Going to draw together all his work. Present an overall unified argument. Present pieces might have seen before.
Started when he got interested in a growing confluence between people interested in buddhism and cognitive science
Mindfulness revolution: mindfulness being mentioned everywhere.
Why is this happening? What do we mean by mindfulness? Going to talk about this.
A lot of other things convergent with this growing interest in buddhism and cognitive science. Increasing interest in the topic of wisdom.
Books offering to train in wisdom becoming popular ex: How to be a Stoic, Massimo Pugliuci - going to talk about that.
Increasing academic and public interest in psychedelics
Radical things with them: treatment released addiction. Increases recovery rate. Healing rate up to 80%
Why is there this interest?
Topic of happiness: we’ve always been a happiness related culture - but people more and more talking not just about sheer contentedness but meaning as well. Meaning in life is predictive of well-being, how well you are doing in your life
No-coincidence - all of this happening now.
Unifying account for why this is happening.
Set of dark factors converging as well:

Seems to be a mental health crisis.
Suicide spiking
Increasing sense of losing touch with reality
Increase of nihilism, cynicism, deep frustration and utility
Abandonment of trust in public institutions
Losing faith in government, judicial system
Participation in religion, clubs, organizations in decline
V argued with Chris Mastropietro there’s an increasing sense of more and more bullshit everywhere, spiking
People getting the sense that spending too much time in virtual environment. Increasing evidence between connection in social media and depression, loneliness
Entertainment we seek and mythologies we like: like zombies, superheroes
Mythological forms are expressions of a cultural sense that we are stuck somehow.
People talking about crisis and collapse, apocalypse, Collapse of civilization.

Negative factors also have a unifying explanation.
Positive and negative factors all point to a unified explanation. Idea that our culture is experiencing a profound meaning crisis.

Environmental crisis and socio-economic crisis as well.

Culture experiencing a meaning crisis: Being discussed in academia needs to be brought to public at large.
3 crises interdependent.
What is this meaning that is coming into crisis. How do we generate the wisdom to generate enhance this meaning
Wisdom about realizing meaning in life in a profound way
How do we cultivate this wisdom? What are practices people can engage in to address need to cultivate wisdom: ex: Mindfulness
What is this meaning? Why do we hunger for it. How do we cultivate the wisdom to realize it?
Get into a historical account of meaning.
Talk about connection meaning, wisdom and self-transcendence
Why do human beings seek to alter their consciousness?
Why does intelligence need to be conjoined to an altered state of consciousness
Shamanism, and ritual, and the flow state (in the zone).
Psychedelic experiences.
Mystical experiences that can occur
Awakening experiences. Come back from the mystical experience that was somehow more real than this. Have to change the world and myself.
Transformative experience. Good research shows they are right. Their lives get better
Propose a scientific account of what enlightenment is. And why it alleviates suffering.
Endemic capacity for self deception
Bullshit is endemic
Foolishness. Something different from ignorance. Lack of wisdom.
Lack of agency. Self-destructive behaviour. Very same machinery that makes adaptively intelligent makes susceptible to foolishness.
Absurdity, alienation, futility, horror
Horror: grip on reality being undermined
Meaninglessness, despair.
Moving from the historical account of the origin of the meaning crisis to the cognitive scientific investigation of meaning.
Meaning is a metaphor: something in their life that is analogous to how a sentence has meaning. The pieces fit together in some way. They make an impact on your cognition. Connect you to the world in some way.
Have to unpack that metaphor: what does it point to?
Some of the most meaningful experiences are those can’t put into words
Different types of knowing. We’ve reduced it to one thing: a certain type of belief. Belief centric. But need to have a more expanded version of knowing. More to knowing than having justified true belief. There’s something to knowing how to catch a baseball, what it is like to be having this experience right now, what it’s like to be in something you are participating in - like a relationship
Therapy: trying to recover these lost kinds of knowing. Kind of insight needed. Transformation not of your beliefs but how you see things, your sense of self, sense of realness have to be transformed in therapy
Give us a structural functional account of meaning. What are its mechanisms. How do they function.
Historical account and structural functional account and have them talk to each other.
From that dialogue will propose a real response to the meaning crisis
Not a simple problem. Not a short answer
Complex and difficult problem.
Series going to be several videos long (50!)
Commitment to offer rigorous rational argumentation. Give proper scholastic credit.
Not offering absolute uncontested truth.
This is for people who are coming to this because of a genuine, personal, existential reason
Can’t be unbiased, that’s not a thing. Try and present my arguments and viewpoints. Why they are highly plausible.

24:20: How and why is meaning so much a part of our humanity?

Not the absolute starting point, but a time when many people think our humanity came into form. Kind of humanity we would recognise as us
Upper paleolithic transition. Around 40,000 BCE
Biologically as a species existed much longer than this. Since about 200,000 BCE
Around 40,000 BCE there’s a radical change:

Making art, representational art.
Sculpture, cave paintings, music
Pretty good evidence there’s significant enhancement of cognition: first use of calendars, symbolic representation of phases of moons, days. Keeping track of time to enhance hunting abilities
Developing projectile weapons (neanderthals didn’t have them)
Homo sapiens develop thin spears with bone tip. Light. Spear thrower, and sling. Carry multiple missiles. Requires increased development of frontal lobe -> increased intelligence

Project: working on. Pro-ject - throwing.
Object: thrown against
Subject thrown under
All day long, cognitively throwing.
Throwing is such a complex task. Developing AI to do that is hard problem
What’s going on? Why is all this stuff exploding?
All of this being associated with meaning: art and music, also time being more meaningful
Time and space more meaningful- being used in highly dynamic way in projectile weaponry
Why did it occur?
Lot of good work on this: David Lewis Williams, matt Rossano: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
Did meditating make us human?
Argues radical change in human cognition.
30,000 - 60,000 BCE went through a near extinction event. Maybe to a maximum of 10,000 individuals
Tremendous pressure put on human beings. Move to the coast to try and survive.
Adopted an interesting response to this. Diversified diet. Don’t come up with a technological response, come up with a socio-cognitive response. Create broader trading networks, not as subject to environmental variation.
People start forming broad trading relationships, open up the scale at which human cognition must operate
Developed rituals for dealing with both the environmental challenge and the enhanced social network for dealing with it.
Cognition is participatory - participate in distributed cognition. Large networks of cognition.
Culture networked brains together.
Rituals:

Trading rituals
We take it for granted living in a city. We hang around with strangers. That’s a hard thing. Other species don’t do that
Having to interact with people not in our kinship group, relationships
Rituals enhance our ability to come into communication and relationships of trust for individuals we do not personally know
We still do stuff that makes no sense: shake hands.

Show you have no weapons
See if your hands are clammy or not
All kinds of intuitive stuff

How are you?

Have become trivial. We don’t want an answer.
Originally reflected something. Have to be able to take your perspective. Know what’s going on in your mind. Move from first person perspective to a third person perspective really well.
Mindsight: (Daniel Siegal): ability to pick up on other people’s mental states
Meta-cognition

Initiation rituals:

Commitment and loyalty to my own group now more questionable. There’s temptation from the stranger (now part of all of our myths)
Initiation rituals, show commitment to the group
Often require risk, threat, sacrifice
Often very traumatic. Put in situations of pain, fear
Why? If they go through pain and fear shows they are really committed to you
Cognitively: have to improve ability to regulate emotion
Decenter. Let yourself be in the hands of other people
Having tremendous impact on cognition.

Exaptation:

Originally from biology Micahel Anderson: brain operates
Exaptation: using tongue to speak, but tongues didn’t evolve to speak
Tongues evolved to move food around in mouth and poison detectors
Highly sensitive highly flexible muscle.
Also in the air passageway (bad design), tongue and interrupt airflow. That’s what need for speech
Brain will develop mechanism designed for one thing, learn to reuse it for another thing
Enhanced mental abilities from trading rituals exapted into shamanic rituals
Shamanism; cultivated practice for altering consciousness that taps into and expats this enhanced mindset, manipulate and control mental states
Shaman - archetypal figure. Wise old man. Merlin, Yoda
They are the best health care going to have for a long time.
V doesn’t believe in supernatural abilities. He seeks another reason for why shamans so effective.
Plausible case made that advent of shamanism explains why humans capable of sudden expansion of cognition
Not a hardware change: not changing significantly. Much more likely its a software change in how people are using the brain.

Psychotechnology:

Technology means systematic use of a tool
Natural born cyborg: brain evolved to use tools. Brain starts to model tools as part of body. Ex; feel the end of car when parking
A physical tool fits your biology and enhances it: bottle, fits hand and carry liquids
A psychotechnology: fits your brain and enhances how it operates
Ex: literacy: not born literate. Born linguistic, learning how to talk. For most of history illiterate
Literacy standard set of tools, standardize how to process information. Don’t have to hold all these terms in mind can leave them there on the board
Can write stuff down and come back to it later.
Can take my brain now, and link it to my brain back then.
Can also network my brain with your brain.
If took literacy out of brain, can’t imagine words, can’t put stuff on paper, brain is the same, but the problems you can solve collapse dramatic
Psychotechnologies enhance software of cognitive machinery

Shamanism: set of psycho technologies for altering state of consciousness and enhancing cognition
Rise in neo-shamanism.
Shaman does a lot interesting things to get into a particular state.

Sleep deprivation
Intense periods of singing, dancing, chanting
Imitation, put on thee clothing mask represent some other figure
Periods of social isolation, go out into the wilderness
Psychedelics
Awakening experiences.
Shaman trying to disrupt the normal ways in which find patterns in the world

9 dot problem. Have to join all 9 dots with 4 straight connected lines

Think its easy at first. Harder problem.

Have to think outside the box. You projected a pattern here. A square. And engaged unconsciously your connect the dot skills as a kid
Project a pattern and activate appropriate skills. Locked and blocked. Can’t solve the problem because of how framed it. Have to disrupt framing in order to get an insight.
Saying to people: think outside the box does not help them with this problem. Giving them the belief they have to go outside the box does not help resolve the problem.
What’s involved is not believing, it’s knowing how to go outside the box. How to change your perception. How to alter what’s real to you.
Shamanism is a set of disruptive intentional practices to get enhances insight into patterns of the environment that other people may not be picking up on. Enhanced mindsight into other people.
Sense of participatory knowing. When the shaman is enacting the animal. The shaman is becoming the deer. Trying to get together the sense, perspective, skills of the deer, the way the deer thinks. By becoming the deer, enhances ability to track and find the deer.
Shaman combines a lot of things that are for us in separate individuals

Highly charismatic
Imagine if could take a rock star, a super therapist, artist, put them in one individual and they come to you when you are sick. They can enhance your ability to enhance your own placebo effect.
30% of current medicine is placebo effect

Shamans are enhancing their capacity for cognition
Next video going to come back to the shamans. See what they were doing.
Notice in order to tap into all these kinds of knowing. Shaman manipulating the meaning of things. Not the same thing as being a charlatan
Connection between meaning making, altered states of consciousness, enhanced capacity to be in touch with the world
Shaman = one who knows, one who sees, one who has insight
Wizard - wise person

Books mentioned in this video

Michael Anderson - After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain
Barry Boyce (Editor) - The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditation Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life
Andy Clark - Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
Michel Ferrari and Nic Weststrate (Editors) - The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom: From Contemplative Traditions to Neuroscience
Harry Frankfurt – On Bullsh*t
David Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
L. A. Paul - Transformative Experience
Massimo Pigliucci - How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life
•Matt Rossano - Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
Daniel Siegel - Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
Steve Taylor - Waking From Sleep: Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent
John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic - Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis
Michael Winkelman - Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing

•Susan Wolf - Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

Episode 2 - Flow, Metaphor and the Axial Revolution

https://youtu.be/aF9HeXg65AE

Flow state

Shaman engages in practices put significant chances in their attention
Significant disruptive strategies:

Sleep deprivation
Sex privation
Social isolation
Psychedelics
Extended chanting

Designed to bring about radical changes in the way bran operating
Getting into the flow state
Flow state: being in the zone. Involved in a demanding task.

Demands of the situation goes just slightly beyond your skill ability, get in the flow channel, when I can just enough exapt skills and put everything I’ve got into it, in the flow state.
If skills exceed demand get into boredom
If demands exceed the skills = anxiety.
Flow induction machines
Video games: reliable way of inducing flow state in people.
Play jazz, do martial arts, rock climbing -> flow state
Not the same as physical pleasure. Connected to meaning in life. More get into flow state more say life is meaningful
Universal: people across cultures, socio-economic groups report being in the flow state
Universals are important in cognitive science. It gives profound insight into the machinery.
What it like to be in the flow state:

Feel deeply at one with things
Ex: martial arts feel deeply connected to opponent
Spontaneity. Sense of at-one-ment
Like the shaman dancing and chanting, tremendous metabolic effort, but at another level feels effortless
Sense of time passing differently
Sense of self dramatically altered - kind of self consciousness disappears
Internal dialogue, self-presentation, rumination goes away
Super-salient: kind of brightness and vividness in a video game. World seems more intense
People really like this experience. It seems to be where they do their best work, where they excel.

Optimal experience:

Best experience one can have
Doing one’s best at something one excels in

Why is the flow state so good
What you need to get into the flow state:

Skills and demand to be matched
Tight coupling between you and environment
Clear information
Failure has to matter

Kind of training help enhances flow state: Mindfulness training
Ex: rock climbing

Climbing, frame and find patterns
Patterns in knowing how to make sense of things. If that breaks down you’re stuck. Have to break that framing. Restructure what you find relevant and salient, then change yourself to fit that, then refit yourself to the rockface
Then have to do it again, and again
Jazz musician
Cascade of insights

When have an insight - a ha! Like a flash. If took that aha, and extended it: ahaaaaaaa
The more you flow, the more you train your ability for insight and direct interaction with your environment.
Video game: The problem is the environment is not the real world. The shaman is flowing in the real world

Implicit Learning

Not just insight cascade, capacity for implicit learning
Reber: work on how can link strings of numbers and letters together

Generate huge numbers of strings, show them to people
Then generate two kinds:

1 by artificial rules
2 by different rules
Mix them up

Can you tell me the strings that belong with the one before?
People score well above chance
Ask people why?

