https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Yk_4M0DJ368
I for one am very thankful that John and Jonathan have decided to have a conversation with one another and I’ve been very much looking forward to this since I heard they would be able to make the time. So I hope that you will all enjoy Día Logos between the two of them. So I wanted to start by responding, maybe even resonating is the better verb to that masterful presentation of iconography. And so I want to, if you’ll indulge me, I want to talk for a few minutes because I can’t make the point in a couple of sentences. So I’ve studied, that’s probably insufficient, I have been obsessed with the problem of relevance realization at the core of my career and it’s now coming to the fore more and more explicitly in cognitive science and for me that has been, I don’t know what to call it, it’s encouraged me. So one of the problems your cognition faces is the problem that it can’t be either algorithmic or arbitrary, it can’t follow ultimately rules that are working in terms of just truth and falsity and certainty, it can’t work just in terms of arbitrary choice because for many real world problems the amount of information you can pay attention to is combinatorially explosive, the number of options in your search space, as many of you know, a standard chess game, there’s on average the number of pathways, potential solutions you have to search through is 30 to the power of 60, which is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe, so obviously you can’t do an exhaustive search, so you can’t do an exhaustive search, you can’t be algorithmic but you can’t just arbitrarily pick from that search space, of all the information in your long term memory, you can’t search through it all, you can’t search through all the possible combinations that’s combinatorially explosive, right, and there’s more and more instances of these and so just gesturing to the argument you’ve heard me make endlessly. What’s happening of course now and again, and we get stuff getting published is this is now coming into the center of the, so we’ve gone through the first debate, we’re now in what’s called the second debate about rationality, Herbert Simon is playing a pivotal role, but it’s coming in and it’s causing us to really radically reconceive the notion of rationality, we have to give up sort of the Cartesian model, so that’s sort of on the outside the scientific, but I want to now start to resonate with what Jonathan was talking about, kind of wonder what would happen if I’d been brought up in a Christianity that was like what Jonathan presented, I wonder what I would have ended up. So let me give you a lot of instances of these and I want to show you how your biology solves this problem because it appears on many many levels and I just want to give you a bunch of examples fairly rapidly to show you how comprehensive this strategy is. I’m doing all of this because I don’t think of evolution as an intentional process, but I’m also not trying to insult any theists here, trying to keep this as neutral as possible, okay, so give me some charity on that and I will return the charity as full-fold as I can. So, you have to have a certain amount of arousal and put aside Freud, I don’t mean sexual arousal because there should be long periods of time where you’re not sexually aroused, but right, hopefully that’s happening right now, I mean metabolic arousal and so the problem for me is the problem facing you is what level should you have your arousal at and the problem is you’re on a continuum and you need to make it sensitive to the context. Like, I can’t be really highly arousal, that’s not good, I can’t be, and I can’t take sort of an overall Canadian strategy, I’ll just be middle all the time. Oh look, a tiger, right? So, what’s the solution? Well, one thing you might try is you might try creating a system that is calculating all the variables and then taking it into, like taking an input, doing all the calculation, doing output and then trying to manipulate a system. But instead, what you have is you have your autonomus, autonomic meaning from autonomus, self-law, self-governing, nervous system, it’s divided into two subsystems. There’s the sympathetic and the parasympathetic and I’m going to, please understand that I’m going to be using words from now, some words very, very carefully here. The sympathetic system is biased to interpreting as much as it can of the world as threat or opportunity and trying to raise your level of arousal. The parasympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of the world as a safe context in which you can recover and recuperate and digest. And then what you do, what you do is you put the two together like this in what’s called opponent processing and they’re constantly pushing and pulling on each other. So you take two systems that are heuristically biased, they don’t search the whole space, they’re very biased, right? And then you put them in an opponent processing together and they are constantly pulling, notice what I’m doing with my left and right hands. Yes, yes, right, right, left and right hand, I’m pulling, right, like this, opponent processing so that my level of arousal is constantly evolving its fittedness to the context. No, is it a perfect system? No, it can go wrong. But try to make something better than it. It’s really, really hard. So there’s a difference between being a perfect system and being an optimal system. Okay, you face another problem. What should you pay attention to? That’s not what you do. You’re not doing that. At least I hope not. What’s actually happening is you’ve got opponent processing going on. You’ve got a default mode network and a task focus network. The task focus network is trying to keep you on task and exclude as much as it can from the task. Notice what’s going on here. See? Yeah. See why I want to talk about this at length. Okay, pushing away, right? And then the default mode network is making you prone to mind wandering. So if I was, suppose this was not a riveting interesting talk. Suppose it was really boring. Suppose I was talking about, well, you know, for quite some time I have been collecting porcelain cows. And then what will happen is you will drift away. You will drift away. And when you’re in meditation, you can feel these two all the time and you’re actually playing with them. Now, if you