A Conversation So Intense It Might Transcend Time and Space | John Vervaeke | EP 321

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world illiteracy was the norm the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung this is amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan goodberg science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that in real world messy ill-defined situations where there's real uncertainty not risk we've confused those two the risk is you can assign a probability right right but real uncertainty these heuristics actually do really really well but they do make you prone to mistake you take your loved one to the airport and you say don't you say all these euphemisms for don't die like text me when you're there safe trip because you can easily imagine a plane crashing and when a plane crashes it's not a crashes it's a disaster it's a tragedy so the availability and the representative heuristics are getting triggered like mad and then you get back in your car the North American death machine without giving it a second thought and that's an act of self-deception right and it's a significant so you're not properly calibrating your level of affect and arousal to the risks you're facing that's that's what I mean when I think the very things that I can't get rid of the heuristics because then I would face combinatorial explosion if I try and do the probability calculations but this is the no free lunch theorem right well that's that's the complicating factor of how much of so you might say well how much of suffering is due to the intrinsic nature of finite finitude that's infinitude how much is due to ignorance and inevitable blindness and then how much is due to failure to hit the mark and wisdom is about being able to differentiate those and properly calibrate your efforts to that differentiation [Music] hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and Associated platforms I'm here today in person so that's nice with Dr John vervaki he's a professor at the University of Toronto like I am or was depending on how you look at it um our work is run in parallel for a long time probably 20 years maybe longer than that and we had a lot of students at the University of Toronto in common and we've had a lot of discussions on YouTube uh John and I are both interested in this issue of the issue of relevance realization which is uh a very abstract way of pointing to something extremely fundamental which is the fact that certain things announce themselves to your perception as primary things attract your attention and attract your focus and that's a great mystery it's an immense mystery it might be the immense mystery in some real sense and so John has made a tremendous amount of progress on that front using sources different than the ones that I've relied on and so that's made our conversations for me extremely interesting because we're trying to address the same problem which is really the problem of meaning whatever meaning is but he draws on literatures that are distinct from those that I've drawn on and so our conversations are reproductive because of that I'm gonna provide a brief bio of of John and his work and then we're going to jump right into the talk topics at hand because there's lots to talk about on this front so John verviki is an associate professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto his work as I alluded to construct a bridge between science and spirituality which we'll talk about in order to understand the experience of meaningfulness and the cultivation of wisdom so as to afford Awakening from the meaning crisis the meaning crisis is a phrase that John's popularized and that many of you may be familiar with so welcome good to see you it's good to see you again you're looking great well thank you sir it's my Twitter suit so um I wanted to start I'm going to jump right into this please there's some very complicated and essential issues that I want to talk to you about I talked with Carl friston a while back and for those of you watching Kristen is one of the world's Premier neuroscientists and he's very interested in categorization and Ai and he said something to me that was extremely Illuminating and I think it's related to your notion of through line and also Oneness because one of the questions John's interested in by the way is what is it that allows us to presume that any given thing is one thing especially when it's made out of parts and what does it mean for two things to be similar or identical given that they're separate and so all of this is lurking in the background as problems that need to be solved so friston is very interested in the use of cognitive categories to constrain entropy and so entropy is the proclivity of things to move in multiple directions and I've always construed entropy uh what regulation and constraint as constraint of negative emotion but he pointed out to me that it's importantly associated with positive emotion so yeah that makes sense to me there's a huge neuropsychological literature that indicates that you experience positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal that's what the dopaminergic tract responds to yes and he pointed out that that's also entropy reduction because entropy which is disorder in some sense something I'd figured out a while ago but hadn't associated with positive emotion entropy is something like path length to a destination and so if you see the pass links pass links shrink which means you're getting closer to your destination you're reducing entropy but that reduction which is in advance right a pragmatic Advance is actually signaled by the positive emotion system so the negative emotion system signals an explosion of entropy which might be part of combinatorial explosion and part of um what's the what's the well the mere fact that things can be perceived in a multi-frame problems in multitude of ways so that accounts for negative emotion but to construe positive emotion as a response to a decrease in entropy that's associated with voluntary action struck me as well it's another form of unification right because it brings both emotional channels under the rubric of entropy reduction and so that relates them as well to a very fundamental physical reality insofar as entropy is a physical reality yeah I mean that's I mean first of all uh I've haven't met Carl friston I've worked with a lot of his students um and I have met and talked with Andy Clark um um but for me just before we get into the content what what Carl furston is doing represents the big picture cognitive science that I think we need right the attempt to give get a synoptic integration like he thinks of it as a unifying framework across many different sub-disciplines and so I see one of the jobs of cognitive Sciences overcoming the fragmentation within psychology and then overcoming the fragmentation between the various minded disciplines like psychology AI neuroscience and his work is doing that and that is the kind of work I Aspire uh to doing as well so first of all I think that's really important I would argue it's not the sole cause but I would think I would argue a contributing factor to the replication crisis is the fact that we're over privileged over privileging innovation as opposed to integration in Psychology so what we're getting is we're getting these very narrow very almost effect specialized I have a theory about this effect I have a theory about this stuff like that and and so the the the the the the controlled uh theoretical framework you need in order to make sure that these the constructs are plausible they're clear that you they're intelligible they're intelligible you don't have you know the jingle jangle problem in Psychology get rid of all of that kind of thing and so I think that that kind of work is exemplary I I think he's also I think it's also really good work I think it's careful it's mathematically rigorous you know I work we he has a student um uh Mark Miller who's also one of my former students and I work a lot with Mark um he actually got a huge cert Grant to come to Toronto and we're going to work together on a lot of this stuff and Mark has been one of the people in fact just to bring it back around who has been really trying to integrate the predictive processing framework with affect right right right right right yeah right well there's yeah well it's very so that because it isn't obvious that the AI models for example experience anything that you might consider akin to emotion but if you can relate negative emotion into an explosion of potential Pathways I think and relate positive emotion to a reduction then you're starting to make a very tight connection between information processing and emotional experience let's say or or at least the meaning of emotional experience right and but that's where his work and my work starts to integrate uh because a way of Translating that reduction of entropy I do want to get back to the theme of you know a shared grammar between cognition and reality yeah but but first you know a psychological way of understanding uh that uh the the the affect is around the notion of basically surprise reduction so the idea right right the idea is the brain is trying to um I predict I would argue a better term is anticipation but we can come back to the the brain is trying to predict the world um because the more it can predict the world the more adaptive capacity it has to be proactive it's very easy it's much better to avoid the tiger than to confront the tiger right and then the thing about that is you know when you like when I first say this to my students I start oh so you the brain is this massively recursive system for reducing surprise a lot of them will say but I like surprises and you go yeah that's right and then and so then you start to get this question about well you want to reduce you want to reduce surprise right but it's not sort of absolute reduction it's more like the rate and and then you're playing the rates at a different longitudinal scales yeah so I might like the short-term surprise for my birthday party because it's a long-term predictor of stable relationships so my long term right uh ability to protect the environment goes up because all of these people have done all of this intricate work to surprise me at the party so I just want to make it clear because if people easily get this confused with he's just proposing some simplistic just you know just make just reduce surprise yeah across the board so then you get this very accidental surprise in some sense and I know I know that's not a complete uh solution to the problem either because some accidental surprises are positive but yeah we're much happier about surprise if we encounter it voluntarily and then there's a re there's a rate problem there that's proportionate to something like depth and that's associated with the phenomenon of meaning as well yes so so let me take um frisk's argument apart a little bit more because I asked him a very specific question so I asked him if he thought that basic perceptual categories were micro narratives right so because one of the one of the places that your work and I and mine dovetail is in our observation that the very categories of perception that make themselves manifest to us aren't simple objects no right that's where you bring in the neoplatonic teleology agent Arena relationship right right and so what we seem to see in the world are patterns that have functional utility and the functional utility is construed in relationship to a goal and of course then that brings up the question of what should the goal be and is there such a thing as an integrated goal and so there's a pragmatism like the empiricists and the rationalists but let's say the empiricists to begin with seem to presume that what we see in the world are objects and then we derive meaning we impose a meaning on top of that and that isn't how it works is that the very things we see as objects are tools that we use in relationship to goals and some of those can be described objectively but that isn't the essence of perception itself no I agree and if you get so if you look at the even the history of the psychology of uh of categorization there there's a there's a there are sort of two fundamental presuppositions that have been we're running through it that point to exactly what you're talking about that really sort of kick started to come into question in the mid 80s early 80s and then gathered steam well neural networks and now they're to the four but there was the idea that um concepts are just lists of features yeah right lists of features yeah and that the primary function of a concept is to label the world and describe it and that's that's turned both of those which are sort of often uh it's interesting because when you ask people what they think concepts are that's what they tell you that there's features there's the list two things are identical if they share the same list of features yeah yeah it's axiomatic yeah and that's what they think yeah but that's not how they actually do the categories because that won't give you categorization yeah right and so the and Kristen's work points to a fundamental and it belongs to a much broader uh framework about no no what concepts are is their generative models they they are a structural functional organization of features that allow us to predict and explain how things are going to behave especially with relationship to us all right so and then what you and that's the pragmatism element right in the functional element exactly and so you get different a much different notion of similarity so instead of thinking of uh here's these two feature lists and then you get Goodman's problem of what goes on the features right right right and all that stuff we've talked about here's another idea let's say I have these two generative models and could I how many steps can I go back where I can trace them back to a common shared degenerative model it's like an evolutionary so if two things are similar if they have an ancestor generative model that is close to them and they're dissimilar if you have to go through a lot of transformations to get them back to a shared generative model so we're judging I I thought of that actually a variant of that as a way of determining whether something was real you know well can you imagine two measurement methods that are similar or different you might say well what makes them you want to measure the same thing in as many different ways as you can to calibrate its reality yes but then you run into the thorny problem of what makes two measurement systems different and one of the answers to that on the conceptual uh level at least is distance evolutionarily yeah like there might be a domain of measurement that emerged Christian in physics and a domain of