwzA
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. This is episode 13. So we’re ending the series on an auspicious number. Right, we’ll invert that and all of a sudden have it be lucky. Yes, yes. And so I’m here and I’m joined with my good friend and colleague and interlocutor and dialogical partner and co-creator of Insight and et cetera, et cetera, Greg Enriquez. And so what we wanna do today is, well first of all, I think I wanna say, and I’m gonna give Greg the opportunity to, what this series has meant to me. And then what we wanna do is sort of, and because Greg has really built a platform for this too, and Greg’s also aware of my work about putting this into, the stuff about consciousness into the larger issues around the meaning crisis, maybe altered states of consciousness, self-transcendence, the nature of the self. And part of that is just same shameless advertising for our next series that we’re gonna do with Christopher Massa-Pietro, the elusive eye on the nature and function of the self. We are not about shameless advertising. We can look at the self there. So what has this series meant to me? So first of all, a tremendous amount of gratitude to Greg in many ways. And so mostly what I wanna do is express gratitude. I wanted to exemplify a way of pursuing this material that was different than the standard academic monological treatise. Many of you know that I’m very interested, and Greg has contributed to the anthology on this. I’m very interested in dialectic dialogue, theologos, accessing distributed cognition, getting to places collectively that we can’t get to individually, all that sort of stuff. And so I was just so pleased on how this worked out. Both within every episode and then the overall unfolding of the episode. And Greg had a lot to do with that. He’s an excellent dialogical partner. And there was times when it clearly gelled into theologos and we were just really, really resonating. But he also, of course, I learned a lot in this series. Greg has encyclopedic knowledge. He’s very much Aristotle in a lot of important ways. And I think he is trying to do, and I mean this as a serious compliment, he’s trying to take up the mantle of the Aristotelian project because it’s sadly lacking, as he himself has regularly and reliably noted is sadly lacking in the world today in a lot of important ways. And the thing is, I do, of course, people send me their systems all the time, as you can imagine. And many of them are as you can imagine they are, right? They’re idiosyncratic and autodidactic and they’re spinning off. And I have to confess, when Greg first reached out to me, I thought that was the case. But as I’ve come to see his system, that’s why I now compliment it by saying it’s very much, I think he is a well-adjusted child of the Aristotelian parentage. So I think that’s really, really wonderful. I’ve learned a lot. And in conjunction with that, and this has also been a benefit to me, I’ve gotten to know Greg better as a person. And that’s just been, it’s wonderful. Perhaps all people have this potential and perhaps part of a wise life is to actualize that potential. But there are people that they strike you almost like a work of art in that, you like being in their presence, there’s beauty there, there’s goodness, there’s a sense of exploration, of discovery. And I found that very much in the discussion with Greg. So much so that I, and as I’ve already advertised shamelessly, I reached out to him and I said, I wanna do this again. And then I wanted to connect him with one of my most beloved friends, who’s also one of my most profoundest biological partners, Christopher Masuriet-Pietro. And to my great delight, to my great delight, Greg and Chris have talked, and to my understanding for both of them is they really hit it off tremendously. And so this just all feels like there’s a Logos taking shape and drawing us. So I wanted to thank Greg for that. And so a couple things, like obviously we, many of you have written in and you said, what about this theory of consciousness? You know, there’s 17,000 theories of consciousness right now, go ahead. John, can I pause you there for a second? I just need to have my filled heart share that. It’s a beautiful opening. Thank you very much, sir. Oh, you’re welcome, Greg. So, and I’m glad, I’m glad. And I want you to know, as I think you do, you know, I go on walks and somebody recommended this super cool thing called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And in a very short period of time, I was doubling my walks so that I could consume a series that was nothing short of transformative. And I was like, I need to talk to that guy. So I pursued and doggedly shared my crazy system and hoped that he would see through the initial craziness of it. And I’m so flattered and honored to be here and to share this journey with you. And I see recursive relevance realization everywhere I look, my friend. And it has broadened my horizons, it’s sharpened my horizons. It has allowed me both the immediacy of the presence and the distance of perspective. And I have deeply, deeply benefited from your work and the impact that you are making in this world is tremendously new. Well, thank you for saying that, Greg. I appreciate that too, thank you very much. So as I was saying, now it’s hard when you get some powerful emotions. As I was saying, many of you have written in and what about this theory of consciousness? What about that theory of consciousness? And I wanna be honest with you guys, I faced that same problem when I teach the course at the university and you can’t canvas them all. And so I tried to pick the ones that were most prominent and grab as many as I could that are prominent and of which I have the relevant expertise to make insightful comment. So I’m not making any claims to being comprehensive and complete, that would be a good Dillion error anyways. But I do, what I’ve tried to do with Greg’s, or Ned’s help is make a plausible argument, highly plausible, highly convergent, and as Greg says, a highly conciliant argument in powerful ways. So I can’t reply to what about this theory of consciousness. What I can say to you is I have to, in the end, as a scientist, have a faith in this practice of science and the community of scientists to sift through all of the hypotheses and move towards the ones that are the most plausible and then test them to see the ones that turn out to be the most probable. And you say, but there’s been mistakes made. Yes, there have, and there will be mistakes made. And you might actually have the one brilliant theory that the rest of us just don’t yet get, but that is not, and I don’t mean to be cruel to anybody here, but the chances that that’s true are very, very, very low. And I can’t, and neither can Greg, you can’t canvas everything. And so what I’m saying is please don’t be offended if we didn’t consider your particular thing or well, what about this theory? Because in the end, I’m hoping that if you’re right, it will come out that you’re right. That’s what I’m hoping, I’m putting my faith in it. That if you are right, that you’ll be able to convince enough of the right people in the right places at the right time to the right degree, because that’s what all of us have to do, for your theory to come to the fore and get a grip on the world as well as a grip on people’s minds. So please, please understand that I did my best to be as synoptically integrative as