https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IZ-tHaHfB8A
I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, a Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. In real world messy ill-defined situations where there’s real uncertainty, not risk, we’ve confused those two. Risk is you can assign a probability, right? But real uncertainty, these heuristics actually do really, really well. But they do make you prone to mistake. You take your loved one to the airport and you say all these euphemisms for don’t die, text me when you’re there, safe trip. Because you can easily imagine a plane crashing. And when a plane crashes, it’s not a crash, it’s a disaster. It’s a tragedy. So the availability and the representative heuristics are getting triggered like mad. And then you get back in your car, the North American death machine, without giving it a second thought. And that’s an act of self-deception, right? And it’s a significant, so you’re not properly calibrating your level of affect and arousal to the risks you’re facing. That’s what I mean when I think the very things that… I can’t get rid of the heuristics because then I would face combinatorial explosion if I try and do the probability calculations. But this is the no-free-lunch theorem. Well, that’s the complicating factor of how much of… So you might say, well, how much of suffering is due to the intrinsic nature of finite finitude, natural finitude, how much is due to ignorance and inevitable blindness, and then how much is due to failure to hit the mark? And wisdom is about being able to differentiate those and properly calibrate your efforts to that differentiation. Hello, everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms. I’m here today in person, so that’s nice, with Dr. John Vervecky. He’s a professor at the University of Toronto, like I am or was, depending on how you look at it. Our work has run in parallel for a long time, probably 20 years, maybe longer than that. And we had a lot of students at the University of Toronto in common. And we’ve had a lot of discussions on YouTube. John and I are both interested in this issue of the issue of relevance realization, which is a very abstract way of pointing to something extremely fundamental, which is the fact that certain things announce themselves to your perception as primary. Things attract your attention and attract your focus. And that’s a great mystery. It’s an immense mystery. It might be the immense mystery in some real sense. And so John has made a tremendous amount of progress on that front, using sources different than the ones that I’ve relied on. And so that’s made our conversations, for me, extremely interesting, because we’re trying to address the same problem, which is really the problem of meaning, whatever meaning is, but he draws on literatures that are distinct from those that I’ve drawn on. And so our conversations are reproductive because of that. I’m gonna provide a brief bio of John and his work, and then we’re gonna jump right into the topics at hand, because there’s lots to talk about on this front. So John Vervecky is an associate professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. His work, as I alluded to, constructs a bridge between science and spirituality, which we’ll talk about, in order to understand the experience of meaningfulness and the cultivation of wisdom, so as to afford awakening from the meaning crisis. And the meaning crisis is a phrase that John’s popularized and that many of you may be familiar with. So, welcome, good to see you. It’s good to see you too, yeah. It’s nice to be in person with you. You’re looking great. Well, thank you, sir. It’s my Twitter suit. Let’s do it. So, I wanted to start, I’m gonna jump right into this. Please, please. There’s some very complicated and essential issues that I wanna talk to you about. I talked with Carl Friston a while back, and for those of you watching, Friston is one of the world’s premier neuroscientists, and he’s very interested in categorization and AI. And he said something to me that was extremely illuminating, and I think it’s related to your notion of through line, and also oneness, because one of the questions John’s interested in, by the way, is, what is it that allows us to presume that any given thing is one thing, especially when it’s made out of parts, and what does it mean for two things to be similar or identical, given that they’re separate? And so, all of this is lurking in the background as problems that need to be solved. So, Friston is very interested in the use of cognitive categories to constrain entropy. And so, entropy is the proclivity of things to move in multiple directions, I would say. And I’ve always construed entropy, regulation and constraint, as constraint of negative emotion. But he pointed out to me that it’s importantly associated with positive emotion. So, there’s a huge neuropsychological literature that indicates that you experience positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal. That’s what the dopaminergic tract responds to. And he pointed out that that’s also entropy reduction. Because entropy, which is disorder, in some sense, and this is something I’d figured out a while ago, but hadn’t associated with positive emotion, entropy is something like path length to a destination. And so, if you see the path length shrink, which means you’re getting closer to your destination, you’re reducing entropy. But that reduction, which is an advance, right, pragmatic advance, is actually signaled by the positive emotion system. So, the negative emotion system signals an explosion of entropy, which might be part of combinatorial explosion, and part of, what’s the, well, the mere fact that things can be perceived in a multi-frame problem, and perceived in a multitude of ways. So, that accounts for negative emotion. But to construe positive emotion as a response to a decrease in entropy that’s associated with voluntary action struck me as, well, it’s another form of unification, right? Because it brings both emotional channels under the rubric of entropy reduction. And so, that relates them as well to a very fundamental physical reality, in so far as entropy is a physical reality. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I haven’t met Carl Friessen. I’ve worked with a lot of his students, and I have met and talked with Andy Clark. But for me, just before we get into the content, what Carl Friessen is doing represents the big picture cognitive science that I think we need, right? The attempt to get a synoptic integration. Like, he thinks of it as a unifying framework across many different sub-disciplines. And so, I see one of the jobs of cognitive science is overcoming the fragmentation within psychology, and then overcoming the fragmentation between the various minded disciplines, like psychology, AI, neuroscience, and his work is doing that. And that is the kind of work I aspire to doing as well. So first of all, I think that’s really important. I would argue, it’s not the sole cause, but I would think, I would argue a contributing factor to the replication crisis is the fact that we’re overprivileging innovation as opposed to integration in psychology. So what we’re getting is we’re getting these very narrow, very almost effect specialized, I have a theory about this effect, I have a theory about this effect. And so, the controlled theoretical framework you need in order to make sure that these, the constructs are plausible, they’re clear. That you- They’re intelligible. They’re intelligible, you don’t have, you know the jingle jangle problem in psychology, get rid of all of that kind of thing. And so I think that that kind of work is exemplary. And I think he’s also, I think it’s also really good work. I think it’s careful, it’s mathematically rigorous. You know, I work, he has a student, Mark Miller, who’s also one of my former students, and I work a lot with Mark. He actually got a huge cert grant to come to Toronto and we’re gonna work together on a lot of this stuff. And Mark has been one of the people, in fact, just to bring it back around, really trying to integrate the predictive processing framework with affect. Right, right, right. Well there’s, yeah, well it’s very, so that, because it isn’t obvious that the AI models, for example, experience anything that you might consider akin to emotion. But if you can relate negative emotion to an explosion of potential pathways. I think. And relate positive emotion to a reduction, then you’re starting to make a very tight connection between information processing and emotional experience, let’s say, or at least the meaning of emotional experience. Right, but that’s where his work and my work starts to integrate. Because a way of translating that reduction of entropy, I do wanna get back to the theme of a shared grammar between cognition and reality. But first, a psychological way of understanding that the affect is around the notion of basically surprise reduction. So the idea. Right, right. The idea is the brain is trying to predict. I would argue a better term is anticipation, but we can come back to that. The brain is trying to predict the world, because the more it can predict the world, the more adaptive capacity it has to be proactive. It’s very easy, it’s much better to avoid the tiger than to confront the tiger. Right? And then the thing about that is you note, when I first say this to my students, I say, oh, so the brain is this massively recursive system for reducing surprise, a lot of them will say, but I like surprises. And you go, yeah, that’s right. And so then you start to get this question about, well, you wanna reduce surprise, right? But it’s not sort of absolute reduction, more like the rate. And then you’re playing the rates at different longitudinal scales. So I might like the short-term surprise for my birthday party, because it’s a long-term predictor of stable relationships. So my long-term ability to predict the environment goes up, because all of these people have done all of this intricate work to surprise me at the party. So I just wanna make it clear, because people easily get this confused with, he’s just proposing some simplistic, just reduce surprise across the board. So then you get this very- It’s accidental surprise in some sense. And I know that’s not a complete solution to the problem either, because some accidental surprises are positive, but we’re much happier about surprise if we encounter it voluntarily. And then there’s a rate problem there that’s proportionate to something like depth, and that’s associated with the phenomenon of meaning as well. So let me take Frith’s argument apart a little bit more, because I asked him a very specific question. So I asked him if he thought that basic perceptual categories were micro-narratives. So because one of the places that your work and I and mine dovetail is in our observation that the very categories of perception that make themselves manifest to us aren’t simple objects. No, no. That’s not the case. They’re simple objects. No, no. That’s where you bring in the neoplatonic teleology. Agent arena relationship. Right, right. And so what we seem to see in the world are patterns that have functional utility, and the functional utility is construed in relationship to a goal. And of course, then that brings up the question of what should the goal be and is there such a thing as an integrated goal? And so there’s a pragmatism, like the empiricists and the rationalists, but let’s say the empiricists to begin with, seem to presume that what we see in the world are objects and then we derive meaning, we impose a meaning on top of that. And that isn’t how it works, is that the very things we see as objects are tools that we use in relationship to goals. And some of those can be described objectively, but that isn’t the essence of perception itself. No, I agree. And if you get, so you look at the, even the history of the psychology of categorization, there are sort of two fundamental presuppositions that have been, were running through it that point to exactly what you’re talking about, that really sort of started to come into question in the mid-80s, early 80s, and then gathered steamed well neural networks, and now to the fore. But there was the idea that concepts are just lists of features. Lists of features, and that the primary function of a concept is to label the world and describe it. And that’s turned, both of those, which are sort of often, it’s interesting, because when you ask people what they think concepts are, that’s what they tell you. You bet, you bet. There’s features, there’s a list, two things are identical if they share the same list of features. Yeah, it’s axiomatic. Yeah, and that’s what they think, but that’s not how they actually do the categorization, because that won’t give you categorization. And so, and Friston’s work points to a fundamental, and it belongs to a much broader framework, but no, no, what concepts are is they’re generative models. They are a structural functional organization of features that allow us to predict and explain how things are going to behave, especially with relationship to us. And then what you- And that’s the pragmatism element, and the functional element. Exactly, and so you get a much different notion of similarity. So instead of thinking of, here’s these two feature lists, and then you get Goodman’s problem of what goes on the features, and how do you solve it. Right, right. Right, and all that stuff I’ve talked about. Here’s another idea. Let’s say I have these two generative models, and how many steps can I go back where I can trace them back to a common, shared generative model? It’s like an evolutionary. So if two things are similar, if they have an ancestor generative model that is close to them, and they’re dissimilar, if you have to go through a lot of transformations to get them back to a shared generative model. So we’re judging- I thought of that actually, a variant of that, as a way of determining whether something was real. Well, can you imagine two measurement methods that are similar or different? You might say, well, what makes them, you want to measure the same thing in as many different ways as you can to calibrate its reality. But then you run into the thorny problem of what makes two measurement systems different. And one of the answers to that, on the conceptual level at least, is distance evolutionarily. There might be a domain of measurement that emerged in physics, and a domain of measurement that emerged in psychology, and