I don’t know, just feel it
Give some explanation - they are deceiving themselves because doesn’t predict success

We are picking up on complex patterns outside of our conscious awareness
Experiment: feeling of being stared at:

Had someone in a room, can’t see or hear or feel
People would come in and stare at them
People reporting well above chance
Turned out that if you made a slight change to experiment wouldn’t replicate
First one tell if were correct or not - researchers thought they were introducing people into the room randomly, actually had a pattern
Person was implicitly learning the pattern because given feedback
Take away feedback back to chance

A lot of what looks like psychic abilities is picking up on complex patterns in the environment
Hogarth: educating intuition

What we call intuition is a real thing
Not magical
Result of your implicit learning
Ability to detect patterns and just don’t know how

Ex: know how far to stand from someone, what angle to stand, etc.

If ask how do that? Don’t know, just know how to do it
When people don’t know how to do it it creeps you out

Implicit learning: intuition and bias are different things that are confused

intuitionWhen we think its going well
bias/prejudice when we think its going back

Two kinds of patterns in environment

Correlations (does not mean causation):

Ex: how large wedding is and how long wedding lasts
Reason why bigger wedding predict longer marriage is because have financial resources, social network, etc.
Ex: greenhouse gasses going up, caribbean piracy going down
Many patterns are illusory
Bigot picked up on correlative patterns not causal

Causal

Can’t tell people to pick up on patterns deliberately: if tell people to pick up on the pattern it gets worse - it is implicit
What we can do explicitly is to set up the right factors so get on causal patterns
Hogar: want to control the context like science, set up environment situation where can distinguish corr from causal
In experiment try to get very clear information
Look to see chain in one variable linked to change in another
Try and do implicit learning in that context
V: those are the conditions for flow:

Clear information
Tightly coupled feedback
Error matters

Shaman getting into the flow state, insight cascade, enhanced implicit learning, picking up on real complex patterns.
Don’t know how they are doing itt.
Insight and implicit learning enforcing one another
Getting into flow state deeply enhancing of cognition
Don’t know why so insightful, radical at one-ment. Not verbal insights, getting an insight in how the deer moves, how to talk to a person,
Getting something almost like a mystical experience, Shaman - making meaning, singing dancing, telling stories, healing and transforming people
Why does this empower the upper paleolithic era?
Brain learning to get areas that talk to each other than don’t normally talk to one another
Brain scan of someone having psychedelic experience areas are talking to each other than usually don’t.
If have enhanced insight can bridge between them
Capacity for metaphor

Metaphor

Metaphor: to bridge, to carry over, to connect things
Reflect on how thought and language filled with metaphor
Do you see what I’m saying, do you get my point, do you understand it, I’m about half way through this talk
It’s pervasive and profound
All of your cognition, filled and functions through metaphorical enhancement
Why is metaphor so powerful? It’s how you make creative connections between ideas. Connection between science and art.
Shamans enhancing this machinery - connecting areas of brain, massive enhancement of metaphor
Deep connection between how good problem solver you are and capacity for metaphorical thought
Shaman developing psycho technologies to get into flow state, make them more insightful, and generators of metaphor - providing people with the forms of thought allowing them to connect ideas
Carving a figurine connect to ideas of fertility, bone carvings track the moon
Weaving together, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, making more meaning
Hunter gatherer groups with shaman outcompete others
Exapts our basic machinery
Origin of getting high: experience of soul flight, as if going to another world and flying through it
Shaman experiences themselves as if flying through the world
Why would the brain generate this?

Shaman is getting a more comprehensive grasp of more complex patterns
When get a bigger picture of things you are above them,
Oversight of them, or supervision of them
Metaphors
Little whispers of shamanic flight

Neolithic Revolution

10,000 BCE - Neolithic revolution - agriculture
For the first time people start to stay in one place for significant periods of time
Goes through a very long period of development - becomes the ancient world
Stone gives way to metal - bronze age
First great civilizations in Egypt Mesopotamia
Human beings still have rituals, complex systems, engage in altered states of consciousness
Epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian mythology, Sumarian important, long lasting, but modern people do not find them relevant, they are not widely read.
In contrast, Plato, Bible, Confucius probably have read feel are relevant in way people from the bronze age aren’t
Another great change: Axial age

Axial Age

800 BCE - 300 BCE great change
We will find relevant authors from that time period
Something happened here that was formative of us as western civilisation
World civilization
What happened? Why this change?
We don’t quite know. We know the bronze age collapses.
Different discussions about why it collapsed
Gravity of this collapse:

Greatest collapse in civilization world has ever known
More cities go out of existence at this time than any other time in history
Greatest loss of literacy
Collapse of trade
Closest thing world has experienced to apocalypse
What happens here is a dark age

Before this had titanic empires, lasting milenia then they disappear
Once empires pass out of existence get a lot of little small scale societies, people barely hanging on, demand on cognition to adapt
(Evolutionary) Bottleneck event
People are more willing to experiment, try new things, new forms of social organization
Start to invent new things, new psycho-technologies - standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together - your brain to your own future state of brain, and to others
Something happens in one of the areas hit hardest by the bronze age collapse
Palestine - modern Israel, jordan, land of Canaan
Invented a new kind of literacy
Bronze age had literacy, hieroglyphics and cuneiform, but very hard to learn. Job to be literate: scribe.
Alphabetic literacy gets invented
Invented in Canan, moves to Phoenicians taken up by the Greeks
Canaanite alphabet merges Into archaic hebrew then into hebrew
Powerful psychotechnology
Much more learning, more effective and efficient
Literacy enhances cognition, if give you alphabetic literacy can learn much more effectively
Number of people who can be literate expands
When can write things down can reflect back on my own thoughts and come back to them
Can externalize my thought, correct them
Store them independent of my memory
Second-order thinking

We all have metacognition - awareness of your own mind
One of the things can do with literacy, can internalize literacy into metacognition
Can reflect, store, share with others
Second order thinking is when you internalize a psycho-technology into your meta-cognition and it improves your capacity to critically examine your own thinking and correct your own thinking

What else is being invented at this time?

Coinage: physical technology - but symbolic. Money teaches you think in terms of an abstract symbol system
Numeracy: have to start thinking mathematically
Abstract symbolic logic rigorously being trained

Bring that second order thinking and abstract symbolic thought - getting people having a clear sense of:

How much they can correct their cognition - self-transcendence
Enhancing their awareness of how self-deceptive they are, how much error was in their cognition

Put them together: humans start to change their sense of self and sense of the world
More personal sense of responsibility, change how think morally
Before this time, people think of chaos, and warfare as part of the normal order
Then people thinking: we are responsible for the violence and chaos
The way the mind makes meaning
People understand - there is no enemy greater than your own mind, there is no ally greater than your own mind.
Undisciplined cognition leads to violence through self-deception and illusion but discipline through self-correction and self transcendence leads to wisdom and the ability to reduce the violence and the suffering

Books in the Video:

Karen Armstrong - The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (Editors) – The Axial Age and its Consequences
Eric Cline - 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The Dhammapada
Robert Drews - The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C.
Robin Hogarth – Educating Intuition
Karl Jaspers - The Origin and Goal of Hist
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - Metaphors We Live By
Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Arthur Reber - Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious
Joseph Schear (Editor) - Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate

Episode 3 - Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar

https://youtu.be/C1AaqD8t3pk

The Axial revolution: 800 BCE - 300 BCE
Following the bronze age collapse - greatest collapse the world has seen.
Facilitated experimentation in smaller scale societies
New psychotechnologies:

Alphabetic literacy - area of Canaan -> Hebrews -> Phoncians -> Greeks
Makes literacy more effective, get enhanced awareness of our cognition, its power and peril
enhanced awareness of its capacity for self correction and self transcendence and self deception

Coinage - trains in abstract symbolic thought and more rigorous mathematical reasoning
Gets internalized and exapted - people more aware of themselves. Aware of illusion and self deception and to break out of illusion and self deception.
Contact with a more real world
People more aware of their responsibility for violence and chaos
Transformation of the mind and heart way to alleviate suffering.

Myth

Myth: has come to mean “a falsehood that is widely believed” - not how using it here
Myths aren't false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always with us.
Attempt to take these intuitive implicitly learned patterns and put them into some form that is shareable with ourselves and others
In Bronze age: people experiences the world as continuous cosmos:

Experienced themselves in radical continuity - that sense of connectedness that you see even back in the shamanic world.
People feel there’s a deep connection/continuity between the natural world and the cultural world, and between the cultural world and the world of the gods
Differences in power.
Not odd for animals to talk, or for some people to see themselves as gods (ex: Pharaohs)
We can understand that at most metaphorically but it’s not a metaphor for the ancient Egyptians
Differences between humans and the gods are differences in power
Reality is experienced in power. Gods more powerful/glorious than us
Glorious: shining with power. Not moral term
Continuous cosmos
Moves in great cycles, like the seasons
Ritual behaviour trying to tap into that continuity. Tap into the power of creation. Enact the metaphorical story, the myth of how the universe is created in order to try and tap into that creative power
Constant nostalgia for getting back.
Want to fit into these cycles. If change the future undermining my past
Continuity between natural world, social world, divine word - time is wrapped on itself

Axial age: this way of looking at things is shattered
Totally different worldview gets layered on top of this

The Great Disembedding

Charles Taylor: the great disembedding
Mythological neither scientific nor just metaphorical
New mythological worldview uses a mythology of two worlds
Everyday world

the world of the untrained mind. Beset by self-deception, self-destruction, violence, chaos.
Out of touch with reality

Real world:

How the trained mind, the wise mind sees the world as it really is
Reduced suffering and violence, because the mind not beset by foolishness because not out of touch with reality

Wisdom is power oriented: learn to acquire the power that waa imbued at creation
Energy put into system and cycles around - try to tap into that power
Captured in our sense of prudence - knowing how to fit into the power structures of society, how to make things work for you, getting the most power and prosperity yu can
Radically different from that view of wisdom - you don’t want to conform to this world, you want to move from the everyday world to the real world
Old shamanic myth of soul flight being exapted into a sense of self-transcendence
Out of the everyday world into the soul world
Wisdom is now knowing how to make that transformative leap
Meaning is about a special kind of connectedness. Connectedness to the real world, not to a detrimental connectedness to an illusory world
Notion of self is changing.
Defined not by how you fit in but by how you self-transcend.
Getting more mature, getting more in touch with themselves
The Great Disembedding: because now we have a different relationship to the every day world. We are somehow strangers in the world. We don’t belong there, we belong in the real world

Some people with^[b] literalize this but most people will understand this as a mythological representation for the process of self transcendence and self transformation
Exaptation of that shamanic ability into this new mythological framework

Internalization of psycho-technologies

Greece and ancient Israel - two foundational world mythologies for us, deeply constitutive or what we are
India: source of confluence between buddhism and the western world. Mindfulness revolution.
Each one of these areas, developed particular psycho-technologies that were internalized
Lot of what you think is natural to you is actually generated historically and internalised culturally.
Forget the historical origins. Problematic: the degree to which we don’t have a historical understanding is a degree to which we are going to be ignorant of the historical factors that are driving the meaning crisis

Foreshadowing the Meaning Crisis

Foreshadow meaning crisis: mythological way of thinking that allows us to articulate and train the psycho-technologies of the axial revolution, the psycho-technologies of self-transcendence, wisdom and enhanced meaning
Problem is this mythology is failing us right now. The scientific world-view is destroying this for us
Scientific worldview returning us to a continuous cosmos
There is no radical difference in kind between you and the primates you evolved from
Isn’t some radical difference in kind between your mind and your embodied existence.
Science is levelling the world and returning to one world
If we can no longer live in this mythology…
How do we salvage the ability to cultivate wisdom, self-transcendence, enhance meaning, overcome self-deception, realize who we are and how the world is, when we can no longer use the mythological worldview in which it was born.
Re-embedding into the physical world: Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein.
But we don’t want to lose all that we gained through the great dis-embedding
How do we reconcile those. How do we live with the legacy of the axial revolution when we can no-longer inhabit its worldview?

Ancient Israel and the Participatory Story

Biblical illiteracy rising. Problem: degree to which you don’t have a grasp of the grammar of the bible is the degree to which you don’t have a grasp of the grammar of your own cognition
Not talking about what you say - but how you think
Doesn’t matter if atheist.
Nietzsche: I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar
We still talk this way. With god-grammar of the bible.
These psycho-technologies have become part of the grammar of our existence and existential way of being
Important psych-tech invented in ancient Israel, perhaps influenced by Persia (Zarathustra): understanding time as a cosmic narrative, as a story
The cycle isn’t a story.
Story:

beginning,
Crucial climax/turning point
Resolution
Direction to it
Purpose to it

Idea of cosmic history. Explain how the cosmos is unfolding over time.
Cyclical time cultures: repetition of the cycle is onerous, horrible (ex; reincarnation, trying to get free)
Doing again and again is terrifying- no purpose to it
Here the future is open. Your actions now can change the future. If you can figure out how to participate in the story, your actions can change the future
Ongoing creation through history
Not all at once creation at the beginning but ongoing creation through history
You can participate with God in the ongoing creation of the future
Stories operate through meaning and morality. Moral content of your actions decides how things go.
Gods of the pre-axial world are the gods of a place or function. Have no moral arc.
The god of the old testament not bound to time and place
Exodus: israelites imprisoned, liberated, sets on journey to a future that is promised
The god of the future
At first has no name, to name something is to tie it down
When reveals his name: I will be what I will be. I am the god of the open future. You can participate with me.
Can shape it to go to its resolution or to go off-course
Looking for turning points. Where the course turns.
We know at some level your life doesn’t unfold like a movie, but we love that structure, and the great turning point where something learned or resolved, and the future is made
This god becomes progressively axial, more and more the deity of something that w take for granted: progress
Idea: is our life progressing, or move forward? History progresses. Can degenerate or improve
Kairos: (developed by theologian Paul Tillich) :

sense of crucial turning point
getting things at the right time and the right pace to turn things either back on course or to further develop them

Da’ath and Sin

Da’ath:

Adam knew his wife - have sex with
We don’t use sex as a metaphor for knowledge, many cultures do
Participatory sense: there’s a course here and you participate in it
Participatory: don’t know it from the outside, just having beliefs about it. Or just having skills. Know it by identifying with it, you change it while it’s changing you. Immersed in it like a stream
When making love, participating with them. You are changing them and they are changing you. Rises to a climax

Faith in ancient Israel didn’t mean believing in ridiculous things for which there is no evidence. That’s a recent idea.
Faith was a sense of da’ath: in this reciprocal realization. In a course, on course, evolving with things
Sense on course, sense turning point, ah I know what to do. Who to change into.
Know how to turn myself and things.
How is this relationship going, is it on course, is it growing, is it going well?
Can get it wrong. Can think on course when you’re really off course. Trespassing
Sin:

