https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XCy6OZ7prB0
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. We’re getting close to the end, and my companion on this wonderful journey, and he’s gonna go right through to the end with me, and I hope that doesn’t sound ominous, is my good friend, Greg Enriquez. Where are you taking me, John? And so Greg is gonna, again, take the lead today, and I’ll try and act as his dialogic interlocutor. And both Greg and I have pointed out periodically, and now that we’re coming near the end, I want to also point out the fact that it’s not just the content we’re trying to demonstrate here. Obviously, Greg and I have huge theoretical concerns that we’re trying to bring to bear, but we have been trying to exemplify a way of exploring these issues, especially issues that are not merely theoretical or scientific, but that have an existential import in this more dialogical format where we’re seeking genuine mutual insight. You guys saw that in a previous discussion between us, between us, something emerged, very powerful, the power of distributed cognition, which Greg is gonna just take us into the depths of today. And so this dialogical process of the co-emergence of insight and the convergence of independent thought towards a mutually affording plausibility, we’re trying to exemplify that as well. And so in that spirit of friendship and fellowship, I turn things over to you, Greg. Well, that’s a wonderful segue because essentially a lot of what I’ll be arguing is that this emergence of dialogue set the stage for transforming us from primates into persons. Right, right. And so I’ve, and I’ve loved being a person with you, John, in this journey. Yeah, thank you. I agree, I agree. And I think we’ll see, as we try to reinvent dialogos in the 21st century, I think we’ll see, and this sort of set us up as we bring this series to a close, what is the self, what is society? Right. This bridging, of course, we’ve been talking about consciousness in a particular way, cognition and consciousness, and now we’re sort of bringing in the self and society and personhood. Yeah. And so this is, and this will launch us to our next series and set us up and link back to the meaning crisis in a very, very direct way. That’s well said. So Greg and I and Christopher Mastapietro, who some of you might know, are going to take up this question about the nature and function of the self in our next series called The Elusive Eye. And we’ve got part of what we need to talk about the self in depth, because the self-consciousness, right, and also participation in, well, what I think Greg appropriately calls justification systems and processes, right, the self touches and bridges between those in some profound and important way that, of course, is directly relevant to awakening from the meaning crisis, because to the degree to which we leave the self untransformed, and then, you know, this is a point that goes back very long way, but the degree to which we leave the self untransformed is the degree to which I think we’re incapable of awakening from the meaning crisis. So we’ve got a lot here, and I’m excited. So I’m gonna stop talking, so Greg can start talking. Beautiful, all right, so here we go. I’m gonna go ahead and share screen. Greg, everybody loves your slides. Man, your comments are great. Wonderful, love to hear that. Good to be affirmed as we continue onward. So I’m talking today about justification systems theory. And by the way, this idea really was unbelievably transformative for me. The seeds of this idea come before the tree of knowledge system, which I’ve talked about, and in 1996, this is the seeds of this idea. And we’re gonna frame it as a theory of propositional knowing, it’s gonna, and self-consciousness, and the culture, person, plane of existence as we’ve already been touching on. I just wanna say something here for everyone, because Greg is very modest. There’s a lot of work going on right now about just this and the inherent nature of distributed cognition and how reasoning is often done in groups and should be done in groups. And Greg has clear precedent on this. He was publishing on this before a lot of other people, and I just wanted to take the time to acknowledge that Greg needs, no, he doesn’t need, he’s not psychologically dependent. We need, we need to more acknowledge what Greg has done and the precedent he had in this kind of work. So he’s not gonna say that because he’s a nice guy and he’s modest, but I’m gonna say that. He deserves to be given more credit for opening this up and developing it to the degree that he has. Beautiful, well, thank you so much, John. We couldn’t have planned that better, because what I wanna do is I wanna reflect on the concept of justification systems, and you just laid one out. Right, right, yeah. Right? Okay, and part of the idea here is that this system is everywhere. And indeed, the actual idea emerged for me as I encountered, I was thinking about this, so I’m a clinician, okay? Right. So I’m learning to become, what do we do? People come in and I say, hey, what brings you in today? And that essentially opens the door to their justification narrative. Right, right. And so now all of a sudden their story, the justification idea actually comes with a client where the exception proves the rule. Basically, the idea generally is that people should be biased toward the self. Of course, clinically, we know there are some examples, people are really depressed with what’s called avoidant personality or major depressive disorders. These are all people that really turn against the self and think of themselves as weak, ineffectual, ugly, et cetera. So why would that be? The actual birth of the idea comes with me working with a psychiatric patient who I had to do an evaluation on. And she had all of these characteristics. She had what’s called avoidant personality disorder, a real sense of inferiority, a social anxiety, a deep sort of depressive realism or even worse, thought she was ugly when she was fairly attractive, thought she was stupid when she was above average. So how does that happen? And so these are these exceptions, because the idea is it should be most of the people are trying to bias themselves. Well, her story, I was in University of Vermont doing my doctoral training. She lived in rural Vermont, had an alcoholic father, a timid mother. And one of her father had died about six months earlier and she then had made a suicide attempt. Oh. I was getting her history. She’d been hospitalized. I’m getting her history and I’m getting the backstory of her development. And she had an older brother. She was never physically abused by her father, but as her older brother turned into adolescence, he became more defiant and he started beating the crap out of the older brother. Oh. And she had a distinct memory of him getting the crap beaten out of him and his father saying, why can’t you be more like your obedient sister? Oh. Okay. All right. So here she sees a 12, 13 year old boy, she’s seven or eight, getting beaten, literally. And she hears this as an image. Now let’s think about her. If we want to say, oh gosh, assert yourself, stand up, protect yourself, you have every right. And you live in that kind of environment, guess what’s actually probably gonna happen? You’re gonna get beaten. And people may have heard of Stockholm syndrome where people often, they internalize the value of their hostage takers. Right. Right. And they then see this whole thing makes sense. Well, let’s think about that from a functional social influence view. Essentially, what that means is you’re waving the white flag of submission. I’m lesser, I’m unavailable, I will not challenge you. I don’t deserve, I deserve your punishment. Right. And what that basically, if you internalize that critic, then you’re preempting potentially much more dangerous conflict. Right. Okay. So we could place her learning, her turning against the self as a form of submission that actually did legitimize a social influence justification strategy, okay, that given her available options, actually did maximize her social influence in a particular kind of way. Right. In the sense that it avoided her father beating her, okay? And then of course, once we know then once these things get internalized and they become habits and then they become relevance realization schema, right? Then they get entrapped and then they can reinforce themselves and do a whole bunch of other things. And I think we see in psychotherapy often, or not even more than often, almost always can see some functional adaptation pattern that has utility in one setting, and then it overgeneralizes and they get people trapped in reciprocal narrowing and that kind of process that traps them. So this is the story of where