just drifted away, it would be very problematic to you. So why don’t I just stay, why can’t I just stay task focused? The problem when you stay task focused is you may not be noticing what you need to notice. There’s not enough variation. So the mind wandering takes you away. It introduces new things you might think about. And then you kill off most of them, bring them back, and then just keeps doing that. And that’s how you evolve your attention. There’s no boss. It’s constantly doing that. You face another problem. There’s two sets of problems, two kinds of problems in the world. There are problems that are very familiar to you, very well defined, like 24 times 3. You know what kind of problem it is. It’s a multiplication problem. So you know what operations you can perform. You know what the goal state looks like. When you’re done doing multiplication, you should have a number. You shouldn’t have a picture of a squirrel. You know what operations you’re allowed to perform. You know that singing is irrelevant. But there are ill-defined problems. These are problems in which your initial state, your goal state, and your operations are unclear to you. I mentioned that in my talk. Giving a good talk is an ill-defined problem. Participating in a conversation is an ill-defined problem. So what should you do? What you should do is maybe divide the brain into two systems. One that works to direct attention for well-defined problems. So it looks for detail step by step. Because if he and I are both doing a multiplication problem, the one that does it more step by step with individual care is going to do better. You’ve got a part of the brain that’s going to be dedicated step by step, individual, look for certainty, pursue clarity. That’s really good for well-defined problems. We’re doing multiplication. Now an eagle swoops in towards our head. I don’t want to be doing that. Well, is it an eagle? What kind of eagle is it? So now, when you have problems that require a gestalt, that you deal with all of the problem, sort of all at once, processing everything in parallel, and that part is designed to deal with ambiguity and urgency. And that’s the right hemisphere. This is Ian Magocres that some of you know. I have a talk with him coming out soon. And what’s the relationship between the left and the right hemisphere? The right hemisphere is the one that’s going to be doing the important processing through the corpus callosum. They’re constantly pulling and pushing on each other. And another problem. How do I take all of that attention and how it comes out in consciousness? Should I be doing all of my processing in consciousness? Imagine that. Imagine that. I need to get up. Consciously attend to all the muscles in my right leg. Consciously contract them. See what I mean? You’ll choke. This is the proceduralization, the automatization versus consciousness. But you don’t want everything to be unconscious. So what do you have? You have a point of processing between long-term memory that’s largely unconscious and working memory that’s a higher-order relevance, and they’re constantly trading back and forth. So your memory, because of that trade-off, because of that important processing, is not very accurate. Forty-nine percent of confident eyewitness testimony is false. That’s why we should never convict people just on eyewitness testimony. There’s a woman watching a TV show. A man broke in and assaulted her. She went to the police shortly thereafter and confidently identified the man. It was a person she was watching on TV, and it was a live broadcast. Couldn’t have possibly been him. This was conscious. She wasn’t aware of this. And they get fused together. Most of your memory is like that, and yes, it’s true, your mother didn’t really love you. Okay, I can do more and more and more and more and more about this. Artificial intelligence. Key breakthrough. 1996. Jeff hinted. It’s at the core of all of the renaissance that’s happening right now. Trying to get a neural network to learn. What do you do? You get it to compress the data. What’s that? You try to find what’s invariant, the same in all of the data. See what my hands are doing? And then on the basis of that, you internally generate variations. He says the network is fantasizing. And then that interacts with the world, and then you recompress and do this again. The variation, compression. Piaget, how does a kid learn? A kid is constantly trading between two things. Assimilation, in which it’s trying to make everything fit into its cognition, and accommodation, in which it’s introducing variation in order to fit that cognition to the world. Do you see what’s happening here again and again and again and again? Machine learning, developmental psychology, aspects of your biology. This is the primary way, I’m arguing, in which your cognition is making the most fundamental sense of the world by this process. You see how it resonates with everything you’re saying? My big question for you is that one of the things that I’m suggesting in the talk, and that I’m proposing just in general in terms of symbolic structure, is that that aspect, let’s say the right hand and the left hand are concentric and eccentric, that that is not, it actually exists at all levels of things that I recognize as having being my attention, but then also if I participate in anything that is transpersonal, it will be true as well. That is that the basketball team has the same shape as this attention process that I have internally. Okay, so let me speak to that please. So again, how does evolution, biological evolution work? Variation, selection, variation, selection within a self-organizing cycle. It’s the same thing, right? And that’s part of what’s called the deep continuity hypothesis. Notice, by the way, that all of Jonathan’s images were embodied left and right handedness. Have you ever wondered why we have handedness? It’s an opponent processing, it’s a solution to opponent processing. Other primates don’t, we do. At least that’s one good theory of it. What if this is the deep grammar that we keep converging on, on how we make sense of things, how we latch on to the intelligibility of the world? And what if it’s a grammar that’s exactly like evolutionary adaptivity? It’s about fitting to, conforming to use older language to the intelligibility of the world. Now here’s a proposal. If that is such a fundamental grammar