Value, virtue, purpose and meaning - Voices with Vervaeke (6GlWM1PAc0Q)

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The Stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife’s edge of what’s happening now. Thank you, Peter. Welcome everybody to our second Body and Soul, the Mind of Culture series. We had a really good first round, I thought, jamming about matter, life, mind, and culture. So my soon-to-be-here cohost, Greg, and I are thrilled to welcome both John Verbeke and Steve McIntosh to discuss values and transcendence and all of this. So first thing I’d like to do is introduce John. John Verbeke, as folks know, is a hero of mine and no stranger to this territory. And since folks know a lot about John, I won’t say a lot about it. But what I’d like, John, maybe you could do is we have framed this in terms of a communal dialogos, which of course is a term that you raised folks’ consciousness about. You and I engaged in an academic dialogos. I just wondered if you could both introduce yourself and introduce a little bit of that concept to set the stage for what will be jamming around here. Thanks Greg. And thank you, Peter. And it’s good to meet you, Steve. I look forward to our discussion. And well, if I’m Greg’s hero, like I say, Greg is for me the incarnation of Aristotle. And so that’s pretty good. And one of the gifts of the series is some of the relationships I’ve formed. And one of them is with Greg. And we have ongoing work together. And Greg, I know I owe you an email, and I’ll get that back to you soon. So dialogos. I don’t want to take sole credit for this. Some of the credit, in fact, goes to Greg. We have been working out and I’ve been doing all kinds of participant observation and participant construction. Peter also has had a significant contribution to this. It’s the core, the central thing I’m working on right now. Christopher Mastapietro and I have edited and contributed to an anthology. Greg has also contributed to it about the dialogos. And of course, also some of the work I’ve done with Jordan Hall. Some of you, of course, know Jordan and Guy Sandstock. And there’s other people, but those are the core people that have been really reverberating around this. And so what I’m particularly interested in dialogos is a way in which human beings can not just communicate with each other in dialog, but commune with each other, deeply connect with each other at the level that entrusts us to each other, that allows us to jointly envision, so that we activate and access the collective intelligence of distributed cognition in a flowing dynamic in which priority is given to mutually generated and shared insight so that the participants all get a clear sense that they’re on the cutting edge of the emergence of new intelligibility and that they’re getting to a place collectively that they couldn’t get to individually. And so I’ve been trying to work out what does that look like in terms of communicative practices? What are the underlying cognitive processes? What are the things that make it go wrong? What are the things that afford it going right? We’ve done a couple of examples of earlier instantiations of trying to work out dialogos. My hope is the following. I’m doing sort of a two pronged thing. I’m doing a historical analysis, similar to what I did in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the whole Platonic tradition starting, it’s better to in fact call it the whole Socratic tradition of the invention of a meta-psycho-technology of dialectic, a psycho-technology that’s intended to engender dialogos and to thereby afford the individual and collective cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And I want to combine that historical analysis with the participant observation and cognitive science theorizing about all these emerging communities of authentic discourse. You might have heard of one. It’s called the Stoa. There’s other ones that are emerging all over the place. And how are they emerging and what are they doing? And how can we get the history and the cognitive science and the participant observation of these emerging communities to communicate effectively with each other, both practically and theoretically? That’s what I’m trying to do with the dialogos right now. Beautiful. Beautiful. And I will say as a professor, it kind of feels like that might be what the university could be doing, but rarely. So isn’t it interesting? We kind of have to, as from one professor to another, it’s like, huh, that’s kind of feels like the academy, but it’s not. So I’m glad we’re inventing that. I’d also like to then introduce Steve McIntosh. I think Greg is back. Greg’s a good friend. Steve and I had a great conversation about wisdom, energy and values energy. And it’s emergence. I’ll see if Greg is here and wants to introduce his friend, Steve McIntosh to our communal dialogos. Yes, I would. Thank you so much, Greg and John. Well, Steve is a friend and colleague. He’s the president of the Institute for Cultural Evolution, co-founder. And by training him, he’s a lawyer. He’s an entrepreneur. But mainly he’s a philosopher, an integral and political philosopher and author of several books, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution, Evolution’s Purpose, Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins, The Presence of the Infinite, The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and Developmental Politics, How America Can Grow into a Better Version of Itself. Thank you, Greg. Looks like he froze up there. But those are my books. I’m working to apply philosophy in politics, in American politics right now. The Institute for Cultural Evolution think tank has recently received a new round of funding. We have a lot of luminaries associated with it. We’re very interested in helping America grow out of the poison politics that it presently experiences. But in drawing on my political work, I fall back on thinking that I’ve been doing over the last 15 years around the evolution of consciousness and how that co-evolved in culture and the role of what, for lack of a better term, value, how that influences consciousness at almost every level of its manifestation and how we can find a place for its realism, maybe not its naive realism, but some understanding that value is not just purely subjective, but some things really out there are better than others and that we’re capable of getting it wrong. So making the world a better place, evolving politics, evolving consciousness, evolving culture is the focus of my work. Amen. And so one of the things that I was hoping, I see Greg’s getting synced up on his, on Jewel’s thing, one of the things maybe, Steve, that you could talk about that you spoke to very clearly in developmental politics is what you see as sort of the different value means across different sort of domains of consciousness and some of the emergence that you see might afford us if we think about the ways in which different people are organized around different values like heritage values, class of liberal values, things along those lines. And then what we may then circle back to is like where are we in sort of the emergence of values, how do values evolve? But maybe you could speak to a little bit of that because the idea of how systems come together and dialogue and where they are in relationship to different anchor points I think might be helpful to set the stage for some of the conversation going forward. Sure. Well, what I often refer to as integral philosophy is usually associated with the writer Ken Wilbur. I certainly have respect for Wilbur, but I’m not a Wilburian. I part from him on a variety of different issues. So I don’t want, if I refer to him at all, I don’t want you to think that I’m a Ken Wilbur fan for it or anything like that. But what I do share with Ken Wilbur is this understanding of the evolution of culture and certainly the Victorian notions, Victorian evolutionism in the 19th century when they first started to notice building on the idyllists, the history was in the process of becoming, that led to all kinds of mistaken notions and Eurocentric hubris regarding what culture is more evolved than another. So certainly this new understanding of the evolution of consciousness and culture is not a revamped version of Victorian evolutions. But one of the things that I want to say is that a big part of Wilbur’s has been bringing in developmental psychology, specifically the work of Claire Graves and his theory of spiral dynamics which has its limitations but also is highly accessible. And a number of other, Robert Keegan, a famous developmental psychologist, my critique of developmental psychology is that it thinks of human psychology as evolving by steps and stages that inevitably fall along a linear trajectory. So when I talk about the evolution of consciousness and culture, I’m focusing more on the cultural structure. And those cultural structures in a sense what underlines those is the emergence of modernity itself. Like during the enlightenment with this sort of scientific rational world, you can’t pigeonhole it, but clearly in the historical record, modernity emerges and transforms those countries which man and nation adopt its culture. And part of the way that modernity achieves its, it’s, it’s a very important part of modernity is that it’s a part of the way that modernity achieves its advances in wealth, in democracy, in all kinds of ways that it makes the world a better place, as well as the ways its blind spots make modernity bring new pathologies and new threats that the world has never seen. So there’s, there are the most important the most important demigodies of modernity and disasters that go with it. It makes the problems worse, but it’s certainly not the end of history. But the modernist worldview, this cultural context of agreements, it’s a structure of agreements, all of us are swimming in this water, a little bit like, you know, where the fish, it’s hard to see sometimes. But in mainstream discourse, the difference between modernity and the older religious worldview that precedes modernity, in just about every place where it’s emerged, of course it’s Christian, but also we can see the traditional worldview in, in, in Islamic civilization and Indian civilization and Chinese religious complex. For thousands of years, most of the great civilizations of the world were organized around religions. And that creates, you know, the religions are diverse, they do seem to create very similar cultural structures, right, they all have a kind of feudalism, they all have kings, they all have a caste system. And so modernity beginning in the alignment breaks out of that, it has a new authority on truth instead of scripture being the authority on truth, science becomes the authority on truth. And so in this historical period, since the emergence of modernity, approximately 300 years or so ago, it has been in a sort of tug of war with traditionalism, right, gradually, modernity has gotten the upper hand legally, socially, politically, over traditionalism. And in