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John Vervaeke on Psychedelics, Evil, Consciousness, and Buddhism vs Christianity
September 15, 2020
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Last year, I interviewed Professor John Vervecky,
And many of you thought it was one of the best interviews that you've seen, so why not combine them and re-release, given that we've had a slew of new subscribers. John Vervecky is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, and he deserves the highest superlatives I can give. His ability to integrate cognitive processes with how we construct meaning is peerless, and I recommend you check out his Meaning Crisis series on YouTube. Much like the rest of the talks on this channel, this one is filled with plenty of technical jargon, and you'll need to do your homework to keep up.
because I'm asking questions that I would like to know the answer to selfishly and there's an unwillingness to constantly simplify since often the nuance is washed away in the compression and what you're left with is it might appeal to a wider audience but I find it's a patronizing distortion and it's not an accurate representation. The goal with this channel is to explicate on theories of everything which is a physics terminology as well as coupling them with theories of consciousness and then subsequently present them.
These conversations were from a while ago and at the time I didn't even know what a Protestant was nor what the Reformation was and I was embarrassed of re-releasing this because I thought well it's embarrassing and then I thought well you know I might as well display my ineptitude instead of pretending that I mature out the gate. Think of me as a foolish person who knows nothing except maybe a little math and physics. Enjoy. So I'm here with the
Magnanimous, sensational, superlative, colossal, prodigious, sumptuous. John Vervecky, Professor John Vervecky of the University of Toronto. Professor of Cognitive Science. Professor both of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science.
I visited the president's office once and it's
just slightly larger than this. And I've never visited a professor who has an office this big. Well, you know, it was probably heated much better than this office is heated. So there you go. You can get your own portable heater and that's it. It's $40 to get this much space. That's it. Yeah. I mean, it's been very, very useful to have this space because it's afforded me having larger meetings, which have often been useful in my work. You use the word affordance right now.
Actually, can you get me a pen? Yes, thank you. You use the word affordance and I know Peterson makes a connection between meaning and affordances. Can you explain the concept of affordances and then what meaning has to do with that, if anything, from your point of view? Oh, sure. The term originally goes back to J.J. Gibson and I was extremely fortunate. I actually got to study
with John Kennedy who was one of JJ Gibson's most significant and important proteges and John himself did just some amazing work. But what Gibson was actually arguing was that we think we're perceiving, we're primarily perceiving objects and it's a very sort of model, it's a model like very similar to what you see in Locke, sort of the idea that we get these impression of objects and then we form ideas around the
And then Gibson argued, no, the objects come later. There's sort of abstractions out of what we're actually perceiving our affordances. And so, for example, this object is graspable. So that, to experience it, to perceive it as graspable, is it being graspable a property of
The bottle? Well, no, not really, because for many creatures, praying mantis, this isn't graspable. Is it a property just of me? Is it a subjective property? Well, no, because not everything I want to be graspable is graspable. It's actually a relational property. It's a real relational property. There's properties of this object and properties of my hand, for example.
that can be causally coupled together such that my hand can fit and make use of the objects in this object in certain ways. So the object affords grasping. This desk affords me placing things on it, right? So that's what you see first and then the objects are inferred afterwards. Right, and this is part of the whole idea of embodied cognition.
It's instead of thinking of yourself as sort of a passive receiver, that's the lock-in model, right, of these impressions, think of the word pressing on you, right, instead of thinking, instead of thinking yourself that way, think instead, no, this is what you're actually doing, that it's your perception
and your action are always deeply interpenetrating and conditioning and coupling each other. So I'm seeing that as I'm moving towards it, trying to make use of it. You say, well, sometimes I sit still. Even when you're sitting still, you're usually shifting your attention around it. Your eyes are saccading, right? And what you're often doing, right, is you're trying to get to a place
where Marlo Ponti talks about this and Dreyfus and others, where you get what's called an optimal grip on it. I'm trying to get to the place where I get the sort of... That's only if you want to pick it up, or does that just happen even if you're writing a paper? First of all, we want to know what it is, right? But of course, those are not disconnected. I don't want to know everything about this.
I want to know things that I can interact with it in terms of, like it's graspable or perhaps it's throwable, and that would be something different for me, right? You know, there's an, oh no, and I need to throw it, right? And so what it means is, okay, there's trade-off relationships. If I get too close to the object, I'm missing, I can't get, I'm not getting a lot of the structure. I might get some details here, right? If I get too far back and are static,
I'm missing some of the details and I'm missing some of the, you know, the curvature of it. So to get the cup, I have to move around and notice getting the cup, getting a grip on the cup. It's dependent again, like I said, on what I need from the cup. I might need the details, you know, maybe, you know, I'm Sherlock, you know, oh, I need this very, I need the fingerprint I have to get in, right?
I might just need it as a heavy object and then I don't need but if it's graspable you see how what I'm trying to do with the thing is going to affect how I'm moving around it so that I get the optimal grip that is relevant to the task
or the problem at hand for me. And so sensation and perception, sensory motor loop, are bound up together, they're interpenetrating. And what's happening is, I'm sort of being shaped as the object is being shaped in the sense of different features, different aspects of it are being foregrounded or backgrounded for me. Okay, what does that have to do with meaning? What that has to do with meaning is... Well, I mean, that's a long question.
But what I think that has to do with meaning is when we talk about meaning in meaning in life. So let's be clear. I'm not talking about what people talk about in like ultimately in semantics like the meaning of sentences or things like that.
Because when we use that term, talking about our life, we're using it as a matter of fact. So we should be using different words. We're using meaning and then the meaning of life and then the meaning of a sentence. We should say meaning A of life or meaning B of a sentence. Philosophers will often distinguish between semantic meaning and existential meaning or something like that. So right now you're talking about existential meaning. Very much so. The core of existentialism, at least one way of understanding it,
is our meaning-making in this sense of the modes that I get into. I want to be careful how your viewers are understanding this, but I'm creating an identity for this as I'm creating an identity for myself. They're being co-created together. I am becoming a grasper
as this is becoming a graspable thing, right? As this is becoming a graspable, did that not exist beforehand? It existed, but to think that the graspability is in it as a property, you won't find that, for example, as a property in your physics ontology, because it's not an invariant property of this. As I said, this is graspable by me, it's not graspable by all. Yeah, but you can just say it's graspable by me without saying as it becomes graspable.
Well, because I might not be using it that way, right? So I may never grasp it. See, I don't get it, because it's as if what you're saying is you have some motivation, you have some reason you want to pick it up, you have something you want to do with it. But the object itself, from a physics point of view, let's say, from a materialistic point of view, doesn't change because of what you want to do. Well, I think that's unfair. Here's why I think it's unfair. You're thinking that the properties of this object
are somehow inherent in it, like its chemical structure, where many of its properties are interactional properties that are only refilled or disclosed by it as it interacts with other objects or other things. So many of the real properties of things are relational properties. So if I say to you that sugar is soluble, is that a property in the sugar? No, it's a property that the sugar has in relationship to its interaction with water.
Right? And so many of the properties that we want to talk about things, we shouldn't think of them as adhering in the object. They are disclosed in terms of how the object interacts with other things. One of those things that the cup can interact with is me and the way I will, you know, shape it either physically or at least cognitively in terms of what aspects of it stand out for me or important to me.
Okay, I don't want to get bogged down in this, but I'm just going to play the devil's advocate because most people are materialists, or at least that's how they're trained to think that they see the world. That's a mistake, right? They shouldn't be materialists. No, what I mean is they should be physicalists. I mean, there's a big difference between those. Materialism is an 18th century view. Materialism is the view that all that exists is matter.
I mean, and that's a ridiculous view because it's unscientific. You should be a physicalist. You should believe that in addition to matter, there's energy, there's space, there's time, there's causal properties, there's fundamental forces, right, there's the curvature of space, there's relativity, there's, right, there's, you should be including all of those in your ontology and many physicists are leaning towards the idea that, you know, information should be thought of as physical and part of the fundamental,
That's what we should be talking about. How did you know that?
with a calculation, like you make up a hypothetical, we can make up hypotheticals in physics all the time. We can make up hypotheticals about what would happen if this hit the wall, and it doesn't have to hit the wall, and we can calculate it, and then we test it out and it turns out to be correct, it could also turn out to be wrong, and then we update our models. Right, so you should, right? And so all of your ways of actually obtaining your knowledge are actually dependent on getting things to interact together. Yes, you could try and a priori calculate
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So does it exist independent of our knowability? Well, I mean, you would have... There's a tree falling in the woods now.
Well, it's not quite knowability. There's a difference between knowability and whether or not it's a real property. I assume that sugar dissolved in water way before there were cognitive agents or life wouldn't have evolved the way it did. So I don't think this is dependent on there being
You know, cognitive agents with consciousness knowing that sugar dissolves in water in order for sugar to be soluble, but what it does depend is it depends crucially on a real relation between sugar and water and not something that just belongs to water as a property itself. So you're using the word relation and interaction interchangeably in this? Yeah, because I mean interaction is a species of relation, yeah. Okay, so let's get bogged down a little bit further. Okay. Like Sam Harris and Peterson, what is the notion, what is your notion of truth?
So that's a long question. And I think it's fair to say that one of my criticisms is we have a notion of truth that is too separate from the different ways in which we obtain knowledge about the world. So our standard way of understanding truth, and the interesting thing about the Greeks, for example, is they had four different terms.
for talking about this. So the model we have, the dominant model we have is propositional truth. So we have propositions, and then we determine if they're accurate or they correspond. And of course, there's a lot of philosophical debate, right? But some notion of they correspond to reality in one way. And that's our epistemic sense of truth. And I think, if I understand him correctly, because it's very hard to pin Harris down, because he always claims to be misunderstood when people try to criticize him.
But anyways, I think that the notion of truth he is advocating is exactly that notion, and he thinks that's the sole notion of truth. What I think Jordan to be doing with his pragmatic notion of truth, I think he's conflating a bunch of different things together. In his own little Petersonian form of truth. Yeah, because he talks about the truth in the world of action, right?
He talks about this in terms of pragmatism, and I take him to be using something like a Jamesian notion of pragmatism. Let me try and get at that. So in addition to knowing that things are the case, like knowing that that is a cup, and that's proposition knowing, there's procedural knowing, and I think that's part of what Jordan's talking about. So I know how to catch a ball. I know how to ride a bicycle. That's a skill. It's not a theory. It's a skill.
And that's pragmatic.
That's part of what pragmatism means, I think. Because to be apt or inept means that you have some goal. There's some goal but it's also the appropriateness or the fittedness of the action.
So the standard there isn't really a standard of truth. So let me let me try it this way. I think all the knowledges have a different way of talking about ways in which we find things to be real. One way is propositional truth. Then another what skills give us is they give us a sense of realness in terms of power, right? How much power we are able to wield, how much
our actions can intervene and alter the course of things. And that's definitely what's being emphasized by certain forms of pragmatism. And you can even see it in some postmodernisms when Foucault was talking about the relationships between knowledge and power. But I think there's another notion. So the Greeks have episteme for theoretical truth, propositional truth. They have thekne,
for this procedural ability. Tekne. It's where we get our technology from. This is the knowing how to do things. Is that related to perspectival knowledge? No. I would say that that's a different thing. And so I think the Greek word that corresponds to that is noesis. And so this is closer to our word for noticing. And so what perspectival knowing is, right, knowing what it's like to have a particular salience landscape.
Knowing what it's like to be here now, with these things salient to me, and these things backgrounded, these things foregrounded. I'm offended that you refer to me as these things. No, a bunch of things, sorry. What relationship does the perspectival knowledge have to truth? And also, let's just get to your notion of truth, because right now you're reiterating what you think Peterson's notion of truth is, or Sam Harris's. Well, I am. So, well, I'm trying to get to my notion by distinguishing and contrasting mine with both Harris and Peterson. So unlike
Harris, I think that there, I think truth belongs to a family, right, of ways of deciding how things are real for us. And then I think Jordan is calling, what Jordan is talking about, he's talking about some aspect of our procedural knowing, our techne, and one way things strike us, a criterion we use for determining if things are real is their power, which is different from, right, the accuracy of our propositions.
The perspectival knowing, studying this right now with Dan Schiappi, it has a different sense of realness to it. It comes with this notion of presence. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We're currently studying scientists who do work with like the rovers on Mars. And what's interesting there is this notion of telepresence, being on Mars.
And it's important that you know that the rovers are not joystick controlled. In fact, you can't do that because the time delays too great. So what you do is you get batch, you get all these photos and all this data and then you sort of process it and then you set up a set of instructions like to curiosity or things like that. Now what's interesting is you look at these people and you can see similar things when people are trying to do VR, virtual reality. They talk about being on Mars.
They have this perspectival sense of being on Mars, and they'll do things like...
You know, the rover needs, here's my camera, and they'll say, you know, I need to, and they'll say, they'll do that, they'll do first-person perspective, first-person perspective. I need to turn this way. I need to turn this way, right, because the light, the light's going to be here, and if I don't turn this way, if I turn this, I won't be able to get what I need, and they do all this perspectival adjustment from the first-person perspective, right? And so, what's really important to them, right,
And they look for it in the people that are trying to join the team, is that sense of being on Mars, being there, that sense of presence. And it's also a constant, notice the word we use, virtual reality. It becomes more real to us when we get a sense of presence, when we get that sense of immersion, when we get that sense that we have a perspectival salience landscape that is working for us. So perspectival knowing, noesis, has this sense of presence.
And then I think there's a fourth one, and you can see it also a bit in what I was talking about with the scientists, right? There's a participatory knowing. And this goes to gnosis as a Greek term. This is knowing by sharing a fundamental identity.
with things. And so, for example, the scientists are identifying with the rover. That's why they'll say I. And when you write to identify with your pen, is that similar or not? Well, I think that's part of it. I mean, so when I'm writing, I think there's two parts to the identification process. Part of it when I'm identifying with something is I'm doing what Polanyi calls indwelling.
I'm actually not sensing it, I'm sensing through it. Actually, you're typically not paying attention to the pen when you're writing, you're paying attention to it. So that's one way. But you also do something else that you probably aren't doing with the pen as much. You do internalization. So, for example, you have metacognition. You are able to reflect on your own thinking.
You don't come with that, right? You get that by imitating adults when you're a kid taking a perspective on you. And so you imitate them taking a perspective on you until eventually you can do that for yourself. You internalize other people's perspectives, aren't you? And that's partially also how you get inculturated. So we identify things, and this is what you can see them doing with the rover, they're sort of indwelling, they're seeing through the rover, but they're also internalizing it into, you know, sort of becoming the rover.
And we have lots of ways in which we have this kind of participatory knowing. So a really important way. And I think this goes towards some of Jordan's concern with narrative, although narrative also involves perspectival knowing. But we think of ourselves as temporally extended selves, like, you know, here's my past, here's my future. And so we have this sort of autobiographical sense of our of ourself as extended in time, right?
That again isn't sort of natural to us. We acquire that and we acquire it through constantly practicing narrative. This is some of Daniel Hutto's work on the narrative practice hypothesis. We again think that thinking in narrative is natural to us but notice that we spend so much bloody time practicing it and we practice it all the time with each other. You meet somebody at a party and they want to know who you are. What do you do? You tell them your story.
You go to home at the end of the day. People want to know, how did your day go? You tell them your story. But we wouldn't think of that as practicing, but we are. But we are. And notice what you do when you have a kid. What do you do? You have to practice narrative. Do they get narrative right away? Can they tell or understand jokes right away? No.
So narrative is not innate, but it's useful. And it's culturally universal. So it's not innate, but it's culturally universal.
Because we usually look at cross cultures to see, do we all smile when we're happy? And then we say, oh, okay, we can infer that that's innate. Yeah. So you should use, I mean, universality is important. So I don't usually make the inference directly from universality to innate. I make the inference usually to universal for having some fundamental function, right? And those aren't the same thing as you just pointed out.
And so let's go back to the Teletubbies. We do this really, really simplified narrative and watch the show. It's horrific as an adult because it's repetitive and repetitive and we're doing this because we have to
We have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and slowly make it more complex until eventually we can do narrative and then eventually we can indwell narrative. I can start to see the world as a story and then I can also start to internalize the world as a story and I become a story. I'm a story and the world is a story. Now that's participatory knowing. I'm a story participating in a story and that story is participating in me.
And that, right, that's, that's gnosis, that's a con, that's another kind of knowing. And it, it gives you the realness of that ultimate sense of being, right, in tune, attuned, sort of one between you and the world. And so I think all of these are different ways in which we, we make judgments about realness. And I think it's a mistake. So here's how I return back to both
I think it's a mistake to try and equate truth to any one of these. I think we should understand that truth, we should reserve it for what it's prototypically meant, the accuracy, the correspondence between
the content of our propositions in the world. And we should think about power, we should think about presence, and we should think about attunement as additional ways in which we connect up to realness. And now I can now answer your question. Those ways in which we connect up to realness, especially the procedural, the perspectival, the participatory, that's where a lot of the meaning that goes into meaning in life is to be found. What would Peterson say to that?
What would his objection to that be? Because he would say he has a strong belief in his notion of truth. And then you also seem to, I don't know if it's conflating, but to equate realness with truth. No, I was trying to say that truth is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a propositional fashion.
Power is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a procedural fashion. Presence is one of the ways we judge things to be real. And by power, you just mean influence? Influence, yeah, yeah. I don't mean like, you know, brutality. No, I don't mean anything like that. No. Oppression. Pardon me? Oppression. No, no, I'm not trying to give it any political overtones. And then one of the ways we, you know, the participatory way we judge things to be real is this sense of participatory attunement with things.
So every different point of view has its own realness to it? Well, I don't think these are points of view. I think these are fundamentally different ways in which we know and come into contact with reality. And these are the grounding ways in which
we try to make the connections to reality that underlie, I mean one of the things that people, even if you look at the psychology of meaning of life, one of the things that makes people feel that they have a meaningful life is how connected they are, connection, how connected they are to something
greater than themselves something more real than themselves does have a relation to the two world problem because that's I mean a problem two world model because the connectedness is you transcending and being more connected exactly what is real and then the realness is just all of what you said yes yes so that's why in in fact in in for example let's take the I think the archetypal philosophical position for the axial age are on the two world model which is you know platonic or neoplatonic view right and you've got the upper world is the more real
the more real world and the lower world is the less real. It's in Plato and I think it's very well explicated in Plotinus. When you ascend, I'm speaking mythologically of course, to the upper world, you actually transcend propositional truth.
You're moving ultimately into oneness at one minute. Eventually you move into the perspectival and then that eventually becomes the participatory. So these levels below the propositional are actually the ones that, at least that tradition, are considered the ones by which we most deeply get that connectedness to reality. Okay, now getting back to what Peterson would critique you. How would he critique you and then what would your response to him be? Let's build a virtual Peterson.
Okay, so that's a hard thing to do because Jordan's a really complex guy. I've debated him a couple times. Are those on the internet? Because I've only seen one conversation with you. It wasn't a debate. So I don't even know what I'm thinking of as the debate. Okay, we can call it a discussion of you with. I've had a complex conversation that contained disagreement with him about meaning in life.
There was an earlier one, it wasn't recorded, where it was much more of what you might call a formal debate, where we were debating about a problem called the frame problem. Artificial intelligence? But it also overlaps with stuff we're sort of touching the edges on, which is how humans zero in on relevant information. Because part of what I'm going to argue is that that process of zeroing in on relevant information is sub-propositional. It's taking place in these lower levels that I've been talking about, primarily.
And that a lot of what it means for us to say that we have a meaningful life is we feel connected by deep bonds of relevance to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. And that's very much what this psychological research is showing about how you can manipulate or enhance or degrade people's sense of meaning in life. Okay, so what would Jordan say?
Well, Jordan would like a lot of it. He would like a lot of, because for a long time we shared students precisely because both he and I spoke about the frame problem, spoke about relevance. I think he would like some aspects of the non-propositional knowing, the kinds of knowing that I've been talking about. He might
I don't know. You're asking me to do conjecture here, and so I'm being sort of cautious. He might object to my claim that you have to drop below the propositional level. Here's why I'm saying that, and I don't know if this is fair or unfair to him. One of the things I'd like to do is have another discussion with Jordan about these kinds of things. You see, one of the consequences of what I'm arguing is that most of
You know, this meaning is sub propositional and the cognitive state by which you grasp your propositions is belief. And so what I'm saying is a lot of meaning in life is actually below your belief systems, right? And it's therefore, it's sub semantic, sub syntactic in really important ways. And that means that understanding, trying to formulate, articulate and express
this in an ideological fashion as something that is captured primarily by beliefs, I think is a fundamental mistake. And I think Jordan would, that's an area where Jordan and I would significantly disagree. That's, for example, why I tend to view, I'm quite critical of trying to deal with the meeting crisis in terms of formulating it as a
conflict between ideologies in which one ideology must be victorious in some fashion because I think that is both symptomatic of the meaning crisis and exacerbating of it because it's precisely pitching us at the wrong level we need to be at in order to enhance and recover the meaning in life that people feel is under threat.
Do you feel like that comes from your Buddhism background that whenever there's a paradox that it's just an apparent contradiction and that one doesn't need to win, that both can be right? Well, I don't know. That's a really good question. I think it's not just the Buddhist training. It was also the Taoist training. I am a practicer. Well, in Tai Chi, you actually play Tai Chi. You don't practice it. It's like playing music. And I've been doing that
as long in fact even longer about a year longer than I've been doing the Buddhist practices. One of the things that did happen to me is and this was a long time ago because I've been doing these things for like 28 years but people I I've been doing the Tai Chi for quite a while and the meditation but especially the Tai Chi and people came to me and I I was like I was just doing it because I was sort of getting something out of it and I you know and I sort of had a vague idea that this would be deeply transform transformative
But people were coming to me and they're saying, what's going on? And I said, what do you mean? Well, you talk differently and you write differently. How long after you started practicing? Probably two or three or four. It's hard. Years or months? Months. So probably three or four years, I think, maybe something like that. And again, it's because
Tai Chi is taking place at this level, right? These lower levels that we're talking about. Did you find it affected your hand gestures too? Because even when you talk, you look like you're performing Tai Chi. I gesticulate just as much as anybody, but yours are flowy. Mine are just erratic. I think that's true. And I think I get more into the flow state because of being a Tai Chi practitioner, Tai Chi player. I keep catching myself
People really said that at this upper level, the level of propositions and inferences and theories, they were noticing a change, and I hadn't even noticed it. But see, stuff was happening at the procedural, perspectival, and even the participatory level that was emerging up, percolating up. I don't know what the correct metaphor here is, but it was actually altering
How I go about and do my theoretical endeavors. Let's get to BS or bullshit. Okay. You're allowed to swear, don't worry. I don't like to swear, so I'm going to say BS. Well, technically it's not swearing, it's just vulgarity, but that's okay. I'm going to say what I think it is because I'm trying to make sure I understand and then you'll just correct me, okay? So BS is not necessarily you're lying to yourself or someone's lying to you. It's when there's the inappropriate hijacking of
salience from something like a relevance landscape or habit that makes conspicuous something that's irrelevant. Yeah, in an important way. I think that's right. I would add a bit more to it. I would put it in sort of the notion comes from Frankfurt, Harry Frankfurt and his seminal essay on bullshit, which is like 20 years old now.
He starts the book in a way that of course is ultimately deeply relevant to the meaning crisis because one symptom of the meaning crisis is he says there's this sense of just increasing amounts of bullshit and then he said if that's the case, I'm paraphrasing him of course, it's not verbatim.
But if that's the case, you know, we've got to get clear about what bullshitting is. And he then tries to distinguish it from lying. And he says, the liar works by trying to get you to believe in the truth of something. Right. And so the liar is depending on altering your behavior because you care about truth. Right. So I tell you that Susan loves you, even though she doesn't, because... What? What? Yeah. So I do that and I can change your behavior.
Now, what the bullshit artist does according to Frankfurt is they get you to become indifferent to the truth.
I think the following thing I'm going to say is implicit in Frankfurt, but part of what I've done is sort of explicated, make it more explicit. I think that what the bullshit artist does then is not only make you indifferent to the truth, they make you indifferent to the truth, as you said, by trying to make something inappropriately salient and catchy to you as a way of manipulating your behavior. And part of what I think that inappropriateness means is that the salience has been, how you're tracking salience has been uncoupled
The Simpsons? The Simpsons? The Simpsons? The Simpsons?
90% of ads.
Yes, and so 90% of ads are basically bullshit. And do the ads make you not believe in truth at all or do they just make something salient and you still care about the truth? Well, so it doesn't it doesn't actually besmirch your truth-seeking. That's a good metaphor. Now that's a really tricky question. I mean, so I can't give like a yes no answer to it, right? I think
So in the instance what happens there is, of course, and this is why the advertisers do it, you buy the product. You buy the product largely independent of your assessment of the truth. They're counting on impulse buying for a lot of what you do. It jumps off the shelf at you kind of thing. That's what salience is. Things stand out for you. Now your question, I want to pause on it because I think it's a question that deserves reflection.
How often do you have to cycle through this where you are disconnected from truth? You become, let's use the right word here, indifferent. It drops into the background. It's not salient to you. It's not motivationally affecting you. How often when you disconnect from that and allow yourself to be caught up in salience does it have to go on
before this gains enough autonomy that it becomes compelling and difficult for you to return to the truth tracking. Because obviously that can happen and cults are an example of that. Of course. Now magicians are an example to me of someone who's a self-admitted bullshit artist. Yes. So they'll tell you I'm doing, this is all bullshit. Yeah. You want to play the game of watching and being interested. But at the end you know it's bullshit but the advertisers won't tell you it's BS because
Maybe in an interview later they'll say it's BS. They typically won't do that. They're trying to make a joke. Some advertising works with the joke of, you know that's not true, I know you know it's not, and they'll give you the conceit
that you are smart because you know it's not true. Well, the trouble with that, what's problematic about that, is by appealing to your sense of excellence, this is the superiority illusion, most people believe they're above the average in all dimensions, which of course is false, it has to be false, but because they're appealing to that,
the situation in which they appeal to your sense of superiority because you know the advertisement isn't true, precisely makes the product salient to you so that you are more likely to buy the product. So, yeah, this can and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Is BS related to trigger words? Like, this is getting a little bit political, but redefine like racism and not oppression, actually violence.
My other example is the one from The Simpsons, the famous speech by the aliens.
My fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backwards, upwards, not forwards, twirling, twirling towards freedom. You're not saying anything, but it gives you this rush, right? This tremendous rush. It's evocative, it's catchy, right? It's super salient to you. And I think wherever political discourse is retreating to things that are super salient to us without any articulated, defended, like,
So how do we prevent ourselves from falling prey to bullshit? Maybe it starts with identifying it, I'm not sure. Well, I mean, part of it is that, but part of it is to do this.
One of the arguments I make, one of the applications I make of Frankfurt is that we can use it as a powerful way of understanding self-deception and this is actually what we're already discussing. We're discussing the ways in which we fall into patterns of self-deception and this is again why these levels are important to me because for very deep reasons you can't really lie to yourself because beliefs don't work that way. Pick a belief you want to have. You can't just believe.
I would like to believe that everybody loves me. I can imagine that, but belief doesn't work that way. So you can't really deceive yourself by lying to yourself, but what you can do is you can bullshit yourself because of the way attention alters salience. So if something is salient, like if there's a loud noise over here, it catches my attention, remember the catchiness, but I can also use my attention to make something salient, like look at this.
Right. And so notice what I can do. I can use my attention to make something salient and then that is what the advertisers doing. Right.
and then that makes it more likely that it will catch my attention and then that right and then i guess a feedback loop yeah a feedback loop very much a feedback loop and that's how you can bullshit yourself you can lead yourself until so let's say you're addicted to chocolate and you have chocolate on your desk that's very apropos for me i have to i've had to give up eating chocolate uh... for health reasons so so let's say there's chocolates in there man so let's say you're addicted to chocolates
You want to not eat chocolate, but you keep it on your desk. That makes you more likely to eat it because it's secret. Hear that sound?
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The ways in which people fall into self-deception. Many people have what's called the restraint bias. They believe that they are capable of a lot more self-regulation and because they believe in the truth of, I shouldn't eat the chocolate. That's enough, right?
No, it's not. In fact, that's the fallacy. And so what they'll do is they'll subject themselves to the temptation, and then they'll find that they're eating the bloody chocolate, precisely because this chocolate is salient, and without even realizing it often, they'll start eating the chocolate. I want to stop using my phone so much, and you're telling yourself that as you're looking at your phone. Look, one of the best models of addiction, my colleague and friend,
Mark Lewis, he's one of the world's foremost experts on addiction. He was himself a drug addict. He wrote a really good book called Memoirs of an Addictive Dream. Is he a professor? Yes. He was a professor at Oisey at the University of Toronto. That's how I got to know him. He's now in the Netherlands. And his model of addiction, watch how it brings together everything we've talked about. Did he leave Oisey because of the BS from the postmodernists?
No, no, no. He left because of career opportunities for his spouse. Okay, so sorry. I was just making a joke. That's fine. So most people, and Mark has a lot of arguments in evidence against this, have sort of the chemical dependency model. So it's like an infection model. I take the drug and then I get infected and then I get dependent on that and I have to get it.
and that just does not explain a lot of the data about addiction, but it's kind of a model we like for, I think, political reasons. What actually seems to go on in addiction is something like this, and watch how it brings in all the stuff we're talking about. So I take the drug, and what the drug does, right, is it alters what I find salient or relevant, and if I don't have some, you know, some important skills and abilities around that, that will actually start to limit some of my options in the world.
So my world narrows a little bit, right? Now because my world narrows a bit, that tends to... I start to internalize that. Remember we talked about that? And that starts to narrow and limit my cognition. It becomes a little less... I lose some cognitive flexibility. As I lose cognitive flexibility, my ability to make sense of the world and solve problems in the world goes down, and so the world also narrows. He calls this addiction as reciprocal narrowing. The world narrows, and then my cognition narrows, and then the world narrows, and my cognition narrows.
until they both get so narrow that it looks like these two things are true. My world can't change and I can't change. I can't be anybody other than that. So that's rumination that's related to it? Rumination is related to that, but it's more than rumination, right? Because rumination is typically in here. But notice I'm talking about, remember we talked about the affordance loop and these relational properties and indwelling and internalization and the way you make sense of this world in this dynamic fashion. That's all in place.
Addiction? Addiction. I had this insight a few months ago or maybe a year ago. I was just alone in my condo when I was living downtown and it was dark and I never do this. I just turned off the lights
And I was just thinking with the lights off in my living room, like when do you do that? Why do you do that? I mean, you probably do that because you're a meditative guy. But most people, I don't do that. So I was just thinking and I was getting into some deep thoughts about profound insights about humanity. And then I felt like I was speaking to Carl Jung in my own brain, like conjuring him or what I think he is. And then
I shifted my head a bit, and my curtains had a little bit of a slit or a slat, and there was light from outside. It was nighttime. And my attention was drawn there. And then I realized, wait, why did I just, I think, lost all my thoughts. And then I was thinking, what drew me there? It was almost like a moth or a mosquito to the light. And it's just the neon lights of Zanzibar or some other downtown advertisement.
I remember thinking, hmm, there's this connection in the Bible between Satan and the bringer of light, Lucifer. And then I wondered, huh, I wonder if that's related to attention. Be careful of what grabs your attention. And now I want to know if you see any connection between Lucifer, the bringer of light, and BS. So, wow.
So, I mean, originally Lucifer, there is no actual identification between Lucifer and Satan, right? There are different figures in the Bible, and then it's later Christian tradition that identifies them together, although is it Milton or Dante that's still, they're still separate figures? I can't remember, but it's one of them. Because Lucifer was originally the morning star, and that's why it was the bringer of light, right? And then, which of course is Venus, and the morning star was associated with all kinds of
religious practices of the cultures around ancient Israel. And so that morning Star God associated with the adversaries, the enemies,
of Israel. And that eventually got associated with Satan, who was originally not an evil figure. He's the antagonist in God's court. That's why he has admitted he can just walk into God's court in the book of Job, for example, and talk to God because he's there as a prosecutor, right? And then those things eventually get fused together and we get sort of our modern notion of evil. But
I guess a Jungian, a Jordan, as an example, might say, you know, everything you just said, John, is historically true. But the way in which we need to pay attention to what we find salient and what attracts us is a perennial
a perennial piece of advice that myths do give to us, that you'll find in many mythological stories. So here's another one that's famous, the sirens in the Odyssey.
Be careful about what you pay attention to. Be careful about what it's doing to you. So notice
What Odysseus does, he has forethought, he lashes himself to the mast and he has wax put in the ears of all of his men so that he cannot do anything to alter the course of the ship. So he gives up that. Something interesting, I have this argument with a friend of mine who feels like anytime that, let's say you're extremely attracted to women and you're
Married. No, I'm not married. That's how you get so much work done by the way. I have a partner and she's a wonderful woman. Let's say you have your partner and you're attracted to other women and you know that and you don't want to be tempted so you just stop looking at other women. Now my friend would say that's repression because he's
He has a Freudian mindset that whatever you're trying to not to do, there's somehow repression there. But I would say, is it repression if you clean your room because it's more conducive to you working better? Is it repression because you're just changing your environment? Is it repression if you take off your shirt when you're extremely hot? This putting of wax in the ear. To me, that's an admission that you're a limited being, that you're not infinitely strong.
I mean, we're still trying to work around to the question that this is all in service of, which is, you know, how do you deal with BS? And I'm not objecting to this because I think trying to unpack all of this machinery and get a deep understanding of BS is really necessary, indispensable, at least to a, it may not be logically necessary, but it's at least epistemically indispensable to coming up with a good answer about how we respond to that.
And I think if you try to capture self-regulation just in rules, I think you're making a fundamental mistake. But you're also making a fundamental mistake to think that rules don't have any service in the project of self-regulation. Both of those, I think, are overly simplistic.
It has to do with the fact that rules do organize and limit, but you can never completely get the self-regulation you need from the rule itself. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So here's a rule I try to follow. Be kind. I want to be kind. And that's a rule. What I mean by that is I limit my options and my behavior in order to try and exemplify that. But notice that
That doesn't alleviate me from all of this work of determining what's relevant and salient and making judgments. Because here, look at this. The way I'm kind to my son Spencer is not the way I should be kind to my partner. That would be condescending, inappropriate. The way I'm kind to my partner, the way I'm kind to her, is not the way I should be kind to my students. That would also be, this is my language, inappropriate.
If the way I'm kind to my students is not the way I should be kind to a stranger, that would also again be inappropriate. So even when I'm trying to follow a rule, I'm still dependent on having to make judgments about what's salient and relevant. I still have to rely on my capacity to determine what is appropriate, what is the best fittedness
In other words, the rule is like an adage of generality that you have to then apply in specific situations. Right. This is called the problem of specification. And what I can't do is specify all the specifications. I can't put into the proposition, be kind, all the conditions and all the context and all the possible ways I'll need to specify. Trying to pre-specify it will be too prejudicial. I'll prejudge it in too many ways and I'll get too rigid, too inflexible, and I'll actually end up not being kind.
even though in one sense I'm trying to follow the rule. Because what I'll be doing is I'll be trying to capture being kind in just a set of rules, right? And what I'm trying to do is remove that process of specification and try and put it in a limited number of finite
finite ahead of the time pre-specifications and you can't do that because the world is complex and dynamic and changing and so are you and so are people and if you try and pre-package it all that way you're actually going to miss all most of the time all that appropriately but at the same time you can't get rid of the rules exactly that's exactly my point in fact that I've got to have the two together what I want is I want rules that give me sort of you know things that I want to try and do across contexts
In many different contexts, I want to be kind, so the rules are giving me the cross contextual, but I also need this ability to make them context sensitive in their specific appropriateness and application. So your books, the four series, is it like the rules of life? Is it like Jordan Peterson's? No, no, no, no. So the books are, the series of books are
In many ways, it's paralleling the video series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. There's two components to this. There's a historical argument of what is the Meaning Crisis? How does it arise? And part of that is to give us a sense of what is the meaning we're talking about by trying to understand the genealogy of how it was lost.
And then that's in dialogue with and eventually the emphasis shifts in the second half of the series of a lot of what we've been talking about here, which is the scientific understanding of, yes, but what are the cognitive processes that are at work in meaning making?
So, and then what you want to do is you want to have the historical genealogy and the scientific ontology talk to each other. So it's history and science? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And those are always interdependent in almost everything we do. Even when you're doing science, you're depending on the history of science. And even when you're doing history, you're depending on the scientific ontology for how you examine materials, etc. You should always be having those in discourse with each other. You dated back the meaning crisis. So first, you'll define the meaning crisis.
I guess you've defined meaning somewhat so far, although it's complicated. It's not easy to put into one sentence. Exactly, exactly. Let's forget about defining it again. The meaning crisis is what you'll define and you'll also tell me when did it come about because you seem to have this perspective that there's a paradigm shift around the year 1200. Yeah. Okay, so the first part is what's the meaning crisis? The meaning crisis is the, I mean,
You can see it, I think, symptomatically in terms of related things, like the addiction crisis. We're talking about addiction. You know, the mental health crisis, the fact that we've got this paradox in our culture that everything is being politicized at the same time as people are feeling disenfranchised, distrustful, disconnected from political institutions, political methods, political processes. Those are symptoms of the meaning crisis. That's right. Exactly.
And you've got, we've already talked about it, you know, foreshadowed in Frankfurt, the increasing sense of bullshit. We actually graph it in the book. You've got the disaffiliation from, you know, religious institutions. The fastest growing group are nones, N-O-N-E-S, people with no, and when the paradox about that again. Paradox, when there are no people of no what? No religious orientation.
So I haven't said what the paradox is. The paradox is, well, there's simultaneously this decline in religious institutions. Most of these people also are, this notion of being spiritual but not religious is also accelerating and growing powerfully.
And that's symptomatic of the meaning crisis? To me I see that as people have an innate need for religion, but then they see religion of the past as being hyper dogmatic, but religion is a two-sided coin of dogma and spirituality. So they're essentially saying, I'm spiritual but not dogmatic.
Notice what you're trying to do. You're trying to separate the propositional from the non-propositional because you're trying to recover the meaning separate from the beliefs that you no longer think are true. And you said that's because people are naturally disposed towards religion. That packs a lot in it.
I mean, religio, one of the etymological origins, it means to connect, to bind together. What people were seeking in religion, if we agree that these metaphysical truths are extremely doubtful, what they were seeking in religion are sets of procedures, perspectival transformations, transformations of identity through participatory knowing, in which they are enhancing and enriching
these senses of connectedness that make life more meaningful to human beings. So, I agree with you in the fact that people are doing exactly what they're doing, disaffiliating from religion, yet trying to pursue spirituality, means they're trying, at least in an intuitive fashion, to say, forget the propositional, I want to get down to the meaning and I want to find how to get that meaning that isn't in my life the way I need it to be there anymore. So that's, I think, why it's clearly an example of the meaning crisis. I think other things,
related to that like the mindfulness revolution and that people are turning to all of these perspectival participatory transformation techniques and methods is because again they're trying how do I get back this meaning that's being lost right and the meaning crisis is essentially a loss of meaning yes that people have a pervasive loss of meaning yeah and so yeah I think I think this is why
I'm just wondering if you can graph the loss of meaning just like you can graph the presence of BS. There's a sense in which that project is starting.
One of my hopes is that a lot of this work, this historical and theoretical work, and it's not just theoretical because I make use of all kinds of empirical data, but all of this work is to try and get a theoretical construct of meaning that will afford more direct experimental investigation. Because presumably that is where we will get the kinds of patterns
in the phenomena that will allow us to reliably measure it in some fashion. And so that is happening. So I mentioned the work of Samantha Heinzelman and others. You do an experiment something like this. You give people a bunch of pictures
and that they can sort of make sense of it. Oh yeah, I make sense of that. You know, and think about all that stuff, that perspectival. Like I know, I see this, it's a tree. Yeah, it's a tree, but I also can understand sort of what's going on here, right? Like I get the scene, I get the situation, right? Not just object identification. And then you give them pictures that are maybe less coherent. It's like, what's going on here?
or cubism, or you may put a potted plant in front of a computer, or something like that. Like, what's going on there, right? Absurd in some way. Yeah. And absurdity is, of course, not a statement about truth. It's a statement about this kind of meaning that we're talking about. It's a statement about the incongruity between two perspectives. Your perspective as, like,
Your perspective as somebody who could sort of find this situation a live option and then the perspective of just what are the objects in this, right? So, you know, you can tell me what the objects are in the picture, that's a potted plant, that's a computer, but how would I, what does this mean perspectively for me? Like, I can't see how I'd put myself into this picture. Is that okay? Okay, so you give people a bunch of these pictures and some of them are, and the term that's used,
It's kind of right, but I don't like it because it has logical overtones. So some of these pictures have more coherence.
and some of them have less coherence in the sense in this sense we're talking about here right so what you do is and this is the this is the manipulation you just give people either these these ones that are coherent or ones that are less coherent and right after you show them these pictures these two types you just ask them using a standardized questionnaire that's been validated for you know you know for being a good psychological measure right you ask them how meaningful is your life
And what you'll find is if they've been looking at the meaningful pictures, the coherent pictures, they'll say, oh, my life is meaningful. You'll see an increase above control of meaning in life. And the people who are looking at the more absurd pictures will say, oh, my life's not very meaningful. Notice what's going on there.
They're not reflecting on the what of their life. They're not reviewing their facts. They're not even reviewing, even in this situation, their story. What they're tapping into is how activated and fitted is the machinery, the perspectival and participatory machinery to this situation. And if it's active and well-fitting, that's a measure of how meaningful. And if it's not, ugh.
And so just because you've experienced something that's been meaningful in the sense that it's cohesive in the, or sorry, coherent, coherent in this, in this, with this nomenclature, that that gives you a sense that your whole life has been meaningful just because you're being asked that on the spot. Yeah. And you somehow color the rest of your life. Yeah. Okay.
