https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hz3mEYdJEvY
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. Last time, Greg did this excellent thing where he took sort of the philosophical problems given to us, most prominently by Descartes, but a cohort of other people, Galileo, et cetera, and then he showed how that just sort of unfolded through what he has aptly named the problem of psychology. And so what we have, what we’re seeing is that the problem of consciousness is enmeshed with the problem of our commitment to the scientific worldview, and neither Greg nor I are anti-scientific. That’s not the point of what I just said. What we’re trying to show is that Descartes’ creation of what’s called the mind-body problem, and that’s what all the arguments have shown, was deeply enmeshed with the creation of the scientific worldview. And so that’s one problematic on one side, and then Greg, and these are not independent, but following from that, Greg showed an important specification of that problematic in the problem of psychology, which is the discipline that is supposed to be, at least officially, studying the mind can’t get its shit together, in the sense of giving us a coherent picture that we could then bring into the formulation of the problem, what’s the relationship between mind and matter. And then Greg and I both acknowledge that that’s now been exacerbated by the emergence of additional competing sciences of mind, like neuroscience and artificial intelligence and linguistics, et cetera. And so we have a very problematic situation, Greg, I think, very difficult. Amen, amen. And I’ll just say that when we understand the emergence of what happened, as you articulated, with the modern science revolution, it was to create the split between, okay, you have secondary representation, oh, there’s a primary quantity quality out here, right? And then we have an epistemological change in empiricism, really, where it’s like, oh, it’s empiricism is what you see, and it’s like, wait a minute, we have to factor out what you see and measure it from a third-person perspective. And then if it’s a third-person perspective, but we’re also interested in, it’s also a first-person perspective, well, that’s a real, that’s an epistemological problem. And I just happened to see a, I scan actually all intro psych texts that come across my feed, I have a feed, and I just saw psychology for students, student-friendly version, and it just opens up, it says, oh, what is mind? Mind is all these things that are really cool, and then it just says, well, you can’t see it, so we saw the psychologist to study it, study scientifically behavior. So it’s like, it does this whole thing, here’s mind, and then all of a sudden you don’t know what it is, and then they say, because it’s science, it has to be behavior, which is basically then saying, because we’re in the epistemological category of a third-person view, then we have to frame it this way. And then they’re off and running as it will, actually, you’d really wanna stop there and make sure your problem formation’s really clear, make sure you don’t start equivocating on what mind is and what behavior is and what you can see and what you can’t, and do any of that, they just proceed it. So that’s to me the shit show. That is the problem, and that’s why we’re here doing this thing, to untangle the world knot. Exactly. Thank you, that was good. I like it when you get in that riff mode, I really like it. So I wanna return back, Greg, to Descartes, because we’ve largely had what you might call a negative, the problematic, the critical aspect, and I think we’ve done a lot to really at least make it plausible that there is a really difficult issue of even formulating the problem in the first place, let alone, which is why I tend to be skeptical of people who just sort of, here’s what consciousness is, and they do some video on it or promote some argument. Not that they should be ignored, I’m not promoting censorship, but I think that, unless this inter-penetrating set of problems is addressed, explicit, is explicated and formulated, I think the chances of making progress on the untangling the world knot are very diminished. 100%, I mean, we have historical problem formulation, the other thing I’ve become very keen on is, what’s the epistemological dynamic, what’s the ontological reference, and are you being clear? And if I hear somebody saying, oh, I saw the problem of consciousness, it’s this thing, and they don’t talk ontology, epistemology, or historical grammar of whatever justification system you’re coming from, then it’s gonna be almost certainly equivocating and confusing. Yeah, and that’s where your metaphor, which you’ve drawn for Wittgenstein, all of these language games that are not using the same sort of cultural cognitive grammar, using different epistemological frames, having different ontological commitments is making this very, very difficult indeed. And so yeah, you get, and as you know, I have a video out there about how even the various competing disciplines, all neuroscience studies the brain, and it uses this method and gathers this kind of data, and then psychology, as you just said, doesn’t know, it claims to be studying behavior, it uses experimental method, but blah, blah, blah, and then you got computer science that no, we don’t study brain and we don’t study behavior, we make machines that do information processing, all the methods are different, all the theoretical ontologies are different, the language games are fundamentally different, and they all use the word mind and cognition interchangeably, but they’re talking about different things, so we have to be very cognizant of that, so let’s go very carefully. So I wanna go back to Descartes and try and pick up on something positive from Descartes. Amen. I wanna remind everybody of our first session, Greg and I had, where we talked about how there’s these two fundamental problems concerning consciousness, and there’s another place, by the way, there’s even sort of equivocation or negligence in the fact that often these questions are brought up independently of each other, sometimes confused with each other, and this is the nature of the generation problem, this is, broadly speaking, how does something like the phenomena of mind emerge or come to be, I’ll use a less contentious word, come to be in the world as it’s described by the scientific worldview, and as I’ll remind you one more time, this problem commits you to the scientific worldview if you really want to solve it, because that’s how it’s enmeshed. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the scientific worldview unchallenged, but you can’t ignore it or dismiss it. Amen. So that’s the nature or generation problem, and then there is the other problem, which is the function problem, what is it that consciousness does? And that’s a more pressing problem than faced by Descartes, because post Freud onward, and then Chomsky and others, we have come to understand how much of our intelligent behavior is carried out by unconscious processes, and therefore, what is the special function that consciousness is bringing to our intelligent behavior, if any at all? And of course, you know and I know there are some people who propose that consciousness has no important function, it’s almost a purely epiphenomenal entity. Now Descartes does something very interesting, and I think it’s instructive to us. He doesn’t solve these problems, but what he does is the way he formulates them might be helpful. He formulates them in a way in which he tries to address the function and the nature problems together. And I would argue that that is actually a very, very good strategy to pursue. So what I wanna do with you, Greg, is take a look at, go ahead, sorry. I was just, you are so much more familiar with Descartes than I am in terms of the depth of his thought and how, did he use this distinction? Was he pretty clear on the function nature of distinction? Or you’re just saying that his intuition and his model basically blend in, but he wasn’t necessarily. That’s the latter, very much the latter. Okay, just wanna be clear about that. And in fact, I think the integration was so intuitively apparent to him that the distinction is one that I’m anachronistically imposing on him. Perfect, okay, just wanna be clear about that. No, of course, excellent question. So let’s start with the problematic, a problem that Descartes faced and unfold a bit of the problematic around it. So