justification comes from is when I’m playing with this idea, seeing that most people have self-serving biases, but if you don’t, and then in the clinic context realize, oh gosh, there are actually pathways in which this inverted arrangement of self can make a lot of sense actually from this particular perspective. Right, right. So did that, I don’t know if, one thing that I’m hearing and I don’t know if that, like it strikes me that when, I mean, philosophers have been talking about justification for a very long time, and then the angle you’re bringing in here is there seems to be, given the nature of her age and the developmental position, like that we, that we’re never sort of, sorry, that’s too strong. We’re not at least primordially or initially justifying claims. We’re initially trying to justify our situation and the kind of person we are within that situation. Is that kind of the insight? That’s 100% correct, okay? And what I’m gonna argue is that the pragmatics, the social, psychological, or social, personal, and analytic pragmatics of justification emerge long before philosophers come on the scene, like Socrates, and I argue basically Socrates discovered or certainly exemplified formal epistemology, the problem of justification, and realized that actually, I mean, what does Socrates realize other than, or actually a lot of us are just BSers, right? He becomes wise because he deconstructs that all of this is essentially a pragmatic social construction process, okay? So what he sees is that we do it for social rationalization purposes. What is real, authentic, epistemologically sound justification. We essentially discover in the emergence of culture, and then philosophers have been hunting that for a long time. And that’s a really important linkage because what it means is that there’s a side of justification that is this sort of pragmatic social, very similar to Freudian rationalization. Right, right, right. And then at the same time, there’s a side of it that goes into the analytic philosophy, which is the deepest questions of, is this knowledge legitimate? Is it epistemologically justifiable, and how do we know that? So justification is a continuum, and it bridges the social rationalization dynamics and the philosophical dynamics of legitimizing knowledge claims. So in that sense, is it fair to say it’s sort of the shared origin and ground of rationalization and reason? Is that okay? Yes, yes, exactly, exactly, 100%. So we’re gonna argue that it’s also the essence of persons behaving in culture. Culture is a capital C. I wanna be clear that although animal lovers out there will say, hey, don’t other animals have culture? Absolutely, if you define it in terms of sort of the flavor of that group, if you turn them, certainly learn practices, but the nature of human culture and the nature of narrative proposition, it does change things quite dramatically. Right. When you get there. And the first thing I wanna do for us is I wanna locate justification in our journey in untangling the world knot. Right, right. So that folks can travel with us in terms of where we’ve been. Now, in terms of before I got to you, and still, I mean, justification is part of the tree of knowledge, it’s this joint point between mind, which is beneath this and that sort of mind-brain behavior, and then the emergence of the theory of culture. That, by the way, includes science, and this connects to our point we were just making is philosophy is gonna give us formal epistemology, and then modern science is gonna connect that to empirical, quantitative epistemology, which of course brings us back to some of the discussions we’ve been having at the opening of this in terms of how to make sense out of the world. It’s a reverse engineering hypothesis about the evolution of self-consciousness and reason giving. Right. And it gives rise to an updated tripartite model, that’s a reference to Freud. And to Plato. And to Plato, you keep reminding me of that. That’s right, that’s my, remember I’m Aristotle, but I’m getting convicted. Conversion is happening. Maybe his mentor knew something after all. Right, and so that we have these different domains in us. And so we’re gonna be talking then about exactly what those are, and also the dynamic interrelation between them. But in relationship to our journey, of course we now, we have SIM 3R organizing us. We’re gonna backdrop that with the TOK, which is a theory of science and reality, important to make that distinction. And we’ve lined up our four Ps with the map of mind so that you and I are syncing up on the metaphysical picture. Then there’s the meta theory, which is the intersection of assimilation of integration. And you have brilliantly walked us through a meta theory of cognition, intelligence, consciousness with SIM R3. And I can’t tell you how much everywhere I look, I just see relevance realization. You’re all in my head. And we mentioned how sort of the base from a TOK perspective, behavioral investment theory, and I think we saw that coming from the base in our shared joint distributed collective cognition around, oh my God, is there valence qualia that’s embodied? And then, oh, that helps explain that verbal and adjectival qualia, and the emergence of that. Over this past week, since I’ve been talking about the influence matrix, this idea of relational recursive relevance realization, and getting metabolized through the process, that has sharpened my analysis of this architecture for myself in a very, very pristine way. So thank you for that. And it’s just been, yeah, it’s been really, really fascinating and interesting for my own edification of, and when somebody else’s concept deepens your own concept, not only aligns with it, but deepens it, that’s very, very telling. Well, I wanna say something, not in reverse, but in relation, resonant. So I’ve always argued from the beginning, and I did it in this series, that relevance realization is not cold calculation. It’s always affect and arousal, and the commitment of very precious attentional resources, of temporal resources. So it’s always deeply affectively latent, and therefore there is no deep distinction between sort of problem solving and emotion. But what you’ve done is, first of all, you’ve explicated that and articulated it, and then you’ve also articulated it in a way that bridges up into distributed cognition, which I think is very, very powerful indeed. Because I hadn’t paid enough attention, just recently I had, and that’s why I asked you last time, I hadn’t paid enough attention to how, I hope this was the right adjective, Greg, how social emotions are, right? And the thing that you’ve been doing with the influence, just like, oh right, now I see it, I see it. I see that the affect that is inherent, even in the lizard’s relevance realization, gets carried up into emotions that have, as you articulated it so clearly, this inherent social location and existence. I thought that was brilliant and beautiful. Thank you, fantastic. I think it is absolutely essential for the relevance of the meaning crisis. Because one of the things I think we did with the capital labor relations, is I think we emphasize social influence, not enough relational value. And one of the things that we can tweak then, is if we can trade a commons in a society where people are known and valued rather than just used, right, that’s gonna be, so, and that will be affectively fulfilling, and it will be, the socio-emotional entire context in which people are raised and developed would be different. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I think meaning in life, one of the most predominant factors, and this comes right in from your matrix, is mattering, which is, right, right, just making that socio-emotional cognitive impact on others, is just central to meaning in life. Absolutely, and what we will be able to see today, I think with more clarity, is A, first off, how the primate system serves as a fundamental base for our propositional system, and I think we both would agree that one of the things that Western enlightenment does through philosophy and then into science is essentially over-exaggerates the epistemological power of propositional knowing and disconnects it from our procedural perspectival participatory. Totally, totally. Right, okay, so if the engine of all of this, and certainly Ian McGilchrist talks a lot about this also, the engine of all of this is about coordinating our phenomenological grip in relationship to the world and relationship to others, right, we’re gonna need to understand what that relationship is, and very much now we need to then place the propositional knowing system on top of this guiding relevance-realized intuitive perspectival participatory relationally participatory relevance realization system, and so now we’re putting then the layer on top of this, this justification systems theory of propositional knowing. Excellent, beautiful, beautiful. So now we can say, oh, this is the, in terms of what is untangling the world not, well, you know, here we go, right, this is sort of like, Descartes did not have access to what, to this, you know, framed reference. Yeah, exactly. So there are three key ideas that make up justification systems theory. One, a theory of propositional knowing that emerges with the evolution of language into its propositions, and I’ll explain that, and that gives rise to the problem of justification. Right, right. The problem of justification that enables a reverse engineering frame, I’ll be sure to explain exactly what we mean by reverse engineering. Please. We’ve already been talking about that in relationship to the, but I think, especially if anybody says, oh, evolutionary psychology is just so storytelling, actually, as long as you have a good match between the reverse engineering specificity of the problem, and you can then make predictions about dynamic relations in real time here, which I think this does, you can get a lot of confidence in that match. Good, good argument, good point. And then it gives rise to an updated tripartite model that as a clinician, I will invite us to take a look at, this is what I see all the time, and then once you have a lens for it, you really can’t see, you see it in your home and yourself, and everywhere. Right, right, right. It’s a little crazy making, sorry, but ultimately it will help for metacognitive wisdom. Everything that has psychology in it should have a warning label about self-diagnosis. Right, no, you get into trouble some, okay? But this will be ultimately a guide, and then we’ll, then we’re really, and you and I, I’ve just thrown a few things out there. This is such a big topic, especially this last one really gets into, so you and I can just banter around, and I wanna make a few points just in relation. Okay. So the first thing is, just provides a clear evolutionary framework for the origins of human consciousness in capital C culture. Right. It does this locking key thing, it maps human consciousness, and it gives rise to a picture of the remarkable changes that we now call the Anthropocene over the last 50,000 years. The world changed as a function of this weird, you know, homo sapien mammal that appeared, and then all of a sudden changed the equation. And we have good records and many different analyses. Now exactly when the time happens is of course up for debate. When, you know, when really does the evolution of human culture take its place? But a lot of individuals refer to this as the mind’s big bang. Right. In relationship to geological time, it’s a very narrow band of time that all of a sudden sees an acceleration. And that took, yeah, go ahead. We’re talking about sort of the upper Paleolithic transition period. Exactly, exactly. Which is as an archaeological, the quality and nature of the kind of finds, so that by the time they’re finding, you know, cave art and tools that are happening, and then you go back 200,000 years and yeah, you just don’t see that kind of stuff at any level. So there’s a qualitative shift. And of course, then you can just mark with a lot of people, I think it was Richard Peels initially who called it, the acceleration of history. You basically see an increasing evolution of historical process. So that’s something that needs to be explained, like what happened and why, that’s exactly. And then justification systems theories posits that humans have an elaborate self-consciousness system because language created the problem of justification, which I will explain, it’s because of language that humans became the only animal that had to explain why it did what it did. Yeah, excellent point. And so of course, with other primates, there are actions, feelings, motives, we’ve been very clear about that. They’ll have rich mental lives. But with language, then self-conscious reason giving must emerge. I like that reason giving. I would almost hyphenate that term, Greg. Reason giving. Yeah, I do, but good point. It’s really good. Then with self-conscious reason giving must emerge. I think that’s very important. And there’s a sense in which, I mean, the self-consciousness becomes a unique kind of self-consciousness, because there’s some evidence that other animals have some proto-self-consciousness, right? I know you don’t deny that. But with us, we have the self-consciousness that is enmeshed and explicated in this project of reason giving. And the two now become totally interpenetrating. That’s right. And this is now your prep. Thank you, this is a great prep up, because then the issue is, yeah, okay, we can see, for example, other animals engage in, Gordon Gallup demonstrates in 1972, mirror self-recognition. That’s a great, interesting. And the first thing we would note is most animals fail that test miserably. So that’s kind of interesting, right? The failure of it. If they have a really elaborate sense of who I am, the idea that you would not be able, with a lot of practice, not be able to recognize that it’s you in the mirror, that’s a good indicator. And then you have the subset animals that do pass it, and they do very, all sorts of creative, rich things. But then we ask, well, yeah, I think we have a different level of that. Humans pass that over 18 months, two years. And then you’re like, well, okay, what exactly, John, is the nature of this self-consciousness system? What’s its design features? And that’s now I’m gonna be, oh, okay, yeah, actually it has design features. And you really see this as a clinician, by the way. So the clinic room is a great place to see the design features of the self-consciousness system. Right, right. All right, so there are three basic postulates. So the first is the evolution of propositional language must have created the adaptive problem of justification that actually has three different elements to it. The analytic element is what I refer to as the truth element or the accuracy element. This is to what extent does the proposition correspond to the certain state of affairs or not? Right, right. And so it has utility to the extent it corresponds. There may be other useful functions, but that’s one obvious reason. Then there’s a social function, okay, and a personal function, okay. The social function is, oh, how do we sync up together? And what do we do as a group? Okay. And then I’m gonna argue there’s also a personal function. Well, what is my interest in relationship to the social interests? Okay, so there’s truth value, social interests, and then personal interests in relation. And the problem of justification actually activates all of those. And I’m gonna argue then it’s the intersection of all those is gonna create a force that’s then gonna create a shaping. So that’s then the lock. And then there’s emergence, and the way evolution works then is when a new adaptive problem starts to emerge, it then will ex-apt a proto-self-consciousness system and then shape it to have particular kinds of design features. Right, right, right. And the interesting thing then is the nature of that lock is then gonna give rise to a picture of the domains of human consciousness that I think A, we can all relate to, okay, that would be cross-cultural, at least in their broad organization, all right, that virtually every culture should be able to relate to at least these three domains. And I’m also gonna argue that Freud made a number of key insights about the nature, the dynamic really of the conscious domains. And then we can update his particular picture of both topological model of consciousness, we talked about pre, un, and conscious. He didn’t really talk about self-consciousness, although that’s mostly what he meant, by the way. So when Freud talks about the conscious material, he really, yeah, yeah. I am explicitly aware of what I’m talking about as opposed to say what we’ve been talking about at level of perception and perspectival knowing. Yeah, yeah, very much. And we can then say, yeah, actually Freud saw a lot, he was a brilliant guy and saw a lot of interesting things. He didn’t have quite the right evolutionary or social psychological or cultural knowledge quite to get it right, but we can do a little tweaking and bring his model up to date in modern science. And finally, we can have a framework. My mentor is a sociologist, okay? My undergrad and long-term and it’s tragic, John, you may not know this, but the disciplines don’t always talk to each other. Really? I’m gonna have you know this. So sociologists and human psychologists and anthropologists, I mean, they barely, at least cognitive science has a little bit better job of doing some interdisciplinary, but I have never, I’m