Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - John Vervaeke on Psychedelics, Evil, Consciousness, and Buddhism vs Christianity

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Prof. John Vervaeke's info: https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke The "Meaning Crisis" series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ John's Twitter: https://twitter.com/vervaeke_johnSubscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:43 What is an "affordance" in Cognitive Science? 00:07:28 The different uses of the word "meaning" 00:10:10 Materialism vs Physical-ism 00:12:48 What is "truth"? Harris vs Peterson from a Cognitive Scientific perspective 00:17:43 Perspectival knowledge (definition and examples) 00:21:13 The ways we practice narrative 00:27:13 The two world model 00:31:13 Buddhism's influence on John's worldview 00:33:43 The definition of Harry Frankfurt's "bullshit" 00:42:43 Addiction 00:45:48 Relationship between Lucifer and Frankfurt's BS 00:55:23 What is the "meaning crisis"? (explicating the "meaning of life") 01:10:23 Poetry should be read aloud 01:11:53 Faith, love, and participatory knowledge 01:18:23 The Platonic / Aristotelian influence on Christianity 01:21:43 How do reverse-engineer other points of view (such as what it's like to be someone in the 1200s) 01:32:13 The relationship between "reason" and "love" 01:47:43 The skepticism toward wisdom institutions and the birth of narcissism 01:49:43 The way Vervaeke uses the word "God" (God as affording transcendence) 01:54:53 The language of myth is lost but we retain the grammar 02:00:43 Where are we going with the "meaning crisis"? Is it getting worse? 02:06:20 How does John manage his time? 02:07:45 What do psychedelics provide that meditation doesn't? 02:18:00 Modelling truth in the other domains of knowledge (procedural, participatory, perspectival) 02:21:40 The "interpretation crisis" vs the "meaning crisis" 02:22:40 "Meaning" is not present in the scientific world view 02:25:50 What's relevance? (technical term is: "relevance realization") 02:31:30 John Vervaeke's origin of recognition of others 02:34:10 How does John collaborate? 02:38:50 People will sacrifice wealth for meaning 02:43:50 What is "evil"? Buddhism vs Christianity 02:49:35 Is Nihilism negative to the psyche, or salutary? 02:50:00 What could "free will" mean, possibly? ("freedom" in a certain sense isn't intrinsically "good") 02:57:20 Trolley Problem + Sam Harris' model of "evil" being neurological and a reduction of responsibility 03:00:50 Jungian individuation's relationship to the Big 5 model 03:05:50 How do we practically use this knowledge to cultivate character? 03:10:45 On self-deception 03:13:00 Tony Robbins (and other self development gurus) operate primarily on the placebo effect 03:14:15 "Being in the present moment" is horrible advice 03:17:10 What is 3rd generation Cognitive Science? 03:24:40 On "wisdom is knowing the difference between what you control and what you don't." 03:27:50 What wisdom is (relevance realization) 03:28:15 Which theory of consciousness does Vervaeke think is most correct / wrong? 03:32:50 Are intelligent people more "consciousness" or wise? If so, are they then more valuable people? 03:39:00 What is "reason" vs "rationality"? 03:41:30 Audience question: What is objectivity / what is real? 03:45:40 Audience question: On evil, and a "moral dimension" 03:48:00 Audience question: Is the point of meditation to reduce anxiety?

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Last year, I interviewed Professor John Vervaeke, and many of you thought it was one of the best interviews that you've seen, so why not combine them and re-release, given that we've had a slew of new subscribers? John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, and he deserves the highest superlatives I can give. His ability to integrate cognitive processes with how we construct meaning is peerless and I recommend you check out his Meaning Crisis series on YouTube. Much like the rest of the talks on this channel, this one is filled with plenty of technical

jargon and you'll need to do your homework to keep up because I'm asking questions that I would like to know the answer to selfishly and there's an unwillingness to constantly simplify since often the nuance is washed away in the compression and what you're left with is, it might appeal to a wider audience, but I find it's a patronizing distortion and it's not an accurate representation. The goal with this channel is to explicate on theories of everything, which is a physics terminology, as well as coupling them with theories of consciousness, and then subsequently present them. These conversations were from a while ago, and at the time, I didn't even know what a Protestant was,

nor what the Reformation was, and I was embarrassed of re-releasing this because I thought, well, it's embarrassing, and then I thought, well, you know, I might as well display my ineptitude instead of pretending that I'm mature out the gate. ineptitude instead of pretending that I mature out the gate. Think of me as a foolish person who knows nothing except maybe a little math and physics. Enjoy. So I'm here with the magnanimous, sensational, superlative, colossal, prodigious, sumptuous John Verveke, Professor John Verveke of the University of Toronto, professor of cognitive science. Professor both of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I'm 60% appointed in cognitive psychology and

40% in cognitive science. So that's why he has this big office because it's 40% larger because he has 40% more obligations. It was just a very nice way of being treated by the university. I visited the president's office once and it's just slightly larger than this and I've never visited a professor who has an office this big. Well you know but it was probably heated much better than this office is heated so there you go. You can get your own portable heater and that's it. That's it. It's $40 to get this much space. That's it. Yeah. I mean, it's been very, very useful to have this space because it's allowed me

to, it's afforded me having larger meetings, which have often been useful in my work. You use the word affordance right now, which actually, can you get me a pen? I think this is your pen. Yes. Thank you. You use the word affordance, and I know Peterson makes a connection between meaning and affordances. Can you explain the concept of affordances and then what meaning has to do with that, if anything, from your point of view?

Oh, sure. So, I mean, the term originally goes back to J.J. Gibson, and I was extremely fortunate. I actually got to study with John Kennedy, who was one of J.J. Gibson's most significant and important protégés. And John himself did just some amazing work. But what Gibson was actually arguing was that we think we're perceiving, we're primarily perceiving objects. And it's a very sort of model, it's a model like very similar to what you see

in Locke, sort of the idea that we get these impression of objects and then we form ideas around them. And then Gibson argued that no, the objects come later, they're sort of abstractions out of what we're actually perceiving are affordances. And so, for example, this object is graspable. So that, to experience it, to perceive it as graspable, is it being graspable a property of the bottle? Well, no, not really, because for many creatures, praying mantis, this isn't graspable. Is it a property just of me? Is it a subjective property? Well, no, because not everything I want to be graspable is graspable.

It's actually a relational property. It's a real relational property. It's that there's properties of this object and properties of my hand, for example, that can be causally coupled together such that my hand can fit and make use of the objects in this object in certain ways. So the object affords grasping. This desk affords me placing things on it, right? So that's what you see first, and then the objects are inferred afterwards. Right, because what, and this is part of the whole idea of embodied cognition, instead of thinking of yourself as sort of a passive receiver, that's the Lockean model, right, of these impressions, think of the word pressing on you, right,

instead of thinking of, instead of thinking yourself that way, think instead, no, this is what you're actually doing, that it's your perception and your action are always deeply interpenetrating and conditioning and coupling each other. So I'm seeing that as I'm moving towards it, trying to make use of it. You say, well, sometimes I sit still. Even when you're sitting still, you're usually shifting your attention around it, your eyes are saccading, right?

And what you're often doing is you're trying to get to a place where, Marlo Ponti talks about this and Dreyfus and others, where you get what's called an optimal grip on it. I'm trying to get to the place where I get the sort of... That's only if you want to pick it up, or does that just happen even if you're just writing a picture? Even if you're trying to, first of all, want to know what it is. But of course those are not disconnected. I don't want to know everything about this. I want to know things that I can interact with it

in terms of, like it's graspable or perhaps it's throwable, and that would be something different for me, right? You know, there's an object, oh no, and I need to throw it, right? And so what it means is, okay, there's trade-off relationships. If I get too close to the object, I'm missing, I can't get, I'm not getting a lot of the structure. I might get some details here, right? If I get too far back and are static, I'm missing some of the details and I'm missing some of the, you know, the curvature of the. So, to get the cup, I have to move around. And notice getting the cup, getting a grip on the cup, it's dependent again, like I said, on what I need from the cup.

I might need the details. You know, I'm Sherlock. Oh, I need the fingerprint. I have to get in. Or I might just need it as a heavy object and then I don't need. But if it's graspable, you see, what I'm trying to do with the thing is going to affect, right, how I'm moving around it so that I get the optimal grip that is relevant to the task or the problem at hand for me. And so sensation and perception, sensory motor loop, are bound up together. They're interpenetrating. And what's happening is I'm sort of being shaped as the object is being shaped in the sense of different features, different aspects of it

are being foregrounded or backgrounded for me. Okay, and what does that have to do with meaning? What that has to do with meaning is, well, I mean, that's a long question. But what I think that has to do with meaning is when we talk about meaning in meaning in life. So let's be clear. I'm not talking about what people talk about ultimately in semantics, like the meaning of sentences or things like that. Because when we use that term, talking about our life, we're using it as a metaphor.

So we should be using different words. We're using meaning and then the meaning of life and then the meaning of a sentence. We should say meaning A of life or meaning B of a sentence. Yeah, so I mean philosophers will often distinguish between like semantic meaning and existential meaning or something like that in order to... So right now you're talking about existential meaning. Very much so. And the way to think of the core of existentialism, at least one way of understanding it, is our meaning-making in this sense of the modes that I get into, right? So, right, I want to be careful how your viewers are understanding this, but I'm creating an identity for this as I'm creating an

identity for myself. They're being co-created together. I am becoming a grasper as this is becoming a graspable thing. As this is becoming a graspable? Did that not exist beforehand? It existed, but to think that the graspability is in it as a property, you won't find that, for example, as a property in your physics ontology because it's not an invariant property of this. As I said, this is graspable by me. It's not graspable of all. Yeah, but you can just say it's graspable by me without saying as it becomes graspable.

Well, because I might not be using it that way, right? So I may never grasp it. See, I don't get it. Because it's as if what you're saying is you have some motivation, you have some reason you want to pick it up, you have something you want to do grasp it. See, I don't get it, because it's as if what you're saying is you have some motivation, you have some reason you want to pick it up, you have something you want to do with it. Right. But the object itself, from a physics point of view, let's say, from a materialistic point

of view, doesn't change because what you want to do... Well, I think that's unfair. Here's why I think it's unfair. You're thinking that the properties of this object are somehow inherent in it, like its chemical structure, where many of its properties are interactional properties that are only revealed or disclosed by it as it interacts with other objects or other things. So many of the real properties of things are relational properties. So if I say to you that sugar is soluble, is that a property in the sugar?

No, it's a property that the sugar has in relationship to its interaction with water, right? And so many of the properties that we want to talk about things, we shouldn't think of them as adhering in the object. They are disclosed in terms of how the object interacts with other things. One of those things that the cup can interact with is me and the way I will shape it either physically or at least cognitively in terms of what aspects of it stand out for me or important to me. Okay, I don't want to get bogged down in this but I'm just going to play the devil's

advocate because most people are materialists or at least that's how they're trained to think that they see the world. That's a mistake, right? They shouldn't be materialists. No, they shouldn't be. No, no, no. What I mean is they should be physicalists. I mean, there's a big difference between those. Materialism is an 18th century view, right? Materialism is the view that all that exists is matter.

I mean, and that's a ridiculous view because it's unscientific. You should be a physicalist. You should believe that in addition to matter, there's energy, there's space, there's time, there's causal properties, there's fundamental forces, right? There's the curvature of space, there's energy, there's space, there's time, there's causal properties, there's fundamental forces, right? There's the curvature of space, there's relativity, there's, right? You should be including all of those in your ontology. And many physicists are leaning towards the idea that, you know, information should be thought of as physical

and part of the fundamental. That's what we should be talking about. Okay, so let's say physicalist. Well, that's important, I think. So then what a physicalist might say is that sugar, dissolvability of sugar is an inherent property of the sugar, that that exists independent of whether or not water exists. How would you know that? With a calculation. Like you make up a hypothetical.

We can make up hypotheticals in physics all the time. We can make up hypotheticals about what would happen if this hit the wall. And it doesn't have to hit the wall and we can calculate it. And then we test it out and it turns out to be correct. It could also turn out to be wrong. And then we update our models. Right. So you should, right?

And so all of your ways of actually obtaining your knowledge are actually dependent on getting things to interact together. Yes, you could try and a priori calculate all of this, but that's not how we actually do science, right? That's not a fair representation of how we do science. And to say that if you had no knowledge of water's ability to dissolve things, how would you determine, you know, your hypothetical... But now we get to knowability. Well, that's right. So does it exist independent of our knowability? Well, I mean, you would have to. There's a tree falling in the woods now.

Well, now, it's not quite knowability. It's, right, there's a difference between knowability and whether or not it's a real property. I assume that sugar dissolved in water way before there were cognitive agents or life wouldn't have evolved the way it did. So I don't think this is dependent on there being cognitive agents with consciousness knowing that sugar dissolves in water in order for sugar to be soluble. But what it does depend is it depends crucially on a real relation between sugar and water and not something that just belongs to water as a property itself. So you're using the word relation and interaction interchangeably in this? Yeah, because I mean interaction is a species of relation, yeah.

Okay, so let's get bogged down a little bit further. Okay. Like Sam Harris and Peterson, what is your notion of truth? So that's a long question. And I think it's fair to say that one of my criticisms is we have a notion of truth that is too separate from the different ways in which we obtain knowledge about the world. So our standard way of understanding truth, and the interesting thing about the Greeks, for example, is they had four different terms for talking about this. So the model we have, the dominant model we have, is propositional truth. So we have propositions, and then we determine if they're accurate or they correspond. And of course, there's a lot of philosophical debate, right? But some notion of they correspond to reality in one way. And that's our epistemic

sense of truth. And I think, if I understand him correctly, because it's very hard to pin Harris down because he always claims to be misunderstood when people try to criticize him. But anyways, I think that the notion of truth he is advocating is exactly that notion, and he thinks that's the sole notion of truth. What I think Jordan to be doing with his pragmatic notion of truth, I think he's conflating a bunch of different things together. In his own little Petersonian form of truth. Yeah, because he talks about the truth in the world of action, right?

And he talks about this in terms of pragmatism, and I take him to be using something like a Jamesian notion of pragmatism. Let me try and get at that. So in addition to knowing that things are the case, like knowing that that is a cup, right, and that's proposition knowing, there's procedural knowing, and I think that's part of what Jordan's talking about. So I know how to catch a ball. I know how to ride a bicycle. That's a skill. It's not a theory. It's a skill, right? And, you know, it's even, you know, realized in different functions, areas of

the brain, et cetera, things like that. So when I talk about skills, I don't talk about them being true or false, right? I talk about them being apt or inept. And that's pragmatic. That's part of what pragmatism means, I think. Because to be apt or inept means that you have some goal. There's some goal, but it's also the appropriateness or the fittedness of the action. So the standard there isn't really a standard of truth. So let me try it this way. I think all the knowledges have a different way of talking about ways in which we find things to be real. One way is propositional truth.

Then another, what skills give us is they give us a sense of realness in terms of power. what skills give us is they give us a sense of realness in terms of power, right? How much power we are able to wield, how much our actions can intervene and alter the course of things. And that's definitely what's being emphasized by certain forms of pragmatism. And you can even see it in some postmodernisms when Foucault was talking about the relationships between knowledge and power. But I think there's another notion. So the Greeks have episteme for theoretical truth, propositional truth. They have techne for these procedural abilities. Techne. Techne. It's where we get our word technology from. This is the knowing how to do things. Is that related to perspectival knowledge? No, I would say that that's a different thing.

And so I think the Greek word that corresponds to that is noesis. And so this is closer to our word for like noticing. And so what perspectival knowing is, right, knowing what it's like to have a particular salience landscape. Knowing what it's like to be here now with these things salient to me and these things backgrounded, these things foregrounded. I'm offended that you refer to me as these things. No, it's a bunch of things.

What relationship does the perspectival knowledge have to truth? And also, let's just get to your notion of truth. Because right now you're reiterating what you think Peterson's notion of truth is, or Sam Harris's. Well, I am. So, well, I'm trying to get to my notion by distinguishing and contrasting mine with both Harris and Peterson. So unlike Harris, I think that there, I think truth belongs to a family, right, of ways of deciding how things are real for us. And then I think Jordan is calling, what Jordan is talking about, he's talking about some aspect of our procedural knowing, our techne.

And one way things strike us, a criterion we use for determining if things are real is their power, which is different from the accuracy of our propositions. The perspectival knowing. Studying this right now with Dan Schiappe, it has a different sense of realness to it. It comes with this notion of presence. So let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We're currently studying scientists who do work with the rovers on Mars.

And what's interesting there is this notion of telepresence, being on Mars, right? And you have to- it's important that you know that the rovers are not joystick controlled. You can't- in fact, you can't do that because the time delay is too great. So, what you do is you get batch, you get all these photos and all this data, and then you sort of process it, and then you set up a set of instructions, like to Curiosity or things like that.

Now, what's interesting is you look at these people, and you can see similar things when people are trying to do VR, virtual reality. They talk about being on Mars. They have this perspectival sense of being on Mars, and they'll do things like, they'll, like, you know, okay so, you know, the rover needs, here's my camera, and they'll say, you know, I need to, and they'll say, they'll do that, they'll do first-person perspective, first-person perspective, I need to turn this way, I need to turn this way, right,

because the light's going to be here, and if I don't turn this way, if I turn this, I won't be able to get what I need. And they do all this perspectival adjustment from the first-person perspective, right? And so what's really important to them, right, and they look for it in the people that are trying to join the team, is that sense of being on Mars, being there, that sense of presence. And notice the word we use, virtual reality. It becomes more real to us when we get a sense of presence, when we get that sense of immersion, when we get that sense that we have a perspectival salience landscape

that is working for us. So perspectival knowing, noesis, has this sense of presence. And then, I think there's a fourth one, and you can see it also a bit in what I was talking about with the scientists. There's a participatory knowing, and this goes to gnosis as a Greek term. This is knowing by sharing a fundamental identity with things. And so, for example, the scientists are identifying with the rover. That's why they'll say I. And when you write, you identify with your pen. Is that similar or not? Well, I think that's part of it. I mean, so when I'm writing, I think there's two parts

to the identification process. Part of it, when I'm identifying with something, process. Part of it when I'm identifying with something, I'm doing what Polanyi calls indwelling. Like I'm actually not sensing it, I'm sensing through it, right? And actually you're typically not paying attention to the pen when you're writing, you're paying attention to it. So that's one way. But you also do something else that you probably aren't doing with the pen as much. You do internalization. So, for example, you have metacognition. You are able to reflect on your own thinking. You don't come with that, right? You get that by imitating adults when you're a kid taking a perspective on you. And so you imitate them taking a perspective on you until eventually you can do that for yourself. You internalize other

people's perspectives onto you. And that's partially also how you get enculturated. So we identify things, and this is what you can see them doing with the rover. They're sort of indwelling, they're seeing through the rover, but they're also internalizing it into sort of becoming the rover.

And we have lots of ways in which we have this kind of participatory knowing. So a really important way, and I think this goes towards some of Jordan's concern with narrative, although narrative also involves perspectival knowing. But we think of ourselves as temporally extended selves, like, you know, here's my past, here's my future. And so we have this sort of autobiographical sense of our self as extended in time, right?

That, again, isn't sort of natural to us. We acquire that. And we acquire it through constantly practicing narrative. And this is some of Daniel Hudo's work on the narrative practice hypothesis. We, again, think that thinking in narrative is natural to us. But notice that we spend so much bloody time practicing it, and we practice it all the time with each other. Like how?

When you meet somebody at a party, and they want to know who you are, what do you do? You tell them your story. You go to a home at the end of the day, people want to know how did your day go? You tell them your story. But we wouldn't think of that as practicing, but we are. But we are. And notice what you do when you have a kid. What do you do?

You have to practice narrative. And do they get narrative right away? Can they tell or understand jokes right away? No. And if you ask them to tell a story when they're really... So what do we do?

I mean, I've had two kids, so I had to go through this. You know, you watch the Teletubbies. So narrative is not innate, but it's useful. And it's culturally universal. So it's not innate, but it's culturally universal. Yes. Because we usually look across cultures to see, do we all smile when we're happy?

And then we say, oh, okay, we can infer that that's innate. Yeah, so you should use, I mean, universality is important. So I don't usually make the inference directly from universality to innate. I make the inference usually to universal for having some fundamental function, right? And those aren't the same thing, as you just pointed out, right? And so let's go back to the Teletubbies. We do this really, really simplified narrative. And watch the show. It's horrific, right? And so let's go back to the Teletubbies. We do this really, really simplified narrative and watch the show. It's horrific, right? As an adult, because it's repetitive and repetitive.

And we're doing this because we have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and slowly make it more complex until eventually we can do narrative and then eventually we can indwell narrative. I can start to see the world as a story and then I can also start to internalize the world as a story and I become a story. I'm a story and the world is a story. Now that's participatory knowing. I'm a story participating in a story and that story is participating in me. And that, right, that's gnosis. That's another kind of knowing. And it gives you the realness of that ultimate sense of being, right, in tune, attuned, sort of one between you and the world.

