Plato's The Republic, Book 7 Discussion, part 2⧸3 (0-uzMo281WM)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0-uzMo281WM

Let’s revisit the intentions that we said two weeks ago now. Danny was trying to see the grammar discernment on attention and focusing on how to be able to explain things simply. I was trying to relate to the principle behind education, which is the place where we kind of didn’t get to. So I guess I’m going to have to revisit that. Mark was focusing on the nature of analogy. And Ethan was trying to be present with the insights of others. Parasitizing your guys’ insights for my own. Yeah. Well, tell us how that worked out for you. I don’t know. I mean, I can’t think of anything specifically off the top of my head. But. But it does happen. I know that. Yeah. I was I was talking to Danny about relating to the process that you’re participating in effectively. Right. So, yeah, let’s revisit the last two weeks that I do a lot. Not not so much around cave work. I did I did some studying after. Pretty rough bike ride. So so that was pretty good to figure that I could still concentrate and do that. I do got the sense that not specifically in relation to this book, but just in general, like all of this for me stuff gets more more of a body for me. Like it becomes more tangible and relatable. Instead of ineffable. That’s good. Good news. I’m thinking now this idea of of justice, right? Like it’s. It’s real strange because we were talking about authority and the talking about authority and stuff like that. Right. And it’s like there’s also implications in what what authority do you accept? Right. Like is it a just authority or not? Right. Like like how do you so I think I think it’s interwoven in a bunch of stuff with a bunch of connections that we haven’t engaged with yet. If we try to apply it to the modern condition. So what? How do you know what authority to trust is? To a certain extent, you don’t know. You have to. I mean. That’s the scary. Well, I would argue that you do know. The point is that people overrule that or ideological reasons. And and and and neurotic reasons or whatever. Right. Like just like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, there’s. There’s just things that keep people busy. And. They privilege over communing with you. Right. Just because. They’re they’re alien to communing with you. So, yeah, my intention is. I’m going to try and take a step back and see how. The relation, how to relate to some something. Can be improved. I guess that that’s going to be my focus for today. Danny, you want to set your intention? Yeah, mine is going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. I’m going to be. One step in that direction, one step beyond understanding grammar and one step towards. How to use what I’ve been learning to relate to other people. So it’s, I’m kind of going to stick with a similar intention, but. Continue to try to advance it. So there’s been a lot of fruit from. I’ve been having lots of conversations with people and I’ve been doing a lot of things in the last two weeks and I’m seeing a lot of manifestations from we’ve been doing here. Oh, sorry. Hand it off. Ethan. I think my intention is going to be. Again, back to that similar and dissimilar dissimilarity. And I don’t even just. I guess. Appreciating the, the, those two concepts and the fact that they both exist and. I’m just thinking about that, I guess. Um, and being able to see it and appreciate it more. I don’t know how to, I can’t refine it any better than that. Maybe I will eventually, but yeah. Similarities and dissimilarities and. They’re. Where they meet up and where they don’t. Thanks. Mark. Yeah, so. No. Fill on my quest to. Just sort of see the other perspectives on the text and, and figure out how they relate to it’s actually in the text. A lot of people are projecting into this still that things that are not there. Right. And some, some of them are seem to be issues of mistranslation and some seem to be issues of wishful thinking. A lot of them just seem to be misunderstandings around that. Is actually oriented. Nick, do you want to set an intention? Uh, well, I’m just here to glean, I think probably more than anything and just. Yeah. Sorry, I don’t mean to be parasitical on everybody else’s work, but, um, yeah, it’s been, it’s been really busy lately. And, uh, I’m actually feeding animals right now still. So. It’s up to you. You get to pick. So, um, yeah, so I want to go over what we went through last week. Right. So there was this one thing that I felt that we didn’t focus on. Was that the phenomenological aspect of, of the trajectory, right? So there’s a lot of stuff like pain, irritation, dazzlement, becoming accustomed. Um, non-direct relations. And, and, and, and then in the sense also the loss of the outside, um, but it changed in perspective. Um. Well, the moment of the eyes as consequence of answering and leaving. So there’s a implication that in a transition, uh, you have to readjust, which, which is basically switching frames, right? You need to recontextualize what you’re doing and then shitting on the people who profess that they can, uh, invoke this process in people. Um, because basically the argument is that you need to move the whole soul to see in the mind and basically cannot do that from the outside, you have to cultivate that as a person. And then they’re making the argument that the capacity to do this is pre-existent. Right. So that’s why they choose them in, in you. Um, the station between becoming and being right from the world of becoming to the world of being. We had some issues around that, right? And so becoming is that which is in time. And the being, I’m not sure where I got this, but I’ve written down that it needs to be endured. So in some sense, you’re, you’re subjected to being. And then the path of education is true aestheticism. Actually you remove the factors that distract you. And there’s a part about binding being self-taught, right? So there’s this, this aspect where the philosopher is alienated from society because they’re just separated, right? They, they’ve been isolated in, in the being raised. So the gratitude aspects, uh, needs to be highlighted, uh, how they are integrated within and the culture and how the city facilitated what, what they could be. And I think we were talking about the duty, right? That they have towards the city that that’s kind of coming forward. That’s kind of coming forward from, from that aspect. Um, well, yeah, and then reluctant, right? This is where we ended, right? Reluctant governance turns to quiet governance, right? So if you don’t want to do things, you’re not going to turn any stones. If you don’t turn any stones, you’re not going to find much opposition. You don’t find opposition. You’ll have a peaceful state effectively. You don’t overstep. You react to what is brought to you. You need to provide your word in virtue and in wisdom. And, uh, if, if you want to write, if you have an agenda, then you will attract the competition. Um, and then they’re talking about creating the process for ascension, uh, defining the category of knowledge that would draw a soul from becoming to being. And they go into these categories that we had before, gymnastic, relating to growth and decay of the body, uh, to generation and corruption. Music is relating to the influence of habit, harmony, rhythm. Now you have calculation that’s making a distinction between one, two, and three. Right. And then if we should hold on to that part of it, right. Cause I think, well, the one is the individual, right. And then the two is, uh, you’re making, you’re making a distinction between you, you’re making groupings, right. And then the tree is, is that which kind of like, I think the one is the unity, the unity of everything. So like he’s talking about the fingers, right. They’re all fingers and since they’re all the same, they’re all one. I think that’s the way he’s talking about the one. Right. But that’s the identity. Like I wouldn’t call that unity, but that’s because, and it’s also contextual, right. Cause like the fingers is the same because we’ve defined finger in a certain way, probably as a consequence of its function and location or whatever. Right. And then to, to, well, yeah, you can go through the text. Maybe we should read in the text, but I think the individual will be the number. So he says the one and number and the individuals, the number, what makes them unique or different from each other, which requires the, the, the distinction, or I guess we could say discernment. And that’s what, um, that’s the, not the sensible, but the intelligible realm, you know, we, you know, we got the, the line, right. Which things that require thinking is what he’s saying. Things that require thinking discernment that aren’t, yeah. He goes into, he goes into that later. Right. What he’s basically stating here is this, what I would call much to do about nothing relevance, realization, neo-platonic framework everybody’s talking about. Right. Which it’s, it’s odd to me that it’s right here with the cave, right. With the den. He’s basically talking about how do we discern one, one from many and when do, when does it sort of, when is it advantageous to change how we’re looking at things? And he doesn’t use the word perspective, obviously, but that’s effectively what they’re discussing. What’s the proper perspective, right. To your point, Ethan, that’s, that’s really all this neo-platonism stuff that Vervege talks about. It’s all resolved here. I don’t even know why it’s a disgust. Did you read the Republic? Cause it’s actually kind of there. It’s all resolved. You don’t, you don’t need the neuroscience, the rest of the philosophy, right. It’s already here. It’s done for you. You don’t need to recapitulate it and make it sound smarter with the words. Cause Plato already put that one to bed right here, which again, I find, I find interesting, but yeah, the discussion around the fingers is exactly that discussion. You’ll notice it’s not a binary. And I think that’s also important to realize that there’s two things happening, right. So there’s, there’s going from finger as such, right. To the individual finger with the individual characteristics. And, and there’s also the going up, right. So it’s going up from, from a subset to, to the entire set, right. And those two movements, they are, they have different rules, right. Because the finger emanates the identity on all fingers. While when I’m trying to get the essence of the finger from one finger, that’s way harder and different because now there’s a body, right. Like there’s, there’s something beyond the specific identity of my finger that I need to relate to, to connect all fingers into one thing. