https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Iy0kx-r0K4Q
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 phenomenon 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. We came to fantastic fruition in our last discussion. We had sort of a dialectical, dialogos insight together, which I think is really important. You’re gonna be taking the lead and I’m gonna be more the Socratic interlocutor. And so I turn things over to your capable hands. All right, man. This is great. This is dialogos in action, as far as I’m concerned, right? And my hope for this whole project, and I think obviously it came from your notion was we could show, you know, scholars come together and dialoging and see what happens. And we definitely synced up on something that I’ve been excited about. So I’m really looking forward to getting back into this and sharing and then seeing where it takes us. So I’ll do my thing. I’ll pull up the slides. And what I’ve got here is a 10 minute or so walkthrough and the audience can then see, you and I have done some texting, but we bridged it in terms of the framing of it. And then we’ll see where that takes us. Excellent. Excellent. So take away. Yep. Okay. So we talked at the end of the last episode, there was this whole issue of pleasure and pain and what is that, how it sat in mind. And then it really, as we were syncing up, it was like, okay, what’s adjectival that clarified and then what are these things? And we called them normative qualia. I think for actually, certainly my feeling on that was, that was exactly right in the sense that there was some sort of evaluation or element along those lines. But normative for me was, often gets entangled sort of in justification and what are norms. Totally. And that launches us way up the hell into the propositional level. So it’s, we had the, I think it was the right idea, but exactly the wrong term. It was a felicitous term, I think, for capturing it. And so then anyways, there’s digesting it, it’s an investment value system that BIT says. So I then said valuation, but that essentially had the same problem. And then Valence hooked for me and I sent you and we had some dialogue and you immediately honed in on that. And so Valence qualia is an idea. And so really what this is, is now we’re simmering on the possibility of Valence qualia, does this really fit? And so we’re in the rawness of it, folks. This is what scholars try to get, it’s like, hey, does this sync up? Very much. So exciting, right? That was like a trip last time. Yeah. I love it when that happens. Yeah, so this whole bridge then, which I’ve always felt, and I really feel is just gonna continue. So we have this SimR3R BIT linkage here, and then they give rise to this new territory. So anchoring somewhere from where I’m coming from, there’s this whole operant experiential world of perception relative to motivation, relative to emotion. And there’s some control theory model. And this is a base above reflexive activity that’s gonna then correspond to operant theory. And the idea here is that at some level, you’re gonna get some sort of pleasure pain broadcast function, okay? That’s going to have some capacity. This is before global neuronal workspace, but there is some sort of yoking capacity where pain pulls for sensory perception together with energizing action together, and pleasure’s doing the same kind of thing. So we think about this as sort of an intersecting broadcast function along these lines. So now if we then say, okay, the idea that pleasure and pain serve that function, they’re gonna orient the animal to either approach or avoid in particular ways, and evolving to link sensation perception and emotion together. And then this gives us idea of valence quality or merge and function to hierarchically integrate sensory motor input, sensory input with motor output to enable a more holistic dynamic modeling system, okay? To guide the animal to approach and avoid. We’re talking about foundational law of effect here in some ways, okay? And operant experiential. And then this opens up this idea, okay? Of there is, hey, we’re really creating a dynamic modeling relation of the animal environment relation, right? Right, yep, very much. The potential for the base of participatory knowledge here. Yep, yep, I think that’s great. Yeah, I mean, and you and I were talking about, that their weird phenomenological feel, right? Yes. They sort of, they hang below the adverbial and the adjectival, right? In this really interesting way. And they give you just this very, the crudest possible sort of proto-phenomenological orientation, right? Brilliant. All right, and then the idea, and you’re right, the participatory knowing, right? It’s simultaneously a knowing and a being, knowing by being, right? Yep. And so yeah, all of that is just, I think that’s just really starting to bring the functionality and the phenomenology and the primordialness all together. And the idea that these operate as basically sort of your really, really primitive of affordance landscaping, which is what the participatory knowing does. And then that’s gonna make and afford the possibility of the adverbial qualia as specifications of, I’m thinking of the valence qualia like as these orientation thing, and then they get specified into the here-ness, now-ness, togetherness of the adverbial, et cetera. And then they get made ready for reason by the adjectival. Sorry, I’m stealing your thunder, I’m just excited. I know, this is, and I’m gonna come back to a personal story that I think will yoke that together in a second here, okay? So that’s exactly the energy. And by the way, I’ll make a little forecasting here, okay, that our fields of phenomenology, you are in mine, me getting to know you and you getting to know me, we’re starting to create an intersubjective participatory underlying dynamic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our friendship, you can feel that, all right? And that’s a foreshadowing for a couple of things down the road here in terms of what are the relational influence matrix and ultimately self kinds of notions. So I just wanna make that, so I’m loving that you’re, because I’m seeing you’re mirror, we’re getting mirror neuron action because as you get excited, I’m like, oh, that’s exactly where I am. Okay, so here’s our architecture, okay? So we get rid of, we have the top of proposition, but we get rid of that. We have the center here of, there’s this adjectival, and I can put a word here, gestalt, that I wanna come back to, okay? Adjectival, gestalt, and adverbial quality, witness, okay? And then we have this idea about valence of the base. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So now here’s the story that I wanna tell you about and see how this resonates with exactly what you were saying, okay? So base sentience, but not full phenomenological consciousness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my son, John, my wife was a, hey, my son, John. My wife was a soccer coach, coaching him. He was, I think, nine at the time playing. He fell awkwardly, okay, and fell down. My wife, hey, are you okay? Turns around and his arm is completely, completely vertical, you know, off key in a horrible way. So that’s like, ah, you know, the whole system. So we got re-raced there, eventually get called and we’re over there, I arrive, you know, everybody’s a little freaked out, but he’s calmed down. But it’s a nasty break, okay? And they’re gonna then try to set it, okay? So the ER then is gonna set the bone. But thankfully, we live in a modern day, not in a hundred years ago, that would have been. So what do they do? They anesthetize them, okay? So they’re gonna give him anesthetize. And we were just standing there and the ER people were like, well, you may wanna leave the room. And I was like, why? And they were like, well, the body reacts. Right. Okay? Yeah. And we said, well, we don’t wanna leave, we just can’t