And so I think all of these are different ways in which we make judgments about realness. And I think it's a mistake, so here's how I return back to both Harris and Jordan, I think it's a mistake to try and equate truth to any one of these. I think we should understand that truth, we should reserve it for what it's prototypically meant, the accuracy, the correspondence between the content of our propositions in the world. And we should think about power, we should think about presence, and we should think about attunement as additional ways in which we connect up to realness.

And now I can now answer your question. Those ways in which we connect up to realness, especially the procedural, the perspectival, the participatory, that's where a lot of the meaning that goes into meaning in life is to be found. What would Peterson say to that? What would his objection to that be? Because he would say he has a strong belief in his notion of truth, and then you just, you also seem to, I don't know if it's conflating,

but to equate realness with truth. No, I was trying to say that truth is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a propositional fashion. Power is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a procedural fashion. Presence is one of the ways we judge things to be real in a procedural fashion. Presence is one of the ways we judge things to be real. And by power, you just mean influence? Influence, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't mean like, you know, political power. Brutality.

No, no, I don't mean anything like that, no. Oppression. Pardon me? Oppression. No, no, I'm not trying to give it any political overtones. And then one of the ways we, you know, the participatory way we judge things to be real is this sense of participatory attunement with things. So every different point of view has its own realness to it? Well, I don't think these are points of view.

I think these are fundamentally different ways in which we know and come into contact with reality. come into contact with reality. And these are the grounding ways in which we try to make the connections to reality that underlie... I mean, one of the things that people, even if you look at the psychology of meaningful life, one of the things that makes people feel that they have a meaningful life is how connected they are. Connection, right? How connected they are to something greater than themselves, something more real than themselves. Does this have a relation to the two-world problem? I mean, not problem, two-world model, because the connectedness is you transcending and being more connected to what is real, and then the realness is just all of what you said.

Yes, yes. So that's why, in fact, for example, let's take, I think, the archetypal philosophical position for the axial age on the two-world model, which is, you know, a Platonic or Neo-Platonic view, right? And you've got the upper world as the more real world, and the lower world is the less real, right? And if you, like, it's in Plato, and I think it's very well explicated in Plotinus, when you ascend, I'm speaking mythologically, of course, to the upper world, you actually transcend the, you transcend propositional truth, right? You're moving ultimately into oneness at one minute. Eventually you move into the perspectival, right? And then that eventually becomes the participatory.

So these levels below the propositional are actually the ones that, in at least that tradition, are considered the ones by which we most deeply get that connectedness to reality. Okay, now getting back to what Peterson would critique you, how would he critique you, and what would your response to him be? Let's build a virtual Peterson. Okay, so that's a hard thing to do because Jordan's a really, really complex guy. I mean, I've debated him a couple times. Are those on the internet? Because I've only seen

one conversation with you. It wasn't a debate. So I don't even know if what I'm thinking of is the debate. Well, okay, we can call it a discussion of you with. I've had a complex conversation that contained disagreement with him about meaning in life. There was an earlier one, it wasn't recorded, where it was much more of a, what you might call a formal debate, where we were debating about a problem called the frame problem. Artificial intelligence? But it also overlaps with stuff we're sort of touching the edges on, which is how humans zero in on relevant information. Because part of what I'm going to argue is that that process of zeroing in on relevant information is sub-propositional. It's taking place in these lower levels that I've been

talking about primarily. And that a lot of what it means for us to say that we have a meaningful life is we feel connected by deep bonds of relevance to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. And that's very much what this psychological research is showing about how you can manipulate or enhance or, you know, degrade people's sense of meaning in life. Okay, yeah, so what would Jordan say? people's sense of meaning in life. Okay, yeah, so what would Jordan say? So what Jordan would like, a lot of it, he would like a lot of, because for a long time we shared students precisely because both he and I spoke about the frame problem, spoke about relevance.

I think he would like some aspects of the non-propositional kinds of knowing that I've been talking about. He might, I don't know, you're asking me to do conjecture here, and so I'm being sort of cautious. He might object to my claim that you have to drop below the propositional level. Here's why I'm saying that. And I don't know if this is fair or unfair to him. One of the things I'd like to do is have another discussion with Jordan about these kinds of things. But you see, one of the consequences of what I'm arguing is that most of this meaning is sub-propositional. And the cognitive state by which you grasp your propositions is belief.

And so what I'm saying is a lot of meaning in life is actually below your belief systems, right? And it's therefore, it's sub-semantic, sub-syntactic in really important ways. And that means that understanding, trying to formulate, articulate, and express this in an ideological fashion as something that is captured primarily by beliefs, I think is a fundamental mistake. And I think Jordan would, that's an area where Jordan and I would significantly disagree. That's, for example, why I tend to view, I'm quite critical of trying to deal with the meaning crisis in terms of formulating it as a conflict between ideologies in which one

ideology must be victorious in some fashion because I think that is both symptomatic of the meaning crisis and exacerbating of it because it's precisely pitching us at the wrong level we need to be at in order to enhance and recover the meaning in life that people feel is under threat. Do you feel like that comes from your Buddhism background, that whenever there's a paradox, that it's just an apparent contradiction and that one doesn't need to win, that both can be right? Well, I don't know. That's a really good question. I think it's not just the Buddhist training.

It was also the Taoist training. I am a practicer. Well, in Tai Chi, you actually play Tai Chi. You don't practice it. It's like playing music. And I've been doing that as long, in fact, even longer, about a year longer than I've been doing that as long, in fact, even longer, about a year longer than I've been doing the Buddhist practices.

One of the things that did happen to me is, and this was a long time ago, because I've been doing these things for like 28 years, but people, I've been doing the Tai Chi for quite a while, and the meditation, but especially the Tai Chi. And people came to me, and I was like, I was just doing it because I was sort of getting something out of it. And I sort of had a vague idea that this would be deeply transformative.

But people were coming to me and they're saying, what's going on? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, you talk differently and you write differently. How long after you started practicing did you sit up? Probably two or three or four. It's hard. Years or months? Months. So probably three or four years, I think.

Maybe something like that. And again, it's because Tai Chi is taking place at this level, these lower levels that we're talking about. Did you find it affected your hand gestures too? Because even when you talk, you look like you're performing Tai Chi. I gesticulate just as much as anybody.

Yours are flowy. Mine are just erratic. I think that's true. And I think I get more into the flow state because of being a Tai Chi player.

I keep catching myself. And yeah, people really said that they had, at this upper level, that level of propositions and inferences and theories, they were noticing a change. And I hadn't even noticed it. But see, stuff was happening at the procedural, perspectival, and even the participatory level that was emerging up know, emerging up, percolating up. I don't know what the correct metaphor here is, but it was actually altering how I go

about and do my theoretical endeavors. Let's get to BS or bullshit. Okay. You're allowed to swear. Don't worry. I don't like to swear, so I'm going to say BS. Well, technically, it's not swearing. It's just vulgarity, but that's okay.

I'm going to say what I think it is because I'm trying to make sure I understand, and then you'll just correct me, okay? So BS is not necessarily you're lying to yourself or someone's lying to you. It's when there's the inappropriate hijacking of salience from something like a relevant landscape or habit that makes conspicuous something that's irrelevant. Yeah, in an important way. I think that's right. I would add a bit more to it. I would put it in sort of... The notion comes from Frankfurt, Harry Frankfurt,

and his seminal essay on bullshit, which is like 20 years old now. It's fairly new. Because most of these ideas, they're like Nietzsche and Jung. So that's pretty new. Frankfurt's a really important modern philosopher. And so Frankfurt was, he starts the book in a way that, of course, is ultimately deeply relevant to the meaning crisis, because one symptom of the meaning crisis is, he says,

there's this sense of just increasing amounts of bullshit. And then he said, you know, if that's the case, I'm paraphrasing him, of course, this is not verbatim, but if that's the case, you know, we've got to get clear about what bullshitting is. And he then tries to distinguish it from lying. And he says, the liar works by trying to get you to believe in the truth of something. And so the liar is depending on altering your behavior because you care about truth. So I tell you that Susan loves you even though she doesn't because that will What? What?

Yeah. So I do that and I can change your behavior. Now what the bullshit artist does, according to Frankfurt, is they get you to become indifferent to the truth. And then, I think the following thing I'm going to say is implicit in Frankfurt, but part of what I've done is sort of explicate it, make it more explicit. I think that what the bullshit artist does then is not only make you indifferent to the truth, they make you indifferent to the truth, as you said, by trying to make something inappropriately salient and catchy to you as a way of manipulating your behavior. And part of what I think that inappropriateness means is that the salience has been, right, how you're tracking salience has been uncoupled by how you're trying to determine the truth

of things. So one of my standard examples is, as I give, it's like in... Pardon me? The Simpsons. Oh, I wasn't going to do The Simpsons, but I could do The Simpsons. One of my standard examples, another one is advertising.

So, like, you go into... First of all, you watch a commercial, right? And, you know, a person's in a bar and they get some alcohol, which, of course, they don't actually drink, but they alcohol, and then of course, they don't actually drink. But they alcohol. And then there's attractive people come around and everybody's smiling and laughing. And you know this is not true.

You just go into a bar. That's not what's going on there. And you know it's not true. And they know you know it's not true. But you know what they're doing? They're making that alcohol very super salient to you because you have attractive people. You've got nice lighting. That's 90% of ads.

Yes. And so 90% of ads are basically bullshit. And do the ads make you not believe in truth at all? Or do they just make something salient and you still care about the truth? It doesn't actually besmirch your truth-seeking... That's a good metaphor. Now, that's a really tricky question. I mean, so I can't give like a yes-no answer to it, right? I think, so in the instance what happens there is, of course, and this is why the advertisers do it, you buy the product, right? You buy the product largely independent of sort of your assessment of the truth. They're counting on impulse buying for a lot of what you do. You know, you're walking and it

jumps off the shelf at you kind of thing. That's what salience is. Things stand out for you, right? Now your question, I want to pause on it because I think it's a question that deserves reflection. It's like, how often do you have to cycle through this where you are disconnected from truth? You become, let's use the right word here, indifferent. It drops into the background. It's not salient to you. It's not motivationally, you know, affecting you. How often, when you disconnect from that and allow yourself to be caught up in salience, does it have to go on before this gains enough autonomy that it becomes compelling and difficult for you to return to the truth-tracking?

Because obviously that can happen, and cults are an example of that. Of course. Now, magicians are an example to me of someone who's a self-admitted bullshit artist. Yes. So they'll tell you, this'm doing, this is all bullshit. Yeah. You want to play the game of watching and being interested. Yeah.

But at the end, you know it's bullshit, but the advertisers won't tell you it's BS, because maybe in an interview later they'll say it's BS. They typically won't do that. Unless they're trying to make a joke. Well, the joke will be, in fact, some advertising works with the joke of, you know that's not true. I know you know it's not. And they'll give you the conceit that you are smart because you know it's not true. Well, the trouble with that, what's problematic about that is by appealing to your sense of excellence. This is the superiority illusion.

Most people believe they're above the average in all dimensions, which of course is false. It has to be false. But because they're appealing to that, so the situation in which they appeal to your sense of superiority because you know the advertisement isn't true precisely makes the product salient to you

so that you are more, precisely makes the product salient to you so that you are more likely to buy the product. So yeah, this can and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Is BS related to trigger words? Like this is getting a little bit political, but redefine like racism and not oppression, actually violence is another redefined word. So they'll use these words that are emotionally triggering. I think wherever anybody, right or left or center, is,

and that's why your other example is such a pertinent one. My other example is the one from The Simpsons, the famous speech by the aliens. My fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backwards, upwards, not forwards, twirling, twirling towards freedom. You're not saying anything, but it gives you this rush, right, this tremendous rush. It's evocative, it's catchy, right, it's super salient to you. And I think wherever political discourse is retreating to things that are super salient to us without any articulated, defended understanding of the truth claims that we're making in terms of them, yeah, I think we're falling into bullshit. So how do we prevent ourselves from falling prey to bullshit? Maybe it starts with identifying it. I'm not sure.

Well, I mean, part of it is that, but part of it is to do this. Right. One of the arguments I make, one of the applications I make of Frankfurt is that we can use it as a powerful way of understanding self-deception. And this is actually what we're already discussing. We're discussing the ways in which we fall into patterns of self-deception. And this is again why these levels are important to me. Because for very deep reasons, you can't really lie to yourself. Because beliefs don't work that way. Pick a belief you want to have. You can't just believe.

I would like to believe that everybody loves me. I can imagine that. But believe it? Belief doesn't work that way. And so you can't really deceive yourself by lying to yourself. But what you can do is you can bullshit yourself because of the way attention alters salience, right? So if something is salient, like if there's a loud noise over here, it catches my attention. Remember the catchiness.

But I can also use my attention to make something salient, like look at this, right? And so notice what I can also use my attention to make something salient like look at this Right and so notice what I can do I can use my attention to make something salient and Then that is what the advertisers doing right and then that makes it more likely that it will catch my attention And then right and then I guess I'll have a clue Yeah, a feedback loop very much a feedback loop and that's how you can bullshit yourself You can lead yourself until let's say you're addicted're addicted to chocolate. And you have chocolate on your desk. That's very apropos for me. I've had to give up eating chocolate for health reasons. So let's say you're addicted...

There's chocolates in there, man. Okay, cool. So let's say you're addicted to chocolates. And you want to not eat chocolates, but you keep it on your desk. That makes you more likely to eat them because of the cigarettes. This is one of the ways in which people fall into self deception. Many people have what's called the restraint bias. They believe that they are capable of a lot more self-regulation and because they believe in the truth of I shouldn't eat the chocolate. That's enough, right? No it's not. In fact that's the fallacy. And so

what they'll do is they'll subject themselves to the temptation, and then they'll find that they're eating the bloody chocolate, precisely because the chocolate is salient. And without even realizing it often, they'll start eating the chocolate. I want to stop using my phone so much. And you're telling yourself that as you're looking at your phone. Look, one of the best models of addiction, my colleague and friend, Mark Lewis, he's one of the world's foremost experts on addiction. He was himself a drug addict. He wrote a really good book called Memoirs of an Addictive... Is he a professor?

Yes. He was a professor at OISE at the University of Toronto. That's how I got to know him. He's now in the Netherlands. And his model of addiction, watch how it brings together everything we've talked about. Did he leave OISE because of the BS from the postmodernists? No, no, no. He left because of career opportunities for his spouse. Okay, okay. So sorry. I was just making a joke.

That's fine. So most people, and Mark has a lot of arguments and evidence against this, have sort of the chemical dependency model. So it's like an infection model. I take the drug and then I get infected and then I get dependent on that and I have to get it. And that just does not explain a lot of the data about addiction, but it's kind of a model we like for, I think, political reasons. What actually seems to go on in addiction is something like this. And watch how it brings in all the stuff we're

talking about. So I take the drug. And what the drug does is it alters what I find salient or relevant. And if I don't have some important skills and abilities around that, that will actually start to limit some of my options in the world. So my world narrows a little bit, right? Now, because my world narrows a bit, what that tends to, I start to internalize that. Remember we talked about that? And that starts to narrow and limit my cognition. It becomes a little less, I lose some cognitive flexibility. As I lose cognitive flexibility, my ability to make sense of the world and solve problems in the world goes down. sense of the world and solve problems in the world goes down, and so the world also narrows.

He calls this addiction as reciprocal narrowing. The world narrows, and then my cognition narrows, and then the world narrows, and my cognition narrows, until they both get so narrow that it looks like these two things are true. My world can't change, and I can't change. I can't be anybody other than that. So that's rumination that's related to it? Rumination is related to that, but it's more than rumination, right? Because rumination is typically in here. But notice I'm talking about, remember we talked about the affordance loop and

these relational properties and indwelling and internalization and the way you make sense of this world in this dynamic fashion? that's all in place there. So what you're doing is this loop is tightening and tightening and tightening, and you're losing the options of who you can be, and the world is losing the options as to what kind of future it can have. And that's when it becomes... Addiction? Addiction.

I had this insight a few months ago or maybe a year ago. I was just alone in my condo when I was living downtown and it was dark. And I never do this. I just turn off the lights and I was just thinking with the lights off in my living room. Like, when do you do that? Why do you do that? I mean, you probably do that because you're a meditative guy. But most people, I don't do that.

So I was just thinking and I was getting into some deep thoughts and profound insights about humanity, and then I felt like I was speaking to Carl Jung in my own brain, like conjuring him or what I think he is. And then I shifted my head a bit, and my curtains had a little bit of a slit or a slat, and there was light from outside. It was nighttime.

And my attention was drawn there. And then I realized, wait, why did I just, I lost all my thoughts. And then I was thinking, what drew me there? It was the light, almost like a moth or a mosquito to the light. And it's just the neon lights of Zanzibar or some other downtown advertisement. And then I remember thinking, hmm, there's this connection in the Bible between Satan and the bringer of light, Lucifer. And then I wondered, huh, I wonder if that's related to attention. Be careful of what grabs your attention. And now I want to know if you see any connection between Lucifer, the bringer of light, and BS.

So, I mean, originally Lucifer, there is no actual identification between Lucifer and Satan, right? There are different figures in the Bible and then it's later Christian tradition that identifies them together. Although, is it Milton or Dante that there's still separate figures? I can't remember, but it's one of them. Because Lucifer was originally the morning star, and that's why it was the bringer of light, right?

And then, which of course is Venus. And the morning star was associated with all kinds of religious practices of the cultures around ancient Israel. And so that morning star got associated with the adversaries, the enemies of Israel. And that eventually got associated with Satan, who was originally not an evil figure. He's the antagonist in God's court. That's why he has admitted he can just walk into God's court in the book of Job, for example,

and talk to God, because he's there as a prosecutor, right? And then those things eventually get fused together, and we get sort of our modern notion of evil. But I guess a Jungian, a Jordan, as an example, might say, you know, everything you just said, John, is historically true, but the way in which we need to pay attention to what we find salient and what attracts us is a perennial piece of advice that myths do give to us that you'll find in many mythological stories. So here's another one. It's famous, right? The sirens in the Odyssey, right? If you get caught up in this, and we use the sirens now as... So is that related to BS?

Well, it could be. I mean, it's like, don't get caught up in this beautifully attractive thing because it will draw you to your own destruction. It will lead to self-destruction. Be careful of what you pay attention to. Be careful about what you pay attention to. Be careful about what it's doing to you. So notice what Odysseus does. He has forethought.

He lashes himself to the mast, and he has wax put in the ears of all of his men so that he cannot do anything to alter the course of the ship. So he gives up that. See something interesting, I have this argument with a friend of mine who feels like anytime that let's say you're extremely attracted to women and you're married. No I'm not married.

But I'm saying in this example, in this hypothetical, so you're married so that's how you get so much work done by the way because you're well no no but I mean I have a partner and she's a wonderful woman okay okay so let's say you have your partner and you're attracted to other women but and you know that and you don't want to be tempted and so you just stop looking at other women now my friend would say that's repression because he's he's of that he's a because he's a Freudian, he has a Freudian mindset that whatever you're trying to not do there's somehow repression there. But I would say is it repression if you clean your room because it's more conducive to you

working better? Is it repression because you're just changing your environment? Is it repression if you take off your shirt when you're extremely hot? This putting of wax in the ear. To me, that's an admission that you're a limited being, that you're not infinitely strong. I mean, we're still trying to work around to the question that this is all in service of, which is, you know,

how do you deal with BS? And I'm not objecting to this, because I think trying to unpack all of this machinery and get a deep understanding of BS is really necessary, indispensable at least try to capture self-regulation just in rules, I think you're making a fundamental mistake. But you're also making a fundamental mistake to think that rules don't have any service in the project of self-regulation. Both of those, I think, are overly simplistic. I think are overly simplistic. It has to do with the fact that rules do organize and limit, but you can never completely get

the self-regulation you need from the rule itself. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So here's a rule I try to follow, be kind want to be kind and that's a rule what I mean by that is I limit my options and my behavior in order to try and exemplify that but notice that that doesn't alleviate me from all of this work of Determining what's relevant and salient and making judgments. Because here, look at this. The way I'm kind to my son Spencer is not the way I should be kind to my partner. That would be condescending, inappropriate.

The way I'm kind to my partner, the way I'm kind to her, is not the way I should be kind to my students. That would also be, this is my language, inappropriate. The way I'm kind to my students is not the way I should be kind to a stranger that would also again be inappropriate. So even when I'm trying to follow a rule I'm still dependent on having to make judgments about what's salient and relevant. I still have to rely on my capacity to determine what is appropriate, what is the best fittedness to this situation.