for reasons which we’ve already sort of indicated, and I know you’re doing work on it, so I’ll give you a bit of space to dive on it, but Descartes had come to the conclusion that only human beings had consciousness. He made that argument because of their capacity for speech. Interestingly, notice he’s capturing an intuition that we need addressed. This is the intuition that we attribute consciousness on the basis of the complexity and flexibility of creatures’ cognitive behavior, right? So we actually think that intelligence is some kind of important marker of consciousness, even though we now know that a lot of intelligence is unconscious. So that’s why this is problematic. But that intuition is nevertheless the one we draw upon when we make our attributions, even today. So if you ask people, do you think a cat has consciousness? Yeah, yeah, I think a cat has consciousness. What about a worm? Yeah, exactly, unless you’re panpsychism. We’ll come back to panpsychism later. Okay, so now what that means is, notice what that intuition relies on. That intuition relies on that the nature of consciousness and the function of consciousness are actually intimately related. Right. Because I can only attribute consciousness to other things in terms of how they’re functioning, very broadly construed. And so that is, of course, I think, a very important intuition. And I’m gonna argue that it should, unless we can get an independent argument for rejecting that intuition, and given that that is the widespread method by which everybody does the attribution of consciousness, I think that intuition should be taken seriously. And that is one argument among many why the nature and the function problem should be addressed together. Yes. Okay, so Descartes goes in with this problem. He says only human beings have consciousness, and because he’s now redefined the soul as consciousness, and all the problematic reasons we talked about that, the Catholic church sort of likes that because there’s been a longstanding Christian doctrine, which I think might be undergoing revision right now, that only human beings have souls. Animals don’t have souls. They don’t have an afterlife. So Descartes inherits a problem that faced the Christians, and you can see this in some of their battles with some of the pagan philosophers. Well, given that animals don’t have souls, maybe in the Aristotelian framework they do. They just have an animal soul. They don’t have… Right, right. Even plants have a vegetative soul. Exactly, exactly. A vegetative soul is something much more functional. But let’s say given that… So Descartes inherits the problem of, yes, but animals clearly are intelligent, like a dog. They can learn, they can be trained, they can solve problems, they navigate through the world, they protect themselves, they protect their young, they seek out and hunt and find food. Like trying to get a machine to do all of that is really, really wickedly difficult. We don’t have artificial intelligence that’s at that level now. Okay, so Descartes has this problem of, okay, if they don’t have souls and consciousness, why are they nevertheless capable of so much intelligence? And see how he’s confronting the front seat. Greg, it’s not, like I said, it’s not explicit, but he’s bumping into the relationship between the nature and the function, right? That’s right. And by the way, now I’m also in my own frame of psychology, which lines up with your cognitive science, okay? What we’re doing is we’re watching the complex, functional, adaptive behavior of animals, right? And then we’re saying there’s something that’s mediating that dynamic problem solving adjustment system, right? Yes, yes, very much. And then that’s some sort of brain intelligence, cognition, they don’t have to be done enough. Cognition is a term, conscious something, right? Is at least the mentalist assertion. So that’s that connection, deep connection. Just now we have an external view of the world, i.e. a behavioral scientific, and we can just watch what animals do, you know? So maybe before we return to Descartes, maybe this is a good time. I know you’ve just mentioned before we started recording that you’re doing some review and study of, you know, the attribution of consciousness to animals. And you said there’s a lot of stuff coming out of that right now. So the position, if that’s true, that the problem that Descartes faces is even more pressing for us because we are even much more aware. And it’s even harder for us to not attribute consciousness to animals. But maybe I’ve said too much. No, no, absolutely. In fact, now there’s a, I think it was 2012, I could find the actual thing. There was a declaration of animal consciousness by ethologists and comparative psychologists and neuroscientists that were studying this issue. And that says, absolutely, there’s some forms of consciousness in the animal kingdom 100%, or at least, you know, that’s our strong, that’s why we need to make sure that everybody knows that scientifically now we believe Descartes is wrong. There’s all sorts of reasons to believe that animals have an experience of, there is something that it is like to be a bat, to use the Nagel term. And so I’ll just make a couple of interesting points, at least in my own, just for reference. So in terms of deep consciousness, like when does it really get started? There are some people, Jablanca, if I hope I say her name right there, and her colleagues, the evolution of the sensitive soul, they go back essentially to the Cambrian explosion. That’s about 550 million years ago. And it’s really the emergence of operant learning, okay, for them is that that is the beginning of experience and pleasure and pain and moving toward and moving away. Okay, so that’s pretty deep. And if you know, 500 million years ago, 550 million years ago, and then other individuals are looking to see the shape or contours or functionality of consciousness. So for example, like how much, what we would call perspectival, perceptual awareness does an entity have? Some animals seem to have a lot of that. How much self, almost self-awareness or what I would call proto-self-awareness or extension of intuitive self, elephants seem to have a huge amount of that kind of consciousness. So there are some people that are then starting to really map different dimensions, corresponding to functional responses, brain imagery, then a whole set of assumptions, kind of like global neuronal workspace kinds of assumptions that are operative. So it’s really exciting, I think some of the work that I do. Thank you, that is very cool. So let’s pick up on the first one, because I think it’s a theme running throughout that the attribution of consciousness seems to be paired with the attribution of intelligence, because when you’re getting operant learning and some capacity for learning and problem solving. So just for people are clear, so classical learning is like what a little reflex system will do. And it will become habituated or sensitized to certain kinds of stimuli. Operant learning is when you’re gonna feedback loop on your consequences. When you start doing stuff and then you extract resources, then you draw your attention and investment in a particular way at so much more fluid and dynamic. And also it makes a creature well, more intelligent. Well, there it is and maybe more conscious. Exactly, exactly. So within the scientific community, as Greg has pointed out, there’s a consensus about the attribution slaying consciousness exists in terms of its functionality. So again, trying to keep the nature and the function problem distinct, I think is not an intuition, or sorry, it’s not a strategy we should follow. I think Descartes intuition is well-placed. Okay, so back to Descartes, and so let’s back to this problem, which is the problem of, he’s facing the problem of, well, let’s say like dogs. And then we know he thinks dogs don’t have souls because he justifies doing vivisection on them where they’re still alive, because they don’t have consciousness, but he’s aware that dogs are highly intelligent. And so how does he explain this intelligence? Well, he brings up something that’s very interesting. And this goes to the work of my colleague at U of T, Bill Seeger, in his book on consciousness. So I recommend people to take a look at this because Descartes has often been, we often are given a caricature of Descartes rather than an in-depth study. And Seeger takes Descartes seriously and takes what Descartes does seriously. So Descartes says, and very interesting, he says, well, what animals have, and I’ll have to use some modern language because it’s faster than trying to use archaic language and then translate it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But basically what Descartes says is, well, what animals have is they have sort of brain states that reliably covary with things in the environment. They reliably covary. So if some object comes in front of them, there’s a brain state, and whenever that object is there, that brain state, and so they reliably covary. And of course we have a version of this that’s very prominent right now with the whole predictive processing model. Okay, so well-placed. And also one of the sort of standard presuppositions of most models of what a representation is, and you pointed out that psychologists often don’t even talk about what a representation is, they just presuppose it. But in cognitive science, there’s this deep question of what the heck is a representation. And most models are versions of a co-variation model that for me to have a representation of the world is for me to have some state in here, often my whole embodied. For recognition, yep. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Unless you say some state in me that reliably covaries with the environment. And then what Descartes says is, okay, and what that’ll do is that’ll allow the organism the ability to vary its behavior, the co-variations. The last organism will vary its behavior according to environmental conditions, and that will make the organism behave in an intelligent fashion. But what is the organism not capable of doing? It’s not capable of reasoning. So what’s going on there? So here I’m gonna help Descartes out by jumping ahead to the current discussion about representation. So when you look, and we can’t do another whole series on mental representation, so I’m just pointing out, again, how challenging this is. People often, often use this term in a highly equivocal fashion, okay? But one of the problems that has been brought up by Cummins and others about the co-variation theory, and it’s a standard, it’s now, there’s a consensus that it is a genuine problem, is that if I have some object, right, and this co-varies, the problem is, the co-variation co-varies with many things, many different possible mental representations. So if I have an apple in front of me, right, this thing is co-varying with an apple, it’s co-varying with a fruit, it’s co-varying with food, it’s co-varying with something in my hand, it’s co-varying with an object that I can throw, right? And those mental representations are much more distinct and specific than the co-variation. So representation has a referential specificity that co-variation does not have. And what that means is it is irredeemably vague in terms of its potential semantic content. So while it may be guiding, and then, you know, Quine also made this famous with the Gavagai problem, there’s all kinds of versions of this. So this is a very, right, pressing issue. And this also, I think, is an issue that needs to be taken up. I’m discussing with Mark Miller in predictive processing, it’s like, what is it you’re predicting? And what is it that’s selecting? Because all of these predictions come true. There’s an apple there, there’s a fruit there, there’s food there, there’s an object that I can throw there. There’s the thing that the witch used to poison, snow white there, right? All of these predictions are coming true, but they’re not all the same plane because they have different semantic content. And this is something that Descartes sort of gets. That’s why he ties consciousness to language because language gives you the specificity of reference. And I’ll add just a little quick. So from the unified perspective, I’ll just say the constraints then to make that is gonna be behavioral investment, which is an energy expenditure function. Like, what does this mean to me and what does it afford in relation? So there’s gonna be a connection between, this object has affordances, it has stressors, it has an investment relation, and that’s gonna constrain some of that and frame it in relation. Yes, and I’m gonna argue, and I think you’re in agreement with that, that that’s where notions of relevance realization can be importantly brought to bear. Well, that’s a key ingredient that seems to be missing. So Descartes seems, and it’s hard, and it’s, you know, I’m worried of the, I’m worried about the anachronism bias, but, you know, Seeger is also a very careful reader. What Descartes seems to think is that the job of consciousness is to pick out, to select from the covariation, which aspect is to be made ready for reasoning. So the job of consciousness is to aspectualize. It’s to pick out the aspect that is going to be made ready for reasoning so that we can evaluate it for the particular truth. So because reasoning cares with truth, cares about truth, right? Reasoning needs covariations that have been aspectualized and specified so their semantic content is specifiable enough that it can be evaluated. So he has this role for consciousness. What consciousness does is, right, when you, right, the covariations are something you sort of see through. You aspectualize them, and that’s how you, so consciousness, this is a bit of a slogan, but it’s mnemonically helpful. Consciousness turns covariations into representation through a process of aspectualization. That’s really powerful and brilliant, yes. So I’ll come back to what Descartes says about, oh, go ahead, please, Greg, please. So that’s, so again, I’ll make another reference, okay? So when I’m looking at this issue, I’m looking at it from the bottom in the evolutionary history of animal consciousness. Yeah, yes. Right, and I’m also then looking at sort of from the top, if you wanna use that, the tree of knowledge helps me justify that vertical and angle, and then I wanna get into the unique secondary layer of consciousness that is human. Yes, yes. And you, when I was listening to this one in the meaning crisis, I think you used this term ready for reasoning a bit, or at least in the other times, and man, did a light bulb go off, okay? Because the justification system’s there. Yes, yes, Greg, yes. It says that language and then reason giving means that you now have to give an account, okay? And that means that you do at a self-conscious level, not at a phenomenological perspectival level, but at a self-conscious level, there is the whole problem of ready for reason so you can justify, right? So it was like seeing that Descartes saw that as the problem and then saw that as a mechanism, it’s sort of like he’s missing the first part of consciousness, right? But he’s actually really honing into the second part of consciousness that I can see, and then remember that connects directly to what Freud ends up seeing in terms of, oh, there’s an animal consciousness beneath, and this is how the ego is a mental organ of justification. So there are a lot of intersections, and I didn’t understand Descartes nearly as well as you did, so that made the light bulb go off for me when I first heard it. Now that you say that, that makes me think of something because when we did the reason for reason, we were talking about the inherently social cultural nature of reason, and you wanna work on the justification system and then later work that is convergent with your work by Sperber and Mosquit, people like that, about how reason is ultimately, it’s mostly done and mostly should be done in distributed cognition. Dialogue, it’s a dialogical function that emerges in nature. It’s not an abstraction function, it’s a dialogical function. Right, so given that Descartes has the self-enclosed monological model of mind, he can’t actually get to the sociocultural level of cognition. Right, and he’s then dominated by the modern science which gives pristine place of analytic reasoning, and then he has to be like, this has to be the highest function, analytic reasoning, and he misses the whole social pragmatic dimension that would have evolved obviously prior to these higher order mathematical analytics. And it’s always needed even when we’re doing the higher. Always needed, and that comes later, and obviously really is a psychotechnology invention essentially of cultural evolutionary justification processes. I agree, so I just wanted to bring that up because that’s another way in which the individualistic, monolithic self-enclosed- Misses the boat of modernist, neoliberal modernism, not