Now, what about these studies where you give someone a warm cup of coffee and then they're more likely to rate a character as loving than if you gave them iced coffee? So you heard about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what if you did something like that with meaning? I know it might not have been done, but I would imagine that someone would say, my life is more meaningful if they held a warm cup of coffee. Then the question is, let's suppose that that's true, that they increase their meaning. Now, what if they increase their sense of meaning more than if they looked at these coherent pictures? Now, what would that say?
If that was the case, it might say something that, and I have to put a grain of salt on that because some of these experiments from social psychology about this, some of them have been failing to replicate. They're not completely sound. Yeah, well, I don't want to be that judgmental.
They might not be. There's a lot of assumptions. Let's assume this is all true. Given the hypothetical nature of it, then I need to pay attention that there's some deeper level at which meaning is being generated for people.
I don't know what that would mean. What typically happens in the interpretation of the experiments you're referring to, and I think this is actually something that in broad strokes I'm in very large agreement with, is the whole notion of embodied cognition. And then the idea is the way you're connected to the world has such an embodied aspect to it. It's so down at the participatory level that
At that level, if I can manipulate that level, then that would be altering me. If you get the ultimate embodied change, which is a massage, then you're going to feel like your life is extremely mean. That's right. Now, because that kind of thing, or at least similar kinds of things, don't seem to be the case, that's why I suspect
those experiments wouldn't turn out the way you're hypothesizing. Because what seems to happen, because we've run an experiment on that, even when people are having things like mystical experiences or flow experience, it's sort of this insight aspect, this ability to go in and make meaning where there wasn't meaning before and really feel connected. That seems to be what's contributing
You know what I find interesting is that when I asked you what is meaning, it's a 30 minute explanation and that was a condensed version. But when you ask these people is your life meaningful, they have a sense of it, yes or no. So do they have a sense and what you're doing is you're making it explicit. Yes, I'm trying to explicate and articulate. You have to be careful too though.
And that's why you have to run experiments and you have to try and validate the questionnaires between different situations and you have to see if the questionnaires match up with behavioral tests for all of the reasons that, you know, do I think people have a sense of meaning and do I think it's normative on their behavior to act as a standard by which they alter themselves and their actions? Yes.
Do I completely trust their introspective judgment as to giving me the account of how meaning is made? No, because I don't trust that about anything else. I think people have a sense of smell. If I ask them introspectively to tell me how smell works, I'll get a lot of cockamamie theories that don't really tell me at all how smell works. So do people have the sense and does it regulate their behavior? Yes. Does that mean that they have an introspective authority over explaining or articulating that? No, I don't think so.
Okay, let's go back to dating at 1200, you said. Okay, what happened around 1200? Well, what starts to happen is, so notice, we've talked about this indwelling internalization. And one of the things we do, because we're sort of natural born cyborgs, as Clark would say, right, is we have this kind of identification relationship to some technologies, right? And
And not only physical technology. This is a physical technology. We can do it with what I call psychotechnologies. This is a notion influenced by people like David Olson and Vygotsky and others. Like literacy is one of my prototypical examples. You're using literacy right now in your notes.
And so what that does, notice what you've done, you've put your thoughts on paper, so you don't have to, you can reflect on your thoughts without having to hold it in working memory, right, you can go back and correct your thoughts, you can correct, you can connect previous instances of when you were thinking to instances now, to future instances, you could have me read it and connect your,
So it just massively empowers your processing, right? So these psychotechnologies, and we... What are some other examples of psychotechnologies? Numeracies, another psychotechnology? Coding, an example of psychotechnology? You mean computer coding? I would need to ask people, but I imagine it is. I imagine if they've started to understand and think...
So it has to be related to the cognition because it's not just what expands the amount that you do. I guess that's technology. Yeah, that's right.
Notice how, like I said, notice how second nature literacy is to. If you try to, if I ask you to look at those pages and don't cheat by like un-focusing your eyes, look at the marks and don't read them. It's almost impossible for you to do that. It's become so internalized to you. And it seems like it's innate. It seems like it's natural to you. It seems like it's natural to all of humans. But it's odd because of course for overwhelming most of history, for overwhelming most of humanity, people were illiterate. And there's still some people who are illiterate. And we have to teach people.
Okay, so how people relate to literacy, and I think one of the things that drove the Axis revolution was a change in literacy, a change from hieroglyphic, cuneiform literacy to alphabetic literacy. And so when you see changes in how people relate to literacy, that can help drive significant changes in our cognition and even our consciousness, how we understand ourselves, how we understand the world.
I think that, for example, and I argue in this series, that the change to alphabetic literacy helped to drive the generation of the two-world mythology. So what I think, one of the things that's happening, one of the things, there's many things, one of the things that's happening in the 12th century, and this is an argument I think meant by Chatham, but I think he's citing somebody else, I think it's Kahn's. Anyways, the argument is people started to read differently in the 12th century. And what's interesting is I've taught myself
to read in the way that they read before is changed. So the differences? So the differences, so the reading that I've learned, it's called Lectio Divina. It's still practiced in sort of religious and sort of neoplatonic communities, right? So when I'm, think about, here's where you probably might be doing it, when you're reading a poem, right? Now you might just read it in your head.
And then what that tends to get you thinking is that the ideas and the meaning are in your head and you think of it largely propositionally. But what you should do, and in fact if you had a good teacher of poetry, is poetry should be read aloud.
You should read the poetry aloud because you're trying to use the meter and the rhythm and some poets will even use the graphic shape of the poem. So you're trying to use all of this stuff around the proposition to trigger these other aspects of knowing, the perspectival, the procedural, the participatory. And so people were reading and they were reciting
I remember hearing that one of the first people, not the first people, but somebody, I think Caesar could read in his head and people thought he was a superhuman.
So it wasn't that common. That's one of the reasons why we started inventing more and more sophisticated punctuation so that we could read in our head rather than having to read aloud. Because it's faster. Yeah, it's faster and it's much more important. It has its advantages, but then there's a disadvantage. Yes, it has significant advantages. I'm not saying to anybody stop silent reading.
but when what happens is right you you go through this change right where you you go from i have to be participating involved i have to be going through a transformation as i'm engaging with the text like and that's what we often still read when i think when we're reading poetry properly we want the poem to transform us to change we're not just trying to get the the information from the poem we want to undergo some experience some transformation related to faith or doth
The Hoth? Because I know that has to do with experiencing something. Yeah, that's participatory knowing. So is this related or is it just seems like it is? It is. So the Hoth, the participatory knowing, so you see it in the Bible in the Old Testament.
because it's used it's used both of like a relationship like a faith as you said but it's also used as the term for sexual intercourse because in sexual intercourse you become intermittently participatory with another human being you're actually conforming and you're you know there's deep perspectival engagement right and so yeah that knowing by loving by having a loving interaction with something notice why that makes sense
When I'm involved in these loops, remember we did the addiction and it gets narrowed? Well, love is the other way, right? What love does, even when you're loving an object, if I put it that way, right? And Aaron showed this in his work, this mutually accelerating disclosure. So what happens is, in addiction you get the reciprocal narrowing, but in love you get the reciprocal opening up. So I start to, you get what I call reciprocal realization, I start to realize more about my partner,
Right? And that allows me to connect more deeply to her. Who started this idea? You said it and gave a name just now? Which one? That love opens up. I mean, the idea of it being mutually accelerating disclosure is a researcher called, his last name is Aaron. I think the idea goes back. It's just interesting, that's why. No, no, no. I think the idea goes back. I think people would want to research it. Yeah, I think the idea goes back to Plato, ultimately. Because Plato sees a deep connection between love
and wisdom. And the process that Plato talked about is an agogé, is this kind of reciprocal opening up, right? His idea, when I look at beautiful things, that sort of transforms me and makes me a more beautiful person, which then allows me to see deeper and more profound aspects of beauty that then
And what happens is it opens up and that's what happens when you're in love with somebody. You're getting to the depths of the person and that affords them getting to the depths of you and you sort of reciprocally realize each other in very powerful ways. So what happens is people start go from, if you'll allow me this to extend this, people go from reading the text in a loving manner, okay,
to reading the text in a purely propositional, inferential manner. How is it reading in a loving manner if you read it out loud and you have the cadence and you try to get into it? How's that loving? Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to trigger, right? You're trying to trigger
All aspects of your information processing that are much more procedural and perspectival. I mean, because you're listening. This is like the difference between reading a script and then acting out the script. Exactly. Exactly. And it's why, and I tell people this all the time, I was telling my son this other day. In fact, my older son was telling my younger son, don't read Shakespeare. It won't make any sense to you.
You have to go and see Shakespeare. You have to go and you have to hear them and see them acting and moving around and see how the words are connected to their characters and their identities. And then Shakespeare makes all this deep sense to you. Now does this only apply to poetry? Like if you're reading a non-fiction book, so The Shallows right there, or What is an Emotion, are you going to act that out and do you gain something from that? Well, I mean, it depends. Obviously you lose speed. Well, if
It depends what my project is. Again, it's all about what are my goals, what's the task, what's the set of problems I'm trying to solve. I think some philosophical texts should be read in this fashion. I think there's a good reason why Plato wrote in dialogues rather than just in a simple... Yeah, I've always found that strange. Yeah, because he's trying to trigger the perspectival and the participatory.
And he's trying to put you into the kind of knowing that would allow you to indwell the dialogue and internalize Socrates. Now, let's go back to it. People start reading differently, and so this starts to come to the fore. The idea that I can get information without having to go through transformation. And you say, okay, who cares? What are most of the texts? The texts are religious texts, clearly. It's 12th century.
And this is an idea that Jinsung Kim and I talk about a lot, and I owe a lot to him about this, but it's also in Konza's work and Chatham's work. It used to be that you could only gain access, if this isn't the right word, to God, the deepest reality, you could only have that knowing by going through transformation.
So theology was always linked to the process of spiritual transformation. But what starts to happen is I can do theology, I can generate propositions and beliefs about God without having to go through any transformation. So theology gets divorced from self-transcendence. Around the year 1200? Yeah, that's when it starts happening. Why? Because the reading is changing. Ah, okay, okay. And the reading changed because
Probably for reasons you said. I mean, there's many ways in which I can make my reading much more efficient, much more effective. I can consume more information, right, if I read in this silent fashion. But now I start to think of myself inside my head and that I am my beliefs and that meaning is in the propositions in my head rather than the meaning that was carried in
in this reciprocal realization between me and the text, in this mutual transformation. So now there's a separation. That's right. And at the same time, Aristotle's being rediscovered. And so Aristotle is, to the ancient world, he's science. He literally writes all the books on science, like literally. And so when Aristotle's being rediscovered,
You've got all this scientific knowledge that's coming in and it can't be ignored by the Christian Church. It can't be ignored because of the authority they give to the ancient world and also because Aristotle and Plato had deep influences on people like Augustine and so they can't just ignore Aristotle but they can't simply assimilate. So they've already respected Aristotle or the Greeks? There's a respect for Aristotle that has been set up within sort of
It's in the warp and the woof of the way in which Christianity had integrated with the Platonic tradition. Around what year was that? The integration with the Platonic tradition starts much much earlier. That's much later. I'm actually getting to Aquinas in this picture that we're talking about. But no, this is much earlier. You're seeing this in the third and fourth century and most especially in the fifth century with Augustine. Augustine is the person that really fuses Christianity
When you say he's fusing it, it's not as if he's taking passages from Aristotle and putting it in the Bible. What you mean is he's respecting their line of thinking and then applying it to the Bible? Yes. In fact, Augustine famously argued that he could not have become a Christian until he was exposed to Platonism because Plato's way of thinking about the upper world, the Platonic way of thinking,
like the idealized world yeah yeah that that gave august because augustine was a very much sort of a materialist in his way of thinking and he he couldn't get into christianity because he didn't know how to relate to this god that was this invisible unseeable he was an atheist before no he's a manichaeanist
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He reads Plato and Plato gives him the conceptual grammar so that he is then capable of moving into Christianity. You can see that. I find it hard to relate to this because for me hearing this and for most people I would imagine we're so
ingrained, I mean our thinking is so ingrained and rooted and fortified in a rational Aristotelian platonic way of thinking that to think that people didn't think that way is difficult. So how did you come about, how do you even imagine it, because to me I can only sort of understand it on an intellectual level, but not, I can't put myself in that perspective. So I'm not clear which perspective you're referring to, the perspective of people that are sort of non-platonic? Yeah, so in one of your lectures you were talking about how
Rational knowledge, I mean rational lines of thinking, logic is pretty new. It came about with the Greeks. People didn't think logically. They had to teach that. And now it's so taken for granted that when you don't, you say I'm being irrational and you don't like it. And it's difficult to think of, it's difficult to not think rationally.
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If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Well, it is again, but if only if you're using introspection as your way of evaluating
and interpreting and examining your own experience. But either way, my question is, do you find it difficult to have a perspective of someone from the year 1200? Did you find it difficult? It's probably not difficult for you anymore. No, I want to slow down because I take this problem very seriously. I take the problem of how to reverse engineer my cognition, how to go through a transformative process such that I can make their worldview viable.
So that it's not just something I'm thinking, but something that I would understand what it would be like to live that way. Here's another example. Yeah. Let's go pre-exile. So upper paleolithic transition after that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's the timeless loop. I don't know what to call it. I'm just in continuous cosmos. Okay. So there's no difference in kind. There's difference of power, but it's not weird for there to be an elf or a fairy or a plant that talks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now to us,
We can only understand that written down and just say, okay, they thought like this, but it's difficult for me to think like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, you probably had difficult because we all must, but do you find it now easier to go into that mode of thought? Or can you not even go into do you still look at it intellectually on a piece of paper? Okay, so that's and that's what my my previous answer was trying to get at. Like, so trying to reverse engineer
practices, psychotechnologies that would give me some lived sense of what these people are talking about. That's why, for example, when I try to explain shamanism, I don't go in like, I can't be a shaman. I think that would be preposterous. But I can try and understand some of what shamanism means by actually practicing getting into the flow state. I can understand what shamanism means by training myself to do lucid dreaming and to see what that's like in there.
And so these give me ways of bringing in the perspectival and the participatory, even the procedural elements of it, right, that I won't get from the text. Now, does that mean that I wouldn't make the ridiculous claim, oh, I'm a shaman or I know what it's like to be a shaman, right? But I think that gives me much, much more, right, than was typically conveyed just by the propositional knowledge. So a lot of what I'm doing
When I'm trying to do the hermeneutic task, that's what I mean. I'm trying to reverse engineers. The hermeneutic task is the task of trying to interpret and understand a text. When I'm doing that, that's what I mean. I don't just, I'm trying to go back before the 1200, I don't just read the text. I'm trying to reverse engineers transformative processes that will help me to re-engage with that worldview so I can turn it into something that I can have a perspectival understanding of and a participatory understanding of.
Does it match? Of course not. When did you first start to do that? Were you 20? Were you 25? Were you 30 when you realized that this was important in order for me to understand it at a non, at not just an intellectual? It came about reverse. It came about, I guess it was in my 20s? Yeah, I guess it would be. Did someone teach you that or you came about with it? I came up with this idea of reverse engineering in the way we're talking about, but I mean it's influenced by reading a lot of other people.
But it went in reverse for me. Here's a little bit of autobiograph. So I went into university and I fell in love with Plato, the figure of Socrates, and that's why Plato is... I mean, I have lots of criticisms of Plato, but Plato is very much sacred to me. I can return to Plato again and again and again, and as I change, I see things of value in Plato that I hadn't seen before, and so the text always resonates with me in this ongoing fount of intelligibility and insight.
But so I became really deeply, intrigued isn't the right word, I was interested, invested in this project of wisdom. But then as I went on in academic philosophy at the time, the early 80s, wisdom, I mean this sounds paradoxical because wisdom is in the very word philosophy, phylia sophia, you know the love of wisdom, but wisdom drops off the table as a topic.
You don't talk about it at all. Because who are we to know? No, no, no. It's because philosophy... I don't want to leave false impressions. I want to say something before we go on. Philosophy has come back around to this topic, and so has psychology. Psychology and philosophy, in fact even neuroscience, is now talking about wisdom again. Again, I think this is part of trying to respond to the meaning crisis.
At that time, philosophy was much more interested in sort of knowledge issues rather than wisdom issues. And so that fell off the table. And so I decided to look elsewhere. I took up transformative practices. I took up Tai Chi and I took up Vipassana meditation, Meta-contemplation. And then as I was doing these, I started to read some of the texts, like the Tao Te Chen or the Dhammapada.
And I came to this realization that, wow, if I had been reading these texts without these practices and how they've been transforming me, there'd be an important sense in which I'd be misreading these texts. It'd be like trying to under, like let's go back to Hoff. I know what sex is when you've never actually been with another person or something like that. I know golf because I've read lots of golf books, books about golf. Yeah, I used to be that. I used to think that I could read a book on how to ride a bike and then just instantly ride a bike. Well, there you go. And so
I realized, and that's sort of when I had the insight, it's like, oh, at least some texts, texts from the Axial Revolution, like the Tao Tei Chan or the Dhammapada, and of course, in many ways the Bible, they should be read in this fashion. There should be sets of transformative practices that go with the reading of the text, because if you don't have them,
The text aren't speaking to you in the way they really should or could speak to you. And that's how I sort of came up with this idea. And then I came across the work of Pierre Haddow, like what is ancient philosophy and philosophy as a way of life. And he makes the huge argument, yes, that when you try to understand ancient philosophy as opposed to modern philosophy, you should be reading it in this way that I'm describing to you. That you have to set the text, the discourse. When was Pierre Haddow?
Very recent. He just died not that long ago. So these books are like... Okay, so he was saying that there's obviously a difference between reading the book in this manner and then reading it like this. That's right. And that started to separate around the year 1200. Right, that starts to separate around the year 1200. Plus, at the same time, there's something going on with Aristotle and... Right. So you've got this idea that I can get at the deeper aspects of reality. And again, there's a positive side to this.
I can get at the deeper aspects because this is a piece of position you need for science. I don't have to go through a personal transformation to do science, although I think maybe you do, but at least for a lot of the scientific method, I just have to come up with the correct set of propositions. So there's a good aspect to what I'm talking about, but we're talking about how it engenders the meaning crisis. So what happens is
I don't have to go through transformation. I just have to get the correct propositions in my head and that will get me to the depths of reality. And then you've got Aristotle coming in and he can't be ignored, but he can't be assimilated. And so Aquinas is trying to like, what do I do? What do I do? Right? So Aquinas is in the 13th century. He's after this change is taking place in the 12th century. Right. And so Aquinas is saying, well, you know, we can't ignore Aristotelian science.
But I obviously don't want to lose the Christian faith. And so he starts to push on this idea that the two worlds can be understood, not in the fashion that they had been understood. The upper world is real and then the everyday world is dependent, it's derivative, and it's in some ways decaying.
Right? But it's participating to use a platonic term, right? And this is a term used by the Christian Platonists, right? And then what Aquinas seems to do is instead he says, no, no, no, this world is independently real. It's real in this world, this world here. This world, it's independently real. And we can get access to it just by getting the correct propositions. Just by doing science, we can do science. It's Aristotelian science, but the point is still the correct point.
Just by getting the correct theories, I can get at this real world. And I don't have to do any deep transformative spiritual thing to get at this reality. But there, up there, I still need to go through some deep transformative process to get there, but now that has been completely separated.
from rationality and science. So this is when the notion of the supernatural as something right now. So two worlds are being split now. I mean, one world is being split into two. Well, I would say the two worlds are already there, but what's happening is the two worlds before Aquinas, there is passage between them. Like in Plato, like we talked about, your rationality
your reasoning and your love for the truth, they lift you together towards the higher level, right? But now, no, no, the rationality of the science is down here, right? So it's about the development of science. You better believe it. Aquinas in a very powerful, so these two things, reading and getting knowledge of reality without having to go through transformation,
And the idea that this world is real and I can get at it scientifically without having to go through a spiritual transformation, that's the background for making science possible, of course. And then what happens is you get a reflective change in how the upper world is now understood.
The upper world is only accessible through love, and it's love in this sense that's now been completely divorced from reason, and it's love as this driving of your will to make assertion. Even you saying it, it's love in the sense that it's divorced from reason, I can only intellectually understand. When I say intellectually, I just mean as if I'm reading it. This implies this implies this.
I can't feel how reason can be associated with love. Sure. I mean, so I'll point you again to Harry Frankfurt and his wonderful book, Reasons for Love, and even work by Reed Montague, the neuroscientist. One of the differences between us and computers is we have to care about the information we're processing and the computers don't, right? And so this notion of caring and the notion of love are really central because, right, if you can't
Which way should I start from this? I could start from one side and work to the other. I could work either way. So let me try what Frankfurt says. I can't sort of reason about everything. I can't do that. There has to be, even if I'm going to do science, there have to be topics, to use Frankfurt's words, topics I take seriously, things I care about. This relates to salience. Yes, exactly.
Relevance realization is not called calculation. You are, your brain is deciding, you know, out of all the things it can pay attention to, which ones it should commit, it's very, we pay attention, which things it should devote, it's very,
precious time and processing resources to out of all the things that could and that's always risky because this not might not be the right thing. So that is always deeply an affective thing. It's never just an inferential calculative thing. So if it's Demasio's work on Descartes error, right? If you get people, right? They have a brain damage such the frontal lobes are working, but it's not connected to their emotional center. You can give them like a calculative problem and they can
Solve massive calculators. They have no problem with that. But you can destroy them sort of in this way. Do you want to write this problem in red ink or blue ink? They start trying to compute. Yeah, all the possibilities and permutations and you can't. You have to care.
and caring is like a simplest it's the core of love right heuristic yeah used to simplify yeah well and enable if you don't do this and this is montague's point about how we're different from computers if you don't do this like you're going to hit combinatorial explosion of all the facts and permutations and possible combinations you're going to have to and this is related to the frame problem as well yeah exactly exactly exactly so right so
There's that aspect. If you don't care, you actually can't reason. But it also, I can go from the other pool. Reason is ultimately, right, it's got this, and this is I think one of the great platonic insights. And this is how we should understand. That's why I corrected you one point when I want to talk about rationality and not just logic. Because logic is a relationship between propositions, right? Whereas rationality is supposed to be a relationship you have to reality.
And one of Plato's great insights is that in addition to whatever we desire, we desire it to be real. We want it to be real. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Part of what makes things meaningful is we want it to be real. Is that innate? I don't know how... I don't know... Because after listening to you and watching lots of your work, I question now how much of what I think is innate is innate. So even this,
You know, you give the example of who's in a great relationship, and then who would want to know something that undermines that. And 95% of the people say, I want to know. Okay, so that means that we want to be a part of this real world. We want to be connected to it. And when people have these experiences, mystical experiences, they'll transform their whole life and their identity.
because they want to remain close and in consonance, even conformity, identity with this increased realness that they've discovered. So people will radically change everything just to stay in contact with realness. So is it a meta drive? Do I think Plato's right? I think we're getting increasing empirical evidence that Plato's right in addition to all the arguments that Plato already gave us. Is it innate? I don't know.
I think relevance realization abilities have to be innate in some fashion because you have to have them to some degree in place to get going.
So precipitated by the fact that now you can read in your head, and then Aristotle, which is essentially science being formed. So imagine Aristotle didn't exist, but you can just read in your head. Would you think the meaning crisis would have happened? Maybe, but probably not. Slower. Maybe a different history. Going back and trying to rewind history, that's a really difficult and tricky thing to do.
Okay, so it starts to split, and then that split just gets grabbed, and obviously around 15th, 16th, the invention with Newton, Galileo. So you've got the scientific revolution, you get Descartes, before that you have the Protestant Reformation. Can you explain that? Which one? Protestant Reformation. I'm a scientist, I'm familiar with Descartes, well not actually much familiar with data, but with Newton and Galileo. You should be familiar with Descartes, because if you're a scientist you're using graphs. Yeah, yeah, that's Cartesian, that's all I know. There's another psychotechnology.
invented by Descartes. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to do science without Cartesian graphing. Notice how often these pivotal changes are associated with changes in psychotechnologies. Protestant Reformation
So for lots of various reasons having to do with corruption that had been sent into the church, because the separation from God and God is becoming sort of more absurd. Yes. Wait, I just want to make sure that because I'm just I'm trying to understand. So the way that I understand is I'll explain it and then I get corrected. Yeah, I understand so much better. So no, no, that's Lutheran. I think I think I was thinking of the Luther, Martin Luther. But one of them was I can have a personal relationship to God.
Was that Luther? Yes. Oh, okay. So forget about it. I don't know what the Protestant is. But Luther is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Oh, okay. So then there we go. Yeah, you're right. Okay. So what Luther is growing up and spirituality is changing, right? So the Platonic elements are being lost, right? And, you know, the supernatural is being separated from the scientific, right? And the Renaissance is happening and the scientific revolution is sort of
starting to percolate, right? And the relationship to God is becoming much more tenuous, but the text is becoming much, much more important. The text, not the community, not the church reading the text, but the text itself and your individual reading of the text is becoming important, right? And so all of that's coming together in Luther, and Luther comes to the conclusion
that right and and part of it's because of the way this gap is opened up that there's nothing we can do there's no way in which we participate in our salvation there's no way in which we do anything that helps us community human beings so i'm speaking as if i was luther here this is not my beliefs right but they're like human beings right can't get to god in any way so
His notion of the self has become so like so enfolded that the sense of self-deception has become so profound and overwhelming. He thinks that anything and everything we try to do just gets folded back into this self-deception and that there's no way on our own we can possibly escape it, right? And that's a reflection of course of how God is now sort of becoming inaccessible, right?
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He comes to the conclusion that the only way we can be saved is by God saving us completely from the outside. And this is what he means by faith alone and by scripture alone. And what he means by that is God acts through scripture, just the Bible, not the church. God acts through scripture and that
somehow transforms you and frees you and saves you. That's how you get salvation, because salvation actually means to heal, right? You know, salve, healing potion, right? And so, why does this matter so much? Well, what it means is, it means a lot of things. It means this is part of the final divorce of religion from any kind of rationality. Luther calls reason a whore.
So you made a distinction between logic and rationality, but reason and rationality are synonymous. So Luther calls reason a whore. I can't see Augustine saying that, especially because of his respect for Plato and Plotinus, right? And the fact that you do not participate at all in your salvation means participatory knowing is irrelevant. It's irrelevant.
And this whole notion from the actual age of self-transcendence, you're incapable of self-transcendence. It's God's arbitrary act. And notice also what it means. You are in no way deserving of being saved by God. There's nothing you did or could possibly do that would cause God to save you rather than that person there. Now notice how
How terrifyingly sort of absurd that makes God. I'm surprised that became popular instead of just instead of burning him. Well, the thing you have to remember, right, is that Luther is also, you know, he's taking a stand against the Catholic Church. He's taking a stand against its corrupt practices like indulgence. He's giving the German princes. It's only because the German princes backed him. He's giving them a new way of organizing and identifying themselves in opposition.
political and economic opposition to the Catholic Church. So there's all these extraneous factors that help. There's also the fact that Luther is giving people a kind of authority
over there. It's not authority in the sense that they can do anything, but it's a sense, like you said, that authority is the wrong word. You talked about Luther promising them a direct personal relationship with God, because you can't go through the church. God has to directly reach into you. You can see why this is destroying the roles of participatory
It's exacerbating the fact that now I'm not going through any transformation. God is saving me. And is he saving you arbitrarily so it doesn't even matter if you know the Bible or read it? Well, ultimately it's God who's going to lead you to the Bible and lead you to read the Bible correctly so that you will be saved. So there's no free will? Well, I don't know... I'm not saying what you believe. I mean in the Lutheran model.
Luther seems to have this weird view that we are free to sin, but we're not free to do what's right. I mean, I've talked to Lutherans about this. All you can do is sin minimization. Maybe. I'm not even sure that that's a real possibility for him. I mean, this is part of the debate he had with Erasmus, because Erasmus was still trying to, with his synergistic theology, he was still trying to argue that we participated in our salvation in some way.
But you see, the concern I have is, notice what's happening here, right? You know, the participatory, perspectival, transformative stuff, it's all in your head, it's all propositions, all that matters is asserting the right things, because that's all the love does. The love doesn't give you argument, the love just, ah, I believe, right? And so it's just a matter of will, right? So it's God's arbitrary will, arbitrary choice, and then you've got this arbitrary response, right? And
So a lot of the machinery of meaning I think is being deeply undermined. And I'm particularly critical of this, and this gets me into hot water with some Christians, because I think all of that's quite destructive. I mean, it's important because, like I said, it helps open up Europe to at least a non-Catholic way of life.
This kind of willingness to challenge authority and the deep valuation of propositional knowing is going to also help facilitate science. Luther thinks... So it has its pros. Definitely. So I want that in place, but we're concentrating on the genealogy. So I'm emphasizing the negative side of things. You see, but look what Luther is teaching you. He's teaching you that you're worthless. You're empty inside, right?
And the only thing that can save you is unearned positive regard. From up above? From up above. That you don't have any control over? You don't have any control over it. So it may not be arbitrary, but you just don't have control over it? Well, it's arbitrary in the sense that God has no reason for choosing you over anybody else. So why would God do that? We don't know.
I mean it's mysterious. And then you get endless debates in Christianity about whether or not God chose before the beginning of time which people are going to be saved or not, predestination, and whether he predestined people to heaven or hell. So there's endless attempts, and this is why Protestantism fragments and fragments and fragments and fragments.
endless attempts to try and resolve this problem that don't get properly resolved. So I'm not going to try and do that because the Protestants haven't succeeded on that project. But notice what's happening. You get endless fragmentation. In fact, it's still accelerating today. So you get this fragmentation happening. You get the loss of the participatory and transformative knowing. So Luther thinks, and this is important because he was a monk,
Luther thinks the monastery should be shut down. Because what are people doing there? Where they're trying to cultivate wisdom. They're trying to engage in self-transcendence. They're practicing spiritual exercises. Well, in Luther's mind, that's just pride. That's just sin. Because human beings can't do anything. So the monastery's got to be shut down. So that's the wisdom institutions of our culture
It seems extremely anti-authoritarian and skeptical. It is, and that's why there's a direct connection.
Exactly. As the birth of extreme skepticism? I think it's at least the grandfather. At least extreme skepticism directed at something related to meaning. Yes. Because there's always been skepticism and logic and vitality with ideas. Even in the ancient world, there's the philosophical skeptic.
There's one more important thing, and I want to go back to it. So the wisdom institutions are being destroyed. But also, notice that framework we talked about. Think about it as a grammar. Right? You're worthless. There's nothing you can do to do. What will save you is unearned, you know, love. That's the structure of narcissism. That's what a narcissist is. It's somebody, I'm worthless, and what will save me
is unearned attention from other people. That's narcissism. And you get the training in narcissism. I thought narcissism was, people they act, oh that's arrogance. People, you're narcissistic so you have a self, you have an inflated ego and you think you deserve it. It's an inflated ego covering a vacuous identity, right? That's why you're... So they're deeply insecure narcissists. Yes, and this is why you have the craving for attention, why the narcissist must be in the spotlight.
Because if they're not in the spotlight, they're going to start to disappear. They're going to start to lose their sense. Okay, so you were talking about narcissism and that narcissists... Yeah, I'm talking about you get this cultural grammar that's being created for narcissism. And then, you know, as that God becomes more inaccessible and more absurd, he starts to drift out of the picture. Think about, very close, think about Shakespeare.
Titanic intellect, deeply concerned, artistic sensitivity, one of the titans. Notice how small a presence God has in his work. Like even by the time of Shakespeare, God is, right? And so when God comes out of this picture, that grammar, right, that grammar, it doesn't go away. So God is, when we talk about God, we're using the grammar of meaning or meaning is associated with the grammar? Yeah, I mean we're using God, I'm using God
Jesus, I don't mean this. Jesus, I don't mean this. No, I didn't say Jesus. I don't say that. I said Jesus. I don't mean this. I don't mean this to be disrespectful. I try never to do that because I hold Jesus in very high regard. That's important. But when I'm using it, I'm using God as, and I mean this term very deeply and I wish we had time to unpack it,
I mean God as a participatory symbol of this higher reality and it's not just a word or an abstract symbol, it's a participatory symbol that actually affords
Transformation and self-transcendence. Interesting, interesting. God affords meaning, or God affords transcendence. Right, yes. Because there's always meaning, even when you've gotten rid of God. Yes. But there's a more profound meaning. So there's different levels, there's hierarchies of meaning. Oh, definitely. There's always levels. I'm hesitant to say hierarchies, but there are at least levels of meaning. There's a very non-Petersonian of you. Yeah, and this is something I would like to talk to Jonathan about, because
I take Jonathan Pajos, like I've said this before, I take what he does very seriously and he has a lot about hierarchy that I would like to talk to him more about. You're talking about you watch his videos or does he have a book that you've read? I watch his videos. I've watched his videos and I've had the pleasure of having an online discussion with him that was filmed and then I've also had the pleasure, he was in Toronto and we spent a few hours together talking and having a meal together
And we correspond periodically. And I deeply respect, because I think people like Jonathan and Jean de Peugeot, Paul van der Kley, they're really, I see them as Christians wrestling very deeply. There are Christians in like the history, in the legacy of people like Tillich, they're wrestling very deeply with the meaning crisis and trying to reformulate Christianity into a plausible response to the meaning crisis.
I don't ultimately agree with that project, but I really, really deeply respect it. So to go back to it, I think like God is
Like, it's a participatory symbol that affords you getting this anagogy, getting this reciprocal realization, going with deeper aspects of reality. It opens you up, right? And it opens up and discloses the world to you. And then when that goes away, all of that machinery just doesn't, it doesn't just disappear. It latches on to other things. And I think we have this… You use an analogy of the grammar that we've changed
The words, but we still use the same grammar. That's exactly why I use the term. We change the vocabulary, but the grammar is still there running. And see, I'm not making the argument, and this is where I would differ from Jordan, and perhaps from Jonathan, I'm not making the argument that we're all sort of inevitably Christians. That, you know, no matter what we do... What about Greco-Romans? Pardon me? What about Roman, or Greek?
Well, we're sort of all of these and none of them, right? We're Buddhist. Well, I guess so. I mean, I don't even consider myself a Buddhist. But yeah, where I would differ is I'm trying to say that this grammar, in fact, doesn't make us inevitably Christian, although it has a Christian heritage to it. It's now got an autonomous
functionality to it, right? But it still latches onto things to use your metaphor. So, I mean, the thing is people should pay more attention to the work of Dan Sperber, who I think had a better way of talking about the mimetic aspect of things. But in a shorthand way, yes, there's a way in which these ideas
Can I take this vocabulary analogy?
just a little bit further and tell me if it's stretching it and now it doesn't apply so you said something like we've changed the word we kept the grammar now is it as if we've changed so we were english before and now we've changed to in hindi yeah so we've taken the vocab so we've taken the
all the definitions from the words from Hindi and applied it to English, so now it doesn't make sense. So does that make sense? So what we're using is we're using different words and now it doesn't make sense and this cognitive dissonance between what we think makes sense and it doesn't make sense is what is creating them. That's wonderful, I like that. I mean that's part of the idea that we have an axial age grammar and then we have a Protestant Reformation grammar and these are all...
And they're not compatible with a scientific worldview, right? But the point I was trying to make is that that grammar, it doesn't go away and that's why, and this is another way in which people I think are talking about the meaning crisis, we sort of have this narcissism epidemic. We're getting the increasing sense that people are more and more narcissistic. The accusation of being narcissistic is now becoming much more pervasive and profound.
And again, I think that's part of all of like, because we think it's natural to process information in this way. How's narcissism tied to insecurity? Because like I was saying before, the way that I think of narcissism is somebody who thinks extremely highly of themselves, although that's arrogance, actually. When I say it out loud, I realize that. And they look at themselves in the mirror and they just love themselves.
No, I mean, so that's only the first half of the myth of narcissists, right? Of course, he falls in love with his image, but he also falls into the lake and drowns, right? And so you have to pick up on that there's a self-destructiveness, right? Because the narcissist is very hollow. There's this kind of a sense of hollowness. Now, that can either be a felt one or it can be sort of more sort of procedural in their processing. But either way,
The narcissist needs you to shine the light of your attention into the darkness at the center of their psyche because if you start shining it, they will go dark. And you can see how Luther really entrenched that way of understanding and thinking of ourselves and seeking for that external light.
And so that has become pervasive. I mean, in other ways, that grammar has... So Luther, you know, you get the Protestant work ethic. That's why it's called the Protestant work ethic. We took something... Oh, the Protestant work ethic is, you know, this goes back to an idea from Weber, but I mean, it seems to be the case that, you know, the Protestant idea that one of the ways in which we serve God is by working really hard.
We work really hard and, you know, idle hands are the devil's workshop and you should work and you should work and it should be meaningful work but also you shouldn't hear that sound.
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You shouldn't celebrate your work. You shouldn't glory because that's arrogance, that's pride. What should you do with the fruits of your labor? Well, you should plow them back into your work and you get
the beginning of the accretion of capital and the idea of a business that exists to promote and expand itself, right? Some of the foundational grammar of capitalism. And part of that is because if you're in the Lutheran model, this is Weber's argument, I think there's still an important point to be made here. If you're in the Lutheran model, how do you know if you're saved? I mean, this is the key question, and there's nothing you can do.
to find this out, right? So this is very anxiety producing, right? So, well, what can you do? Well, you're already told that it's really important to work hard. Well, if I work hard and I succeed, that must be evidence that God has chosen me, right? And so I can alleviate a lot of that insecurity about whether or not I've been saved.
This reminds me of the just world, because if people are suffering, that's evidence that God has singled them out as not being worthy of salvation. Yeah, exactly. There's a sense in which that's sort of the opposite side of the same point. It's part of American cultural discourse. It's also in Thatcher.
The point you're making is this idea that if someone's at the bottom, there's a good chance they deserve to be there. They have fallen there, and their state reflects their status in a really important way.
Okay, so before we just end, I know that this is a large question but
I guess if you could quickly outline our current meeting crisis, because we talked about how it builds up to this, our current meeting crisis, and then where do you think it's going to go? A little bit of prediction. Are you optimistic? What do we need to heal it? I know that's another two-hour conversation. Yeah, because that's what the whole series is about.
So one of the things that's really important now that's accelerating the meaning crisis, you notice how we've talked about along the way things have happened and they accelerate the meaning crisis and they're often psychotechnologies. And now we have this line, and you mentioned it earlier, that's blurring between psychotechnologies and cyber technologies. This, social media, the internet, right? These things are, and we're getting increasing evidence,
are significantly accelerating and exacerbating the meeting crisis. Instagram is actually bad for your mental health. If you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, I predict, as a scientist, you're going to be very depressed and you're going to be driven towards a narcissistic thing. And that's causal. Yes. You see all these pictures of these people living a better life than you and it's all bullshit because it's all staged
But that doesn't matter. Knowing that doesn't matter. It's like buying the alcohol, right? And so you see this and you're getting signals that these people are leading better lives than me. And you're getting overwhelmed by it. And then you feel like, and nobody likes me. Look at that. Look at that. That's the place of the God saying,
The community on it, I'm not getting enough likes. And you're just depressed. And you're both narcissistic and depressed. It's very bad for you. Or you get the echo chamber effect. Remember we talked about self delusion and the way you can bullshit yourself? Social media, I can do confirmation bias all over the place.
I want to believe some crazy thing, and so what do I do? I'll pay attention. I'll only look on the internet for people who share my beliefs, and then I'll reinforce that until, oh, of course, it must be true. All of this stuff is exacerbating. People, we get a tremendous increase in sense of loneliness.
The very thing it promised, it'll connect us all together. It connects us propositionally and with images, a kind of pornography of salience, but it doesn't connect us in the way that makes meaning for us. There is tremendous potential. I'm not a Luddite. I'm using the internet, I'm using YouTube. I'm ultimately optimistic precisely because
The people I'm meeting through the video series and some of the discourse that I'm seeing emerging in the internet, I'm meeting people who are deeply interested in the meeting crisis and not just in speech. They're trying to set up communities where people can go to
reestablish sets of practices, supportive communities, guides for the cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of self-transcendence, people doing this, trying to set these up, make this work, trying to figure out how can we develop skills and practices to reduce the bullshit in our communication, how can we bring back the valuation of in-person
discourse and dialogue like all of this is happening and one of the great gifts of the video series is I've come more and more in contact through the internet with these people and I'm doing I mean I meet you because of it right the same thing and and so on one hand I think we can see it's clear I think that you know
The social media and all of these cyber psychotechnologies are really accelerating the meeting crisis in very powerful ways. I'm not ultimately, I'm not teleological, I don't think there's any destined history, but I have a lot of hope now that I didn't have before precisely because I see people like, I mean I was talking to a guy this morning, right, and he owns a dojo and we're dialoguing but
How can I do what the martial arts used to do? How can I teach people the martial arts in a context of other practices so that the dojo becomes a place where they cultivate wisdom and they start to get these kinds of connections we're talking about and they can start to respond to the meeting crisis in their own lives? So this is more and more happening. I can't make a prediction in the way a scientist can predict.
the dependent variable and the independent variable. I predict these two things and it's unclear to me because there's a race. The degree to which social media and our political polarization and the degradation of the ecology and the increasing economic disparities between rich and poor
All of these things are interacting with each other. All of that's happening. But I'm also seeing this growth, and it's growing rapidly, of people taking seriously, not just in words, but bringing back to the words the transformative processes. They're trying to afford psychotechnologies and communities of transformation to respond to the meeting crisis. And it's unclear to me who's going to win this race. But I have a lot more hope than I used to.
What do your days look like? What do my days look like? You schedule something for seven hours in a block and then you record your interviews, your lectures. How do you manage your time?
It's challenging right now because I'm teaching, I'm doing research and of course marking and doing these interviews. I'm also meeting with various people to try and help them on the projects they're engaged in with responding to the meeting crisis. As I mentioned to you before, one of the gifts of doing the video series is I've gotten to meet a lot of people who are putting time and talent towards trying to create real responses both individually and in communities of response to the meeting crisis. So I'm meeting with those people because they want to
See if, you know, if my work can contribute to that. So, yeah. So my days are quite varied. Some days I'm just reading and writing all day. Other days I'm doing this. I'm talking to people all days. So it's quite... So what time do you wake up? What time do you sleep? And is it regimented? I'm trying to get it more regimented. I'm trying to. So I'm trying to be asleep by 12 and getting up by eight kind of thing.