In other words, the rule is like an adage of generality that you have to then apply in specific situations. Right. This is called the problem of specification. And what I can't do is specify all the specifications. I can't put into the proposition, be kind, all the conditions and all the contexts and all the possible ways I'll need to specify. Trying to pre-specify it, right, will be too prejudicial. I'll prejudge it in too many ways and I'll get too rigid, too inflexible,

and I'll actually end up not being kind, even though in one sense I'm trying to follow the rule. You won't be kind because? Because what I'll be doing is I'll be trying to capture being kind in just a set of rules. And what I'm trying to do is remove that process of specification and try and put it in a limited number of finite, ahead of the time pre-specifications. And you can't do that because the world is complex and dynamic and changing. And so are you and so are people and if you try and pre-package it all that way you're actually going to miss all most of the time all that appropriate but at the same time you can't get rid of the rules exactly that's exactly my point in fact that i've got to have the two together what i want is i want rules that

give me sort of you know things that I want to try and do across context. In many different contexts I want to be kind, so the rules are giving me the cross contextual, but I also need this ability to, you know, to make them context sensitive in their specific appropriateness and application. So your books, the four series, is it like the rules of life, is it like Jordan Peterson's The Tower of Honor? No, no, no no no no uh so the books are the the the series of books are trying to in many ways they it's paralleling the the video

series awakening from the meaning crisis where like we're trying to there's there's two components to this there's a historical argument of like what is the meaning crisis how to how does it arise and the part of that is to give us a sense of what is the meaning we're talking about by trying to understand the genealogy of how it was lost. And then that's in dialogue with, and eventually the emphasis shifts in the second half of the series, of a lot of what we've been talking about here, which is the scientific understanding of, yes, but what are the cognitive processes that are at work in meaning making? And then what you want to do is you want to have the historical genealogy and the scientific

ontology talk to each other. So it's history and science? Yes, exactly. Right, exactly. And those are always interdependent in almost everything we do. Even when you're doing science, you're depending on the history of science. And even when you're doing history, you're depending on the scientific ontology for how you examine materials, etc. You should always be having those in discourse with each other.

You dated back the meaning crisis. So first, you'll define the meaning crisis. I guess you've defined meaning somewhat so far, although it's complicated. It's not easy to put into one sentence. Exactly, exactly. Let's forget about defining it again. The meaning crisis is what you'll define, and you'll also tell me when did it come about because you seem to have this perspective that there's a paradigm shift around the year

1200. Yeah. Okay, so the first part is what's the meaning crisis? The meaning crisis is the... I mean, you can see it, I think, symptomatically in terms of related things, like the addiction crisis. We were talking about addiction. You know, the mental health crisis, the fact that we've got this paradox in our culture that everything is being politicized

at the same time as people are feeling disenfranchised, distrustful, disconnected from political institutions, political methods, political processes. Those are symptoms of the meaning crisis. That's right. Exactly. And you've got, we've already talked about it, you know, foreshadowed in Frankfurt, the increasing sense of bullshit. We actually graph it in the book. bullshit. We actually graph it in the book. You've got the disaffiliation from religious institutions. The fastest growing group are nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people with no… and the

paradox about that again… Paradox of no people of no what? No religious orientation. But I haven't said what the paradox is. The paradox is, well, there's simultaneously this decline in religious institutions. Most of these people also are, you know, this notion of being spiritual but not religious is also accelerating and growing powerfully. And that's symptomatic of the meaning crisis? Yes, because... To me, I see that as people have an innate need for religion,

but then they see religion of the past as being hyper-dogmatic, but religion is a two-sided coin of dogma and spirituality. So they're essentially saying, I'm spiritual but not dogmatic. Notice what they're trying to do. Notice what you're trying to do. You're trying to separate the propositional from the non-propositional because you're trying to recover the meaning separate from the beliefs that you no longer think are true. And you said that's because people are naturally disclosed towards religion. That packs a lot in it. I mean, religio, one of the etymological origins, it means to connect, to bind together. What people were seeking in

religion, if we agree that these metaphysical truths are extremely doubtful, what they were seeking in religion are sets of procedures, perspectival transformations, transformations of identity through participatory knowing, in which they are enhancing and enriching these senses of connectedness that make life more meaningful to human beings. So I agree with you in the fact that people are doing exactly what they're doing, disaffiliating from religion, yet trying to pursue spirituality, means they're trying, at least in an intuitive fashion, to say, forget the propositional, I want to get down to the meaning,

and I want to find how to get that meaning that isn't in my life the way I need it to be there anymore. So that's, I think, why it's clearly an example of the meaning crisis. I think other things related to that, like the mindfulness revolution and that people are turning to all of these perspectival participatory transformation techniques and methods is because, again, they're trying, how do I get back this meaning that's being lost, right? And the meaning crisis is essentially a loss of meaning. Yes. That people have a pervasive loss of meaning. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think this is why, I mean, on one end you're getting, and this goes back to an argument. Can we measure meaning psychometrically or in any, I mean, not to invalidate this, but I believe it to be the case.

I'm just wondering if you can graph the loss of meaning, just like you can graph the presence of BS. Yeah, so that's, I mean, there's a sense in which that project is starting. And one of my hopes is that a lot of this work, this historical and theoretical work, and it's not just theoretical, because I make use of all kinds of empirical data, right, but all of this work is to try and get a theoretical construct of meaning that will afford more direct experimental investigation. And because presumably that is where we will get, right, the kinds of patterns in the phenomena that will allow us to reliably measure it in some fashion. And so that is happening. So I mentioned the work of Samantha Heinzelman and others.

You do an experiment something like this. You give people a bunch of pictures that they can sort of make sense of. Oh yeah, I make sense of that. You know, and think about all that stuff, that perspectival. Oh, yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I see this, it's a tree. Yeah, it's a tree, but I also can understand

sort of what's going on here. Right? Right? Like, I get the scene. I get the situation. Right? Not just object identification. And then you give them pictures

that are maybe less coherent. It's like, what's going on here? Cubism? Or cubism, or you may put a potted plant in front of a computer or something like that. Like, what's going on there, right? Absurd in some way. Yeah, and absurdity is, of course, not a statement about truth. It's a statement about this kind of meaning that we're talking about.

It's a statement about the incongruity between two points of view? Perspectives. Between two perspectives. Your perspective as somebody who could sort of find this situation a live option, and then the perspective of just what are the objects in this, right? So, you know, you can tell me what the objects are in the picture. That's a potted plant. That's a computer. But, like, what, like, how, how would I, what does, what does this mean perspectivally for me? Like, I can't see how I'd put myself into this, this picture. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay, so you give, you give people a bunch of these pictures, and some of them are, and the term that's used, it's kind of right, but I don't like it because it has logical overtones. So some of these pictures have more coherence, and some of them have less coherence, in the sense we're talking about here, right?

So what you do is, and this is the manipulation. You just give people either these ones that are coherent or ones that are less coherent. And right after you show them these pictures, these two types, you just ask them, that are less coherent. And right after you show them these pictures, these two types, you just ask them, using a standardized questionnaire that's been validated for being a good psychological measure, right? You ask them, how meaningful is your life? And what you'll find is if they've been looking at the coherent pictures, they'll say, oh my life is meaningful. You'll see an increase above control of meaning in life and the

people who are looking at the more absurd pictures will say, oh my life's not very meaningful. Notice what's going on there. They're not reflecting on the what of their life. They're not reviewing their facts. They're not even reviewing, even in this situation, their story. What they're tapping into is how activated and fitted is the machinery, the perspectival and participatory machinery to this situa- and if it's active and well-fitting that's a measure of how meaningful and if it's not ugh. And so just because you've experienced something that's been

meaningful in the sense that it's cohesive in the- or sorry, coherent in this, in this, with this nomenclature, that that gives you a sense that your whole life has been meaningful just because you're being asked that on the spot. Yeah. And you somehow color the rest of your life. Yeah. Okay. Now what about these studies where you give someone a warm cup of coffee and then they're more likely to rate a character as loving than if you gave them iced coffee. So you heard about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what if you did something like that with meaning? I know it might not have been done, but I would imagine that someone would say, my life is more meaningful if they held a warm cup of coffee. Then the question is, let's suppose that that's true,

that they increased their meaning. Now, what if they increased their sense of meaning more than if they looked at these coherent pictures? Now, what would that say? If that was the case, it might say something that, and I have to put a grain of salt on that because some of these experiments from social psychology about this have been, some of them have been failing to replicate. They're not completely sound. Yeah, well, I don't want to be that judgmental.

But they might not be. They might not be. Okay, so there's a lot of assumptions. Let's just assume this is all true. Right. So given the hypothetical nature of it, then that would say, then I need to pay attention that there's some level, some deeper level at which meaning is being generated for people. And I don't know what that would mean. I mean, so what typically happens in the interpretation of the experiments you're referring to,

and I think this is actually something that in broad strokes I'm in very large agreement with, is the whole notion of embodied cognition. And then the idea is, right, the way you're connected to the world has such an embodied aspect to it. It's so down at the participatory level, right, that at that level, if I can manipulate that level, then that would, you know, be altering me. If you get the ultimate embodied change, which is a massage, then you're going to feel like your life is extremely mean. That's right. Now, because that kind of thing, or at least similar kinds of things, don't seem to be the case. That's why I suspect those experiments wouldn't turn out the way you're hypothesizing. Because what seems to happen, because we've run an experiment on that,

even when people are having things like mystical experiences or flow experience, it's sort of this insight aspect, this ability to go in and make meaning where there wasn't meaning before and really feel connected, that seems to be what's contributing. You know what I find interesting is that when I asked you what is meaning, it's a 30-minute explanation and that was a condensed version. But when you ask these people, is your life meaningful, they have a sense of it, yes or no. So do they have a sense and what you're doing is you're making it explicit. Yes. I'm trying to explicate and articulate. You have to be careful too, though. And that's why you have to run experiments and you have to try and validate the questionnaires between different situations. And you have to see if the questionnaires match up with behavioral

tests for all of the reasons that, you know, do I think people have a sense of meaning and do I think it's normative on their behavior? Does it act as a standard by which they alter themselves and their actions? Yes. Do I completely trust their introspective judgment as to giving me the account of how meaning is made? No, because I don't trust that about anything else. I think people have a sense of smell, but if I ask them introspectively to tell me how smell works, I'll get a lot of cockamamie theories that don't really tell me at all how smell works. So do people have the sense and does it regulate their behavior? Yes. Does that mean that they have an introspective authority

over explaining or articulating that? No, I don't think so. Okay, let's go back to dating at 1200, you said. Yeah, yeah. Okay. What happened around 1,200? Well, what starts to happen is... So notice we've talked about this indwelling internalization. And one of the things we do, because we're sort of natural-born cyborgs, as Clark would say, right, is we have this kind of identification relationship to some technologies, right? And not only physical technology. This is a physical technology. We can do it with what I call psychotechnologies. This is a notion influenced by people like David Olson and

Vygotsky and others, right? Like literacy is one of my prototypical examples. You're using literacy right now in your notes, right? And so what that does, notice what you've done. You've put your thoughts on paper. So you don't have to done. You've put your thoughts on paper, so you don't have to, you can reflect on your thoughts without having to hold it in working memory, right? You can go back and correct your thoughts. You can correct, you can connect previous instances of when you were thinking to instances now, to future instances. You could have me read it and connect your, so it just massively empowers your processing, right? So these psychotechnologies, and we- What are some other examples of psychotechnologies? Numeracies, another psychotechnology.

Coding, an example of psychotechnology? You mean computer coding? Computer coding. I would need to ask people, but I imagine it is. I imagine if they've started to understand and think, you know, through, so if they've started internalizing and thinking in terms of coding, and sort of, you know... So it has to be related to the cognition, because it doesn't just, it's not just what expands the amount that you, well, I guess that's technology.

Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. So, so, right, notice how, like I said, notice how second nature literacy is to, if you try to, if I ask you to look at those pages, and don't cheat by like unfocusing your eyes, look at the marks and don't read them, it's almost impossible for you to do that. It's become so internalized. And it seems like it's innate. It seems like it's natural to you. It seems like it's natural to all of humans. But that's not, because of course, for overwhelming most of history, for overwhelming most of humanity, people were illiterate. And there's still some people who are. And we have to teach people to become literate. Okay, so all of that. Okay, so how people relate

to literacy, and I think one of the things that drove the Axial Revolution was a change in literacy, a change from hieroglyphic cuneiform literacy to alphabetic literacy. And so when you see changes in how people relate to literacy, that can help drive significant changes in our cognition and even our consciousness, how we understand ourselves, how we understand the world. I think that, for example, and I argue in the series, that the change to alphabetic literacy helped to drive the generation of the two-world mythology. So what I think one of the things that's happening in... One of the things, and there's many things, one of the things that's happening in the 12th century, and this is an argument

I think meant by Chatham, but I think he's citing somebody else, I think it's Kahn's. Anyways, the argument is people started to read differently in the 12th century. And what's interesting is I've taught myself to read in the way they read before has changed. So the difference is? So the difference is, so the reading that I've learned, it's called Lectio Divina. It's still practiced in sort of religious and sort of Neoplatonic communities, right? So when I'm, think about, here's where you probably might be doing it, when you're reading a poem. Now you might just read it in your head, and then what that tends

to get you thinking is that the ideas and the meaning are in your head, and you think of it largely propositionally. But what you should do, and in fact if you've had a good teacher of poetry, is poetry should be read aloud. You should read the poetry aloud because you're trying to use the meter and the rhythm. And some poets will even use the graphic shape of the poem. So you're trying to use all of this stuff around the proposition to trigger these other aspects of knowing. The perspectival, the procedural, the participatory. And so people were reading and they were reciting texts. And they were often reading in concert.

So it was also not just individual, it was shared and communal. I remember hearing that one of the first people, not the first people, but somebody, I think Caesar could read in his head and people thought he was a superhuman. Yeah, so... So it wasn't that common. Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we started inventing more and more sophisticated punctuation

so that we could read in our head rather than having to read aloud. Because it's faster. Yeah, it's faster. And it's much more important. It has its advantages. But then there's a disadvantage. Yes, it has significant advantages.

I'm not saying to anybody, stop silent reading. But what happens is you go through this change where you go from, I have to be participating, involved. I have to be going through a transformation as I'm engaging with the text. And that's what we often still read, I think, when we're reading poetry properly. We want the poem to transform us, to change. We're not just trying to get the information

from the poem. We want to undergo some experience, some transformation. Is this related to faith or doth? Doth? Yeah, I don't know how to pronounce it. Because I know that has to do with experiencing something. Yeah, that's participatory knowing. So is this related or is this just seems like it is? It is. So dahath, right, the participatory knowing, it's the, so you see it in the Bible

in the Old Testament because it's used, it's used both of like a relationship, like a faith, as you said, but it's also used as the term for sexual intercourse because in sexual intercourse, you become intimately participatory with another human being. You're actually conforming, and there's deep perspectival engagement, right? And so, yeah, that knowing by loving, by having a loving interaction with something. Notice why that makes sense. When I'm involved in these loops, remember we did the addiction and it's narrowed? Well, love is the other way, right? What love does, even when you're loving an object, if I put it that way, right? And Aaron showed this in his work, this mutually accelerating disclosure. So what happens is in addiction, you get the reciprocal narrowing, but in love, you get the reciprocal opening up.

So I start to, you get what I call reciprocal realization. I start to realize more about my partner, right? And that allows me to connect more deeply to her. Who started this idea? You said it and you gave a name just now. Which one? That love opens up. Point to, I mean, the idea of it being mutually accelerating disclosure is a researcher called, his last name is Aaron, I think the idea... It's just interesting, that's why I'm... No, no, no. I think the idea goes back... I think people would want to research... Yeah, the idea, I think the idea goes back to Plato, ultimately, this, because Plato sees a deep connection between love and wisdom. And the

process that Plato talked about as anago, is this kind of reciprocal opening up. His idea, when I look at beautiful things, that sort of transforms me and makes me a more beautiful person, which then allows me to see deeper and more profound aspects of beauty. And what happens is it opens up. And that's what happens when you're in love with somebody. You're getting to the depths of the person and that affords them getting to the depths of you and you sort of reciprocally realize each other in very powerful ways. So what happens is people start go from, if you'll allow me to extend this, people go from reading the text in a loving manner, okay, to reading the text in

a purely propositional, inferential manner. How is it reading in a loving manner if you read it out loud and you have the cadence and you try to get into it? How's that loving? Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to trigger, right, you're trying to trigger aspects of your information processing that are much more procedural and perspectival. I mean, because you're listening. So it's like the difference between reading a script and then acting out the script. Exactly.

Exactly. And it's why, and I tell people this all the time, I was telling my son this other day, in fact my older son was telling my younger son, don't read Shakespeare. It won't make any sense to you. You have to go and see Shakespeare. You have to go and you have to hear them and see them acting and moving around and see how the words are connected to their characters and their identities. And then Shakespeare makes all this deep sense to you. Now, does this only apply to poetry?

Like if you're reading a nonfiction book, so The Shallows right there, or What is an Emotion? Yeah. Are you going to act that out? And do you gain something from that? Well, I mean, it depends. Obviously, you lose speed.

Well, it depends what my project is. I mean, again, it's all about what are my goals, what's the task, what's the set of problems I'm trying to solve, right? I think some philosophical texts should be read in this fashion. I think there's a good reason why Plato wrote in dialogues rather than just in a simple... Yeah, I've always found that strange. Yeah, because he's trying to trigger the perspectival and the participatory. He's trying to put you into the kind of knowing

that would allow you to indwell the dialogue and internalize Socrates. Now, let's go back to it. People start reading differently, and they start, and so this starts to come to the fore, the idea that I can get information without having to go through transformation.

Okay? And you say, okay, who cares? Okay. What are most of the texts? The texts are religious texts. without having to go through transformation. And you say, okay, who cares? What are most of the texts? The texts are religious texts. Clearly, it's 12th century. And this is an idea that Jensen Kim and I talk about a lot. And I owe a lot to him about this.

But it's also in Kansa's work and Chatham's work. It used to be that you could only gain access, if this is the right word, to God, the deepest reality, you could only have that knowing by going through transformation. So theology was always linked to the process of spiritual transformation. But what starts to happen is, I can do theology, I can generate propositions and beliefs about God without having to go through any transformation.

So theology gets divorced from self-transcendence. Around the year 1200? Yeah, that's when it starts happening. Why? Because the reading is changing. Ah, okay, okay. And the reading changed because? Probably for reasons you said. I mean, there's many ways in which I can make my reading much more efficient, much more effective. I can consume more information, right, if I read in this silent fashion. But now I start to think of myself inside my head,

that I am my beliefs, and that meaning is in the propositions in my head, rather than the meaning that was carried in this reciprocal realization between me and the text, in this mutual transformation. So now there's a separation. That's right. And at the same time, Aristotle's being rediscovered.

And so Aristotle is, to the ancient world, he's science. He literally writes all the books on science. Like, literally. And so when Aristotle's being rediscovered, you've got all this scientific knowledge that's coming in. And it can't be ignored by the Christian church. It can't be ignored because of the authority they give to the ancient world, and also because Aristotle and Plato had deep influences on people like Augustine.

So they can't just ignore Aristotle, but they can't simply assimilate. So they've already respected Aristotle or the Greeks? There's a respect for Aristotle that has been set up within sort of some, it's in the warp and the woof of, you know, the way in which Christianity had integrated with the Platonic tradition. Around what year was that? Oh, so the integration with the Platonic tradition starts much, much earlier. That's Aquinas? Oh, no, that's much later. I mean, I'm actually getting to Aquinas in this picture that we're talking about. But no, this is much earlier. You're seeing this in the, you know this in the third and fourth century, and most especially in the fifth century with Augustine. Augustine is a person that really fuses Christianity and Platonism together. But you're also seeing it

in Eastern Christianity. You're seeing it with pseudo-Dionysus. And when you say he's fusing it, it's not as if he's taking passages from Aristotle and putting it in the Bible. What you mean is he's respecting their line of thinking and then applying it to the Bible? Yes. In fact, Augustine famously argued that he could not have become a Christian until he was exposed to Platonism because Plato's way of thinking about the upper world, the Platonic way of thinking. Like the idealized world? Yeah. That gave Augustine, because Augustine was very much sort of a materialist in his way of thinking. Like the idealized world? Yeah, yeah. That gave Augustine, because Augustine was very much sort of a materialist in his way of thinking, and he couldn't get into Christianity because he didn't know how to relate to this God, this invisible, unseeable. He was an atheist before.

No, he's a Manichaeanist. He follows the religion of Manny, which was a very sort of dualistic, very materialistic, especially his version of it. Sorry, I keep interrupting. No, no, no. Do what you want. So he, right, he can't get to this incorporeal, invisible God until he reads Plato. And Plato gives him the conceptual grammar so that he's then capable of moving into Christianity. You can see that. Do you find it hard to relate to this? Because for me, hearing this, and for most people, I would imagine, we're so ingrained. I mean, our thinking is so ingrained and rooted and fortified in a rational Aristotelian, Platonic way of thinking that to think that people didn't think

that way is difficult. So how did you come about, how do you even imagine it? Because to me I can only sort of understand it on an intellectual level but not, I can't put myself in that perspective. So I'm not clear which perspective you're referring to, the perspective of people that are sort of non-platonic? Yeah so in one of your lectures you were talking about how rational knowledge, I mean rational lines of thinking, logic is pretty new. It came about with the Greeks. People didn't think logically. Rationally, yeah. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the

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someone from the year 1200? Ah. Did you find it difficult? It's probably not difficult for you anymore. No, I want to slow down because I take this problem very seriously. I take the problem of how to reverse engineer my cognition, how to go through a transformative process such that I can make their worldview viable so that it's not just something I'm thinking, but something that I would understand what it would be like to live that way. Here's another example. Let's go pre-axial. So, upper Paleolithic transition after that.