so they don’t share a lot of underlying axiomatic presuppositions, and if you bring both of them to bear on the problem, and they report the same pattern, then you can be reasonably sure that that pattern exists independent of your projection. And it’s kind of what your senses do too, right? Because you have five senses, and they’re really qualitatively different. Vision and audition are extremely different, and audition and vision and touch are extremely different. And we use, it’s not triangulation, I guess it’s quintangulation, but we go in on patterns to see if they’re replicable across all the sensory domains, and that’s also a form of what would you call analysis by optimally different measurement systems. Okay, and then that is a way, and that connects to research and work I do, that can help to supply the missing normativity for pragmatism. The problem with pragmatism is they had this very nebulous concept of utility, which was very hard to get any sort of normative guidance. But what you just described, this goes towards a lot of the literature, I’m sort of punning here, that’s converging on the notion of plausibility. Now, there’s two senses of plausibility. One is just a synonym for highly probable, but another is when we invoke things like, say, that makes good sense, or that seems to reason, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that, those kinds of judgments. And what it’s turning out is, what you’re getting in plausibility is, half of plausibility is that. Like you said, when you have convergence from many different, and they converge to the same source, and the reason, that gives you what Nesher calls, sorry, Resher calls, trustworthiness. Yeah. Because the chance, so if I have just one information channel, the chance that my conclusion is being affected by bias in the system is significant. Right. But if I have multiple converging ones, the chance of them sharing all of those biases. Is very low. Very low. Yeah, and it probably decreases exponentially as the number of measurements that you use to assess the reality of a given phenomenon increases. Right, but you hit a law of diminishing returns at some point. Right, right, right. At some point, a friend of mine says, for human beings, one is, I’ll think about it, two is, maybe, three. Three. Well, three or four, it’s like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sort of the working memory capacity kind of thing. But that’s not all you want for plausibility. You also want the thing here to have that structural functional organization. You want it to not just be a feature list. You want it to be a generative model, things that can predict counterfactuals, because what you want that construct also to do is you want it to be able to go in to many different domains and find and formulate problems well. So it has to have this elegance. So it has convergence. So that would be multi- Appness, yeah. Right, right. So that would be utility across a broad range of potential applications. That’s right. Because that makes a nice tool, right, is that you can use it for more than one thing. So, you know, force equals mass times acceleration. You can use it for talking about whales floating in the water. You can use it for talking about planets circling a sun. You can use it to talk about bullets. Right, so cross situational generality. Right, and then the third thing you want is you want balance, right? And so if I give you a tremendous amount of convergence to something that has very little elegance, well, that’s trivial. Right, right. You don’t say it’s false, you say it’s- Right, right. Well, and that’s actually the fate of most facts. And this is related to this problem in psychology. It’s always struck me in relationship to the social sciences is that our method of movement forward is incremental fact gathering. But the problem with that is that there’s an infinite number of facts. And most of them are irrelevant. And so without these unifying theories, then you can’t integrate across the facts in any coherent manner. And you just get the endless generation of, well, valid in some sense, but pointless facts. Right, and that goes to the point we were talking about with Friston’s work about generating those frameworks that bring all the things together. And you’re getting a generative model rather than just a feature list of facts. Right, right. But you also, like I said, you get triviality. You also get the reverse. If I have very little trustworthiness, but the promise of a lot of elegance, that’s when we think of something as far-fetched. Like if you just believe that the British monarchy are lizard peoples from space, look at all the things I can explain. And so you can get far-fetchedness. Right. And if you actually pay attention- That’s where the conspiracy theories in some sense make themselves manifest. That’s exactly right. Except when they’re true. Right, and then you can also equivocate. You can do Mott and Bailey and a lot of things where you seem to be doing this, but you’re actually equivocating. Like a deepity. So love is a four-letter word. Okay, on the graphic side, that is highly convergent, but it’s absolutely trivial. Who cares? But then you think that they’re not talking about the grapheme, right? You think they’re talking about the concept of love, so you equivocate. And then you think something important is being said about this phenomena that ramifies for your whole life. So you’ve got convergence to a triviality that then equivocates to something that’s profound, that would promise, but there’s nothing being said when you say love is a four-letter word. Like, is that sort of proving that love is an inconsequential phenomena? Of course not, but it sounds. So you can get all kinds. I’m trying to show, though, the way the plausibility machinery just gets misused and misled pervasively in our culture. So you want that balance. The current administration’s New Year’s goals are to tax, spend, and turn a blind eye to inflation. If this is at odds with your goals, if you’re tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plans, then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch Gold today. For over 5,000 years, gold has withstood inflation, geopolitical turmoil, and stock market crashes. With help from the experts at Birch Gold, you can own gold in a tax-sheltered retirement account. Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401K into an IRA in precious metals. Just text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metal specialists. Birch Gold will hold your hand through the entire process. Text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today. With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, and countless five-star reviews, you can trust Birch Gold to help protect your savings. Text Jordan to 989898 today. That’s another form of triangulation in some sense. Yes, yes. So I wanted to explain to everybody who’s listening a little bit more about this idea of entropy, just so that it can be made more understandable. So imagine that you’re driving to work and you’re in your car and your car isn’t bothering you. You’re not attending to your car apart from the fact that you have to drive it. And the reason that you’re not attending to your car is because it’s performing its proper function as a car in relationship to your goal, which means that it is moving you down the road reliably. Now, imagine what happens in your imagination when your car stops. Let’s say it stops on a busy highway. Now, what’s happened is the path length to your destination and to also other multiple potential destinations has now become indeterminately large. And then imagine that the search space opens up. It’s so like now you’re off to the side of the road with your car. Well, your first set of problems is your whole day is now messed up. How are you going to get to work? So you have to compute a whole variety of potential pathways in the world just in relationship to your day. And then while you have the broader problem of the fact that your car is now no longer a car, it’s a useless chunk of metal that you’re trapped in in a dangerous situation. And you have no idea how to fix it. And maybe you have no idea where to take it. And so the collapse of the simplicity of your car as an affordance in relationship to a proximal goal has exposed you to entropy. And entropy is the multiplication of the problems that now beset you. And category collapse does that. And so if you understand this, if you understand that your perception of car is dependent on the maintenance of its function in relationship to a goal, you start to understand something very fundamental about categories themselves, because everything you see in the world has this nature. It’s a unity of form, which is something that the empiricists can concentrate on, but it’s a unity of form in relationship to a goal. And that’s built right into the perception of the so-called object itself. And so your object perception is constraining entropy by organizing the world into categories that are functionally relevant to goals that you maintain either explicitly or even more importantly, implicitly. And category collapse produces this increase in entropy. Now you feel positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal, and you feel negative emotion when some uncertainty with relationship to that goal is manifested itself, or when you encounter, say, a determinant obstacle that you have to walk around. And so that’s part of the way that, to go back to an earlier section of this discussion, that you can relate emotion to both cognition and categorization. So this issue of entropy reduction is crucially important because it’s, well, it’s at the basis of categorization itself. Now, the reason I’d asked Friston about categories as micro-narratives is because I was very curious, I’m very curious, and this is probably more relevant to your work on spirituality. So one of the things you point out in the recent lecture you did for Ralston College is that even the perception of a given object is dependent on some sense of oneness. And so Piaget was very interested in this, is like, why is this one thing? Right, because it’s not, they’re, you know, now it’s two things. And things don’t have to be physically contiguous to be one thing. Right, right, and so the question is what constitutes the oneness of the thing, given that it’s fractionable in an infinite number of ways. And so, and then another question that emerges out of that is what makes two cell phones in the same category? Okay, so let me run a hypothesis by you and tell me what you think about that. So I think that things are one. First of all, they’re one if you can use them for a specific purpose with a specific sequence of actions in relationship to a given goal. But they’re interspersable, so they’re the same. If you can replace them functionally in the same pattern of operations with no transformation of the path. So they’re the same because they’re functionally equivalent in relationship to a goal, not because they share a set of features. So anything that’s swappable is the same. But that is dependent on a teleology. It’s necessarily dependent on a teleology. Yeah, I mean, this is the, this is the, and this is not a criticism. This is a classical notion of multiple realizability. So I can have the same program, Excel, and I can run it on many different machines. So the actual physical instantiation can be different as long as I’m getting the reliable same generative model. As long as I’ve got the same formal system running. In fact, you don’t think that there was one pattern, one program here and one program there. Think about it. Think about this abstract entity, a computer program, or even a file. You can, you move it. What space are you moving it through? The language has come so readily to us. You’re doing this thing where you’re moving it from one computer to another because of exactly that. Because you say, oh, the generative model here and here, there’s no, and this is an important qualification, there’s no relevant difference. Yes. For example, this one might run a little bit slower on this computer than here, but if it doesn’t impact on how you can use it, then. Then it’s the same enough. Yes. Now I wanted to introduce, and this will help get us into a little bit more, I recently published a paper with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller on integrating the relevance realization framework and the predictive processing framework. You wanna do entropy reduction, but if you look at network theory, and the way you explain it in terms of paths reduction is really important here. So there’s three basic kinds of networks. Networks are just ways in which things are connected, like sequences, or the way an airline is connected, or the way the internet is connected, or the way neurons are connected, functional connectivity. So there’s a regular network, which is nodes are just things that are connected. You have all the connections are just one step away, node to node. And then there’s what’s called a random network, is where you can have long distance connections, very long distance connection. So I don’t have to fly from Savannah to Atlanta to, I can just fly directly from Savannah to Toronto, something like that. So the regular network is highly inefficient. The way you measure efficiency is called mean path distance. You take all the distance from all possible combinations, how many steps do I have to go from this point to that point? And then you take all of them and you average them together. You get the mean path distance, the average path distance between any two points. In a regular network, it’s very, very high. You have to go through a lot of steps. And a regular network is one where they’re all connected. They’re all local connection. When you look at it, it looks beautiful. It’s highly ordered, because all the lines are the same length and everything. But it’s highly inefficient. The random network is highly efficient, because you have a lot of these long distance connections that collapse your path, your mean path distance. But the brain doesn’t go for either one of those. Because there’s a trade-off relationship. As I make the network more random to make it more efficient, which sounds like a contradiction in our terms, but it’s not, I lose robustness in the system. So think about it. When you have a lot of these little connections, there’s lots of redundancy. And so I can lose a lot of stuff, and I get graceful degradation. I only get a small reduction in functionality. I have this random network. I can take out one link, and entire nodes can become isolated from each other. So that’s the danger of efficiency versus redundancy. Yeah, and so what the brain does is what’s called small world network. So a small world network is mostly regular, and then one or two long distance connections. So I pointed this out before. And is that associated with the manner in which the cortical columns organize themselves? Because there’s a lot of micro-connections within cortical columns that are very fast and efficient, and relatively sparse connections between cortical columns. The cortex, by the way, the cortex is made up of these cortical columns, which are replicated units of about, I think it’s 100,000 neurons each, with 10,000 connections, certain neuron, something like that. And then that structure’s replicated. That makes up the cortical sheet. So, I mean, everything we’re talking about right now is in one sense controversial. There’s lots, I’m not saying anything that doesn’t have a lot of good empirical evidence for it. But we’re relying on technologies that are still, like FMRI and Dense EEG, that don’t give us the kind of precision. So I wanna say that, I’m not saying anything ridiculous here, but I don’t wanna claim, like we’ve consumed- Subject to revision. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But it looks like the brain is organized at multiple levels of analysis, not only top-down, but back-front and in-out, in small world network formation. And here’s some really interesting things. So you give somebody propofol, and you take them into unconscious. The brain will go from being a global small world network into, it’ll break up into small local regular networks. And then as you bring them back into consciousness, it’ll go from those local regular networks back into a comprehensive small world network. So Carhartt Harris talks about criticality in consciousness. And so how do you understand- Oh, totally, totally, yeah. So how do you understand the relationship between, so Carhartt Harris and other people, and I talked about this in Maps of Eating- The brain’s right on the edge of criticality. Yeah, exactly. And it’s on the border between chaos and order. That’s the technique. Okay, so how is that related? How do you understand the relationship between that connectivity? It’s great, okay. And then I wanna bring it to a phenomena of insight, because insight has that combination of initial surprise and then long-term gain. Yeah, yeah. We talked about it earlier. Is it long-term or iterable gain? It depends. I mean, you can have a systematic insight. You can have the kind of insight that Piaget talks about, which is not an insight into this problem. It’s an insight into a system. Or you can have just an insight into this problem, like the nine dot problem. And it’s just in the future, you’ll know how to do that. And the first insight would be a deeper insight than the second. Yes. And that’s like a technical definition of deep. Yes, yes, exactly. Which is a fun thing. That’s something we just talked about too, is what it means technically for something to be deep. Okay, so back to consciousness and network organization. Right, okay, so we talked about small world network. And so what the brain seems to be doing is, and especially the work I’ve done recently with Brad and Mark, it’s not just redundancy. The brain is training between, and this is helpful because it’s now too easy, between efficiency and evolvability in the technical sense that’s coming out of biology, which is, the term is degeneracy, but I don’t like to use the term degeneracy because it means to degenerate away from a, because when the average person hears that, does it mean degeneracy, what the hell? Wrong connotations, man. Bad naming, bad naming. So, evolvability is, you want enough redundancy and overlap in your system. To be resilient. Right, so just quick, just very quick. You have the robustness problem in biology, which is, you want a lot of variation in the species, but you don’t want to be the individual that has the variation. Right. Chances are, you’re going to get killed, right? So, what you do is you, and this is the work of Andreas Wagner, at the level of the genotype, you have quite a bit of this degeneracy and overlap and evolvability in the genome, but it doesn’t show up in phenotypical differences. So, there’s not significant behavior, but soon as there’s a change in the environment, the genome is ready to shift and produce a new phenotypical behavior. So, that’s what I- Do you know that the older the gene structure that codes for morphology, the less likely it is to avoid correction if it’s mutated? Yes, yes. Yes, that’s a relatively new finding. So, it looks like even at the mutation level, that biology will play with the fringes, but leave the center intact. So, mutations are basically random, and they can occur anywhere in the genome, but if it’s a fundamental element of the genome, the error correction systems replace it back to exactly what it was. So, I think that’s analogous to this issue we’re getting at in terms of optimized learning. 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And the problem, right? The problem is they became brittle. They couldn’t, if there was a sudden change in the market, because everybody’s working at their max, well, Bob, can you do this as well? No, I’m sorry, I’m working eight. There’s no evolvability in this system. And so there’s a lot of work coming out now that natural selection doesn’t just select for traits, it selects for the meta trait of evolvability. Because if you and I are basically equal and we have more evolvability, as long as the environment is stable, nothing’s gonna, right? Differentiated. Yeah, but if there’s a sudden change in the environment, I’ll get what’s called, I’ll get the innovator advantage. Yeah. I will evolve faster and then I will go into the new niche. And I may not be optimally fitted for that niche, right? I will propagate and fill that niche so much that it’s hard. That’s general cognitive ability. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so, right? So what you’re doing, now back to self-organizing and criticality. Yeah. So what you’re doing is, and this goes to a paper I published with Leo Ferraro way back in 2013. We actually talked about this at one point. You used to have the Metapsychology Group. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That eventually came into publication. So by the way, thank you. Good, good, good, good. So again, subject to revision, but what looks like happening, what the brain is oscillating between two different states. There’s the neurons firing in synchrony, and that seems to do something like data compression. And data compression is like when you draw the line of best fit on a scatter plot. You’re basically, you’re throwing out a lot of variants so that you get clean interpolation and extrapolation. So you get generalized ability. Right, that’s gist in some sense. Yes, you get, gist allows you to generalize, the two Gs, right? Yeah, yeah. Gist allows you to generalize. Okay, right. Now, but then the brain, like, avalanches, all the neurons will fire in asynchrony. Now what that does is that mutual predictability goes down, entropy is going up. Yeah. Why would the brain do that? Because when it does that, that opens up an opportunity for it to evolve anew. That’s what the psychedelics are doing then? Yes, yes, right. And so what the brain is doing is it’s constantly, right, it self-organizes, and then it goes critical, it breaks up. Not too much, it breaks up enough so that it can now reconfigure in something different. And so what you’re doing is you’re not just getting a one-shot, you’re actually exploring different generalizations that are possible within the state space. Mm-hmm. Did that make, so if you can get the brain on that edge, right, where it’s constantly doing this, and there’s been some… Okay, so now that also, while that takes us very interestingly, so, and people should attend to this, because I think it’s crucial, is that we have a debate in our society, probably since the Enlightenment, about whether the phenomenon of meaning is real in any real sense. And it tends to be downplayed by empiricists because it’s not objective. But it seems to me highly probable that the sense of meaning, most fundamentally, is a signal of the operation of the optimization of this process. Is that right? Is that we wanna put ourselves on the edge where things are predictable enough so that we get what we need and want, but so that at the same time, we’re expanding our adaptive competence in a variety of domains simultaneously, right? Exactly. And I think meaning, so here’s a way of thinking about this existentially. So imagine that you’re pursuing a given goal, whatever it is, maybe you wanna get married, you wanna have children, and then you think, well, who the hell cares in 100,000 years? What difference is it going to make anyways? And then all your motivational energy is drained out by that sort of nihilistic thought. Now, one thing you can think in relationship to that is, well, that nihilistic thought is accurate because that’s a superordinate timeframe. And if you had any sense, that’s the timeframe across which you would evaluate things and you just have to pay the price of the non, of the meaninglessness of your life. Or you could say, well, wait a second, if I’m pursuing a goal and I use a frame of interpretation that renders it a motivational, one possibility is that I’m using counterproductive frame of reference and that’s actually what my nervous system is signaling to me. So one of the discussions we could have is like, is it reasonable epistemologically and even ontologically to use your sense of deep meaning as a guide to optimal functioning in the world? I think it’s the instinct that is literally that guide. So I think there’s like 17 things I wanna say that’s really powerful. First thing, I think Thomas Nagel is right. Nihilism is not generated by argument because the arguments are actually technically not valid. So if someone says, well, 100,000 years from now won’t matter, it’s symmetrical. What’s happening 100,000 years from now doesn’t matter to you. It has no normative demand on it. Why is that a relevant fact? Exactly. Yes, yes, because you’re making an implicit presumption that the wider timeframe is the appropriate. Yes, exactly, exactly. So that’s the first point. And so for him, and I agree with him, it’s not a matter of a propositional argument, it’s a matter of you haven’t learned how to properly integrate your different perspectives. Your first-person perspective, the cosmic, and this is why I think things like the four-e cognitive science and neoplatonism are about how do we properly cultivate the virtues for managing and improving the relationship between our perspectives. Yes, that’s the Jacob’s Ladder problem. Yes, yes. So that second thing is, and this goes towards, and this is something you and I both talked in common, and we have in common, we’ve talked a lot about, and I was privileged to work with John Kennedy, is the notion of real relationship, Gibson’s notion of affordance is a crucial one, is that no, no, no, let’s go to biology and adaptivity. Is adaptivity in the organism? Of course not, that doesn’t make any sense. Is the great white chart adaptive? Well, not if you put it in the Sahara Desert. Like is the adaptivity in the environment? That doesn’t make any, it’s a real relationship between, it’s the way they’re really coupled, and there are real couplings that make a real difference. And so we have to get away from, like we have to get away from that Cartesian exhaustive, the problem with the Cartesian exhaustive divide is it gives you nothing that relates the subjective to the objective, which means truth is not possible. Right, but it also means that meaning evaporates in some real sense, because it’s reduced to the subjective, and then that’s reduced to the arbitrary, and then that just disintegrates, and that doesn’t work because, well, I don’t think it works biologically either, because meaning does appear to me to be something akin to a profound instinct, and even from an objective perspective, you have to make the supposition that an actual biological instinct is real. And so the idea of the object eats itself in that regard in some fundamental sense, this is kind of the argument that I always tried to have with Sam Harris. It’s like there’s a contradiction between the Darwinian notion of reality and the Newtonian or Cartesian idea of reality, because there’s a reality that has something to do with this notion of fit, right, of relationship between this objective and the objective. Right, and the Newtonian and the Cartesian are formal systems. Darwin’s theory of evolution is the first significant and important dynamical systems theory within science, in which the self-organization of the system and its coupling to the world are constitutive of the kind of entity it is. Right, including as entities of categorization and perception. Yes, now, let’s go back to the adaptivity and the self-organizing. So the self-organizing criticality, think about what it’s doing. Think about how it is Darwinian, right? So you get the avalanche, that introduces variation, and then you get the compression that selects from it. And then a new variation, so what the brain is doing at, Mike, is it’s implementing the same grammar by which biological evolution across species are fitting them to the environment. Your brain is doing this self-organizing criticality that is constantly evolving your adaptive, your cognitive adaptive fit to the environment. Okay, so that’s also why, just to point out to everyone, that’s actually also why zero-sum economic models are false, is because the zero-sum economic model presumes a fixed reality in relationship to affordances. And there is no fixed reality, and the way that we’ve superseded the limits to growth, and perhaps not in absolute sense, but in some very important sense, is that we do have this capacity, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead said, that we can let our ideas and concepts die instead of us. Right, and so we can, you might say, well, it’s a zero-sum game, economically speaking, there’s only so much that you and I can share. But there’s an implicit part of that argument, which is, well, given the manner in which we’ve structured our relationships and the environment, that might be true. But then it’s an open question, how much