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s basically the, the, the, and he, and he did this earlier with the asymmetrical nature of going up versus going down. Right. So he’s already established the asymmetrical nature of up versus down. So they’re not the root, the inverse of one another. That’s not what they are. Already stated that abundantly clearly. Right. And now we, I’m sorry for the other person you mentioned, but I’m sorry for the other person. You’re not the one that’s going to be the one that’s going to be the one that’s going to be the one that’s going to be the one that you laugh at. I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Now what he’s, what he’s effectively doing at this point is he’s saying you can’t use emergence to figure this out. That’s what he’s saying. That you cannot use the single instance or any set of single instances to figure out what a finger is because each finger, each actual finger instantiated is unique. And that is the problem that this, these modern quote neoplatonists, which doesn’t exist, are struggling with, right? Which is just, it’s just a postmodern restatement. It’s the, you know, trying to take postmodernism and say, I don’t know, Plato, Plato didn’t account for this or something when, when in fact, he put this whole issue to bed rather nicely with, with, and it’s not two things. It’s still actually three. Right. One of the things that always bothered me about the concept of opponent processing is like, what do we mean by opposition? Opposition with respect to what? So what we’re talking about with this finger stuff, it’s at 525 and right before 525 comes 524 when he’s talking about you can’t have a heavy without soft, you can’t have, you know, they go together. You don’t first have to learn to know cold and then you have to, you know, you know, and sequentially, and then you have to learn hot. Like you, you know, one by the other. And so when we use the language to describe, you know, a lot of the properties and objects, it’s like, well, you know, it’s yeah, that’s something that always, always bothered me that came to mind here. Yeah, I had a little bit of a time here. Yeah, he calls it opponent processing. Bishop Maximus actually in their set of three talks, I think it’s the third one, pushes back on that. It’s not opponent process. John, of course, doubles down for reasons that make no sense. It’s not opponent processing. There’s no opposition. That is insane. And it’s wrong. And it’s obviously observably by your experience incorrect. To your point, Danny, there’s no way to understand hot and cold as in opposition to one another because you need you need both of them to understand that entire spectrum of experience. So you would say like, oh, in order to know that something is cold, you would have first need a priori knowledge of what something hot is. Well, how do you know what that something hot? How do you know what hot is in the first place? There’s some we’re getting back into this trap of like somewhere that we need a preexisting knowledge of something, you know, and that’s the thing where we were born into creation that we came to. Right. And yeah, like you I think what he’s saying is like, so I lift up this cup and me lifting up that he says uses the term two senses. And when we think of senses, we think of like sight material senses. Right. That’s not what he’s talking about. So when I lift this up, this motion of lifting is the same thing that I would use for something that’s heavy and for something soft. So me lifting something up does not tell me if it’s if it’s heavy or light. And this is I wanted to go, Manuel, what were you saying? Like, OK, OK, so with the fingers, like you need some knowledge of the intelligible realm of the form of fingers. I think you were getting on this right in order to distinguish the body. Right. Like, go back to that. Like, what were you what were your notes on that? I don’t I don’t know if I went into the notes because like it’s obvious to me. Right. Like it because it’s it’s in a frame. Right. So I talked with Danny about this earlier. Right. So when we’re talking about the lifting, right, what tells it whether it’s heavy is that we’re embodied beings. Right. So our our body is. Implicitly contextualizing, right. So if if and in some sense, it doesn’t matter, right. Like, at one point, I lift something and it’s heavy to me and I lift something that has more weight that isn’t heavy, right, because I feel energetic or whatever. Right. So like the way that we relate to things is also contextualizing the heaviness or the hotness or the coldness. OK, it’s like. It goes back to the born into creation. You’re born. You’re not you’re not a spirit. You’re born into a body, right. You’re born in. OK, yeah. It you relate from the body, right? Like it’s a precondition for participation. Right. Right. The body is that into it. Right. Yeah, the body is a pre-existing context that you were born into. Yeah. And from that, you contextualize everything else. That’s where embodied knowledge comes from. I love PSJA and all those. OK. And well, OK, I think what the point is, is that it’s nonsensical to detach from that frame, right. So if we’re talking about heavy or light, we cannot this contextualize them from the body that that is lifting. Right. Because they are linked and and even even the conditions, because if you would be on the moon, like light would be different, even though you’re relating to the same object. Right. So. Yeah, back to our our metric system is evil debate. Yeah. Well, depends on what you’re trying to use it for. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the most important part is that he’s he’s doing this gymnastic music and calculation as a set of three things. Right. So they require each other in some sense. They interface with each other. Right. And so. If you don’t know gymnastics, you don’t have the discernment required to say this is a finger, right. Because like the embodiment informs the categorization of the world that you need in order to achieve things. Right. And then. Oh, yeah. Hmm. You’ve written the gym that OK, that makes a lot of sense why the gymnastics is primary for everyone, regardless for everybody in the polis, because it’s really familiarizing yourself with the implicit context or really familiarizing yourself with the context that you’re born into the body. Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I didn’t realize that until now. Thank you. Right. And the music is that which facilitates attunement. Right. And he’s connecting it to have it as well. Right. So it’s in some sense, the structure, right, like the spiritual structure that is super imposed on the body. Right. So it’s liturgy effectively. Right. That’s what the music is referencing to. Right. And then and then the calculation is. Maybe what we would reference science as modern science in some sense, it’s. Structuring the world in such a way that we can apply our agency optimally, effectively. Right. And in order to do that, right, like distinguishing one, two and three. Well, that’s ontology. That’s what Vakie would say. Kind of. And it’s interesting that he’s relating that to to warriors. Right. So he’s making references to fighting. And I think he’s making references to ships as well, numbering ships and organizing rank a file and stuff like that. And. The capacity to do that, right. It’s it’s also the capacity for social organization. Right. So it’s like a transcendence of your individual participation into organized group participation. And like, if you don’t have the proper discernment, if you don’t have the assignment. Of what is proper to the agent that can manifest the assignment, then you cannot do what you need to do. Right. And so. Well, that that’s where you get like the city thing as well. Right. Like you need to. Organize. Hmm. Something worth pointing out here in the dialogue with Glaucon is Glaucon kind of trips over a couple of things and Socrates. I think we talked about this maybe last week. Socrates calls them out and so they’re talking, oh, OK, there’s these there’s this utility in calculation because it helps us structure things, helps us in the military or the army and all these things. And there’s a point where Socrates makes the point that the reason for calculation isn’t for a utility of these things. These things that are utilities participate in the ethic of the ethic of calculation. So calculation exists first as primary. And the fact that that exists is what allows us to organize our military in a certain way and build things and whatever. It’s not the other way around. Those the calculation doesn’t exist for these things. Well, it does for the plans. Right. And so he’s trying to organize it into a system that that’s allowing for the Ascension. Right. And for the purpose of Ascension, you need to relate to the form, right. Or the principle that is informing. So I think it and that’s why Glaucon is is a very important point. And that’s why Glaucon is is he’s representing the utilitarian ethic. Right. It’s like, oh, yeah, we can just use this for this. Right. And I can’t remember where it’s at, but Socrates calls him out. He says, I feel like you’re embarrassed to admit that it’s that it’s good to study things that have no use. I can’t remember where that’s at, but. Yeah, I did make a bunch of notes on because at a certain point they talk a lot. So I do have notes on that, I think. Yeah, let’s just. At some point, at some point they go into play. And it’s like, oh, so so three of the big concepts that that that say for Vicky and and also Peters and talk about are right here. They’re right here in this particular section of the Republic, which I find very strange that everyone’s so caught up on something that was already known. But apparently, yeah, people are like that. So where they arrive at at 530 C is that these things ought to serve purposes. So this is 530 C. Then I said in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of right. We would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use. That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers. I like that joke. Yes, I don’t think that’s a joke. But OK, well, it’s funny because it’s true, right? It’s funny because it’s true. Yeah. So I actually think that here, I don’t know why, because I made a separation, but. I think Socrates asks, I’m back to the three categories, asked for yes, no feedback, right, which is interesting dialectical. Yeah, yeah, he says in order for us to do to progress, I need you like he was relying on him to for this dialogue, right, or feedback. Right, which is an assertion of authority, right? Because it’s basically you have to submit to me and like either you go along or we’re in close. No, I don’t. I actually I think you got that backwards. It’s the authority is backwards. He’s submitting to the authority of Glaucon saying we can’t continue without you. Which is where people get authority wrong. Like that’s actually is that authority or is that like. No, he’s appealing to the authority of Glaucon. He’s saying I can’t do this without you. Yeah, OK, that’s