So there's the timeless loop. I don't know what to call it. Oh, in continuous cosmos. So there's no difference in kind, there's difference of power, but it's not weird for there to be an elf or a fairy or a plant that talks. Or for a man to be a god, right, yeah, yeah. Now, to us, we can only understand that written down and just say, okay, they thought like this. But it's difficult for me to think like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Now, you probably had difficulty, because we all must, but do you find it now easier to go into that mode of thought? Or can you not even go into it? Do you still look at it intellectually on a piece of paper? Okay, so that's what my previous answer was trying to get at. So trying to reverse engineer practices, psychotechnologies that would give me some lived sense of what these people are talking about. That's why, for example, when I try to explain shamanism, I don't go in like, I can't be a shaman, I think that would be preposterous. But I can try and understand some of what shamanism means by actually practicing getting into the flow state. I can understand what shamanism means by training myself to do lucid dreaming and to see how, what that's like in there. And so these give me ways of bringing in the perspectival and the participatory,

even the procedural elements of it, right, that I won't get from the text. Now, does that mean that I wouldn't make the ridiculous claim, oh, I'm a shaman, or I know what it's like to be a shaman, right? But I think that gives me much, much more, right, than was typically conveyed just by the propositional knowledge. So a lot of what I'm doing when I'm trying to do the hermeneutic task, that's what I mean. I'm trying to reverse engineer…

The hermeneutic task? The hermeneutic task is the task of trying to interpret and understand a text. When I'm doing that, that's what I mean. I don't just… I'm trying to go back before the 1200. I don't just, I'm trying to go back before the 1200, I don't just read the text. I'm trying to reverse engineer transformative processes that will help me to re-engage with that worldview so I can turn it into something that I can have a perspectival understanding of and a participatory

understanding of. Does it match? Of course not. When did you first start to do that? Were you 20? Were you 25? Were you 30? When you realized that this was important in order for me to understand it at a non, at not just an intellectual level? It came about reverse. It came about, I guess it was in my 20s. Yeah, I guess it would be. Did someone teach you that or you came about it? I came about it.

Well, I sort of, I came up with this idea of reverse engineering in the way we're talking about, but I mean, it's influenced by reading a lot of other people. But it went in reverse for me. Let me, here's like a little bit about our biograph. So I went into university and I fell in love with Plato and the figure of Socrates. And that's why Plato is right. I mean, I have lots of criticisms of Plato, but Plato is very much sacred to me. I can return to Plato again and again and again, and as I change, I see things of value in Plato that I hadn't seen before, and so the text always resonates with me in this ongoing fount of intelligibility and insight.

But so, and I became really, like, deeply, intrigued isn't the right word,, I was interested, invested in this project of wisdom. But then as I went on in academic philosophy at the time, the early 80s, wisdom, I mean this sounds paradoxical because wisdom is in the very word philosophy, philia, sophia, the love of wisdom, but wisdom drops off the table as a topic. You don't talk about it

at all. And so I got like, what? Because who are we to know? No, no, no. It's because philosophy, now, I don't want to leave false impressions. I want to say something before we go on, right? Philosophy has come back around to this topic, and so have psychology. Psychology and philosophy, in fact, even neuroscience is now talking about wisdom again. Again, I think this is part of trying to respond to the meaning crisis. But at that time, philosophy was much more interested in sort of knowledge issues rather than wisdom issues. And so that fell off the table. And so I decided to look elsewhere. I took up transformative practices. I took up Tai Chi and I took up, you know,

Vipassana meditation, metta contemplation. And then as I was doing these, I started to read some of the texts, like the Tao Te Chen or the Dhammapada. And I came to this realization that, wow, if I had been reading these texts without these practices and how they'd been transforming me, there'd be an important sense in which I'd be misreading these texts. It'd be like trying to under, like, let's go back to Hoth. I know what sex is when you've never actually been with another person or something like that. I know golf because I've read lots of golf books, books about golf. Yeah, I used to be that.

I used to think that I could read a book on how to ride a bike and then just instantly ride a bike. Well, there you go. And so I realized, and that's sort of when I had the insight, it's like, oh, at least some texts, texts from the Axial Revolution, like the Tao Te Chan or the Dhammapada, and of course, in many ways, the Bible, they should be read in this fashion.

There should be sets of transformative practices that go with the reading of the text, because if you don't have them, the texts aren't speaking to you in the way they really should or could speak to you. And that's how I sort of came up with this idea. And then I came across the work of Pierre Hadot, like what is ancient philosophy and philosophy as a way of life.

And he makes the huge argument, yes, that when you try to understand ancient philosophy as opposed to modern philosophy, you should be reading it in this way that I'm describing to you, that you have to set the text, the discourse. When was Pierre Hadeau? Very recent. He just died not that long ago. So these books are like... Okay, so he was saying that there's obviously a difference between reading the book in this manner

and then reading it like this. That's right. And that started to separate around the year 1200. Right, that starts to separate around the year 1200. Right, that starts to separate around the year 1200. Plus, at the same time, there's something going on with Aristotle and... Right, so you've got this idea that I can get at the deeper aspects of reality, and again, there's a positive side to this, right? I can get at the deeper aspects because this is a presupposition you need for science.

I don't have to go through a personal transformation to do science, right? Although I think maybe you do, but at least for a lot of the scientific method, right? I just have to come up with the correct set of propositions, right? So there's a good aspect to what I'm talking about, but we're talking about how it engenders the meaning crisis. So what happens, right, is I don't have to go through transformation. I just have to get the correct propositions in my head and that will get me to the depths of reality.

And then you've got Aristotle coming in and he can't be ignored, but he can't be assimilated. And so Aquinas is trying to, like, what do I do? What do I do, right? So Aquinas is in the 13th century. He's after this change has taken place in the 12th century, right? And so Aquinas is saying, well, we can't ignore Aristotelian science, but I obviously don't want to lose the Christian faith.

And so he starts to push on this idea that the two worlds can be understood, not in the fashion that they had been understood. The upper world is real, and then the everyday world is dependent, it's derivative, and it's in some ways decaying. But it's participating, to use a platonic term. And this is a term used by the Christian Platonists, right? And then what Aquinas seems to do is instead he says,

no, no, no, this world is independently real. It's real in this world, this world here. This world, it's independently real. And we can get access to it just by getting the correct propositions. Just by doing science, we can do science. It's Aristotelian science, but the point is still the correct point. Just by getting the correct theories, I can get at this real world. And I don't have to do any deep, transformative, spiritual thing

to get at this reality. But there, up there, I still still need to go through some deep transformative process to get there. But now that has been completely separated from, you know, rationality and science. Right? So this is when the notion of the supernatural as something right there. Oh, so two worlds are being split now. I mean, one world is being split. Well, the two worlds are, I would say the two worlds already there, but what's happening is the two worlds before Aquinas has like, there is passage between them. So that like in Plato, like we talked about, you know, your rationality, your reasoning, and your love for the truth,

they lift you together towards the higher level, right? But now, no, no, the rationality of the science is down here, right? So it's about the development of science. You better believe it. Aquinas in a very powerful... So these two things, reading and getting knowledge of reality without having to go through transformation, and the idea that I can get at the real, this world is real and I can get at it scientifically

without having to go through a spiritual transformation, that's the background for making science possible, of course. And then what happens is you get a reflective change in how the upper world is now understood. The upper world is only accessible through love and it's love in this sense that's now been completely divorced from reason and it's love as this driving of your will to make assertions. Yeah, see, even you saying it, it's love in the sense that it's divorced from reason. I can only intellectually understand, when I say intellectually, I just mean as if I'm reading it.

This implies this, implies this. I can't feel how reason can be associated with love. Sure. I'll point you again to Harry Frankfurt and his wonderful book, Reasons for Love, and even work by Reed Montague, the neuroscientist. One of the differences between us and computers is we have to care about the information we're processing and the computers don't. And so this notion of caring

and the notion of love are really central. Because if you can't... Which way should I start from? Start from one side and work to the other? I could work either way. So let me try what Frankfurt says. I can't sort of reason about everything. I can't do that. I have to… there has to be… even if I'm going to do science, there have to be topics I… to use Frankfurt's… topics I take seriously, things I care about.

This relates to salient. Yes, exactly. Relevance realization is not cold calculation. It's a, you are, your brain is deciding, you know, out of all the things it can pay attention to, which ones it should commit its very, we pay attention, which, which, you know, which things it should devote its very precious time and processing resources to out of all the things it could.

And that's always risky because this might not be the right thing. So that is always deeply an affective thing. It's never just an inferential calculative thing. So this is Damasio's work on Descartes' error, right? If you get people, right, they have a brain damage, such that their frontal lobes are working, but it's not connected to their emotional center, you can give them, like, a calculative problem,

and they can solve massive calculators. They have no problem with that. But you can destroy them, sort of in this way. Do you want to write this problem in red ink or blue ink? Right? And so, right? They start trying to compute. Yeah, all the possibilities and permutations, and you can't. You have to care. And caring is like a simplest, a... It's the core of love, right? A heuristic. Yes.

That we use to simplify. Yeah. Well, and enable. If you don't do this, and this is Montague's point about how we're different from computers, if you don't do this, you're going to get combinatorial explosion of all the facts and permutations and possible combinations. You're going to have to examine. And this is related to the frame problem as well. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. So there's that aspect. If you don't care, you actually can't reason. But it also, I can go from the other pole. Reason is ultimately, right, it's got this, and this is, I think, one of the great Platonic insights. And this is how we should understand, that's why I corrected you at one point when I wanted to talk about rationality and not just logic. Because logic is a relationship between propositions, right? Whereas rationality is supposed to be a relationship you have to reality, right? And one of Plato's great insights is that in addition to whatever we desire,

we desire to be real. We want it to be real. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier. We want it, part of what makes things meaningful is we want it to be real. Is that innate? I don't know how, I don't know. Because after listening to you and watching some lots of your work I Question now how much of what I think is innate is innate so even this You know you give the example of who wants who's in a great relationship And then and then who would want to know something that under and 95% of the people say I want to know okay, so that means that we want to be a part of this real world We want to know. Okay so that means that we want to be a part of this real world we want to be connected to it. And when people have these experiences of

mystical experiences they'll transform their whole life and their identity because they want to remain close and you know in consonance you know even conformity identity with this increased realness that they've discovered so people will radically change everything just to stay in contact with realness so yeah I think real now so is it a meta drive realness. So yeah, I think real... now, so is it a meta-drive? Do I think Plato's right? I think we're getting increasing empirical evidence that Plato's right, in addition to all the arguments that Plato already gave us. Is it innate? I don't know. I mean, I think relevance

realization abilities have to be innate in some fashion because you have to have them into some degree in place to get going Is does that I I don't know I'm sorry. I okay, so to recapitulate. It's a 12th century split between so Precipitated by the fact that now you can read in your head. Yeah, and then Aristotle yeah, which is essentially science being formed So imagine Aristotle didn't exist, but you can just read in your head, would you think the meaning crisis would have happened? Maybe, but probably not. Slower.

Slower and maybe a different history. I mean, going back and trying to rewind history, that's a really difficult and tricky thing to do. Okay, so it starts to split, and then that split just gets great. And obviously around 15th, 16th, the invention with Newton, Galileo. So you've got the scientific revolution. You get Descartes. Before that, you have the Protestant Reformation.

Can you explain that? Which one? Protestant Reformation. Oh. I'm a scientist. I'm familiar with the Descartes. Well, not actually much familiar with data, but with Newton and Galileo. You should be familiar with Descartes, because if you're a scientist, you're using graphs.

Yeah, yeah. That's Carto. You should be familiar with Descartes, because if you're a scientist, you're using graphs. Yeah, yeah, Descartes, that's Cartesian, that's all I know. There's another psychotechnology invented by Descartes, and it really... Imagine how much more difficult it would be to do science without Cartesian graphing. Okay, so anyways,

notice how often these pivotal changes are associated with changes in psychotechnologies. So Protestant Reformation, there's a... Just real quick. Yeah, okay, so... So for lots of various reasons having to do with corruption that had sent into the church, because there's separation from God

and and and and God's becoming sort of more absurd yes I just want to make sure because I'm just

I'm trying to understand so the way that I understand is I'll explain it and then I get corrected I understand so much better so no no that's oh no that's Lutheran

I think I was I think I was thinking of the Luther Martin Luther but one of them was I can have a personal relationship to God was that Luther yes oh okay so them was, I can have a personal relationship to God. Was that Luther?

Yes. Okay, so forget about it. I don't know what the Protestant is. But Luther is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Oh, okay, so then there we go. Yeah, you're right. Okay, so what Luther is doing. So Luther is growing up, and spirituality is changing, right?

So the platonic elements are being lost, right? And the supernatural is being separated from the scientific, right? And the renaissance is happening, and the scientific revolution is sort of starting to percolate, right? And the relationship to God is becoming much more tenuous. But the text is becoming much, much more important. The text. Not the community, not the church reading the text,

but the text itself. And your individual reading of the text is becoming important. And so all of that's coming together in Luther. And Luther comes to the conclusion that, right, and part of it's because of the way this gap is opened up, that there's nothing we can do. There's no way in which we participate in our salvation. There's no way in which we do anything that helps us. You're talking about we as in communal? Community, human beings. So I'm speaking as if I was Luther here. This is not my beliefs, right? But they're like human beings, right?

Can't get to God in any way. So his notion of the self has become so enfolded that the sense of self-deception has become so profound and overwhelming. He thinks that anything and everything we try to do just gets folded back into this self-deception, and that there's no way on our own we can possibly escape it, right? And that's a reflection, of course, of how God is now sort of becoming inaccessible, right? he comes to the conclusion that the only way we can be saved is like by god saving us completely from the outside right and this is what he means by by faith alone and by scripture alone right

and what he means by that is god acts through scripture just just the Bible, not the Church. God acts through Scripture, and that somehow transforms you and frees you and saves you. That's how you get salvation, because salvation actually means to heal, right? It's, you know, salve, a healing potion, right? And so why does this matter so much? Well, what it means is, it means a lot of things. It means this is part of the final divorce of religion from any kind of rationality. Luther calls reason a whore. So you made a distinction between logic and rationality. But reason and rationality are synonymous. So Luther calls reason a whore.

Yes, yes, yes. So Luther calls reason a whore. I can't see Augustine saying that, especially because of his respect for Plato and Plotinus, right? And the fact that you do not participate at all in your salvation means participatory knowing is irrelevant. It's irrelevant. And this whole notion from the Axial Age of self-transcendence, you're incapable of self-transcendence. It's God's arbitrary act. And notice also what it means. You are in no way deserving of being saved by God. There's nothing you did or could possibly do that would cause God to save you rather than that person there. Now notice how terrifyingly sort of absurd that makes God. I'm surprised that became popular instead of just, instead of burning him. Well, the thing you have to remember, right, is that Luther is also, you know, he's taking

a stand against the Catholic Church. He's taking a stand against its corrupt practices like indulgence. He's giving the German princes. It's only because the German princes backed him. He's giving them a new way of organizing and identifying themselves in opposition, political and economic opposition to the Catholic Church. So there's all these extraneous factors that help. factors that help. And there's also the fact, right, that Luther, right, is giving people a kind of authority over their, it's not authority in the sense that they can do anything,

but it's a sense, like you said, that authority is the wrong word. You talked about it. They have, Luther's promising them a direct personal relationship with God. Because you can't go through the church. God has to directly reach into you. You can see why this is destroying the roles of participatory knowing. It's exacerbating the fact that now I'm not going through any transformation. God is saving me. And is he saving you arbitrarily so it doesn't even matter if you know the Bible or read it? Well, ultimately it's God who's going to lead you to the

Bible and lead you to read the Bible correctly so that you will be saved. So there's no free will? Well, I don't know... I'm not saying what you believe. I mean, in the Lutheran model. Luther seems to have this weird view that we are free to sin, but we're not free to do what's right. I mean, I've talked to Lutherans about this. All you can do is sin minimization. Maybe. I'm not even sure he would. I'm not even sure that that's a real possibility for him. I mean, this is part of the debate he had with Erasmus,

because Erasmus was still trying to, with his synergistic theology, he was still trying to argue that we participated in our salvation in some way. But you see, the concern I have is, notice what's happening here, right? You know, the participatory, perspectival, transformative stuff, it's all in your head, it's all propositions. All that matters is asserting the right things because that's all the love does. The love doesn't give you argument.

The love just, ah, I believe, right? So it's just a matter of will, right? So it's God's arbitrary will, arbitrary choice, and then you've got this arbitrary response, right? And so a lot of the machinery of meaning, I think, is being deeply undermined. And I'm particularly critical of this, and this gets me into hot water with some Christians, because I think all of that's quite destructive. I mean, it's important because, like I said, it helps open up Europe to at least a non-Catholic way of life.

This kind of willingness to challenge authority and the deep valuation of propositional knowing is going to also help facilitate science. Luther thinks... So it has its pros. Definitely. So I want that in place. But we're concentrating on the genealogy, so I'm emphasizing the negative side of things.

You see, but look what Luther's teaching you. He's teaching you that you're worthless. You're empty inside, right? And the only thing that can save you is unearned, unearned positive regard. From up above? From up above. That you don't have any control over?

You don't have any control over it. So it may not be arbitrary, but you just don't have control over it. Well, it's arbitrary in the sense that God has no reason for choosing you over anybody else. So why would God do that? We don't know. I mean, it's mysterious.

And then you get endless debates in Christianity about whether or not God chose before the beginning of time which people are going to be saved or not, predestination, and whether he predestined people to heaven or hell. And so there's endless attempts, and this is why Protestantism fragments and fragments and fragments and fragments, endless attempts to try and resolve this problem that don't get properly resolved. So I'm not going to try and do that because the Protestants haven't succeeded on that project. But notice what's happening. You get endless fragmentation. And in fact, it's still accelerating today. So you get this fragmentation happening, right? You get the loss of the participatory and transformative knowing, right?

You get the... So Luther thinks, and this is important because he was a monk, Luther thinks the monastery should be shut down. Because what are people doing there? Well, they're trying to cultivate wisdom. They're trying to engage in self-transcendence. They're practicing spiritual exercises. Well, in Luther's mind, that's just pride.

That's just sin. Because human beings can't do anything. So the monastery's got to be shut down. So that's the wisdom institutions of our culture gets shut down. And the university and the monastery, the knowledge institution, the wisdom institutions used to be... It seems extremely anti-authoritarian and skeptical. It is. And that's why there's a direct connection. Exactly. As the birth of extreme skepticism? I think it's

at least the grandfather. At least extreme skepticism directed at something related to meaning. Yes. Because there's always been skepticism in logic and vitality with ideas. Even in the ancient world, there's the philosophical skeptics. There's one more important thing, and I want to go back to it.

So the wisdom institutions are being destroyed, but also notice that framework we talked about. Think about it as a grammar. Right? You're worthless. There's nothing you can do. What will save you is unearned love. That's the structure of narcissism.

That's what a narcissist is. It's somebody, I'm worthless, and what will save me is unearned attention from other people. That's narcissism. And you get the That's narcissism. And you get the training in narcissism. I thought narcissism was people they act oh that's arrogance.

People are you're narcissistic so you have a self you have an inflated ego and you think you're deserving of it. It's an inflated ego covering a vacuous identity.

That's why you're So they're deeply insecure narcissists. Yes. And this is why you have the craving for attention why the narcissist must be in the spotlight. Because if they're not in the spotlight they're going insecure narcissists. Yes, and this is why you have the craving for attention, why the narcissist must be in the spotlight. Because if they're not in the spotlight, they're going to start to disappear.

They're going to start to lose their sense. Okay, so you were talking about narcissism and that narcissists… Yeah, I'm talking about you get this cultural grammar that's being created for narcissism and then you know as that as that as that God becomes more inaccessible and more absurd he starts to drift out of the picture. Think about very close think about Shakespeare. Titanic intellect, deeply concerned, artistic sensitivity, one of the Titans. Notice how small a presence God has in his work. Even by the time of Shakespeare, God is...right? And so when God comes out of this picture, that grammar, right, that grammar, it doesn't go away.

So God is...when we talk about God, we're using the grammar of meaning, or meaning is associated with the grammar? Yeah, I mean, we're using God, I'm using God, I don't mean this. Jesus, I don't mean. No, no, I didn't say Jesus, I don't say that. I said geez, I don't mean this. I don't mean this to be disrespectful. No, I try never to do that because I hold Jesus in very high regard. So I want to—that's important. But when I'm using it, I'm using God as—and I mean this term very deeply and I wish we had time to unpack it—I mean God as a participatory symbol of this higher reality. And it's not just a word or an abstract symbol,

it's a participatory symbol that actually affords transformation and self-transcendence. Interesting, interesting. God affords meaning. Or God affords transcendence. Right, yes. Because there's always meaning, even when you've gotten rid of God. Yes. But there's a more profound meaning. So there are different levels, there's higher more profound meaning. So there are different levels.

