Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke [Round 2] Theolocution on Mind Upload, Shadow Integration, and Consciousness

Starting point is 00:00:00 This channel is about investigating theories of everything. Now that includes string theory, or m-theory, or some flavor of string theory, E8, geometric unity, even Wolfram's model. In fact, I'm speaking with Wolfram in about a week. But also, broadly speaking, it encompasses Weltanschauungs, that is, a philosophical comprehensive theory of everything. Hence, the following two guests, Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke. Bernardo Kastrup holds a PhD in computer science and philosophy and is defending idealism, that is,

Starting point is 00:00:31 the ontology that all that exists is the mental, in fact we're all part of one mind, which he calls mind at large. John Vervaeke, on the other hand, is an associate professor at the University of Toronto near me in cognitive science, advocating for naturalism. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker and the host of this podcast with a background in math and physics. This is a theolocution, which is rather than critiquing and sparring, it's about constructing and building and understanding the other's position, consonant with love, hopefully. Round one is linked below in the description, and it's imperative that you watch that first, or at least look at the timestamps and skip around a few times,

Starting point is 00:01:12 in order to gain a bird's eye view of their respective philosophies and where they agree slash disagree. Today I welcome the podcast's first sponsors. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company, with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write-downs, while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI. The second sponsor is Brilliant.

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Starting point is 00:02:06 well. The plan is to have more conversations like this, both theolocutions and then the regular podcasts. For example, I have Josje Bak and Donald Hoffman coming up in a few weeks. There are also a few others planned that I can't announce just yet. They're huge names. I'm working with them, and if you'd like to support to see the conversations, then please do consider becoming a patron. Every single dollar helps. Thank you. Thank you so much and enjoy the podcast. Welcome, John. Welcome, Bernardo. Great pleasure to be here. Great pleasure to be here. Great to see you again, Bernardo.

Starting point is 00:02:40 My pleasure, John. Okay, so let's start firstly with a recapitulation of last time. That is, let's see if, John, if you can state what Bernardo, what you think Bernardo says in a way that's consonant with what he meant, and then vice versa. Yeah. Maybe one to five minutes, and we'll start with you, John. Sure, I'll do my very best, and I will reserve any kind of critical response to it later. I just want to make sure that I am understanding. First of all, I'll do my very best, and I will reserve any kind of critical response to it later. I just want to make sure that I am understanding. First of all, I want to comment on the fact that I thought Bernardo's presentation of his ideas was excellent and very clear.

Starting point is 00:03:19 So the main, I mean, there were many theses put forward by Bernardo, I mean, there were many theses put forward by Bernardo, but I think the central one that it seems to me everything's hanging on is his claim for what's in the technical lingo is called absolute idealism, a strict form of mononism, in which ultimately all of reality is some modification or state within a unified consciousness, unified at least at the substantial level. And then Bernardo wants to deal with one of the crucial problems facing that, which is, well, where does all this phenomenology, because we're in the realm of consciousness, about an external world and material objects that seem to exist independent of our consciousness come from. Bernardo made it very clear that he's not a solipsist, and he's in that sense not what you might call an individual Berkeleyan idealist. Objects exist when we're not looking at them, and the deep past isn't a problem

Starting point is 00:04:22 for him, because the consciousness within which reality is to be found, if that's the right way of putting it, is what he sometimes calls cosmic mind, or mind at large, which is a consciousness. So the main argument he makes, and I don't want to say that's the exclusive argument, he made many arguments and they're all connected, but the central argument is an argument in terms of parsimony. So he argues that the main problem facing a naturalistic account, and I think, just one small thing, I try to make clear that I think the real competitor with his view is a kind of naturalism, that a naturalism has difficulty explaining the emergence and also the interact, the emergence of something like consciousness understood as subjective qualitative experience,

Starting point is 00:05:20 qualia, and how that qualia could possibly causally interact with the material domain. So those are two perennial problems. And he argues that parsimony says the way to avoid those is just to posit that there's one underlying unified substance. Then he faces, as I said, the difficulty of explaining how we get externality and materiality. And the way he explains that is that there is a dissociation process, somewhat analogous to the empirical evidence we have for dissociative states within the consciousness of human beings. And that something analogous to that is going on in cosmic mind, and that psychological, I think that's right, dissociation, helps to explain

Starting point is 00:06:12 the phenomenological externality and the phenomenological materiality. I think that's the best I can do right now within one to five minutes. think that's the best I can do right now within one to five minutes. Bernardo? I think John's main message is not necessarily metaphysics dependent. I think the import of what he has to say would still be there, whatever metaphysics turns out to be true, wherever that argument goes. whatever metaphysics turns out to be true, wherever that argument goes.

Starting point is 00:06:47 His main message, as far as I understand, which is, of course, filtered by my own interests, has to do with meaning. I think we in the West today are in a very peculiar historical situation, and John points that out very well, in which we've lost our sources of meaning. We've lost contact with the fundamental driver of life, the will to meaning, as opposed to Nietzsche's will to power or Freud's will to pleasure. In that sense, John is in the line that in the 20th century maybe was most visibly defended by Viktor Frankl, that

Starting point is 00:07:27 idea of the search for meaning. Metaphysically John is not prepared to give up on some reality behind the concept of matter but he is not an extreme reductionist in the sense that he is not saying that consciousness can be completely accounted for purely by quantitative physical parameters. He appeals to some forms of emergence, perhaps even to what Chalmers would call some form of strong emergence, which basically means that the emergent phenomenon cannot be directly deduced from complete knowledge of the underlying dynamics. In other words, something real with the reality of its own arises from or in a way related to brain processing. And that's something that has reality is our

Starting point is 00:08:26 conscious lives and if i understood him if i correctly recall what he said he's even open to some forms of downward causation he's open to some forms of the gestalt of our conscious experience impinging downwards into brain processes and And of course, there is some degree of empirical evidence for that. It's difficult for me now to proceed and point out in a critical way points where I disagree with John's main message because, well, I largely don't. I think the point where we don't see eye to eye is

Starting point is 00:09:07 on the details of the metaphysics I don't think however that that is really relevant for the importance of what he has to say but I do think and now I'm trying to do my best to be critical about something I think that if we appeal to things that are unknown such as some form of strong emergence I think the burden is on the one who appeals to it to try to close that somehow to try to make sense of that somehow and I think that even has some degree of psychological bearing. I mean, we did talk briefly about it last time. I posed the question, you know, for people to really find meaning in their lives, would they be satisfied with the notion that they make their own meaning?

Starting point is 00:10:00 Or do they really have to have at least the belief that there is inherent meaning out there, that we are not making stuff up to sort of deceive ourselves. And that's the point where I think John's message could benefit from a more explicit, well-defined metaphysical position. I think it would strengthen his main message, the role, the main role he's playing in the culture right now. That was excellent.

Starting point is 00:10:33 Very fair. Very fair. Let's be recollective for a second. As for the last conversation, I'm curious how you all think it went and what points said by the other person nettles you ever since and made you may perhaps even rethink a position of yours. Maybe not a vital pillar, but it gives you pause at least. So John, you first, please. Well, first of all, the overall tenor again,

Starting point is 00:10:59 I think Bernardo succeeded in, I think, one of, there's goals that are preliminary to the goals of conviction of truth, but they're necessary goals. I think Bernardo succeeded admirably in, and I think this is important, by the way, this is not meant to be dismissive. I think he succeeded admirably in making his position intellectually respectable. Bernardo knows as well as I do that there are many, many versions of absolute idealism out there that are absolutely drecky and horrible and woo-woo, and they're equivalent to postulating that leprechauns cause things. And it became very clear to me, you know, because this is the first time I really seriously interacted with Bernardo, that that is not what is happening with him. And he made his position intellectually

Starting point is 00:11:47 respectable. And he did it in a responsive and congenial manner. And I greatly enjoyed the dialogue. A couple, I mean, I have been thinking about it. I go for walks in the morning and often I'm talking to Bernardo in my head when I'm on the walk, which is not an unpleasant thing as well. And a couple of things for me came up. Well, one was Matt Segal put out a commentary. I texted you the link, Kurt, about the discussion. And then I had like a three-hour discussion with him yesterday, or two and a half hours, about Whitehead and his version of pan-experientialism and the notion of apprehension. And I found that I was coming a lot closer to that view. And then upon reflection, I thought, well, when Bernardo was talking about consciousness,

Starting point is 00:12:46 he said it's at this instinctive level. It doesn't have intentionality. It doesn't have reflective rationality, reflective self-awareness. I felt that the distance between us was growing smaller in the positions I was willing to consider and take seriously. Because I did mention last time that I take Whitehead's proposal very seriously. I think Whitehead was one of the most significant philosophers who was contemporary with the scientific revolution of the early 20th century. And I think he's an important response to that. And so that happened for me. The thing that nettles me, I don't know if nettles me is the same. And this goes towards perhaps my larger metaphysical view, which I briefly talked about last time as being sort of a naturalistic Neoplatonism. ideas. So in Plato, it's pretty much an emanation metaphysics with participation. And then Plotinus,

Starting point is 00:13:52 you have a two-way movement. There's emanation and then there's return. And that's because the Neoplatonists realized that there were sort of two problems that needed to be explained. How does the one become many and how does the many become one? But Plotinus still gives emphasis. By the time you get to Erringina, it's completely dialectical. They're completely equally symmetrical. And I remember a really good book written by Katz quite a while ago called The Metaphysics of Meaning, where he basically said that the naturalist faces the problem of getting up to unity and explaining how normative normativity emerges. And then he said that the plateness has the problem of how do we get the diversity and how do we get down into causation?

Starting point is 00:14:31 So it's basically how do causes become reasons and how do reasons become causes? And I tend to see Bernardo, he won't agree with this, but I do think it's a movement towards our positions being closer. I do see, I think, I see what I would, and what Katz has claimed. I think there's a symmetry issue. I acknowledge that, and I don't mean to imply that Bernardo isn't acknowledging things. I'm just saying something straight out. That the problem of emergence is a real problem and that all we have are weak analogies that fail fundamentally at the point where we need them to work.

Starting point is 00:15:11 I see it, and again, I foresee that Bernardo won't agree, but I see it that the problem of dissociation is an equally mysterious problem. All he has for it is a weak analogy, the analogy to psychological dissociation, and it fails at precisely the point where we need it to work. All the empirical cases of psychological dissociation don't produce material objects, don't produce independent external existence, etc. So that dissociation doesn't actually supply the metaphysical move he makes. I see that symmetrical to the way emergence relies on weak analogies. So if he'll allow me just at least a parallel in terminology, I think he needs something like strong dissociation to produce the real differences that we experience phenomenologically, because they're at least phenomenologically real. He never denies that. He's not a soul obsessed. So I see them as symmetrical. And where that leads to me

Starting point is 00:16:12 more generally is, like I said, I think my metaphysics is very much about the idea that there's a deep interpenetration of emergence and emanation. That's why I'm attracted to Whitehead. And for me, that's consonant with the increasing number of non-dualities we are discovering about reality. Matter and energy, time and space, and waves and particles, etc. And so my metaphysics is in that sense more of a Neoplatonic position. Now, what many people on the other side of the fence,

Starting point is 00:16:57 sort of the people who are much more perhaps scientific rather than scientific, but, oh, but Neoplatonism is so anti-scientific. I argue explicitly against that. We have very good historical argumentation that Neoplatonism has been and continues to be a significant birthplace for scientific ideas. It comes to the fore during scientific revolutions. John Spencer's book on the influence of Neoplatonism in the scientific revolution of the 20th century i think is very good uh the recent work by berman on platonism and the objects of science saying that science presupposes intelligibility and then presupposes um something

Starting point is 00:17:37 like you know platonic forms in order to do what it does as science, I think that's a beautifully written and well-argued book. And if you look at it, so for me, my starting place is a little bit different from Bernardo's. And in that sense, perhaps it might be helpful if I just briefly said what it was. They're not disconnected from each other, but I don't think they're identical. So I start from intelligibility. So this is much more like ancient philosophy rather than sort of a Cartesian approach, which is what has to be presupposed in your ontology in order for knowledge to exist. So you take it as a fundamental presupposition that you reject absolute skepticism, absolute solipsism. And then the idea is, well, the universe has to be comprehensible.

Starting point is 00:18:24 It has to be intelligible. And then what the Neoplatonist notes is there's this weird relations within intelligibility. You need information in order to have knowledge. Information causes knowledge, but knowledge can't be reductively explained in terms of information. And you need knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge causes wisdom, but you can't reductively explain knowledge in terms of wisdom. And so Neoplatonism has seen within intelligibility this causal emergence upward and the normative constraining downward. And it tries to unfold a metaphysics that I think best grounds our experience of intelligibility that is presupposed by our science. And I want, and I think this is sincere, I want to see if this is ultimately reconcilable with that at least

Starting point is 00:19:16 smaller gap between Bernardo and I, between sort of the right-headian idea of prehension, because he tries to lay that in as the ground both of causation and of intelligibility and what Bernardo is saying. So maybe there's something there. I don't know. And I'm happy to explore it. So that's my sort of summation and initial response. What did John say in the previous round, or even now, that, like I said, either gives you pause or upends one of your pillars, or at least shakes it and has been corrupting you since? Only on the negative side, because your original question was both the positive side and the negative side. I want to talk about the positive first, if it's okay. It's difficult to say that it's because of our last discussion, because I already knew John's material, so I already sort of have my favorite thing amongst the many things he says, and he said it again in our last debate. So that's the thing that is always with me, and I think that's one of the most critical things in our culture today,

Starting point is 00:20:27 And I think that's one of the most critical things in our culture today, which is to have a correct understanding of what wisdom means. I think we've fumbled that idea so badly in the West that we've lost our guides. We just do not know who to look up to for orientation. And I like to call it the idolatry of nerds and the word nerd is appropriate because it means that somebody has chosen one amongst many psychic skills to center his entire life and ignore all our other psychic functions and organs all the other things that are key constituents of wisdom. And we take our cue now from nerds who have an ax to grind, as opposed to true wisdom. And John takes this seriously. He just doesn't say, well, our definition of wisdom is wrong.

Starting point is 00:21:17 This is the right definition. No, he makes it a study area. He invites you to explore that question. He doesn't whitewash it. He doesn't make it look simple. He gives it the depth that it fundamentally has. And he doesn't give you a ready answer, but he shows us the way to sort of revise our exploration of that question.

Starting point is 00:21:40 I think this is pretty central. I don't want to get across as too exaggerated, but it's honest what I'm about to say. I think it's central to whether we will make it as a civilization or not. It's central to whether we will survive. Look, the planet will survive if we screw up badly, give it a million years, and the planet's a garden again, just without us. Not even without us, because the Australian aboriginals, the Inuits, the Bushmen in Africa, they have the skills to survive that.

Starting point is 00:22:11 And the question is whether our culture, our way of life, our accumulated knowledge, our civilization will survive. And I think that question rests to a large degree on a better understanding of wisdom and a better choice about who we take our directions from. So that, I think, is pretty central. Now, the thing that made me upset,

Starting point is 00:22:38 nothing made me upset, really. So I'd rather choose one of the things that John said now. I would take this as an opportunity to try to weave a defense it's normal by the way that I am on the defense because I make of my work a metaphysics question John doesn't so if the disagreement is on a metaphysics question of course I am the one who will be on the defense

Starting point is 00:23:02 because I am the one who is trying to make an explicit case. John's case doesn't rest on metaphysics, so he doesn't need to be as explicit. So, in a sense, it's natural that I have a much bigger target painted on my forehead than he has. It's by construction. So, he said now that he sees that there is some symmetry between the analogy of dissociation, doing what it needs to do to serve the purpose I want it to serve, and an appeal to emergence. I will take the liberty to disagree. I don't think the symmetry is there, but I recognize the point because I have heard this made many times before. And if the point is made very explicit, it goes something like this.

Starting point is 00:23:50 If I am a dissociated alter of universal consciousness and you too, I happen to be here looking at you. I can shake your hand, I can talk to you, I see you around, but the alters of a person with dissociative identity disorder don't see each other. They don't see each other. They don't shake hands. They are not inhabiting a common environment. So the analogy doesn't work all the way.

Starting point is 00:24:12 It doesn't do what I want it to do. I think that's not true because we are taking the analogy at the wrong level. Remember, we as alters of universal consciousness, we are in a shared mental environment by my hypothesis. And if you take my hypothesis to be true for the sake of argument, we share a mental environment. And so we see each other within that mental environment. You cannot compare that to the alters in the mind of a person. You cannot expect those alters to see each other in the external world. Because there is no external world from the point of view of a universal mind. Everything is within that mind. So if you want to make a comparison correctly,

Starting point is 00:24:57 you have to look at the world within the mind of a person with DID and not expect that the alters will see each other in the external world. So the correct analogy is to look at the dreams of a person with DID and compare that to this, a dream of a universe that undergoes dissociation. Because in both cases, then it's within that mental context. Then it's a correct comparison comparison so let's look at the dreams with people with DID it turns out research from Harvard indicates that twenty-five percent one quarter of people with the DID they have dreams in which multiple alters partake in the same dream and they see each other in

Starting point is 00:25:41 the dream they hear each other in the dream, they hear each other in the dream, they interact with each other in the dream. How do they know that? Because when the person recalls the dream, afterwards, each alter recalls the dream from a different point of view, and they identify the other alters as characters in the dream. So if that's the correct comparison, I would say, well, 25% is a very statistically significant number, I would say the analogy does what it's supposed to do if you look at it at the correct level for comparison. Now, I will acknowledge that we don't have a full and explicit conceptual account of dissociation.

Starting point is 00:26:20 It has to do with inferential isolation. It has to do with inferential isolation. It has to do with pathways to memory access. We know that. We have pieces of the puzzle, but we don't have a complete puzzle assemble that tells us this is the conceptual account of what dissociation is and how it happens. Well, mainly how it happens. We know what it is. But I would say, well, that is secondary. It takes a second seat to the fact that it empirically happens, and now there is no question about it from neuroimaging that it does happen, there is something dissociation looks like, it can make you blind, literally.

Starting point is 00:26:59 So the fact that we don't have a conceptual account for it is not a detriment to one's ability to use dissociation in an explanatory framework, because whether we conceptually understand it or not, it happens. It's out there in nature. Now, you can't say the same thing about strong emergence, emergence because how do you have an empirical account of strong emergence that is independent of your theoretical assumptions? That's not possible because all you can say, well, this phenomenon exists, but to say that it is an empirical instance of strong emergence, you have to say that there is something there that is physically real and which fundamentally cannot be accounted for in terms of its constituent parts. Now, that's impossible today and probably forever because, you know, the fastest computers

Starting point is 00:28:00 we have, if they were to run simulations of nature on the basis of first principles, the laws and the standard model of particle physics, you could simulate maybe a hundred particles. A thousand would already be on the edge. You can't simulate a protein molecule, a complex one, starting from first principles, from the laws of quantum mechanics and the standard model, because it's an explosion of complexity. So it is impossible to appeal to an empirical fact about strong emergence, but it is entirely possible to do that for dissociation. So that's how I would wrap up my defense. John, what do you think? Make sure from now on, we don't say he, we don't say John, you say you, because you're speaking to Bernardo and Bernardo.

Starting point is 00:28:49 I am in the background. I am just an observer. I did say Bernardo most of the time I was talking last night. So I'll try to say you and Bernardo. So I think you could strengthen your case by the work that's also been done on lucid dreaming. think you could strengthen your case by the work that's also been done on lucid dreaming. So I take, I mean, this sounds, and maybe that's relevant to the discussion we're going to have later about religion. This sounds very similar to sort of Vedanta ideas about Brahman and Brahman dreaming. And in the dream, that's what, how the world, I mean, so the dream mechanism is ultimately the main mechanism by which the ontology unfolds. And the problem that, again, arises for me is most of the empirical accounts of dreaming presuppose a distinction between conscious and unconscious processing to explain the phenomenology of the dream. So that, you know, I have a certain amount of consciousness, but I'm not aware of all the

Starting point is 00:29:49 unconscious processes that are then generating the alternatives. And it seems to me then, if you're going to invoke dreaming, you're going to invoke the ontology that we currently use empirically to explain it, which posits a very strong distinction between conscious processes and unconscious processes, like in order to explain why dreams have the content they do and why they have the features they do, et cetera. Like, why is this coming up? Well, because there's an unconscious process that's doing memory compression, it's removing parasitic programs, and that's why these figures come up, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think to invoke dreaming is perhaps problematic because it ultimately invokes the existence of an unconscious, which I don't think you can posit for consciousness at large. There can't be an unconsciousness for consciousness at large, because then you do have at the substantial level of your fundamental metaphysics, you have a dualism, and I know you reject ultimately such dualism.

Starting point is 00:30:49 So that would be the issue I would have there about that, if that makes any sense. It does, it does. We touched on it last time. And I appealed to the difference between this phenomenally conscious and phenomenally unconscious divide. And my point was, well, it's all phenomenally conscious, but there is still a divide. There is a divide between the two sides of a dissociative boundary, and there is a divide between metacognitive consciousness and non-metacognitive consciousness. Processes that are conscious, you are experiencing, but you don't know that you are experiencing them, so you can't even report them to yourself. Things like blindsight, for instance, that seem to be going in that direction. So, I am,

Starting point is 00:31:36 I just wrote a book about Jung's metaphysics, so this stuff is still very fresh in my mind. physics, so this stuff is still very fresh in my mind. I don't have a problem with the idea of an unconscious as defined implicitly or explicitly by Jung, Freud, and Janney, because I think they are very clear repeatedly about it throughout their corpuses, that what they are alluding to as the unconscious is psychic but non-metacognitive. Jung goes beyond, Jung adds even more stuff to make the definition even more specific. He says it has to be connected in a web of associative meanings, so you have to place it into context for it to be conscious. But the general idea is that they are not saying that the unconscious is non-phenomenal.