most of American history, the conflict between the traditional religious worldview and the emergent worldview of modernity was really the primary cultural conflict that American history was roiled by. But beginning about 50 years ago, we recognize the emergence of a third major cultural block. It’s not just an ideology. It’s a third culture which is dialectically separated from modernity. It’s not against modernity. There’s many names for this culture, but what we’re calling it now formally is the progressive postmodern worldview. I can trace it all the way back to Rousseau and the transcendentalists, there’s plenty of examples of intellectuals trying to escape the culture of modernity and its pathologies. And so in the beginning of the 1960s, we see a democratization of this way of thinking. It’s not just the elite artists and intellectuals who join in the rejection of modernity. It’s the counterculture. The counterculture emerges and it gains a lot of evolutionary traction. It steaks out a third kind of culture that’s neither thoroughly aligned with modernity or traditionalism, even though it borrows the social capital from both those earlier worldviews. So the last 50 years, progressivism, for short, has been emerging from initially a counterculture and now it’s become a counterestablishment. And now it supplies the moral system for the elite segments of modernity. It used to be that modernity has had its liberal values, but its morality was supplied by the traditional religious worldview more or less. And now progressivism as it’s emerged is in a competition with the traditional worldview to be the moral system that guides the decisions and the horizon of improvement for modernists. Well, at least this is a partial explanation of the cultural conflict that’s led to the poisoning of the United States politics. Modernism is a symptom of the pushback of the traditional side against the progressive side. Modernity is sort of pulled in both directions. That’s why most of the traditional worldviews on the right, most of the progressive worldviews on the left, the modernist worldviews kind of divide down the road. So these values overlap. I don’t want a pigeon holder or a stereotype stages. Modernity can be distinguished from traditionalism and progressive postmodernity can be distinguished from modernity. And this helps explain the cultural milieu, because these worldview systems are made out of value agreements. Their focus is in the intersubjective. And that’s what’s really experiencing the structural emergence, more than the individual consciousness, right? People’s consciousness make up these worlds, contribute to them, identify with them. Some people identify completely with one worldview to the exclusion of the others. Other people make meaning using different worldviews in different circumstances. But these intersubjective structures of emergence, they extend the structure of evolutionary emergence. It goes all the way back to the Big Bang. Right. Even though cultural evolution can’t be conflated with biological evolution or cosmological evolution, there is this nested structure whereby something more keeps coming from something less. And how that works, how there is a current not only of solving difficult problems, but of responding to a sense that a better way is possible, a kind of allure as Whitehead put it, regarding the beautiful, true, and the good. You know that I like that the term values is kind of stodgy and has a lot of baggage. I like to try to unpack that by talking about at least intrinsic values, goodness, truth, and beauty, as kind of primary values, or like primary colors. I don’t see these values as simply objective, but I don’t see them as entirely subjective either. I think they bring subject and object together in the course of seeing and being seen. But, you know, we can talk about values and it’s the magnetism that values have on consciousness. But at least that’s at least some context. When I talk about these structures of value agreements, modernity, progressivism, traditionalism, what that does is it creates a vertical dimension of normative growth. Right? Certainly modernity is not better than traditionalism in every way. Progressivism brings up its own new pathologies. One of these systems of values has very important bigotries and also unfortunate disasters. So the idea is that we can begin to reckon. If we want to make the world a better place, we can’t flinch from the responsibility to recognize better and worse. Not in a linear way, not in an absolutistic way, but in a way that says a culture where you have a quality between the sexes, where you have a quality between the races. That’s a more evolved culture, a culture where the morality is more world-centered than it is ethnocentric. That’s a more evolved culture. It doesn’t mean that it’s simply better. The other, just like all evolutionary structures of emergence, the lower levels are necessary for the sophistication of the higher level. They work together as an ecosystem. So I’m constantly trying to revalorize traditionalism, revalorize modernity in the face of all the valid critiques that are landed against these earlier systems of meaning. Right. There is this evolution error, this evolution creates a dimension of development. And being able to recognize some room within that dimension of development, rather than simply having to make things all relatively equal, rather than having to flatten everything is horizontal and lesser and greater value. I think that’s problematic. Relativism is important. It’s one of two poles. One is relative and one is to recognize verticality. But just to wrap up that statement, I can say that understanding evolution as moving toward more inclusiveness, not always, not deterministically. But the reason that culture evolves is that people are trying to make their world a better place. And they’ve been trying to make it a better place for at least 40,000 years. And sometimes those very efforts have resulted in significant progressions. But nevertheless, I think that part of our reason for being here as human beings is to evolve our culture and evolve our consciousness and make the world incrementally better. And I believe that better is a real thing. Okay, Greg, Double G Greg. Yep. Okay, so let me just say that to all here I apologize for my technical difficulties. Thank goodness, my wife has a computer that’s not too far by and I was able to transition. I want to also say on Steve’s behalf because I saw some people comment in the chat. Right before we came on, Steve had technical difficulties with his mic. So you’re hearing him back in the room. That’s, unfortunately, what we have to deal with. Now, can you all hear me fine? Yep. Yep. Okay, good. All right. So what I’d like to do is I’d like to ask John to comment on what he heard Steve lay out. We have quite a bit that we can discuss. But one of the reasons that I was excited to bring the two of you together, you and Steve, John, is because I heard you in a conversation with a young man, trying to remember his name, he has a five part podcast on evolutionary, I’m trying to think of his name. Steve, you know I’m talking about. Conscious evolution. Thank you. Right. Conscious evolution. And you and he really talked about whether or not evolution has been a teleology, which means a directionality and some type of purpose. Now before you respond to that, I do also want to say that in our first session last week, which featured physicist Stefan Alexander, evolutionary biologist Stephen Ogunu and Greg and I, one of the things that Brandon said as an evolutionary biologist is that evolution doesn’t actually have a direction per se. It said what evolution does is solve problems. Okay. So I just want to bring that in and then please have you all come up here. Well, thank you. Steve said a lot and it was very rich. Perhaps, you know, some very important convergence of evolution and evolution is a very important part of evolution. And I think that’s what we need to do. And I think that’s what we need to do. I similarly, and some of you who’ve seen awakening to the meaning crisis, give a historical analysis. And I think I talked about something very similar to what Steve is talking about. We talked about a cultural cognitive grammar that seriously constraints of people make sense of the world and you can see a history in this. And the history of that is the loss. For me, what I’m interested in is how people make meaning, how they respond to problems of self-deception, how they establish connections, and that cultural cognitive grammar is creating a worldview that is housing and homing ecologies and practices by which people try to cultivate wisdom, overcome self-deception, establish connection between themselves and the world, each other. And that that cognitive cultural grammar has gone through, as I think this agrees with Steve, we’ve lost a religious worldview that really homed a lot of those practices. I think one of the issues, and perhaps my take is a little bit starker than Steve’s, I’m not sure. I think what happened in the Enlightenment is the worldview shifted to one particular aspect of our cognition, the propositional, in a way that left the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory behind. And yet those, and this is what the current cog Psy think is arguing, those are the levels at which humans need to do most of the work to overcome self-deception, to make meaning. And so this has been sort of a disaster, a disastrous trade-off. There has been the acceleration of the accumulation of knowledge and information, while most people, and a lot of, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence pointing towards this, are suffering from a wisdom and a meaning famine. And I see postmodernism, I don’t like to lump it together. I’m very critical of that. This is one of my harshest criticisms of my friend and colleague, Jordan Peterson. I don’t like lumping postmodernism together as if they’re all saying exactly the same thing. There are deep and important differences, for example, between two postmodernists who I’ve read rather deeply, Foucault and Derrida, and simply treating them as the same, I think, is unfair. But I do think there are some over, and I’m not accusing Steve of that at all. That’s why I mentioned who my target was. And so I see postmodernism as, I think I see it more locked into modernism, in that I see that it’s bound to modernism as being not an inherently constructive project, but a project that is predicated on a negation of modernism. And I’m interested therefore in metamodernism, which I see as somewhat of a corrective to postmodernism, because it’s trying to say, yes, but what’s the positive constructive project. And so I tend to look at postmodernism and metamodernism together as white might be foreshadowing what’s coming. So, I think I wanted to be clear about this because I think DL logos really depends on people really recognizing and appreciating and understanding what they’re saying, what other people are saying and I’m trying, I