https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QX3IBoMg3Tc
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 a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Throughout the entire series, I will be joined in dialogue by my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez, from James Madison University in the United States. Throughout, we are going to wrestle with the hard problems of how we can give an account of a phenomenal-like consciousness within the scientific worldview, how we can wrestle with that problem in conjunction with the problem that Greg calls the problem of psychology that is pervasive throughout psychology, which is that psychology has no unified descriptive metaphysics by which it talks about mind and or behavior. Throughout this, we will be talking about some of the most important philosophical, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific accounts of consciousness. So I hope you’ll join us throughout. I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez. I’m John Vervecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I do work on and teach on work on the nature of consciousness and its relationship to intelligence, its relationship to other aspects of cognition, and what I wanna do here with Greg’s really excellent help in a dialogical manner, I wanna present an argument, Greg’s familiar with this argument. I wanna present an argument about trying to make an argument that I’ve been developing to try and make some progress on untangling the very difficult problem of the place of cognition in the world. Last time, I’ll introduce Greg in a sec. Last time, Greg and I sort of brought up the two central problems that we want to wrestle with around consciousness, and that, and these are the function problem, what does consciousness do, and the nature or generation problem, which is how is it that something like consciousness exists in, has a place in the otherwise physical, naturalistic world we see ourselves within. Greg has forewarned that he and I are gonna get into some interesting, hopefully fun friction around physicalism and naturalism, I look forward to that, and I think that’s a good segue for passing it over to Greg to introduce himself. Right, actually, physical naturalism, now we’re already building bridges, right? Sounds good to me. Yes, so I’m Greg Henrikis, I’m a professor of psychology at James Madison University. I am interested in what I call the problem of psychology, which gets into what is the science of behavior and mental process, why has that been such an unbelievable, difficult thing to define with any kind of consensus, and some of that also takes me into what I call my unified meta-psychology framework, which offers a new naturalistic definitional system for mind and matter, and then I came to learn about John and all of his wonderful work, and have been dogging him ever since, so that I can learn and see his model of consciousness fits in a very, very exciting way and fills out an enormous amount of richness, and that’s what I’m looking forward to teasing out, so I’m really, really thrilled to be here. Great, thanks Greg, that’s wonderful. I realize I’ve been mispronouncing your last name, I apologize, but be comforted in the fact that nobody’s pronounces my last name correctly. All right, I’m so used to it, I don’t even hear that anymore, so whatever. So what are we gonna try and do with this? Well, we are going to try, as I said, we’re gonna really try and tackle these interconnected problems the nature and function of consciousness, but as the subtitle of the whole series indicates, this is particularly why Greg is here, not only for his expertise on psychology, but also because Greg, like me, is very interested on the existential and potentially, and I think I’m gonna use this very broadly, Greg will often use it in a more specific sense, but I’m gonna use it broadly right now, an existential and therapeutic ramifications of this coming to a different and deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Greg and I are both a little bit uncomfortable with this word, but I’ll speak it on our behalf. We’re interested in what you might call the spiritual implications of getting right about, getting as right as we can, I don’t wanna be pretentious or heuristic, getting as right as we can about the nature of consciousness. So I’d like to start, and I proposed this to Greg, and he agreed that this is a good place to start, I’d like to start with how we got into the problem of consciousness. So many of you have seen Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where how do we get into the hard problem of the meaning crisis, and believe me, that we will keep coming back to that in the course of what we’re gonna, the two problems are not separable. But I wanna do something similar and get into how did consciousness become such a difficult thing for us in particular? And there’s a myriad of places we could start, and so really in the interest of time, I’m gonna start in a place that I think is sort of optimal for getting us getting our feet on the ground for this problem, and that’s Descartes’ response to the Scientific Revolution, because I think the arguments that Descartes proposes, there are three arguments, have laid out our cultural cognitive grammar for thinking about mind, and Greg is gonna develop that later, have laid out the cultural cognitive grammar of thinking about mind that we still carry with us today. Well, we need to get this answered. Why is this cultural cognitive grammar so attractive, but it is also so problematic and so damaging to us? So there’s something odd, it’s almost like crack. It’s really attractive, right? It’s really, really attractive to us. It’s almost inescapable to us, and yet we’ve known, and many people, much more brilliant than myself, have pointed out how this Cartesian framework has been so damaging to us in so many ways, and Greg is again gonna really develop that, I think, for us at length, and so what my main thesis is going to be, my initial proposal, what I’m proposing to Greg, is that the reason why it’s so attractive is because of the way that conception of the mind is so deeply bound up with the conception of the world that emerged in the scientific revolution, and because of the success of the scientific worldview, and because it is inseparably bound up with the Cartesian cultural cognitive grammar, we are deeply attracted to this grammar, even though in many ways it is almost traumatizing to us, both collectively and individually. So Greg, what do you think about that? Brilliant, and let me riff off of that for just a second. So as a clinician, and as somebody who studied personality, one of the things I often notice is somebody’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Right, right, yeah. And so I think that there is something very, very enormously appealing, and you’ll be able to articulate that with good, you know, about this frame. It makes perfect intuitive sense. I think the connection between the frame and the modern scientific revolution is absolutely key, and its disaster is key, both conceptually and to the larger existential spiritual meaning crisis that we reside in. And so, you know, in my own work, I’ve identified what I call the enlightenment gap, and the enlightenment gap is that the modernist idea of empirical science had two really difficult problems that they didn’t, and no synthetic system was able to resolve, one of which is this mind matter problem, okay, and the other is what is actually scientific knowledge relative to socially constructed knowledge, and how do we crisply differentiate those? And we see the emergence of postmodernism really as, especially in the second one, but we see the problem of psychology in the first, okay? All right, and so here we can say here’s Descartes, one of the fathers, although Galileo generally is called the father of modern science, but Descartes, one of the fathers, clearly, to giving us the grammar with such richness. Through your work, I’ve come to appreciate how sophisticated, I sort of give Descartes a short shrift in my own writing historically. He’s a brilliant person, and I think he gives, I knew he did, was that, but his work on the mind and consciousness was really rich, much richer than I was aware of, so that gives us an opportunity to move into it. Thank you, Greg. That was, that’s a, first of all, bringing up those two problems, I just wanna acknowledge that that’s good. The sort of the mind-body problem, as it’s traditionally called, and then the relationship