Collective Intelligence: Angels in Scientific Terms | with John Vervaeke

so hello everybody i am here with john viveki many of you most of you i pretty much everybody who's watching this will have seen a video with me and john vervicky before and also john had a discussion with jordan peterson a few months ago and that discussion in that discussion many things came up that were related to also john and i's discussion and then jordan and i's discussion and so jordan someone in the group had the idea of doing something with me and then that added bishop baron on top and so a few weeks ago we had a discussion with bishop and barum which is going to be online i'll link it to the description many of you may even have seen it and it was a very interesting discussion one which at first kind of tried to find its way and then suddenly we really felt like uh it just kind of took off and many interesting things were said so john and i thought it would be a good idea to uh to kind of dive back into the things that we talked about and explore them even more so john thanks for coming [Music] this is jonathan pedro welcome to the symbolic world it's a great pleasure jonathan and it was my idea by the way to include you uh i i was very kind to you well no because well friendship was part of it but the other part of it was you were very much a ghostly presence in the conversation i had with jordan and i felt it was unfair ultimately to not allow you to actually be present and be involved so that's why i suggested it to jordan and it's interesting because with adding bishop baron the conversation definitely morphed into something completely different yeah yeah because he's not involved in this kind of inner the way that we've been talking about religion let's say for the past several years you and i and jordan in our different ways but kind of coming towards similar ideas about phenomenology or in your jordan's evolutionary approach all of this is kind of coming towards something and bishop baron is just dropping out from outside with with a more kind of catholic thomas and augustinian way i'm thinking so it for me it was that was one of the most interesting things was to watch the discussion move towards the direction where all of a sudden i could see in bishop baron's eyes that he was like oh this is like there's something else going on here there's another type of discussion yeah i he just wrote i i just read it this morning i didn't read it thoroughly i just read parts of it he wrote a a blurb a blog about uh and yeah he was very clearly appreciative in all three senses of the word of the discussion um and so i think i think your observation is accurate and so i think but i think that this is to me it was exciting because i think that the discussion we're having you know and bringing it back to the human experience in a way that a lot of the arguments that have been going on in the past few hundred years a lot of them have been arguing religion from a sociological perspective or from a scientific perspective even which that was always the worst the worst one but you know a lot of it from kind of a more philosophical metaphysical perspective but the way that we're trying to break come towards it although it does include metaphysics and sociology and all of that it brings it back to the to this just the way that we experience the world and how it's coherent with those those experiences yeah i i think that's uh i think that's right i think and part of what we're doing is try to trying to articulate and explicate and elucidate the relationship between these things so what i'm going to say isn't going to be terribly clear but you know there's there's this there's this not only is there a convergence between us and i share that with you by the way that sense and i'm appreciative of it um i think you know there's this convergence around you know things these topics of meaning and wisdom and transformation and connectedness um and the central roles of you know intelligence uh in an ancient sense and attention the way they're bound that's what i want to say the way intelligence and attention are bound up together um all of these things are coming together i think in a very powerful way um and i and i think they that that convergence between us and between those terms and concepts and topics is also resonant it's not identical but it's it's deeply analogous to some of the convergence i see happening in sort of the broader culture um at least aspects of it or what sevilla king calls this corner of the internet yeah it's getting to be a pretty big corner uh but uh yeah i appreciate that yeah it's interesting because this corner of the internet also it has its different branches and different emphases but it definitely is this kind of convergence i would say the way that i see it is also an exciting opening you could say it's like that there's an exciting opening where things that people before didn't couldn't understand or wound or didn't understand all of a sudden they're starting to get a sense of what it's about no i mean the basic idea that religion was superstitious that religion is silly that it's just a you know it that you're that it's just added on to our experience you know this is was the common understanding not for everyone but it was like a common understanding that was floating around in culture but now that seems to be breaking down and people are excited to now be able to understand things that before just didn't make any sense to them at all yeah it's i agree with that very much i mean um i mean i think there's a bifurcation i think that that's happening there's a you know you know way before kobet and even before i did um you know awakening for the meeting crisis that i was reading about people talking about the the religious turn within phenomenology that that was a broad movement happening um and then you saw i saw within the emergence of 4e cognitive science that these these themes that were previously considered woo-woo mindfulness and mystical experience and wisdom and meaning and transformation and even you know the sense of the sacred these are now coming into these are legitimate topics again and it's very been a very rapid increase on the other hand i also see uh the ramping up of the you know of the machinery of distraction uh in our culture and and and and the machinery of surrogacy where we're gonna replace you know the real pursuit of of meaning and wisdom with with surrogates uh some rather you know innocuous and others were really really toxic um so i i see that both of those happening and i and and that's that's not a contradiction i think they're both happening for the same reason uh uh so yeah that makes a lot of sense that there's a zeitgeist that's kind of pulling things pulling apart the ancient the ancient well the and not the ancient the modern world he was kind of pulling it apart and now people lost in their you know the like the phenomena that is bringing us this new understanding of religion is the same phenomena that brings about uh viral videos on the on youtube right yeah all of a sudden realizing how much attention is part of the way the world manifests itself but in that version like the viral video on youtube is really the broken down version of it where all of a sudden things pop up take up all the attention and then vanish and then pop up take up all the attention and then vanish yeah this is this super rapid cycle of of attention you know but it like you said it if you take those two phenomena together it points us to people understanding or becoming more aware of attention the problem and the opportunities of attention yeah i i think it's a case i think this is consonant with what you're saying it's a case of one group of people and i'm not trying to do an us them thing i'm just trying right people who are becoming aware of the centrality of attention and what i call relevance realization and connectedness and the human need for both grounding and self-transcendence and both individuation and participation in community all of that and kovid i think highlighted all these themes but then there's people who are not so much aware of it uh but embodying it almost you know almost like in a psychoanalytic sense they're acting it out the importance of attention and salience and relevance but like but but they're acting it out in a way that's generally not uh fruitful for uh their own flourishing or the flourishing of the of the people that they're that they're living with or living in connection with exactly because it also because the internet has afforded a space where the re the relationship between attention and power has been increased you know by thousands of times and so all of a sudden people understanding that that how attention is a can be a weapon right and attention can be a a way to dominate and can be a way to seduce and be all these things are kind of coming