leave our son, so we’re just gonna be here. Okay? So the next 15 minutes, they knock him out and then the doctors and they hold him down, okay? As the doctors move the arm around. Okay, so they knock him out and then, and what is the body doing? He is moaning and pulling the affordance, right? Well, the agony is embedded in his body, okay? Right, right. And so he’s moving around and wailing and moaning, right? And then they actually take some three times, they’re gonna have to do a slight surgery. It’s a stressful reality for this. But anyway, here’s the funny part or the hysterical part, my wife and I will always remember this. So, 20 minutes later or whatever he’s coming around and he goes from just starting to wake up to boom, he sits up and he goes, I’m alive. All right? So the idea here is that the adjectival, adverbial witnessing and justifying consciousness, the thing’s taken offline, but embedded in the embodied mental affordance, this hurts like hell at a embodied level, but we can disconnect it with anesthesia and turn the observing consciousness system off and then it comes back online. And so that connection between non-conscious, but still embodied pleasure pain kind of dynamic is brought to life with that story, I think. That’s cool, that’s very cool. So basically this idea is that there’s some sort of emergence shouting in the dark because it doesn’t have a witness function. And then you get over revolutionary time, you get the valence qualia become consolidated by adverbial qualia. Yeah, aspectualized, exactly, yeah. The elements associated, this is the witness function. Adjectival qualia experience qualitative properties of the aspectualized gestalt on the screen of attention. Right. Okay? And I use the word gestalt here because this is another area in which you and I are syncing up and it actually echoes a history in the problem of psychology between the structuralist and the gestaltist, okay? Which is the idea, the structuralist like Edward Tichenor coming off of the book, is the idea that, okay, there are all these parts that are the qualia are the base sensory elements, right? And that’s really what you, that somehow those things exist first and then they’re pieced together somehow and they grow and then they turn into it. And the gestalt said no way, okay? What’s actually happening is that you are, you see patterns and the whole pops and then if you introspect, you can say, yes, I see what green is, but you actually see the meadow and the green is some other thing. Yeah. Okay. So for me, and this is the question sort of I wanted to ask you is that as that witnessing function comes along and is aspectualizing, it then is pulling the top down bottom up processes together. Yeah, totally. And then essentially pulls the gestalt, the screen of consciousness gestalt up and it’s those elements that are adjectival. Yeah, I think in so far as we understand that gestalt and feature are relative terms like tall. Yes, absolutely. Right, so they gestalt, if you allow me to turn it into a verb, they gestalt up, right? Yes. But they are feature, they’re sort of feature or foundations for the like for conceptual content, propositional content. And that’s exactly, so there’s the upward looking face of adjectival qualia and the downward looking face of adverbial qualia. That’s how I’m seeing what you’re saying. Perfect, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And what I’m saying is then that is this bottom up, top down interface, okay, that can allow us to gain much more specificity on these domains. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. What we’re seeing is a progression of specification, right? You’ve got orientation and valence specified into aspects with adverbial and then it’s gonna get specified into proto-representational content, right? With the adjectival and then that gets specified into, well, justifiable truth claims. That’s what I’m seeing here going on. Exactly, exactly. And in fact, actually, what will then happen, what I would argue is that as this thing, okay, so now that these perspectival experience have an exterior, so these are, what comes in from the exterior, I see this tote can as outside, right? I can also feel the, I just ate, so I feel something in my stomach on the inside. And those intersections are also then, I can also feel, hey, I’m feeling joy. Good things are happening, so I feel the joy. So that’s the affect, okay? So that then creates the particular screen. Then I can run stimulations, imaginations on particular domains and now I get up into my creative imaginative, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now, but now to complete the thought of what you were saying is what I believe happens with the human is when we get really rich, shared attentional space, that’s gonna create a lot of texture in this domain, okay? A lot of rich self other texture and shared interspect, shared intersubjective space and we’ll be talking about that in a second, all right? And then what you have is you have figure ground relations, which then allow for the object to be then tagged as a noun. Right, okay. And then the change of object will tag over time and then the various differences in the properties is the adjectives, so you get nouns, adjectives and verbs that are then tagged, okay, in the symbol. So the perceptual field will have the object, the change and the property difference, which are nouns, verbs and adjectives as the fundamental units, okay? For propositional processing. Right, which while these are the symbolic elements and then we put them in syntax and then the syntax, once the symbol gets locked into self other syntax, then they have propositional meaning and then boom, we’re in the propositional world. That’s excellent. So I wanted to ask you about just that because like when you’re at that level of the intersubjective, you’re getting multi-perspective table, that’s affording metacognition, right? Dotsky kind of arguments, but I’m also thinking of like, because it seems to me that these two things merge together and so I wanted to ask you about that. So when I can start doing multi-perspective, that’s gonna afford counterfactuality, right? Because then I can consider other than I see it, which is I think the proto beginnings of counterfactuality. And then counterfactuality brings up, it could be other and then that brings up, the fact that it can be other is what you need in order for should. Should makes no sense. I mean, it’s the classic Kantian thing, right? Often implies can, right? You have to have a modal sense that it can be other or it could be other in order to bring in the should. So it sounds to me like this ability, the intersubjective stuff is gonna afford counterfactuality and that’s immediately gonna require something like justification in order to manage the relationship between how it is and how it could be. Am I sort of understanding that? Yes, although what I would say is is that there is a fundamental difference. So what’s happening when we get into sort of the influence matrix, which then is gonna set the stage for this self other relating, which is gonna set the stage for much better meta representation of possibility, which then sets the stage for counterfactual possible outcomes, okay? But these are all nonverbal simulations so at this juncture, okay? So the nonverbal simulation allows for a lot more creativity and a lot more potential thought that we see when we see animals act really intelligently. Like the Caledonian’s post making tools in one location and taking it to another. That requires counterfactual thought, that’s your point. Exactly, exactly. And I would guess or Kafka, the Wolfgang Kohler’s chimps are doing certain kinds of modeling at this level, all right? About then they put the boxes up and then they climb and they got a whole lot of insight, okay? So it’s clear in your mind that the counterfactual ability precedes sort of the, but it