and we keep seeing it, remember you had defractal, fractal levels, all levels, and I can give you tons more examples and tons more argument, please read some of my published papers. Why is this, does this keep coming? By the way, this is what’s being developed in predictive processing models too. Most of, yeah, I’m pretty confident to say this, most of the advances that are going on in AGI right now are just taking this idea and getting it better implemented. So the point I’m going to make is, so the point I’m going to make, and I’ll be quiet, if this is the fundament of intellect, and I don’t mean in our modern sense of an intellect like the snooty person who’s read too much SART. I mean in the ancient sense, that ability for us to grok onto patterns in the world, sorry, many of you wouldn’t know that reference, that’s a rub, Robert Heinlein, but to adaptively fit to the world, and if we reject the Cartesian proposal that that’s imposed on an otherwise indeterminate world, but instead adopt a realist position, then you have to conclude that there must be something fundamentally corresponding to that grammar in the grammar of things. There has to be a grammar to grammar conformity, or else we are actually severed in terms of the fundamental grammar of the intelligibility of the world and our intelligence, and then we are trapped in a kind of profound skepticism and solipsism. So if you reject skepticism and solipsism, then I think you’re led to this, and that’s how I would say the inner grammar and the outer grammar are deeply interpenetrating and reflective of each other. That’s how I wanted to address your second point. Does that make sense? No, I mean, of course I totally agree, that’s for sure. But it’s freaky that it’s in those pictures. Okay. I’m happy that… So now, if we come down to… If we come down to a specific thing, so if you think of breathing, that seems to be what’s going on, at least phenomenologically, I think that’s probably why breathing has always been such an important aspect of spiritual practice, because it is a stabilization, and that’s a conscious participation in the gathering and letting go. It’s an active symbol. And if you look at, for example, in the orthodox tradition, we have a main prayer for mystical practice, which is called Jesus Prayer. And so the Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, sinner. And usually we say, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, inspire, breathe in, have mercy on me, a sinner, expire. So that structure is there in the prayer and is there in the breathing, those two things together. And so it becomes this… It becomes like the simplest way, you could say, of participating in this pattern, the basic pattern. But then that’s why, especially in the orthodox church, you could say something like, the entire liturgy is contained in that prayer. But then it gets expanded socially and say in terms of all our other gestures into everything else that we do, and all the processions and all this entering and exiting of the priest from the holy place, and all of these movements are all these, let’s say, complex representation, complex participations in the basic invocation. So if you don’t like the fact of the prayer, think of the prayer, at least the concept of the prayer, which is this idea of the two aspects of prayer, this call up and invoking, and then this, let’s say, letting go or realizing that I’m not that, right? It’s like bringing in and letting go, it’s the basic movement of prayer, and then that becomes, moves all the way into all the other aspects of the liturgy, and then in the art and all that. So it’s like this fractal practice that is completely coherent together from the deepest mystical prayer into the final, the highest, let’s say the most complex aspect of a monastic life, which has these daily hourly prayers that are super complicated, but that they all know that this is just an explicitation of this one basic pattern. So I want to say two things to that. First, there’s something very similar in the prajna practice. So as I exhale, I let my attention move more and more, so I’m attending more and more to attention until I get into that, where I’m as in as I can possibly be. When you exhale? Yeah, when I exhale, because of the attention, right? And then as I inhale, because you’re following the movement of the stomach. You see the stomach’s coming in when you exhale, so you’re following that, right? And then when you inhale, you go out to the farthest you could go in a contemplative practice. And then you are moving between them like this with the breath. You’re scaling up and scaling down of attention. And then what happens is it goes from being sequential to stereoscopic, and you… And that is supposed to give you a state of mind prajna, in which you see the whole in each part and the part, right, as it fits into the whole. But you don’t see them sequentially like that. It’s like what you do in reading, where you’re reading the letters to read the word, and you’re reading the word to read the letters. And so you get the prajnak awareness of the world. So there’s a similarity there, again, with the movement of attention. It’s interesting, though, because… It’s the opposite. Because you’re following the course of the breath, and in the prajna you’re following the abdomen’s movement. Yeah, isn’t that… But the intent is exactly the same. It’s to get the two movements coordinated until you get a stereoscopic integration of the two. So you get the fractal emergence, like you see all the parts in the whole. The skin’s the intuitiva, the whole in all the parts, the part… And how each part contains the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, right? No, that’s… I mean, I think it’s definitely similar, at least to the way it’s expressed in the Filokali or in the mystical fathers. For them it is, let’s say, it’s very personal too, but there is a sense that this is an existential practice, which is why it’s framed as mercy and sinfulness, right? So you inspire and you bring the spirit in. So now it really is this whole image of the spirit. You inspire, you bring the spirit in, and then you recognize your incapacity, because obviously you can’t hold your breath forever. And then in the expiration you realize the breaking, like how fragmented you are. But then the mystical… In the Filokali they say that at some point, I mean, don’t