Starting point is 00:32:34 They are just adding higher level mental functions to what is psychic, which is phenomenal, I think, to differentiate what consciousness means. And even dissociation, I think, could be appealed to to account for the, quote, unconscious, in the sense that our ego is largely dissociated from the totality of our being. I mean, most of us, we identify with our adaptive selves,

Starting point is 00:33:00 not with our natural selves. That natural self we were when we were five years old, and by the time we are seven, it begins to slip away. By the time you go to college, it's gone. And then it's a struggle later in life to sort of reconnect with your natural self. So I think that speaks volumes. I mean, there's a lot of clinical evidence about this. And I think that speaks volumes to the idea that not only are we not metacognitive of the vast majority of our phenomenal contents, our experiences, but even the part of us that we identify with, that subset of phenomenal consciousness that we identify with, seems to be, in the context of our culture, very, very largely dissociated, whatever dissociation conceptually is, seems to be very largely dissociated from the totality of what we are.

Starting point is 00:33:55 That's a good answer. But I guess the reply, and I don't know how much more we can go on this, because this is, well, maybe going in this direction is also very, on its own, an interesting thing. So, you know, Searle made this, a similar argument, and then he argued that the unconscious ultimately has to be accessible to consciousness, and he did that in terms of, you know, anything that's cognitive is representational, representations are aspectual, aspectual is dependent on a point of view, and ergo he said he was willing to countenance something like a Jungian, he said Freudian, but that doesn't matter, I think, for the point he's making. Unconscious, and he would therefore say that even the

Starting point is 00:34:44 so-called unconscious processes, insofar as they become genuinely cognitive processes, have to at least be accessible to phenomenal consciousness. That's his argument. Now, the debate that swirled around that was he seemed to be denying what people have sort of called the Chomsky unconscious, which is an unconscious that is never accessible to us. For example, the processing that's happening right now for you, whereby the sounds coming out of my face hole are becoming ideas in your mind. You have no introspective and there's nothing, I can put you through psychoanalysis for 30 years and you'll never access that. And so, I mean,

Starting point is 00:35:20 it seems plausible to conclude that that's, you conclude that the cognitive unconscious doesn't need to have access to phenomenal experience in order to operate and process. And that's sort of the general view within a lot of cognitive psychology, that we, in fact, most of our explanations of human behavior require that Chomsky unconscious. Why can you only hold four chunks in working memory? You don't have any introspective access to that limitation. It's functional. You deeply depend on it, but you can't bring that into, you can't stand back and go, oh, that, now I'm experiencing why working memory is constrained. And so I guess, since we're in here, what do you think of the proposal of, if you'll allow me to call it as, we'll call it what Jung and Freud did just for purposes of distinction, the psychodynamic unconscious and what I'm talking about as the cognitive unconscious.

Starting point is 00:36:16 And what I was proposing, the connection was that I think a lot of dreaming, I'm not denying there isn't a psychodynamic unconscious for dreams. That would be ridiculous. I'm not claiming that at all. What I'm claiming, though, is that there's a psychodynamic unconscious for dreams. That would be ridiculous. I'm not claiming that at all. What I'm claiming, though, is that there's also the cognitive unconscious for dreams. And that seems to be something that's operating without ever needing to have access to phenomenal experience. Yeah, I think what we call consciousness, which is better called metaconsciousness, what we call consciousness, which is better called metaconsciousness,

Starting point is 00:36:47 and this is metacognitive awareness, which entails not only representation, but internal re-representation of mental contents. It's, evolutionarily speaking, a recent acquisition, right? It came hand-in-hand with symbolic thinking and language. So we are talking, what, 30, 50 thousand years? I mean, to say that it's the blink of an eye in the three and a half billion years of the existence of life on this planet is a major exaggeration. It's much less than the blink of an eye. It popped up yesterday. Now, why should it be comprehensive enough to encompass everything about the psyche? Why would evolution favor that? Evolution will

Starting point is 00:37:34 favor re-representation of things that would give us a survival advantage to ponder about, but processes that need to have very quick reaction time or which never need to be re-represented in order to be effective, why would we develop the ability to re-represent those? Why should the scope of metaconsciousness be all-encompassing? There's no reason for that. For Freud, I think the idea of a cognitive unconscious is much more palatable because for Freud, the unconscious is made of former contents of consciousness. So it is consciousness that is the mother of the unconscious. The unconscious is just repressed, forgotten, former contents of consciousness. So it's much more friendly to this idea

Starting point is 00:38:26 that for something to be psychic, it has to be at least in principle cognitively accessible. But for Jung, it's totally different because for Jung, consciousness is a growth out of the unconscious. The unconscious is creative. It's the matrix of being.

Starting point is 00:38:44 And I would think that Jung's position is more consistent with what we now know about the phylogenetics of the human psyche. human creature 200,000 years ago devoid of the ability to think symbolically, which of course preempts metacognition, because what is a re-representation but an internal symbol? And only 30 or 50,000 years ago we've developed

Starting point is 00:39:20 this ability to explicitly introspect into the contents of our psyche, I think that's more in line with the Jungian hypothesis that the unconscious is the matrix. And if that's the case, then I would say we have absolutely no reason to demand from evolution an all-encompassing consciousness in the sense that the depth psychologists defined it in other words metaconsciousness why should metaconsciousness be all encompassing that there seems to be no evolutionary advantage for that on the

Starting point is 00:39:53 contrary even a disadvantage because pondering entails delay and and some reactions need to be immediate and quick. So I appreciate that answer. I wasn't trying to give an ontological priority or a causal history. I was trying to say that our own consciousness in the argument about consciousness has an epistemological priority. And it seems to me that you're saying that our metacognitive, our introspective aspect of consciousness is actually fundamentally ontologically inaccurate. It doesn't grasp it as it truly is. And then my problem is it's sort of a Kantian argument. Then the consciousness you're talking about is kind of a thing in itself for which I don't have any experiential evidence.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And again, it seems to me that then epistemologically, we're back to a symmetrical argument again. I think you could say that whatever is metaconscious is perforce phenomenally conscious. In other words, it entails qualities, it entails experience, some experiencing of some form. So the jump from what is metacognitively conscious to what is only phenomenally conscious, but not metacognitively so, is an extrapolation in degree, but not in kind. Because it is still phenomenal phenomenal it's still phenomenal conscious of the same kind that you can become explicitly aware of when you introspect and in

Starting point is 00:41:33 addition to that there are things that i mean most people i think who who pay attention to introspection have had that experience you may become only later in life explicitly or that experience, you may become only later in life explicitly or metacognitively aware of something that retroactively you know you were experiencing all along. You just didn't know that you were experiencing those. I don't deny that. I don't deny that we can retrospectively have metacognitive access. But it seems to me that the way, I mean, the phenomenality of my consciousness is of a here and now localized consciousness, right? The idea that is consciousness at large is not

Starting point is 00:42:15 phenomenologically accessible to me, right? And so I was trying to point out that my only instance, my only, sorry, I want to say this very correct, not my only theoretical, my only phenomenal instance of consciousness is my own. I agree with you that that doesn't license solipsism, but that seems to indicate to me that you are like positing a kind of consciousness for which I have no phenomenological evidence. And that's why in the discussion I wanted to say, well, I don't have phenomenological introspective evidence for it. And you're nodding, so thank you. And so I need some independent argument from it at large

Starting point is 00:42:59 that doesn't just presuppose consciousness at large in order to make that move. You always need to extrapolate somehow, unless you're a solipsist. Then you say, all that exists is my personal experience, and everything else is a story I'm making up. So you always need to extrapolate. We agree on that. We agree on that. So take that as a given. Like I said, at that level, I'm a neoplatonist. And the intelligibility

Starting point is 00:43:25 of the, of the, you know, we, we, at least whatever, but we both call it the external world. We have different reference for it, but I take that for granted. And I take that as something that I take, I'm a realist about reason in that sense. Can you not get to mind at large via experience from psychedelics or a deep meditative state, Bernardo? If I follow John's argument line, you could say, well, in a sense, yes, but then that already becomes your personal experience. So to say that that's not your personal experience becomes a theoretical move based on what you identify yourself with, what you believe is information you could have access to as a person. So you can make that inference, but it's immediately a theoretical inference,

Starting point is 00:44:20 which doesn't mean that it's invalid. I think it's valid. Not at all. But in John's argument line, he can maintain his argument despite this, because he can say, well, yes, you can make that inference, but that inference is still based on your personal experience, your personal experience of something impersonal or transpersonal. However, in response to you, Kurt, and directed back to you, Bernardo, when we did discuss these experiences, and I've had them, like of the pre-consciousness event or profound experiences of non-dual oneness, they gave me, and if I remember correctly, and I may be remembering incorrectly because memory isn't reconstructive, one of the things I was just alluding to a few minutes ago, and I don't know how or why that happens. I mean, it's phenomenologically. But it gave me

Starting point is 00:45:16 something that at least sort of in a Kantian sense, I could give what Kant would call an intuition. There was some empirical experience that I could use to give content to the proposal you were making of cosmic mind. So although I agree with you, and thank you for defending me, that was gracious on your part, was gracious on your part, that it doesn't get, I think, beyond the symmetry issue. I do think that your acknowledgement about that that might be a better place to look for making the extrapolation, I found that personally helpful. I found that helpful in the discussion because I got a better sense of, ah, and that brings me back to the point where now maybe we can move. This is how we're apart. And I really do want to try and close the gap. I don't think we'll close it all the way. of what perhaps Whitehead is meeting by prehension. Because there isn't, there aren't objects, right? There's just, there's this oneness where everything is prehending everything else. Do you mind defining prehension for the audience?

Starting point is 00:46:36 Yeah. So for Whitehead, he's trying to get a word other than experience or feeling, which he's also willing to use. And that would be, I know you're not a panpsychist, Bernardo, but like I said, I'm sincerely trying to do bridge building here. And I did talk about that with Matt. So he came up with the term because he wanted to get away from the term's experience and feeling because they were laden with our egocentric sense of these terms. And that would make him guilty of kind of a lazy anthropomorphism, for example. And he was very worried about that. I think legitimately so. for example. And he was very worried about that. I think legitimately so. And to be fair to him,

Starting point is 00:47:30 you know, the people, you know, you've got Heisenberg and other people talking about these connections that seem to be going on between consciousness and, you know, you know, the emergence of quantum particles and things like that. And I don't want to get into all the around that. I'm just trying to give a bit of background for explanation. And I know Bernardo does not rely on that. And so I'm not accusing anybody of anything here. I'm just trying to give a bit of background for explanation. And I know Bernardo does not rely on that woo, and so I'm not accusing anybody of anything here. I'm just trying to... But so Jung was very interested in, and then, not Jung, Whitehead was very interested in, and he was trying to get at, okay, again, if we take the root of ancient epistemology rather than Cartesian epistemology, Gerson does a good job of it, right? The Cartesian project, which I think is prototypical for modernity's understanding of epistemology,

Starting point is 00:48:08 is you start from first-person experience and you try to build the world out from that. And that has become extremely problematic. Ancient epistemology says, no, assume that knowledge is real and then what kind of ontology must there be in order for there to be knowledge? And it works outward in rather than inward out. And I think Gearson makes a good case for we should go back and really look at that

Starting point is 00:48:31 as a serious alternative because of the deep binds epistemology is now in. I think all the attempts to build foundations have basically crumbled. Okay. All of that said, Whitehead said, I'm going to presuppose that there's intelligibility and there's causation. And he's very well aware of the Humean problem, you know, about causation. And then he's very well aware of Kant and he's trying to get beyond both of those. So what he's saying is what we need to understand is how the past is real in the present. Right? So instead of thinking of the events as billiard balls that are isolated from each other and somehow have some specious present content, what we have to see is how the past is realized, and I'm using that in both senses, in the present.

Starting point is 00:49:20 So the idea is, his idea is, and if you think about it, let me do a little bit of a thought experience to help make this plausible. I'm just arguing for its plausibility right now, right? So if I ask you, you know, what caused the sinking of the Titanic, notice that your answer is dependent on the event you want explained. Like, well, it hit an iceberg. But why did it sink in the North Atlantic? Oh, well, because they were competing with the Americans.

Starting point is 00:49:44 Why did it sink on April whatever? Well, because the iceberg broke off then. Why is there ice there? Well, here's the previous period of glaciation. And eventually, what you get is the entire previous history of the universe, which is the actual, and this is sort of a Hegelian point, which is the actual explanation of any event. And then Whitehead said, well, all of these events are somehow prehending each other insofar as they come into this event. So things are prehending each other insofar as the past comes into the present, and also insofar as the present affords the future. And so you can think of all of the universe coming into

Starting point is 00:50:25 this event, but also that event over there. And then all of these events are also being drawn together. All these new emergent events are being drawn together into the new events that are happening. And so things have this prehensive relationship to each other. They are realizing, and I'm really playing on that word, they are realizing and being realized in each other. And then Whitehead said, and this is also why he used the word prehension, because it's at the root of our word apprehension, comprehension, a fundamental sort of intelligibility process. And his idea is that realization within things, very similar to Plotinus' idea that everything is contemplating, but it's not like how we contemplate, right? It's of the same kind

Starting point is 00:51:13 as the cognitive realizations that we're having when we are comprehending or apprehending things. And so there's a deep continuity between the way reality is realizing itself and the way we come to moments of realization of reality. Did that work at all or was that really confusing? Ian McEwgurst is making this point now recently. It's his latest. It's new to me. And so, I mean, I had a conversation with jonathan pageau who should definitely appear on this channel by the way kurt um and i'm happy to come on and have a

Starting point is 00:51:50 discussion with him at some point there is a conversation between me and jonathan no no yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what i meant i mean one of these um and because i was i was in debate again this kind of debate. Sorry, Bernardo, I'm talking quite a bit. It's okay. Go ahead. It's very enjoyable. So I was having one of these fellowship debates, theologos with him, about this. And he said to me, he said,

Starting point is 00:52:19 well, John, don't you think there's something like relevance realization going on in reality at large? He was proposing, of course, the platonic idea of the logos. He's a Christian Platonist because he's an Orthodox in the sense of Eastern Orthodox Christian. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, and we sort of had to tease it out because it was sort of an unclear idea. But we worked it out together. And then I realized he was proposing something like Whitehead.

Starting point is 00:52:42 You know, here's all the possibilities that are metaphysically available. And then there's something that constrains them, the probabilities that constrains them to actual events. And he said, and then that affords and makes possible and it rules out certain things. And he says, isn't there something analogous? And then I thought, hmm, that's a very interesting proposal, that there's something analogous to intelligence going on in the universe, and there's something analogous to how relevance realization works. And that would help to metaphysically ground the intelligibility of the universe, because there would be a participatory conformity, a shared kind of identity between the way reality is realizing itself and the way cognition realizes itself. And then for me, that came together in the Shetani's proposal, that religion is the real self-realization of reality.

Starting point is 00:53:33 So when you get to these states of pure consciousness, enlightenment, there's no deep difference between the relevance realization going on here, and if you'll allow me, the intelligibility realization going on out there. And that actually, because I think without genuine participation, and I think this is where Bernardo and I perhaps agree, you don't have a real response to absolute skepticism. There has to be some way in which the mind and the world are fundamentally the same in order for knowledge to be possible between them. And so I know this isn't your position, Bernardo, but I hope you could see how, you know,

Starting point is 00:54:09 in the last two weeks in reflection, I feel like it's closer to your position at least. It's probably closer than you think. I mean, I wouldn't go as far as to give complete ontological power to cognition or to the epistemic side of things. But there are many lines of evidence indicating that how the world is cognized plays an enormous role in what the world can be said to be. There is a physicist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, I quote him a lot recently, Marcus Miller, and he tries to develop a physics of first-person perspective. So his idea is that

Starting point is 00:54:57 what we call the objective outside world is constructed by an inferential process that we make. We ask ourselves questions like, what does the world need to be in order for me to account for this observation? And he claims that if we construct our world inferentially like that, then statistically you can prove that your world will be consistent with mine and with everybody else's, even though it's not an objective world. It's constructed by our own inferences. It emerges from a first-person perspective.

Starting point is 00:55:30 We also have evidence now, well, evidence, there's mathematics sort of showing that. What's his name? It's a British neuroscientist. I forgot his name. But he shows that unless perception would be largely inferential, in other words, instead of mirroring the states of the world as it is in itself, we sort of construct it by inference.

Starting point is 00:55:53 Unless that is the case, we couldn't maintain our structural and dynamical integrity. Carl Friston? Carl Friston, exactly. Right, in predictive processing. Yes, yes. There's a lot of work going on right now, and if people are interested, there's a video I recently had with Brett Anderson about the need to integrate predictive processing and relevance realization models together.

Starting point is 00:56:19 I won't go into the argument in detail, but the main argument is, and Friston, by the way, has moved and said when he's using the word inference, he's using it like not necessarily representationally. He's embodied inactive senses of that. So I'm not pinning him to any kind of propositional tyranny. He has explicitly moved away from that, as has Andy Clark. So when we say inference, they always do this now, which is fine. I'm happy with that. I want to make clear that they're not falling into some sort of simplistic Cartesian thing. But the idea is you need something, what's called precision weighting within predictive

Starting point is 00:57:00 processing. It's basically the attentional function. And the main argument is what you can see is the relevance realization machinery work and the precision weighting that's at the core of predictive processing actually integrate really, really nicely together. And so, yeah, I do think, you know, Princeton's idea that the brain is predicting itself proximately. And as it gets really good at predicting itself proximately, it distally ends up predicting the world quite well. And like I said, I'm a realist about this because I think, and again, the evidence that most of our perception is accurate prediction rather than accurate detection. I don't like when people say it's a hallucination because hallucinations are by definition not true. What we have is accurate prediction, right? So it

Starting point is 00:57:52 looks like I'm seeing the whole wall over there is white. Actually, I'm subtending a few pieces, sampling, and I'm doing really, really good theorizing, again, in scare quotes, right? That's giving me accurate prediction, right? And so I take it. So again, for quotes right that's giving me accurate prediction right yeah and and and so i take it so again for me there's there but i i take it that there's something about the way the world is such that that works right um and and there there that there's an intelligibility i so like for example what ep epistemologies am I rejecting? Just to be clear by contrast. I'm rejecting a very romantic epistemology that says the world out there is a blank canvas on which I project.

Starting point is 00:58:33 And the construction is arbitrary and subjective on my part. And I'm also rejecting the empiricist position. No, no, I'm just a blank slate that receives the truth from the world. I think both of those are deeply undermined. I agree with you on both accounts. Yes. And so that's why I've tried to coin this idea of transjectivity, the idea that the world's intelligibility and my relevance realization machinery together are co-creating the knowledge. You have to talk to Jan Magogorst. I have. I talked to him once.

Starting point is 00:59:07 We had a beautiful conversation. We do want to talk again. It's just a matter of us. And what we agreed is I would wait until his book on wisdom was done, which it now is. So I'm going to reach out. I think he finished. He finished this week. You're supposed to finish mid-May.

Starting point is 00:59:24 So I'm going to reach out to him and, yeah, we'll have another discussion with him. It was a wonderful discussion. So for me, and I don't know if we want to segue now. I don't want to bully the conversation. But for me, that, and Bernardo's right. I mean, sort of the deepest ontology for me doesn't have to be resolved one way or the other. Although I am, like I said, I'm have to be resolved one way or the other. Although I am, like I said, I'm trying to show that I take his work seriously and I'm trying to respond by moving my position. And because I think we should be, the Socratic ideal is we should be

Starting point is 00:59:57 responsible to well-presented arguments. So I'm not denying that, but this notion of transactivity and the co-determination, co-creation between intelligibility, which I call a participatory knowing, for me, that's the ultimate grounding relationship for meaning in life. And I think one of the reasons why I kept hesitating around the Cartesian proposal is I think our, and Bernardo, I think, said something very consonant with it, our reduction of our sense of who we are as cognitive agents to proposers of propositions has disconnected us from procedural, respectival, and ultimately this participatory kind of knowing that grounds and grounds in depth our capacity for being connected to ourselves to each other in the world and that for me is the most significant contributor of the meaning crisis not independent of all the historical reasons but

Starting point is 01:01:00 i think the historical reasons ultimately bite into us existentially at that deep kind of forgetting we are having. Now, we're not forgetting it functionally, and this is where Bernardo's distinction between, you know, it being realized and it being metacognitively appreciated comes to the fore. Although we've lost our metacognitive access to all these kinds of knowing, they're, of course, still operating in us, or else I wouldn't see this floor as walkable. I'm not doing that. Right. It's the world.