between scientific knowledge and socially constructed knowledge, that’s also excellent. And that, of course, has been the tortured relationship between the hard sciences and the humanities, or the hard sciences and the social sciences. And we’ll see as we go along that those problems, as you’re intimating, are deeply interconnected. I like what you also mentioned there about Galileo and Descartes, I’ll talk a little bit about that in the history. One of the things I find about Descartes that’s interesting is there’s a sense in which he is responding to the spiritual crisis being caused by the emergence of the scientific revolution. And it’s no coincidence that he labeled one of his most important, he titled, sorry, one of his most important works, the meditations, because he is alluding to Marcus Aurelius’ meditations, which are a series of spiritual exercises, because he’s trying to get people, he’s trying to give people an existential response to the way their world was being torn asunder by the scientific revolution. And unfortunately, that existential aspect of Descartes’ work has also tended to be not properly remembered. And so we’re gonna try to remember it. We are going to respond to that and remember it throughout what we’re doing here together. Did you wanna say anything more before we, I proposed sort of the first argument? Yeah, no, no, I think we’re ready then to set, so the setup is, you know, here we are in the emergence of modernist thinking. Science is happening, Descartes gets his Cartesian coordinates, so all of a sudden we start to mathematically map behavior and change in particular ways, of course, Galileo’s doing that. And now this whole issue of the dual world history into a mono world reality. So yeah, no, on the edge of the seat, we’re excited. This is fun to be doing this together with you. We’re really appreciate it. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to, take a look at what I consider Descartes’ three core arguments. Not because I’m trying to convince you about the conclusion of these arguments, not at all. In fact, in a very real sense, I’m not convinced by their, by the writing. But I wanna show you, I want to bring all us together into a proper respect for these arguments. And so that we can get a deep understanding of the issue we’re facing. I talk a lot of my work elsewhere about the importance of problem formulation. You’ve got to step back and spend a lot of time really carefully excavating, right? And explicating your problem formulation. If you get it in a sense that you’re bashing your head against a problem, that means stop trying to solve it before you do some heavy work at getting clear about the problem formulation. So that’s what we’re gonna do right now. Amen. And there are few more difficult but more important things to get our handle on in the problem. If we’re dealing with consciousness, the language games are just enormous. Exactly, exactly. So the first argument, I’m not gonna be citing Descartes like word for word or verbatim. I’m trying to present the gist of the argument. So the first argument is basically runs along these lines. And again, I’m not gonna worry about getting this sort of technically, logically, precisely valid. Right, we’ll try to put our academic training on the backend and just talk like normal people. As much as possible. Right, which is hard for us people, appreciate that. Yeah, so the first argument goes like this. It’s like, take a look at the properties of the mind and we’ll come back later to why Descartes zeros in on these properties. Take a look at the properties of the mind. The mind has what’s called intentionality. Okay, what does that mean? That means my mental states are about, they’re directed at, they refer to things other than themselves. And material objects don’t have that. This pencil is not about anything else. My thought about the pencil might be, but the pencil itself is not about anything else. Doesn’t refer to, it just is in itself. It has causal interactions with other things, but it has nothing like intentionality. And then closely related to this is mind is a place where there’s meaning. This is the second of the hard problems, so I’m not gonna say too much about that. It’s gonna rely on your intuitive sense that you, for example, are getting the meaning of what I’m saying right now. It’s meaningful to you. Many things, your environment makes sense to you. It’s meaningful to you. And so, but material things, obviously, things don’t mean anything to this pencil. That doesn’t make any sense to us. In fact, if you had an experience where you seriously thought things were meaning being meaningful to the pencil, like you’d be questioning your sanity. You’d be checking me out in a license sort of way. Yes, exactly, well said, Greg. Okay, and so, and then related to that is you are oriented towards truth. Can I say something real fast about that? Because this is important. Meaning is in many ways automatic. You see a red cup and you intuit the fordances of this cup. It’s just the machinery, and we can talk, I know some more of that, but highlight how robust meaning comes to you simply through your perceptual awareness. Yeah, we’re gonna come back to this a lot. Right. Because one of my major proposals is gonna be that a deep way of trying to get at this meaning that will connect it to consciousness is through the idea of relevance realization. That’s what Greg is alluding to right now. And so we’re gonna come back to that. And so to continue, I can evaluate my ideas or my thoughts in terms of whether they’re true or false. Again, material things aren’t true or false, they just are. And for, think about how strange this is. How much does truth weigh? What’s its color? How big is it? These are all just absurd things to say, okay? So you can see that there are these deep properties of mind and matter seems to be completely lacking in them. And then when we take a look at the properties of matter, well, it seems to have extension. It has resistance, right? It has force, physical force. And of course, mental states don’t have, they’re not extended, right? They don’t have anything like inertial resistance. What would that mean? They don’t have energetic force. And you’ll say, but my ideas are forceful to me. You’re using a metaphor, you’re using a metaphor. And we’re gonna come back to why do you want to use those kinds of metaphors, right? So what Descartes noted was, he said, well, look, mind seems to have properties that are completely lacking in matter, and matter seems to have properties that are completely lacking in mind. And therefore, he drew this conclusion. Mind and matter are two separate, independently existing substances. This is known as Cartesian dualism, that reality is made up of two kinds of stuff. Okay, and so why is this, first of all, important? Many people carry around, many people have very confused ideas about mind and body, and the relationship between mind and brain, and we’ll come back to that too. But many people do have and carry around a kind of implicit dualism, because again, this has become very prevalent in our culture, and we’ll see that Descartes’ model thought integrated with a particular interpretation of Christianity that also wove it into a lot of our religious framework. So it has huge consequences. So what’s the first thing to say about this argument? Well, let’s go carefully with it. First of all, the argument is not technically a valid argument. A valid argument is one in which the premises of the argument necessitate the conclusion. So if you accept the premises, you must on being of logical inconsistency. A deductive argument, yes. A deductive argument, yes. So why is it not technically valid? Because in order for it to be technically valid, the list of features has to be exhaustive, it has to be complete. So Descartes looks at three or four properties. What if the next 100 properties are shared by mind and matter? Then Descartes’ argument loses all of its force, right? Loses all of its force. And you say, well, but maybe Descartes got them all. He clearly did not. So now, and this is gonna be an important move, we have to set this argument into its historical context. Descartes, for example, was not aware of unconscious cognition. Most of us now understand that a crucial feature of your cognition is that most of it happens unconsciously. Descartes did not have this as a feature of mind. He did not have many of the features that we now attribute to matter. He thought of matter almost as equal to extension. Many of the properties