Not just doing something very immoral
New testament: archery can’t shoot where your eyes tell you to look because will miss the mark
Trying to sense the course of things, if self-deluded or illusory then off course without realizing it

Human beings thrown into this universe where they have the option of participating in the future
But human beings sin: they are self-deceptive and go off course
Hebrews taking movement from the everyday world to the real world and turning it into a historical story
Start now and move towards the promised land.
Sin: make decisions steer the course of history away from its culmination. God has to intervene periodically
God has to do something to wake people up

Prophetic tradition

Prophetic tradition
Prophet not someone who tells the future.
Prophesy not about telling what’s going to happen
Prophecy: calling forth. To wake you up NOW to how you are off course
Like when you go to therapy, wakes you up to how off course.
Increasing emphasis on the morality of human decision making
Exhortation to wake up to your moral responsibility for helping everyone to get back on track and to turns things back towards the promised land
Idee of justice and righteousness

(Do we ever reach the promised land)

Think of ourselves as on a journey, starting here, trying to make a better self, trying to make right decisions. Steer things.
Commitment to more and more trying to cultivate the wisdom of deeply remembering God, participating in the ongoing creation of the world, progress towards moral improvement, towards people living up to their promise. Is it important to you?
That’s part of the grammar inherited from the hebrews
Christianity made claim this kairos found in a particular person

Cognitive Fluency

When increase the ease at which people can process information, they come to believe it is more real, have more confidence in it
Can be something as simple as changing font contrast between letters and the page. If font more clear more likely to say that is true than when font less clear (experiment)
Regardless of the content.
Fluency of your processing increases your confidence in it, sense of how real the picture it’s giving you is
Has to do with how well brain accessing information
But if do something that increases cognitive fluency get enhanced sense that you’re actually in touch with things
Good idea for brain to us the fluency of its processing for sense of how much in touch with reality
Ex: flow state

Ancient Greece: Literacy, Democracy and Rational Argumentation

Greeks add vowels to the alphabet: increase how easy it is to process information. Increase the fluency - ramp up how powerful
Introduced standardized reading from left to right
Other languages go the other way
When standardize increases the fluency of processing
Ratchet up power of literacy to enhance cognition
Individual states in competition with each other. Athens: slowly the emergence of democracy
Puts a premium on argumentation and debate
Speed up the axial revolution of their own cognition.
They enhance the use of reason and reflection
Start to do things that didn’t happen before. Lots of cultures doing arithmetic, but they invented mathematics, geometry, start to create abstract symbol system for their own sake
Inventing capacity for rational argumentation
Very important consequences
Pythagoras:

Belongs to group of individuals around 600 BCE: the Divine Men
Represented a rediscovery of shamanic psychotechnologies
A lot of it legendary
Pythagoras real person
Seems to have gone through shamanic training - thunderstone ceremony; isolating in a cave going through radical transformation. Soul flight: talked about capacity to be liberated from the body.
Dressed as a god
Discovers the octave - mathematical proportions in the world
Rational reflection and mathematics give access to abstract patterns
Takes idea of realizing abstract patterns links to shamanic ability to engage in self-transcendence
We’re trapped in this world, but can learn to fly above it, fly free
Getting in touch with the rationally realized patterns - liberate us
Invents word cosmos: universe as cosmos.
Cosmetic: reveal the beauty of things, how beautiful and ordered they are
Pythagoras: idea that if use music and mathematical thinking can transcend and see the world as beautiful
Huge influence on Plato

Socrates: epitomizes the Greek form of the axial revolution. Socratic revolution.
We are no longer in the worldview of pythagoras. Looking at the universe as a cosmos

Episode 4 - Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom

https://youtu.be/Lhl51bZQlM8

Axial revolution into ancient Israel
Psycho-tech of time as cosmic history as a narrative
Open future that you participate in along with God
Idea of moral progress, increase in justice
Move from less real world to the more real world
God of the open future, intervenes at turning points (Kairos), tries to bring people back on course
Being on course - sense how history unfolding, being able to participate in that story, how you are shaping it and being shaped by it in a reciprocal manner
Sin is deviation from that - need to wake up be brought back on course
Prophets represented that. Represent axial vision of the moral redemption of history
Axial revolution came into Greece. Represents an exaptation of that shamanic behavior of altering your state of consciousness entering into soul flight, allied with the psycho-tech of rational arguments
We can enhance our capacity to pick up on real patterns of the world and by coming into contact with those real patterns, transform ourselves
Changes shamanic soul flight into a release from the prison of our bodies

Socrates

Many different socratic groups, many interpretations
JV coming from a particular interpretation. Become part of the cognitive existential grammar of the West
In ancient Greece thought could speak to the gods through oracles. Oracle at Delphi.
Delphi:

Woman, Pythia, sits in a cave, might be intoxicating gases, eat Eucalyptus leaves, probably going into trance state
People thought to have access to the gods by entering into altered states of consciousness.
People come in, ask questions, Pythia would speak
Oracles don’t want to give clear answers (JV doesn't believe in real supernatural powers)
Give obscure answers that might provoke an insight, a reflection in them
Can often retrofit the answer to whatever the situation.

Socrates’ friends ask the oracle about Socrates, “Is there anyone wiser than Socrates?”. Expecting cryptic answer, but got “no, there is no human being wiser than Socrates”. Crystal clear answer
Socrates’ response is not self-congratulatory (most people see themselves as above average in intelligence even if they are not),
Confirmation bias: we seek information to confirm our beliefs, ignore that which challenges it. Confirmation porn (Leo Ferrera), gratuitous and un-morally justified satisfaction of a desire then we are living in an age of confirmation porn
Rather than giving into confirmation bias he challenges it.
Socrates believes in the gods. He transforms them into moral exemplars. Means the gods can’t lie
For Socrates as portrayed in Greek Myths aren’t accurate because they lie and cheat, betrays
For Socrates gods represent ways in which we can self transcend and improve
Way greeks wed truth and sacredness are bound up together is pivotal
For Socrates they are interpenetrating
Know thyself:

Socrates has significant and profound self knowledge. “Know thyself” his personal slogan.
Doesn’t mean know your biography, not stroking auto-biographical ego
Kind of direct participatory knowing. Understanding how you operate, your owner’s manual
What are the principles, powers, perils, constraints operating within you
Critical awareness and responsibility of one’s own cognition

Socrates has self knowledge that he is convinced that he’s not wise, not willing to give up on that or that the god’s said he was the wisest
Holds these two together: existential self knowledge and this disclosure from reality, neither one going to be given greater authority
Personal dilemma: how can he be the wisest being when he knows he’s not wise

Socrates’ Quest

Starts on a quest to determine how both of those things could be true at the same time
Went to people known to be wise and asked them questions: The Socratic Method
Way of asking questions to draw someone out
Two groups of people accredited as being wise were the philosophers and the sophists
Pythagoras invented the word philosophy:

Philea - friendship love
Sophia - wisdom
The friendship love of wisdom
Pythagoras created a community around him in order to try and pursue wisdom
Philosopher someone who in concert with others is a lover of wisdom

Socrates interacts with the natural philosophers who came before him
Also doing the Socratic method with the Sophists - also people who claim knowledge

Natural Philosophers - Thales

Natural philosophers: first example of it: Thales
A lot of what we have from him fragmentary
Three fragments

All is moist
The loadstone has psyche
Everything is filled with gods

What does it say about his kind of thinking?
All is moist:

everything is made out of water. False scientifically, but put that aside. What surrounds ancient greece? Water bellow, above, in between. It is false but highly rational, plausible
Using reason and observation to come up with highly plausible explanation of what the underlying substance is behind everything
Substance - stands under, another metaphor
Not doing mythology, not doing narrative about divine agent, no story, doing a rational analysis based on observation, trying to get at the underlying stuff that everything made of

Thales inventing how to think scientifically - we now take it for granted
The loadstone has psyche:

Loadstone is natural form of magnet
Magnets can move themselves
Psyche: breath or wind, but meant anything self-moving
Can move itself and make other things move
Wrong but that doesn’t matter
Trying to get at the underlying force behind things

Psyche: originally being able to move yourself and other things. Why does that come to be the word for mind? Because the mind is that part of you that you can most move. Where all your capacity to move other things starts
That way of thinking about me starts with Thales
Everything is filled with gods:

JV doesn’t think throwback to mythology
Ontology: study of being and the structure of reality
Ontological analysis: when use reasoning to get at the underlying structure of reality to get at the underlying stuff and the underlying forces at work in it.
Science still trying to get at the underlying forces - engaging in ontological depth perception. Seeing with the mind into the depths of reality
Thales inventing this way of looking at the world, leeds to right now
Access to the depths of reality - provokes awe and wonder, gives a sense of what’s most real. That’s what it is to experience something as Sacred

Anaxagoras: influenced Socrates. Declared the sun wasn’t a god, but a hot rock, got into trouble for things like this
Socrates impressed at the natural philosophers attempts to get at the truth
Ultimately Socrates rejects the natural philosophers, not because he rejects reason, rational analysis, argumentation - they don’t help him with his axial project
They give truth without transformation, facts knowledge but don’t indicate how become wise, how overcome self deception
Even today many say our scientific world view gives us knowledge but does not tell us how to become wise, does not tell us how to transcend ourselves and become better people
Truth but no relevance - not existentially relevant, they don’t matter, don’t enable the cultivation of wisdom, the transformation, transcendence of the self

The Sophists

Socrates more antagonistic
In Athens, beginning of democracy, though only for Athenian adult males
Direct democracy, everyone votes on everything
Capacity for debate/argumentation is route to power
Group of people invent a new psycho-tech: rhetoric. Ways of picking up on how language and cognition interact, find standardized skills that can be practiced and developed so that you can influence people, increase the chance that your language will change their mind
Sophists taught the skills, separate from moral commitment
What mattered was empowering the individual to win the argument
When communicating, driven by what find salient, relevant, not just what find true
What stands out to us, what is relevant shapes how we see things, how we understand them
Ex: advertising: makes use of way brain associate things, finds certain things salient, makes them highly relevant to you to manipulate behavior - independent of if true
Beliefs aren’t the only thing driving you

Bullshit and lying

Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt On Bullshit

Frankfurt talking about difference lying and BS
Lying:

depends on commitment to the truth, says P when Not P true, because behaviour influenced by what thik is true
Lying depends on people being committed to the truth because people are committed to reality

Bullshit:

works by making you unconcerned by whether what is being said is true
Trying to get you to not find it central how true the claim is, instead working in terms of the rhetoric, how catchy, how salient, it is, grabs your attention
Ex: Simpsons: two aliens running for political office. Giving a speech to Americans “my fellow americans, I dreamt of being a baseball, but now must move forward, always twirling towards freedom” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RM-k7nBJ0g
Meaningless, but invokes baseball, freedom, salient things, always relevant

BS is increasing: we are separating relevance from truth
Deeper reason: can’t lie to yourself, but can bullshit yourself
Lying has to do with believing, but believing isn't something you directly do. Take any belief you have can’t just change it
Can hope, can wish, but can’t just believe something. Not voluntary action.
But can bullshit yourself: you can direct your attention. You can choose to pay attention to something.
Two slides to attention:

Can direct attention - if say your left big toe suddenly it is more salient to you.
Attention can be caught - sudden noise and attend to it. Captured by what you find salient.

This means you can direct your attention to something and make it more salient, which will make it capture your attention, etc.
Feed on each other.
Spins on itself in self-organized manner until your attention is attached to something
Supersalient, highly relevant, lose the capacity to notice other things. That’s how you bullshit yourself

(media, social media focus attention on things that make them relevant event if they shouldn’t be)

Salience and catchyness of the stimulus overtaken whether it is true and represents reality
Socrates antagonistic to sophists. Opposite of the axial revolution, opposite of rational self-knowledge
Attempt to overcome self-deception. Promote bullshit
Make us more vulnerable to self-deception
Sophists are relevance without truth
Have the power to transform people.
What Socrates wanted was people who knew how to pay attention in such a way that what they found salient helped them determine the truth, which helped them train their attention to find salience

Socrates’ Trial

Socrates would go up to someone and ask questions, kept asking why, oh so you must know what X is
Keeps asking questions until collapse. Fall into a state of aporia - don’t know what’s going on.
Socrates is trying to get you to realise how much each one of us bullshitting ourselves all the time
We pursue things, find things salient to us, pursuing it, putting our efforts into it way before we understand it
Always making ourselves susceptible to bullshit, we are driven by motivations that are salient to us, that are greatly in excess of our understanding of their truth or reality
Provokes reaction in people. Either become angry, or they have an insight - OH! I need to transfer myself, need to find a way to have relevance and truth tracking each other.
Socrates knew what he did not know = wisest.
Knew in a way that allows you to directly painfully confront your capacity in yourself
I am pursuing that and I don’t know what’s going on.
Socrates put on trial. Accused of atheism (teaching strange gods).
“The unexamined life is not worth living”: a life in which there is no effort to put truth and relevance together, beset by self-deception and self-destructive behavior
Knew what makes life meaningful: wisdom is to kp your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so don’t bullshit yourselves
Ta Erotika: knows how to love well, knows what to care about
Keep what he cares about with what’s real
Marketplace: look at all the things I don’t need.
Knew what to find significant, important
Knew how reason and love went together. Need to rationally know what we most care about
Lost narrowly. Each side proposes a penalty. Accusers chose death. Socrates notes practicing philosophy has been very costly for him, that would be the worst penalty, so government should give him free food and shelter for his life
Pisses everyone off, condemned to death
Socrates willing to die for his meaning
Shamanic still in Socrates: could stand in place meditating for 24 hours, was in control of his body’s physiological reactions, could drink a lot without getting drunk, winter without shoes, divine voice, whenever about to do something wrong, heard voice
Plato present at trial, but not there for his death. Going to take Pythagoras and Socrates together to advance the axiaal revolution in Greece

Episode 5 - Plato and the Cave

https://youtu.be/neDutbcedUY

Issues of meaning, wisdom, self transcendence all wrapped up together
Socrates: Particular conception of wisdom: what we find salient/relevant closely coupled to what we find true or real
What is transformative of us and what is true of the world are meant to be held together
We are prone to uncoupling those two, prone to BS

Plato

Inexhaustibleness to his writings. Speaks to you in ways didn’t speak to you before
sacred: inexhaustible fount of insight and intelligibility that’s transformative of us
Many in the ancient world read him. Platonis/neoplatonism bedrock of western spirituality
Plato traumatised by the death of Socrates - keeps coming back to it. How could his beloved Athens kill his beloved Socrates
Wanted to understand how people could have been so foolish
He takes the two world mythology - lower less real world, do something different from the hebrews.
Hebrews: we’re fallen now but progressing towards the future, from the world of illusion to the world of reality