Starting point is 01:01:29 This is Gibson's idea. The affordance emerges in the co-shaping of the world and me together, etc. But that metacognitive loss, which I think translates into a spiritual loss, I would say grounds out in an ontological issue, namely the issue of what is it about the meaning making that, what makes that possible, what affords that. And so what, I'll say two sentences, hopefully, or three, and then I'll turn it back over to Bernardo. I mean, I'm trying, and it's sincere. I'm trying to move and get closer because I think that at least the movement that I'm capable of making right now, maybe I'm still resistant, but I'm trying to be responsible, right, helps to strengthen this account, this ancient epistemological account of the deep participation between intelligence and intelligibility that makes meaning in life

Starting point is 01:02:32 possible for us. And that shouldn't be understood as the semantic content of our propositions. And I think even though he may go deeper than I do, we at least converge below that propositional level of meaning making. At least it seems to me. If the goal was for us to get closer to each other, I think we can high five right now. We've met at a place where I'm entirely comfortable to be with you. I'm more and more open to this idea of co-creation. Although I'll be honest with you, I started out as an objective idealist. The world is really out there. It is whatever it is. And it happens to be mental.

Starting point is 01:03:15 And it presents itself to my dashboard of perceptual instruments as what I call the physical world. But more and more as I keep studying the work of people like ian marcus miller yourself uh it's becoming clear to me that i think even at an ontological level this participatory co-creation is deeper than just at at the story level it's not just a nice story that there is there is ontological teeth to this you know what i mean and for me what is important is that if we have empirical and rational reasons to contemplate a theory of reality seriously that does give this participatory co-creation ontological teeth then we should leverage that because otherwise it becomes just psychology

Starting point is 01:04:08 and not real. And I think that's where the search for meaning can flounder because people like me who are always critically questioning everything, you know, if this story reinvests my life with meaning and it intuitively resonates profoundly with me, but I don't have a coherent, explicit, and well-constructed conceptual theory of reality that gives it plausible ontological teeth, then I run away from it driven by this need to not deceive myself, which for me is instinctual. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:04:49 I agree. And so I think it's fair and honest to say that I'm trying to do that. And, you know, and part of that process is, I have explicitly argued that I think, in fact, it should be, is a dialogical process. I'm aware of my side bias and confirmation bias and things like that. And I'm also aware that the Neoplatonic tradition talked about both the dialectic within the individual and between individuals, and then between individuals and reality. And coordinating those three dialectics is something that I think is going to be needed for doing this. So I appreciate what you said. I had understood that.

Starting point is 01:05:35 How do I want to put this? I didn't do enough. I'll be more self-critical. I didn't do enough about trying to bring together what you might call the cognitive scientific machinery and what I'll call for my sake, the neoplatonic ontology. I talked about it, but I did not foreground that in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I've been trying to do that more recently in conversations like with you, like with Matt, like with Sam Adams, and like with Jonathan Pajot. So that is very much, and this is not to, I mean, I think I'm pursuing them reliably and rigorously. I'm not claiming to be anywhere near finished.

Starting point is 01:06:21 That would just be ridiculous and hubristic. I'm not claiming to be anywhere near finished. That would just be ridiculous and hubristic. So I take your point seriously is what I'm trying to say. And I see myself as trying to address that lacuna in previous work, which is one of the reasons why I want to be here and do this, what's happening right now. I don't like versions of idealism. And I've made it clear that I'm not putting this on you, Bernardo. I don't like versions of idealism that afford spiritual bypassing, that afford

Starting point is 01:06:55 not taking seriously science. One of the things that continually impressed me is both your knowledge of and your respect for empirical and theoretical science. You should know, maybe you move in different circles than I do. That's not the norm for the people that I interact with when I'm largely up against people who propose cosmic consciousness and things like that. And so to the degree to which that's being used to do spiritual bypassing, I will remain opposed to it. Because like you, I think if we make it purely a psychological project, we're ultimately still being romantics. We're ultimately still saying, I'm making, and even the favorite word of the romantics, I'm expressing it. I'm expressing it onto the world, right? And

Starting point is 01:07:47 so I'm deeply critical of that. So I do think, and I think we agreed on this last time, but just to bring it foregrounded again, I do think that there's an inescapable ontological dimension and a needed reconstruction of our ontology in order to finally address the meaning crisis. Now, the one concern I have, and this is not a philosophical concern between you and I, is the issue of how do we do that without making it a requirement that everybody who wants to respond to the crisis engage in the education that's required to undertake this kind of ontological discussion? So do you understand what I'm trying to say? It definitely has epistemological priority, but we don't want to hijack the existential

Starting point is 01:08:40 project by giving it existential priority. Exactly. That's the key question. Yeah. What would be useful would be to get your views on mind uploading, because I think this will further the distinction between you both. So Bernardo, what are your thoughts on mind uploading? Is it possible? Is it ridiculous? So could you be more specific, Kurt? Because there's different, I mean, mind uploading is we're being uploaded into some universal simulation. That's very different from I could upload my mind

Starting point is 01:09:07 into some computational device. They carry all kinds of different ontological commitments, etc. The Ray Kurzweilian one. You want to ask me what I think about it? Complete and utter nonsense. Rubbish, not deserving of

Starting point is 01:09:24 academic credibility because it's a category confusion we are basically pre-assuming that a description of our minds is our minds because what you upload

Starting point is 01:09:42 is a description, what you upload is a copy of states, at least relative to one another. Not even absolutely, because the substrate is different. One is an organic substrate, the other one is a silicon substrate. But even if you ignore this glaring, absolutely significant difference, and you fall into the sea of abstraction that today is plaguing academia to the point that we have achieved liftoff from the terra firma of reality and we now engage in endless pure abstraction even if I concede which I don't but even if I were to concede that the substrate has no significance which of course it has, but even then, to upload a copy of the states

Starting point is 01:10:30 from one substrate to another doesn't necessarily mean that you've transferred the thing in itself which is described. I will use this metaphor again. I use it all the time, but I don't want to overuse it, but it brings it to life. I can simulate kidney function on my computer accurately down to the molecular detail, but that doesn't mean my computer will be on my desk. So mind uploading is something that you could see the same way. You can upload a very accurate description of the states of my mind, the dynamisms of my mind, into a silicon substrate and replicate those dynamisms in that other substrate with complete accuracy. That doesn't mean that my mind has moved to that silicon substrate or that the silicon substrate has a conscious copy of me. To assume that it is entails so many assumptions about the nature of mind, the nature of metabolism, the nature of silicon, the nature of information. I mean, it's a hidden pile of arbitrary unjustified assumptions that one needs to overlook to take this idea even seriously to begin with.

Starting point is 01:11:48 So I think this is just an expression of the profound confusion that faces our culture today and which affects the most intelligent, intelligence defined in a very restricted, old-fashioned way, but it unfairly affects the most intelligent segments of our culture more than people who are, quote, less intelligent, between air quotes, but are much more grounded in reality. Look, I am, by original education, a computer engineer.

Starting point is 01:12:24 I emphasize the engineering over computer science, which I could also say I was. But engineering is grounded in the sense that, you know, whatever theories are, engineering is about what works. That's how I started. And we had, at least the people I was involved with, we had physical intuition about what computation is. But today I see computer scientists out there, some of which you have interviewed, I found out a couple of days ago, who are waving a PhD around and get a lot of airtime. and get a lot of airtime. But these guys don't have anything more than a fake conceptual intuition about what real computing is.

Starting point is 01:13:10 They operate on 20 levels of abstraction, pre-assuming the existence of all kinds of tools, all kinds of APIs, all kinds of things. And they live in that world of pure abstraction, so disconnected from reality that some of them will, so disconnected from reality that some of them will tell you, well, I built a conscious machine the other day. Oh, really? Okay. So what do you think of Josje Bok's idea of consciousness is a simulated property of

Starting point is 01:13:35 computation? It's totally nonsensical, spout out by somebody who has no clue what he's talking about. Okay. Do you mind telling the audience audience because what i said was one sentence description do you mind giving them a better sense as to what yosha's point of view is and then telling us why you think it's nonsense and then john i imagine you agree but i imagine you agree perhaps for a different reason so that at that point i'd like you to come in yeah i agree for those reasons and convergent reasons but i'll be quiet quiet. So, Bernardo, explain Josje Bak's point of view. Well, I don't know. I'm not a specialist on his particular point of view.

Starting point is 01:14:12 I recall that I have had an interaction with him, but many years ago, he came to my website, and ultimately, I think I had to block him because he was, how do you call it, trolling me online at some point. The beginning of our exchanges were objective, were based on argument, but it got to a point where he just sort of went down the deep end. I don't know what motivated that change.

Starting point is 01:14:41 I'm not a specialist in his particular content. I have seen snapshots here and there. So I'd rather speak more generally of this notion that consciousness is a simulation. This is one instance of a trick that is very tempting to apply in our culture. It's a trick against your own self, which is to explain what is fundamentally not explainable in terms of the assumptions we make by redefining that which we want to explain. You see, for instance, we have no idea what consciousness is, right? There is a hard problem of consciousness.

Starting point is 01:15:19 So if we make reductionist, physicalist assumptions, and I'm using the word reductionist here to differentiate that from John's position. If we start from reductionist, physicalist assumptions, you have an impossible problem to deduce the qualities of experience from physical parameters alone. That's called the hard problem of consciousness. So consciousness becomes unexplainable. So what's the move that a lot of people do? They define consciousness as opposed to explaining it. So some people will say, well, I solved the heart problem. Consciousness is the electromagnetic field dynamics surrounding your neocortex.

Starting point is 01:15:58 That's not an explanation. That's a redefinition. I can do the same thing. I can say consciousness is the involuntary wiggling of my left big toe. Hard problem solved. I have a friend who calls it the Pinocchio theories of consciousness, which are explanations by redefinition. And it's not entirely arbitrary because they are usually leveraging some empirical correlations. Like there is a correlation between electromagnetic field dynamics surrounding the neocortex and reported experience.

Starting point is 01:16:28 Or there is a correlation between electrochemical neuronal firings and reported experience. So it leverages those correlations loosely and then explains by redefining the term. Now, we only get away with this with the one profound mystery that seems inaccessible to our reductionist physicalist assumptions, which is consciousness. For everything else, it would be immediately perceived as a clown if you tried to do something like that to explain anything else. But our intuitions of plausibility fail when it comes to consciousness. We sort of become gullible, collectively gullible to all kinds of nonsense because it's such a mysterious thing that you sort of give yourself freedom to entertain stupidity, validated by the notion that you need to entertain something far out in order to sort of

Starting point is 01:17:27 squeeze this into the parameters of reductionist physicalism. There is no other way. Therefore, it becomes plausible by construction. But that plausibility is an artifact of the assumptions you make. It has nothing to do with reason and empirical evidence. So to say consciousness is just a simulation is as arbitrary as to say consciousness is just a simulation is as arbitrary as to say consciousness is the wiggling of my left big toe. Are you explaining anything by saying this? No, you're explaining nothing. You are just engaging into an orgy of conceptual fantasies and losing ground with the concreteness of the world, with the concreteness of our own being as organic beings, metabolizing beings. I find this approach to things no better than fantastical fantasizing, just as stupid as

Starting point is 01:18:15 fantastic fantasizing. John, your thoughts? Well, first of all, that was beautiful, and I enjoyed being present to that. You know, I also object to, you know, explaining woo with goo, which a lot of these things are, you know, like, you know, this is weird and this is weird. Oh, therefore. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, so I agree with a lot of what Bernardo said. I think it's a ridiculous proposal. And I think the fact that we're taking it seriously

Starting point is 01:18:45 flies in the face of good theoretical argument, like Bernardo just said, and even our accumulating empirical evidence. I'll talk a bit about the second first, because I want to give more emphasis to the theoretical points. I mean, what was giving this some initial plausibility was computer-human interface.

Starting point is 01:19:04 And initially, what's surprising is two things. So, for example, notice how this doesn't get as much press as the other. So, we're getting machines that can look, do significant EEG and tell what you're thinking, tell if you're thinking of Apple or Pear, never anything abstract, by the way. Well, it turns out that now we've realized that all of those experiments were bullshit. They all suffer from failure of replication if you control for confounds within the data. So it all goes away, right? So it's initially, wait, right? Maybe, you know, finding one-to-one neural correlates between our shared concepts and what's happening in our brains

Starting point is 01:19:47 is, you know, not, maybe that's something we should challenge. Michael Anderson, for example, in his book, After Phrenology, has said, we should be giving up the idea of like strictly localized functions, et cetera, in the brain. So even that kind of reading idea that I can somehow do that, so I'm not saying it's been falsified. I'm saying the stuff that gave it empirical plausibility has vanished. And so the historical inability to find the neural correlate of consciousness, right, which everybody sort of grudgingly agrees to right now, points out that this is actually a really, really hard problem, just at an empirical level. So the claims that, like the idea that, wow, given our current empirical success, I can plot this

Starting point is 01:20:37 graph, and in 2040, that's bullshit. That is just not paying attention. We are not having that kind of empirical success. Now, that's not the more important argument, but I wanted to make that argument because that argument undermines the graphs that seem to lend the air of predictability and science to this. empirically extrapolated from. Okay. Now, notice what I'm going to say one more time. That wasn't an empirical, you know, falsification, but it means don't take that seriously, because it's not extrapolation. Okay. Now, the theoretical point. I agree with everything Bernardo said, and let me try and say something that I think is convergent. So, I mean, first of all, you know, the work of my colleague, Brian Cantwell-Smith, at the University of Toronto, in the philosophy of computation shows that the model of computation that's being presupposed by these people is very inadequate. What is that model, by the way? And so that model, as far as I can tell when I look at it, is the proposal, which was taken very seriously in first wave cognitive science.

Starting point is 01:21:44 I'm very familiar with it, that cognition is a formal system that we can capture, that the mind is very much like the game of chess. What do I mean by that? Well, chess is a formal system in that it doesn't depend on the matter that it's made out of. I can play chess with pieces of wood. I can play chess with pieces of stone. I can play chess with helicopters with stone. I can play chess with helicopters with flags on them, a building top, right? And what's really interesting is I can start playing chess in wood, move to metal, move to stone, move to helicopter, and it's all the same game.

Starting point is 01:22:15 And so, and I can do the same thing with computer files. See how I can move them around? Because they're purely formal systems. The problem you face with formal systems is there are knockdown arguments that they cannot, they render qualitative experience causally inert. They have to. And also that they cannot, formal systems are formal systems precisely because they are completely internally defined. And therefore, they cannot grasp the meaning relation. The problem of how to get the computer to find its processing meaningful to the computer cannot be answered within formal systems. Formal systems can't explain development. If your formal system, if your cognition is ultimately a formal system, it is bound by a logic, a system of axioms and

Starting point is 01:23:02 functions. You know what you can't do? You can't compute within a formal system and get to a stronger formal system. You can't work within predicate logic and if I just manipulate it fast enough, I'll get modal logic. That can't happen. But human beings go through qualitative development. I am capable of cognition now that I would never be capable no matter how much information you gave me that I would never be capable to watch how much information you gave me that I was as a five-year-old. So formal systems can't deal with the inherently developmental nature of cognition. They can't deal with the inherently non-propositional aspects of cognition, like procedural knowing, perspectival knowing,

Starting point is 01:23:41 participatory knowing. Also, and I think Bernardo made this point, I want to reinforce it. I argue, and this is a, it's not consensus, but it is a prominent and increasing position within 4E cognitive science, that cognition is deeply continuous with the principles of life. So that cognition is like, not like chess, it's more like football. so that cognition is not like chess. It's more like football. The actual causal properties of the thing doing it are relevant to its functionality. So there is no cognition without life,

Starting point is 01:24:13 biologic, autopoetic life. And so I think everything I've said is consistent with what Bernardo said, but I think of all of these arguments converging with the ones he said. And so that is not common sense plausibility. That's normative plausibility. There's a lot of convergence of independent lines of argument and evidence. There's a paucity of empirical evidence for it. So the position is radically implausible to my mind. I think that that's

Starting point is 01:24:41 very close to what Bernardo was saying when he thinks it's bullshit. And I think that we're pinning our hopes on some kind of silicon rapture into simulated heaven, I think is a ridiculous response to the meaning crisis. And just the idea, like what is the ontology of a simulation? You're ultimately relying on the idea that somehow it's an illusion. What is having the illusion of consciousness? Where's the ontological basis of that? Okay, Bernardo, what are your responses to this? And please do so with the same intensity yelling at the camera.

Starting point is 01:25:20 It was beautiful to sit here and watch John do this. I wish it had gone on a little longer. I was not ready to have it finished yet. John's looking clean. I don't know if that's the same person that he said clean in all caps. John's looking clean. I don't know if that's the same person that said John is sexy from before. I'm clean shaven now.

Starting point is 01:25:41 I had a beard last time. Maybe that's what they were referring to. Okay. All right. Bernardo. Look, I think this ties back to my favorite part of John's message, which is, who are we looking up to for wisdom? What do we consider wisdom?

Starting point is 01:26:11 we consider wisdom? Is this the arbitrary, implausible fantasizing of Joshua Bach? Is that what we call wisdom today? Or is it just a fancy flight from reality, which we give us license to do because we are facing problems that our assumptions do not allow us to solve, and which is quickly going towards a religious direction. And John hinted on it, didn't elaborate on it. I was hoping he would continue on that path. But singulatarianism, a la Ray Kurzweil, is a distorted expression of the religious impulse in all of us. It's part of being human. I agree. That you sort of, you aspire for a greater power, a power that would be or is in control, a power that is aligned with yourself in terms of shared values.

Starting point is 01:27:02 So you sort of, you exert control by proxy. You do not have control over nature, but that greater power, which does have control over nature, shares your values. So it's controlled by proxy in the psychology of the situation. And with a very restricted and poor

Starting point is 01:27:22 set of assumptions, like reductionist physicalism, that instinct, that aspiration towards, you know, luminosity, religious luminosity, has to find a way to express itself through the restricted channels it's given. And what happens then? Well, it's singulatarianism. It's computers will be conscious. Not only that, you will be able to upload your consciousness into computers, thereby becoming immortal, which is one of the key religious ideas. You become immortal, achieving immortality. machines will be able to construct ever more intelligent machines with an exponential growth. And at some point, there will be a machine that is effectively God, the Almighty,

Starting point is 01:28:12 which controls everything and would keep us fed, healthy, and entertained like in a Disneyland-type zoo as inferior animals having a great life. And we could look upon this great singularity machine as the almighty father. So what you see there is the religious impulse expressing itself in profoundly distorted ways, which are outright contradictory to reason.

Starting point is 01:28:41 And in that sense, you might say, well, as contradictory with reason as any other religion. Okay, I take that. But it is much more deficient of meaning than all the other religions, because it aims at satisfying only sort of the base level of religious aspirations, meaning immortality and the Almighty God, but it fails to address what is the meaning and purpose of our lives. It gives you sort of a way out of our deepest anxieties, which is the anxiety of death

Starting point is 01:29:16 and the anxiety of not being in control. Now you can upload yourself and live forever and exert control by proxy because this supercomputer will share your values since you made it. But it doesn't give us, you know, Viktor Frankl's or John Vervaeke's will to meaning. It doesn't give us a path towards that. It may buy us the sense that we have then time,

Starting point is 01:29:39 infinite time to figure out the question of meaning later. But it doesn't give us a path towards that, unlike the other religions. All the world's main religions give you some kind of path to a realization of meaning. So, yeah, I think that's what's going on. I think these movements like Singulatarianism and Consciousness Uploading. They are just an expression of the religious impulse and as, at least, as irrational and as devoid of empirical foundations,

Starting point is 01:30:14 as devoid of internal logical coherence as the better-known religious myths going on around. I thought... I was just going to say, that was beautiful. I don't know if you've heard it, Bernardo, but it goes back to your point about, you know, the elevation of the nerds. I've heard Kurzweil described as the rapture of the nerds

Starting point is 01:30:36 from the sort of Christian evangelical idea of the rapture of the saved. Yeah, so the rapture of the nerds. I don't know if you've heard that. I just thought I'd throw that out for you. Yeah. I do want, at some point, Kurt, to, I want to, like, respond. Sure, sure, sure. Respond quickly, if you don't mind. Well, I'll just lay down a foreshadowing. I would really like to discuss more, I mean, complete agreement, but I think this is symptomatic. It's not an isolated thing.

Starting point is 01:31:07 I think we see throughout our culture, many attempts to create ersatz religions to try and give expression to this impulse, which tells me two things. As a psychologist tells me, we should be paying attention to this impulse. If it can't be repressed, it ultimately comes out in frustrated forms. And besides, you know, the scientific, you know, fantasies, we, of course, have pseudo religious political ideologies that are doing similar things. So what is that impulse? And why is it there? I think is a very important question we should ask. Secondly, and in connection with that, and I'll just lay this down, I want to come back and say more about this. One of the deep differences is the offloading of the requirement for transformation. So one of the big things that happens in the Middle Ages with the advent of normalism, and then it gets taken up much later and extended,

Starting point is 01:32:01 and it's part of the loss to the will to meaning, I would say, is the idea, and you can see quotes of this, like I could get your quotes just from Descartes saying this, that we can access the deepest truths without undergoing even the most superficial of transformations. Before that turning point, there was the idea that deep truths required substantial, right, that you couldn't separate the knowledge project from the wisdom project. That deep truths required deep transformation. Even in the way people read the Bible, for example,

Starting point is 01:32:34 was fundamentally different. I can talk about that later. I'm not proselytizing for Christianity. I'm just pointing to that as an example. And so what you see with the rapture of the nerds is I don't have to do any transformation. I can get the deep truths just by doing some abstract theorizing. And then I can then realize the existential change, also just in term. And so I'm just expanding, I think, Bernardo, on what you talked about when

Starting point is 01:33:01 you're saying there's no path. There's no path for transformation. There's no path, right? And I, think about how ridiculous this claim is. We believe very deeply for everybody until we're out, like, I believe that kids have to go through fundamental transformations before they're capable of accessing certain ontological aspects of reality. And I think most people, if, right, would agree with that. It's like, no, no, the kid needs to mature more. They need to grow more. Right? Before they can... So don't explain Heidegger to a five-year-old for something like that.