that we now assign to matter, like energy and other, Descartes did not know that. So his list is clearly, clearly not exhaustive or complete. So right away, it’s not technically valid. Right, and let me just say, you’re introducing two super important concepts here that are gonna be crucial for us when we get into the 20th century and then ultimately 21st century for the right language game, okay? So the energy matter difference and relation, all right, through James Cork Maxwell and then ultimately quantum mechanics and general relativity, that’s unbelievably key, okay? And the other thing is the cognition versus consciousness distinction. Yes, yes. So those are both now, we’re creating language systems that are actually now creating much more rich texture in allowing us to narrate the landscape. Excellent, thank you, Greg. That’s excellent. So one way we could try and steel man Descartes, right, on his behalf is we could say, okay, but what Descartes has found are the essential properties of mind and matter. So even if his list is not exhaustive, at least he has the essential properties and therefore we could restructure the argument because there’s an essential difference between mind and matter and that at least makes it probable that mind and matter might be different substances. Okay, that’s fair enough. The problem is again, claiming that we have the Descartes of the essence of matter is clearly false. As Greg just said, there’s lots more that turned out to be essential so he does not have the essence. So claiming that we have the essence of mind, as Greg is gonna make really clear, we can’t agree on what, I mean, a lot of Greg’s work in fact is wrestling with the fact that we can’t agree on academically, culturally, we have no consensus. Greg is laboring to try and bring about this consensus and he has to label in such a heroic fashion precisely because there is such a lack of consensus about what the mental is. It’s a fragmented pluralistic landscape with no grounding. There’s no meta grounding that allows a paradigmatic realization. So it’s just everybody has different starting points, different emphases, it’s very dramatic and those starting points people get anchored to and so yeah, that’s why it’s a task. So many people, in fact, this is a technical problem in philosophy, it’s called the mark of the mental, trying to figure out even, not even the essence, but even a distinguishing mark of the mental that will pick it out reliably. So although we have intuitions, those intuitions don’t reliably guide us to an essence and here’s where again it intersects with science because there’s an argument by Quine that says largely one way of interpreting and I think this is a valuable thing to note about science. What science does is it finds those categories that do have an essence because when you find a category that has an essence, you can make broad and deep generalizations, inductive generalizations and that’s what science is in the business of doing and of course, well, we might say that physics has made a lot of progress towards that. It’s very questionable that psychology has made similar progress towards producing that kind of scientific success. So we are not currently historically in the place where we could safely reconstruct Descartes’ argument as here are the essential properties of mind, here are the essential properties of matter and therefore draw the conclusion. Okay, so what did we get? Well, that was easy, we just dispose of Descartes, right? Brevecky just disposed of Descartes and it’s all solved and it’s like, that’s ridiculous. Okay, so the point we have, the thing we have to ask ourself if this is not a deductively valid argument, why is it such a powerfully persuasive argument? And let’s acknowledge the fact that most of the good arguments in science are not deductive arguments in the first place, right? Okay, so here’s the point I wanna make. I am proposing that what Descartes does, I don’t think Descartes thought he was doing this, I’m proposing a way to explain why his arguments are so persuasive even though they’re not deductively valid is that Descartes doing, we can reconstruct his argument as an inference to the best explanation. That Descartes’ argument best explains what’s going on in the scientific revolution, right? He comes up with a way of explaining the mind that makes the best sense of the mind in terms of the scientific revolution and it’s precisely because of that that his view is so successful. So what I’m doing right from the beginning is wedding the success of his argument to the success of the scientific revolution. What do you think, Craig, about that? I think that’s absolutely correct and although maybe I don’t have quite the appreciation for the connection between Descartes and say the Catholic Church, I certainly wanna say that remember, modernist thinking is coming off the formal scholastic academic tradition which is dual world, okay? So and if you have an embedded dual world, this mind-body dualism is part and parcel to your understanding. You die and your soul goes to heaven if we think about it in concrete terms. You fall asleep, there’s your body, your mind is wherever it is, and then you wake back up, your mind’s back in action when you’re, so we can empathize right away with the intersection of Christianity and dual world, the idea that there’s some sort of enlighten, breath-giving soul that lights you up that is separable from your body is embedded in the grammar that comes before in the Western European tradition here. And then it’s gonna become this psychological middle ground even if Descartes doesn’t argue it in terms of I talk a lot about how people justify. So the idea that we can take Descartes and basically like, okay, we can believe in this matter in motion stuff, but we still have a mind that’s separable for many people. That’s gonna create a psychological, maybe not elegant philosophical solution, but it will create a psychological solution of like, oh, okay, we can believe in science and still have our Christian version of reality. I think that’s excellent. Thank you. So I wanna pick up, so yeah, I think there’s very much a two worlds mythology that we’ve inherited from the ancient world and through the medieval world. Greg’s right, that’s in there. And that part of the attraction of Descartes, yeah. Part of the attraction of Descartes’ argument is precisely how it not only is meshed with the scientific revolution, it allows, it re, I wanna, I wanna turn, I wanna, it re-languages Christianity so that for a while, it has a safe space within that emerging scientific worldview. So. Perfect. Okay, so, let’s just do a very quick thing on inference to the best explanation, how does it work? And this is, and the point about this is Descartes claimed fair, I think, because I would argue, and many people, there’s many people in philosophy of science would argue that most of science works in terms of inference to the best explanation. So let’s. I believe that, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let’s do it by an example. Here’s a very important scientific theory, the Darwin’s theory of evolution. So what’s the issue? Well, we have some phenomena that seems to demand from us explanation. Creatures seem to be really well designed in the sense of their morphology and their behavior seems to be really well fitted to the environment that they’re in. How did that happen, right? And we care about this because it has implications for us. And so deep implications for us. Okay, so you can look around, and now I’ll be Paley who comes before Darwin. Well, I can look around, how do some things get their shape? Well, sand dunes get their shape by the wind blowing. Oh, well, maybe the wind blows enough and it will make it go, that doesn’t seem right. Okay, that seems very, very implausible. Well, you know, maybe, well, sometimes lightning strikes and it starts a fire. Well, maybe lightning strikes and it strikes a particular kind of fire because goats are warm and that’s how you get a goat. And notice how you’re probably finding these proposals ridiculous. And then you get, well, it’s Paley says, you know, think about this, I come across a watch and the watch is really complex. And compared to all these other explanations, here’s a good explanation for how the watch came into existence. There’s an intelligent designer that made it. And so compared to the other explanations, we conclude because the explanation of the intelligent designer explains more and more precisely than the other two and gives us, you know, a tighter