OK. Maybe it’s. What if it’s something like this? Glaucon is right. So you have a top and a bottom, right? And we have the ideas coming from Socrates. And if the ideas can’t properly be embodied by Glaucon, then we don’t have a real dialogue or discussion. So it’s that it’s that love between the top and the bottom. That’s right. That’s what I mean. So the person leading is Socrates. The person with the authority is Glaucon. Yeah, that’s what we in in in recent times get confused because we confuse leadership and authority. They’re not always located in the same space. And that they probably never should be different discussion. And and and and note, too. It’s not a yes or a no. Yes proceeds forward and no stays where you are until it can proceed forward. It’s not a binary. It looks like there’s only two options, but those two options do not lead to equal weighted end results. The end result is going to be either the project fails or we continue to discuss, we continue to discuss, but continue to discuss and project fails are not. They’re not equal. They’re not weighted equally. And this is important because this is where we get the falsity of equality doctrine. So we just balance out the binaries and everything would be OK. There’s no binaries. Everything’s asymmetrical. Kind of reminding me this this this this particular circumstance where the leadership and the authority are not located in the same place. It makes me think of like, for example, somebody climbing Mount Everest where they have a Sherpa. The Sherpas leading, but the authority is the person climbing. So the Sherpa is going to be ahead, but they’re going at the pace of the whatever. The rich person in there, whatever that’s paying like or African safari or something like that. Yeah, so like I the word that came into my mind is direction, right? Like like one gives direction and I I don’t I don’t want to. Confuse that with authority, because I don’t think they’re exactly the same, but. But in order for them to be whole right or to move as one body, right, like the slowest part needs. To to stay in alignment, right? And I think that’s that’s what I don’t necessarily think is the slowest part. He’s the example, because as Ethan said, does Sakuchi is no good to make an argument that doesn’t resonate with anyone else. Then you don’t have an argument. You have your own little worldview in your own little head, right? And and and leaders are prone to that, right? Where they’re going off and doing their own little thing without paying any attention to whether or not anybody can follow. Because if they don’t cut the proper trail for people to follow, then they’re not leading anybody or anything except themselves. Right. And there’s the solipsism. I mean, that’s what’s that’s what the sophists are. They’re the they’re leaders that are leading themselves and not leading anyone else. And and and the authority is not there. They lose the authority. That’s what it means to lead yourself. If you lead yourself, you’ve lost the authority, because the authority is the thing that’s actually directing you, whether or not your leadership is good. So what they had just with the diet, what they were just talking about a couple of pages before this about the philosophers not staying on the island, they’re using embodying that principle that they were just talking about by making sure that Glaucon is there with him and not leaving, leaving him in the dust. Wow, I just realized that right now. Cool. Yeah, I think I think the way I would frame it is embodying the principle. It’s happening on all these different levels in the dialogue. It’s really as well. I think the authority is an integrity of the body. And Glaucon is the one that’s giving voice to the security of the integrity. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Is your is your argument intact? Right. And there’s a limitation to that, right, because it splits. Okay. The argument could be wrong or the argument could be unintelligible. And and Chakotis doesn’t know, right, because he’s the leader. Seems like he doesn’t know. Right. It’s either could be true. Either he’s leading in the wrong direction or he’s not cutting a good enough trail for people to follow. And if no one’s following, he has no authority. Because the authority follows. I can almost see a parallel here between God and Moses, not that Socrates is God, but it’s fractal, right? In the concessions that God will make with Moses, it says, okay, you know, Moses can only go so far. So God will give him a concession of, well, here’s Aaron and, you know, you know, you know the story. Yeah, interesting. They’re not fractal again, right, because you have the priestly class and then the plans, right? So to go to the next line, you judge two kinds of objects of sense. And I think this is my own notes, reliable and unreliable. And then I wrote down that it requires more explanation, right? Like, how does that relate to relevance? So there’s objects of sense that you can use, right? That you can put weight upon. And then there’s objects of sense that, I don’t know, they can’t hold. And it seems to me that that is somehow the justification for the relevance of things, right? Like, if they’re able to bear things, then that is a qualifier of their realness. Like, they’re true in a way that makes you privilege them over other senses. And then I’m going into the fingers. The fingers don’t invite or excite intelligence. Relating them to the other senses is. Well, one thing that just came to mind, when you say you judge objects of sense, I think, you know, In Flatland, you just jump to utilitarianism, but I think it’s important to remember that being and sensoriness go together. And so the way that you are being is tightly coupled to how you sense and relate to the things. And that changes your experience with how you relate to them. I think that’s kind of a message that is, that message of embodiment is just, you know, oftentimes, missing a lot of the times. Well, I think I like what you said, Danny, about Flatland and utilitarianism. Yeah, when you flatten the world, you get utilitarianism. You have no, it’s not an optional thing. The minute you start reducing things, you’re going to get utilitarianism. It’s going to get worse the more you reduce, but you’re going to want to reduce more to add to it. And so I think that’s kind of the message that is, that message of embodiment is just, you know, add more certainty. All right. And it’s the certainty that’s killing you in that case. And you don’t even realize it because you don’t understand that when you go after accuracy and precision, you’re increasing certainty. And therefore, you’re having to continually reduce or flatten the world. And that’s always going to lead you to utilitarianism because that’s all you have at that point. And what was it? Well, the relational is the body. I think all relational things have to be your body because, and we went over this earlier, right? Ethan said it well, you were created in a body. So all the way you know relation as such, as a concept, the concept of relation, it’s through your body. And that’s it. You can’t know it any other way. It’s not possible for you and it’s not required. It’s fine. It’s not a big deal. Yeah. And then you have to account for the whole body because if you don’t account for it, and this is more important with other bigger bodies, right? Like, so if you have a school and you don’t account for the whole school, your school is going to fracture and miss a line. So he’s making the statement that we are perceiving qualities, but they’re nonsensical. He’s going into… Is it fair to distinguish these two senses as a material sense and an intelligible sense? Is that what he’s doing here? Well, it’s not, it’s intelligible in something else. I don’t remember what the other… Well, he’s using contextual terms, right? So the intelligibility is from the context, right? So I think that’s the case that he’s making. So there’s absolute intelligibility and then there’s relative intelligibility. Well, that’s back to relevance realization. So the soul, sense, and the body are all the same. So the soul summons calculation and intelligence to separate between one and two. Can you read that again? The soul summons calculation and intelligence to separate between one and two. So I related the intelligence to being and the calculation to contrast. So because the intelligence is that by which you intelligence, right? So that’s how you see what is, the being that something is participating in. And the calculation is in the divisive nature more so, at least in my mind, because I don’t think that’s in the text. Yeah, in my mind, I like thinking of being in contrast as being components of the soul, because the soul filters and is a filter for intelligibility. We were talking, Manuel was, we were talking about this. If we think of the soul as being the filter that everything goes through, which we use to intelligence, two components of that are being and contrast. And contrast. Yeah, and two makes them different in a state of division. Right. Right. So you’re focusing on their otherness. What was the word that the dissimilarity? Yeah, that’s just what I was thinking about. In order for you to distinguish that they’re different, they already need a common baseline of similarity. Right. Well, yes, but at this example, you’re starting from that they’re the same. Right. And then you’re calculating or what is the word? Well, you’re dividing them, right? You’re making a calculated decision to separate them. Right. Okay. So and then everybody is like, this is the philosophical problem. Like, how do you make the calculation? How do you make the calculation? Well, let’s just go through this first and then we can maybe go there. You see things in a confused way before you distinguish. Right. So they’re intermingle and then you find a way to untangle them. Right. Like that’s the process. So this is rationality, I think, right, or consciousness. Assume separation instead of confusion. Right. So I think he’s literally doing the conscious versus unconscious or the poetic versus the propositional nature of things. Right. And then he says, well, that produces a question. Right. So if you’re making the assumption that things are not the same, then why are they not the same? Oh, no. No, no. But that confusion and separation aren’t about things not being the same. That’s the process of relevance realization or I would call it discernment. So that’s slightly different. But if, well, if you assume separation, then that also assumes ordinance. Right. No, not necessarily. It’s just the difference between confusion and discrete parts. You can have a confusion and say this is all part of one thing, but it’s very confused. That would be like modern art. Where is it like they explicitly do that? Or you can say, no, no, no, there’s separation in here. There are discernible parts or discernible