a psychologist, I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a presentation, very rarely, in a psychology conference that invited a sociologist, unless the one I invited would try to my mentor and come talk to us, that’s really remarkable. And sociologists adopt very different explanatory frameworks for why social forces and what happens. And the bridging between a human psychological formulation and a sociological formulation is weak and this provides a structured framework, I think, that actually aligns human psychology with sociology in a particular way. So those are the three basic and notice they’re gonna have a bios, biological, evolutionary, a human, psychological and social science kind of, right, right, right. In each one of these. So let’s start with the basic problem, the postulate one is human language generated the emergence of the adaptive problem of justification. So initially we have language likely involve symbols and shared attention. The argument is that, okay, we’re hunter gatherers with some basic tool use, we now have fire maybe half a million years ago, 500,000 years ago. Yeah, clearly predates the upper Paleolithic transition by tons, by tons. Tons, yeah. And so what do we have? Well, we know that humans have a massive capacity for shared attention. We talked a little bit about this in the context of the influence matrix, which means we have a shared intersubjective self other correspondence. I think we’re gonna need to be coordinating our behavior to hunt, to gather, to move around. So, and this is gonna create a cognitive load for bigger heads, which creates trouble, but as advantages. And it’s gonna create an opportunity for a more flexible working memory system. That then allows for initially a symbolic tagging of, so that we can say things like kill. You can have a single word there, antelope. So this is the stage that’s set, as far as I’m concerned, 300,000 years ago. And the required ability to then process symbolic language is crucial, in other words, this is we can get shared attention and I have a learning system that can symbolically tag, say nouns and verbs, but not together. So it’s like there, antelope, or kill. And you can intuit what it is that I’m talking about and that will create shared attention. However- It’s kind of like an 18 month old telegraphic speech. Telegraphic speech to 18 month old, and then my argument, however, is that once there’s a tipping point where those symbols get then organized into syntax, so you then get symbolic syntactical language acquisition processing. Right, right. And then you put subjects, objects, and verbs together, and then you make propositional claims. Yes, yes. So they go from being ostentations and imperatives to being claims. Is that- Exactly, 100%. Now here’s the issue with a claim. A claim, we talk some about counterfactuals, once an animal can start to simulate various possibilities, then has to simulate, well, maybe not. Well, this makes then explicit counterfactuals. Right, right. And there’s a cognitive gadget that allows for counterfactuals to be made explicit, and that’s the question. Question, yeah, questions. Questions. And if you hang around with a precocious four year old, you know that questions actually don’t take a lot of cognitive load. Right, yeah, yeah. Why are you bald? Why is the sky blue? Why do we eat this? It’s like, I don’t know, kid. And now we just do, right? Very quickly you get to, I don’t know. And why? Because the question why, once you have that cognitive gadget, you can apply it super easily to create what I call negative propositional space, which is whatever contrast they ever claim that you have. Right, right, right. So now this creates an explosion of complexity right here. This creates an explosion of complexity. This is what I call question answer dialogues or dynamics. Okay? And these then become justification dynamics. But go ahead, you’re gonna say. No, I was just gonna say, this goes towards some of the work that I’m doing with Chris right now and I’ve made this argument in a couple other videos. And I think you’re explicating it here that I think dialogue and the potential for dialogos, the question answer stuff is primordial. I think it is exactly the transition point from as you indicate, from symbolic imperative and symbolic ostentation to actual, you know, what we now see as the ability to explore the world in speech, if you’ll allow me to put it that way. We can exact our sensory motor ability to explore the world into exploring the world in speech. Completely. And I would just take a note here, but by the way, this is now an intersubjective participatory fusion of minds here, by the way. Okay. And now, however, these propositional claims or question answer dynamics create a real problem, okay, of like, what’s legitimate, okay? And then how do you build systems of legitimizing, reason giving systems, okay, that then legitimize and that this fundamentally is gonna legitimize is and ought to create meaning making structures. Right. And ultimately, the argument here is that the problem has these three elements. There’s the truth value element. How does it, with the correspondence value, hey, are there antelope over there or are they over there? I mean, that’s helpful to know. There’s the social element, should we go hunt them? Okay. And then there’s the personal element. Well, if you hunt them and I hunt them, who does better? Who is more efficacious, who gets more? And we know, by the way, that the hunter gatherers way, they dealt with this personal element or at least one of the ways is they really manage dominance and narcissism big time. Right, right. They did lots of regulatory structures. So there’s almost certainly was pressure for individuals to personalize, say advantage, high disadvantage in certain ways. And they created a social network. And because of the nature of the hunter gatherer relation, I think they could be a lot more successful. I’m gonna argue that modern society allows for that thing to go crazy. Right. And that’s gonna be a problem down the road, okay? So reason giving then sets the stage for shared reasons about what is and ought to be, all right? Ties to outcomes, tradition, practices. We also then set the stage for meaning making in the explanatory spiritual sense. Yeah. Sort of like why do things happen? And you see animism here. And you see the shamanistic traditions. And of course, what are they doing? They’re building a structure of understanding about why. And I believe then that this is gonna open up essentially. Yeah. Oh, that just triggered. Cause I was thinking, sorry. Because there’s two main hypotheses about, and you just brought them together about what’s going on in the upper Paleolithic transition. One is the linguistic hypothesis that you get the evolution of syntactic language out of something like proto-language and pigeon type language, which you’ve talked about here. But the other one is the work of Winkleman and Rossano and Lewis Williams, the mind in the cave, that what’s going on is, no, what’s actually happening is the invention of metaphorical thought through the ability to alter consciousness. And I was just thinking, you’re just bringing the two together. And in the shaman, obviously what they’re doing is they’re creating altered states of consciousness in some ways. Sure. And then they’re linking that to, right, ways of manipulating speech, metaphorical thought, exploring connections that aren’t apparent, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, but I hadn’t, yeah, putting those two together cause the shaman is doing the altered state of consciousness for the metaphorical speech, but the metaphorical speech is also going to be used to, like you said, to give you worldviews, right, extended metaphors, right, worldviews that are the home for reason given. Do I understand you correctly? Is that? 100%, exactly. They come right together that way. That’s beautiful. That’s very beautiful. Yep. You don’t have to choose, you see them, oh, they’re natural consequences of this dynamic now that it’s in motion. And they’re mutually reinforcing. They’re mutually reinforcing, exactly. And we based on what we did, but like the 11th problem of consciousness and what we just went over, we can then see the shaman doing their altered states, right? And melting whatever propositional system that they had to give rise to new phenomenological optimal grips. And then they bring that wisdom back to the tribe and voila, you know. And speak it, and they speak it. And they do that whole process, and now they have that system of justification that their wise elder help enable, okay. Excellent, excellent, Craig. And we also see, you know, that there’s good evidence that you can then say this distributed argument of cognition of