would also make possible sort of a justification requirement, right? Right, for me, there’s really two layers. So the counterfactual is when to be a simulator, once you open up intense stimulation and then you open up intersubjective simulation together, every time you’re opening up a space, you’re also opening up a negative, okay? So in other words, it’s a combinatorial explosion. So there is the requirement of creativity requires constraints. And I think of those constraints as the capacity of an animal to manipulate. Well, is it down this path or is it down this path? How do we judge that? And then it might not be down that path. Now they’re not saying that in propositional language, but they are stimulating it in frontal lobe space. Yeah, some sort of meta-perspectival ability. Some sort of right, meta-representational perspectival, exactly, okay? And I believe that the more fluidity that you would have is going to then also, if you then have additional working memory space for the opportunity for symbolic tagging of those cognitive gadgets and their potential, that’s then gonna set the stage for language acquisition device, okay? And then symbolic syntactic. And then I am very keen on once you get symbolic syntactical propositional, then there’s really concrete propositional assertions and questions which are concrete counterfactual potentials. Right, right, right, right, I see what you’re saying. And that’s, so it’s a layered, multi-layered system here of simulation. And then we’re guiding, but you cannot, I mean, my dog Benji really socially guided you, blah, blah, blah, and we have good relation. That was our bond deepens and all of this. But man, figuring out whether or not, what he really thinks and what’s justified at that level is a real task. Yeah. A real lock there. And I don’t know if I did this before, Bertrand Russell’s quote about, no matter how eloquently the dog barks, it can’t tell you that its parents were poor, but hardworking. Yeah. Right, right, that kind of thing. That kind of deal. So you can’t have any explanatory justification kind of moves made until you’ve got the full blow on syntactic language. So that’s the move that you’re adding. That’s the move. And I’ll share my friend, original mentor and our colleague was associate dean, I don’t think I shared it with you, I’ve mentioned a couple, sorry if it’s redundant. But his college invited Jane Goodall to give their commencement address and he happened to have lunch or dinner with her. And because he’s familiar with it, he was like getting all the rich mental lives of chimpanzees. And he asked her, he’s like, well, do they ever do anything like justify? And her answer was point blank, no. They would never be able to do that. I will say, I worked some with Sue Savage Rumbaugh, who worked with Bonobos. And she did believe, in fact, we almost went to the Great Ape Trust and worked on testing whether or not we could decode whether Kanzi or the other linguistically fluid apes, which have symbol, but whether they have propositional and whether you can get engaged in question answers. That’s very controversial. I think Brickerton’s right that they have proto-language. They don’t have syntactic language. Right, so we were in disagreement, she thought they could and I was like, and then we were thinking about experiments and then it got derailed for completely other reasons. But there you go, yes. For me, there is a hard line of propositional justification and that opens up an adjacent possible space over the last 50,000 years that explodes us into. No, I’m in agreement on how this argument unfolds. Yeah, so excellent. I also then, because you come back and you made such a very important point to me, see if this jives about what a pure consciousness event, it seems to me that this is an adverbial witness function where that specializes itself almost. Yeah, exactly. Right, okay, so it’s some perceived or perceived meditative loop and that closes in and sort of collapses into being itself. It’s really, I have never had that experience. And I was thinking about this and I think you might agree with this. It’s the adjectival qualia, I’m sorry, not the adjectival, the adverbial qualia almost getting back down to what you have with the valence where it’s just, you know it by being it. It’s a pure knowing by being kind of thing. Right, and I think that that opens people up when they talk about non-dual. I mean, where the perceiver and perceived are one in a particular kind of way. Exactly, exactly. It’s interesting though that, like I said, in addition, I hadn’t thought about this because I would talk about the aspectuality and centrality and how the hereness, the nonness and the togetherness are still in your conscious event. But so is valence because it’s experienced as overwhelmingly positive. Yep, okay, right. And you can then totally see how then you would then interpret that in a particular ontology as connecting to the cosmic consciousness. Yeah, yeah, something like that, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so, all right, well, I think we’re safe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Okay, so now what I can do, and then we’ll come back and we can then riff a little bit more, but this then potentially bridges us up to the next thing is because, and so now we have this adverbialagic tival and valence qualia, and now I just wanna emphasize there’s the backend of the energizing emotion, okay? So, behavior investment theory, law of effect, suggest a pleasure-paying parallel fitness principle, and I mean that both evolutionarily or phylogenetically and developmentally or ontogenetically. Right, right, right. So, and this then provides a potential grounding then for participatory dynamic feedback. Right. Okay, we are talked about valence qualia linking directly a concept of emotion defined as in the most base level of energized motion, or comparing energized motion. When we put it in behavioral investment terms, we then will see two broad axes of motivated emotional response set. Of course, the first is this valence of approach avoid, and the second, because the behavioral investment theory is always highlighting energy economics kinds of issues, becomes an active spend versus passive conserve dimension. Yep, yep, yep, very much. So that’s always the, that kind of view. That just maps into relevance realization just totally. Completely, and in terms of the logic of it gives rise to a very well-documented empirical reality about emotion, which is the circumplex model of emotion and road, okay, which is this thing whereby we have, if you do a two by two pleasure, pain, active, passive, you get an affective fear, okay, and if somebody works all the time with both anxiety and depression disorders, you’re gonna see that in terms of what happens to systems over time is they get into various attractor states. So an active fear that threat is emerging is what we call generalized anxiety when the entire system is feeding back on it. Fear and anxiety are a little different. Anxiety is more of the mood and it’s because it’s more cognitively diffused. Fear is more I know what the stimulus is that I wanna avoid, but they are cousins and the active pleasure, desire, okay, drive to desire. Passive pain, depression, this is my particular area of expertise is what is clinical depression, how you treat that, and the reverse is of the passive content. After you achieve goal, okay, orientation, you experience contentment. There’s actually a comment here then about an interesting point about, so feel a little charged. What is mania? Mania is really when you feel desire and goal attainment, instead of getting contentment and having a state reduction, it actually elevates you further and there’s no counterbalance. So you just basically have an epileptic fit of energized desire and you explode into mania. That’s not good. So we can see actually, and just in terms of understanding our own