And then you just work flat out or do you spend time with your family? I usually do a set of practices. I do like Tai Chi Chuan and meditation and contemplation, Lectio Divina. I do a bunch of practices for about an hour. I have something to eat, do a bunch of practices, and then I usually start work in some fashion. Yeah.
We're going to talk about psychedelics a little. Okay. And I was going to ask, as I told you, I don't know if you got a chance to read over the... I read over the question. Okay. So I want to know, what is it that psychedelics can provide that Zen Buddhism or meditation can provide and vice versa? I don't know if it's a question of can. I think it's a question of more or lesser timing.
So I think one of the things that the psychedelics could do, if put in to a proper context, and I think that's a very important thing to note, I don't think it's the drug per se that is responsible for a lot of the effects we're seeing in the psychedelic renaissance. I think it's a combination. It's almost always, for example, in the therapeutic situations, it's a combination of the psychedelic drug and therapy.
But what I think the psychedelics do is they enhance, I think there's reason to believe and we're starting to gather some good empirical evidence that they enhance cognitive flexibility and they allow areas of the brain to talk to each other that are not normally talking to each other in our everyday state of consciousness. And that combination of enhanced cognitive flexibility and rewiring of the communication in the brain affords
Very probably both profound and systematic insights that can be very transformative of people. But I think Zen will do the same thing for you with enough time, enough practice.
I also think that one of the advantages that Zen has right now, at least over psychedelics, is precisely what I was mentioning. Zen has a well-established tradition, a set of institutions, reliable guides that can give you a lot of correction because when you're messing around with your salience landscape and your cognitive flexibility, you're also making yourself very vulnerable to self-deception. And so I think
Is it because the psychedelics are a shortcut or is it simply just because of the loss of community that there's that absence?
I think it's both. I think the fact that they're a shortcut would mean there's a good chance that the psychedelics are going to be combined with people. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The psychedelics are not going to be combined with the acquisition of skills. And I think there's a whole important set of skills that are really necessary for getting, for lack of a better adjective, the spiritual benefits out of psychedelics.
That's the one concern. So the shortcut concern is definitely there. And then the other is I think a concern that typically people are taking psychedelics, they're not taking it.
in a context, whether the context is shamanic for an indigenous culture or Zen for a Buddhist culture. And that lack of appropriate ritual and reflective context, I think, also increases the risk that the psychedelics will feed into sort of an autodidactic process of self-deception. Can you give me an example of where someone would feel self-deceived from the salient landscape that's open to them when they take psychedelics that they
would be corrected if they were in a wisdom tradition? So it's very tempting to think that you've, perhaps because of the intensity of the experience, that you are confusing that with you've now achieved full-blown enlightenment.
or you're confusing the intensity of the experience with the possible truth of your metaphysical interpretation of the experience. The thing we have to know is that people come out of these things with very different metaphysical interpretations, each one often convinced
about sort of the solid truth. Like some feel that there's God and some feel like there's no God. Some people have been talking. Is that rare though? Because I've seen that there's this book called How to Change Your Mind Psychedelics. So there's some recent research coming into the Griffiths lab that if people have an experience, sort of a higher state of consciousness or mystical experience, this is very recent, and they take psychedelics, they're more liable to describe confronting ultimate reality,
Whereas if they have the experience outside of psychedelics, they are much more likely to describe the experience as encountering God.
So that seems to be the variation that's going on there. And that again should cause you to step back and reflect on. You have to be really, really careful about, you know, these experiences are very challenging to us and therefore like that the intensity and the felt presence of the demand they're making for us to transform our lives can be easily confused with I'm enlightened or I am the messenger or all kinds of inflationary stuff.
or also this view is the final absolute truth for all of humanity kind of thing so they're not technically putting you in touch with reality with reality quote-unquote this is something you mentioned a lot which is that the whole point of getting out of self-deception is to get closer to reality to match yourself with reality i might be misquoting you but i wanted to know
What is this reality? How does one define it? And is it necessarily positive when one identifies with reality? Because I can imagine somebody realizing, oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, or I'm more arrogant than I think I was, therefore, and that's more real, that's actually real, and then that's devastating to them. So it's not necessarily a positive meaning.
Okay, so let's talk about the second part first, the meaning part. Of course, I don't equate these, if you remember our previous conversation, I don't equate truth with reality per se. But even when we get a lot of unpleasant truths, we don't want them.
And I think this is very important. There seems to be, and this is a platonic insight, there seems to be a meta drive above and beyond whatever we desire coming to be the case that it is in some sense real. I just did this again in a lecture.
On Tuesday, I asked people to put up their hands. Are you in a romantic relationship you like? How many of you would want to know that the person was cheating on you, even if it meant the destruction of this really satisfying relationship? You know, 90% of the people keep their hands up. And I then asked, I didn't do this before, I asked the people who didn't keep their hands up. I said, when you put your hands down, how did you feel? And they said, I felt anxious because I thought I probably should keep my hand up, right? No, they felt like they should keep their hand up because they saw other people put their hands up? No, well, I don't know. That's a potential confound. I don't know.
My sense, and that's all it is, my sense was no, it was more the sense that they're not being completely honest with themselves, that they would want to know if their partner was cheating on them. And so the question is a hard one to ask. Would there be some negative emotional consequences of finding out certain truths? Yes.
If I were to say to you, the price you pay for avoiding those is to progressively lose your contact with what's real. I think most people, I mean, that's what this experiment shows, would prefer to keep the closer contact with reality than to avoid the unpleasant, unpleasant truths. So that's the first part. The second is defining. Right. The first was defining reality. Yeah. So that's a tough thing to do.
Because there's two things we have to talk about. There's our sense of realness, which is sort of the primary cognitive state or states, at least features of our cognition and our consciousness. So that's a sense. A sense, right? And then there's what it purports to be referring to, which is reality. So on that, I guess my answer is, I think the overall greatest
plausible convergence between these different senses of reality, the normative senses, the truth of our propositions in terms of measures of accuracy, the power of our skills, the presence that we get
in our perspectival knowing and the sense of attunement with the world, a sense of sharing a kind of important identity. I think when of those all independently converge in a mutually supportive and coherent fashion, I think what's revealed in that is our best take on what reality is. But I'm a fallibilist. I don't think there's any
There's no evidence that we have knowledge claims that will not be subject to criticism and revision in the future. You just mentioned that it's the convergence between these different lines of something like knowledge or truth, and there's one which is propositional, there's one which is perspectival.
What else are there? So there's perspectival, there's procedural, participatory, I believe. I don't know if those are the same. No, there's propositional, there's procedural, there's perspectival and participatory. It's just the four. Now, are there more that we haven't discovered? I don't know. I mean, so I often think about that. And the only method I have for doing that, because this isn't a conceptual thing, because this is the concepts by which we're examining empirical reality, rather than something that we're determining from empirical reality,
Because they're concepts of knowing, right? I try to come up with additional ones and see if they can resist being reduced to the other four. And I haven't been able to do that so far. That's the only method. And I don't mean this just by myself. I do it in discussion with other people.
But it does seem to comport well, and again, you know, the Greeks have these four different terms, right, the episteme, that's the propositional, tekne, that's the procedural, noesis, the perspectival, gnosis is the participatory, and we seem to have different notions of realness, there's truth for propositional, there's power for procedural, there's presence for perspectival, there's attunement, the agent arena
co-fittedness for participatory knowing. And so I think when those are all really independently converging, such that there's a high plausibility that it isn't a bias in any of the one kinds of knowing that's driving my conclusion, my realization, then I think we have sort of the best we can plausibly have
This convergence, this is something I've been thinking about. Let's imagine that there's four sliders here. This is procedural and then the other three. Okay, so there's a truth when it comes to propositional truth. So let's say we can prove something to be true and then you slide it here. Now it's true. Here it would be false.
You mentioned that it's the convergence between them. So doesn't that mean that, let's say it's not true, it's in the middle, but then the procedural is in the middle, and then this one's in the middle, so they line up. But propositionally, it could be false or somewhat false, but there's a convergence between them.
Yeah, but what they're converging on, right, so what you're trying, so convergence doesn't just mean that they sort of line up. It means that they're driving you towards the same conclusion and it sounds like the same conclusion they're all for driving you towards is this isn't only half true or not very powerful or not very present or not very well attuned and then it's like, okay, that means I'm not very much in touch with reality. So that's, I don't mean just that they line up, I mean that they are
Equally meeting sort of the normative standard you're looking for and they're all lining up at truth means That you're likely to be perceiving reality if they're all lined up here They're all lined up in the middle It means you're likely to perceiving to be perceiving something that's kind of true and then if it's false it for sure that is false Yeah, well, I would say I would I never say for sure I would say it's highly plausible and I think ultimately what we have to we have to rely on the fact that all of our other attempts to get at reality is
ground out in judgments of plausibility. We're doing a scientific experiment. We can't check for all the logically possible confounds because there's a combinatorial explosive number. We check the plausible alternative explanations. When we're putting our theory in competition with other theories, we only put it into competition in inference to the best explanation.
plausible theories. When I do an interpretation, I don't consider all logically possible interpretations. I have to consider the plausible ones. I think the finitary predicament, the fact that we are finite creatures in a fundamental way, means we ultimately have to rely on plausibility judgments while also always acknowledging that they are just plausibility judgments. So that's what I would
When someone's conflicted in a Jungian sense, they would say that you have competing personalities, that you have a goal, but they're not all competing for the same goal. It's not coordinated, it's not integrated. So that's maybe a Jungian interpretation from this perspectival, procedural, participatory, and propositional perspective. Is it simply when someone is
I wouldn't claim that all internal conflict is driven by that. No, not by any means. I think there are many different important explanations for why internal conflict arises. However, I would agree that an important potential source of conflict is when we're getting misalignment between propositional claims, for example, and our perspectival claims.
And this is part of, I think, what happens in the meeting crisis. We see a lot of sort of, I think, reason to believe in the plausible truth or accuracy of our scientific propositions, but this is not lining up with, you know, our perspectival sense of
how we're present in the world or a participatory sense. And this is why, you know, there's been ongoing critiques of this, like the phenomenological critiques, right, the existential critiques that the truth of the scientific worldview is not lining up with these other ways in which we assess how real or ultimately meaningful our experience is. So let's say propositionally science says we live in a world that's of a billion stars. Empty of purpose. Empty of purpose.
Okay, propositionally, our lives are somewhat meaningless from this perspective, but then we feel as though we're special somehow, and so there's a conflict.
Is this part of the meaning crisis or is this something called the interpretation crisis? And if not, what the heck is the interpretation crisis and what is this relation to the meaning crisis? Okay, so I think that what we're just talking about is part on parcel of the first part, you know, the conflict between here's a set of propositions that science is giving us and that we do not find it a viable thing, a viable worldview in which we can live, that we can't find how... There isn't a way of making that an immersive presence for us in a way that it comports well
with our judgments of how our lives need to make progress, etc. etc. There's all that sort of stuff missing from the scientific world. Progress and purpose, all of that is not in the scientific... meaning itself is not in the scientific world. The scientific worldview does not give an explanation of meaning. It presupposes the existence of meaning in its assertion of truth.
For example, what do you mean? There is no scientific account of meaning. That's part of what cognitive science is trying to figure out. We do not have anywhere near a consensus answer of what it means even for a sentence to be linguistically meaningful, let alone figuring out what it is in a comprehensive sense that makes a conscious state meaningful to us, etc.
We presuppose that all of that is active in the scientist when he or she says E equals MC squared. They have a way of taking those otherwise arbitrary graphic marks and attaching meaning to them such that through the way meaning structures our experience, we can then look to see if that actually lines up accurately with the way reality seems to be testable.
So this is part of something that makes sense. This makes sense when we have a proposition that coheres. I was thinking about this. What does it mean for something to make sense, phenomenologically? What does it mean when we feel like, ah, that makes sense? Can you give an account? Because you said that what makes sense, what meaning is, is related to, and it's an analogy for, does a sentence make sense? Yes.
Okay, then the question is, that just begs the question, what does it mean for a sentence to make sense? Well, I just said there isn't yet a philosophical consensus. So, feelings so far? Well, there's ideas that part of what it has to do for a sentence is there's a syntactic structure that is interpretable to us and that that lines up with
And so that I think that a very difficult question.
I take it that that problem doesn't have to be solved to use the metaphor. So when people are talking about their life being meaningful, what they're saying is there's something like the way a sentence coheres together, the way the parts are all relevant to each other, the way they're then relevant to me, and the way I can then use that relevance to me and the relevance of the parts to make something relevant to you. And I think what they're saying is there's something like that in their lives. The elements of their life
Okay, so relevance boils down to something pragmatic.
such as something like I have a cognitive model that's and then it when I execute this cognitive model it works that what I want to happen happens. Is that what it means for something to be relevant? So I mean I've published a lot of work on relevance and so I happen to argue and I've had a lot of help from people like Tim Lilliclap and Blake Richards and Leonardo Farnaro and others that
What relevance is, is it's a
I think I would agree with you if we have some time to talk about how you're using the word pragmatic. I think we'd have to extend it much more than beyond what James was talking about. I think although James pragmatism is often talking about relevance and he thinks he's talking about truth. So we can come back to that. The issue of pragmatism is kind of fraught in that way. But to say that something is relevant to me is to say that there's a bunch of different adaptive trade-offs
Efficient implies a goal.
Well, there's a constitutive goal. There's a difference between representative goals and constitutive goals. I have the constitutive goal of being an autopoetic thing. The goal of remaining alive is part and parcel of just the way I'm structured to be.
Okay, that's a constitutive goal. Right. I mean, to be an autopoetic thing, to be a self-making thing, to be a thing that is making itself, that has the goal of making itself, is precisely constitutive of being a living thing. It can't be a living thing and then have this as an external goal. It has to be very part and parcel of the way the thing is structured. A paramecium is literally physically structured in such a way that it is
constantly satisfying the goal of maintaining itself and seeking out the conditions that maintain itself. Okay, and then there's other type of goal? Pardon me? And then you said there's constitutive goals and then there's... Well, then there's... people often talk about goals as states of affairs in the world that they want to realize, right? And in a technical sense, you know, autopoetic goals are states of affairs in the world that you want to realize, but there's states of affairs in you, yeah. And so I think that's how I would at least try and make at least
Pro Tem distinction between them. So back to it, I think what's one of the things you're trying to do, right? So think about an organism, think about it in a bioeconomic sense, it has very limited resources, very limited time. So one of the ways in which it can gain an advantage, right, is by being very efficient in the processing of information.
One way, not always, I'm giving an example, is I can try and generalize my cognition as much as possible. So the more I can use, let's say I have some information processing function, I'll use a little bit like mathematical, the more I can use the same function in many different contexts,
The more efficient I am because I'm using the same thing again. That's related to elegance? Partially. I think elegance is partially related to that. We can come back to elegance in a sec. This is why we like things like E equals MC squared. I can use the same formula all over the place and very effectively find and solve problems. The problem with efficiency,
Is the problem with efficiency is it tends to integrate
you're assimilating information, you're looking for what's invariant, because you're doing all this data compression, you're trying to get, right? Now, that's all wonderful, except that it's not always the case that what's invariant is what is going to give you an advantage. Sometimes what matters is, so what's relevant to you, if your language is not what's the same, but how something is different. So sometimes what matters is not what is invariant across context,
But what is specially different about this context in particular? We even get that with the proverb, jack of all trades, but master of none.
Think about this if you'll allow me a financial economic analogy. You can downsize a corporation and get very efficient in the use of resources. The problem is if I downsize too much, I lose resiliency. I lose the ability to adapt to novel unexpected changes. So when we did the big downsizing in the 80s, what was discovered is a lot of companies become very brittle. If everybody's working as much as they possibly can,
and a sudden threat, an unexpected, novel threat or opportunity arises, you don't have any resources to dedicate to this new thing. So you lose resiliency if you push efficiency too much. Efficiency and resiliency are in a trade-off relationship. This makes you integrate information, resiliency makes you differentiate. And what relevance realization is, I would argue, is an optimization relation. These are an opponent
relation and your what your brain is doing is constantly trading between these and there is no final place to be out for relevance right but what relevance is right now is what that optimization settles on right for ultimately I think giving me the relationship to the environment to connect it to the environment that optimizes my ability to solve my problems
Whenever you explain these concepts, you tend to give credits where credits do, and you do that plenty. Is there a reason why you do that? Were you burnt before in the past where your ideas weren't given credit? Do you feel like you don't want to be accused of overindulging your own ideas? Because you do it more than anyone else. I like it, but I want to know what's driving that? Well, a lot of different motives. One is gratitude and
Were you always like that? I don't know. It's a good question. I think most of my academic career I've tried to be like that. It's an important personal goal to me. Part of it is gratitude. Part of it is, I think, is this more selfish? I don't know. The recognition that I would give proper credit, these people who I respect deeply will be more willing to work with me again in the future. Part of it is I'm very concerned about how
People's attention to me could be inflationary, cause me to, we talked about this earlier, think too much of myself and a way to remind myself that I am not the sole author, the self-made or any of that bullshit, right, is to remind myself and do it in action, not just in belief, that, you know, this is often work that is done in collaboration with other people.
Also, I genuinely want to help further other people's career, help develop it. And if they respect what I'm doing, and if other people find value in my work, then that could translate to people looking at their work and finding their work potentially valuable. Do you tend to do your best work when you're collaborating? Always. Always.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why Plato appeals to me more than Aristotle because, you know, Plato is written in dialogue whereas Aristotle is written in a monologue, right? And I think one of Plato's greatest insight is our best cognition is done in collaboration with other people. And that has just been reliably the case for me. Even when I'm working on my own, I'm imagining the people I work with. And that's very helpful, but it's
Getting to work with other people gets you to a place where you just can't get to in your own thought. When you're working with someone else, how does that process look like? You just spitball an idea. I know this is so basic, but let's take the example of earlier today. We're talking with somebody in the University of California.
It's different with different people. I could tell you how I work with Dan, but that's not the same way I work with Leo.
or the same way I work with Christopher Master Pietro on the zombie book. It's different with, and that's part of the value of it. So with Dan, for example, before we started to write anything, he's going to be first author. So he's doing most of the original text production. But before we started doing anything, we just read a whole bunch of books together and we met regularly and talked and argued and discussed and reflected on it.
And then what's happening is Dan's starting to write some text. He'll send it to me. I'll put in commentary. Then we'll meet and I'll have ideas in response to what he said. He'll think, you know, those are good. Note those down. And then I send those ideas to him. We do some more writing. That's how I'm working with Dan. Whereas when I'm working with Leo, very often
We'll sit in the same room and we'll just start, I'll start talking and he'll write and then he'll say stuff and then I'll talk and we'll write and so it's different with different people. What is this building up to? Do you feel like you have a goal? So my goal, one of my goals is the theory of everything. It's a physics goal. Yeah. Okay. Are you building up to something or are you just exploring and you're having fun? Well, I am having fun and I'm also generating a lot of meaning and those aren't the same thing. But I suppose
I would like as much as possible to get that plausible convergence between the different areas of work. And that is something that I do have as a goal in all my work, to get the various pieces to constantly talk to each other and integrate together. And ultimately, the goal is to give the best possible foundation
for giving a comprehensive response to the meaning crisis. That really is my life work, if that's not too pretentious to say. Is the meaning crisis our main crisis right now, in your opinion? No. And I keep saying this, because I talk about it so much, people think that I think that's the issue. I do not think that. I talk about it so much just because that is what I can contribute, the work I can do. I think the main crisis facing us
It's white privilege, no I'm just kidding.
We're seeing political crises, I mean two of the major democracies. The meaning crisis relates to them. They do, and I was going to explain how I think it does. So I think, you know, there's all these things happening and they're also sort of reflective of the fact that a lot of the machinery, the post-World War II machinery that we had created for solving problems does not seem to be adequately addressing these problems. How does the meaning crisis contribute? I think the meaning crisis helps to explain
why we feel so impotent and at times incompetent in addressing these other crises. So very often we are asking people to make tremendous changes in order to deal with these other crises. We're going to have to. I mean, just as a matter, I think of sort of consensus scientific fact,
We're going to have to make major changes in how we live to address the ecological crisis that we're facing. And the question is, well, we're not doing it. And the response so far has been, well, people just don't have enough information. Let's give them more information, more information, more information. That's not doing anything. That's not moving. That's propositional? Yeah, exactly.
Since enlightenment, we think that the solution to all our problems are propositional? That's part of it, but it's also the following. I want to make a...
I want to make a specific claim about the specific causality of the meaning crisis. So there's a lot of work being done right now, good work, on scarcity mentality. When a valuable resource, the human being, is scarce, they become actually much more irrational in their thinking, very short-term, very impulsive, much less reflective, much more prone to self-deception. And I think when there's a scarcity of meaning, that people are a scarcity
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Reduces your standard of living. It reduces your economic standard of living, your mental health. There's even some evidence that your longevity is reduced by having a child. And when you ask people what's happening to your subjective well-being when you have a child, they reliably, it goes down.
Why do they do it? Because you know what goes up reliably? Meaning in life. People will sacrifice a lot for meaning in life. That's interesting. I thought the meaning was tied to wellbeing.
It's not. No. Because one can go down and the other can go up. So at least subjective well-being. There's a moral sense of well-being. We have to be very careful with these terms. So there's a psychological sense of subjective well-being. How am I doing? Right? And that would go up. That goes down. That can go down independently of meaning going up. When some people talk about sort of a moral sense of well-being, I think meaning in life is part of that. So let's keep those distinct.
So the meaning crisis, there's a scarcity of meaning, which means when there's a scarcity of meaning, people will not give up other stuff because you can't promise them, oh well, give up this, I'll give you more meaning because they're already feeling a scarcity of meaning. And you're asking them to, think about this, you're asking them to make comprehensive changes in their consciousness, their cognition, their character, their communities. The thing that has done that for us reliably in the past is religion.
And most people, this is what the statistics show, are now post-religious. Religion isn't an option for them. And the pseudo-religious ideologies of the 20th century, the secular versions like Nazism and Communism, drench the world in blood. So we're sort of locked.
We don't want religion. We don't want the secular alternatives. We need to make these comprehensive changes. We don't have anything guiding us to do that. And we're being asked to make these comprehensive changes without any promise that the meaning that's already scarce is going to be forthcoming. Because of that, we get stuck.
Do you think if we solved the meaning crisis, solved it, that the other problems would be solved as well because we would be acting in a wise manner, or do you think that they need to be addressed independently?
I don't think they need to be addressed independently of the meaning crisis. I would argue that, well, I gave you an argument, well, I think it's interdependent. I still stand by that argument, and I think there's other reasons for thinking they're independent. So imagine we solve the socioeconomic crisis, we solve the ecological crisis, but we still have a meaning crisis.
I understand you're giving me a thought problem, so I'm not trying to be obtuse.
I find it implausible that we could overcome
I think a constitutive component of addressing the meaning crisis is to bring back, as a serious project, the cultivation of wisdom. And that doesn't necessarily have to be in a religious form or what people think of as traditional religion? I don't think so. I mean, so this, of course, is what I would get into, I think. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to talk to them about it. Who's them? Oh, Jonathan Pageau or Paul Van der Kley or some of the people who have taken a lot of interest in my work, but they still come from a religious framework.
or even some of the people that come to the video series from a Buddhist perspective and things like that. But while I think if you've watched the series, I'm very respectful of religion, I do not think that we have to tie the cultivation of wisdom or self-transcendence to a religious way of life, nor do I think is that a plausible
attempt to solve the meaning crisis precisely because most people have become post-religious, again, and that's increasing, and the scientific worldview is clearly a post-religious worldview. Do you believe in evil? Depends what you mean by it. I mean, the problem with the word evil is it's gone from being a metaphysical category to just a description of the moral quality of action. So, I mean, if you were
the time of Augustine, for example, or even Plotinus, if you ask them if they believe in evil, there was a metaphysics of evil. There was a worldview in which they had a place within the ontology for evil. There is no
place for evil in the scientific world view. It's not part of our ontology. So when we use the word evil, we tend to mean, you know, very significant immoral behavior. But that's not what evil meant. So for example, in that use of the term evil, it would make no sense to say there's no people, but they're still evil. But for honesty... In which sense? In the moral action sense? In the moral action sense. Because if there's no moral actors, then evil isn't possible.
But I think for Augustine, insofar as I understand him, and I think for Plotinus, even if there's no people, there's still evil, because evil represents sort of a whole in being, a way in which
There's a lack of intelligibility at sort of the bottom of the hierarchy of being. Can you sort out what Buddhism says about evil to me? Because some people say in Christianity there is evil and that's because you choose to do something evil. When you choose, then it's evil, something related to free will. But in Buddhism, as far as I know, people say Buddhism doesn't have a conception of free will or it's telling you that free will is an illusion and that evil is akin to ignorance. What do you think of that?
Well, first of all, do I think that's a correct interpretation of Buddhism, or do I think that's a correct way of thinking about evil? There's two different questions you're asking me. Which one? Is that a correct interpretation of Buddhism? Does Buddhism actually have something to say about evil, which is that it's essentially ignorant? It's very difficult to speak of Buddhism as a whole. I mean, there's aspects of Buddhism, maybe Nichiren Buddhism, in which the idea of evil, I think, might be a plausible thing to talk about. Whereas in Zen Buddhism,
Probably not at least anything like the Christian, again speaking of Christianity a hole is dangerous, but sort of the standard, I don't know the adjective, Christian model of evil. The thing about the Buddhist notion of no free will, it's not quite right because the notion of causation and the ontology. It's not like
When you say a Buddhist doesn't have free will, it's like the Buddhist is in our worldview and our notion of causation and within that there's no free will.
If you have no free will, if whatever you did was caused by something prior that you had no control over, it's cause, cause, cause, cause, all the way down. There's that, but you have to understand, right? So Buddhism is dependent on these versions of it, like Zen that come out of Nargajuna, on shunyata, the emptiness, right? That nothing individually exists, right? Everything is completely interdependent and impermanent.
It's not right to say that you don't have free will, because there's a sense in which, in a deep sense, you don't individually exist. So the notion of you is not what we think of as you? The notion of you is a conventional and convenient truth for talking about how I can interact with a particular
That being said, the idea that
that there is something at the core of reality like so augustine describes evil and this is based on platonic like it's like a tear in being it's a hole in being i'm only using this as an analogy really clear an analogy right evil is a black hole in your metaphysics things you know being and and realness go into it but nothing ever comes out right that's how it's under
understood. And what Nishatani, for example, famously, I think in one of the great books on meaning, Religion and Nothingness said, there's a fundamental difference in the East, right? The East tends, so the West, right, tends to view non-being and no-thingness as a lack, a privation, whereas the East, both in Daoism and Buddhism, views a lack, right?
emptiness as actually something positive, as that which makes things possible. And Nishatani in fact famously argued that the West is incapable of dealing with nihilism because we can't grasp no-thingness as a positive thing. We see it as a lack of being because we think of being in terms of thingness, whereas in the East no-thingness is a positive
So Peterson would say that nihilism is associated heavily with negative affect.
And you're saying that if you have Buddhist training, you might not necessarily see nihilism as negative. Or put it the other way around. I'm agreeing with you, Kurt. I just want to use the wording a little bit differently. You might not experience emptiness or no-thingness nihilistically. You may experience it positively as a liberating experience. Do you personally believe in free will? No. I mean, if I understand what you're saying,
I'm a compatibilist. I'm somebody who thinks that whenever we've been talking about free will, we didn't mean what is typically meant by free will. I take it that this is what you mean by free will. And if you don't, of course, correct me. But at least when I have discussions with people about this, they mean that there's something in them that is uncaused, an uncausal center
a non-causal center of causation, so that there is in some way a first mover, that there's something in them that is totally uncaused but then can make things cause, can initiate a causal chain. I find that both incredible in the sense of something I can't believe in and I also find it
I don't understand why people want this capacity. First of all, I think my life gets better as my thinking is more and more determined by what's true. My actions are more and more determined by what's good. My
My experience is more and more determined by what's beautiful. I don't think freedom, in that sense, is an intrinsic good. I mean, for me, freedom is an instrumental good about getting more and more. I would love it if my thoughts were completely determined by the truth, my actions were completely determined by what was good. If I completely lost my freedom in truth, goodness, and beauty, great. Why not?
Freedom for its own sake, I don't understand that as a value. I understand it as an important political value, an instrumental value, but as a metaphysical thing, I don't find it inherently valuable. So when I talk about what it is to say that an action is free from a compatibilist framework, what that means for me is the most causally relevant explanation of my behavior was my current state of consciousness and cognition.
That's what I think it means when you say, I'm responsible for X. Did we ever mean that I was the sole causative? No, of course. I can't think of an instance where we think we are the only causal thing for something happening, even when I'm speaking. It's dependent on all the causal properties of my lips and my vocal cords. I can't think of anything where we're talking about sole causation. For me, we've always been talking about causal relevance.
I don't want a part of me, that's what I was trying to do earlier, that is uncaused, that is not causally connected. That would mean my actions were completely arbitrary. They were in no way relative to or relevant to the events in the environment. Because if they are in any way relevant to the environment, that's going to play out in there being some important causal relationship between what's happening in the environment and my state of mind.
Not that I believe in free will, but just to play devil's advocate, what you're saying is that there are constraints. So there are physical constraints, the laws of physics, how your tongue is situated in your mouth, the words that you speak. I'm also saying there's normative constraints, truth, beauty, and goodness. Yeah, but go ahead. Okay, so there are constraints. Why can't there be free will with constraints? So you're saying, well, if you go back, then you would have to be a first mover. Yeah. But you could be a first mover within constraints, not just a first mover
With no constraints, like what the hell are you going to do? Wait, are you saying the first mover is responsive to the restraints? Think of it like chess. Or think of it like Go. The game Go. So there's tremendous constraints. First of all, we're playing a board game. Second of all, you can only move this piece and so on and so on. But there's so many options within Go that if you ran a supercomputer from now, from the beginning of the universe to the heat death of the universe, it still wouldn't exhaust it. Yeah, it's combinatorial explosive.
So what I'm saying is that there could be constraints, heavy constraints on free will, so commensurate with your... Wait, but there's a difference here. Your example of Go is that there's lots of possibilities, right? And that's not the same thing as saying you have free will.
Then you choose from those possibilities. You choose from those possibilities based on... Okay, so now we're getting into a causal model, but free will has to be outside of causality. That's exactly what I can't get an analogy for. Well, we know when we come down to subatomic particles that causality is just... you throw it out the window. So causality being not a part of this universe is true. It breaks down to its own sense. And there are other systems, like you said, a structural functional
We have two different things we're talking about, and I think that's important. There's causation and there's constraints.
And those aren't identical. Causation is about events that change actuality. Constraints are about conditions that shape possibility. And I'm invoking both of those and saying freedom of the will is, I mean, if... It's logically impossible. Or do you just not want to believe it or you feel like you have a propositionally consistent worldview that proves that there is no free will?
I think that it doesn't make any sense. I don't know if that's the same thing as saying it's logically impossible. Logically impossible would mean it clearly makes sense and then we can find it's inherently contradictory. I don't know if it makes any sense. The idea of free will.
That doesn't make any sense to me, and also the valuation of free will doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to be obtuse. I don't know why people want it. I mean, most of the major philosophical conundrums like the mind-body problem and things like that, they deeply interest me. The free will determinism thing leaves me cold.
I don't know why people want it and I don't know what they mean when they say they have it. Because even to say that you're choosing, unless your choice is completely arbitrary and not in any way affected by the options you're considering, constrained by them, then it's not a free choice in the free will sense.
If your actions are in any way responsive to, responsible to the environment, you don't have that kind of free will we're talking about. Now, a compatibilist said, we were never talking about that when we said I acted freely. What we mean when I say I acted freely is precisely what we're talking about. I'm acting responsibly and responsibly
to the environment and the most causally relevant, not the sole cause, not the original cause, but the most causally relevant explanation of that responsiveness and responsibility is my current cognitive state. That's all we ever meant, I think. Well, you know, Phineas Gage, that famous example. Yeah. Okay, so something like brain damage caused him to act in a certain way. Then you can say that anytime someone does something, this is Sam Harris's
Sam Harris's statements is something like, anytime someone acts in a way that we think is evil, it's actually akin to neurological damage. If you reduce it down to just the brain was wired in this way, then that changes what we think of as holding somebody responsible. Why? I mean, whenever you're speaking a sentence, it could be reduced down to neurons happening in your brain. Does that mean there's no truth? Because now you're in a self-contradiction.
What would you do in the trolley problem? You know the trolley problem, there's five people in front of you and then there's one person in this... Do you know about the trolley problem? Okay, what would you personally do? What would I personally do? Would you switch it? So, I mean, so tell me which... I mean, because there's different versions of it. Okay, so the trolley problem... I know the trolley problem. Is there the five people here and then, right? There's a track with one person, but you have to actually switch
But there's different versions. There's one version where I switch the track. There's one where I push the man in front of the player. Okay, let's go on the one where you switch the track. Well, if that is the only option available to me, I switch it so it kills the one person rather than five. What about the one where you have to push someone off? Well, see, that's a difficult thing because we have sort of evolutionary constraints on us that where we take more responsibility for physically acting. I would like to believe
that I would not let those evolutionary constraints override that again limited to this problem because I think the point is to avoid getting into the trolley problem but say I have no choice and we can go back to that debate right then I would like to think that I would still do the same thing. You push someone off. I push the person off if it's going to if I have
overwhelmingly clear and high probable evidence that by doing that, I will save five lives. Yes. I mean, what else would one do? I mean, the only reason why you wouldn't do the push. So the difference is, your viewers probably know that. Most people say, well, I'll throw the switch. That's okay.
There isn't any logical difference. There's just the interpersonal closeness or proximity of the person when you're pushing them. But in that situation, I don't see why it matters.
There's a lot of wrong conclusions to draw from that. The wrong conclusions to draw from that is that close interpersonal presence never makes a moral difference. That's false. It often makes a huge moral difference. So you shouldn't conclude from the trolley problems, oh, we should just be utilitarians and we should never pay attention to these other factors. That's just false. I don't think that follows. I was thinking about the actuality and then potential Aristotelian questions. Okay. And then I was thinking about how that relates to Carl Jung.
So Carl Jung has this idea of individuation. Yes. Okay. So the way that I think of that is similar. So let's say you have the big five personality model. Remember someone was talking about that individuation. You can think of it as you're born with certain set of traits, individuation, making yourself more capable, actualizing yourself is actually about spreading. So that let's say you're highly neurotic. You need to learn to be not neurotic. Let's say you're highly open. You actually need to learn to be, to know what it's like to be unopened and closed and then conscientious. Same thing. Yes.
So then that's getting close to individuation. First of all, I want to know what you think about that. And then my second question would be that to me sounds like you're actualizing yourself, but actually you're giving yourself more potential because you have the potential to do more and be more when you're individual, when you're individuated, because now you've spread what you can do. So you actualize yourself, but at the same time you've increased potential. And those seem to be contradictory because in the Aristotelian notion, you have potential and then you actualize.
Okay, so let's try and answer that. First of all, I have criticisms of the Jungian model. One would come from Tillich that we shouldn't just talk about individuation, we should always talk about individuation and participation, and those are in a trade-off relationship. I want to individuate, but I also want to participate. I have an identity
onto myself and I have an identity in so far as I belong to other people. And man, is it important to you that you belong to other people? So that should first of all be set off as a serious limitation in the Jungian model. Okay, then the idea of individuation. I like the way you described it because I think it's better than what is often a romantic interpretation of Jung. And the problem is Jung is influenced by romanticism, so I understand why people make that. So the romantic interpretation that I reject is, you know, I have my true self
And the point about this is to find what's unique about my true self. And to be in alignment with it? Is that romantic? Well, to believe that you have a true self and what's value about your true self is its uniqueness and that you're born with it and the point is to express it.
to press it out, right, express. Okay, so that's a romantic notion that you have your criticism. Yeah, very, and so I reject that. Now you gave a different interpretation, at least it sounded different to me, and it sounded much more Aristotelian. It's like, no, no, what individuation is, is what Aristotle would call character cultivation.
So my character is different than my personality. You listed the five factors, the big five of personality. And these are basically dispositional. These are given to me. How they're given to me genetically or my family of origin environment. I'm just going to be neutral on that right now. But in some sense they're given to me, right? And part of what character is, and we've lost a sense of this, is character is exactly how you describe it. Character is about acquiring
what Aristotle would call a habit, a skill, ultimately a virtue that compensates for the deficits in my personality. And then, of course, that's why the whole notion of the romantic notion of your true self is kind of, again, I think something we should suspect because is your true self your personality? Is it your personality as compensated for by your character, etc., etc.? Secondly, you then said, well, what seems to be happening here is, right,
I seem to be actualizing my potential, but that gives me new potential. But you have to understand that actuality and potentiality for Aristotle are reflective. They're relative, not reflective. I just said the wrong word. They're relative. So what's actuality to the potential of something can be the potential for a higher level of actualization.
Let me give you classic Aristotelian doctrine. Being a living thing is the potential for being a moving thing. But being a moving thing is the potential for being a cognitive thing. Being the cognitive thing is the potential for being a rational thing. So, as you cultivate your character, you are actualizing the potential within your personality, but you're also creating the potential to become, potentially,
I remember you were talking about a virtual engine model where there's a limiter and a generator or a governor and then okay so that's a virtual engine and then you can use that to develop character
Yes, and that's what I think Aristotle's notion of virtue is. I think his notion of a virtue is exactly that. I mean, if you look at the idea of the golden mean, you know, that courage is in between cowardice and foolhardiness, right? There's deficits of access and there's deficits of lack. And what you're trying to do is, right, you're setting up a virtual engine. You're setting something, a selective thing that's clamping down on the excess
and then you're also creating a generator to make sure you don't have the deficits of lack and you're trying to create this optimization and by the way I think relevance realization to go way back to meaning is again about getting a kind of virtual engine right between being economical right really like clamping down your possibilities and being resilient really opening up your options and you're constantly trying to get the most virtuous optimal balance between those
Difficult question to answer. But practically speaking, how does one use this virtual engine model to increase their character? So you again, I mean, sorry, I wasn't clear. So I don't want to just sound like I'm repeating myself. I was trying to present Aristotle's method of the golden mean as a process by which you create a virtual engine on your development. And that's how you will acquire aspects of character. So let's say
I determine that in order to compensate for my personality deficits, I need to be more courageous. There's an aspirational rationality. I reason as to what I need, what I don't have, and how I will proleptically move towards that.
So how do I go about cultivating that? Well, I can't just say, I'm going to be brave now because it doesn't work that way. So what I do is I try to develop habits of avoiding the extremes. I try to, first of all, the extremes of cowardice. So you have to recognize where you are on this spectrum first. You do, but it's not static. As I start to get better at
getting a systematic relationship between the generator and the governor between building habits of constraint that limit the excesses
building habits of generativity that compensate for the lack. As I get better at that and getting them into a systematic attunement with each other, that's also going to increase my ability to recognize, get a better sense of these things in the world. And it's going to self-organize. I'm going to tune myself into this virtue. Let's say someone is extremely timid, scared, low self-esteem,
What do they do? First of all, they don't recognize themselves. Let's just hypothetically say they think, no, I'm actually fine. Most people have too much temerity, too much foolhardiness. What do they do? What's a practical step that they can undertake?
Well, you've put me in a difficult situation because you set the thought experiment up with that they don't recognize that they're... Okay, but they recognize that something's wrong inside. Okay, well then... They're not feeling good. So hopefully what they'll do is they will seek discussion or therapy that will help them break out of aspect disguise. So the problem that people face when they get into this is, I mean you see this in therapy, is what I call aspect disguise. So somebody will come in and say,
Look, I have a lot of trouble in my life because I'm really stubborn. I'm too inflexible. It's really causing... That's the complaint I'm hearing from all the people around me and I recognize that I've got to change it. And then you talk to them for a while and then you wait and you come back and you say, what do you really like about yourself? Oh, well, I'm persistent. I don't ever give up. See, so people don't realize they're talking about the same thing under different aspects. And so very often what you have to do is get people, right, like
Are they disguising and therefore unwilling to give up their timidness because they, in this equivocal fashion, identify it with being gentle? And gentle is a good thing. So you have to work with people to break out of that. You say, is there a way to be both gentle and courageous?
Right? And can you get them to break the aspect disguise, the equivocation between gentleness and timidity. So you have to do a lot of that work. Then if they open that possibility up, that's an important if, then you can start to do something like what I was talking to you. I mean, that is my situation. I am... You feel like you're timid? I was very shy as a child. I suffer from
very powerful social anxiety to this day right now it's happening right now so what i what i've done i love you you're doing great don't worry thank you you don't have to do that but what what i've tried to do it's always dangerous to hold yourself up as an example because it can be self-promotional but sometimes it's a good way of being authentic so i'm trying to get that balance but right what i've tried to do is to
do that. I've tried to develop skills and habits of virtues of interaction with people and try to get the balance right and we talked about it earlier about giving other people credit so don't overcompensate and be imposing and intimidating right so get the persona try to get the persona and the set of virtues and skills for interaction to compensate for the fact that I'm actually what I would really like to do is to not
In the case of this person who was timid but didn't think that they were timid or thought that the problem was the rest of the world, would you say that there was self-deception there? Yes. Okay. I remember you said that it's difficult to self-deceive. No, no. I think self-deception is very, very easy. What I said is it's incorrect to understand self-deception as lying to yourself. Just to give the viewers some background, in one of your videos,
From what I understood, I thought you said that you can't lie to yourself, so which I interpreted as you can't self-deceive, but you can BS yourself, the technical term. You can watch the other video for that. Okay, now you're going to clarify. Yeah, so what I mean by that is I think what I was trying to say is I think self-deception is very prevalent in our lives, in our cognitive lives. I think the common metaphor of understanding self-deception as lying to yourself
is an incorrect metaphor because I don't think you can lie to yourself. I think the correct model for understanding self-deception is you can BS yourself. And so we're not really lying to ourselves, we're BSing ourselves. And I think that's very important
because I think again it shifts the issue of self-deception off of propositions onto issues about perspectival knowing, issues of salience, issues of identity. Most of your self-deception is motivated reasoning that has to do with the salience of stimuli and your sense of trying to preserve your identity. I was thinking about this, the inability to lie to yourself, and I was wondering is that why porn is so
liked because when you think about it why would you have to watch porn when you can imagine anything you want okay so you're imagining but then you're not getting something like the procedural or participatory so when you watch it maybe you have maybe you have propositional truth oh yeah this person is doing so and so act to me and i'm doing it too but you don't have some of these you don't have the presence you can't get the sense of presence and so now you watch it yeah and it
Okay, because
People like Tony Robbins. I don't know if you've ever followed Tony Robbins. They're like, change your state. Like go like this. Yeah. Yeah. Scream. Yeah. Okay. And now do you feel better? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. So you can do that.