There's hierarchies of meaning. Oh, definitely. There's always levels. I'm hesitant to say hierarchies, but there are at least levels of meaning. There's a very non-Petersonian of you. Yeah, and this is something I would like to talk to Jonathan about

because I take Jonathan Pajot's, like I've said this before, I take what he does very seriously, and he has a lot about hierarchy that I would like to talk to him more about. You're talking about you watch his videos, or does he have a book that you've read? I watch his videos. I've watched his videos, and I've had the pleasure of having like an online discussion with him that was filmed,

and then I've also had the pleasure, he came in, he was in Toronto, and we spent a few hours together talking and having a meal together, and then I've also had the pleasure, he came in, he was in Toronto, and we spent a few hours together talking and having a meal together, and we correspond periodically. And I deeply respect, because I think people like Jonathan and Jonathan Pajot, Paul Vendigle, they're really, I see them as Christians wrestling very deeply. They're Christians in the history, in the legacy of people like Tillich, they're wrestling very deeply. There are Christians in the history, in the legacy of people like Tillich,

they're wrestling very deeply with the meaning crisis and trying to reformulate Christianity into a plausible response to the meaning crisis. I don't ultimately agree with that project, but I really, really, really deeply respect it. So to go back to it, I think like God is like, it's a participatory symbol that affords you getting this anagoge, getting this reciprocal realization going with deeper aspects of reality. It opens you up, right? And it opens up and discloses the world to you. And then when that goes away,

all of that machinery just doesn't, it doesn't just disappear. It latches onto other things. And I think we have this great- You use an analogy of the grammar that we've changed the words, but we still use the same grammar. That's exactly why I use the term. We change the vocabulary,

but the grammar is still there running. And see, I'm not making the argument, and this is where I would differ from Jordan, and perhaps from Jonathan, I'm not making the argument that we're all sort of inevitably Christians, that, you know, no matter what we do... What about Greco-Romans? Pardon me? What about Roman, or Greek? Well, we're sort of all of these, and none of them, right?

We're very Buddhist of you. sort of all of these and none of them, right? We're all Buddhists. Well, I guess so. I mean, I don't even consider myself a Buddhist. But yeah, where I would differ is I'm trying to say that this grammar, in fact, doesn't make us inevitably Christian, although it has a Christian heritage to it, it's now got an autonomous functionality to it, right? But it still latches onto things, to use your metaphor. Have you studied memes, Richard Dawkins memes? Of course. Would this be related to memes? Like, is the term latching on as if it has its own identity? So, I mean, the thing is people should pay more attention to the work of Dan Sperber,

who I think had a better way of talking about the mimetic aspect of things. But in a shorthand way, yes. There's a way in which these ideas have a life of their own, right? And the way they link minds together, they link various domains of interaction together, they even perhaps help link various areas of the brain together, things like that.

Can I take this vocabulary analogy just a little bit further and tell me if it's stretching it and now it doesn't apply. So you said something like we've changed the word, we've kept the grammar. Now is it as if we've changed, so we were English before, and now we've changed to Hindi, so we've taken the vocab, so we've taken all the definitions from the words from Hindi and applied it to English, so now it doesn't make sense. So does that make sense? So what we're using is, we're using different words, and now it doesn't make sense, and this cognitive dissonance between what we think makes sense and it doesn't make sense is what is creating the matrix.

That's wonderful. I like that. I mean, that's part of the idea that we have an axial age grammar, and then we have a Protestant Reformation grammar, and these are all... They're not compatible. And they're not compatible with a scientific worldview, right? scientific worldview, right? But the point I was trying to make is that grammar, it doesn't go away. And that's why, and this is another way in which people I think are talking about the meaning crisis, we sort of have this narcissism epidemic. We're getting the increasing sense that

people are more and more narcissistic, that the accusation of being narcissistic is now becoming much more pervasive and profound. And again, I think that's part of all of, right, because we think it's natural to process information in this way. How's narcissism tied to insecurity? Because like I was saying before, the way that I think of narcissism is somebody who thinks extremely highly of themselves, although that's arrogance, actually. When I say it out loud, I realize that. And they look at themselves in the mirror,

and they just love themselves. No, I mean, so that's only the first half of the myth of narcissists, right? Of course, he falls in love with his image, but he also falls into the lake and drowns, right? And so you have to pick up on that there's a self-destructiveness, right? Because the narcissist is very hollow. There's this kind of a sense of hollowness. Now, that can either be a felt one or it can be sort of more sort of procedural in their processing. But either way, the narcissist needs you to shine

the light of your attention into the darkness at the center of their psyche, because if you stop shining it, they will go dark. Right? And you can see how Luther really entrenched that way of understanding and thinking of ourselves and seeking for that external light.

And so that has become pervasive. I mean, in other ways, that grammar has... So Luther, you know, you get the Protestant work ethic. That's why it's called the Protestant work ethic. We took something... What is that? What is that? Oh, the Protestant work ethic is, you know, this goes back to an idea from Weber, but, I mean, it seems to be the ethic is, you know, this goes back to an idea from Weber,

but, I mean, it seems to be the case that, you know, the Protestant idea that one of the ways in which we serve God is by working really hard. We work really hard, and, you know, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and you should work, and you should work, and it should be meaningful work. But also, you shouldn't celebrate your work. You shouldn't glory because that's arrogance, that's pride. So what should you do with the fruits of your labor? Well, you should plow them back into your work.

You get the beginning of the accretion of capital and the idea of a business that exists to promote and expand itself, right? Some of the foundational grammar of capitalism. And part of that is because if you're in the Lutheran model, this is Weber's argument, I think there's still an important point to be made here. If you're in the Lutheran model, how do you know if you're saved? I mean, this is the key question, and there's nothing you can do to find this out, right? So it's, ah, right, this is very anxiety-producing, right?

So, well, what can you do? Well, you're already told that it's really important to work hard. Well, if I work hard and I succeed, that must be evidence that God has chosen me, right? And so I can alleviate a lot of that insecurity about whether or not I've been saved. This reminds me of the just world. Because if people are suffering, that's evidence that God has singled them out as not being worthy of salvation.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, yeah, there's a sense in which that's sort of the opposite side of the same point. Well, you know, that person, it's part of, you know, American cultural discourse. You know, well, that person, I mean, it's also in Thatcher, you know. Man, I've got to study Protestant because I just, I completely, I know nothing. I learn everything about it right now. Well, but the point you're making is this idea that, you know, someone's at the bottom,

you know, there's a good chance they deserve to be there, right? They have fallen there and that's, you know, their state reflects their status in a really important way. Yeah, so that's the opposite. But then the reverse, and you see this in the American dream, right? If I climb to the top, that must mean that it's...

So Americans are somehow inherently... They were founded by the Puritans, who are the fundamentalist Protestants of their time. They are the shock troops of the Protestant Reformation. Interesting. They're pure in their Protestantism. That's what a Puritan is. Okay, so before we

just end, I know that this is a large question, but I guess if you could quickly outline our current meaning crisis, because we talked about how it builds up to this, our current meaning crisis, and then where do you think it's going to go? A little bit of prediction. Are you optimistic? What do we need to heal it? I know that's a big, I know that's another two-hour conversation. Yeah, because that's what the whole series is

about. So one of the things that's really important now that's accelerating the meaning crisis, you notice how we've talked about along the way things have happened that and they accelerate the meaning crisis and they're often in psychotechnologies. And now we have this line and you mentioned it earlier that's blurring between psychotechnologies and cyber technologies, you know. This, social media, the internet, right? These things are, and we're getting increasing evidence, are significantly accelerating and exacerbating the meaning crisis, right? Instagram is actually bad for your mental health. If you're spending a lot of time on Instagram, I predict, as a scientist, you're going to be very depressed and you're going to be driven towards a narcissistic thing.

And that's causal. Yes, yes. Because you see all these pictures of these people living a better life than you, and it's all bullshit, right? Because it's all staged. But that doesn't matter. Knowing that doesn't matter. It's like buying the alcohol, right?

And so you see this, and you're getting signals that these people are leading better lives than me, and you're getting overwhelmed by it, and then you feel like, and nobody likes me. at that look at that that's the place of the god saying i like you right but the community on it i'm not getting enough likes and my i don't have my pick my like oh no and you're just depressed and you're both narcissistic and depressed it's very bad for you right or you get the you get the echo chamber effect. Remember we talked about self-delusion and the way you can bullshit yourself? Social media,

I can do confirmation bias all over the place. I want to believe some crazy thing, and so what do I do? I'll pay attention. I'll only look on the internet for people who share my beliefs and then I'll reinforce that until, oh, of course, it must be true. All of this stuff is exacerbating. People, we get a tremendous increase in sense of loneliness, right?

The very thing, you know, it promises, it'll connect us all together. It connects us propositionally and with images, a kind of pornography of salience but it doesn't connect us in the way that makes meaning for us. And so I think there is tremendous potential. I'm not a Luddite. I'm using the Internet. I'm using YouTube. I'm ultimately optimistic precisely because the people I'm meeting through the video series

and some of the discourse that I'm seeing emerging in the internet, I'm meeting people who are deeply interested in the meaning crisis and not just in speech. They're trying to set up communities where people can go to reestablish sets of practices, supportive communities, guides for the cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of self-transcendence. People doing this, trying to set these up, make this work, trying to figure out

how can we develop skills and practices to reduce the bullshit in our communication. How can we bring back the valuation of in-person discourse and dialogue? All of this is happening. And one of the great gifts of the video series is I've come more and more in contact through the internet with these people. And I meet you because of it, right? Same thing.

And so on one hand, I think we can see it's clear, I think, that social media and all of these cyber psychotechnologies are really accelerating the meaning crisis in very powerful ways. I'm not ultimately, I'm not teleological. I don't think there's any destined history. But I have a lot of hope now that I didn't have before, precisely because I see people like, I mean, I was talking to a guy this morning, right? And he owns a dojo. And we're dialoguing, but how can I, you know, do what, you know, the martial arts used to do? How can I teach people the martial arts in a context of other practices

so that the dojo becomes a place where they cultivate wisdom and they start to get these kinds of connections we're talking about and they can start to respond to the meaning crisis in their own lives? So this is more and more happening. So I can't make a prediction in the way a scientist can predict the dependent variable and the independent variable. I predict these two things, and it's unclear to me because there's a race. The degree to which social media and our political polarization and the degradation of the ecology and the increasing economic disparities between rich and poor.

All of these things are interacting with each other. All of that's happening. But I'm also seeing this growth, and it's growing rapidly, of people taking seriously, not just in words, but bringing back to the words, the transformative processes. They're trying to afford psychotechnologies and communities of transformation to respond to the meaning crisis. And it's unclear to me who's going to win this race.

But I have a lot more hope than I used to. What do your days look like? What do your days look like? What do my days look like? My days... Because you schedule something for seven hours in a block and then you record your interviews, your lectures. How do you manage your time? It's challenging right now because I'm teaching, I'm doing research, and of course marking,

and doing these interviews. I'm also meeting with various people to try and help them on the projects they're engaged in with responding to the meeting crisis. As I mentioned to you before, one of the gifts of doing the video series is I've gotten to meet a lot of people who are putting time and talent towards trying to create real responses, both individually and in communities of response to the mean crisis. So I'm meeting with those people because they want to see if my work can contribute to that. So my days are quite varied. Some days I'm just reading and writing all day.

Other days I'm doing this. I'm talking to people all day. So what time do you wake up? What time do you sleep? And is it regimented? I'm trying to get it more regimented. I'm trying to. So I'm trying to be asleep by 12 and getting up by 8 kind of thing. And then you just work flat out? No, no, no. I usually do a set of practices. I do Tai Chi Chuan and meditation and contemplation, Lectio Divina. I do a bunch of practices for about an hour. I have something to eat, do a bunch of practices and then I

usually start work in some fashion. We're going to talk about psychedelics a little. Okay. I was going to ask, as I told you, I don't know if you got a chance to read over the question. I read over the question. Okay. I want to know what is it that psychedelics can provide that Zen Buddhism or meditation can't provide and vice versa? I don't know if it's a question of can.

I think it's a question of more or less or timing. So I think one of the things that the psychedelics could do, if put into a proper context, and I think that's a very important thing to note, I don't think it's the drug per se that is responsible for a lot of the effects we're seeing in the psychedelic renaissance. I think it's a combination. It's almost always, for example, in the therapeutic situations, it's a combination of the psychedelic drug and therapy. But what I think the psychedelics do is they enhance. I think there's reason to believe, and we're starting to gather some good empirical

evidence, that they enhance cognitive flexibility and they allow areas of the brain to talk to each other that are not normally talking to each other in our everyday state of consciousness. And that combination of enhanced cognitive flexibility and rewiring of the communication in the brain affords very, probably both profound and systematic insights that can be very transformative of people. But I think Zen will do the same thing for you with enough time, enough practice. I also think that one of the advantages that Zen has right now at least over psychedelics is precisely what I was mentioning.

Zen has a well-established tradition, a set of institutions, reliable guides that can give you a lot of correction. Because when you're messing around with your salience landscape and your cognitive flexibility, you're also making yourself very vulnerable to self-deception. And so I think if you were to ask, if you would ask me right now, which would I would pursue, I would pursue Zen rather than taking the psychedelics. Is it because the psychedelics are a shortcut or is it simply just because of the loss of community, there's that absence? I think it's both. I think the fact that they're a shortcut would mean there's a good chance that the psychedelics are going to be combined with people. Sorry, let me rephrase that. that the psychedelics are going to be combined with people...

Sorry, let me rephrase that. The psychedelics are not going to be combined with the acquisition of skills. And I think there's a whole important set of skills that are really necessary for getting, for lack of a better adjective, the spiritual benefits out of psychedelics. That's the one concern. So the shortcut concern is definitely there. And then the other is, I think, a concern that typically people are taking psychedelics. That's the one concern. So the shortcut concern is definitely there. And then the other is, I think, a concern that typically people are taking psychedelics, they're not taking it in a context, whether the context is shamanic for an indigenous culture, or Zen for a Buddhist culture. And that lack of appropriate ritual and reflective context,

of appropriate ritual and reflective context, I think, also increases the risk that the psychedelics will feed into sort of an autodidactic process of self-deception. Can you give me an example of where someone would feel self-deceived from the salience landscape that's open to them when they take psychedelics, that they would be corrected if they were in a wisdom tradition? would be corrected if they were in a wisdom tradition? So it's very tempting to think that you've, perhaps because of the intensity of the experience, that you're confusing that with you've now achieved full-blown enlightenment. with you've now achieved full-blown enlightenment or you're confusing the intensity of the experience with the possible truth of your metaphysical interpretation of the experience. The thing we have to know is that people come out of these things with very different metaphysical interpretations, each one often convinced about sort of the solid truth.

Like some feel that there's God and some feel like there's not a God. There's not a God. There's not no God. Some people have been talking about it. Is that rarer, though? What? Because I've seen that there's this book called How to Change Your Mind, Psychedelics.

So there's some recent research coming out of the Griffiths Lab that if people have an experience, sort of a higher state of consciousness or mystical experience, this is very recent, and they take psychedelics, they're more liable to describe confronting ultimate reality, whereas if they have the experience outside of psychedelics, they're much more likely to describe the experience as encountering God. So that seems to be the

variation that's going on there. And that, again, should cause you to step back and reflect on. You have to be really, really careful about, you know, these experiences are very challenging to us. And therefore, like the intensity and the felt presence of the demand they're making for us to transform our lives can be easily confused with I'm enlightened or I am the messenger or all kinds of inflationary stuff. Or also this view is the final absolute truth for all of humanity kind of thing. So they're not technically putting you in touch with reality, with reality, quote unquote. This is something you mentioned a lot, which is that the whole point of getting out of self-deception is to get closer to reality, to match yourself with reality. Now I might be misquoting you, but I wanted to know, what is this reality? How does one define it? And is it necessarily positive when one identifies with reality?

Because I can imagine somebody realizing, oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was, or I'm more arrogant than I think I was, and that's more real, that's actually real, and then that's devastating to them. So it's not necessarily a positive meaning. Okay, so let's talk about the second part first, the meaning part. Of course, we can even, and I don't equate these, if you remember our previous conversation, I don't equate truth with reality per se. But even when we get a lot of unpleasant truths, we don't want them. But, and I think this is very important, there seems to be, and this is a platonic insight,

there seems to be a meta-drive above and beyond whatever we desire coming to be the case that it is in some sense real. I just did this again in a lecture on Tuesday. I asked people to put up their hands. Are you in a romantic relationship you like? How many of you would want to know that the person was cheating on you,

even if it meant the destruction of this really satisfying relationship? You know, 90% of the people keep their hands up. And I then asked, I didn't do this before, I asked the people who didn't keep their hands up. I said, when you put your hands down, how did you feel? And they said, I felt anxious because I thought I probably should keep my hand up. No, they felt like they should keep their hand up because they saw other people put their hand up? No, well, I don't know.

That's a potential confound. I don't know. My sense, and that's all it is, my sense was, no, it was more the sense that they're not being completely honest with themselves, that they would want to know if their partner was cheating on them. And so the question is a hard one to ask. Would there be some negative emotional consequences of finding out certain truths? Yes. But if I were to say to you, the price you pay for avoiding those is to progressively lose your contact with what's real, I think most people, I mean, that's what this experiment shows, would prefer to keep the closer contact with reality than to avoid the unpleasant

truths. So that's the first part.. So that's the first part. The second is defining. The first was defining reality. Yeah. So that's a tough thing to do because there's two things we have to talk about. There's our sense of realness, which is sort of the primary cognitive state or states, at least features of our cognition and our consciousness. So that's a sense. A sense, right? And then there's what it purports to be referring to,

which is reality. So on that, I guess my answer is, I think the overall greatest plausible convergence between these different senses of reality, the normative senses, the truth of our propositions in terms of measures of accuracy, the power of our skills, the presence that we get in our perspectival knowing, and the sense of attunement with the world, a sense of sharing a kind of important identity.

I think when those all independently converge in a mutually supportive and coherent fashion, I think what's revealed in that is our best take on what reality is. But I'm a fallibilist. I don't think there's any knowledge claims. There's no evidence that we have knowledge claims that will not be subject to criticism and revision in the future. You just mentioned that it's the convergence between these different lines of something like knowledge or truth, and there's one which is propositional, there's one which is perspectival, one which is procedural. What else are there?

So there's perspectival, there's procedural, participatory, I believe. I don't know if those are the same. No, there's propositional, there's procedural, there's perspectival and participatory. It's just the four. Now, are there more that we haven't discovered? I don't know. I mean, so I often think about that. And the only method I have for doing that, because this isn't a conceptual thing, because this is the concepts by which we're examining empirical reality

rather than something that we're determining from empirical reality, because they're concepts of knowing. I try to come up with additional ones and see if they can resist being reduced to the other four, and I haven't been able to do that so far. That's the only method. And I don't mean this just by myself. I do it in discussion with other people. But it does seem to comport well.

And again, the Greeks have these four different terms, right? The episteme, that's the propositional. Techne, that's the procedural. Noesis, the perspectival. Gnosis, it's the participatory. And we seem to have different notions of realness. There's truth for propositional. There's power for procedural.

There's presence for perspectival, there's attunement, the agent arena, co-fittedness, right, for participatory knowing. And so I think when those are all really independently converging, right, such that there's a high plausibility that it isn't a bias in any of the one kinds of knowing that's driving my conclusion, my realization, then I think we have sort of the best we can plausibly have for saying this is what reality is. This convergence, this is something I've been thinking about. Let's imagine that there's four sliders here

This is procedural and then the other okay So there's the truth when it comes to propositional truth So we can let's say we can prove something to be true and then you slide it here now It's true here. It would be false. You mentioned that it's the convergence between them So does that mean that let's say it's not true It's in the middle, but then the procedurals in the middle and then this one's in the middle So they line up yeah, but there the procedural's in the middle, and then this one's in the middle, so they line up. But propositionally it could be false or somewhat false, but there's a convergence between them.

Yeah, but what they're converging on, right, so convergence doesn't just mean that they sort of line up. It means that they're driving you towards the same conclusion. And it sounds like the same conclusion all four are driving you towards is this is only half true or not very powerful or not very present or not very well attuned. And then it's like, okay, that means I'm not very much in touch with reality. So I don't mean just that they line up. I mean that they are equally meeting sort of the normative standard you're looking for. If they're all lining up at truth, it means that you're likely to be perceiving

reality. If they're all lined up here, if they're all lined up in the middle, it means you're likely to be perceiving something that's kind of true, and then if it's false, for sure that is false. Well, I would say, I never say for sure. I would say it's highly plausible. And I think ultimately, we have to rely on the fact that all of our other attempts to get at reality

ground out in judgments of plausibility. If we're doing a scientific experiment, we can't check for all the logically possible confounds because there's a combinatorial explosive number. We check the plausible alternative explanations. When we're putting our theory in competition with other theories, we only put it into competition in inference to the best alternative explanations. When we're putting our theory in competition with other theories, we only put it into competition in inference to the best explanation to plausible theories. When I do an interpretation, I don't consider all logically possible

interpretations. I have to consider the plausible ones. I think the Finitary Predicament, the fact that we are finite creatures in a fundamental way, means we ultimately have to rely on plausibility judgments while also always acknowledging that they are just plausibility judgments. So that's what I would think. So when someone's conflicted in a Jungian sense, they would say that you have competing personalities, that you have a goal, but they're not all competing for the same goal. It's not coordinated. It's not integrated.