fit between our explanations of what we’re trying to explain, we conclude that that’s the case. So we put, we have our phenomena, we put a bunch of explanations into competition and the one that does the best job, we conclude that the entities that are proposed in it must therefore exist, the intelligent designer brings it. Now, Darwin comes along and this shows you something about inference to the best explanation. They are always historically relative because there’s always more possible explanations, always, always. Darwin comes along and he comes up with an alternative, you know, basically natural selection. And the thing about Darwin is his theory is a better explanation. Why is it better? Because he can explain not only really good design, but he can explain really, really crappy design. Like, you know, why is our back at this weird stupid S-curve in it? Well, because we have all done quadrupeds, right? Why do we have these wisdom teeth that are, you know, very not functional, right? Well, it’s because we evolved, right? And so he, why does, you know, famously, you know, Gould, the panda’s thumb, why doesn’t the panda have a good thumb? Because, right? And so Descartes, he can explain both good design and bad design and he can evoke entities that we can observe, right? We can observe competition between animals. We can observe sexual reproduction or just reproduction in general. So he has, he explains more phenomena in terms of mechanisms for which we have more direct evidence. So his proposal is the best. And that’s why many people, myself included, I know Greg is too, think that this is the explanation of how, you know, organic creatures came to be. Now notice, and this is actually happening right now, because people are now, and I mean, within biology, I don’t mean crackpots. People within biology are challenging Darwin’s account and saying, you know, even the grand synthesis, right? Has to be revised. Dennis Walsh, a friend and colleague of mine is doing fantastic work on this, a bunch of other people, because- I’ve got ideas about that, but I’ll spare you. Well, that’s good. So the point is, when it beats out the competition, we conclude that it’s real. But we often forget that inference to the best explanation is historically relative. Before Darwin, if you didn’t believe in intelligent design, you were kind of an idiot, right? But after Darwin, it’s really hard to believe in intelligent design. And so that’s where we’re at. So what I wanna do- I’ll make a quick plug here for justification systems theory. So justification systems theory does say that our ideas for what is and ought to be exist in a socio-historical context and justification is a key functional dynamic. So it just basically, if you have that frame, you always are then situating whatever justificatory frame you have in its history. Yeah, that’s good. That’s- oh, this is wonderful having you here, Greg. That’s a great connection. I hadn’t put those two together. That’s really interesting. So what Greg is proposing, make sure I understand you, Greg, is proposing that the epistemic strategy of inference to the vast explanation is bound up with the socio-cultural strategy of justification, which actually constitutes the cultural sphere. Did I understand you correctly? Yeah, and actually, when you get used to the language of justification, it permeates everything. So it’s like, well, I’m justifying myself in a context of justification and creates all these loops. But yeah, that’s exactly right. Okay, so what I wanna do is I want to do, so I tried to convince you that Descartes’ argument is an inference to the vast explanation, and therefore, our approach to it has to be properly historical. And what that means is we have to look at Descartes’ time at the competing explanations that were on offer, and why did Descartes’ model win out over the competing explanations? And let’s remember that the arena of the competition is the scientific revolution, and as Greg has reminded us, it’s also the arena of the Catholic Church in crisis, because the Protestant Reformation has occurred, for example. Yes, of course. Okay, so what is on offer? So first of all, what’s on offer is the Aristotelian worldview. So that’s the official main competitor of the Aristotelian worldview. So when you read sort of the standard textbooks, the official main competitor is the Aristotelian worldview, and this was undergoing something of a very powerful collapse, and this was not a trivial affair, because the Aristotelian worldview had been in existence for a bit dominant for about 1800 years kind of thing. And so that’s a long time, and it had deeply inseminated Catholic theology, a promise of promise, it deeply stitched Christianity and the Aristotelian worldview together, and the educational system, the scholastic tradition that Greg alluded to, was deeply woven with Aristotelian ideas about learning and the cultivation of virtue. So this was the, so a good thing to ask is, what was the scientific revolution? What was the scientific revolution revolting against? It was revolting against the Aristotelian worldview. Again, to get a more complex view of that, I refer people to some of the episodes from Awakening for the Meeting Crisis. Go ahead, Greg. I’ll make a quick comment here, because actually what I’m really interested in is, just in this, it gets back to some of my stuff, so I won’t go on to, but actually there’s an explosion of what I would call pure lame metaphysics, around the 15th century, 16th century. If you do pure lame metaphysics, everything is tautological. So you get Aristotle’s metaphysics combined with the Catholic Church, and then on steroids, where it can’t, and then Galileo hates that. So Galileo’s empiricism is defined against metaphysics gone wild. We should do a video on that. Metaphysics gone wild. So anyway, so that’s in that tradition. So that tradition is collapsing, and that’s actually gonna come back, because I actually think that we do a disservice to metaphysics, at least the natural, modern empirical science, doesn’t realize that you need a descriptive metaphysics for your empiricism, that’s a point I will make. So anyway, that’s a… And I’ve gotta argue there’s aspects of Aristotle that come back. Oh, absolutely, especially at the issues of life, mind, and culture, when we get into final and formal causation. I don’t know if you wanna get into that, but that’s a whole nother excitement. Well, we will. So I’m gonna, like I said, let’s talk about what was lost, what was being lost in the scientific revolution, what was being dispensed with from the Aristotelian worldview. So a useful way to look at how people are living their metaphysics is in terms of their worldview, and a worldview, some of you recognize this argument from elsewhere, it’s made up of two components, a model of the world and a model of your viewing, your knowing of the world, knowing broadly construed, and they have to mutually support each other in a very powerful fashion. And like Greg just said, that can degenerate into a kind of empty totology kind of thing. Greg wasn’t saying that the Aristotelian worldview was itself a totology. Oh, no. But that attunement can be misappropriated as an empty kind of totology. So what’s the theory of viewing? The theory of viewing is the conformity theory. Again, I’m not gonna go into this detail. You can take a look at some of the videos from, I’ll put links in the notes. We can go to specific extended arguments about this from Awakening for the Meeting Crisis. But the basic idea is that what makes something intelligible is its structural functional organization, and that what I do when I know something is my mind actually takes on the same structural functional organization as the thing. So shape is only a metaphor for structural functional organization. If you were to sort of integrate our ideas of shape with the idea of like a chemical structure or a biological structure, you’re getting closer to what I’m talking about when I’m talking about structural functional organization. But I’ll use shape as a metaphor for structural functional organization. So if my hand, if my mind is like my hand, we use the word grasp for knowing. I grasp something or I comprehend it. My hand literally takes on the shape. It takes on the same structural functional organization as the thing it possesses. So there is a deep identity between my mind and the thing that is known. This is what is called the conformity theory. So I want you to notice the deep connectedness, the intimacy, even the identification between the mind