hope to both represent what I’m hearing Steve say in a way that he would acknowledge and appreciate what he’s saying. The issues around evolution. That’s perhaps where we might have some lively discussion, and I look forward to that. But one more point of bridging that might be useful for that, because Steve said something at the end that I thought that I take to be very, very important. I’ve even coined a term for it I’ve talked about a lot that we have folk, and this is, I think, one of the disastrous dichotomies that the enlightenment gave us, there’s the mind body dichotomy mind world dichotomy, and they interweave and they mutually support each other and then we vacillate between romanticism and positivism in the culture. And so I’ve been trying to make use of some current work in cognitive science that talks about the transjective that talks about that aspect that is co created by the environment and the organism and actually grounds and makes it possible and so here I’m building on the work of People like Gibson, and his idea of affordances that right you know the grasp ability of the cup is not in the cup it’s not in my hand. It’s a real relationship between them and most of my cognition therefore isn’t in my head. It’s in the dynamical coupling between myself and the world in an ongoing way. And so, seeing transjectivity as central for meaning making. And I think that the process that’s at the core of this I’ll try and wrap this up quickly is a process that I call relevance realization which is a dynamical self organizing process for how we zero in and pay attention to this information, rather than that information and I think that’s the core of our intelligence, and it’s the core of our ability to start caring about this rather than caring about that. And that’s, again, not enough. That’s not a subjective thing or an objective thing, but a transjective. And I think that’s deeply analogous that process of relevance realization is deeply analogous to how biological evolution works. To put it very crudely, I think the brain introduces variation and what it will pay attention to and then put selective pressure on it windows it down and then opens it up and windows it down. You can see extended discussions between Greg double G and I on this topic. Greg has written beautiful blogs on it so you can go. I’m not trying to be cryptic and trying to be brief. Right. There’s lots there. And I think that that process, and this is perhaps where we can discuss. I think that process like biological evolution is open ended, I don’t think there can be any sort of completion. I’m a big fan of Plato but my biggest critique of Plato is a kind of perfectionism. I don’t think that adaptation as a real affordance that adaptations can be compared. Is the great white shark more adapted than the spiny anteater. I don’t know. The great white shark is very adapted in the ocean but it dies pretty quickly in the desert. So, I don’t know, like, it’s because I think of adaptation as a transjective organism environment relation, and the environment is static and changing so that and the organisms therefore are constantly changing I don’t think there’s any final resting place for relevance and that seems to be how relevance works so if you pay attention and moment by moment experience. My fingers relevant now wasn’t relevant a second ago is it perpetually relevant. No, we’re constantly when we get a moment of insight what we found relevant Oh, turns out that that’s not important. This is important. And so, I see the evolution as open ended, because activity works in terms of an open ended environment. And so, I think there are deep similarities my friend and colleague Evan Thompson talks about deep continuity, there’s deep continuity between biological evolution and cognitive evolution. I’m, and I do acknowledge that there’s something that looks like perhaps evolution at a cultural level, because of the ratcheting effect of culture, each generation can build on previous generations. I get wary, I’ll be honest, also speak from my, when people, it sounds to me like, and that’s how I’m putting it, that they’re equivocating when they move between cosmological evolution, biological evolution cognitive evolution and cultural evolution I think I don’t think there’s identities there. And so there’s things I don’t, I don’t. I mean, I don’t think there’s a T loss. And, and I’m really glad there isn’t, because I think we have a T loss. There’s a temptation to T loss I’m trying to speak very cautiously because I don’t want to prejudice people against Steve, that’s unfair, I don’t want to do that. I think I would say there’s a temptation to T loss because we live in, we, we do a lot of relevance realization by constructing narratives and narratives are inherently teleological, and I think a lot of our political problems and our discourse problems are because of narrative bias narrative biases we see narrative everywhere. And a lot of times we shouldn’t be there isn’t a narrative there. And so I’m hesitant for seeing sort of something like a narrative teleology at work, and I’m worried that, well, or maybe I would propose that we might be seeing a possibility that human We might start shifting to something that isn’t so beholding to narrative for our understanding of how we make meaning. And so that’s, that’s my response, I’ll leave it there because I’ve talked way too long, I apologize. Okay, just wanted to quick things and Steve, please want to have you come back in. So a couple of things. One is very interesting that Steve is an integral philosopher and he looks at the integral stage as following postmodernism, with the same with a very similar type of acceptance of aspects of traditionalism modernity and postmodernism is unique but in the acceptance of the best of the previous in the similar way that metamonism does. So there’s a very strong relationship there that’s one of the things I want to say, and I’ll just hand it over to Steve so Steve can respond. John just said was very interesting and I want to circle back and talk about a variety of these excellent points. Let me say first that when I talk about this progressive stage of cultural emergence postmodernism is a difficult term because people think of postmodernism as critical theory, or they think of it as you know post structuralists or the deconstruction of postmodernism as a distinct branch of philosophy, even though of course it’s got people within that branch, you can argue to say disagree like, you know, very down to come. But when I refer to that’s why we’re migrating away from the term postmodern just because it has, among that many other kinds of baggage. And I think that’s a worldview it’s not a senior ideology or a singular philosophy, it’s sort of the one thing that all progressives have in common is their, their agreement regarding the abundant pathologies of modernity. So, you know, we can see it in the environmental movement, we can see it in their feminist movement and their racial justice movement and then the progressive spirituality movement. And so there are many branches of progressivism, and they don’t always hold together perfectly. But when you meet people who are progressive they, a lot of them share these same views so it does, there are plenty of arguments that we can make, we don’t have to believe in a point about how much of a moral view this thing is. Well, let me come back and say that I, I don’t think I believe in the kind of teleology that you don’t believe in either. So I don’t think that the universe being guided or you know all of these, you know, religiously inflected notions of providence and the emergence of the universe. I think that trying to get at the purpose within evolution is it, I’m coming at it from a different perspective and don’t need to claim to those earlier notions about, you know, innovation or determinism or whatever like that. But what I will say is that the cosmological evolution, biological evolution and let’s call it psychosocial evolution or the evolution of human history, right, which includes the individual people’s ability to think as well as their cultural structures and everything that’s in the same category, but what I don’t want to conflate these things, in other words, you know, cosmological evolution seems like it’s just a bunch of downhill reactions to entropy, biological evolution seems like it’s, you’re working out a natural selection with no purpose As I mentioned, cultural evolution or psychosocial evolution, that’s very dependent upon intention. It’s, you know, it’s on purpose, unless it happens occasionally. So one of the only thing that makes all of these kinds of universe becoming arguably describable and understandable within one overall rubric, which you can call evolution, is this structure of emergence whereby something more keeps coming from something less. And the proof of this structure as being one whole structure is that our bodies, each human body is like a little microcosm of the entire structure, right, the most numerous atoms in our bodies are the hydrogen atoms. The universe appeared 13.8 billion years ago and no hydrogen atoms have been made since, right, it’s just boom, that’s all hydrogen in the universe appears at once with a big bang. So that emergence of hydrogen is the foundation of our bodies, as well as most of the periodic table, right, all of the minerals and elements in our bones. And in the same way that we contain most of the evolutionary accomplishments of cosmological evolution, both within our bodies and our atoms and in this geological planet we’re living on, that’s how this cosmological evolution, this stage, continues to support the leading edge of psychosocial evolution in the present. And we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this, right, we have to think about this… You and I differ on this, we talk about it in interesting ways. I followed Holmes Ralston, who’s a, no, professor, who’s done a lot of work in this area, And he recognizes that within the emergence, the original emergence of the Big Bang, the second Big Bang with the emergence of life, and what he argues convincingly for as the third Big Bang with the emergence of humans. And what makes that third Big Bang comparable is that it opens up a new realm, a new domain of evolution where a new kind of evolution can take place, right? The conscious evolution of our culture and our history by humans. But what ties all these three very different kinds of becoming together is that they all are hung along this structure of emergence, which goes back to 2.8 billion years, which is continuing to function here in the present in a vital way. So when I’m talking about cultural evolution as its own domain, I’m talking about human history. Clearly the evidence is we now have this global civilization that encompasses the planet. Like something more has come from something less and there’s many ways in which we could distinguish it from regular biological evolution. But the point is that this universe that we live in, this finite universe is in the