measurement that emerged in Psychology and so they don't share a lot of underlying axiomatic presuppositions exactly and if you bring both of them to bear on the problem and they report the same pattern then you can be reasonably sure that that pattern exists independent of your projection and it's kind of what your senses do too right because you have five senses and they're really qualitatively different like vision and audition are extremely different and audition and vision and touch are extremely different and we use uh it's not triangulation I guess it's quintangulation to zero in on patterns to see if they're replicable across all the sensory domains and and that's also a form of of what would you call analysis by by optimally different measurement systems okay and then and then that is a way and that connects to research and work I do that can help to supply the missing normativity for pragmatism the problem with pragmatism is they had this very nebulous concept of utility which was very hard to to to get any sort of yeah uh you know normative guidance but what you just described this goes towards a lot of the literature uh I'm sort of pointing here that's converging on the notion of plausibility now there's two senses of plausibility one is just a synonym for highly probable but another is that when we invoke things like say that makes good sense or that's to reason yeah right oh yeah yeah yeah I get that yeah those kinds of judgments and what it's turning out is what you're getting in plausibility is it the pleasant half of plausibility is that like like you said when you have convergence from many different and they converge to the same source and and the reason why that gives you what Nash should call I'm sorry Russia calls um uh trustworthiness yeah because the chance so if I have just one information Channel my the chance that my conclusion is being affected by bias in the system is significant right but if I have a multiple converging ones yeah the chance of them sharing all of those biases is very low very low yeah and it probably decreases exponentially as the number of measurements that you use to to to to to assess the reality of a given phenomenon increases right but you hit a law of diminishing returns right right right at some point you know a friend of mine says you know for human beings one is I'll think about it two is maybe three well three or four it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah sort of the working memory capacity kind of thing right but that's not all you want for plausibility you also want the thing here to have that structural functional organization you want it to not just be a feature list you want it to be a generative model things that can predict counter factuals because what you want that construct also to do is you want it to be able to cook to go in to many different domains and find and formulate problems well so it has to have this Elegance so it has convergence so that would be multi-multi abstinence yeah right right so yeah so that would be utility across a broad range of potential applications that's right that makes a nice tool right is that you can use it for more than one thing so you know uh you know four sequence times acceleration you can use it for talking about whales floating in the water you can use it for talking about you know planets circling a sun you can use to talk about bullets right across situational General generality right so and and so and then the the third thing you want is you want balance right um and and so if I give you a tremendous amount of convergence to something that has very little Elegance well that's trivial right it doesn't say it's false you say it's true right right well and that's and that's actually the fate of most facts and this is related to this problem in Psychology it's always struck me um in relationship to the social sciences is that our method of movement forward is incremental fact Gathering but the problem with that is that there's an infinite number of facts yes and most of them are irrelevant and so without these unifying theories exactly then you can't you can't integrate across the facts in any coherent Manner and you just get you just get the endless generation of well valid in some sense but pointless facts right and that's that goes to the point we were talking about with with Tristan's work yeah about generating those Frameworks that bring all the things together and you're getting a generative model rather than just a feature list of facts right right and then but you also like I said you you get triviality you also get the reverse if I have very little trust within this but the promise of a lot of Elegance that's when we think of something as far-fetched like if you just believe that the the the the British Monarchy are lizard peoples from space look at all the things I can explain and so you get that you can get far-fetchedness right and you if you actually pay attention and this is where the conspiracy theories in some sense make themselves manifest that's exactly right when they're true right and then you get and you can also equivocate you can do Martin Bailey and uh a lot of things where you like you you you seem to be doing this but you're actually equivocating like a deepity uh so you know love is a four-letter word okay on the graphic side that is highly convergent it's absolutely trivial who cares but then you think that they're they're not talking about the grapheme right the you think they're talking about the concept of love so you equivocate and you and then you think something important is being said about this phenomena that ramifies for your whole life so you've got convergence to triviality that then equivocates to something that's profound that would promise but there's nothing being said when you say love is important like how how is that sort of proving that love is an inconsequential Phenom of course not but it sounds so you can get all kinds this I'm trying to show the way the plausibility Machinery just gets misused and misled pervasively in our culture so you want that balance [Music] the current administration's New Year's goals are to tax spend and turn a blind eye to inflation if this is at odds with your goals if you are tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plans then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch gold today for over 5 000 years gold has withstood inflation geopolitical turmoil and stock market crashes with help from the experts at Birch gold you can own gold and attack sheltered retirement account Birch gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401K into an IRA in Precious Metals just text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists Birch gold will hold your hand through the entire process text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today with an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews you can trust Birch gold to help protect your savings text Jordan to 989898 today [Music] that's another form of of triangulation in some sense yes yes so I wanted to explain to everybody who's listening a little bit more about this idea of entropy just so that sure it can be made more understandable so imagine that you're you're driving to work and uh you're in your car and your car isn't bothering you you're not attending to your car apart from the fact that you have to drive it and the reason that you're not attending to your car is because it's performing its proper function as a car in relationship to your goal which means that it is moving you down the road reliably now imagine what happens in your imagination when your car stops let's say it stops on a busy highway now what's happened is the path length to your destination and to also other multiple potential destinations has now become indeterminately large so and then imagine that the search space opens up and so like now you're off to the side of the road with your car well your first set of problems is your whole day is now messed how are you going to get to work right so you have to compute a whole variety of potential Pathways in the world just in relationship to your day and then while you have the broader problem of the fact that your car is now no longer a car it's a useless chunk of metal that you're trapped in in a dangerous situation and you have no idea how to fix it and maybe you have no idea where to take it and so the collapse of the Simplicity of your car as an affordance in relationship to a proximal goal has exposed you to entropy and entropy is the multiplication of the problems that now beset you and category collapse does that and so if you understand this if you if you understand that your perception of car is dependent on the maintenance maintenance of its function in relationship to a goal you start to understand something very fundamental about categories themselves because everything you see in the world has this nature it's a it's a Unity of form which is something that the empiricists can concentrate on but it's a Unity of form in relationship to a goal and that's built right into the perception of the so-called object itself and so um your object perception is constraining entropy by organizing the world into categories that are functionally relevant to goals that you uh that you maintain either explicitly or even more importantly implicitly and category collapse produces this increase in entropy now you feel positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal and you feel negative emotion when some uncertainty with relationship to that goal is manifested itself or when you encounter uh say a determinate obstacle that you have to walk around and so that's part of the way that to go back to an earlier section of this discussion that you can relate emotion to both cognition and categorization so this issue of entropy reduction is crucially important because it's well it's at the basis of categorization itself now the reason I'd asked uh Kristen about categories as micro narratives is because I was very curious I'm very curious and and this is probably more relevant to your work on spirituality so one of the things you point out in the recent lecture you did for Ralston college is that even the perception of a given object is dependent on some sense of Oneness yes and so Piaget was very interested in this is like why is this one thing yes right because it's not there you know now it's now it's two things and things don't have to be physically contiguous to be one thing right right and so the question is what constitutes the Oneness of the thing given that it's fractionable in an infinite number of ways yeah and so um and then another question that emerges out of that is what makes two cell phones in the same category okay so let me run a hypothesis by you and tell me what you think about that so I think that things are one first of all they're one if you can use them for a specific Purpose with a specific sequence of actions in relationship to a given goal but they're interspersible so they're the same if you can replace them functionally in the same pattern of operations with no transformation of the path so so they're they're they're they're they're they're they're the same because they're functionally equivalent in relationship to a goal not because they they share a set of features so anything that's swappable is the same yeah but that is dependent on a teleology it's necessarily dependent on a teleology yeah I mean this is the this is the and this is not a criticism this is a classical notion of multiple realizability so I can have the same program Excel and I can run it on many different machines so the actual physical instantiation can be different as long right as I'm getting the reliable same generative models as long as I I've got the same formal system running that's why you that in fact you don't think that there was one pattern one program here and one program there think about it we think about this abstract entity a computer program or even a file you can you move it yeah and you move it yeah what what space are you moving it through like the language has come so readily to us yeah you're doing this thing where you're moving it from one computer to another uh because of exactly that because you say oh degenerative model here and here there's no and this is an important qualification there's no relevant difference um like for example this one might run a little bit slower on this computer than here but if it doesn't impact on how you can use it right then then it's then it's it's the same enough yes now I want to I wanted to introduce and this will help get us into a little bit more I've recently published a paper with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller on integrating the relevance realization framework and the predictive processing framework you want to do entropy production but if you if you look at Network Theory you you and the way you explain it in terms of path reduction is really important here so there's three basic kinds of networks networks are just ways in which things are connected like sequences or or the way an airline is connected or the way the internet is connected or the way neurons are connected functional connectivity so there's a regular Network which is nodes are just things that are connected you have all the all the connections are just one step away node to node right and then there's what's called a random network is where you can have long distance connections very long distance you mentioned right so I don't have to fly you know from Savannah to Atlanta to blow I can just fly directly from Savannah to Toronto something like that yeah right so the regular network is highly inefficient the way you measure efficiency is called mean path distance you take all the distance from all possible combination how many steps do I have to go from this point to that point and then you take all of them and you average them together and you get the mean path distance the average path distance between any two points in a regular Network it's very very it's very very high you have to go through a lot of steps and a regular network is one where they're all connected with all local connections yeah so when you look at it it looks beautiful it's highly ordered because everyone and all the lines are the same length and everything and but it's highly inefficient right the the the random network is highly efficient because you have a lot of these long distance connections that collapse your path right you mean path distance but you don't the brain doesn't go for either one of those because there's a trade-off relationship as I make the network more random to make it more efficient which sounds like a contradiction in our terms but it's not yeah I lose I lose I lose robustness in the system so think about it when you're