phenomenology, you can see the opposite of depression is desire in many ways. In fact, anhedonia, meaning the absence of interest and pleasure is a pull down of desire. And of course, the opposite of contentment of passive is fear. And so these allow you to kind of really, I say this in part because one of the things I know as a clinician is people are so confused about their feelings. Yes. They don’t know what they are, they don’t know what they do. We get taught that negative feelings are bad and negative feelings are just part of the system. They’re not bad in themselves. Right. There’s a huge set of literature on this particular way of thinking about mood and emotion. That’s called the circumplex. So we have now identified these valence elements with an energy economic view that creates an active passive and pleasure pain. And that’s super consistent with a lot of research in the area. So that’s nice for our assimilation integration. And now we’ll just set up the potential then this is a single animal model. I mean, we’re just the agent arena relationship. We have not talked, I mean, we’ve alluded but we haven’t really talked about the relational animal with the care of offspring. I’m using that intentionally. Hydro group. The intimate relational model of being is born. So obviously other animals are super key. You have to mate with them. You have to compete with them and all this others. And certainly it’s a world of other animal but it’s not relational. Really? It becomes relational and in particular, the mother offspring then sets the stage for a relational foundation. Right. And that’s then sets the stage for us to potentially talk about then the fourth branch on the tree is called the influence matrix. It’s a map of the human relationship system. And to make the connection, we have this model. And so now we’re talking about us as social primates. I often talk about as human beings as both primates and persons. Right. And we carry a social primate architecture like what the horse and rider or what John Haye talked about the elephant and rider. This is the core of the elephant. And the argument here is that there are motivations and emotions, which are the goal states that are going to them and the energizing states around that. And so that’s what we’re jumping off into but I want to just sort of stop there and see if there are things that you wanted to pick up with the qualia but I’m prepared to go into relational recursive relevance realization. I’m happy right now with, I mean, I think we had some nice expository insights on packing a little bit more of the valence qualia and that connection to the PCE, the pre-consensus event, I thought that was very fruitful. Now I’m happy about how things are unfolding. I’d like to go into the relational recursive relevance realization. Great. So this is an area, so again, sort of as a clinician, when people come and they talk to me about their problems, what do I hear over and over and over again is an angst about self, one’s relationship with the world, one’s relationship with others, traumas of the past. And what I’m almost always tracking is the head and the heart in the relational world. Right, right, right. So this is, that’s what then, and what I’m then gonna share with you is an aspect of a map, we’re gonna aspectualize a particular element of the relationship system. So while you’re doing that, I was just gonna foreshadow what you just said, of course, converges with a lot of the work from the meeting in life literature about these relationships mattering to others, so we take care of others, others care about us, also we care about our shared world, our cultural world. These are the relationships that are central to meeting in life. I just wanna, I know you’re in agreement with this, we’re not talking about stuff that’s just within the therapeutic context, it broadens into the whole project of meeting in life, and I’m doing that so that we can foreshadow how this will lead back into a discussion about how this all potentially links back into the meeting crisis. Well, John, you’re making, I actually feel that in my body because I’m actually struggling with my profession a little bit these days for a whole host of different reasons. I am even seriously considering giving up my license, and part of it has to do with, I’m convinced more than ever, and I love my discipline, so it’s a complicated relation, as we all have, right, with our home families, but I’m also frustrated with it in certain ways, and one of the things that I believe unbelievably deeply is that we need a wise translation of the wisdom of the therapy room out of the therapy room, meaning I’ve gotta get it out and into the psychotechnologies, into the schools, into the families, into your heart, and not cloistered in a professional relationship that has confidentiality wrapped all around it and all of that. I mean, obviously, there’s a place for that, of course. I’ve spent both my life to that, but so much of the wisdom now is getting professionalized, and it’s as though, so you even have to say, yeah, we’re not talking about a therapy relationship, we’re talking about life, we’re talking about brotherhood and sisterhood and being in community and being with self and at every level of being, and you know more than anyone how much potentially the scientific enterprise, at least in its reductive form, has essentially eviscerated our contact with this, and I really, really want to re-energize that and justify the metaphysics from a natural scientific view how clearly this is needed and valid at every level of being. Well, thank you for saying that, Greg, and I just wanna do some advertising on why it’s somewhat self-promotional, but it’s mostly on Greg’s behalf. So Chris, Mr. Pietro and I, Chris is gonna join us when we do the elusive I. We put together an anthology called Inner and Outer Dialogues, and there’s a chapter in there in which Greg develops very beautifully that argument he just gave us about the need to take what’s going on inside the therapeutic dialogue and expand it out so we have a sapiential, existential dialogue available to the culture at large. So for those of you who are interested in that point that Greg just made, there is a forthcoming book in which he has a chapter in which he makes that argument very clearly and eloquently. Great, thank you, John. Yes, and the book is, I’m super excited of every book that I’ve contributed to. I think I’m the most excited about this one. It’s so you laid it out. And by the way, the inner and outer dialogues, I know in DIA Logos we talk about both vertical alignment and horizontal alignment. Yep. Well, this system, what we’re about ready to, is really a way of mapping where the heart is in the intersubjective field, and then on top of that is the justifying system. Right, right. If we can harmonize our heart and our head in our relational world, that’s, boom, we’re a lot of the way there. And there’s so much in the world that actually, unfortunately, works against that. But if we tweak it right, and align it, actually, the colleague I already mentioned, my sociology colleague, so from a sociological perspective, where he’s talking, he’s working on a project now, a playoff of Steve Pinker, but from a sociological angle, called the Better Angles of Our Nature. Right, right, right. OK? And what he’s emphasizing is, yeah, how are we aligned or not? And of course, we’ve just gone through it. Of course, the world is, we’re going through this unbelievable election right here, right? This is live for us. And the clash of identity and social force, in a particular sort of, the ego investment in the clash, and then the shattering of that, potentially, for everybody’s psyche and health, as opposed to the potential harmony. I mean, there are a few things that are, in terms of mattering, and meaning, and how to be in the world, it’s really, really important. Well, we did entitle this, Untangling