So that's maybe a Jungian interpretation from this perspectival, procedural, participatory, and propositional perspective. Is it simply when someone is conflicted that these are out of line? Is that what you would find in this model? I wouldn't claim that all internal conflict is driven by that. No, not by any means. I think there are many different important explanations for why internal conflict arises. However, I would agree that an important potential source of conflict is when we're getting misalignment between propositional claims, for example, and our perspectival claims.

And this is part of, I think, what happens in the meaning crisis. We see a lot of sort of, I think, reason to believe in the plausible truth or accuracy of our scientific propositions. But this is not lining up with our perspectival sense of how we're present in the world or our participatory sense. And this is why there's been ongoing critiques of this, like the phenomenological critiques, the existential critiques, that the truth of the scientific worldview is not lining up with these other ways in which we assess how real or ultimately meaningful our experience is. So let's say, propositionally, science says we live in a world

that's of a billion stars. Empty of purpose. Empty of purpose. Okay, propositionally, our we live in a world that's of a billion stars empty of purpose empty of purpose okay propositionally our lives are somewhat meaningless from this perspective but then we feel as though we're special somehow and so there's a conflict is this part of the meaning crisis or is this something called the interpretation crisis and if not what the heck is the interpretation crisis and what is this relation to the meaning crisis okay so i think the what we're just talking about is part and parcel of the first part, the conflict between here's a set of propositions that science is giving us and that we do not find it a viable thing, a viable worldview in which we can live.

That we can't find how that... There isn't a way of making that an immersive presence for us in a way that it comports well with our judgments of how our lives need to make progress, etc., etc. There's all that sort of stuff missing from the scientific world, progress and purpose. All of that is not in the scientific, meaning itself is not in the scientific world. The scientific worldview does not give an explanation of meaning. It presupposes the existence of meaning in its assertion of truth. For example, what do you mean? Give me a scientific... There is no scientific account of meaning.

I mean, that's part of what cognitive science is trying to figure out. We do not have anywhere near a consensus answer of what it means to... Even for a sentence to be linguistically meaningful, let alone figuring out, you know, what it is in, you know, in a comprehensive sense that makes a conscious state meaningful to us, et cetera. But we presuppose that all of that is active in the scientist when he or she says E equals MC squared.

They have a way of taking those otherwise arbitrary graphic marks and attaching meaning to them, such that we, through the way meaning structures our experience, we can then look to see if that actually lines up accurately with the way reality seems to be testable. So this is part of something that makes sense. This makes sense when we have a proposition that coheres. I was thinking about this.

What does it mean for something to make sense phenomenologically? What does it mean when we feel like, ah, that makes sense? Can you give an account? Because you said that what makes sense, what meaning is, is related to, and it's an analogy for does a sentence make sense? Yes. Okay, then the question is, that it's an analogy for, does a sentence make sense? Yes. Okay, then the question is, that just begs the question, what does it mean for a sentence to make sense?

Well, I just said there isn't yet a philosophical consensus on... Just a feeling so far? Well, there's ideas that part of what it has to do for a sentence is there's a syntactic structure that is interpretable to us and that that lines up with a semantic content that refers to the world in the right way and then that somehow plugs into the human capacity for intentionality that I can have thoughts about the world whereas nothing else has that kind of intentional relationship. And so I think that's a very difficult question. I take it that that problem doesn't have to be solved to use the metaphor.

So when people are talking about their life being meaningful, what they're saying is there's something like the way a sentence coheres together, the way the parts are all relevant to each other, the way they're then relevant to me, and the way I can then use that relevance to me and the relevance of the parts to make something relevant to you." And I think what they're saying is there's something like that in their lives. Their elements of the life that they're interacting with are relevant to each other in a way that reliably is

relevant to them, to their actions, to each other in a way that reliably is relevant to them, to their actions, to their goals. And then that structure of intelligibility, the way things are co-relevant to each other and relevant to them, is useful, reliably useful in creating actions, speech, information that is relevant to other people. Okay, so relevance boils down to something pragmatic, something like, I have a cognitive model that's, and then when I execute this cognitive model, it works. That what I want to happen happens.

Is that what it means for something to be relevant? So, I mean, I've published a lot of work on relevance. And so I happen to argue, and I've had a lot of help from people like Tim Lilliclap and Blake Richards and Leonardo Farnaro and others, that what relevance is, is it's a, I think I would agree with you if we have some time to talk about how you're using the word pragmatic. I think we'd have to extend it much more than beyond what James was talking about. I think although James' pragmatism is often talking about relevance and he thinks he's talking about truth.

So we can come back to that. The issue of pragmatism is kind of fraught in that way. But to say that something is relevant to me is to say that there's a bunch of different adaptive trade-offs that are at work. So my brain is, as much as possible, trying to be as efficient as it can in its processing of information. Because, of course, the more efficient I am, the better I'm making use of my resources. Think about this in a bioeconomic sense. Efficient implies a goal?

Because you have to be efficient with regards to something? There's a constitutive goal. There's a difference between representative goals and constitutive goals. I have the constitutive goal of being an autopoetic thing. The goal of remaining alive is part and parcel of just the way I'm structured to be. Okay, that's a constitutive goal. Right. I mean, to be an autopoetic thing, to be a self-making thing, to be a thing that is making

itself, that has the goal of making itself, is precisely constitutive of being a living thing. It can't be a living thing and then have this as an external goal. It has to be very part and parcel of the way the thing is structured. A paramecium is literally physically structured in such a way that it is constantly satisfying the goal of maintaining itself and seeking out the conditions that maintain itself. Okay. And then there's the other type of goal? Pardon me?

And then you said there's constitutive goals and then there's… Well, then there's… People often talk about goals as states of affairs in the world that they want to realize, right? And in a technical sense, you know, autopoetic goals are states of affairs in the world that you want to realize, but there are states of affairs in you. Yeah. And so I think that's how I would at least try and make at least pro tem distinction between them. So back to it, I think what's one of the things you're trying to do, right? So think about an organism, think about it in a bioeconomic sense. It has very limited resources, very limited time. So one of the ways in which it can gain an advantage,

right, is by being very efficient in the processing of information. So one of the ways, one way, not always, I'm just giving an example, right, is I can try to do, I can try and generalize my cognition as much as possible. So the more I can use, let's say I have some information processing function, I'll use sort of a little bit like mathematical language, the more I can use the same function in many different contexts, the more efficient I am, because I'm using the same thing again. That's related to elegance? Partially, partially. I mean because I'm using the same thing again. I mean so that's related to elegance Partially partially. I mean I think elegance is partially related to that we can come back to elegance in a sec So so this is you know

This is why we like things like equals MC squared. I can use the same formula all over the place and very effectively find it solve problems. Now the problem with efficiency, right, is the problem with efficiency is it tends to integrate, you're assimilating information, you're looking for what's invariant because you're doing all this data compression, you're trying to get, right? Now that's all wonderful except that it's not always the case that what's invariant is what is going to give you an advantage. Sometimes what matters is, so what's relevant to you, if you align with this language, is

not what's the same, but how something is different. So sometimes what matters is not what is invariant across context, but what is specially different about this context in particular. We even get that with the proverb, jack of all trades but master of none, right? So think about this if you'll allow me a financial economic analogy. You know, you can downsize a corporation and get very efficient in the use of resources. The problem is if I downsize too much, I lose resiliency. I lose the ability to adapt to novel, unexpected changes.

So when we did the big downsizing in the 80s, what was discovered is a lot of companies become very brittle. If everybody's working as much as they possibly can and a sudden threat, an unexpected, novel threat or opportunity arises, you don't have any resources to dedicate to this new thing. So you lose resiliency if you push efficiency too much. Efficiency and resiliency are in a trade-off relationship. This makes you integrate information, resiliency makes you differentiate. And what relevance realization is, I would argue, is an optimization relation.

These are an opponent relation and what your brain is doing is constantly trading between these. And there is no final place to be at for relevance, right? But what relevance is right now is what that optimization settles on, right? For, ultimately, I think, giving me the relationship to the environment, the connected to the environment that optimizes my ability to solve my problems. Whenever you explain these concepts, you tend to give credit where credit's due. And you do that plenty. Is there a reason why you do that?

Were you burnt before in the past where your ideas weren't given credit? Do you feel like you don't want to be accused of overindulging your own ideas? Because you do it more than anyone else. And I like it, but I want to know what's driving that. Well, a lot of different motives. One is gratitude. And were you always like that? I don't know.

It's a good question. I mean, I think most of my academic career I've tried to be like that. It's an important personal goal to me. I mean, part of it is gratitude. Part of it is, I think, is this more selfish? I don't know. The recognition that if I give proper credit, these people who I respect deeply will be more willing to work with me again in the future. proper credit, these people who I respect deeply will be more willing to work with me again in the future. Part of it is I'm very concerned about how people's attention to me could be inflationary,

cause me to, we talked about this earlier, think too much of myself. And a way to remind myself that I am not the sole author, the self-made or any of that bullshit, right, is to remind myself and do it in action, not just in belief, that, you know, this is often work that is done in collaboration with other people. Also, I genuinely want to help further other people's career, further other people's career, help develop it. And if they respect what I'm doing, and if other people find value in my work, then that could translate to people looking at their work and finding their work potentially valuable.

Do you tend to do your best work when you're collaborating? Always. Always. Always. best work when you're collaborating or a long work? Always. Always. Always. That's one of the reasons why Plato appeals to me more than Aristotle, because Plato is written in dialogue whereas Aristotle is written in a monologue. And I think one of Plato's greatest insight is our best cognition is done in collaboration

with other people. And that has just been reliably the case for me. Even when I'm working on my own, I'm imagining the people I work with. And that's very helpful. But it's getting to work with other people gets you to a place where you just can't get to in your own thought. When you're working with someone else, how does that process look like? You just spitball an idea. I know this is so basic, but let's take the example of earlier today. We're talking with somebody in the University of California.

Yeah. Okay. How does that be? Dan Schappi. Dan Schappi. Yeah. Okay. How does that look like?

You're saying, okay, we're working on this. I have this idea. What do you think? And then this person talks about what they think. It's different with different people. So, I mean, I could tell you how I work with Dan, but that's not the same way I work with Leo or the same way I work with Christopher Master Pietro on the zombie book. It's different with, and that's part of the value of it. So with Dan, for example, before we started to write anything, he's going to be first author, so he's doing most of the original text production. But before we started doing anything, we just read a whole

bunch of books together, and we met regularly and talked and argued and discussed and reflected on it. And then what's happening is Dan's starting to write some text. He'll send it to me. I'll put in commentary. Then we'll meet, and I'll have ideas in response to what he said. He'll think, you know, those are good. Note those down. And then I send those ideas to him. Some are writing. That's how I'm working with Dan.

Whereas when I'm working with Leo, very often we'll sit in the same room and we'll just start. I'll start talking and he'll write and then he'll say stuff and then I'll talk and we'll write. And so it's different with different people. What is this building up to? Do you feel like you have a goal? So my goal, one of my goals is the theory of everything. It's a physics goal. Okay. Are you building up to something or are you just exploring and you're having fun? Well, I am having fun and I'm also generating a lot of meaning and those aren't the same thing. But I suppose I would like as much as possible to get that plausible convergence between the different areas of work. And that is something that I do have as a goal in all my work, to get the various pieces to constantly talk to each other and integrate together. And ultimately, the goal is to give the best possible foundation

for giving a comprehensive response to the meaning crisis. That really is my life work, if that's not too pretentious to say. Is the meaning crisis our main crisis right now, in your opinion? No. And I keep saying this because I talk about it so much, people think that I think that's the issue. I do not think that. I talk about it so much just because that is what I can contribute, the work I can do. I think the main crisis facing us is, you know, what Thomas Bjorkman... It's white privilege. No, I'm just kidding. is what Thomas Bjorkman... It's white privilege. No, I'm just kidding.

What he calls the meta-crisis. There's a looming ecological crisis. There's definitely a socioeconomic crisis. We're seeing political crises. I mean, two of the major democracies... The median crisis relates to them. They do, and I was going to explain how I think it does. So I think there's all these things happening, and they're also sort of reflective of the

fact that a lot of the machinery, the post-World War II machinery that we had created for solving problems does not seem to be adequately addressing these problems. How does the meaning crisis contribute? I think the meaning crisis helps to explain why we feel so impotent and at times incompetent in addressing these other crises. So very often we are asking people to make tremendous changes in order to deal with these other crises. We're going to have to. I mean just as a matter I think of sort of consensus scientific fact, we're going to have to make major changes in how we live to address the

ecological crisis that we're facing. And the question is, well we're not doing it. And the response so far has been, well, people just don't have enough information. Let's give them more information, more information, more information. That's not doing anything. That's not moving. That's propositional? Yeah, yeah. It's not moving. Yeah, exactly. It's not doing it because people will not, right? Look. Since enlightenment, we think that the solution to all our problems are propositional? That's part of it, but it's also the following. I want to make a specific claim about the specific causality of the meaning crisis. So there's a lot of work being done right now, good work, on scarcity mentality.

When a valuable resource to a human being is scarce, they become actually much more irrational in their thinking, very short-term, very impulsive, much less reflective, much more prone to self-deception. And I think when there's a scarcity of meaning, right, that people are in a scarcity mentality. And what that means is that they are then going to grab onto other stuff and hold onto it. People will give up. is that they are then going to grab on to other stuff and hold on to it. People will give up. They will actually sustain significant diminishment in their economic standard of living if you give them more meaning. I can give you an

indisputable case for this. Indisputably having a child reduces your standard of living. It reduces your economic standard of living your mental health There's even some evidence that your longevity is reduced by having a child and when you ask people What's happening to your subjective well-being when you have a child they're reliably it goes down Why do they do it because you know what goes up reliably meaning in life? People will sacrifice a lot for meaning in life. That's interesting. I thought the meaning was tied to well-being.

It's not. No. Because one can go down and the other can go up. No. So at least subjective well-being. There's a moral sense of well-being. We have to be very careful with these terms. So there's a psychological sense of subjective well-being.

How am I doing? Right? And that would go up. That's related to meaning? That goes down. That can go down independently of meaning going up. When some people talk about sort of a moral sense of well-being, I think meaning in life is part of that.

So let's keep those distinct. So the meaning crisis. There's a scarcity of meaning, which means when there's a scarcity of meaning, people will not give up other stuff because you can't promise them, oh, well, give up this. I'll give you more meaning because they're already feeling a scarcity of meaning. And you're asking them to think about this.

You're asking them to make comprehensive changes in their consciousness, their cognition, their character, their communities. The thing that has done that for us reliably in the past is religion. And most people, this is what the statistics show, are now post-religious. Religion isn't an option for them. And the pseudo-religious ideologies of the 20th century, the secular versions like Nazism and communism, drenched the world in blood. So we're sort of locked. We don't want religion. We don't want the secular alternatives, we need to make these comprehensive changes, we don't have anything guiding us to do that, and we're being asked to make these comprehensive changes without any

promise that the meaning that's already scarce is going to be forthcoming. Because of that we get stuck, we're inert, we're unable to address these other profound issues. So I don't think the meaning crisis is our only crisis, but I think it terrifically exacerbates our attempts to respond to the other things. Do you think if we solved the meaning crisis, solved it, that the other problems would be solved as well because we would be acting in a wise manner? Or do you think that they need to be addressed independently? I don't think they need to be addressed independently of the meaning crisis. I would

argue that the, well, I gave you an argument why I think it's interdependent. I still stand by that argument. And I think there's other reasons for thinking they're independent. I do think that, so. So imagine we solve the socioeconomic crisis, we solve the ecological crisis, but we still have a meaning crisis, then new crises, maybe the socioeconomic crisis would come back, or maybe a worse ecological crisis would come back. Yeah. I mean, I think if I find it, I understand you're giving me a thought problem, so I'm

not trying to be obtuse. I find it implausible that we could overcome the foolishness and the self-destructiveness in our behavior that's driving a lot of these things without having addressed the meaning crisis. And as you said, part of the way of addressing the meaning crisis attended, I think, a constitutive component of addressing the meaning crisis is to bring back as a serious project the cultivation of wisdom. And that doesn't necessarily have to be in a religious form or what people think of as traditional religion? I don't think so.

I mean, so this, of course, is what I would get into, I think. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to talk to them about it. Who's them? Jonathan Pajot or Paul VanderKley or some of the people who have taken a lot of interest in my work, but they still come from a religious framework. Or even some of the people who have taken a lot of interest in my work, but they still come from a religious framework. Or even some of the people that come to the video series

from a Buddhist perspective and things like that. But while I think if you've watched the series, I'm very respectful of religion. I do not think that we have to tie the cultivation of wisdom or self-transcendence to a religious way of life, nor do I think is that a plausible attempt to solve the meaning crisis precisely because most people have become post-religious, again, and that's increasing, and the scientific worldview is clearly a post-religious, again, and that's increasing, and the scientific worldview is clearly a post-religious worldview. Do you believe in evil?

Depends what you mean by that. I mean, the problem with the word evil is it's gone from being a metaphysical category to just a description of the moral quality of action. So, I mean, if you were in the time of Augustine, for example, or even Plotinus, if you asked them if they believe in evil, there was a metaphysics of evil. There was a worldview in which they had a place within the ontology for evil. There is no place for evil in the scientific worldview. It's not part of our ontology. So when we use the word evil, we tend to mean very significant immoral behavior. But that's not what evil meant. So for example, in that use of the term evil, it would make no sense to say there's no people, but there's still

evil. But for Augustine... In which sense? In the moral action sense? In the moral action sense. Because if there's no moral actors, then evil isn't possible. But I think for Augustine, insofar as I understand him, and I think for Plotinus, even if there's no people, there's still evil. Because evil represents sort of a hole in being, a way in which there's a lack of intelligibility at sort of the bottom of the hierarchy of being. Can you sort out what Buddhism says about evil to me? Because some people say in Christianity there is evil,

and that's because you choose to do something evil. When you choose, then it's evil, something related to free will. But in Buddhism, as far as I know, people say Buddhism doesn't have a conception of free will, or it's telling you that free will is an illusion and that evil is akin to ignorance What do you think of that? Well first of all do I think that's a correct interpretation of Buddhism or do I think that's a correct way of thinking about evil? There's two different questions you're asking me which one is that a correct interpretation of Buddhism does Buddhism actually have Something to say about evil which is that it's essentially ignorant It's very difficult to speak of Buddhism as a whole.

I mean, there's aspects of Buddhism, maybe Nichiren Buddhism, in which the idea of evil, I think, might be a plausible thing to talk about. Whereas in Zen Buddhism, probably not at least anything like the Christian. Again, speaking of Christianity, a whole is dangerous, right? But sort of the standard, I don't know the adjective, Christian model of evil.

The thing about the Buddhist notion of no free will, it's not quite right because the notion of causation and the ontology, it's not quite right because the notion of causation and the ontology. It's not like When you say say a Buddhist doesn't have free will it's like the Buddhist is in our worldview and our notion of causation and Within that there's no free will so it's it's actually because if if you have no free will if whatever you did was caused by Something prior that you had no control over its cause cause cause cause all the way down

whatever you did was caused by something prior that you had no control over. It's cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, all the way down. There's that, but you have to understand, right, the notion, so Buddhism is dependent, at least versions of it, like Zen, that come out of Nargajuna, on shunyara, the emptiness, right, that nothing individually exists, right?

Everything is completely interdependent and impermanent. So it's not right to say that you don't have free will, because there's a sense in which, in a deep sense, you don't individually exist. So the notion of you is not what we think of as you. The notion of you is a conventional and convenient truth for talking about how I can interact with a particular intersection of the way everything is interdependent and impermanent. That

being said, the idea that there is something at the core of reality. So Augustine describes evil, and this is based on Platonism, it's like a tear in being. It's a hole in being. I'm only using this as an analogy, really clear, an analogy. Evil is a black hole in your metaphysics things you know being and realness go into it but nothing ever comes out right that's how it's under understood and what nishitani for example famously i think in one of the great books on meaning uh religion and nothingness said there's a fundamental difference in the east right the east tends, so the West tends to view non-being and no-thingness as a lack, a privation,

whereas the East, both in Taoism and Buddhism, views a lack, emptiness, as actually something positive, as that which makes things possible. And Nishitani, in fact, famously argued that the West is incapable of dealing with nihilism because we can't grasp no-thingness as a positive thing. We see it as a lack of being because we think of being in terms of thingness, whereas in the East, no-thingness is a positive. we think of being in terms of thingness, whereas in the East, no thingness is a positive. And the East, therefore, right, he thinks the Eastern philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism, or Zen, which integrates the two together, have a greater chance of responding to the problem of nihilism precisely because they do not have to see no-thingness as evil.

So Peterson would say that nihilism is associated heavily with negative affect. And you're saying that if you had Buddhist training, you might not necessarily see nihilism as negative. Or put it the other way around. I am agreeing with you, Kurt. I just want to use the wording a little bit differently. You might not experience emptiness or no-thingness nihilistically. You may experience it positively as a liberating experience. Do you personally believe in free will? If I understand what you're saying, I'm a compatibilist.

I'm somebody who thinks that whenever we've been talking about free will, we didn't mean what is typically meant by free will. I take it that this is what you mean by free will. And if you don't, of course, correct me. But at least when I have discussions with people about this, they mean that there's something in them that is uncaused, an uncausal center, a non-causal center of causation. So that there's in some way a first mover. There's something in them that is totally uncaused, but then can make things cause, can initiate a causal chain.