when when you're when you have a lot of these little connections they're often there's lots of redundancy right yeah and so I can lose a lot of stuff and I get graceful degradation I only get a small reduction I have this random Network I can take out one link and entire nodes can become isolated from each other right so that's the danger of efficiency versus redundancy we have so what you want what what the brain does is what's called small world Network yeah so a small world network is mostly regular and then one or two long distance connections yeah so I pointed this out before and and is that associated with with the manner in which the cortical columns organize themselves because there's there's a lot of micro connections within cortical columns that are very fast and efficient and relatively sparse connections between cortical columns yeah yeah the cortex by the way the cortex is made up of these cortical columns which are uh replicated units of about I think it's a hundred thousand neurons each with ten thousand connections certain neuron something like that and then that's structures replicated that makes up the cortical sheet so I mean everything we're talking about right now is is is in one sense controversial there's a lot I'm not saying anything that doesn't have a lot of good empirical evidence for it but you know we're relying on technologies that are still like fmri and density EG that don't give us the kind of precision like so I want to say that I'm not saying anything ridiculous here but I don't want to claim like we've come subject to revision yeah yeah yeah right but it looks like the brain is organized at multiple levels of analysis not only top down but back front and in out um in small world Network formation and and here's some really interesting things so you give somebody uh propofol and you take them into unconscious the brain will go from being a global small world Network into it'll break up into small local regular networks and then as you bring them back into Consciousness it'll go from those local regular networks back into a comprehensive small so Carhartt Harris talks about criticality and Consciousness and so how do you understand totally totally yeah so how do you understand the relationship between so Carhartt Harris and other people and I talked about this in maps yeah exactly and it's on the border between Chaos and Order that's the technical okay so how is that related how do you understand the relationship between that connectivity it's great okay and then and then I want to bring it to a phenomena of insight because insight has that combination of initial surprise yeah and then long-term gain yeah yeah we talked about is it long-term or iterable gain it depends I mean you can have you can you can have I mean you can have a systematic Insight you can have the kind of insight that Piaget talks about which it's not an insight into this problem it's an insight into a system yeah yeah or you can have just an insight into this problem like the nine dot problem and it's just in the future you'll know how to do that and the first Insight would be a deeper Insight than the second yes and that's like a technical definition of deep yes yes exactly which is a fun thing that's something we just talk about too is what it means technically for something to be deep okay so back to Consciousness and and network organization right okay so we've talked about small world Network um and so what the brain seems to be doing is and and the especially the work I've done recently with Brad and Mark um it's not just redundancy the brain is training between and this is helpful because it's not too easy between efficiency and evolvability in the technical sense that's coming out of biology which is the term is degeneracy but I don't like to use the term degeneracy because it means degenerate away from it because when when the average person hears that is yeah degeneracy what the hell wrong connotations man they're bad naming bad name so evolvability is you you want enough redundancy and overlap in your system to be resilient right so just quick just very quick uh you have the robustness problem in biology which is you want a lot of variation in the species but you don't want to be the individual that has the variation right because you're the chances are you're going to get killed right so what you do is you you and this is the work of Andreas Wagner you you at the at the at the level of of the genotype you have quite a bit of this degeneracy and overlap and evolvability in right in the in the genome but it doesn't show up in phenotypical differences so there's not significant Behavior but as soon as there's a change in the environment The genome is ready to shift and produce a new a new phenotypical Behavior so that you know that the older the uh the older the the the gene structure that codes for morphology the less likely it is to avoid correction if it's mutated yes yes that's a relatively new finding eh so it looks like even at the at the mutation level that biology will will play with the fringes but leave the center intact so mutations are basically random and they can occur anywhere in the genome but if it's a fundamental element of the genome the error correction systems replace it back to exactly what it was yes so I think that's analogous to this issue we're getting at in terms of optimized learning foreign [Music] with the start of the New Year 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brittle they they couldn't if there was a sudden change in the mark because everybody's working at the max well Bob can you do this as well no I'm sorry I'm working right there's there's no evolvability in this system and so there's there's a lot of work coming out now that natural selection doesn't just select for traits it selects for the metatrade of evolvability because if you if if you and I are basically equal and we have more evolvability as long as the environment's stable there's Nothing's Gonna right differentiate it yeah but if there's a sudden change in the environment I'll get what's called I'll get the innovator uh Advantage yeah I will I will evolve faster and then I will go into the new Niche and I might not be optimally fitted for that Niche right right I will propagate and fill that Niche so much that it's that's General cognitive ability yes yes yes okay so right so what you're doing now back to self-organizing critical yeah so what you're doing is and this is a goes to a paper I published with Leo Ferraro way back in 2013. we actually talked about this at one point you used to have the metapsychology group the publication so by the way thank you good good good so again subject to revision but what looks like happening which the brain is oscillating between two different states there's the neurons fire in synchrony and that seems to do something like data compression and data compression is like when you draw the line of best fit on a scatter plot you're basically a lot you're throwing out a lot of variants so that you get clean interpolation and extrapolation so right generalizes just in some sense yes you get but just allows you to generalize the two G's right yeah it just allows you to generalize okay right now but then the the brain like Avalanches all the neurons will fire in asynchrony now what that does is that Mutual predictability goes down entropy is going up why would the brain do that because when it does that that opens up an opportunity for it to evolve Anew that's what the psychedelics are doing then yes yes right and so what the brain is doing is it's constantly right it's it it it self-organizes and then it goes critical it breaks up not too much it breaks up enough so that it can now reconfigure in something different and it and so what you're doing is you're not just getting a One-Shot you're you're actually exploring different generalizations that are possible within the state space did that make so if you can get the brain on that edge right where it's constantly doing this and there's been some okay so now that also well that takes us very interestingly so and people should attend to this because I think it's crucial is that we have a debate in our society probably since the enlightenment about whether the phenomenon of meaning is real in any real sense and it tends to be downplayed by empiricists because it's not objective but it seems to me highly probable that the sense of meaning most fundamentally is a signal of the operation of the optimization of this process is that right is that we want to put ourselves on the edge where things are predictable enough so that we get what we need and want but so that at the same time we're expanding our adaptive competence in a variety of domains simultaneously exactly and I think meaning so so here's a way of thinking about this existentially so imagine that you're pursuing a given goal whatever it is maybe you want to get married you want to have children and then you think well who the hell cares in a hundred thousand years what difference is it going to make anyways and then all your motivational energy is drained out by that sort of nihilistic thought now one thing you can think in relationship ship to that is well that nihilistic thought is accurate because that's a superordinate time frame and if you had any sense that's the time frame across which you would evaluate things and you just have to pay the price of the non of the meaninglessness of your life or you could say well wait a second if I'm pursuing a goal and I use a frame of interpretation that renders it a motivational one possibility is that I'm using a counterproductive frame of reference and that's actually what my nervous system is signaling to me so one of the discussions we could have is like is it reasonable epistemologically and even ontologically to use your sense of deep meaning as a guide to Optimal functioning in the world like I think it's the Instinct that is literally that guide so I think there's like 17 things I want to say that's really powerful um first thing uh I think Thomas Nagel is right uh nihilism is is not generated by argument because the arguments are actually technically not valid so if someone says well a hundred thousand years from now won't matter it's symmetrical what's happening a hundred thousand years from now doesn't matter to you right it has no normative right why is that right yes why is that a relevant fact exactly yes yes because you're making an implicit presumption exactly that the wider time frame exactly yeah yeah yes exactly exactly so that's the first point right and and so for him and I agree with him it's not a matter of a propositional argument it's a matter of you haven't learned how to properly integrate your different perspectives right right first person perspective the cosmic there and you know this is what I think things like you know 40 cognitive science and neoplatonism are about how do we properly cultivate the virtues for managing and improving the relationship between our pers our perspectives yes which is that's the Jacob's Ladder problem yes yes so that second thing is uh when this goes towards you know this is something you and I have both talked and comment and I I you know um we haven't come we've talked a lot about and I I was privileged to work with John Kennedy is the notion of you know real relationship Gibson's notion of affordance is a crucial one right is that no no no let's go to uh you know biology and adaptivity is adaptivity in the organism of course not that doesn't make any sense it's a great white chart adaptive well not if you put it in the Sahara Desert like is the adaptivity in the environment well that doesn't make any it's a real relationship between it's the way they're really coupled and there are real couplings that make a real difference right and so we we have to get away from like the we have to get away from that Cartesian exhaustive the problem with the Cartesian exhaustive divide is it gives you nothing that relates the subjective to the objective right which means truth is and is not possible Right but it also means that meaning evaporates in some real sense because it's reduced to the subjective and then that's reduced to the arbitrary and then that just disintegrates and that doesn't work because well I don't think it works biologically either because meaning does appear to me to be something akin to a profound Instinct and even from an objective perspective you have to make the supposition that uh an actual biological instinct is real and so the the idea of the object eats itself in that regard in some fundamental sense this is kind of the argument that I always tried to have with Sam Harris it's like there's a contradiction between the darwinian notion of reality and the Newtonian or Cartesian idea of reality well because there's a reality that has something to do with this notion of fit yeah right of of of relationship between the subjective and the objective right and and and the Newtonian and the Cartesian are formal systems Darwin's theory of evolution is the first significant and important dynamical systems theory within science in which the self-organization of the system and it's coupling to the world are constitutive of the kind of entity it is right including as category or as ident as entities of categorization and deception yes now let's go back to the adaptivity and and and and the and the self-organizing so the self-organizing criticality think about what it's doing think about how it is darwinian right so you get you get the Avalanche that introduces variation and then you get some compression that selects from it yeah and then a new variation and and you know so what the brain is doing at Mike is it's implementing the same grammar by which biological evolution across species are fitting them to the environment your brain is doing this self-organizing criticality that is constantly evolving you're adaptive your cognitive adaptive fit to the environment okay so that's also why just to point out to everyone that's actually also why zero-sum economic models are false is because the zero-sum economic model presumes a fixed reality in relationship to affordances yeah and there is no fixed reality and the way that we've we've superseded the limits to growth in in perhaps not an absolute sense but in some very important sense is that we do have this capacity I think it was Alfred North Whitehead said that we can let our ideas and Concepts die instead of us right and so we we can you might say well it's a zero-sum game economically speaking there's only so much that you and I can share but the there's an implicit part of that argument which is well given the manner in which we structured our relationships and the environment that might be true but then it's an open question how much restructuring of those a priority