https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ipUj3TP4Eq8
I take it when we’re talking about meaning in this context, we’re using meaning as a metaphor. We’re talking about something similar to the way a sentence works. It has an intelligibility to it that connects us to the world in some important way so that we can interact with the world and so we can be informed by the world. And then what we’re talking about when we’re talking about meaning when in the sense of meaning in life, not just the meaning of a sentence. The question to ask is what is that metaphor pointing to. So I’ve put forth the proposal that what that metaphor is pointing to do is something that’s fundamental to our cognitive agency. And Jordan, this is something you and I have talked about before in other contexts, which is the problem of relevance realization, which is this deep profound problem at the heart of cognitive science you find at the heart of AI, many issues within cognitive psychology, categorization, communication. And this is of all of the information available to me. How do I zero in on the relevant information of all of the information available in my long term memory and all the potential ways I could combine them. How do I, how do I connect and zero in on the relevant information out of all the possible courses of actions I can undertake the way I could sequence various things together. How do I select the appropriate sequence of actions. How do I do that. And that’s the thing that’s that’s mysterious and wonderful and perplexing and intriguing and I’m obsessed about is we’re doing it all right now and we’re doing it like this. And it’s not a cold calculation. You know, I’m standing out I’m salient. There’s an element of arousal there’s affect you’re caring about some information and you’re backgrounding and ignoring other information. So it’s this very affectively laden connectedness, because the idea of relevance realization is it’s not relevance isn’t in the head. It isn’t in the world. It’s in a proper real relation between the embodied brain and the world. This is what’s known as embodied cognition. This is the kind of cognitive science. I am involved in. So the idea is, this is a dynamical self organizing process and you can feel it a little bit at work right now, as I’m talking, part of your attention wants to drift away and think about other things. Right. This is like variation and evolution. Another part of your attention is focusing in and selecting and you’re constantly varying and selecting and you’re evolving in this dynamically coupled fashion, a salient landscape that makes you feel that you’re here now in this particular state of consciousness in this situational awareness. So you’re deeply fundamentally connected and that is deeply central to your cognitive agency. If you don’t have that, you’re not a cognitive agent and this is of course one of the things that has the whole project of artificial intelligence has disclosed. We thought that intelligence was mostly about propositional manipulation, right, getting, you know, sort of coherence and instead know this dynamical embodied evolving connectedness is very central to our cognitive agency so much so that it stands to good reason that it is a core motivational feature and dimension of our whole agency. So I talk about meaning in life and I use the word and I use it deliberately, but I hope it’s not offensively. I use the word religio to describe this connection because that’s one of the, that’s the meaning of religio to bind together. It’s one of the purported etymological origins of the word religion, and that allows me to now segue into what I would want to say religious meaning is so I think when we are. Here’s a metaphor. And I often use this, a lot of our, a lot of the time our mental framing is transparent to us like my glasses, we’re looking through it and by means of it. But there are times when I need to step back and consider this is what you do in mindfulness practices I need to consider that mental framing, and I might want to not only consider it, I might want to educate it I want, I might want to celebrate it. Normally, religio is transparent to us and, and therefore we are it affords our agency. But there are things we do where we step back. And we try to become more directly aware of religio in order to educate it, perhaps correct it, improve it, celebrate it. And when we’re doing that in a way that creates. I call it a reciprocal opening the opposite of what happens in addiction reciprocal opening is my agency is opening up the world is opening up, and I’m experiencing this inexhaustible fount of emerging intelligibility that’s not just conceptual but is this about this religio. For me that’s the experience of sacredness. And so when we when religio, when we, when we focus upon religio rather than focus through it in order to accentuate it and accelerate it so that we can come into the deepest mutual resonance between ourselves and the depths of reality. That for me is what religious meaning would be the religio about the sacred. So that would be my initial answer. I hope that was helpful. Okay, so, so I’m going to comment on that, and I’ll make my comments about this question, because I’m also a psychologist and then we’ll move to, we’ll move to, to you, to you guys to Jonathan and to Bishop Aaron. So, if you think you’re, when you look at the world. There’s a central point of focus. And that’s mediated by your fovea, and that’s at the back of your. That’s on your retina in the center, essentially. And you’ll notice that when you zoom your eyes on something, that becomes very clear. It’s a very small area that becomes very clear. And then you’ll notice that around that area, it’s less and less and less clear until it fades out into nothingness and the nothingness you don’t even perceive. It’s just not there. And so it’s high resolution in the center, lower, lower, lower, lower, way out here in the periphery. You actually don’t even see color. You can’t tell that, but you don’t. And you’re better at detecting motion because maybe you should look at moving things and then the world vanishes. So, and that’s sort of what that’s very much like what consciousness is. And you’re and also it’s associated with meaning because you focus your fovea on what’s most meaningful. And those foveal cells are tremendously connected into the visual cortex. It takes a lot