restructuring of those a priori axioms can we do? And the answer is, well, an indefinite amount. We’re unbelievably good at that, and we can do more with less all the time. Yes, I agree with that. Because we can take it up into levels of symbolic, well, you know this, you put person in the scene, and I’ll give you 5, and I give you 5, they don’t want to belong to the system that is- Right, right, right. So they move up a level of abstract. They don’t want to participate in what they see as perceived unfairness. And that’s, I think, because they’re playing a metagame in that situation. Exactly. And what I was going to say is, the degree to which we can abstract the metagames we’re playing in, I don’t know of any formal argument that says it stops at this level to go towards your point. Now, bring it back one more thing around. So the brain is evolving. And I think this has a lot, this is what basically is going on in relevance realization. You can see it in your attention. Default mode and task center. Default is making you mind wander, and you introduce variation, and then task selects, and then you kill off most of the variations, but some of them come in, because your mind wandered enough. You can do this, and Stefan and Dixon, you give people a problem, like an insight problem, and they’re in passing, they can’t solve it. And you just introduce a little bit of entropy into the system. Like you put some static on the computer screen, or you shake it, and then they’ll have the insight. Because it puts in enough criticality- Right, so they stop this unidimensional task-focused attention, and it allows the spread of activation. And then they reselect, and they evolve a new way of framing the problem. You get the on- Well, so that would mean in some sense, so imagine that you snap out of goal-focused attention. This reminds me of the psychoanalytic idea. So Freud would put his clients into a state of free association. And so Freud’s tack was, try just to say whatever comes into your mind, or describe your fantasies, and just let yourself talk. No self-censorship. And so really what he meant by that was, abandon any instrumental goal-focused attention for the moment, and let your mind wander. Jung did a lot of this too, because he did a lot of purposeful fantasizing. He just let his- Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a contradiction in terms. He let his mind wander. He would have discussions with the characters of his imagination, for example. It’s very hallucinogenic in some real sense. But you can imagine that, imagine there’s a hierarchy of goals, and you move from a unity at the top of the hierarchy to a plurality. At any given moment, when you’re focusing your attention, you’re using the center focus of your attention as the main source of unity, and that’s reducing everything to an a priori set of perceptions and principles. But then you let that go. Well, now you have these diverse networks in your brain that can, they all have a slightly different way of looking at the same situation. And you can let them have an internal dialogue, and some of those, one of the things the psychoanalysts pointed out is some of those can be id-like. So imagine, for example, that you’re angry at someone, and so you allow yourself to notice the fantasies that you’re generating as a consequence of the anger. And you’ll see maybe you have a very violent fantasy and something that’s highly aggressive. Well, you’re being informed that part of your category system has that vengefulness, say, as a goal, and that actually might be relevant in some sense if you could figure out how to integrate that id-related goal to a higher set of principles, right? You don’t wanna produce absolute bloody mayhem because that doesn’t iterate well across instances, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the input of these subsidiary systems. Exactly. So you introduced the very, so when you’re variation, differentiation, right? And then, but differentiation that has the potential to reconverge. And so you get a system simultaneously differentiating and integrating. It becomes what Kelso and others call metastable. The system is complexifying. It can do a greater variety of things while remaining integrated as an agent. It doesn’t call. Yeah, right, right, right, right. And so what you want is you. That’s what happens, by the way, in the Chartre Cathedral when you wander the maze. So that’s the symbolic representation there, right? So the idea is you go into the maze in one section, and then you walk all four quadrants of the world, right? So you have to cover all the territory, and that way you get to the center. And so the idea there is maximum differentiation as a consequence of voluntary experience that pushes together towards a unity. Exactly. And so what you get is a system that is complexifying, and if it’s done right, it’s because of this real adaptive fittedness. Its complexification is increasingly conforming to the complexity of the world. Yeah, right, right. That’s the scientific enterprise in some sense, right? That’s that calibration against real world patterns. If it has good synoptic integration and not just differentiation over innovation for your career. Yes, right, yes, yes, yes, yes. There is that. Okay, so that’s self-organizing criticality. Now here’s the thing. Self-organizing, when a system is, let’s all use the Hebb’s firing wiring distinction. When it fires in self-organizing criticality, it tends to create a small world network wiring. Because it’s mostly, it’s organized, right? And when it’s organized, that orders it. But when it breaks apart, that opens up the possibility of one of these long distance connections. Now if a system starts to wire as a small world network, what’s mostly regular connections keeping you in the norm, but it has a few long distance connections that can suddenly snap you out. That’s like the balance between conservatism and liberalism there. Well, it is, it is. And so, if it fires as a small world, fires as self-organizing criticality, it tends to wire as a small world network. And if it wires as a small world network, it tends to fire as self-organizing criticality. So these two things can actually mutually inform each other. And so if you can get it right, you can be organizing your brain so that you make it more capable of this evolving of framing. And as you get better at doing that, that will tend to reinforce you organizing your brain. So there’s a real possibility here for people to do that. To get that sort of reciprocal opening of virtuous cycle going on. And it’s interesting that we have two different, we have that self-organizing criticality theory of insight. So insight is you have to break out of an inappropriate frame, that’s the criticality, and it reorganizes into the better frame. You do that evolution. But Schilling has. And better would be something like both efficient and capable of performing a broader range of actions. That was like a Piagetian description of what constituted a better theory. A better theory allows you to do everything the previous theory allowed you to do, plus something more, hopefully with a gain of efficiency. And that’s a definition of better. But you wanna keep, so a good theory, a good theory is efficient in that sense, but a good theory is also generative. So you’re always trying to optimize between efficiency and evolvability. And so like you said, you don’t just do compression. That’s epilepsy. If your brain just fires in a completely synchronous thing, that’s epilepsy, right? Because you’ve just locked the system down. It has no capacity to adaptively refit itself to the world. So the brain is constantly, I think of this actually as mapping on to Piaget’s notion of assimilation, accommodation. Assimilation is compression, making everything integrated. Accommodation is how you introduce. And then the calibration is this dynamical, constantly trading between them. So you don’t come to any kind of stable thing. You’re constantly evolving. And the theory, you don’t find the final theory, right? You’re constantly moving to a theory that grabs more differences and yet brings them into an integration. And then the theory has to write. Yeah, well, one of Piaget’s points in his writing, and I mean, he said this explicitly, was that the task of genetic epistemology was to specify the process by which the balance between assimilation and accommodation occurs. Exactly, thank you. And that has something to do with, okay, so two questions. So we’ve already put forward the hypothesis that the instinct for meaning is something like a marker for the proper expansion and organization of the category system, of the brain itself, maybe even related to health. But then there’s another interesting thing that Carhartt Harris and people like him have been concentrating on, which is that the phenomenon of consciousness itself, which is being itself in some real sense in so far as you have to be conscious of things for them to be, is like, I still don’t understand how this gets us out of the so-called zombie problem. It’s like, why is it that consciousness itself and this sense of being is associated with operation on this meaningful edge? Okay, and that’s a great question to ask, right? Because I’ve already said there are relationships between small world network formation and how conscious you are. And there’s also relationships between self-organizing criticality. So you can present people to visual stimuli that are put on the visual system so the brain is constantly flipping between them, like a triangle and a square. And what you can see is self-organizing criticality moving between areas as the brain is flipping in consciousness between the triangle and the square. Right, so two different patterns of perception, each associated with their independent consciousness. Okay, so here’s, I’ve been alluding to that. I think a lot of this stuff is how we’re implementing. If I can put one more piece on this, I can get to your consciousness. Okay, okay. Let’s go back. That’s worth it, Dan. I’m willing to wait around for that. So you’re trying to do predictive processing and they pick up on Hinton’s insight and then Friston has it too. The brain doesn’t try and predict the world, it tries to predict itself and its interaction with the world, which is this really, really profound idea. Right, and prediction, this is why I say a better term is anticipation. It’s not just predicting, it’s attempting to complete. So it’s trying to predict. It’s also something, by the way, that’s the problem I’ve always had with the prediction models is there’s a cold, cognitive element to it because we really want to have happen in the world what we desire. So it’s not just cold prediction. Right, and this is a slogan I’ve been putting. Relevance realization is not cold calculation. Right, okay, okay. I didn’t know you had formulated that. Yes, yes. So predictive processing, you’re doing all this stuff, but the question, and you’ve bumped into it already, is well, what do I predict? And you can’t do initially teleological answers because they presume that you’ve got some capacity to represent the environment. So you have to, there’s a long argument here. I’ll just sort of deke around it. What you have to do is you have to have, the system has to have an internal way of deciding which error signals and generative models it’s gonna prioritize. Right, yes, yes, it certainly needs that, yes. So that’s called precision weighting within predictive. And their theory of precision weighting is explicitly that that is what selective attention is. And this maps onto the models of a lot of, like Watson and others, that what attention is, it’s this really nested dynamical prioritization thing and it’s constant, it gives you this flowing, salience landscape, right? That’s what attention is doing. Okay, so where in the paper that Brett and Mark and I published is you got predictive processing comes down to the centrality of this precision weighting. And then you get Clark in 2017 saying, well, that’s task relevance. And then, oh, and then we’re back to the relevant. But what’s happening is the convergences, relevance realization says, you know what you’re actually doing is you’re doing something like this evolution. And what that cognitive evolution is doing is it’s finding these important trade-off relationships between efficiency and evolvability, between exploiting the here now and exploring the there then, between being at the level of the features, zooming in, and being at the level of the gestalt, between looking out into the world and stepping back and looking, and so there’s all, so you can think about each one of these as a domain of opponent processing, right? Like in your autonomic nervous system between the parasympathetic. And then you have this, and where, and there’s meta-opponent processing. All of the opponent processes are also pulling in. And so you get this multi-dimensional state space that, oh, here. So that’s like a hierarchy of dialogues. Yes, yes, yes, and they’re all intersecting. And so the idea was that that is primarily what’s coming out in the predictive, like that’s how precision weighting is working. It’s basically doing this multi-dimensional opponent processing, this multi-dimensional complexification, this multi-dimensional evolution of your adaptive fit. And then the two models come together, and they fit together. And it’s like the marriage between Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics, the two theories. Dovetail. Dovetail, and come together. And they converge on a solution to the frame problem. We’ll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s gonna call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re gonna see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. And where is that hope? Yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. Okay, so… And then I’ll be able to use that to talk about consciousness. Okay, well, I wanted to just make a segue here that people might find interesting. I think all that’s modeled extremely well, particularly by symphonic music. Because what you have, if you listen to symphonic music, what you see is there’s dialogues at the level of the instrument. So there’ll be a proposition and then a counter response. And then all those dialogues are structured hierarchically in relationship to a higher order structure. And that’s the melodic integrity of the entire piece. And people will align themselves with that. And so you can see this multi-dimensional processing occurring in a musical