the World, Not the Hard Problems of Consciousness and Meaning, of Mind and Meaning. Amen. Yeah, and what I was seeing, how they bridge together, in your work and my work, together. Absolutely. Keep going, please. So OK, so now we’re looking to then sync up. We already linked the behavioral investment theory. And now we’re going to see about syncing up the SIMR3 with the influence matrix. Right, right, right. And given the jump into the valence qualia, we’re going to be in good shape, I believe. So what is the influence matrix? The fourth key idea in the unified theory of knowledge, it maps what’s called the human relationship system. I want to be clear over and over again, this will become clear. But this is the embodied participatory perspectival aspect. Now there’s clearly going to be loops of narrative self-concept. But all of this is present before any propositional narrative self-concept loop. There’s going to be a really key point. And I believe this is absolutely central for the meaning crisis and the shifts that we need. And this is the idea about what the core of this backbone is called relational value and social influence, the overlap and difference between these two. In fact, I think it was in your talk with Eric Brown, you actually quickly immediately highlighted this difference. And I think you were talking about your relationship with your partner because you made a very clear distinction between, well, there’s instrumental movement of other people. Like you can get them to do certain things. And then there’s actually really valuing them. I wouldn’t want to just learn how to manipulate my wife so that she does something. It’s a being and presence of value of who she is. It’s very much a perspectival presence and participatory identity that you’re after when you’re after loving somebody. Exactly. And what I’m going to argue is that we want social influence and we want to be known and valued in a particular way. And those things, interestingly, can be aligned or not aligned. Yes, very much. Kind of a Frommian idea, too. Yeah, well, right. And the question of how we align it and the ideas is that actually I believe our capitalist system and the capital labor relations make us very vulnerable to tipping into just instrumental influence and gutting relational value in certain ways. And if you do that, you’re going to feel empty. You might have a lot of power. You’re going to feel empty and hungry inside. And I think we actually see that. Yeah. So reverse is the case, too, though, right? Because Fromm, although he emphasizes the modal confusion at the expense of the being mode, he says the other is possible. You could have somebody, because I’ve met these people, the people who are all about caring and loving. And they’re just like, no. We had a phrase in the church I was growing up in, too heavenly minded to be any earthly good kind of thing. Right? Perfect. Yeah, I mean, to me, Dharma is a question of being and becoming and doing. I mean, and I think that I pulled that sum from Dan Schmackenberger, although I basically had that frame already, David Dharma inquiry. And doing, being, and becoming are all parts here. Another way of thinking about this is, you know, if you, I don’t know if you ever saw, what is it, Cast Away with Tom Hanks? Oh, I love that movie. Yeah, it’s a great movie. It’s perhaps my favorite Tom Hanks movie, actually. Well, wonderful. Well, he’s valued, of course. But of course, he has no direct contact because of the actual physical reality. He’s completely no social influence, right? There’s no actually concrete way of connecting to people. So he carries the value. But you know, so there are lots of different ways these things can be disconnected. Yeah, that’s good. But it’s also the case that they’re tied together. And both of them, we care deeply about. Yes. The Matrix, that’s the black line. And then the Matrix also is going to provide a way to understand three process dimensions of power, love, and freedom that I’ll talk about. And it also, and I’ve already alluded to this, clarifies the relationship between social motivations and emotions. It also opens up some interesting new possibilities. We’ve talked about our metaphysics. I believe that the idea of a relate, I’ll suggest a relational participatory inner subjective space might be really interesting. Yeah, we talk about that in, I think you, the collective we space is the term that opens up. And it has this interesting phenomenology associated with it too. It’s also in the inner outer dialogues books. Yeah. Greg, before you go on, I wanted to ask, is this the place, I might be wrong. Is this the place where we see the emotion, because this, you know, I’ve been doing work on this, on the work I’ve been doing on the nature and function of the self. Is it this interaction between social motivation and emotions where we get the emergence of what are called the social emotions? Pride and shame and things like that. Exactly, exactly. Now there’s debate and I think some people, they’ll say that pride, shame, the Juntaigne and others will talk about these as being self-conscious emotion and you’ll need certain kinds of self-consciousness. We can get into the fine-grained analysis about what’s, I’m gonna argue that a non-propositional chimpanzee can feel shame and pride. Yeah, I think so too. I’m pretty convinced of that as well. And that’s because, and we can get into this and what the self is, there’s a phenomenological self here that’s gonna become pretty sophisticated as it manages self-other relation, even though it doesn’t have narrative justification. Right, well, especially if it has that stuff you were talking about earlier, that ability for meta-perspectival, kind of fact quality, right? Totally, okay. So here’s the, but now to really bring you and I in the room together, okay. So here’s, of course, we did all of our stuff completely independently and met each other, whatever it was, right? But we’re climbing up a mountain. You reached out to me and thank God you did. Yeah, absolutely. Cause I listened to you on a merge. I was talking about that. Yeah, and then that got me into the meeting crisis and then I was like, brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much, very much. Right, so here’s the basic issue, right? We have an idea that the cognitive architecture is structured for recursive relevance realization. Yep, very much, very much. Now we’re gonna enter into the relational world, okay? And now I’m gonna then say, well, what I did with the influence matrix is build a schematic for the way in which you would process relevant relational information. Right, right, right, right. Okay, and then it should be recursive across interpsychically, meaning I’m gonna build internal working models, I’m gonna be very, and then we’re also gonna be engaged in participatory dance stuff dynamically. So we’re gonna get a relational recursive element between people. Right, right, right, that’s cool. So this issue of does this thing map that and vice versa? Are they in harmony with one another in the relational world? That’s our question. Right, right, right. And that is completely convergent and independent and to the extent that it’s a lock key match and this does then say, oh, these would be the kind of features that a social primate should be tracking in the world to develop, to realize relevance in the relational world. Right, that’s excellent. Okay, so now we start with the black line here, okay? And the black line basically says, it’s relational value, social influence, and we can differentiate the two, but for right now we’ll collapse them. And indeed in my, I came from an evolutionary view, I used to just call it social influence, and then it became relational value and social influence, which actually as we’ve talked about is a big difference, but it’s an important and interesting nuance and how my own evolution thinking, I think hopefully maybe we can