justification does set the stage for particular kinds of problem solving. It yokes people together in particular way, and it does provide a frame of reference for understanding. Yeah, but Mercer and Spurwer should give you more credit. They should. I’ll just say that one more time. I appreciate that. Okay, but I don’t need, you know, we don’t really, I don’t need to justify their credit because actually, you know, what you wanna see from my vantage point and the reason that, you know, if you work on this 20 years, you see a whole nother bunch of layers, okay. Because now what you say is, well, if this argumentation and reason giving thing, that’s great for the social process of dialogue and reason giving in the emergence. I’m a clinician and what Mercer and Spurwer don’t do at all is they’re like, well, they don’t take the Freudian turn in relationship to this. Okay, so it goes further. Yeah, into its therapeutic and existential import. Exactly. So I’m gonna argue that this problem of justification now at the personal and the personal social dynamic sets the stage for the heart of psychodynamics. Right, right, right, right. How, why is that? Well, imagine Beta here is attracted to Alpha’s mate and he’s spending time with her and I apologize, this is masculine archetype, but there it is, that’s what I am. Okay, so it’s easy for me to wonder about. And Alpha says, hey, why are you hanging around with my mate? Okay, now, how he explains his behavior is tricky. Okay, and let’s just imagine, okay, according to Just, there’s a window, language now has created this window into the subjective space in a radically new way. Right, right. We were talking about before, I can’t ask my dog Benji, why are you doing what you’re doing? Right, right, right. You can ask another, okay? And then how we explain ourselves to others is now gonna be tied to a fascinatingly crucial, in a fascinating way to a crucial social resource, which is social influence. Like what are other people gonna do? Okay. Right, that’s really interesting. I just wanna savor that point because what you’ve got this, self-consciousness is that, right, part of it is that language gives other people access to our consciousness. Exactly. And we get access to other people’s consciousness by which we can get a sense of our own consciousness too. Completely. Yeah. Right. And we’ll then track the way they respond to our consciousness. Exactly. And the entire learning process. I mean, this is socialization. And this is tied to ourselves in a social environment. So every concept, the relevance realization of the impact of what people do in relation, now is ubiquitous. Yeah, right, right. So this means then the self-consciousness system may have been shaped by the construction of information about the self and the world that solves the personal social justification problem. Right. If so, then we should see evidence, okay? So now we get into the idea of, well, the argument is that this thing is a mental organ of justification. Right, right, right. And although don’t cite it too much here, you may know about, of course, split-brain patients, right? And so that’s one area we can go. I’m gonna stay more grounded here in just the pragmatics of the scenario. And I’m gonna argue that Sigmund Freud’s basic insights, not his theories necessarily, but his basic insights, watching what people did as they tried to explain themselves in the world, sets the stage for these dynamics to be very, very apparent. Right. Okay. So Just posits that the aptive is more complicated than just reason given in argumentation. Why are you hanging around her? Now, let’s say you had no filter whatsoever, okay? I hope to separate the two of you and take her as my mate. Yeah, that’s fine. Okay, okay. And if you’ve ever hung around with people that have, let’s say on the neurodiversity spectrum or other people that don’t really get social dynamics or young kids, okay? You will see that people will blurt out things that have significant consequences that feel very lacking in tact and counter-intuitive. Okay? Yeah. Well, that’s because their structure has been shaped by eons of evolution in general, okay? And so what the person potentially has access to is a whole bunch of explanations. There’s a multitude of possible explanations that might explain this behavior. And the argument is that the system is justification is gonna be seeking those explanations and cultivating particular kinds of narratives. Right, right. Hey, she’s teaching me to plant seeds, ain’t no thing. Right, right, right, right, right. Right? Okay. So now what we have is the idea that the shaping pressures of how you learn to justify, to navigate social influence is absolutely key, okay? Of course, now the listener has a trouble, okay, determining whether or not the person is BSing them or not. Right, right. And you can see what an affiliative orientation is. Oh, they’re telling the truth. A hostile orientation, everything is BS. Look at our politics, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so in terms of how you hear people and what’s relevant realization, your position on the matrix will totally shift how you hear the various stories that people give. So Greg, it also seems that what’s happening here is sort of socio-motor, so that’s not socio-motor, sensor-motor situational awareness, right? People need to exact that up into social situational awareness. They need to take that machinery, but they need to be aware not of only the actual environment but the modal possibility environment that social cognition gives them access to. Completely, in fact, they’re now demonstrating that actually they do that, our system does that pretty literally, like our spatial organization system is now exacted to our social spatial organization system. We actually see ourselves vertically, horizontally. Closely, close, far away. Close, far away, all of that is what gets exacted so that we can use that to then say, yeah, there’s a social force distance, which is very similar to the physical force distance, further away, close together. Oh, right, and the way that awe can be engendered either by physical, something that’s physically vast or something that’s socially vast, which, yeah, exactly, exactly. Absolutely. So you can see the matrix then sets the stage and then you have this propositional stage on top of that dynamic, okay? So the argument here, what I’m saying, is not just about line, like the guy really knows that he’s there to pay attention and separate the two and now he’s gonna lie. Although obviously lying is now part of this equation. There was a movie called The Invention of Lying, all right? But we would know from this vantage point, no, the shaping of lying is gonna be so embedded in all of this, it’s not like somebody is gonna wake up one day and invent lying. Yeah, I thought about that and I thought about the impossibility of Orwell’s new speech, right, to speak. Well, we’ll create a language in which a rebellion against the party is impossible or the opposite, we’ll somehow create a language in which people can’t deceive and lie to each other. And I hear people making that proposal and I think that’s an impossible proposal. Well, you see with Orwell, at least he realizes how much social engineering control you gotta have to top down, to electric the crap out of you if you’re gonna try to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but my argument is going to be, or is that before this bait is ever questioned, you must deal with the possibility of being held accountable. Right, right, right, right. And this is what I would say for all of us, is you’re born into a scenario, as you become a person, you are now actually merging onto the stage where others can ask you to give account and your internal self is now the process by which this accountability is beginning to be manifold, manifested and explored. So, I am hanging around her just to plant seeds. That’s why I’m doing this. Right, right. Okay? And now what does that mean? If that conscious justification is apparent, well, my desire for her as a mate is, well, what? It’s suppressed. Right, right. Okay? It’s not brought onto the self-conscious stage of explicit relevance realization, but is in fact recognized to be potentially dangerous as part of the story and then blocked, okay? But still alive. So now the idea is that nature will tweak the capacity for self-deception to have this fine line between what you can legitimize, given facts and what’s socially acceptable, and what might also be selfish animalistic desires. So you could give priority of attention to your seed planting with her and really- Right, no pun intended. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no pun intended, right? And then sort of not really pay much attention and not make an effort to remember the moments when you were looking at her in a lustful fashion and things like that. And then you just rely on reconstructive memory to keep it out of awareness and there you go, kind of thing. You just describe repression. Yeah, right, right. And that’s exactly what it is. Right, right. Right? And notice how then this problem basically almost insists that the relationship between a self-conscious system and a subconscious system is gonna be regulated by repression where the socially acceptable version of reality will be shined a light on and the unacceptable ones that would cost you social influence are then pushed into the shadow of your subconscious awareness. So the idea here is that we now have an evolutionary explanation for Freud’s foundational insight regarding the dynamic unconscious. Right, right, right. Which he never generated. I mean, his model, I mean, he had some notions about it. He kicked it around, but he had never any clear evolutionary tipping point like propositional language that would then drive this in a particular way. Right, right, right. So we can now go to Freud’s tripartite, id, ego, superego. We have his topological model, we have his structural model. Right. Okay. And now we’re gonna update that, okay? We’re gonna update it by recognizing there’s an experiential domain. This is your primate that is notice, it’s encapsulated the perspectival knowing, only you have access, it’s across an epistemological gap. Yeah. Okay. Then we have a private self-consciousness system, your internal narrator, your public self-consciousness. Your public self-consciousness. When mind two, the essence of mind two, is that experiential, mind three A is private, mind three B is public. Right, right, right. Some of these elements then, the mind two, the nonverbal perceptual emotional core of the self. Right. Okay. This is the what you see from behind your eyes. And it has these elements that we have talked about, perceptions, basic drives, motives, emotionally organizing, pleasure, pain, foreign, the foundation, et cetera. Right. Okay, we’ve gone through this. Right. And we’ll talk then about the connection between that experiential experience and the experiential self. And we’ll talk about that more next time. Right, right. The connection between the episodic memory. We can then see very clearly, there’s a difference between the experience of red and the narration of I have seen red. Right. Okay. And so now we get a private self-consciousness, the seed of our self-reflective awareness. I think therefore I am. The narrative stream of consciousness, our identity self-concept is gonna connect to our ideology, morality, worldview, can be referred to the ego, interpreter. This by the way is Michael Gazaniga, he interprets and calls it the interpreter function. Right. So that’s exactly, both there’s internal and external interpreting. Right. And now we wanna be very clear. So that’s one key dynamic, but we’ve been also exploring the social dynamic. There is the private thought, I don’t like that shirt, it doesn’t look good on her. And then there’s the social consequences of saying it out loud. Right. Okay. And so we filter the out loud and say a white lie, oh, that looks nice. Right. Right. Right. Because the relevance realization, as we anticipate the consequence of a particular event that then has negative consequences, we shape ourselves all the time. Okay. And that public self-consciousness system is what we publicly share, our persona, a mask. Right. Largely defined by the audience we are engaged in. Think how different you are, John, when you’re with your partner, when you’re with your students, okay, when you’re in a conflict with somebody. Right. Very much. All of the poll very, very, it’s just, and it’s a natural shift that we make in these radically different roles, because we’re constantly attuned to these audience dynamics in relation to where we are. Okay. And it’s operating. So this is like the Goffman stuff, right? The presentation of self in everyday society. Right. Okay. So it’s almost like Goffman in relationship to the presentation of self in everyday life. Right. Exactly. So this is the, and that’s it. And notice the relationship between that, okay, and the private. So we see two very clear dynamic relations. It ultimately then gives rise to an updated, I’m gonna shift in and map this a little bit since we talked about the global neuronal workspace. Right, right. BARS. So here is BARS basic model, okay? Conscious spotlight and these elements of it. I can update what I’ve been talking about like this. So we have a screen of consciousness. Okay. We have the backstage elements of learned procedures, schemas, defenses. We can divide the consciousness into the perceptual, experiential, emotional attention, and the linguistic representations. We put it in a working memory loop, okay? And then we’re also regulating behavioral outputs and linguistic inputs to people that actually can then see the products as we filter it through an imagined audience. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So this holds that idea and then it updates it based on the dynamics that we have now surrounded it with. Yeah, that’s good. I like the idea of the filter through the imagined audience. I think that’s very important. Mm-hmm, yep. And by somebody like for example, in the clinic room, what do you see very often? I feel like I’m an imposter, okay? Right, right. And it’s like, well, that’s because they live out here while they’re worried in here, but they can’t show that so they feel this big discrepancy. Right, right, right, right. And learning about that dynamic. Which overlaps with their sense of self in a profound way. Tremendously, tremendously, okay? And that then brings us to this idea of the dynamic relations between these domains. So we have the attentional filter, okay? So this is of course, relevance realization at the level of basic intersection. We then have, in addition to relevance realization, just through what the animal wants, the idea that there are these different domains of consciousness that operate on different sort of programs of relevance realization that have different emphases. And that’s gonna create conflict and tension between them. So one being the Freudian filter, okay? And then the other being what I call the Rogerian filter. I could call Rogers, right? Exactly, okay? So the attentional filter is this recursive relevance from bottom-up sensory to top perceptual witness and narrative, okay? So we bring in this, we say perspectival knowing. We have an adjectival screen of conscious awareness with an adverbial witness function, okay? And that dynamic relationship of just what are we paying attention to, okay? But there’s a narrator now that’s telling the story of is it okay to look at this? What are you looking at? Right, right, right, right. It involves this idea that there are certain dynamics that will set the stage for the self-system to might keep certain conscious elements off the stage or screen of consciousness, okay? And this is then gonna relate to Freud’s fundamental observation about the tension between the subconscious feelings and self-conscious rationales, okay? The basic model for this is called the May Line Triangle of Conflict. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the May Line Triangle of Conflict? No, I have not. So this is the most basic lens by which a psychodynamic theorist will look at the process of repression and psychodynamic defense. And the argument is that what you’ll get is you’ll get an emerging impulse image-feeling wish-fear complex of some sort, okay? So the analogy that I like to use is the old Polaroid element where you take a picture and it’s gray and you wave it like this. It starts to appear on its screen, okay? And then as it becomes accessible to working memory consciousness and the narrator, meaning as it, oh, now I have perceptual access and narrative access, okay? The danger of it activates a secondary signal anxiety. This is as you start to look at that, okay? And then start to integrate that, the implications of you integrating that are gonna have all sorts of threat possibility. Right, right. Okay, so then you get an anxiety secondary inhibitory affect of the initial impulse image or feeling, okay? And then that then triggers a particular, your psychological immune system gets triggered into action and then you either filter it out through repression, suppression, denial, compartmentalization, or you reconfigure it through your system of justification to legitimize it through rationalization, moralization, intellectualization. Right, right, right. Or by passing. Exactly, exactly. So now, and what you can see in these defenses is that they’re really, I like to break the psychodynamic defenses into three