to get into that, but yes, that is one of the corrections is a transformation from hyper-individualism into a much more networked, systemic and social conception. Okay, that’s good. But the readiness for reasoning is gonna come back when we talk about global workspace and stuff like that. So Descartes has a, and also Bloch and Tai’s notion of poisonous and access consciousness. I think there’s a clear precursor there. But I wanna get up on this issue of aspectualization because it’s like what? Is that really relevant? Well, I wanna now jump into- Yes. Yeah, it’s very relevant. I wanna jump into somebody who has been a pivotal figure in recent cognitive science, famous, justifiably famous soap. This is John Searle, the famous creator of the Chinese room argument, which is of course an important argument about the nature of mind and intelligence and meanings. But Searle has another argument that people aren’t as familiar with from his book, The Rediscovery of Mind, which came out in 1992. And Searle makes an argument that’s very interesting. Now give me a second on this, Greg, because as soon as I unfold it, you’ll then see how the Descartes stuff we just talked about is relevant. So Searle goes in and does something that you and I mentioned needed to be done. He goes in and he says, wait, wait, wait, wait, you’re all using this word representation and mental representation. Let’s slow down and look at this. Let’s slow down and look at this. And he draws on something again, and there’s already a long heritage coming from Descartes Ford on this, at least of it implicit, but often explicit in many people’s work, which is the idea, and this is his term in fact, that representations are inherently aspectual. What does he mean by that? He means like, you know, that whenever I’m representing something, and you can see how Descartes is like lurking behind you. I don’t know if you’ve read this part of Descartes or not, because Seager’s work comes later, I think in publication day, but this object has just a huge number of properties, and there’s a huge number of aspects to it, unlimited, uncountable, you know, right? And so whenever I- And whenever that emerges, folks, just if you’re playing, that means that we have a combinatorial explosion problem. Yes, exactly. Okay, which means now you have a frame problem that you’re not gonna be able to solve unless you put constraints on it at some level. Exactly, exactly. Thank you, Greg, well said. And we’ll come back to that again. Right, I just wanna make sure for both of us. No, no, I think that’s proper seeding for the whole relevance realization stuff, and your investment theory. Okay, so what Searle argues is, if I represent this as a phone, or as a rectangle, or as a projectile, or as the thing given to me on my birthday, again, we see the similarity to Descartes, right? So there’s all, this has an innumerable number of features that co-vary with me, right? And so what Searle says is, any representation is inherently aspectual, because out of all of the properties, I select some subset, and they’re not just higgledy-piggledy, they’re selected as belonging together, as forming what the work of Murphy and Medin showed, that there’s a structural functional organization within any concept we have of a thing, right? We’ll come back to that when we talk about optimal grip and stuff. Okay, so I select all, out of all the properties, I select some, right, in terms of the ones that are relevant, then I determine how they’re relevant to each other, and then also, and this goes back to, and this is something now emphasized by Fourier cognition, how it’s relevant to me. Yes. How it’s particularly relevant to me. Brilliant, brilliant. So, Go ahead. The Gestalt psychologists, okay, this is, you know, which really precursors some perceptual cognitive ways of thinking, this is a lot of what they’re doing in many ways, they’re seeing laws that pull things together. Yeah, exactly. In a particular way, that force a particular kind of, and if you guys, if folks wanna, you know, get a real experience of this, go check out like a perceptual illusion, like the duck rabbit, depending on how you look at it, okay? You will see aspects just in your own phenomenology, they’ll jump into a duck collection, and then they’ll flip over and they’ll jump into a rabbit collection, and you’ll see the connection of all the, how the aspects actually, yeah, they don’t randomly co-vary, it depends on what you’re deciding is relevant, or what your frame of investment is and your relation to it, and all of a sudden it jumps into those categories. And Wittgenstein famously talked about the duck rabbit, and he also invoked the term the dawning of an aspect. And that’s another one. Really, I didn’t know about that, yeah. Yep, the dawning of an aspect. And you know, and the Gestalt psychologists had the famous nectar cube, and you’ve all seen it, that three dimensional line drawing, and it flips on how it’s oriented in three dimensions. So all of this, clearly the case. And then, so Thrills then says, okay, so all representations are inherently aspectual. Notice how he’s already giving an independent argument supporting what Descartes is doing, that’s important. But then he does something really interesting. Again, which sounds just like Descartes. He says, ah, but every aspect is dependent on a point of view. Huh, huh, right, because if I want to see it as a duck, I have this point of view, but if I want to see it as a rabbit, I have this point of view, right? If I want to see it as a phone, I have this, you know, we’ll talk about it later, I have this perspectival knowing of it, whereas if I want to see it as a weapon, I have this, et cetera, et cetera. And then you go, okay, that sounds reasonable, point of view, yep, yep. And then he says, aha, now I have you. And notice how this sounds like Descartes. And I think it’s completely independent, but convergent. He said, but point of view is dependent on having consciousness. Things can only have a point of view if there’s a viewer, and the metaphor of sight is being used for to stand for all of conscious awareness. So a point of view centers on a consciousness. And then Searle makes this argument. He says, well, you know what that means? That means that there are no purely unconscious representations. And he seems to have a view that is remarkably similar to Descartes. He seems to think that the brain has something like states that could vary, and they only become representations when they’re actually brought into consciousness. And for similar reasons, that’s where they are, in a sense, made ready for reason, because they are now given a determinate content. So Descartes, that’s not just a dusty argument, and then there was a lot of kerfuffle about this, because what Searle then said is, so all this talk about unconscious representations that can never be brought into consciousness, like Chomsky’s using, or maybe even some of the psychodynamic stuff, or any of the learning theorists, all of that’s just no good, because those can’t be representations. So people got all upset and everything. Right, right. All of a sudden you got a language police problem. And what if you’re… So, but yeah. Now what I wanna say to that is, I think what you’ve got is an independent and converging argument, and we’ve drawn a lot of people together, Dickenshtein, Dickenshult, right? For the, that there is a deep connection between representation and aspectualization, and there’s a deep connection between aspectualization and consciousness. This has to be unpacked. Now Searle and Descartes are making it very linear, right? Representation depends on aspectualization, which depends on consciousness, and that’s the function of consciousness. Now what I wanna argue is, but maybe there’s another way of doing, another way of getting that, the order, right? Right. What I wanna argue is that maybe there is something deeper that is needed for aspectualization. And this is what we’ve alluded to. And notice how I invoked it when I described how you form a representation. And this is the process of relevance realization. I have the combinatorially explosive amount of information available to you in the object. I zero in on what’s relevant, and then how those pieces belong and fit together in a way that’s relevant to me. This complex relevance realization going on. Right. And so what if we inverted the order and said, relevance realization can generate representation and the aspectualization, and maybe aspectualization then can give rise to consciousness. What if we reverse the causal error? Because of course, one of the most prominent problems that human beings fall into is the AB confusion of causation, right? Right. Right? What if there is lots of unconscious processing that’s doing relevance realization that then makes aspectualization possible in representation, and then that aspectualization can be a basis for consciousness itself. Then we would get out of all the problems that Descartes and Searle are giving us. Right. And that immediately has resonance around a wide variety of different domains. Yes. I mean, so I’ll just say one, for example. Please. Okay. When we think about making something, an aspect that becomes salient, folks, I’m sure have the experience of everything that you, much of what you do, if you do it over and over again, it all of a sudden will drift it at least into pretty far away consciousness. Yes. Right? Yes. Okay, sort of get into a procedural way of being that is pretty far away from our conscious, but then all of a sudden you get surprised. Yeah. Okay. And that consciousness all immediately comes back online. All right. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. And then the aspect of that system needs to be brought together to integrate a whole brain function to start to connect things so that you can then start engaging mental manipulation and problem solving. That’s beautiful, Greg. And notice how what the experience of insight does for you. The insight, like, you know, remember when you talked about how the duck rabbit flips? Well, you get that same kind of flip in an insight. You’ve been framing it one way and it reframes another way. And notice how that is accompanied and is prototypically even with the icon of the light bulb. There’s a flash. There’s a, right? And there’s a, somehow there’s an accentuation of consciousness in that salience restructuring of what we find relevant. Your perspective opens up. Yes, yes. And see, if we invert the order of explanation by inverting the order of causation, we can start to explain all of these phenomena. We can also explain how a lot of your unconscious behavior could nevertheless be so sophisticated in terms of its intelligence. Amen. So, I want to propose to you that there’s, now that means, that brings up two competing vehicles for consciousness, right? One is that consciousness is a function of representational content. And that, and of course the problem there is, well, we have so many unconscious representations, right? Right. Let’s say we, and so what many people do, they reject Searle, is what they do is they say, well, consciousness is some kind of representation, is some kind of meta representation. It’s representations of representations. Because they know in consciousness the mind somehow touches itself. And we’ll take a look at that. And there’s, I mean, that’s an intelligent proposal, but it’s problematic. I want to propose to you, and this is perhaps where I’m being perhaps innovative, that instead of trying to build consciousness out of representational content, we try to build it out of the process of aspectualization that is presupposed by representation, right? And also presupposed by consciousness. And I want to argue that we could explain that aspectualization in terms of processes that are neither themselves intelligent or consciousness, are neither intelligent nor conscious, namely the process of relevance realization. Right. That’s setting up that argument there. Right, and that’s, I believe certainly anything I’ve seen, I’ll say, talk about a light bulb. When I heard you first lay this out, I was excited all day, okay? So I think it’s a hell of an innovation. And certainly it’s, I mean, I wrote you or whatever. So yeah, as we were teasing it a little bit here, but it’s like, yeah, no, this is a big shift, certainly for me. And I thought quite a fair amount about these issues. Well, that’s why I’m in dialogue with you. I think you thought a fair amount and you thought very well. So what I’m pointing to is that aspectualization might give us, I’m sorry, might be the basis for an integrated response as to what consciousness does. It aspectualizes so that there are representations and it does further aspectualization so that those representations are ready for reason, right? All that, and we’re gonna come back to that. We might see that in the shift, as you already indicated, from things being relevant to us to things being salient to us. And we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about that in a minute, right? And that might also help to explain the nature or the emergence of consciousness. Because if you can get a system that is capable of relevance realization, then it can start to aspectualize and then it can start to get the basis of what we’re gonna talk about when we talk about perspectival knowing. So we might be able, go ahead, go ahead, Ben. Let me add that, so we talked about making ready for reason. But actually what I’m gonna then suggest is really when we’re talking about the evolution, it’s gonna be ready for simulation. Yes, yes. So then, in other words, so a rat can get to a maze and then simulate which side of the T maze they’re gonna go to. And then they’re gonna run through particular investment paths and make some cost benefit calculation around that. So this goes towards a theory, one of the neuroscientific theories within the information closer theory that argues that the main function of consciousness is to afford counterfactuality that we can, right? We can, organisms can work in a hypothetical space, which of course is not the same thing as global reason, but it is again, deeply presupposed by all reasoning. It sets the stage for it. Very much, nice metaphor there. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about this aspectualization. And I wanna move to some work and sort of build up to it a little bit more. I wanna move to the work of Zen and Polition, which he’s got, I think the most science fiction sounding name of anybody in cognitive science. His last name, by the way, everybody, does not have any vowels in it. It’s all the letter Y, Polition. And so, and we have to understand where Polition is coming from. Polition is one of the godfathers with Jerry Poder of computational functionalism and the computational theory of mind. So the fact that he’s gonna make the argument that he makes is something that he was led to by the data being generated in his experiments, because it significantly challenges in some ways the standard model that he had developed with Poder about a computational theory of mind, at least to many people’s mind and to my mind. So what Polition was doing was he was actually studying vision and you might even call visual attention. And we’re gonna have to get into what relationship we’re doing, attention, awareness, and consciousness, which is brat. So just give me, for those of you who are already getting your knives out, just wait, wait, okay? Give me a chance. But what he was doing is he’s doing a thing called multiple object tracking. So let’s say there’s a computer screen and there’ll be a bunch of shapes on it, like a bunch of Xs and zeros, and then they’re moving around. And let’s say the Xs are all different colored, like red and green. What you have to do is you have to track them. So let’s say there’s a green X and it starts here, and you have to be able to tell me where it ends. And here’s a pink circle here, where does it end? Now you may think, well, I can only do one object at a time, it turns out, no, you can’t. You can do more than that. And you can, there’s some question about how big this is between five and eight, let’s say, controversy. But you can track, that’s why it’s called multiple object tracking. You say, well, who cares about this? Well, just hang on a sec. So what Polition noticed is as you max out how many things are tracked, there’s a trade-off relationship. And that’s gonna, trade-off relationships are gonna be key to relevance realizations. There’s a trade-off relationship between how many objects you can track and how many properties you can attribute to each object. So as I open up the number of objects I’m tracking, and I sort of overload this system with demand, what happens is that people, well, let me describe it in terms of what happens in experiment. So let’s say there’s this thing here on the computer screen and it started as a red circle. And while it’s moving, it changes into a green X. It changes its