try this at home folks, but that at some point the monks will actually be in tune with their heart, and that the heartbeat will become the rhythm. Same thing. So when you get an extended, like deep prajna practice, your breathing can diminish to almost nothing, and you can feel the heartbeat and other things like that happening. Yeah, very much. So the thing that comes out for me then is this idea that’s, right, of opponent processing, which is the left and the right hand that you were doing. And there’s also the up and the down, right? And then I was thinking about, again, the whole manner of the conference, because we were trying to… Opponent processing sounds sort of nasty, but it’s actually like all these things I’ve been describing in your biology. Imagine if the parasympathetic and the sympathetic system were in adversarial processing, where the sympathetic system was trying to defeat and destroy and demolish the parasympathetic system or vice versa. Then you’re dead. Imagine if the left and right hemisphere, although Iain McGovern said the left hemisphere is now dominating too much, but imagine if it became pure adversarial processing. Have you ever thought that a lack of understanding of these very deep truths is what has led to something like, let’s say, Marxist dialectic, where there is a sense of opposition as the basic structure? And these are, let’s say, the accusations that the Christians had against the Manichaeans, for example, whether or not, some people might say, I’ve said that they’re not totally justified. But the idea that at the origin is opposition… But it’s adversarial. See, I’m trying to make a distinction. No, I’m saying that a misunderstanding of what you’re saying seems to be at the root of this problem that we’re seeing even in terms… So one of the things Jordan Peterson has been suggesting is that in the political sphere, the right and the left should work something like… And opponent processing. Exactly. And I’ve been making that argument independently in Convergent, which is democracy is the idea of opponent process. So the left says, when the left isn’t insane, and I’m also going to say the same about the right, the left says human beings are subject to fate. I don’t mean in a cosmic sense, but they can be overwhelmed by forces beyond their control. And we should… Overwhelmed by circumstance. By the wandering of these things on the outside which will intrude on the plan, let’s say. Right. And then the right, when it’s not insane, says, yes, but we’re not animals, we are called to personal virtue and responsibility. And then if they’re in opponent processing together, we can constantly evolve our fittedness as a society. And when you look at how democracy was understood, it was supposed to be that opponent processing. The whole checks and balance system in the United States depended on a commitment from everybody to opponent processing. That the best way I can correct myself is through you, and the best way you can correct yourself is through me. But if that gets taken over by the spirit of adversarial processing, it turns into gridlock and this mutual self-destructiveness that is now overtaking democracies in many places of the world. Yeah. No, I think this is… I mean, to me, that we get here is a way to help understand how crucial the things that we’re… How crucial these questions are that this… You know, when you talk about… Like if I talk about fractal structures of relationships of right and left towards the center, I have my own language, John will talk about opponent processing in a more scientific way. The consequences of the misunderstanding of that, of how that functions, is you could say, is that the root of a lot of the social problems that we have? So you can understand it in different ways, which is that you can understand a society that is obsessed with its identity, that becomes completely obsessed with that which makes it what it is, and wants to reduce everything to that, and wants to chop off anything that doesn’t fit into that central identity. And that would be a problem. But you can also understand another image of a society that is obsessed with idiosyncrasy, that is obsessed with that which is outside, that is obsessed, actually obsessed with that which is strange to its own identity, and hates its own identity. And then you can understand that that would also be a problem, now wouldn’t it? And so this, the right possibility of these two interacting together, of a love, let’s say, an understanding of the need of identity for anything to exist, you need an identity for anything to exist, but then also to understand, like when I talked about St. Peter and St. Paul, for example, it’s like the problem of identity is pride. If identity holds itself too much like that, then it thinks it’s self-sufficient, it closes itself off, and it becomes prideful. The problem with that is that then it falls, because it will shatter. You can’t hold things together like that forever. And the opposite problem, or the opposite of St. Paul, which is the one arguing for the stranger, remember what St. Paul is arguing for, we don’t need circumcision, we don’t need all the law, we don’t need the law, we don’t need circumcision, we don’t need these things. You know, I’m caricaturing a little bit. But I’m trying to show two tendencies in already the setting up of the church in the first century, but that if we can see that these two structures, these two sides, these two pillars, work with each other, then we can have a, we can, I think we can help heal to the extent that, I don’t know if it’s really possible, but at least create an alternative, an alternative space to the gridlock that we’re facing in the world right now. Sorry for that speech there. It was a good speech. So, I guess, so, you know, deep down you can, I could talk about other things, self-organizing criticality in the brain, I can talk about small world network. The brain is constantly trying to trade between being as efficient as possible and doing all of that, and then being as sort of, as evolvable as possible. This is also called the stability plasticity problem, and you can see the brain, and so we now have this idea emerging of metastability, that is the two constantly interweaving, right? And again, this is what I, right? I made my career out of seeing all these convergences and then getting people to talk to each other about it. And then you did this, and it was like, right? Because it’s the convergence of, like, if I’d gone into these churches, I would have went, pretty pictures. Bet that’s Jesus. Maybe those, right? The one on the cross is probably Jesus. Right? Now, the thing to me is, there’s two things to be considering here. One is, so, the idea that most of our learning is implicit learning, most of our learning is we’re picking up on complex patterns without awareness, and that’s what the basis of our intuition, and when we like it, we call it intuition, and when we don’t like it, we call it prejudice or bias. And so I can see doing this is a way of constantly surrounding people with this, so the implicit learning is picking up on all this, and people are getting a deep, sort of intuitive sense of this. That seems like… No, but I think it’s more. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s… Is it that, though, too? No, it is definitely. It’s definitely that. But I think it is also the… This is… People are going to think this is weird, but it is the most natural space. That is, it is the space in which we are… Say the church in this context would be the space in which we are the most human, because it has condensed this process, which we experience all the time every time we grab a cup. We have these implicit engagement with these processes, whether it’s how our nation functions or whatever, but there’s a manner in which that is religion. There’s a manner in which that gets smashed, just grabbed and brought together, and then just like a… How can I say this? Just like a story. So a story is a bunch of stuff. You know, the story of your love relationship lasts, I don’t know, 10 years, and there’s all these down times in them, and there’s all this stuff that… More than that, please. Or whatever, like, whatever how long it’s lasted, but it’s like there’s this down stuff that has nothing to do with the love relationship, that while you’re also going through this love relationship, you’re also working and then cleaning your room and doing all this stuff, and then what we do is we take the salient points, we grab them, we put them together, we compress them, and then we’re like here. So it’s like… Right? And all of a sudden I’m in the pattern that I recognize to be true, and I’m experiencing as the most real because it compresses the real into a thing. So that’s in terms of story, but now in terms of… Think about it in terms of something like… Think about the Christian church as this. What it’s representing is this image of reality. It’s compressing it together. It’s linking it to the relationship we have with each other, and then it’s making us engage in behavior that is bringing all this together as well. So you’re standing in this space, you’ve got this structure, you’ve got these people that, like in Dante, are manifesting the goods and the virtues to you, and then you are standing, you’re acting together, you’re singing, you’re processing, you’re noticing hierarchy, you’re participating in hierarchy, you’re doing all these things, and so it actually ends up being… It becomes like the root in terms of experience of all those other subtle, less explicit versions of it. So two things to that. First… I could say that about pretty much… I think that that’s true for all religious rituals. Yes. But I think, of course, in terms of the Christian church, I can explain it to you more clearly because I understand the symbols. Right. We’ll come back to that point you just made about ritual, but I just wanted to draw one connection to what’s happened here, because this was also an ecclesia, it was a kind of gathering, and it’s a gathering in good faith. And one of the ways of understanding dialogos is to try to replace adversarial debate with opponent processing between people. So it doesn’t mean that the two sides of the autonomic nervous system don’t homogenize. The differences have to be maintained, but they actually thereby afford each other the most mutual self-correction, and then together, not him, not me, but together, we’re better at getting towards the truth, fitting reality. That’s dialogos as opposed to debate. And when it gets into the flow state, when he’s having insights that are priming my insight, that’s dialogos. So there’s co-emergence. And the brilliance of the designers of this conference is they gave opportunity to present positions, and then they put them into that kind of opponent processing and dialogos. That’s what was happening here. You were participating in it. You were witnessing it, and you also got to participate in it. And this, right, Jonathan just a few minutes ago in his speech, you know, it was almost apocalyptic, we’re on the, we’re in a very bad place, and I want you to see that you are participating in not some airy-fairy utopia. You’re participating in the real alternative to that that can reground democracy. And it’s really cool that it comes with these beautiful, beautiful pictures. And for those of you who know me, beauty is not a sentimental thing for me. It’s a profoundly platonic thing. So I just wanted to say that because I thought that connected what you and I are doing to what is happening here. So the only, the point that I wanted to make or to help people maybe see or understand that the way that I described it from this concentration, you can, you can… But I was going to challenge you on that. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Because I get it, but the point, and this is the relationship with ritual, right? There’s something about the ritual that’s unchanging, but the work that’s being done, I’m doing a lot of work now on ritual knowing. Knowing, thinking through ritual is a great anthology, and how we know through, the kind of knowing we do. It’s not, big surprise, it’s non-propositional. And what it’s doing is trying to constantly, you’re trying to do this compression in the ritual, but rituals evolve, they don’t, even your pictures evolve. Of course. Yes, yes, yes. And I’m thinking of Paul, right, trying to evolve between the now and the always, right? And so what I wanted to get is, yeah, you get the compression, but it’s also varying in each person in the church that is seeing, right? The point that I wanted to make in terms of, because I’m trying to help people understand why this would exist, because it’s not just like we’re going there and there’s pretty pictures. That wasn’t meant to be. I don’t know, but it’s like we’re, the people that, you could see how that experience of coming together and having that experience together in this, in a context like that, with all of these elements, would be seen as the source of my experience. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, it’s the, or the culmination, culmination and source of, and the anchoring of the more mundane aspects of my life. Okay, can I give you an analogy from the Platonic tradition? I know you’re not hostile to it. No, not at all. Right? So, and this is from D.C. Schindler’s book, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason, which is, so Plato, many of you are familiar with the parable, it should be called a parable, not an allegory, the parable of the cave, with the people trapped in the cave, and they’re only, right, the shadows and the echoes. By the way, why are they less real? Because they’re not multi-aspectual. They’re not multi-aspectual. They don’t, they can’t open up with inexhaustible intelligibility. So the shadows and the echoes are less real. Remember, the people come out of the cave and they see the sun, and the sun’s supposed to be the metaphor for the good. But the thing about the sun is you don’t just see it. If you’re in a Cartesian frame, you think the point is to see the sun. The point is to realize that you are made by the sun. That’s just what, right? Yeah, the sun makes other things visible. But no, it doesn’t make other things visible. It’s made the energy that is literally running your body, right? All of it. The sun is making you and making visible. And so you are not looking at the sun. You are participating in it. The very processes that are organizing your life are, right, are participating in that. So that’s exactly the idea that, no, I’m not looking at it. Because you often use that word. I’m participating in it. It’s not only coming down to me, it’s also emerging up through me. Yeah, yeah. And what’s interesting is that in the, right, those who know the traditional liturgy, whatever, in the liturgy you see those two movements happening at the same time. And so we have these moments where we lift up our hearts, right? We lift them up unto the Lord. This idea that we who represent, their image is like we who represent the cherubim. We’re gathering all these things into us and moving up or offering it up. And that’s why the priests, right, offer up the host. These movements that we do where we offer up and then there’s an influence from above which comes down upon it. So the staging of that is there, I think, to represent those two together. Where we come together, we offer up, and then it comes back down on us. The two movements that you talk about. Right, and then that goes to, that notion of participation goes to the argument I was trying to make about our cognition is not just representing the intelligibility of the world, it’s participating in the same fundamental principles. Yeah. Okay, so now if that’s the case, I want to make a proposal to you. Yeah. Which is, right, and this is sort of making use of Jennings and Shilbrack and Boyd and a lot of people writing about ritual right now. Ritual is actually going through a nascence. One of the arguments that’s coming out is rituals are, and so just give me a moment because it’ll, rituals are in a sense useless behavior. You’re not doing anything, right? You’re not like making a house. You’re not transporting groceries. You’re not reproducing. You’re not even conversing with people and building social, you’re just doing this thing, right? And then, but in another sense, they’re universal. And the proposal that’s coming out of this is the idea that what we’re doing in ritual is we are finding, like what you’re saying, we’re finding these condensations of all of this that have the greatest capacity to transfer to as many domains of our life as possible. That’s right, yeah. Right? Right? Yeah, I think that’s exactly the right way to see it. Okay, so I have a metaphor for that. Sorry, I’m just going to stand up for a sec. So I’m going to go, I’ll be off mic, right? Just general advice, if you’re in a bar and people are doing this, the guerrilla thing, you’re pretty safe. They don’t know what to help you do. For a fight? Yeah, for a fight. Okay, he’s going to fight, John’s going to fight. People like this, they take the root, they’re in a lot of trouble. And I talk about rooting in meditation. But you don’t ever fight with this. This is called your stance. And different arts have different stances. Obi-Wan does this really weird thing, I don’t know what it’s called. Okay. So why that? You’ll see the metaphor in a second. That is a condensate. Here’s a bunch of things, here’s a bunch of positions I need to get into. That actually do something. They fit me to that or that. What I want is I want to condense them. Each one of those is an optimal grip on that situation, that situation, that situation. Yes? What I want to do is condense them to the perfect nexus point that gives me the easiest place from which I can get to any of the places I need to get to. Does that make sense? Yeah. That’s your meta-optimal grip. Do you see that? Yeah. Rituals are condensing to give a meta-optimal grip that gives you the greatest chance of transfer. That’s the proposal. Yeah. No, I think that that’s exactly the right way to understand it. And it’s also, so you can see it, how can I say this? So you can see it represented in the way that people talk about it in the Christian liturgy. It would be something like, say the communion meal, right? It’s a condensation of what it means to eat together. But it’s also a sacrifice at the same time. And it’s this relationship between heaven and earth. In the image, all the image of the Eucharist is like insane condensation. Exactly. There’s the normal aspect of eating a meal. There’s the transgressive aspect of eating flesh and blood. There’s the normal aspect of eating bread and wine. There’s the fact that it’s a table. It’s a sacrifice. It’s all these things. And it’s like, it’s just so crazy that you would condense all these categories into this space, like in the middle. But it’s like, yeah, but that’s it. Yes. That’s the source of reality. That’s how you notice the convergent point of all these things. And that is what, when we look at the story of Christ, so one of the things, I’m not going to do it