possible. And man, if you don’t think Greg is good at synoptic integration, you haven’t been paying attention. So I mean, between us, I think we were able to zoom out and zoom in with pretty, I think pretty good flexibility and systematicity, and so that’s my response to that. So if you’re here and looking for, I wanna see how he responds to, what Kacsepp has to say about consciousness or Hoffman has to say about consciousness. That’s not what we’re gonna do here right now. Because as I said, I’ve given you the reasons why that’s the case. I do think that some of the questions that some of you have been asking about, how does this connect up to everything? I take those very seriously, and there’s enough of you asking about that. So there’s two broad sets of questions that I’d like to address if we have time, which is how does it fit up? How does it scale up? How does it fit into the bigger picture of the meaning crisis? And Greg and I, I think at least initially independent, converged on this issue, right? And very consonant about it. And then the other one are sort of a host of questions around sort of altered states of consciousness. And we’ve talked a bit about those, but perhaps a little bit more about what they might say about consciousness, psychedelic experience, things like that. So I hope that Greg and I get a chance to talk about those two sets. But like I said, I don’t wanna disappoint anybody, but we’re not gonna go through and say, here’s what I think about Hoffman’s theory, here’s what I think about Kacsepp’s theory, here’s what I think about the dynamical field theory or the quantum theory. We’re not gonna do that. We can’t do that. That’s an indefinite project. Amen. Yeah, no, that’s exactly what I think. I think that the setup to connect both to your prior work and awakening from the meaning crisis to look foreshadow a bit on the meaning of the self, to bring it up. I also think that just in terms of, as we think about what it’s been, certainly for me, I can talk a little bit more in depth about how this is meaningful at the personal level and meaningful at the theory level. And I think that theory person level speaks a lot to the whole why this is so relevant for the meaning crisis. Well, Greg, that sounds like actually an excellent place to start. I mean, that sort of formulates the problem and concretizes it to a degree that might give us a good place to start from rather than just sort of waving our hands in abstract space. Okay. Yeah, so for me, one of the things that I found, there are really two very powerful interfaces that I experienced as we went through this journey in particular that were new. Okay. And that came near, somewhat near the end. I’d heard your system before, so I was internalizing it. When we hooked up onto the valence qualia. Right, right, yeah. Okay, the embodiment of valence qualia. And then the extension of that into relational recursive relevance realization. Right, right. For me, put a sharpness to how I attend to things in relation so that actually, so that now I am much more, I mean, my wife and I have been together for a long time. Okay. Congratulations. High school, high school sweetheart kind of deal. Oh, wow, that’s great. But what I noticed in terms of just the insight that what we are engaged in is a relational relevance realization across the self-other field. Yeah. Okay. The empathy with which I had for her, what her system was tracking through recursive relevance realization on the field of the matrix as it were. Yeah. It brought a level of resonance and specificity to, and that’s actually hard to do based on our history because we’re just, it’s a rich, we do a lot of scale and variant multi-level modeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you do. Right, right. And so, and then since that, I’m a clinician, so I track the empathy kind of dynamic. So I would say that I have found myself utilizing that with a level of, and then on top of what the body is doing in terms of valence qualia, put my perspectival participatory relational system in harmony of tracking in ways that really sort of elevated the precision and have moved me that way. Thank you for sharing that, Greg. That’s really, I was just on, I mentioned before we started recording, I was talking to two guys who reached out to me from the Czech Republic, and they were talking about, one of them related this, he said, I’ve been really picking up on the idea of the perspectival and the participatory knowing and the salience landscaping, and he went out and he tried to describe how he was doing this practice of opening up and zooming in, and then he’s getting into a state of wonder and then he comes back and he comes back to his building that’s Stalinist, brutalist building, and it’s supposed to be ugly, but he’s seeing how it’s connected, like he’s having this experience of wonder and awe, and it was, and he was saying that that was what, sorry, this sounds self-promotional, but I’m trying not to, he was saying that that, that ability to move between the theoretical, scientific propositions and a direct transformative experience in his own life was what he found that was sort of different or new, and I happen to think, Greg, that it’s hard to exemplify that connection monologically. What I’m saying is I think the connections between the kinds of knowing that you can have in your own experience, like you just talked about there, I think it’s best activated and exemplified between two people in dialogue, and I think that that, first of all, thank you for saying that, and I wanna just say that I find that one of the most important things that I hope my work can do with people, and we did it together, of course, I’m not taking sole credit, we converged them together, but that, yeah, that goes towards something like hopefully we’ll talk about, which is this relationship, this new way of doing it, which combines the theoretical and the therapeutic, if I could put it that way, expanding both of those beyond their normal meaning, so that, because I do think, I do conclude after a lot of argument and evidence and experience, and I think we’ve talked about this bit, that some of the most important truths are only realized in transformation, that you can’t realize them just by consuming propositions, they have to be situated and home to within attendant processes of transformation, and so, yeah, I think having you here, dialogically, and bringing in that therapeutic perspective, again, I mean that complimentary, Greg, right, really builds that bridge better, builds that bridge better between the theory and the transformative experience, so that the truths that we are going to need to understand consciousness in light of the meeting crisis, I think are exactly those transformative kinds of truths. Totally, yeah, and when we synergistically sync up, then you get a distributed collective intelligence, right, and if you wanna, to me then, if I take this whole relational recursive relevance realization a step further, and I also then, if we now sync up with the game A, game B people, right, okay, and what I would argue that game A fundamentally is about is an instrumental competition for social influence and control, which we distributed through economic market forces, which then did a lot of good things in terms of our instrumental control, but from an influence matrix perspective, we can also say that people will then feel alienated, they will split their public