Starting point is 01:33:34 Right? But we've got this fictional myth that when we're 20, that stops. Yeah. Exactly. You don't need to go through any more cognitive transformation or development in order to access deeper ontological commitments. Now, Plato, for my primary example, held exactly the opposite view, right? As the child is to the adult, the adult is

Starting point is 01:33:58 to the sage. Just like you had to go through a lot of transformation to be able to see through self-deception and self-illusion to get deeper ontological purchase. You still have to do it now. There is no spiritual bypassing. You can't just adopt a bunch of beliefs. So the path, I'm trying to really deepen the path. I'm trying to really say, like, we have got to give up this fiction that we're finished in terms of our cognitive access to reality when we're 20 or 25 years of age. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes.

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Starting point is 01:36:08 else wasn't bullshit which i think it is about kurt's file at what age do you want to be uploaded when you're 20 man i don't want to be a 20 year old forever how about 30 i don't want to be a 30 i'm 60 now so i can talk do I even want to be 50 years old forever? Nope. It has become, I don't know, it probably has to do with the computer revolution of the 70s and the early 80s, that the notion of nerdiness

Starting point is 01:36:37 has become elevated to an ideal. It's like, it's okay, it's good to be a nerd. It counts in your favor because we are so focused on propositional knowledge and, you know, the nerdish things, factual and propositional knowledge. And we lost sight of, look,

Starting point is 01:36:59 it's not okay to be a nerd. A nerd is, by definition, somebody who has a profound imbalance in the development of a number of psychic functions by focusing on only one. It's a jack of one trade.

Starting point is 01:37:14 Bernardo comes from a more continental position just because of listeners. Psychic doesn't mean anything to have to do with ESP. He's using the term, right? We in North America typically say psychological, just so people aren't misunderstanding him here. I don't want him to make certain

Starting point is 01:37:30 people in California happy by the indication of that term. So go ahead, please, Bernardo. I just thought that was important to interject. Thank you for that. I don't mean that. I mean psychic in the psychological sense. We have many psychological functions, emotional functions, feeling functions, intuitive functions, sense

Starting point is 01:37:48 functions, people who really can perceive the world with the richness of the world, which I can't, for instance. And the ability to think according to axioms and rules of derivation, which is the nerd way of thinking, that's one psychic function, a sort of human computer, a human calculator,

Starting point is 01:38:11 who is able to write code. Look, I know that. It was my life. I used to do that. But to focus on that at the expense of maturity on all the other aspects of the psyche, of the mind, the human

Starting point is 01:38:26 mind, is not okay. This should not be elevated by our culture into a sort of goal, a sort of ideal. It's like... You're talking about the veneration of intellect? Only the modern sense

Starting point is 01:38:44 of it, not the ancient sense of it, not the ancient sense of intellect, not the ancient sense at all. Exactly. Exactly. It's a veneration of a particular form of intellect, which we now think it's okay. I mean, before we knew

Starting point is 01:38:59 it was not okay. It was an offense to be called a nerd. Somehow it has become okay. Where did we take this wrong turn? It's not okay to be called a nerd. Somehow it has become okay. Where did we take this wrong turn? It's not okay to be a nerd. It's okay to be a complete, mature, ever-evolving human being, ever-learning human being who has emotional intelligence,

Starting point is 01:39:16 who pays attention to intuition, who has empathy, who can share in the feelings of other people and therefore can know what other people are going through in their own minds, who has sensory skills, who is able to taste the flavor, the subtleties of the flavor of food and wine. How many of us can't do that? Who has maturity about life, which in the US, I think I am with James Hillman on this.

Starting point is 01:39:49 Hillman used to say that the US is in love with innocence, which is precisely this notion that the innocence of dividing the world into good and bad, black and white, that's something that's a childish way of looking upon the world because there is evil in all of us. Things are more subtle and complicated than just this division between two polarities. But in the US, according to Jim Hillman, this has become an ideal, this cult of innocence,

Starting point is 01:40:19 which is a sort of a denial of the process of maturation. It's unfortunate. So somehow we are no longer elevating maturity, which goes hand in hand with wisdom, to its rightful place. We now think of old people as burdensome and old-fashioned, people not in tune with the times, as opposed to mature people who have a lot to teach and share.

Starting point is 01:40:52 We have this cult of innocence that Jim Hillman used to talk about. We have this idolatry of nerds, which is my way of talking about it. Sorry to interrupt. I've been thinking about for quite some time, which is the way that we view the elderly in our culture. I wonder if the quality of a culture is how you view the elderly. And in our culture, in the West, we view them as...

Starting point is 01:41:17 Well, we barely view them. We barely look up to them. And if we do, it's only as a repository of stories of the past. How is it that we should be viewing them? Well, look, I think you can make the mistake both ways. If you look at an old person, and by definition, you expect wisdom from that person. Yeah, you're going too far. Because an old person, old people have the same variability that non-old people have.

Starting point is 01:41:44 that non-old people have. But I think what happened is that we've missed... We are no longer developing our sense for subtlety and nuance. We have become incapable to recognize subtlety and nuance. We want to divide everything into neat drawers with a clear label, because that's how we compartmentalize things, and that's how we give ourselves intellectual justification for not thinking things through. We just label it quickly, put it in a drawer, and we say, this is A, this is B, this is black, this is white. And that means that all the subtlety and nuance where the core of the message is flies over our heads. And because we've lost this sense for subtlety and nuance, we don't recognize the wisdom in old people because that wisdom expresses itself in subtlety

Starting point is 01:42:38 and nuance, not in clear-cut recipes. And everybody wants an easy ride now, a clear-cut recipe. Just give me the seven steps to happiness. You know, that's what people want. And guess what? The treasure is just underneath a few layers of subtlety and nuance. You cannot bypass those. But we've lost our ability to see that. Therefore, we've lost our ability

Starting point is 01:43:01 to recognize true wisdom, including true wisdom in other people. We live in a falsified, in an arbitrarily simplified world, so to say. And we make enormous efforts to confirm to ourselves that that's how the world is, because it makes life more easier. So I want to follow up on that, because first of all, the last point that Bernardo made, I want to give it some experimental empirical teeth because so, and this is work from one of my colleagues at the University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher, which does work on working

Starting point is 01:43:40 memory. So one of the things that Hasher made clear is we've gone from sort of a simplistic working memory. So one of the things that Hasher made clear is we've gone from sort of a simplistic working memory is just a holding to working memory is a higher order relevance filter. That's why things like chunking work for working memory. Anyways, there's just a lot of good evidence for that. Now, why am I bringing that up? Just give me a sec, because there's very important correlations between measures of working memory, especially its ability to filter out irrelevant information, and measures of general intelligence. They at times approach a parity. So there's something deeply connected there. Okay, what does this all have to do with wisdom and old age? Okay,

Starting point is 01:44:18 so when you take old people and young people and you give them standard IQ measures, the young people crush the older people. Why? Because almost all the problems on a standard IQ test are well-defined problems, like mathematical problems, a pattern completion where one of the answers is available and you have to choose it. These are all well-defined problems. So old people, you know, they don't do very well because the young people get the answers faster. Well, why? Well, the older people, the negative view is, well, they're more distracted. And so, you know, let's put the old people away. They're distracted. We can get to the bottom line. We're younger,

Starting point is 01:45:01 we're fast. You are. You're younger, you're fast, and for well-defined problems, you outperform. But Lynn Hasher did some work, and she's even got a thing called Older Brains Are Wiser Brains. It's in the title, right? Who? Yeah, Lynn Hasher at U of T, University of Toronto. And so what happens with, you can give people, there's all kinds of ways of establishing this empirically. What happens with older people, for example, when they're reading a text, they will keep more of the possible meanings of a term active than young people. So that looks like if the point is to get through, the older people are distracted. And if you give them a well-defined problem, they're over here, and young people are zeroing in on the correct answer that

Starting point is 01:45:45 there is to be found. But what if you switched to an ill-defined problem? An ill-defined problem which we don't know, you know, we don't know what the important representation of our initial state is, the goal state. What are the relevant operations? What are the relevant patterns to pay attention to? Now when you do that, older brains out outcompete younger brains because they keep more options alive, which makes them better at dealing with the multivariate dynamics of situations like messy,

Starting point is 01:46:15 emotionally laden, interpersonal situations, which are, by the way, prototypical situations where we look for people's wisdom. So I'm not claiming, Bernardo's right, that there's no simple correlation, old age wisdom, but we ignore the potential for being more wise with or poor old people because we have this seriously algorithmic notion of what intelligence is that blocks us from seeing this defect as something that actually affords wise response

Starting point is 01:46:49 to ill-defined problems. Now, I think that gives a lot of teeth about what Bernardo was saying about losing nuance, losing nuance. I think for me, and the, I mean, there's a lot here about propositional tyranny and that, but I think what, I like to put this within the Frommian perspective, that I think we have confused the having of propositions with the becoming of wise, the becoming of mature. So Fromm famously, he's an existential psychologist, he divided human motivations up into two broad camps. There's the having needs. These are needs met by having something, having water, having oxygen, having food.

Starting point is 01:47:32 And it's very important that we be able to categorize that, manipulate those objects, secure control over them. We have what Buber would call an ayat relationship to them. And there's nothing wrong with that. If you don't have an ayat relationship with water, if you treated water as an important individual that you shouldn't trespass on for moral reasons, you're going to die, right? So you need to have that. Then he said there is what he called the being mode. I'm not quite happy with that term, but what he meant is that there are needs that are met by becoming being. Like, I have a need to become mature. So these are

Starting point is 01:48:03 developmental needs. And these are needs that are not met by categorically manipulating things. These are needs that are met by the project, the Viktor Frankl type project of meaning making. Because what I'm doing with becoming mature is I'm trying to construct an identity that is responsible to the meanings in the world. Neither one of these is good or bad, but what Fromm argued is we get into modal confusion. We try to satisfy being needs within the having mode. So then instead of becoming mature, I buy a car. Instead of being in love, notice we even use this word, I have a lot of sex. And the point is, we're not satisfying the developmental needs. Because again, my point,

Starting point is 01:48:53 we're not going through any significant transformation. We're just acquiring stuff. And we do this epistemically. We acquire propositions as opposed to going through fundamental transformations. So we're locked in modal confusion. And so we spin this faster and faster because it doesn't meet the needs. And what we're told by our culture is because you need more, and you need it more frequently and more often. And so we spin faster and faster and faster as our being needs atrophy, and we fall into addictions around our having needs. And I think that's not just in the marketplace of mercantile products. I think it's in the epistemic marketplace. We are doing the same thing. We are confusing the having of propositions with the transformation that's required to become wise and virtuous. Okay. You said many interesting points.

Starting point is 01:49:39 This has been fantastic. John, what you just mentioned reminds me of addiction and the reciprocal narrowing. Yeah. At one point, I would like you to talk about love, which is the opposite of that reciprocal opening or some positive feedback effect there. And the reason why is because in many religions, God is tantamount to love. And in Bernardo's view, many people would see mind at large as synonymous with God, which means there may be some relationship there that I'd like you all to explore. Well, I mean, and this goes from one of, I have a couple of slogans

Starting point is 01:50:17 on my, in my signature in Gmail. And one of them is love is, it's a classical slogan from the Christian Neoplatonism, love is its own kind of knowing. And I'll try and work towards that in importance. So it's not just that God is love, it's that love is a kind of knowing. And John in the epistles says God is agape, right? And he's trying to bring both of those sides together. I think there are similar things in Sikh, not Sikhism, Sufism, because it's basically an integration of agape kind of love with Neoplatonism. But I'm just trying to make clear that I'm not making an exclusivity imperialistic claim on Christianity's behalf. Neither am I dismissing it. But I think we do well to pay attention to that tradition, because I think of Jesus as the sage

Starting point is 01:51:11 of agape. I think that's a way of trying to understand him. I think there's similar ideas in the Buddha with Karuna. And you want to talk about Jesus and the Buddha, maybe we can do that also. Yeah, we will. We will. Either way, go through the explication on love. So the idea, this came to me, right, there was a bunch of pieces, but I have the great good fortune to be friends and colleagues with Mark Lewis, who's one of the premier neuroscientists and cognitive scientists doing work on addiction. And he's doing it, he did it also from the inside because he was also himself an addict. And you're always an addict in some sense. So if you want to read the autobiography,

Starting point is 01:51:50 you can read Memoirs of an Addicted Brain. Part of the reason why he went into neuroscience was to understand addiction. I have a friend of mine who said people go into psychology to study their defects. And since mine is relevance realization, again, I guess I'm worried about being irrelevant. But the point is that... Are you being facetious or are you being honest? Both. My intent was there's some truth to it, but hopefully there's also some humor in it.

Starting point is 01:52:24 So what's Mark's model? You know, Mark was, you know, one of the first people to propose a dynamical system interpretation of emotions. He's a forerunner in a lot of ways. He's also, you know, he's also a gifted therapist. He's kind of polymath in this important way. And so I was also, I was at a conference, and it was not just him, but a bunch of psychologists and neuroscientists where it was, you know, a mini, it was a symposium within the conference on basically challenging the disease model of addiction. And the disease model of addiction is the idea that, you know, you ingest the substance and it's like a disease and you have to get rid of the disease. substance and it's like a disease and we have to get rid of the disease. And that aligns with a lot of sort of governmental policies and the way governments like to deal with things. Even though the evidence that prohibition is a completely failed strategy with dealing with addiction. So what they, and it doesn't account for the data well. So you have weird phenomena like this. You have Vietnam soldiers using opiates in Vietnam.

Starting point is 01:53:28 Opiates, opioid prices, right? And then they come back to the United States, and without any therapy or anything else, the vast majority of them stop using. They're in highly stressful situations. They're taking opioids to escape trauma. They're ingesting this substance that's inherently addictive. They come back and they don't. That's just one among many facts, empirical facts. It's like the disease model

Starting point is 01:53:51 isn't fitting well. I have this substance, it infects me and it compels me. So instead, Mark proposes a learning model of addiction. And he calls it reciprocal narrowing. It goes like this. So I'll use alcohol just because I can presume that most people are familiar with that intoxicant. So I face some stressful situations. So I drink some alcohol to reduce the stress. The problem with that is it reduces my cognitive flexibility, makes me much more susceptible to impulsivity, hyperbolic discounting. It basically shrinks. And what happens there is my world, my world, I don't mean physically, but the options available to me in my world shrink. Now that means that my problems become more exigent and pressing on me,

Starting point is 01:54:37 right? And I've lost the ability to manipulate and get to alternatives. So now I'm more stressed. So I'm going to drink more alcohol and I'm going to reduce my cognitive flexibility even more. And then the world's going to shrink down, and then I'm going to shrink down. And I use this idea from Clifford Geertz about an agent arena relationship. Our agency is always co-defined by how we turn the world into an arena for action, and the arena is always co-defined with the type of agency we're assuming. And so what happens is your agency is shrinking and the world's optionality is shrinking until the world can't be any other than it is right now. And you can't be any other than you are right now. And that's when you're addicted. That's addiction. And this fits the data way, way better. But governments don't like this because the kind of changes you have to bring aren't changes

Starting point is 01:55:31 where you can simply prohibit a substance. So what I was having, literally having lunch with Mark, and I've done a lot of work on Plato and the Platonic notion of anagage. And I said to Mark, I said, but if there's reciprocal narrowing, isn't there reciprocal opening? And he went like that. It was like, yes, of course, there has to be. And then I thought about this, and this is clearly what Plato advocates for. You can see it very clearly in the Republic. You know, I get, I bring about a sort of intra-psychic harmony, and that reduces my impulsivity, my self-deception.

Starting point is 01:56:06 I see more real patterns in the world. I then get better at detecting real patterns. I internalize that, and I better afford my inner justice. And then that allows me to connect better. And so I reciprocally open. And Plato, I think, rightly describes that as love. Now, he thinks of it as eros, but Socratic eros is very different than our meaning of eros. I'll put that aside. Let's just say it's love for now. Well, why might that be the case? Well, if you look at the work of

Starting point is 01:56:35 Aaron, that's a last name, not a first name, how do you get people to sort of fall in love with each other? You get them to do mutually accelerating disclosure. You get them to be on theolocutions. get them to do mutually accelerating disclosure. You get them to be on theolocutions. Yeah, sort of. So what it is, is if I open up a bit about me and you reciprocate by opening up a bit about me, first of all, I start to see you better and you start to see me better. So we're doing mind-sight resonance. And that allows me to, not only can I open up more, I can open up better because I can open up more, but I have a better sense of how you're seeing things because you've opened up to me. So I start to open up more and better, and then you reciprocate by opening up more and better. And we do this. We reciprocally open,

Starting point is 01:57:14 and that will make people fall in love. Now, not necessarily erotic love. It can be phileic love. It can be agapic, right? But that reciprocal opening, we know it as love. It is a way of knowing by which we bind ourselves to, right? We bind our being needs to another being, and we reciprocally go through transformation and open up to each other. And I think we can fall in love. This is, I think, a platonic claim that we should think about taking seriously again. We can fall in love with reality. We can fall in love with the world in a profound way. And I think part of the meaning crisis is getting people so they can fall in love again with reality and with the depths of reality.

Starting point is 01:57:57 And so the reciprocal opening and the love and the anagoge, I think, all converge in sort of a coherent manner. And I think reciprocal opening is also what's happening in therapy. People come in with the propositional knowledge of what needs to change. It does almost shit. So there's almost nothing for them. What a good therapist does is take them through a process of reciprocal opening until they get to be a different person living in a different kind of world that is now viable to them. They want to be that person over there living in that world, but they don't know how to get there because they don't have the religious

Starting point is 01:58:34 and wisdom traditions that afford people the serious play, the developmental play in reciprocal opening that affords that kind of transformation. So I hope that answered your question. you may think that this is beyond you, but that's false. Brilliant provides pellucid explanations of abstruse phenomenons such as quantum computing, general relativity, and even group theory. When you hear that the standard model is based on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3, that's group theory, for example. Now, this isn't just for neophytes either. For example, I have a degree in math and physics, and I still found some of the intuitions given in these lessons

Starting point is 01:59:24 to vastly aid my penetration into these subjects, for example electricity and magnetism. Sign up today at brilliant.org slash toe, that is T-O-E, for free. You'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Try four of the lessons at least, don't stop before four. And I think you'll be greatly surprised at the ease at which you comprehend subjects you previously had trouble grokking. Links are in the description. This notion of reciprocal opening, so that's agape, that's love, is synonymous in many religions, especially Christianity, with God in terms of John mentioned in John's epistle. And your theory has mind at large,

Starting point is 02:00:00 which is similar to God. So is there any link between reciprocal opening and mind at large, which is similar to God. So is there any link between reciprocal opening and mind at large? And then we're going to get to religion without a religion, or what do we do to solve our current meaning crisis? Well, let me start by saying what John just said makes all kinds of sense to me from a first-person experience perspective. This idea of love as this reciprocal opening, as becoming more than you thought you were in that dance of love. It makes all kinds of sense to me, and I think it's a beautiful way to visualize it

Starting point is 02:00:34 and communicate it. It's a very hard act to follow after that. So I will make a comment, Kurt, on your question, but restricted to a point I think is important too, not meant as a complete answer. I can't follow what we've just had, and I'm completely in peace for not being able to follow what we've just seen.

Starting point is 02:01:02 But I'll make a comment that I think is important. Would love be part of mind at large? Surely, love is clearly a part of nature. It's a kind of... a force that binds things together. Maybe the correlate of love on the screen of perception is gravity. But we also know that the universe's expansion is accelerating. So there is this other thing we call dark energy right now, which seems to have the opposite effect.

Starting point is 02:01:35 To deny that what we call evil is also part of nature would be naive, I think. And I think it's not only naive, it's dangerous because it has led to a sort of an extreme attempt to spiritualize reality. And I'm going to use the words spirit and soul, not in the religious sense, but in the psychological sense. So, spirit is sky, air, sunlight, abstractions, single-sidedness, sumum bonum, the sumum bonum of the New Testament, the pure good. That's spirit. There's this flights of abstraction and spiritualization. And soul is on the other hand.

Starting point is 02:02:23 Soul is earthly. It's moist. It's dark. It's where the roots suck their life energy from. It's Hades, the mythical hell, but also the place where the goddess of spring emerges from every year to renew life. So this is all soul, it's the ground of reality and it's morally ambiguous. soul. It's the ground of reality. And it's morally ambiguous. It's a place where psychologists know that there comes insight and profound deception. Good and evil. It's where the human shadow resides. And we

Starting point is 02:03:00 have this tendency, probably started already with Christianity because the God of the Old Testament was morally very ambiguous. A tribal God, very morally ambiguous. And with the New Testament, God was pure good. And to this day, our culture seems to have this notion that we have to go always only towards spirit. to go always only towards spirit, this single-sidedness of light and goodness and abstraction and lightness, not only light, but lightness, this airy, floating quality of spirit.