axioms can we do yes and the answer is well an indefinite amount right they're unbelievably good at that and we can do more with less all the time yeah so I I agree with that and and and and and and and and and that I mean because we we can take it up into levels of of symbolic abstraction well you know this you get you get you put person in sing and I'll give you five dollars will you take it of course now you put them in this situation I'll give you five dollars and I give you ten dollars but you only get to keep your five if you let him keep his ten yeah most people I don't want it even though they could get the five dollars they don't want to belong to the system that is right right right so they move up a level of abstract they don't want to participate in what they see as perceived unfairness well and that's I think because they're playing a medication exact situation right and what I was going to say is like the the degree to which we can abstract The Meta games we're playing yeah yeah like it I I I don't know of any formal argument that says it stops at this level you have to go towards your point yeah bring it back one more thing around so the brain is evolving it's uh and I think this has a lot this is what basically what is going on in relevance realization you can see it in your attention you know default mode and task Center default is making you mind wander and you introduce variation and then tasks selects and then you vary you kill off most of the variations but some of them come in because you might wondered enough you can do this and Stefan and Dixon you give people a problem like an inside problem and they're impassing they can't solve it and you just introduce a little bit of entropy into the system like you put some static on the computer screen or you shake it and then they'll have the Insight because it puts in enough criticality right so they stop this uni-dimensional task focused attention right and it allows the spread of activation right and then and then they reselect and they evolve a new way of framing the problem you get the honest well so that would mean in some sense okay so imagine that you snap out of gold focused attention this reminds me of the psychoanalytic idea so Freud would put his class into a state of free association right and so Freud's tack was tried just to say whatever comes into your mind or describe your fantasies and just let yourself talk right no self-censorship and so really what he meant by that was abandon any uh instrumental goal focused attention for the moment and let your mind wander Jung did a lot of this too yes he did a lot of um purposeful fantasizing right he just let himself yeah that's a contradiction in terms he let his mind wander he would have discussions with the characters of his imagination for example it's a very hallucinogenic in some real sense but you can imagine that imagine there's a hierarchy of goals yeah and you move from a Unity at the top of the hierarchy to a plurality yes at any given moment when you're focusing your attention you're using the Center focus of your attention as the main source of unity and that's reducing everything to an a priority set of perceptions and principles but then you let that go well now you have these diverse networks in your brain that can they all have a slightly different way of looking at the same situation exactly and you can let them have an internal dialogue essentially yeah and some of those one of the things the psychoanalysts pointed out is some of those can be in like so imagine for example that you're angry at someone and so you allow yourself or to notice the fantasies that you're generating as a consequence of the anger right and you'll see maybe you have a very violent fantasy um and and something that's highly aggressive well you're being informed that part of your category system has that vengefulness say as a goal and that actually might be relevant in some sense if you could figure out how to integrate that in related goal to a higher set of principles right you don't want to produce absolute bloody ma'am because that doesn't iterate well across instances but that doesn't mean you should ignore the input of these subsidiary systems exactly I bet that so you introduced the the very so when your variation differentiation right and then but differentiation that has the potential to reconverge that's right and so you get a system simultaneously differentiating and integrating it becomes what Kelso and others call metastable the system is complexifying it can do a greater variety of things while remaining integrated as an agent it doesn't yeah right right right right right right and so what you want is that's what happens by the way in the shark Cathedral when you wander the maze so that's the symbolic representation there right so the idea is you go into the maze in one section and then you walk all four quadrants of the world right so you have to cover all the territory and that way you get to the center and so the idea there is maximum differentiation as a consequence of voluntary experience that pushes together towards a Unity exactly and so what what you get is a system that is complexifying and if it's done right it's it it because of this real adaptive fittedness its complexification is increasingly conforming to the complexity of the world yeah right so right that's the scientific Enterprise in some sense right that's that's that calibration against Real World patterns synoptic integration and not just differentiation over Innovation for your career yes right yes yes yes yes there is that okay so that self-organizing criticality now here's the thing so if we're gonna when a system is let's I'll use the heb's firing wiring distinction when it fires in self-organizing criticality it tends to create a small world Network wiring because it's mostly it's it's organized right and when it's organized that orders it but when it breaks apart that opens up the possibility of one of these long-distance connections yeah yeah now if a system starts to wire as a small world Network what's mostly regular connections keeping you doing in the norm but it has a few long distance connections that can suddenly snap you out it's like the balance between conservatism and liberalism there well yeah it is it is and so small if it fires as a small world it fires itself organizing critically it tends to wire as a small world Network and if it wires as a small world Network it tends to fire as self-organizing criticality so these two things can actually mutually inform each other they and so if you can get it right you can be right you can be organizing your brain so that you make it more capable of this evolving of Framing and as you get better at doing that that will tend to reinforce you organizing your brain so there's a real possibility here for people to do that yeah right to get that that that that sort of reciprocal opening of a virtuous cycle going on it's interesting that we have two diff we have that self-organizing criticality theory of insight so Insight is you've you've you you you have to break out of an inappropriate frame that's the criticality and it reorganizes into the better you do that Evolution but showing yeah and better would be something like both efficient and capable of performing a broader range of actions that was like a piagetian description of what constituted a better Theory a better Theory allows you to do everything the previous Theory allowed you to do plus something more hopefully with a gain of efficiency right and that's a definition of better but you you you want to keep so a good theory right a good theory is efficient in that sense but a good theory is also generative so you're always trying to optimize between efficiency and evolvability that yeah right and so like you said you you don't you don't just do compression that's epilepsy if your brain just fires in a completely synchronous thing that's epilepsy right because you just locked the system down it has no capacity to adaptively refit itself to the world so the brain is constantly I think of this actually as mapping on uh to Piaget's notion of assimilation accommodation yeah yeah assimilation is compression making everything integrated accommodations yeah and then the collaboration is this dynamical constantly trading between them so you're not you don't come to any kind of stable thing you you're constantly evolved in the theory you don't find the final Theory right you're constantly moving to a theory that grabs more differences and yet brings them into an integration and then the theory has yeah well one of Piaget's points in in his writing and I mean he said this explicitly was that the task of uh genetic epistemology was to specify the process by which the balance between assimilation and accommodation occurs exactly yeah and that has something to do with okay so two questions so we we've already put forward the hypothesis that the Instinct for meaning is something like a marker for the proper uh expansion and organization of of the category system of the brain itself or maybe even related to health but then there's another interesting thing that that Carhartt Harris and and people like him have been concentrating on which is that the phenomenon of Consciousness itself yes which is being itself in some real sense insofar as you have to be conscious of things for them to be is that I still don't understand how this gets us out of the so-called zombie problem it's like why is it that Consciousness itself and this sense of being is associated with operation on this meaningful Edge okay and that's a great question to ask right because I've already said there are relationships between small world Network formation and how conscious you are and there's also relationships between self-organizing criticality so you can get uh you can present people to visual stimuli that are are put on the visual system so the brain is constantly flipping between them like a triangle and a square and what you can have what you can see is self-organizing criticality moving between areas as the brain is flipping in Consciousness between the triangle and the square right so two different patterns yeah perception each Associated yes or independent Consciousness okay so here's uh like I've been alluding to that I think a lot of this stuff is how we're implementing if I can put one more piece on this I can get to your Consciousness okay let's go back that's worth it okay willing to wait around for that so you're trying to do you're trying to do you know predictive processing and and and you know and they pick up on hinton's insight and then friston has it too the brain doesn't try and predict the world it tries to predict itself in its interaction with the world which is really a really profound idea right and and and prediction this is why I say a better term is anticipation it's not just predicting it's attempting to complete so right it's trying to predict it's also something by the way way that's the problem I've always had with the prediction models is there's a cold cognitive element to it because we really want we really want to have happen in the world what we desire let's say so it's not just cold prediction right and this is a a slogan I've been putting relevance realization is not called calculation right okay okay I didn't know you had formulated yes yes so so the the pro so predictive processing you're doing all this stuff but the question and we've you've bumped into it already is well what do I predict right and you can't do you can't do initially teleological answers because they pursue they presume right that you've got some capacity to represent the environment so you you have to there's a long argument here I'll just I'll just sort of deak around it what you have to do is you have to have the the system has to have an internal way of deciding which which error signals and generative models it's going to prioritize right yes yes it certainly needs that yes so that's called Precision waiting within predictive and their theory of precision weighting is explicitly that that is what selective attention is and this maps on to the models yeah of a lot of like Watson and others that the attention is is is it's this really nested dynamical prioritization thing and it's constant it gives you this flowing salience landscape right that's what attention is doing okay so the the and where the two where in the paper that uh that Brett and Mark and I published is you got predictive processing comes down to the centrality of this Precision waiting and then you get Clark in 2017 saying well that's task relevance and then no and then we're back to the relative but what's happening is the convergences relevance realization says you know know what you're actually doing is you're doing something like this Evolution and whatever solution that that cognitive evolution is doing is it's finding these important trade-off relationships between efficiency and evolvability between exploiting the here now and exploring the there then between being at the level of the features zooming in and being at the level of the Gestalt yeah between looking out into the world and stepping back and looking And so there's all so you can think about each one of these as a domain of opponent processing yeah right like like in your in your autonomic nervous system between the parasipid and then you have this Mo and where and there and there's meta opponent processing all of the opponent processes are also pulling in and so you get this multi-dimensional state space that inter oh here that's like a hierarchy of dialogues yes yes yes and they're all intersecting and so the idea was that that is primarily what's coming out in the predictive like that's how so you know how Precision waiting is working it's basically doing this multi-dimensional opponent processing this multi-dimensional complexification this multi-dimensional evolution of your adapter fit and then the two models come together and they fit together and it's like it's like the marriage between darwinian natural selection and mendelian genetics the two theories dovetail and come together and they Converge on a solution to the frame problem we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question okay so so and then I'll be able to use that to talk about okay okay well I wanted to just make a segue here that people might find interesting I think all that's modeled extremely well particularly by symphonic music because what you have if you listen to to to symphonic music what you see is there's dialogues at the level of the instrument right so there'll be a proposition and then a counter response and then all those dialogues are structured hierarchically in relationship to a higher order structure and that's the melodic Integrity of the entire piece and people