up to the coming to the fore but instead of in a little village where you realize that you can do things to to manipulate others or to kind of you now you have a hundred thousand people you know a hundred thousand people under you that can act as your body to uh to kind of to act out in the world and yeah i mean we see the results of that yeah the internet's kind of like uh tolkien's the one ring right it's just this magnifier right uh in some fashion and it can magnify you know for the hobbits it magnifies their sort of uh you know diminutive sneakiness and they can become invisible but for sauron it magnifies his cruelty and his might um and so yeah i think the the internet is very much uh like the one ring in that fashion um and maybe that's maybe that myth coming to mind isn't uh totally just uh ephemeral i mean part of it is we are not doing what one of the strongest recommendations of that whole fantasy series is to step back and really reflect and think about like what you know what's our relationship to the one ring and should we be picking it up and should we be more wary of it and things like that and i i do worry that we are running this grand social experiment with social media and with phones on ourselves and the next generation there's already some preliminary evidence that's having an impact and we don't know what this is going to do like we're doing something that is 10 times more powerful than the printing press and they're pretty pressed on unleashed forces that then turned to bloody religious war in europe in an unforeseen fashion and so like i i i don't i do not think we are exercising proper care around this that's for sure nobody's no it gets too big it is like you know when we talk about this is when i look at the internet and i look at social media it's the closest thing i have to understanding a a kind of uh how can i say this a god acting in the world in the sense that like uh you know like a pagan deity that is embodied in ritual and in practice and and in you know nodes of attention because it's just there's no one controlling it yeah but it still seems to have a will and seems to be going towards atello's and everybody sees it and nobody can stop it and everybody says well at least i'm going to get what i can get as i watch this this god kind of move towards its sacrifice or whatever is going on but everybody's like well at least i can get something out of it while it's happening i think that's a very apropos way of thinking of it um i i often use thomas merton's idea of a hyper object uh and that and uh and and more not not morton martin thomas morton i'm i'm i misspoke yeah i was surprised that he would have a term like that no no no it's weird whenever they're like object sorry uh and so morton's idea in hyper objects is that there are things like you know uh the internet global warming evolution uh they're realities but they don't they they're not they're not like bodies they're not spatially temporarily located they're distributed right and and we can't actually sort of conceive of them uh like we can have terms referring to them but we can't sort of if you allow me a science fiction reference we can't grok them we can't sort of really get uh and so we we but but they're not abstract things over there right they're they're they're insinuating themselves into the very fiber of our being um yeah they have more subtle bodies to use uh to use a religious term yeah and and i i'm i'm fine with that and you see a sim uh a similar kind of move in later neoplatonism when you wear proclass and the elements of theology and he's trying to work out all of these principalities and powers and principles and and i think uh and i think the relationship uh that a lot of people have to the internet is is properly understood as a religious relationship i mean the the internet serves as an oracle think about that i mean think about the the devotion people uh they want to live in its world like and like you said they have a sense of it having a life and power of their own that they people want to be in service to uh but they also want to appropriate that power it's very much it's almost like you know bald or something from the old testament uh in that fashion um and so i think that's again just to circle it back i think that's again right the reason why these things are coming together and you you talk about this better than i do right it is right the the the what we're talking about about the internet and what we're talking about about this this meaning wisdom movement uh about religion those again they they might seem like opposites or in opposition but there's a deep underlying common ground that they're both pointing to again right this phenomena i i don't think it's a coincidence that the internet and you know the shared universes of marvel and all of this are also occurring at the same time as this return to an understanding of the depth and importance of religion i think those are completely uh they belong together in terms of a unified explanation yeah there's an interesting thing that i've been realizing recently is that one of the one of the aspects that seems to have happened in in christianity but probably has happened in buddhism as well because it seems similar is then the understanding that ultimately the sacrifice is a sacrifice of we say a sacrifice of worship that's how the christians will present it like when when we go to vessels service we talk about the evening sacrifice and it's a sacrifice of worship and it's to actually understand that sacrifices is attention yeah that's what sacrifices right and so it's this the way that you attend when you attend you kind of give your attention to the thing that you are tending to and at the same time you're also sacrificing the things next to them right you're focusing yes yes yes um and so and that seems to be something which with the internet is now accelerating so much that it's almost impossible not to notice that that's what that's what it is that the internet is like a is like a monster or is it is a being that lives through attention that requires our attention to exist like neil gaiman i don't know if you know a little bit about neil gaiman he wrote a lot about that like in some of his series even in american gods he had this idea that these gods exist through attention and if you don't give them attention then they weaken if you give them attention then they become stronger um i know for all my criticism neil gaiman that's a really powerful understanding and i think one that is actually very christian like that we really do have this idea that you know as we move away from the physical sacrificial system in in ancient times we move towards the world where we understand sacrifice as attention itself i think that's i think that is so consonant with the model that's emerging uh by wall and others uh wu yeah the cogsi of attention we're moving from a rather simple model of attention as a filter uh to that what was actually happening in attention is prioritization yeah uh though that the function of attention is to prioritize and right and so um and that means i think quite correctly like you said that um you know good attention is proper prioritization if you think of it that way that you're prioritizing the things that should be given priority and um i i i i don't know if this is adequate and i'm not claiming that it is but i i can see why notions of worship and sacrifice are bound up together there's two sides of the same coin of the idea of trying to give uh proper priority uh to you know to quote aristotle and people don't understand it you know first things first right uh and and that people think that just means the first thing on your list is the first thing you should do that's not what aristotle means no it means that the task is to realize what the first principles are and to you and to prioritize them over things that are uh less central to being and to truth etc and so and i i think of that as the virtue of reverence and i think reverence uh is to is to properly realize the relevance of something that should be given a priority even over yourself and that's where it starts yeah that's where you start to get the notions of sacrifice and worship which i like i say if you go away from sacrifices killing something right which is which is usually focal in people's mind to this idea of prioritization and a recognition and acknowledgement of priority um then i think i i'm in agreement with what you're talking about yeah and the idea of killing something is always the wrong way of understanding sacrifice at least at the at the first let's say at the first level it often involves killing something but not necessarily there are sacrifices of grain sacrifices of oil all these different sacrifices it has to do with with offering up that you take something that's precious and then you you give it up towards something which