process of becoming. And at least here in the realm of cultural evolution, much of the becoming whereby something more becomes depends upon human action, human intention, which is driven by human purpose. So whether or not we can claim that there’s purpose of the universe in any kind of teleological sense, what we can say is there’s purpose in the universe because we all have it and use it daily to get out of bed. So the fact that there’s purpose is a vital part of what it means to be human. And it’s the primary driver of this third domain in this third big bang realm of the evolution of human history. And so understanding how that occurs, why animal needs can be satisfied, but human needs can never be satisfied because as soon as we take care of one set of needs, we awaken to another set of ways in which we’ll be better. That’s part of what drives these worldview structures is their horizons of improvement. And so it gets to the point where the worldview is done as much as it can. And in order to improve the human condition further, you have to improve your definition of improvement itself, which is what constitutes this new value agreement membrane, which creates this intersubjective system that persists across multiple generations of which colors are current cultural condition. So anyway, purpose, I argue that we have it. I believe that we do have small degrees of freedom that allow us to be creative and imagine how things can be better in novel ways. And those degrees of freedom are directly related to the ethical causation of our purpose. So that’s a mouthful, but at least that’s some thoughts relative to what you said. One of the things that sort of that commerce seems to bring me to is I feel, and I think we all feel this in various ways, that this is a very important time in cultural conscious evolution. And that modernity played a particular role to create a particular structure. But if we look in the back half of the 21st century, I’m not sure that the structures that modernity built for us are adequate to the task. And it seems to me that transformation is in the air. If we ask transformation, I think both of you have offered really powerful and interesting reflections about sort of the Kairos of the moment. And I think the issues of values, John, I know you’ve been engaged in recently rich conversations with Jordan Hall about the sacred. And so what I’d like to throw in here maybe is get both of you reflecting on, as we think about this moment and think about values and transcendence, how do we reflect on the values that will guide us in particular ways? And how do we create intersubjective spaces that will enable us to be guided by the kinds of values that will have the kinds of consequences we hope for? Should I speak now? Yeah. Yes, yes, John. Okay. So let’s perhaps I can both respond to Steve and respond to you if I zero in on Kairos because I think that’s a good way of putting it. So there just may be a semantic difference between Steve and I. What Steve talks about is evolution. I talk about his emergence because that’s the more frequent term that’s used within cognitive science. And then I also worry about emanation because possibilities seem to be structured, not just actualities. And that actually is something you see in Whitehead as well too. He has God structuring possibilities and then the emergence. And so that’s an idea that I see a lot of people converging on. And then I’m getting to Kairos in one sec. I think one of the main drivers of emergence, and you see this in biology and you see it in cognition is a process of complexification whereby a system becomes a complex system and systems complexify if they’re simultaneously differentiating their parts and integrating them together. You see that a zygote becoming a full-fledged organism. There’s both different differentiation and integration. You get emergent functions because the differentiations allow it to do different things. And the integration means it doesn’t fall apart and get it cross purposes as it does different things. Now, the thing I see about complexification is it’s a double-edged sword. I see complexification affording transcendence, but I see complexification at work in depression taking shape and having emergent properties that were not there before. So I see complexification as a double-edged sword. And Kairos’ are typically bifurcation points. They’re points of complexity. And the main argument I would make is we complexify cognition in order to try and couple effectively to the complexification of reality. And I think I’m hearing Steve say something very similar. But I think that what’s, and this is where Jordan and I are both, Jordan Hall and I, we think the issue that’s happening right now is the complexification of the environment. And we’re speaking mostly here of the psychosocial technological environment, that that rate of complexification and the emergent functions that are coming out of it, is it going off exponentially? And so the Kairos we face is that a lot of the previous grammars, cultural cognitive grammars, by which we try to shape ourselves to the complexity of the environment are insufficient for that rapid takeoff. And that what we’re seeing is not only adaptive complexification, but as I was arguing a few minutes ago, we’re seeing lots of maladaptive complexification. And that’s why the social network, the social media are creating, I think much more pernicious complex systems than adaptive ones. So what I see we’re facing is, we’re facing this thing of, okay, how do we structure a cultural cognitive grammar so that we can tap into this Kairos? And so that we become more adaptively fit for it. And so that we can respond to these massively complex self-organizing systems that seem to be deleterious to our life. And I don’t mean just our cultural life, I mean our biological life and the life of the planet. And so I think that that really need, well, I wanna exclude Jordan, we seem to be in agreement that we need to open up what we mean by the sacred and here’s why. So I do work on meaning in life. What is it that actually drives people to find their lives more meaningful? And there are four factors and one of them is purpose. People need to have a sense of purpose. But there are three others. One is mattering. People need to feel connected to something that’s bigger than them, that has a value independent of their egocentric concerns. Another is coherence. People need to, they need their world to make sense so that there’s an agent arena relationship between them and the world. And finally, people need to have experiences that they think are significant, have a depth to them, take them into a deeper reality. There’s an onto normative drive in human beings. They like, I’ll do this with my class. How many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? Put up your hands, right? How many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating on you, even if it really threatened that relationship? Almost all of those people keep their hands up. Yes. So in addition to whatever we want, we want what is satisfying our desires to be real. And here’s what the research shows. Purpose matters, but mattering and coherence and significance actually matter more than purpose. And so part of my concern is to try and open up the sense of the sacred, have it non-narrative because narrative focuses on purpose. And I want to try and open up the sense of the sacred, a non-narrative sense. And to be fair to me, many of the mystics end up in a non-narrative place, right? Live without a why, you know, Rumi, right? And also I think Eckhart. And so I want to open up the sense of the sacred so that we can reconnect to those three connections that we don’t tend to emphasize as much, even though the research shows they’re more important. One is more important singly. Mattering is more important than purpose. People will sacrifice purpose for mattering, okay? The other three collectively are also more important than purpose. I’m not saying purpose doesn’t matter. I’m not saying that. Sorry for that pun. I’m not saying that, right? But the other, and I think I would argue that our exclusion of those three is consonant with our exclusion of the non-propositional kinds of knowing, the perspectival, the procedural and the participatory. So I would argue that we need a sense of the sacred that re-resurrects both of those in a mutually supportive fashion. So we have the kind of dynamic coupling that will prepare us in a discerning fashion for that accelerating complexification of the sociocultural technological world that we’re facing. And so I talk about, and this goes on really current work from Owen Guilford, where he talks about natural reward, not just natural selection. And you can see it in organisms. Evolution modifies traits. So you have advantage, right? But the capacity to evolve is itself a trait. And what can happen is organisms can evolve their evolvability. And that gives them a tremendous initial advantage when there is a rapid change in the environment. So when there are rapid changes in the environment, evolution isn’t the key thing. The evolution of evolvability seems to be the key thing. And so I’m proposing that if we shift this way, we can refocus the notion of the sacred in such a way that it affords us, as I said, to revivify the lost three kinds of knowing, these other aspects of meaning making, so that we have the evolution of our evolvability. And so that’s how I’m trying to answer Kairos, respond to Steve, and respond to you, Greg. That’s marvelous. Okay, so Steve. Yes, I mean, I just talk about what he just said, because that was so rich. I mean, don’t ask me a question, just looking to respond to John. No, no, I’m gonna say, no, I’m saying, I’m just opening the floor to you to continue along that line. Okay, well, let me just say that this is a sacred dialogue about the sacred that I feel blessed to be part of, because ultimately our ability to recognize the sacred in the sense is completely with you, that a more sophisticated, I will call it reinvention, like Stuart Koffa, I don’t think we invented it in the first place, but I think understanding it at a deeper and wider and more significant level is exactly the key to overcoming this crisis, this crisis of meaning, this crisis of the environment, the crisis of modernities, pathology to catch up with us, et cetera. So what the sacred is, is the topic I love to talk about intensely. And of course, a lot of this is semantic, right? It relates to what we mean when we talk about the transcendent. Try to use in developmental politics, my 2020 book, I try to use the term transcendent as an umbrella term, at least from a political perspective, that can stand for anything that’s an authentic, greater than self-interest. So we all have self-interest, it’s rooted in our biology, but I argue that this self-interest is directly interdependent with some kind of greater than self-interest, right? So like it says in the Bible, where there is no vision that people perish, right? So something