Now some people can do that and they feel better, but some people feel like I'm self deceiving myself. That's stupid. It is. I would agree with the people who say that because all this stuff about power posturing has sort of collapsed. It's failed to replicate the stuff about changing your facial expression. There is when we do it carefully, it's there, but it's a very small effect.
So real work would have to be done elsewhere. Don't just try and change your state quote unquote by changing your physiology and do something else. Yeah, I think there's a lot more you have to do. I think there's a lot more you have to do. I would conjecture that the success that Robbins is getting is largely not due to the power posturing or the changing of their facial expression. I think it's probably more placebo effect.
There's a critique of Westerners, which is that we're not present enough. But then there's also a critique that we seek immediate gratification, that we live in the now, almost like a child. And then I was wondering, wait, aren't those two contradictory? What do you think of that? So one of the criticisms I have of one aspect of the mindfulness revolution, which I think is a response to the mean crisis, is this glorification of being in the present moment.
I don't think that's a good way of talking about mindfulness scientifically. Maybe it's a good way of training it in meditation. But being in the present moment there's a sense in which
That can be a completely impulsive, wanton way of behavior. Well, I mean pay attention in the present moment to what's relevant. Relevant to what? Relevant to something other than the present moment. Because then you're no longer in the present moment? Exactly. Relevant to your values, your goals. Well, those aren't in the present moment. They're something that extend across... So the mere pursuit of being present is not sufficient? I don't think so.
It's important to develop the mindfulness skill to come into an awareness of your current processing so that you can more effectively intervene in it. But that is not the only important point of intervention you need in your processing. You need also to deal with overcoming hyperbolic discounting.
Hyperbolic discounting is the phenomena, it's an adaptive phenomena, but it misleads us in a lot of ways, it's also known as temporal discounting, that present stimuli are more salient to us than future things. This is why people have a tough time losing weight, because the chocolate cake is here now and the health is in the future. And if I can't make that future self-present to me, you know what I'm going to keep doing? Eating the chocolate cake and not losing the weight. Yes, part of what I need is to become aware of
This is a bit of a silly question, but given the fact that there are these four, as far as we know, forms of knowledge, so the propositional is just one, and the rest are vital, important.
But in the courtroom, propositional is all that matters. Well, it does and it doesn't, right? So should we value procedural perspectival? And how does one practically go about demonstrating that in a courtroom? So we value procedural in an explicit sense when we allow expert judgment. We're saying certain individuals have certain skills.
Not certain claims, they have certain skills and those skills allow them to make determinations that we have to take into consideration. So we do make a place for procedural... But only in so much as it helps the propositional? I don't know. That's an interesting question.
I mean, I guess because ultimately the decisions are rendered through statements that everything is ultimately in service of the inferential processes by which the conclusions of the trial, meaning like verbal statement conclusions are reached, yes. But we do nevertheless acknowledge that procedural knowing matters significantly in very many cases to the determination of that
Okay, so that's an idea drawn from Dawson and many other people. It's also known as, there's third generation COGSI, there's also what's called 4e COGSI.
First generation COGSI was largely built around the computational metaphor. So the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software, and cognition is largely like a computer program. And that's still prevalent in the common person's mind. They think of the mind as a machine, as a mechanical. And there's still people within cognitive science who think that's the right way to go.
But there are flaws. We don't have to get into the flaws. So that's why second? Second generation put a lot more emphasis on neural networks and what made it different than what you saw in GoFi, good old-fashioned AI.
was the old model that goes back to Hobbes and Descartes is the idea that cognition is ultimately like language. That what I'm doing when I'm thinking is very much like what I'm doing when I'm speaking. I'm doing something analogous. I'm running something like an argument in my head.
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Neural networks give up that model that cognition is language-like, that what we're doing when we're thinking, at least foundationally,
is doing something like running an argument. And Jeff Hinton, of course, was here at U of T. The idea was, no, no, the better way of trying to understand cognition is that cognition is brain-like rather than language-like. We shouldn't be looking primarily to the structure of language. We should be looking to the, I don't mean the anatomical structures, I mean the functional structures of how the brain operates as a neural network in order to understand cognition.
Third generation came along and said, it's not so much the neural networks, it's the dynamical systems that are operating on the neural networks. It's the self-organizing processes. And those self-organizing processes are not in the brain, just in the brain. They're self-organizing processes between the brain and the body, between the brain, the body, and the environment. And it's all these loops of dynamic self-organization that we have to study if we want to properly understand
So cognition is embodied, it's embedded, it's extended. So then is there not a clear delineation between what is you and what is your environment? Depends what you mean by that. So it's very much a part of the... So the 40s are embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted, right? And so many people, I would include myself in this work I'm doing with Dan and others,
the idea that cognition is in an important sense is extended, that cognition is not just happening in your head, that there's important ways in which part of the information processing, this gets very philosophically complex and I can't be as precise as I need to be right now, so I'm asking for some tolerance from viewers who are more philosophically educated on this point.
I can address that, but I can't do it right here. So speaking in this more coarse manner, the idea is that the significant aspects of the information processing are being done outside of the brain, in the environment, and in the body, and that they count as much as part of your cognition as the events that are internal to your brain. That's what it is to say you're embodied or you're embedded and your cognition is extended in important ways.
Is third-generation cognitive science related to wisdom in some way? I know that your work focuses plenty on wisdom. Yeah. So I don't know if you have your own, it's fourth gen, it's vervachy cognitive. No, no, no, it's vervachy. No, no, I think I'm third generation for E. I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm. You don't think you've invented one yet. So let's go back to something. Let me try and show you what I mean. And let's go back to something we talked about earlier, the relevance realization stuff. Okay. So here's a problem facing your brain.
Right? We were talking about it. Out of all the information, what do I pay attention to? What do I consider relevant? Well, you can't sort of reason your way through that. You can't sort of propositionally infer your way through that. What I was arguing earlier is I think it's actually a bioeconomic thing. It's the economy of your brain. Efficiency and resiliency are bioeconomic terms. What's happening is the brain is constantly trading between efficiency and resiliency and when it gets an optimal thing right now that
increases my capacity for problem solving, meeting initially my constitutive goals and then the goals in my interaction with the environment, right? Now think about what that means. That your cognition, your problem solving ability is dependent on your brain belonging to a biological economy, the biological economy of your body. If your brain wasn't embodied,
It wouldn't belong to a bioeconomy. It wouldn't be regulated by efficiency and resiliency. It wouldn't have a capacity for relevance realization. Your body is actually constitutive, because it's a bioeconomy, of sets of constraints that actually afford your cognition being able to zero in on relevant information.
So being embodied is constitutive of you being cognitive. And then, of course, once you move that way, right, then you start to talk about, okay, well, we talked about this last time. What does that relevance look like? Is it just in my head? Is it just in my object? Remember, in the object, remember what you're talking about? No, no, it's an affordance. It's a loop. It's a relation? Yeah, a real relation, a dynamic relation between myself and the object. So the meaning is not what's being related, it's the relation. I think so.
And so, if my cognition is bio-economically embodied and it's embedded in affordances between me and the environment, my cognition is not just in my brain. There's a quote which says something like, wisdom is knowing what you have control over and what you don't. Who said that again? Epictetus. Okay, what do you think of that, given the fact that you don't believe in free will? So, the Stoics also are compatibilists.
So I'm in good company with Epictetus. So having control over and not having control over, I don't want to repeat that argument saying that
I have absolute prime mover and sole causal control. Again, the current state of my cognition in terms of the dispositions is the most causally relevant thing for what's happening in the environment. That's what I mean by having control over something. I have control over this because most of the behavior of this cup is due to what's happening in my hand and most of what's happening in my hand right now is due to the current state of my brain and etc.
I would, I think there's something right about that, but you have to read, I don't want to say read into Epictetus, you have to unpack it. Epictetus doesn't just mean sort of, in fact he really doesn't mean physical control. Epictetus means that what we ultimately have control over in this sense, and we don't recognize, is the meaning of events.
we have a lot more control over the relevance that we are helping to generate with respect to events than we do over the events themselves. Now the problem, there's two issues that come out of that. Because we confuse, think of the word, confuse the meaning with the thing, we try to manipulate the meaning by controlling the thing.
And we forget that very often it's not the thing. Not always. If the truck hits you, it's the physical properties of the truck that destroy you. But in many cases, it's not the event or the thing, it's the meaning of the event or the thing. And we can't control that?
That means you can't train... No, no, sorry for interrupting, but Epictetus is saying, no, no, you can. You can exercise a lot more control over the meaning-making machinery than you can over the events, but because we don't pull them apart, because we confuse them together, we try to deal with the meaning by controlling the events, and we have much less control over events
then we like to believe and we don't recognize how much control we have over the meaning-making machinery. We're often ignorant because, an example you've seen me use before, we're often looking through that meaning-making machinery then stepping back and becoming aware of it in any kind of fashion that enables us to intervene in a powerful way. So part of what wisdom is, is to
become much more aware of this relevance realization process, the way in which we're connecting to events and making meaning about them. And I think, I mean, isn't that part of what it is to be a wise person? Isn't the wise person the one who can zero in on the relevant information in the messy complex situation? And not just zero in, you know, as a thought, but can actually engage their own relevance realization machinery so they create affordances
Effective affordances for intervening in that difficult situation. They are capable of insight in that profound way. That sounds to me like a big part of what wisdom is. Yes. Are there any theories of consciousness that you feel like are on the right track? So there's a few. I don't know many of them, but there's like the sensory motor theory of consciousness. And then there's the integrated information. And then there's a global workspace of bars. There's Clearman's
There's two issues we have to address when we address consciousness. We have to address
They're two separate questions in the sense that they shouldn't be conflated or identified together. I do think they're interdependent in so far as we answer one, we have to be thinking about answering the other. But what are these two questions? One is the function question. What does consciousness do? What's it do? And then there's the nature question, which is how does something like consciousness arise out of all this non-conscious matter? And those are not the same question because I could potentially answer
at least in a logical sense, the question as to how it arises without giving you any account of what it does. Now the reason I point that out is different theories put different emphasis on these two questions. Barr's theory of the global workspace has a lot to say. Talk about what it does. What it does. Very little about how it could have arise from non-conscious matter.
Tononi's integrated information theory is much more about the nature. He's trying to explain how out of the physical activity of the brain, something like consciousness could emerge. Like what conditions need to be met in order for there to be some unit of consciousness? Yes. It doesn't say what consciousness is, because there are actually three questions.
What the heck is consciousness? How does it arise and what does it do? So I think the first question, what is consciousness, is the answer we would get if we had an integrated answer of how does it arise and what does it do. I don't know what else it would mean to say what consciousness is other than being able to explain how it emerges ontologically and how it acts causally.
right? How it functions. Or whether or not it does emerge, whether or not it's a fundamental part of reality. Yeah, totally. I mean, but that's also another answer to the nature question. What I'm saying is the question, what is it, I think is the attempt
And I think there's something right about this. I think it's okay to a certain degree to try and answer the function question or answer the nature question, but I think ultimately they have to be answered in an integrated fashion. I really can't get at the function of something if I don't say something about its nature, and to talk about the nature of something without explaining how it functions or interacts is also ultimately not going to work.
What I want in the end, the holy grail, would be to have a good answer, a scientifically legitimate answer to, what does consciousness do, a scientifically legitimate answer to, scientifically and philosophically, what does consciousness do, how does it arise, and then how do those two things mutually support each other in an overall coherent
Do you have any personal views on the answers to those that have not been given? I do. I've done a lot of work with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu and others. There's a manuscript I have floating around of which I try to give our best account of what I think consciousness is. Let me give a couple of steps towards that. On the function issue, I think there is
A convergence argument, we've talked about the value of convergence argument. If you look at Barres, I mean he publishes it with Shanahan and Barres, right? The main function of, I mean this is explicit, the main function of consciousness is higher-order relevance realization, right? I think it's a strong implication in the Bohr and Seth model of consciousness as, you know, how we restructure and encode information, right, in order to deal, how we chunk information in order to get through working memory.
So you think the more working memory someone has, you can actually say they're more conscious?
Let's say someone has only one unit of working memory. If it's possible to individuate conscious working memory into units like that, so that's an important if. Because then one can make the argument that the more intelligent you are, since that's associated with working memory, the more conscious you are. I think that's an implication of what I'm arguing. I think the implication is that there's a sense in which there's a deep interconnection between intelligence, general intelligence, not all intelligence, not crystallized intelligence or whatever,
But fluid general intelligence's ability to zero in on relevant information overlaps with the functionality of working memory and consciousness. In fact, when I teach this, I like to talk about the fact that attention, working memory, consciousness, and fluid intelligence are all just different aspects of the same thing. And they use
Well, not perfectly, but tremendous overlap in using the same machinery in the brain. Well, where's the tension? Oh, it's here. Oh, it's here, right? And so the idea that they're all, all of these theories, I think even Tanoni, when he talks about tests for consciousness, his test for consciousness is
You know, a system is conscious if it can figure out that there's inappropriate relations in a picture, like there's a potted plant in front of a computer. It's relevance realization, right? And so I think what you can see, I mean, I've made this argument, we've presented it at Mind and Life and there's other places that there's a growing convergence that the main function of consciousness is higher order relevance realization.
And what does that look like phenomenologically? What that looks like phenomenologically is the part of relevance realization that we call salience, the way things stand out to us and the way obviation occurs, right? So I have a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. The function of consciousness is to generate a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. And that's related to wisdom.
Okay, so then can one make an argument, a controversial argument, that the more intelligent you are, the more capable you are of being wise, or the more wise you are?
In the sense that I think intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rationality, where I take rationality, you know this, I don't take rationality just to mean logical argumentation, I take rationality to be any set of set of skills or virtues that helps us overcome self-deception in a systematic and reliable fashion.
So in that way, mindfulness, the way it trains our attention to help us systematically and reliably overcome self-deception is a form of rationality. Insofar as intelligence is a necessary but nowhere near sufficient condition for rationality, and I think rationality in the sense that I'm using it,
is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wisdom. You can say that, of course, if I increase intelligence, I increase the chance of rationality, but I don't necessitate it because it's necessary but not sufficient. And as I increase rationality, I increase the possibility of wisdom, but I don't cause it to happen. So I wouldn't put it in a sort of direct causal relation. That's what I've tried to… But you say it would be more likely that an intelligent person would be more wise.
One of the things that can give you an advantage for becoming wise in
in certain contexts is to be more intelligent. The problem with being more intelligent is it also can often make you much more susceptible to self-deception. So intelligence is really a mixed bag. I think when intelligence is used to train rationality, then the more intelligent you are, the greater the chance that, let's say you have a personality trait. In addition to being highly intelligent, you have a high need for cognition.
So high need for cognition is people who don't just passively wait for problems to come. They seek out problems, they find problems, they try to understand. I think if you have a high need for cognition and a high need, sorry, let's say high G, high general intelligence, high need for cognition, then there's a very good chance you're going to move towards becoming more rational. And in that sense, there's a greater chance that you'll be much more likely to cultivate wisdom.
To wrap this up, what's the difference between reason rationality and well logic you just said is separate from rationality because rationality is associated or if not the same thing as overcoming self-deception? I would argue that that's your definition of rationality. Yeah, I would argue that's the key facet or the key characteristic, maybe the key criterion of rationality is the
systematic and reliable ability to overcome self-deception. You just can't be comprehensively logical. The idea of the Spock ideal that we could become rational by becoming comprehensively logical, that's just been subject to devastating critiques. The problem with trying to be logical, to work according to a normativity of certainty, is that if I try to infer my way,
If I want to be certain, I have to be algorithmic. Any search space that I'm engaged in, I have to check. If I wanted to be certain about how I should leave the room, how much of the information should I check in the room? I can't. I can't check it all.
Yes, logic works according to normativity of certainty. And Czerniak made this point, look, any proposition actually has an indefinitely large number of potential implications. When I'm making an inference as opposed to a logical implication, out of all of those potential, and Fodor made this argument too in a convergent fashion, out of all the possible implications when I make an inference,
I'm selecting a subset as the relevant implications I'm going to make salient and act upon. That's why you can't equate logic to reason. If what we mean by reason is making inferences in order to direct our behavior, then inference is already a process that is not purely logical. So animals can be reasonable? Insofar as animals are
using intelligence, relevance realization, to select implications, right? Which they should be, otherwise they'd be dead. Yes. Then we can talk about them doing reason. But not rationality. Right. Because what I can then do, I could use reason, which is my ability to selectively direct my implications, at least at my inferences,
Yeah, I'll put it that way. Selectively direct my inferences, that's more accurate. I could use that ability to reflectively change or modify my behavior with the goal of reducing self-deception. Then it becomes rationality. But I want to emphasize,
It's not only inferences that I will use to reduce my self-deception and become more rational, it's also my attention, it's also my skills, it's also my identity formation. There's many things I have to reflectively modify in order to reduce my proclivity to self-deception, and I think rationality includes
all of those. I think a wise person is somebody who not only has sort of individual sets of rationality but has an optimal relationship between all of them. So their inferential rationality, their attentional rationality, their identity rationality, their skill rationality, all of these things are optimally related to each other so that they're mutually compensating for each other character
Okay, so this is all very new to me, so I'm embarrassed by how simple, you guys were talking about reality earlier. Is that just like
looking at things as objectively as possible, or just being as receptive as you can to the environment around you like wood. So objectivity is a Cartesian sort of way of, well, at least it's inspired by Descartes, way of trying to stipulate what's real. And so the idea is, right,
There are properties of things that are only in our mind, subjective, and then there's properties that are things that are independent of our mind. That's what it means to say they're objective. They're in the object, not in the subject, right? And then Descartes proposed that the way we determine the things that... They're objective? The way we determine which properties are objective is mathematical. The mathematical... I was hesitating, but I don't want to attribute that solely to Descartes. Galileo starts that process in a very important way.
that the mathematical properties, the mathematically measurable properties are the properties that are in the object independent. The problem with that, the problem with equating realness to properties in object is that has a great deal of difficulty of dealing with parts of reality that have to do with relations between objects. And so
One of the issues you're going to get into is I can, Berkeley does this very well, is I can invert it. That's what Berkeley does. He says, look, I can't do, how would I measure, do the math on the cup? Well, I'd have to measure the cup, right? That's how I do them. Here's its length. Here's its circumference. But how could I possibly measure the cup if I couldn't see the color and feel the resistance? But the color and the resistance are subjective.
So I can't get at any of the objective properties except through my subjective experience. So then Berkeley turns it all around and says, everything is in your mind. It's all subjective. And so the attempt to equate realness with objectivity... Because objectivity depends on subjectivity. Yeah, there's ways in which objectivity you can show depends on subjectivity and then that just undermines the whole project.
Again, I'm not saying that Berkeley's right, and I'm not saying that the scientific- I don't see a flaw with that, with the fact that whatever's objective, you can only verify via subjectivity. Because then what Berkeley concludes is that you should give up the notion of objectivity. Things don't exist- I don't necessarily agree with that. Why not, though? It could be useful.
I take it that the claim for objectivity is that this thing has properties mind-independent. What Barclay is trying to show is there's no way of finding mind-independent properties because every property you're gaining access is, as you said, is dependent on your subjective state of mind. And so Barclay then concludes from that, right, well then there are no mind-independent properties.
And then, of course, you have all the problems with that. Well, objects seem to do things when nobody's aware of them, and then so Berkeley posits God. God's aware of everything at all time, and that's how things sort of stay in existence. And then you're into a really, really problematic place. Really, really problematic. So many people, you know, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, have been trying to undermine
Another one that I was interested in is being present in the moment
Because I can be anxious just like anyone else and that will like my ego and my personal thoughts and delusions will keep me away from being present and is that what meditation is that what meditation can help alleviate is like your own worries or like things you're like anxious about is the whole point of meditation to be more like
Just being able to discern your worries from the reality. Which one do you care most about? You guys had an interesting bit on evil. You talk about evil and then you're talking about metaphysical.
So metaphysical evil is to say that evil exists part of the structure of reality. It's not just our way of evaluating human actions. Like there's space and time, and that's part of what we think is a constituent element of reality. Space and time and matter. Then maybe there's another, maybe in addition to space and time, there's a moral dimension. I don't know if this is equivalent, but
It could be something like that. And so we're constantly, just like we're moving in space and time, we can also be moving in a moral dimension towards, maybe it's linear, maybe it's just one dimensional, maybe it's, who knows, but you can be moving towards the good and moving towards the bad. I happen to think that there may be something like that, but if there is something like that, I have a feeling
What would you call a personality deficit?
So personally, you might be too high in neuroticism. Let's go back to your meditation question. Neuroticism means you have a lot of negative affect, you have a lot of inner conflict, anxiety, things like that. That's very high in neuroticism. That can be debilitating for you trying to lead your life. Now what you can use is you can use the rationality of mindfulness.
And one way of training it is in meditative practice. You also want contemplative practices, I would argue. But anyways, as I said, by becoming aware of the way, instead of looking at the world through your anxiety, in meditation you're trying to step back and look at it. These are thoughts?
Well, not making a judgment on validity, but trying to do what we were talking about when we were talking about Stoicism. And that's the areas where the prosaash, the paying good attention in Stoicism, overlaps with Buddhism. Other people have noted this. Remember we talked about, you know, not confusing the meaning and the thing. The anxiety is projecting all kinds of meaning onto things, and what the mindfulness can make me realize is, oh wait, right? That's in my mind, right? That's the way what's happening in my mind is distorting
that thing, right? And what I can do is I can separate the distortions. I can start to see through the distortions in the different sense of not being misled by them. They're sort of evaporating if I've practiced the mindfulness on the anxiety itself. So if I can become aware of the patterns and processes in the anxiety as something
Okay.
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"text": " because I'm asking questions that I would like to know the answer to selfishly and there's an unwillingness to constantly simplify since often the nuance is washed away in the compression and what you're left with is it might appeal to a wider audience but I find it's a patronizing distortion and it's not an accurate representation. The goal with this channel is to explicate on theories of everything which is a physics terminology as well as coupling them with theories of consciousness and then subsequently present them."
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"text": " just slightly larger than this. And I've never visited a professor who has an office this big. Well, you know, it was probably heated much better than this office is heated. So there you go. You can get your own portable heater and that's it. It's $40 to get this much space. That's it. Yeah. I mean, it's been very, very useful to have this space because it's afforded me having larger meetings, which have often been useful in my work. You use the word affordance right now."
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"text": " Actually, can you get me a pen? Yes, thank you. You use the word affordance and I know Peterson makes a connection between meaning and affordances. Can you explain the concept of affordances and then what meaning has to do with that, if anything, from your point of view? Oh, sure. The term originally goes back to J.J. Gibson and I was extremely fortunate. I actually got to study"
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"text": " with John Kennedy who was one of JJ Gibson's most significant and important proteges and John himself did just some amazing work. But what Gibson was actually arguing was that we think we're perceiving, we're primarily perceiving objects and it's a very sort of model, it's a model like very similar to what you see in Locke, sort of the idea that we get these impression of objects and then we form ideas around the"
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"text": " And then Gibson argued, no, the objects come later. There's sort of abstractions out of what we're actually perceiving our affordances. And so, for example, this object is graspable. So that, to experience it, to perceive it as graspable, is it being graspable a property of"
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"text": " The bottle? Well, no, not really, because for many creatures, praying mantis, this isn't graspable. Is it a property just of me? Is it a subjective property? Well, no, because not everything I want to be graspable is graspable. It's actually a relational property. It's a real relational property. There's properties of this object and properties of my hand, for example."
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"text": " that can be causally coupled together such that my hand can fit and make use of the objects in this object in certain ways. So the object affords grasping. This desk affords me placing things on it, right? So that's what you see first and then the objects are inferred afterwards. Right, and this is part of the whole idea of embodied cognition."
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"text": " It's instead of thinking of yourself as sort of a passive receiver, that's the lock-in model, right, of these impressions, think of the word pressing on you, right, instead of thinking, instead of thinking yourself that way, think instead, no, this is what you're actually doing, that it's your perception"
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"text": " and your action are always deeply interpenetrating and conditioning and coupling each other. So I'm seeing that as I'm moving towards it, trying to make use of it. You say, well, sometimes I sit still. Even when you're sitting still, you're usually shifting your attention around it. Your eyes are saccading, right? And what you're often doing, right, is you're trying to get to a place"
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"text": " where Marlo Ponti talks about this and Dreyfus and others, where you get what's called an optimal grip on it. I'm trying to get to the place where I get the sort of... That's only if you want to pick it up, or does that just happen even if you're writing a paper? First of all, we want to know what it is, right? But of course, those are not disconnected. I don't want to know everything about this."
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"text": " I want to know things that I can interact with it in terms of, like it's graspable or perhaps it's throwable, and that would be something different for me, right? You know, there's an, oh no, and I need to throw it, right? And so what it means is, okay, there's trade-off relationships. If I get too close to the object, I'm missing, I can't get, I'm not getting a lot of the structure. I might get some details here, right? If I get too far back and are static,"
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"text": " I'm missing some of the details and I'm missing some of the, you know, the curvature of it. So to get the cup, I have to move around and notice getting the cup, getting a grip on the cup. It's dependent again, like I said, on what I need from the cup. I might need the details, you know, maybe, you know, I'm Sherlock, you know, oh, I need this very, I need the fingerprint I have to get in, right?"
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"text": " I might just need it as a heavy object and then I don't need but if it's graspable you see how what I'm trying to do with the thing is going to affect how I'm moving around it so that I get the optimal grip that is relevant to the task"
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"text": " or the problem at hand for me. And so sensation and perception, sensory motor loop, are bound up together, they're interpenetrating. And what's happening is, I'm sort of being shaped as the object is being shaped in the sense of different features, different aspects of it are being foregrounded or backgrounded for me. Okay, what does that have to do with meaning? What that has to do with meaning is... Well, I mean, that's a long question."
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"text": " But what I think that has to do with meaning is when we talk about meaning in meaning in life. So let's be clear. I'm not talking about what people talk about in like ultimately in semantics like the meaning of sentences or things like that."
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"text": " Because when we use that term, talking about our life, we're using it as a matter of fact. So we should be using different words. We're using meaning and then the meaning of life and then the meaning of a sentence. We should say meaning A of life or meaning B of a sentence. Philosophers will often distinguish between semantic meaning and existential meaning or something like that. So right now you're talking about existential meaning. Very much so. The core of existentialism, at least one way of understanding it,"
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"text": " is our meaning-making in this sense of the modes that I get into. I want to be careful how your viewers are understanding this, but I'm creating an identity for this as I'm creating an identity for myself. They're being co-created together. I am becoming a grasper"
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"text": " as this is becoming a graspable thing, right? As this is becoming a graspable, did that not exist beforehand? It existed, but to think that the graspability is in it as a property, you won't find that, for example, as a property in your physics ontology, because it's not an invariant property of this. As I said, this is graspable by me, it's not graspable by all. Yeah, but you can just say it's graspable by me without saying as it becomes graspable."
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"text": " Well, because I might not be using it that way, right? So I may never grasp it. See, I don't get it, because it's as if what you're saying is you have some motivation, you have some reason you want to pick it up, you have something you want to do with it. But the object itself, from a physics point of view, let's say, from a materialistic point of view, doesn't change because of what you want to do. Well, I think that's unfair. Here's why I think it's unfair. You're thinking that the properties of this object"
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"text": " are somehow inherent in it, like its chemical structure, where many of its properties are interactional properties that are only refilled or disclosed by it as it interacts with other objects or other things. So many of the real properties of things are relational properties. So if I say to you that sugar is soluble, is that a property in the sugar? No, it's a property that the sugar has in relationship to its interaction with water."
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"text": " Right? And so many of the properties that we want to talk about things, we shouldn't think of them as adhering in the object. They are disclosed in terms of how the object interacts with other things. One of those things that the cup can interact with is me and the way I will, you know, shape it either physically or at least cognitively in terms of what aspects of it stand out for me or important to me."
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"text": " Okay, I don't want to get bogged down in this, but I'm just going to play the devil's advocate because most people are materialists, or at least that's how they're trained to think that they see the world. That's a mistake, right? They shouldn't be materialists. No, what I mean is they should be physicalists. I mean, there's a big difference between those. Materialism is an 18th century view. Materialism is the view that all that exists is matter."
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"text": " I mean, and that's a ridiculous view because it's unscientific. You should be a physicalist. You should believe that in addition to matter, there's energy, there's space, there's time, there's causal properties, there's fundamental forces, right, there's the curvature of space, there's relativity, there's, right, there's, you should be including all of those in your ontology and many physicists are leaning towards the idea that, you know, information should be thought of as physical and part of the fundamental,"
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"text": " That's what we should be talking about. How did you know that?"
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"text": " with a calculation, like you make up a hypothetical, we can make up hypotheticals in physics all the time. We can make up hypotheticals about what would happen if this hit the wall, and it doesn't have to hit the wall, and we can calculate it, and then we test it out and it turns out to be correct, it could also turn out to be wrong, and then we update our models. Right, so you should, right? And so all of your ways of actually obtaining your knowledge are actually dependent on getting things to interact together. Yes, you could try and a priori calculate"
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"text": " So does it exist independent of our knowability? Well, I mean, you would have... There's a tree falling in the woods now."
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"text": " Well, it's not quite knowability. There's a difference between knowability and whether or not it's a real property. I assume that sugar dissolved in water way before there were cognitive agents or life wouldn't have evolved the way it did. So I don't think this is dependent on there being"
},
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"text": " You know, cognitive agents with consciousness knowing that sugar dissolves in water in order for sugar to be soluble, but what it does depend is it depends crucially on a real relation between sugar and water and not something that just belongs to water as a property itself. So you're using the word relation and interaction interchangeably in this? Yeah, because I mean interaction is a species of relation, yeah. Okay, so let's get bogged down a little bit further. Okay. Like Sam Harris and Peterson, what is the notion, what is your notion of truth?"
},
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"text": " So that's a long question. And I think it's fair to say that one of my criticisms is we have a notion of truth that is too separate from the different ways in which we obtain knowledge about the world. So our standard way of understanding truth, and the interesting thing about the Greeks, for example, is they had four different terms."
},
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"text": " for talking about this. So the model we have, the dominant model we have is propositional truth. So we have propositions, and then we determine if they're accurate or they correspond. And of course, there's a lot of philosophical debate, right? But some notion of they correspond to reality in one way. And that's our epistemic sense of truth. And I think, if I understand him correctly, because it's very hard to pin Harris down, because he always claims to be misunderstood when people try to criticize him."
},
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"text": " But anyways, I think that the notion of truth he is advocating is exactly that notion, and he thinks that's the sole notion of truth. What I think Jordan to be doing with his pragmatic notion of truth, I think he's conflating a bunch of different things together. In his own little Petersonian form of truth. Yeah, because he talks about the truth in the world of action, right?"
},
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"text": " He talks about this in terms of pragmatism, and I take him to be using something like a Jamesian notion of pragmatism. Let me try and get at that. So in addition to knowing that things are the case, like knowing that that is a cup, and that's proposition knowing, there's procedural knowing, and I think that's part of what Jordan's talking about. So I know how to catch a ball. I know how to ride a bicycle. That's a skill. It's not a theory. It's a skill."
},
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"text": " And that's pragmatic."
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"text": " That's part of what pragmatism means, I think. Because to be apt or inept means that you have some goal. There's some goal but it's also the appropriateness or the fittedness of the action."
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"text": " So the standard there isn't really a standard of truth. So let me let me try it this way. I think all the knowledges have a different way of talking about ways in which we find things to be real. One way is propositional truth. Then another what skills give us is they give us a sense of realness in terms of power, right? How much power we are able to wield, how much"
},
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"text": " our actions can intervene and alter the course of things. And that's definitely what's being emphasized by certain forms of pragmatism. And you can even see it in some postmodernisms when Foucault was talking about the relationships between knowledge and power. But I think there's another notion. So the Greeks have episteme for theoretical truth, propositional truth. They have thekne,"
},
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"text": " for this procedural ability. Tekne. It's where we get our technology from. This is the knowing how to do things. Is that related to perspectival knowledge? No. I would say that that's a different thing. And so I think the Greek word that corresponds to that is noesis. And so this is closer to our word for noticing. And so what perspectival knowing is, right, knowing what it's like to have a particular salience landscape."
},
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"end_time": 1251.442,
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"text": " Knowing what it's like to be here now, with these things salient to me, and these things backgrounded, these things foregrounded. I'm offended that you refer to me as these things. No, a bunch of things, sorry. What relationship does the perspectival knowledge have to truth? And also, let's just get to your notion of truth, because right now you're reiterating what you think Peterson's notion of truth is, or Sam Harris's. Well, I am. So, well, I'm trying to get to my notion by distinguishing and contrasting mine with both Harris and Peterson. So unlike"
},
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"text": " Harris, I think that there, I think truth belongs to a family, right, of ways of deciding how things are real for us. And then I think Jordan is calling, what Jordan is talking about, he's talking about some aspect of our procedural knowing, our techne, and one way things strike us, a criterion we use for determining if things are real is their power, which is different from, right, the accuracy of our propositions."
},
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"text": " The perspectival knowing, studying this right now with Dan Schiappi, it has a different sense of realness to it. It comes with this notion of presence. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We're currently studying scientists who do work with like the rovers on Mars. And what's interesting there is this notion of telepresence, being on Mars."
},
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"text": " And it's important that you know that the rovers are not joystick controlled. In fact, you can't do that because the time delays too great. So what you do is you get batch, you get all these photos and all this data and then you sort of process it and then you set up a set of instructions like to curiosity or things like that. Now what's interesting is you look at these people and you can see similar things when people are trying to do VR, virtual reality. They talk about being on Mars."
},
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"text": " They have this perspectival sense of being on Mars, and they'll do things like..."
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"end_time": 1373.148,
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"start_time": 1345.52,
"text": " You know, the rover needs, here's my camera, and they'll say, you know, I need to, and they'll say, they'll do that, they'll do first-person perspective, first-person perspective. I need to turn this way. I need to turn this way, right, because the light, the light's going to be here, and if I don't turn this way, if I turn this, I won't be able to get what I need, and they do all this perspectival adjustment from the first-person perspective, right? And so, what's really important to them, right,"
},
{
"end_time": 1402.244,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1373.507,
"text": " And they look for it in the people that are trying to join the team, is that sense of being on Mars, being there, that sense of presence. And it's also a constant, notice the word we use, virtual reality. It becomes more real to us when we get a sense of presence, when we get that sense of immersion, when we get that sense that we have a perspectival salience landscape that is working for us. So perspectival knowing, noesis, has this sense of presence."
},
{
"end_time": 1420.725,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1402.978,
"text": " And then I think there's a fourth one, and you can see it also a bit in what I was talking about with the scientists, right? There's a participatory knowing. And this goes to gnosis as a Greek term. This is knowing by sharing a fundamental identity."
},
{
"end_time": 1444.957,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1421.152,
"text": " with things. And so, for example, the scientists are identifying with the rover. That's why they'll say I. And when you write to identify with your pen, is that similar or not? Well, I think that's part of it. I mean, so when I'm writing, I think there's two parts to the identification process. Part of it when I'm identifying with something is I'm doing what Polanyi calls indwelling."
},
{
"end_time": 1465.503,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1445.179,
"text": " I'm actually not sensing it, I'm sensing through it. Actually, you're typically not paying attention to the pen when you're writing, you're paying attention to it. So that's one way. But you also do something else that you probably aren't doing with the pen as much. You do internalization. So, for example, you have metacognition. You are able to reflect on your own thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 1494.753,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1465.879,
"text": " You don't come with that, right? You get that by imitating adults when you're a kid taking a perspective on you. And so you imitate them taking a perspective on you until eventually you can do that for yourself. You internalize other people's perspectives, aren't you? And that's partially also how you get inculturated. So we identify things, and this is what you can see them doing with the rover, they're sort of indwelling, they're seeing through the rover, but they're also internalizing it into, you know, sort of becoming the rover."
},
{
"end_time": 1524.787,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1495.094,
"text": " And we have lots of ways in which we have this kind of participatory knowing. So a really important way. And I think this goes towards some of Jordan's concern with narrative, although narrative also involves perspectival knowing. But we think of ourselves as temporally extended selves, like, you know, here's my past, here's my future. And so we have this sort of autobiographical sense of our of ourself as extended in time, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 1555.077,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1525.179,
"text": " That again isn't sort of natural to us. We acquire that and we acquire it through constantly practicing narrative. This is some of Daniel Hutto's work on the narrative practice hypothesis. We again think that thinking in narrative is natural to us but notice that we spend so much bloody time practicing it and we practice it all the time with each other. You meet somebody at a party and they want to know who you are. What do you do? You tell them your story."
},
{
"end_time": 1572.295,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1555.896,
"text": " You go to home at the end of the day. People want to know, how did your day go? You tell them your story. But we wouldn't think of that as practicing, but we are. But we are. And notice what you do when you have a kid. What do you do? You have to practice narrative. Do they get narrative right away? Can they tell or understand jokes right away? No."
},
{
"end_time": 1591.869,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1572.654,
"text": " So narrative is not innate, but it's useful. And it's culturally universal. So it's not innate, but it's culturally universal."
},
{
"end_time": 1616.237,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1592.398,
"text": " Because we usually look at cross cultures to see, do we all smile when we're happy? And then we say, oh, okay, we can infer that that's innate. Yeah. So you should use, I mean, universality is important. So I don't usually make the inference directly from universality to innate. I make the inference usually to universal for having some fundamental function, right? And those aren't the same thing as you just pointed out."
},
{
"end_time": 1631.459,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1616.613,
"text": " And so let's go back to the Teletubbies. We do this really, really simplified narrative and watch the show. It's horrific as an adult because it's repetitive and repetitive and we're doing this because we have to"
},
{
"end_time": 1659.155,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1631.732,
"text": " We have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and slowly make it more complex until eventually we can do narrative and then eventually we can indwell narrative. I can start to see the world as a story and then I can also start to internalize the world as a story and I become a story. I'm a story and the world is a story. Now that's participatory knowing. I'm a story participating in a story and that story is participating in me."
},
{
"end_time": 1688.985,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1659.462,
"text": " And that, right, that's, that's gnosis, that's a con, that's another kind of knowing. And it, it gives you the realness of that ultimate sense of being, right, in tune, attuned, sort of one between you and the world. And so I think all of these are different ways in which we, we make judgments about realness. And I think it's a mistake. So here's how I return back to both"
},
{
"end_time": 1706.732,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1689.718,
"text": " I think it's a mistake to try and equate truth to any one of these. I think we should understand that truth, we should reserve it for what it's prototypically meant, the accuracy, the correspondence between"
},
{
"end_time": 1734.172,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1707.022,
"text": " the content of our propositions in the world. And we should think about power, we should think about presence, and we should think about attunement as additional ways in which we connect up to realness. And now I can now answer your question. Those ways in which we connect up to realness, especially the procedural, the perspectival, the participatory, that's where a lot of the meaning that goes into meaning in life is to be found. What would Peterson say to that?"
},
{
"end_time": 1755.794,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1734.838,
"text": " What would his objection to that be? Because he would say he has a strong belief in his notion of truth. And then you also seem to, I don't know if it's conflating, but to equate realness with truth. No, I was trying to say that truth is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a propositional fashion."
},
{
"end_time": 1785.196,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1756.408,
"text": " Power is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a procedural fashion. Presence is one of the ways we judge things to be real. And by power, you just mean influence? Influence, yeah, yeah. I don't mean like, you know, brutality. No, I don't mean anything like that. No. Oppression. Pardon me? Oppression. No, no, I'm not trying to give it any political overtones. And then one of the ways we, you know, the participatory way we judge things to be real is this sense of participatory attunement with things."
},
{
"end_time": 1801.032,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1785.282,
"text": " So every different point of view has its own realness to it? Well, I don't think these are points of view. I think these are fundamentally different ways in which we know and come into contact with reality. And these are the grounding ways in which"
},
{
"end_time": 1823.985,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1801.22,
"text": " we try to make the connections to reality that underlie, I mean one of the things that people, even if you look at the psychology of meaning of life, one of the things that makes people feel that they have a meaningful life is how connected they are, connection, how connected they are to something"
},
{
"end_time": 1854.224,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1824.428,
"text": " greater than themselves something more real than themselves does have a relation to the two world problem because that's I mean a problem two world model because the connectedness is you transcending and being more connected exactly what is real and then the realness is just all of what you said yes yes so that's why in in fact in in for example let's take the I think the archetypal philosophical position for the axial age are on the two world model which is you know platonic or neoplatonic view right and you've got the upper world is the more real"
},
{
"end_time": 1872.892,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1854.224,
"text": " the more real world and the lower world is the less real. It's in Plato and I think it's very well explicated in Plotinus. When you ascend, I'm speaking mythologically of course, to the upper world, you actually transcend propositional truth."