instrumental self out from not necessarily feeling known and valued. They’ll be, now we can say they’ll be attuned to the difference between our recursive relevance realization of contingency of manipulation versus their fundamental experience of being known and valued. We can know clinically that’s gonna create tensions and filtering between the systems of conflict. Dissonance. Dissonance, absolutely, and then we’ll know clinically that we will see people coming in empty and wondering, right, and you line that up and you say, well, what is the implication this has for like the meaning crisis? You say, well, it diagnoses the modernity, capitalist labor relation as emphasizing an aspect of our social being, right, the instrumentality of it in a way that’s actually also soul crushing if we don’t attend to the need for relational value in a particular way. Right, so this converges, I think, very well with a version of the argument I’ve made in the awakening for the meaning crisis from Fromm about the modal confusion. Totally. Right, how we’re, as you said, we have a mode that’s instrumental and manipulative, it’s curiosity driven and acquisition driven and control and consumption, and there’s nothing wrong with that mode. It’s an existential mode that, because there’s lots that we need to have and we have to complete. We have and do, but also we need to connect and be. Yes, exactly, we need to connect and be and to develop and become and aspire. And so we have different sets of needs. And Fromm’s point is we get locked into what he called the having mode, and then we try to satisfy our being needs from that mode. And as Greg said, you’re gonna, they’re not gonna be like, you know, being in love is very different from having sex and becoming mature is very different from buying a car and self-transcending is very different from having some booze, right? And so. I’ve worked with a lot of successful, rich, empty people. Right, yes, no doubt, no doubt, no doubt. And I see lots of students coming out of affluence that are empty, are hungry and are struggling. Paul Wachtel, Paul Wachtel has a book called The Poverty of Affluence, which is. Yeah, right. Now, let’s be clear, Greg and I are not sort of Dewey-eyed leftists or something like that. Getting people out of poverty is absolutely central to anything we’ve been talking about right here, right? Take care of the base of mass, you know, it’s a basic Maslow equation. They’re the first two rungs, but we need a logic that manages social influence, but recognizes relational value and the harmony of the social emotional, the narrator and the public self to cultivate a sense of fulfillment. And I think that in the meaning crisis, that the difficulty we’ve had in doing that and creating a context that fosters that regularly is at the heart of a lot of the meaning crisis. So it sounds like we’re saying some interesting connections here, let me see if I can explicate them and then I’ll let you respond. Because I think we’ve already said this in the series is like this, the dichotomies that were introduced into our understanding of the relationship between well, mind and body, consciousness, meaning making and embodied causal interaction with the world, right? You call it the two epistemologies, that’s the way I think this is, that division really fragmented us from ourselves in an important way. And that fragmentation from ourselves exacerbates and makes it easier for us to fall into that kind of modal confusion, where we get trapped into an existential mode that can’t put together meaning and the manipulation of matter, right? That’s what we’re talking about, it sounds like to me. That’s 100%, right. And I believe that the modern scientific enterprise did so much, but it gets reasonably right, the physical, chemical and biological levels of analysis and undercuts our mythos, our religious mythos in a particular way and really struggles to handle us a clear virtue, value, character, ethics, yet then we can weave into our education and socialization and sort of leaves that so diffuse that we don’t know how to place our souls back into our bodies, that’s it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But part of what we’ve argued is that there is, there is emerging cognitive science that is giving us ways in which we can theoretically start to cross that divide. And Greg has shown how you can re-situate that into a much more comprehensive view of the relationship between science and reality. That means we don’t have to stay in this situation. No, exactly. We can now take our scientific knowledge and return to the question of wisdom, right? Which basically now is a value grounded meta perspective and not see those two as totally different questions but the sciences and the humanities that are not related to one another in any particular way but there’s actually a bridging and interface cumulative, conciliant conversation to be had. I think that’s a good point to make because I mean, what I’m seeing is we’ve lost the opponent processing that’s at the core of all these dynamically self-correcting processes and at many levels, we’ve divided into adversarial incommensurable opponents that are participating in a zero sum game like the battle between the humanities or social sciences and the so-called hard sciences or our political polarizations that have been ripping your country to shreds. With high risk, I will say, with that genuine risk, not to get into that but it’s a genuine risk. If this kind of process, which by the way, now we can go to the process of this event, which is when you remember after you invited me, I said, oh sure and then I think it was the next day, I was like, John, I just processed what this means and that is two academics coming together in a deal logos conversational network to get to know one another, build relation and then give the exploration for the cultivation of wisdom, right? As opposed to, hey, let’s get up, we’ll do our papers, we’ll try to defend them, we’ll try to get them in the journals, we’ll try to get the grants. I mean, that’s okay but it is definitely less relationally cumulative and connecting than this process just opens up. So there’s a whole process element here as well as a content element. We’re very much trying to exemplify and I just wanna amplify what Greg said. We’re trying to exemplify stitching back together, weaving back together the cultivation of meaning and wisdom and the practice of science. Greg’s not saying that we should stop running experiments or presenting papers or doing peer review or going to conference or we should not stop theoretical debate or experimental competition. He’s not saying that at all. But what he’s saying is in addition to that, we should be doing this, we should be doing this because we need a practice in which we are situating like sort of the purely academic scientific enterprise back into the existential cultural cognitive enterprise of cultivating wisdom, making community, right? Creating meaning, addressing the meaning crisis. And I just wanted to say one more thing. I don’t think, I want people to, I’m saying this is not a coincidence and I think Greg agrees with me. The fact that you’re finding all these dangerous dichotomies in your life is not independent from the dichotomy at the heart of things that we have been calling the world not, right? And if you don’t untangle down there, it’s gonna keep giving birth to these dangerous dichotomies