piece that speaks to the core issue of reality, which is actually the harmony and the beauty of the piece itself. And that means that that deep meaning that you’re describing is pointing to something like the optimized balance between multiple levels of processing simultaneously. And some of that is also temporal, right? Balancing the here and now, as you said, with the, what did you call it? The there, there, the there and then. Right, right. And so the reality is the emergent balance between all those different viewpoints rather than any given viewpoint. And it flows, right? So this is perfect. Because music is basically playing with our salience landscaping for the sake of playing. It’s computer, for me, it’s the being mode. It’s not the having mode. We’re not trying to do anything. We’re in pure development because we’re doing pure play. We play music. Yes, pure play, yeah, pure play. Music is the closest. What Rex Murphy said, all music, all art aspires to the condition of music. Right, and notice how music is not in you or, it’s between, it’s fundamental. The resonance, the betweenness, the connectedness. The fitting. You see that in dancing. Right, and then Roussin, John Roussin, in Bearing Witness to Epiphany, and I got to talk to John Roussin. He said, and this is so, and he admits it because he’s deeply influenced by Plato. This is such a platonic thing. Now, think about how intelligibility is basically, there’s a musicality to intelligibility. Right, right, definitely. Right, so there are rhythms, right, and then there’s melodies. Everything has its through line, which is like a melody, and then the melodies and the rhythm go together with an overarching harmony, and you’re getting all of this salience. And so music. And that’s all pointing to something like an ultimate unity in some fundamental sense. The one in neoplatonism, yeah. Right, right, and I wanna talk to you about that one idea too, so we’ll get into that a little bit later. Return to consciousness. Yes. Okay, so, and consciousness is closely associated with, of course, with attention, with working memory, and with fluid intelligence. Yes, yes. Right? Yes. And of course, there’s quite high levels of correlation between working memory and standard measures of G. Yes, they might be the same thing even. Maybe, maybe. Yeah, yeah, they’re very close. They’re close, yes. So here’s the idea, and I’m gonna do that plausibility argument. So if you take a look at many of, so there’s two different, well, there’s three questions, I did this at the end of the debate, there’s three questions about consciousness. Okay. One is, what’s the nature of consciousness? How does this weird non-physical thing exist in the physical universe? That’s the, right? There’s, but there’s the function problem. What does consciousness do? Since you can do so much behavior as an intelligent zombie. Right, right, why not all of it? Yeah, why not all of it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because you do, well, your cerebellum’s a good example of that, right? I think there’s more neurons in the cerebellum than in the cortex. Than in the cortex, yeah. And it’s not conscious by any normal measures. So it’s like, obviously consciousness isn’t a mirror consequence of neural activity. No, no, no. So much of that’s unconscious, and then it does beg the question, if so much of it is unconscious, why not all of it? Right, and then the third question is a meta question. What’s the relationship between the nature and the function question? Here’s where I actually agree with Descartes, and I disagree with a lot of current philosophy. Descartes tries to answer those two questions in an integrated fashion. The nature question and the function question should be answered together. What we tend to do in modern academic philosophy is we tend to separate them. We talk about just the function problem or just the heart problem, which is the nature problem. And that, if you just think about it for a minute, that’s very problematic. Trying to talk about function without talking about nature is very, very problematic, and vice versa. Trying to talk about the nature of something without talking about how it functions with respect to other things, very, very problematic. There’s a longer argument there. I’m just giving you the gist. You wanna, so, but if you take a look, right, if you take a look at some of the leading theories, let’s take the global workspace theory, for example. And what’s the function of consciousness in the global world? So the idea is your consciousness is something like your computer desktop, and your unconscious is all the files, and what consciousness is, is I can bring anything onto the desktop, and I can manipulate it, and then I can broadcast it back to whatever I need. Right, and you can, well, you update your unconscious doing that, too, right? Because part of what consciousness does seem to do is to assess faulty, unconscious actions, recalibrate them, and rejig them. So consciousness is this thing that moves up and down the hierarchy of unconscious and regulates it. Right, but here’s the thing, and this, of course, is the frame problem. You can’t check all of the possible error, right? Yeah, right, that’s definitely a problem. So, and this is, I’m not imposing this on Bars. Shanahan and Bars, right, they publish, they and Bars has explicitly argued Shanahan has gone on, and Shanahan’s important, because Shanahan is literally the person who, like, writes the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the frame problem, right? And so they argue that one of the functions of consciousness is to help solve the issue of relevance realization, the problem of relevance. Now, I don’t think their solution works, but that’s not the issue. They’re saying, look, the function of consciousness is to do enhanced relevance realization. Then you look at the work of Bor and Seth, and they say, well, what’s the function of consciousness? The function of consciousness is, like, and think about the relationship to working memory, it’s to reorganize and restructure, like chunking, so we can, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then, and why, when do we need that? Well, we need it in situations, compare when you can drive your car like a zombie, and when you can’t drive your car like a zombie, right? When I need consciousness. So when something axiomatic has moved. Well, yeah, yes, and it cashes out in this way. The problem I’m facing is now ill-defined rather than a well-defined problem for me. The problem is messy, there’s sudden. That’s a path-length multiplication problem. Yes, yes, and, right, there’s novelty. There is now stuff that I was previously able to discard as irrelevant error that I can’t discard as irrelevant error anymore. And that would be associated with the fact that you’d have an automatized solution to whatever set of problems was making themselves manifest. That’s right. You don’t have to attend to it because you’ve already taken it into account. Even your perceptions has taken it into account. And allow a lot of little regular networks to run it. Yes, right. But now I get into this situation, and I need to go into, right, a small world network. I need to have the system, I need to evolve and enhance my relevance. That’s why you get a flash of consciousness when you have insight, you actually get that. And so you get that. Or when something goes wrong. Yes. It’s like, uh-oh, that’s consciousness. It’s who wants that? Okay, so there’s a longer argument here, but you can take a look at Clearman’s radical plasticity hypothesis, Tononi’s integrated information. Basically, they all converge on what consciousness is doing is its higher order relevance realization, which of course is what working memory is doing. Like the stuff that our colleague, Lynn Hasher, was talking about. It’s not just Miller’s holding space, because that doesn’t really account for why chunking is so important. No, no, it’s functional. It’s sort of the last ditch survey of how good is my relevance realization before I commit to action in the world, right? I think salience is actually just relevance to your working memory in that fashion. So the functionality. Okay, so let’s say that there’s a growing convergence, and I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. But I think that’s a really good point. Okay, so I think it’s a good point. Okay, so let’s talk about the functionality. I think the functionality for many different people onto the function of consciousness is higher-order recursive relevance realization. Your unconscious has done some preliminary relevance realization, and then you do the yes, but this is the demanding, and you ratchet up the relevance realization. Is that plausible? Okay, now if you give me that, right, I can start to talk a lot about the phenomenology of the concept of the well, I would argue hasn’t been made very well, and therefore there’s a deep equivocation and confound. You need to make a distinction between adjectival qualia, qualia are the felt experience things. You need to make a distinction between the adjectival qualia and the adverbial qualia. Adjectival qualia are greenness, blueness, the ones that philosophers love to talk about. Adverbial qualia are things like togetherness. Now you say, well, why would I ever need that? Okay, so, politicians were- Why are those adverbial? Because they’re modifications of how you are connected to the world. They are not specific properties. Okay, so does that correspond to a noun, that’s a noun-verb distinction in some sense? Right, so- So it’s what things are versus the different, what would you say, modification qualities of their function? How they could co-emerge in being and in your consciousness. So, let’s talk about two pieces of empirical evidence that support what I’m saying. I’m not just drawing this as speculation. One is, and I’ve been in this state, and it’s widely reported, many different people across, many different variables, culturally, history. You can get into what Foreman calls the pure consciousness event. So you’re not conscious of anything, you’re not even conscious of consciousness, you’re just purely conscious. It’s, remember when we talked about you can step back and- Yeah. You can step back until you can’t step back any further because you’d be trying to step back in consciousness into unconsciousness, right? And when the pure consciousness event, there is no greenness, there is no blueness, there is no blackness, there are no objects, there are no things, but you don’t black out. What there is is there’s a sense of here-ness, but it’s pure here-ness, eternity, right? And presence, I should say. And now-ness is that sense of eternity, and then there’s, everything is one. And unity, togetherness. So the here-ness and the now-ness and the togetherness don’t go away, even though the adjectival qualia do, which tells you the adjectival qualia are not necessary for consciousness, but the adverbial ones. So do you think of that as an experience of something akin to the ground of being? Yes, because here, when you’re doing- Is that the name of God that was announced to Moses? Is that the same idea? Well, the name is, I am that I am. I was that I am. I wanna try and answer that, and I wanna try and answer. So I was at, I went to, I went to the Respond Retreat in Vermont, and I was giving my talk on relevance realization, and I was getting great questions from monks, and I was actually interacting with other theorists, and I came to what I think is an important insight. So your system is doing relevance realization, and that is giving you the complexification of the world. It’s giving you the world of things, but as you said, organized, so it’s giving you this. But you can come to the, and one of the things relevance realization is interested in is relevance realizing. That’s what an insight is. You realize, oh, my way of realizing what’s relevant was actually wrong, I have to restructure it. So it’s intrinsically, because it’s intrinsically evolving and self-correcting, it is intrinsically interested in itself. So I can do relevance realization on the world, and that is relevance realization of beings. But relevance realization has to realize its own irrelevance with respect to being. You have to stop trying to thingify your experience. That’s movement up, Jacob. Okay, so in the Exodus story, what happens with Moses is that he’s walking through the desert, so he’s confused in some sense, and something attracts his attention. It’s the burning bush, and it doesn’t announce itself in some magnificent way. It glimmers in the shadows of his perception, but then he investigates it. So imagine this, imagine that something glimmers to attract your attention. That’s Mercury, by the way. He’s the winged messenger of the gods. Hermes, yeah, trying to attract your attention. So now you pursue that, and now you pursue it deeply, and the deeper you pursue it, the farther you get away from the particulars of the phenomenon itself, and the closer you get to something like generalized being. And that seems to be the idea that’s implicit in that story of the burning bush and the announcement of the name of God. Yes, but so what happened, and this is from Gregory of Nyssa and his work on Moses going up at the mountain, and all the way to Nicholas of Cusa, right? The burning bush is inherently paradoxical, right? Yes, right, because it’s something that is destroying itself, but is maintained. Right, right, right, and so it’s underneath generation and destruction. It’s underneath all of the mechanisms by which being is particularized. It is trying to point I am that I am, or actually I will be what I will be, right? And so it is trying to point to the ground of being as opposed to the world. And what does Moses try and comprehend? And it’s a paradox, as you said. It’s so interesting, because a paradox is pointing the way to that. You talked, I think, in your lecture in Ralston about the idea that the parables in the New Testament are basically zen cones, right? They’re paradoxes that are designed to produce a state of insight, and that’s the grip of imagination by relevance realization and a pointer to something that’s beyond at the same time. Exactly, you get gripped by the paradox. And does Moses try to comprehend it? No, he takes off his shoes and he goes into reverence. Right, right, right, right, right. That’s why he takes off his shoes, because now he knows he’s standing on holy ground. And so the attempt to name is abandoned. That doesn’t mean you stop naming, it’s