},
{
"end_time": 1901.237,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1873.097,
"text": " You're moving ultimately into oneness at one minute. Eventually you move into the perspectival and then that eventually becomes the participatory. So these levels below the propositional are actually the ones that, at least that tradition, are considered the ones by which we most deeply get that connectedness to reality. Okay, now getting back to what Peterson would critique you. How would he critique you and then what would your response to him be? Let's build a virtual Peterson."
},
{
"end_time": 1925.469,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1901.305,
"text": " Okay, so that's a hard thing to do because Jordan's a really complex guy. I've debated him a couple times. Are those on the internet? Because I've only seen one conversation with you. It wasn't a debate. So I don't even know what I'm thinking of as the debate. Okay, we can call it a discussion of you with. I've had a complex conversation that contained disagreement with him about meaning in life."
},
{
"end_time": 1955.486,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1925.811,
"text": " There was an earlier one, it wasn't recorded, where it was much more of what you might call a formal debate, where we were debating about a problem called the frame problem. Artificial intelligence? But it also overlaps with stuff we're sort of touching the edges on, which is how humans zero in on relevant information. Because part of what I'm going to argue is that that process of zeroing in on relevant information is sub-propositional. It's taking place in these lower levels that I've been talking about, primarily."
},
{
"end_time": 1981.203,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1955.964,
"text": " And that a lot of what it means for us to say that we have a meaningful life is we feel connected by deep bonds of relevance to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. And that's very much what this psychological research is showing about how you can manipulate or enhance or degrade people's sense of meaning in life. Okay, so what would Jordan say?"
},
{
"end_time": 2009.428,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1982.807,
"text": " Well, Jordan would like a lot of it. He would like a lot of, because for a long time we shared students precisely because both he and I spoke about the frame problem, spoke about relevance. I think he would like some aspects of the non-propositional knowing, the kinds of knowing that I've been talking about. He might"
},
{
"end_time": 2036.237,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2011.596,
"text": " I don't know. You're asking me to do conjecture here, and so I'm being sort of cautious. He might object to my claim that you have to drop below the propositional level. Here's why I'm saying that, and I don't know if this is fair or unfair to him. One of the things I'd like to do is have another discussion with Jordan about these kinds of things. You see, one of the consequences of what I'm arguing is that most of"
},
{
"end_time": 2062.927,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2036.903,
"text": " You know, this meaning is sub propositional and the cognitive state by which you grasp your propositions is belief. And so what I'm saying is a lot of meaning in life is actually below your belief systems, right? And it's therefore, it's sub semantic, sub syntactic in really important ways. And that means that understanding, trying to formulate, articulate and express"
},
{
"end_time": 2089.753,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2063.404,
"text": " this in an ideological fashion as something that is captured primarily by beliefs, I think is a fundamental mistake. And I think Jordan would, that's an area where Jordan and I would significantly disagree. That's, for example, why I tend to view, I'm quite critical of trying to deal with the meeting crisis in terms of formulating it as a"
},
{
"end_time": 2111.647,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2090.026,
"text": " conflict between ideologies in which one ideology must be victorious in some fashion because I think that is both symptomatic of the meaning crisis and exacerbating of it because it's precisely pitching us at the wrong level we need to be at in order to enhance and recover the meaning in life that people feel is under threat."
},
{
"end_time": 2139.616,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2112.125,
"text": " Do you feel like that comes from your Buddhism background that whenever there's a paradox that it's just an apparent contradiction and that one doesn't need to win, that both can be right? Well, I don't know. That's a really good question. I think it's not just the Buddhist training. It was also the Taoist training. I am a practicer. Well, in Tai Chi, you actually play Tai Chi. You don't practice it. It's like playing music. And I've been doing that"
},
{
"end_time": 2169.821,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2139.838,
"text": " as long in fact even longer about a year longer than I've been doing the Buddhist practices. One of the things that did happen to me is and this was a long time ago because I've been doing these things for like 28 years but people I I've been doing the Tai Chi for quite a while and the meditation but especially the Tai Chi and people came to me and I I was like I was just doing it because I was sort of getting something out of it and I you know and I sort of had a vague idea that this would be deeply transform transformative"
},
{
"end_time": 2194.292,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2170.401,
"text": " But people were coming to me and they're saying, what's going on? And I said, what do you mean? Well, you talk differently and you write differently. How long after you started practicing? Probably two or three or four. It's hard. Years or months? Months. So probably three or four years, I think, maybe something like that. And again, it's because"
},
{
"end_time": 2223.456,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2194.855,
"text": " Tai Chi is taking place at this level, right? These lower levels that we're talking about. Did you find it affected your hand gestures too? Because even when you talk, you look like you're performing Tai Chi. I gesticulate just as much as anybody, but yours are flowy. Mine are just erratic. I think that's true. And I think I get more into the flow state because of being a Tai Chi practitioner, Tai Chi player. I keep catching myself"
},
{
"end_time": 2248.2,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2224.121,
"text": " People really said that at this upper level, the level of propositions and inferences and theories, they were noticing a change, and I hadn't even noticed it. But see, stuff was happening at the procedural, perspectival, and even the participatory level that was emerging up, percolating up. I don't know what the correct metaphor here is, but it was actually altering"
},
{
"end_time": 2275.913,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2248.558,
"text": " How I go about and do my theoretical endeavors. Let's get to BS or bullshit. Okay. You're allowed to swear, don't worry. I don't like to swear, so I'm going to say BS. Well, technically it's not swearing, it's just vulgarity, but that's okay. I'm going to say what I think it is because I'm trying to make sure I understand and then you'll just correct me, okay? So BS is not necessarily you're lying to yourself or someone's lying to you. It's when there's the inappropriate hijacking of"
},
{
"end_time": 2300.486,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2276.254,
"text": " salience from something like a relevance landscape or habit that makes conspicuous something that's irrelevant. Yeah, in an important way. I think that's right. I would add a bit more to it. I would put it in sort of the notion comes from Frankfurt, Harry Frankfurt and his seminal essay on bullshit, which is like 20 years old now."
},
{
"end_time": 2329.735,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2300.862,
"text": " He starts the book in a way that of course is ultimately deeply relevant to the meaning crisis because one symptom of the meaning crisis is he says there's this sense of just increasing amounts of bullshit and then he said if that's the case, I'm paraphrasing him of course, it's not verbatim."
},
{
"end_time": 2358.422,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2330.23,
"text": " But if that's the case, you know, we've got to get clear about what bullshitting is. And he then tries to distinguish it from lying. And he says, the liar works by trying to get you to believe in the truth of something. Right. And so the liar is depending on altering your behavior because you care about truth. Right. So I tell you that Susan loves you, even though she doesn't, because... What? What? Yeah. So I do that and I can change your behavior."
},
{
"end_time": 2365.52,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2359.019,
"text": " Now, what the bullshit artist does according to Frankfurt is they get you to become indifferent to the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 2394.787,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2366.084,
"text": " I think the following thing I'm going to say is implicit in Frankfurt, but part of what I've done is sort of explicated, make it more explicit. I think that what the bullshit artist does then is not only make you indifferent to the truth, they make you indifferent to the truth, as you said, by trying to make something inappropriately salient and catchy to you as a way of manipulating your behavior. And part of what I think that inappropriateness means is that the salience has been, how you're tracking salience has been uncoupled"
},
{
"end_time": 2421.118,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2395.094,
"text": " The Simpsons? The Simpsons? The Simpsons? The Simpsons?"
},
{
"end_time": 2442.892,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2421.596,
"text": " 90% of ads."
},
{
"end_time": 2467.619,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2442.892,
"text": " Yes, and so 90% of ads are basically bullshit. And do the ads make you not believe in truth at all or do they just make something salient and you still care about the truth? Well, so it doesn't it doesn't actually besmirch your truth-seeking. That's a good metaphor. Now that's a really tricky question. I mean, so I can't give like a yes no answer to it, right? I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2497.671,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2469.241,
"text": " So in the instance what happens there is, of course, and this is why the advertisers do it, you buy the product. You buy the product largely independent of your assessment of the truth. They're counting on impulse buying for a lot of what you do. It jumps off the shelf at you kind of thing. That's what salience is. Things stand out for you. Now your question, I want to pause on it because I think it's a question that deserves reflection."
},
{
"end_time": 2521.92,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2498.575,
"text": " How often do you have to cycle through this where you are disconnected from truth? You become, let's use the right word here, indifferent. It drops into the background. It's not salient to you. It's not motivationally affecting you. How often when you disconnect from that and allow yourself to be caught up in salience does it have to go on"
},
{
"end_time": 2550.213,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2522.568,
"text": " before this gains enough autonomy that it becomes compelling and difficult for you to return to the truth tracking. Because obviously that can happen and cults are an example of that. Of course. Now magicians are an example to me of someone who's a self-admitted bullshit artist. Yes. So they'll tell you I'm doing, this is all bullshit. Yeah. You want to play the game of watching and being interested. But at the end you know it's bullshit but the advertisers won't tell you it's BS because"
},
{
"end_time": 2568.2,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2551.305,
"text": " Maybe in an interview later they'll say it's BS. They typically won't do that. They're trying to make a joke. Some advertising works with the joke of, you know that's not true, I know you know it's not, and they'll give you the conceit"
},
{
"end_time": 2591.561,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2568.524,
"text": " that you are smart because you know it's not true. Well, the trouble with that, what's problematic about that, is by appealing to your sense of excellence, this is the superiority illusion, most people believe they're above the average in all dimensions, which of course is false, it has to be false, but because they're appealing to that,"
},
{
"end_time": 2620.043,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2591.561,
"text": " the situation in which they appeal to your sense of superiority because you know the advertisement isn't true, precisely makes the product salient to you so that you are more likely to buy the product. So, yeah, this can and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Is BS related to trigger words? Like, this is getting a little bit political, but redefine like racism and not oppression, actually violence."
},
{
"end_time": 2638.353,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2620.299,
"text": " My other example is the one from The Simpsons, the famous speech by the aliens."
},
{
"end_time": 2667.568,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2638.643,
"text": " My fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backwards, upwards, not forwards, twirling, twirling towards freedom. You're not saying anything, but it gives you this rush, right? This tremendous rush. It's evocative, it's catchy, right? It's super salient to you. And I think wherever political discourse is retreating to things that are super salient to us without any articulated, defended, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2683.968,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2668.2,
"text": " So how do we prevent ourselves from falling prey to bullshit? Maybe it starts with identifying it, I'm not sure. Well, I mean, part of it is that, but part of it is to do this."
},
{
"end_time": 2710.794,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2684.548,
"text": " One of the arguments I make, one of the applications I make of Frankfurt is that we can use it as a powerful way of understanding self-deception and this is actually what we're already discussing. We're discussing the ways in which we fall into patterns of self-deception and this is again why these levels are important to me because for very deep reasons you can't really lie to yourself because beliefs don't work that way. Pick a belief you want to have. You can't just believe."
},
{
"end_time": 2740.572,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2711.169,
"text": " I would like to believe that everybody loves me. I can imagine that, but belief doesn't work that way. So you can't really deceive yourself by lying to yourself, but what you can do is you can bullshit yourself because of the way attention alters salience. So if something is salient, like if there's a loud noise over here, it catches my attention, remember the catchiness, but I can also use my attention to make something salient, like look at this."
},
{
"end_time": 2749.155,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2741.049,
"text": " Right. And so notice what I can do. I can use my attention to make something salient and then that is what the advertisers doing. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 2775.418,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2749.445,
"text": " and then that makes it more likely that it will catch my attention and then that right and then i guess a feedback loop yeah a feedback loop very much a feedback loop and that's how you can bullshit yourself you can lead yourself until so let's say you're addicted to chocolate and you have chocolate on your desk that's very apropos for me i have to i've had to give up eating chocolate uh... for health reasons so so let's say there's chocolates in there man so let's say you're addicted to chocolates"
},
{
"end_time": 2783.268,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2775.418,
"text": " You want to not eat chocolate, but you keep it on your desk. That makes you more likely to eat it because it's secret. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2810.247,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2784.172,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2836.408,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2810.247,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2862.159,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2836.408,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2889.582,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2862.159,
"text": " The ways in which people fall into self-deception. Many people have what's called the restraint bias. They believe that they are capable of a lot more self-regulation and because they believe in the truth of, I shouldn't eat the chocolate. That's enough, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2914.292,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2890.162,
"text": " No, it's not. In fact, that's the fallacy. And so what they'll do is they'll subject themselves to the temptation, and then they'll find that they're eating the bloody chocolate, precisely because this chocolate is salient, and without even realizing it often, they'll start eating the chocolate. I want to stop using my phone so much, and you're telling yourself that as you're looking at your phone. Look, one of the best models of addiction, my colleague and friend,"
},
{
"end_time": 2939.002,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2914.667,
"text": " Mark Lewis, he's one of the world's foremost experts on addiction. He was himself a drug addict. He wrote a really good book called Memoirs of an Addictive Dream. Is he a professor? Yes. He was a professor at Oisey at the University of Toronto. That's how I got to know him. He's now in the Netherlands. And his model of addiction, watch how it brings together everything we've talked about. Did he leave Oisey because of the BS from the postmodernists?"
},
{
"end_time": 2964.343,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2939.275,
"text": " No, no, no. He left because of career opportunities for his spouse. Okay, so sorry. I was just making a joke. That's fine. So most people, and Mark has a lot of arguments in evidence against this, have sort of the chemical dependency model. So it's like an infection model. I take the drug and then I get infected and then I get dependent on that and I have to get it."
},
{
"end_time": 2993.712,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2964.565,
"text": " and that just does not explain a lot of the data about addiction, but it's kind of a model we like for, I think, political reasons. What actually seems to go on in addiction is something like this, and watch how it brings in all the stuff we're talking about. So I take the drug, and what the drug does, right, is it alters what I find salient or relevant, and if I don't have some, you know, some important skills and abilities around that, that will actually start to limit some of my options in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 3023.148,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2994.002,
"text": " So my world narrows a little bit, right? Now because my world narrows a bit, that tends to... I start to internalize that. Remember we talked about that? And that starts to narrow and limit my cognition. It becomes a little less... I lose some cognitive flexibility. As I lose cognitive flexibility, my ability to make sense of the world and solve problems in the world goes down, and so the world also narrows. He calls this addiction as reciprocal narrowing. The world narrows, and then my cognition narrows, and then the world narrows, and my cognition narrows."
},
{
"end_time": 3052.585,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3023.336,
"text": " until they both get so narrow that it looks like these two things are true. My world can't change and I can't change. I can't be anybody other than that. So that's rumination that's related to it? Rumination is related to that, but it's more than rumination, right? Because rumination is typically in here. But notice I'm talking about, remember we talked about the affordance loop and these relational properties and indwelling and internalization and the way you make sense of this world in this dynamic fashion. That's all in place."
},
{
"end_time": 3079.206,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3053.148,
"text": " Addiction? Addiction. I had this insight a few months ago or maybe a year ago. I was just alone in my condo when I was living downtown and it was dark and I never do this. I just turned off the lights"
},
{
"end_time": 3104.326,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3079.77,
"text": " And I was just thinking with the lights off in my living room, like when do you do that? Why do you do that? I mean, you probably do that because you're a meditative guy. But most people, I don't do that. So I was just thinking and I was getting into some deep thoughts about profound insights about humanity. And then I felt like I was speaking to Carl Jung in my own brain, like conjuring him or what I think he is. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 3133.626,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3104.787,
"text": " I shifted my head a bit, and my curtains had a little bit of a slit or a slat, and there was light from outside. It was nighttime. And my attention was drawn there. And then I realized, wait, why did I just, I think, lost all my thoughts. And then I was thinking, what drew me there? It was almost like a moth or a mosquito to the light. And it's just the neon lights of Zanzibar or some other downtown advertisement."
},
{
"end_time": 3161.988,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3134.07,
"text": " I remember thinking, hmm, there's this connection in the Bible between Satan and the bringer of light, Lucifer. And then I wondered, huh, I wonder if that's related to attention. Be careful of what grabs your attention. And now I want to know if you see any connection between Lucifer, the bringer of light, and BS. So, wow."
},
{
"end_time": 3189.821,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3162.927,
"text": " So, I mean, originally Lucifer, there is no actual identification between Lucifer and Satan, right? There are different figures in the Bible, and then it's later Christian tradition that identifies them together, although is it Milton or Dante that's still, they're still separate figures? I can't remember, but it's one of them. Because Lucifer was originally the morning star, and that's why it was the bringer of light, right? And then, which of course is Venus, and the morning star was associated with all kinds of"
},
{
"end_time": 3198.882,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3190.111,
"text": " religious practices of the cultures around ancient Israel. And so that morning Star God associated with the adversaries, the enemies,"
},
{
"end_time": 3223.968,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3199.121,
"text": " of Israel. And that eventually got associated with Satan, who was originally not an evil figure. He's the antagonist in God's court. That's why he has admitted he can just walk into God's court in the book of Job, for example, and talk to God because he's there as a prosecutor, right? And then those things eventually get fused together and we get sort of our modern notion of evil. But"
},
{
"end_time": 3245.589,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3225.043,
"text": " I guess a Jungian, a Jordan, as an example, might say, you know, everything you just said, John, is historically true. But the way in which we need to pay attention to what we find salient and what attracts us is a perennial"
},
{
"end_time": 3260.862,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3247.039,
"text": " a perennial piece of advice that myths do give to us, that you'll find in many mythological stories. So here's another one that's famous, the sirens in the Odyssey."
},
{
"end_time": 3283.08,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3261.254,
"text": " Be careful about what you pay attention to. Be careful about what it's doing to you. So notice"
},
{
"end_time": 3306.664,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3283.08,
"text": " What Odysseus does, he has forethought, he lashes himself to the mast and he has wax put in the ears of all of his men so that he cannot do anything to alter the course of the ship. So he gives up that. Something interesting, I have this argument with a friend of mine who feels like anytime that, let's say you're extremely attracted to women and you're"
},
{
"end_time": 3331.067,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3307.363,
"text": " Married. No, I'm not married. That's how you get so much work done by the way. I have a partner and she's a wonderful woman. Let's say you have your partner and you're attracted to other women and you know that and you don't want to be tempted so you just stop looking at other women. Now my friend would say that's repression because he's"
},
{
"end_time": 3359.206,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3331.459,
"text": " He has a Freudian mindset that whatever you're trying to not to do, there's somehow repression there. But I would say, is it repression if you clean your room because it's more conducive to you working better? Is it repression because you're just changing your environment? Is it repression if you take off your shirt when you're extremely hot? This putting of wax in the ear. To me, that's an admission that you're a limited being, that you're not infinitely strong."
},
{
"end_time": 3386.613,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3359.974,
"text": " I mean, we're still trying to work around to the question that this is all in service of, which is, you know, how do you deal with BS? And I'm not objecting to this because I think trying to unpack all of this machinery and get a deep understanding of BS is really necessary, indispensable, at least to a, it may not be logically necessary, but it's at least epistemically indispensable to coming up with a good answer about how we respond to that."
},
{
"end_time": 3414.206,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3386.903,
"text": " And I think if you try to capture self-regulation just in rules, I think you're making a fundamental mistake. But you're also making a fundamental mistake to think that rules don't have any service in the project of self-regulation. Both of those, I think, are overly simplistic."
},
{
"end_time": 3444.036,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3415.384,
"text": " It has to do with the fact that rules do organize and limit, but you can never completely get the self-regulation you need from the rule itself. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So here's a rule I try to follow. Be kind. I want to be kind. And that's a rule. What I mean by that is I limit my options and my behavior in order to try and exemplify that. But notice that"
},
{
"end_time": 3470.725,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3444.224,
"text": " That doesn't alleviate me from all of this work of determining what's relevant and salient and making judgments. Because here, look at this. The way I'm kind to my son Spencer is not the way I should be kind to my partner. That would be condescending, inappropriate. The way I'm kind to my partner, the way I'm kind to her, is not the way I should be kind to my students. That would also be, this is my language, inappropriate."
},
{
"end_time": 3496.749,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3471.152,
"text": " If the way I'm kind to my students is not the way I should be kind to a stranger, that would also again be inappropriate. So even when I'm trying to follow a rule, I'm still dependent on having to make judgments about what's salient and relevant. I still have to rely on my capacity to determine what is appropriate, what is the best fittedness"
},
{
"end_time": 3526.954,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3496.971,
"text": " In other words, the rule is like an adage of generality that you have to then apply in specific situations. Right. This is called the problem of specification. And what I can't do is specify all the specifications. I can't put into the proposition, be kind, all the conditions and all the context and all the possible ways I'll need to specify. Trying to pre-specify it will be too prejudicial. I'll prejudge it in too many ways and I'll get too rigid, too inflexible, and I'll actually end up not being kind."
},
{
"end_time": 3543.49,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3527.261,
"text": " even though in one sense I'm trying to follow the rule. Because what I'll be doing is I'll be trying to capture being kind in just a set of rules, right? And what I'm trying to do is remove that process of specification and try and put it in a limited number of finite"
},
{
"end_time": 3572.432,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3544.104,
"text": " finite ahead of the time pre-specifications and you can't do that because the world is complex and dynamic and changing and so are you and so are people and if you try and pre-package it all that way you're actually going to miss all most of the time all that appropriately but at the same time you can't get rid of the rules exactly that's exactly my point in fact that I've got to have the two together what I want is I want rules that give me sort of you know things that I want to try and do across contexts"
},
{
"end_time": 3596.254,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3572.773,
"text": " In many different contexts, I want to be kind, so the rules are giving me the cross contextual, but I also need this ability to make them context sensitive in their specific appropriateness and application. So your books, the four series, is it like the rules of life? Is it like Jordan Peterson's? No, no, no, no. So the books are, the series of books are"
},
{
"end_time": 3618.046,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3596.664,
"text": " In many ways, it's paralleling the video series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. There's two components to this. There's a historical argument of what is the Meaning Crisis? How does it arise? And part of that is to give us a sense of what is the meaning we're talking about by trying to understand the genealogy of how it was lost."
},
{
"end_time": 3632.227,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3618.166,
"text": " And then that's in dialogue with and eventually the emphasis shifts in the second half of the series of a lot of what we've been talking about here, which is the scientific understanding of, yes, but what are the cognitive processes that are at work in meaning making?"
},
{
"end_time": 3661.937,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3632.551,
"text": " So, and then what you want to do is you want to have the historical genealogy and the scientific ontology talk to each other. So it's history and science? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And those are always interdependent in almost everything we do. Even when you're doing science, you're depending on the history of science. And even when you're doing history, you're depending on the scientific ontology for how you examine materials, etc. You should always be having those in discourse with each other. You dated back the meaning crisis. So first, you'll define the meaning crisis."
},
{
"end_time": 3692.005,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3662.79,
"text": " I guess you've defined meaning somewhat so far, although it's complicated. It's not easy to put into one sentence. Exactly, exactly. Let's forget about defining it again. The meaning crisis is what you'll define and you'll also tell me when did it come about because you seem to have this perspective that there's a paradigm shift around the year 1200. Yeah. Okay, so the first part is what's the meaning crisis? The meaning crisis is the, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 3721.647,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3692.534,
"text": " You can see it, I think, symptomatically in terms of related things, like the addiction crisis. We're talking about addiction. You know, the mental health crisis, the fact that we've got this paradox in our culture that everything is being politicized at the same time as people are feeling disenfranchised, distrustful, disconnected from political institutions, political methods, political processes. Those are symptoms of the meaning crisis. That's right. Exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 3751.152,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3721.817,
"text": " And you've got, we've already talked about it, you know, foreshadowed in Frankfurt, the increasing sense of bullshit. We actually graph it in the book. You've got the disaffiliation from, you know, religious institutions. The fastest growing group are nones, N-O-N-E-S, people with no, and when the paradox about that again. Paradox, when there are no people of no what? No religious orientation."
},
{
"end_time": 3770.913,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3751.374,
"text": " So I haven't said what the paradox is. The paradox is, well, there's simultaneously this decline in religious institutions. Most of these people also are, this notion of being spiritual but not religious is also accelerating and growing powerfully."
},
{
"end_time": 3787.483,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3771.203,
"text": " And that's symptomatic of the meaning crisis? To me I see that as people have an innate need for religion, but then they see religion of the past as being hyper dogmatic, but religion is a two-sided coin of dogma and spirituality. So they're essentially saying, I'm spiritual but not dogmatic."
},
{
"end_time": 3804.36,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3787.961,
"text": " Notice what you're trying to do. You're trying to separate the propositional from the non-propositional because you're trying to recover the meaning separate from the beliefs that you no longer think are true. And you said that's because people are naturally disposed towards religion. That packs a lot in it."
},
{
"end_time": 3825.555,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3804.36,
"text": " I mean, religio, one of the etymological origins, it means to connect, to bind together. What people were seeking in religion, if we agree that these metaphysical truths are extremely doubtful, what they were seeking in religion are sets of procedures, perspectival transformations, transformations of identity through participatory knowing, in which they are enhancing and enriching"
},
{
"end_time": 3854.838,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3825.555,
"text": " these senses of connectedness that make life more meaningful to human beings. So, I agree with you in the fact that people are doing exactly what they're doing, disaffiliating from religion, yet trying to pursue spirituality, means they're trying, at least in an intuitive fashion, to say, forget the propositional, I want to get down to the meaning and I want to find how to get that meaning that isn't in my life the way I need it to be there anymore. So that's, I think, why it's clearly an example of the meaning crisis. I think other things,"
},
{
"end_time": 3877.312,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3855.128,
"text": " related to that like the mindfulness revolution and that people are turning to all of these perspectival participatory transformation techniques and methods is because again they're trying how do I get back this meaning that's being lost right and the meaning crisis is essentially a loss of meaning yes that people have a pervasive loss of meaning yeah and so yeah I think I think this is why"
},
{
"end_time": 3899.957,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3877.841,
"text": " I'm just wondering if you can graph the loss of meaning just like you can graph the presence of BS. There's a sense in which that project is starting."
},
{
"end_time": 3929.053,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3901.8,
"text": " One of my hopes is that a lot of this work, this historical and theoretical work, and it's not just theoretical because I make use of all kinds of empirical data, but all of this work is to try and get a theoretical construct of meaning that will afford more direct experimental investigation. Because presumably that is where we will get the kinds of patterns"
},
{
"end_time": 3946.715,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3929.258,
"text": " in the phenomena that will allow us to reliably measure it in some fashion. And so that is happening. So I mentioned the work of Samantha Heinzelman and others. You do an experiment something like this. You give people a bunch of pictures"
},
{
"end_time": 3971.698,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3947.073,
"text": " and that they can sort of make sense of it. Oh yeah, I make sense of that. You know, and think about all that stuff, that perspectival. Like I know, I see this, it's a tree. Yeah, it's a tree, but I also can understand sort of what's going on here, right? Like I get the scene, I get the situation, right? Not just object identification. And then you give them pictures that are maybe less coherent. It's like, what's going on here?"
},
{
"end_time": 3997.602,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3971.869,
"text": " or cubism, or you may put a potted plant in front of a computer, or something like that. Like, what's going on there, right? Absurd in some way. Yeah. And absurdity is, of course, not a statement about truth. It's a statement about this kind of meaning that we're talking about. It's a statement about the incongruity between two perspectives. Your perspective as, like,"
},
{
"end_time": 4029.65,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3999.906,
"text": " Your perspective as somebody who could sort of find this situation a live option and then the perspective of just what are the objects in this, right? So, you know, you can tell me what the objects are in the picture, that's a potted plant, that's a computer, but how would I, what does this mean perspectively for me? Like, I can't see how I'd put myself into this picture. Is that okay? Okay, so you give people a bunch of these pictures and some of them are, and the term that's used,"
},
{
"end_time": 4035.213,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4029.872,
"text": " It's kind of right, but I don't like it because it has logical overtones. So some of these pictures have more coherence."
},
{
"end_time": 4061.34,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4035.725,
"text": " and some of them have less coherence in the sense in this sense we're talking about here right so what you do is and this is the this is the manipulation you just give people either these these ones that are coherent or ones that are less coherent and right after you show them these pictures these two types you just ask them using a standardized questionnaire that's been validated for you know you know for being a good psychological measure right you ask them how meaningful is your life"
},
{
"end_time": 4080.333,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4061.869,
"text": " And what you'll find is if they've been looking at the meaningful pictures, the coherent pictures, they'll say, oh, my life is meaningful. You'll see an increase above control of meaning in life. And the people who are looking at the more absurd pictures will say, oh, my life's not very meaningful. Notice what's going on there."
},
{
"end_time": 4103.439,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4080.691,
"text": " They're not reflecting on the what of their life. They're not reviewing their facts. They're not even reviewing, even in this situation, their story. What they're tapping into is how activated and fitted is the machinery, the perspectival and participatory machinery to this situation. And if it's active and well-fitting, that's a measure of how meaningful. And if it's not, ugh."
},
{
"end_time": 4122.688,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4103.729,
"text": " And so just because you've experienced something that's been meaningful in the sense that it's cohesive in the, or sorry, coherent, coherent in this, in this, with this nomenclature, that that gives you a sense that your whole life has been meaningful just because you're being asked that on the spot. Yeah. And you somehow color the rest of your life. Yeah. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 4152.073,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4122.858,
"text": " Now, what about these studies where you give someone a warm cup of coffee and then they're more likely to rate a character as loving than if you gave them iced coffee? So you heard about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what if you did something like that with meaning? I know it might not have been done, but I would imagine that someone would say, my life is more meaningful if they held a warm cup of coffee. Then the question is, let's suppose that that's true, that they increase their meaning. Now, what if they increase their sense of meaning more than if they looked at these coherent pictures? Now, what would that say?"
},
{
"end_time": 4168.916,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4152.159,
"text": " If that was the case, it might say something that, and I have to put a grain of salt on that because some of these experiments from social psychology about this, some of them have been failing to replicate. They're not completely sound. Yeah, well, I don't want to be that judgmental."
},
{
"end_time": 4187.09,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4168.916,
"text": " They might not be. There's a lot of assumptions. Let's assume this is all true. Given the hypothetical nature of it, then I need to pay attention that there's some deeper level at which meaning is being generated for people."
},
{
"end_time": 4215.93,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4188.916,
"text": " I don't know what that would mean. What typically happens in the interpretation of the experiments you're referring to, and I think this is actually something that in broad strokes I'm in very large agreement with, is the whole notion of embodied cognition. And then the idea is the way you're connected to the world has such an embodied aspect to it. It's so down at the participatory level that"
},
{
"end_time": 4233.66,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4216.288,
"text": " At that level, if I can manipulate that level, then that would be altering me. If you get the ultimate embodied change, which is a massage, then you're going to feel like your life is extremely mean. That's right. Now, because that kind of thing, or at least similar kinds of things, don't seem to be the case, that's why I suspect"
},
{
"end_time": 4256.544,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4234.002,
"text": " those experiments wouldn't turn out the way you're hypothesizing. Because what seems to happen, because we've run an experiment on that, even when people are having things like mystical experiences or flow experience, it's sort of this insight aspect, this ability to go in and make meaning where there wasn't meaning before and really feel connected. That seems to be what's contributing"
},
{
"end_time": 4276.271,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4257.381,
"text": " You know what I find interesting is that when I asked you what is meaning, it's a 30 minute explanation and that was a condensed version. But when you ask these people is your life meaningful, they have a sense of it, yes or no. So do they have a sense and what you're doing is you're making it explicit. Yes, I'm trying to explicate and articulate. You have to be careful too though."
},
{
"end_time": 4297.398,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4276.271,
"text": " And that's why you have to run experiments and you have to try and validate the questionnaires between different situations and you have to see if the questionnaires match up with behavioral tests for all of the reasons that, you know, do I think people have a sense of meaning and do I think it's normative on their behavior to act as a standard by which they alter themselves and their actions? Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4326.698,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4297.875,
"text": " Do I completely trust their introspective judgment as to giving me the account of how meaning is made? No, because I don't trust that about anything else. I think people have a sense of smell. If I ask them introspectively to tell me how smell works, I'll get a lot of cockamamie theories that don't really tell me at all how smell works. So do people have the sense and does it regulate their behavior? Yes. Does that mean that they have an introspective authority over explaining or articulating that? No, I don't think so."
},
{
"end_time": 4354.411,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4327.005,
"text": " Okay, let's go back to dating at 1200, you said. Okay, what happened around 1200? Well, what starts to happen is, so notice, we've talked about this indwelling internalization. And one of the things we do, because we're sort of natural born cyborgs, as Clark would say, right, is we have this kind of identification relationship to some technologies, right? And"
},
{
"end_time": 4368.37,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4354.821,
"text": " And not only physical technology. This is a physical technology. We can do it with what I call psychotechnologies. This is a notion influenced by people like David Olson and Vygotsky and others. Like literacy is one of my prototypical examples. You're using literacy right now in your notes."
},
{
"end_time": 4386.527,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4368.677,
"text": " And so what that does, notice what you've done, you've put your thoughts on paper, so you don't have to, you can reflect on your thoughts without having to hold it in working memory, right, you can go back and correct your thoughts, you can correct, you can connect previous instances of when you were thinking to instances now, to future instances, you could have me read it and connect your,"
},
{
"end_time": 4404.838,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4386.527,
"text": " So it just massively empowers your processing, right? So these psychotechnologies, and we... What are some other examples of psychotechnologies? Numeracies, another psychotechnology? Coding, an example of psychotechnology? You mean computer coding? I would need to ask people, but I imagine it is. I imagine if they've started to understand and think..."
},
{
"end_time": 4424.206,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4404.838,
"text": " So it has to be related to the cognition because it's not just what expands the amount that you do. I guess that's technology. Yeah, that's right."
},
{
"end_time": 4452.5,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4424.804,
"text": " Notice how, like I said, notice how second nature literacy is to. If you try to, if I ask you to look at those pages and don't cheat by like un-focusing your eyes, look at the marks and don't read them. It's almost impossible for you to do that. It's become so internalized to you. And it seems like it's innate. It seems like it's natural to you. It seems like it's natural to all of humans. But it's odd because of course for overwhelming most of history, for overwhelming most of humanity, people were illiterate. And there's still some people who are illiterate. And we have to teach people."
},
{
"end_time": 4478.643,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4452.91,
"text": " Okay, so how people relate to literacy, and I think one of the things that drove the Axis revolution was a change in literacy, a change from hieroglyphic, cuneiform literacy to alphabetic literacy. And so when you see changes in how people relate to literacy, that can help drive significant changes in our cognition and even our consciousness, how we understand ourselves, how we understand the world."
},
{
"end_time": 4508.012,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4479.241,
"text": " I think that, for example, and I argue in this series, that the change to alphabetic literacy helped to drive the generation of the two-world mythology. So what I think, one of the things that's happening, one of the things, there's many things, one of the things that's happening in the 12th century, and this is an argument I think meant by Chatham, but I think he's citing somebody else, I think it's Kahn's. Anyways, the argument is people started to read differently in the 12th century. And what's interesting is I've taught myself"
},
{
"end_time": 4537.978,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4508.592,
"text": " to read in the way that they read before is changed. So the differences? So the differences, so the reading that I've learned, it's called Lectio Divina. It's still practiced in sort of religious and sort of neoplatonic communities, right? So when I'm, think about, here's where you probably might be doing it, when you're reading a poem, right? Now you might just read it in your head."
},
{
"end_time": 4552.483,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4538.2,
"text": " And then what that tends to get you thinking is that the ideas and the meaning are in your head and you think of it largely propositionally. But what you should do, and in fact if you had a good teacher of poetry, is poetry should be read aloud."
},
{
"end_time": 4575.657,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4553.336,
"text": " You should read the poetry aloud because you're trying to use the meter and the rhythm and some poets will even use the graphic shape of the poem. So you're trying to use all of this stuff around the proposition to trigger these other aspects of knowing, the perspectival, the procedural, the participatory. And so people were reading and they were reciting"
},
{
"end_time": 4590.555,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4575.657,
"text": " I remember hearing that one of the first people, not the first people, but somebody, I think Caesar could read in his head and people thought he was a superhuman."
},
{
"end_time": 4614.258,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4590.845,
"text": " So it wasn't that common. That's one of the reasons why we started inventing more and more sophisticated punctuation so that we could read in our head rather than having to read aloud. Because it's faster. Yeah, it's faster and it's much more important. It has its advantages, but then there's a disadvantage. Yes, it has significant advantages. I'm not saying to anybody stop silent reading."
},
{
"end_time": 4642.193,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4614.258,
"text": " but when what happens is right you you go through this change right where you you go from i have to be participating involved i have to be going through a transformation as i'm engaging with the text like and that's what we often still read when i think when we're reading poetry properly we want the poem to transform us to change we're not just trying to get the the information from the poem we want to undergo some experience some transformation related to faith or doth"
},
{
"end_time": 4660.947,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4643.148,
"text": " The Hoth? Because I know that has to do with experiencing something. Yeah, that's participatory knowing. So is this related or is it just seems like it is? It is. So the Hoth, the participatory knowing, so you see it in the Bible in the Old Testament."
},
{
"end_time": 4686.425,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4660.947,
"text": " because it's used it's used both of like a relationship like a faith as you said but it's also used as the term for sexual intercourse because in sexual intercourse you become intermittently participatory with another human being you're actually conforming and you're you know there's deep perspectival engagement right and so yeah that knowing by loving by having a loving interaction with something notice why that makes sense"
},
{
"end_time": 4716.749,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4686.971,
"text": " When I'm involved in these loops, remember we did the addiction and it gets narrowed? Well, love is the other way, right? What love does, even when you're loving an object, if I put it that way, right? And Aaron showed this in his work, this mutually accelerating disclosure. So what happens is, in addiction you get the reciprocal narrowing, but in love you get the reciprocal opening up. So I start to, you get what I call reciprocal realization, I start to realize more about my partner,"
},
{
"end_time": 4744.462,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4717.176,
"text": " Right? And that allows me to connect more deeply to her. Who started this idea? You said it and gave a name just now? Which one? That love opens up. I mean, the idea of it being mutually accelerating disclosure is a researcher called, his last name is Aaron. I think the idea goes back. It's just interesting, that's why. No, no, no. I think the idea goes back. I think people would want to research it. Yeah, I think the idea goes back to Plato, ultimately. Because Plato sees a deep connection between love"
},
{
"end_time": 4764.701,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4744.684,
"text": " and wisdom. And the process that Plato talked about is an agogé, is this kind of reciprocal opening up, right? His idea, when I look at beautiful things, that sort of transforms me and makes me a more beautiful person, which then allows me to see deeper and more profound aspects of beauty that then"
},
{
"end_time": 4791.749,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4764.701,
"text": " And what happens is it opens up and that's what happens when you're in love with somebody. You're getting to the depths of the person and that affords them getting to the depths of you and you sort of reciprocally realize each other in very powerful ways. So what happens is people start go from, if you'll allow me this to extend this, people go from reading the text in a loving manner, okay,"
},
{
"end_time": 4808.916,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4792.056,
"text": " to reading the text in a purely propositional, inferential manner. How is it reading in a loving manner if you read it out loud and you have the cadence and you try to get into it? How's that loving? Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to trigger, right? You're trying to trigger"
},
{
"end_time": 4830.708,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4810.691,
"text": " All aspects of your information processing that are much more procedural and perspectival. I mean, because you're listening. This is like the difference between reading a script and then acting out the script. Exactly. Exactly. And it's why, and I tell people this all the time, I was telling my son this other day. In fact, my older son was telling my younger son, don't read Shakespeare. It won't make any sense to you."
},
{
"end_time": 4858.848,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4830.708,
"text": " You have to go and see Shakespeare. You have to go and you have to hear them and see them acting and moving around and see how the words are connected to their characters and their identities. And then Shakespeare makes all this deep sense to you. Now does this only apply to poetry? Like if you're reading a non-fiction book, so The Shallows right there, or What is an Emotion, are you going to act that out and do you gain something from that? Well, I mean, it depends. Obviously you lose speed. Well, if"
},
{
"end_time": 4888.541,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4859.258,
"text": " It depends what my project is. Again, it's all about what are my goals, what's the task, what's the set of problems I'm trying to solve. I think some philosophical texts should be read in this fashion. I think there's a good reason why Plato wrote in dialogues rather than just in a simple... Yeah, I've always found that strange. Yeah, because he's trying to trigger the perspectival and the participatory."
},
{
"end_time": 4919.241,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4889.394,
"text": " And he's trying to put you into the kind of knowing that would allow you to indwell the dialogue and internalize Socrates. Now, let's go back to it. People start reading differently, and so this starts to come to the fore. The idea that I can get information without having to go through transformation. And you say, okay, who cares? What are most of the texts? The texts are religious texts, clearly. It's 12th century."
},
{
"end_time": 4949.377,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4920.435,
"text": " And this is an idea that Jinsung Kim and I talk about a lot, and I owe a lot to him about this, but it's also in Konza's work and Chatham's work. It used to be that you could only gain access, if this isn't the right word, to God, the deepest reality, you could only have that knowing by going through transformation."