will align themselves with that right and so you can see this multi-dimensional processing occurring in a musical piece that speaks to the core issue of reality which is actually the Harmony and the beauty of the piece itself and so and and that means that that deep meaning that you're describing is pointing to something like the optimized balance between multiple levels of processing simultaneously and some of that is also so temporal right balancing the here and now as you said with the what did you call it they're there they're there and then right right and so the the reality is the emergent balance between all those different viewpoints right than any given Viewpoint and it flows right like so think that this is perfect because you know music is basically playing with our salience landscaping for the sake of playing it's computer it's uh it's for for me it's in the being mode it's not the having mode we're not trying to do anything we're we're in pure development because we're doing Pure Play we play Pure Play yeah music is the closest what Rex Murphy said all music all art aspires to the condition of music right and notice how music is not in you or it's yes between it's fundamental the resonance the between this the connectedness the efficiency that in dancing right and then rusin John Russett and bearing witness to Epiphany and I got to talk to John Russen he he said and this is so and he admits it because he's deeply influenced by Plato this is such a platonic thing no think about how intelligibility is basically there's a musicality to intelligence right so there are rhythms right and then there's Melodies everything has its through line which is like a melody and then the Melodies and the Rhythm go together with an overarching Harmony and you're getting all of this salience land and right and so music and that's all pointing to something like an ultimate unity and so fundamental the one in neoplatonism yeah right right and I want to talk to you about that one idea too so we will get into that a little bit later but to return to Consciousness yes okay so uh and Consciousness is closely associated with uh with of course with the tension with working memory and with fluid fluid intelligence yes yes right yes and and of course there there's a you know there's there's quite high levels of correlation between working memory and standard measures of G yes they might be the same thing even maybe maybe or very close they're close yes um so here's the idea and I'm going to do up that plausibility argument so if you take a look at many of so there's two different there's well there's three questions I did I did this at Thunder Bay there's three questions about Consciousness okay one is what's the nature of Consciousness how does this weird non-physical thing exist in the physical universe that's the right there's but there's the function problem what does Consciousness do since you can do so much Behavior as an intelligent zombie right right why not all of it yeah why not yeah yeah absolutely okay and then because you do well your cerebellum is a good example of that right I think there's more neurons in this area cortex yeah and it's not conscious by any by by any normal measures so it's like obviously Consciousness isn't a mere consequence of neural activity no no right so much of that's unconscious and and then it does beg the question if so much of it is unconscious why not all of it right and then the third question is a meta question what's the relationship between the nature and the function question um here's what I actually agree with Descartes I disagree with a lot of current philosophy Descartes tries to argue answer those two questions in an integrated fashion the nature question that a function question should be answered together what we tend to do in modern academic philosophy and science is we tend to separate them uh we we talk about just the function problem or just the hard problem which is the nature problem and and that if you just think about it for a minute that's very problematic trying to talk about function without talking about nature is very very problematic and and vice versa trying to talk about the nature of something without talking about how it functions with respect to other things very very problematic there's a longer argument there I'm just giving you the gist so you want to or so what but if you take a look right if you take a look at some of the leading theories uh let's take the global workspace theory for example and what's the what's what's the function of Consciousness in the global way so the idea is your Consciousness is something like your computer desktop yeah and your unconscious has all the files and what Consciousness is is I can bring anything on to the desktop and I can manipulate it and then I can broadcast it back to whatever I need right and you can and well you update your unconscious doing that too right because part of what Consciousness does seem to do is to assess faulty unconscious actions recalibrate them and re-jig them so Consciousness is this thing that moves up and down the hierarchy of unconscious and regulates it right but here's here's the thing and this of course is the frame problem you can't check all of them yeah right right there's definitely a problem so and this is I'm not imposing this on bar Shanahan and bars right with the public they and bars explicitly argued Shanahan has gone up and Shanahan's important because Shanahan is literally the person who like uh you know writes the Stanford encyclopedia article on the frame problem right and so they argue that one of the functions of Consciousness is to help solve the issue of relevance realization the problem of relevance now I don't think their solution works but that that's not that's not the issue they're saying look the function of Consciousness is to do enhanced relevance realization then you look at the work of Borah and Seth and they say well what's the function of Consciousness the function of Consciousness is like and think about the relationship to working memory it's to it's to reorganize and restructure like like chunking so we can yeah right right yeah yeah but but then it's and why when do we need that well we need it in situations compare when you can drive your car like a zombie and when you can't drive yourself a zombie right when when I need Consciousness when something axiomatic has moved well yeah yes and it cashes out in this way the problem I'm facing is now ill-defined rather than a well-defined yes for me the problem is messy there's there's sudden that's a pass links yes yes and right uh there's novelty there is now stuff that I was previously able to discard as irrelevant error that I can't discard as a relevant error anymore so and that would be associated with the fact that you'd have an automatized solution to whatever set of problems was making themselves manifest that's right you don't have to attend to it because you've already taken it into account even your perceptions has taken it into account and allow a lot of little regular Networks to run it yes right but now I get into this situation and I need to go into right A Small World Network I need to have the system I need to evolve and enhance my relevance wheel that's why you get a flash of Consciousness when you have Insight you actually get that and so you get that or when something goes wrong yes right it's like oh oh yes Consciousness yes who wants that but okay so and there's a longer argument here but you can take a look at you know Clearman's radical plasticity hypothesis uh tononi's integrated information basically they all converge on what Consciousness is doing is it's higher order relevance realization which of course is what working memory is doing like the stuff that our colleague Lynn hasher was talking about it working it's not just Miller's holding space because that doesn't really account for white chunking is so important no no it's it's functional it's it's it it it is sort of the last ditch uh survey of how good is my relevance realization before I commit to action in the world right I think salience is actually just relevance to your working memory in that fashion so the functionality okay so if you let's say that there's a growing convergence member plausibility for many different people onto the function of Consciousness is higher order recursive relevance realization your unconscious has done some preliminary relevance realization then you do that yes but this is a demanding and you you ratchet up the relevance realization is that is that a plausible okay now if you give me that right I can start to talk a lot about the phenomenology of Consciousness beyond the functionality but I mean I need to make a distinction I need to make an important distinction that has not been well I I would argue hasn't been made very well and therefore there's a deep equivocation and confound you need to make a distinction between adjectival qualia are the felt experience things you need to make a distinction between the adjectival qualia and the adverbial qualia adjectival qualia are greenness blueness you know that the the ones that philosophers love to talk about adverbial qualia are are things like hereness nowness togetherness now you say well why would I ever need that okay so positions why are those adverbial because they're modifications of how you are connected to the world they are not specific properties okay so or do they do or do they does that correspond to uh a noun that's a noun verb distinction in some sense right so it's what things are versus the differ what would you say qualification qualities of their function how they could co-emerge in being and in your consciousness so let's let's talk about two pieces of empirical evidence that support what I'm saying I'm not just drawing this as speculation one is and and I've been in this state um and it's widely reported many different uh people across many different variables culturally history you can get into what Foreman calls the pure Consciousness event so you're not conscious of anything you're not even conscious of Consciousness you're just purely conscious it's it's remembering when we talked about you can step back and yeah you can step back until you you can't step back any further because you'd be trying to step back in Consciousness into unconsciousness right and when the pure Consciousness event there are there are there is no greenness there is no blueness there is no Blackness there are there are no objects there are no things but you don't black out what there is is there's a sense of heareness but it's pureness eternity right and and presence I should say and now-ness is that that sense of Eternity and and then there's everything is one Unity togetherness so the ureness and the numbness and the togetherness don't go away even though the adjectival quality of do which tells you the adjective of qualia are not necessary for Consciousness but the adverbial ones so do you think of that as an experience of something akin to the ground of being yes because here when you're when like when you're doing is that what is that the name of the is that the name of God that was announced to Moses is that the same idea because well the name is I am that I am I I was that I am I want to try and answer that and I want to try and so I was at I I went to um uh where I went to the respond Retreat and in Vermont and I was giving my talk on relevance realization and I was getting great questions from monks and I was actually interacting with other theorists and I came to what I think is an important Insight so your system is doing relevance realization and that is giving you the complexification of the world it's giving you the world of things but as you said organized like in right so it's giving you this but you can come to the and one of the things relevance realization is interested in is relevance realizing that's what an Insight is you realize oh my way of realizing what's relevant was actually wrong I have to restructure yeah so it's intrinsically because it's intrinsically evolving and self-correcting it is intrinsically interested in itself okay so I can do relevance realization on the world and that's that that is relevance realization of beings but relevance realization has to realize its own irrelevance with respect to being it has to let you have to stop trying to thinkify your experience that's movement up Jacobs okay so yeah okay so in The Exodus story what happens with Moses is that he's walking through the desert so he's confused in some sense and something attracts his attention yes right it's the burning bush and it doesn't like announce itself in some magnificent way it glimmers in the shadows of his perception but then he investigates it so imagine this imagine that something glimmers to attract your attention that's Mercury by the way yes he's the winged messenger Hermes yeah trying to attract your attention so now you pursue that and now you pursue it deeply and the deeper you pursue it the farther you get away from the particulars of the phenomenon itself and the closer you get to something like generalized being and that seems to be the idea that's implicit in that story of the burning bush and the announcement of the name of God yes but so what happened this is you know this is from Gregory of Nissa and and his work on Moses going up right at the mountain and all the way to Nicholas of kuza right the burning bush is inherently paradoxical right because yes right right because it's a it's it's something that is destroying itself but is maintained right right right and so it's underneath generation and destruction it's underneath all of the mechanisms by which being is particularized it is trying to point I am that I am or actually I will be what I will right right right and so it is trying to point to the ground of being as opposed to the world and what yeah what does Moses try and come and it's a paradox as you said it's so interesting because a paradox is pointing the way to that that's sort of you you talked I think in your lecture at Ralston about the idea that the parables in the New Testament are basically Zen cones yeah yeah they're paradoxes that are designed to produce a state of insight yeah and that's the grip of imagination by relevance realization and a pointer to something that's beyond it exactly exactly you get gripped by the Paradox and different Moses try to comprehend it no he takes off his shoes and he goes into reverence right right right right that's why he takes off his shoes yeah because he now he knows he's standing on Holy Ground and so the attempt to name is abandoned even that doesn't mean you stop naming yeah ridiculous yeah that would be the abandonment of of Sanity right in some real sense there is there's a moment when the relevance realization right can