sort of spread that so that we can all, so we can go from sort of modernist social influence to a meta-modern relational value world view. Right. So relational value is the experience of being known and valued by important others. Right. So note you can be valued, but not necessarily known. Right, right. And actually I work with this clinically all the time, people are valued, but they feel like imposters. Ah, I see what you mean. Right, and that’s, well that’s interesting because that’s also where the perspectival sense of presence at the phenomenological level is being manipulated. Right, right. Right, well, and this by the way, is I think a uniquely human problem, okay? And this is actually, this comes, this distinction between known and valued, right? And I will come because of the problem of justification and the way in which language opens up a highway to us. Right, and then like. Which sets the stage for me to justify to you, I will put on a face and I will tell you what I am as I hide what I really am. Yeah. Okay, and become an imposter so that I get you to love me and get social influence even as I hide from you what my real self is about. That’s what I call the public-private Rogerian filter and I’m doing it to manage your judgment. Yeah, you’re not gonna find any gazelles that are sort of problematic. Nobody knows me. Right, I mean, now there it is. Because they don’t have to justify themselves and give accounts for the stage and manage all of that stuff. It’s just a totally new. So they care whether they’re valued and I will argue that our whole attachment system when we’re born is tracking social influence and value. But it’s not, it’s known and valued are essentially the same until you start to get self-consciousness and justification. Yeah, I see that. That’s a good point. That’s very good. And then social influence is this pragmatic capacity to move others in accordance with your influence. Okay, so and then the matrix says there are these motives. These are gonna be these templates to approach and avoid and then they’re gonna be emotions, which energize and then you’re gonna then see that the high is gonna then energize one way or the other. Right. And then we can sort of test this phenomenologically and the test I have my students go through is sort of, well, all right, it should be the case that we’re tracking relevant realized emotionally charged information that will be remembered in our episodic memory that’s key to self. That’s right. So audience, you can do this a little bit. So I asked folks, go back to your adolescence, okay? And then pick out one memory that you associate with joy, okay? And a positive memory for you. And then pick out one memory that’s really sad, okay? Negative, that was painful for you. Right. Okay, so I’ll share with you mine. These are the classic ones when I do this exercise. Okay. So for me, when I was 12, all right, my dad was a soccer coach, okay? And we were a really good team for three years and our arch rival was Man Tua to this day, I remember it. And this was the second year, we won the trophy the year before. We were in a battle with them, we’re head one, nothing, I’m the goalie, okay? They come bursting down, there’s five minutes left to go. They shoot, I dive, bounce it out, great save. They shoot again, I go race to the other side, save it and the crowd, 20 people go crazy. Right, okay. And I look over at my dad and I get the eye to eye contact with my coach and him saying this and now I’ve achieved something that people see in me, right? Yeah. And then to this day, I still get cellular activation when I have that, you know, my little, this is a highlight of my sports career, John, but there it is. Okay, so okay, so there’s that. Now the other memory that I have, okay, fast forward four years or so, 16, I did not have a good judge on my mate value criteria when I was 16, so I was always overshooting. So that set me up for some pain. So this one girl, Christine, was like the head of the cheerleading squad, all right? So at break, I had developed, I had talked to her and I thought maybe we’d go out on a date, so I pulled together a rose, all right, and a note and I said, hey Christine, will you have dinner with me? And then during break, which is second and third periods, I didn’t know her very well, I gave her the bag and ran off, right? So then fast forward to lunch, all right? And I get there a little early and I sit down and two tables over are the cheerleaders, okay? And in the middle of the group is guess what? My rose and bag, okay? And everybody’s laughing. Oh. Yeah. So there you go, you see you’re an empathetic character, you can feel exactly that this isn’t my positive memory. So as you’re 16 year old, but your buddies aren’t there, every, the space is between you, two tables down and the entire system is looking at you going and you are just naked and embarrassed, right? Right. And I was, yeah, I would say it was like, oh. Yeah, so there it is. So what, you know, relational value, social influence, that’s sort of the archetype, okay? Right. And so that’s the invitation folks is, you know, when did you fall, you know, what do you remember? You’re gonna remember achievement that people recognize, you’re gonna remember falling in love, you’re gonna remember heartbreaks, you’re gonna remember embarrassment, you’re gonna remember betrayal, generally, trauma, okay? And the argument is that over and over again, and I certainly find this, I certainly see it clinically, is that over and over again, there are these very powerful self other relations, right? That speak to one’s relational value and social influence and they really get then seared into the consciousness and become core templates of one’s worth or not and how others will see and experience it. It goes towards the sort of the felt evaluative sense of the self to some significant degree. Totally, totally. Which, you know, and then the how we regulate that, okay? That there’s a broken trauma, a trust when it’s injured, and then how we try to protect against that, defend. Yeah. So much of the ego, it’s then really concerned, we’re trying to avoid that, protect that, justify why that’s not gonna happen. Like doesn’t deserve to happen. So that’s the, and the whole point of it is, this is all relevance realization stuff, obviously, right? Very much, very much, yeah. It’s like, what am I gonna pay attention to? And then what’s the, what’s the valence quality of? What am I as spectralizing and what does it mean? And now as a higher order primate, I’m like, what does it mean about me? I guess I’m not very datable. Right, right, right, right. It worked out okay, my high school sweetheart, actually two years later, we’re still married today. So the story ends happy. Good, good, good. Good, thanks for the happy ending. Still some neurotic insecurities, but welcome to humanity, right? Okay, so now, so that’s the core, okay? And now there’s these three relational process dimensions. I’m very key to emphasize the term process, which basically means I’m gonna track the self other relational frame. Right, right. And the process by which we’re positioning ourselves. Yeah, right. And I make a note, like we talk about process all the time, it’s the how of the relational exchange and the relative positions. And that’s gonna be very different than content. As I say, sex and the movies and doing laundry are not on the matrix. Right, right, right. But whether or not you’re really enjoying sex or fighting over sex or doing the laundry together or fighting over it, that’s gonna be, the process dimensions are what, and it is those process dimensions that are relatively invariant, meaning everywhere you go in the dynamic participatory world, these are the variables, okay? These are the social space matrices that allow you to constrain and frame the self in relation to other. Right, the universal process, exactly. Okay, and so one of them is power. And we’re