ridiculous. Yeah, well that would be the abandonment of sanity in some real sense. But there is a moment when the relevance realization can point to its own irrelevance when you are trying to not grip anything. You’re trying to be opened to the ground of everything. Right, right, right. So that’s how I would answer that. And then the utility. Okay, so now the utility of being open to the ground of everything, let me lay this out, you tell me what you think about this. So you might say, well, does everything have to converge on one? That’s the monotheistic question in some real sense. Well, let’s say, forget that question for a minute, let’s look at the alternative. Things don’t converge. Okay, so what’s the psychological state associated with non-convergence? Well, there’s two. If I have a multitude of goals, and if they’re a multitude, that means they conflict because if they didn’t conflict, they’d be a unity. So I have a multitude of goals. Okay, so that’s an entropy problem, and I’m going to be chaotic, confused, and anxious as a consequence. So that’s one consequence. And the second consequence is, if positive emotion is associated with movement towards a goal, but I have multiple fractured goals, then the intensity of my positive emotion, that’s my enthusiasm, and that’s possession by God, then my enthusiasm is diminished. So the alternative to the vision of a monotheistic unity is a chaotic plurality that’s associated with the decrementian motivation and enthusiasm. Now, that doesn’t answer the question of what that ultimate unity might be, right? But it does at least point out the consequences of not assuming that such a thing exists. It’s basically the, you could call it the psychopathology of polytheism. It’s something like that. And when that’s manifested socially, this is also something interesting. If you and I cannot agree on a unity of vision, now in the moment, we’re both exploring, and we agree on that. So we can sit here without conflict. If we cannot agree on a unity of vision, then we are in conflict. Those are the only options. So now we have this problem. There has to be a unity, or else, these are the consequences. And then the mystery is, well, what constitutes that unity? Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you see arguments from Plotinus and Spinoza basically doing that, that move, which is, I think, I mean, there are some things you can say about the unity. It can’t be at any level below ultimate reality. Right, right. It has to be because- That’s sort of the definition of ultimate reality. Yes, exactly, exactly. And then you get, so I could add to the psychological, the epistemic, right, to understand something and to grasp it. Its reality is an act of integration. It’s an, you know. Yeah. So think about what science does. Here’s all these disparate phenomena, and I have a unifying understanding. And then here’s two different theories. Here’s Darwinian natural selection, here’s Mendelian genetics, and I get modern evolutionary theory, the grand synthesis, right? And why are scientists trying to find the ultimate- Yeah, and those are profound syntheses, and they’re profound because they point to a deep underlying unity. Exactly, exactly. And this is the Neoplatonic argument. And then you add in the argument I did at length in Ralston. If reality isn’t, or if that fundamental grammar of intelligibility doesn’t conform to a fundamental grammar- Yes, right, right. We are doomed. We are doomed to a radical solipsism, a radical, so it’s not, you can’t, I would argue, and I would ask people to look at the longer argument at Ralston, but you can’t take the Kantian position that yes, that is the grammar of intelligibility, but reality is somehow fundamentally different. Because, like, just, like, Clark’s argument, different Clark, Samuel Clark, right? Like, Kant presupposes the existence of other minds with an epistemology that gives him no way of acknowledging the existence of other minds. Why is he writing the damn critique if he doesn’t think, why is he upset when he doesn’t get the reception? Because he believes that there are other minds, right, and they’re real and they’re out there, and he somehow has access to them, and they have alternative frame- Right, so his implicit presuppositions and his explicit presuppositions don’t match. He’s in a performative contradiction, like Whitehead talks about. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so the neoplatonic argument is, not the particulars, but the grammar of intelligibility and the grammar of reality have to ultimately- Okay, okay, so this is actually really why I wanted to talk to you today. So this issue here, so I did a lecture for Ralston as well at Ephesus on the Greek idea of the logos. Yes. Yes, so okay, so I want to, I want to ask you some questions about this, and I suppose this has something to do possibly with neoplatonism and Buddhism and Christianity. Sure. Okay, so let’s, we’ll open with the question about what might constitute this ultimate unity. Now you can think about it as a phenomenological unity in some sense and put it in the objective space, but I want to make a different case. So I think the ultimate unity is better conceptualized as something that you might term a spirit, and we can get into your description of spirit as well. Yeah, Jonathan, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, so a spirit is an animating principle or a set of animating principles. Yes, yes. And a universal spirit would be the same set of animating principles animating a lot of people simultaneously, right? So it’s like a meme in the Dawkins sense, right? It’s like a hyper meme. And so the question is, well, why should you conceptualize that as a spirit? So let me offer a proposition about what’s happening in the biblical corpus. Okay. So, okay, so there’s some attempt to specify the implicit unity, and the way the biblical corpus does that is by laying out a sequence of narratives, and the narratives stress a different ultimate unity. So for example, in the story of Noah, here’s the unity that’s being pointed to. So you have Noah characterized as someone who’s a wise man for his time and place, which is any, all of us, anything all any of us can hope for. Now, Noah has a intuition that the storms are coming, and he has faith in the intuition and acts on it, and then God is characterized as the source of the intuition, and faith, in Noah’s case, is characterized as the willingness to abide by that intuition. That’s the story. Against all the people that are criticizing him. And against all other things that might occupy his attention. He prioritizes that. Yes, yes. Okay, so he meant that, and that’s how he manifests faith in it. That’s right. Okay, so now another story bumps up against that, and the next story is the Tower of Babel, and they’re very different narrative, and so what you have here is this, and this is actually related to this problem of criticality, but we won’t go into that. You have this proposition that human beings can build these towers of abstraction that can become totalitarian in their essence, right? And that God punishes that. Yeah, he fragments them. He fragments it and makes people confused. Okay, so now that’s a very different picture of God, the Noah God. Okay, but they’re contiguous. They call that metonymy. So there’s an implication by juxtaposition that there’s an identity between those two different things, but they’re very diverse. Okay, so then I’ll just do two more of these. So then you have the story of Abraham. Yep. Abraham is a slow starter, right? So he’s very wealthy. His parents are wealthy. He lives a very privileged and sheltered life, but a spirit makes itself manifest to him, and the spirit is the call to adventure, and so God in the Abrahamic story is the spirit that calls even the comfortable out to the catastrophic adventure of their life, and that’s juxtaposed against these other two spirits. Then you have, let’s say, Moses. Now you have a different characterization of the ultimate unity, and the ultimate unity in the story of Moses is the unity that announces itself in the burning bush, but also the spirit that punishes the tyrant and that calls the slaves out of slavery. And, okay, so now. The open future, too. Meaning? The gods of Egypt are gods of location and function. The god of Moses, and even, so this is a development of the god of Abraham. The god of Moses travels with people through space and time into an open future that they make. Right, right, right, okay, and that’s a reference, as far as I can tell, back to the opening lines of Genesis, because God characterizes himself at the beginning of the book of Genesis, I think, in terms that are very much akin to the terms we’ve been using to describe consciousness itself, because God is the thing that confronts the pluripotential chaos, and that’s really, if you look at what, what’s the word, teotohu vabohu, that’s really what it means. It means pluripotential chaos, is something like that. He confronts that pluripotential chaos and generates the habitable order that is good out of it, and that’s the image of God in man. Those are identified as the same thing. And this is so crucial, because it also implies, so one of the questions my students used to always ask me is how do you know that what you’re teaching us isn’t just another ideology? Because I was trying to teach counter ideology, and that’s a really good question, right? It’s the question right now. It is the question. But if, imagine that you could have a story that concentrates on the process by which functional stories are generated. Well, this is what I wanted to say to you. I think what you’re getting, I mean, a spirit is something like a multiply realizable, like, you know, generative function. What I mean by that is, you’re trying to find the through line. Each one of the, think about, remember I did the multi-dimensional opponent processing? Each one of these narratives is an opponent processing. You’re right, right? Yeah, it’s Cain versus Abel. And there’s this, but there’s also, right, there’s Egypt versus the promised land. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, conflict. But Egypt is exploit the here now, or explore the there then. That we talked about at the core of relevance. Remember they talk about the flesh pots of Egypt, like this, but if we stay here, right, there’s so much we could just exploit. But you’re in a slave. Right, well, that’s what the Israelites get, what would you, nostalgic about when they’re in the desert too, is right, their immediate needs are no longer being gratified. And that causes them to become faithless and fractious. So what I’m suggesting to you is like, I’ll just use the Exodus story though, as one of, but all of them, I would argue, what myth is always doing, or often doing, and Levi Strauss had sort of a sense of this with structuralism. But what it’s doing is it’s pointing you to opponent processing. And then you can think of, okay, here’s this myth with this opponent processing. Here’s this myth with this opponent processing. What’s the through lines? And then what I do is I try to find, like what you’re doing, what I was talking about earlier, you’re trying to find the multi-dimensional, like nexus, the through line of the meta. The meta through line. Yeah, of all the opponent processing. You’re trying to say, okay, all of the relevance realization, if I could do all the trade-offs, this is Nicholas of Cusa with his open sense of infinity. In the ancient Greek world, infinity is a bad thing. It’s chaos, but with Cusa, it opens up into, and then the whole Neoplatonic tradition, into a positive thing. It’s like, no, no, if I could get all of the opposites, I would see that in infinity, they all coincide, the coincidence of the opposites. Right, oh, oh, oh. And that would be the culmination, not in any entity, that would be sort of the summation of what our cognition is about. It would be sort of, I would have found the source of intelligibility, because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition, which would get me. And that’s the resolution of all opposing conflicts. Okay, so here’s an interesting question. So I’ve been thinking about this recently, so talking with Pagio. So there’s this idea in the story of Adam and Eve that suffering doesn’t descend upon the world until the sin of Adam and Eve. And I’ve been trying to take that apart with Matthew Pagio most particularly. And Pagio believes that, Matthew believes that the sin of Eve and Adam was something like pride. And so Eve hearkened to the voice of the serpent. And the serpent, in some sense, is that which is poisonous, and the fruit that it offers is inedible in its essence. And Eve’s pride is that she can even speak for the poisonous and inedible. And Adam’s pride is that he’ll hearken to the voice of Eve. And so, and I like that idea. I like the idea that pride comes before a fall, and that we can bite off more than we can chew. And that men’s pride, what would you say, motivates them to attempt to appear bigger than they are in the eyes of women, and that women’s pride motivates them to incorporate under the guise of compassion more than they can eat, let’s say. Now there’s a Christian idea, and a Jewish idea as well, that suffering doesn’t descend upon the world until this sin takes place. Now so you can imagine that you followed the through line of meaning assiduously, and you were able to bring the opposites into coincidence. And you’d have to do that with proper epistemic humility, and openness to possibility. The question would be, in some sense, is to what degree do your moral errors actually constitute the suffering to begin with, and then to what degree do you think the suffering itself could be ameliorated, and I mean maybe eliminated in favor of something like the spirit of play, if you followed the through line of meaning religiously. Right? And that’s because I have this sympathy to the idea that unbearable suffering in some sense is built into the structure of reality itself, right? Because we’re finite and mortal creatures. That makes you more of a Buddhist. Yes, right, right. Although you see the same emphasis in Judaism, right, with the tragic sense of history, and of course, the fact that the central figure in Christianity is crucified, in some sense, speaks to the same thing. But then there is an open question there, right, which is, well yes, suffering is built into finitude, but it’s clearly the case that we exaggerate and multiply it by failing to hit the mark, you know, and so. I