and what is known. So that is actually being destroyed. And so most of us don’t think of that today. What was the scientific revolution doing? Well, the scientific revolution was challenging the idea that our mind had this intimate even identification with, intimate connection and identification with. Why? Because Aristotle had said, this is how you can tell if your mind is in conformity. You do a bunch of checks. You make sure the relevant organ is functioning. You make sure the medium that’s operating in is not distorting. And you make sure you have interpersonal agreement. And this is what we do in our day to day lives when we wanna know if something’s real. We wanna make sure, are my glasses clean? Right, right. Is it foggy or? Did you see that too, Bob and Susan? Oh, absolutely. All right, and that’s how we do it. Get that correspondence going. Yeah, exactly. And so, and now Aristotle said, now he didn’t mean just sort of like, a whimsical or everyday sense. He said, you do it really, you do it very philosophically. You do a lot of rational reflection and discussion and you do all this very careful work. And then after you pass those three tests, then you know that the form in your mind and the form in the world are conformed together. And then Copernicus comes along. And we’ll come back to Copernicus later, but what’s he doing? He said, you know what? We can all get up. We’re stone cold sober. Our eyes are all 20-20 vision. It’s a clear day. Yeah. There’s a bunch of us around and we’re talking and we’re making sure we’re checking with each other. And we all see the sun rise in the east, pass overhead and set in the west, and we are all wrong. Right. We’re all wrong. In fact, and why did he say that? So remember this. He said that because, as he said it, because putting the sun at the center and having the earth go around it and turn on its axis made the math work better. We’re gonna come back to that. So what happens is, Copernicus and then Galileo say, rather than experience being the moment of conformity, experience is actually something that veils us from the world. It blinds us to the world. We need the math to get through the veil, to get to the thing. And so what is born is the idea that knowing happens through representation. I have to have something that, because the thing is not present to my mind in conformity, I have to have some other thing that re-presents it, the world, to my mind. Yep. Exactly. We get this idea that the mind is inherently representational and it is cut off from the world. And that most of experience is therefore illusory in some important fashion. So I’ll stop there for a second and give Greg a chance to interject or respond. Yes, I mean, I will certainly, we can suggest that this idea is present, certainly in the Greeks, if we go to Plato and think about the allegory of the cave, there’s allusion to this notion that we are suggesting about the mind representation. But the break, the Copernican worldview is really, people just hadn’t thought about it. It’s really kind of remarkable, not to say, but really the idea was that the heavens had to conform to perfect circles of our earth and of our mind. So the earth shattering nature of this heliocentric transition is really remarkable. And it does set the stage for an enormous, profound justification dilemma of like, well, what is the ground upon which we are legitimizing? Because, and so your story about this narrative, I just want people to realize how worldview foundational shaking it is. When that conformity thing slips away and people now are like, well, wait a minute, maybe we’re all BS, and this would come back to Rene Descartes, evil demon, in relationship to what, the possibility of that. Well said. So notice what’s happening here, on what the mind is withdrawn into itself from the world. What’s happening on the other side? What was the model of the world? And Greg already pointed to it. Under Aristotle, it’s a geocentric worldview, because what is the structure of my experience? The structure of my experience is I’m at the center and things are moving around me and they seem to be moving in perfect circles. And all of that falls apart. And it falls apart because, we’re getting much better measurements, much better, and we’re getting much better math and algebra is coming in from the Arab world. And so we’re getting, and we’re seeing that the heavens, Mars is doing this weird retrograde. Things are just behaving strangely. And as I mentioned, Copernicus said, well, if we put the sun at the center, the math works better. And so mathematical representations are now going to be much more trustworthy than all of this. So stop and pause, because think about what that means for consciousness already. You go from thinking of consciousness as something that is putting you in contact with reality, to being something that’s somehow in the mind, because all of this of which unconscious, all of this qualitative, structured, meaningful experience, it’s not out there, because it’s not mathematically measurable. It’s not there. It’s not there. So for example, in Aristotle’s worldview, things are moving on purpose. Everything is moving on purpose because every element is trying to get to where it belongs. Everything is moving on purpose. But Galileo discovers inertial motion. Things aren’t moving on purpose. They’re not, think about what’s at the heart of the word inertial, inert, lifeless, purposeless, dead. So everything is moving not on purpose. And now the fact that we move on purpose is again, well, it’s not like we’re doing what everything else is doing. We’re now doing something really weird and unique and what’s happening, you see, I keep doing it with my hands. We go from the mind and consciousness being a way in which we are affined and identified to the world to be no, no, all of these properties are actually withdrawing and they’re completely in the subject. They’re completely subjective. All that’s out there is what the math represents to me. The mathematical properties are the real, are the properties in the object. So this is unbelievably crucial to understand the dilemma that we’re in. I often refer to as the modernist empirical and we can get in this word empirical is a very interesting word because it used to mean basically first person experience and then it means exterior third person measurement and observation and the science switch. So there’s a switch and what the science then stops doing is it becomes unbelievably suspect of the subject. I often call it the anti-knower and what I mean by this, the anti-subjective bias-knower that tries to get to objectivity. So it’s trying to cross out that subjective perspective and give rise to a general observer third person view. How do you do that? Through mathematical logic, measurement and some sort of generic observer that interprets that measurement. So we’re really transforming our epistemology here, very, very profoundly. Excellent. So let’s pick up on that. So notice what’s happening here. Copernicus isn’t trying to do anything about the mind. He’s trying to solve a problem of making sense of the new sciences understanding, emerging new sciences understanding of the heavens. And yet that immediately ramifies into this grammar that Galileo is gonna develop, that Greg just talked about of the subjective and objective. And all of these properties that were previously in the world are now withdrawing into the mind and are being regarded as illusory and only subjective in existence. You see the very project of the scientific revolution is driving us into a way of thinking about the world and the mind that is pulling them apart and setting them against each other, which is very opposite to the Aristotelian view that had them deeply conforming and mutually defining of each other. So can we, let’s just for the, if we’re thinking to connect this back to the meaning crisis, you know, our, I mean, obviously there’s other philosophy going on here, but our foundational epistemological, this is what truth is, okay? It’s now cutting out the subjective Noah and the meaning that it represents about the world, okay? So this is a very, very profound element of what the modernist mentality is going to mean downstream here in terms of what we’re gonna be dealing with. So I just let the viewer think about the implications of that. I wanna riff on that a sec. It’s also desiccating the world. Yeah, well, yeah. It leaves the world desiccated also. And so we are cut out from the scientific worldview that’s sort of this direction that Greg pointed to. And I’m also