Plato’s Psychology - Man, Monster and Lion

Plato: first psychological theory in history. Still relevant now
Develops theory why people are foolish
Inner-conflict - two strong motives working against one another. Divided against ourselves, feel most stuck
Ex: dieting, 5% success rate, makes billions because of the problem: I know I should lose weight, then see the cake, beacons to you, drawing you in, end up eating it.
Plato gets insight: deep connection between inner conflict and self destructive self-deception
Plato posits: we have different centres in the psyche, each with different cognitive relationship to the world, motivates us in different ways
Represents is mythologically:

Man - Head - Reason - motivated by truth - scope: long term goals, deal with abstract entities like health
Monster - stomach/genitals - Appetite - motivated by pleasure/pain - scope: immediate, very superficial properties (cake yummy)
Lion - chest - thymos - motivated by honour and shame, scope: intermediate

appetite/superficial not bad - can save your life
Opposite to each other Socrates’ practice was to get people to focus on that what they find salient is rushing ahead of what they find truthful
Plato: that’s not a coincidence: we have different parts of the psyche
Monster makes things salient to you, motivates you urgently right now, Man makes you understand
This is why we are so prone to bullshit we are perpetually vulnerable
Ex: dieting: what helps: join a group - you are not just a biological creature - also cultural. Lot of socio-cultural motivations.
Lion: social animals
Honour: to be respected by your peers, shame when you feel you have failed to gain respect from peers
Guilt - when fail to meet your own ideal of who you should be
Lion intermediate scope - can pursue midterm goals, not just immediate or abstract but socially agreed upon shared goals
Works on the cultural aspect of things, shared meaning - we want to share our experience with other people, shared cultural meaning
Connection to distributed cognition powerful way you increase your cognitive power over the world
Chest: feel a lot of our social motivations in the chest.
Thymos: part of you that is motivated socially.
Lot of potential conflict in this system, want to get it properly ordered
When don’t order it, salience and understanding, participation get out of sync with each other - subject to bullshit
More inner conflict, more likely engage in self-deception, more likely become egocentric. When people suffering become more self-centered/selfish - when experiencing inner-conflict threat signal. When people under threat become more ego-centric - adaptive
Hyperbolic discounting:

Breakdown of Will - George Ainsle
This pattern of behaviour across species
Discounting: how much reducing the salience of a stimulus - less it stands out to you
Present stimulus large degree of stimulus, something in the future much less
That’s why monster can override the man
Adaptive: further away get in the future, probability of any one event occurring goes down, you should pay less attention to things that are less probable. If didn’t have this would be overwhelmed by all the possibilities

Highly anxious people find things salient that they shouldn’t
But problem: hyperbolic discounting blinds you to specific possible outcomes, but also blinds you to what they all have in common (ex: smoking: each possible way of dying but also the abstract concept of death itself)
By blinding to what they abstractly share, machine leads to taking another puff on the cigarette - sets on the course to cancer
Very machinery that makes adaptive makes prey to self-destructive behaviour. Wisdom and meaning have to wrestle with the unavoidable reality that can’t throw away the machinery - but can’t let it run untutored.
Need to develop ability to form abstract thought about what is in common in the distant future - that’s what the Man does.
Plato: Man can learn theory, abstract symbolic representation, Lion can be trained - can use your reason to train - Socrates took reason into the social arena, dialogues with people, social interaction read to rational reflection to overcome self-deception
Using socratic method Man can train the Lion to tame the Monster
Reduce the inner conflict
Optimization strategy. If let the Monster rule, everything else shrinks to a minimum, want each to live as much as it possibly can without putting the other two in danger
This is to experience a fullness of being. Peace - inner conflict has dropped
If have an inner drive to get inner justice, realize wisdom, get fullness of being can appeal to it socratically
As reduce inner conflict self-deception goes down, less egocentric - more in touch with reality
Effect: getting clearer vision of reality
Want to be in touch with reality
Get better at picking up on real patterns in the world
Socratic self-knowledge: can apply it to yourself - as get better knowledge of myself can better teach the Man, better train the Lion, tame the Monster
Cycle: feeds each other
Less inner conflicted, more in touch reality

Self transformation and getting mor in touch with the world are interconneected
I have to change myself in order to see the world, and then the world changes that puts a demand on e to change myself - the world discloses itself in a new way and so on
Participatory knowing: not just changing my mind, knowing with the very machinery of my self

Myth of the Cave

People in cave chained to a wall, with a fire, just see the shadows
Take the shadows to be the real thing. An individual gets free, turns and sees the fire, realises the shadows not the real thing
Ability to notice the real patterns have changed
People start to see what real patterns feel like
Start to look around and explore, see path, with light. Journey upwards.
At first blinded by the light, have to stop and adjust. Gain the ability to see what they couldn’t before - participatory transformation
Eventually come up and look around: want to see the source of the real light, that’s letting them pick up upon the patterns
Where is the source of understanding and life
Sun overwhelming, beyond their comprehension, filled with awe
Go back down, try and tell what they saw, but saying things don’t make sense, if they could they would kill that person.
Enlightenment: not just an eastern idea. This is a myth of enlightenment
Myth of self-transcendence, in greater contact with reality
Anagoge: this reciprocal ascent
movement between the illusory world and the real world, make it more rational
More and more in contact with the patterns that make sense of reality
Satisfy mutually supporting fashion your meta-drive for inner peace and meta-drive to be in contact with reality
This is wisdom - a fullness of being
Matrix: people need to wake up and be in contact with the real world, Neo - from neo-platonism - that’s the story of the cave
Myth: talks to you about perineal problems that you face, talks about the psyche being in conflict with each other, being caught up in illusion, out of touch with reality, possibility of liberation and self-transcendence and fullness as enhanced meaning in life
It’s a myth of wisdom that is perennially relevant.
Reason and spirituality not opposed to each other, bound together
Pythagoras - rising above yourself
This myth going to be a constant refrain in the West

Eidos and Logos

Eidos:

translated in the word “form” which brings to mind shape, or “concept” brings to mind idea
not what Plato means
closer to mean paradigm: the real patterns that we’re discovering in reality.

Real patterns: both:

the access/pathway we have for getting at the reality of something
Also what makes something be what it is

Ask what something is, give a feature list - then think that the way I understand something is by having a definition, but that’s not really how we understand things
Could put the feature list together and just have a big mess. Missing the structural-functional organization: way all the things structured together to function as a whole
Makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts: Gestalt (german)
Logos = structural functional organization
You know what a bird is, have some sense of the logos, but if ask you - how do these all function together can’t tell you - grasp is intuitive
Often have an intuitive grasp of the logos of things
Not just how it’s integrated together but how your mind is integrated together
Logos: how you know something and also the pattern that makes it what it is
When I really know something I con-form to it. Become like it in some important way. Get in my mind same real pattern that’s in the thing
Enter into reciprocal realization with it
Gets taken up with Aristotle

Episode 6 - Aristotle Kant and Evolution

https://youtu.be/A_gH5VIZO0Q

Plato - grammar of Western civilization made up of the bible and Plato
Plato’s notion of wisdom: align the psyche to reduce inner conflict and self-deception
More in contact with what is real - as we track real patterns in the world reflect those back on ourselves.
Increase our self-knowledge, reduce self-deception, increase contact with reality - flow in process of anagoge

Aristotle

Lays foundation for scientific approach to wisdom and meaning
Student of Plato, studied with him 20 years then breaks with him “While I love Plato, I love the truth more”
Remained a platonist but thought lacking Plato’s account of change
Word he used for change more accurately translated as growth
Interested in how things grow and develop
Part of what we mean when say have a meaningful life is we are growing
Eidos: gestalt - structural functional organisation that makes something function as a whole.
That logos/eidos is hard to put into words. It’s what makes a bird a bird, the pattern that makes a bird what it is

(John seems to be using logos and eidos as synonyms)

Actual and Potential

Aristotle wanted to talk in terms of development
Analogy of artifacts (human made things) to living things
Can have a block of wood, make it into a chair/table/boat
What makes the wood behave like a chair or table
Actuality: realness, real something
Change - analogy for development. Analogous to how an organism grows
It’s the form (eidos) that makes it act as a chair or table - structural functional organization
Potential: wood is potentially a chair, table, ship
When wood given a particular form it acts as a chair/table. In-formation
Living things: doing this for themselves. Like a chair that is making itself
Unfolds across time - see it as change and development

Cognitive Science of Change and Kant

Alicia Arara: Dynamics in Action, inspired by Aristotlean framework
Newton: change occurs from causal impact
Be-cause: what causes it to be
Event A -> B -> C
Kant: why was Newtonian model overtaking Aristotle
Gives simple account of how things come to be
Prevents circular explanations: when assume thing trying to explain
Homunculus theory: little man in head seeing the triangle -> infinite regress
Kant: newtonian scheme wonderful - cause independent event, don’t fall into circular explanations
what started it all - not getting into that now
Kant: problem: kinds of things that can grow. Ex: tree: sunlight making tree through the leaves, but what’s making the leaves? The tree. Circular
Self-organizing: living things make use of feedback cycles -> fall into circular explanation - came to conclusion there can’t be a science of living things
Can’t just dismiss that - there obviously is biology - if there is biology, and living things use feedback cycles, when try and explain get into circular explanation, but circular explanations are vacuous and empty -> where is Kant going wrong?\
Alicia Arara: for long time couldn’t solve this problem
To understand Aristotle, to understand what we mean that living things grow and develop, which is integral to our meaning and sense of who and what we are, if cannot give an answer to this problem, then we cannot understand fundamentally who and what we are, and what we are talking about how important growth and development are -> that language will be separate from scientific understanding
We know that Newton ultimately wrong - doesn’t work with relativity or quantum level - so shouldn’t be absolutely committed to that view
Arara: uses Aristotle to explain Dynamical Systems Theory
Distinction causes and constraints
For pencil to move when I push it there have to be certain conditions (flat space, etc). Those aren’t events. Causes are events
Causes: events that make things happen
Constraints: conditions, don’t make things happen. Make things possible
Aristotle considers the constraints more important
When talking about structural functional organization - talking about a pattern - talking about conditions. This is were find a form - the formal cause

Conditions are structurally functionally organized such that motion is possible

Causes -> events -> happen -> actuality
Constraints -> conditions -> possibility -> potential
Possibility shaped by constraints so that these are more possible than other things
Tree: why do trees spread out - increase the chance of photon hitting the chlorophyll - the structure of the tree shapes the possibility of the events
Events cause the structure, but the form constrains the events
Structural functional organization of living beings create internal environment in which the probability of events is altered - things have low probability happening out there, high probability in here, and vice versa
Events cause a structure (eidos/form) and that constrains the events.
Not circular explanation. Two things - actuality and potential
Integral to science: science depends on there being real potential
Kinetic energy becomes potential energy
F = ma: not an event - its how things are shaped. Puts a limit on how things are possible in the world
Arara: two kinds of constraints:

Enabling constraints: make a form of event more possible
Selective constraints: reduce the possibilities/reduce the options

Natural Selection

Theory of Evolution

Natural selection probably first dynamical Systems theory
Accounts for growth and development across speciation
Feedback cycle:

Sexual reproduction
Goats come from other goats

Darwin realized selective constraints in the environment that reduced options for organism: scarcity of resources
Early years of life no scarcity of resources, so life is static about 800,000 years
Scarcity of resources -> competition -> not everything can live -> reduces options
Enabling constraints: open up the options, variation increases the options
Cycles: Selective conditions reduce the options available, then variation opens up again, then pushed back down
Constantly changing to be better fitted to the environment
Depends on Aristotlean ideas
Virtual governor: governor limits what can do. Not an actual machine.
Virtual generator: generating options
When put a virtual governor systematically together with virtual generator so that systematically generating a feedback cycle -> virtual engine
Dynamical system theory lays out the virtual engine

Aristotle and cultivating character

Interested in our development
How does wisdom and meaning develop?
Character:

Not your personality - born with that - your general constitutio
Character that aspect of you that you can cultivate.
When say acting out of character making an existential or moral criticism
Ex: he;s normally honest, usually virtue
Virtue: not an event, but a set of conditions cultivated in someone
Character: the virtual engine on a person’s development
What system of constraints have you identified with and internalised to regulate development

Ex: spend a lot of time on appearance, status - how much time did you spend today on your character?
If character is the virtual engine regulating your growth and development should spend a lot of time on your character
Aristotle: proposed ways of trying to cultivate character
Golden mean

Ex: what is courage: golden mean between cowardice and foolhardy
Trying to set up a system where pay attention when lack the enabling constraints (don’t have generation) and when don’t have the selecting constraints - too broad
Train yourself, engage in practices, slowly, over time, create virtual engine

You are self-organizing
Are you just letting that run or are you trying to rationally and reflectively cultivate your character
Ex: not living UP to his potential - part of what makes life meaningful is you have cultivated character to allow you to actualize your potential - regulates your development in a way that makes you grow UP
Notion of development and growth to have a meaningful life
Wisdom is gaining the ability to cultivate virtues - to create your virtual engine - a set of virtues regulating your growth and development to actualize your potential
Akrasia: foolishness that comes from lack of character

often translated as weakness of the will but there’s evidence that the notion of will-power is a defunct idea. We should give it up
Akrasia: when you know what the right thing to do is and you don’t do it

Aristotle: ignorance is when you do the wrong thing because you don’t know, foolishness when know what the right thing is but do the wrong thing
Aristotle: do the wrong thing because though you have the right beliefs, don’t have sufficient character, Have not trained things. Have not created a virtual engine that is regulating your growth such that you will live up to your potential. Actualize yourself and do the right thing.
Developmental aspect of meaning.
What is it to say you are living up to your potential?

Analogy of man-made thing: how know when man-made - when it has a structural functional organization that allows it to fulfil its purpose
Humans are self-making - auto-poetic
We can seek out conditions that will protect and promote self-organizatioon
Eric Pearl, Thinking Being: in living things, the purpose of the thing is its structural functional organization
Your purpose/function is to enhance your structural functional organization
Aristotle: pay attention to the fact that you are a rational, reflective, creature

Animal - self moving thing
Psyche: originally meant self-moving
You are a mental thing, a psychological thing
You can optimize, can do the actual revolution on yourself -> a rational thing.
To live up to your potential is to make sure you cultivate your character that takes you up as high as you can go

Cultivate your character to actualize your potential foran being a rational moral human beings as possible
We can go back and rejuvenate these terns.