think we can ameliorate it. I happen to think that the very processes of relevance realization that make us adaptive make us perennially susceptible to self-deception. That’s my interpretation of the first noble truth of Buddhism. The very processes, like just look at the heuristic and bias literature. It’s double named for a good reason. I can’t do, I can’t actually calculate formal probability of events. It’s combinatorially exclusive. So I have to use the representative heuristic and the availability heuristic, right? But, and there’s, and the work of, I’ll be talking about this in the course, right, of Gigerens and others, is in many situations that outperform, in real world messy ill-defined situations where there’s real uncertainty, not risk. We’ve confused those two together. Risk is you can assign a probability, right? But real uncertainty, these heuristics actually do really, really well. But they do make you prone to mistake. You take your loved one to the airport and you say, you say all these euphemisms for don’t die. Like text me when you’re there, safe trip. Because you can easily imagine a plane crashing. And when a plane crashes, it’s not a crash, it’s a disaster, it’s a tragedy. So the availability and the representative heuristics are getting triggered like mad. And then you get back in your car, the North American death machine, without giving it a second thought. And that’s an act of self-deception, right? And it’s a significant, you’re not properly calibrating your level of affect and arousal to the risks you’re facing. That’s what I mean when I think the very things that, I can’t get rid of the heuristics because then I would face combinatorial explosion if I try and do the probability calculations. But this is the no free lunch theorem. Well that’s the complicating factor of how much of, so you might say, well how much of suffering is due to the intrinsic nature of finite finitude, metal finitude. How much is due to ignorance and inevitable blindness and then how much is due to failure to hit the mark? And wisdom is about being able to differentiate those and properly calibrate your efforts to that differentiation. Elaborate on that. So Plato, Jule Highland, finite transcendence. Plato’s whole argument is we are finite transcendent. We are being capable of transcending ourselves. But if we only pay attention to that, we fall prey to hubris. Right, right. If we only pay attention to our finitude, we fall prey to tyranny and servitude. Right, right. We’re the two in ongoing opponent processing. Yeah, yeah. And what we want, what we keep trying to do is resolve it into one of these or the other. And we keep going back and forth. And Plato is about, you know, you can’t resolve that. You have to always hold those two together. Right, right. And that means you have to properly realize. So there’s no, the solution is participation in the process that continues to generate the solution. So let me give you a strong analogy. When we’ve been invoked, is there a final form of life in evolution? That makes no sense. If you understand evolution, there isn’t a culminating life form. That’s not, there’s no intentionality to evolution. But you know, I’m just speaking that way. Right, there’s no project of, ah, now. Now we’ll have the organism that will never suffer the possibility of extinction. That’s impossible. You can’t do that. I think that, and if relevance realization, the meaning is a kind of, you know, ongoing rapid cognitive evolution. There is no final form of that. This is one of the areas where I criticize the Platonic framework. Plato’s notion of the sacred as completion, static perfection, that I find is very problematic because I don’t think it actually sits well with his notion of, and soccer music. I like to think of music in that regard too. And you think about what Bach does in particular. I really love the Brandenburg Concertos because what Bach does is he brings a phrase to a magnificent conclusion, and then out of that emerges another set of possibilities that he brings to another magnificent conclusion. And it seems to me that that’s a nice model for the unfolding of being, right? It’s to attain a goal and then to pull out of that goal a new goal that transcends the previous goal and to do that indefinitely. That’s the self-organizing. And then maybe you do have as a final solution in some sense to that, the acquiescence to that process. Okay, so let me off. Sorry, but isn’t that the ultimate version of your metagame? Yes, yes, definitely. Yes. Okay, so let me show this. And there is a notion of this in Christianity, especially in Eastern Orthodoxy. You see it with Gregory of Nyssa, and you see it in Maximus, and it’s this notion of epictasis, that we don’t come to rest in God. What God is, is God is the meta affordance so that we continually self-transcend through God. Yeah, yeah. That’s the Jacob’s ladder vision. Yes, right. To ascend continually towards a destination that’s infinitely receding. That’s right. And that grows as it recedes. But this is the thing, the infinity is not inaccessible to you, right? Because the infinity is not just receding from you, it’s also reaching towards you. And this is reality. Reality is constantly shining into your frame with intelligibility, and constantly receding out into the mystery. And I think the- And that’s the parallel of the Greek idea of the logos, I think, with the Judeo-Christian idea of the logos. I think so too. I mean, there’s lots of people who won’t like that. But I think the notion of the logos, that especially as you see it coming through the neoplatonic tradition and taken up into diologos and to dialectic, I think that deeply converges. I mean, the Christian model is ultimately a model of that. And this is, you know, and I’m not gonna try and do anything, but the paradox of the unity trinity is an attempt to somehow say there’s something inherently dialogical, I would argue, about how we come into relationship with ultimate reality. Right, right. And that’s- Right, and it’s an attempt to solve the problem of unity and multiplicity as well. So I’d be looking at the transformations of the image of God in the biblical corpus. We know the biblical corpus is an assembled library, right? And we don’t exactly understand the process by which the stories came to follow one another in the order- And how they were redacted with each other. Exactly, exactly. So it’s a mystery, but it’s a mystery of collective intuition. It’s something like that. Yeah, distributed cognition was that word. Yes, yes. And it’s something like distributed insight because what happens is there’s different forms of juxtaposition and some of them catch on. People go, oh yes, that works, but they don’t know why, which is a very interesting thing. So you have the Old Testament corpus in Christianity followed by the New Testament corpus. And there’s a new proposition here. I want you to tell me what you think about this. So one of the things that psychotherapists have learned across disciplines in the last hundred years is that if you get people to voluntarily confront what they’re afraid of avoiding, disgusted by, and inclined to be willfully blind about, they get braver. It isn’t habituation. It’s not the substitution of relaxation for anxiety because you can do it without relaxation training. It seems to be contingent on the willingness to do the voluntary confrontation. But that means, I think that really means a willingness to break down to a degree. So the willingness can’t be mere assertion. It’s not propositional. You have to do it. Yeah, you have to do it, and there has to be a vulnerability. There has to be a real willingness to learn. Yeah, that’s humility. Yes, humility, epistemic and moral humility. And so I think what you’re doing is you’re actually making use of dialogue, or perhaps even dialogos, in order to afford the complexification of the person’s competence, which is actually what they are ultimately seeking. Yes, yes. Well, you do that in part by demonstrating to them that they can find the zone of proximal development through voluntary confrontation, right? So if you’re exposing to someone to an elevator that they’re afraid of, they might not get in the elevator, but they will stand 40 feet away and look at it, right? And 39 feet. Progressive desensitization. Yeah, which is not a good term, because what it is in fact is it’s progressive, generalizable adaptation. Exactly. Which is a very different thing. Yes, and that’s what I was gonna argue. I was gonna argue it’s actually progressive complexification of their cognitive capacity. They can manage more and more of the variables without being overwhelmed by the potentialities they’re presenting. Well, and they also have a chance to observe themselves acting out the proposition that they are those creatures, right, because one of the metacognitions that goes along with phobic avoidance is, I can’t handle this. Yes. And so then you put the person in the situation. You challenge that. Yeah, and you show, well, yes, under certain circumstances, not only can you handle this, but you find it optimally challenging and it’s really good for your development. And so basically what you do is you put someone, you’re using exposure therapy, you put them into the zone that everyone occupies when they’re learning optimally. It’s exactly the same thing. But the zone is exactly that place between assimilation and accommodation that we were talking about earlier. You’re trying to get them to see, if you’ll allow me some of my language, that it’s not, the problem isn’t just subjectively in them. I can’t get in the elevator. No, no, there’s a real relationship that you are capable of evolving. Like you can, and you can evolve your cognition so that you can get into the elevator. So that you can confront what you’re afraid of. I had one client, the doors finally opened to the elevator and she said, that’s a tomb. And I thought, well, we’re simultaneously exposing you in this Freudian symbolic manner, not only to the elevator, but to the idea of your own finitude and mortality. And that was definitely happening at the same time. Okay, so imagine that the biblical corpus is assembled and there’s multiple pictures of the spirit of God that characterize the Old Testament. And then there’s a culmination, at least from the Christian perspective, in the New Testament. But here’s the idea of the culmination. The idea is that the same spirit that called Noah to prepare for catastrophe and the same spirit that called Abraham out of his comfort to the adventure of his life is the spirit that is motivating people to voluntarily confront the catastrophic suffering of their life. It’s the same idea. And then that idea gets transformed even one more, one more, in one more profound manner, which is not only is that the same spirit now humanized, because that’s something you can actually act out, but that if you do act it out, that that inverts the tragedy. And so the hypothesis is that there’s a paradoxical balance between the degree to which you’re willing to voluntarily take on the suffering of your life and your ability to simultaneously transcend the suffering. And that in the final analysis, the more you’re willing to bear the burden of being voluntarily, the less suffering is actually associated with that, the more play, right? The more progression up Jacob’s ladder. And so, okay, two things. What do you think about the proposition that seems to emerge there that that’s the same spirit and that it’s reasonably construed as a spirit? And what do you think about that as a proposition? I mean, you tend to come at this from a more Buddhist perspective. Or Neoplatonic. I mean, so for me, I mean, that process, that process of being able to find the through lines of the deeper, for me, when you’re talking about a spirit, you’re talking about like a dynamical self-organizing system that’s generative in the way we’ve been talking about. And it doesn’t just generate being, it generates the intelligibility of being. So, right, and that’s logos. Yes, right. And so for me, trying to find the through line, right? So this has a logos and this has a logos, but what’s the logos of all of these things? Right, right, right. And it’s this nested. And that maps onto everything we’ve been talking about, about cognition, intelligence, and consciousness, the recursive relevance realization, the predictive processing. Like for me, those two things sing. And if the argument about the grammar of reality has to be, our cognition has to be deeply conformable to that, then for me, that’s something the Neoplatonists are talking. So what the Neoplatonists are doing, right, is they’re taking Plato and they’re finding that spirit. Right, Plato’s the spirit that takes you out of the cave, the ascent, the reciprocal. And the dialogical spirit. Yeah, and I’d like to come back to that. And then you’ve got the Aristotelian spirit, which is the idea of knowing as conforming, and the scientific project of trying to get an organized systematic understanding. And then you have the stoic system of, no, no, logos is how do I best integrate my agency so that I can be most virtuously disposed to the world so that I am not overwhelmed by the tragedy, but I can be at the end, right? And then, so Neoplatonism is like that grand unified field theory of the whole philosophical spiritual tradition of Socrates. This is what I’m doing in my series, After Socrates, is tracing that out. Right, you should just tell everybody now about that so that everybody listening knows. So, which, so just continue talking like this? Sure. Yeah, so January 9th I’m releasing my new series, After Socrates, it’ll be free on YouTube, it’ll be released twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. And I’m really trying to play with the format and bring to light this whole through line that runs from Socrates to people like Nicholas of Cusa and Regina, right? And what it is is there’s a continuing lectures series that build a continuous argument, like I did in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, but I also have a section on points to ponder, so, and this is to encourage people to reflect and to discuss with each other. And then I also teach a practice. I move out of the propositional and there’s a pedagogical program of practices that is also unfolding in parallel to the lectures. And then I also move out of the monologue because I’m trying to be Socratic, right? And so I have episodes where I’ll be with other people and the four of us will demonstrate a whole ecology