aspects. So that’s different. And that, I think, is the difference that they’re pointing to in the text. Well, but anyway, like, I think when you assert the thinking mind, it does assume a separation. It doesn’t have to be true. Like maybe that’s how you fix that problem. I don’t see it as a problem. There’s confusion, separation, and otherness. There’s three things. Just add the third thing. Confusion goes away. The problem goes away. You don’t create the problem by putting things in a box of A or B. You open the box back up to ABC and then there’s no confusion or problem to be solved. Everything just kind of works out. So then you get the question. This is how you get a separation of visible and intelligible. Well, that’s I mean, if you think about being separated from, I don’t know what another word to use besides God, that state of being is not the same as saying I’m other than. It’s a different dimension of, like maybe I could be confused by my perception of God, or I might feel that I’m other than God, but when I use language to say I’m separated from God, I think that carries different connotations. Or you could just put the word justice there. Whatever. You just put whatever you want in that box. But what you’re pointing at is relationship. You’re saying you’re separated from something you don’t have a relationship to. When you’re saying you’re other than something, you haven’t cut off the relationship at all. Might be my bias, but that goes right back to intimacy, which is the quality of relationship. You can say I have no relationship, therefore there’s no quality of relationship, therefore there’s no intimacy. Or you can say, oh, I’m separated from this. In the act of separating yourself from something else, you now have a relationship to it, because you haven’t said I’m apart from it. Right? I’m completely off of it. Separating yourself from it entirely is a different matter, because then the relationship is gone. Yeah, that’s apathy. And nihilism from there. Or at least that’s where it ends. This is where people get confused. It doesn’t begin that way. Okay, fair enough. But that’s where it ends. Maybe no. So then when there is a tension between what is visible and what is intelligible, they invite thought. That’s basically a signal for you that you need to engage with something. In my translation, he calls it summoners. It summons thoughts while others don’t. Those that strike the relevant sense at the same time as their opposites I call summoners. Well, I was actually in a church and they were talking about horns. And the horns, they sound something, right? They’re announcing something, right? So it is like an invitation to engage. And those invitations can be good in nature or evil in nature. Because if an invitation is not relevant, it will misdirect you. Or if the announcement is of danger, right, it will drive you away from your participation out into something else, right, like fleeing or fighting. So what you’re saying is that cell phones are evil. Yes. And they actually use horns, which is even worse. It’s so obvious. Okay. And then we go to the classification of unity and number. There is an invitation to inquire towards absolute unity when we recognize that unity exists. This holds true for one and therefore of all numbers. So basically it’s trying to find the universe. Like at the point that you recognize that universals exist, you have to recognize that there’s an absolute universal or something. So this is basically the basis for all the platonic oneness things. The reduced complexity of numbers leads the mind towards truth. Numbers qualify through their abstraction. Study has to reveal the nature of numbers. Numbers have to be related to from the right context. And I have two notes that are in the opposite way. Fractions constitute a new whole, which is a fractal thing. And then integration means the presupposition of existence. Which is a fractal thing. And then integration means the presupposition of existence of a part. So that’s two notes I need to expand this because this is a while ago again. So when you have a whole and you break off a part, the part has a new oneness nature to it. So it’s a new whole. So in a sense, the oneness is identical to the oneness where it was a part of. And that’s how you get the fractal nature. It shares the essence or part of the essence of the body that it originally was part of. And numbers show that really properly. And then the integration, when you do an integration on like a mathematical integration, you lift up the… How do I explain this? Do you guys know math? Then I don’t have to explain what integration is. No? I don’t know any math. Clear about that. So integration says that there is a formula that you can take the derivative of, and that’s the integratedness of the formula. But it’s not a formula. It’s actually a set of formula that have the characteristics. You’re much better at math than I am, but I’m very good at calculus. He’s breaking up. Sounds like… I heard the derivative of acceleration is moving in a certain direction. And so the derivative of acceleration would be velocity. But you move it up the other direction and you’ve got a formula for acceleration, which is a bit of change. Yes. I’ll rephrase that. If you have the graph of your velocity, of your acceleration, you can take the derivative and then you have the graph of the velocity. Now you can use the graph of the velocity to go back to the acceleration. And if it’s the other way around… Linear exponential velocity would be linear acceleration. Right. And the fundamental theorem of calculus is about drawing infinitely many rectangles under the curve, and that’s what integration is. Integration is representing drawing infinitely many… So you have to get that idea of infinity in your head. It doesn’t make any sense. How can that lead to a perfect answer? But anyway, that’s… Bizzani was breaking up and I heard him say fundamental theorem. So that’s what that is. But it’s trying to capture the shape of what would produce the derivative. That’s the integration. So you’re lifting it up to the origin. And the point that I was trying to make is that when you make that move, you’re making the presupposition that what you’re relating to is a part of something higher. And that’s the profound thing. So you’re presuming that there’s something else that is in existence that velocity is a part of, which is acceleration or the other way around. Doesn’t matter. And this assumption allows you a whole bunch of movement. And like Danny said, the surface area below the graph is the thing that allows you to understand what the integration would lead up to. Consistency of numbers only consists in thoughts. You need a cognitive grammar in math that allows us to conceptually move through relations. There is an expectation possible from math that is universally applicable. That’s basically the case that’s made. And now we all got upset because we had to think too much. And that’s why there’s no comments. Great. Let’s ignore all the math. Well, on the consistency in thought, one thing that we talked about last week is that we laid out, there’s a section about understanding science, opinion, and belief. And Manuel defined those things. And having defined those things, I felt that useful. So I don’t know if you think it would be useful to me. I don’t know if you think it would be useful to lay those concepts out in a clear way. I mean, we’ve been circumambulating all these things, but just to- That’s three pages ahead. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I still have three pages to go before I get there. Then we get to geometry. Geometry is necessary for cooperation in space. Geometry compels us to view being or just becoming. Yeah. So I don’t know why I wrote that. But yeah. Geometry is the thing that provides the comprehensive nature of things. Right? It’s in some sense the frame or that in which the mathematical principles manifest. And so I think that’s why they’re making the step from the maths to the geometry. Right. And yeah, I don’t have much more to say on that, I think. And then here’s a note on that there’s people that recognize the truth, having ICC versus people that will ignore the meaning of things. Right. So that’s willful blindness. Then Socrates anticipates a third option, carrying on the argument for its own behalf, pointing to the higher. Moving to solids and solids in revolution. Solid geometry. And this was like the area that they didn’t know anything about or whatever. Right. Like the solids in motion. And I actually think that was the realm that Aristotle started focusing his endeavors on. Heaven is the most perfect of the visible things. Inferior to the absolute of slowness and swiftness. So he’s talking about the physical haven. Right. And then he’s. I don’t have heaven in here. The heavens, right? Like I think he’s talking about straws. By heavens, yeah, that makes more sense. Yeah. And then I made a list. So you have the true, right, or the one, I guess. And then you have number, figure, solid, and then motions. That was the hierarchy that I extracted from this. And they all commune within space and time. And then I made a list. They all commune within space, I guess. You have to relate to the pattern and the beauty through equal to double. There is an eternal quality to day, night, month, year. This is the heavenlies, I guess, and how they manifest and what’s relevant of them. And it kind of seems like symbolism, right? Like there’s a temporal quality that gets, not a temporal quality, but a temporal cyclical quality that seems to be instantiated there. And these are the things that govern. And we go to the ears and eyes and sense organs and that they have different understanding of movement. Study means the creating of an affordance for expectation. Musicians privilege their perception over finding a transcendent pattern. The torture metaphor is being used on strings. That was a contextual note. Pythagoreans ignore relating to the manifestation. So this was all contextual information about how people relate to these things. A view to the beautiful and to the good will make it useful and therefore true. And then I try to put that in the system, right? And we already talked about this. So you have the good, which is my orientation. You have the true that is manifesting in relation and that would be an expression of virtue. And then you have the beautiful that is on the external, right? Like it’s an impression of the external. So I connected that to worship here, but I would now connect that to other things, I think. The integration of all subjects will provide the value. In the hymn of dialectic, there is an antedialectic at the pure intelligence. The fire in the cave is an image of the sun. The power to perceive the light is a consequence of study. So there’s an assertion that the light or the quality of the light is revealed through the study of these