color and its shape. People don’t notice the change in color and shape. All they can say is whatever started there is now there. So they don’t, they lose any conceptual properties for the object. All they have is what Polition called fingers of instantiation. And then he created this at the next instinct. And the idea is this, like if I, like he thought of like the mind has like, almost like elastic fingers, but it doesn’t know what this is, but it can put its finger on it and know, you know, where it is, right? Like this, right? Let me use an example so that, so remember we were just talking about the duck rabbit thing. Right, right. Right, to maintain attention on it, then all of the aspects of realization comes there. But you can then basically zoom out, just have an outline of that thing, right? And have some notion about its positionality, but you’ll lose your contact with the richness of it. Right? Exactly. So all of the sort of adjectival content disappears. And what’s left is, and you have to forgive me people, but I’m gonna need to talk this way. And the fact that we don’t have ready available terms has actually been part of the language game problem. But what is this doing? Well, it’s here now, here now, here now, here now, here now, here now, here now, here now. So this is called indexicality. Indexicals are things that don’t have a category. A categorical content to them. So here’s an indexical, this, okay? I can use this for anything. This, this, this, this, right? That’s different from cat. Cat has a content to it. Yes. Like a set of properties, okay? Right. So this is a purely indexical tracking. Here now, here now, here now, here now. So I’m gonna call this, these are adverbial qualias. They are not adjectival qualias, like shape or color or the kind of thing it is. They are merely adverbial. They are telling you, right? Where and when, here now, here now. And all they’re doing, all they’re doing is what I call salience tagging. When your finger touches this, it’s making this here nowness salient to you. Standing out for you. That’s all it is, it’s salient tagging. There’s no adjectival content to it. It’s purely adverbial. It’s pure here now. Now you might say, okay, who cares? Ah, then pollution has this really powerful argument. I’m just gonna get another object here and another one here. I should have done this ahead of time. No, but it’s important. Okay, so pollution requests from us that we understand he’s going to use a metaphor. He’s gonna use a metaphor from language, but he does not mean to imply that the process he’s describing is a linguistic process. It is a linguistic metaphor for a much more primordial process because he thinks, I think, correctly, and there’s evidence for it, that animals have to be able to do even this object tracking thing. Okay, so what’s the linguistic metaphor? I just used it a few minutes ago. The linguistic metaphor is the linguistic metaphor of demonstrative reference. So things have categorical reference, words like cat, dog, chicken, right? But there are things that only have demonstrative reference. Because they’re purely indexical, I can only do the reference in demonstration, like when I say this. This, yes. So all I’m doing is here nowness is being salient to you. This, salience tagging. Yep. Demonstrative reference. Now, pollution says, notice that you need demonstrative reference in order to form your categories. He says, am I going to form a category? I have to mentally draw things together. I have to go this, this, this. I have to have a pre-categorical ability to draw them, make them salient together in the same here nowness. So Finsting, salience tagging, is actually presupposed by any categorical identity. So before I can aspectualize this as a pencil, I have to have first, something that allowed me to draw things together, adverbially, because there’s no adjectival content, because there’s no category. I don’t know, there’s no wetness to this is. I just have it’s this, this, this. Ah, now that they’re drawn together and salient, they’re together in the same here nowness. Now I can start to see how they belong together and I can start to categorize them and find patterns of similarity and draw out particular aspects. So that means what Polishin argues, what he’s uncovering in the multiple object tracking is something that is deeper. He says it’s presupposed by all of our conceptual abilities. And here’s notice what it’s doing. It’s making things ready for reason by drawing them together through salience tagging so that similarity can be noticed between them and similarity, we’ll argue later, is just an inherently irrelevance realization function. I see how they belong together, right? And that makes aspectualization possible. That’s brilliant. I’ll riff off this real, see where, why I had such a positive reaction to this. From my own journey and sort of some sense making stuff that I was doing. So, you know I’m really big on the concepts of behavior, figuring out what that is. Yeah, of course. At multiple levels. Like one of the things is what is the relationship between phenomenology and behavior, both epistemologically and they’re really very fascinating ontological relations across multiple levels. Okay, so for example, our capacity to pull objects, and then track their changes. Yes. And I became convinced by a whole host of different data, but I’ll get to the language issue in just a second, that what is happening is that we have perceptual categorical fields for objects in fields, okay? And how they change, and then what are their constituent elements that make them up, okay? And so now let’s run to make another connection here in the human mind and the formation of language, okay? So what are the fundamental elements of grammar and language and syntax, okay? The fundamental categories of is a noun. Yes. All right, okay. So that’s the thing, okay? A verb, which is how the thing changes, right? And then adjectives, which are corresponding to differences within the noun. Okay. So I was like, yeah, okay. So there’s a very clear symbolic tag, noun, verb, adjective, right? But what I overlooked and what this brought to bear is, well, yeah, and that presupposes the existence of a categorical system that’s defining objects, right? And changes that sets the stage for them to be honed in on, if need be, but you need to have that frame, right? I never really brought, I was seen through the lens of the frame, but your system then immediately caused me to jump out, and I was like, oh, right, the frame has gotta be built. Yes, exactly. Frame has gotta be built to presuppose all of this. So I was like, oh, I hadn’t really had that piece of awareness. And then when you do it and it lines up the way, and then you could say, well, wait a minute, the presupposing of that frame, the machinery, the functionality, all that, that starts to line up with a lot of cool things. That’s well said, thank you, Greg. And what position argument is showing and what I think I have convergent arguments for, pick up on this language you’re using, is any of the processes within the framing, right, are not gonna be processes that you’re gonna be able to use to explain how the frame is generated in the first place. Because you’re just, if all the processes within the framing presuppose the framing, and therefore are not gonna be able to explain it. And that’s exactly what Polishin is saying. He’s saying all of the conceptual machinery, right, and all of the, I would argue, the representational machinery is not gonna be able to explain this because, right, it is based on a process that is presupposed, right, this pre-representational, at least in the sense of pre-categorical, pre-conceptual machinery of finsting, of salience tagging. Absolutely. I’m reminded of the experiments, I’m blanking exactly on, there’s a whole cluster of them, I’m sure you are aware, mostly social psych experiments. Like where a guy is talking to somebody, they don’t know that well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, change lines. Yeah, there it is, of course. Thank you for that, yep, change lines, right? So yeah, people will, yeah, you can do a thing where you’re talking to somebody, a bunch of people walk past, it’s a stranger, right, with like a, they’re just like, excuse me, and they pass like, they carry a piece of plywood, and while they’re passing, that person is replaced by another person, sometimes different gender even. Right, race can change very, it’s just sort of like- People don’t