point to its own irrelevance when you are trying to not grip anything yeah you're trying to be opened to the ground of everything right right right so that's how I would answer and the utility okay so now the utility of being open to the ground of everything let me lay this out you tell me what you think about this so so you might say well do does everything have to converge on one that's the monotheistic question in some real sense well let's say forget that question for a minute let's look at the alternative things don't converge yes okay so what's this psychological State associated with non-convergence well there's two if I if I have a multitude of goals and if they're a multitude that means they conflict because if they didn't conflict they'd be a Unity so I have a multitude of goals okay so that's an entropy problem and I'm going to be chaotic confused and anxious as a consequence so that's one consequence and the second consequence is if positive emotion is associated with movement towards a goal but I have multiple fractured goals then the intensity of my positive emotion that's my enthusiasm and that's possession by God by the way then my enthusiasm is diminished so the alternative to the vision of a monotheistic Unity is a chaotic plurality that's associated with the decrement in motivation and enthusiasm yes now that doesn't answer the question of what that ultimate unity might be right but it does at least point out the consequences of not assuming that such a thing exists it's basically the you could call it the Psychopathology of polytheism it's something like that and and when that's manifested socially this is also something interesting if you and I cannot agree on a Unity of vision now in the moment we're we're both exploring and we agree on that so we can sit here without conflict if we cannot agree on a Unity of vision then we are in Conflict yes those are the only options yeah so now we have this problem there has to be a Unity or else these are the consequences and then the mystery is well what constitutes that Unity yeah I totally agree I mean uh you see arguments from platinus and Spinoza basically doing that that move which is right I I think I mean there are some things you can say about the unity it can't be at any level below Ultimate Reality right right right it has to be because that's sort of the definition of Ultimate Reality yes exactly exactly and and then you get it's so I could add to the psychological the epistemic right to understand something and to grasp it its reality is is an act of integration it's a it's a you know yeah right and so think about what science does here's all these disparate phenomena and I get have a unifying understanding and then here's two different Theory here's darwinian natural selection here's mendelian genetics and I get I get modern evolutionary theory the grand synthesis right and why what and why are scientists trying to find the old yeah and those are profound syntheses and they're profound because they point to a deep underlying Unity exactly exactly and this is the neoplatonic argument and then and then you add in the argument I did at length and Ralston if reality isn't or if that fundamental grammar of intelligibility doesn't conform to a fundamental grammar yes right right we are doomed we are we're doomed to a radical solipsism a radical so it's not you can't you I I would argue and I would ask people to look at the longer argument at Ralston but you can't take the content position that yes that is the grammar of intelligibility but reality is somehow fundamentally different because like just like Clark's argument the different Clark Samuel Clark like Kant presupposes the existence of other Minds with an epistemology that gives him no way of acknowledging the existence of other Minds why is he writing the damn critique if he doesn't think why is he upset when he doesn't get the reception Because he believes that there are other Minds right that and they and they're and they're real and they're out there and he somehow has access to them and they have alternative frame like right so his implicit presuppositions explicit for suppositions don't matter he's in a performative contradiction and so if you and so the neoplatonic argument is not the particulars but the grammar of intelligibility and the grammar of reality how's the ultimately okay so this is actually really why I wanted to talk to you today so this this issue here so I did a lecture for Ralston as well at Ephesus on the Greek idea of the logos yes yes so okay so I want to I want to I want to ask you some questions about this and I suppose this has something to do possibly with neoplatonism and Buddhism and Christianity sure okay so let's we'll open with the question about what might constitute this ultimate unity now you can think about it as a phenomenological unity in some sense and and put it in the objective space but but I want to make a different case so I think the ultimate unity is better conceptualized as something that you might term a spirit and and we can get into your decision yeah Jonathan as well yeah yeah yeah okay okay so so a spirit is an animating principle or a set of animating principles and a universal Spirit would be the same set of animating principles animating a lot of people simultaneously right so um it's like a meme in the in the dark and sense right it's like a hyper Meme and so the question is well why should you conceptualize that as a spirit so let me offer a proposition about what's happening in the biblical Corpus okay so okay so there's some attempt to specify the implicit unity and the way the biblical Corpus does that is by laying out a sequence of narratives and the narratives stress a different yes ultimate unity right so for example in the story of Noah here's the unity that's being pointed to so you have Noah characterized as someone who's a wise man for his time and place which is all any all of us anything all any of us could hope for yeah now Noah has a intuition that the storms are coming and he has faith in the intuition and acts on it and then God is characterized as the source of the intuition and faith in Noah's case is characterized as the willingness to abide by that intuition that's the story against all the people that are criticizing and against all other things that might occupy his attention he prioritizes that yes yes okay so he met that and that's how he manifests faith in it that's right okay so now another story bumps up against that and the next story is the Tower of Babel yeah and they're very different narratives and so what you have here is this and this is actually related to this problem of criticality but we won't go into that you have this proposition that human beings can build these towers of abstraction that can become totalitarian in your essence right and that God punishes that yeah yeah he fragments the fragments it and makes people confused yeah okay so now that's a very different picture of God the Noah God yeah okay but they're contiguous yeah they call that metonymy yeah so there's uh an implication by juxtaposition that there's an identity between those two different things but they're very diverse okay so then I'll just do two more of these so then you have the story of Abraham yep now Abraham is a slow starter right so he's very wealthy his parents are wealthy he lives a very privileged and sheltered life but a spirit makes itself manifest to him and the spirit is the Call to Adventure and so God in the abrahamic story is the spirit that calls even the comfortable out to the catastrophic adventure of their life and that's juxtaposed against these other two spirits then you have let's say Moses now you have a different characterization of the ultimate unity and the ultimate unity in the story of Moses is the unity that announces itself in the burning bush but also the spirit that punishes the Tyrant yeah and that calls the slaves out of slavery and okay so now the open Future too meaning the gods of Egypt are gods of location and function the god of Moses and even even so this is a development of the god of Abraham the god of Moses travels with people through space and time into an open Future that they right right okay and that's a that's a reference as far as I can tell back to the opening lines of Genesis because God characterizes himself at the beginning of the book of Genesis I think in terms that are very much akin to the terms we've been using to describe Consciousness itself because God is the thing that confronts the pluri potential chaos and that's really if you look at what uh what is what's the word that's really what it means it means pluri potential chaos is something like that he confronts that plural potential chaos and generates habitable or the habitable order that is good out of it and that's the image of God in man those are identified as the same thing and this is so crucial because it also implies so one of the questions my students used to always ask me is how do you know that what you're teaching us isn't just another ideology because I was trying to teach counter-adiology and that's a really good question that's right it's the question right it is it is the question but if if imagine that you could have a story that concentrates on the process by which functional stories are generated well this is what I wanted to say to you I think what you're getting I mean a spirit is something like a multiply realizable like you know generative function what I mean by that is you're trying to find the through line each one of the think about remember I did the multi-dimensional opponent processing each one of these narratives is an opponent processing it's clean versus disabled yeah and there's this and but there's also right there's Egypt versus the promises yeah yeah Egypt yeah conflict but but Egypt is exploited here now or explore the there then that we talked about at the core of relevance remember they talk about the flesh parts of Egypt is like that this you but if we stay here right there's so much we could just exploit right but right well that's what the Israelites get get uh what would you nostalgic about when they're in the desert because that's right their immediate needs are no longer being gratified and that causes them to become faithless and and and fractious so what I'm I'm suggesting to you is like I'll just use the The Exodus story though as one of it but all of them I would argue what myth is always doing we're often doing and Levy stress had sort of a sense of this with structuralism but what it's it's doing is it's pointing you to opponent processing and and then you can think of okay here's this myth with disappointed processing here's this myth with this opponent processing what's the through lines and then what I do is I I try to find like like what you're doing what I was talking about earlier you're trying to find the multi-dimensional like Nexus the through line of the meta of the ministry line yeah of all the opponent processing you're trying to you're trying to say okay all of the relevance realization if I if I could do all the trade-offs this is Nicholas of kuza with his open sense of infinity in the ancient Greek World in Infinity is a bad thing it's chaos but with kuza it opens up into and then the whole neoplatonic tradition into a positive thing it's like no no if I could get all of the of all of the Opposites I would see that in Infinity they all coincide The Coincidence of the opposite right and that would be the culmination not in in any entity and that would be sort of the summation of what our cognition is about it would be sort of I would have found the source of intelligibility because I would have moved to the deepest grammar of cognition which would get me and that's the resolution of all opposing conflicts and some okay so here's an interesting question so I've been thinking about this recently so talking with Peugeot so there's this idea in the um in the story of Adam and Eve that suffering doesn't descend upon the world until the sin of Adam and Eve yeah and I've been trying to take that apart with Matthew pasgow most particularly yeah believes that Matthew believes that the sin of Even Adam was something like pride and so Eve hearken to the voice of The Serpent and the serpent in some sense is that which is poisonous in and and the fruit that it offers is inedible in its Essence and Eve's pride is that she can even speak for the poisonous and inedible and Adam's pride is that he'll hearken to the voice of Eve and so and so and I like that idea I like the idea that pride comes before a fall and that we can bite off more than we can chew and that men's Pride uh what would you say motivates them to attempt to appear bigger than they are in the eyes of women and that women's Pride motivates them to incorporate under the guise of compassion more than they can eat let's say now there's a Christian idea and a Jewish idea as well that suffering doesn't descend upon the world until this sin takes place now so you can imagine imagine that you followed the through line of meaning assiduously and you were able to bring the Opposites into coincidence and you'd have to do that with proper epistemic humility of course right and openness to possibility the question would be in some sense is to what degree do your moral errors actually constitute the suffering to begin with and then to what degree do you think the suffering itself can be ameliorated and I mean maybe eliminated in favor of something like the spirit of play if you followed the through line of meaning religiously um right I mean and that's because I have this sympathy to the idea that that unbearable suffering in some senses built into the structure of reality itself right because we're finite and Mortal creatures that makes you more of a Buddhist well yes right right although although you see the same emphasis in Judaism right with the tragic sense of history and of course the fact that the central figure in Christianity is crucified in some sense speaks to the same thing but then it there is an open question there right which is well yes suffering is built into finitude but it's clearly the case that we exaggerate multiply it by failing to hit the mark you know and so I think we can ameliorate it um I happen to think that the very processes of relevance realization that make us adaptive make us perennially susceptible to self-deception that's my interpretation of the first Noble Truth of Buddhism the very processes like like just look at the the heuristic and bias literature it's double name for a good reason I can't do I can't actually calculate formal probability of events it's combinatorially yeah so I have to use the representative heuristic and the availability heuristic right but and there's and and the work of Kurt I'll be talking about this in the