classes. Some of which are these blocking functions, okay? Repression, suppression, compartmentalization, denial. Some of them which are these legitimizing functions. And then some of these are these complicated dynamic interrelations like a reaction formation, okay? Where the homophobe who has homoerotic impulses develops hatred of the homosexual and develops all that because the justification strength then has really got to counterbalance the underlying urge to maintain the socially acceptable place. Right. In relationship to the public to private filter, there’s what we wanna know and you mentioned exactly that there’s a sense of social self that connects to the public self. And that’s what we’re trying to do. So, you know, if you’re in a room, it’s called Roger Rogers, in the therapy room, what do you try to do? You try to create a non-judgmental, unconditional positive regard so the person’s sense of social self connects to their narrator and then deep into their phenomenological self to create that context is fundamentally trying to create a flow between the underlying feeling system, the narrator and the public self. And so, the person’s sense of social self at the heart is narratively like I like myself for this and other people love them for it. They don’t come to my office, John. Right, right, right, right. I’ve heard they exist. But. Right. So everyone comes in because they’re having all of these conflicts between these different domains and they’re stuck because they have no, they have some narrative notion about what they should do, but they have no idea how to get rid of the various jamming forces that are engaged in their conflict. I get the attentional filter is clearly relevance realization. Are you saying these other filters are what you’re calling relational recursive relevance realization? They’re definitely tracking that in the context then of building justification narrative. So I’ll give you the story. It’s a pretty classic story. So one of my friends, so in the 1980s, we were not as, shall we say, enlightened about LGBTQ issues. Right, right. So we would call each other like fags, sorry about that, but we would. Right. And we’d have other kinds of things. And one of my friends was always lukewarm when we were talking about girls. Okay. Right. And over time, when he, so from 15 to 18, he thinks he’s heterosexual, but by the time then he’s 18, he comes out to himself. Okay. I learned this later. And then by then when he was 21, he came out to all of us. Right. Okay. What does he mean by came out to himself? It means his justification system before his, you know, he lived in a not exactly homosexual friendly environment. It was, if he started to have homoerotic feelings, what would happen to him? He’d start to then get the secondary anxiety, say that’s not me. I want to like her, you know, I don’t want to like him. And then eventually enough of relevance realization happens. Enough love happens for him, for himself. So he then allows the feeling to then say, oh my God, maybe I am attracted to men. Right. Right. And then for three years, he hides, meaning the Rosarian for the private to public filter. And then he comes out of the closet, means opens up that filter and says, Hey everybody, this is my identity. Right. Right. Right. Wow. So my argument is that actually we’re constantly tracking phenomenological experiences. And then because the private and public narrative systems deal with different contingencies when they become public out here and the private are in, then have to justify them. They have different relevance realization mechanisms and those kinds of dynamics then create potential tensions. Right. Right. Right. And the management of those tensions are a lot of what I see it’s in the world of psychopathology. Or when they go wrong, people then get trapped. And you talk about reciprocal narrowing, people will get channeled into parasites of mind to try to stay safe. And the more defensive you get, the more fragile you are, and the more constraints you have to put on the environment, and the more likely to get knocked off and then activate, oh my God, threat is everywhere. Because inside my head, the systems aren’t getting along. So one area that you and I should do some work on then is integrating this more psychodynamic account of reciprocal narrowing and kind of recursive propensities to self-deception with a very cognitive account I’ve built elsewhere about the cognitive biases, how they reinforce each other. Because I mean, there’s no reason why the two couldn’t be integrated together to my mind. No, in fact, it’s really a function. I mean, the most important social cognitive empirical awakening was cognitive dissonance in the 1950s with Leon Fessinger. Right, right. Okay. And Elliot Aronson is a great social psychologist. What does he identify the core of cognitive dissonance around? Self-beliefs that one is good, self-beliefs that one’s done the right thing. These are all, in other words, one is a socially justified state of being. Right, right, right. And what does he call these ego defenses? He calls cognitive dissonance, these dissonance processes, ego defenses. You know who he doesn’t cite? Freud. I mean, you know. Yeah, yeah, right. Ego defenses to protect the self and relationship to anxiety that you might be revealed in a vulnerable way is not, you know, so that’s our, yeah, we have these huge broke breakdowns. It is absolutely very, very similar. It’s especially when you put it in the idea that the self-conscious narrator is doing this interpretive functioning that’s trying to tell the story of the self in a protective way, which of course, there are all these biases, you know, my side bias and self-serving bias. Confirmation bias. And if you’re in a defensive state, you regress into these and you cling to them, right? Right. I don’t know. That’s cool. It’s not cool when it happens, but that’s cool theorization. Yeah. And it shows, I mean, you know, if you’re trained in both that sort of ego, protective cognitive, justifying bias lens and the psychodynamic lens, they really are two sides of the wheel. Not even, they’re just different languages for saying the same thing. So, the last postulate here that we’re then on the cusp of, so you and I are psychologists and we learn a lot with, you know, it’s important to realize all of, as I know, of course we do, you know, the cultural social constructed histories of the world and all of course we’re embedded now in, as I say, you know, obviously if I grew up 5,000 years ago, or if I grew up in Saudi Arabia, my systems of justification, I wouldn’t be me. I’d be a very, you know, completely. So we wanna then place ourselves in a socio-historical context. And I’ll just throw out a few things. We can define ourselves as a person as opposed to a human primate this way. We can place a context of justification as being central in human development. Peter Lindbergh did a beautiful thing with Culture War 2.0. He sort of diagnosed all these justification systems, what he called paradigms with their justification systems. I think we can also frame the evolution of culture and our current sensibilities to see ourselves at the time between worlds and then actually use this for the kind of sort of meta justification systems and trans paradigmatic work that you and Jordan and I have talked to, Jordan Hall and I talked about that. And you were just invoking Zach Stein there as well. Absolutely. So real quick, this guy, Peter Osorio, talked about what a person is. And he really basically said, it’s any entity that would have this capacity. It’s really a skilled developmental capacity, a self-conscious reflective entity that justifies their actions. Of course, empirically, all known examples of persons are human beings. However, there are great examples like Jabba the Hutt, okay? There’s a person in this sense, right? But obviously not a human being. That’s really important because it means that humans and persons are different concepts. Yep, very much. And I believe that we learn to become persons and that’s a very important, and it is that socialization process of learning to justify oneself, give accounts, take accounts, legitimize, by the way, it’s gonna connect, of course, to things like free will and all these other kinds of very interesting, complicated philosophical elements. I was just thinking of it with respect to Jabba the Hutt. So as a primate, I find him dangerous, but as a person, I find him a villain. And those are two different things. Absolutely, right. Because you don’t wanna encounter that creature in the woods in darkness, right? Because that would be pretty nasty. And your moral sense of what is justified, good and evil, you’re like, oh my God, he’s so contemptuous at both levels. But I can feel him in my heart curl and