things. And then he’s defining the nature of dialectic. Paths that lead there, they reveal the end. Paths that lead there, they reveal the end. And then at this point he says, Glocken, I’m not going to be able to help you here because you’re not going to be able to understand. So he’s giving up the communion as a buddy, I guess. Dialectic only works if you have been educated in the previous sciences. It’s the only way, right? And that’s where he leaves, that’s the argument that he uses to leave Glocken behind. So maybe we should reflect on that a little bit. Yeah, I didn’t see a definition of dialectic in the hymn. Yeah, I didn’t see a definition of dialectic in here at all. I don’t know where that is. No, I think that’s what they were going to do. I think that was the assertion that they made. Well, don’t we know all of this is a prelude to the song itself, which must be learned? For surely it’s not your opinion that the men who are clever at these things are dialecticians. But I don’t see… I read the portions of this twice. I didn’t see a definition of dialectic anywhere. But if you say that this is a characteristic of the people that are performing this, then you kind of defined what it is. Yeah, and I think that principle is, I think, stated in 533d when he says dialectic alone goes directly to the first principle. Like, it depends. When you do dialectic, it depends what principles you’re standing on. Yeah, well, but he also does something else, which is far more interesting, right? Which is in 532a. He’s talking about the realm of intelligibility, but it is limited by the power of sight. We said that sight at last tries to look at the animals themselves and the stars, and at the stars themselves, and then finally at the sun itself. So also when man tries by discussion, by means of argument, without the use of any senses, to attain each thing itself, and is, that is, and doesn’t give up before he graphs, before intellection itself, that which is good itself, it comes to the very end of the intelligible realm, just as the other man was then at the end of the visible. So what he’s saying there is you can’t talk your way into dialectic. Dialectic is not talking. He’s saying it’s absolutely not. And I think that is one of the things we’re missing, because everybody’s casting dialectic as a type of conversation. And Plato’s saying it’s not, because you can’t know things that way. That’s what he’s saying. You cannot do it explicitly. This all talking things out isn’t going to work, according to Plato. And maybe more contemporary language, you could say you can’t reason somebody into faith. You can’t logic somebody into a faith relationship. Logic is not the thing that’s going to get it there. Yeah, that is a great analogy. But the way that I see dialectic is the communion with the form, or the principle, right, the principle behind the form. And being in the circumambulation through study, right, is where that intelligibility gets revealed to you. And that’s the process of dialectic. So that’s why I found that definition in my mind. I mean, the connotations of synthesis and antithesis come to mind because of the contrasting of the hot-cold stuff. That’s kind of what came down to that. That’s why it seemed dialectic to me. That’s why I see a definition of dialectic. That’s a Gaelian definition of dialectic, and Hegel was just wrong about that. Like, he’s flat out. And most scholars admit Hegel’s dialectic is not Plato’s dialectic. Right. They say it right out. But then they use Hegel’s dialectic and start making claims about Plato. That’s a bad move. I mean, maybe I think that idea of synthesis, I think that maybe just gets stuck on one side of the divided line, perhaps. I don’t know if that’s… Well, and also… Right. If you’re stuck… So you have the two divisions, the intellect and the opinion. And so perhaps that you stay in flash land because you’re stuck in the opinion. You think you’re abstracting, but you’re not connecting with the principle because you’re not accounting for how you’re being, which the relationship of being and sensing. You have to account for the relationship of being and sensing in order to ascend properly and up. That’s what I got. That was my interpretation. Yeah, but again, that takes us out of a binary mode entirely. Right. So this definition of dialectic with those two things is wrong. It’s just wrong. It’s not hard. Three fingers, right? Three types of discernment. Three, three, three. Everything’s three. There’s no twos in here. That’s not in the book. I don’t know why people do this. It’s not in the book. The options aren’t be in the cave or be out of the cave. Nope, not in the book. Nowhere in this book. Sorry. It’s not there. And so the question is why do we keep going there? And I think it’s some of these statements like only the dialectic way of inquiry proceeds in this direction, destroying the hypothesis to the beginning itself in order to make it secure. Right. And so when you take like that piece without understanding, no, talking alone isn’t going to work. Then you set up a binary. You set up the Hegelian dialect immediately because you’re not paying attention to all the pieces that go into what they’re talking about with dialectic. And I don’t know. It looks to me like it’s stating the limits of dialectic at the same time that it’s stating that it’s the way out of a bunch of things. So, yeah, what’s interesting if I don’t, man, go ahead. You mind if I respond? Well, when you say make it secure, what’s interesting, that is to me strikes me as a personified way of relating and that if I’m thinking, is my activity generative? So if I’m directing my time and energy and attention towards something, it’s almost, is that thing, if the idea of you manifest things, ideas have you or do you have your ideas? And if ideas have you, then am I just trying to secure this idea so that it can survive? Because maybe it’s a spirit that needs to be killed off. I mean, that’s kind of one what came to mind is the personalities and the personal aspects or characteristics that ideas can carry. Go into that with the problems with this method, that people can get captured if they’re not relating to them from the right place. So I just want to read this etymology. So critical examination of the truth of an opinion, formal reason and logic applies to rhetoric and refutation. That’s the original definition. And then they have a whole new piece. Originally synonymous with logic in modern philosophy, refined by Kant, the theory of false argumentation leading to contradictions and fallacies. Dan by Hegel, who made it a process of resolving or merging contradictions in character to attain higher truths. And then in 20th century Marxism, evolution by means of contradictions. It’s in the etymologies, like just the whole problem with the world. Yeah, the whole corruption of a very useful, otherwise very useful concept and how it got hijacked by lesser minds and destroyed. That was terrible hearing that etymology that you just. Well, it’s terrible that the etymology is right there and nobody looks at it and goes, oh, right, the problems apparent. It’s lesser minds trying to understand something because they probably didn’t have good reading comprehension. And then other people believing, even though the only distinction is they bothered to put in the effort to write books. Yeah, well, writing books became accessible to everybody. Forbidden knowledge or forbidden technology. Same thing. So what I heard kind of was logical. You have the different levels that you went through about that etymology. You have logical errors and then you have poorly formulated or leaky abstractions, bad abstractions, and then you have corrupt systems. And so one way, if I’m talking to somebody, I think looking at it that way, I can look to see where they’re at, what level they are, and you can poke holes in their abstractions. Maybe your abstractions leaking. So I mean, if you form, so like the rogue, that’s kind of what the rogue is. It’s like, okay, you start with primitives, a lot like capacities, and then I can use those capacities and by having a wrong relationship with them, I’m going to use my capacities to go rob a house. So now I have a rogue. Now if we organize a gangster circuit of rogues, we can have system of, you can scale that up. What’s the use? I’m confused about the application. That is just an image that came to mind, I guess. Maybe it’s not relevant. Well, you said you can use it to relate to them, right? So that’s why I’m asking. Well, you can tell if somebody is talking about the polis or politics or economics, you’re in a different world than if you’re talking about a story in your local environment, and then you have this idea of, I had this idea of my head of depression or whatever, any abstraction, right? And so like locality is one of the dimensions, and this is going to get very imprecise, trying to exact this beyond is going to probably get imprecise. But I think you need to rephrase it, right? So you can go up the stack, right? You as a conversational partner can say, okay, like the contradiction or whatever, right? The conflict that you’re in is related to this principle, right? And so now you have the principle, and then you have to go back down from the principle, and you go down back to the specific, and you have to explain, right? Or we can let recontextualize that person within right relationship to that principle, and whatever that looks like, that’s, let me use the term, that’s a calculation that you need to make. Well, yeah, and I think 532 talks about this, right? We’re basically saying that there’s a journey, right? Within the realm of the intelligible, it’s imitated by the power of sight, right? But by means of argument without the use of any of the senses to attain each thing in and of itself, you know, that is, right? And doesn’t give up before he grasps by intellection itself, which is good itself. Then he comes to the very end of the intelligible realm, just as the other man was then at the end of the visible. And so it’s a journey, it’s not a process, you know, per se. It’s not a process of discussion or argumentation or any of that. It’s this journey to the end of the intellection, in the same way that there’s another journey that’s not dialectic, it’s the end of the visible. Yeah, and I think there’s a parallel there, right, between the visible and the intelligible. And what he says, it is in the realm of the intelligible, it is imitated by the power of sight, in other words, the visible. Right. And so if you have the relationship to the visible, the relationship to the intelligible, you can commune with the person in the visible. Like that’s the implication. Right. This is why a better word for generative AI should be imitative AI, because it just absorbs a bunch of data that humans feed it. So when meditating on the concept of generation, it’s like, well, am I, like, what are the