at many level, at least that’s what I’m predicting. That’s what I’m gonna make a prediction here as a scientist. Well, yeah, and I think that ultimately a prediction in many ways has been realized. I mean, what is the, much of what the meaning crisis is, you know, is what is love? Who am I? What does my life matter? How do I make sense out of it in the ecology of information that is unbelievably chaotic and fast changing? I’m ungrounded from particular paradigms of living. I have infinite numbers of possibilities, but no grounded clarity and your handed meaning making systems that actually have dichotomies in them that are very difficult to put together for the academics. Yes, let alone for the person just trying to live a good and meaningful life. Yeah, that was well said, Greg, that was well said. So, and I mean, Greg sees this, I think, more profoundly than I do, but I see it at least in two sets of people, obviously in my students, my academic students, but I also see people hungry for the kind of transformation we’re talking about that are coming to the meditation and contemplation saying that I teach or joining the discourse. Like they’re coming because they don’t just want another theory, some people are interested in my work for just that, and that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with that. But I was sort of overwhelmed when I started to realize how much people were coming to this with much more developmental needs that they wanted addressed, at least articulated and acknowledged and potentially addressed. And I guess you’re like, well, you’ve already said, you’re seeing that a lot in your therapy. I wanted to ask you about that. Do you think, I mean, I argue that the meeting crisis has been accelerating and then social media is, and then COVID there is like, it’s like accelerant on the fire. Are you seeing more and more people coming in in a therapeutics context that are being driven more and more? I mean, maybe it was always the case. So I don’t know, I’m ignorant, but are you seeing like, is there a growth? Sorry, that’s the wrong word. I mean, okay, so there is a crystal clear. So youth mental health crisis. Right, right. So in other words, so when we look at our youth, all right, here’s the, so when I was in school, I went to school and undergraduate in late 1980s. Okay, if we were to take a survey of individuals that had clinically significant problem in 1988, we would hit about one out of every 10 active students at that juncture would be clinically significant in 1998. You wanna take a guess as to what it is now? I don’t know, one in three? That’s exactly what it is. Wow. So it’s one in three now. And that’s a big difference, right? Big difference. I just saw in terms of now COVID, all right? So this is, and there’s a significant spike, some researchers at least argue this, of course it’s researchers, everybody debates. But there’s a big spike that the, there’s an acceleration of anxiety and distress that starts in 2007, 2008, emergence of the iPhone. I particularly think that there’s a subset of vulnerable girls and adolescents who are very, very vulnerable to the way in which the relational dynamics of emerging female identity in terms of who am I, who do people think, how does gossip work? What then affords a social media identity is I think unbelievably toxic to a subset of individuals. I mean, a significant subset of individuals. Yeah, I see some of that evidence. So then you get, what are you trying to do? You’re trying to get intimacy versus isolation, trying to get identity versus role confusion, standard Ericksonian developmental tasks. I think that we are inviting our youth in their transitions from adolescence to adulthood into an unbelievably chaotic system where the primary thing that we offer as adults is, oh no, we’ll try to protect you because it is a dangerous world and we’ll give you sort of maternal therapeutic care, which is good from 50 years ago we didn’t do, but know also clarity about how to develop character and develop an anti-fragile, robust, resilient way of being in the world. And so it’s, oh my gosh, it’s dangerous, it is confusing. We’re gonna try to bubble wrap you and give you all sorts of rights. And so what we see is a level of suicidal ideation, a level of depression, a level of anxiety that is just, that’s epidemic proportions and the COVID suggestion early on, I’ve seen mixed things about this, but there was a CDC report that did a survey of 18 to 25 year olds in June and found one quarter of them in the last month had considered, had suicidal ideation. That’s like, whoa, that’s very, very high. So I think the evidence is very clear. I will say it’s complicated, at least in the sense that we’re now living in a therapeutic world where the ability, the encouragement, the reduction of stigma to say you have problems, we have changed the norm on that. In my day, it was much more, there was a lid on that kind of stuff. There’s a two-edged sword in relationship to opening and reducing the stigma because then more people talk about it, but that’s a complicated thing because the norms have changed. But I think it’s crystal clear, I’ve made this many, many cases that, especially in our youth and in general, anxiety, depression, stress, suicidality, is just qualitatively worse than it was 20 years ago, no doubt. Right, right. And then you also see, I’m trying to remember, I gave a talk about this with two years ago, I think it was either 2018, 2019, the UK survey and 89% of the respondents said that their lives were meaningless, that they had no point. And we have, and you know, we’re both aware of all the evidence that shows the protective and promoter meaning in life is. If you don’t have meaning in life. You got to matter. You got to know. Yeah, and so, and then, and of course that was more, the older people were better, and that only 50% of them said their lives were, and a couple other important things. You know, the number of people that reported their lives as more meaningful, as you can expect, a proponent of them came from a religious heritage. Now religion, and you and I both talked about, this is also a double edged sword. Religion, I know it myself, religion can very much harm people. It can send them off into really crazy metaphysics and wonky ideas. It can make them anti-science in very dangerous ways. But nevertheless, there was, so for all of the ways in which, in politics and knowledge, religion has maybe gone wrong. We should, you know, gather the baby back about the cultivation of wisdom, meaning, and community. Because one of the things that social media exacerbates to my mind, and I’ve seen some evidence about this, is there’s a kind of modal confusion, because people confuse having connections with being in networks of relationships. They fundamentally confuse, that’s a deep modal confusion, and we need to be in, we need to commune in community, right? That is how we turn ourselves, we turn ourselves into persons by, right, by being around and internalizing other people. Absolutely. I mean, look what happened at the beginning of this episode, right, with us, right? Because now we are participating in a joint enterprise, valuing one another in a meaningful effort, right? And the soul gets filled in that. I mean, that’s, and so to engage in that, and to understand what that’s about, and to embrace that, I mean, much of what religion did on the positive was to share in the collective