my, oh my God, yes, lock him away. So all of this in the garden and the theory of knowledge, this justification systems is this second branch. The thing that I mentioned is this primate mental and now this culture person. This culture person then brings us into somebody like Broffenbrenner and the socio-ecological model, which basically says, hey, notice that you’re nested in a set of socio-ecological circles. You have individual, I have knowledge. I’m in interpersonal role structure, okay? That’s then gonna form clear relations. I’m gonna develop it. I grow in an organization and community. And ultimately there are laws. All of these social structural institutions are knitted together by systems of justification that operate at different levels of operation. So we can make that connection. You and I have talked, in fact, this is where you and Guy Sendstock and then I circled back around. What is the social interpersonal context of justification? What’s happening? And this is really about the dynamics between the analytic and the social personal. So the con game is when I’m, it’s all my personal manipulative. I’m gonna lie, I’m gonna manipulate you. I’m gonna deceive you. I’m gonna try to get you to do a certain thing. The courtroom is, oh my God, the socials attacking me personally. So I then have to shape it so that I’m not punished a particular way and we have to sort out what is accurate in that regard. The courtyard is our shared social dimensions and of course we’ll also have personal interests that we’ll have to navigate. And then ultimately the science lab is the epitomized isolation of variables so that we get the most accurate or analytic analysis of cause in the process of developing scientific justifications for how the world works in a particular way. That does possibly link us back to causes and reasons because science then gives rise to the idea that things happen for causes. We’ve been talking a lot about justifications, justifications emerge. This is a very interesting and complicated dynamic. Here’s just a note of the mammamic words. The last thing I’ll say here is just that bridges where we are. So I think that we can then frame the evolution of cultural consciousness in terms of these codes, one of which is oral indigenous. This is our face to face relational way of being in the world, whereby we get together and create an embodied sense of who we are. I think we do this in our families to this day. Of course, for many thousands of years people did this. This was their way of life. I believe there’s an enormous amount of wisdom in oral indigenous sensibilities that have been lost and is in danger of losing. And I think we should think seriously about what they have to offer. We see 10,000 years ago, the emergence of formal civilized. Why? Because in order to manage a civilization, you can’t do it face to face. You have to have laws, you get institutions, you have to have regulatory structures. You get all these technologies like money, you have to have Hammurabi’s code and things like that, that are fundamentally different because they yolk systems of justification with the institutional mechanisms of civilization. Literacy and everything. Literacy and all of that. And by the way, this is a fundamental change in the way in which we think about justification because now we’re plugged into a society, which is before is a novel construction over the last 10,000 years. 500 years ago, we see the evolution of modernity and science and its justification. And 50 years ago, so we see the critique of this in the postmodern. And Lene Rachel Anderson offers a view of metamodernism called metamodernity. And her basic articulation is that each one of these sensibilities is key. We need an appreciation for their strengths and weaknesses. And a metamodern sensibility would be one that includes and transcends and appreciates. And if we build a society and structure that has the insights from each of these, we will actually be able to cultivate a wise way going forward. And if we educate that in our young and we may be able to, well, right the ship a little bit. So this connects it ultimately then to metamodern is then this sort of like shift, the lateral shift in our justifications. It’s a meta shift in our justifications and it’s grounded into values, a meta perspective grounded into values. Well, that’s like the definition of wisdom somebody taught me. Yeah. In relation. And that then, I think is what I hope is, is that through these kinds of processes that you and I are engaging broadly, this kind of meaning making, we can take our scientific knowledge and cultivate a wisdom orientation. So in conclusion, it’s hysteria propositional knowing is rise to these three cleat domains, updated tripartite model, connected by these three filters and offers a theory of the evolution of the cultural person plane of existence and where we are. So. Well, also making some powerful illusions along the way to the meaning crisis as you’ve said many times throughout. That was beautiful, Greg. And I think that’s, I don’t have much to say now. I had stuff to say throughout, but there was, but now that we’ve come to the end, I think that’s really beautiful. I think we now have a comprehensive account. And I like the way self-consciousness and personhood are being discussed because that’s gonna set up a lot of the stuff we’ll talk about with the elusive eye. Yeah, that was just really, really wonderful, Greg. Thank you very much for that. Well, thank you. And when we started this, and I think this is where we can pick up next time, Ron, there’s this very big basic academic question about what happens with modern science and then what shatters our understanding, which we never had obviously completely, but as we added science to the mix, a set of questions arise. And I think the downstream questions of those about what is mind, about what is human nature, where are we, then the failure or the physicalist reductionist of STEM and its inability to answer cognitive science, psychology kinds of questions for the populace sets the stage for the meaning in mental health crisis. Yep, I agree, I agree. And so now that we have then mapped this territory, then there is a lot of implication for what we might do to address it going forward. Yeah, and I like the invocation of wisdom at the end, something, and the idea of realigning the stacks of the kind of knowing as a way of overcoming propositional tyranny. Obviously, I’ve made convergent arguments elsewhere about that before I even met you. So I think- Oh, absolutely. I stole them all for you and then I wouldn’t have done it. Well, friends should have all things in common, as players. Well, apparently we did. We were climbing up different sides of this mountain, but it’s nice that we got to the peak and share so much in common as we find ourselves here. Well, Greg, I’m gonna wrap it up for here so we don’t trust too much on the time and attention of our viewers, but that’s fantastic. So we’re gonna have one more session, that’s it, in which we can’t end today on the 13th episode that we’re filming on Friday the 13th. I mean, we’re just- Oh, God. All right, all right, all right. I forgot about that intersection. I’m glad we made it. So. Yeah, so anyways, we’re gonna have one more where we’re gonna try and go over some of the themes and connections and foreshadow the next series and also make some connections to, as we’ve already alluded to, the meeting crisis issue. Greg is also very, very interested in responding to that. In a way, and I mean this as a compliment to Greg, in a way in which you can see all of my work was built towards this apex of trying to address the meeting crisis. All of this powerful, this very powerful system that Greg has articulated. To my mind, I sense that that’s all also organized towards the problem of reducing human suffering, affording human flourishing, especially in our context of the meeting crisis. Amen. I mean, it’s a tree of knowledge and then a tree in a garden. It’s got some mythic archetype built in to try to suggest that maybe there could be a religion that’s not a religion, I don’t know. Yeah, well, that’s one of the things we might touch on next time because there were aspects of, we talked about it a little bit when we brought up shamanism about, because there’s an aspect in which there’s a connection between the society and its worldview that’s mediated by religion in powerful ways. And so there might be something there we wanna talk a little bit about. Or maybe we can talk about it with you and I and Chris are talking. I think that we’ve opened up many, many productive pathways for exactly that conversation. So as always, this was a great pleasure, my friend. And so I’ll end it here. And I look forward to our culminating session next week.