pointing out, we can’t find ourselves at home in that world because it doesn’t have any of the properties that make our experience meaningful to us in any deep fashion. So I’m gonna- Amen. And this is actually going back to Galileo and what he takes from Aristotle’s metaphysics in terms of empirical substance and efficient or really kinetic cause, okay? And he’s gonna kill formal and final causation. That’s exactly what I was gonna move into next. So what is also happening, as Greg just said, is like the kind, so Galileo basically, we think of this as so natural that you do science by doing math. Think about, and we graph and we do math. There is no math in Aristotelian science. There’s no math. They had math, the Greeks invented mathematics. It’s not like they didn’t, they invented formal mathematics. They had it, they had formal logic. Aristotle invents it. So they had it, but the idea that you do science by applying math, that’s not in the Aristotelian worldview. But Galileo does this and then he proposes that because of what Copernicus says is, I can use the math in order to overcome the way in which my experience is so deceptive, so musery. I can use the math. And what I have to do is I have to set up the world so I can mathematically measure and manipulate it because that’s the way in which I will be able to overcome the self-deception. And that’s where you start to get the experimental method. You start to get the experimental method developed. And what happens, as Greg said, when you do this, is that as the gap is opening up and as the representation is our primary connection to the world, all of these properties, notice what we’ve talked about, all of these properties of purpose are being removed. Purpose and meaning. And so Galileo is discovering inertial motion. And so he thinks that the only way things happen is through contact, efficient causation. This is the billiard ball model. They have to bang, things have to contact. So notice what’s happening here, right? Is that the only way in which they can understand causation is through things, because things are inert. There’s no dynamic to them because all purpose and meaning has been removed to them. The only way they can interact is by inertially smashing into each other. Matter and motion. So we get the essence of this matter and motion. We can independently observe with mathematics, entities and their change. And now this becomes the conceptual grammar, the lens through which we will make sense of the material world. And then the question is, well, where, is that everything? And now we’re gonna get into this. But there’s this other stuff. So let’s try and gather together. What we’ve got is we’ve lost the conformity theory and the geocentric worldview. And that’s made so many of the properties of the world actually estranged from the world. And then we have to house them into this new conception of the mind as this self-enclosed separate substance that is actually cut off from reality and that can only get to through reality through math and through mathematical representation. And that the only thing therefore it can pick up on in the world, the only real relations that things have to each other, the only real causal relation that exists are things physically coming into contact with each other, banging into each other. Okay, what else happens there? Well, I was fortunate as an undergraduate to study with Albert Shalom. And he made this argument about the loss of the Aristotelian worldview, a further consequence of it, which is the function of the mind. The mind used to, this is gonna be the hardest part. What used to be called the mind, it wasn’t really the mind, but in Aristotle, the mind was basically the dynamic development of the structural functional organization. So mind’s job was to actualize the potential of matter. So Aristotle had a notion of matter, but it’s very different from ours. So for Aristotle, it’s helpful to use the Greek word for matter, hula, which originally meant wood, right? And so Aristotle said, well, from the same block of wood, I could make a chair or a table, or I might make a small ship, right? And so the wood is potentially a chair or a table. What makes it actually a table or a chair is how it’s structurally functionally organized. It has been informed, a particular form, structural functional organization has been put into it so that it acts in a certain way. So matter is potential that is actualized by structural functional organization. And then living creatures, and especially mental creatures, have a dynamic capacity for actualization. And so the mind for Aristotle is that about us, which at many level is actualizing the potential of our body and our interaction. So the mind is actually a developmental actualizer of all of the potentiality that is given to you. And so we can say, actually, so, and his word is psyche, by the way. No, okay, that really is soul, but it’s the functional form of the entities, all right? And then I get all excited because he’s gonna put this on a scale of natura, right? And then he’s gonna say there’s inanimate functional forms, and then there’s vegetative functional forms, and then there’s animal functional forms, and then there are rational personal functional forms. If you know tree of knowledge, matter, life, mind, and culture, there’s gonna be a lot of overlap in relationship to there. But so he is thinking about functional form at these different levels of nature. And that really, mind, he don’t really have the equivalent of the term mind. He has this functional form that jumps off of the material plane and gets into the vegetative, animal, and rational planes. Right, excellent. And as you’re going up the scale of actualization, you’re coming into entities that are more and more capable of actualizing. Right, have more complicated, functional structural forms and doing more and more sophisticated things. So you have this whole model of the mind as an engine of dynamical development and emergence. Right, which actually isn’t a bad model. No, a good model. And here’s the thing, we lose that. This is Shalom’s point. We lose that when the Aristotelian view is lost. And so we lose the job of mind being inherently connected to development and emergence. We lose the function of mind as being inherently connected to development and emergence. So now the mind is not only isolated, it doesn’t really have any important relationship to the body, it’s not actualizing the body, and it is not inherently in development. It is just an epistemic engine. Its only job is to represent the world as mathematically accurately as possible. Brilliant, brilliant. I’ll make a quick point here. I detailed in depth John Watson, you know, a famous behaviorist. And he has a footnote, he basically says, to the extent there’s any problem of consciousness, it’s a philosophical problem to legitimize epistemology. Okay, that’s what he said. He’s like, you know, because he has this neural network reflex model that reduces to all this mechanical stuff. So he’s like, to the extent, it’s a problem of just philosophers and epistemology about what an observation is and how do you legitimize it. So it’s really cool about how much he’s internalized that as a behavior, you know, the raw behaviorism. Right. Internalizes this, and then he still has to see, somehow consciousness plays a role. Well, he skirted it all the way up to the problem of epistemology and the profession of philosophy. It’s really interesting. That’s pretty cool, I didn’t know that. Yeah. Thank you, that’s very good. So notice what we now have. We have the Aristotelian view is collapsing. Why is the Aristotelian view collapsing? Because it doesn’t do well with the science at all. It doesn’t do well with the emerging science at all. Instead, the science is driving, and this is not to say that science is evil. That is not what we’re saying. I’m not saying that. Yeah, I don’t think John and I are gonna be in that camp. So, but what the scientific revolution is doing, it’s revolting against the Aristotelian worldview, and we’re losing, right? We’re losing purpose and final causation. We’re losing a picture of the mind as functioning in development and in emergence. We’re losing the idea of the mind being intimately connected to the world, and that meaning is something that all the things that we find meaningful are disclosing, aspects of the world. Instead, the mind is now a place where all of the properties that can no longer exist in matter have to be found. So the beauty of the rose isn’t anything out there because it’s not