And I find that both incredible in the sense of something I can't believe in and I also find it, I don't understand why people want this, why they want to possess this capacity. First of all, I think my life gets better as my thinking is more and more determined by what's true, my actions are more and more determined by what's good, my experience is more and more determined by what's beautiful. I don't think freedom, in that sense, is an intrinsic good. I mean, for me, freedom is an instrumental good about getting more and more.

I would love it if my everything about, if my thoughts were completely determined by the truth, my actions were completely determined by what was good. If I completely lost my freedom in truth, goodness, and beauty, great. Why not? Right? Freedom for its own sake doesn't, I don't understand that as a value. I understand it as an important political value, an instrumental value, but as a metaphysical thing, I don't understand that as a value. I understand it as an important political value, an instrumental value, but as a metaphysical thing, I don't find it inherently valuable. So when I talk about what it is to say that an action is free from a compatibilist framework, for that, what that means for me is the most causally relevant explanation of my behavior was my current state of consciousness and cognition.

That's what I think it means when you say, I'm responsible for X. Did we ever mean that I was the sole cause of it? No, of course not. I can't think of an instance where we think we are the only causal thing for something happening, even when I'm speaking. It's dependent on all the causal properties of my lips and my vocal cords. I can't think of anything where we're talking about soul causation. For me, we've always been talking about causal relevance. Second, I don't want a part of me, that's what I was trying to do earlier,

that is uncaused, like that is not causally connected. That would mean my actions were completely arbitrary. They were in no way relative to or relevant to the events in the environment. Because if they are in any way relevant to the environment, that's going to play out in there being some important causal relationship between what's happening in the environment and my state of mind. Not that I believe in free will, but just to play devil's advocate, what you're saying is that there are constraints. So there are physical constraints, the laws of physics, how your tongue is situated in your mouth, the words that you speak.

I'm also saying there's normative constraints, truth, beauty, and goodness. Yeah, but go ahead. Okay, so there are constraints. Why can't there be free will with constraints? So you're saying, well, if you go back, then you would have to be a first mover. Yeah. But you could be a first mover within constraints, not just a first mover with no constraints. Like, what the hell are you going to do? Wait, wait. Are you saying the first mover is responsive to the restraints? Think of it like chess. Or think of it like Go. Right. The

game Go. So there's tremendous constraints. First of all, we're playing a board game. Second of all, you can only move this piece and so on and so on. But there's so many options within Go that if you ran a supercomputer from now, from the beginning of the universe until the heat death of the universe, it still wouldn't exhaust it. Yeah, it's combinatorial explosive, right? But there, so...

So what I'm saying is that there could be constraints, heavy constraints on free will. So commensurate with your... Wait, wait, but there's a difference here. Your example of Go is that there could be constraints, heavy constraints on free will. So commensurate with your... Wait, wait, but there's a difference here. Your example of go is that there's lots of possibilities, right? And that's not the same thing as saying you have free will. Then you choose from those possibilities. You choose from those possibilities based on... Okay, so now we're getting into a causal model, but free will has to be outside of causality. That's exactly what I can't get an analogy for.

Well, we know when we come down to subatomic particles that causality is just, you throw it out the window. So causality being not a part of this universe is true. It breaks down to some sense. Right, but as you- And there are other systems, like you said, a structural, functional, I forget what it was called, organizational. Sure. So that also breaks a causal model.

Wait, wait, wait. But wait, wait. We have two different things we're talking about, and I think that's important. There's causation and there's constraints. And those aren't identical. Causation is about events that change actuality. Constraints are about conditions that shape possibility, and I'm invoking both of those and saying freedom of the will is, I mean, if...

So you think it's logically impossible, or do you just not want to believe it, or you feel like you have a propositionally consistent worldview that proves that there is no free will? I think that it doesn't make any sense. I don't know if that's the same thing as saying it's logically possible. Logically impossible would mean it clearly makes sense and then we can find it's inherently contradictory. I don't know if it makes any sense. The idea of free will. The idea of free will.

That doesn't make any sense to me. And also the valuation of free will doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not trying to be obtuse. I don't know why people want it. I mean, most of the major philosophical conundrums like the mind-body problem and things like that, they deeply interest me. The free will determinism thing leaves me cold, right? I don't know why people want it,

and I don't know what they mean when they say they have it. Because even to say that you're choosing, unless your choice is completely arbitrary and not in any way affected by the options you're considering, constrained by them, right, then it's not a free choice in the free will sense. If your actions are in any way responsive to, responsible to the environment, you don't have that kind of free will we're talking about. Now, a compatibilist said, we were never talking about that when we said I acted freely. What we mean when I say I acted freely is precisely what we're

talking about. I'm acting responsibly and responsibly to the environment. And the most causally relevant, not the sole cause, not the original cause, but the most causally relevant explanation of that responsiveness and responsibility is my current cognitive state. That's all we ever meant, I think. Well, you know, Phineas Gage, that famous example. Yeah. Okay, so something like brain damage caused him to act in a certain way. Sure.

Then you can say that anytime someone does something, this is Sam Harris's statements, is something like anytime someone acts in a way that we think is evil, it's actually akin to neurological damage. If you reduce it down to just the brain was wired in this way, then that changes what we think of as holding somebody responsible. Why? I mean, whenever you're speaking a sentence, it could be reduced down to neurons happening in your brain. Does that mean there's no truth?

Because now you're in a self-contradiction. What would you do in the trolley problem? You know the trolley problem, there's five people in front of you and then there's one person in this. Do you know about the trolley problem? Okay, what would you personally do? What would I personally do?

Would you switch it? So, I mean, so tell me which, I mean, because there's different versions. Okay, so the trolley problem. I know the trolley problem. Is there the five people here and then, right? There's a track with one person, but you have to actually switch. But there's different versions.

There's one version where I switch the track. There's one where I push the man in front of the trolley. Okay, let's go on the one where you switch the track. Well, if that is the only option available to me, I switch it so it kills the one person rather than five. Okay, what about the one where you have to push someone off? Well, see, that the only option available to me, I switch it so it kills the one person rather than five. Okay. What about the one where you have to push someone off?

Well, see, that's a difficult thing because we have sort of evolutionary constraints on us where we take more responsibility for physically acting. I would like to believe that I would not let those evolutionary constraints override that, again, limited to this problem, because I think the point is to avoid getting into the trolley problem, but say I have no choice, and we can go back to that debate, right, then I would like to think that I would still do the same thing. You'd push someone off. I'd push the person off.

If I have overwhelmingly clear and high probable evidence that by doing that I will save five lives, yes. I mean, what else would one do? I mean, the only reason why you wouldn't do the push... So the difference is, your viewers probably know that, most people say, well, I'll throw the switch. That's okay. But pushing the person, that's,

and the point of the trolley problem is, well, that's, right, there isn't any logical difference. There's just the interpersonal closeness or proximity of the person when you're pushing them. But in that situation, I don't see why it matters. Now, there's a lot of wrong conclusions to draw from that. you're pushing them. But in that situation, I don't see why it matters. Now there's a lot of wrong conclusions to draw from that. The wrong conclusions to draw from that is that close interpersonal presence never makes

a moral difference. That's false. It often makes a huge moral difference. So you shouldn't conclude from the trolley problems, oh, we should just be utilitarians and we should never pay attention to these other factors. That's just false. I don't think that follows. I was thinking about the actuality and then potential Aristotelian notions. Okay. And then I was thinking about how that relates to Carl Jung. So Carl Jung has this idea of individuation.

Yes. Okay. So the way that I think of that is similar. So let's say you have the big five personality model. Remember someone was talking about that individuation. You can think of it as you're born with a certain set of traits. Individuation, making yourself more capable, actualizing yourself is actually about spreading so that let's say you're highly neurotic. You need to learn to be not neurotic.

Let's say you're highly open. You actually need to learn to be, to know what it's like to be unopened and closed and then conscientious, same thing. Yes So then that's getting close to individuation. First of all, I want to know what you think about that and then my second question would be That to me sounds like you're actualizing yourself But actually you're giving yourself more potential because you have the potential to do more and be more when you're individual when you're individuated Because now you've spread what you can do.

So you've actualized yourself, but at the same time you've increased potential. And those seem to be contradictory because in the Aristotelian notion, you have potential and then you actualize. Okay. So let's try and answer that. So first of all, I have criticisms of the Jungian model. One would come from Tillich that we shouldn't just talk about individuation. We should always talk about individuation and participation. And those are in a trade-off relationship. I want to individuate, but I also want to participate. I have an identity onto myself, and I have an identity insofar as I belong to other people. And man, is it important to you that you belong to other people.

So that should, first of all, be set off as a serious limitation in the Jungian model. Okay, then the idea of individuation. I like the way you described it because I think it's better than what is often a romantic interpretation of Jung. And the problem is Jung is influenced by romanticism so I understand why people make that. So the romantic interpretation that I reject is, you know, I have my true self, right? And the point about this is to find what's unique about my true self and express it. To be in alignment with it? Is that romantic? Well, to believe that you have a true self and what's value about your true self is its

uniqueness and that you're born with it. And the point is to express it, to press it out, right, express. Okay, so that's a romantic notion that you have your criticisms. Yeah, and so I reject that. Now, you gave a different interpretation. At least it sounded different to me, and it sounded much more Aristotelian. It's like, no, no, what individuation is, is what Aristotle would call character cultivation.

So my character is different than my personality. You listed the five factors, the big five of personality. And these are basically dispositional. These are given to me. How they're given to me genetically or my family of origin environment, I'm just going to be neutral on that right now. But in some sense, they're given to me, right? And part of what character is, and we've lost the sense of this, is character is exactly how

you described it. Character is about acquiring what Aristotle would call a habit, a skill, ultimately a virtue that compensates for the deficits in my personality. And then, of course, that's why the whole notion of the romantic notion of your true self is kind of, again, I think something we should suspect. Because is your true self your personality? Is it your personality as compensated for by your character, et cetera, et cetera, right? And secondly, you then said, well, what seems to be happening here is, right, I seem to be actualizing my potential that I'm creating all this. But that gives me new potential, right, I seem to be actualizing my potential and that I'm creating all this, but that gives me new potential, right? But you have to understand that actuality and potentiality for Aristotle

are reflective. They're relative, not reflective. I just said the wrong word. They're relative. So what's actuality to the potential of something can be the potential for a higher level of actualization. Let me give you a classic Aristotelian doctrine. Being a living thing is the potential for being a moving thing. But being a moving thing is the potential for being a cognitive thing. Being the cognitive thing is the potential for being a rational thing. Being the cognitive thing is the potential for being a rational thing. So, right, as you cultivate your character, you are actualizing the potential within your personality, but you're also creating the potential to become, potentially, a reflective rational agent. That in turn,

I would argue, because I would add Plotinus to Aristotle, is the potential for you becoming a self-transcendent kind of being. I remember you were talking about a virtual engine model where there's a limiter and a generator, or a governor. Yeah. And then, okay, so that's a virtual engine, and then you can use that to develop character. Yes, and that's what I think Aristotle's notion of virtue is. I think his notion of a virtue is exactly that. I mean, if you look at the idea of the golden mean, that courage is in between cowardice and foolhardiness, right? There's deficits of access and there's deficits of lack. And what you're trying to do is, right, you're setting

up a virtual engine. You're setting something, a selective thing that's clamping down on the excess. And then you're also creating a generator to make sure you don't have the deficits of lack. And you're trying to create this optimization. And by the way, I think relevance realization to go way back to meaning is again about getting a kind of virtual engine, right? Between being economical, right? Really like clamping down your possibilities, and being resilient, really opening up your options. And you're constantly trying to get the most virtuous, optimal balance between those.

Okay. Difficult question to answer, but practically speaking, how does one use this virtual engine model to increase their character? So, you, again, I mean, sorry, I wasn't clear. So I don't want to just sound like I'm repeating myself. I was trying to present Aristotle's method of the golden mean as a process by which you create a virtual engine on

your development. And that's how you will acquire aspects of character. So let's say I determine that I need in order to compensate for my personality deficits, I need to be more courageous. So I have, you know, there's an aspirational rationality.

I reason as to what I need, what I don't have, and how I will proleptically move towards that. So how do I go about cultivating that? Well, I can't just say, I'm going to be brave now, because it doesn't work that way. So what I do is I try to develop habits of avoiding the extremes. I try to, first of all, the extremes of cowardice and for... So you have to recognize where you are on this spectrum first. You do, but it's not static. As I start to get better at getting a systematic relationship between the generator and the governor, between building habits of

constraint that limit the excesses, building habits of generativity that compensate for the lack. As I get better at that and getting them into a systematic attunement with each other, that's also going to increase my ability to recognize, get a better sense of these things in the world. And it's going to self-organize. I'm going to tune myself into this virtue. Let's say someone is extremely timid, scared, low self-esteem. What do they do? First of all, they don't recognize themselves. Let's just hypothetically

say they think, no, I'm actually fine. Most people are too, they have too much temerity, too much foolhardiness. What do they do? What's a practical step that they can undertake? Well, you've put me in a difficult situation because you set the thought experiment up with that they don't recognize that they're... Okay. But they recognize that something is wrong inside. Okay. Well, then... They're not feeling good. So hopefully what they'll do is they will seek discussion or therapy that will help them break out of aspect disguise. So the problem that people face when they get into this is, I mean, you see this in therapy, is what I call aspect disguise.

So somebody will come in and say, look, I have a lot of trouble in my life because I'm really stubborn. I'm too inflexible. It's really causing, that's the complaint I'm hearing from all the people around me and I recognize it. I've got to change it. Okay. And then you talk to them for a while, then you wait and you come back and you say, what

do you really like about yourself? Oh, well, I'm persistent. I don't ever give up. See, so people don't realize they're talking about the same thing under different aspects. And so very often what you have to do is get people, right, like, are they disguising and therefore unwilling to give up their timidness because they, in this equivocal fashion, identify it with being gentle. And gentle is a good thing. equivocal fashion, identify it with being gentle and gentle is a good thing. So you have to work with people to break out of that. You say, is there a way to be both gentle and courageous? And can you get them to break the aspect disguise, the equivocation between gentleness and timidity? So you have to

do a lot of that work. Then if they open that possibility up, that's an important if, then you can start to do something like what I was talking to you. I mean, that is my situation. I am... You feel like you're timid? I was very shy as a child. I suffer from very powerful social anxiety. To this day?

Right now. It's happening right now. So what I've done... I love you. You're doing great. Don't worry. Thank you. You don't have to do that.

But what I've tried to do, it's always dangerous to hold yourself up as an example because it can be self-promotional, but sometimes it's a good way of being authentic. So I'm trying to get that balance. But what I've tried to do is to do that Aristotelian. I've tried to develop skills and habits of virtues of interaction with people and try to get the balance. And we talked about it earlier, about giving other people credit. So don't overcompensate and be imposing and intimidating, right?

So try to get the persona and the set of virtues and skills for interaction to compensate for the fact that I'm actually, what I would really like to do is to not have to engage in social interaction. In the case of this person who was timid but didn't think that they were timid or thought that the problem was the rest of the world, would you say that there was self-deception there? Yes. Okay. I remember you said that it's difficult to self-deceive. No, no. I think self-deception is very, very easy. What I said is it's incorrect to understand self-deception as lying to yourself. Just to give the viewers some background, in one of your videos, from what I understood, I thought you said that you can't lie to yourself, which I interpret as you can't self-deceive,

but you can BS yourself, the technical term. You can watch the other video for that. Okay, now you're going to clarify. Yeah, so what I mean by that is I think what I was trying to say is I think self-deception is very prevalent in our lives, in our cognitive lives. I think the common metaphor of understanding self-deception as lying to yourself is an incorrect metaphor because I don't think you can lie to yourself. I think the correct model for understanding self-deception is you can BS yourself. And so we're not really lying to ourselves, we're BSing ourselves.

And I think that's very important because I think, again, it shifts the issue of self-deception off of propositions onto issues about perspectival knowing, issues of salience, issues of identity. to issues about prospectival knowing, issues of salience, issues of identity. Most of your self-deception is motivated reasoning that has to do with the salience of stimuli and your sense of trying to preserve your identity. I was thinking about this, the inability to lie to yourself, and I was wondering, is that why porn is so liked? Because when you think about it, why would you have to watch porn when you can imagine anything you want?

Okay, so you're imagining but then you're not getting something like the Procedural or participatory so when you watch it, maybe you have person maybe a propositional truth Oh, yeah, this person is doing so so to me and I'm doing it But you don't have some of these you don't have the presence. You can't get the sense of presence So now you watch it. Yeah. And it gives you truth in some other form of knowledge.

Well, at least it gives you presence. It gives you that immersive sense of presence, at least enough, presumably, for some form of sexual gratification. Some people have a problem with, as you know, if you smile, let's say you're feeling depressed, you smile, then you actually start to feel better, at least momentarily. I don't know if you're familiar with that research. The research says it's a very small effect. Okay. Because people like Tony Robbins, I don't know if you've ever followed Tony Robbins. They're like, change your state. Like go like this. Yeah. Yeah. Scream. Yeah.

Okay. And now do you feel better? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. So you can do that. Now some people can do that and they feel better, but some people feel like I'm self deceiving myself. That's stupid. It is. I would agree with the people who say that because all this stuff about power posturing has sort of collapsed. It's failed to replicate the stuff about changing your facial expression. There is when we do it carefully, it's, it's there, but it's a very small effect. So I think most real work would have to be done elsewhere? Don't just try and change your state, quote-unquote,

by changing your physiology and do something else? Yeah, I think there's a lot more you have to do. I think there's a lot more you have to do. I think this... I would conjecture that the success that Robbins is getting is largely not due to the power posturing or the changing of their facial expression, I think it's probably more placebo effect.

There's a critique of Westerners, which is that we're not present enough. But then there's also a critique that we seek immediate gratification, that we live in the now, almost like a child. And then I was wondering, wait, aren't those two contradictory? What do you think of that? So one of the criticisms I have of one aspect of the mindfulness revolution, which I think is a response to the mean crisis, is this glorification of being in the present moment. I don't think that's a good way of talking about mindfulness scientifically. Maybe it's a good way of training it in meditation. But being in the present moment, there's a sense in which that can be a completely impulsive, wanton way of behavior.

Well, I don't mean, I mean pay attention in the present moment to what's relevant. Relevant to what? Relevant to something other than the present moment? Because then you're no longer in the present moment. Exactly. Exactly. Relevant to your values, your goals. Well, those aren't in the present moment. There's something that extend across. So the mere pursuit of being present is not sufficient. I don't think so. I mean. And it's been romanticized. Yeah. I think it's important. Okay. It's important to develop the mindfulness skill to come into an awareness of your current processing so that you can more effectively intervene in it. But that is not the only important point of intervention you need in your processing.

You need also to deal with overcoming hyperbolic discounting. processing. You need also to deal with overcoming hyperbolic discounting. Hyperbolic discounting is the phenomenon, it's an adaptive phenomenon, but it misleads us in a lot of ways, it's also known as temporal discounting, that present stimuli are more salient to us than future things. This is why people have a tough time losing weight because the chocolate cake is here now and the health is in the future and if I can't make that future self present to me, you know what I'm going to keep doing? Eating the chocolate cake and not losing the weight. Yes, part of what I need is to become aware of my online processing right now, how I'm

framing things. But sometimes in addition, what I need to do is expand, open up that framing so it includes my future self so I know what long-term goals are relevant now. This is a bit of a silly question, but given the fact that there are these four, as far as we know, forms of knowledge, so propositional is just one, and the rest are vital, important, but in the courtroom, propositional is all that matters. Well, it does and it doesn't, right? So should we value procedural, perspectival?

And how does one practically go about demonstrating that in a courtroom? So we value procedural in an explicit sense when we allow expert judgment. We're saying certain individuals have certain skills, not certain claims. They have certain skills, and those skills allow them to make determinations that we have to take into consideration. So we do make a place for procedural... But only in so much as it helps the propositional? Propositional? I don't know.

That's an interesting question. I mean, I guess because ultimately the decisions are rendered through statements, that everything is ultimately in service of the inferential processes by which the conclusions of the trial, meaning like verbal statement conclusions are reached, yes. But we do nevertheless acknowledge that procedural knowing matters significantly in very many cases to the determination of that truthful conclusion. What's third generation cognitive science? I remember you talked about there's first and there's second and then there's…well, obviously, there's third. There's first and second. You don't just jump to third. What is it?

Okay, so that's an idea drawn from Dawson and many other people. It's also known as…there's third generation cog-sci, but there's also what's called 4E cog-sci was largely built around the computational metaphor. So the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software, and cognition is largely like a computer program. And that's still prevalent in the common person's mind. Oh, in a lot of ways. They think of the mind as a machine, as a mechanical. And there's still people within cognitive science who think that's the right way to go.