here, but one of the things that I’ve done is I’m trying to show you how, if you actually look at the story of Jesus, it’s a crazy, it’s an insane story. And because even if you know traditional storytelling, it’s like Jesus can’t, you don’t have stories where someone is like a warrior and a king and a shepherd and a worker and a monk. And he’s like, all these categories jammed into this one story. Like, this doesn’t make sense. This character doesn’t make sense. But that’s the point. The point is to grab all these story structures, all these stories of descent and ascent and all these different, these aspects of the gods. It’s interesting because a lot of the people that have tried to criticize Christianity will say, well, Jesus is just a copy on all these old gods. And it’s like, yeah, I mean, all of them? Like, every single one of them? He’s all these weird things that would never for a pagan be brought together. And it’s like, well, he’s Apollo and he’s Dionysus at the same time. He’s all these things gathered into the one. And so it’s like, that’s it. So it’s like, you look at the image of that person on the throne and it’s like, it’s that, right? That condensation, right? And it’s like, and then that person, that’s a condensation of all these things. He is the source, but he also ends up being the judge, right? Because he’s the standard by which all the multiple aspects get, get, let’s say compared to or the through line. There you go. The through line is found in the multi-aspect. Yeah. And notice. So Freud noted that a long time ago that religious symbols and dream symbols have a tremendous amount of condensation. But he saw it as an evidence of a primitive form of thought. But if you pay attention to what a massive, powerful neural network is doing in deep learning, it’s doing tremendous compression from which it can then create new variation that then gets recompressed. It’s just doing it. So many people are now saying, no, no, no, maybe the compression or the condensation is actually, especially in ritual studies, is people are taking a lot of, they’re using propositions and pictures. I’m not denying that. But people in rituals are taking a lot of non propositional complex patterns and then doing this compression, the meta optimal grip so that that can then vary out back into their lives in ways that is helpful and insightful. Does that land for you? No, that lands. I think that’s exactly what it is. And I think that at least for a secular world and a secular audience, I think it’s a way for people to at least re-understand why these things exist. Good, good, good, good. OK. OK. So here’s, so, you know, and we’re introducing ritual. I consider Tai Chi Chuan a ritual in this deep sense. And of course, there’s also, I was static there, but you’re also moving, you’re evolving one, one, I’m trying to do Tai Chi while I’m sitting in a chair. Right. But there’s also the evolving that I’m talking about. And it gets you to, so you’re trying to find the through line. So you have all these different moves you might do, but what’s the through line between them? Right. And that’s what the form is. There’s all these aspects of fighting, but I’m finding the through line through all of them. Right. And all of that’s going on. So you met an optimal grip, but it’s a flowing meta-optimal grip. What’s the difference between that in our everyday lives and the sacred? Do you see that? Because we’re saying this is how I walk around the room. But it’s also in the ritual, I could, in a very realistic sense, I could be using everything we’re talking about to fight you, like martial arts. I don’t want to, I love you. Right, right, right. I’m sure you’d take me, John. But what’s the different, right, do you see what I’m trying to get? No, no, I see what you’re trying to get. And so I would see it as, so I would see it as a hierarchy, like a fractal hierarchy, that’s the way that I see it. Yeah. So let’s think of, let’s take another ritual which is closer to the… But Jonathan, I’ve heard you say the sacred reaches from the very top to the very bottom. That’s right. So you can’t locate the sacred just at the top. No, no, definitely not. Okay. But what I mean, so let’s take an example, because I talked about the Eucharist before. So think about a family meal, right? So a family meal is ritualized and it does exactly what you’re saying. Right. Because what it does is it creates a common space and a compressed moment in which you are compressing the relationships that exist more in flux and subtle of a family into a ritualized moment. And so we’re sitting around the table, you know, we set the table, we learn how to talk to each other. You don’t want one person to talk too much. You don’t want one person to take too much food. You want to share. You want to attend to what the other is doing. And so you’re actually ritualizing the behavior of your entire family into one moment, like one activity. Okay. So there could be other versions of that, but that’s definitely one version. That’s a great, that’s a great. And so let’s say that meal will also have a higher version of it, which will be something like a wedding feast, let’s say. Yes. So now you have a wedding feast in which we all come together to eat a meal together in the celebration of an important event in our larger group. So there’ll be all these rules and rituals about how to function in that and to properly function and to not take up too much attention, to focus your attention on the bride and groom, blah, blah, blah, etc. Excellent. So then you keep going. But then if you raise that up to the last highest rung, you will come to the altar table. And then the altar table will become the meal of meals and will become the meal of the entire cosmos in the imagery, the cosmic meal, which brings all these different rituals together, anchors them, but then contains them all together. So to me, there’s like a there’s a scaling question. And so I don’t know if Tai Chi can do that. But what I mean is that so you can understand that there the sacred exists in the family in the and will pray, obviously, you’ll pray before the meal. You do all these things. So it exists at the level of the family and then it scales up at different levels. And then there’s a there’s in church, especially in the traditional church, we’re saying like this is the ecumenical like the church is the kingdom. It’s the whole