course right gigarettes and others is in many situations that outperform admit in real world messy ill-defined situations where there's real uncertainty not risk we've confused those two the risk is you can assign a probability right right but real uncertainty these heuristics actually do really really well but they do make you prone to mistake you take your loved one to the airport and you say don't you say all these euphemisms for don't die like text me when you're there safe trip because you can easily imagine a plane crashing and when a plane crashes it's not a crashes it's a disaster it's a tragedy so the availability and the representative heuristics are getting triggered like mad and then you get back in your car the North American death machine without giving it a second thought and that's an act of self-deception right and it's a significance so you're not properly calibrating your level of affect and arousal to the risks you're facing that's that's what I mean when I think the very things that I can't get rid of the heuristics because then I would face combinatorial explosion if I try and do the probability calculations but this is the no free lunch theorem right well that's that's the complicating factor of how much of so you might say well how much of suffering is due to the intrinsic nature of finite finitude that's infinitude how much is due to ignorance and uh inevitable blindness and then how much is due to failure to hit the mark and wisdom is about being able to differentiate those and properly calibrate your efforts to that differentiation elaborate on that so so Plato Drew Highland finite Transcendence Plato's whole argument is we are finite Transcendent we are being capable of transcending ourselves but if we only pay attention to that we fall prey to hubris right right if we if we only pay attention to our finity we fall prey to tyranny and servitude right we have to keep the two in ongoing opponent processing and that's and what we want what we keep trying to do is resolve it into one of these or the other and we keep going back and forth and Plato is about you know you can't resolve that you have to always hold those two into together right so and that means you have to you have to properly realize like so there's no salute there's no the solution is participation in the process that continues to generate the solution so let me give you a strong analogy when we've been invoked is there a final form of life and evolution that makes no sense if you understand Evolution there isn't defined if there isn't a culminating life form that's not that's not the that's not there's no intention functionality to Evolution but you know I'm just speaking that way right there's there's no there's no project of ah now now we'll have the organism that will never suffer the possibility of Extinction that's impossible you can't do that I think that and if relevance realization the meaning is a kind of you know ongoing rapid cognitive Evolution there is no final form of that this is one of the areas where I criticized the platonic framework Plato's notion of of the sacred as completion static Perfection that I find is very problematic because I don't think it actually sits well with his notion of and Socrates I like to think of Music in that regard too and you think about what Bach does in particular I really love the Brandenburg concertos because what Bach does is he brings a phrase to a magnificent conclusion and then out of that emerges another set of possibilities that he brings to another magnificent conclusion and it seems to me that that's a nice model for the unfolding of being right it's yes to attain a goal and then to pull out of that goal a new goal that transcends the previous goal and to do that indefinitely that's the self-organization and then maybe you do have as a final solution in some sense to that the acquiescence to that process okay so let me ask you that the sorry but isn't that the ultimate version of your metagame yes yes definitely absolutely okay so let's let's revolution of this in Christianity especially in eastern Orthodoxy you see it with Gregory of niss Nissa and and you see it in Maximus and uh it's this notion of epictasis that we don't come to rest in God right what God is is God is the The Meta affordance so that we continually self-transcend through God yeah yeah we never that's the Jacob's Ladder Vision yes too right right to ascend continually towards a a destination that's infinitely receding that's right right and it grows as it receives right and but this is the thing the infinity is not inaccessible to you right it because the infinity is not just receding from you it's also reaching towards you and this is reality reality is constantly shining into your frame with intelligibility and constantly receding out into the mystery and and I think the the and that's the that's the parallel of the Greek idea of the logos I think with the judeo-christian idea of the logos I think so too I mean there's lots of people who who won't like that but I I think the notion of the logos um that it's you know especially as you see it coming through the neapolitanic tradition and taken up into Dia logos into dialect yeah I think I think that deeply converges uh I mean the I mean the the Christian model is ultimately a model of that and and this is you know I'm not going to try and do anything but the Paradox of of the unity Trinity is an attempt to somehow say there's something inherently dialogical I would argue yeah about um how we how we come into relationship with Ultimate Reality right right and that's right and it's an attempt to solve the problem of unity and multiplicity as well um so I'd be looking at the transformations of the image of God in the biblical Corpus we know the biblical Corpus is an assembled library right and we don't exactly understand the process by which the stories came to follow one another and how they interacted with each other exactly exactly so it's a mystery but it's a mystery of collective intuition it's something like that yeah yes yes and and and it's something like uh distributed Insight because what happens is there's different forms of juxtaposition and some of them catch on people go oh yes that works but they don't know why which is very interesting thing so you have the Old Testament Corpus in Christianity followed by the New Testament Corpus and there's a new proposition here I want you to tell me what you think about this so um one of the things that psychotherapists have learned across disciplines in the last hundred years is that if you get people to voluntarily confront what they're afraid of avoiding disgusted by and inclined to be willfully blind about they get bravery it isn't habituation it's not uh the substitution of relaxation for anxiety because you can do it without relaxation training it seems to be contingent on the willingness to do the voluntary confrontation yeah but but that means I think that really means a willingness to break down to a degree to like to there has to be so the willingness can't be mere assertion it can't be it has to be it's not it's not it's not propositional yeah it has to do it yeah you have to do it and there has and there has to be a vulnerability there has to be a real willingness to learn and to be yeah that's humility yes humility yeah epistemic and moral humility yeah and so I think my my is it what you're doing is you you're actually making use of dialogue or perhaps even Dia logos yeah in order to afford the complexification of the person's competence which is actually what they are ultimately seeing yeah yes yes well you do that in part by demonstrating to them that they can find the zone of proximal development exact voluntary confrontation right so if you're exposing to someone to an elevator that they're afraid of they might not get in the elevator but they will stand 40 feet away and look at it right again 39 Progressive desensitization yeah which is not a good term because what it is in fact is it's Progressive generalizable adaptation exactly right that's a very different thing yes and that's what I was going to argue I was going to argue it's actually Progressive complex vacation of their cognitive capacity they can manage more and more of the variables without being overwhelmed by the potentialities that are presenting well and they also have a chance to observe themselves acting out the proposition that they are those creatures right because one of the metacognitions that goes along with phobic avoidance is I can't handle this yes and so then you put the person in the situation challenge that yeah and you show well yes under certain circumstances not only can you handle this but you find it optimally challenging and it's really good for your development and so basically what you do is you put someone you're using exposure therapy you put them into the zone that everyone occupies when they're learning optimally it's exactly the same thing but the zone is exactly that place between assimilation and accommodation that we were talking about earlier right you're trying to get you're trying to get them to see if you'll allow me some of my language that it's not the problem isn't just subjectively in them I can't get in the elevator no no there's a real relationship that you that you are capable of evolving between like you can and you can and you and you can evolve your cognition so that you can get into the elevator right so that you can confront what you're afraid of I had one client the door is finally opened at the elevator and she said that's a tomb and I thought well we're we're simultaneously exposing you in this Freudian symbolic manner not only to the elevator but to the idea of your own finitude and mortality and that was definitely happening at the same time eh yeah okay so there's so imagine that the biblical corpuses is assembled and there's multiple pictures of the spirit of God that characterize the Old Testament and then there's a culmination at least from the Christian Perspective in the New Testament but here's the idea of the culmination the idea is that the same spirit that called Noah to prepare for catastrophe and the same spirit that called Abraham out of his comfort to the adventure of his life is the spirit that is motivating people to voluntarily confront the catastrophic suffering of their life it's the same idea and then that idea gets transformed even one more one more in one more profound manner which is not only is that the same Spirit now humanized right because that's something you can actually act out but that if you do act it out that that inverts the tragedy and so the hypothesis is that there's a there's a paradoxical balance between the degree to which you're willing to voluntarily take on the suffering of your life and your ability to simultaneously transcend the suffering and that in the final analysis the more you're willing to Bear the burden of being voluntarily the less suffering is actually associated with that the more play right the more the more progression up Jacob's Ladder and so like okay two things what do you think about the proposition that seems to emerge there that that's the same spirit and and that that's reasonably construed as a spirit and what do you think about that as a proposition I mean you tend to take to come at this from a more Buddhist perspective so or neoplatonic I mean right right right so for for me um uh that Pro I mean that process that process of being able to find the through lines of the deeper for me when you're talking about a spirit you're talking about like a dynamical self-organizing system that's generative in the way we've been talking about and it doesn't just generate being it generates the intelligibility of being so right and that's logos yes right right and so for for me trying to find right the through line right so this has a logos and this has a logos but what's the logos of all of these right right right and and it right and it's this nested and and that maps onto everything we've been talking about about cognition intelligence and Consciousness the recursive relevance realization the predictive processing oh like for me those two things sing and if the the argument about the grammar of reality has to be our cognition has to be deeply conformable to that then for me that's that's something the neoplateness talk and then so what the neoplatonists are doing right is they're they're taking Plato and they're finding that Spirit right the Plato's the spirit that takes you out of the Cave the ascent the recipients yeah and I'd like to come back to that and then you've got the Aristotelian Spirit which is the the the idea of knowing as conforming and the scientific project of trying to get an organized systematic understanding and then you have the stoic system of no no logos is how do I best integrate my agency so that I can be most virtuously disposed to the world so that I am not overwhelmed by the tragedy but I can right right and then and and and and then so neoplatonism is like that grand unified field Theory uh of of the whole philosophical spiritual tradition of Socrates this is what I'm doing in my series after Socrates is tracing that out right you should just tell everybody now about that so so that everybody listening knows so which so just continue talking like that sure yeah so uh on January 9th I'm releasing my new series um uh after Socrates it'll be free on Youtube it'll be released uh twice a week Mondays and Thursdays and I'm really trying to play with the format and and bring to light um this this this whole through line that runs from Socrates to people like Nicholas of kuza and I Regina right and and what what it is is there's there's a continuing lectures series that build a continuous argument like I did in Awakening for the meeting crisis but I also have a section on points to ponder so and this is to encourage people to reflect and to discuss with each other and then I also teach a practice I move out of the propositional and there's a pedagogical program of practices that is also unfolding in parallel to the lectures and then I also move out of the monologue because I'm trying to be Socratic right and so I have I have episodes where I'll be with other people and the four of us will demonstrate a whole all Ecology of practices and then I'm also trying to put the whole Socratic right away into dialogue with like with with Christianity uh because that's what happened in the west right right right and so uh like there's a there's a series within the series Christopher Master Pietro and I we meet and we go into dialogue because we're doing crooked guards confrontation with Socrates and kirkegaard's wrestling of this and I would say it's opponent processing he's constant so he's a follower of Christ but Socrates is his teacher and he's constantly toggling