of brain to make those fovea work. And that’s why it’s such a small area. And we move it around instead of just having a retina that’s all fovea. We’d have to have a brain like this big to manage that. So, okay, so that’s sort of like a metaphor for consciousness and meaning. And then I want to layer something on top of that metaphor. So, and this is something like the relationship between the conscious and unconscious and also the relationship between narratives and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness. So I’m looking at, say, John right now. I’m looking at his eyes because that’s what you do when you converse with someone. And I’m doing that because we’re having a conversation. And so I have this little frame of reference that helps me realize what’s relevant right now. My goal is to have an interesting conversation. And I’m picking out the targets that I presume are relevant to that goal. And then, but then you might ask yourself, well, why that goal? And then so that net that story that’s guiding me is nested in a larger story, which is, well, maybe I’m an educator and a communicator. And I’d like to bring this knowledge to myself, but also to other people. And then outside of that is another story, which is, well, why am I doing that? And well, it’s because I think that it’s an interesting thing to do and it’s a meaningful and useful thing to do. But it’ll help educate people. And maybe that’ll make the world a slightly better place in some manner. And then outside of that, there’s another presumption, which is, well, why would I bother trying to make the world a better place? And maybe that’s because, well, because not suffering is better than suffering and because I think that that’s a moral way to act. And I would like to act in a moral manner. And then outside of that, there’s yet another story, which is well, and that’s where you start to shade into the religious. It’s like, who exactly am I imitating when I enact that morality? And I think that’s where we can have a particularly interesting discussion, because I would say psychologically that implicit figure at the outer edge of the narrative structuring of my consciousness and meaning realization. That would be something that’s psychologically equivalent to the hero of heroes. In some sense, that would be culture free. But in our culture, in the Judeo-Christian culture, that figure is Christ. And so then there’s a then there’s this is independent of religious belief as far as I’m concerned. Now, there’s an interesting relationship with formal religious belief, but I think this is the way it works psychologically. And I got some of this from studying neuroscience, the same sorts of things John is studying, but some of it from studying Jung. And, you know, Jung proposed that at the very least, speaking psychologically, Christ is the symbol of the self. And what he meant by that is that Christ is the symbolic realization of our culture’s determination of the embodiment of the ideal. And it’s an image and it grips us. It’s the thing we imitate or we fight against. We’re in that whether we like it or not. And then the question becomes for me, OK, that’s a psychological truth. But it can also be a metaphysical claim and an ontological claim. And that and that’s where this starts to shade into the religious per se. So that’s it for me. So, Bishop, do you want to take it from there? Yeah, thank you. First of all, everybody, thank you. And Jonathan and John, to meet you for the first time, at least virtually, I’ve met Jordan twice now virtually. But good to be with all of you. You’re all Canadians, right? All of you are Canadian born. Because all I can think of as you’re both were talking about Lonergan. I’ll get maybe back to him. But one of my favorite philosophers, the Canadian Jesuit Lonergan, came to my mind a lot. But to answer the opening question, I guess I would say meaning is to be in a purposeive relationship to a value. So I think certain values appear, epistemic values of the true, moral values and aesthetic values. So the true, the good and the beautiful, right? The three transcendental properties of being. And I think those values appear. And I really like what you were saying, too, both of you about attention. What gets our attention? What draws our consciousness? Why, like, you know, William James says, the mind is like a bird that flies and it perches for a time, it looks and then it flies again. Why does it focus on certain things? And we call those values, I would say. And a meaningful life is one that’s lived in a purpose of relationship to values. It’s seeking them in a very concentrated way. Now, what’s religious value is a life lived in purpose of relationship to the supreme value, the sumum bonum, to the source of goodness, truth and beauty, which is God. And you know what came to my mind as you were talking, Jordan, was two things from Aquinas. One is probably the most misunderstood and overlooked of his famous five arguments is the fourth argument. And it’s the most platonic of the five. He’s usually Aristotelian in form, Aquinas. But number four is platonic. And what he says is we experience things in the world as more or less true, good and beautiful. So just what I was saying, we notice values and we also notice them ordered hierarchically. That’s truer, that’s better, that’s more beautiful. Then Thomas says we only can make that calculation in implicit relationship to something we consider highest in goodness, truth and beauty. And the way it’s misunderstood is people think, oh, I guess there’s a tall building, there’s a taller building, and boy, there’s the tallest building. There must be some absolutely tall building. But he’s not talking about something as trivial as that. He’s talking about the properties of being, the good, the true and the beautiful. And being is by its very nature unlimited. So therefore it’s true that we make those calculations, we see those hierarchies only finally in relationship to an unconditioned, if I can use the more modern kind of Kantian language, some unconditioned form of goodness, truth and beauty. That’s religious meaning, it seems to me, is to be in purposive relationship to that. The other thing from Aquinas, and I think Jordan, you and I talked about it last time we were together. I love what you did there because that’s an implicit argument for God. It’s in the second part of the Summa. From