story of good and evil, and how you would live your life in a collective way. That’s the, you know, and like all the criticisms you offer, we have to reclaim that. We have to figure out to create a mythos that goes with our logos, you know, and in the best sense of the term, there has to be an ought, I like to say it about be a good ancestor, right? Right, right, right. You know, that’s, then you wanna place yourself in the arc of time, in the cosmic coordinates of the universe, and yes, the baton of energy information across the arc makes a difference down in time, and that energizes, and if we collectively feel that, the potential for, you know, a music rises in that effort. And I think we definitely dimmed that, and I think science has some, you know, science has got to figure out how to bridge the logos to the mythos, and our theology has to come back. Of all the things in Jordan Peterson, you know, what he, you know, on all of this complicated presentation, I found a lot, for example, what he tried to do like with the Bible series, making so much interest because there’s a vacuum of trying to make that connection, and I think we have to figure out a path that resorts that in a healthy way. I agree, I mean, and well, I know Jordan personally, he’s a complicated guy, and there’s a lot. Right, I didn’t mean to open up any can of worms there, but I was saying- No, no, no, no, no. He speaks to something. There’s lots in Jordan that, Jordan’s work that I think is insightful, there’s lots that I have criticisms of. It’s, the problem is trying to make those criticisms, like even with him and an arena of respect is very hard because his followers are so sort of, right? Right, that’s a whole nother phenomenon. He’s either deified beyond criticism or he’s demonized beyond recognition, and it’s like, I don’t wanna participate, because that’s just another stupid dichotomy, right? That’s right, but I do think the point you made is right, that the idea of reconnecting, and this goes with reconnecting to the other kinds of knowing, reconnecting with our mythos making machinery and being able to situate that honorably and legitimately within a scientific framework, it’s I think one of the most important questions facing us today. And I think in connection with that, I think of religion not only giving the mythos, but what it does is it actually affords the rituals that do what I just said, the rituals that turn the mythos into ways of knowing procedurally and perspectival, and so it helps you to not only homes, but it schools you in wisdom, is what I’m trying to say. Exactly, and I think I heard you on a podcast mentioned maybe in response to Paul VanderKlay or one of your other friends, you were in dialogue, and it does it potentially at the practice level of the individual, but at the level of communitas potentially. Yeah, yeah. This is to begin the dialogos relational process of us coming together to engage in some sort of meaningful effort to be a part of and to have that larger mission and vision, and I think that that is something, with a spiritual element that also has a sane metaphysics, I think is one of the great challenges of a religion that’s not a religion. I agree, and I think it is, but I mean, I’m glad to have met you and that you have joined in partnership with that project, or I joined my project yours, I don’t wanna give priorities, and so yeah, I think that’s really important. That takes me into something because you and I have published on it elsewhere in a couple of blogs that you were first author on and you invited me and did friendship to join you on, because in response to a series of arguments I’ve made on video and that I’ve actually presented also at scientific conferences about higher states of consciousness and how they are afforded, because remember I was talking about the people that interviewed me and what made that impact was the theory goes into a transformative experience that he could participate in. Basically what was a ritual, he turned his walk into a ritual and then he was sharing it dialogically with his friend and it’s like, yeah. And so I wanna just say a little bit about what I think is going on in altered states of consciousness, and then you can riff on that and we can also, I’m gonna ask for your help to make sure that it doesn’t get too far off this way that we home it back into this overall question of addressing the meaning crisis, but it is no coincidence that people are seeking out ecologies of practices that have as their core T loss, the alteration of their state of consciousness, mindless practices, psychedelic practices, parkour practices, getting into the flow state, all this stuff about flow state induction, all of this is that people are trying to alter their consciousness in order to try and recapture, reactivate their meaning making and their mythos making machinery. So I’m just gonna say a little bit and then I’m gonna give it back to you Greg. Okay. What I mean, I talk about this at length elsewhere, but we did make the argument pretty much in detail in this series, the consciousness at its core functionality is, well, recursive relational relevance realization, right? And it’s, so it’s a kind of relevance realization. One thing that sort of annoys me is that people keep talking about relevance realization as if it’s called calculation. And then they say, but where’s emotion in this? And like, and it’s like, no, and you really helped me show this. Relevance realization is inherently affective, right? And I’ve been arguing that from day one, right? And then you came in and said, look, here’s seven other ways in which John has been saying that relevance realization is inherently affective. And even the discovery together of the valence quality was about the affect. Yeah, exactly. That nails it together. And so, right? So relevance realization is ultimately not just meaning making, it’s mythos making. It’s about how we fundamentally religio are connected to ourselves, each other and the world. It’s relational, recursive relevance realization through and through. Now, if consciousness is ultimately about recursive relevance realization, and the way Greg and I have argued, altering your state of consciousness is going to fundamentally alter your capacity for religio for that generating that sense of connectedness. The question is, right? Remember what consciousness is for. It’s about dealing with novel, complex, ill-defined problems. So you have to ask yourself, right? Is your altered state of consciousness actually generative? Is it actually, right? And Dyckman said this, and I quote him again and again and again, it’s ultimately not about altered states of consciousness, it’s about altered traits of character. Right? I would also say altered patterns of communitas too. But let’s put that in, OK? If your altered state of consciousness is not homed within a wisdom tradition, and if it does not feed back and empower your wisdom tradition, I would be very suspicious of it. Because simply messing with your relevance realization machinery, yes, it does afford you. It really makes new affordances of religio possible. But there’s a reason why we have this perennial myth of the person who looks down and catches a reflection of the light from above, and instead of ascending, dives into the depths and falls into hell. Right? So it makes perfect sense to me, given that argument, why people are altering consciousness in order to try