Episode 7 - Aristotle’s Worldview and Erich Fromm

https://youtu.be/yy47YzvGniQ

Aristotle concerned with change. Understood in terms of growth and development.
A used the concept of form, change - something is being informed? Wood potential table or chair then wood acts as table or chair.
A’s idea of wisdom as a virtual engine
Wisdom the cultivation of a virtual engine actualize your potential
Moving through hierarchy as actualization.
To be wise is to cultivate a character to rationalize self reflection, self-actualization. Fulfills humanity.

(I really do like Aristotle's version of actualization of a potential as a conceptual approach to thinking about potential. My objection to it is only if we’re taking it literally. So it’s pretty useful as a framing of what we’re doing).

4:15. socratic challenge: what are you doing to cultivate your character?

(there are things I do such as this process right now. But then there are other ways that I know I don’t - or at least I struggle with it much more even though I want to. And I feel guilty or ashamed or weak when I give in.)

Rationality and Being in Contact with Reality

living up to potential, ascending the hierarchy
Aristotle interested in rationality - axial revolution idea 2nd order thinking. Can reflect and self-correct. Hallmark of rationality - core idea is capacity to reflectively reason self- capacity for illusion and error and self correction
We’ve reduced rationality to being logical. But the core is your capacity for reflectively realizing your capacities for self deception and illusion and for self-correction

(This is a really interesting take on rationality that I don’t think we talk about much - at least I haven’t seen it brought up when talking about rationality. I like this addition. We can talk about the base ability to analyse logically, but key is the ability to re-analyze, self-reflect, and correct. If one doesn’t do that analysis in that way they aren’t being rational)

6:15: being in contact with reality. That’s the core motivation of rationality. The desire to come into as deep a contact with reality as possible by those means that are as reliable as possible.
What is it to truly know something? We have got a view in which we conceive of knowing that we can accurately give a description of something.
Challenge: who knows better what a chair is- someone who can describe it or make it?
Some say person who describes can’t really understand, if can make it grasp something more. If can cause X to be, then you deeply understand it.
What does the maker have that the descriptor doesn’t have? The structural functional organization. Chair maker has the eidos - like an architect with a blueprint.
Can use that idos to actualize the chair
To know something is to possess the same eidos as it.

(though it’s a scale, we can know things at different levels)

actualizing the same form. When I know something there is con-formity- I share the same form of it - mind takes on the same structural functional organization as the thing

(here I think we’re getting into metaphorical again. It’s a useful concept, but I don’t think it matches reality. We don’t actually share a form.)

could cause it to be.
Shape is not the same thing as form. Can use shape for an analogy for form.
Can conform to the cup to interact with it. When you know something, your mind is in conformity with it
Aristotle had no distinction between knowing and being. - would say changing my structure by picking up the cup. Changing my being not just knowing. Changes structure and functioning of being.
No distinction between knowing and being - Aristotle: I’m changing my structure, change in my structure
Charles Taylor: talk about conformity theory as a contact epistemology. To know something is to contact with it - participate in the same form of a thing
Participatory knowing: when I shape myself in order to know the thing
Differing from descriptive knowing: generate propositions about the thing.
Intimate connection between mind and reality.
Coming to see that this participatory knowing more central to how cognition works
14:30: not separate from it and merely pointing at it by words and propositions.
If in conformity with the world, my patterns of intelligibility- how I make sense of things - same pattern by which thing are organized
After we’ve done all that second order thinking, rational reflection, once we get to that eidos we can be confident when we’ve made sense of things the pattern in our mind is the same as the pattern in the world
17:15: ex. Interested in Susan, talking to Tom. T says I think S likes you. You like S. Don’t want to leap in. So say wait, I saw you last night, you were drunk. Tom says, I heard before drunk. Ask questions…make sure, relevant organ of cognition (attention, memory, brain) functioning normally, make sure environment not distorted conditions, intersubjective agreement (did other people experience it) then once get there can have significant confidence in conformity with reality - pattern in the mind same as the pattern in reality
Still do it now. Something plausible and practical. That’s how we make sure we’re in touch with things.

Aristotle’s World-view

What is the structural functional pattern of the world when I’m making sense of things?
How does it look to us? Seemed that we’re at the centre in Aristotle’s time, things moving around us
He has geocentric worldview
Why do things move?
Idea that things move for the same reason we do: when push on a table, feels like table moving against me. When lift pen and drop, looks like it moves itself to get back there
Aristotle’s idea everything made of elements, earth, water, air and fire
Natural motion, internal drive, everything trying to get where it belongs, moving on purpose. Meaningful view of things
Just like us, doing things to get where we belong
Some did think the earth revolved around the sun there, but there were counter-arguments, until get theory of gravity, inertia, didn’t make sense.
We still live as if earth is at the center and not moving - plausible
World View: account of the world and account of how you know the world, mutually support each other in strong bonds plausibility
Deep bonding between understanding of understanding and understanding of the world
World of purpose, things moving on purpose

The Agent-Arena Relationship

His view makes sense of what he sees around him. This view external world is an arena: know how can act in it
Arena: place that’s organized such that you know how you can act in it. It makes sense to you. You know where things belong, what actions are appropriate, how to measure and calibrate your performance
know how to be involved, how to act, can conform
This how become an agent:
Agent: to be an agent is to be capable of pursuing goals. To be able to organize cognition and behaviour so that actions fit the environment
World view: have this agent/arena coupling so can meaningfully interact with the world
Co-identification: each determines the other
We do this all the time. Always assuming an identity, assigning an identity to everything around me

(abstract concepts)

Existential mode: Always assigning an arena and assuming agency
Process by which co-identifying agency and arena. Get coherent and functioning worldview
Meta-meaning relations: if do not have the agent/arena relationship none of your particular actions have meaning. If put tennis player in the football arena it’s absurd. Unless the coupling works, individual actions and projects of meaning don’t work. This mode makes possible an entire system of meaning.
Throwing the ball has a meaning to the football player because of the agent/arena

doing it right now, assumed a particular identity, assigned an identity to professor, very important: existential mode meta-meaning instance of enacting world-view relationship
Enacting world-view relationship

(interesting: don’t need to actually know how it all works, but to have something that fits for you - does it therefore matter if the view is correct? What would make it matter?)

Worldview Attunement: existential mode (way in which creating co-identifications of agent/arena) have to fit into the process of worldview attunement. If don’t have a world-view with world-view attunement, will be like the tennis player in the football arena. Experience existence as absurd.
This matters: one of the ways in which meaning crisis manifests is that think their existence is absurd
Gives ways in which co-creating with the world the agent-arena relationship
Powerful: Aristotle given us a way, a language of articulating a connection between project of intellectual understanding the world and our existential project that we fit in and belong in a meaningful fashion
For many of us today we don’t find that clear consonant connection, we have scientific worldview, but doesn’t give existential guidance. Doesn’t tell us how to make our lives meaningful
nomological order: talking about worldview constant attunement, agent-arena relationships unfolding naturally, constantly unfolding deep connectedness, between intellectual and existential projects of finding meaning, belonging, and fitness
This what makes the universe lawlike. Cosmos for us: best attempts to understand the world and existentially live within it. When it breaks down get absurdity: lose sense of how fit in and belong
To have a meaningful life is to have one that is situated in a nomological order, an attuned worldview ha is reliably generating existential modes that are consonant with our best scientific understanding

Siddhartha and the Mindfulness Revolution

mindfulness revolution
Meditation and contemplation: India. Axial revolution there: Buddhism
Complex topic, not going to do it all at once.
Siddhartha the embodiment of axial revolution in India
Siddhartha: all of these figures, Socrates, Jesus, Siddhartha, what’s the historical - separate historical from legacy largely can’t do. Can’t say with certainty this is what he was doing. Not going to try and separate myth from history - because that’s how they make impact on west.
Siddhartha, when born, father had sages come to birth, foretold that the boy had one of 2 futures, either great king, or important religious figure. King wanted him to be king. Decided to remove all the things that might trigger religious life. Gave all the benefits of power and prosperity. Never saw anything distressing. Everything he wanted.

Existential Modes: Having and Being

Myths: attempts to engage with perennial ongoing patterns:
Palace: It is possible to be happy even in a palace (Marcus Aurelius): palace antithetical to the axial revolution
Fromm: existential mode. Palace represents existential mode: mythological way to get you to activate in your memory a particular existential mode
Two modes we all face:

Having needs: having mode - met by having something. Needs met by categorizing things efficiently, controlling them effectively. Understanding is categorical. Put things in the right category. Here’s a cup. Improves ability to hold things. Oriented towards me for effective control. Need to have water. Categorize world and manipulate and control it very important
I - it fashion (Buber): it is an identity something has when it belongs to a category: rely on intelligence to control and manipulate things to achieve solving my problems.

(very important: abstract concept)

Nothing wrong with having mode.
Being needs: being mode

Needs met by becoming something. Need to become mature. Need to become virtuous. Developmental needs. Fromm: because of that, have to have a particular kind of meaning for existence,. Relating to the world expressively
When in love with someone, engaged in being need: trying to become something, meet the needs of meaning, and maturity, growth and development
Mutual development, reciprocal realization

(really interesting: this is what I’m describing in my method of communication: working together to learn together, work through problems together, understand one another)

don’t understand categorically but expressively

(When we’re communicating with others as Us/THEM it’s categorical: you are a liberal, or conservative, atheist, christian - we put one another in boxes and treat them as opponents. Not people that we’re trying to understand and grow together)

I-thou relationship, not I-it
Not about trying to get rid of problems, trying to make meaning

Ex: when in love don’t think of them categorically - don’t interact with them categorically
to live in the palace is to try and live everything in the having mode.
Modal confusion: try to serve being needs from the having mode
serve a lot of market interests: if can meet being needs in the having mode.
make love, have sex. Modal confusion. Deep existential confusion
Then needs not met so try to do more. More cars, more sex. The more corporate world can induce modal confusion the more can sell. Being in the palace is a myth for modal confusion.
Story continues, Siddhartha leaves the palace in a way that teaches us something about overcoming modal confusion.

Episode 8 - The Buddha and Mindfulness

https://youtu.be/EWumJSBqXa8

Theory of the world, theory of how we know the world, and be within the world aare intimately connected and mutually supporting
Worldview attunement
Existential modes - co-identifying the agent and the arena.
Axial age in India - impact of the mindfulness revolution.
Siddartha Gautama - early life in the palace.
Two modes :

Having mode: organised around meeting our having needs, perceive the world categorically, want to manipulate it, solve problems, control it
Being mode: organised around being needs, met by becoming something, virtuous, love

Modal confusion: trying to meet being needs from having mode
Can become enmeshed in modal confusion -> try more and more to have things than to become what you need to become
Being in the palace - mythological representation of this
By inducing modal confusion, possible to sell you more

Siddartha leaves the palace

Siddartha leaves palace in chariot, sees a sick person. He’s distressed. What did he do to cause that? Nothing. (this is the awakening to the suffering in the world). I could get sick too? Of course.
Drive along and meets an old person. Is he sick as well? No he’s old. Happens to everyone, Didn’t do anything.
Siddartha wants to go back to the palace. Return to the self enclosure of the having mode. Meets a funeral procession. Sees a corpse. That person is dead. It happens to everyone.
The having mode has been completely undermined. Has an existential crisis. Crisis at the existential mode.
As Siddartha goes back to the palace, meets a Mendicant. Renouncer. Given up the having mode. Deep peace in his eyes. Contrast to his existential crisis.
Mendicant represents the being mode.
Siddartha feels that contrast.
Siddartha can’t find the peace he wants
Disillusionment: usually described as a state where moving towards despair. But at the heart of it is the loss of illusion. This is an axial thing.
Losing that sense of belonging that he had when he was in the palace
Tries to make it work. But he can’t go back. So he decides to leave.
He has a wife and child. Abandoning them. Myth is saying: the moral life sits upon something deeper. Moral life can be rendered meaningless if you’ve lost meaning.
Morality sits upon, depends upon your life being meaningful
Meaning in life is different from simply leading a moral existence
Something more to wisdom than just morality
Siddhartha goes into the forest. Tries to cultivate a solution to the fear and the turmoil
Pursues various things, different teachers
Still hasn’t left the having mode: still carrying that confusion. He’s pursuing asceticism\. Subjecting body to tremendous pain, self denial.
We do these swings between self-indulgence and self-denial
Not working. Trying to annihilate the self is still about having something.
Still understanding the problem in the having mode.
Self-denial just the negation of self-indulgence - not its transcendence
Sitting on the banks of a river. Fatiguing. Hears a barge. Musician on the barge, saying to apprentice - strings can’t be too tight or too loose.
Middle path: radical reformation. To transcend the having mode by rejecting self-indulgence and self denial
Flow: trying to optimize. The right connectedness
Being mode about being connected in the right way
Siddartha falls into the river, saved by a little girl. Demeaning to those in that time. Give him something like rice pudding.
Realizes must pursue the middle path. Find a way of optimizing his cognition that allows him to transcend and rediscover the missing mode. The mode that he saw in the eyes of the mendicant
Sati - to remember, to remind. Not just a fact. To bring it to mind. To remember a lost mode of being. Remembering what it is like to be in the being mode
Modal memory - participatory knowing
Siddartha trying to remember the being mode
Sati translated as Mindfulness
Stephen Batchelor - Alone with others - described it this way
Siddhartha wants to recover the being mode. Not as an intellectual idea, but as an agency, and the very way in which the world he realized in conjunction and co-identification with that agency
One of the ways we remember (Sati) when we wake up. Recover my world and my identity.