Starting point is 02:03:36 And what happens is that because this has become our ideal, we close our eyes to the soul side of ourselves, to our shadows, to the earthly, to the dark, moist, womb-like, cave-like aspect of ourselves, which is the place in nature that is pregnant with all potentialities, all unrealized potentials. And where growth ultimately comes from, where the energy of the spring comes from,

Starting point is 02:04:04 the energy of the spring comes from, the energy of transformation. There is a kind of self-honesty that is required to be in contact with that soul side of life. And we have a culture that does its best to eliminate it from existence, to deny it, to become completely single-sided. And then what happens, and that's the dangerous thing, to become completely single-sided. And then what happens, and that's the dangerous thing, what do you do with a part of yourself that is intrinsic to you, but which you do not recognize?

Starting point is 02:04:31 You project it. So where does the evil go? It goes to the criminals in prison. It goes to the Palestinians in Gaza, or the Israelis across the world, depending on which side you are. It goes to the Jews during the time preceding the Second World War, since the late 19th century. You project that, and the moment you project it, that's when you get into conflict. That's where war comes from. That's where civil unrest comes from.

Starting point is 02:04:59 That's where all the crap, all the shit that's happening comes from. And that's why we become unable to deal with it with maturity. It's because we've become unable to see that in ourselves, to empathize with that, and therefore have a subtle, nuanced approach to how we deal with it, a mature approach to how we deal with the dark side, how we deal with the evil forces. approach to how we deal with the dark side, how we deal with the evil forces. We are totally innocent about how to deal with it because we are so focused on love as opposed to the dark energy. We are so focused on air and clouds and light and abstraction as opposed to the humid, dark, earthly ground of our being where we are rooted. And this lack of sophistication, this lack of self-awareness is what makes it impossible for us to have empathy and to understand the other side.

Starting point is 02:05:56 And if you cannot understand the other side, you don't need to agree. You don't need to give it free reign. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying let's give free reign to the shadow side. No. But if you don't want to give free reign to the shadow side, you have to know it. You have to know what it is. You have to know what it's doing. But if you repress and deny it, you don't see what it's doing. And that's when it gets free reign. You see, it gets free reign precisely by being ignored, by not being legitimized, by our not giving it, not telling it the following words.

Starting point is 02:06:29 I see you. I recognize your right to exist within me, but I shall not give you free reign. Our inability to do that is what sets off this madhouse that we are seeing right now. It's right now popping up in the Middle East, but it's always popping up somewhere. So that's what I wanted to say. Every time we talk about love, and I'll link back to your question finally, every time we talk about love and we want to say,

Starting point is 02:06:56 well, mine at large is love, it's God, it's the sumum bonum, it's all true, but it's half of the truth. And ignoring, denying the right of the other half to exist, to be there, is immature and dangerous. So, with the same conviction that I would say, yes, love is mind at large, it is God, I would also say, and so is the energy that expressed itself through Hitler. And it's intrinsic to nature and to humanity I mean your backyard is a bloodbath right now I think I mentioned to you last time you know ants cutting up earthworms in pieces while they are wiggling alive I mean it's a it's a disaster look at

Starting point is 02:07:40 nature nature is a bloodbath what What's happening? And to deny it, to deny its existence, to not grant it the right to exist is a very mature, very dangerous move. And today, an extraordinarily unpopular move. I mean, you run the risk of being culture cancelled very swiftly, if you say what I just said. very swiftly if you say what I just said. Now, why do I say that? Because I don't give a damn if I'm culture cancelled, you know. I don't need anymore this, you know, recognition from the outside. It's fine, whatever way it goes. But I think it's very dangerous. It's a degree of psychological unsophistication and immaturity that sits at the source of the evil we see in the world. Because to control the shadow, you need to grant it the right to exist and to be there, and only then can you police it. What does it mean to understand the shadow part of you, the evil part of you? Does it mean to, in John's words, see its point of views or goals as plausible?

Starting point is 02:08:43 What does it mean? And how does one practically do it? Recognize that it exists. Recognize how it feels. Before you rush to judgment and you say, well, my shadow side is wrong. Fine, you will get there. But first, I will speak metaphorically because there's no other way to speak about it. First, look at it and say, I see you. You exist in me. And it is okay that you exist in me. I am not going to try to weed you out or cut off your head. I'm not going to deny your rights to be. You are there. It's all right. However, I have a different point of view. I am metacacognitive I can process things in a way that you cannot and I will not give you free reign

Starting point is 02:09:29 now you may even to the degree that is safe and conducive to health and harmony you may even throw some breadcrumbs to it every now and then indulge your shadow side in a safe, controlled way,

Starting point is 02:09:48 so it can also express itself as part of nature. Because if you shut the door on it and you say, not only do I not see you, I don't grant you the right to exist, I don't even recognize that you exist, that's where it's going to undermine you from the ground up, from the roots up. If you go all towards the sun and you forget where you were rooted, you know, you will be able to do photosynthesis, but you will not have the minerals and the water that sustain your life. Trees are a great metaphor for this. They need the sun, they need the spirit, but they are rooted in soul. They are rooted in the darkness, moist realm of moral ambiguity

Starting point is 02:10:26 where the shadow is. So I think for lacking this degree of sophistication, not only lacking it, but elevating it as a positive cultural value, to lack that sophistication is extraordinarily dangerous because it decreases the end of empathy it turns the world into a dance of projections that have very little to do with reality there is more in common between

Starting point is 02:10:53 me and my enemy than the bernardo who was 30 years old would ever dare contemplate as possible and the moment you see this you may think, I don't want to get to that realization because I would hate myself. No, you would not, because that comes with a degree of kindness and acceptance towards yourself that you wouldn't be capable of before. And that same kindness then just gets extended to the world at large that ability and i think old people have this ability they've gone through enough shit that they know that things are never quite black and white that behind that evil there is something you share you see to understand

Starting point is 02:11:38 something doesn't mean that you need to agree to understand an evil act doesn't mean that you condone it, but we've come to associate understanding with approval. We conflate these two things and this is a disaster. Look, I don't need to approve of what the SS did to understand what Austrians from Austrian villages, what motivated them to join the SS. I can understand that. And I do understand that. Do I condone it? Do I approve of it?

Starting point is 02:12:11 Absolutely not. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't make an effort to understand, that I shouldn't make an effort to empathize in some way, because it's only through that understanding and empathy that we will solve our problems, that we'll solve our conflicts. There's a lot I want to say in response to that. First of all, yeah, I agree with that critique of sort of pure airy spirituality. I try to make the case that the very, you know, the very same processes that make us adaptively intelligent also make us permanently susceptible to self-deception, that you can't extricate one from another. The heuristics that allow us to avoid combinatorial explosion

Starting point is 02:12:57 are the same heuristics that bias us and prejudice, and trying to separate and trying to somehow get the one without the other is a farcical endeavor. It's a futile endeavor. And now it doesn't mean we can't ameliorate the way Bernardo was saying, but trying to get some sort of ontological separation, I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding about how intelligence and adaptivity and meaning making work. And so what I'm proposing now is much more like the Buddhist perspective. You know, realize that everything is threatened by dukkha. Realize that everything you do, every domain, no matter what domain you're in, you can fall prey to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, because that's what dukkha is.

Starting point is 02:13:43 And that's one of the noble truths. And I think that actually lines up with how we're increasingly understanding the functionality of cognition. Second riff point, and these are all related, I see there's another point where I'm maybe now a little bit closer, because I see Bernardo's mind at large much more like the Tao than like God. I'm a Tai Chi player. I have been for, you know, three decades. And so, this is not just something I think about propositionally. I mean, in fact, you don't really know that, you don't know the Tao until you're doing the Tao. You can't just, like, read about it. And the idea that the Tao is disclosed

Starting point is 02:14:27 between... You all know the famous yin-yang, and notice that there's the little dot of black within the white, and white within the black, and the line between them is sinewy. And there's a dynamic interpenetration, an inter-co-creation between the yang, which is the expansive airy, and the yin, which is the earthy grounding. And so, if mind at large is more like the Tao, and that our primary relationship to it is one of ongoing maturation. So you do Tai Chi in order to become more mature in your capacity to deal with the yin and the yang. And you hope that it percolates through your psyche and permeates through your life. And that's what you're actually, and that's how to love it. So, I mean, I would suggest that there,

Starting point is 02:15:18 that there's a way of, there is, and Bernardo expressed, there's a kind of love that is not trying to exclude the shadow. There is even the reciprocal opening to the shadow. And I want to point out something else. This is right out of the Neoplatonic tradition. Now, Bernardo was speaking, and perhaps he was speaking metaphorically, but I practice and I'm involved in, like, IFS and other things like that, emotion-focused therapy, in which you don't just sort of describe it to yourself. You actually enact these inner dialogues. You actually go into an imaginative space. You'll have a part come up. And instead of trying to exclude it, you try and mature it. You try and, first of all, appreciate its adaptive functionality and then get it to realize that that functionality is now maladaptive and it needs to grow.

Starting point is 02:16:06 And this is why IFS, Mark Lewis, by the way, recommend. Can you give a specific example? Sure. So internal family systems therapy is, I'll try not to spill my own guts too much on this. But so I have a part of me that when sort of feels threatened by overwhelming experience, it's kind of like it wants to smash. It sort of smashes things. It wants to sort of, you know, just disrupt whatever is happening now so that this situation cannot unfold anymore. And so you sort of, well, what's that for? And then you start to appreciate, oh, well, that ability to smash things, that's

Starting point is 02:16:51 adaptive. When properly aligned, it allows me to criticize and escape from oppressive things that are trying to hold me back. And so you get into dialogue with this part and you try to say, well, you're just smashing everything. Do you need to smash everything all the time? And first of all, it says, yes, because if I don't, you're going to get overwhelmed. And then you say, but can you step back and you sort of become aware of me, right? As Bernardo said, the metacognitive me and this wider scope. And you see all the skills that are available to us now. It's like the Tai Chi. I've developed a finesse. I don't just have to smash things. We can carry out that function, but could we do it more like a martial artist? So I even offer my part when it starts to run. I said, hey, why don't we just sort of do

Starting point is 02:17:33 almost enact Tai Chi internally? And it starts to get into a different framing, and it starts to think, oh, wait, I can discharge this function, but in more sort of finesse interaction rather than just going in and smashing it. And then what happens is the wanton impulsive aspect of this that's confusing urgency and intensity with legitimacy, it starts to become less confused. It starts to realize, oh, wait, I can meet the goal. First of all, the goal doesn't have to be met the way I thought it has to be met. And I can meet the goal by First of all, the goal doesn't have to be met the way I thought it has to be met. And I can meet the goal by, you know, doing this other thing. And it's a process of basically

Starting point is 02:18:10 internal dialogue. Sometimes you're imagining the part and you're talking to it. Sometimes it's more like a direct just intuition. Sometimes you get imagery that comes up, but you learn. It's a skill. You learn to enter into dialogue with this. It's very similar to something that's convergent in EFT, motion focus therapy, the empty chair technique, which is you feel an inner conflict, and what you do is you move between the chairs, and you'll have this part.

Starting point is 02:18:38 Go to that part. Take its perspective. Take its identity. Say what it wants to say. Now go to this other part. Take its perspective. And I've done this. I've done emotion-focused therapy with Les Greenberg and stuff like that.

Starting point is 02:18:48 And what happens is the two parts start talking to each other. They start realizing that they're there. I don't want to be too anthropomorphic. But what happens, the point I'm making is this, what's happening is a revolution right now within the psychotherapeutic world of all these independent lines of convergence on inner dialogue being an effective thing. Now, one of the things that's helped is the Jungian version of this was too tied to visual imagery, speaking therapeutically. And there's a wide variation, including no capacity for visual imagery in the populace. We have at

Starting point is 02:19:23 least 5% to 10% of the people that can't do visual imagery. So active imagination is not available to them. So what's happened is people have tried to say, well, can we save the baby from the bathwater? And can we get other forms? And they've moved into more discourse, dialogic ways of carrying on these inner dialogues. And they're sort of gaining a lot of traction within the psychotherapeutic world. And I find that very interesting, because for me, that's just the Neoplatonic tradition brought back. Because it's very clear that with things like theurgia, the Neoplatonists were doing this inner kind of dialectic dialogue, and then they were doing it between each other in philosophia, and then they were doing it contemplatively with

Starting point is 02:20:09 reality, and they were coordinating these three together. And I feel like, and this is just an intuition, so don't give it too much, but I feel what these different fields are all starting to converge towards each other to potentially give us a set of abilities that would give us a very powerful kind of way of... Notice what Bernardo was doing. We're going through a transformation so that we can realize, not just in thought, but in our being, some fundamental patterns within ontology. But I do think that all of that is also still a kind of love. But again, not the spiritualized airy. It's the ability, like you say, there's a love, right? It's like what Plato talks about when he compares Philea Sophia to

Starting point is 02:20:52 Philea Noachia. I'm not trying to destroy the shadow. I'm also not condoning it. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to open it up and open myself up to it in the right way. At least that's how I understand it. And I don't know if that's consonant with everything you're saying, Bernardo, but those are some of the riffs I wanted to get on. I'm very excited about all of this happening right now because I participate a lot in these emerging communities of interpersonal dialogue and man, do they become religious for people almost automatically. I'm very much, like I said, really trying to understand the dialectic within ontology. I think, by the way, that that separation from soul and spirit is, again, we get both in our culture. We get, you know, just a sort of giving into raw emergence,

Starting point is 02:21:37 a kind of, you know, which is, you know, to take the soil but not try to grow from it, right? And then you have like the tree just receptive to the sunlight of emanation. And, you know, even Plato was critical of that. He said, no, no, look at the sun and then go back down into the cave. Because if you don't go back into the cave, you haven't really understood the sun, right? You didn't get it. You didn't get it, right? And so I'm really trying to bring all these things together in my work. So I was just, I'm sorry, it's not a counter argument. I'm just expressing sort of convergence and excitement with what you were talking about. I see these symptoms as positive symptoms rather than the generation of ersatz religions to the meaning crisis.

Starting point is 02:22:29 So I'm interested how, I agree with Bruno, you see all of this stuff, the Kurtzweilian and all this crap going on over here. But there's also this, is on these emerging communities of practice and how they're also converging with each other. Sorry, that was a lot, but I was just really inspired by what Bernardo had to say. To speak personally, I try to go by this screenwriting adage which says that the more personal the pain, the more general. So if you try to speak in platitudes, no one relates. But if you're more honest, then people tend to relate. I get this distinct feeling that I don't love myself.

Starting point is 02:23:17 And I'm unsure how to do shadow integration with one particular aspect of myself, that'll say. Now there's probably 20. But one is laziness. I'm unsure how to do shadow integration with one particular aspect of myself, that'll say another probably 20. But one is laziness. So I work hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. And I feel like some well, one, I need to work hard, because to prep for some of these podcasts requires quite a bit of work. But every minute, almost every minute that I spend that I'm not working, I'm unconsciously beating myself up saying that I'm wasting time. I'm wasting time. I need to get back to work.

Starting point is 02:23:51 And when I'm spending time with my wife, which I love, that's like, all I love to do is work and to spend time with my wife. If I'm honest, when I'm spending time with my wife, I'm thinking, why aren't I working right now?

Starting point is 02:24:00 And I, so I, I have a feeling that comes from me not loving myself do you think what interjection what do you do do you do you do the opposite when you're working do you think why am i not spending time with my wife sometimes sometimes oh but i would say it happens more often okay but it does happen that i when i'm working, I'm always looking forward to spending time with my wife. I actually, I'm so happy that the two aspects of my life that I get to do almost 100% of the time is work intensely and spend time with my wife intensely. And when I'm spending time with my wife, I'm not working. It's like watching a movie, going for a walk and so on.

Starting point is 02:24:40 I'm trying to point out something to you. Very frequently, and this goes back to what I said a few minutes ago, very frequently the reason why we can't integrate with something is because of aspect disguise. Let's first give, I'll give a description that's not pertinent to your case, and then let's try and apply it here. So somebody will come into therapy and they'll say, why are you here? And they'll say, I'm stubborn. Like, I'm stubborn. I'm inflexible. And you don't tackle that directly. You talk to them for a while and you get them off somewhere and you say, tell me something you really like about yourself. And they'll say, I'm perseverant. I really keep going. And they don't realize that those are two different aspects of the same function. And I'm trying to get you to realize if your laziness is also the positive

Starting point is 02:25:18 function of taking you into relationship with your wife, then you can see that it's not just a drag on your work. There's also a positive aspect to it. And you've got to bring the two aspects back together. If they're disintegrated from each other, you can't integrate with them. They have to come back together because you can't properly appreciate, in all the meanings of the word appreciate, that reality and that function and integrate with it unless it has been properly reintegrated back together. You leave it like this and you try to integrate with this and this is going to kick in the ass. Or you try to integrate with this and this is going to pull you into, right? And if

Starting point is 02:25:58 you don't put them back together, you can't integrate with it. That's what I'm trying to get you to see is your laziness. Also the thing, maybe that's also, Hey, I want to connect with my wife. I want to do, there are things other than my work that are important. That was just a suggestion. I mean, you need to do therapy to do, do this, but I'm trying to get you to see like that, like you have, it's a Bernardo, it's a much more nuanced thing. Part of the problem with the current discourse around shadow integration is it's very simplistic. It's almost like there's a black figure there, and what I'm going to do is just sort of bind to him, right?

Starting point is 02:26:34 Exactly. That is not helpful. That is not therapeutically helpful. And that failure to deal with aspect disguise is what blocks people. failure to deal with aspect disguise is what blocks people. And one of the things about IFS and other therapies is they're trying to get people to see both aspects of any function. Sorry, I was just trying to be helpful there. Definitely are. And Bernardo, one time you told me that I take myself too seriously, and I do. And I think I've taken myself less seriously since you've told me that but not drastically it's difficult for me because I'm in many ways I'm extremely insecure I don't feel like

Starting point is 02:27:12 I know anywhere near as much as I need to know when I look at what I have to learn not just for these podcasts but what I would like to learn from my life these theories of everything's 200 of them man I know one percent of what i should know and i'm constantly beating myself up like i should be farther along i felt like i wasted five to eight years of my life in depression and i'm so far behind where i should be and i look at other people and think at how much i'd admire how much they know and then it pushes me to go even harder, but sometimes it exhausts me. And I have a feeling that this and a lack of shadow integration is, well, many other aspects are the reason why I feel the way that I feel. And, well, I'll just say that.

Starting point is 02:28:00 Well, you sound like Socrates. I'm trying to be both funny. I'm trying to be a little bit therapeutic here. I'm trying to be funny because humor gets around defenses, but I'm also trying to challenge you. I'm trying to say, well, you know, really knowing that you don't know is,

Starting point is 02:28:18 first of all, that's, that's the Socratic, that's the central Socratic insight because only, and not, not knowing it the way, you know, two plus two equals Socratic insight, because only, and not knowing it the way you know two plus two equals four, but like, you know, Ivan Illich knew he was going to die, right? Knowing that is the thing that grounds and makes possible Socratic humility. It makes possible wonder, and wisdom begins in wonder. So the gift you have out of this, the positive aspect of not knowing is your capacity

Starting point is 02:28:45 to find this wondrous and to find it that it calls to you and calls you beyond yourself. If you knew all of this, you'd be static and dead. But you are capable of awe and wonder precisely because you recognize that you don't know and you know it and you take it seriously. But that's, again, I'm trying to get you to see, right? You have to put the two aspects together. Yes, there's times when I feel that too, you know, like, you know, I wish I was as well-read as that person. I wish I was as mature as that person. And you can get down. But then I realize, but the part of me that's making me down, I can aspect shift it. And that's the part of me that can be transformed. Oh, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:29:26 And that's good. Because not knowing makes me responsive to other people. Makes me responsive to the world. Makes me capable of falling in love with other people and falling in love with the world. Because if I can't find them wondrous, I'm not going to fall in love with them. Yeah. yeah i will speak out of my own experience and intuition it's not an area where i have expertise unlike john so i i will speak as if what i am saying were facts but it's just how i see it okay

Starting point is 02:30:01 it's grammatically it's easier to just make statements and not keep on adding disclaimers all the time. So what I think is this, you will always try to get out of this situation through a paradigm of victory. So you will achieve victory in some kind of conceptual wrestling match against yourself. But you will get out of this, in fact, through a completely different paradigm, a paradigm of surrender to what you are, to what is the case about you. Now, this may sound as bad news, but it's not, because that surrender, when it's authentic, that surrender, when it's authentic, it comes hand in hand with a lot of loving kindness and acceptance towards yourself. The judgments you pass on yourself sort of dissipate, not because they are resolved by choice, but because those values are seen through. It's like Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values.

Starting point is 02:31:07 So it's not like one side of the equation will achieve victory. It's the very fight will be seen through. And that seeing through has the quality of a kind of an exhalation, a surrender with a lot of comprehension, understanding, and loving kindness towards yourself, which sort of transcends those paradigmatic values of what you should be as opposed to what you think you are, how you should behave as opposed to how you think you behave. You come to a place where you are what you are. You're lazy? That's okay.