a mathematical property. It’s just in here. The sweetness of the honey, the sunrise and sunset are not there. They’re just subjective. They’re just illusions, right? All of it is an illusion, and so you get this self-enclosed mind that has a single basic function. All it’s doing is trying to create mathematically accurate representations of the world, and so the mind is basically struggling against the fact that it is filled with all of these properties that don’t belong in the world, and it’s trying to use mathematical representation because that’s the only way in which the world can be present to it again. Right, that’s what a scientific mind is trying to do. Exactly, exactly. Okay. So notice what we’re getting here. So this will allow us to introduce one technical term. We will try to keep these to a minimum. So philosophers, so Galileo proposes a distinction between sort of primary and secondary qualities that Descartes takes up and that Locke takes up, et cetera, because he’s taking it. So the primary qualities are the properties of things, the qualities of things that are mathematically measurable, and therefore they are objective. They are in the object. All the properties that are not mathematically measurable are secondary qualities, and they only subjectively exist. They only exist in the mind, and now you have a place for all these secondary qualities. So philosophers have a name for these secondary qualities. We call them qualia, qualia. They’re all of the felt meaningful aspects of our experience that we don’t think are actually in the world. So we have the qualia. And then of course we have a place for the qualia, and that place we start to call consciousness. Consciousness is the self-enclosed place where the qualia are found and where purpose and development and self-actualization or whatever, everything retreats there. And so what you have is this notion, so I’m gonna come back to this in Descartes’ second argue, but here’s the notion. The mind was once in conformity to the world. Charles Taylor calls this a contact epistemology, so I keep using contact. What happens is the only thing that the mind is now in contact with is itself, and that contact with itself are the qualia. When the mind is touching itself, those are the purely subjective qualia. That’s consciousness. Consciousness is the mind touching itself in acts of qualia. And that’s how we start. And notice how this is completely subjective as opposed to objective, and notice that it is something that is by definition not mathematically measurable, and therefore completely other than the external world. So Descartes’ argument comes along, and he looks at this and he says, you know why that’s the case? People didn’t think this was the case 100 years before Descartes, but everybody’s confronting these ideas now. Descartes says, you know why that’s the case? Because mind and matter are actually two fundamentally different kinds of substance. They share no properties. They’re unique and distinct from each other. And in comparison to the Aristotelian worldview, it can’t explain all of this, what’s going on in the scientific revolution. Descartes’ argument makes perfect sense. It explains why we are coming to all of these conclusions about qualities and properties and how the earth is actually going around the sun and that there is no purpose out there. And the only thing the mind does is know the world. It explains all of this perfectly in a way in which the Aristotelian framework does not. And so that’s one way in which his argument is beating out the Aristotelian worldview. I wanna put out one other, there’s one other contender that is not normally talked about in the official textbook. And this is part of the history. And we need to mention this because there’s a section which Greg and I wanna bring back at least aspects of this contender into what we wanna talk about. So Cedar talks about this and a couple other people, Mark Taylor talks a lot about this in his book, I believe, After God, talks about that there was actually a third contender that was actually very prevalent. And this was the neoplatonic magical tradition that was coming out in the late Renaissance. The fact that we even call it magic means we’ve already got this whole way in which we marginalized it and excluded it. And rightly so, like even when I uttered that word, I sort of, there’s part of me that goes, what, right? But let’s try and situate it historically. What were the neoplatonic philosophers, magicians, pointing to? Well, they were pointing to things that didn’t fit into either the Aristotelian worldview or the new Cartesian worldview. They were saying, but wait, there seems to be action at a distance. There seems to be magnetism. And why are things falling? If they’re not moving on purpose, like Aristotle said, Descartes, why would I, like how does the earth, the earth isn’t touching the pen and yet it’s drawn, like what’s going on? There’s action at a distance. And they’re looking at living things and they’re saying, but living things are self organizing, right? They’re self, they don’t use that term, but that’s right. They’re using terms, that’s exactly what they’re pointing to. They’re dynamic, they’re self organizing, they’re inherently developmental. Using more modern language, they seem to have emergent properties. And so action at a distance and emergence and self organizing. And they’re trying to say, we need to make these the centerpiece. If they had won, biology would have been the first primary science other than physics, right? And it’s only now that biology is coming into its core. If you compare the sort of theoretical advance in the two sciences, biology is showing way more theoretical advance right now than physics is. And that isn’t a coincidence by the way. I’m not saying that physics is bad or they’re not generating all kinds of data. I’m talking about a very specific point about theoretical advance. Okay, so let’s go back to the neoplateness. They’re saying all this. And the Catholic church is looking at all this and it’s like, oh my gosh, the Aristotelian world is collapsing, but we’re Thomas and we don’t wanna lose that. And initially Descartes, Descartes bad, Galileo’s bad, Galileo is almost like he’s put on house arrest, right? But while Descartes put on house arrest, Bruno is actually burnt at the stake and he’s one of those neoplatements. Now why? Why does the church regard this is even more dangerous? Well, because if it’s natural for there to be action at a distance, then miracles aren’t all that strange. Everything has the potential, and this is why they’re thought of as being magical. Everybody could potentially bring about action at a distance. Lifeless magnets bring about action at a distance. Surely human beings could develop a kind of magnetism and as we’re much later, right? And so they’re miraculous. And if things are self organizing and emergent, well, you don’t need a creator. So you don’t need God the Father and you don’t need Jesus and his miracles. Oh no, whoa. That’s really dangerous. That’s like witches stuff. So it’s like, you know what? Let’s actually embrace the Cartesian worldview with inertial motion and only efficient causation because it strangles out and prevents it. That neoplatonic stuff. No, I was talking about the psychological utility of the Cartesian view. You just added a whole nother dimension of justification that I wasn’t aware of in relationship to the pressures that would give rise to that fusion. So not only is it a psychological middle ground of science and you know, but it’s actually now also a defense against a potential incursion. Right, excellent. And so what gets pushed to a side are organic, dynamic, emergent, embodied, embedded approaches to cognition that are only now very much later resurfacing in what’s called four E cognitive science. It’s taken that long, right, to get back to where we can now talk about the kinds of things that the neoplatonists wanted to talk about. And so what happens is a large part of the Catholic Church aligns. And this is what I was trying, what Greg was alluding to about why the Catholic Church aligns with Descartes because by aligning with the Cartesian framework, it can actually, and especially when it’s getting all of the approval of the emerging scientific revolution, then it can have a ball work against this other view that is much more dangerous to the Catholic worldview, the Christian worldview. And Descartes dualism, as Greg rightly alluded, gives you a way of reconceptualizing. And now we take it for granted. But