in Maslow recognized this, whether self-actualization is self-transcendence, Victor Frankl, transcendence is well accepted, but what it means philosophically, how we can unpack it and directly tie it in with this idea of the sacred is very important work you’re doing and I’m doing it our own way, so it’s great to come together and talk about it. When I think about the transcendence, I mean, just the literal definition is it’s going beyond, but more important, I would say that greater than self-interest, which has the ability to fulfill human needs, not like a false transcendent interest, like the antique car in your garage that you love and want to devote your life to, but no, something more noble than that, hopefully, and it can be secular, it doesn’t need to have a spiritual ontology attached to it, but nevertheless, there is this pull, the same way that we feel a pull to our self-interest, I think many people, most of us, feel a pull to find something that’s transcendent, to connect, to be congruent with, to matter for, to do all of those, to relate to it in all the ways that you just ticked off, right? And the purpose being, again, we’re getting into the semantics of it, right? So I don’t want to get hung up on the word purpose and I appreciate that there’s something about the transcendent in its fulsomeness, which is, in a sense, non-dual, right? It’s not part of time and it escapes the narrative structure because a narrative structure is a sequence in time, right? I mean, so we know the finite universe is highly myriad in its structure, from the Big Bang onwards, there’s something about the sacred, something about this magnetic power that pulls us or that draws us deeply to find and serve, if you’ll find the term, something that’s transcendent. There’s something about the transcendent which goes beyond time, it goes beyond the narrative structure, it goes beyond purpose or any kind of goal-oriented thinking because it’s simply one, but yet there’s more to it, we don’t have to just rest in the oneness of it, there’s a deep unpacking and indeed a political relevance. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the political significance of transcendence and how we can rediscover it in a way that doesn’t mean a regression to the pre-modern religious worldview. Charles Taylor has done some tremendous work in this area. I think that he also misses a lot of things. So unpacking what it means to have this transcendence or sacred understanding for the 21st century, I think that’s where the leading edge of human understanding is right now. I wanna, now I do wanna ask, and this is for Double G, John Vervecky and Steve, okay. So I wanna stay where we are. I love the sacred, I love the spiritual, and I would like to add energy to this because energy is in the title of this event. And Greg Enriquez, Double G, talks about wisdom energy. You have talked about gravitational pull and then you’ve now transformed to another form of energy, values as energy. You had virtues in your last book also. I know John, since I’ve watched Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, values and virtues are also very important to you. But what I would like to specifically ask about, and this is Steve, this is based on Steve’s work. He talks about interdependent polarities, right? And one of the most frankly, profound interdependent polarities that I’ve seen in his work is that on one hand you have the non-dual, on the other you have the love of God. And Steve is one of the only ones that I’ve seen recognize both as polarities, that you have both these dimensions and that together they kind of form a circuit, a virtuous engine of sorts. I can’t explain it, Steve, you certainly can, but I really would like you all to riff on that. And if you could also add panentheism, I asked this because last week, one of the things that Stefan Alexander, the physicist said is that one of the cutting edge perspectives in physics is that when you look at quantum reality, it looks as if some type of panpsychic something is real. So I know panpsychicism is different than panentheism, I don’t know how much time we have, but this stuff is so juicy for me and I got you guys here, so please. You want us to adequately address all of those things you just said? I apologize, I know it’s not the time, but to really unpack it, but if there’s a way to summarize or at least touch on the points that are relevant to you. Well, let me see if I can just do three minutes and then let these other guys talk about it. So let me just key it out. One of the things that makes the emergence of life in the second big bang distinctly different is as Lynn Margulis puts it, life is matter that chooses. And that choice, I mean, even though we could say that these prokaryotes, that their choices are completely like an algorithm, that it’s instinctual, it’s pre-programmed, but no, even Stuart Kaufman has talked about these prokaryotes and new prokaryotes as minimal molecular autonomous agents. The point is that life, one of the things that makes it different from just well-organized matter or a system of matter in which there’s a proof of energy is that life is responding to the purpose to survive and reproduce. It can fail at this purpose, right? That is matter, material systems don’t have a goal that they can fail at, but surviving and reproducing is a goal and it’s a primitive form of goodness. At least it can be understood that way philosophically. So life is being drawn toward this intention to survive and reproduce. Why is that? I don’t think it has an adequate explanation within materialism or physicalism, but regardless of whether we wanna attribute intentionality or how much we wanna attribute it to life, when it comes to humans, we clearly have this intentionality. We are attracted by values. And as Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, every natural fact in some ways is a symbol of some spiritual facts, some higher, but some transcendent fact. And I’ve put a lot of weight on that notion with the idea that we’re here in the physical universe, we have this ubiquitous feature of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? Energy is a big part of what it is to be in the finite physical universe. And energy certainly has physics to it. I mean, in addition to the electromagnetic spectrum, we can see how electricity moves in a circuit, right? Between the positive and the negative. And it has both, it has a charge and has power and has light, you know, that it’s only about 150 years since humans really understood this phenomenon on which we now call the electromagnetic spectrum. And so using this analogy in ways that I can’t unpack here as I try to keep myself through another minute, is the idea that beginning with animals, but coming online more fully with humans, is this ability to feel, like I said, a better way is possible. That there is a thing, that this is sort of the basic morality that we sense in our bones, that means that human life does have a certain sacredness to it, that it does have a moral component, which bleeds over into something we might identify as objective. Value’s not an objective thing. What we feel is this pull that a better way is possible. We are attracted by the beautiful, the true and the good. Not just, you know, biologically, we’re attracted to beauty as Plato understood, that transcends our biology. And it sort of ushers us into this higher level of mind, same with goodness, same with truth. It’s the telos, if you’ll pardon the term, of all science to try to find out the truth and philosophy as well. So there’s something that’s drawing us forward. And some could say, well, it’s just the problematic life conditions that are irritating us and that causes us to seek a better way that way. But as I argue at length, no, there’s actually some kind of it, comparing it to magnetism. Seeing that value, as it manifests in our consciousness, at least, does have certain identifiable behaviors, which are remarkably similar to the energetic properties of physical energy. One of those behaviors is this polarity, whereby the more intrinsic the value is, the more it seems to be related to a complimentary value, like liberty and equality. Liberty can’t stand alone. It needs to be conditioned by equality, same with equality, real and ideal is another one of these conceptual behavioral polarities by which values appear in these complimentary pairs. And they need each other to maximize their value creating capacity. So the promise of understanding, if you’re part of the term of physics of value or a way that we could maybe understand the way it motivates people, the way it magnetizes consciousness, the way it can generate political will or not generate political will. These are things that it seems to me is within our capacity as humans to discover. And the promise of discovering these things is that they’ll revolutionize psychology, they’ll revolutionize politics when we can generate value energy more intentionally and more safely in ways that can uplift people, uplift the human condition in powerful ways, just as we’ve learned to uplift the human condition by harnessing physical. Double G or John? I’ll offer a few thoughts and then pass it over to John. So a couple of things that resonates a lot with me. I think of our cognitive machinery and then our collective intelligence as anticipating possible futures, creating liminal spaces, making predictive elements that have particular values. I believe that we’re guided in a recursive relational relevance realization way by whether or not we’re known and valued and are oriented and drawn toward that. And we’re also afraid that we’ll be rejected or injured. And we try to then balance whether or not we have power and love, whether or not we have freedom or dependency. And when those are positively synced, I see in the clinic room all the time that there’s a coherent integration around a true felt sense. And when I see that individuals are in a polyvagal defensive spot, they’re polarized. They’re hyperdependent and then counter dependent. They drop to power to be hostile and then love and they defer and they fawn. So I think what you are saying at an individual level makes sense to me and dyadic relation. Then we drop up to the political collective. Yeah, I think liberty and freedom and appreciation of hierarchy, but at the same time need for fairness are all positive values. And I do believe that there were searching spaces for potentiality. In fact, why this makes us a sacred conversation for me is precisely because there is an intuitive sense that something in all of the complexification, we better attend to the potential values that serve as liminal load stars that we should maintain faith in. And that to me is the searching for that and to be in relation. And the last thing I’ll say in relationship for me, the concept of wisdom energy, what I sort of, I went as people know, I’m a systematic narrative justifier that then wants science in all of its boxes. Okay, that’s my physicist mind, masculine mind, but I’m