between those and you can see this very powerful that's an opponent process that's at work in western civilization exactly exactly and so Chris and I are bringing that out and so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to I'm trying to people can get access to this on your YouTube channel exactly so you can just look up John verviki find his YouTube channel we'll put the links in the description of this video and so my what I'm trying to do is it's called after Socrates because I'm I I I I'm after Socrates and that I'm trying to understand him right I'm trying to what because there's he's a deeply enigmatic figure and and importantly so because I one of the the great things that about the socratic dialogues is Socrates never Socrates is always in that zone of proximal development he's all he's all he's shining in enough to your intelligibility and then he puts you into aporia that state where you a perplexity and wonder because he wants to also open you up to the mystery and he's constantly and so I want I'm after Socrates in that sense and I'm after Socrates and that I want to try and reverse engineer this practice of dialectic and to deal with not hegelian dialectic platonic dialectic and there's all this new work on it so dialectics is a practice and deal logo is a process yeah you get it like well Dia logos is the practice of psychotherapy I think so it is it's the Redemptive practice of psychotherapy right the mutual exploration of the true truth that redeems so crates is you know is about this is easy to say and it is hard to realize in both senses of the word of understanding to make real to be able to follow the logos wherever it goes and and to do that comprehensively profoundly percolating through different layers of the psyche permeating many different domains of your life getting that ultimate profundity that ultimate kind of plausibility and that ultimate unity yes yes and so and and intensity of purpose because when things become unified in relationship to the purpose it makes you in some sense comparatively Unstoppable well it's a good thing you to be unstoppable in life because there's plenty of things that conspire to attempt to stop you yes and he uh I mean that's why he actually he dies for it right well well that's very very relevant too to our discussion of transcendent meaning because one of the things that emerges in the socratic apologia is the sense that Socrates has lived a life so deep and meaningful that he's able to he's able to abide by his set of moral principles even in the face of death yes right and and part of the reason for that appears to be that he lived his life fully and and and so he's satisfied with it in some fundamental sense right he's not clinging to it he he so this is the interesting thing about him I mean you know Socrates knows that he does not know and that eventually becomes the Learned ignorance of Nicholas of kuza and the ability to wrestle with the paradoxes and The Coincidence see that but but he but he does know things he knows erotica he knows what to care about which is your point and he also knows that the unexamined life is not worth living the life in which you have not tried to because well it's unconscious it's unconscious and it's also going to be your agency is going to break down you're making yourself more prayed and self-deception you're tyrannical you're gonna exactly all of this stuff and so I'm trying to trace out but not just Trace out the ideas because Socrates is ultimately about this is third what's called Third Way platonism the the new scholarship Socrates is ultimately about trying to get shift people into the non-propositional because that is ultimately where virtue is cultivated you and I both know you can get the these University professors who are highly trained in moral argument and that is in no way predictive of how virtuously they live their lives propositional management is at most a necessary condition for virtue but it is in no way sufficient and you can see soccer and Socrates is always challenging two things he's challenging just intuitive pronouncement as to what something is well what is courage is and he's also challenging sort of third person right technical definition well I learned this definition in Secretary says but do you do you do you reenacted yes right so he's constantly challenging the first person perspective of just spontaneous subjective Authority he's constantly challenging the third person imposing technical Authority because he's trying to constantly get us into the second person perspective where we actually enter into the dialogue that trains us for virtue so he you'll get like when he's arguing with the two generals about courage they like one represents this intuitive the other represents he learned all these definitions from the sophist and they're very sophisticated right right and Socrates undermines both of those and he doesn't come to a conclusion but here's the thing the generals were coming to Socrates because they're asking where should we take our sons for Education because we want them to be courageous there's no conclusion at the dialogue but the generals both both generals say we would like your son our sons to come and learn from you right right because Socrates exemplifies the courage in the dialogue you know you see you see something similar happening in the brother's karamazov yeah because you have Ivan is a very is very able to put forward extremely compelling propositional atheistic arguments right in kind of a nietzschean spirit yeah real sense right and eliosha who's the monastic novitiate is no match for Ivan on the propositional front but he's a way better person yes and Dostoevsky also explores that in the idiot because that's Prince Michigan right it is the Christ analog for all this purposes right but Dostoevsky because he uses narrative rather than philosophy is able to produce an embodied figure who exemplifies virtue even though the propositional grounds for his moral pronouncements are relatively and what undeveloped and I think this is a profound thing and trying to bring that out and then say so what are the practices that you started well the so so uh you want to bring in a Socratic Socrates was famous for being able to stand in a meditative state transfix for 24 to 48 hours ah totally right so there's a profound capacity for uh mindfulness and this is why he famously never got drunk he could drink quite a bit and but the mindfulness was like he he could stay I wonder how much of that hallucinogenic Greek wine he was consuming while doing all of this I I I I that I don't know but he had he he has this tremendous so I start with teaching people about a basic meditative practice that's taking off your mental Framing and looking at it seeing what way it might be distorting but how do you know if you've distorted well you have to put your glasses on and see if you now see more clearly or deeply and those are contemplative practices and and I take I take people through a contemplative practice uh and you take them into a kind of uh teach them lectio Divina how to read the platonic text Not Just for information but how to get into that resonance with it so it will bring about transformation there's a lectio Divina which is a way of reading and then there's philosophical Fellowship where people people sort of do a joint kind of lectio Divina with each other about a philosophical text and you're not trying to is this text right or wrong I'm not saying you should never do that right the point of this practice is no no I want to presence the perspective from which this text was generated so that I can enter into a vygotsky and relationship right with that perspective because it will challenge me into a zone of proximately right and then I can practice being in the zone of proximal development as a consequence of engaging in dialogue well that's you know I think one of the things that maybe distinguished me to some degree from my from my peers let's say my academic peers is that almost every time I read something my goal was to see what I could learn from reading it yeah not to dispense with it like to and I think it's the same position of reverence that you described in relationship to Moses and taking off his shoes it's like yeah I want to find out what's in this I did that with Freud and I did that with Jung and I did do that with the biblical Corpus not to dispense with it or to argue it out of existence even though test ideas is important but to but to be open to whatever might transform me as a consequence title to the adverbial right okay I'm not just so I I like I've had this many times but one one time really profound for me was Spinoza Spinoza is hard Spinoza is like reading Euclid's elements because it's patterned on euclide your axioms and proofs and Theorem and it's the most logical rigorous thing in your ER and you're trying to remember all the predicates this and that and then what happens though is you get what he talks about you you go from recursive re uh discursive reasoning into what he calls scancia into antiva you see you get this realization where you see all of the whole in each premise and each premise and all of the whole and then you see all of reality like that and it so you see you see spinosistically you take on Spinoza's perspective rather than remembering his proposition right that's what I mean about being so yeah well that's that's something like that's that's something like ancestor worship that's something like inhabiting the spirit of the Divine ancestor because what you're trying to do one of the things I loved about University was that it enabled me to select my peers from among the great men of history now I'm not saying I was able to manage that but I at least had that opportunity right each of those people was animated well I would say by a central in some sense by a central exploratory and benevolent Spirit insofar as they were manifestations of logos so this is so you get I'm doing these practices with people that are you know nuns n-o-n-e-s secular and they'll but they'll say well that was like a spirit that was like a secular Seance right because I felt like Spinoza was present right right and so what happens is you get you get that we agency you get that you get that you get the the spirit of the distributed cognition that is not reducible to a mere aggregation of individual consciousnesses you get that you get you get that you get that emergent Dynamic like a rock concert yes exactly exactly but you're doing it with intelligibility rather than just Salient sounds yeah right and and well so that isn't it but that also is we we can stay pretty forthrightly that that is an experience of a profoundly unifying spirit because it wasn't people wouldn't be able to inhabit the same conceptual and perceptual space simultaneously so you take people through this progression you get them into that and then you take them into dialectic into dialogues where you actually get them to get that Collective Flow State around the examination of a virtue and right right and the group acts like as a a a and people are shifting rules to group acts like Socrates to the individual and everybody is switching around and what happens is people get this Collective Spirit logos shows up the fire of Harry and people people are suddenly drawn and what happens is they go from all their propositions about virtue to saying they experience awe and reverence about the virtue and they and right right and then they also say they'll report this sort of progression of intimacies they'll say I I discovered a kind of intimacy with people that I didn't know existed but I've always wanted right right it's not friendship it's not sexuality I I use the Christian term Fellowship it's Fellowship right right and and and and and then and then they do this neat thing they'll go from you and I are experiencing this kind of intimacy too we all are experiencing intimacy with the logos yeah and then that they can also go to you and I intimacy with each other with the logos and all of that is becoming more intimate with being itself yeah I'm talking about feeling more connected to real that's dialectic into theologous okay well so if all of you are inclined to um uh be interested in this sort of thing you can go over to John's YouTube channel and follow his series of lectures it's going to launch win January 9th and just so you all know too uh um some of you may know that I've started this Academy with my daughter Peterson Academy which is a an attempt to bring Humanities and liberal arts education to people on a large scale and we have a lot of professors lined up to help us with that about 30 so far top rate top rate people as far as I'm concerned and John is actually going down to Miami this week to record a series of lectures that will add up to about eight hours on the sorts of topics that we discussed today exactly exactly so okay so everyone we have to stop unfortunately because we could continue pretty much forever and hopefully will and I'd like to thank all of you for attending watching and listening today and to encourage you to check out John viveki's YouTube channel and to follow his lectures um I'm uh there's no doubt that if you participate that in that with some degree of intent that the consequences will be transformative John was and he is one of the most popular lectures that the University of Toronto ever produced and his students were constantly raving to me when I was still there um about the Transformations they had encountered both intellectually and I would say personally as a consequence of taking John's courses so this is a good deal so go go and go and check that out and I'm going to turn over to the Daily wire plus platform now and talk to John more on the biographical level for a while I want to trace the development of his through line through his life which is what I tend to use the extra half an hour for and so for all you watching and listening happy New Year and thank you very much for your time and attention and don't hesitate to check out John viveki's YouTube channel ciao thanks John thanks great as always thank you yep hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 799,394

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: IZ-tHaHfB8A

Length: 120min 40sec (7240 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

Dr Jordan B Peterson and John Vervaeke discuss entropy reduction, incremental fact gathering, systems of complexity and the ultimate unity in the holy spirit.

John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. His work constructs a bridge between science and spirituality in order to understand the experience of meaningfulness and the cultivation of wisdom so as to afford awakening from the meaning crisis.

[u/rogerwilcobravo]

What is it with Canadians and outlandish suits