and recover religio. I get that. But I would put to you that the recovery of religio is not dependent on, right? It’s sorry. That the altered state of consciousness might be unnecessary, but is nowhere near a sufficient condition for bringing this about. My analogy for this is, and Greg knows more about this than I do, but I’ll just mention it, we’re starting to get people to take some psychedelics, or at least psychotropic drugs, in conjunction with therapy, especially for very resistant things. But it seems the evidence that it’s the combination of the therapy and the drug that’s actually the efficacious thing. So by analogy, just altering your state of consciousness without having the appropriate therapeutic, or at least wisdom-conducing context, I think you’re throwing the dice. You’re rolling the dice in a dangerous way. So I think what you want to do is, from within a sapiential context, sapiential having to do with the cultivation of wisdom and meaning, pursue altered states of consciousness that feed back into, are vetted by that sapiential context, and feed back to it and empower it. And I call those states of consciousness higher states of consciousness. There’s the states of consciousness that reliably seem to lead people into a life in which they’re cultivating relationships more wisely. So that’s what I would want to say about the relationship between our account of consciousness here we’ve crafted together, all the way up, all the way down and all the way up, how it has to relate to meaning-making, and then ultimately why it does depend on those higher states of consciousness that are conducive to the cultivation of wisdom, not just any altered state of consciousness. So that’s what I have to say about that. But I want to hear what you want to say about it, Craig. Yeah. So for me, what we have, we have our normal gross state of consciousness, which is constantly basically having to deal with the normal level of constraints at the level of perspectival, participatory, justificatory, and procedural. And we have to solve our everyday problems. But we’re making all sorts of possible associations, and we can find ourselves in particular kinds of flow and group. And we can then achieve certain kinds of insights in those novel relations. But what the altered state of consciousness, and this is what, as I learned about your frame of reference in the 11th and 12th episodes of your series, is that, OK, so we have this perspectival participatory schema set. But there are ways in which we can, what is that? That’s a grip of self and relationship to the world. Right, right, right. And if there are particular potentials, which I then believe that individuals through, like a wisdom orientation, a rite of passage, is set up that can be then prepared for, and then go through the various hypnotic trances, meditative trances, altered state induced with proper psychedelics. What does that do? We don’t know exactly what it does, but it melts. It unfreezes the standard grip that individuals has. And if the condition is right, the possibility for making novel associations on the perspective, the intuitive placement, the phenomenological participatory placement of oneself in the world and what it means, what we see over and over again is that that novel system seems to open up the expanse of possibility. There’s a reciprocal opening in relation, and then you transcend the everyday ego concerns that you have and somehow realize, and different people do this in different ways, a lot of it is intuitive, but there’s a fundamental transcendent expanse. And then people bring that story back, and then the other issue is you need then the justification system come back online, in my estimation, and start telling the story of what that means. So you’re then grounded in the story of who you are, what you’re trying to value, who you are in relationship to other people. Because you don’t just live in that state, you achieve it, and you have to consolidate, you have to come back. But from my vantage point, when individuals are telling the story of how they matter, those peak experiences to have some of them, and the data bear this out, right? As a way of touching the divine, touching an ultimate concern, over and over that, we know empirically that that’s the case to be explained, and I think we have a reasonable account for how that happens. And yeah, the data on psychedelics and psychotherapy are, I think now, just compelling that there may be a qualitative improvement than regular psychotherapy, especially for a number of cases. So that’s a side angle on it. But I think it’s a very, with caution and everything else, I think that we’ve lost touch with that, and that’s something that can be cultivated as part of our transformation and awakening from the meaning crisis, definitely. That’s well said, Greg. I mean, part of it is, we have this cultural cognitive grammar that keeps us in sort of a monoculture of distributed cognition, and then makes us live as if our thinking is completely monological, and that we only have a monophasic state of consciousness that we should be in. And if you compare that to other cultures across history and time, ours is the aberrant culture. Like the idea that we’re inherently monological, that the culture is sort of, you know, we have a monoculture of distributed cognition, and that there’s one state of consciousness you should be in other than like drunk or something. Like, it’s just very bizarre. It’s very bizarre. I like the logos, mythos, pathos, ethos frame of reference. I mean, there are lots of different ways to slice what you were saying, but one of them is to realize, I’ll put this in Wittgensteinian’s terms, these are different language games. The language game of logos placed by a particular set of rules, the logic of the day, get accuracy, science and natural science epistemology does a great job of delineating general truths that you can then use critical reasoning around. Mythos, we know that there is a, you can’t derive from is, especially in the scientific epistemology, we need to clearly in our lives, we need to bridge ourselves to some value element that has to have some social interest narrative. That’s the mythic. And we live our lives. I would tell people when I would do, sit on dissertations, and then in psychology, and they bring all this data, and then they’re so, okay, we’ll do this correlation grid. And then they say, hey, look at this line of correlation, we shoot these variables. And I’m like, so when you go home and say you have a fight with your significant other, is this relevant? Do these variables matter? And everyone else in the community, like, what are you talking about? It’s like, well, there’s the pathic existence of life, our pathos stemming from our emotions in a real relationship with one another, okay? The reality of being in the world. I mean, that’s a, so pathos, mythos, logos, and I don’t, we need conciliant ways and put them in an ethos. And I think the Greeks get that so much better than we do. I think that we don’t appreciate those different domains and how to interconnect them. It’s interesting you should say that because I’ve been doing, like I’ve been taking a look at two of the great traditions within the West, in addition to taking a look at ancient philosophy, which I’ve been doing in depth for a lifetime. But over the last decade, I’ve been really looking at, the phenomenological tradition and the pragmatic