gonna see it’s indirect and indirect, ranking competition. One’s love, so red line, and then freedom, avoiding obligation and being controlled. These are the basic descriptions of them. If we then put them on the matrix, the first, or could be on any, then see power ranked this way. So this is the, we can think about this as relative rank status control, defined by the poles of dominance and submission, a sense of being vertical in relation. And in fact, actually people, we now know actually the way people think about social, they actually are co-opting the space system, the three-dimensional space system through the relational system. And that’s really interesting. Yep, and also the perspectival, because it maps up to construal level. People talk about construal level, the same thing, right? Yep, 100%. We can think about this also in direct and indirect terms, indirect is zero sum, like somebody has power and doesn’t, like a boss, or, and then indirect is your, hey, I have a Ferrari, look at me, I got these great GRE scores, those are, don’t necessarily translate, but they signal indirect status from where. Right. Then we go to the second domain, and then that’s the love axis. Cooperative influence, influence via altruism and affiliation. There’s gonna be different classes of this, and then the positive side here of affiliation, kin, friend, partner, there’s also moral care, like I really care about anybody that’s getting injured, there’s an interesting, what gives rise to that. So what is affiliation? Affiliation is a process of internalizing the other’s interests and joining with them, okay? So you can see this, like when my son was injured, I felt pain. Yep. Just seeing him in pain, to this day, it’s like, oh my God, I wanna hold you and protect you. And so that’s, it’s like I’m in pain. And those are, so that’s affiliation and identity. In fact, there’s actually good brain evidence that’s really sort of, it creates static between you and the other, so that you really do have this blended feeling. Yep, very much, very much. Hostility is actually just basically the reverse. You separate interests, that’s the other, that’s definitely not like me, and then I’m gonna be antagonistically positioned because that person’s gonna be in the way of my interests. There’s something that’s in the way, and that will energize me to potentially spend energy to harm them, okay? You may have rage is the more active, and then contempt is a little bit more conservative, disgust, I’m just gonna move away, okay? But rage and contempt are gonna be the extremes of these. So then the last dimension here is called freedom. It’s really an autonomy dependency access. Autonomy is the capacity to function independent and be free from the undue influence of others, okay? Dependency is the extent to which one requires others to function effectively. I think it’s helpful to divide this up a little further into the following depiction here that has autonomy and interdependency, as the balance between those is healthy and it’s gonna be associated with high relational value, social influence, because we are social creatures that are embedded, so we need it. And then the extremes of that are what’s called counter and hyperdependency. Oh, I see. In terms of, and those are indications, gonna be indications of more low influence. We’re also gonna see if we look at this through the lens of the attachment literature, we’re going to see very clearly the domain of the insecure, which a counter-dependent avoidant would actually, Bowlby originally calls counter-dependency, which I wish we had said, and then the ambivalent, which we originally calls hyperdependency. Right, right, right. And we’re gonna stay with those. Or disorganized, which is bouncing back and forth, which is things are so crazy. Okay, that’s, yeah, that’s lack of optimism. And secure attachment, when you have a safe haven, when you connect to other people, you feel valued in getting those needs met, because there’s a nice balance, usually between your capacity to competition and love, autonomy and interdependency, or you’re able to keep the constraints in the domain of feeling known and valued and having social influence. So it then maps, we can then map the self-other relations in social space this way. Okay, so this is the basic domain. And now we add the emotions on the outer ring. Right. Right, so we already did that. And then one of the things about this is that it orients us. I see this clinically all the time. There’s a now difference between other oriented strategies. Okay, so now I can basically, hey, am I gonna attend to you? And I put you first. And what that means, I’m gonna reward you or punish me. Right. And I’ll have feelings of shame, guilt and love. Right, right. Or I’ll be self-oriented, all right, reward self, punish other, have hate, anger, should come pried up right there. So this is an archetypal in personality theory, agency versus communion. This issue of whether you’re selfish or other oriented is a ubiquitous element. In fact, Theodore Milan argues in terms of the fundamental sort of energies and prototypes. You got pleasure pain, active passive, and then a self other dialectic. Right, right. That’s really foundational. And so I can tell you clinically that you see that very knowing instantaneously whether you’re dealing with self, other, disorganized is something you pick up on real quick in the clinic. So the last thing that I’ll do, and then we’ll come up and see where to go, is I’m gonna put this then in the context of some of the things that we were talking about before about where are we. There’s of course the metaphysical. Yeah. And there’s the meta theoretical element, okay, which we can now add the matrix to sort of like, okay, so meta theoretical. Right. I’m gonna come back to the metaphysical, that’s where we can end. But now if we do, where is the influence matrix on the unified theory of psychology? It fits really in between behavioral investment theory in the sense that that delays the groundwork and the architecture, then you have the social system. And then when we get to propositional knowing self-consciousness, it sort of fits in many ways in between the two. Right, right, right. This is a very platonic model in some ways. Yeah, no, it’s certainly, I’ve been more platonic lately. I was 90% Aristotle a while ago, and now I’m like, I don’t even know. So it’s grounding just in terms of giving honor to the tradition, it’s grounded in what’s called the circumplex model, interpersonal circumplex model. Actually, Timothy Leary, the guy that did acid and all that good stuff. Before that, he was a professor at Harvard, developed the circumplex model, that’s where it has to. I didn’t know that, wow, thank you. Yeah, yeah, so, yep, he was a Harvard professor of personality and identified this. And by the way, if you know anything about like, Harry Stack Sullivan, so Harry Stack Sullivan, interpersonal models coming off of Freud, identifies power and love. And then Timothy Leary also pulls that and identifies dominance and nurturance. So if you know the legacy then into psychoanalytic, this goes back, by the way, into aggression and sex. The energy of aggression and sex gets translated socially into power and love, and then its personality world gets then identified in competition cooperation, so that’s an interesting lineage to connect. And the other is attachment theory. Yeah, we have been talking on and off about for sure. Exactly, okay. And once we have those two, there are actually a lot of other, just like we did with the whole SIM3R kind of model, you know, this is an simulative and integrative model for a wide variety of different perspectives. So another sort of psychodynamic, Eric Erickson’s psychosocial developmental frame actually has ubiquitous themes of self in relationship to other. And this goes through the developmental life history model, so that you’re concerned with different