Re-member: to belong to myself and the world, to be a member
Siddartha wants a set of psycho technologies to help remember the being mode
Buddha = the awakened one

Mindfulness

JV appreciative of science of mindfulness and also critical
Published paper on this with Leo Ferraro on mindfulness in 2016 in Hypnosis and meditation
How can we get a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes at work in mindfulness and how they can affect such important existential transformation
Ask people who do mindfulness - will give a standard understanding of what mindfulness is: trying to pay attention to the present moment in a non judgemental practice. Hint of being mode: being present. But this approach while helpful is misleading
JV both studies mindfulness scientifically and teaches it. Familiar with both academic attempt to explain mindfulness and the pedagogical attempt to teach it
Distinction: language of training and explaining:

Language when teaching: use language that helps one acquire the skills
But can’t use that language when explaining.
Ex: One of the most powerful ways to train memory is method off location (mind palace). Memorize a space, put things in different locations. Then to remember call up image and get all the info need. Move around mind-palace. This is powerful. Powerful language of training: but may think this is how memory is organized. But memory not organized spatially.
Metaphors great for training memory but overly simplistic to understand how memory actually works

Language by which we train mindfulness should not be imported uncritically into our scientific attempts to explain and understand it
Paying attention to the present moment. First have to know how to pay attention. Pay attention like I shine a spotlight
What is the present moment? Right here right now? Present is indexical.
Pay attention to the here and now: useless to explain, what’s here? This table, this room, this universe? But useful for training.
Need to reformulate mindfulness so it can tell us how people can become awakened.
Plato: knowledge not captured just by a feature list, its also the structural functional organization
Feature list mindfulness, all give is feature list

Being present
Not judging: what do you mean not judging?
Supposed to bring about insight.
Reduce reactivity

Missing the eidos: the structural functional organization that tells me how those things actually go together
Need to turn feature list into a feature schema
Need. to reinterpret the list to explain its functionality
Makes distinctions between the types of features
Being present, non-judging: states can be in, things can do
Insight/Reduce reactivity: not things doing, results - traits you can cultivate
By making this distinction can ask: how does being present cause insight?

Feature list doesn’t have the eidos, not asking causal/constitutive questions
Mindfulness is about getting right kind of concentration, paying attention
Two ways of concentrating: Ellen Langer, Mindfulness, 1988

Concentrate on finger: focus on it, hard CONCENTRATE!
Soft vigilance: renew interest, constantly exploring and opening up

Need a model of concentration that does soft vigilance. Renew interest
What kind of attention: don’t want too hard or too soft
What’s going on with attention. It’s not a spotlight. Complicated optimization process. About tunng, getting between too tight and too loose
Allow you to become intimately involved, conformed to, inter-esse
Why do we like the spotlight metaphor? One of the things attention does is captured by the spotlight metaphor. Shine a light on something makes it stand out - salience. Attention makes things more salient
What’s wrong with spotlight: missing much about what the optimization of salience is
Christopher Mole: Attention is Cognitive Unison: attention isn’t something you directly do
Ex: walk and practice. Walking is something can ask you to directly do. But if say “practice”. Say “practice what?”. You practice something by optimizing how you do something else
Mole: you don’t directly pay attention. You pay attention by optimizing some other process. Can ask you to pay attention in many ways.
Can’t just “pay attention” do it by optimizing other things doing.
Optimizing: coordinating various processes so that they’re sharing the same goal and working well together
Plato’s idea of getting different systems to work well together.
Need to understand what is attention, how is it optimizing, how is it integrating things together. How does that get improved in mindfulness practice?

Episode 9 - Insight

https://youtu.be/jkWNBdBDyoE

Study of mindfulness is misleading because it starts with feature list and leaves out the eidos: the structural functional organization
present, not judging, insightfulness, increase equanimity
Traits can cultivate.
part/whole relationship
Replace the language of trining with language of explaining
Ask what does it mean to be present. Concentration.
Noted that took us into paying attention, tuning optimization]
Attention not very well served by spotlight metaphor
attention: optimizing different focus
Understanding of attention that could capture that its an optimization strategy linked to a response to modal confusion and alleviate suffering therein
Cognitive unison: investigate more concretely what that might mean.
Attention has a structure: Polanyi
Tapping experiment:

(Cool effect, attention shifting, can feel things didn’t feel before. Similarly in meditation can suddenly hear the ticking of a wall clock, sound was always there, but never heard it)

important structure. Not completely unaware of probe, but not aware of it, but aware through it. Through the probe, aware of the cup.
Aware through this, aware of this. Like probe is transparent. Cup opaque.
Analogy: glasses are like framing. Transparent. Looking through them, but can redirect my awareness to look at them. Transparency to opacity shift.
Transparency to opacity shift: implicit awareness of probe, aware through probe, of focal object: focal awareness vs. Explicit awareness
Attention is structuring phenomena; from to, from subsidiary awareness to focal awareness, but can shift, step back, and back, from probe, to fingers, to sensations, stepping back,
Whole time was looking at cup looking through all that. Spotlight metaphors missing all that layered recursive stuff going on.
Can go back and forth: opacity to transparency shift
Attention doing that all the time, shifting.
What you’re seeing is how many processes being coordinate, integrated together to optimize and prioritize this particular object, scene, situation.
Tend to use in out metaphor for this.
When I was knowing cup through probe, indwelling the probe. Participating in how the probe is being with respect to the cup. Not knowing the probe, knowing through the probe, integrated with it and through it.
Like vision integrated with the glass lenses.
Also works with technology and psychotechnology. Literacy: don’t look at it much, look through it.

16:00: THE CAT: read first one as H and another as A - fits in one
Letters are the feature, the word is the overall structure
Problem: in order to read the word must read each letter, but to figure out the letter must read the word
Attention is simultaneously going up from the features to the structure (eidos) and down from the words to the letters -

(is it attention though? Or unconscious? )

Mindfulness has to do with making use of all this complex dynamical processing - mindfulness optimizes them in some way.
Transparency to opacity shifting: always direction that matters - stepping back and looking at, indwelling and looking out into the world
Can also go up and down from features to gestalt
Nothing is inherently a feature - letter is feature in the word, word is feature in the letters
Operating in highly integrated fashion

(IIT)

(Reminds me of that meme where so long as the first and last letter are correct the other letters can be mixed up and can still read it.)

break up the whole finger into parts, scaling up and scaling down of attention
Vipassana:

pay attention to breath but tell them pay attention to feelings in abdomen - what they are doing is trying to maintain and renew interest and make it salient to themselves
Not looking through sensations looking at them.
Stepping back and looking at, breaking the gestalt into its features, that’s what do in meditation
Meditation means to move towards the centre

Why does this help cause insight?
Contemplation

In the west often confuse meditation and contemplation - not synonym
root is temple, latin word from part of the sky look up to see signs from the gods
Theory: try to see more deeply into reality - meditation is scaling down, contemplation scaling up

27:45: 9 dot problem: have to break up the gestalt, and also de-automotize cognition. Take stuff that normally happens unconsciously and bring it back into the conscious: do that by making a transparency opacity shift.
Normally automatically sensing through probe but can shift and be aware of the probe
Break up the inappropriate frame, deautomatise cognition by scaling down.
Can improve ability to insight if can do chunk decomposition (breaking the gestalt) and constraint relaxation (deautomatising cognition)
Scaling down helps to break up chunks, and deautomitse - but not enough. Have to break up the gestalt but also make a better frame: have to take what’s in the background and look for deeper broader patterns - scale back up.
Have lots of evidence that one of the ways to improve ability to be insightful if can complete patterns in a kind of leaping. Take picture out of focus and refocus them mentally
Both make better, but both make worse: if just scale up: immediately project square and lost. If just scale down choke oneself.

(See this a lot in discussions: you have people who focus mainly on the micro level and people who focus on the macro level - but for a well-rounded analysis you need to look at both the tree level and the forest level. Often people don’t reconcile the two: they have their forest view and don’t adjust when the trees don’t align. The layers of abstraction must be consistent with one another - if they aren’t we have to rethink it. )

have to do both: don’t want the strings too tight or too loose. Want to train people in both skills and to flow between them. Coordinate and get the right degree of attentional engagement most fitting to the world.
Mindfulness not just with meditation
8 fold path: trained in meditation and contemplation and flow between them.
When scale down making mind less representational, less inferential. Gaining awareness of problem framing, making more insightful.
What if just scaled down and scaled down: get a mystical experience: pure consciousness event.
Meditation like doing reps: building ability.
Went back in layers - work back to just being conscious not conscious of anything

(This is an interesting suggestion and I’m curious as to what this experience is. What does it mean to be conscious but not OF anything? Consciousness tends to imply having an experience. He still calls it an experience. So SOMETHING is being experienced.)

what if really scale up: see everything as interconnected and permanent..feel at one. Super flow state, deeply at one with everything. Resonant at-onement.
Explains why people get into these mystical experiences
We want both at the the same time.
Third state: the state that matters: the state of non-duality.
As inhale scale up - trying to get onement, as breathe out trying to get to pure consciousness event: often have to do that for years
What can happen is can have the third type of mystical; includes both at the same time, awareness deeply to depths of consciousness and reality, all at once. Prajna state: state of non-duality wisdom

(But is it true, does it matter?)

this is what can lead to insight: the guts and grammar of agent/arena relationship. So can see connectedness between the two. Capacity for insight into existential modes of being. This is how can remember the being mode. Can have fundamental insight.
This is what buddy experienced: his innovation was to join vipassina and meta together: experienced enlightenment. Awakening.
Walking down the road: visage has changed. In the flow state. I am awake.
Sati: remembered the being mode. Not an insight about this or that problem, but fundamental insight into what it means to be a human being. Optimizes entire being. Fundamental transformative experience.
Why do people pursue altered states of consciousness, psychedelic. Why so powerfully important.
Awakening metaphor: in contrast to sleeping. Dream state: seems real but when wake up realize it wasn’t real. Normally when have an altered state wake up point at it and say that’s not real. Sometimes people have experiences and say that was more real. And this is less real

(does that mean it's real? Does it matter? What if it's just our brain functions temporarily remapping, producing really cool experiences. Does it matter if that’s all it is?)

access to the real world: but why is it more real. Back to the cave.
Going to change myself and change my world to try and recapture, remember that really real. Start to transform their whole lives.
Quantum change theory; bad name, good theory

(Should look this up)

how is it that these experiences have such authority
At the core of world religions

(Is this evidence that it's not real? That religions have sprung from cool brain states)

had an significant increase in meaning of life

(if meaning of life improved, does it matter if it's not real? What does real mean?)

experiment work

(Should look up Vervake’s work)

doesn’t matter what the content of the experience is: but somehow optimizing capacity to make sense - both inwardly and outwardly
Similar claims in all mystical traditions
Seem to be deep truths about the nature of mindfulness and attention, can significantly alleviate existential stress

(This is why it may not matter if its true. Allevaites anxiety.)

Episode 10 - Consciousness

last week: Mindfulness can bring about insight not just into a single problem but a modal insight, a systematic insight that is fully transformative of the agent/arena relationship and relieve existential distress
Two kinds of attentional scaling: transparency/opacity shift, breaking gestalt into features and scaling up
mindfulness: scale down, break down inappropriate framework. Also scale up train making better framing
Optimize by flowing between the two, can optimize capacity for more comprehensive insight
Progena: non-duality, dissipate modal confusion, realness, increase meaning and life

Transformative Experience: LA Pauls

Altered State of Consciousness

hard problem of consciousness
Not going to talk about that but looking at some of the form and function of consciousness
Two questions:

What is consciousness: how does it emerge out of the brain
What is the function of consciousness
No consensus on what consciousness does.

Don’t know your consciousness the way that you know other things. Just know you’re consciousness. Knowing and being are the same. You participate in your consciousness
What does it do?

Not obvious. Do most things without conscioussness. No conscious awareness of what brain is doing that allows to generate speech.
What is consciousness for, what does it do?

Not going to answer these comprehensively: hard problem of meaning is the goal here
Work on consciousness points to why C is valuable

Global Workspace Theory

C functions like the desktop of a computer
Have desktop and files, can activate file and bring it into desktop, pieces of information broadcast back to you and can broadcast back to the files
All unconscious processing in brain, retrieve it to working memory, activate it so pieces can work together, then broadcast it back to existing files
Don’t want all files active at same time b/c that’s disaster
What to bring them to mind when relevant, transform them, then broadcast them back
Baars: paper
Idea that architecture helping to solve the “frame problem” - helping to zero in on relevant information.
3 areas where huge issue:

All information available in this room astronomically vast, can’t make use of all of it, have to select what info make use of
Huge information in my memory, have to select from all of that.
Have to put pieces of information altogether

C helping to zero in relevant info out there, in the brain, and put them together.
C associated with working memory which is associated with function
Help realize, actualize relevant information
Will come back to this

Neuroscientific account

correlation with brain activity
Activity seems to be involved when people chunk information or insight
Boren-Seth model

Integrated Information Theory

Tononi, about the nature of C
C is how powerfully integrated pieces of information are in brain
More tightly integrated more powerful processing
Why is it doing this? Proposes like a Turing test for C, can test by giving it anomalous pictures and see if they don’t make sense
Tracking how much picking up on the patterns in the world, making sense of the world
Trying to track the complexity of the world
Main function of IIT: allow to determine if pieces of information are relevant to one another and relevant to you

Not saying any relevance realization is C
But C is to coordinate attention and other related abilities of awareneesss to optimize how insightfully insight the world
Can reduce C when problem well defined, no high degree of novelty or insight
Don’t know if its a complete account of the function of C but a part of it
Insight is like a flash, brightening of C
Explains why may want to alter state of C, alter what I find relevant and salient

Putting it together:

Matson: sizing up
Salience
: picking out out of all the things could be picking out some features (featurization)
foregrounding: foreground some of what is around you, the rest is backgrounded. Goes both ways. Take them in Gestalt those features, create a figure - figure it out - make it stand out even more - more salient, also configuring it together
Figuration: also feeds back
Framing: framing problems
Very complex dynamical system at work
C creates a salience landscape: some things rising up out of unintelligibility as features that get forgrounded and configured, frame problems around them, attention shifting
Highly textured/flowing salience landscape. That’s what it’s like to be here right now
If get too close lose the gestalt, if too far lose the details: want to get an optimal “grip” on it.
Optimizes between gestalt and feature, taking salience landscape

(This episode more about framing and providing language for what we’ve already concluded: that need a balance between gestalt and features)

grip: metaphorical contact, where I can place things, this is movable
Salience landscape gets you in contact, then optimal gripping get info affordances. Agent/arena: I am a grasper and this is graspable.
I am presenting myself to it and it is presenting itself to me
Sizing up: Presence Landscape: whole affordance network laid out for you
flow: need to track the differences between correlational and causal patterns
Depth landscape: C is figuring out the causal patterns and not just correlational.
2 year old and spoon: drop it over and over, because trying to use salience landscape to use affordances. The spoon is graspable. Transform salience landscape into presence landscape into a depth landscape
Getting a deep understanding interjectionally with the spoon
This is what C is doing for you. Helping zero in on relevant information

(This is the argument against pre-suppositionalism. My argument with Sye Ten B on how why we trust our senses - based on empirical experience. Why we trust won’t fall through the earth).

shifting dynamically, how you and what’s salient are being co-identified in agent/arena and tracking the Casal patterns, connect with the guts of the world

(Course it seems to do more than that)

if transform my C transforming all this: salience landscape, presence landscape and depth landscape

(So is it more about different perspective? Is that about truth? Does it entail truth? Which model of truth: affects how we interact and see ourselves, maybe function better, more self-realized?)

the patterns going to track, the kind of agent going to be, kind of arena in going to be transformed.