Starting point is 02:31:47 Laziness is part of you. It doesn't need to be judged constantly. It may surprise you because of what people perceive as my production. I'm an extraordinarily lazy person. But I stopped fighting my laziness. I kid you not. This is factually true. I am a very lazy person. Today, for instance, I had a whole lot of things to do. But I gave me the excuse that I had a long debate at six. So I did absolutely nothing today.

Starting point is 02:32:21 The difference between you and me is that, although I used to be very much like you, I'm not saying that I'm ahead of you. I'm in a different place. The place where I am now is, okay, I've been very lazy today. It's fine. It's just the truth of the moment. It's what happened at that point in time. I'm not going to drive myself nuts by judging myself. There was a time I caused myself tremendous agony. I made a 30-second stupid mistake. I tried to remove a siren from an alarm system in my house knowing that it was not deactivated. Knowing full well it had a safety mode and it would go off.

Starting point is 02:33:09 But I thought, well, it goes off, I only need 10 seconds to pull the batteries out, it's okay. Well, it went off and gave me terrible tinnitus. I have tinnitus in both ears that sound like a dentist's drill at 3 meters distance, day and night. And it has driven me to the point of planning my suicide twice for 30 minutes or so now i went nuts against myself when that happened you know i looked at the mirror and you were so bloody stupid you know that was going to happen look at what you did, you asshole. Now, that dissipated too. It doesn't come as a victory. It's like you transit into another way of being that you don't achieve, you don't secure through a paradigm of conflict and fight.

Starting point is 02:33:58 You sort of just allow yourself to slide into it. It's very hard to describe. But the good news is there is a place of peace that is almost inevitable to arrive at, even if you arrive at it 30 seconds before you die and you are already in your deathbed. Usually people are forced into that place through major life dramas, a job loss, a divorce, a death of a loved one, some major thing that sort of shakes the edifice of your narratives, which sort of overwhelms your ego, your ability to try to be in control or to pretend that you are in control. And once that ability is taken out and you stop

Starting point is 02:34:40 fighting, you sort of slide into this place of acceptance, this transvaluation of all values in which, you know, the judgment of yourself sort of goes away and you are just living in service of your daimon. And my daimon is not a Socratic daimon. It doesn't tell me what not to do. It tells me pretty explicitly what to do. So I have a particularly severe diamond. And I live in peace with this paradigm of surrender and slavery. My coat of arms has a chain. And I added that to symbolize the fact that my life is in a wonderful condition of permanent slavery. Slavery towards what nature wants to do through me. A sort of complete giving up of the paradigm of control.

Starting point is 02:35:27 I'm not in control. I have never been in control, by the way. And it's all right. And there is no point in judging me. Who am I to judge me? There is a form of arrogance built into self-judgment. What's happening is what's happening. What you are is what you are.

Starting point is 02:35:43 Laziness has its place. If it becomes compulsive and addictive, then it's something else. What's happening is what's happening. What you are is what you are. Laziness has its place. If it becomes compulsive and addictive, then it's something else. And then John can tell us what happens there. But this shadow side, the shadow of laziness, the shadow of anger that we try to repress, they have their moment. They have their moment of expression so long as they don't become dysfunctional. That paradigm of acceptance makes space for all that. And at some point you look back and you see, you know, my life went just like the way it

Starting point is 02:36:15 went. And that was nature. And it couldn't have been any other way. And the proof of it is that it was the way it was. I mean, Bernardo, you're sounding more and more like a Tai Chi player to me all the time. Slingerland has a good book around this entitled Trying Not to Try about how you see this thing

Starting point is 02:36:37 within Taoism, Buddhism, I think perhaps also within Islam, properly understood its notion of surrender too, because that's what Islam literally means. But, yeah, this idea of, and I've tried to, because what you're trying to, yeah, it's interesting, because you're both trying and not trying. I mean, if I just sit on the couch, I'm not doing Tai Chi.

Starting point is 02:37:07 But if I get up and I say, I'm going to make myself get into the flow state, I'll never get there. So you have to do this finesse thing where you open yourself up, but you have to let something take shape within you. But you don't just let it impulsively. That's why I keep using Pascal's term. Instead of the spirit of geometry, the spirit of finesse, like it's a finessing kind of thing in which you really have to, in Iris Murdoch's things, you really have to give things their just attention, the attention that they properly deserve. And figuring out the wisdom of how much attention to give something and finesse it. I think that's a big

Starting point is 02:37:45 part of maturity and wisdom. And that's what I meant by when I talked about Philea Sophia rather than Philea Nikea. Plato consistently contrasts them, you know, and the people that are lovers of wisdom as opposed to the people that are lovers of victory, even over themselves. And so I just think that that was beautifully well said. And I don't know if you do anything from the Taoist tradition, but you certainly have a sensibility that would open you up to those practices, I think, very readily. Probably. I have no background in this thing so i'm just speaking from from where i am the quality i sense in it is the quality of tuning it's more attuning to to the flow frequency and

Starting point is 02:38:35 energy of the moment without judging the energy of the moment so if the energy of the moment is like it was for me earlier today laziness sit on the on the living room and watch electronics videos all afternoon then i tuned into that without that energy of judgment that energy of control trying to make it be different uh but it works the other way around as well sometimes the energy of the moment is compulsive work and and i tuned into that too it was the case a couple of days ago. So, that was the energy of the moment. That's what the diamond wanted to do through me. So, on we go. Let's go with it. Transvaluating all values. In other words, without passing the

Starting point is 02:39:17 judgment, whether it's good or bad, within reason, of course. I mean, I'm not going to surrender to the energy of anger, which happens often enough, but I'm not going to give it free reign. The other day I wanted to do something physically bad to a neighbor, but okay, I put limits on that. You know, it got close, it came until he gave it, oh, no, no, no, no, you're not going to have free reign. You are there, I recognize you exist, there is this anger inside me, but I will stop you here, and I will, no, you're not going to have free reign. You are there. I recognize you exist. There is this anger inside me, but I will stop you here and I will go in and I will punch a dust bag. I'll give it another outlet. But I was still in tune with it.

Starting point is 02:39:56 I didn't repress that. So I don't know. It has happened naturally to me after my 45th year, this sort of sliding into the energy of the moment and not fighting it, you know, giving up the illusion that I was ever in control and just tune in to the radio of nature within reason because I'm a reflective being after all. I will use my reflection to establish the limits. I know you both have to go soon, but I just want to respond to that, please. Yeah, sure, sure. There's just so much. I mean, if you heard me a minute ago, you're not a Tai Chi

Starting point is 02:40:31 doer. You're a Tai Chi player where the verb is to play music. And so getting into attunement and playing music and achieving harmony between the different tunes that you're attuning to is very much the central Taoist metaphor. So I think you might be a Taoist without knowing it, Bernardo, but that's meant in affection. Schopenhauer said that the closest thing, the closest human activity to the intrinsic rhythms and characteristics of the wheel was music. The rhythm and flow, the ebb and flow of music

Starting point is 02:41:08 was the clearest representation, the closest representation to the will as it is in itself, as opposed to how it presents to us as representation. So that has to do with that as well, tuning yourself to the flow of nature that is expressing itself through you. And your only choice is you either fight that or you let it happen. I just choose now to not fight that. I want to get to religion without a religion.

Starting point is 02:41:40 But before we do that, John, what age or what moment in your life was it that precipitated you feeling more at peace or surrendering to a part of yourself that you resisted? Because right now, when I look at both of you, you're calm. You seem to have a well-developed Weltanschauung. Otherwise, I wouldn't have asked you on to this program. And I think I lack almost all of those now. I'm also being a bit harsh on myself when I say that, but I'm definitely not to the degree of peace that you are, you both are. And I'm curious. So John, what age or what moment, what happened to lead you to where you are now? Well, that's a different question from the question of where did i realize peace because i don't think peace is something i have going back to from i think peace is something that i

Starting point is 02:42:30 like maturity i should always be realizing um i mean that's the i mean this is similar to uh the point that mcgee and barber make that one of the surest signs that somebody isn't wise is if they say to you i am wise um and that has nothing to do with the semantics or the syntax of the proposition, right? And I think the similar thing, you know, I almost think somebody who says that, you know, I'm perpetually at peace, I'd be a little bit worried about that. I mean, the Buddha, for example, classically warned against people who pursue meditation to get that sort of spiritually bypassed contentedness, because then they're useless. They're useless for other people. They're useless for trying to reduce suffering, enhancing agency, improving connectedness, meaning in life. So I just want to say that I don't want to put it into the having mode

Starting point is 02:43:21 way of understanding it. What put me on the path to trying to realize peace within and peace without, if you'll allow me that, sort of the Jewish notion of shalom, or Plato's notion of justice, which has a lot to do with that kind of peace and harmony, not with our notion today so much. What put me on that path was a loss and an encounter. I was in a fundamentalist Christianity that now upon reflection traumatized me. I'm grateful for it, though. I've learned with therapy and time to be grateful to it because you know how you have a mother tongue language?

Starting point is 02:44:00 That Christianity was my mother religion. that Christianity was my mother religion. It gave me the taste for meaning and wisdom and self-transcendence and fellowship and trying to get to a deeper aspect and the sacred that I'm grateful for. But nevertheless, it seriously traumatized me. And then there was experiences that brought me out of that. And I'm glad that that happened, but because it was my mother religion, it left a kind of hole in me, a gap. And I did a lot of thrashing around and, you know, became sort of a very antagonistic atheist and, you know, that kind of thing. But, and I don't want to make it sound like there's stages. That kept going for a while, but I'm talking about sort of attenuation on a graph. But in university, I encountered the figure of Socrates in Plato's work.

Starting point is 02:44:51 And it gave me an alternative way of thinking about how to cultivate wisdom, self-transcendence, fellowship, a relationship to what's sacred, moving into the depths. fellowship, a relationship to what's sacred, moving into the depths. And that, for me, put me on a course of seeking. Now, what happens in academic philosophy, I think Bernardo will back me up on it, until very recently, the topic of wisdom drops off the table, and you get into epistemology and metaphysics. And, you know, and I think Bernardo and I have shown that's valuable. And so I pursued it for its own sake, but the hunger for what I saw in Socrates, and then later, as I just alluded to in Spinoza, wasn't being met in academic philosophy. So I undertook Tai Chi, Vipassana meditation, metacontemplation practices, and I started to get a sense of the perspectival, participatory, procedural transformations of wisdom. And then, lo and behold, fourth generation cognitive science was emerging, and people were starting

Starting point is 02:45:58 in psychology to talk about wisdom before they talked about it in philosophy, by the way. And these two streams just started to, it was like a Kairos in the world. The world was bringing these two together and I needed them to come together. And I just happened to be there at the right place and the right time for that convergence without, the convergence without and the convergence within met. And that was for me, the Kairos, the turning point.

Starting point is 02:46:20 And that's the point from which I have not looked back. I hope that answers your question. Bernardo, what about you? I don't think there was a specific point where a major transition happened. I think it was a progressive sort of giving in to what is. I still suffer from a lot of anxiety. So taking my cue from John, let me highlight this. I take it for granted that we all suffer. So sometimes I don't emphasize this, but I don't want to come across as somebody spiritually enlightened because I'm anything but. And I mean it when I say it.

Starting point is 02:47:06 I suffer from anxiety, but the difference is I don't fight with it anymore that much. When anxiety is there, anxiety is there. And before, there would be multiple layers of fights and meta-fights and meta-meta-fights against the anxiety. Should I be anxious or not? I'm wasting my time by being anxious. I don't have a reason to be anxious. So how do I make myself not be anxious?

Starting point is 02:47:31 Oh, that thing, you know, it's mushrooms. That didn't stop completely, but it's a lot less present. There is an easier sort of, okay, this is the energy of the moment, I'm anxious, okay, I'm anxious. How did that happen? I think suffering has a lot to do with it. Suffering has a lot to do with insight, with becoming more mature, because it's the one thing in nature that makes you stop and re and reevaluate your narratives. Because if you're not suffering, then you're living an Epicurean life, which is irresistibly unexamined.

Starting point is 02:48:16 Why would you stop and examine it? You're having fun. You're having a ball. So there is something about suffering that is directly tied. something about suffering that is directly tied, I would say even an enabler of insight and maturation, because it forces you to stop and think, because your game is not working. Something is going wrong in the game you're playing. Something is wrong in your narratives, in your values, somewhere. Something is not right. And it's that consistent undermining that suffer puts you through, like water against a rock. You know, it doesn't kick the door open in one go, but over the years, it softens you, like it softens a rock. It makes you less angular, more roundish. There is more nuance,

Starting point is 02:49:09 more roundish um there is more nuance more more subtlety more finesse as as as john put it and less internal fight um i wouldn't be able to tell you a precise moment but uh it happened happened through suffering yeah for sure yeah and and it and it is happening it it's a verb it's it's not a noun it's not a place you arrive at it's a path that uh that you accept to to allow nature to pursue through you um and i say this more or less metaphorically i don't say this in a religious sense i'm not saying that i'm controlled or some spirit incarnated in me. I'm trying to convey the feeling of it through metaphor. And the feeling of it is the feeling that you are not in control. It's just that you are not fighting with the rhythm and flow of nature as it wants to go through you at that moment.

Starting point is 02:50:02 What I could tell you is that until I was when I was 32 I was promoted to director position in the company I was working for which is a major company it's Europe's top 50 it's in the footsie major major company if that company stopped existing today

Starting point is 02:50:24 there would be no new electronics for five to ten years. And at 33, I was director, probably the youngest at the company at that time. And that was the peak of my adaptive self. The adaptive self is that personality that has found a way to secure a place in the world for themselves

Starting point is 02:50:46 despite all the shit that you go through like losing my father when i was 12 and you adapt to the circumstances and you create a way for you in the world the adaptive self is a tool to get there and it reached the peak when i was 32 towards 33. And it was at that moment when something happened, I thought I had found, well, I found a growth in the person who was then my wife. I found a growth in her breast. And it took two weeks for doctors to rule out cancer. But in those two weeks, I was confronted with the reality that although my adaptive self ticked every box that it had set for itself when I was 12, like these are all the goals I achieved in my life. Although it was extraordinarily successful, at the end, I was

Starting point is 02:51:39 not in control of anything and the carpet could be pulled out of my feet the next moment and it can happen now i can get i think i mentioned to you last time we can get a phone call in the next 30 seconds that will destroy my life as i know it now so that happened and that was the moment of awakening that was the first oh shit you know and from that point 33 until until 43, 44, say, thick 10 years, that's when this transition happened. And in that process, there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of inner fight. But recently, it has gotten a lot better for some reason. But all I can tell you is that it's an ongoing process that I didn't achieve. I slid into.

Starting point is 02:52:27 And I would probably have slided into it kicking and screaming. The difference is once I was sliding, I figured I can't stop the slide anyway. So let's see where it goes. Bernardo, can I ask you a question? Sure. Because like one of the reasons why I've been trying to come up with this, work out this notion of participatory knowing is again, to try and get out from a purely active or a purely passive epistemic and ontologic existential stance, right? You know, the romantic, I just make it, the empiricist, I just receive it. And my experience is these processes,

Starting point is 02:53:06 we have, you know, there's similarities. That's what I try to get at with the idea that I participate in it. I'm not just sort of passively receiving, and I'm not making it happen. It's, again, this trying not to try. I'm trying to, like, the metaphor I use is like becoming someone's friend. I can't make it happen. I can't, you're my friend, right? I can't just sort of like, okay, be my friend, right? But, right, I have to participate in it, right? And so I'm trying to not, I'm not only trying to make an epistemological point about participatory

Starting point is 02:53:39 knowing, I'm trying to give people a concept by which they can understand how to get into right relationship with these kinds of pathways. Does that land for you? Does that resonate for you? Absolutely. Look, I don't have a recipe, as I'm sure you're not asking for one either, because it's a naive way to go about it.

Starting point is 02:53:56 But to me, it went hand in hand with a form of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which was intimately tied to my view of what reality is. These two things were not separate from me. So that's why I keep on insisting on the importance of a plausible ontology that's conducive to this. Because for me, it was indispensable. Because the way I'm put together, my intellect is the bouncer of my heart.

Starting point is 02:54:25 If I do not have a plausible intellectual hypothesis to ground whatever I'm pursuing, I shut myself off from it. And there was a lot of shadow acceptance. Look, I never said this because I was never asked, but I will volunteer this now to probably surprise the vast majority of the audience. volunteered is now it'll probably surprise the vast majority of the audience a big part of my shadow was vitriolic criticism of woo woo paranormal new age cosmic mind all that stuff i was so caustic about that i would jump to criticism so quickly i would be so critical of all this stuff in my 20s and 30s um it required a sort of involved years-long intellectual process for me to accept this because i needed the intellectual plausibility but it was not the only game there was an emotional opening to that softer side of myself that i'm giving expression to right now if you met me 10 years ago i would have very little empathy

Starting point is 02:55:35 i would be very black and white my imtp score in a personality test my T score was the maximum possible score. I've answered every question in a way that tilted me to T. The evaluator, I was doing that for a company, the evaluator looked at that and thought, you are the first perfect T, perfect thinker. Thinking over values everything for you. He said, I was the first to score a perfect score on the T, could not have been a higher um

Starting point is 02:56:07 and so that was my conscious self uh my my adaptive self everything was thinking because you know it helped helped shut away the trauma of my father's loss it helped so much it was such a brilliant adaptive move that had its place but then it no longer had its place. And opening up to those other psychological functions was a process of shadow acceptance for me. A very difficult process of shadow acceptance because suddenly I was becoming everything I was critical of yeah not to an extreme but you know to to even dip my toe in those waters was like what am I doing and I still have it I still have it secretly I still am invited to and last week I was invited to to an online conference and I I really had to hold myself back

Starting point is 02:57:05 because my shadow side was screaming about the style, the language that other people were using. I was like, come on, get a grip. Stop this. Stop this bullshit. Which, of course, is not the fact of the matter. Those people have their perspective.

Starting point is 02:57:23 They have their journey. They have their path. but integrating this in a way that doesn't go to extremes either way uh was was was difficult it's a it's like an onion it never ends and there is always a new layer of acceptance of yourself acceptance of the world i call it the ball of string the ball of string. The ball of string. You're always unwinding it and it seems like it's never going to change. It's endless.

Starting point is 02:57:48 When you think you got there, then, oh, no, then comes the next thing. Look at this now. And you go, oh, shit, it's even worse than I thought. There's so much convergence between your story and mine on that point.

Starting point is 02:58:01 I mean, I specifically took up, I only described the light side of it. I didn't describe the shadow side of it. I specifically took up the Tai Chi and the Buddhism and everything because that was me opening myself up to the woo-woo and to kinds of knowing that weren't computational thought and argumentation for very similar reasons. And it changed me from behind. It changed me from my blind side. I didn't put it folkily present,

Starting point is 02:58:34 but that's what happened in the process. I think that's always how it happens. It doesn't happen under your control. No, no. So I just wanted to share with you that I resonated with what you said about that because it's something very similar for me. And I now have garnered the reputation of the person. I suppose in this channel, I seem much more the positivist, but I'm often in other things. I'm the person who talks about all the woo that other people don't want to talk about.

Starting point is 02:59:05 So, yeah, I wrestle with that. I wrestle with something similar. And I wrestle with how to, you know, how to separate, you know, critique, which, you know, anybody who's advocating position should be open to critique and discussion from, you know, that destructive smasher that wants to just smash it down. It's like, okay, here's how I respond. But part of responding is to try and genuinely listen, which is often very challenging for me because I grew up having to listen to the word of God and the word of my parents. And so my reactance to that is I'm going to speak and I'm going to speak monologically and I'm going to overwhelm people with my speaking.

Starting point is 02:59:50 And one of the shadow reasons why I'm taking up this whole Dialogos project is to learn, no, no, no, you don't want to be a monologue. The Cartesian monologue monadic mind is what got us into this problem. You want to, and if you're going to really enter into a dialogical mind, then listening matters as much as speaking. But that's been very challenging for me because listening is often triggering a sense of vulnerability to authority and to dictation.

Starting point is 03:00:19 And I'm playing on both senses of the word dictation there. both senses of the word dictation there. Yeah, I recognize that. And it never ends in the sense that to this day, if you look at how I articulate my own views, I articulate them purely on the basis of reason and empirical evidence. So you still see that my shadow, although I accept it, it's there. And that's what I think is important that people who are in the paradigm of fight, they don't understand.

Starting point is 03:00:56 To incorporate the shadow doesn't mean that you killed the shadow. No. You sort of accept its expression. And a big expression of my schedule, you see my work. My work is purely on the, everything I do, I argue on the basis of reason and evidence, 100%. And I am fully aware that that's not the whole story. I'm fully aware that there is a lot of intuition, that there are aspects of reality that do not comply to Aristotelian logic. Why should they? Why should the set of natural axiomatic statements of a monkey be such that

Starting point is 03:01:34 they encompass the whole of reality, right? Of course not. So I'm keenly aware that introspective insight, intuition, feeling, these count as much to build up one's worldview or more, maybe they count more than reason and evidence, but I am the way I am. I have my shadow and my shadow needs to go through this purely on the basis of reason and evidence. I had private exercises about integrating my shadow. One paper i published in a in a technical journal the journal of consciousness studies one of the main philosophy journals in the world today you got the paper there you have a phd um i made a point i usually use the words extended mind or universal subjectivity something academic and neutral in that paper i thought i'm

Starting point is 03:02:26 going to do an exercise here i'm going to use the words cosmic consciousness which were the words that used to give me shock like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i made a point of putting it there um yeah and it was accepted uh the rest is history but I sort of on purpose made my life more difficult to sort of, you know, embrace the process I was in. So I wrote about cosmic consciousness. I had to look in the mirror and say, I published a paper in which I talk about cosmic consciousness. What are you going to do now? Are you going to shoot yourself in the head? No, it's done.