tradition. Like, I’m talking about like, Kirst and Dewey and some of the more modern people, like Davidson, et cetera, and how much they emphasize what you just said, right? That we, like the touchstone for us is ultimately when we get all of those to converge, right? If you’re in some room and you’ve got your graph and you’re tracking all this, and you can’t answer that question, like, but how does this transfer back? How does this make a difference? And then it’s like, yeah, like I’m, right? Something’s missing. And this is the great argument of the pragmatists because they, I think they were trying to point out that relevance matters, not just truth. And that they were trying to point out that most of our knowing is grounded independent on the non-propositional. And that’s where the whole phenomenological tradition comes in from Husserl through, you know, Heidegger, Marlowe, Ponte. It’s like, no, no, you guys, all of this abstract stuff is completely sourced in and continually dependent on, right? On the other P’s, on the procedural, the participatory. Totally. When I was doing in the theory, so as I’m a clinician and then a scientist, and this is in the world of psychology and psychotherapy, we have this battle. There’s these two different worlds. Right, right. And I remember one of the clinician perspective was, is that there’s scientific empirical analysis in theory, and then there is the real. Okay, your client comes in and there is the real. Theory is not reality, okay? And you had to know the proper relation is the question. All right? But so many people get obsessed with our theoretical analysis of the logos. They actually confuse that as reality. It’s like, that’s a theory reality, not the same thing. Math territory, pretty basic. And you guys have to pay attention that that’s coming from somebody who is an expert theory builder. That’s right. But it’s always, it’s me and the person, me and my wife, me and you, me and the person we’re in. It’s the embodied manifestation. And you have to take that. I think that it’s easy for folks to get obsessed with theory in a particular way. And I think our knowledge-oriented institutions, I’m more, I’m reading up on this idea that, hey, these are really, we should be wisdom-oriented. And that’s a really interesting twist. Yep, exactly. He’s been making that case for a long time. And I’m in the midst of saying, hey, how to make, from my vantage point, that resonates a lot. What does that really look like? Is there a frame on wisdom, which of course I know you’ve been involved in deeply in terms of giving us frames that actually, that do bridge scientific conceptual framing with actual, what embodied wisdom does seem to look like in the real world at multiple levels. And that’s a very great, and I think that’s a meaning crisis bridge myself also. I would point, Robert Sternberg is also trying to bring about that bridge between the science and the pedagogy, as Zach Stein is as well. Yep. So there’s a lot of, that’s just, and that’s not an exhaustive lift by any means. No, I did an article with Bob Sternberg. It made a very similar relationship actually between theory as knowledge and then the practice of therapy in the wisdom of the therapy room. Exactly, exactly. So I think that’s very important. So, well, that’s interesting because I mean, you threw like a gem there, right? The proper relation, because sometimes when people say, don’t give views the map with the territory, I sometimes say to them, yeah, but I don’t wanna go around in the territory without the map either, right? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because I actually have a very poor, because I think it’s had to do with Meniere’s another thing. I have no sense of direction, right? So like I have to, and this is how I can sense the difference, right? I have to memorize an inferential list of propositions in order to find a place. I can’t rely on sort of that intuitive sense of direction. Right, right. And so that metaphor really matters to me, especially because I know that when we’re moving around in concept space, map space, we’re actually exacting the same machinery for moving around in physical space. So the relationship is, yeah, we shouldn’t confuse the map with the territory, but we should appreciate how much the map clarifies the territory and opens it up for us. Now, I’m a theorist. And I love that totally. I mean, I get into the therapy room and I listen to all these cacophony of different voices back in the mid 1990s. And I was like, how do I know which one’s relevant? They all seem staying relevant, but then they have different language systems, right? And actually, why can’t I have a map that actually turns this cacophony of noise into actual music so I know which parts sing in which? Yeah, yeah. And then- Oh, I like that metaphor. That’s beautiful. I know. And it makes a huge difference in my opinion when you actually have that. It’s just, you know, obviously. Talk to somebody who knows what they’re doing versus somebody who doesn’t. Well, it’s also- Yeah, I think knowledge is pretty key to wisdom, you know, at many levels. I’ve been using the mixed martial arts metaphor. People with different martial arts become very, very powerful, right? Right. All right. Well, great. I brought up a couple of the concerns I wanted to address. And we’re sort of running out of time. I wanted to give some space. If there’s any topic, any connection in a summative or cumulative fashion you wanna make right now, I wanna sort of make space for you to do it. We certainly covered, you know, we got a chance to, you know, what this has meant to us at a personal level. I, what I hope people see, I mean, there’s a reason I got obsessed with the problem of psychology, right? And the problem of psychology was essentially, as I situated myself, I wanted knowledge from the academy that gave me a coherent map that I could then employ to work with people in real life scenarios to cultivate wisdom or more adaptive living, okay? In contrast to the duke and trapped mind and entrenched maladaptive patterns that they found themselves in. Right, right, right. And when I looked out at that landscape, what I see is a massive amounts of, it’s a super complicated question, but it is the case that it’s so chaotic that we do not, we’re not giving people an ecology of practice. We’re not giving people a frame of reference or what does it mean to have a soul that feels fulfilled, that’s known and valued, that’s consistent with your narrator, that it matters, and you sit in a relational field that appreciates you for who you are. It’s not that complicated, but we don’t communicate that. Yeah. You know? I mean, it’s a miracle when you actually sit back and what people don’t know about their feelings, about what it is actually that they’re built to be connected around. And I think that’s a travesty when we think about what our responsibility is as academics to make clear what does it mean about how we educate people. My kids will go through 12 years of public education. I don’t think they’ve had an hour on what emotions are. Yeah, yeah. Okay? You know, no notion about what is it actually that fulfills them and makes their character a particular way. I mean, what an opportunity. To socialize our children and what do we fill them with? It’s just very distorted relative to what I believe that we need. So if we get the picture, the territory of our existence, and we can bridge from