},
{
"end_time": 4976.681,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4950.64,
"text": " So theology was always linked to the process of spiritual transformation. But what starts to happen is I can do theology, I can generate propositions and beliefs about God without having to go through any transformation. So theology gets divorced from self-transcendence. Around the year 1200? Yeah, that's when it starts happening. Why? Because the reading is changing. Ah, okay, okay. And the reading changed because"
},
{
"end_time": 5001.476,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4977.108,
"text": " Probably for reasons you said. I mean, there's many ways in which I can make my reading much more efficient, much more effective. I can consume more information, right, if I read in this silent fashion. But now I start to think of myself inside my head and that I am my beliefs and that meaning is in the propositions in my head rather than the meaning that was carried in"
},
{
"end_time": 5026.937,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5001.749,
"text": " in this reciprocal realization between me and the text, in this mutual transformation. So now there's a separation. That's right. And at the same time, Aristotle's being rediscovered. And so Aristotle is, to the ancient world, he's science. He literally writes all the books on science, like literally. And so when Aristotle's being rediscovered,"
},
{
"end_time": 5051.852,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5027.329,
"text": " You've got all this scientific knowledge that's coming in and it can't be ignored by the Christian Church. It can't be ignored because of the authority they give to the ancient world and also because Aristotle and Plato had deep influences on people like Augustine and so they can't just ignore Aristotle but they can't simply assimilate. So they've already respected Aristotle or the Greeks? There's a respect for Aristotle that has been set up within sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 5079.787,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5051.852,
"text": " It's in the warp and the woof of the way in which Christianity had integrated with the Platonic tradition. Around what year was that? The integration with the Platonic tradition starts much much earlier. That's much later. I'm actually getting to Aquinas in this picture that we're talking about. But no, this is much earlier. You're seeing this in the third and fourth century and most especially in the fifth century with Augustine. Augustine is the person that really fuses Christianity"
},
{
"end_time": 5108.541,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5079.787,
"text": " When you say he's fusing it, it's not as if he's taking passages from Aristotle and putting it in the Bible. What you mean is he's respecting their line of thinking and then applying it to the Bible? Yes. In fact, Augustine famously argued that he could not have become a Christian until he was exposed to Platonism because Plato's way of thinking about the upper world, the Platonic way of thinking,"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.879,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5108.848,
"text": " like the idealized world yeah yeah that that gave august because augustine was a very much sort of a materialist in his way of thinking and he he couldn't get into christianity because he didn't know how to relate to this god that was this invisible unseeable he was an atheist before no he's a manichaeanist"
},
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"end_time": 5145.998,
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"start_time": 5126.254,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5173.046,
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"start_time": 5146.988,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
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"start_time": 5199.155,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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"end_time": 5248.695,
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"text": " He reads Plato and Plato gives him the conceptual grammar so that he is then capable of moving into Christianity. You can see that. I find it hard to relate to this because for me hearing this and for most people I would imagine we're so"
},
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"end_time": 5277.91,
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"text": " ingrained, I mean our thinking is so ingrained and rooted and fortified in a rational Aristotelian platonic way of thinking that to think that people didn't think that way is difficult. So how did you come about, how do you even imagine it, because to me I can only sort of understand it on an intellectual level, but not, I can't put myself in that perspective. So I'm not clear which perspective you're referring to, the perspective of people that are sort of non-platonic? Yeah, so in one of your lectures you were talking about how"
},
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"text": " Rational knowledge, I mean rational lines of thinking, logic is pretty new. It came about with the Greeks. People didn't think logically. They had to teach that. And now it's so taken for granted that when you don't, you say I'm being irrational and you don't like it. And it's difficult to think of, it's difficult to not think rationally."
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business. So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
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"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
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"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Well, it is again, but if only if you're using introspection as your way of evaluating"
},
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"end_time": 5416.681,
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"text": " and interpreting and examining your own experience. But either way, my question is, do you find it difficult to have a perspective of someone from the year 1200? Did you find it difficult? It's probably not difficult for you anymore. No, I want to slow down because I take this problem very seriously. I take the problem of how to reverse engineer my cognition, how to go through a transformative process such that I can make their worldview viable."
},
{
"end_time": 5447.227,
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"start_time": 5417.551,
"text": " So that it's not just something I'm thinking, but something that I would understand what it would be like to live that way. Here's another example. Yeah. Let's go pre-exile. So upper paleolithic transition after that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's the timeless loop. I don't know what to call it. I'm just in continuous cosmos. Okay. So there's no difference in kind. There's difference of power, but it's not weird for there to be an elf or a fairy or a plant that talks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now to us,"
},
{
"end_time": 5472.654,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5447.415,
"text": " We can only understand that written down and just say, okay, they thought like this, but it's difficult for me to think like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, you probably had difficult because we all must, but do you find it now easier to go into that mode of thought? Or can you not even go into do you still look at it intellectually on a piece of paper? Okay, so that's and that's what my my previous answer was trying to get at. Like, so trying to reverse engineer"
},
{
"end_time": 5499.906,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5472.995,
"text": " practices, psychotechnologies that would give me some lived sense of what these people are talking about. That's why, for example, when I try to explain shamanism, I don't go in like, I can't be a shaman. I think that would be preposterous. But I can try and understand some of what shamanism means by actually practicing getting into the flow state. I can understand what shamanism means by training myself to do lucid dreaming and to see what that's like in there."
},
{
"end_time": 5527.159,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5500.077,
"text": " And so these give me ways of bringing in the perspectival and the participatory, even the procedural elements of it, right, that I won't get from the text. Now, does that mean that I wouldn't make the ridiculous claim, oh, I'm a shaman or I know what it's like to be a shaman, right? But I think that gives me much, much more, right, than was typically conveyed just by the propositional knowledge. So a lot of what I'm doing"
},
{
"end_time": 5556.715,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5527.466,
"text": " When I'm trying to do the hermeneutic task, that's what I mean. I'm trying to reverse engineers. The hermeneutic task is the task of trying to interpret and understand a text. When I'm doing that, that's what I mean. I don't just, I'm trying to go back before the 1200, I don't just read the text. I'm trying to reverse engineers transformative processes that will help me to re-engage with that worldview so I can turn it into something that I can have a perspectival understanding of and a participatory understanding of."
},
{
"end_time": 5587.363,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5557.705,
"text": " Does it match? Of course not. When did you first start to do that? Were you 20? Were you 25? Were you 30 when you realized that this was important in order for me to understand it at a non, at not just an intellectual? It came about reverse. It came about, I guess it was in my 20s? Yeah, I guess it would be. Did someone teach you that or you came about with it? I came up with this idea of reverse engineering in the way we're talking about, but I mean it's influenced by reading a lot of other people."
},
{
"end_time": 5616.374,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5587.739,
"text": " But it went in reverse for me. Here's a little bit of autobiograph. So I went into university and I fell in love with Plato, the figure of Socrates, and that's why Plato is... I mean, I have lots of criticisms of Plato, but Plato is very much sacred to me. I can return to Plato again and again and again, and as I change, I see things of value in Plato that I hadn't seen before, and so the text always resonates with me in this ongoing fount of intelligibility and insight."
},
{
"end_time": 5642.09,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5616.834,
"text": " But so I became really deeply, intrigued isn't the right word, I was interested, invested in this project of wisdom. But then as I went on in academic philosophy at the time, the early 80s, wisdom, I mean this sounds paradoxical because wisdom is in the very word philosophy, phylia sophia, you know the love of wisdom, but wisdom drops off the table as a topic."
},
{
"end_time": 5671.596,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5642.671,
"text": " You don't talk about it at all. Because who are we to know? No, no, no. It's because philosophy... I don't want to leave false impressions. I want to say something before we go on. Philosophy has come back around to this topic, and so has psychology. Psychology and philosophy, in fact even neuroscience, is now talking about wisdom again. Again, I think this is part of trying to respond to the meaning crisis."
},
{
"end_time": 5702.108,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5672.466,
"text": " At that time, philosophy was much more interested in sort of knowledge issues rather than wisdom issues. And so that fell off the table. And so I decided to look elsewhere. I took up transformative practices. I took up Tai Chi and I took up Vipassana meditation, Meta-contemplation. And then as I was doing these, I started to read some of the texts, like the Tao Te Chen or the Dhammapada."
},
{
"end_time": 5732.654,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5702.773,
"text": " And I came to this realization that, wow, if I had been reading these texts without these practices and how they've been transforming me, there'd be an important sense in which I'd be misreading these texts. It'd be like trying to under, like let's go back to Hoff. I know what sex is when you've never actually been with another person or something like that. I know golf because I've read lots of golf books, books about golf. Yeah, I used to be that. I used to think that I could read a book on how to ride a bike and then just instantly ride a bike. Well, there you go. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 5757.961,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5733.404,
"text": " I realized, and that's sort of when I had the insight, it's like, oh, at least some texts, texts from the Axial Revolution, like the Tao Tei Chan or the Dhammapada, and of course, in many ways the Bible, they should be read in this fashion. There should be sets of transformative practices that go with the reading of the text, because if you don't have them,"
},
{
"end_time": 5786.596,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5759.343,
"text": " The text aren't speaking to you in the way they really should or could speak to you. And that's how I sort of came up with this idea. And then I came across the work of Pierre Haddow, like what is ancient philosophy and philosophy as a way of life. And he makes the huge argument, yes, that when you try to understand ancient philosophy as opposed to modern philosophy, you should be reading it in this way that I'm describing to you. That you have to set the text, the discourse. When was Pierre Haddow?"
},
{
"end_time": 5812.688,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5786.92,
"text": " Very recent. He just died not that long ago. So these books are like... Okay, so he was saying that there's obviously a difference between reading the book in this manner and then reading it like this. That's right. And that started to separate around the year 1200. Right, that starts to separate around the year 1200. Plus, at the same time, there's something going on with Aristotle and... Right. So you've got this idea that I can get at the deeper aspects of reality. And again, there's a positive side to this."
},
{
"end_time": 5839.974,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5813.166,
"text": " I can get at the deeper aspects because this is a piece of position you need for science. I don't have to go through a personal transformation to do science, although I think maybe you do, but at least for a lot of the scientific method, I just have to come up with the correct set of propositions. So there's a good aspect to what I'm talking about, but we're talking about how it engenders the meaning crisis. So what happens is"
},
{
"end_time": 5869.94,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5840.862,
"text": " I don't have to go through transformation. I just have to get the correct propositions in my head and that will get me to the depths of reality. And then you've got Aristotle coming in and he can't be ignored, but he can't be assimilated. And so Aquinas is trying to like, what do I do? What do I do? Right? So Aquinas is in the 13th century. He's after this change is taking place in the 12th century. Right. And so Aquinas is saying, well, you know, we can't ignore Aristotelian science."
},
{
"end_time": 5897.227,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5870.52,
"text": " But I obviously don't want to lose the Christian faith. And so he starts to push on this idea that the two worlds can be understood, not in the fashion that they had been understood. The upper world is real and then the everyday world is dependent, it's derivative, and it's in some ways decaying."
},
{
"end_time": 5926.442,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5897.551,
"text": " Right? But it's participating to use a platonic term, right? And this is a term used by the Christian Platonists, right? And then what Aquinas seems to do is instead he says, no, no, no, this world is independently real. It's real in this world, this world here. This world, it's independently real. And we can get access to it just by getting the correct propositions. Just by doing science, we can do science. It's Aristotelian science, but the point is still the correct point."
},
{
"end_time": 5950.691,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5926.749,
"text": " Just by getting the correct theories, I can get at this real world. And I don't have to do any deep transformative spiritual thing to get at this reality. But there, up there, I still need to go through some deep transformative process to get there, but now that has been completely separated."
},
{
"end_time": 5981.067,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5951.067,
"text": " from rationality and science. So this is when the notion of the supernatural as something right now. So two worlds are being split now. I mean, one world is being split into two. Well, I would say the two worlds are already there, but what's happening is the two worlds before Aquinas, there is passage between them. Like in Plato, like we talked about, your rationality"
},
{
"end_time": 6005.418,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5981.613,
"text": " your reasoning and your love for the truth, they lift you together towards the higher level, right? But now, no, no, the rationality of the science is down here, right? So it's about the development of science. You better believe it. Aquinas in a very powerful, so these two things, reading and getting knowledge of reality without having to go through transformation,"
},
{
"end_time": 6022.927,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6005.674,
"text": " And the idea that this world is real and I can get at it scientifically without having to go through a spiritual transformation, that's the background for making science possible, of course. And then what happens is you get a reflective change in how the upper world is now understood."
},
{
"end_time": 6046.715,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6023.268,
"text": " The upper world is only accessible through love, and it's love in this sense that's now been completely divorced from reason, and it's love as this driving of your will to make assertion. Even you saying it, it's love in the sense that it's divorced from reason, I can only intellectually understand. When I say intellectually, I just mean as if I'm reading it. This implies this implies this."
},
{
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"index": 247,
"start_time": 6047.227,
"text": " I can't feel how reason can be associated with love. Sure. I mean, so I'll point you again to Harry Frankfurt and his wonderful book, Reasons for Love, and even work by Reed Montague, the neuroscientist. One of the differences between us and computers is we have to care about the information we're processing and the computers don't, right? And so this notion of caring and the notion of love are really central because, right, if you can't"
},
{
"end_time": 6104.667,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6077.517,
"text": " Which way should I start from this? I could start from one side and work to the other. I could work either way. So let me try what Frankfurt says. I can't sort of reason about everything. I can't do that. There has to be, even if I'm going to do science, there have to be topics, to use Frankfurt's words, topics I take seriously, things I care about. This relates to salience. Yes, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 6122.927,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6104.991,
"text": " Relevance realization is not called calculation. You are, your brain is deciding, you know, out of all the things it can pay attention to, which ones it should commit, it's very, we pay attention, which things it should devote, it's very,"
},
{
"end_time": 6152.381,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6123.37,
"text": " precious time and processing resources to out of all the things that could and that's always risky because this not might not be the right thing. So that is always deeply an affective thing. It's never just an inferential calculative thing. So if it's Demasio's work on Descartes error, right? If you get people, right? They have a brain damage such the frontal lobes are working, but it's not connected to their emotional center. You can give them like a calculative problem and they can"
},
{
"end_time": 6173.729,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6152.568,
"text": " Solve massive calculators. They have no problem with that. But you can destroy them sort of in this way. Do you want to write this problem in red ink or blue ink? They start trying to compute. Yeah, all the possibilities and permutations and you can't. You have to care."
},
{
"end_time": 6199.923,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6174.394,
"text": " and caring is like a simplest it's the core of love right heuristic yeah used to simplify yeah well and enable if you don't do this and this is montague's point about how we're different from computers if you don't do this like you're going to hit combinatorial explosion of all the facts and permutations and possible combinations you're going to have to and this is related to the frame problem as well yeah exactly exactly exactly so right so"
},
{
"end_time": 6223.285,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6200.23,
"text": " There's that aspect. If you don't care, you actually can't reason. But it also, I can go from the other pool. Reason is ultimately, right, it's got this, and this is I think one of the great platonic insights. And this is how we should understand. That's why I corrected you one point when I want to talk about rationality and not just logic. Because logic is a relationship between propositions, right? Whereas rationality is supposed to be a relationship you have to reality."
},
{
"end_time": 6248.695,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6223.524,
"text": " And one of Plato's great insights is that in addition to whatever we desire, we desire it to be real. We want it to be real. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Part of what makes things meaningful is we want it to be real. Is that innate? I don't know how... I don't know... Because after listening to you and watching lots of your work, I question now how much of what I think is innate is innate. So even this,"
},
{
"end_time": 6269.002,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6249.445,
"text": " You know, you give the example of who's in a great relationship, and then who would want to know something that undermines that. And 95% of the people say, I want to know. Okay, so that means that we want to be a part of this real world. We want to be connected to it. And when people have these experiences, mystical experiences, they'll transform their whole life and their identity."
},
{
"end_time": 6295.862,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6269.002,
"text": " because they want to remain close and in consonance, even conformity, identity with this increased realness that they've discovered. So people will radically change everything just to stay in contact with realness. So is it a meta drive? Do I think Plato's right? I think we're getting increasing empirical evidence that Plato's right in addition to all the arguments that Plato already gave us. Is it innate? I don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 6311.937,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6296.544,
"text": " I think relevance realization abilities have to be innate in some fashion because you have to have them to some degree in place to get going."
},
{
"end_time": 6337.637,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6312.722,
"text": " So precipitated by the fact that now you can read in your head, and then Aristotle, which is essentially science being formed. So imagine Aristotle didn't exist, but you can just read in your head. Would you think the meaning crisis would have happened? Maybe, but probably not. Slower. Maybe a different history. Going back and trying to rewind history, that's a really difficult and tricky thing to do."
},
{
"end_time": 6367.722,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6337.91,
"text": " Okay, so it starts to split, and then that split just gets grabbed, and obviously around 15th, 16th, the invention with Newton, Galileo. So you've got the scientific revolution, you get Descartes, before that you have the Protestant Reformation. Can you explain that? Which one? Protestant Reformation. I'm a scientist, I'm familiar with Descartes, well not actually much familiar with data, but with Newton and Galileo. You should be familiar with Descartes, because if you're a scientist you're using graphs. Yeah, yeah, that's Cartesian, that's all I know. There's another psychotechnology."
},
{
"end_time": 6393.473,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6368.183,
"text": " invented by Descartes. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to do science without Cartesian graphing. Notice how often these pivotal changes are associated with changes in psychotechnologies. Protestant Reformation"
},
{
"end_time": 6423.558,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6394.77,
"text": " So for lots of various reasons having to do with corruption that had been sent into the church, because the separation from God and God is becoming sort of more absurd. Yes. Wait, I just want to make sure that because I'm just I'm trying to understand. So the way that I understand is I'll explain it and then I get corrected. Yeah, I understand so much better. So no, no, that's Lutheran. I think I think I was thinking of the Luther, Martin Luther. But one of them was I can have a personal relationship to God."
},
{
"end_time": 6453.746,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6424.172,
"text": " Was that Luther? Yes. Oh, okay. So forget about it. I don't know what the Protestant is. But Luther is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Oh, okay. So then there we go. Yeah, you're right. Okay. So what Luther is growing up and spirituality is changing, right? So the Platonic elements are being lost, right? And, you know, the supernatural is being separated from the scientific, right? And the Renaissance is happening and the scientific revolution is sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 6483.217,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6454.053,
"text": " starting to percolate, right? And the relationship to God is becoming much more tenuous, but the text is becoming much, much more important. The text, not the community, not the church reading the text, but the text itself and your individual reading of the text is becoming important, right? And so all of that's coming together in Luther, and Luther comes to the conclusion"
},
{
"end_time": 6509.377,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6483.643,
"text": " that right and and part of it's because of the way this gap is opened up that there's nothing we can do there's no way in which we participate in our salvation there's no way in which we do anything that helps us community human beings so i'm speaking as if i was luther here this is not my beliefs right but they're like human beings right can't get to god in any way so"
},
{
"end_time": 6538.507,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6510.503,
"text": " His notion of the self has become so like so enfolded that the sense of self-deception has become so profound and overwhelming. He thinks that anything and everything we try to do just gets folded back into this self-deception and that there's no way on our own we can possibly escape it, right? And that's a reflection of course of how God is now sort of becoming inaccessible, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6568.302,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6539.189,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
},
{
"end_time": 6595.384,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6570.299,
"text": " He comes to the conclusion that the only way we can be saved is by God saving us completely from the outside. And this is what he means by faith alone and by scripture alone. And what he means by that is God acts through scripture, just the Bible, not the church. God acts through scripture and that"
},
{
"end_time": 6623.575,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6595.776,
"text": " somehow transforms you and frees you and saves you. That's how you get salvation, because salvation actually means to heal, right? You know, salve, healing potion, right? And so, why does this matter so much? Well, what it means is, it means a lot of things. It means this is part of the final divorce of religion from any kind of rationality. Luther calls reason a whore."
},
{
"end_time": 6652.039,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6624.326,
"text": " So you made a distinction between logic and rationality, but reason and rationality are synonymous. So Luther calls reason a whore. I can't see Augustine saying that, especially because of his respect for Plato and Plotinus, right? And the fact that you do not participate at all in your salvation means participatory knowing is irrelevant. It's irrelevant."
},
{
"end_time": 6676.954,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6652.21,
"text": " And this whole notion from the actual age of self-transcendence, you're incapable of self-transcendence. It's God's arbitrary act. And notice also what it means. You are in no way deserving of being saved by God. There's nothing you did or could possibly do that would cause God to save you rather than that person there. Now notice how"
},
{
"end_time": 6704.394,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6677.176,
"text": " How terrifyingly sort of absurd that makes God. I'm surprised that became popular instead of just instead of burning him. Well, the thing you have to remember, right, is that Luther is also, you know, he's taking a stand against the Catholic Church. He's taking a stand against its corrupt practices like indulgence. He's giving the German princes. It's only because the German princes backed him. He's giving them a new way of organizing and identifying themselves in opposition."
},
{
"end_time": 6720.538,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6704.838,
"text": " political and economic opposition to the Catholic Church. So there's all these extraneous factors that help. There's also the fact that Luther is giving people a kind of authority"
},
{
"end_time": 6748.66,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6721.305,
"text": " over there. It's not authority in the sense that they can do anything, but it's a sense, like you said, that authority is the wrong word. You talked about Luther promising them a direct personal relationship with God, because you can't go through the church. God has to directly reach into you. You can see why this is destroying the roles of participatory"
},
{
"end_time": 6775.913,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6748.968,
"text": " It's exacerbating the fact that now I'm not going through any transformation. God is saving me. And is he saving you arbitrarily so it doesn't even matter if you know the Bible or read it? Well, ultimately it's God who's going to lead you to the Bible and lead you to read the Bible correctly so that you will be saved. So there's no free will? Well, I don't know... I'm not saying what you believe. I mean in the Lutheran model."
},
{
"end_time": 6806.783,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6777.176,
"text": " Luther seems to have this weird view that we are free to sin, but we're not free to do what's right. I mean, I've talked to Lutherans about this. All you can do is sin minimization. Maybe. I'm not even sure that that's a real possibility for him. I mean, this is part of the debate he had with Erasmus, because Erasmus was still trying to, with his synergistic theology, he was still trying to argue that we participated in our salvation in some way."
},
{
"end_time": 6833.063,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6806.783,
"text": " But you see, the concern I have is, notice what's happening here, right? You know, the participatory, perspectival, transformative stuff, it's all in your head, it's all propositions, all that matters is asserting the right things, because that's all the love does. The love doesn't give you argument, the love just, ah, I believe, right? And so it's just a matter of will, right? So it's God's arbitrary will, arbitrary choice, and then you've got this arbitrary response, right? And"
},
{
"end_time": 6855.401,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6833.473,
"text": " So a lot of the machinery of meaning I think is being deeply undermined. And I'm particularly critical of this, and this gets me into hot water with some Christians, because I think all of that's quite destructive. I mean, it's important because, like I said, it helps open up Europe to at least a non-Catholic way of life."
},
{
"end_time": 6885.247,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6855.776,
"text": " This kind of willingness to challenge authority and the deep valuation of propositional knowing is going to also help facilitate science. Luther thinks... So it has its pros. Definitely. So I want that in place, but we're concentrating on the genealogy. So I'm emphasizing the negative side of things. You see, but look what Luther is teaching you. He's teaching you that you're worthless. You're empty inside, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 6912.159,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6885.606,
"text": " And the only thing that can save you is unearned positive regard. From up above? From up above. That you don't have any control over? You don't have any control over it. So it may not be arbitrary, but you just don't have control over it? Well, it's arbitrary in the sense that God has no reason for choosing you over anybody else. So why would God do that? We don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 6934.002,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6912.415,
"text": " I mean it's mysterious. And then you get endless debates in Christianity about whether or not God chose before the beginning of time which people are going to be saved or not, predestination, and whether he predestined people to heaven or hell. So there's endless attempts, and this is why Protestantism fragments and fragments and fragments and fragments."
},
{
"end_time": 6960.828,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6934.36,
"text": " endless attempts to try and resolve this problem that don't get properly resolved. So I'm not going to try and do that because the Protestants haven't succeeded on that project. But notice what's happening. You get endless fragmentation. In fact, it's still accelerating today. So you get this fragmentation happening. You get the loss of the participatory and transformative knowing. So Luther thinks, and this is important because he was a monk,"
},
{
"end_time": 6981.049,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6961.476,
"text": " Luther thinks the monastery should be shut down. Because what are people doing there? Where they're trying to cultivate wisdom. They're trying to engage in self-transcendence. They're practicing spiritual exercises. Well, in Luther's mind, that's just pride. That's just sin. Because human beings can't do anything. So the monastery's got to be shut down. So that's the wisdom institutions of our culture"
},
{
"end_time": 6995.145,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6981.288,
"text": " It seems extremely anti-authoritarian and skeptical. It is, and that's why there's a direct connection."
},
{
"end_time": 7017.432,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6995.623,
"text": " Exactly. As the birth of extreme skepticism? I think it's at least the grandfather. At least extreme skepticism directed at something related to meaning. Yes. Because there's always been skepticism and logic and vitality with ideas. Even in the ancient world, there's the philosophical skeptic."
},
{
"end_time": 7046.869,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7018.285,
"text": " There's one more important thing, and I want to go back to it. So the wisdom institutions are being destroyed. But also, notice that framework we talked about. Think about it as a grammar. Right? You're worthless. There's nothing you can do to do. What will save you is unearned, you know, love. That's the structure of narcissism. That's what a narcissist is. It's somebody, I'm worthless, and what will save me"
},
{
"end_time": 7075.708,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7047.398,
"text": " is unearned attention from other people. That's narcissism. And you get the training in narcissism. I thought narcissism was, people they act, oh that's arrogance. People, you're narcissistic so you have a self, you have an inflated ego and you think you deserve it. It's an inflated ego covering a vacuous identity, right? That's why you're... So they're deeply insecure narcissists. Yes, and this is why you have the craving for attention, why the narcissist must be in the spotlight."
},
{
"end_time": 7105.725,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7075.964,
"text": " Because if they're not in the spotlight, they're going to start to disappear. They're going to start to lose their sense. Okay, so you were talking about narcissism and that narcissists... Yeah, I'm talking about you get this cultural grammar that's being created for narcissism. And then, you know, as that God becomes more inaccessible and more absurd, he starts to drift out of the picture. Think about, very close, think about Shakespeare."
},
{
"end_time": 7136.34,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7106.527,
"text": " Titanic intellect, deeply concerned, artistic sensitivity, one of the titans. Notice how small a presence God has in his work. Like even by the time of Shakespeare, God is, right? And so when God comes out of this picture, that grammar, right, that grammar, it doesn't go away. So God is, when we talk about God, we're using the grammar of meaning or meaning is associated with the grammar? Yeah, I mean we're using God, I'm using God"
},
{
"end_time": 7163.353,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7136.954,
"text": " Jesus, I don't mean this. Jesus, I don't mean this. No, I didn't say Jesus. I don't say that. I said Jesus. I don't mean this. I don't mean this to be disrespectful. I try never to do that because I hold Jesus in very high regard. That's important. But when I'm using it, I'm using God as, and I mean this term very deeply and I wish we had time to unpack it,"
},
{
"end_time": 7177.312,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7163.592,
"text": " I mean God as a participatory symbol of this higher reality and it's not just a word or an abstract symbol, it's a participatory symbol that actually affords"
},
{
"end_time": 7207.125,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7177.756,
"text": " Transformation and self-transcendence. Interesting, interesting. God affords meaning, or God affords transcendence. Right, yes. Because there's always meaning, even when you've gotten rid of God. Yes. But there's a more profound meaning. So there's different levels, there's hierarchies of meaning. Oh, definitely. There's always levels. I'm hesitant to say hierarchies, but there are at least levels of meaning. There's a very non-Petersonian of you. Yeah, and this is something I would like to talk to Jonathan about, because"
},
{
"end_time": 7236.084,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7207.415,
"text": " I take Jonathan Pajos, like I've said this before, I take what he does very seriously and he has a lot about hierarchy that I would like to talk to him more about. You're talking about you watch his videos or does he have a book that you've read? I watch his videos. I've watched his videos and I've had the pleasure of having an online discussion with him that was filmed and then I've also had the pleasure, he was in Toronto and we spent a few hours together talking and having a meal together"
},
{
"end_time": 7264.872,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7236.152,
"text": " And we correspond periodically. And I deeply respect, because I think people like Jonathan and Jean de Peugeot, Paul van der Kley, they're really, I see them as Christians wrestling very deeply. There are Christians in like the history, in the legacy of people like Tillich, they're wrestling very deeply with the meaning crisis and trying to reformulate Christianity into a plausible response to the meaning crisis."
},
{
"end_time": 7277.944,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7265.333,
"text": " I don't ultimately agree with that project, but I really, really deeply respect it. So to go back to it, I think like God is"
},
{
"end_time": 7304.462,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7278.456,
"text": " Like, it's a participatory symbol that affords you getting this anagogy, getting this reciprocal realization, going with deeper aspects of reality. It opens you up, right? And it opens up and discloses the world to you. And then when that goes away, all of that machinery just doesn't, it doesn't just disappear. It latches on to other things. And I think we have this… You use an analogy of the grammar that we've changed"
},
{
"end_time": 7326.493,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7305.06,
"text": " The words, but we still use the same grammar. That's exactly why I use the term. We change the vocabulary, but the grammar is still there running. And see, I'm not making the argument, and this is where I would differ from Jordan, and perhaps from Jonathan, I'm not making the argument that we're all sort of inevitably Christians. That, you know, no matter what we do... What about Greco-Romans? Pardon me? What about Roman, or Greek?"
},
{
"end_time": 7355.589,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7327.773,
"text": " Well, we're sort of all of these and none of them, right? We're Buddhist. Well, I guess so. I mean, I don't even consider myself a Buddhist. But yeah, where I would differ is I'm trying to say that this grammar, in fact, doesn't make us inevitably Christian, although it has a Christian heritage to it. It's now got an autonomous"
},
{
"end_time": 7384.957,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7356.067,
"text": " functionality to it, right? But it still latches onto things to use your metaphor. So, I mean, the thing is people should pay more attention to the work of Dan Sperber, who I think had a better way of talking about the mimetic aspect of things. But in a shorthand way, yes, there's a way in which these ideas"
},
{
"end_time": 7403.814,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7385.265,
"text": " Can I take this vocabulary analogy?"
},
{
"end_time": 7418.524,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7404.002,
"text": " just a little bit further and tell me if it's stretching it and now it doesn't apply so you said something like we've changed the word we kept the grammar now is it as if we've changed so we were english before and now we've changed to in hindi yeah so we've taken the vocab so we've taken the"
},
{
"end_time": 7445.947,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7418.831,
"text": " all the definitions from the words from Hindi and applied it to English, so now it doesn't make sense. So does that make sense? So what we're using is we're using different words and now it doesn't make sense and this cognitive dissonance between what we think makes sense and it doesn't make sense is what is creating them. That's wonderful, I like that. I mean that's part of the idea that we have an axial age grammar and then we have a Protestant Reformation grammar and these are all..."
},
{
"end_time": 7475.247,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7446.22,
"text": " And they're not compatible with a scientific worldview, right? But the point I was trying to make is that that grammar, it doesn't go away and that's why, and this is another way in which people I think are talking about the meaning crisis, we sort of have this narcissism epidemic. We're getting the increasing sense that people are more and more narcissistic. The accusation of being narcissistic is now becoming much more pervasive and profound."
},
{
"end_time": 7502.312,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7475.879,
"text": " And again, I think that's part of all of like, because we think it's natural to process information in this way. How's narcissism tied to insecurity? Because like I was saying before, the way that I think of narcissism is somebody who thinks extremely highly of themselves, although that's arrogance, actually. When I say it out loud, I realize that. And they look at themselves in the mirror and they just love themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 7532.278,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7502.534,
"text": " No, I mean, so that's only the first half of the myth of narcissists, right? Of course, he falls in love with his image, but he also falls into the lake and drowns, right? And so you have to pick up on that there's a self-destructiveness, right? Because the narcissist is very hollow. There's this kind of a sense of hollowness. Now, that can either be a felt one or it can be sort of more sort of procedural in their processing. But either way,"
},
{
"end_time": 7558.319,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7532.654,
"text": " The narcissist needs you to shine the light of your attention into the darkness at the center of their psyche because if you start shining it, they will go dark. And you can see how Luther really entrenched that way of understanding and thinking of ourselves and seeking for that external light."
},
{
"end_time": 7582.637,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7559.121,
"text": " And so that has become pervasive. I mean, in other ways, that grammar has... So Luther, you know, you get the Protestant work ethic. That's why it's called the Protestant work ethic. We took something... Oh, the Protestant work ethic is, you know, this goes back to an idea from Weber, but I mean, it seems to be the case that, you know, the Protestant idea that one of the ways in which we serve God is by working really hard."
},
{
"end_time": 7594.991,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7582.961,
"text": " We work really hard and, you know, idle hands are the devil's workshop and you should work and you should work and it should be meaningful work but also you shouldn't hear that sound."
},
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"text": " You shouldn't celebrate your work. You shouldn't glory because that's arrogance, that's pride. What should you do with the fruits of your labor? Well, you should plow them back into your work and you get"
},
{
"end_time": 7725.913,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7697.841,
"text": " the beginning of the accretion of capital and the idea of a business that exists to promote and expand itself, right? Some of the foundational grammar of capitalism. And part of that is because if you're in the Lutheran model, this is Weber's argument, I think there's still an important point to be made here. If you're in the Lutheran model, how do you know if you're saved? I mean, this is the key question, and there's nothing you can do."
},
{
"end_time": 7748.916,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7726.561,
"text": " to find this out, right? So this is very anxiety producing, right? So, well, what can you do? Well, you're already told that it's really important to work hard. Well, if I work hard and I succeed, that must be evidence that God has chosen me, right? And so I can alleviate a lot of that insecurity about whether or not I've been saved."
},
{
"end_time": 7778.729,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7749.667,
"text": " This reminds me of the just world, because if people are suffering, that's evidence that God has singled them out as not being worthy of salvation. Yeah, exactly. There's a sense in which that's sort of the opposite side of the same point. It's part of American cultural discourse. It's also in Thatcher."
},
{
"end_time": 7803.729,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7779.07,
"text": " The point you're making is this idea that if someone's at the bottom, there's a good chance they deserve to be there. They have fallen there, and their state reflects their status in a really important way."
},
{
"end_time": 7833.848,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7804.326,
"text": " Okay, so before we just end, I know that this is a large question but"
},
{
"end_time": 7855.486,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7835.555,
"text": " I guess if you could quickly outline our current meeting crisis, because we talked about how it builds up to this, our current meeting crisis, and then where do you think it's going to go? A little bit of prediction. Are you optimistic? What do we need to heal it? I know that's another two-hour conversation. Yeah, because that's what the whole series is about."
},
{
"end_time": 7885.213,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7856.118,
"text": " So one of the things that's really important now that's accelerating the meaning crisis, you notice how we've talked about along the way things have happened and they accelerate the meaning crisis and they're often psychotechnologies. And now we have this line, and you mentioned it earlier, that's blurring between psychotechnologies and cyber technologies. This, social media, the internet, right? These things are, and we're getting increasing evidence,"
},
{
"end_time": 7911.101,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7885.503,
"text": " are significantly accelerating and exacerbating the meeting crisis. Instagram is actually bad for your mental health. If you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, I predict, as a scientist, you're going to be very depressed and you're going to be driven towards a narcissistic thing. And that's causal. Yes. You see all these pictures of these people living a better life than you and it's all bullshit because it's all staged"
},
{
"end_time": 7929.65,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7911.476,
"text": " But that doesn't matter. Knowing that doesn't matter. It's like buying the alcohol, right? And so you see this and you're getting signals that these people are leading better lives than me. And you're getting overwhelmed by it. And then you feel like, and nobody likes me. Look at that. Look at that. That's the place of the God saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 7956.988,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7930.998,
"text": " The community on it, I'm not getting enough likes. And you're just depressed. And you're both narcissistic and depressed. It's very bad for you. Or you get the echo chamber effect. Remember we talked about self delusion and the way you can bullshit yourself? Social media, I can do confirmation bias all over the place."
},
{
"end_time": 7977.039,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7957.517,
"text": " I want to believe some crazy thing, and so what do I do? I'll pay attention. I'll only look on the internet for people who share my beliefs, and then I'll reinforce that until, oh, of course, it must be true. All of this stuff is exacerbating. People, we get a tremendous increase in sense of loneliness."
},
{
"end_time": 8005.64,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7977.346,
"text": " The very thing it promised, it'll connect us all together. It connects us propositionally and with images, a kind of pornography of salience, but it doesn't connect us in the way that makes meaning for us. There is tremendous potential. I'm not a Luddite. I'm using the internet, I'm using YouTube. I'm ultimately optimistic precisely because"
},
{
"end_time": 8027.858,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8006.8,
"text": " The people I'm meeting through the video series and some of the discourse that I'm seeing emerging in the internet, I'm meeting people who are deeply interested in the meeting crisis and not just in speech. They're trying to set up communities where people can go to"
},
{
"end_time": 8053.148,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8028.114,
"text": " reestablish sets of practices, supportive communities, guides for the cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of self-transcendence, people doing this, trying to set these up, make this work, trying to figure out how can we develop skills and practices to reduce the bullshit in our communication, how can we bring back the valuation of in-person"
},
{
"end_time": 8076.203,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8053.558,
"text": " discourse and dialogue like all of this is happening and one of the great gifts of the video series is I've come more and more in contact through the internet with these people and I'm doing I mean I meet you because of it right the same thing and and so on one hand I think we can see it's clear I think that you know"
},
{
"end_time": 8099.838,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8076.613,
"text": " The social media and all of these cyber psychotechnologies are really accelerating the meeting crisis in very powerful ways. I'm not ultimately, I'm not teleological, I don't think there's any destined history, but I have a lot of hope now that I didn't have before precisely because I see people like, I mean I was talking to a guy this morning, right, and he owns a dojo and we're dialoguing but"
},
{
"end_time": 8128.677,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8099.838,
"text": " How can I do what the martial arts used to do? How can I teach people the martial arts in a context of other practices so that the dojo becomes a place where they cultivate wisdom and they start to get these kinds of connections we're talking about and they can start to respond to the meeting crisis in their own lives? So this is more and more happening. I can't make a prediction in the way a scientist can predict."
},
{
"end_time": 8151.476,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8128.951,
"text": " the dependent variable and the independent variable. I predict these two things and it's unclear to me because there's a race. The degree to which social media and our political polarization and the degradation of the ecology and the increasing economic disparities between rich and poor"
},
{
"end_time": 8181.613,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8152.381,
"text": " All of these things are interacting with each other. All of that's happening. But I'm also seeing this growth, and it's growing rapidly, of people taking seriously, not just in words, but bringing back to the words the transformative processes. They're trying to afford psychotechnologies and communities of transformation to respond to the meeting crisis. And it's unclear to me who's going to win this race. But I have a lot more hope than I used to."
},
{
"end_time": 8198.336,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8183.37,
"text": " What do your days look like? What do my days look like? You schedule something for seven hours in a block and then you record your interviews, your lectures. How do you manage your time?"
},
{
"end_time": 8227.654,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8198.814,
"text": " It's challenging right now because I'm teaching, I'm doing research and of course marking and doing these interviews. I'm also meeting with various people to try and help them on the projects they're engaged in with responding to the meeting crisis. As I mentioned to you before, one of the gifts of doing the video series is I've gotten to meet a lot of people who are putting time and talent towards trying to create real responses both individually and in communities of response to the meeting crisis. So I'm meeting with those people because they want to"
},
{
"end_time": 8254.48,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8228.507,
"text": " See if, you know, if my work can contribute to that. So, yeah. So my days are quite varied. Some days I'm just reading and writing all day. Other days I'm doing this. I'm talking to people all days. So it's quite... So what time do you wake up? What time do you sleep? And is it regimented? I'm trying to get it more regimented. I'm trying to. So I'm trying to be asleep by 12 and getting up by eight kind of thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8273.097,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8254.923,
"text": " And then you just work flat out or do you spend time with your family? I usually do a set of practices. I do like Tai Chi Chuan and meditation and contemplation, Lectio Divina. I do a bunch of practices for about an hour. I have something to eat, do a bunch of practices, and then I usually start work in some fashion. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 8291.305,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8273.456,
"text": " We're going to talk about psychedelics a little. Okay. And I was going to ask, as I told you, I don't know if you got a chance to read over the... I read over the question. Okay. So I want to know, what is it that psychedelics can provide that Zen Buddhism or meditation can provide and vice versa? I don't know if it's a question of can. I think it's a question of more or lesser timing."
},
{
"end_time": 8316.118,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8291.8,
"text": " So I think one of the things that the psychedelics could do, if put in to a proper context, and I think that's a very important thing to note, I don't think it's the drug per se that is responsible for a lot of the effects we're seeing in the psychedelic renaissance. I think it's a combination. It's almost always, for example, in the therapeutic situations, it's a combination of the psychedelic drug and therapy."
},
{
"end_time": 8345.998,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8316.442,
"text": " But what I think the psychedelics do is they enhance, I think there's reason to believe and we're starting to gather some good empirical evidence that they enhance cognitive flexibility and they allow areas of the brain to talk to each other that are not normally talking to each other in our everyday state of consciousness. And that combination of enhanced cognitive flexibility and rewiring of the communication in the brain affords"
},
{
"end_time": 8358.712,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8346.527,
"text": " Very probably both profound and systematic insights that can be very transformative of people. But I think Zen will do the same thing for you with enough time, enough practice."
},
{
"end_time": 8383.285,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8359.206,
"text": " I also think that one of the advantages that Zen has right now, at least over psychedelics, is precisely what I was mentioning. Zen has a well-established tradition, a set of institutions, reliable guides that can give you a lot of correction because when you're messing around with your salience landscape and your cognitive flexibility, you're also making yourself very vulnerable to self-deception. And so I think"
},
{
"end_time": 8394.394,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8383.814,
"text": " Is it because the psychedelics are a shortcut or is it simply just because of the loss of community that there's that absence?"
},
{
"end_time": 8420.589,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8394.735,
"text": " I think it's both. I think the fact that they're a shortcut would mean there's a good chance that the psychedelics are going to be combined with people. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The psychedelics are not going to be combined with the acquisition of skills. And I think there's a whole important set of skills that are really necessary for getting, for lack of a better adjective, the spiritual benefits out of psychedelics."
},
{
"end_time": 8430.043,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8421.203,
"text": " That's the one concern. So the shortcut concern is definitely there. And then the other is I think a concern that typically people are taking psychedelics, they're not taking it."
},
{
"end_time": 8459.292,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8430.299,
"text": " in a context, whether the context is shamanic for an indigenous culture or Zen for a Buddhist culture. And that lack of appropriate ritual and reflective context, I think, also increases the risk that the psychedelics will feed into sort of an autodidactic process of self-deception. Can you give me an example of where someone would feel self-deceived from the salient landscape that's open to them when they take psychedelics that they"
},
{
"end_time": 8482.602,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 8459.616,
"text": " would be corrected if they were in a wisdom tradition? So it's very tempting to think that you've, perhaps because of the intensity of the experience, that you are confusing that with you've now achieved full-blown enlightenment."