thing. It’s the final moment. It’s the eschaton. We’re at the end of times. All of this is a gathering in into the final moment of everything. That’s what it’s represent. That’s what if you don’t believe that it’s actually happening, it’s at least presented that way. OK. And so it becomes the anchor for all these other things. So I’m sure there are versions of that, like, let’s say, in other. Yeah, there are. Yeah. But we can we don’t even maybe we’ll tackle the pluralism. I’m not I wasn’t bringing that up for that. No, I’m trying to see. I’m trying to get to the scaling part of the sacred like how it. But so but you brought in something really, really interesting. Let me see if I’m getting it right. So we’ve been doing a lot of horizontal condensation and opening right transfer appropriate processing is right. The the the cogs I term right. And that but you now just said, you know, but there’s also transfer appropriate up and down. Yeah. Is that is that. Oh, yeah. And so is the tutoring. Oh, sorry. That’s the wrong word. Is the education in the sense of the do sing going also up and down? Namely, does what happens in the family meal? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I don’t. Yeah, exactly. So the it goes it goes from bottom up to if you have. Yeah, you won’t. If you have improper families and improper family meals, then that wedding will go bad. It will go bad. And then people will hate each other in church. Like, it’s going to build. It’s going to go up. It’s going to go up that way, too. Like, it doesn’t just come down. That’s for 100 percent. Sure. Yeah. So so so so now we’re trying to find. So a really. Powerful. I don’t that’s not quite the right adjective, but use it as a placeholder. A really good, powerful ritual is one that would be the nexus both of horizontal transfer and vertical transfer. Is that is that right? Does that does that make sense? So, yeah. So would part of what it is to be a wise person is to be able to either find, create or participate in that kind of nexus ritual? Because if this is the machinery of intelligence and the machinery of intelligibility and we need it to do optimal this way and this way, one way to distinguish a wise person from a less wise person is that they could find the nexus point and share it with others. Is that is that a reasonable proposal? I think so. I don’t know. I’m not saying that’s the only characteristic. No, no, no, no, no. I would say that in terms of wisdom, which is a which is a let’s say I don’t know moral virtue. It would I don’t regard wisdom as a moral virtue. So we might be using the term slightly differently. Go ahead. So I would say I would tend to see what you’re saying in terms of of of the goods in terms of human interaction. That’s the way that I would see it mostly. It’s like a person will become a nexus for a virtue and then will will become like a rippling pond for the world like like an anchor and will ripple. But I’m not sure like you have to find yourself to that point. You have to find your way to that. Right. I mean, if you’ll allow me to compliment Lee, you’re displaying a kind of wisdom in pointing this out. You can find your way through a lot of this. You don’t just know it. You grasp the significance of it and you have insight into it. So you can write. The reason why I’m hesitating is that my experience is that most people who make up rituals, they don’t succeed. Like the ritual have to be anchored somehow in something which is given. No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s my. But I think I think you’re agreeing with me. You’re not. Let me let me know. But this is how I think you’re agreeing with me. Most attempts at ritual fail. Yes. Yes. Yes. Which means there’s a normativity in them. Yes. And I’m proposing that the normativity is this sort of meta optimal grip on these two dimensions that enhances transfer. Is that is that OK? Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. I agree. Right. And so an individual who was better at getting the meta optimal grip horizontally and vertically and coordinating them together would be. Would be somebody that presumably can help other people get to the place that sort of optimizes what we’ve everything we’ve been talking about. Is that OK? Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine. OK. So you are still agreeing with me. OK. OK. And so what I’m then saying is the wisdom to see to have insight to zero in on what’s most relevant to find the meta optimal grip. These are I think these are all consonant with each other. I’m saying the wise person succeeds precisely because they are guided by the normativity that distinguishes a good ritual from a bad ritual and they have learned to track it well. That’s what I’m proposing. OK. Yeah. I mean maybe. I’m not sure what the corollaries of that are. Like I don’t know what that means. What would it look like? Let’s say what would it look like? It would look like the person who could move between who could do this at the family dinner, help coordinate the condensation and then how it also reparticularizes so the family flows well. And then and then when the kid gets married, knows how to educate his kids so that they go into the ceremony, the wedding ceremony. Right. And then also can participate perhaps at your altar table in a way that other people find. Wow. That was and they can move between them and and you get and they are conducive to other people being able to participate in depth. That’s what I’m proposing to you. No, I agree. I think that would definitely be that would be an aspect, let’s say of a wise person. Yeah, I’m not claiming that’s the essence of wisdom. I said that before. I think there’s a lot more to wisdom. But I’m what I’m what I’m I’m having a realization about a dimension. Let me call it a ritualistic in the good sense of the word dimension to wisdom that I hadn’t thought of before. Yeah, I think that’s a good. It’s a good might actually be a good place to stop as well, because I’m looking at. Everybody just quiet. As if as if this discussion is over, it’s not this discussion is never over. We have to stop the discussion, but there’s no way this discussion is over. The only good thing that sort ever said was you never complete anything good. You abandon it. Thanks, everybody. Thank you so very much. Thank you, everyone, for coming. If you could give our speakers another round of applause.