of practices. And then I’m also trying to put the whole Socratic, right, a way into dialogue with Christianity because that’s what happened in the West, right? And so there’s a series within the series, Christopher, Master Pietro and I, we meet and we go into dialogue because we’re doing Kierkegaard’s confrontation with Socrates and Kierkegaard’s wrestling of this, and I would say it’s opponent processing. So he’s a follower of Christ, but Socrates is his teacher. And he’s constantly toggling between those and you can see this very powerful. And Chris. Well, that’s an opponent process that’s at work in Western civilization itself. Exactly, exactly. And so Chris and I are bringing that out. And so what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to, I’m trying to. Now people can get access to this on your YouTube channel. Exactly. So you can just look up John Vervecky, find his YouTube channel. We’ll put the links in the description of this video. And so what I’m trying to do is, it’s called After Socrates because I’m after Socrates and that I’m trying to understand him, right? Because he’s a deeply enigmatic figure and importantly so, because one of the great things about the Socratic dialogues is Socrates never, Socrates is always in that zone of proximal development. Yeah, yeah. He’s shining in enough to your intelligibility and then he puts you into a poria, that state where you have perplexity and wonder because he wants to also open you up to the mystery and he’s constantly. And so I’m after Socrates in that sense. And I’m after Socrates in that, I wanna try and reverse engineer this practice of dialectic into dialogus, not Hegelian dialectic, Platonic dialectic and there’s all this new work on it. So dialectics is a practice and dialogus is a process. Yeah, yeah. Well, dialogus is the practice of psychotherapy. I think so. It is, it’s the redemptive practice of psychotherapy, right? The mutual exploration of the truth that redeems. So Socrates is about, this is easy to say and it is hard to realize because it’s so hard to understand and to make real. And so I think it’s important to understand that in both senses of the word of understand and to make real, to be able to follow the logos wherever it goes and to do that comprehensively, profoundly, percolating through different layers of the psyche, permeating many different domains of your life, getting that ultimate profundity, that ultimate kind of plausibility. That ultimate unity. Yes, yes. And so. And intensity of purpose is unstoppable. Well, it’s a good thing to be unstoppable in life because there’s plenty of things that conspire to attempt to stop you. Yes, and he, that’s why he actually, he dies for it. Right, well, that’s very relevant too to our discussion of transcendent meaning because one of the things that emerges in the Socratic apologia is the sense that Socrates has lived a life so deep and meaningful that he’s able to, he’s able to abide by his set of moral principles even in the face of death. Yes. And part of the reason for that appears to be that he lived his life fully and so he’s satisfied with it in some fundamental sense. He’s not clinging to it. So this is the interesting thing about him. I mean, Socrates knows that he does not know and that eventually becomes the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa and the ability to wrestle with the paradoxes and the coincidental, but he does know things. He knows, to erotica, he knows what to care about, which is your point, and he also knows that the unexamined life is not worth living. The life in which you have not tried to. Because it’s unconscious. It’s unconscious and it’s also gonna be, your agency’s gonna break down, you’re making yourself more prey to self-deception. You’re tyrannical. You’re gonna, exactly, all of this. And so I’m trying to trace out, but not just trace out the ideas because Socrates is ultimately about, and this is what’s called third-way Platonism, the new scholarship. Socrates is ultimately about trying to shift people into the non-propositional because that is ultimately where virtue is cultivated. You and I both know you can get these university professors who are highly trained in moral argument, and that is in no way predictive of how virtuously they live their lives. Propositional management is at most a necessary condition for virtue, but it is in no way sufficient. And you can see Socrates, and Socrates is always challenging two things. He’s challenging just intuitive pronouncement as to what something is. Well, what is courage? Did you know? I know what courage is, blah, blah, blah. And he’s also challenging sort of third-person, right, technical definition. Well, I learned this definition. Socrates says, but do you really? You enact it. Yes. Right. So he’s constantly challenging the first-person perspective of just spontaneous subjective authority. He’s constantly challenging the third person imposing technical authority, because he’s trying to constantly get us into that second-person perspective where we actually enter into the dialogue that trains us for virtue. So you’ll get, like when he’s arguing with the two generals about courage, one represents this intuitive, the other represents, he learned all these definitions from the sophist, and they’re very sophisticated. Right, right, right. And Socrates undermines both of those, and he doesn’t come to a conclusion. But here’s the thing. The generals were coming to Socrates because they’re asking him, why shouldn’t we take our sons for education? Because we want them to be courageous. There’s no conclusion at the dialogue, but the generals, both generals say, we would like our sons to come and learn from you. Right, right. Because Socrates exemplifies the courage in the dialogue that you’ve been… You know, you see something similar happening in the Brothers Karamazov, because you have Ivan is very able to put forward extremely compelling propositional atheistic arguments. In kind of a Nietzschean spirit, in real sense, right? And Alyosha, who’s the monastic novitiate, is no match for Ivan on the propositional front, but he’s a way better person. And Dostoevsky also explores that in The Idiot, because that’s Prince Mishkin, right? It’s a Christ analog for all its purposes, right? But Dostoevsky, because he uses narrative rather than philosophy, is able to produce an embodied figure who exemplifies virtue, even though the propositional grounds for his moral pronouncements are relatively… And I think this is a profound thing, and trying to bring that out and then say… So what are the practices that you start to… Oh, well, so… You want to bring it as Socrates was famous for being able to stand in a meditative state, transfixed for 24 to 48 hours, totally, right? So there’s a profound capacity for mindfulness. And this is why he famously never got drunk. He could drink quite a bit. But the mindfulness was like he could stay… Wonder how much of that hallucinogenic Greek wine he was consuming while doing all of this. I don’t know, but he has this tremendous… So I start with teaching people about a basic meditative practice. That’s taking off your mental framing and looking at it, seeing what way it might be distorting. But how do you know if you’ve distorted? Well, you have to put your glasses on and see if you now see more clearly or deeply. And those are contemplative practices. And I take people through a contemplative practice. And you take them into a kind of… Teach them lexio divina, how to read the Platonic text, not just for information, but how to get into that resonance with it so it will bring about transformation. There’s a lexio divina, which is a way of reading. And then there’s philosophical fellowship where people sort of do a joint kind of lexio divina with each other about a philosophical text. And you’re not trying to, is this text right or wrong? I’m not saying you should never do that. But the point of this practice is, no, no, I want to presence the perspective from which this text was generated so that I can enter into a Vygotskyan relationship with that perspective because it will challenge me into a zone of proximal development. And then I can practice being in the zone of proximal development as a consequence of engaging in dialogue. Well, I think one of the things that maybe distinguished me to some degree from my peers, let’s say my academic peers, is that almost every time I read something, my goal was to see what I could learn from reading it. Not to dispense with it. Like to, and I think it’s the same position of reverence that you described in relationship to Moses and taking off his shoes. It’s like, I want to find out what’s in this. I did that with Freud and I did that with Jung and I did that with the biblical corpus. Not to dispense with it or to argue it out of existence, even though testing ideas is important, but to be open to whatever might transform me as a consequence of reading the text. It’s a shift from the adjectival to the adverbial. Right? Okay. I’m not just, so I’ve had this many times, but one time really profound for me was Spinoza. Spinoza’s hard. Spinoza’s like reading Euclid’s Elements because it’s patterned on Euclid’s Elements. You have axioms and proofs and theorems and it’s the most logically rigorous thing in your ear. And you’re trying to remember all the predicates, this and that. And then what happens though is you get what he talks about. You go from discursive reasoning into what he calls schiancia into intiva. You see, you get this realization where you see all of the whole in each premise, in each premise and all of the whole, and then you see all of reality like that. And so you see Spinozistically, you take on Spinoza’s perspective rather than remembering his propositions. That’s what I mean about being, well, that’s something like ancestor worship. That’s something like inhabiting the spirit of the divine ancestor because what you’re trying to do, one of the things I loved about university was that it enabled me to select my peers from among the great men of history. Now I’m not saying I was able to manage that, but I at least had that opportunity. Each of those people was animated, well, I would say by a central, in some sense by a central exploratory and benevolent spirit in so far as they were manifestations of logos. So this is, so you get, I’m doing these practices with people that are, nuns, N-O-N-E-S, secular, but they’ll say, well, that was like a secular seance because I felt like Spinoza was present. Right, right, right. And so what happens is you get that we agency, you get that, you get the spirit of the distributed cognition that is not reducible to a mere aggregation of individual consciousnesses. You get that emergent dynamical. Like a rock concert. Yes, exactly, exactly. But you’re doing it with intelligibility rather than just salient sounds. Yeah. Right? And- Well, so that isn’t it, but that also is. We can state pretty forthrightly that that is an experience of a profoundly unifying spirit because if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be able to inhabit the same conceptual and perceptual space simultaneously. So you take people through this progression, you get them into that, and then you take them into dialectic, into dialogus, where you actually get them to get that collective flow state around the examination of a virtue. Right, right, right. And the group acts like, and people are shifting roles, the group acts like Socrates to the individual, and everybody is switching around, and what happens is people get this collective spirit, logos shows up, the fire of Herakles kindles, and people are suddenly drawn, and what happens is they go from all their propositions about virtue to saying they experience awe and reverence about the virtue, and they- Right, right, right. And then they also say, they’ll report this sort of progression of intimacies, they’ll say, I discovered a kind of intimacy with people that I didn’t know existed, but I’ve always wanted, right? Right, right. It’s not friendship, it’s not sexuality, I use the Christian term, fellowship. It’s fellowship, right? Yeah, right. And then they do this neat thing, they’ll go from, you and I are experiencing this kind of intimacy to we all are experiencing intimacy with the logos. Yeah. And then, they can also go to, you and I, intimacy with each other, with the logos, and all of that is becoming more intimate with being itself. Yeah. Talk about feeling more connected through it. That’s dialectic into the logos. Okay, well, so if all of you are inclined to be interested in this sort of thing, you can go over to John’s YouTube channel and follow his series of lectures. It’s gonna launch when? January 9th. And just so you all know too, some of you may know that I’ve started this academy with my daughter, Peterson Academy, which is an attempt to bring humanities and liberal arts education to people on a large scale. And we have a lot of professors lined up to help us with that, about 30 so far, top rate people, as far as I’m concerned. And John is actually going down to Miami this week to record a series of lectures that will add up to about eight hours on the sorts of topics that we discussed today. Exactly, exactly. So, okay, so everyone, we have to stop unfortunately, because we could continue pretty much forever. And hopefully will. And I’d like to thank all of you for attending, watching and listening today, and to encourage you to check out John Vervecky’s YouTube channel and to follow his lectures. There’s no doubt that if you participate in that with some degree of intent, that the consequences will be transformative. John was, and is, one of the most popular lecturers that the University of Toronto ever produced. And his students were constantly raving to me when I was still there about the transformations they had encountered, both intellectually and I would say personally, as a consequence of taking John’s courses. So this is a good deal. So go and check that out. And I’m going to turn over to the DailyWire Plus platform now and talk to John more on the biographical level for a while. I want to trace the development of his through line through his life, which is what I tend to use the extra half an hour for. And so for all of you watching and listening, happy new year and thank you very much for your time and attention. And don’t hesitate to check out John Vervecky’s YouTube channel. Ciao, thanks John. It was great as always. Thank you. Yep, yep. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on DailyWirePlus.com.