final causality, every time I make an act of the will, I’m seeking a good, I’m seeking a value of some kind. But as you say quite correctly, and that’s just like Aquinas, that value nests in a higher value, which nests into still higher value. And so I can’t go on indefinitely. That would make my act of the will incoherent. So I’ve got to come finally to some summum bonum, some supreme value that’s motivating me. That’s religious meaning, it seems to me, is now to be in relationship to this most alluring horizon of all desire. Now there’s Lonergan again, my Canadian reference. To be in relation to God, Lonergan said, is to want to know everything about everything. So that’s the value, the epistemic value of the truth, but now in its unconditioned form. I want to know everything about everything. We call that in religious language the beatific vision. Or I want not just this particular good. So I’m talking to the three of you now, which I think is a good. But it’s nesting, as you say, in a higher good, and a still higher good. And so finally I want not just this particular good, I want goodness itself. That’s a religious relationship. So I guess that’s how I’d approach it, maybe piggybacking a bit on what you both said. The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. 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But I think that what’s interesting in what John said in terms of relevance realization and in terms of this hierarchy of values that both Jordan and Bishop Baron brought up, the thing that I might add, at least in my perception, is that first of all, this pattern recognition that we engage with and this hierarchy of values and just hierarchies in general, they really are teleological in the way that Bishop Baron said. That is that the reason why we perceive hierarchy is because we’re always judging or perceiving or trying to evaluate whether something is good. But the other thing that this does in terms of, so it binds reality together, right? So you’re looking at something and you want to evaluate the apple and this desire makes you see the pattern of the apple because you have to engage with it. You have to relate to it. You have to eat it. Because you have to eat the apple, that’s why you see it and that’s why you can perceive it and that’s why you’re evaluating it. But this pattern, let’s say, a binding of religio that John mentioned, it stacks up. So until now, we’ve actually talked mostly about individual relationship, this individual relationship with the field of being that presents itself to us, the individual relationship with the ultimate good. But it also does something else, is that it stacks up people together. It binds us together as well. And that’s in terms of meaning of religio in a broader sense, that can also kind of help you understand religious practice. Why we get together, why we sing together, why we celebrate, as John mentioned, why do we celebrate together? Because when you see the apple and you see a good apple, you’re implicitly celebrating it. Every act of recognition of a good is going to be a mini celebration. But that stacks up together in terms of people gathering and singing and processing and doing all the things we do in order to celebrate the highest good. Let me just intersperse something there from a psychological perspective. Well, that idea of the mini celebration. So there’s a technical reason for that in some sense. So let’s say you specify a goal and that goal is nested inside the value hierarchy that we’ve already described. And so now you’re pursuing something of value. If you see something that leads you down the pathway to that value, that produces positive emotion, technically speaking, that’s dopaminergically mediated. And so there’s psychological, there’s a fundamental neuroscientific reality underneath the idea that to perceive something good in relationship to a higher good is a celebration. And that is it is definitely that that imbues our life with a sense of positive meaning. And I mean that directly like meaning is derived from this nested hierarchy and then the perception of valued. What would you? The perceptions of values that lead us down that pathway. Without that, there is no positive emotion in my understanding of it. And so the last thing I might want to say is that so in the same way that the world reveals itself to us as this hierarchy of the good in the same way that we see that we it also reveals to reveals itself to us cosmically. That’s why I’m saying it stacks up. And that’s why there are these. That’s why there are temples. That’s why there are there’s the law of Moses that was received on the top of the mountain that there is a cosmic revelation of the same pattern that you encounter as an individual, which is inescapable as an individual. And so that is what ends up creating these revelations of, you know, of being into the world and binding us together as a body instead of just these disparate individuals. And as Jordan said, it’s very appropriate to discuss, you know, what are these revelations and what do they look like and and of these revelations, which is the one that binds the most reality together into itself. And I think that that is when the image of Christ as being God man as going all the way down into death as reaching to the highest summit as as you know, we don’t want to go into his story too much. But Jordan, you know that there’s a most of Christ’s story seems to go to the limit of storytelling in all the aspects in which he goes right. So Christ doesn’t just go down into the underworld and resurrect when he comes back up, the underworld is empty and death is defeated. And that’s the end. And so it’s like that for almost every aspect of Christ’s story where he reaches the limit of storytelling. And so in that way, it’s it’s a it’s a it is ends up just being the fact that we recognize it, that we’ve brought it together, that we’ve celebrated it means that it is part of this kind of cosmic. Revelation, and it’s something that we can look at objectively and talk about and discuss, but it’s definitely there in our story as a as Europeans as you know as Westerners and we’ve discounted it completely but I think we’re at a point now with this with this meaning crisis where we can go back and reevaluate it and understand it as this the possibility of these relevant realization pattern stacking up beyond the individual, let’s say.