},
{
"end_time": 8499.292,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 8483.012,
"text": " or you're confusing the intensity of the experience with the possible truth of your metaphysical interpretation of the experience. The thing we have to know is that people come out of these things with very different metaphysical interpretations, each one often convinced"
},
{
"end_time": 8527.961,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 8499.292,
"text": " about sort of the solid truth. Like some feel that there's God and some feel like there's no God. Some people have been talking. Is that rare though? Because I've seen that there's this book called How to Change Your Mind Psychedelics. So there's some recent research coming into the Griffiths lab that if people have an experience, sort of a higher state of consciousness or mystical experience, this is very recent, and they take psychedelics, they're more liable to describe confronting ultimate reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 8535.401,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 8528.234,
"text": " Whereas if they have the experience outside of psychedelics, they are much more likely to describe the experience as encountering God."
},
{
"end_time": 8564.838,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 8536.118,
"text": " So that seems to be the variation that's going on there. And that again should cause you to step back and reflect on. You have to be really, really careful about, you know, these experiences are very challenging to us and therefore like that the intensity and the felt presence of the demand they're making for us to transform our lives can be easily confused with I'm enlightened or I am the messenger or all kinds of inflationary stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 8584.531,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 8564.838,
"text": " or also this view is the final absolute truth for all of humanity kind of thing so they're not technically putting you in touch with reality with reality quote-unquote this is something you mentioned a lot which is that the whole point of getting out of self-deception is to get closer to reality to match yourself with reality i might be misquoting you but i wanted to know"
},
{
"end_time": 8602.705,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 8585.094,
"text": " What is this reality? How does one define it? And is it necessarily positive when one identifies with reality? Because I can imagine somebody realizing, oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, or I'm more arrogant than I think I was, therefore, and that's more real, that's actually real, and then that's devastating to them. So it's not necessarily a positive meaning."
},
{
"end_time": 8619.906,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 8602.705,
"text": " Okay, so let's talk about the second part first, the meaning part. Of course, I don't equate these, if you remember our previous conversation, I don't equate truth with reality per se. But even when we get a lot of unpleasant truths, we don't want them."
},
{
"end_time": 8635.384,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 8620.384,
"text": " And I think this is very important. There seems to be, and this is a platonic insight, there seems to be a meta drive above and beyond whatever we desire coming to be the case that it is in some sense real. I just did this again in a lecture."
},
{
"end_time": 8663.131,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 8635.384,
"text": " On Tuesday, I asked people to put up their hands. Are you in a romantic relationship you like? How many of you would want to know that the person was cheating on you, even if it meant the destruction of this really satisfying relationship? You know, 90% of the people keep their hands up. And I then asked, I didn't do this before, I asked the people who didn't keep their hands up. I said, when you put your hands down, how did you feel? And they said, I felt anxious because I thought I probably should keep my hand up, right? No, they felt like they should keep their hand up because they saw other people put their hands up? No, well, I don't know. That's a potential confound. I don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 8686.647,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 8663.131,
"text": " My sense, and that's all it is, my sense was no, it was more the sense that they're not being completely honest with themselves, that they would want to know if their partner was cheating on them. And so the question is a hard one to ask. Would there be some negative emotional consequences of finding out certain truths? Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 8713.763,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 8686.817,
"text": " If I were to say to you, the price you pay for avoiding those is to progressively lose your contact with what's real. I think most people, I mean, that's what this experiment shows, would prefer to keep the closer contact with reality than to avoid the unpleasant, unpleasant truths. So that's the first part. The second is defining. Right. The first was defining reality. Yeah. So that's a tough thing to do."
},
{
"end_time": 8741.664,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 8714.599,
"text": " Because there's two things we have to talk about. There's our sense of realness, which is sort of the primary cognitive state or states, at least features of our cognition and our consciousness. So that's a sense. A sense, right? And then there's what it purports to be referring to, which is reality. So on that, I guess my answer is, I think the overall greatest"
},
{
"end_time": 8756.817,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 8742.005,
"text": " plausible convergence between these different senses of reality, the normative senses, the truth of our propositions in terms of measures of accuracy, the power of our skills, the presence that we get"
},
{
"end_time": 8780.043,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 8757.159,
"text": " in our perspectival knowing and the sense of attunement with the world, a sense of sharing a kind of important identity. I think when of those all independently converge in a mutually supportive and coherent fashion, I think what's revealed in that is our best take on what reality is. But I'm a fallibilist. I don't think there's any"
},
{
"end_time": 8797.466,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 8780.503,
"text": " There's no evidence that we have knowledge claims that will not be subject to criticism and revision in the future. You just mentioned that it's the convergence between these different lines of something like knowledge or truth, and there's one which is propositional, there's one which is perspectival."
},
{
"end_time": 8824.445,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 8797.91,
"text": " What else are there? So there's perspectival, there's procedural, participatory, I believe. I don't know if those are the same. No, there's propositional, there's procedural, there's perspectival and participatory. It's just the four. Now, are there more that we haven't discovered? I don't know. I mean, so I often think about that. And the only method I have for doing that, because this isn't a conceptual thing, because this is the concepts by which we're examining empirical reality, rather than something that we're determining from empirical reality,"
},
{
"end_time": 8841.101,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 8824.804,
"text": " Because they're concepts of knowing, right? I try to come up with additional ones and see if they can resist being reduced to the other four. And I haven't been able to do that so far. That's the only method. And I don't mean this just by myself. I do it in discussion with other people."
},
{
"end_time": 8869.087,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 8841.459,
"text": " But it does seem to comport well, and again, you know, the Greeks have these four different terms, right, the episteme, that's the propositional, tekne, that's the procedural, noesis, the perspectival, gnosis is the participatory, and we seem to have different notions of realness, there's truth for propositional, there's power for procedural, there's presence for perspectival, there's attunement, the agent arena"
},
{
"end_time": 8898.404,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 8869.292,
"text": " co-fittedness for participatory knowing. And so I think when those are all really independently converging, such that there's a high plausibility that it isn't a bias in any of the one kinds of knowing that's driving my conclusion, my realization, then I think we have sort of the best we can plausibly have"
},
{
"end_time": 8916.271,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 8898.916,
"text": " This convergence, this is something I've been thinking about. Let's imagine that there's four sliders here. This is procedural and then the other three. Okay, so there's a truth when it comes to propositional truth. So let's say we can prove something to be true and then you slide it here. Now it's true. Here it would be false."
},
{
"end_time": 8931.732,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 8916.664,
"text": " You mentioned that it's the convergence between them. So doesn't that mean that, let's say it's not true, it's in the middle, but then the procedural is in the middle, and then this one's in the middle, so they line up. But propositionally, it could be false or somewhat false, but there's a convergence between them."
},
{
"end_time": 8960.896,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 8932.022,
"text": " Yeah, but what they're converging on, right, so what you're trying, so convergence doesn't just mean that they sort of line up. It means that they're driving you towards the same conclusion and it sounds like the same conclusion they're all for driving you towards is this isn't only half true or not very powerful or not very present or not very well attuned and then it's like, okay, that means I'm not very much in touch with reality. So that's, I don't mean just that they line up, I mean that they are"
},
{
"end_time": 8988.746,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 8960.896,
"text": " Equally meeting sort of the normative standard you're looking for and they're all lining up at truth means That you're likely to be perceiving reality if they're all lined up here They're all lined up in the middle It means you're likely to perceiving to be perceiving something that's kind of true and then if it's false it for sure that is false Yeah, well, I would say I would I never say for sure I would say it's highly plausible and I think ultimately what we have to we have to rely on the fact that all of our other attempts to get at reality is"
},
{
"end_time": 9009.701,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 8989.138,
"text": " ground out in judgments of plausibility. We're doing a scientific experiment. We can't check for all the logically possible confounds because there's a combinatorial explosive number. We check the plausible alternative explanations. When we're putting our theory in competition with other theories, we only put it into competition in inference to the best explanation."
},
{
"end_time": 9032.329,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9009.701,
"text": " plausible theories. When I do an interpretation, I don't consider all logically possible interpretations. I have to consider the plausible ones. I think the finitary predicament, the fact that we are finite creatures in a fundamental way, means we ultimately have to rely on plausibility judgments while also always acknowledging that they are just plausibility judgments. So that's what I would"
},
{
"end_time": 9053.08,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9032.329,
"text": " When someone's conflicted in a Jungian sense, they would say that you have competing personalities, that you have a goal, but they're not all competing for the same goal. It's not coordinated, it's not integrated. So that's maybe a Jungian interpretation from this perspectival, procedural, participatory, and propositional perspective. Is it simply when someone is"
},
{
"end_time": 9079.121,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9053.985,
"text": " I wouldn't claim that all internal conflict is driven by that. No, not by any means. I think there are many different important explanations for why internal conflict arises. However, I would agree that an important potential source of conflict is when we're getting misalignment between propositional claims, for example, and our perspectival claims."
},
{
"end_time": 9097.432,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9079.121,
"text": " And this is part of, I think, what happens in the meeting crisis. We see a lot of sort of, I think, reason to believe in the plausible truth or accuracy of our scientific propositions, but this is not lining up with, you know, our perspectival sense of"
},
{
"end_time": 9126.561,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9097.671,
"text": " how we're present in the world or a participatory sense. And this is why, you know, there's been ongoing critiques of this, like the phenomenological critiques, right, the existential critiques that the truth of the scientific worldview is not lining up with these other ways in which we assess how real or ultimately meaningful our experience is. So let's say propositionally science says we live in a world that's of a billion stars. Empty of purpose. Empty of purpose."
},
{
"end_time": 9134.667,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9127.125,
"text": " Okay, propositionally, our lives are somewhat meaningless from this perspective, but then we feel as though we're special somehow, and so there's a conflict."
},
{
"end_time": 9164.718,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9134.991,
"text": " Is this part of the meaning crisis or is this something called the interpretation crisis? And if not, what the heck is the interpretation crisis and what is this relation to the meaning crisis? Okay, so I think that what we're just talking about is part on parcel of the first part, you know, the conflict between here's a set of propositions that science is giving us and that we do not find it a viable thing, a viable worldview in which we can live, that we can't find how... There isn't a way of making that an immersive presence for us in a way that it comports well"
},
{
"end_time": 9188.592,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9165.623,
"text": " with our judgments of how our lives need to make progress, etc. etc. There's all that sort of stuff missing from the scientific world. Progress and purpose, all of that is not in the scientific... meaning itself is not in the scientific world. The scientific worldview does not give an explanation of meaning. It presupposes the existence of meaning in its assertion of truth."
},
{
"end_time": 9211.664,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9189.411,
"text": " For example, what do you mean? There is no scientific account of meaning. That's part of what cognitive science is trying to figure out. We do not have anywhere near a consensus answer of what it means even for a sentence to be linguistically meaningful, let alone figuring out what it is in a comprehensive sense that makes a conscious state meaningful to us, etc."
},
{
"end_time": 9239.224,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9212.295,
"text": " We presuppose that all of that is active in the scientist when he or she says E equals MC squared. They have a way of taking those otherwise arbitrary graphic marks and attaching meaning to them such that through the way meaning structures our experience, we can then look to see if that actually lines up accurately with the way reality seems to be testable."
},
{
"end_time": 9265.077,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9239.616,
"text": " So this is part of something that makes sense. This makes sense when we have a proposition that coheres. I was thinking about this. What does it mean for something to make sense, phenomenologically? What does it mean when we feel like, ah, that makes sense? Can you give an account? Because you said that what makes sense, what meaning is, is related to, and it's an analogy for, does a sentence make sense? Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 9289.07,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9265.401,
"text": " Okay, then the question is, that just begs the question, what does it mean for a sentence to make sense? Well, I just said there isn't yet a philosophical consensus. So, feelings so far? Well, there's ideas that part of what it has to do for a sentence is there's a syntactic structure that is interpretable to us and that that lines up with"
},
{
"end_time": 9306.63,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9289.531,
"text": " And so that I think that a very difficult question."
},
{
"end_time": 9336.903,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 9307.756,
"text": " I take it that that problem doesn't have to be solved to use the metaphor. So when people are talking about their life being meaningful, what they're saying is there's something like the way a sentence coheres together, the way the parts are all relevant to each other, the way they're then relevant to me, and the way I can then use that relevance to me and the relevance of the parts to make something relevant to you. And I think what they're saying is there's something like that in their lives. The elements of their life"
},
{
"end_time": 9365.026,
"index": 383,
"start_time": 9337.295,
"text": " Okay, so relevance boils down to something pragmatic."
},
{
"end_time": 9392.483,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 9365.538,
"text": " such as something like I have a cognitive model that's and then it when I execute this cognitive model it works that what I want to happen happens. Is that what it means for something to be relevant? So I mean I've published a lot of work on relevance and so I happen to argue and I've had a lot of help from people like Tim Lilliclap and Blake Richards and Leonardo Farnaro and others that"
},
{
"end_time": 9396.903,
"index": 385,
"start_time": 9393.183,
"text": " What relevance is, is it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 9424.206,
"index": 386,
"start_time": 9397.278,
"text": " I think I would agree with you if we have some time to talk about how you're using the word pragmatic. I think we'd have to extend it much more than beyond what James was talking about. I think although James pragmatism is often talking about relevance and he thinks he's talking about truth. So we can come back to that. The issue of pragmatism is kind of fraught in that way. But to say that something is relevant to me is to say that there's a bunch of different adaptive trade-offs"
},
{
"end_time": 9441.135,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 9424.684,
"text": " Efficient implies a goal."
},
{
"end_time": 9457.261,
"index": 388,
"start_time": 9441.527,
"text": " Well, there's a constitutive goal. There's a difference between representative goals and constitutive goals. I have the constitutive goal of being an autopoetic thing. The goal of remaining alive is part and parcel of just the way I'm structured to be."
},
{
"end_time": 9484.292,
"index": 389,
"start_time": 9457.261,
"text": " Okay, that's a constitutive goal. Right. I mean, to be an autopoetic thing, to be a self-making thing, to be a thing that is making itself, that has the goal of making itself, is precisely constitutive of being a living thing. It can't be a living thing and then have this as an external goal. It has to be very part and parcel of the way the thing is structured. A paramecium is literally physically structured in such a way that it is"
},
{
"end_time": 9513.626,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 9484.292,
"text": " constantly satisfying the goal of maintaining itself and seeking out the conditions that maintain itself. Okay, and then there's other type of goal? Pardon me? And then you said there's constitutive goals and then there's... Well, then there's... people often talk about goals as states of affairs in the world that they want to realize, right? And in a technical sense, you know, autopoetic goals are states of affairs in the world that you want to realize, but there's states of affairs in you, yeah. And so I think that's how I would at least try and make at least"
},
{
"end_time": 9536.323,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 9514.019,
"text": " Pro Tem distinction between them. So back to it, I think what's one of the things you're trying to do, right? So think about an organism, think about it in a bioeconomic sense, it has very limited resources, very limited time. So one of the ways in which it can gain an advantage, right, is by being very efficient in the processing of information."
},
{
"end_time": 9558.985,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 9536.783,
"text": " One way, not always, I'm giving an example, is I can try and generalize my cognition as much as possible. So the more I can use, let's say I have some information processing function, I'll use a little bit like mathematical, the more I can use the same function in many different contexts,"
},
{
"end_time": 9588.012,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 9559.906,
"text": " The more efficient I am because I'm using the same thing again. That's related to elegance? Partially. I think elegance is partially related to that. We can come back to elegance in a sec. This is why we like things like E equals MC squared. I can use the same formula all over the place and very effectively find and solve problems. The problem with efficiency,"
},
{
"end_time": 9591.067,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 9588.251,
"text": " Is the problem with efficiency is it tends to integrate"
},
{
"end_time": 9619.343,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 9591.254,
"text": " you're assimilating information, you're looking for what's invariant, because you're doing all this data compression, you're trying to get, right? Now, that's all wonderful, except that it's not always the case that what's invariant is what is going to give you an advantage. Sometimes what matters is, so what's relevant to you, if your language is not what's the same, but how something is different. So sometimes what matters is not what is invariant across context,"
},
{
"end_time": 9628.763,
"index": 396,
"start_time": 9619.548,
"text": " But what is specially different about this context in particular? We even get that with the proverb, jack of all trades, but master of none."
},
{
"end_time": 9655.077,
"index": 397,
"start_time": 9629.087,
"text": " Think about this if you'll allow me a financial economic analogy. You can downsize a corporation and get very efficient in the use of resources. The problem is if I downsize too much, I lose resiliency. I lose the ability to adapt to novel unexpected changes. So when we did the big downsizing in the 80s, what was discovered is a lot of companies become very brittle. If everybody's working as much as they possibly can,"
},
{
"end_time": 9680.555,
"index": 398,
"start_time": 9655.077,
"text": " and a sudden threat, an unexpected, novel threat or opportunity arises, you don't have any resources to dedicate to this new thing. So you lose resiliency if you push efficiency too much. Efficiency and resiliency are in a trade-off relationship. This makes you integrate information, resiliency makes you differentiate. And what relevance realization is, I would argue, is an optimization relation. These are an opponent"
},
{
"end_time": 9709.548,
"index": 399,
"start_time": 9681.049,
"text": " relation and your what your brain is doing is constantly trading between these and there is no final place to be out for relevance right but what relevance is right now is what that optimization settles on right for ultimately I think giving me the relationship to the environment to connect it to the environment that optimizes my ability to solve my problems"
},
{
"end_time": 9738.166,
"index": 400,
"start_time": 9710.179,
"text": " Whenever you explain these concepts, you tend to give credits where credits do, and you do that plenty. Is there a reason why you do that? Were you burnt before in the past where your ideas weren't given credit? Do you feel like you don't want to be accused of overindulging your own ideas? Because you do it more than anyone else. I like it, but I want to know what's driving that? Well, a lot of different motives. One is gratitude and"
},
{
"end_time": 9768.814,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 9738.899,
"text": " Were you always like that? I don't know. It's a good question. I think most of my academic career I've tried to be like that. It's an important personal goal to me. Part of it is gratitude. Part of it is, I think, is this more selfish? I don't know. The recognition that I would give proper credit, these people who I respect deeply will be more willing to work with me again in the future. Part of it is I'm very concerned about how"
},
{
"end_time": 9795.384,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 9770.06,
"text": " People's attention to me could be inflationary, cause me to, we talked about this earlier, think too much of myself and a way to remind myself that I am not the sole author, the self-made or any of that bullshit, right, is to remind myself and do it in action, not just in belief, that, you know, this is often work that is done in collaboration with other people."
},
{
"end_time": 9825.469,
"index": 403,
"start_time": 9796.22,
"text": " Also, I genuinely want to help further other people's career, help develop it. And if they respect what I'm doing, and if other people find value in my work, then that could translate to people looking at their work and finding their work potentially valuable. Do you tend to do your best work when you're collaborating? Always. Always."
},
{
"end_time": 9855.879,
"index": 404,
"start_time": 9825.913,
"text": " I mean, that's one of the reasons why Plato appeals to me more than Aristotle because, you know, Plato is written in dialogue whereas Aristotle is written in a monologue, right? And I think one of Plato's greatest insight is our best cognition is done in collaboration with other people. And that has just been reliably the case for me. Even when I'm working on my own, I'm imagining the people I work with. And that's very helpful, but it's"
},
{
"end_time": 9872.432,
"index": 405,
"start_time": 9856.783,
"text": " Getting to work with other people gets you to a place where you just can't get to in your own thought. When you're working with someone else, how does that process look like? You just spitball an idea. I know this is so basic, but let's take the example of earlier today. We're talking with somebody in the University of California."
},
{
"end_time": 9889.411,
"index": 406,
"start_time": 9872.568,
"text": " It's different with different people. I could tell you how I work with Dan, but that's not the same way I work with Leo."
},
{
"end_time": 9914.957,
"index": 407,
"start_time": 9889.804,
"text": " or the same way I work with Christopher Master Pietro on the zombie book. It's different with, and that's part of the value of it. So with Dan, for example, before we started to write anything, he's going to be first author. So he's doing most of the original text production. But before we started doing anything, we just read a whole bunch of books together and we met regularly and talked and argued and discussed and reflected on it."
},
{
"end_time": 9938.387,
"index": 408,
"start_time": 9915.247,
"text": " And then what's happening is Dan's starting to write some text. He'll send it to me. I'll put in commentary. Then we'll meet and I'll have ideas in response to what he said. He'll think, you know, those are good. Note those down. And then I send those ideas to him. We do some more writing. That's how I'm working with Dan. Whereas when I'm working with Leo, very often"
},
{
"end_time": 9969.087,
"index": 409,
"start_time": 9939.258,
"text": " We'll sit in the same room and we'll just start, I'll start talking and he'll write and then he'll say stuff and then I'll talk and we'll write and so it's different with different people. What is this building up to? Do you feel like you have a goal? So my goal, one of my goals is the theory of everything. It's a physics goal. Yeah. Okay. Are you building up to something or are you just exploring and you're having fun? Well, I am having fun and I'm also generating a lot of meaning and those aren't the same thing. But I suppose"
},
{
"end_time": 9989.241,
"index": 410,
"start_time": 9969.838,
"text": " I would like as much as possible to get that plausible convergence between the different areas of work. And that is something that I do have as a goal in all my work, to get the various pieces to constantly talk to each other and integrate together. And ultimately, the goal is to give the best possible foundation"
},
{
"end_time": 10019.104,
"index": 411,
"start_time": 9989.701,
"text": " for giving a comprehensive response to the meaning crisis. That really is my life work, if that's not too pretentious to say. Is the meaning crisis our main crisis right now, in your opinion? No. And I keep saying this, because I talk about it so much, people think that I think that's the issue. I do not think that. I talk about it so much just because that is what I can contribute, the work I can do. I think the main crisis facing us"
},
{
"end_time": 10035.367,
"index": 412,
"start_time": 10019.411,
"text": " It's white privilege, no I'm just kidding."
},
{
"end_time": 10065.52,
"index": 413,
"start_time": 10035.657,
"text": " We're seeing political crises, I mean two of the major democracies. The meaning crisis relates to them. They do, and I was going to explain how I think it does. So I think, you know, there's all these things happening and they're also sort of reflective of the fact that a lot of the machinery, the post-World War II machinery that we had created for solving problems does not seem to be adequately addressing these problems. How does the meaning crisis contribute? I think the meaning crisis helps to explain"
},
{
"end_time": 10091.049,
"index": 414,
"start_time": 10065.776,
"text": " why we feel so impotent and at times incompetent in addressing these other crises. So very often we are asking people to make tremendous changes in order to deal with these other crises. We're going to have to. I mean, just as a matter, I think of sort of consensus scientific fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 10115.282,
"index": 415,
"start_time": 10091.391,
"text": " We're going to have to make major changes in how we live to address the ecological crisis that we're facing. And the question is, well, we're not doing it. And the response so far has been, well, people just don't have enough information. Let's give them more information, more information, more information. That's not doing anything. That's not moving. That's propositional? Yeah, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 10127.193,
"index": 416,
"start_time": 10115.691,
"text": " Since enlightenment, we think that the solution to all our problems are propositional? That's part of it, but it's also the following. I want to make a..."
},
{
"end_time": 10156.305,
"index": 417,
"start_time": 10127.568,
"text": " I want to make a specific claim about the specific causality of the meaning crisis. So there's a lot of work being done right now, good work, on scarcity mentality. When a valuable resource, the human being, is scarce, they become actually much more irrational in their thinking, very short-term, very impulsive, much less reflective, much more prone to self-deception. And I think when there's a scarcity of meaning, that people are a scarcity"
},
{
"end_time": 10180.486,
"index": 418,
"start_time": 10156.852,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 10207.466,
"index": 419,
"start_time": 10181.391,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 10233.609,
"index": 420,
"start_time": 10207.466,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 10256.954,
"index": 421,
"start_time": 10233.609,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 10286.63,
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"start_time": 10256.954,
"text": " Reduces your standard of living. It reduces your economic standard of living, your mental health. There's even some evidence that your longevity is reduced by having a child. And when you ask people what's happening to your subjective well-being when you have a child, they reliably, it goes down."
},
{
"end_time": 10299.411,
"index": 423,
"start_time": 10287.363,
"text": " Why do they do it? Because you know what goes up reliably? Meaning in life. People will sacrifice a lot for meaning in life. That's interesting. I thought the meaning was tied to wellbeing."
},
{
"end_time": 10325.862,
"index": 424,
"start_time": 10299.821,
"text": " It's not. No. Because one can go down and the other can go up. So at least subjective well-being. There's a moral sense of well-being. We have to be very careful with these terms. So there's a psychological sense of subjective well-being. How am I doing? Right? And that would go up. That goes down. That can go down independently of meaning going up. When some people talk about sort of a moral sense of well-being, I think meaning in life is part of that. So let's keep those distinct."
},
{
"end_time": 10355.367,
"index": 425,
"start_time": 10326.834,
"text": " So the meaning crisis, there's a scarcity of meaning, which means when there's a scarcity of meaning, people will not give up other stuff because you can't promise them, oh well, give up this, I'll give you more meaning because they're already feeling a scarcity of meaning. And you're asking them to, think about this, you're asking them to make comprehensive changes in their consciousness, their cognition, their character, their communities. The thing that has done that for us reliably in the past is religion."
},
{
"end_time": 10370.742,
"index": 426,
"start_time": 10355.93,
"text": " And most people, this is what the statistics show, are now post-religious. Religion isn't an option for them. And the pseudo-religious ideologies of the 20th century, the secular versions like Nazism and Communism, drench the world in blood. So we're sort of locked."
},
{
"end_time": 10389.821,
"index": 427,
"start_time": 10371.169,
"text": " We don't want religion. We don't want the secular alternatives. We need to make these comprehensive changes. We don't have anything guiding us to do that. And we're being asked to make these comprehensive changes without any promise that the meaning that's already scarce is going to be forthcoming. Because of that, we get stuck."
},
{
"end_time": 10413.882,
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"start_time": 10389.821,
"text": " Do you think if we solved the meaning crisis, solved it, that the other problems would be solved as well because we would be acting in a wise manner, or do you think that they need to be addressed independently?"
},
{
"end_time": 10434.974,
"index": 429,
"start_time": 10415.043,
"text": " I don't think they need to be addressed independently of the meaning crisis. I would argue that, well, I gave you an argument, well, I think it's interdependent. I still stand by that argument, and I think there's other reasons for thinking they're independent. So imagine we solve the socioeconomic crisis, we solve the ecological crisis, but we still have a meaning crisis."
},
{
"end_time": 10451.766,
"index": 430,
"start_time": 10435.333,
"text": " I understand you're giving me a thought problem, so I'm not trying to be obtuse."
},
{
"end_time": 10466.749,
"index": 431,
"start_time": 10452.21,
"text": " I find it implausible that we could overcome"
},
{
"end_time": 10495.657,
"index": 432,
"start_time": 10467.056,
"text": " I think a constitutive component of addressing the meaning crisis is to bring back, as a serious project, the cultivation of wisdom. And that doesn't necessarily have to be in a religious form or what people think of as traditional religion? I don't think so. I mean, so this, of course, is what I would get into, I think. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to talk to them about it. Who's them? Oh, Jonathan Pageau or Paul Van der Kley or some of the people who have taken a lot of interest in my work, but they still come from a religious framework."
},
{
"end_time": 10525.077,
"index": 433,
"start_time": 10496.135,
"text": " or even some of the people that come to the video series from a Buddhist perspective and things like that. But while I think if you've watched the series, I'm very respectful of religion, I do not think that we have to tie the cultivation of wisdom or self-transcendence to a religious way of life, nor do I think is that a plausible"
},
{
"end_time": 10554.65,
"index": 434,
"start_time": 10525.333,
"text": " attempt to solve the meaning crisis precisely because most people have become post-religious, again, and that's increasing, and the scientific worldview is clearly a post-religious worldview. Do you believe in evil? Depends what you mean by it. I mean, the problem with the word evil is it's gone from being a metaphysical category to just a description of the moral quality of action. So, I mean, if you were"
},
{
"end_time": 10568.439,
"index": 435,
"start_time": 10554.821,
"text": " the time of Augustine, for example, or even Plotinus, if you ask them if they believe in evil, there was a metaphysics of evil. There was a worldview in which they had a place within the ontology for evil. There is no"
},
{
"end_time": 10595.162,
"index": 436,
"start_time": 10568.814,
"text": " place for evil in the scientific world view. It's not part of our ontology. So when we use the word evil, we tend to mean, you know, very significant immoral behavior. But that's not what evil meant. So for example, in that use of the term evil, it would make no sense to say there's no people, but they're still evil. But for honesty... In which sense? In the moral action sense? In the moral action sense. Because if there's no moral actors, then evil isn't possible."
},
{
"end_time": 10609.923,
"index": 437,
"start_time": 10595.469,
"text": " But I think for Augustine, insofar as I understand him, and I think for Plotinus, even if there's no people, there's still evil, because evil represents sort of a whole in being, a way in which"
},
{
"end_time": 10638.575,
"index": 438,
"start_time": 10610.333,
"text": " There's a lack of intelligibility at sort of the bottom of the hierarchy of being. Can you sort out what Buddhism says about evil to me? Because some people say in Christianity there is evil and that's because you choose to do something evil. When you choose, then it's evil, something related to free will. But in Buddhism, as far as I know, people say Buddhism doesn't have a conception of free will or it's telling you that free will is an illusion and that evil is akin to ignorance. What do you think of that?"
},
{
"end_time": 10668.251,
"index": 439,
"start_time": 10639.258,
"text": " Well, first of all, do I think that's a correct interpretation of Buddhism, or do I think that's a correct way of thinking about evil? There's two different questions you're asking me. Which one? Is that a correct interpretation of Buddhism? Does Buddhism actually have something to say about evil, which is that it's essentially ignorant? It's very difficult to speak of Buddhism as a whole. I mean, there's aspects of Buddhism, maybe Nichiren Buddhism, in which the idea of evil, I think, might be a plausible thing to talk about. Whereas in Zen Buddhism,"
},
{
"end_time": 10698.012,
"index": 440,
"start_time": 10668.746,
"text": " Probably not at least anything like the Christian, again speaking of Christianity a hole is dangerous, but sort of the standard, I don't know the adjective, Christian model of evil. The thing about the Buddhist notion of no free will, it's not quite right because the notion of causation and the ontology. It's not like"
},
{
"end_time": 10708.933,
"index": 441,
"start_time": 10698.882,
"text": " When you say a Buddhist doesn't have free will, it's like the Buddhist is in our worldview and our notion of causation and within that there's no free will."
},
{
"end_time": 10734.77,
"index": 442,
"start_time": 10709.241,
"text": " If you have no free will, if whatever you did was caused by something prior that you had no control over, it's cause, cause, cause, cause, all the way down. There's that, but you have to understand, right? So Buddhism is dependent on these versions of it, like Zen that come out of Nargajuna, on shunyata, the emptiness, right? That nothing individually exists, right? Everything is completely interdependent and impermanent."
},
{
"end_time": 10760.794,
"index": 443,
"start_time": 10735.077,
"text": " It's not right to say that you don't have free will, because there's a sense in which, in a deep sense, you don't individually exist. So the notion of you is not what we think of as you? The notion of you is a conventional and convenient truth for talking about how I can interact with a particular"
},
{
"end_time": 10772.346,
"index": 444,
"start_time": 10761.903,
"text": " That being said, the idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 10803.046,
"index": 445,
"start_time": 10773.677,
"text": " that there is something at the core of reality like so augustine describes evil and this is based on platonic like it's like a tear in being it's a hole in being i'm only using this as an analogy really clear an analogy right evil is a black hole in your metaphysics things you know being and and realness go into it but nothing ever comes out right that's how it's under"
},
{
"end_time": 10832.858,
"index": 446,
"start_time": 10803.387,
"text": " understood. And what Nishatani, for example, famously, I think in one of the great books on meaning, Religion and Nothingness said, there's a fundamental difference in the East, right? The East tends, so the West, right, tends to view non-being and no-thingness as a lack, a privation, whereas the East, both in Daoism and Buddhism, views a lack, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 10855.879,
"index": 447,
"start_time": 10832.961,
"text": " emptiness as actually something positive, as that which makes things possible. And Nishatani in fact famously argued that the West is incapable of dealing with nihilism because we can't grasp no-thingness as a positive thing. We see it as a lack of being because we think of being in terms of thingness, whereas in the East no-thingness is a positive"
},
{
"end_time": 10883.234,
"index": 448,
"start_time": 10855.879,
"text": " So Peterson would say that nihilism is associated heavily with negative affect."
},
{
"end_time": 10913.029,
"index": 449,
"start_time": 10883.712,
"text": " And you're saying that if you have Buddhist training, you might not necessarily see nihilism as negative. Or put it the other way around. I'm agreeing with you, Kurt. I just want to use the wording a little bit differently. You might not experience emptiness or no-thingness nihilistically. You may experience it positively as a liberating experience. Do you personally believe in free will? No. I mean, if I understand what you're saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 10936.22,
"index": 450,
"start_time": 10913.37,
"text": " I'm a compatibilist. I'm somebody who thinks that whenever we've been talking about free will, we didn't mean what is typically meant by free will. I take it that this is what you mean by free will. And if you don't, of course, correct me. But at least when I have discussions with people about this, they mean that there's something in them that is uncaused, an uncausal center"
},
{
"end_time": 10961.271,
"index": 451,
"start_time": 10936.578,
"text": " a non-causal center of causation, so that there is in some way a first mover, that there's something in them that is totally uncaused but then can make things cause, can initiate a causal chain. I find that both incredible in the sense of something I can't believe in and I also find it"
},
{
"end_time": 10979.155,
"index": 452,
"start_time": 10961.698,
"text": " I don't understand why people want this capacity. First of all, I think my life gets better as my thinking is more and more determined by what's true. My actions are more and more determined by what's good. My"
},
{
"end_time": 11009.428,
"index": 453,
"start_time": 10979.462,
"text": " My experience is more and more determined by what's beautiful. I don't think freedom, in that sense, is an intrinsic good. I mean, for me, freedom is an instrumental good about getting more and more. I would love it if my thoughts were completely determined by the truth, my actions were completely determined by what was good. If I completely lost my freedom in truth, goodness, and beauty, great. Why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 11039.206,
"index": 454,
"start_time": 11009.633,
"text": " Freedom for its own sake, I don't understand that as a value. I understand it as an important political value, an instrumental value, but as a metaphysical thing, I don't find it inherently valuable. So when I talk about what it is to say that an action is free from a compatibilist framework, what that means for me is the most causally relevant explanation of my behavior was my current state of consciousness and cognition."
},
{
"end_time": 11069.701,
"index": 455,
"start_time": 11039.872,
"text": " That's what I think it means when you say, I'm responsible for X. Did we ever mean that I was the sole causative? No, of course. I can't think of an instance where we think we are the only causal thing for something happening, even when I'm speaking. It's dependent on all the causal properties of my lips and my vocal cords. I can't think of anything where we're talking about sole causation. For me, we've always been talking about causal relevance."
},
{
"end_time": 11097.927,
"index": 456,
"start_time": 11070.606,
"text": " I don't want a part of me, that's what I was trying to do earlier, that is uncaused, that is not causally connected. That would mean my actions were completely arbitrary. They were in no way relative to or relevant to the events in the environment. Because if they are in any way relevant to the environment, that's going to play out in there being some important causal relationship between what's happening in the environment and my state of mind."
},
{
"end_time": 11124.224,
"index": 457,
"start_time": 11098.114,
"text": " Not that I believe in free will, but just to play devil's advocate, what you're saying is that there are constraints. So there are physical constraints, the laws of physics, how your tongue is situated in your mouth, the words that you speak. I'm also saying there's normative constraints, truth, beauty, and goodness. Yeah, but go ahead. Okay, so there are constraints. Why can't there be free will with constraints? So you're saying, well, if you go back, then you would have to be a first mover. Yeah. But you could be a first mover within constraints, not just a first mover"
},
{
"end_time": 11148.336,
"index": 458,
"start_time": 11124.753,
"text": " With no constraints, like what the hell are you going to do? Wait, are you saying the first mover is responsive to the restraints? Think of it like chess. Or think of it like Go. The game Go. So there's tremendous constraints. First of all, we're playing a board game. Second of all, you can only move this piece and so on and so on. But there's so many options within Go that if you ran a supercomputer from now, from the beginning of the universe to the heat death of the universe, it still wouldn't exhaust it. Yeah, it's combinatorial explosive."
},
{
"end_time": 11166.647,
"index": 459,
"start_time": 11148.592,
"text": " So what I'm saying is that there could be constraints, heavy constraints on free will, so commensurate with your... Wait, but there's a difference here. Your example of Go is that there's lots of possibilities, right? And that's not the same thing as saying you have free will."
},
{
"end_time": 11196.305,
"index": 460,
"start_time": 11167.449,
"text": " Then you choose from those possibilities. You choose from those possibilities based on... Okay, so now we're getting into a causal model, but free will has to be outside of causality. That's exactly what I can't get an analogy for. Well, we know when we come down to subatomic particles that causality is just... you throw it out the window. So causality being not a part of this universe is true. It breaks down to its own sense. And there are other systems, like you said, a structural functional"
},
{
"end_time": 11210.93,
"index": 461,
"start_time": 11196.783,
"text": " We have two different things we're talking about, and I think that's important. There's causation and there's constraints."
},
{
"end_time": 11239.445,
"index": 462,
"start_time": 11211.596,
"text": " And those aren't identical. Causation is about events that change actuality. Constraints are about conditions that shape possibility. And I'm invoking both of those and saying freedom of the will is, I mean, if... It's logically impossible. Or do you just not want to believe it or you feel like you have a propositionally consistent worldview that proves that there is no free will?"
},
{
"end_time": 11259.616,
"index": 463,
"start_time": 11240.572,
"text": " I think that it doesn't make any sense. I don't know if that's the same thing as saying it's logically impossible. Logically impossible would mean it clearly makes sense and then we can find it's inherently contradictory. I don't know if it makes any sense. The idea of free will."
},
{
"end_time": 11280.93,
"index": 464,
"start_time": 11259.957,
"text": " That doesn't make any sense to me, and also the valuation of free will doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to be obtuse. I don't know why people want it. I mean, most of the major philosophical conundrums like the mind-body problem and things like that, they deeply interest me. The free will determinism thing leaves me cold."
},
{
"end_time": 11302.619,
"index": 465,
"start_time": 11281.254,
"text": " I don't know why people want it and I don't know what they mean when they say they have it. Because even to say that you're choosing, unless your choice is completely arbitrary and not in any way affected by the options you're considering, constrained by them, then it's not a free choice in the free will sense."
},
{
"end_time": 11324.804,
"index": 466,
"start_time": 11303.2,
"text": " If your actions are in any way responsive to, responsible to the environment, you don't have that kind of free will we're talking about. Now, a compatibilist said, we were never talking about that when we said I acted freely. What we mean when I say I acted freely is precisely what we're talking about. I'm acting responsibly and responsibly"
},
{
"end_time": 11350.794,
"index": 467,
"start_time": 11324.804,
"text": " to the environment and the most causally relevant, not the sole cause, not the original cause, but the most causally relevant explanation of that responsiveness and responsibility is my current cognitive state. That's all we ever meant, I think. Well, you know, Phineas Gage, that famous example. Yeah. Okay, so something like brain damage caused him to act in a certain way. Then you can say that anytime someone does something, this is Sam Harris's"
},
{
"end_time": 11376.647,
"index": 468,
"start_time": 11351.408,
"text": " Sam Harris's statements is something like, anytime someone acts in a way that we think is evil, it's actually akin to neurological damage. If you reduce it down to just the brain was wired in this way, then that changes what we think of as holding somebody responsible. Why? I mean, whenever you're speaking a sentence, it could be reduced down to neurons happening in your brain. Does that mean there's no truth? Because now you're in a self-contradiction."
},
{
"end_time": 11402.261,
"index": 469,
"start_time": 11377.415,
"text": " What would you do in the trolley problem? You know the trolley problem, there's five people in front of you and then there's one person in this... Do you know about the trolley problem? Okay, what would you personally do? What would I personally do? Would you switch it? So, I mean, so tell me which... I mean, because there's different versions of it. Okay, so the trolley problem... I know the trolley problem. Is there the five people here and then, right? There's a track with one person, but you have to actually switch"
},
{
"end_time": 11431.237,
"index": 470,
"start_time": 11402.978,
"text": " But there's different versions. There's one version where I switch the track. There's one where I push the man in front of the player. Okay, let's go on the one where you switch the track. Well, if that is the only option available to me, I switch it so it kills the one person rather than five. What about the one where you have to push someone off? Well, see, that's a difficult thing because we have sort of evolutionary constraints on us that where we take more responsibility for physically acting. I would like to believe"
},
{
"end_time": 11454.753,
"index": 471,
"start_time": 11431.715,
"text": " that I would not let those evolutionary constraints override that again limited to this problem because I think the point is to avoid getting into the trolley problem but say I have no choice and we can go back to that debate right then I would like to think that I would still do the same thing. You push someone off. I push the person off if it's going to if I have"
},
{
"end_time": 11477.005,
"index": 472,
"start_time": 11455.657,
"text": " overwhelmingly clear and high probable evidence that by doing that, I will save five lives. Yes. I mean, what else would one do? I mean, the only reason why you wouldn't do the push. So the difference is, your viewers probably know that. Most people say, well, I'll throw the switch. That's okay."
},
{
"end_time": 11496.852,
"index": 473,
"start_time": 11477.381,
"text": " There isn't any logical difference. There's just the interpersonal closeness or proximity of the person when you're pushing them. But in that situation, I don't see why it matters."
},
{
"end_time": 11526.698,
"index": 474,
"start_time": 11497.551,
"text": " There's a lot of wrong conclusions to draw from that. The wrong conclusions to draw from that is that close interpersonal presence never makes a moral difference. That's false. It often makes a huge moral difference. So you shouldn't conclude from the trolley problems, oh, we should just be utilitarians and we should never pay attention to these other factors. That's just false. I don't think that follows. I was thinking about the actuality and then potential Aristotelian questions. Okay. And then I was thinking about how that relates to Carl Jung."