(Interesting, the arena is a mental construct here, it’s not the bare physical pieces, it is how we perceive it.)

not an insight IN C, its an insight OF C
Radical transformation of all landscapes
Systematic insight
Goes back to Piager, childhood development
As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage
5 candies experiment with 4 year olds. Two layers of candies, bottom one is more spread out. Ask which row they want. Counted, know there are the same amount. All the kids pick the bottom row. Bunch of errors.
Used to pay attention to what the kids got right, but thought might be a pattern in the errors
Constraints operating in the child’s cognition
Maybe could understand development on how constraints are shifting.

(Interesting though that there’s a strong physical link there. The kids literally aren’t capable of that deeper understanding based on their current physical development now. The pathways aren’t formed. Meditation has been found to reinforce certain neural pathways. Does give you better - or different - ability to process. Interesting physical/mental relationship).

Kids picking lower row because it takes up more space. Space variable super salient to them. Only picking up on that. Adults also make salient that the extra space is non-candy space so not relevant.

( a robot could be programmed to make the same inference, he’s saying our C helps us do this.)

we see through this illusion. Our salience landscape trained to see these multiple variables at the same time.
Zero in on the relevant information in the relevant way
Super-salience triggers bullshitting and self-deception - if can change salience landscape don’t fall prey to the illusion and don’t behave foolishly
Kids make a system of errors, salience landscape not sufficiently cultivated.

(But is there a difference between what one considers relevant and what one SHOULD consider relevant. In practice we all tend to focus on subtly or non-subtly different relevances. Left/Right is a prime factor in this. Working together to share what we’ve picked up helps us spot all of them. I guess cultivating mindfulness helps us do it ourselves, but maybe there are pros to just focusing on one or the other so long as we come together or trade off (like why I don’t want my preferred party in power all the time)

33:50; what if has systematic insight of C, change salience landscaping. See through illusion and into reality.

(Is any change in salience landscaping good? How do we know that our new perception is seeing through the illusion)

even as adult falling for systematic illusions not aware of. Only become aware if change the 3 landscapes systematically. Systematc improvement in insight is to be wise.
Significance landscape: Systematically tracking presence in depth so can wisely zero in on the relevant information and make life more meaningful. Protects from BS, allows to see through illusion and into reality and afford you having things more present to you
More comprehensive flowing relationship with reality

(but still have to double check)

Alterred States of Consciousness

- 36:50: altered states of consciousness have potential to create insight of C, but also screw up salience landscape make more prone to BS

Most altered states do that. But certain altered states do the opposite feel like changing systematic insight - it all makes sense now

(But is “feels like” a key word here?)

why is that altered state more real? Really real. And this state less real. Why feel like woke u37:30: Set up the problem. We know that many people experience higher states of C, reliably what is characteristic of these states find it to be really real, arena and agent. That’s the way the world really is and who I really am. So much so that I’m going to transform my everyday experience. Mutual more realness
AS prompts to change, need to have that
Willing to transform everything to get back to that really real world and self
Problem of the Ontonnormativity: Ontology: structure of reality. Normative: when things placing demand on you to be better
AS challenging you to change because presenting more realness.
Historically important and pervasive: Steve Taylor waking from sleep
Newberg: how enlightenment changes your brain
Range in intensity: 30-40% of the population

(Seems high?)

psychedelic experience can produce deeply transformative mystical experince.
Problem: transformative experience people undergo seem driven and justified by this more realness. Justify the transformation. Religions have this. Come down to this claim: I had THIS and it justifies what I’m telling you.

(getting at the questions I asked above)

problematic because in contrast to how we see most of our other altered states.
Why do reject dreaming as unreal: when in the dream it seems real. When come out pattern in dream don’t cohere to rest of life
intelligibility plato: more intelligible something is, more real it is. Dream doesn’t fit in so less real
Real: pattern of intelligibility with the widest scope: makes the most sense of experience
But: in higher state of C its the reverse: single experience, doesn’t cohere with rest of life, and challenges rest of life.
Difference so great that instead of rejecting it, reject everyday experience
What’s going on?
Does this without providing new content: ineffable can’t put into words, trans-rational, can’t explain.
No content, and temporary but we treat it the opposite of most AS
Should be the states we most reject. But we promote them as really real, and reject everyday experience
Core of axial revolution
Way it is still informing cognitive grammar, and informing existential way of being
Know that AS can bring about developmental improvement, but how?
Can we give an adequate explanation of AS?
People’s lives do get better, Not making it up

(So maybe it’s not about truth? It’s about making our lives better)

have to solve this problem. Make some progress on it:

Descriptive explanation - cognitive brain processes, explain the phenomenological
Explain why people feel it being more real, feels justifies empowers and motivates them to transform - psychological
Prescriptive account: is it actually a legitimate thing? Do they provide a rational explanation and guide to the transformation
Are they actually philosophically justifiable or just an illusion? Is it rationally justifiable
Prescriptive account must integrate with the descriptive to be coherent.
Descriptive account best way is to do a cognitive science approach: plausibly trying to integrate different levels in the analysis
Good account of cognitive processes in the mind, information processes at work, draw on AI and machine learning.
Draw on neuroscientific accounts of what’s happening in the brain
Going to try and give this account. Though not going to argue these states give us any special knowledge - not about changing evidence, shouldn’t use them as a way of challenging scientific claims/ that’s a mistake many make. People think the whole point of cognition and rationality is to get better beliefs and shown more to it

(This is really interesting. Getting at its not just about truth. Want to see where he’s going with this)

when child stops falling prey to illusion, no new facts been discovered. What changed was not knowledge but wisdom.
Pursue idea that higher states of cognition are rational not because give us new knowledge (people come out with opposite conclusions) knew God, knew no God -= content diametrically opposite. Diametrically opposite claims
What’s changing is not the content is your functioning. Gaining wisdom. Gaining skills of significance landscaping, radically transform existential mode

(So it's how we operate, how we feel. )

buddha didn’t answer metaphysical questions

John: leaves out intentionality, feeling of directing things. Consciousness can be passive, it’s a thing happening rather than being directed. Searle: asking of C that is about directing, have intentions about what doing,

Episode 11 - Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1

2 modes of being in Buddha: having mode and being mode.
Modal confusion and overcoming it.
Mindfulness: intentional scaling. Increase cognitive flexibility, capacity for insight.
idea that people have alternative state of C that see as more real - problematic because tend to judge realness by how well we get an overall coherence in our intelligibility
Instead of rejecting AS as illusory, reject everyday experience as illusory
Ability to transcend through illusion to get connected to what is real = wisdom
Connectedness to reality = regard one’s life as authentically meaningfu
Want a theory that is both prescriptive and descriptive
In higher state feel deep connection to reality and radically change their lives.
descriptive; Need to give account of psychological processes, informational, and brain processes
prescriptive: why it should be considered rationally justifiable: can we see why these states should be listened to when they claim to give access to deeper reality.

Descriptive Explanation:

5:20: what does it feel like to be in such a state
3 components:

How is the world being experienced
How is the self being experienced
How is the relationship between self and world=

Reports:

Ppl report world seems extremely clear to them and makes sense to them in a way that it hasn’t before
perceptual: seen as bright, things are shiny (glory) - feature ppl report in flow experience
expansion of vision (aware of the world) but also capture finite features
Insight: seeing into reality
Increased sense of making sense of things
8:23: World both intricate and interesting, beautiful
World is alive, pregnant with energy and significance
Notion of oneness. Deep and profound integration.
Self: report profound sense of peace (Plato)
Profound joy: (lost sense of what this word means): joy not just fun or pleasure: positive emotion have when experience a deep connection to what is good
Fundamental change in sense of self:

Normal sense of self disappeared: self-consciousness, autobiographical sense of self disappear
Remember my true self, what I really am

Change in energy and vitality
Insight and understanding

Relation:

Deep at oneness, participating in the reality, sharing identity to it
(Aristotle conformity theory of knowing: identification with reality)
So profound and transformative - say connection is ineffable - so if no declarative content why considered so loaded with signature of ultimate reality

disrupt normal cognitive functioning and alter state of consciousness
Can be long term/short term
Long term strategy: Buddha: 6 yrs of meditation and contemplation
Short term disruptive strategy: fasting, sexual and sleep deprivation, drumming, chanting - disrupt normal level of cognitive, psychedelics

(heh, would like 14:45: Disruptive Strategies:

to try psychedelics but have no idea how to even get them)

Combinations of these strategies can be good
Have to do a lot breaking frame before can make a new frame
Experiment:

Yadin 2017: 69% reported ontonormativity, was actually predictive of improvement across many dimensions of life: family health, sense of purpose, spirituality, will, release from anxiety and fear of death
decentering: when ppl describe these experiences, shift from egocentric to allocentric - speaking more from 3rd person perspective
Can describe my motion egocentrically: to the right of me, left of me
Allocentrically: where I am vis a vis north poll
Much less egocentrically oriented
Salience of reality capable of eclipsing narcissistic glow of own ego
Release from imprisonment, BS, of own egocentric perspective
Do you sometimes wish to be free from the super-salience of your own ego:

(We should talk about this on stream: what does it mean?)

Insight

sense of what’s relevant/important been altered. Radically make sense, coherence, underlying intelligible pattern: predictive of experience of meaning in life
Samantha Henzelman:

Give ppl a bunch of scenes that make sense to them, ask them how meaningful their lives are, will rate their lives as more meaningful
The act of finding coherence helps make their lives more meaningful
Act of making sense, elevates the sense of how meaningful lives are

If were to have an insight that would give even more sudden increase in sense of meaning in life, and what if it’s in flow - going to be even more enhanced

(Note again the cautious use of language: the sense of meaning of life. Again, does the truth of it matter if life is better?)

Radical sense of deep intelligibility of the world and yourself in both directions at same time. Profound sense of increased meaning and life.
If it actually does guide you in improving life then will give confidence on the path

Flashes of insight:

Tobolinsky: insight is a fluency-spike
fluency is general property of all cognitive properties
How easy it is to process information
How accessible it is, how well system zeroing in on the relevant information
When fluent processing information efficiently
Insight experience = sudden spike in in fluency, start to judge the information processing therein as likely more real.

(Again subjective language. Is he foreshadowing that it’s only a feeling and not real or just building suspense?)

part of evolutionary heritage - fluency heuristic good strategy, in real world situations if pressing fluently picking up on the real patterns
flow: insight cascade
Picking up on bigger patterns that not consciously aware of

(Again: how do we know they are real patterns vs. Illusory. Humans are good at spotting patterns that aren’t there)

Continuity Hypothesis: (29:00)

continuity hypothesis: want scientifically plausible explanation when someone claims enlightenment
Want good explanation and good justification for why should follow and be guided
CH: Vervaeke’s own hypothesis though Newberg came up with one
Fluency -> enchanted insight -> enhanced flow -> enhanced mystical experience -> transformative experience
Same machinery being used but being progressively exacted into more and more powerful processing that can afford rationally justified guidance into kind of transformation
If seeking to cultivate meaning, awaken from the meaning crisis we are seeking one of these experiences
Newberg says if have a lot of little insights will lead to transformative experiences - more practicing mindfulness, more can prime the pump
Help explain what’s going on
In flow: we know there has to be a relevant expertise: flow state where skills can meet the demands of the situation. If don’t have the relevant skills can’t get into flow state.
ask: what’s flowing in these higher states of consciousness? What expertise using: fundamental expertise, central to everyday experience making sense of the world
Ponty, Dreyfus, Charles Taylor

34:45: Optimal Grip What process being optimized?

Optimal grip: harkens back to conformity
When try to perceive an object, don’t remain static, move around the object until get to a place where trade-off relationship: can see as many details as possible (zooming in), also the gestalt (overall thing). Move cup around for best optimization for my needs between overall and grasp of details
Dynamic balance between them
Martial arts: want to get the right flow over the person, takes practice, sense of whole body but can zero in on details.
Own body: take a stance: optimal sense of whole body but also details of where fingers are, joints doing what can do
Do this cognitively
categorization: talk about cat or dog not usually level up to mammal, though might zero down to cocker spaniel. But usually default to basic level: cogntively optimal grip

(theme always comes back to scaling up and down)

As go higher up get more abstract, when go down get too specific.
Have to practice optimal grip
First date: try and get a sense of the person, trying to get an optimal grip on the other person
advice: look into her eyes, but not too much.
Do it without thinking: ex: how close to stand to someone. Depends on context and person, most of us have that skill

Proposal: 43:50:

what if got into a flow state about ability to optimally grip the world.
What if made it really challenging, disrupt normal framing and open up and zooming in: see the world in a grain of sand
What if had optimal grip but not on just one object, but a dynamic flowing on the world and itself. Optimally gripping reality, deep conformity.
What’s happening in a higher state of consciousness is people are flowing to get OG on world and themselves
Disruptive strategies essential to insight: mindfulness break frame. Also naturally disposed to do this: mind wanders: Zak Irving: expert on mind wandering
MW enhances capacity for insight. Distracts you from how framed a situation, then return. It helps disrupt framing so can break frame and make new frame
ex; go and sleep on it, take a walk
If give person problem and introduce noise moderate amount can lead to insight

(explains why often listen to music when studying - but I noted back in university that music without words worked better for me. Though I don’t really enjoy it otherwise I found myself studying a lot to trance music or classical Music with words was often too distracting. No music was too quiet. But trance put me in a studying zone)

When brain engaged in insight: shift btw lett and right hemispheres

(Tyler probably interested in this)

De-automatization (48:30)

9 dot problem: automatically unconsciously formulated it as a square and connect the dot problem, which blocks you from solving it
To get out of that had to de-automatize cognition
Disruptive strategies increase the variation in processes
When increase variation can get more awareness of what is invariant.
As move around object, lots of stuff changing, but shape the same
Two kinds of invariants:

Good invariants: opening up variation pick up on bigger patterns that are changing that are real patterns in the world. More in contact with what’s really going on. Tells us what’s more real - real patterns
Bad invariants: ways in which formulating problems that are blocking you from solving problem.
Notice invariants heuristic: across different problem formulations that are failing: what am I not changing in all of these failures? Often what not changing is what need to change.