is above you and that's that's exactly what attention is and that's what prioritization is um one of the interesting things i wanted to ask you about because there's a there there's something that i've been thinking about and there's several priests that are thinking about this right now is that in the in the jewish law like in the hebraic law there's during yom kippur which was the day of atonement right the day of make becoming one right there were two sacrifices and this i i'm wondering what you think about this in terms of attention there was a sacrifice which was offered up and was used to purify the space and then there was a sacrifice which was cast away a scapegoat which was sent out to azazel which is a demon out in the wilderness right um and so the to me like this is what i've been thinking about in terms of attention which is detention seems to have two parts to it one which is a concentration focus right uh prioritization but another part which is like a cutting off right a circumcision a cutting off of you have to be able to kind of chop off the things that were are pushing in or trying to take over let's say and then so it's like a double movement one of focusing and then one of pushing away i don't know if that's something that that is confident with yeah i think it is and um [Music] i'll need a little bit of space but uh what i mean by that is it like i think the prioritization function so what i mean is give up the old model of there's input and then there's processing and then there's output uh the new the newer model is there's a sensory motor loop as i'm moving i'm sensing as i'm sensing i'm moving and there really isn't anything there isn't a homunculus willpower out there instead there's something more like character there are sets of constraints on this and then what we're doing and remember and attention is self-organizing like that because we both direct attention but attention also directs us and so right what we're trying to do is what i'm trying to get you to see is a new way of thinking of what decision is like instead of thinking of decision as the the executor behind it all like doing this think of decision as exactly what you're saying so um a way of thinking about this is attention is both ruling in and ruling out yeah right it's it's it's what's what's ruled in and what's ruled out this is analogous uh one of my former students and our colleague corey lewis talks about this in the philosophy of science he talks about uh that what laws do is they rule out they say not no no no yeah yeah and that what models do is rule in this is how this is what you have to bring in and this is what you have to prioritize right in order to do your thing and so in an analogous fashion attention is making decisions of ruling in and ruling out did that help no that makes a lot of sense and it makes a lot of sense in also if you think of things like um ancient law like ancient roman law the way that it worked there were two aspects of the system one with one which was a toritas and potestas right and so potestas were the actual rules like the you know like the the or the the military or the the embodiment of like what you're not allowed to do the police part of it and the other one was a tortas which was the motto like you said the thing you follow the person you model your life on you know someone who inspires you to be a certain way it was like a direct non-explicit model and then the other one is like an explicit set of rules that is lacking the the more direct part of it so it ends up being like a kind of like a right hand and a left hand of of uh of how the system works let's say uh and and you know you can see that with like the idea of the saints and then the canons of the church for example where you have models you're supposed to follow and then you have a bunch of things you're allowed to do are not allowed to do like all these rules that are more kind of uh let's say more precise and more kind of about yeah what you're not allowed to do let's say yeah i mean so one one way of thinking about it is attention has the function of constraining possibility right this is impossible right and so it's structuring that or at least this is highly improbable and this is even in predictive processing models of attention but you also need attention is also aspirational right hey that's a nice word love that yeah yeah so it's trying to uh it's trying to disclose the affordances by which we can more properly come into conformity or transform a transformative relationship to what's real what's happening what's relevant what's pertinent all the sort of stuff that i tend to obsess about uh but yeah um that yeah very much and then the idea also that's happening with the tension that goes into this is um to to to not have a human model of attention so the human model of attention is the static uh impersonal observer and toads in his book on body and mind says that's why hume can't find causation of the world because his his his model of attention is is is a pure right is a pure passive spec spectacle of observation okay right and not moving around engaging and so the the other thing is to right this goes with christopher moles work that attention is adverbial um it's it's a way of modifying other things you're doing so let me quickly point out what i mean by that like we tend to think of attention as a spotlight and we shine it and there's there's truth to that because light makes things stand out and that's what attention does it make things more salient but the thing is and mole points this out but but but attention isn't like walking i can say to you walk get up and walk okay now if i say to you start start practicing you'll say to me practice what or if i say train begin training you'll go train what the things we do that we do by modifying other things and if i say to you you have to do this a little more subtly to bring it up i say i want you to pay attention but i don't want you to pay attention by changing how you're looking or how you're listening or how you're remembering or how you're coordinating looking listening and remembering i just want you to pay attention and you'll say to me i don't know what that means right attention is a way in which this is what i mean it's more adverbial it's a way in which we're modifying our our connectedness to reality and it's not like it's not a beam coming out of our head it's a shaping of our whole orientation and connectedness to reality it's a much more comprehensive thing does that make sense is this it makes a lot of sense and it makes a lot of sense because at least in at least in kind of the orthodox perspective theological perspective there really is this idea of synergistic relationship like a synergistic relationship with god where like you said there's an i there's a sense in which you're kind of called like you're called for and then you you kind of moved forward but that also affects the amount of calling or the direction of calling so it's something that's very difficult to fully separate and say something like you know it's like that god acting that's you acting it's like no it's this it's this constant moving between this call towards your your own telos and then your capacity to embody it and then it modifies the direction so it's it's it's a like you said it's a more kind of it's a synergistic model in terms of of how we we talk about transformation it's synergistic this way exactly there's the calling and it's not action or passivity it's participation yeah but it's also it's also it's also synergistic this way it's it's not sort of a cartesian theater or lockheed theater it's the whole person like if i would put it in a slogan and take it take caution around that because it's a slogan but you attend with your whole body you don't just attend with sort of through yeah with your brain yeah right that's what i'm trying to get at uh and and and and then another dimension of that um is the fact that attention is often shared in it like distributed attention is a significant part of distributed cognition so wait like children if you watch babies like they joint attention in that loop that you're talking about not like between people is what makes language learning and impossible like attention is there primordially joint attention like that like and we take it for granted like when i point you look you you try and trace out my intention of attention but if you point like for to any other animal they look at your finger yeah because you made it salient right but and notice how kids sup when kids are at the one word stage they supplement it with pointing they so they use joint attention to make meaning to make meaning clear so again it's it's it's it's more whole person it's more dynamic and it's more shared and joint i mean it's funny um you'll like this there's a there's a line in the psalms that um is becoming sort of uh resonating