notice that it’s a different person. Right, right. Whenever you say that, everybody out there right now is saying, oh, I’ve noticed. Yeah, right, right, right, whatever. Like the gorilla experiment, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’d see it now, actually. Now it’s amazing, but that just shows how much operation maybe is going on with basic Finstein, which we assume is doing aspect realization, but it’s actually, oh my God, how much cognitive work is being done by just organizing where things are, and then filling in the blind spots when we need to, but a lot of it is just running off of that frame. Thank you. Okay, so let’s do a quick cycle back to Descartes, and then we’ll, so notice what I’m doing. I’m swinging between Descartes and current, important cognitive scientists like Searle and Polishin, right, and notice we’ve got both conceptual arguments from Searle and experimental data from Polishin, both, the argument is a good argument, should be taken seriously, and the data is robust and reliable, it replicates well, et cetera, et cetera, all that stuff. Okay, so Descartes, let’s go back. What does Descartes thinks going on? Well, he isn’t, and he’s struggling, and there’s vagueness there, but again, through the, from the help of Bill Seeger, by the way, I’m not claiming that Bill Seeger and I, Bill Seeger agrees with everything I say, but I’m giving him due credit for his important, affording influence on me. So, people know some of this story. Descartes has the famous idea about the pineal gland, right, and, you know, and that’s no solution to the problem, but putting aside that it fails to solve the mind-brain problem, you should notice what Descartes is doing. He seems to think that all of these co-variations somehow get superimposed on each other and somehow integrated into consciousness, right? And that’s part of how this aspectualization takes place. So he uses the metaphor of, you know, superimposition, right? That somehow brings an integration. But when I read that, I thought, oh, crap, there’s two different people from two different traditions that I think are talking about that. One is Michael Polanyi, coming out of sort of, you know, the analytic North American scientific tradition, he’s originally a scientist, then he becomes a philosopher. And then there’s Marleau-Ponty, a French person coming out of the phenomenological tradition, right? So I normally do this with people, but, like, I actually run through it, but I’ll just describe, and I’ve done this multiple times, and that’s why these examples are used by Polanyi and used by Marleau-Ponty and used repeatedly, and they were independent of each other. As far as I can tell, Marleau-Ponty doesn’t know anything about Polanyi. I don’t think Polanyi knows Marleau-Ponty at all. Let me just describe, I’m going to use touch, because touch is slower than sight, and therefore you can have sort of more introspective awareness of what I’m talking about. So what I do is I’ll often, you know, hold out your hand, and I’m going to put an object in your hand. I know what this object is, but pretend you don’t, right? Or I’ll put it on the table in front of you, and you’re going to close your eyes as if you’re a blind person, and you’re going to tap it with an object. This is going to be your probe. This is the blind man’s cane, again, used independently by both Polanyi and Marleau-Ponty. And so, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to tap it, and you’re tapping it to aspectualize it. You’re tapping it so that you can, right, from the tappings, you’ll be able to, and notice this is a weird thing, figure out what it is, right? And of course, you’re going to figure it out, that’s to aspectualize. But notice what I’m getting. I’m getting a moment of finsting. Here now, here now, here now, here now, here now, here now. Is that okay? Salience tagging. But when people do this, right, they’ll often, they can often tell me, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s a phone, it’s a phone, right? And then I’ll say, okay, keep tapping it, but now instead of paying attention to what it is, pay attention to what your pencil is doing, how it’s making those moments of contact. And they go, yeah, I can do that. And then I’ll say, can you now also, instead of paying attention to your pencil, pay attention to how your fingers are moving the pencil. Oh, yeah. And then I’ll say, now see if you can pay attention to the sensations by which you’re feeling your fingers. And some people can and some people can’t. Interestingly, this is only anecdotally, I haven’t done this experimentally, but it’s very reliable. The people who can become aware of the sensations in their finger are often people who’ve had mindfulness training. Okay. And then I say, and then you can go the reverse. You can go from, okay, stop paying attention to your sensations in your fingers, right? Pay attention to your pencil, right? And then stop paying attention to your pencil, start paying attention again to the phone. Yep. So notice what’s happening, right? There’s all these layers in there. So I use a metaphor here, and it’s a metaphor used by actor, psychologist, a singer, a philosopher. So again, convergence. And so this is the metaphor. It’s a transparency opacity shift. Let me use, give you the analogy and you use the metaphor. So right now, notice how they’re also framing, right? I’m looking through my glasses, which means I’m looking by means of them and beyond them, both, by means of them and beyond them. So they are transparent to me. I don’t see them. I see through them. I’m not aware of them. I’m aware through them, but I can do this. Oh, now I’m not aware. I’m not seeing through my glasses. I’m not looking through them. I’m looking at them. They’re opaque to me because I’m looking at them. I’m not looking through them. I can step back and look at. In a similar way, initially, I’m not, I’m not looking at my pencil. I’m looking through my pencil at the object. But I can step back and look at the pencil. Right. Oh, now what am I looking through? I’m looking through my fingers at the pencil. And then I can step back and look at my fingers. Right. And then I can even, some people they’ve had the training and the practice. I can step back and look at my sensations. And I can go the other way. So each time I step back and look at my pencil, I can look at my fingers. And I can go the other way. So each time I step back and look at, I’m doing a transparency opacity shift. And each time when I go the other way, I’m doing an opacity to transparency shift. Yep. And what’s happening is things, moments of salience tagging, and that’s maybe what sensations maybe primitively are, are being integrated into an aspect. And then those, and then those aspects are integrated into further aspects and so on and so forth. And, and so Pallani talked about that attention has a from to structure. I’m always attending through what he calls my subsidiary awareness into my focal awareness. I’m attending through my pencil. Yep. To the phone. So I use this example when I came across it. Okay. And then it was like, oh my God, looking through, looking at, I was loving that. All right. I was on, on my walk. And I was like, oh my God, I could, I can now see this in a lot of things. I was really excited. And then actually it evolved. Okay. So one of my arguments about the evolved into a real useful tool that I think at least other people have now told me, Oh, I get what you’re saying. Okay. So one of my key points in my critique of psychology, science is enormous ambiguity about the concept of behavior. Right. Right. Right. Okay. And actually my argument is one of the huge problems with it is that it has three different meanings. Okay. One of which is epistemological. Yes. Right. You step outside and then you look at the object field change, which modern science forced us to make that shift, which we then quantify in relationship to primary entities. Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay. And so now basically that requires then a grammar from an exterior to use Ken Wilberstam and exterior epistemology. Right. Right. Right. So that’s the general definition of behavior. And then that frames either everything. That’s why I like physics. Some physicists describe physics as the behavior. As the science of the behavior of the universe at all scales. Right. Physicists will sometimes say, okay. So that’s a general definition. That’s not then if psychology. Can’t be the science of behavior. Yeah. Okay. If physics is the science of behavior at all scales, I mean, if Adams behave, then we can, we can’t say that the science of behavior is the science of behavior. Right. And that’s what I argue. Actually the class of behaviors using the tree of knowledge taxonomy should be mental behaviors. Right. Right. Right. Right. And both overt that you see directly and covert that you infer. Right. Okay. So, so then in my book, I’m saying, Hey, scientists stop looking through. The frame of behavior. Take the behavior glasses off. Right. And see that actually the grammar of your justification system is essentially framed by looking through. Behavioral glasses. And if we become aware of that, then we can become aware of the language game that science plays. And the grammar that they structured it. And I structured around. I’m a scientist, but we want to be aware of the rules and framing. That really drive the system. No, that was beautiful. Great. That’s really good. So I want to come back to that actually at some point, because notice how your metacognitive ability is making use of the transparency opacity shifted. And how it’s presupposed in our ability to make ourselves ready for reason. Mainly. Do some kind of self correction. And our problem solving. Well, you gave me one of the many light bulbs. You gave me John, as I listened to your work. Thank you for saying that. Well, You’re sharing it back. So notice what we have here. We have. We have some, we have a process that. Plenty calls integration. You have to be a little bit careful of that word though. And he is careful. He’s not equivocating. Because there’s two senses of integration. There’s integration in which. You know, you know, here’s the parts of a chair and they’re integrated together. You can still see all the parts. Right. But what he’s talking about is more of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, and they’re interwoven, but they’re interwoven. So. What he’s talking about is more like this. I have, like, I have a left field of vision and a right field of vision, and you can, you can do this, put your finger and open and close an eye and you can see your finger move. Right. And what your brain does. Is it, I would say it fuses them like, like, like. Like atomic fusion. But it’s that kind of, it’s the kind of integration in which the. Left and right visual field. You don’t see the left and right visual field. I don’t see the moments of tapping, I see through them to do the object. So I am doing some kind of fusion integration of salience tappings, of moments of here nowness, and that is actually a process by which I am aspectualizing them, bringing them into a focal awareness, which is a higher form of salience, out of all the things that initially are grabbing my attention, this is now giving extra attention, and at the same time I am aspectualizing something, I am integrating those things into a particular structural functional organization. So again, Descartes seems to have been intuitively on the right track. There is some sense in which I have all these co-variations, moments of co-variation, and then when they are integrated in this way, and I am going to argue that that is kind of a data compression thing happening in relevance realization later, but when they are integrated, I get the aspectualization, I am now ready for reason, both in the sense that I have begun the process of giving categorical content, and also your point, I have now made it metacognitively available for self-correction, two of the things presupposed in making something ready for reason. And then you can see that part of what consciousness is doing then is, and maybe I would argue the pivotal thing that consciousness is doing, is this process of recursive relevance realization that is making aspectualization possible for us. Right. And so for me, then what I want to say is, when I hear that, I am like, oh, okay. And the reason that this is another light bulb, we are all tangled together in this particular kind of light bulb, is notice folks what we are doing now, or what John is doing, and that I am really latching onto, is we are really building this cognitive functional view of what consciousness is about, this witnessing function of framing and aspectualizing. We have not talked about what is almost everybody talk about in consciousness, oh, redness. How the heck does redness happen? That is certainly where I go, and it is an important part of this equation, undoubtedly. But notice we haven’t talked about the features and the experiential qualia. We have talked about framing and the functionality of framing that sits the stage for aspectualization. So that to me is like, oh, that is what feels so, huh. And then when we see that relation as it will come back, it is going to be really, really important. So for me, that was a really cool, oh, wow, it is like coming at this with a very rich view from a different angle than I. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. So this is very much building consciousness, at least the functionality and maybe some of the phenomenology of consciousness out of the adverbial qualia first. Right. And really going as far as we can with them before we turn to the problematic adjectival qualia like redness and blueness. Right. Right. So it is the thing that is framing object fields, the structure of object fields without getting into the qualities of those object fields. We have to have a way to bring hereness and nowness to the object field framing relation. Right. And then there is a third thing. There is the hereness, the nowness, and with the integration, the togetherness. Yes. The hereness, the nowness, and the togetherness. And this goes to what Marlo Ponti called optimal gripping. And this is the idea that you are always, and Maitzen in his book Sentience talked about this in terms of what he called sizing up. Whenever I am aspectualizing, I am sizing up in order to get an optimal grip. So do I look at the object here? Well, I might if I need the details. So I look at the object there. Well, that is pretty good too for the Gestalt, but I have lost some of the detail. So typically I will try and find a place where I get, and they are in a trade-off relationship. So I am going to get the place where I get the optimal balance between the features and the Gestalt. But what counts as an optimal balance is again, well, what is relevant to me and the task that I am undertaking? If I want to throw this at you, I am going to optimally grip it in a different way if I want to write with it or if I want to paint it. So that aspectualization is also simultaneously a process of sizing up. What that means is I am getting trade-offs between what is foregrounded and backgrounded. What is Gestalt and what is feature? And all of that is relative to what problems or tasks am I undertaking? And of course, this is part of your whole point about you making decisions about how am I investing, how am I investing my metabolic energy, my precious… All the way down the bio-energenic scale. You are a vector moving toward and away things. So yeah, that frames that. But yes, that is absolutely right. The promise I am going to leave people with, because I think we should end it here, is that all of that stuff we are talking about, about the trading off and investing the bio-economic and doing all of this zeroing in on relevance, that is going to be… I am going to discuss that with Greg explicitly when we move to the topic and the theory of relevance realization. But that is where I think we can leave it for today. I think we have made some important progress today. Absolutely. And so I will just summarize. So a fundamental shift here folks. Greg, you are really quiet all of a sudden. I will summarize. Is that better? A little bit better, yeah. I will summarize just a fundamental point. The shift between adjectival qualia into adverbial qualia and the framing of what we are doing to bring that here-ness, now-ness, togetherness is absolutely a fundamental shift in my opinion opens up so many different novel insights. I agree. Well, a great journey again together today, my friend. So thank you very much. That was really good and thank you for that summary. And we will pick this up and we will move forward and we will take a look at meta-representational theories of consciousness and then we are going to move properly into neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Great. Great. Fantastic. Okay. I will see you soon, my friend. Take good care. Yep.