},
{
"end_time": 11557.005,
"index": 475,
"start_time": 11527.09,
"text": " So Carl Jung has this idea of individuation. Yes. Okay. So the way that I think of that is similar. So let's say you have the big five personality model. Remember someone was talking about that individuation. You can think of it as you're born with certain set of traits, individuation, making yourself more capable, actualizing yourself is actually about spreading. So that let's say you're highly neurotic. You need to learn to be not neurotic. Let's say you're highly open. You actually need to learn to be, to know what it's like to be unopened and closed and then conscientious. Same thing. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 11585.469,
"index": 476,
"start_time": 11557.739,
"text": " So then that's getting close to individuation. First of all, I want to know what you think about that. And then my second question would be that to me sounds like you're actualizing yourself, but actually you're giving yourself more potential because you have the potential to do more and be more when you're individual, when you're individuated, because now you've spread what you can do. So you actualize yourself, but at the same time you've increased potential. And those seem to be contradictory because in the Aristotelian notion, you have potential and then you actualize."
},
{
"end_time": 11606.834,
"index": 477,
"start_time": 11585.896,
"text": " Okay, so let's try and answer that. First of all, I have criticisms of the Jungian model. One would come from Tillich that we shouldn't just talk about individuation, we should always talk about individuation and participation, and those are in a trade-off relationship. I want to individuate, but I also want to participate. I have an identity"
},
{
"end_time": 11637.005,
"index": 478,
"start_time": 11607.295,
"text": " onto myself and I have an identity in so far as I belong to other people. And man, is it important to you that you belong to other people? So that should first of all be set off as a serious limitation in the Jungian model. Okay, then the idea of individuation. I like the way you described it because I think it's better than what is often a romantic interpretation of Jung. And the problem is Jung is influenced by romanticism, so I understand why people make that. So the romantic interpretation that I reject is, you know, I have my true self"
},
{
"end_time": 11655.077,
"index": 479,
"start_time": 11637.449,
"text": " And the point about this is to find what's unique about my true self. And to be in alignment with it? Is that romantic? Well, to believe that you have a true self and what's value about your true self is its uniqueness and that you're born with it and the point is to express it."
},
{
"end_time": 11673.916,
"index": 480,
"start_time": 11655.077,
"text": " to press it out, right, express. Okay, so that's a romantic notion that you have your criticism. Yeah, very, and so I reject that. Now you gave a different interpretation, at least it sounded different to me, and it sounded much more Aristotelian. It's like, no, no, what individuation is, is what Aristotle would call character cultivation."
},
{
"end_time": 11700.572,
"index": 481,
"start_time": 11674.735,
"text": " So my character is different than my personality. You listed the five factors, the big five of personality. And these are basically dispositional. These are given to me. How they're given to me genetically or my family of origin environment. I'm just going to be neutral on that right now. But in some sense they're given to me, right? And part of what character is, and we've lost a sense of this, is character is exactly how you describe it. Character is about acquiring"
},
{
"end_time": 11731.357,
"index": 482,
"start_time": 11701.561,
"text": " what Aristotle would call a habit, a skill, ultimately a virtue that compensates for the deficits in my personality. And then, of course, that's why the whole notion of the romantic notion of your true self is kind of, again, I think something we should suspect because is your true self your personality? Is it your personality as compensated for by your character, etc., etc.? Secondly, you then said, well, what seems to be happening here is, right,"
},
{
"end_time": 11757.602,
"index": 483,
"start_time": 11731.766,
"text": " I seem to be actualizing my potential, but that gives me new potential. But you have to understand that actuality and potentiality for Aristotle are reflective. They're relative, not reflective. I just said the wrong word. They're relative. So what's actuality to the potential of something can be the potential for a higher level of actualization."
},
{
"end_time": 11786.869,
"index": 484,
"start_time": 11758.114,
"text": " Let me give you classic Aristotelian doctrine. Being a living thing is the potential for being a moving thing. But being a moving thing is the potential for being a cognitive thing. Being the cognitive thing is the potential for being a rational thing. So, as you cultivate your character, you are actualizing the potential within your personality, but you're also creating the potential to become, potentially,"
},
{
"end_time": 11807.568,
"index": 485,
"start_time": 11787.517,
"text": " I remember you were talking about a virtual engine model where there's a limiter and a generator or a governor and then okay so that's a virtual engine and then you can use that to develop character"
},
{
"end_time": 11835.282,
"index": 486,
"start_time": 11807.654,
"text": " Yes, and that's what I think Aristotle's notion of virtue is. I think his notion of a virtue is exactly that. I mean, if you look at the idea of the golden mean, you know, that courage is in between cowardice and foolhardiness, right? There's deficits of access and there's deficits of lack. And what you're trying to do is, right, you're setting up a virtual engine. You're setting something, a selective thing that's clamping down on the excess"
},
{
"end_time": 11862.637,
"index": 487,
"start_time": 11835.572,
"text": " and then you're also creating a generator to make sure you don't have the deficits of lack and you're trying to create this optimization and by the way I think relevance realization to go way back to meaning is again about getting a kind of virtual engine right between being economical right really like clamping down your possibilities and being resilient really opening up your options and you're constantly trying to get the most virtuous optimal balance between those"
},
{
"end_time": 11891.561,
"index": 488,
"start_time": 11862.637,
"text": " Difficult question to answer. But practically speaking, how does one use this virtual engine model to increase their character? So you again, I mean, sorry, I wasn't clear. So I don't want to just sound like I'm repeating myself. I was trying to present Aristotle's method of the golden mean as a process by which you create a virtual engine on your development. And that's how you will acquire aspects of character. So let's say"
},
{
"end_time": 11912.056,
"index": 489,
"start_time": 11891.817,
"text": " I determine that in order to compensate for my personality deficits, I need to be more courageous. There's an aspirational rationality. I reason as to what I need, what I don't have, and how I will proleptically move towards that."
},
{
"end_time": 11938.473,
"index": 490,
"start_time": 11913.183,
"text": " So how do I go about cultivating that? Well, I can't just say, I'm going to be brave now because it doesn't work that way. So what I do is I try to develop habits of avoiding the extremes. I try to, first of all, the extremes of cowardice. So you have to recognize where you are on this spectrum first. You do, but it's not static. As I start to get better at"
},
{
"end_time": 11950.06,
"index": 491,
"start_time": 11938.985,
"text": " getting a systematic relationship between the generator and the governor between building habits of constraint that limit the excesses"
},
{
"end_time": 11977.5,
"index": 492,
"start_time": 11950.452,
"text": " building habits of generativity that compensate for the lack. As I get better at that and getting them into a systematic attunement with each other, that's also going to increase my ability to recognize, get a better sense of these things in the world. And it's going to self-organize. I'm going to tune myself into this virtue. Let's say someone is extremely timid, scared, low self-esteem,"
},
{
"end_time": 11994.394,
"index": 493,
"start_time": 11977.978,
"text": " What do they do? First of all, they don't recognize themselves. Let's just hypothetically say they think, no, I'm actually fine. Most people have too much temerity, too much foolhardiness. What do they do? What's a practical step that they can undertake?"
},
{
"end_time": 12018.456,
"index": 494,
"start_time": 11994.991,
"text": " Well, you've put me in a difficult situation because you set the thought experiment up with that they don't recognize that they're... Okay, but they recognize that something's wrong inside. Okay, well then... They're not feeling good. So hopefully what they'll do is they will seek discussion or therapy that will help them break out of aspect disguise. So the problem that people face when they get into this is, I mean you see this in therapy, is what I call aspect disguise. So somebody will come in and say,"
},
{
"end_time": 12044.394,
"index": 495,
"start_time": 12019.019,
"text": " Look, I have a lot of trouble in my life because I'm really stubborn. I'm too inflexible. It's really causing... That's the complaint I'm hearing from all the people around me and I recognize that I've got to change it. And then you talk to them for a while and then you wait and you come back and you say, what do you really like about yourself? Oh, well, I'm persistent. I don't ever give up. See, so people don't realize they're talking about the same thing under different aspects. And so very often what you have to do is get people, right, like"
},
{
"end_time": 12062.654,
"index": 496,
"start_time": 12044.718,
"text": " Are they disguising and therefore unwilling to give up their timidness because they, in this equivocal fashion, identify it with being gentle? And gentle is a good thing. So you have to work with people to break out of that. You say, is there a way to be both gentle and courageous?"
},
{
"end_time": 12091.152,
"index": 497,
"start_time": 12063.012,
"text": " Right? And can you get them to break the aspect disguise, the equivocation between gentleness and timidity. So you have to do a lot of that work. Then if they open that possibility up, that's an important if, then you can start to do something like what I was talking to you. I mean, that is my situation. I am... You feel like you're timid? I was very shy as a child. I suffer from"
},
{
"end_time": 12121.527,
"index": 498,
"start_time": 12091.578,
"text": " very powerful social anxiety to this day right now it's happening right now so what i what i've done i love you you're doing great don't worry thank you you don't have to do that but what what i've tried to do it's always dangerous to hold yourself up as an example because it can be self-promotional but sometimes it's a good way of being authentic so i'm trying to get that balance but right what i've tried to do is to"
},
{
"end_time": 12149.735,
"index": 499,
"start_time": 12121.732,
"text": " do that. I've tried to develop skills and habits of virtues of interaction with people and try to get the balance right and we talked about it earlier about giving other people credit so don't overcompensate and be imposing and intimidating right so get the persona try to get the persona and the set of virtues and skills for interaction to compensate for the fact that I'm actually what I would really like to do is to not"
},
{
"end_time": 12179.991,
"index": 500,
"start_time": 12150.265,
"text": " In the case of this person who was timid but didn't think that they were timid or thought that the problem was the rest of the world, would you say that there was self-deception there? Yes. Okay. I remember you said that it's difficult to self-deceive. No, no. I think self-deception is very, very easy. What I said is it's incorrect to understand self-deception as lying to yourself. Just to give the viewers some background, in one of your videos,"
},
{
"end_time": 12208.507,
"index": 501,
"start_time": 12180.23,
"text": " From what I understood, I thought you said that you can't lie to yourself, so which I interpreted as you can't self-deceive, but you can BS yourself, the technical term. You can watch the other video for that. Okay, now you're going to clarify. Yeah, so what I mean by that is I think what I was trying to say is I think self-deception is very prevalent in our lives, in our cognitive lives. I think the common metaphor of understanding self-deception as lying to yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 12224.07,
"index": 502,
"start_time": 12208.848,
"text": " is an incorrect metaphor because I don't think you can lie to yourself. I think the correct model for understanding self-deception is you can BS yourself. And so we're not really lying to ourselves, we're BSing ourselves. And I think that's very important"
},
{
"end_time": 12249.377,
"index": 503,
"start_time": 12224.497,
"text": " because I think again it shifts the issue of self-deception off of propositions onto issues about perspectival knowing, issues of salience, issues of identity. Most of your self-deception is motivated reasoning that has to do with the salience of stimuli and your sense of trying to preserve your identity. I was thinking about this, the inability to lie to yourself, and I was wondering is that why porn is so"
},
{
"end_time": 12277.073,
"index": 504,
"start_time": 12250.247,
"text": " liked because when you think about it why would you have to watch porn when you can imagine anything you want okay so you're imagining but then you're not getting something like the procedural or participatory so when you watch it maybe you have maybe you have propositional truth oh yeah this person is doing so and so act to me and i'm doing it too but you don't have some of these you don't have the presence you can't get the sense of presence and so now you watch it yeah and it"
},
{
"end_time": 12301.544,
"index": 505,
"start_time": 12278.097,
"text": " Okay, because"
},
{
"end_time": 12312.944,
"index": 506,
"start_time": 12302.398,
"text": " People like Tony Robbins. I don't know if you've ever followed Tony Robbins. They're like, change your state. Like go like this. Yeah. Yeah. Scream. Yeah. Okay. And now do you feel better? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. So you can do that."
},
{
"end_time": 12333.2,
"index": 507,
"start_time": 12313.37,
"text": " Now some people can do that and they feel better, but some people feel like I'm self deceiving myself. That's stupid. It is. I would agree with the people who say that because all this stuff about power posturing has sort of collapsed. It's failed to replicate the stuff about changing your facial expression. There is when we do it carefully, it's there, but it's a very small effect."
},
{
"end_time": 12359.104,
"index": 508,
"start_time": 12333.439,
"text": " So real work would have to be done elsewhere. Don't just try and change your state quote unquote by changing your physiology and do something else. Yeah, I think there's a lot more you have to do. I think there's a lot more you have to do. I would conjecture that the success that Robbins is getting is largely not due to the power posturing or the changing of their facial expression. I think it's probably more placebo effect."
},
{
"end_time": 12387.91,
"index": 509,
"start_time": 12360.589,
"text": " There's a critique of Westerners, which is that we're not present enough. But then there's also a critique that we seek immediate gratification, that we live in the now, almost like a child. And then I was wondering, wait, aren't those two contradictory? What do you think of that? So one of the criticisms I have of one aspect of the mindfulness revolution, which I think is a response to the mean crisis, is this glorification of being in the present moment."
},
{
"end_time": 12401.732,
"index": 510,
"start_time": 12389.053,
"text": " I don't think that's a good way of talking about mindfulness scientifically. Maybe it's a good way of training it in meditation. But being in the present moment there's a sense in which"
},
{
"end_time": 12428.814,
"index": 511,
"start_time": 12402.449,
"text": " That can be a completely impulsive, wanton way of behavior. Well, I mean pay attention in the present moment to what's relevant. Relevant to what? Relevant to something other than the present moment. Because then you're no longer in the present moment? Exactly. Relevant to your values, your goals. Well, those aren't in the present moment. They're something that extend across... So the mere pursuit of being present is not sufficient? I don't think so."
},
{
"end_time": 12455.06,
"index": 512,
"start_time": 12429.224,
"text": " It's important to develop the mindfulness skill to come into an awareness of your current processing so that you can more effectively intervene in it. But that is not the only important point of intervention you need in your processing. You need also to deal with overcoming hyperbolic discounting."
},
{
"end_time": 12485.538,
"index": 513,
"start_time": 12455.657,
"text": " Hyperbolic discounting is the phenomena, it's an adaptive phenomena, but it misleads us in a lot of ways, it's also known as temporal discounting, that present stimuli are more salient to us than future things. This is why people have a tough time losing weight, because the chocolate cake is here now and the health is in the future. And if I can't make that future self-present to me, you know what I'm going to keep doing? Eating the chocolate cake and not losing the weight. Yes, part of what I need is to become aware of"
},
{
"end_time": 12514.36,
"index": 514,
"start_time": 12485.776,
"text": " This is a bit of a silly question, but given the fact that there are these four, as far as we know, forms of knowledge, so the propositional is just one, and the rest are vital, important."
},
{
"end_time": 12537.534,
"index": 515,
"start_time": 12515.384,
"text": " But in the courtroom, propositional is all that matters. Well, it does and it doesn't, right? So should we value procedural perspectival? And how does one practically go about demonstrating that in a courtroom? So we value procedural in an explicit sense when we allow expert judgment. We're saying certain individuals have certain skills."
},
{
"end_time": 12558.131,
"index": 516,
"start_time": 12537.944,
"text": " Not certain claims, they have certain skills and those skills allow them to make determinations that we have to take into consideration. So we do make a place for procedural... But only in so much as it helps the propositional? I don't know. That's an interesting question."
},
{
"end_time": 12588.507,
"index": 517,
"start_time": 12558.558,
"text": " I mean, I guess because ultimately the decisions are rendered through statements that everything is ultimately in service of the inferential processes by which the conclusions of the trial, meaning like verbal statement conclusions are reached, yes. But we do nevertheless acknowledge that procedural knowing matters significantly in very many cases to the determination of that"
},
{
"end_time": 12611.715,
"index": 518,
"start_time": 12588.882,
"text": " Okay, so that's an idea drawn from Dawson and many other people. It's also known as, there's third generation COGSI, there's also what's called 4e COGSI."
},
{
"end_time": 12639.855,
"index": 519,
"start_time": 12612.756,
"text": " First generation COGSI was largely built around the computational metaphor. So the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software, and cognition is largely like a computer program. And that's still prevalent in the common person's mind. They think of the mind as a machine, as a mechanical. And there's still people within cognitive science who think that's the right way to go."
},
{
"end_time": 12655.452,
"index": 520,
"start_time": 12640.299,
"text": " But there are flaws. We don't have to get into the flaws. So that's why second? Second generation put a lot more emphasis on neural networks and what made it different than what you saw in GoFi, good old-fashioned AI."
},
{
"end_time": 12670.981,
"index": 521,
"start_time": 12655.845,
"text": " was the old model that goes back to Hobbes and Descartes is the idea that cognition is ultimately like language. That what I'm doing when I'm thinking is very much like what I'm doing when I'm speaking. I'm doing something analogous. I'm running something like an argument in my head."
},
{
"end_time": 12694.36,
"index": 522,
"start_time": 12671.305,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 12721.442,
"index": 523,
"start_time": 12695.282,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 12740.367,
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the"
},
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"end_time": 12766.186,
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"start_time": 12740.367,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story?"
},
{
"end_time": 12794.889,
"index": 526,
"start_time": 12766.186,
"text": " Neural networks give up that model that cognition is language-like, that what we're doing when we're thinking, at least foundationally,"
},
{
"end_time": 12823.353,
"index": 527,
"start_time": 12795.145,
"text": " is doing something like running an argument. And Jeff Hinton, of course, was here at U of T. The idea was, no, no, the better way of trying to understand cognition is that cognition is brain-like rather than language-like. We shouldn't be looking primarily to the structure of language. We should be looking to the, I don't mean the anatomical structures, I mean the functional structures of how the brain operates as a neural network in order to understand cognition."
},
{
"end_time": 12851.084,
"index": 528,
"start_time": 12823.848,
"text": " Third generation came along and said, it's not so much the neural networks, it's the dynamical systems that are operating on the neural networks. It's the self-organizing processes. And those self-organizing processes are not in the brain, just in the brain. They're self-organizing processes between the brain and the body, between the brain, the body, and the environment. And it's all these loops of dynamic self-organization that we have to study if we want to properly understand"
},
{
"end_time": 12877.944,
"index": 529,
"start_time": 12851.596,
"text": " So cognition is embodied, it's embedded, it's extended. So then is there not a clear delineation between what is you and what is your environment? Depends what you mean by that. So it's very much a part of the... So the 40s are embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted, right? And so many people, I would include myself in this work I'm doing with Dan and others,"
},
{
"end_time": 12900.759,
"index": 530,
"start_time": 12878.148,
"text": " the idea that cognition is in an important sense is extended, that cognition is not just happening in your head, that there's important ways in which part of the information processing, this gets very philosophically complex and I can't be as precise as I need to be right now, so I'm asking for some tolerance from viewers who are more philosophically educated on this point."
},
{
"end_time": 12928.524,
"index": 531,
"start_time": 12900.998,
"text": " I can address that, but I can't do it right here. So speaking in this more coarse manner, the idea is that the significant aspects of the information processing are being done outside of the brain, in the environment, and in the body, and that they count as much as part of your cognition as the events that are internal to your brain. That's what it is to say you're embodied or you're embedded and your cognition is extended in important ways."
},
{
"end_time": 12958.285,
"index": 532,
"start_time": 12928.848,
"text": " Is third-generation cognitive science related to wisdom in some way? I know that your work focuses plenty on wisdom. Yeah. So I don't know if you have your own, it's fourth gen, it's vervachy cognitive. No, no, no, it's vervachy. No, no, I think I'm third generation for E. I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm. You don't think you've invented one yet. So let's go back to something. Let me try and show you what I mean. And let's go back to something we talked about earlier, the relevance realization stuff. Okay. So here's a problem facing your brain."
},
{
"end_time": 12988.763,
"index": 533,
"start_time": 12958.78,
"text": " Right? We were talking about it. Out of all the information, what do I pay attention to? What do I consider relevant? Well, you can't sort of reason your way through that. You can't sort of propositionally infer your way through that. What I was arguing earlier is I think it's actually a bioeconomic thing. It's the economy of your brain. Efficiency and resiliency are bioeconomic terms. What's happening is the brain is constantly trading between efficiency and resiliency and when it gets an optimal thing right now that"
},
{
"end_time": 13015.538,
"index": 534,
"start_time": 12989.002,
"text": " increases my capacity for problem solving, meeting initially my constitutive goals and then the goals in my interaction with the environment, right? Now think about what that means. That your cognition, your problem solving ability is dependent on your brain belonging to a biological economy, the biological economy of your body. If your brain wasn't embodied,"
},
{
"end_time": 13035.35,
"index": 535,
"start_time": 13015.93,
"text": " It wouldn't belong to a bioeconomy. It wouldn't be regulated by efficiency and resiliency. It wouldn't have a capacity for relevance realization. Your body is actually constitutive, because it's a bioeconomy, of sets of constraints that actually afford your cognition being able to zero in on relevant information."
},
{
"end_time": 13064.974,
"index": 536,
"start_time": 13035.35,
"text": " So being embodied is constitutive of you being cognitive. And then, of course, once you move that way, right, then you start to talk about, okay, well, we talked about this last time. What does that relevance look like? Is it just in my head? Is it just in my object? Remember, in the object, remember what you're talking about? No, no, it's an affordance. It's a loop. It's a relation? Yeah, a real relation, a dynamic relation between myself and the object. So the meaning is not what's being related, it's the relation. I think so."
},
{
"end_time": 13093.712,
"index": 537,
"start_time": 13065.247,
"text": " And so, if my cognition is bio-economically embodied and it's embedded in affordances between me and the environment, my cognition is not just in my brain. There's a quote which says something like, wisdom is knowing what you have control over and what you don't. Who said that again? Epictetus. Okay, what do you think of that, given the fact that you don't believe in free will? So, the Stoics also are compatibilists."
},
{
"end_time": 13108.012,
"index": 538,
"start_time": 13093.933,
"text": " So I'm in good company with Epictetus. So having control over and not having control over, I don't want to repeat that argument saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 13138.114,
"index": 539,
"start_time": 13108.285,
"text": " I have absolute prime mover and sole causal control. Again, the current state of my cognition in terms of the dispositions is the most causally relevant thing for what's happening in the environment. That's what I mean by having control over something. I have control over this because most of the behavior of this cup is due to what's happening in my hand and most of what's happening in my hand right now is due to the current state of my brain and etc."
},
{
"end_time": 13166.135,
"index": 540,
"start_time": 13139.121,
"text": " I would, I think there's something right about that, but you have to read, I don't want to say read into Epictetus, you have to unpack it. Epictetus doesn't just mean sort of, in fact he really doesn't mean physical control. Epictetus means that what we ultimately have control over in this sense, and we don't recognize, is the meaning of events."
},
{
"end_time": 13192.432,
"index": 541,
"start_time": 13167.005,
"text": " we have a lot more control over the relevance that we are helping to generate with respect to events than we do over the events themselves. Now the problem, there's two issues that come out of that. Because we confuse, think of the word, confuse the meaning with the thing, we try to manipulate the meaning by controlling the thing."
},
{
"end_time": 13208.404,
"index": 542,
"start_time": 13193.524,
"text": " And we forget that very often it's not the thing. Not always. If the truck hits you, it's the physical properties of the truck that destroy you. But in many cases, it's not the event or the thing, it's the meaning of the event or the thing. And we can't control that?"
},
{
"end_time": 13233.131,
"index": 543,
"start_time": 13208.729,
"text": " That means you can't train... No, no, sorry for interrupting, but Epictetus is saying, no, no, you can. You can exercise a lot more control over the meaning-making machinery than you can over the events, but because we don't pull them apart, because we confuse them together, we try to deal with the meaning by controlling the events, and we have much less control over events"
},
{
"end_time": 13257.005,
"index": 544,
"start_time": 13233.131,
"text": " then we like to believe and we don't recognize how much control we have over the meaning-making machinery. We're often ignorant because, an example you've seen me use before, we're often looking through that meaning-making machinery then stepping back and becoming aware of it in any kind of fashion that enables us to intervene in a powerful way. So part of what wisdom is, is to"
},
{
"end_time": 13285.64,
"index": 545,
"start_time": 13257.005,
"text": " become much more aware of this relevance realization process, the way in which we're connecting to events and making meaning about them. And I think, I mean, isn't that part of what it is to be a wise person? Isn't the wise person the one who can zero in on the relevant information in the messy complex situation? And not just zero in, you know, as a thought, but can actually engage their own relevance realization machinery so they create affordances"
},
{
"end_time": 13312.568,
"index": 546,
"start_time": 13285.964,
"text": " Effective affordances for intervening in that difficult situation. They are capable of insight in that profound way. That sounds to me like a big part of what wisdom is. Yes. Are there any theories of consciousness that you feel like are on the right track? So there's a few. I don't know many of them, but there's like the sensory motor theory of consciousness. And then there's the integrated information. And then there's a global workspace of bars. There's Clearman's"
},
{
"end_time": 13334.428,
"index": 547,
"start_time": 13312.858,
"text": " There's two issues we have to address when we address consciousness. We have to address"
},
{
"end_time": 13363.609,
"index": 548,
"start_time": 13334.821,
"text": " They're two separate questions in the sense that they shouldn't be conflated or identified together. I do think they're interdependent in so far as we answer one, we have to be thinking about answering the other. But what are these two questions? One is the function question. What does consciousness do? What's it do? And then there's the nature question, which is how does something like consciousness arise out of all this non-conscious matter? And those are not the same question because I could potentially answer"
},
{
"end_time": 13389.718,
"index": 549,
"start_time": 13363.985,
"text": " at least in a logical sense, the question as to how it arises without giving you any account of what it does. Now the reason I point that out is different theories put different emphasis on these two questions. Barr's theory of the global workspace has a lot to say. Talk about what it does. What it does. Very little about how it could have arise from non-conscious matter."
},
{
"end_time": 13409.599,
"index": 550,
"start_time": 13389.855,
"text": " Tononi's integrated information theory is much more about the nature. He's trying to explain how out of the physical activity of the brain, something like consciousness could emerge. Like what conditions need to be met in order for there to be some unit of consciousness? Yes. It doesn't say what consciousness is, because there are actually three questions."
},
{
"end_time": 13430.981,
"index": 551,
"start_time": 13409.599,
"text": " What the heck is consciousness? How does it arise and what does it do? So I think the first question, what is consciousness, is the answer we would get if we had an integrated answer of how does it arise and what does it do. I don't know what else it would mean to say what consciousness is other than being able to explain how it emerges ontologically and how it acts causally."
},
{
"end_time": 13447.415,
"index": 552,
"start_time": 13431.442,
"text": " right? How it functions. Or whether or not it does emerge, whether or not it's a fundamental part of reality. Yeah, totally. I mean, but that's also another answer to the nature question. What I'm saying is the question, what is it, I think is the attempt"
},
{
"end_time": 13473.2,
"index": 553,
"start_time": 13447.415,
"text": " And I think there's something right about this. I think it's okay to a certain degree to try and answer the function question or answer the nature question, but I think ultimately they have to be answered in an integrated fashion. I really can't get at the function of something if I don't say something about its nature, and to talk about the nature of something without explaining how it functions or interacts is also ultimately not going to work."
},
{
"end_time": 13501.51,
"index": 554,
"start_time": 13473.524,
"text": " What I want in the end, the holy grail, would be to have a good answer, a scientifically legitimate answer to, what does consciousness do, a scientifically legitimate answer to, scientifically and philosophically, what does consciousness do, how does it arise, and then how do those two things mutually support each other in an overall coherent"
},
{
"end_time": 13528.916,
"index": 555,
"start_time": 13502.312,
"text": " Do you have any personal views on the answers to those that have not been given? I do. I've done a lot of work with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu and others. There's a manuscript I have floating around of which I try to give our best account of what I think consciousness is. Let me give a couple of steps towards that. On the function issue, I think there is"
},
{
"end_time": 13556.92,
"index": 556,
"start_time": 13529.633,
"text": " A convergence argument, we've talked about the value of convergence argument. If you look at Barres, I mean he publishes it with Shanahan and Barres, right? The main function of, I mean this is explicit, the main function of consciousness is higher-order relevance realization, right? I think it's a strong implication in the Bohr and Seth model of consciousness as, you know, how we restructure and encode information, right, in order to deal, how we chunk information in order to get through working memory."
},
{
"end_time": 13574.889,
"index": 557,
"start_time": 13557.261,
"text": " So you think the more working memory someone has, you can actually say they're more conscious?"
},
{
"end_time": 13604.548,
"index": 558,
"start_time": 13575.589,
"text": " Let's say someone has only one unit of working memory. If it's possible to individuate conscious working memory into units like that, so that's an important if. Because then one can make the argument that the more intelligent you are, since that's associated with working memory, the more conscious you are. I think that's an implication of what I'm arguing. I think the implication is that there's a sense in which there's a deep interconnection between intelligence, general intelligence, not all intelligence, not crystallized intelligence or whatever,"
},
{
"end_time": 13629.684,
"index": 559,
"start_time": 13604.548,
"text": " But fluid general intelligence's ability to zero in on relevant information overlaps with the functionality of working memory and consciousness. In fact, when I teach this, I like to talk about the fact that attention, working memory, consciousness, and fluid intelligence are all just different aspects of the same thing. And they use"
},
{
"end_time": 13652.483,
"index": 560,
"start_time": 13629.684,
"text": " Well, not perfectly, but tremendous overlap in using the same machinery in the brain. Well, where's the tension? Oh, it's here. Oh, it's here, right? And so the idea that they're all, all of these theories, I think even Tanoni, when he talks about tests for consciousness, his test for consciousness is"
},
{
"end_time": 13682.415,
"index": 561,
"start_time": 13653.166,
"text": " You know, a system is conscious if it can figure out that there's inappropriate relations in a picture, like there's a potted plant in front of a computer. It's relevance realization, right? And so I think what you can see, I mean, I've made this argument, we've presented it at Mind and Life and there's other places that there's a growing convergence that the main function of consciousness is higher order relevance realization."
},
{
"end_time": 13712.654,
"index": 562,
"start_time": 13683.012,
"text": " And what does that look like phenomenologically? What that looks like phenomenologically is the part of relevance realization that we call salience, the way things stand out to us and the way obviation occurs, right? So I have a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. The function of consciousness is to generate a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. And that's related to wisdom."
},
{
"end_time": 13722.807,
"index": 563,
"start_time": 13713.046,
"text": " Okay, so then can one make an argument, a controversial argument, that the more intelligent you are, the more capable you are of being wise, or the more wise you are?"
},
{
"end_time": 13743.319,
"index": 564,
"start_time": 13723.268,
"text": " In the sense that I think intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rationality, where I take rationality, you know this, I don't take rationality just to mean logical argumentation, I take rationality to be any set of set of skills or virtues that helps us overcome self-deception in a systematic and reliable fashion."
},
{
"end_time": 13762.227,
"index": 565,
"start_time": 13743.319,
"text": " So in that way, mindfulness, the way it trains our attention to help us systematically and reliably overcome self-deception is a form of rationality. Insofar as intelligence is a necessary but nowhere near sufficient condition for rationality, and I think rationality in the sense that I'm using it,"
},
{
"end_time": 13791.493,
"index": 566,
"start_time": 13762.449,
"text": " is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wisdom. You can say that, of course, if I increase intelligence, I increase the chance of rationality, but I don't necessitate it because it's necessary but not sufficient. And as I increase rationality, I increase the possibility of wisdom, but I don't cause it to happen. So I wouldn't put it in a sort of direct causal relation. That's what I've tried to… But you say it would be more likely that an intelligent person would be more wise."
},
{
"end_time": 13809.019,
"index": 567,
"start_time": 13791.493,
"text": " One of the things that can give you an advantage for becoming wise in"
},
{
"end_time": 13836.408,
"index": 568,
"start_time": 13809.77,
"text": " in certain contexts is to be more intelligent. The problem with being more intelligent is it also can often make you much more susceptible to self-deception. So intelligence is really a mixed bag. I think when intelligence is used to train rationality, then the more intelligent you are, the greater the chance that, let's say you have a personality trait. In addition to being highly intelligent, you have a high need for cognition."
},
{
"end_time": 13862.585,
"index": 569,
"start_time": 13836.937,
"text": " So high need for cognition is people who don't just passively wait for problems to come. They seek out problems, they find problems, they try to understand. I think if you have a high need for cognition and a high need, sorry, let's say high G, high general intelligence, high need for cognition, then there's a very good chance you're going to move towards becoming more rational. And in that sense, there's a greater chance that you'll be much more likely to cultivate wisdom."
},
{
"end_time": 13884.565,
"index": 570,
"start_time": 13862.961,
"text": " To wrap this up, what's the difference between reason rationality and well logic you just said is separate from rationality because rationality is associated or if not the same thing as overcoming self-deception? I would argue that that's your definition of rationality. Yeah, I would argue that's the key facet or the key characteristic, maybe the key criterion of rationality is the"
},
{
"end_time": 13913.677,
"index": 571,
"start_time": 13884.838,
"text": " systematic and reliable ability to overcome self-deception. You just can't be comprehensively logical. The idea of the Spock ideal that we could become rational by becoming comprehensively logical, that's just been subject to devastating critiques. The problem with trying to be logical, to work according to a normativity of certainty, is that if I try to infer my way,"
},
{
"end_time": 13933.012,
"index": 572,
"start_time": 13914.172,
"text": " If I want to be certain, I have to be algorithmic. Any search space that I'm engaged in, I have to check. If I wanted to be certain about how I should leave the room, how much of the information should I check in the room? I can't. I can't check it all."
},
{
"end_time": 13960.503,
"index": 573,
"start_time": 13933.439,
"text": " Yes, logic works according to normativity of certainty. And Czerniak made this point, look, any proposition actually has an indefinitely large number of potential implications. When I'm making an inference as opposed to a logical implication, out of all of those potential, and Fodor made this argument too in a convergent fashion, out of all the possible implications when I make an inference,"
},
{
"end_time": 13989.753,
"index": 574,
"start_time": 13960.794,
"text": " I'm selecting a subset as the relevant implications I'm going to make salient and act upon. That's why you can't equate logic to reason. If what we mean by reason is making inferences in order to direct our behavior, then inference is already a process that is not purely logical. So animals can be reasonable? Insofar as animals are"
},
{
"end_time": 14018.729,
"index": 575,
"start_time": 13990.162,
"text": " using intelligence, relevance realization, to select implications, right? Which they should be, otherwise they'd be dead. Yes. Then we can talk about them doing reason. But not rationality. Right. Because what I can then do, I could use reason, which is my ability to selectively direct my implications, at least at my inferences,"
},
{
"end_time": 14042.312,
"index": 576,
"start_time": 14019.633,
"text": " Yeah, I'll put it that way. Selectively direct my inferences, that's more accurate. I could use that ability to reflectively change or modify my behavior with the goal of reducing self-deception. Then it becomes rationality. But I want to emphasize,"
},
{
"end_time": 14062.381,
"index": 577,
"start_time": 14042.875,
"text": " It's not only inferences that I will use to reduce my self-deception and become more rational, it's also my attention, it's also my skills, it's also my identity formation. There's many things I have to reflectively modify in order to reduce my proclivity to self-deception, and I think rationality includes"
},
{
"end_time": 14087.91,
"index": 578,
"start_time": 14062.79,
"text": " all of those. I think a wise person is somebody who not only has sort of individual sets of rationality but has an optimal relationship between all of them. So their inferential rationality, their attentional rationality, their identity rationality, their skill rationality, all of these things are optimally related to each other so that they're mutually compensating for each other character"
},
{
"end_time": 14115.52,
"index": 579,
"start_time": 14087.91,
"text": " Okay, so this is all very new to me, so I'm embarrassed by how simple, you guys were talking about reality earlier. Is that just like"
},
{
"end_time": 14136.425,
"index": 580,
"start_time": 14116.067,
"text": " looking at things as objectively as possible, or just being as receptive as you can to the environment around you like wood. So objectivity is a Cartesian sort of way of, well, at least it's inspired by Descartes, way of trying to stipulate what's real. And so the idea is, right,"
},
{
"end_time": 14166.084,
"index": 581,
"start_time": 14136.783,
"text": " There are properties of things that are only in our mind, subjective, and then there's properties that are things that are independent of our mind. That's what it means to say they're objective. They're in the object, not in the subject, right? And then Descartes proposed that the way we determine the things that... They're objective? The way we determine which properties are objective is mathematical. The mathematical... I was hesitating, but I don't want to attribute that solely to Descartes. Galileo starts that process in a very important way."
},
{
"end_time": 14192.5,
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"start_time": 14166.305,
"text": " that the mathematical properties, the mathematically measurable properties are the properties that are in the object independent. The problem with that, the problem with equating realness to properties in object is that has a great deal of difficulty of dealing with parts of reality that have to do with relations between objects. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 14219.974,
"index": 583,
"start_time": 14193.831,
"text": " One of the issues you're going to get into is I can, Berkeley does this very well, is I can invert it. That's what Berkeley does. He says, look, I can't do, how would I measure, do the math on the cup? Well, I'd have to measure the cup, right? That's how I do them. Here's its length. Here's its circumference. But how could I possibly measure the cup if I couldn't see the color and feel the resistance? But the color and the resistance are subjective."
},
{
"end_time": 14250.077,
"index": 584,
"start_time": 14220.93,
"text": " So I can't get at any of the objective properties except through my subjective experience. So then Berkeley turns it all around and says, everything is in your mind. It's all subjective. And so the attempt to equate realness with objectivity... Because objectivity depends on subjectivity. Yeah, there's ways in which objectivity you can show depends on subjectivity and then that just undermines the whole project."
},
{
"end_time": 14268.353,
"index": 585,
"start_time": 14250.913,
"text": " Again, I'm not saying that Berkeley's right, and I'm not saying that the scientific- I don't see a flaw with that, with the fact that whatever's objective, you can only verify via subjectivity. Because then what Berkeley concludes is that you should give up the notion of objectivity. Things don't exist- I don't necessarily agree with that. Why not, though? It could be useful."
},
{
"end_time": 14294.206,
"index": 586,
"start_time": 14268.541,
"text": " I take it that the claim for objectivity is that this thing has properties mind-independent. What Barclay is trying to show is there's no way of finding mind-independent properties because every property you're gaining access is, as you said, is dependent on your subjective state of mind. And so Barclay then concludes from that, right, well then there are no mind-independent properties."
},
{
"end_time": 14318.2,
"index": 587,
"start_time": 14294.718,
"text": " And then, of course, you have all the problems with that. Well, objects seem to do things when nobody's aware of them, and then so Berkeley posits God. God's aware of everything at all time, and that's how things sort of stay in existence. And then you're into a really, really problematic place. Really, really problematic. So many people, you know, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, have been trying to undermine"
},
{
"end_time": 14346.834,
"index": 588,
"start_time": 14318.507,
"text": " Another one that I was interested in is being present in the moment"
},
{
"end_time": 14369.309,
"index": 589,
"start_time": 14347.5,
"text": " Because I can be anxious just like anyone else and that will like my ego and my personal thoughts and delusions will keep me away from being present and is that what meditation is that what meditation can help alleviate is like your own worries or like things you're like anxious about is the whole point of meditation to be more like"
},
{
"end_time": 14398.712,
"index": 590,
"start_time": 14376.186,
"text": " Just being able to discern your worries from the reality. Which one do you care most about? You guys had an interesting bit on evil. You talk about evil and then you're talking about metaphysical."
},
{
"end_time": 14423.473,
"index": 591,
"start_time": 14400.026,
"text": " So metaphysical evil is to say that evil exists part of the structure of reality. It's not just our way of evaluating human actions. Like there's space and time, and that's part of what we think is a constituent element of reality. Space and time and matter. Then maybe there's another, maybe in addition to space and time, there's a moral dimension. I don't know if this is equivalent, but"
},
{
"end_time": 14443.78,
"index": 592,
"start_time": 14423.763,
"text": " It could be something like that. And so we're constantly, just like we're moving in space and time, we can also be moving in a moral dimension towards, maybe it's linear, maybe it's just one dimensional, maybe it's, who knows, but you can be moving towards the good and moving towards the bad. I happen to think that there may be something like that, but if there is something like that, I have a feeling"
},
{
"end_time": 14465.469,
"index": 593,
"start_time": 14444.206,
"text": " What would you call a personality deficit?"
},
{
"end_time": 14486.425,
"index": 594,
"start_time": 14465.742,
"text": " So personally, you might be too high in neuroticism. Let's go back to your meditation question. Neuroticism means you have a lot of negative affect, you have a lot of inner conflict, anxiety, things like that. That's very high in neuroticism. That can be debilitating for you trying to lead your life. Now what you can use is you can use the rationality of mindfulness."
},
{
"end_time": 14506.988,
"index": 595,
"start_time": 14487.056,
"text": " And one way of training it is in meditative practice. You also want contemplative practices, I would argue. But anyways, as I said, by becoming aware of the way, instead of looking at the world through your anxiety, in meditation you're trying to step back and look at it. These are thoughts?"
},
{
"end_time": 14538.302,
"index": 596,
"start_time": 14508.336,
"text": " Well, not making a judgment on validity, but trying to do what we were talking about when we were talking about Stoicism. And that's the areas where the prosaash, the paying good attention in Stoicism, overlaps with Buddhism. Other people have noted this. Remember we talked about, you know, not confusing the meaning and the thing. The anxiety is projecting all kinds of meaning onto things, and what the mindfulness can make me realize is, oh wait, right? That's in my mind, right? That's the way what's happening in my mind is distorting"
},
{
"end_time": 14566.732,
"index": 597,
"start_time": 14538.729,
"text": " that thing, right? And what I can do is I can separate the distortions. I can start to see through the distortions in the different sense of not being misled by them. They're sort of evaporating if I've practiced the mindfulness on the anxiety itself. So if I can become aware of the patterns and processes in the anxiety as something"
},
{
"end_time": 14583.831,
"index": 598,
"start_time": 14566.971,
"text": " Okay."
}
]
}No transcript available.