with me as i get into this which there's a line where it says deep calling to deep right the deep calling to deep right um and so that that's that's sort of my uh i don't know what to put i don't mean i'm not trying to be sacrilegious anyway i'm trying to be say something that stands out for me that's kind of a biblical motto i guess i have for this for the way of thinking about this and and it is properly again for me because it again it brings up this deep connection we're talking about between all of this and religio right um so here's a question in terms of study because this is something that i've been talking about and thinking about but i'd like to know your opinion on it it seems that we have something also about common joint attention we seem to search out places and moments where we can all attend to similar things as a as a group right so you go to a concert even just in terms of entertainment why do you go to the movie theater like we all sit together and then we watch of course there's the big screen but there's something more than the big screen which is why we like watching movies with friends and with with family um and so it seems like there's also something in terms of that there's a transformation which occurs through uh through common attention and that seems for the good and ill right and so you i have the image of hitler you know with like a hundred thousand people all standing in front of him and just giving him all their attention and it and it acting as like a catalyst for something insane so so i don't know if there's if people have studied that or talked about very much very very much i mean so first of all it goes directly to the point i just mentioned and people like tomasello and others have made that apparent how much of our cognitive development depends on is afforded by joint detention uh the capacity for joint detention and you think about why this would matter uh to hunter-gatherers like joint detention is absolutely crucial for uh for coordination uh social coordination um it goes towards the work that dan chiappie and i published about scientists the nasa scientists uh controlling the rovers on mars and how do they how do they con how do they get how do they coordinate their attention uh but it also goes towards this and think about how this works both internally and externally and how they reinforce each other notice and we know this even for young children and and psychologists have the settings in of giving multiple names to the same problem or the same phenomena or calling two different phenomena by the same name it's called the jingle jangle problem so it's known by many different names uh uh intersensory hypothesis and blah blah blah intermodal and blah blah okay but they all are talking about the same thing that a child will prefer to look at a stimulus that it can both see and hear over a stimulus they can just see or that it can see and hear and touch right and and and then there's good reason for this if you have just i'll use some cybernetic language if you have just a single channel the chances that what you're seeing are due to subjective bias or distortion are quite high but if i have two independent channels the chances that the result is due to bias are reduced precisely right because of the increase of that convergence that's what by the way and it's not just sort of fascism the reason why we like numbers is because numbers allow us to coordinate the senses you can see three you can hear three you can touch three three allows us to bind the senses together and what that does is in using rushers terms that increases the trustworthiness not certainty but it increases the trustworthiness of the information we're getting now think about this and plato brings this out in the dialogues when we can do that with each other like so it's not only within my senses but between how all of us are trying to make sense think about how that massively increases the trustworthiness and you know aristotle treated it as one of the three marks of realness if you know if you had rational intersubjective agreement then it must be real we know that that's not right things can we can get that agreement like you said yeah right and it can still be false but but so that's why you shouldn't confuse trustworthiness with certainty but trustworthiness is valuable right yeah i mean it's very valuable and so i it's we want to share with other people what's happening because it makes it more real for us and in a deep sense and therefore and the way you afford right that what are you converging you're converging attention you're converging attention so that would be my explanation for that yeah that's a really wonderful i mean it when you say it that way it makes so much sense just it's just completely reasonable to understand that if you have a group of people and you're attending to something it increases the reality of the thing you're attending to because you're constantly aware that okay so here's 100 people they are all attending to the thing i'm attending to so maybe i need to attend to it like maybe there's something real about what's happening or more real than than you know a more idiosyncratic moment let's say um but this says a lot about our situation right now you know because i have young children and to imagine you know they spent months and months sitting alone on zoom watching their their teacher or even in class with masks on where you don't see other people's faces like this has a major effect i imagine has a major effect on their capacity to pay attention and to to kind of make sense of what's going on i think it has a i mean i i think it our children are going to be especially sensitive to it especially young children but i think it has an impact on everybody i see so one of the things because i was you know i was talking to people during co during covet about this and one of the adjectives that kept coming up was one of these two adjectives things seem unreal or they seem surreal right there's a sense of losing touch with reality because the capacities for joint attention were being truncated or they were being they were being transferred to this weird kind of joint attention that we have right here right now which is very odd for us it's a very odd kind of joint detention yeah and that that gives me another layer of understanding of the of the floyd protest because you know for me that's been something that i've been trying to understand so much but that all of a sudden puts another layer on it which is that people for months had been starved of joint attention in many ways right you know whether going with whether it was sports or religion or whatever clubs that people participated whatever concerts people went to you know and they it wasn't necessarily a conscious thing but they were just starved for attention and then all of a sudden when this point of attention very salient point of attention appeared on their horizon and the opportunity to kind of join together and celebrate or i mean it wasn't celebrate but in the in the general sense of just kind of getting angry about the same thing and and and so it just it just exploded into these into these moments i think that's true i mean you and i talked about it besides whatever and i think there were legitimate uh reasons about social justice and about you know inequity and i think those are real but i think above and beyond that there was something else that was being poured into this um and it's it's still reverberated through i i think you you see that in in there's many instances of this kind of hunger one of the things we're discovering about attention is not only is it bottom up it grabs our attention it goes from features to the gestalt and top down we can direct it from sort of larger gestalts to specific details right but there's also what you might call a historical dimension so attention is not only organizing up down it's organizing past present so your sort of your previous history of what you're paying attention to has an impact on what what will jump out for you is salient right now um and so now we with with tim leathercraft and blake richards and i we try to actually put that into our relevance realization model that there's these opposing tendencies um to try and um stay with something if it's sort of similar to your past patterns of attention but there's also good evidence for what's called inhibition on return we we also want to move away from what we've paying a lot of attention to and so these two things are playing each other out and i think if you push the attentional pendulum you'll allow me that metaphor too far one way and starve people there's going to be there's going to be a rebound the other way people are going to hunger for like you said something that um can be co-realized uh through joint attention yeah and it can also make you understand the problem of let's say ill