actually, my starting point professionally is a feminine therapeutic heart to bring into the world a way of being that cultivates wisdom, cultivates wellbeing and flourishing and hold suffering in a particular way. And it’s the essential being of that that I sort of encountered in wisdom energy. And in relationship to like the love of God and non-dual, for me, essentially what that was is a transcendent flooding that both hits at the meta and then grounded me at a very basic level. And then ultimately, I think that plugs right into John’s stuff where it’s really like, hey, I’m just walking my dog Benji in a participatory perspectival procedural way. And the flow is such that I’m barely talking to myself. So that’s how I know I’m grounded in wisdom energy. That’s what I mean. And like the propositional narrative sort of drifts into the background and being itself in a good way. Well, that just felt the raw worked energy of that. So. That’s beautiful. So John, you go next and then Peter, please let’s bring in some folks into this deal logos. Okay, thank you. So, wow, this is a lot, which is great. It’s good to be put into a zone of proximal development by this conversation. So I suppose where I would start about the energy thing is to point back towards virtue. The virtue originally meant a power. That’s why we still say you do this in virtue of this and a power is a structure of conditions and constraints. It’s not an action. And so I think what you can see in biology, even in your own biology, you can see how systems are adaptive, how they’re self-corrective, is they have opponent processing. Your sympathetic nervous system is biased and always interpreting things as you should increase your level of arousal. Your parasympathetic system is biased and saying you should always decrease your level of arousal and they’re like this. And neither one has the answer. And what they’re doing is by opponent processing, they’re constantly dynamically restructuring their level of arousal in trying to keep in sync with a constantly changing environment. Now I think at the political level, we’ve replaced the idea of democracy as opponent processing, where my best chance of self-correcting is for you to challenge me with adversarial zero-sum game. My best chance for winning and getting the power I want is destroy you, to debunk you, to demolish you, and social media is really pushing that. And what I think that what we lose, right, is we lose, we’ve lost, I think, one of the most fundamental opponent processing, which is that we’re both individuals and we belong, we have individual cognition and we belong to distributed cognition. And like the way Tillich talks about this, he talks about how we’re constantly pulled between individuation and participation. And he kept warning, he kept warning, and he’s the first non-Jewish academic to be turfed out and persecuted by the Nazis. He kept warning anybody who offered you a resolution of that and said, and I mean this term I’m now gonna use, here’s the final solution to the individuation participation problem. Here’s how we can finally resolve that. We can either dissolve into the collective will or we can become atomic individualism. And I think all of that is very dangerous bullshit. Now, I think what we need to do to pick up on one of the things Greg said is I think we need to go back and see this opponent processing as where we, and that’s what I think DIA Logos is. DIA Logos is where we try to practice the opponent processing between individuation and participation, individual cognition and distributed cognition, so we can get the practice and the taste for what virtuous self-correction through and with each other actually is. Now, I think part of that also requires that we pay attention. Yes, we are not like, and I agree with Steve, we’re not just a simple self-organization of a tornado because a tornado will go into conditions that destroys it. We’re not, we’re autopoetic. We are self-organizing to seek out the conditions that will maintain our existence. And so we do have that. How is it relevant to me? How is it relevant to me? How is it relevant to me? But there’s a difference for us. We are all born and depend on agape. We depend on the fact that we also ask the question and we had parents who took seriously the question, not how is this kid relevant to me, but how am I relevant to this kid? How am I relevant to the conditions that will make this kid turn into a moral agent who can pursue long-term goals of meaning and happiness? And that’s agape. And agape is the thing we need in order to bring back, right? To counterbalance, right? Help us to get the sense of we need a sacred that both homes us and makes us, oh, a home is how things are relevant to you and you’re safe and you’re secure and you’re well-fed, but it also should take us to the horizon of the horror. And that’s what Otto argued. The sacred is both the home and the horizon of the horror because the horizon of the horror is where you have, and that’s what beauty is too. Wilka said beauty is the terror that just doesn’t kill us. Right? The horizon of the horror is when we are really open to this question. And this is the Socratic Platonic question. How am I relevant to that? How do I matter to that? And I think that’s what, and I would say the virtue that’s missing from us is the virtue of reverence, which is the virtue of how we expose ourselves to awe and open ourselves up and afford real agape. So that’s how I would answer that. I gotta say this. John, what you convey is more than just what you say. I talk about that. I know you do. I know you do. And I just say, I felt that. I think everyone else felt that because it’s coming from such a deep place of integrity and intention. And then this is so touching. It’s powerful. Thank you, man. Thank you. Yeah, thank all of you. Thank you. I mean, I wanna thank Greg and Steve. I wouldn’t have gotten to that place without them. I mean, that’s clearly the case. We can feel it. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, man. Yeah, that’s right. We can feel it, man. So Peter. All right. I just wanna clarify with our guests today. Is there a hard stop at the top of the hour because we’re scheduled for 90 minutes in total? Not for me. Not for me. Not for me. Okay, cool, cool. So we’ll try to squeeze two questions in. They’re quite good. We’ll take in David first. Hi, guys. David Collins. Thanks for a great presentation. And I know each of you, Stephen, John, have a response for this. So I’m setting up just a little bit of a straw person for you to play with. But whether we’re talking about evolution that embodies purpose or somewhat, in my contrast, we’re talking about a non-narrativized opportunity for meaning to emerge. I’m remembering images like the Buddha not moving, touching the earth. The Zen teacher Dogen talking about taking the backward step away from constructions. And even Plato talking about turning around a conversion to look at where our ideas come from. So somewhat teasingly, I’m seeing as potential contrasts those images of staying put or even moving backwards to put up against questions of a theological purpose or a growth in meaning realization. So I just invite you, I already know you guys have a lot to say in the direction I’m already heading, but I invite you to play with those perspective contrasts. I could jump in because it gives me a chance to circle back to what Greg mentioned regarding this polarity of spiritual experience, or it might point to different ways of experiencing ultimate reality. One of the things that I write about in my 2015 book, The Prince of the Infant, which it’s a book about spiritual experience and all the different varieties of spiritual experience and how that relates to evolution and cosmology and ontology, et cetera. There I talk about the practice of, well, my argument for these two different, what I call it attractor basins of spiritual experience. The non-dual attractor basin, which has been experienced in various levels and certainly in the level of Somali by mystics throughout human history in almost every form of spirituality, certainly a very important and humanly significant form of spiritual experience is this Somali. But also relevant to human history and powerful, although somewhat out of fashion, is this idea of the spiritual experience of being loved and that the universe is a loving place. And there’s something about love, the spiritual nature of it that’s irreducibly relational, that it has a problem fitting into a completely non-dual ontology. There’s no separation, as Advaita says, and how does love fit in? I mean, you can kind of fudge it and say, it’s just this radiating love of the Dharmakaya or whatever. But again, I try to get down to brass tacks by saying no. If love is gonna be real, then there’s gotta be a spiritual experience and there’s gotta be a relationship, at least philosophically speaking. And that leads to this powerful tractor base of spiritual experience, which has been recognized, again, even the most non-dualism in Buddhism still has many powerful theistic elements within it. And while there have been some people, some have argued, most notably the Perennial philosophy of saying that, well, this theistic experience is a lower level from the ultimate non-dual experience. But I argue against that too. I say that realistically, that these two things can compliment each other. We don’t have to put it in a higher up. But how this relates to your straw man is I would say that in the practice of these kinds of spiritual experience on one’s spiritual path, that these are exemplified by loving engagement and wise non-attachment. So I have not been in the Buddhist practice, but I’ve come to appreciate it much more over the years and what the meaning of wise non-attachment is and its connection to an apophatic or an emptiness, sunyata conception of the sacred. And I’ve tried to practice non-attachment as much as possible. And it’s a deep and wide spiritual practice in its own right, which I’ve come to appreciate deeply. But I also see how wise non-attachment is directly related or is in this one of these complimentary polarities with this idea of loving engagement. So when it’s with your kids, you wanna have a certain amount of wise non-attachment. You don’t wanna control them. You wanna let them be their own people, et cetera. But you also have to be loving engaged. You have to care deeply. It matters when your kid gets hit by a car because you won’t pay attention. I mean, so being able to see these as two legs of our spiritual progress, I think it can help us appreciate the place for loving engagement and how its ability to create value or spiritual experience is related to our ability to take a more apophatic non-attachment perspective too, because both can be true at the same time. That the infinite is present within the finite and the infinite is not narrative. The infinite is eternal, universal, essential. Whatever this thing is, this metaphysical infinite is the grounded foundation of our finite universe. I would say