Starting point is 03:03:02 It has happened. So that was part of my own exercise. That's such a great story. Thank you for sharing that. I've done similar things, but that's really precious. Thank you. That's really wonderful. I'm happy that you can now, like, apprehend it mostly through a humorous lens

Starting point is 03:03:22 rather than, you know, the tension that was at the time, no doubt, when you were doing it. There's two tensions. There's two tensions. There's always a new layer. Yeah, there's the humor, which also helps a lot, I think. I mean, it's really conducive to cognitive flexibility and insight. That's another thing that the West needs to, just to throw out a random, not totally random thought, and this aligns with the stuff I talk about in Loserios play. We need to figure out how to reintegrate humor back into spirituality.

Starting point is 03:03:52 That's part, again, of that separating the air from the earth. And the fact that, you know, somebody once pointed out, you know, there's no humor in the Bible. That's a very odd thing. I asked someone this. did Jesus make any jokes? So not that we're recorded. Now, I doubt that he didn't, because I mean, when you actually get closer, you know, approaches to stage figures, they are, I mean, Socrates has a lot of humor running through him. And there's all this stuff going on. And he does wordplay and all kinds of humor. He could be more funny, but nevertheless, but I think of somebody like Kierkegaard and the humor running

Starting point is 03:04:31 through his work is just, you can't separate the philosophical and the spiritual project from the humor in Kierkegaard. And Kierkegaard said something really interesting about these two figures. He said, I follow Jesus, but Socrates is my teacher. And so, and I really resonate with that in some important ways. But I think, you know, I want to, I'm commending Bernardo, and I'm recommending, and myself included, that we try to reintegrate the spirit of humor into our spirituality, because of all of the work about how much humor, right, how much it integrates different kinds of knowing, how much it facilitates cognitive flexibility, how much it opens you up to other person's perspective, affords insight. The fact that we've kept that out of our spirituality

Starting point is 03:05:16 is only detrimental, is only detrimental. And if you remember in the name of the rose, this was actually one of the central topics. Remember, the document that was being kept hidden and people were being killed about was Aristotle's treatise on laughter. Right. And that's what had to be kept out at all costs. And I think Echo was pointing to something really important there, that until we can properly reintegrate the spirit of humor with our spirituality, I think we're still seriously truncated in our ability to develop a sensibility that is properly, or at least maybe even optimally responsive to the meeting crisis. So that's why I was glad to see the humor mixed with that. Because people can relate those events and they can go back into that. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 03:06:09 Your eyes did that. They can go back into that moment of like, ah, right? But the fact that it was so spontaneously woven with humor, I just wanted to commend that and recommend that to other people. And humor is also something you have to participate in. You can't make it and you can't just wait for it to happen, right? You have to participate in you can't make it and you can't just wait for it to happen right like you have to participate in it you have to slide into it the way uh bernardo says yeah at some point you go through this so many times that uh you know your your self-opinions

Starting point is 03:06:40 and your your opinions in general get shattered so many times that it becomes very difficult to take yourself without humor. That's what I meant when I told you last time, Kurt, to don't take yourself too seriously. Take life seriously, but yourself less so. It has to do with that. If we take ourselves too seriously, it becomes too tight. You know, the process becomes too hard. There's no point doing that john you mentioned the meaning crisis and the way i wanted to end this was to talk about a religion without a religion which is your term john but what i mean is that it seems like we've lost

Starting point is 03:07:17 when i say we i mean modern people modern people who value the intellect tend to disparage God and disparage traditional religion. But then there's this whole. And then even Richard Feynman said that one of the most important questions, if not the most important question, is where do we go? What's the modern church? We can't just go back to church. You can't simply believe. You can't just pray to a statue of Mary. I don't even think you should because that's like an idol.

Starting point is 03:07:49 So I don't know how Catholics get around that. It's another issue. But either way, what do we do? So, John, do you mind talking about that a bit? And then, Bernardo, I'd like to hear your thoughts. This is more about speculation. There's no disagreement. It's almost like you're building something together.

Starting point is 03:08:02 This is more about speculation rather than there's no disagreement. It's almost like you're building something together. Well, I wanted to say that a significant aspect of what I mean, a dimension of what I mean by the religion that's not a religion is what has been happening here. The kind of dialogue that is not just debate, the kind of dialogue that's, you know, that has poesis in it and logos in it and not just logic in it. And so that's important. So when I'm talking about the religion, so the reason I use a contradiction is because I'm trying to break out of the way in which we've locked ourselves into an inappropriate sort of exclusivity. But I want to say one caveat that's really important. I think it's completely empirically justified in terms of the demographic to talk about the nuns, N-O-N-E-S.

Starting point is 03:08:49 These are people who officially, who say on census, and apparently sincerely, that they have no, they do not belong to any religion. Okay? Now, it's a growing group and it will soon be the majority. That's the demographic fact. Now, it's a growing group and it will soon be the majority. That's the demographic fact. I do not want to simply dismiss, because I get into good faith in both senses of the word, discussions, even dialogos, the attempt to get inner peace and to see, to get ontological depth perception. And so I, I, I, I never intended the claim to be everybody's in this. Okay. I want it. I want that very clear. I think if people are, you know, be able to cultivate wisdom and virtue and sensibility, you know, transcend all the stuff we've been talking about within their religion. I don't want to in any way throw a stumbling block in front of them.

Starting point is 03:09:52 But back to the point, there is the demographic fact that church allegiance is even now starting to decline in the United States of America. That's undeniable. And Europe is predominantly non-religious by demographic and things like this. Okay, so there is a group of people, and this has been growing, and that's the people I'm trying to address. I also hope, and I've told that this is the case, that the work I do helps people who are within a religious tradition find more meaning and wisdom within it. But I think it's the case that the nuns are a large and growing demographic, especially in the developing world. Okay. Now, the thing we shouldn't think, still speaking demographically, is they're all Sam Harris atheists.

Starting point is 03:10:46 That's not. That's not what's going on. Are some of them that? And I say that because I want to challenge the idea that it's primarily just intellect that makes people go into the nuns. It's not intellect in our narrow, truncated, suffocated sense of intellect right now. Some of it is. But most of these people

Starting point is 03:11:05 readily and reliably and enthusiastically describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. And the thing about that is the fact that that is so pervasively said and so pervasively valorized and so little thought is given to what the hell does that actually mean, right? In any kind of coherent fashion indicates what's going on with these people. So what does that mean? Well, that's the point. It means something like an inchoate sense that they want to deal with self-deceptive, self-destructive patterns.

Starting point is 03:11:42 They want to come to a more inner alignment. They want to be more in touch with reality. They want to be more connected to other people. They want more meaning in life. They want more wisdom. They want to be able to see, and they don't use this word, but I would make the case that that's what they're talking about. They want to see virtue in themselves and in the world, right? And I think that's why we have the issue, and I'm not taking a stance on this politically, but we have the issue. And I'm not taking a stance on this politically, but we have the whole phenomena of virtue signaling that expresses a hunger in our culture. Wherever you stand on the woke pseudo-religion, there is a hunger that's being

Starting point is 03:12:16 expressed there. Why do we need virtue signaling? Because we're hungry for it. We want to see it in ourselves and other people, but we don't want to go through the transformations, the suffering that's required. So these people are, that's what they mean. They want to do this, but they don't find, and this I think is much more important than disbelief. They don't find for political reasons, for experiential reasons, for idiosyncratic reasons, for reasons of trauma, for moral reasons. They don't find the religions relevant. That's the main judgment. It's not falsity. It's irrelevance. I want to use a Jamesian idea here, right? The religions aren't viable for them. And simply trying to convince them that religion is belief is often, it's extremely clumsy because that's not the basis of the rejection.

Starting point is 03:13:13 And so what they mean is, I find those things irrelevant to satisfying this need, but this need needs to be satisfied. And I'm not clear what this need is. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this autodidactic eclectic search for practices and beliefs and images and groups of people and what they basically do, what spirituality means in practice, even though they won't say this, and there was a very good argument essay about this, is spirituality means the religion of me. It means my religion. It means what I've done. Remember, not all religions are worship-based. So you have to

Starting point is 03:13:50 give up that Abrahamic, right, ethnocentricity. What they're doing is they're cultivating an ecology of practice that's trying to help them engage in self-transcendence, enhance connectedness, more inner peace, more contact with what's real, including the reality of other people, right? Get some kind of virtue into their life. But they suffer from the fact that, they suffer from any project that is driven primarily in an autodidactic, fragmented fashion.

Starting point is 03:14:22 And so they are easily prey to both internal and external compulsive manipulation. Because, you know, my student, my RA, he's not my colleague, Jensung Kim, he's done research, you know, that, and let me say the whole thing, because the whole thing is important. If you compare people who are within a religious tradition to people that are outside a religious tradition, and you compare them by our best sort of measures on wisdom, and we are developing such measures, by the way, the people within the religious traditions do better. That's an empirical thing. However, however, there's no difference between the various traditions.

Starting point is 03:15:07 It just matters that you belong to one. Right. So that's why I keep saying, and this goes with arguments made by Stephen Batchelor, right, when he talks about Buddhism, what's called belief. Because we have reduced religio, that sense of connectedness to belief, and even belief originally meant to give your heart to something, but we've reduced it to the insertion of beliefs. We think, well, all of these systems, look at how much they're in conflict at the belief level. But it turns out, I don't want to say that not having beliefs, it would be functional. I'm not saying that. But what I'm saying is, it's clear that the functionality for the cultivation of wisdom isn't found in the

Starting point is 03:15:43 semantic content of the propositions. And I agree, and I'm going to reinforce it. I agree with Bernardo's point that you can't situate a wisdom ecology in a vacuum. It has to be situated in an affording worldview. And I totally acknowledge that. But what I'm trying to say here is, right, they're trying to do this, back to the nuns, in a, you know, you're reinforcing the very Cartesian, monologic, monadic, individualistic frame and the propositional tyranny, right, and all the proclivities we all, myself included,

Starting point is 03:16:23 share for self-deception. All of that's just getting reinforced by that religion of me. And of course, one of the pervasive kinds of things it leads to is spiritual bypassing and narcissism. And those are, I mean, Trungpa wrote a good book about this. Spiritual materialists in the socioeconomic virtue sense of materialism, not in the ontological sense. Spiritual materialists are the worst. I mean, they're the worst of all. They're, right? I mean, elite, right? Because all they want to do is show you their trophy shelf of all their wonderful experiences that show how unique they are and how the universe is uniquely caring about them. And it's like, wow, that's harder to

Starting point is 03:17:06 get through than somebody who's, you know, buying the car to become mature, because at least that person, right, is confronting some frustration and suffering. You can get to them, but this person over here can have the Buddha talks about, you know, the contentedness of the cabbage that would just prevent them from the, you know, the cabbage that just prevents them from the Kierkegaardian realization of that they are always one step away from the precipice of despair. And I thought it was...

Starting point is 03:17:35 Bernardo jumped in at some point soon. Well, I just wanted to commend Bernardo on something that I forgot to commend him on, which is I have also been in that place where suicide seemed the alternative for me. I also suffer from an ears in my left ear. So I also have not heard silence in decades. And it also comes with attacks of vertigo. So I just wanted to express camaraderie with you, share it on that.

Starting point is 03:18:06 Thank you, Joe. So Bernardo, about religion without a religion, what do you see as the desiderata of it or the criteria or the checks that need to be ticked? I think our loss of religion goes hand in hand with our loss of the meaning of certain words. Because, you see, we don't experience reality directly. We sort of tile the world around us with a mosaic of conceptual signs, right?

Starting point is 03:18:37 Words. We leave the narrative that we tell ourselves about what we are living. So words, in a sense, are important. And we've lost the meaning of so many words. We've lost the meaning and this, I'm not taking a cheap shot at homosexuals by saying this, I'm certainly, I'm a defender of homosexuals if you read my site, but we've lost the full meaning of the word gay for instance. The meaning, the original meaning of the word gay is spontaneous joy. But now, sort of linguistically, only homosexuals have spontaneous joy. Is that fair?

Starting point is 03:19:12 No. We lost something. We lost the meaning of the word metaphysics. That which is more primary is behind and precedes physics. Now it has become synonym for spiritual woo-woo. And we've lost the meaning of the word religion. Religion comes from the Latin religare, to reconnect with the source or with transcendence, with the ground level of reality from which the life force arises. But because of institutionalized religion, now religion has become synonym with morals,

Starting point is 03:19:53 a moral code, dogmas, and beliefs. Where is the rejoining? Where is the relinking? Where is the religare? Where is the religion? And the religion sort of got washed away. I mean, look at the Vatican. They can get, and I say this with some despair because I care about the total collapse of Christianity in the West. And I've been to the Vatican, invited for events at the Vatican.

Starting point is 03:20:20 And I was growing hopeful over the last couple of years. But now look at what they are doing. They use their airtime to talk about arbitrary morals and to insist on a, how to say, calcified interpretation of scripture. So they contribute to this loss of the meaning of the word religion. Religion is about liturgy. It's about the symbolic ritual that points at a truth that cannot be captured in a conceptual framework. Because why would the cognitive apparatus of a primate evolved on

Starting point is 03:21:00 planet Earth be broad enough to capture every salient truth about reality in its own closed conceptual system? Why would that be the case? Of course it's not the case. There are relevant salient truths that cannot be said, it cannot be worded, that cannot be expressed through a closed semantic and syntactical system. And I think what religion does is to use an arsenal of symbols of liturgy to sort of point at that, such that you can have a direct experience of it once you're shown the way, once you're given a hint, a set of rituals that sort of puts you in the suitable frame of mind that is conducive to making that final leap yourself. But that's not

Starting point is 03:21:45 what we see. That's not what we see being done by institutionalized, by the religious institutions that are supposed to nurture religion. Especially after the Reformation, you know, you go to a Protestant church, it's fashioned exactly like a tribunal. The preacher dresses like a judge. And even Catholicism, which still holds on to symbolism, especially Eastern Christianity, which is not Catholic, but they hold on to those symbols. But even they, the sermon is almost invariably a moral discourse, telling you how to live and telling God what to do. Prayer has become, you know, we tell God what God should do.

Starting point is 03:22:36 I mean, where is the religare? We've lost religion. religion. So, in an effort to sort of recover that word, I would say, no, what we miss is religion, not spirituality. We need religion. And I say this, I mean, I don't have the past you've had, John, so I don't have that trauma or that code. Sure, sure. So I speak more freely about it. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. But notice that what I mean by religion is not what religion has de facto become, because of the way it was institutionalized

Starting point is 03:23:18 for power reasons, but what the word originally meant, what the Latin word originally meant. And I think we are in a tremendous lack of that in the West. And I think that has a lot to do with the meaning crisis. Because if you are relinked with that transconceptual source, your relationship with yourself and reality is immediately influenced and transformed by that link.

Starting point is 03:23:46 If you open that valve again. It's a non-conceptual thing. It's not something that you can put in words and explain rationally in a closed system. You can't do that. But it's life-changing, which conceptual systems are not. And because we have such a long history of Christianity in the West, because that's sort of built into, and I'll be a Jungian now, it's sort of built into the collective unconscious now. I think the shortest path back to transcendence, back to that religare with

Starting point is 03:24:18 meaning, is through Christianity. But it has to be a Christianity of liturgy, not a Christianity of morals and beliefs and judgments. Nobody is going to go to Sunday Mass to be judged, to be told everything you're doing wrong, and to hit the chest and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, three times. As Jung said, myths are living things. They have to constantly be reinterpreted. They have to grow. Andinterpreted, they have to

Starting point is 03:24:45 grow. And there are many departure points in Christianity for a sort of refreshing of the Christian myth. So many, I mean Jung pointed out one that was very recent to him, he died in 61 and this this point of departure was in 1950, in 1550, Pius XVI's elevation of the Virgin Mary to the Mother of God. She was elevated to the position of sort of the fourth member of the Trinity, so to say. And that brings in the feminine aspect. There's something to be said about that. There is a new departure point. What happened to Job?

Starting point is 03:25:26 be said about that there is a new departure point what happened to job what god is that that is so unreflective that does does what he what he did to job when what does he tell us about the divinity about mind at large whatever you want to call it about the what is that reflectiveness and what is our role as reflective beings towards God? What are we supposed to do for the divinity as opposed to keep telling the divinity what to do for us? You know what I mean? That's another departure point. How do we help God? What is the meaning of our life in helping that which is transcendent to get to somewhere it apparently is desperate to get to. These are all points of departure to refresh the myth and turn it plausible.

Starting point is 03:26:12 Because a myth, although it's never literal, it has to be vaguely plausible in order to pass through the filter of the intellect. And Christianity, because it has been frozen for 2,000 years, deliberately, since Constantine, it doesn't refresh itself. This is policy in the Vatican. And if you talk to the authorities, to the powers that be in the Vatican, it is their policy that it's the reliability of the tradition that makes Christianity unique. That's their point of view.

Starting point is 03:26:48 But the consequence of that is that you ossify the myth. You don't let it evolve and maintain its plausibility, maintain its life, maintain its relevance to everyday life as a symbol pointing somewhere. It has become so implausible, so ossified, that it then turned into judgment, morals, beliefs, and dogmas. And nobody goes to church for that. Nobody in their sane mind will go to church for being judged against ossified moral codes, arbitrarily defined by a selective read of the scripture. Because you can read Scripture in a way that justifies nearly anything. You just choose the book you read, and you can basically go in here,

Starting point is 03:27:31 read the Apocalypse, and have a sense about the Summum Bonum. Let's have a look whether it's really pure goodness when you read that book. And it was not for nothing that it was the most polemical book to be inserted in the Bible. It was not for nothing that it was the most polemical book to be inserted in the Bible. So I, to be honest, I sort of despair a little bit about the end of religion. I think we need religion desperately. What we don't need is a moral code, judgment, and a set of ossified beliefs. We need something dynamic that has life in it, that's not only outside, but sort of courses through us and informs our relationship with ourselves and with that which is transcendent and imminent in the world,

Starting point is 03:28:17 that which is beyond Aristotelian logic, beyond language, beyond conceptual schemes. logic, beyond language, beyond conceptual schemes. So I think that was a beautiful point. There's religare and religio, they're both contenders for the etymology, but they converge on the idea of binding back or binding together. And so I just wanted to make it clear that there isn't a conflict in that, that I tend to use the term religio as opposed to religare, but they converge anyway. So that's not a big issue. The I was trying to capture that with, I think with the notion of the religion, that's not a religion.

Starting point is 03:29:00 Cause I think religion has, has come to mean, you know, the set of beliefs, the judgment and, and, and worship is understood as acquiescence in some sort of supernatural authority, etc. Basically, all the things you were saying have ossified. I think that is, and I try to trace out, there's a long history of how we got to that point, where religion has come to mean that. And so, what I'm talking about is not religion in that sense, but it's still religion. And the liturgy for me, the liturgy is, what I talk about is an ecology of practices, a whole bunch of practices that are like an ecology. They counterbalance, they coordinate, they constrain and afford each other to intervene

Starting point is 03:29:51 in our psyche in a dynamical and parallel fashion. Because, you know, one of the great lessons we've learned from both pedagogy and from therapy is one-shot interventions into humans don't work because they're so complex, self-adaptive that the system will just readapt. And this is, I think, the great insight of Buddhism with the Eightfold Path. No, no, no. What you have to do, and it's the reason why it's represented by a wheel with shared spokes, there's a deep symbolism there. It's a self-rolling, it's a self-organizing thing. And what you want is you want an ecology of practices that is as dynamically self-organizing as the thing that it's being applied to, so that you have a shot, a hope of actually transforming

Starting point is 03:30:32 that really complex, recursive, multi-layered dynamical system that a human being is. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to really expand the notion of what you meant by the liturgy, a liturgical. There's a set of practices, and most of the symbols, here's why I use Corbin's notion, are not imaginary, they're imaginal. They're not pictures in our mind, they're ways in which we enact and seriously play with the world. Just so readers, sorry, not readers, listeners get a distinction. The imaginary is when I say picture a sailboat in your mind. That's different from when a child picks up a stick and starts walking in a certain way and pretends that they're a Roman centurion. They're not forming a picture in their mind. What they're doing is they're adopting a certain way of configuring their agency and a

Starting point is 03:31:25 certain way of seeing the world so that they can train skills. Why do mammals seriously play? Because that is the primary place in which we undergo development. And so what I think what religions are often doing at the level of ritual, when they're creating ecology of practices, is they're doing sort of imaginatively augmented reality. You know what augmented reality is? When you project virtual reality onto reality in order to see things like a heads-up display for a jet pilot or something like that. I think religions do that. And I mean this as a cognitive scientific proposal. They do imaginal enactments so that they can do imaginal augmentation of reality

Starting point is 03:32:05 so that they can, like the child, go through serious, we can go through serious, both individually and collectively, and I think that's important, you know, development. And again, I think this is part of the Frommian critique. Religion has degenerated into the having of dogma rather than the developing of wise, virtuous people. And they've confused that project, I agree with you, Bernardo, with moral pronouncements. It's like, no, no, no. Telling me over and over again that something is wrong. That's like telling somebody in therapy, you don't want to do that anymore?