practice asceticism right where that if you're not careful asceticism can actually lead to to excesses back and you know like the idea of a diet right the the idea of people dieting where they they they're able they try to just like not pay attention to the thing and then all of a sudden it just cracks and you know yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly um that's a very good analogy i mean the the the thing is to try to get the the virtue the golden mean of esthesis right of of discipline of spiritual exercises um well anesthesia in the traditional sense is always a redirecting of attention yes you hear it all the time people tell you don't just fast if you fast and you don't pray you're in trouble like you're going to be in way more trouble than you were before you started fasting again when you fast you have to go to church pray you have to redirect your attention or else it's not not only is it not going to work but it's going to be damaging to your soul that's why i argue that we shouldn't just practice in the mindfulness traditions and this is western it's not it's it's it's not it's not you know it's ethnocentric right we shouldn't just practice meditation right which is a kind of thought fast we should also practice contemplation which is and now once you've opened up that space through the thought fast what can you theoria what can you contemplate that you couldn't see before that's part of that why leo and i made that argument about the fact that we we we've we've reduced all this whole ecology to this one practice and then we've reduced that practice like the definition of mindfulness is you know paying attention to the present moment that's that that's not what satie means right and i understand that's good language of training that kabetzin used but that's not good language of explaining what's going on when you're trying to meditate for example all right so here's going to be my this is going to be my big push on you here so get ready okay that's fine you don't have to push on me all right so so human beings have capacity for attention and it seems like that capacity for attention has a certain uh priority and and that priority seems to be personal like that is that we pay attention to people first face basis yes we pay attention to faces to people and then then we can't pay attention to more abstract things but those abstract things even those abstract things often end up concentrating in a person right so you you want to train but you can't so you get a coach and then all of a sudden you can train like why is it that you can train because you have a coach but you can't train if you don't have a coach it's because the coach is focusing your desire for attention into something into a person that's that's actually communicating and directing and and becoming like a node for for even the the more abstract hellos that you have yes and so this is this is i guess this is my big question in terms of the manner in which reality exists which is that i've been positing like i've been really working towards positing that reality has even though i i agree with you that you could say that the infinite is transpersonal yeah but that as this infinite manifests itself in the world then it tends to take personal it tends to accommodate interpersonal beings uh and so my question is always for you is always to say like the idea of transpersonal not transpersonal in the sense of beyond humans but i mean i mean trans person in the sense of beyond humans but personal beings that are not human let's say the idea of angels and the idea of bodhisattvas or the idea of of god's little g gods as being the manner in which reality presents itself to us in the manner in which we encounter it let's say well and paul's made us paul benducle he's made a cinema argument okay all right i didn't know that and he asked me to critique it and he he he invoked pascal's difference between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse and his argument of the spirit of finesses is most appropriately afforded in personal relationships um and and so let me try and first of all strengthen your position for you before i demolish it no no um so like we're talking about joint attention and i was talking about its development and you can link this to vygotsky and to a lot of like so let me give you another example of prioritizing and paying attention this is an experiment that's done i've seen a video of this experiment um so give me a moment and then i'm going to go somewhere with this and and you're going to see uh how it's going to strengthen your point and then and and then uh and then i'll i'll i'll offer my cautions i'm not trying to demolish i don't want to do that um so you what you have is you have the you so what you have is there's two participants in the experiment there's a chimp an adult champ and a four-year-old girl um of course this was replicated with lots of individuals so i'm just using this for the purposes of narrative right and you have this box right and you have the adult come in and first of all you show the chimp the box has all these buttons and levers and and the the human does this very complicated pattern of pushing buttons and levers and at the end a candy comes out and he eats it and what's really fascinating is the chimp watches once and then replicates the pattern and gets the the the chocolate or whatever the candy and you go wow that's impressive and there's some there's some evidence that their ability their working memory attention is stronger than ours because we sacrifice a lot for language yeah and then you bring in the four-year-old girl and you sort of i picture myself as cheering i've got a little human flag go human right and they show the girl this and you know when you she just takes one and she replicates it and she gets the candy and goes wow that's cool now and this is the experiment now you bring in the thing the box but now the box is plastic and completely transparent all the same levers and buttons you bring the chimp in the human adult goes through all of this and it's clear that the only thing that that releases the candy is the last action all the other actions do nothing right so that you does this and then the chimp and the chip sort of looks at the human being like and and just pushes pulls the last thing and gets the candy and you go oh that's smart now you bring in the four-year-old girl and she watches and the adult does this and she can see that only the last thing releases the candy what does she do she repeats everything the adult did and you go oh are four-year-olds stupider than chance and then you realize no no no the human is playing the long game the girl is thinking the girl is thinking obviously she's not shooting yeah she's thinking this adult probably sees things i cannot yet see this adult probably knows things that i do not yet know i'm going to imitate them because that will allow me to transcend my own perspective it's very hard to transcend your perspective from within your perspective but if a child imitates an adult's perspective they get the capacity to transcend their own bias and what and bogotsky's theory is and here's the joint attention and the looping we do this enough until i can do it without you being around i do it imaginally i i i imagine in the sense that you're there i don't mean an image but my metacognition is basically well what do you think about all the imagistic language what are you doing metacognition oh you rise above your cognition and you look at it there's no space there like so what we're doing is we're imaginally augmenting our ability and that's what internalization is i and you we got a capacity to become metacognitive aware of ourselves and transcend ourselves by imitatively internalizing other people do you see why that strengthens your argument deeply it because it means i my capacity for self-transcendence development transformation comes for how deeply i can internalize you and then you pair that with pauline's idea that i can internalize you better the more i can indwell you the more i can see things from your perspective the more i can right so i i want to indwell you as deeply as possible and that allows me to internalize you and vice versa hopefully too hopefully it's not one way and consumatory right and what that means is that my capacity for self-transcendence is deeply dependent on a memetic ability in a profound way it's a two-way it's this joint attention this looping the sentry motor this mine site resonance and so it's deeply within us that we transcend by internalizing personifications and i'll use that as a neutral term yeah is that is that is that is that now i think that strengthens your case tremendously i think so i think i think definitely i think so and i think that you can understand that as if you think about it bottom bottom up as scaling up right that's scaling up in terms