operators I’m performing in order to extend from my previous experience? And I think the key to having something be generative is, yeah, one is it needs to replicate being, it needs to manifest things that can be beyond you in the future. And in order to do that, you have to be in right relationship with bodies, your body, other bodies, etc. Well, and the body has to be in relation to the being. Well, and are you generating or are you just moving parts around from somewhere else? AI moves parts around from other people and then tells you, you did something, which is absolutely not true. You’re parasitic upon what other people did. But I also want to point out, I think 532B and well, C, whatever it is, right here in 532, this is where the confusion about Plato’s Cave comes from. So I will note that in my book, in the initial description, analogy for the cave, doesn’t use the word cave, uses the word den. Here he uses the word cave. He’s talking about two different things. The analogy was gone a long time ago, early on in the book, I said this before. Analogy was gone a long time ago. He’s making a new analogy. Right? And he’s talking about releasing from the ponds, turning around from the shadows to the phantoms. So he’s turning from the shadows to the phantoms, to the light, way up from the cave to the sun. And once they are persisting, the persisting inability to look back at the animals and the plants and the sun’s light, looking instead at divine appearances in water and shadows of things that are. No water in the original analogy, guys. It’s not there. Right? So he’s talking about a tiny little. No, it was. There was the reflection of the stars. No, there was. You look at the reflection of the stars. In the water. Like, no, that’s well past the cave, right? That’s back when they’re talking about aisles and all this other stuff. It’s way past the cave. And that’s the, like, again, this is the confusion. You can draw those analogies, but Plato’s not doing that explicitly. He’s using different words. It’s not even cave. It’s dead. Right? He’s not even talking about the same place or type of place. The type of place has changed entirely. He’s drawn in these other additions that he made initially. Right? And then he’s talking about the quality of a shadow, of a phantom, all of this activity, the arts, which we went through as the power to release and leads to what is best in the soul up to the contemplation of what is best in the things that are. Just as previously, what is clearest to the body was led to the contemplation of what is brightest in the region of the body and the vision. So again, he’s not talking about bondage, about things on a wall, about light sources. He’s not talking about anything. All that stuff is gone. This is a completely different reference using different words to a different thing. And yeah, it draws on the past statements, but it’s not the statements from the den and being bound and not understanding things. He’s saying that in the same way that you have a limited understanding as the result of your class, which is what the original cave statement was talking about, was there’s a class of specific people who are limited and because of that, we can’t ignore them. We can’t say, oh, well, we’re not limited. So who cares? Because we’re in a city. Right? It’s that binding aspect again. And I think that’s what he’s referencing, the binding of the people who are stuck in the condition of the cave, because in the condition of the cave, no one gets out. That doesn’t happen. He’s explicit about that. He said, if you were to release someone, don’t you think this might be the case? It’s different from saying that that ever happened because it doesn’t happen. He’s explicit in that they can never get out. They’re born into their bonding. Right? They’re born in a way that they can only interact in the way that they’re bound and they see shadows. And the phantoms don’t relate to anything in the cave. Right? So there’s a bunch of things added here that don’t relate to the cave because it’s not about the cave. And like I said, different work. Den versus cave. Very different. And I think that distinction is deliberate. So I think Plato understands that you’re going to get confused if you’re not careful. And he’s trying to make you more careful. And apparently it doesn’t work because everybody thinks that this is a great parable and that it’s being mirrored everywhere and it’s wrong. That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying something quite a bit different from that. And there’s nothing about even the initial cave analogy that is individualistic. Nothing. Zero things. I don’t know of these connotations that are in Plato, but I can’t help but think of it like a grave. And if you’re asleep, you’re not animated. And in order to wake up, you need something to come breathe life in you to animate you. That’s spirit. So I mean, that’s kind of… I don’t know that those connotations are in there because this is very much influenced by a book that is not this book club book. But that imagery comes to mind. Well, it hasn’t been in here yet, Danny, because they are deliberately and very clearly too, which is puzzling that nobody mentions this, ignoring creation. It’s a middle out story. We’ve got a bunch of people. We have a city. We need to understand justice. Fair enough. Fine starting points. But he’s not talking about the beginning of things. Every time they have to reference a core axiom and appeal to a core axiom, they reference a god or gods. In fact, they do it here. They talk about Zeus again, because they run out of ways to talk about about these things that aren’t religious. So they go back to the religious framing or what we would post 1530 call religious framing. They didn’t call it that. They didn’t have such a concept. Then that meant to them to talk about the world that way. Religion was presumed to be the baseline for everything. Yeah, let’s keep moving. For when a man knows not his first principles and when the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed of he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a fabric of convention can ever become science? This is basically a refutation of people who don’t use the system of going up to the first principle and then going through each sequential step to go to their conclusion. And he’s saying that that’s just invalid. That’s or in other words, opinion. Dialectic is the only science that does away with hypotheses with hypotheses in order to make her ground secure. Dialectic uses handmaids and helpers, a new name because more clearness than opinion and understanding in the realm of Pyrrha. He’s reframing dialectic as the ultimate thing that is divorced from all the things that are still grounded in materiality. I think that’s where he goes. And then he’s making a separation of increased clarity and there’s two things that are manifest within the intellect and two things that are manifest within the realm of opinion. And so in the intellect you have the most clear things that science that’s relating to the intelligibility. Then you have understanding, which is not a direct relationship, but it’s still in the realm of the intellect. And then in the realm of opinion, you have belief and opinion itself as the lesser form. And so they are in a hierarchy of clarity of what is. And the intellect is relating to the being itself, I think. And then the opinion is relating to your experience of the being, instead of the being itself. So Danny, did I need to add something there? Yeah, I mean, I think what we could do is we could probably begin next time by unpacking that, because I think there’s a lot of rich stuff there. And I think it takes time to absorb, but I mean, that’s up to you. I mean, we have a little bit of time so we can at least set some ground. So I found it useful to define under the section where it, find it, sorry, where they talk about understanding science, opinion and belief, we find it in the text. Okay, as being, this is a 534, as being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief and understanding to the perception of shadows. So I found it useful to unpack that. Would you like me to unpack it? Sure. Okay, so this is based on conversations that Manuel and I have said is that understanding is being able to see what body that you’re under or you’re a part of. So there’s two planes. Understanding is to science as opinion is to belief. Okay, so understanding is seeing what body you’re a part of. So science is intelligizing. It’s a more advanced form of the understanding. And it’s kind of has like ontological connotations. It has to do with how you’re going to, once you understand, you see what body you’re a part of. Now, when you do science, the way that you’re going to intelligence and do science is going to be dependent upon your understanding and how you’re positioned. Then on the opinion to belief, opinion is a mere reflection of your experience. Whereas belief imposes itself on your experience. So in the same way that belief is maybe a more advanced form of opinion, it’s better than opinion. The belief has different characteristics to it. So that’s, so as in the same way, so you have at a lower level, you have understanding and belief or understanding and opinion. And at a higher level, you have science and belief. Yeah, now I remember what I told you again, right? And then the being and becoming comes up. The understanding and opinions are things that are relating to emergence. You understand something that comes in front of you and you have an opinion about something that appears to you. While a belief is relating to an amination, that’s the imposition. The belief says, okay, I should understand it this way, right? Or like I should participate with it this way, right? Like it should be this way. Like there’s this shoot in there. And the science is also, it’s relating to the principle, right? So that’s also relating to the amination. So it’s basically saying or it’s framing the understanding, right? Like I should relate the understanding from this angle because that is proper, right? That’s in alignment with the principle that I want to adhere to. And what was, sorry, go ahead. What was important to me to, it’s very important to understand that science is not just the scientific method, this method of falsifying things. It’s something more like ontology. I think that’s in the text. I don’t think, if you think science of scientific method, oh, I’ll apply this process and falsify stuff and get more knowledge. Now I have more knowledge. I think you’re going to miss what the text is saying. It’s like, again, like as Manuel was saying, it’s about how you organize your being and relationships to existence and personhood or something like that. Right. Yeah. It’s in some sense that which allows you to organize your agency or something, right? It’s like it’s facilitating or affording a grasp on your