reconceptualizing the soul. And what Descartes does is he says, well, you know this completely self-enclosed mental stuff that is completely not material? That’s what a soul is. A soul is completely self-enclosed mental stuff. Aristotle would have said, what are you talking about? That makes no sense to me. Right. And so what happens is you get something that we all now take for granted. You get the equation of soul with the conscious mind, that that’s what the soul is. And that the conscious mind is equated with a self-enclosed separable immaterial substance. And that the Catholic Church has a new way of thinking about soul that keeps it independent from being crushed away by the scientific worldview. Now, I wanna be clear. I am not accusing Descartes of engaging in propaganda because he’s trying to save the Catholic Church. Descartes is a Catholic, but his arguments, they have to be taken on their own merits because they were taken on their own merits. But what I am saying is the reverse is the case. There’s a huge branch of the Catholic Church that actually gets attracted to Descartes’ ideas because it squeezes out the neoplateness with scientific legitimacy, and it gives a reconceptualization of the soul that will preserve it from the emerging collapse of the Aristotelian worldview. Yes. So, in a way that is almost imperceptibly complex, this idea of consciousness is bound up via these, via this competition, this emphasis of Descartes wins because his argument functions best to get rid of the Aristotelian, get people out the neoplateness, and re-home the soul. So, it’s just insinuated throughout, it’s woven through the idea of consciousness and it’s insinuated throughout, it’s woven through the scientific worldview and the now emerging Christian worldview, the post-Descartes Christian worldview. And so what we’re seeing here is the intersection between these large-scale systems of justification that are institutionalized and narrating their structures, right, at the sociocultural level as we try to narrate what is going on at the human psychological level, at the subjective, the interface between all of this is why we got a world not of consciousness. So, I think we’re getting to a place maybe where we can start to wrap up this portion of the conversation. Yeah, so I think that’s what we should do. But so, we’ve taken the title of this from Schopenhauer’s quote that, the mind-body problem is the world not. And we chose the world not precisely because, and this is what this argument is trying to show, this isn’t a problem about sort of, here’s some features of consciousness and here’s some features of the natural world, right? It is a world not. Our scientific worldview and our religious heritage, whether or not we’re Christians, doesn’t matter. That has been sewn into our cultural cognitive grammar in a deep way. Absolutely. What I’m trying to show you is the Cartesian model of consciousness is born up with those in an inseparable old fashion, born up with that whole heritage in an inseparable old fashion. And then you say, well, that’s great. I like the dualism. Well, I’m gonna leave you with why it’s problematic and then next time Greg and I will come back and look at Descartes’ second argument. We’re gonna keep doing this. Here’s why it’s problematic. And Descartes knew this and everybody immediately since Descartes knew it. And they saw it as the deepest problem. So everybody says, yes, Descartes must be right for all the reasons we’ve given, but how is it possible that mind or consciousness and matter interact? Because the whole point of this is dualism. The whole point is they share no properties whatsoever. How could the truth of my idea in any way affect the matter of my body? My body has to be moved by some other matter that has physical energy, that has inertial properties, that has electromagnetic radiation. My ideas and the truth of my idea have none of those properties, but yet I’m gonna do it. I wanna move my finger. Hey, there you go, it moved. How did mind move matter or the opposite? Slam my hand on the table. That’s a completely material contact. Galileo’s right, things smashing into each other, but it results in pain, which is a completely subjective qualia. How did something physical, an objective and energetic, cause pain, which is subjective and not? And so this is what’s known as the mind-body problem. We could even call it the consciousness world problem or the consciousness matter problem. Right, that’s the meaning, yep. And do you remember the Duchess or Lady? Because Descartes overlooks this in his first round of this and he gets it pointed out to him and I’m blanking on her name. I think it’s Elizabeth from Sweden who does that. Okay, anyway, so she asked him this very question, of course, and this gets to the pineal gland answer, which is not adequate, but. I would go back to this. Right? So, and everybody takes it up. Spinoza takes it up, and Leibniz takes it up, Leibniz takes it up, and Maulbronch, everybody. And you can, there’s a sense in which this is the problem that everybody, we can’t ignore this question because the solution that Descartes proposed, while elegant in its ability to deal with the scientific worldview and the Christian worldview and hold them together and give people an existential response to all of the trauma that’s happening, while it’s elegant and all of those ways gives us this, what seems like an insolvable problem. There seems to be no possible way in which mind and matter can interact, and yet everything about us tells us everything we’re doing, every moment of our experience, every knowledge claim we make, everything. I claim to know Greg’s knowledge. I’m sorry, I came to know Greg’s mind. I just claimed to have knowledge of it, but all I see is his material body. How could I possibly go from his material body to his mind? It can’t causally interact. So we’re gonna come back to this in the way in which the mind-body problem is also a problem of other minds. No reason for attributing mind to anybody else because the only way mind can be known is consciousness of itself. For all my affection for Greg, I do not know his mind that way. That’s right, yep. Right, and so here we have the knot. The knot has been tied, but we can leave little clues here if we go back and we say, okay, if you remember our first thing, I put up that sort of, okay, we’re gonna work through this mind, right? Mind one, two, three. We can identify with Aristotle and the functional conformity. We can see a functional active mind kind of notion. It starts with plants and then dogs do it and then people do it, okay? And that’s gonna be actually gonna connect to our mind one version of reality. And then we have also connected this notion about these narrative and institutional justification and argument, okay, which is gonna be mind three. And now we’re really honing in on what we’re meaning in our Western tradition, this contained, subjective, representational, phenomenological portion of mind. And then that becomes consciousness. And then how does that connect is where, these are two domains, we’re gonna give a vocabulary to them, but we’re gonna be left with this problem. Yeah. But we’re gonna try and shrink it as much as we can. We’re gonna shrink that thing and we’re gonna box it in and we’re gonna show that with additional language categories and an upgraded version of scientific ontology and epistemology, this thing can be much more effectively addressed. And that, again, will ramify back in terms of the existential and spiritual consequences. It will actually feed back in important ways to addressing the meaning process. Absolutely. Okay, so we’re gonna meet again. And Greg and I, are we both committed to this long term? Because we both think this is a good thing. The journey has been engaged. Yeah. So next time, what I wanna do is present, we’re gonna take a look at Descartes’ three arguments because the three arguments are important and we’ll go through that and then we’ll set up the history. And then I’m gonna turn it over to Greg for a while and he’s going to talk about how this ramifies into the scientific project of psychology. And then we’re gonna gather it up together into what are the current cognitive scientific theories of consciousness, the attempts people are making to give a scientific explanation of consciousness that addresses all of Descartes’ arguments but doesn’t leave us with Descartes’ problems. Okay, everyone. Amen. Next time, take good care of everyone. Thanks so much, my good friend. Thank you, it’s brilliant. Yeah, no, thank you.