of personalities into into kind of personalities that that are beyond just the person i meet you know during a meeting or whatever but that they would become figures of it of personal attention that are communal right that are that can be something like like a god or like an angel or like a you know something which binds our community together and so we imitate athena or we imitate uh you know aries very much sorry i said very much and and if right if we have a hyper objects of persons like people gathered into hyper objects like athens being right and athena is a way of so george herbert mead had this idea of the generalized other right so that that thing that the little girl just did with the adult imagine trying to do that on a baseball team this is george herbert mead's model right and trying to get that individual personally tailored to each person that's very very hard right and and because you're constantly shifting who you're and so mead argued that we crea we create what he called the generalized other we create kind of this model that is somehow the intersection of all these individual models and by relating to that i can effectively coordinate with all these other people and they with me the generalized other so you can think of athena as athena is not just this like oh yeah right but she is a generalized other of athens that people could internalize to become an athenian in a very profound sense yeah so we're talking about it bottom up like because it's just it just it just i think in our context it's easier to talk about bottom up also to help understand its relationship to like say something like cognitive science uh and so is there this is also something that i'm interested in is there a way in which that generalized other would find a head in a in a you know an embodied person so you take the take the baseball team right so the baseball team creates a generalized through which to act but then that generalized other will be kind of embodied in the team captain so it's like the team captain is kind of raised up and named and then he he's not the generalized other but he becomes something like the it becomes something like the like the the the place through which we can attend and then it'll it'll kind of stream down into the to the team so the team can cohere a way of thinking about it is the the formal cause of the generalized other gets transformed into an efficient cause that we can actually have joint detention upon something like that is that is that fair to what you're saying no that that makes sense and it could explain all the the traditions of the kind of the god embodied in the king let's say that you find in egypt and in all these different cultures you know the idea of how the you know or the the the emperor the idea of the divine emperor all of these ways in which because you know you know like i'm a christian i obviously don't agree with doing this but when they worship the emperor they didn't worship the emperor right they worshiped the emperor's genius yes exactly right and so they worship like a like a transpersonal version of the emperor which was embodied in the emperor as a focal point for our attention but we did nobody thought that the physical emperor was let's say a guy he was a guy right he right there was something above him which was calling us into into our communion you could say yeah there's the empire and the empire is a hyper object and everybody's prosperity and peace depended on being in right relationship with that hyper object but uh hyper objects require like we just they require some right something or they require a personal being that we can relate to that we can relate to so that we can properly do the internalization so we can do the we can imaginaly not imaginary we can imaginaly uh uh enter into right relationship with the empire we can be devoted to the empire and internalize the empire's values and normativity by being devoted to the genius the capacity of the emperor to lead and be the voice of the empire yes very much and and i for me i i would say that another great this is how i've tried to understand and again i don't mean this disrespectfully how about i've tried to understand prophecy i don't see prophecy as fortune telling i don't see it like that i see prophecy is doing exactly what you're saying that the the prophet somehow takes something and becomes right the vehicle of the form there's a there's a there's a tradition in later neoplatonism of distinguishing between the form and the vehicle by which the the form can come into um efficient causation right um this and this is what this was one of the origins of this cr the idea that's now become this new age idea of the astral body and all that the akama was this that there's a part of us that right the ontology is not important the point i'm trying to make is that there was this distinction between the form and the vehicle right um so you know there's the form of the good but it needs a particular vehicle by which it instantiates itself in a human being yeah that makes sense because then then that idea of prophecy is far closer to my own understanding which is that prophecies don't just predict the future they predict the future to the extent that they manifest pattern like they they're actually showing you a pattern of how reality manifests itself to you and in that context then of course it predicts the future because it kind of is able to pull out of even of how a society lays itself out and is able to understand that here's a here are some inevitable patterns in which in how something will like an identity will will go to its end let's say so then it imagistically embodies through through these these kind of very very imagistic stories how you know what that means um and that's very much like the platonic notion of a form is not some sort of like per like the notion of a triangle isn't like a perfect triangle it's much better and this is happening and i'm actually involved in this work to try and think of the for the platonic forms phenomenologically like the ideas for marlo ponti like i can show you this right and you never see the object you always see aspects aspects of it yeah yeah there's multi it's multi-aspectual but there's a through line they're not fragmented and that through line also looks up to the through line of yourself which is also also a through line of all of the multi aspects of you right and but there the the the through line of the multi-espectuality is not another aspect that's the mistake right it's not another aspect the form but what do we do what we do is we tr you know we usually draw things from a standard position because that's a vehicle that's supposed to stand in for something that we can't actually capture in a picture so the form comes into a vehicle by which we can face it yeah to use some of our language is that lining up with what you're no that makes that makes a lot of sense and i think the things you're saying are going to be very useful for materialists to understand what it is that we're talking about i always have that fear that some people watch our videos and have no idea what we're even what we're even talking about but i think what you're saying is is really appropriate um and so so this is like i think that even until now like the way you're talking about it and the way that i'm talking about it being cautious in the sense of let's say talk about imaginally interacting with these uh these these uh let's say these these beings that are but the question is like my proposition is something like those beings exist as much as you do right the the trans-personal like the beings that that bind the community together and become take up a face and become principalities for the world to exist they have as much existence as a person they just exist at another level let's say so first of all that's the big that's my big that that's that baby is the like you could say that that's what makes me explicitly religious person it's something like that you know yeah first of all let me let let me try and give a lot of ground towards that position given what i've already said so what i should therefore be rationally consistent with i've already admitted the existence of hyper objects i've already you know the work i do on dialogos that right that there there's there's you know a dynamical system takes shape that something beyond all of the individual consciousnesses and personalities there when we were talking with jordan and bishop i i would use this language and i don't think it's an appropriate i'm using in a greek fashion there was a logos that was present beyond all of us and we started getting caught up in it and following it yeah and i think that's completely appropriate to say and i i've experienced that i've seen people from religious and non-religious experiences encircling and other things they they encounter that i want to acknowledge