things at different stages in your history. And I’m just flashing that up. The last thing then that I’ll say is it maps this interpsychic interpersonal self other social space time, it sets the stage for conception of an implicit intersubjective frame. And then this gives rise to this whole idea of mind to be. We remember we were doing one A’s, one B’s, those kinds of deals. So we have our basic map of the mind, then we add this idea of our capacity, we see the eyes of windows to the soul, what do people mean by that? For me, the idea is there’s this implicit intersubjective shared attentional space, intimate relational modeling. And of course, you know me, I like plays on words, so mind to be. And James Mark Baldwin said, ego and alter are born together, I love that phrase, and us as attachments. So the ground of self really is grounded in an attachment relational structure as it’s born, to meet those needs. One of my colleagues, Darsha Narvaez talks about the nest in which we need to cultivate development. And fundamentally, it’s about creating a secure, embedded, really cultivating our sort of oral indigenous heritage, should be sort of the community nest in which people are on. And then that’s gonna feel known and valued and that’s gonna lay a foundation of security, as opposed to well too often in our meaning mental health crisis, foundations of meaninglessness, insecurity, fragmentation, isolation, loneliness. That was great. That was really good, Greg. Thank you for taking us through that. I know you have a lot more behind all of this. Everybody should know that what we’re seeing here is, is, you know, Greg has this, and he’s doing massive data compression for us here, but I found that very clear, very elegant. Your capacity for systematization is really, really impressive. So I like, well, you know, I’ve been commenting all the way through and making connections, but I think that’s fantastic. And I think, yeah, I think the connections between, you know, taking relevance realization up into relational relevance realization, I think that’s gonna be so important as when we do the elusive I and we talk, and you already were alluding to it, the emergence of the self and what does that mean, and whether or not the self actually, if the self is socially constructed, it is only socially attributed, it is just an illusion. Those are sort of the philosophical questions, and then what are these functions? One place where, one area that I’m doing a lot of work on, where the relational, social relational stuff and the cognitive stuff come together is in the function of what’s called self-relevance, right? And how that’s the glue of the self, and that, I think that will really even tighten the connections of relevance realization and relational relevance realization. We’ve got a lot more to do, but- A lot more to do, right, when you’re doing self, you know, sort of one of the, in the cognitive science world that echoes like the cocktail party phenomenon, right? You know, it’s like you’re, all of a sudden you hear your name, Greg, and it’s like, oh, hey, are they talking about me, right? Yeah, but that’s one of the early, yeah, and notice how that has an effect on attention and salience, right, and a lot, and even orientation, right? And, right, and all that stuff. So, yeah, so, oh, rich and juicy, juicy. And then, of course, you know, the connections between self and consciousness in self-consciousness, self-consciousness came up repeatedly, so there’s a lot more we’re gonna get to unpack, and when Chris is here, he’s gonna want to riff on you a lot on the KUKA Guardian stuff about self and other, ah, I’m just really looking forward to the next series. But, yeah, I gotta stop that. That’s one of my upsetting things. I gotta finish the project I’m in, which is, so what’s in store for us next time, Greg? So, well, let me just say that, you know, the prepping this and thinking, the idea of recursive relevance realization, okay, has so fine-tuned, it just takes out, like, this little diamond lens for me, okay, and pulls out this sort of schematic that I have, but allows it to be so much more elegantly refined, especially on the social cognitive side, so remember, I’m on the emotion motivation side, mostly, okay, and I think people should understand that there’s a cognitive line of understanding, that’s why we split off cognitive, and of course, the mental is really, you know, there are differences, but, so anyway, I just want you to know that the social perception, the cognitive processing line, elegance of the recursive relevance realization to then go through the architecture of that, it’s brought the influence matrix into life to me in the last week in a way that I just feel thankful for, because it’s, I mean, that’s an old system in mind, but it actually is honing in some specificities around niche details that I didn’t have access to before, so that’s what I mean by the synergy is intense sometimes. Yeah, yeah, great, great. So the next, so basically we’ll sort of round out, what I’m seeing now is sort of, okay, so now the lock and key function between our systems, really, I hope, certainly for me, and maybe the audience is feeling, we’ll put a top on this at the person level, okay? We’re gonna bring propositional personhood into the equation, right, and then once we have that, then we’ll have sort of the model of human psychology that I operate from, okay, and I think that’ll be then right around the whole recursive relevance realization, and that’s really gonna set the stage for, well, where are we in terms of the meaning crisis? Yep, yep. And why is this so important? My argument, I think your argument also, is that a modern scientific revolution, although it ultimately gives us cognitive science and psychology, it’s taken us a long time to get adequate models. Yeah, probably. And I think it’s gutted us in many ways, and I think that so now, ultimately, if we can sit here and say, actually, we should not be just manipulating people as objects, because all they are are reinforcement agencies, but they actually have a fundamental soul at the descriptive level of a functional form, and to be both in value to central, of course, obviously, some humanists are saying that for a long time, but we have a frame for that. I think that that’s very, very important for answering core questions, creating dialogos, and cultivating the kind of wisdom awakening that we’re open for. That’s fantastic. Well, that’s a great place to end today. That’s excellent. So thank you so very much, my friend, and well, we’ll be together again. I’m sure you’ll be texting me throughout the week, which is great. Sorry about that, you know, I got all excited. Why are you apologizing? We were working together. I mean, it’s like, it’s great. So, but that’s it for today, everyone. And as Greg foreshadowed, we’ve got some really interesting stuff coming to finish this series off. And we will have one final episode where we sort of call through. We can’t answer everybody’s for obvious reason. We’ll look through the questions, we’ll look through the comments, we’ll come up with some potential responses. Or if we don’t have a response, we’ll at least enter into dialogue about it. And then, like I said, Greg and Chris and I are gonna do a follow-up, in some ways, a follow-up series on the elusivai, the nature and function of the self. And we’re gonna get into really weird stuff in the altered states of consciousness stuff, why that might impact on the sense of self. Greg and I might talk a little bit within Untangling the World. Not about why altering your state of consciousness might have an impact on meaning. Greg and I, we’ve done, I think, was it two, Greg? Or two Psychology Today blogs on the 11th problem of consciousness. And we might wanna discuss that because we’re getting to the place where that’s appropriate. So it’s, ah, ah, ah. We’re gonna get an optimal grip on all this, Jen. Right? Yeah.