Starting point is 03:32:39 Stop it. Stop it. That's not therapy. That doesn't help anybody. Right? Stop thinking these thoughts. Yeah, yeah. Stop doing that.

Starting point is 03:32:52 Right? And so what I meant by religion by religion is trying to get all of that, if you'll allow me the metaphor, all of that machinery of an ecology of practices and imaginatively augmented serious play, right, homed in something that is free from all of the dichotomies that struck back to the Axial Revolution, all the dualisms that I think not only cut us off from each other, but cut us off from the world and even from ourselves, and in a way that is also simultaneously responsive to the fact that many of the mythological forms of the dualism have been undermined by the advancement

Starting point is 03:33:42 of science, right? We had the Copernican Revolution, and then we had Darwin. We are being re-embedded. We are no longer pilgrims from a supernatural realm. That's no longer a viable, and I mean it in James's sense, that's not viable for us. Now, you can pretend all that science doesn't exist, and that's just, to my mind, spiritual bypassing, and I think that'll translate into spiritual bypassing in the rest of your life. And I grew up with people that did that, and the claims of certainty that just put the lie to, right, that had the lie put to them by the anxiety riven nature of their lives, it's like, ah, right? We need to somehow come up, and this is part of why I'm talking to you, right? We need to come up with a worldview, and I want to use this next word very carefully,

Starting point is 03:34:32 that properly homes our ecology of practices and our enacted imaginal augmentations of individual social and ontological reality in a way that properly homes them, that validates them, that gives them, as you said, that we can reliably point to, there's a wise exemplar, right? There's a path that seems reasonable. And like you said, it doesn't have to be any kind of equivalent to a scientific theory, but I agree with you. If it doesn't pass the prima facie filter of plausibility, people are going to be, again, cut into this horrible dualistic dichotomy against themselves, and therefore they're not going to get the inner peace, the religio within and without that they are seeking.

Starting point is 03:35:26 100% agree. Thank you both. Honestly, thank you so much. It was a pleasure for me. I'm honored to have you both on. And the audience, if you could see the live chat, the audience is overwhelmingly positive. I don't see a single negative comment thank you and where can the audience find out more about you john and then bernardo john where can the audience find out more about you oh sorry i was just trying to take a look at the live feed. I don't have it up. I mean, the best place to get to what I think is my apex or most important project is Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And there'll be links to that.

Starting point is 03:36:17 I think if you took seriously what I just said about the exemplification of the logos, I also have an ongoing series called Vo with Reveki where I try to do this with people. And then if you want to see the attempt to integrate the logos with cognitive science directed towards a lot of these issues, I have two series out there. One's complete called untangling the world, not that I unfold dialogically with Greg and Enriquez. And then a current one, which is on the nature of consciousness.

Starting point is 03:36:50 And so it's relevant to both of these discussions. And then there's one that's being released right now called The Elusive Eye, capital I, with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastrofietro. Again, a dialogical presentation of the cognitive science and the psychology and the existential philosophy around this thing we invoke so much and we know so little about, which is the self. Well, what is the self? What kind of entity is it? And how should we properly know thyself, as Socrates would say. He doesn't really mean your autobiography. He means know what kind of thing a self is,

Starting point is 03:37:32 and that's why he often calls it also being a mortal, a mortal, by the way. So that's how people can reach me. If you want to know my academic work, just go on Google Scholar and put in my name, and you'll get the stuff I published. If you want, if you're interested in the meaning crisis and mythology interacting, I also have a book free online called Zombies in Western Culture, a 21st Century Crisis, which is how the zombie mythology, as Lou said, is the mythology of our time. Because we argue that it's the mythology.

Starting point is 03:38:05 I did it with Chris Mastropietro and Philip Misovic. It's the mythology by which the culture is expressing, not resolving, but expressing the meaning crisis right now. Bernardo, where can they find out more about you? What are you working on next? I'm working for Essentia Foundation now, which is sort of a new platform in which I'm basically working to promote other people's work, not my own, but in this direction of a ontology of idealism and some form of objective idealism. That's what I would point people to. Go to EssentiaFoundation.org. One word, EssentiaFfoundation.org one word essentiafoundation.org and about me just type my

Starting point is 03:38:47 name on google or go to bernardocastroop.com one word as well and bernardo i hope that there's an opportunity for you and i to hang out in person at some point in in the future i would enjoy that greatly i'd really enjoy that as well and talk about our favorite philosophers because you dropped a few names today and I was like, oh, I was itchy to talk with you about Kikugo and a few others. Okay. Have a great night, both of you. Oh, and for the people watching, if you would like to see more conversations like this, please do consider going to patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal.

Starting point is 03:39:27 Every dollar helps. And there are many other theolocutions I'd like to have. So for example, what's coming up is Josje Bach. Kastrup mentioned him. Josje Bach and Donald Hoffman. That's in the end of August. And at some point, John, I would like to get you and I don't know if I can announce it because we're still working on it, but a special person. Everybody knows now. Okay. What did it say? Three hours and 40? Four hours, two minutes, 49 seconds.

Starting point is 03:40:03 I don't know. I've got six, nine, six, 3, 6, 3, 5. Oh, that's fine. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:40:10 Thank you. Thanks for doing this, Kurt. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you very much, Kurt. Thank you for staying up, Bernardo. I know it's probably 10 p.m. there. 10 o'clock. I have to have dinner.

Starting point is 03:40:20 Yeah, go eat, go eat. I'm going to email you, Bernardo, and ask you some advice as to how i should speak to rupert spiro because apparently it's a different mode to speak to him you mentioned that he's not interested in analytical conversation so i'm gonna email you and ask you about that but but contrary to a lot of the other spiritual teachers he can engage with it uh but it's not his he will try to have you have the insights directly as opposed to telling you what the insight is

Starting point is 03:40:51 I'm looking forward to it thank you John many thanks appreciate it again you too Bernardo wonderful and I meant what I said I hope at some point we can hang out together in person that'd be wonderful. It shall happen. It shall happen. I see it happening.

Starting point is 03:41:08 Good. Bye-bye. All right, guys. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye. Just a second. It's not over. There's a bonus section of audience questions. Could you ask about the paradox inherent in the trying not to do? In some states of being, you might be tone deaf. I feel sometimes force is needed. I think the person is referring to Slingerlin's phrase, trying not to try, which is not the same thing as trying not to do. There's a very important distinction there. The idea is very, like, let me give you the example of, you can't just,

Starting point is 03:41:47 I'm going to go into the flow state right now. There we go. No, no, no, right? But that doesn't mean you can just sit here and wait for the flow state to happen. What do you have to do? You have to cultivate the finesse of learning how to get into the right relationship, and that means also attitudinal and sensibility, so that there's a real possibility that flow will take shape. This is why I try to use the notion of participation. And repeatedly, it's, you know, and I understand it. Like when you're sparring with people, like you're trying not to force it, right? You're trying to actually flow with the person.

Starting point is 03:42:24 One of the best things to, if you're sparring with a it, right? You're trying to actually flow with the person. One of the best things to, if you're sparring with a person, is to compliment them. That was a really good block because what they then do is they monitor their blocking and then they lose flow, right? So, yeah, I get what you're saying that the point about, you know,

Starting point is 03:42:43 sometimes you need force. There's this notion in Tai Chi Chuan of Peng, which is I want to hold my arm as if water was flowing through it. It's not rigid like this, and it's not limp like that. It's like water's flowing through it, because what that does is it coordinates all the small muscles and the large muscles and brain-body coordination so that I can flow any inertial force through it very, very effectively. And by the way, you enhance that through imaginal augmentation. Actually practice imagining having water flow through your hand and then having somebody press on your arm and know what the difference between resisting it with force and resisting it with flow. Because there's a real felt difference and there's a difference in the functionality. So I understand, I think, I hope, I'm trying to be open, I'm trying to be

Starting point is 03:43:31 responsible. Sometimes you have to just keep going and I get that. But what I want to say is one of the things, you have to give up the notion even of keep going as a willpower. One of the most disconfirmed notions in empirical psychology is the notion of willpower. It was actually seriously proposed by Bowen-Weister. They initially saw, you know, there's sort of mental energy that we, like the ego depletion that we have at reserve to just push ourselves through things. And then it turned out that there's been just massive failures to replicate that. It doesn't look like that's the case. What seems to be the case is what you want to do is develop a capacity to get more flexibility in your framing

Starting point is 03:44:12 of situations. So options open up to you. So that's the effort. The effort is in making yourself more flexible and responsive, more liable to catch the flow. And the more frequently you do that, the more frequently you will do it. And that's the way you sort of persist. I'm sorry, I'm trying to speak almost as I would within a Tai Chi Chuan instruction. But it's very predictive of people who are trying to deal with re-evaluate. It's predicted that those people will fail, that they will fall into recidivism, right? Let me give you an example. I'm going to lose weight.

Starting point is 03:44:52 My willpower, you'll fail, right? And in fact, I've lost 20 pounds on this diet. Within five years, you'll be back to where you were, 95%. I'm really confident in that prediction. What is one of the things that tends to put people in the 5%? Joining a group of people who are also trying to lose weight. That is a much more powerful predictor than you, right? And I'm not trying to insult anybody. I was insulting myself there because I remember doing that kind of thing, right? insulting myself there because I remember doing that kind of thing. Right. And so, yeah, you have to persist sometimes, but try to think of the persistence as flexibility and finesse and putting

Starting point is 03:45:34 yourself into right relationship with others as a way of keeping you going rather than you being like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill. That's how I try to answer that question. Okay, Bernard, i'll repeat the question and by the way it wasn't queer dough it was mr chocolate cookie i can't add to what john has just said all right okay so queer dough now this is actually queer dough's question is the move toward veganism in our society an example of shedding of spiritual bypass of thinking humans are special and supreme so bernardo look i think if we are to have a viable civilization consuming a lot less meat and a lot more vegetables is a

Starting point is 03:46:18 indispensable element of the way out and there are a million reasons for this agriculture of animals is extremely inefficient you need a whole lot of water a whole lot of space so it's a very inefficient way to produce proteins and calories it's a planet-wrecking way of doing that not to mention the incredible amount of suffering that is inflicted on higher animals with complete nervous systems because we treat them as products. So I think the consumption of meat we engage in today is preposterous, it's outrageous, morally it's an affront to our responsibility towards future generations and it is literally carcinogenic towards us it's also unhealthy it's an indulgement of a a addiction that we do not want to give up so i think something in the direction of veganism is indispensable. But can you remind me of the context of the

Starting point is 03:47:28 question again? Because that's not what he actually asked. Sure, yeah, sure. And just as an aside, there's a great video by this YouTuber called What I've Learned that demonstrates that much of the environmental claims against meat eating has been debunked. And I'll send you that after because it's surprising. So is the move toward veganism in our society an example of shedding of spiritual bypass, of thinking humans are special and supreme? No, I don't think so. I don't even see,

Starting point is 03:47:59 I don't even quite see the motivation for the question. I don't think reducing the amount of meat we consume is a sign of any spiritual transformation. I think it's a sign of reason. Good, old, plain reason. If you want to do something good to yourself, to others, to animals and the planet, you will consume

Starting point is 03:48:24 less meat. It's as clear- others, to animals and the planet, you will consume less meat. It's as clear-cut, banal and unavoidable as that, I think. John, do you have any thoughts to add to that? Well, I'd like to see the debunking video. will have a lot of critical responses to it because I think the biomechanics of how many people you can feed with wheat versus how many people you can feed with the cows that you fed the wheat to is just like the cow has to use most of that energy to be a cow. So I'm not clear how you can get out. That seems to me just to be a rock bottom, you know, bioeconomic fact that you're not going to be able to debunk. So I want to say one of them is that most of the land that cows are on are in the land

Starting point is 03:49:14 that food cannot be grown on anyway. And much of the time when they talk about the water that's used for a pound of meat, that's rainwater, which would have come onto that land anyway. And so there's many other there's many ways that the statistics that we know about that are alarming with regard to meat production, speaking purely of ruminant animals, that has been debunked, or at least highly contested. And I didn't know about this until just a month ago. Now that doesn't at all cover the suffering of the animals, which to me is the main point.

Starting point is 03:49:47 I don't like how they're treated. I can speak from a personal experience. We have a vegetable garden here at home. The main patch is about 35 square meters. We have different patches, but the main patch is 35 square meters. And every year we produce a lot more vegetables than we can eat. I and my girlfriend.

Starting point is 03:50:09 And we distribute to our neighbors. We are well known for this. Around July, the food distribution begins here. Now, in that same space, I perhaps could keep three chickens and eat their eggs. There's no comparison. When it comes to pound for pound, what I can use that space for to produce vegetables is just incomparable to the equivalent using a lower animal. I certainly could not have a cow in that space. The difference would be that you wouldn't

Starting point is 03:50:38 be growing a cow or a sheep or a chicken in that place where you could grow vegetables, but instead to do both. But I'll send you the video. Well, but, you know, look at Brazil. Where are they growing cows? Where there was a virgin rainforest before. So to claim that that space cannot be used for anything else is a self-affirming question. Because once you've destroyed the forest. It's the idea that it's sort of unproductive because it's just laying there and we're not growing wheat on it.

Starting point is 03:51:07 We couldn't grow wheat on it. That's to fail to see the whole intricate way in which the ecology works that supports the areas of land upon which we grow the wheat. That's just a very atomistic appraisal. Anyways, we're arguing in absentia. We need to see the video. And, you know, Bernardo and I are both, we have our knives out. And perhaps we should stop.

Starting point is 03:51:35 I do want to respond to the other part of the question. Sure. If I could be allowed. Please. I agree with Bernardo. I think you can make a completely justifiable justification of veganism in some way along mammals. I don't eat octopus because they have the complex nervous systems. They probably have the metacognition and the fluid intelligence that is similar enough to mine that they, in some, I don't mean metacognitively, but they value their existence

Starting point is 03:52:19 in a way that's comparable to mine. And the mammals tend to be the most egregious for the socioeconomic and ecological. And there's also the methane issues around the cows and stuff like that. So I think you can make that move totally that way. And I agree with Bernardo. I think a lot of people do make the move that way. I do think it's possible that there are people who also take up veganism as a transformative practice in which they are trying to get out of an anthropocentric way of being. I have interacted with those people. people. I agree with Bernardo. I do not think that that is a requirement in order to be a vegan. But do I think it's possible that people take it up as something, and I don't mean an insult either way, something analogous to kosher. Human beings have traditionally managed their diet as a way of bringing around fundamental transformations. And one of the transformations that I think does need to be, you know, realized today is getting out of a kind of, you know, unquestioned

Starting point is 03:53:33 anthropocentric worldview. And veganism, I know individuals in which they live veganism, I think that's the right verb. They live veganism as a way of trying to do something, in that sense, religious, afford a transformation of kind of a fundamental transformation of their cognitive cultural grammar. They want to get out of an anthropocentric way of being. And I think if people are doing it, I think that's also also justifiable um i think that's a justifiable reason for taking up veganism and i would think of that as a i think you could make a good case i'm trying to that that's a religious act as opposed to an act of socioeconomic or moral prudence i don't know if bernardo wants to say anything that, but that's... I can see where you're coming from.

Starting point is 03:54:27 I'm not sure I agree, but I can clearly see. Just to give you some background for why I said I'm not sure I agree. I think the productization of life is a very serious problem. Yeah, yeah. But if you look at ancient cultures, they would kill a bison and eat the bison. That could also be a form of religious expression if you respect the animal you killed as a sacrifice to give you sustenance. So I think historically, you know, Abraham was asked to kill his son. The idea of sacrifice has been embedded historically as far as we can go. So I wouldn't, my tendency is not to make anything fundamental about meat at a religious level.

Starting point is 03:55:21 What I think is fundamentally wrong is the productization of life that I think is an affront it's a disaster that we should never have allowed to start but now we've allowed it not only to start but to develop and to become addicted to it yeah I see that I think you know the product

Starting point is 03:55:42 I think you call it the productification of life, the commoditization of everything. I think that's part of the frommy and modal confusion. I don't know if we're disagreeing. I think there is something to speak about killing what you're going to eat. I think it has become too easy. And also the reverse, eating what you kill. And eating what you kill. Exactly. It has become too easy. And also the reverse, eating what you kill. And eating what you kill, exactly. It has become too easy to go to the supermarket and buy a slice of beef and think of it as a steak, not as the muscle, bloody muscle of a living, breathing creature that had a high-level nervous system. I think there is something to be said to the idea that if you want to eat meat, one,

Starting point is 03:56:26 you have to pay the integral cost. And the integral cost is many, many, many times higher than what we are paying today. And two, if you really want it, then kill what you're going to eat. Because killing is something that tie you up to that life you've taken forever, for all eternity. And there is a form of respect, a form of anti-banalization when you are forced to kill what you're going to eat. And in the old times, like 100 years ago, Europe of the 1920s, you know, to the chicken pan, take a chicken and kill that chicken. And that process would be witnessed by the kids or kill a pig. Have you ever seen a pig being killed? It's a very, very noisy, very bloody, very long drawn out affair.

Starting point is 03:57:20 I think if you were forced to have to pay that price for your sustenance, I think it's valid in principle to take a life, a hunter taking a life to sustain his family, because it forces you a level of respect. It forces you an awareness of the cost for that life, of being robbed of it for for sustaining yours that i think makes the whole thing harmonious again nature is not all a sea of roses and nature entails enormous sacrifices the problem is that we get the benefit and we hide the sacrifice away from ourselves and that is what i think is dysfunctional and we cannot feed 7.5 billion people with meat in a way that would do justice

Starting point is 03:58:08 to what I'm saying you cannot have 7.5 billion people go hunt a wild boar there aren't enough wild places and wild boars around so I think because we have become so many the only way the only decent way out of it

Starting point is 03:58:23 is something very close to veganism. Perhaps we can allow ourselves the luxury of meat now and then if we pay the actual price of it instead of this fictitious price we pay today, which is not the integral price of meat. That was very good.

Starting point is 03:58:42 Last question is from David. What did you guys enjoy most about this conversation? That was very good. Last question is from David. What did you guys enjoy most about this conversation? Conversing, being in the presence of John and being in this dance. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the appreciating, the real capacity to appreciate, both in the sense of, you know, understand value and the increase in value. We use appreciate to mean all of those. To appreciate the dance of theologos as an inherently valuable aesthetic, independent from the victory of a debate.

Starting point is 03:59:29 I really enjoy that. I genuinely enjoy that with Bernardo. I share it with you completely. Yeah. For me, it's like sparring in martial arts. I mean, the asshole is the person who, in sparring, tries to knock knock you out all the time because it's like, no, no, no. That's not what we're doing here. We're trying to help each other get better at something, right?

Starting point is 03:59:54 And you get into the flow state when that happens, and that's wonderful for both people. And you grow, and the other person grows, and you grow through each other. And all of that has so much value. And I think the value of that has been lost by the advers to exemplify the joy of participating in the flow of the dance of Dialogos, that's really important to me. Exemplifying it more and more to people. Right now, to my mind, I'm not saying this will go for all of eternity, but right now, we can't get enough of that right now. We can't get enough of the aesthetically pleasing, this is Plato in me making it beautiful, the aesthetically pleasing presentation of the dance of Diologos. We can't get enough of that right now. We need more and more of it all the time. So I thank you, Kurt, for affording this and making it possible.

Starting point is 04:01:08 And lastly, before we recorded the podcast, I was feeling extremely nervous. And so I asked John, who is an expert meditator, for some advice. After this, I'm including an extra bit which happened directly before we went live, particularly because people have already commented that this isn't a live stream. This is a love stream. And I thought you might get a kick out of seeing the interactions between John and Bernardo. John, you may need to help me out right now for one minute with some breathing exercises to calm me down. Can you take me through? I'm honest for 30 seconds. Okay, so close your eyes. And what I want you to do is move forward a little bit. So you feel off center forward forward and then a little bit back so

Starting point is 04:01:45 you feel off-center backwards. Now keep going back and forth slowly, a little less each time, slowly zeroing in where you feel centered front to back. Once you feel centered back and forth, now do the same thing side to side. Move to your left, then to your right. Again, a little less each time until you zero in where you feel centered side to side. Okay, now repeat the same thing with your head. Back and forth, side to side. so now when you feel centered just feel as everything's dropping down into your lower belly okay thank you my friend you're welcome my friend critique was that well there are two critiques

Starting point is 04:03:06 one was from people who are unfamiliar with you john they're more bernardo fans they're like look at john getting all worked up that's fine and another i personally like that i think that's what made it engaging and the number two is yeah exactly i hope i hope i hope that i mean i aspire that even if i get passionate or worked up, I'm never in any way insulting or disrespectful. Not at all. Nowhere near. Oh, no, you can get a lot harder than that. I come from the corporate world, 20 years.

Starting point is 04:03:34 I mean, my skin is thicker than a crocodile. It's no problem. It's important that we restate that. I also feel affection for you, Bernardo. So do I, John. Yeah, so I want to make sure that's conveyed as well. Yeah, but you don't need to pay special attention to it or walk on eggshells.

Starting point is 04:03:52 No, just be yourself. It's fine. you

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke [Round 2] Theolocution on Mind Upload, Shadow Integration, and Consciousness

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