all of that i also want to acknowledge um and this can you know comes out of corbin and even arabi and and a whole bunch of work you know you know what a heads-up display is like in a in a cockpit for a pilot so you you the pilot the pilot can't afford to look down divert their attention yeah and so what you do is you project onto the screen a bunch of things so they can actually look look through the screen and get the information at the same time well you know like pokemon go where you have augmented reality here's a proposal to you to now i'm doing it in good faith i'm trying to move towards what you said so give me give me give me a bit of patience if we properly distinguish between the imaginal and the imaginary that the imaginal is transjective and not subjective the way the imaginary is in corban sense right the imaginal i think it's very reasonable and i see and dan and i published on this we see the scientists doing this for the imaginal augmentation of reality so for example let me get let me give you a concrete example the scientists are getting these flat black and white pictures from the rovers on mars what they're looking for in the researchers are people who can get the sense of being on mars of being the rover like seeing as the rover does right and what do they do they by the way what does the scientists do they do this loop first of all they they they identify with the rover they don't say move the rover there they say we should go there right the rover's we right right or and then and then they also they so they indwell the rover but they also internalize it so you'll get a scientist saying uh so say oh this is what we need to do you put your phone front and she's on a wheelchair and she's and she does this these are the we need to do this and she enacts and embodies the rover rover right yeah right and and and then you'll get these literal rocket scientists saying stuff like this is almost a verbatim quote jonathan you know i was in my gardening and my right wrist kept getting stuck and then i came to the lab and spirit that's ironically one of the names of the rovers its right wheel kept getting stuck and i don't know i don't believe in magic but you know there's some kind of sympathy hahaha and they lack right and that's what i mean and what do they do with those pictures in order to do that you know those wonderful panoramic pictures they send back they're not for the science they're for us yeah what they do is they take these pictures and they color them and they scribble on them and they mark them all out protesty calls it drawing as and all of that imaginal work allows them to draw out so that they can be on mars and be the rover this is what we've recently published on this is not some you know airy fairy stuff i think right i know what that's like when i'm doing tai chi when i'm trying right that in tai chi they'll say like you know like imagine that you're pushing on a ball and you go why and then you do that you go oh that's why and by doing the imaginal thing you you interact with the world in the right way so you see things you wouldn't otherwise see does that make sense the imaginal augmentation yeah no that makes sense okay now let's go with what we talked about before that we can have distributed cognition and we can have shared attention and we can have shared imaginal augmentation that puts us into reality with hyper objects i think that is again you might find this too reductionist but for me i can see a lot of what i call this serious play of religion doing exactly that yeah right you got this shared joint attention and you're getting the distributed cognition and you're allowing for that shared imaginal augmentation of reality perception ontological depth perception so that people can see and realize hyper objects that are otherwise invisible to them like mars is when all i give you is the flat photograph if you'll allow me analogy religion is taking the flat photographs that were given and turning them into me being present on mars yeah in a way that allows me to do the science i can't do the science on mars unless i get that sense of presence okay so then maybe that's not everything you want but no it's not everything i want but so would you apply that process to you that is would you because you because when i think my difficulty is that i'm not sure in your model like if you have this idea that we are let's say intelligent beings and then yeah let's say and then then then these other beings that we're talking about right they're kind of projections of our intelligence or whether or not those being those intelligent beings exist as much as i do as as in the same process that is like let's say i also have all these parts and all these thoughts and all these these these distractions and attentions and and aspects of me that are coordinating and are are being pulled into the same attentions in order for me to exist as a as a unified being let's say that's exactly by the way what moles says attention is it's cognitive unison and i if you would ask me do i think and and and i think like i think this is a very platonic model do i think that distributed cognition has a collective intelligence that is more than the sum of the individual intelligences within it yes i i think that's this goes back to hitchens back in you know cognition in the wild who navigates a shift there's no person that navigates a ship it's a crew and a bunch of equipment and that system has the intelligence to grasp the hyper object of the ocean and the hyper object of the ship and navigate and coordinate them together and and and there's been some pretty gruesome experiments showing that collective intelligence can do things that individual intelligence is a person who literally i don't know how this got through ethics wired rats together so that their brains were wired and that and that that group of rats could solve problems that the individual rats couldn't solve really yeah that doesn't surprise us think about the power of the internet that is given by distributed computation no computer can do this but the network can create this hyper object you called it earlier a god right that is like so powerful uh for us in so many ways um so do i think that that and i think this is one of the great insights of the platonic idea of dialectic it's not the heidelian dialectic the platonic dialectic is we can learn an art and that's how it's taught about coordinating individual cognition into distributed cognition so we can access collective intelligence and perhaps transform it into participate better way of putting it yeah participate in its transformation into collective wisdom yeah that i mean i think it's interesting because there there are these even like an optimistic theories about the idea that every time two beings are in relation with each other they have an angel right so there's a so like if i'm talking to you and i'm actually in communion with you then there's an angel which is acting as a principality and and becoming the intelligence in into which our communion is kind of rising up into that intelligence and i would add one more thing to it which also strengthens your case right and you've heard me talking about this a lot right i don't it's not just emergence up right there's also there's not only the ruling in of the modeling there's the ruling out the emanation that is constraining how these things can take shape they take certain shapes that's why there are these reliable persistent patterns for good and for ill right but there are these reliable like you mentioned it in prophecy the prophet can say like there's a reliable ways this can go this can go this way and it can go this way right and he's often addressing right he's often addressing almost always right i'm sorry sometimes the prophets were she but mostly they were he right uh deborah was a prophet i know that but right but uh but but they are almost always identifying like israel in the collective not just sometimes they address the king but often the king is just the result representative for israel yeah right and there's a spirit that they're trying to address right of that right and so i i i would say all of that now where you and i probably disagree and i'll just oh all right so i i'm trying to do genuine deal logos i'm trying to thank you yeah yeah what it is you know whether or not uh i don't think i have to be really careful i think there is a proper way of talking about something like god you know in spinoza's sense or in the non-theistic sense your notion of that there's something like the pattern of relevance realization in reality realization that is analogous to the relevance realization and cognition i took i take that seriously i think that's right um but i'm i and this is where i don't think there's a consciousness for that collective intelligence um and i don't and i don't think there's an agency to it