But there are flaws. We don't have to get into the flaws. And so that's why second. Second generation put a lot more emphasis on neural networks. And what made it different than what you saw in GoFi, good old-fashioned AI, was the old model that goes back to Hobbes and Descartes is the idea that cognition is ultimately like language, that what I'm doing when I'm thinking is very much like what I'm doing when I'm

speaking. I'm doing something analogous. I'm running something like an argument in my head between various sentences. Now, of course, at times you are doing that. We're never denying, I'm not denying, I don't think anybody would, that at times you are doing that. I'm not denying, I don't think anybody would, that at times you do deliberately run sentences in your mind. What the proposal is, but that's what cognition actually ultimately is. It's like a computer program. There's propositions. They're being run in an argumentative fashion. And that's what it is

to be a cognitive agent. Neural networks give up that model that cognition is language-like, that what we're doing when we're thinking, at least foundationally, is doing something like running an argument. They and Jeff Hinton, of course, was here at U of T, right? The idea was, no, no, the better way of trying to understand cognition is that cognition is brain-like rather than language-like. We shouldn't be looking primarily to the structures of language. We should be looking to the, I don't mean the anatomical structures, I mean the functional structures of how the brain operates as a neural network in order to understand cognition. Third generation came along and said, it's not so much the neural networks, it's the dynamical systems that are operating on the neural networks.

It's the self-organizing processes. And those self-organizing processes are not in the brain, just in the brain. They're self-organizing processes between the brain and the body, between the brain, the body, and the environment. And it's all these loops of dynamic self-organization that we have to study if we want to properly understand cognition. So cognition is embodied, it's embedded, it's extended. So then is there not a clear delineation between what is you and what is your environment? Depends what you mean by that. So, I mean, it's very much a part of the, so the four E's are, you know, embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted, right?

And so many people, I would include myself in this work I'm doing with Dan, right, and others, you know, the idea that cognition is an important sense is extended, that cognition is not just happening in your head, that there's important ways in which part of the information processing... this gets very philosophically complex, and I can't be as precise as I need to be right now, so I'm asking for some tolerance from viewers who are more philosophically educated on this point. I can address that, but I can't do it right here. So speaking in this more coarse manner, the idea is that significant aspects of the information

processing are being done outside of the brain, in the environment, and in the body, and that they count as much as part of your cognition as the events that are internal to your brain. That's what it is to say you're embodied or you're embedded and your cognition is extended in important ways. Is third-generation cognitive science related to wisdom in some way? I know that your work focuses plenty on wisdom. So I don't know if you have your own... It's Vervaki cognitive science. No, no, no. It's Vervaki and I... No, no. I think I'm third generation 4E. I don't think I'm... You don't think I'm...

You don't think you've invented one yet. So let's go back to something. Let me try and show you what I mean. And let's go back to something we talked about earlier, the relevance realization stuff. Okay, so here's a problem facing your brain, right? We were talking about it. Out of all the information, what do I pay attention to?

What do I consider relevant? Well, you can't sort of reason your way through that. You can't sort of propositionally infer your way through that. What I was arguing earlier is I think it's actually a bioeconomic thing. It's the economy of your brain. Efficiency and resiliency are bioeconomic terms. What's happening is the brain is constantly trading between efficiency and resiliency And when it gets an optimal thing right now that increases my capacity for problem solving, meeting initially my constitutive goals, and then the goals in my interaction with the environment, right? Now,

think about what that means. That your cognition, your problemving ability, is dependent on your brain belonging to a biological economy, the biological economy of your body. If your brain wasn't embodied, it wouldn't belong to a bioeconomy, it wouldn't be regulated by efficiency and resiliency, it wouldn't have a capacity for relevance realization. Your body is actually constitutive, because it's a bioeconomy, of sets of constraints that actually afford your cognition being able to zero in on relevant information. So being embodied is constitutive of you being cognitive.

And then, of course, once you move that way, right, then you start to talk about, okay, well, we talked about this last time. What does that relevance look like? Is it just in my head? Is it just in my object? Remember, in the object? Remember what you're talking about? No, no, it's an affordance. It's a loop. It's a relation? Yeah, a real relation, a dynamic relation between myself and the object. So the meaning is not what's being related, it's the relation. I think so. And so if my cognition is bioeconomically embodied and it's embedded in affordances between me and the environment, my cognition is not just in my brain.

There's a quote which says something like, wisdom is knowing what you have control over and what you don't. Who said that again? Epictetus. Okay. What do you think of that, given the fact that you don't believe in free will? So the Stoics also are compatibilists. So I'm in good company with Epictetus.

So having control over and not having control over, I don't think requires, I don't want to repeat that argument, saying that, you know, I have absolute prime mover and sole causal control. I think it's, you know, again, the current state of my cognition in terms of the dispositions is the most causally relevant thing for what's happening in the environment. That's what I mean by having control over something. So, you know, I have control over this because most of the behavior of this cup is due to what's happening in my hand and most of what's happening in my hand right now is due to the current state of my brain and etc etc. Right? So, I would, I think there's something right about that but you have to

read, I don't want to say read into Epictetus, you have to unpack it. Epictetus doesn't just mean sort of, in fact, he really doesn't mean physical control. Epictetus means that what we ultimately have control over in this sense, and we don't recognize is the meaning of events. We have a lot more control over the relevance that we are helping to generate with respect to events than we do over the events themselves. Now the problem, there's two issues that come out of that. Because we confuse, think of the word, confuse the meaning with the thing, we try to manipulate the meaning by controlling the thing. And we forget that very often it's not the thing. Not always. If the

truck hits you, it's the physical properties of the truck that destroy you. But in many cases, it's not the event or the thing, it's the meaning of the event or the thing. And we can't control that? That means you can't train optimism? No, no, no. Sorry for interrupting, but no, Epictetus is saying, no, no, you can. You can exercise a lot more control over the meaning-making machinery than you can over

the events. But because we don't pull them apart, because we confuse them together, we try to deal with the meaning by controlling the events. But because we don't pull them apart, because we confuse them together, we try to deal with the meaning by controlling the events. And we have much less control over events than we like to believe. And we don't recognize how much control we have over the meaning-making machinery. We're often ignorant because, an example you've seen me use before, we're often looking through that meaning-making machinery, then stepping back and becoming aware of it in any kind of fashion that enables us to intervene in a powerful way. So part of what wisdom is, is to become much more aware of this relevance realization process, the way in which we're connecting to events and making meaning about

them. And I think, I mean, isn't that part of what it is to be a wise person? Isn't the wise person the one who can zero in on the relevant information in the messy complex situation? And not just zero in, you know, as a thought, but can actually engage their own relevance realization machinery so they create affordances, effective affordances for intervening in that difficult situation they are capable of insight in that profound way that sounds to me like a big part of what wisdom is yes are there any theories of consciousness that you feel like are on the right track so there's a few I don't know many of them but

there's like the sensory motor theory of consciousness and then there's the integrated information tononi and then there's a global workspace of bars there's clearman's uh radical learning do you feel like some of them are they're completely wrong or some of them yes they're dead on the right track so the the consciousness is really hard. You're good at asking me very hard questions. There's two issues we have to address when we address consciousness. We have to address two separate... There are two separate questions in the sense that they shouldn't be conflated or identified together. I do think they're interdependent in so far as we answer one,

we have to be thinking about answering the other. But what are these two questions? One is the function question. What does consciousness do? What's it do? And then there's the nature question, which is, how does something like consciousness arise out of all this non-conscious matter? And those are not the same question, because I could potentially answer, at least in a logical sense, the question as to how it arises without giving you any account of what it does. Now, the reason I point that out is different theories put different emphasis on these two questions.

Barr's theory of the global workspace has a lot to say. Talk about what it does. What it does. Very little about how it could have arise from non-conscious matter. Tononi's integrated information theory is much more about the nature. He's trying to explain how out of the physical activity of the brain, something like consciousness could emerge. Like what conditions need to be met in order for there to be some unit of consciousness? Yes. Yes

It doesn't say what consciousness is because there's actually three questions. What the heck is consciousness? How does it arise? And what does it do? So I think the the first question what is consciousness is The answer we would get if we had an integrated answer of how does it arise and what does it do? I? Don't know what else it would be to say what consciousness is other than being able to explain how it emerges ontologically and how it acts causally, right? How it functions. Or whether or not it does emerge, whether or not it's a fundamental part of reality. Yeah, totally. I mean, but that's also another answer to the nature question. What I'm saying is the question, what is it, I think is the attempt, and I think there's something right about this. I think it's okay to a certain degree to try and

answer the function question or answer the nature question, but I think ultimately they have to be answered in an integrated fashion. I really can't get at the function of something if I don't say something about its nature. And to talk about the nature of something without explaining how it functions or interacts is also ultimately not going to work. So what I want in the end, the holy grail, would be to have a good answer, a scientifically legitimate answer to, right, what does consciousness do, a scientifically legitimate answer to, right? What does consciousness do? A scientifically legitimate answer to, scientifically and philosophically, what does consciousness do? How does it arise?

And then how do those two things mutually support each other in an overall coherent account? Do you have any personal views on the answers to those that have not been given? I do. I do have. I mean, I've done a lot of work with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu and others. There's a manuscript I have floating around of which I try to give our best account of what I think consciousness is. Let me give a couple of steps towards that. On the function issue, I think there is a convergence argument. We've talked about the value of convergence argument. If you look at Barr's, I mean he publishes it with Shanahan and Barr's, right, the main function of, I mean this is explicit, the main function of consciousness is higher

order relevance realization, right. I think it's a strong implication in the Bohr and Seth model of consciousness as, you know, how we restructure and encode information, right, in order to deal... how we chunk information in order to get through working memory. Right?

A lot of people who draw connections between working memory and consciousness are also pointing towards the idea that the main function of consciousness is relevance realization, because I think idea that the main function of consciousness is relevance realization because i think that's the main function of working memory and i point to lynn hasher's work i think so you think the more working memory someone has you can actually say they're more conscious let's say someone has only one unit of working memory if if it's if if it's

possible to individuate conscious working memory into units like that so that's an important if because then one can make the argument that the more intelligent that. So that's an important if. Because then one can make the argument that the more intelligent you are, since that's associated with working memory, the more conscious you are. I think that's an implication of what I'm arguing. I think the implication is that there's a sense in which there's a deep interconnection between intelligence's general intelligence, not all intelligence, not crystallized intelligence or whatever, but fluid general intelligence's ability to zero in on relevant information, right, is, overlaps with the functionality

of working memory and consciousness. In fact, when I teach this, I like to talk about the fact that, you know, attention, working memory, consciousness, and fluid intelligence are all just different aspects of the same thing. And they use, well, not perfectly, but tremendous overlap in using the same machinery in the brain. Well, where's the tension? Oh, it's here. Oh, it's here, right? And so the idea that, you know, that they're all, all of these theories, I think even Tononi, when he talks about tests for consciousness, his test for consciousness is, a system is conscious if it can figure out

that there's inappropriate relations in a picture, like there's a potted plant in front of a computer. That's relevance realization, right? And so I think what you can see, I mean, I've made this argument, we've presented it at Mind and Life and there's other places that there's a growing convergence

that the main function of consciousness is higher order relevance realization. And what does that look like phenomenologically? What that looks like phenomenologically is the part of relevance realization that we call salience, the way things stand out to us and the way obviation occurs. So I have a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. The function of consciousness is to generate a salience landscape in which things become obvious to me. And that's related to wisdom? Yes. Okay,

so then can one make an argument, a controversial argument, that the more intelligent you are, the more capable you are of being wise, or the more wise you are? In the sense that I think intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rationality. Where I take rationality, you know this, I don't take rationality just to mean logical argumentation. I take rationality to be any set of set of skills or virtues that helps us overcome self-deception in a systematic and reliable fashion. So in that way, mindfulness, the way it trains our attention to help us systematically and reliably overcome self-deception is a form of rationality.

Insofar as intelligence is a necessary but nowhere near sufficient condition for rationality, and I think rationality in the sense that I'm using it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wisdom, you can say that, of course, if I increase intelligence, I increase the chance of rationality, but I don't necessitate it because it's necessary but not sufficient. And as I increase rationality, I increase the possibility of wisdom, but I don't cause it to happen. So I wouldn't put it in a sort of direct causal relation. That's what I've tried to but you say what it would be more likely that an intelligent person would be more wise than a non-intelligent

person so one I don't mean to get you into hot water no no no no no I don't I I'm not worried about that I'm trying to be very careful I think one of the things that can give you an advantage for becoming wise in certain contexts is to be more intelligent. The problem with being more intelligent is it also can often make you much more susceptible to self-deception. So intelligence is really a mixed bag. I think when intelligence is used to train rationality, then the more intelligent you are, the greater the chance that...

Let's say you have a personality trait. In addition to being highly intelligent, you have a high need for cognition. So a high need for cognition is people who don't just passively wait for problems to come. They seek out problems, they find problems, they try to understand. I think if you have a high need for cognition and a high need, sorry, let's say high G, high general intelligence, high need for cognition, then there's a very good chance you're going to move towards becoming more rational. And in that sense, there's a greater chance that you'll be much more likely to cultivate wisdom.

To wrap this up, what's the difference between reason, rationality, and, well, logic, you just said, is separate from rationality, because rationality is associated, or if not, the same thing as overcoming self-deception. I would argue that that's... Your definition of rationality. Yeah, I would argue that's the key facet, or the key characteristic, maybe the key criterion of rationality, is the systematic and reliable ability to overcome self-deception. And the thing about, I mean, you just can't be comprehensively logical. The idea of the Spock ideal that we could become rational by becoming comprehensively logical, I mean, that's just been subject to devastating critiques. The problem with trying to be logical, to work

according to a normativity of certainty, is that if I try to infer my way, if I want to be certain, I have to be algorithmic. Any search space that I'm engaged in, I have to check. If I wanted to be certain about how I should leave the room, how much of the information should I check in the room? I can't. I can't check it all, right? Wow, well, that's not being, yes, that's, that logic works according to normativity of certainty. And I mean, Cherniak made this point. Look, any proposition actually has an indefinitely large number of potential implications. When I'm making an inference as opposed to a logical implication, out of all of those potential, and Fodor made this argument too in a convergent fashion, out of all the possible implications,

when I make an inference, I'm selecting a subset as the relevant implications I'm going to make salient and act upon. That's why you can't equate logic to reason. If what we mean by reason is making inferences in order to direct our behavior, then inference is already a process that is not purely logical. So animals can be reasonable? I think insofar as animals are using intelligence, relevance realization, to select implications, right? Which they should be, otherwise they'd be dead.

Yes. Then we can talk about them doing reason. But not rationality. Right. and talk about them doing reason. But not rationality. Right, because what I can then do, I could use reason, which is my ability to selectively direct my implications, at least at my inferences. Yeah, I'll put it that way. Selectively direct my inferences.

That's more accurate. least direct my inferences, that's more accurate, I could use that ability to reflectively change or modify my behavior with the goal of reducing self deception. Then it becomes rationality. But I want to emphasize it it's not only inferences that I will use to reduce my self-deception and become more rational, it's also my attention, it's also my skills, it's also my identity formation. There's many things I have to reflectively modify in order to reduce my proclivity to self-deception, and I think rationality includes all of those. I think a wise person is somebody who not only has sort of individual sets of rationality but has an optimal relationship between all

of them. So their inferential rationality, their attentional rationality, their their identity rationality, their skill rationality, all of these things are optimally related to each other so that they're mutually compensating for each other,'re mutually compensating for each other character compensating for each other's strengths and weaknesses so we get an optimal ability to overcome self-deception. Thank you man. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Okay, so this is all very new to me, so I'm embarrassed by how simple and just how—you guys were talking about reality earlier. Is that just like looking at things as objectively as possible or just being as receptive as you can to the environment around you? So objectivity is a Cartesian sort of way of— well, at least it's inspired by Descartes, way of trying to stipulate what's real. And so the idea is there are properties of things that are only in our mind, subjective,

and then there's properties that are things that are independent of our mind. That's what it means to say they're objective, They're in the object, not in the subject, right? And then Descartes proposed that the way we determine the things that... They're objective? The way we determine which properties are objective is mathematical. The mathematical... I was hesitating, but I don't want to attribute that solely to Descartes. Galileo starts that process in a very important way. That the mathematical properties, the mathematically measurable properties, are the properties that are in the object independent. The problem with that,

the problem with equating realness to properties in object, is that has a great deal of difficulty of dealing with parts of reality that have to do with relations between objects. And so one of the issues you're going to get into is I can, Berkeley does this very well, is I can invert it. That's what Berkeley does. He says, look, I can't do it. How would I measure, do the math on the cup? Well, I'd have to measure the can't do it how would I measure do the

math on the cup well I'd have to measure the cup right that's how I do them here's its length here's its circumference but how could I possibly measure the cup if I couldn't see the color and feel the resistance but the color and the resistance are subjective so I can't get at any of the objective properties except through my subjective experience. So then Berkeley turns it all around and says, everything is in your mind. It's all subjective. And so the attempt to equate realness with objectivity can be... Because objectivity depends on subjectivity.

Yeah. There's ways in which objectivity you can show depends on subjectivity. And then that just undermines the whole project. Yeah, there's ways in which objectivity you can show depends on subjectivity, and then that just undermines the whole project. Now, again, I'm not saying that Berkeley's right, and I'm not saying that the scientific— I don't see a flaw with that, with the fact that whatever's objective, you can only verify via subjectivity. Because then what Berkeley concludes is that you should give up the notion of objectivity.

Things don't exist— I don't necessarily agree with that. Why not, then? It could should give up the notion of objectivity. Things don't exist. I don't necessarily agree with that. Why not? It could be useful. The notion of objectivity. But wait, wait. I take it that the claim for objectivity is that this thing has properties mind independent. What Barclay is trying to show is there's no way of finding mind independent properties

because every property you're gaining access is, as you said, is dependent on your subjective state of mind. And so Barclay then concludes from that, right, well then there are no mind independent properties. And then of course you have all the problems with that. Well, objects seem to do things when nobody's aware of them. And then so Barclay posits God. God's aware of everything at all time and that's how things sort of stay in existence. And then you're into a really, really problematic place. Really, really problematic. So many people, you know, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, have been trying to undermine this dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity

and say this clear, what seems to be this clear distinction between what's subjective and objective is actually deeply misleading. And we have to break out of that way of thinking of realness in order to solve these problems that we've been saddled with. What else do you got there? Just read them off and then we'll just pick one of them. Another one I was interested in is like being present in the moment because I can be anxious just like anyone else.

And that will like, like my ego and my personal thoughts and delusions will keep me away from being present. And is that what meditation, is that what meditation can help alleviate? Is like your own worries or like things you're like anxious about? Is the whole point of meditation to be more like self own worries or like things you're like anxious about is that is the whole point of meditation to be more like self-aware or yeah like being able to discern like a delusion well like you know just being able to discern like um your your worries from like the reality before you answer can you list off the rest of the questions just so that i can just get to one

or two of them because i know that we both have to go So met metaphysical evil is to say that evil exists part of the structure of reality It's not just our way of evaluating human actions. Like there's space and time, and that's part of what we think is a constituent element of reality. Space and time and matter. Then maybe there's another, maybe in addition to space and time,

there's a moral dimension. I don't know if this is equivalent, but it could be something like that. And so we're constantly, just like we're moving in space and time, we can also be moving in a moral dimension towards, maybe it's linear, maybe it's just two dimensional, maybe it's one dimensional, maybe it's, who knows, but you can be moving towards the good and moving towards the bad.

I think that, I happen to think that there may be something like that, but if there is something like that, I have a feeling that there's this wind that is constantly pushing us towards the evil side. And we have to, it's almost like… You'd be in good company with Augustine then. He would like the way you're talking about this. It's almost like in Alice in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can to stay still.

Yeah, the right thing. Okay. Personality deficits. I was curious about that too. Personality deficit. What would you call a personality deficit? Can you imagine that? Being…

So, a personality deficit, you might be too high in neuroticism. Let's go back to your meditation question. Neuroticism means you have a lot of negative affect, you have a lot of inner conflict, anxiety, things like that. That's very high in neuroticism. That can be debilitating for you trying to lead your life. Now, what you can use is you can use the rationality of mindfulness. One way of training it is a meditative practice.

You also want contemplative practices, I would argue. But anyways, as I said, by becoming aware of the way, instead of looking through the world, sorry, instead of looking at the world through your anxiety, in meditation you're trying to step back and look at it. These are thoughts? Like these have no validity? In meditation you're trying to step back and look at it. You say, like, these are thoughts. These are thoughts? Validity, like these have no validity.

Well, not making a judgment on validity, but trying to do what we were talking about, we were talking about Stoicism. And that's the areas where the prososh, the paying good attention and Stoicism, overlaps with Buddhism. Other people have noted this. Remember we talked about, you know,

not confusing the meaning and the thing. The anxiety is projecting all kinds of meaning onto things. And what the mindfulness can make me realize is, oh, wait, right? That's in my mind, right? That's the way what's happening in my mind is distorting that thing, right? And what I can do is I can separate, right, the distortions. I can start to see through the distortions in the different sense of not being misled by them, they're sort of evaporating, if I've practiced the mindfulness on the anxiety itself. So if I can become aware of the patterns and processes in the anxiety as something independent from how I'm aware of the object or event through those patterns and process, I can start to

intervene in my anxiety independently of how I normally try to intervene, which is I've got to deal with the anxious situation. Right. Okay. Okay.