participation. As, if you do that one level up, right, if you take that to the societal level instead of the individual level, then science would be that which allows the group to relate and manipulate reality, right? So you could see that if you fractally relate that principle one level up, right, like you’d have a different body, right? And you’d have different requirements for that intelligibility, right? So for example, making a machine that can be replicated at multiple spaces so that you can have a consistent relationship with the individual, right? So that’s the way that science is going to work. So I think that’s the way that science is going to work. Now Kannes’s point is, you can have two sets of So if you flatten that, right, if you reduce that to I am an operator of the measuring machine and you lose sight of the body that is doing the measuring, and I think that’s kind of what we’re stuck with. People are unable to relate to the project, what’s the right word, well to the telos of what we’re communing in because there’s a utilitarian ask that’s being made of the science by a political body or a personal ideology of someone that’s directing the research. And apart from that, right, like in some sense, the body is so big that and it doesn’t have a head, right, which is also problematic. So it’s become an agro-core and that’s actually pretty good description. We’ve got a scientific agro-core. And so the other aspect that we explored that I found useful was the contract, I’ll read where at 534, as being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. Okay, so what’s the difference between being and becoming? What’s that about? Well, becoming happens across time. And so I think that there are connotations of being is a relationship to the emergence and the becoming is a relationship to emanation. So the being is in the earthly realm. No, no, no, no, the being, right, the being is that which is outside of time. Right, right, yeah, okay. And the becoming is that which relates to being in time. Yeah, it’s just the only, just to try to, I mean, what come to mind to try to skeptical reaction would be like, I can be at peace by avoiding responsibility and smoking weed, but then I’m just in a state of disillusionment and not a state, what they use the word enlightenment in the opening of book seven. And I think, so I mean, the difference between being sitting around being disillusioned and hold on. You cannot be, okay. Like this is the confusion in English language. And I think it might actually be correct, right? So you can be mad, right? But that you be mad means that you’re participating in the being of mad. So your being, right, you’re becoming, right? And the method of becoming is in the being mad. So you’re participating in the form of madness. Right, right. And so I brought this concept up to some people and one of the immediate misconceptions was, oh, you’re just talking about, oh yeah, there’s different change, change is intense. But if it’s just thinking about being and becoming as like, oh, that means in the future, right? I think the important aspect of the difference is the relational modality or the relational stance. I don’t know how to say it exactly, which is funny. But I think it’s flattening of time to say that becoming is nothing but a future tense of being. I think that is having a misconception with what time is and how you relate to time. Yes. Yeah, well, it ignores the journey. But so like there is no being, like there’s no you outside of time. Like, it just doesn’t make sense. Being is the statement of your relationship to a form. Hmm. So it’s because being doesn’t exist, becoming isn’t the final form of it. Right. But that, and in fact, that’s backwards from how we think about it. Right. You could say you’ve become angry. Ah, right. You’re being angry. Hmm. Right. That breaks the whole problem of tense right there. It’s like, wait a minute. If you’re becoming angry and you’re being angry, where’s the difference? Oh, becoming happens before being. It’s not an end state. Right. Now we’re back into, oh, there’s a transition. And this is the statement of the transition. The being is the closed world, the, you know, the absolute, the formation. Right. You’re stuck in the form and the becoming is getting out of the form or not being in the form. It’s for the form and after the form. Right. That’s why tense doesn’t work to become angry. It means that you’re in the process of finality of anger. And it is a quirk of the language to some extent. I mean, the verb to be is a problem in all languages. It doesn’t get solved by changing languages. And I think, right. So if, if you’re being mad or angry, right. Your soul is becoming different. Right. Because there’s a mutation in your soul as well as a mutation in your physical expression. And we misrecognize the mutation in the soul often. Because that’s what cultivation is. Right. Like effectively, when, when you’re being angry, you’re cultivating your soul to be angry. Right. You’re increasing the angriness of your intelligibility or the mutation of the salience. Oh, I like the salience of angriness in being is increased. Right. Yeah. So you can see it’s not merely a tense issue and become is not the future tense of be. That’s not true. And that’s the problem of reduction of the world to language. The world is not language and language is not a good map of the world. Might be the best one that we have to communicate certain types of things. And it’s odd because that lessons right in here. Like, nah, you can’t just talk your way. It’s not going to work because language is insufficient. You actually have to interact with. I mean, we’re maybe just squabbling over words here. But when I hear mutation, I think about a horizontal change. Whereas if I think about transmutation, I think about changing of quality in a vertical dimension. But I don’t know if that’s, you know, for what it’s worth. Traits transmutation transmute to transmute something. Transmute is to change the quality of something. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That has a vertical connotations in my mind. Yeah, but I think that’s exactly the point. But being to be coming is not vertical. And it’s not horizontal in only one direction to direction of future time. Yeah, I see that. Yeah. Right. It’s it’s. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s baked in. It’s right in between. So you can transmute your soul, right. But you can also transform your soul. And being born again is a transmutation. Right. Being born again is a transmutation. Right. But being angry is a transformation. Yeah, but it’s complicated because when you say transmute, it depends on what dimension you’re talking about. Like the trans can be across. It could be dead to alive. It could be right. I mean, it could be. It could be across. That’s the problem with language. Right. Yeah. Right. You can talk about this stuff all you want. That ain’t going to help you because the language cannot contain vertical causality in any reasonable fashion. Right. You want vertical causality. You do things in the world. You become generative. That’s how you solve that problem. You can’t discuss it at some point. That’s actually what this says. Like we just literally what was in the section. But you can look at it, right. Like what is being born again? Well, it’s a changing of what’s highest literally. Right. Like you change the means by which you inform yourself, which is a higher level thing than the information itself. Right. Like the means of information and that by which you inform yourself. Like those are two separate things. And so one is a God and on the level of God. Right. And the other one is on the level of soul. And I’ve read the word idolatry in Dutch for the first time. And it’s literally a God image. Like that’s the Dutch word for idolatry. Do you think we’re at a good place to wind down? What do you guys think? Yeah. Now I want to hear Ethan. But Ethan doesn’t want to hear himself. That’s a problem. He’s muted. He doesn’t want to talk to us. Some good stuff today. Well, oh yeah. On the back on the. What’s the spot? Was it similar enough to your experience of reading it or was it dissimilar to that? I get it. I can even. It’s dissimilar. Both. Both. Where was it? It was around five. I can’t find it. But it was back on the one in the. The summoners. And because of this, we call the one the intelligible and the other the visible. That’s right. Then this is like. Yeah, I think you guys kind of went over it quite a bit. It’s a dialectic. There’s just some good stuff that I saw over here in this other book that I’m reading. But I guess it’s not really relevant to our conversation. It’s just stuff that Dionysus is going off of going off on. Kind of going from there. He says furthermore, I doubt that anyone would refuse to acknowledge that incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual than similarities are. I think that’s what Plato’s saying here. It’s what the summoners are. So yeah, I guess it’s that dialectic of. Well, yeah, well, I like that because what do you attend to? If you’re attending to the dissimilarities, you’re skeptical. That skepticism. And if you’re attending to the similarities, you’re holistic. And so that’s required to be generative. Because again, if you don’t have a body, or you don’t have a conception of the body, and you try to manifest in the world, you’re going to be handicapped. You can’t properly use that which you use to manifest. I mean, I had that personal experience reading Plato in that if I have a preconception of a word or an abstraction, and then as the story proceeds, Socrates has some kind of way of somehow kicking me out of flat. I describe it as punching myself out of flatland. I have that experience when reading The Republic. And I don’t know, something is able to break being stuck in a propositional frame. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but I mean, I can relate to that personally. It’s like what he was doing with CloudCon and the utility of calculation. It’s like calculations of things. See, look, you can see it in the military. He says, but the reason it exists isn’t for the military. It’s just kind of, look, here it is, and then kind of flips it for you to a higher understanding of it. Well, he doesn’t so much flip it as he opens it up. I think maybe part of it is like it forces me to confront, if I have a preconception about what it says or any idea, it’s like I’m forced to confront being wrong. That seems to be what my experience is like. It’s like, oh, I can either proceed reading with the same conception that I had, or I can admit that maybe there’s something that I don’t know and I can open myself up to, that’s at least one thing that’s going on in my experience at least. Yeah, I think the way that that works is we’re in the book, and we’re in the telos of justice, which is like the highest telos that you can kind of get into. And so if you have a preconception, you’re always in a lesser frame with your conception. And so if it’s not participating in justice, then it’s easier to say, well, I need to let go of that conception and see how it participates in this bigger thing. And if you don’t have that, right, like if whatever you’re going to have participate is lesser than you, because you’re a narcissist or it’s actually lesser, then the incentive to change your conception just isn’t there, because it’s in some sense not justified to do so. And then that relates to humility as well, like, well, can you be humble about your understanding? What can show you that your understanding of something is lacking? Well, it means that you lack the capacity to participate in something that you deem higher. So I guess I’m trying to answer the question of how to have an argument with people, right? Like what is the precondition that needs to be met? Well, you have to say, I want to participate in this higher thing, and that is the thing that allows for the frame breaking. And if you don’t have that, like I don’t think you can ever make an appeal. Yeah, and a big part of when people talk about apologetics, a big part of that is that behind any question, there’s a questioner. And so relating to the question, being able to come down and relate to the questioner is an important part of winsomely addressing any question. Yeah, and that’s the calculation again, right? Right. Like there, and the calculation is in some sense that which modern science does, right? But the calculation is only valid as long as it participates in being, right? Or is informed by the principle that will make a problem. Okay, I think it’s time to land the plane. I kind of forgot how I did this. I think we’re going to do some integration stuff, pick up the things that were salient. Yeah, we did reflection, and then we did intention, then we did integration. Yeah, so, oh yeah, you want to relate to, that’s correct. You want to relate to the intention that you set at the start, see how you lived up to it. And then you want to also set a new intention for the week to see how you can apply your insight in your daily life. And see you on the other side. See you on the other side. Well, I kind of see the outlines of a relationary framework, but yeah, I can’t really envision how to participate in it yet. Well, one thing that came to me was that the theme of the sensory realm being not enough is that you can never get to a posture of being of service if you’re stuck there. You have to be filled up with some hope in order to be in a posture of service. You have to be filled. That’s kind of some of the imagery that came to mind during my reflections. And so, a lot of that is in terms of being generative, policing, for lack of a better word, or my meditations. I mean, that theme of also you become what you meditate on is in there too. If you be angry over time, you’ll become angry. Your soul will train your soul to be angry. I didn’t quite catch the surface thing. What was the necessity? Well, there are ways of relating to things in that you have to give, and the more you give, the more you get, let’s say. Not that it’s a prosperity type of a frame, but there’s a way of engaging with things that you have to engage on the level of faith. You don’t know what will happen. You have to align yourself with what you think is right, and you have to proceed forward. Sometimes there’s some degree of uncertainty, and you cannot do that if you’re filled with what the sensory realm will fill you with. You have to be filled with other types of things. That’s kind of what came to mind. Narcissism is not going to propel you. That’s at least kind of… I don’t even want to use that language. That seems a little bit too loaded, but something like that. That was related to the note that I made in What I Do Today. Right? It’s like there’s a… Because you need to participate in a body to make sense of the idea of service, right? Because the context of service only makes sense if it’s brought together in something. And so if what you’re in service to is in the visible realm, right? Well, first of all, it suffers from distraction, right? And it’s temporal in nature, right? Like it’s always insufficient. Well, if you have your sight on the principle, right, and you try to manifest the principle, then you can change your participation, right, or your activity in service while still manifesting your telos effectively. Yeah, another line that I’ve heard that says something similar is unity in belief does not mean uniformity in expression. So you can have a persistent telos, and that can lead to different manifestations. Yeah, you don’t have to agree with somebody to be friends with them. You don’t have to be friends with them. You don’t have to be friends with them. You don’t have to be friends with them. You don’t have to be friends with them. And yet you have to be ready to be friends with them. You know, I heard recently on Twitter, so yeah, it’s important. It’s important stuff. You also don’t have to tolerate people in order to love them. That’s correct. For being nice and loving are not the same thing. I gotta take off here, but if I can go next, if you don’t mind. The dissimilarity thing, thinking back to Genesis 3, the Forbidden Fruit, and you could have a thing and it could go either way, like there’s different, it could have different ends, or you could say it could have a good end and have a chaotic end, right? And we’ll just say it was a thing, we’ll say an object, well no, I won’t use that word. And the fact that you don’t know where it’s ending, like what its purpose is, the fact it could be used for this or this or many things actually calls in a higher principle, it requires a higher principle or a higher point of view in order to make a judgment on it. Well I would invert it, right? Because you can’t start from the object, you start from the principle and then the object shows itself. Mm-hmm. I’m getting the progression or the chain a little mixed up, maybe it’s the same, but nonetheless there’s some sort of relationship with a higher principle and it’s this thing at the bottom that you have to be in communion, like it calls a communion with your telos in order to make a judgment about this thing down here, if it’s good or not. Or like, I don’t know. The thing isn’t good or no, like that’s bad framing. So what I’m, sorry, I was going to echo what I was hearing. If there’s a, like if you have a piece of fruit and like a tree of good and bad, it’s not like there’s good apples and bad apples, it’s one apple or one piece of fruit that is either good or bad. But if you don’t know, like if you lack the wisdom or lack the sight and you take it without that, it’s going to cause you to fall or bad consequences. So like it requires a higher wisdom before you take the fruit. Or the thing, whatever it is. But it’s calling, but the fact that that exists, it’s calling in that higher, that higher ethic. I don’t know. I mean, like it’s going to require a lot more ruminating on, but. So what I hear when I think dissimilarity, I hear chaos and map territory. And so there’s, what I’m hearing is that there’s two ways to maybe relate to dissimilarity. What I’m hearing is that there’s two ways to maybe relate to dissimilarity of things is one is typographically or ontologically, and the other might be in terms of its function or relation. So like if I say an apple is dissimilar to an orange, well, I could be talking, I could say, well, they’re dissimilar in their properties. That’s being at a lower realm. But then I could also approach dissimilarity from a higher realm. And that’s a different, a change in how I relate to the thing. So like if I say an apple is not like an orange, well, that’s because they’re serving different functions. The purpose of why I’m using the apple is different than the purpose of why I’m using orange. Maybe there’s probably there’s lots, maybe you could unpack that in many different directions, dimensions, but that’s sort of what came to mind for me. And so, but the idea of like map territory came up as like, is this dissimilar because it’s an integration problem, in which case I need to start destroying my existing model and tear down and rebuild? Or, you know, is it, I don’t know. So I think the masculine and a feminine is important. And now I’m going to have to read the Genesis three in that frame. But the masculine is from the principle, right? It’s the amination. Well, while the feminine is from the emergence, right? Like it’s that which is informed. And so if you relate to the fruit as the feminine, that then you get a whole bunch of stuff, right? Like you, well, you get informed by the fruit, right? And you don’t know what’s going to happen, right? Like it’s literally up to God, right? Like you’re subjected by the fruit, right? So you cannot make a judgment on that, right? You got to go by fate on that one, right? And you got to hold on with hope and like maybe if you do right participation, then you can manifest something, something good, right? But if you relate as the masculine, right, you’re basically making it a tool, right? You’re coming from above on the fruit, right? But if the fruit is actually above you, right? So you misjudge and you’re doing a masculine relationship to that which is above you, then that’s always bad, right? Like that cannot work ever because now you’re trying to do something that isn’t possible. Yeah, there’s a lot there. That Genesis 3 story is really hard because there’s so many, it’s very, very rich. But like it’s like two dissimilar things communing with something that’s above them that makes them common or unified. Two dissimilar things are incongruities that are commune with each other and towards a higher principle, something like that. I don’t know. Another theme that I’ve seen a lot recently is when like not being able to agree on forms. So if we’re having problems communicating with our language, how, you know, sometimes people can fail to communicate because they’re not able to look at the right form, right? And I don’t know how to resolve that. But that’s something that has come up a lot as well. There’s a lot of dissimilarity in our ability to relate to each other because we lack a lot of tooling. Because they’re not orientated towards the same thing, is that what you mean? Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. Relativism. It’s a telus problem. Yeah, so if your neighbor is going to a different church than you are, or probably better yet, if your neighbor is, you know, they just have different teluses, there’s a lack of capacity for communion between you and your neighbor because you’re not orientated towards the same thing. Well, Manuel stepped away. Does anybody have anything else before I kill the recording? If going once. Okay, well, thanks, everybody. I thought we covered a lot of great stuff. So see you guys next week.