in um the same way we understand the agency of living things there might be something analogous i'm open and by the way this is not just this is not just me and you'll find this amusing given our our how we came to know each other many people talk about um the the power of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition as a zombie intelligence oh really yeah that's the term that's used so the idea is that that consciousness one of its properties might be that it only exists within a determinant range the things that you so even within your own brain within your own body and body brain like you're not conscious of many levels but you're not conscious of your neurons you're not confident right and there's lots of things at a higher level like these hyper objects you can't be conscious of them you can be conscious of reference to them but i i can't like there's no way in which i can be conscious of global warming like i can't just i can't do it right it doesn't make any sense i can think about it and i can can be conscious of my thinking of it but it's i can't be conscious of global warming the way i can be conscious of this object so wouldn't but wouldn't the fact that for thousands of years and and our let's say period being a complete exception to that for thousands of years communities encountered these these transpersonal beings as being both conscious and having agency and that they represented them as such and and talked about them as such and worshipped them as such and et cetera et cetera like even without talking about god in the supreme kind of infinite way like i don't want to talk about that too much i want to talk about the intermediary beings they're easier to to to keep they're easier to talk about i just wanted to be i just wanted to be clear that i wasn't sort of trying to deny uh a diviner sacred status to things above us i i wanted to be clear about that i wanted to be very clear about that okay so we'll put that aside as long as you acknowledge that uh that's the point i wanted to make yeah yeah and so it but you know um and you won't agree with it but there's a there's a brilliant uh uh anthropologists out there lerman and she wrote a book and she has a bunch of people how god becomes real and she talks about how right how what you would call gods or spirits become real for people and um and she talks about the fact that we have this two different senses of real um we may have three given that hyper objects are real for us and maybe the they all bleed together in important ways that's something the phenomenology i'm trying to work out right now with other people but she talks about that you know these beings are real but not in the same way that other things are real for it she so sorry this might come off as disrespectful but i'm just quoting and she's not being disrespectful either but one of the groups she was studying was a group of evangelical christians and for whom jesus is real in the way you're talking about now i know that jesus is also part of the trinity but i'm just trying to get like call it the spirit of christ or something like that whatever and she said you know jesus is real but you don't ask him to do your homework right that's what one evangelical christian said which was like whoa that's a really interesting thing to say you can ask him to help you do your homework but you don't say no i'm not going to do my homework i'm going to ask jesus to do it now that there could be for moral or religious reasons but it was clear in that that what the person was trying to convey that right they were trying to convey this sense that that the way these beings interact with for lack of a better word physical reality is not the way physical things interact with physical reality right yeah but it's but it's a hierarchy so it's like you could say something like your finger doesn't ask you to clot the cut on it right your finger doesn't ask you to clot the blood in your finger but you're still doing it through your body that is your body is the manner in which you manifest yourself and so that's why he's saying jesus doesn't do your homework you do your homework but you can do that in a way that's participating in the body of christ you could say right and so but notice what's happening there right it that seems to mean that their realness as presence requi is always vectored through us as participating in them right because we're like parts of the body like just like your fingers are part of you then we are part of christ like christ manifests himself we are that's why he's like a higher consciousness right totally so but what i would then say is right um for example you don't think that because we've networked all of the computers together that the computer the internet has consciousness do you i'm pretty sure there's a god behind that i'm sorry i'm gonna freak people out by saying that i've been pointing to it very closely actually i do think the internet is acting as a body for a god i do think so and i think that the real the fact that it's moving without anybody being able to stop it or control it or direct it completely i think the fact that it's it's i agree with you on that so i agree on that and and that's a tricky thing because young said that's the definition of spirit if it acts on its own right uh right if it has a life of its own and a mind of its own right that's definitely when we we we are we are liable to attribute spirit to it uh but i would say just again you know people have also perennially done that with forests and with oceans and rivers and i don't think that rivers have consciousness or or forests have consciousness well it's not the river that has consciousness it's it's the angel that has consciousness right just like your hand doesn't have consciousness it's the fullness of you in relation to your hand that has consciousness yeah but see this is and this is where we differ i don't think there's a way of separating my consciousness from my embodiment no i agree no same same even for the river let's say but look you have a heart out now i i don't want to pull you this is like you're just getting into the good stuff so so so let's just plan for another another discussion we haven't talked oh i like this i like this i i i hope you see that you know i i i i'm not some dullard about this i'm trying to uh i'm trying to uh yeah jp's very sweet about this right he he sees me as trying to get as far as i can by the way thank you so much uh uh for introducing me to him and paul did that too and your tutelage of him i mean it's uh and i hope this doesn't sound condescending it's meant as complementary it's really wonderful watching him flourish oh yeah it's really it's really wonderful watching him flourish and thrive and uh i mean jp is young so so it's like i see the future as being extremely uh there are so many possibilities ahead of him so i'm excited to watch that too so yeah yeah so let's let's let let's so let's let's make it a part one and a part two then sure let's pick it up around this because uh uh i i yeah we're right on the cusp here of because there is i'll ask you to consider a possible tension between participation and independence uh how we get how we get those together uh because that's that's for me the nub of the issue all right i participate in my body and i don't think that john can be separable or independent from it right and i get that i'm not reducible to the the descriptions of the parts of my body i can see to all of that and i think i've conceded on all of the examples i've talked about right yeah that's definitely i'd say i'll just write out say that's love but we can talk about that we'll talk about that and just open up that can and then finish the discussion so so thanks john thank you so much that's a great thing to lay on the table thank you so much this is good thanks and uh and everybody also don't forget to check out our conversation with jordan peterson and bishop barron uh it's bound to make some waves and so we're excited about that and uh also looking forward to a conversation with bishop baron that i will have uh i don't know exactly when it's gonna happen also pretty much very soon and i hope john that you also might have the chance to uh to talk to him as well because i i could see that he was like oh who's this there's something that he's saying that is just it was kind of popping up in his eyes so hopefully you you can have a conversation with them as well he he was complimentary to me in the blog that i read so i'll reach out to him and have a conversation with him i very much like that um so thank you very much and all right and so everybody thank you and we'll see you soon bye-bye take care bye-bye

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 64,041

Keywords: symbolism, myths, religion

Id: Y9ZaFNIH0co

Length: 73min 45sec (4425 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021