that it appears to us in these forms of spiritual experience, both as the part and the whole, as the non-dual and the loving. And so that’s a mouthful of what this is talking about. So, did you go? That was beautiful. And I think that’s really profound. So let me try and respond. I think it was David. I think the standing, I mean, I practiced Tai Chi Chuan. And so making a space and standing backward is often how you win, although you’re trying not to win. You’re trying not to try as Lin Yun, so famously put it. So making space is often very different than forcing. So the way, you don’t try to force, right? You try to do, we try to use a word that I’ve already talked about. You try to afford, which is the different from forcing. And so this is, and I think the Asiatic traditions, Shunyata and Dao, they’re by no means identical when I’m not doing some Western, you know, homogenizing them, but, and I think the Kyoto school is very good at pointing this out, the work of Nishida, Nishitani, et cetera, is that there is a realism about possibility and evaluation of possibility that has not seen the same appreciation in both senses of the word of understanding and value. Maybe three senses, understanding, value, and gratitude for. In the West, the West has been very oriented towards actuality. We even use actual as a synonym for real, which is a very problematic way. Do you love me? Yeah, my love for you is I actually love you, which is the same as I really love you. And of course, that’s not even scientific because science depends on real possibility. It depends on things like potential energy. It depends on E equals MC squared, which is not an event. It’s a constraint, it’s a universal constraint that shapes possibilities. And so I think that one of the things that we have, we need to recover is a way, and I’m gonna get back to Steve’s other point because I thought it was brilliant and beautiful. We need to recover the reality of the potential and give up. See, Aristotle gave it to us, but the person who gave it to us, gave it to us like this. Actuality and potential, right? And it needs to be given like this. And I think the potentiality is where we are getting the non-dual, the out one minute, the eternal, like where is E equals MC squared? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a no thing that’s nowhere. It’s like the definition of God in the 24 philosophers, it’s center is nowhere and its circumference is everywhere. But you also need things happening, you need the actual. And I think, so that’s the non-dual. And then the actual is things acting on each other. And for us, I would argue through being cognitive agents, relevance realization is not cold calculation. Every moment I’m caring, I’m caring about your faces much more right now than I’m caring about the wall behind me. Every moment is a moment of complex, massively dynamic, salient landscape of caring. And that’s the actuality that is pointed to at loving. I think this is how I’m hearing Steve, I’m hearing him say, right? You’ve got the eternity of the real potential and you’ve got right, the existence, that the Heraclidean presencing of actual engagement, of loving engagement, and they’re equally real to our realization in both senses of the word, becoming aware of and making real our realization of the sacred. So that’s how I would respond. And I like you David, I’m worried about language of just acting and just moving forward. And that’s why I was trying to talk about systems of constraints, virtual engines, the way in which possibility is really structured, not just the way in which actuality is really structured. So that’s how I would answer to that. That’s how I would answer to that. Lovely, both of you, I really appreciate it. I’ll tag with my own sense as a longtime contemplative student, both psychology and contemplative traditions. The more I quote unquote empty out and go nowhere, the more what’s always already here is alive and in love. Again, appreciate you both. Well, I could just respond to that last point. And this goes towards my conversation. Well, I think it’s genuine deal logos with Steve and also the two Greggs. I think that what the literature shows about psychological human love is it’s engendered by reciprocal opening. You want two people to fall in love, this is what you do. Get them together is what the research keeps converging on. I divulged something about me. I open myself up, I make a space in myself. I’m vulnerable, I make a space in myself for you. And then if you pick up on that and then you divulged something to me, we’ll get where we reciprocally open up to each other. And I think Plato’s model of anagogy and ascent is coming out of the cave is exactly that, right? The psyche gets restructured so that it can see more into reality. As it sees more into reality, it becomes more realized within itself and they reciprocally open up and we fall in love with the depths of ourselves and the depths of reality in a mutually consonant and growing manner. And so I think that when you make space, you also make possible. And one of the things you can make possible is that mutual opening. And that’s a profoundly loving event. You can fall in love with the two depths and how they’re falling in love with each other. And if we could get people to fall in love with reality again, wouldn’t that be great? Remember I called you John when I was in my manic lovey-dovey energy. I was like, oh my God, philosophy. It’s like everywhere. Yeah. Peter. All right, Evan, you had a question. So this is from way back in the beginning of the conversation that I asked this question. You guys sort of went into this a little bit after I asked it, but just to get some more clarity here, I’m curious. So it sounded like there was at least something of a move towards assigning a telos to evolution itself, right? And so I had some curiosity around what we get out of that basically, because the way I look at it at least is evolution describes the sort of system that has replication, variation and selection acting, right? And that one of the really cool things about having this notion of evolution, right? This thing we can point to indexically with the word evolution is that it explicitly doesn’t have a purpose or telos, right? And so I’m wondering what we get by saying that evolution has a telos that we don’t get by saying the system has a telos. Like the whole dynamical field in which the evolution is taking place because that’s at least compatible with the standard scientific senses of the way the word evolution is used. So I’m just curious for those who were speaking in those terms, what do you think we get for saying that evolution has a teleology to it? Well, certainly the word evolution is a battleground of meaning. And one of the places where that battle is the hottest is with between physicalism, you know, and those who wanna recognize something more than physicalism, it doesn’t need to go all the way to supernaturalism, but certainly there are those who wanna make evolution mechanical. And I resist that. I think the word is worth fighting for. I think it’s worth expanding, but I’m happy in conversations like this to fall back on the word emergence, like John mentioned, he likes to call it emergence, because that’s ultimately what we’re talking about. We’re talking about this, like I call it, the structure of emergence that keeps whereby something more keeps coming from something less and all these somethings more, all these levels of emergence apparently are online and functioning, as I explained in a model to human body. So rather than getting into the debate of whether biological evolution has any larger telos, I would say that the purposes of animals by itself is in a sense, an impoverished argument for biological telos, but let’s just set that aside for a second, because that’s a different argument. The argument that I’m most concerned about is improving the human condition, improving American politics, including suffering in the world, overcoming climate change, all of the urgent conditions that we find in this world of trouble and suffering, which I believe we have a duty to get our arms around. And if we’re gonna get our arms around it, one of the things that’s the most powerful new truth to emerge on the scene is being able to recognize how the culture itself is evolving, right? That was the foundation of Hegel’s entire philosophy, is we saw history was the movement of spirit, I’m not a Hegelian, but I do recognize that there is a structural element to what’s emerging and it’s not just technology, it just can’t be reduced to the physical, it has to do with this inner subjective domain, wherein agreements about values create cultural spaces of meaning-making, which act as platforms for human condition to improve or to go backwards, right? They’re not, it’s not an upward escalator to the good, but it is a circumstance in which I think that finding the transcendent, finding the sacred nature of reality, falling in love with reality because it is sacred and because we have a role to play and it’s in this opportunity at least to move towards something transcendent. I think that emergence is highly relevant to that understanding, that we’re not completely escaping the narrative structure even though we don’t wanna be completely captured by it, we wanna be able to step outside of it and see it through wise non-attachment or see it in its non-dual potentiality, but I would say we also need to balance that with our own duty to make the world a better place, our own duty to be the best people we can be and that is directly related to this whole of transcendence on emergence. So that’s at least one way I can respond in a quick way, but obviously there’s a lot more that we can argue about regarding your question. I’d like to just piggyback off on that because here’s my take, I think that the power of science in modernity and the centrality of physics in science has a huge impact on our modern cognitive grammar and I think it’s got a kind of impact that causes us to be blind. I was just listening to a Mindscape podcast with David Hague, a standard evolutionary biologist talking about the telos of organisms like to survive and to have goals to mate, okay? At a descriptive level, organisms expend energy to survive and to mate, all right? But his biological colleagues, because what happened with the modern scientific revolution is that there was such a Galileo assaulted Aristotle, so dramatically and the metaphysics of Aristotle got so basically castrated that we can’t talk about any kind of functional causation, formal causation, final causation in particular ways that the biological, psychological and social levels get fundamentally undermined for the purpose of science, descriptive, I believe, so that’s painful. And then when we think about our meaning in our own life, when we think about what Newtonian ideology meant for Christian in the Christian dual version and that was what was capital meaning, the intersection of that really created a particular kind of grammar that I think