the natural sciences to a coherent picture of the social sciences, our cognition, our human psychology, and my friend Joe, he’s a sociologist, we get that picture reasonably well. Then we can convey to educators, to families, to parents, hey, this is the matters. And this is how you sort out all the chaos and distill it down into things that you can take away. So that’s why I think this is, it’s not just an academic enterprise, but it’s actually something that once it gains conciliant consolidation, then you distill particular kinds of information to people living their everyday lives and try to do so in a way that would be enabled their personal world to grow and enable the community around them to grow. That’s the hope. That’s beautiful, great. Genuinely beautiful. The last thing I will say just on that, and you know about this, because I started texting you like a little hypomanic guy, is I will share that during over our journey together and related and other related things is I’ve landed on this concept of wisdom energy. And basically I was making some connections about, well, yeah, all right, so we have this sort of knowledge frame, and actually it was that Urban Grossman A on article and part of a few other things that says, hey, well actually, what is the relation? There’s the, by the way, there’s the knowledge pyramid that goes from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. There’s that frame. And then there’s just relationship between knowledge and wisdom, which I often will talk about the development in my own work is there’s the tree of knowledge, which is like, okay, try to get natural science and then the psychology of social science is clear. And then the back half of this, the building of the garden, which is the wisdom philosophy. So it’s that evolution. Well, then I saw this idea that, well, yeah, the basic conceptual architecture of wisdom is a metacognitive stance, you’re grounded in values, oriented towards the flexible application of values toward valued states of being and going forward, basically. Right. Okay. Well, wow. Yeah. I mean, something became so simple to me. It’s like, well, shouldn’t we actually try to socialize our development so that that’s what we produce? Yeah. Being in the world. Yeah. And then that being in the world would be, and I don’t mean the energy, although you’ve made the connection when I told you about it. It was like, gee, and I don’t know enough about the Eastern traditions and I’ll admit my old natural science Western view is always like, oh, I don’t know if I know what they’re talking about there. I have that, I’m guilty at some of that. But I’m talking literally about, well, all energies work effort, right? Right. At a physical level. We can then talk about free energy rate, pulling coordinated work effort. Yeah. Can’t we channel our work effort to that mode of being? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, like this isn’t the place, although there’s a video out there and Jun-Seng and Kim and I are working on a paper. I think the account of Chi that I’m talking about is a completely naturalistic account. Yeah, no, believe me, I trust you. I’m just saying, I’m confessing my own. I often wanna tell people, I wanna be very clear about my own narrow frame, historical frame of reference for narrow-sponsored frameworks. Obviously, and so. But what I like, when people translate aspects of Taoism and I spent decades in Taoist practices, they actually use a bunch of different metaphors because no one of the metaphors captures it. One is an energy metaphor and that’s the one that the West, because of its implicit Newtonianism, which is some kind of weird energy. Well, they’re using energy, but they’re using it, you should have resituate what that might mean in a Chinese context that has not encountered Newtonian science. They also use musical metaphors, right, about a kind of unfolding intelligibility and they also use all kinds of wisdom metaphors. And so that’s what I said. What they were trying to cultivate is what I think you’re calling wisdom energy, right? We’re talking about work effort that is ordered and intelligible and is dissipating entropy in the right way at a physiological level and at a cognitive level and at a distributed cognition level, right? And that’s what we’re talking about. Exactly, in a coherent, integrated way, sort of like a symphony. Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so I think, yeah, I think, well, that’s part of the reason why I’ve advocated when people ask me about an ecology of practices, that people should have a sensory motor practice that gives them a sense of what we’re talking about right here, that you’ve gotta get an embodied, enacted, embedded, extended sense of wisdom so that you don’t reduce wisdom just to headspace manipulation, right? And that’s what you’re gonna need if you’re gonna actually go through the transformations of the cultivation of character that are gonna help to reduce and alleviate suffering in the world. And so I think that’s why I like your notion of wisdom energy. I think it’s cool. It certainly speaks to that. And what I would say is we come, as we sort of say, so can we, can you and I, as academics, dive in, do all of what we did over the last 13 hours and bringing in our high-level analysis and then distill it and then say, okay, what are the practical implications and then turn it around and say, hey, actually we can now bridge to these traditions, these wisdom traditions in particular kinds of ways and bridge a natural into social science concilient view of that logos to wisdom traditions if we can actually do that, John. That’s like, as you well know more than anyone, but I’m just telling people, that’s so exciting. I can’t tell you how exciting that is. It is, it is. And the incitement and the enthusiasm is needed because we are in a race with a lot of other factors that are degrading human viability on this planet in an ever accelerating way. And so we need to run that good race, as St. Paul would say. And we need to feel a momentum that gives us the kind of faith for going forward. Faith not in the sense of believing things, but faith in the sense of faithfulness, of emotion as Greg likes to put it, energized motion. Energized motion. I really believe John, I feel like we are on the cusp of heaven and hell, quite frankly. Yeah, yeah. And thus we still, I feel I’m not in fundamentally optimistic and energetic and I feel we’re still in half time, but it does feel urgent. And so that’s why I’m very energized into this kind of work. So I’m just gonna end with again, last bit of shameless advertising. Notice how we’ve gotten to a place where we’re talking about the intersection between meaning and transformation and person and character and knowing yourself and all that kind of stuff. And so a topic that we also need to do exactly the same kind of thing that we’ve done with consciousness and that intersects with consciousness, especially in the notion of self-consciousness is the nature and function of the self, which Greg and Chris and I are gonna take up. So look for that coming out early next year, early 2021. And I wanna thank everybody that has joined us on this wonderful journey. And one last final time, thank you so much, my good friend. It has been a great joy to do this with you. I’ve really loved it, man. And I’m so glad we’re doing it again. Thank you for the first offer. I’ll thank you for the second.