leaves us undervaluing value. And so for me, the issue of thinking about purpose and mattering and re-establishing reference, as it were, any number of those is absolutely central to re-inject these kinds of conversations. So I agree, I think we should be cautious in some ways, but I also think that from my vantage point, I say this as a agnostic atheistic naturalist. I was like, guys, take a chill. It’s okay to allow certain kinds of concepts to describe processes and man, is it okay for us conscious reflective beings to wonder about how we might evolve with purpose? So I have a huge agreement with both of a lot of what Steve said and Greg said. I agree very strongly with that we need to bring back Aristotle’s formal causation, Alessio Urraro in Dynamics in Action, I think just made the, I think that’s one of the most important books in cognitive science in the last 20 years. And she just made fantastic arguments. Terrence Deacon made some similar arguments in Incomplete Nature. Evan Thompson has made amazing, there’s just this huge and more and more keeps happening. And I think, and the fact that even the physicists, I agree with Greg, we should stop having, physics envy, it’s almost like penis envy. We gotta stop having that. Right? Because look, actually pay attention to the history. Biology is generating way more theoretical ideas, way more theoretically innovative than physics. That’s what’s actually happening right now. And it’s been happening for the last 40 years. We should be paying more attention to biology, way more attention. The other thing I wanted to say about that is to go back to the original question that was asked by Evan. And it’s good to see you again, by the way, Evan. So here’s why I worry. So my question, your question was, what’s added by putting in evolution? Here’s why I worry about making, and Steve is very nuanced about this, and caveated, and he’s bracketed, and I’m respecting all of that. I’m not being dismissive of it. So I’m explaining what I think, and I wanna acknowledge it and be responsible to it. But my concern as a cognitive scientist is, I think there’s deep connections between intelligent design and purpose. And I think we are purposeful creatures because we can intelligently design things. And I think it’s appropriate to talk about even, and Evan does, even microbes have a kind of intelligence, their ability to change the permeability of their membrane and move around, like it’s really complex. Obviously it’s not our level of intelligence, but man, is it sophisticated. I don’t want to try to explain the emergence of our intelligence using intelligent design, because for me, that is ultimately vapidly circular. We have to preserve a sense of evolution and emergence that is in no way dependent or beholding to intelligent design if we’re gonna explain our intelligence in a non-circular manner. So I think as a cognitive scientist, I’m committed to offering non-circular explanations. Now I might be wrong. Maybe there was a God, and this is a fiat and a miracle, and I have to be open to that when there’s evidence and argument for it. But what I have rational hope for and argument and evidence for is I don’t need intelligent design to explain the emergence of creatures who are capable of intelligent design. And for me, that is something I’m gonna hold onto because that for me is a very, very valuable thing as a scientist. And so I, until I, like that to me is doing really, really good work. And so my epistemology is ultimately pragmatic in the Percy and Jamesian sense, not in Rorty, not Rorty. But right, right? And so I think that it’s very crucial. That’s why I don’t use that term when I’m trying to talk about emergence or emanation precisely because I want a metaphysics that will give me a non-circular explanation for how intelligent designers emerge. Because if we don’t do that, we have two options. We have two options, which is, right? I get a scientific explanation of everything except how I’m a purposeful being seeking meaning and that I don’t belong. Or we get some crypto idealism, right? In which it’s all just intelligent design unfolding itself. And I find both of those very problematic for dealing with both history and science. So that’s what I would say, Evan. Let me just add, I’m not a proponent of intelligent design. No, no, Steve, I really wanted to be clear that I wasn’t attributing that to you. However, I mean, clearly, and we can explain the origins of us, the intelligent designers, without any prior intelligent design, that’ll be of course a giant scientific triumph. And I don’t think that’s beyond the realm of possibilities. But regardless of how we got here, we’re here. We have intention. And I think that ultimately they do connect to something you might call sacred. I think we’re in agreement on this, Steve. I don’t have anything to say other than yes. No. No. No. No. No. Well, if all of our guests are willing to take one more question, I think great. Let’s take one more question. Great. Right. Laura, you’re up. Hi, thank you so much for answering my question. Thank you so much for such a beautiful conversation. I guess I just have this question, like having seen so many traditional religions crumble for a variety of reasons, having a common theory, right? That this is all just there. Any language that we use for it is just a language, right? It kind of poetry or mythology. I fear that there’s, I fear that there has to be work done to say that there’s a sense of the sacred that’s strong enough to kind of get people through spiritual crises. You know, it’s like, how do you have a faith that like actually will carry you through great doubt unless you have had some kind of mystical experience that confirms for you, you know, ultimately that is there. Can I answer this question first? Because this is the crux of what I do. This for me is the center of my project. And I think that your ability to do relevance realization is already that, you’re already, and this is not some frivolous ornamental poetry that you sing as you trip through the meadows. This is the guts of your cognition. If you can’t do relevance realization, you’re not an intelligent, adaptive cognitive agent. It is the guts of your cognitive agency. That’s why you care so much about meaning making and making sense. And then what the sacred is, is the sacred is a set of practices. It’s an ecology of practice that allows you to deal with the double-edged sword of relevance realization. Because relevance realization is making you adaptive. And it’s simultaneously the source of your self-deception. Because if you’re finding this salient, you’re ignoring this. And that’s the core of self-deception. That’s how we deceive ourselves. We can manipulate what we find salient and relevant by how we direct our attention. That’s how all the bullshit in our culture works. And the sacred is that which affords our caring about things that enhances our relevance realization so that we overcome as much as we can the self-deceptive side. And we enhance the ability to zero in on what really matters right now. And wouldn’t that be wisdom? And if you have a scientific account of wisdom and meaning making, isn’t that good enough? It should be good enough. It should be good enough for any spirituality. That’s what I would argue. Let me underline that and say, well put, both in form and substance. And let me add that one of the ways that I advocate we can recover spirituality is through an understanding, a deeper understanding of the spiritual, the everyday spiritual experience of the good, the true, and the beautiful and related sub-intrinsic values. You know, we need to include freedom and love and all kinds of values. And they just bleed over into virtues. And we could make a philosophical distinction between values and virtues, which is probably worth doing. But this idea that the good, the true, and the beautiful as concepts that create a kind of a conceptual cathedral that allows for spiritual experience that doesn’t depend on any belief system. It’s not dependent upon spiritual dogma. It’s not only directly experiential, but not only can you experience the good, the true, but you can create, you can be a more moral person. You can care, you can serve. You can create beauty, original new beauty that expresses your spiritual experience and that gives a spiritual experience to other people. And then within these values understood philosophically, but connected to, they can connect seamlessly to all kinds of different spiritual teachings and practices. But the fact that the infinite is present in the finite, not just in a Samadhi experience, but also in these experiences of these intrinsic values. You know, the warm feeling that you have your loved ones, the exquisite beauty of Beethoven, right? The truth of the unification of science and spirituality coming to the same realization. These things are unmistakably experiences of spirit. And I think that while our spiritual experiences ultimately require spiritual practice and spiritual teachings to be fully alive within us and to give our lives that connection to the transcendent, I would say that it’s an excellent starting point that can be compatible with a secular view. But nevertheless, develop this virtue of reverence, which you mentioned, John, which is in a sense related to faith or related to the ability to connect to the transcendent. Like Blaise Pascal, the philosopher said, human things must be known in order to be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known. And so this idea that we’re experiencing the beautiful, the true and the good as a kind of a loving of the sacred, of reality, that opens the aperture for us to experience the spiritual nature of those realities more and more. And I would say that that’s a spiritual path for us to examine. I thought that’s a beautiful articulation from both of you. Laura, I think that’s a beautiful question. It’s a wonderful thing. I’ll simply say for my own journey as a psychotherapist and a scientist, finding that holding space when people are suffering and brutalized by life and to be finding the ground upon which to rebuild life in those contexts has basically been my own quest also. So thank you so much for raising that question. I think it really is at the heart of a lot of the kinds of stuff that we have to work through. All right. Wow, this has been wonderful. I wanna thank Steve McIntosh, John Viveki, my partner in this series, Dr. Greg Enriquez, all of you who attended, who asked questions, who participated in the chat, some who just listened, but you were there. And of course, the steward of the STOA, Peter Lindbergh. Thank you. Thank you all so much. Next week, we’ve got two on one day at 12 o’clock, 12 o’clock Eastern time, we’ll have two guests. We’ll have Nora Bateson and Diane Musho Hamilton together at 12 noon next month. And then at 5.30, we’ll have Zach Stein and Daniel Smoktenberger together with us. So it’s gonna be fabulous. So I hope you all can come back. Greg, you’ve done a great job leading this, man. Thanks so much.