(seems like a useful tool. But missing the bad invariant of picking up a pattern that’s not really there. )

What if have a whole system of errors?
Systematic errors
Developmental change when have systematically penetrative insight, find nexus of errors so can massively intervene on themselves
That’s what can happen during enlightenment experience

Opening up the variation massively, can connect to what’s real, be more connected to world
Get below ways holding back own development
Radical developmental change
wisdom: seeing through illusion

(But how know actually seeing through the illusion and not just a useful illusion?)

- do not believe in the two-world mythology of the axial revolution but don’t want to abandon the psycho-technology

Episode 12 - Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2

possibility of enlightenment, and plausibly accessible
Higher states of consciousness might provide a means for:

Radical self transformation
Self transcendence
Enhanced inner peace
Connectedness to reality

Still needed today even if no longer need the mythology
How do we vouchsafe the value
Properties:

Bright
Comprehensive and detailed
Interesting
World in a grain of sand
Highly intelligible
Beautiful
Pervasive sense of oneness
Self at peace
Joy
Deep remembrance of deep and authentic self
Connectedness btw self and the world as one
Sense of achieving identity at one with the oneness
Ineffable

What might be going on:

Continuity hypothesis: same machinery in the fluency of reading, to moments of insight, flow, then quantum change, deep transformative experience
What’s going on is something like state of flow, but expertise skill of getting optimal grip on the world
People getting flow state in ability to optimally grip on the world

Disruptive stategies:

So central to insight
Can acquire them them mindfulness psychotechonlogy
Reveals invariants - both good (get to the see the patterns remaining unchanged through all the variation - that’s what science does) try to find the real patterns that are invariant
Science increase the variation to find the invariant
But also bad invariants: helping to reveal all the ways in which systematically misframing.

(Includes seeing patterns not there)

like child going through developmental stage, systematically misframing reality, find nexus point - insight not just an intervention in the problem but of a whole class of problems.
Igor Grossman: Decentering strategies: relevant to bringing about wisdom

Solomon effect:
Get ppl to find a messy problem, stuck in. Often interpersonal problem.
Describe it from ego-centric perspective. Remain stuck
Get the person to redescribed the problem from the 3rd person perspective: decanter: break frame. Realize the way been blocked.
Have central insight on how to resolve the problem

(This seems potentially really useful as a prompt when stuck on any problem.)

Systematicity of error of egocentricity: systematic error
Like being asleep, wake up have systematic change in consciousness
Getting transformation, intervention in systematic error; powerful decentering
Can also be traumatic/terrifying
Pursuing it in an auto-didactic fashion very dangerous: tend to get into echo chambers, vicious circles of egocentric entrapment.
Monkey trying to get out of pitch: keeps using hands, feet getting stuck until hunter comes and kills it.
decentering: can alleviate that: but if still pursuing this as an isolated individual, then think about how ill-prepared, unskilled, untutored and ego-centrically trying to confront this radical transformation
Poor idea take psychedelics without a committed community to guide
Don’t have institutions for wisdom
Buddha did do it as individual: deserve admiration but should not take from that some kind of promotion of north american individualism, Buddha made clear that sanga necessary.

(So what does that mean? I shouldn’t pursue this on my own? I’m taking same Harris course, I’ve done some mindfulness courses, but nothing indepth. I shouldn’t continue without seeking out a whole community or instructor? Is that practical?)

radical recentering, can afford wisdom
Participatory change: alters machinery of the self; alters character\
Reciprocal revelation: world revealing itself
Love is mutually accelerating disclosure
Mutual conforming engenders love.

(Hmm, link to USvsTHEM. The more we conform to one another the more our natural distrust falls away.)

knowing by loving

16:30 Cognitive Science:

Humphrey 2015: one of functions of self is to act as glue.

By making things relevant to myself, make them relevant to each other and glue them together.
Complexifying, processing
Self = systematic set of functions that’s integrating. Complexifying together
Powerful machinery of complexification of information and information processing can be exacted: turn the machine whereby integrate yourself and turn it on the world
Glue things together and exact it on the world
Machinery that’s self-focussed could be used to achieve deeper understanding of world

Novak:

What seems to happen is all machinery bound up in ourself turned onto the world. That’s why the world comes alive
Imagine intimacy have of self-knowledge turned on the world

(interesting: do we really know ourselves?_)

radical decentering is doing that.
Time, effort, processing and skill structures built into our ego can be exacted to disclose the world
Coupled with radical sense of moving into being mode, and remembering who and what we really are.

Can understand at psychological level

Information Processing:

look at machine learning, AI: trying to make machines to understand the world
Use of disruptive strategies there.
Woodward: 2014: introduced randomization into neural network
Train them to learn themselves
Have to introduce noise into these networks: essential aspect of self-optimization process

(That’s amazing)

problem face is always sampling from the world: pattern in my experience, want to know if that pattern is in the world or not
Statistics: how do I know if the patterns in my sample is the same as my patterns in the world
representative sample
Often what will happen with neural network is they will overfit for the data

(that’s what we do)

too tightly pick up pattern in the data that doesn’t generalize to the world
Data compression: line of best fit: trying to find the function that will generalize, true of the population
The networks track a function that perfectly tracks sample, butt doesn’t generalize
Throw noise into system: disrupt the processing a lot, prevents from overfitting to the data, allows to compress and find the real invariants

(have no idea why this works)

don’t want to underfit: won’t pick up patterns at all

(Humans naturally overfit - don’t optimize patterns)

have to have disruptive strategies set within powerful pattern detection.
That’s what’s seeing in people who pursuing these higher states of consciousness

(But again: how do we know they are seeing the real invariant pattern?)

The Brain: (29:00)

what’s going on in the brain?
See increased activity in frontal and parietal areas: most associated with general intelligence: ability to make sense and get general grip on world: see these areas get hyperactive, then hypoactive - huge increase then huge decrease
Enhanced activity in thalamus: areas that tries to integrate all kinds of different information together
Greater the disruptive shift, more powerful the awakening experience is
insight: initially bring the machinery to bear to frame it, then have to massively disrupt it, and break it, then system re: self organizes
Psychedelic experiences: Metastability state in the brain doing this complexification.
Normally brain integrating or segregating. But with psicilibin brain is simultaneously integrating and segregating - massively complexifying
Integrating and differentiating
Complexification gives emergent functions
Can do many different things but don’t fall apart
Way grow and self-transcend is by complying
Allows you to see the world (massive integration) in a grain of sand (massive differentiation)
Need to place in the proper sapiential context. Tradition, institutions, committed community to cultivating wisdom

Prescriptive Argument:

Why should we listen to people who have been in this state?
Why justification to transform life?
Are these states actually good guides for transformation?
Plausibility: central to notion of how real things are

Highly probable : not using this sense
Makes good sense: using this one. Stands to reason. Should be taken seriously

Most of the time can’t base actions on certainty but plausibility
26:20: He’s doing work on this.
To make something plausible:

trustworthiness: regard particular proposal or construct as trustworthy if produced by many independent but convergent lines of evidence.
ex: regard as more real something that coming from multiple sense: if can only see it: illusion, but if can see it and touch it and smell it chances illusion diminished
Not certainty but trustworthiness.
Reduces probability that self-deceived
But not certainty: schizophrenia - hard to convince them not real
numbers: help us increase trustworthiness of the data
Model Elegance: that can apply to many domains
Like taking a martial stance, can quickly adapt it to many situations
Elegance for power, multi-aptness
Fluency: has to be higher fluent to me, internalized
Balance: between convergence and elegance

If have a lot of convergence without much elegance: trivial: not powerful, don’t transform
Little convergence with a lot of promise of power: farfetched: conspiracy theories
Want backward and forward commitments to match: only move powerfully forward when have a lot of trust in the model
When have deep convergence, elegance and efficient fluency - profound
Brain performing an evaluation of the plausibility of processing when in a HSC
Strategies for reducing bias:

deautomatization, de centering, fluency in processing
State that you’re in is the state of flowing optimal grip
Intrinsically valued
Finding nexus for development, finding the systematic error
Complexification of processing, emergent new functions
New abilities

(I’m a big fan of reducing bias: but again another one is often applying strategies to control for subjectivity. It still feels like its a feeling)

Brain in state where getting information where saying this processing is deeply trustworthy,
Deeply fluent, deeply powerful so profoundly plausible

(except that it’s all internal, usually we compare to outside world to check reality)

not certainty, but plausibility is what have to rely on

(I agree, certainty is out. But again - it’s all internal. So why are we considering it plausible?)

Science

science doesn’t give you certainty. Gives self-correcting plausibility
Don’t test every hypothesis - ridiculous, absurd, don’t deserve to be taken seriously - implausible
science: control for alternative explanations: inference to the best explanation.
Infinite number of possible explanations - explanation only as good as the plausible alternatives that you beat
Plausibility judgments
HSC is optimization of processing -> brings about state of high plausibility -> relying on processes that are fundamental
Have to get optimal grip before can judge what it is
HSC: indispensability: optimal in terms of best possible functioning to you
Fundamental prior to all cognitive processing
Great guides on how to transform yourself. How to cultvate wisdom
But sometimes come back from these states and make bizarre statements about the world: the propositions people generate from this are useless. Often contradictory.
Isn’t about propositional knowing but participatory transformation
About getting wise practices, wise transformations

(but how do we know we are more wise in these states? Or more optimal. Or seeing real patterns? If they have contradictory and incompatible ideas of what is real, and wisdom is being more connected to reality, how can we say they are more wise. It seems more to be about a prescription for increased mental well-being - but that doesn’t necessarily have to be linked to reality. )

want to take the wisdom from HSCs and get it into rational discourse with an independently established metaphysics by science and philosophy
When we can put those two together have properly salvaged what these HSC can afford for us.
Don’t confuse the rationality of wisdom and the rationality of knowledge

(Not sure he expects us to get this yet or if that is what we nail down next lecture. I feel like I have a hint of it but it hasn’t settled in yet.)

Episode 13 - Buddhism and Parasitic Processing

Last time:

Finished cognitive scientific exploration higher states of conscious
Psychologically accurate description of higher states of conscious
State of consciousness where getting flow state improving optimal grip, optimizing our performance for making sense of things and enhancing our overall capacity for learning.
Justification for these states being guidance for transformation of life. Give brain state that is highly optimized, giving sense of plausible grip on the world. Foundational for us.
While doesn’t give good theories/propositional claims, these states do justify their claim to give us guidance. Rational in sense of wisdom.

3:00: Buddha

Buddha awakens, fundamental transformation in how understands the world, and himself
Deep remembering (sati) seeing through the modal confusion
Remember being mode, and transcend systematic illusion, also see the pronouncements he made through this state.
West often misunderstood Buddha
Stephen Bachelor: recommend his works

Buddhism without Beliefs, After Buddhism
Argues we face interpretation crisis when trying to understand Buddhism.
Suggests must interpret Buddhism from within a tradition. Not about altering belief, it’s about:

Transformation
Participatory knowing
Fundamentally altering agent/arena relationship and existential modes

So need to be within a practice. Understood from within.
Problem is that’s myopic. Many buddhist traditions. To claim that that particular interpretation is sole pathway to interpreting buddhism narrow minded. Subjective and biased
Alternative: outside any tradition such as academic study of Buddhism
But often don’t engage in practices. Lose objectivity if get too close.
Objective account.
Similar to problem that Socrates faced:

Transformative relevance.
Attempt to get at the truth.

Buddhism is about both of these: Trying to find transformatively relevant truths.
10:00: How?

Interacting with the meaning crisis in society.
Break out of all of this
Tries to see where each fixated: argues this will become myopic if becomes fixated on particular propositions - fixated on beliefs.

(Interesting parallel to the discussions going on twitter between Atheists and Theists. Often really focussed on beliefs but not as much focussed on the role that religion plays. That it DOES something to people that goes beyond their mere beliefs.)

Buddhism without beliefs: fixed on trying to understand Buddhism as a set of beliefs. Gotten so used to this way of thinking, that these axial legacy traditions are to be understood as creeds, as systems of belief
Ideologies are attempts to create meaning but fail for deep reason because meaning making machinery not occurring at level of propositional knowledge, beliefs
proposes: need to look at buddhism existentially
Beyond belief: transforming states of consciousness, transforming self
4 noble truths understand as things that can help afford kind of transformations talked about - reenact the buddha’s enlightenment.
Should call them the 4 Ennobling Truths, Vervake says call them the 4 Ennobling provocations: trying to provoke such change

4 Noble Truths/Provocations: 16:15

Standard Way:

All of life is suffering:

technically false
Suffering is comparative term.
more: All is threatened by. Not a metaphysical interpretation
Suffering: original meaning is “insane” but come to synonymous with “angry”
Anger if extreme can render temporary insane temporarily “mad”
Suffering = pain, but that’s not what the word means: it means “to undergo” to lose agency. Can suffer pleasure, so much pleasure lost control of the situation
Not just “pain”: loss of agency
parable: monkey gets stuck in pitch then gets killed. Not pain, but entrapment

(This rings true. When I feel like I am suffering its like being caught in a wave. Feel helpless, lost. Part of therapy is focussed on taking back control and agency. We have these cognitive distortions when depressed. CBT focuses you to not just be carried along by the wave but to stop, analyze and possibly change the direction)

Taste of freedom
Provocaation: All of life is threatened with losing freedom/agency.
Dukkha: like a wheel off its axis. As wheel turning destroying itself. Out of joint, as moving destroying itself.

(This hits true too: Self-destruction is huge part of depression/suffering)

Ex: Pattern in cognitive processing: processes that make you adaptively intelligent also make vulnerable to self-deceptive and self-destructive behaviour

(Just being “smart” doesn’t entail you escape suffering. In fact, I think it could enhance the chance of it. Ability to think fast also the ability to distort fast. Or to get caught up in thoughts. Overthink things)

event happens, interpret as bad. Brain always trying to anticipate other such events
Can’t take in all the events in environment. Use heuristics, zero in on relevant information
Representativeness heuristic: judge how probable an event is by how salient/proto-typical it is.
Availability heuristic: judge how probable event is by how easily can imagine another event occurring
Adaptive: in a bad state because something bad happened, encoding specificity: when sad difficult to remember events in which happy and easy to remember events in which sad

(oooh boy! That’s depression!)

memory stores the state you were in: way to help remember is to get back in the state was in
Experiment: group A and B remember words, A does 2nd test in the same room, B in another room. A will do better.
Adaptive: Brain fits you to the environment
Bad thing happened, salient, so judge more probable happen again
Confirmation bias: adaptive strategy, look for info that supports current belief. Finding disconfirmation takes too long, complex.
So in memory look to confirm memories that highly probable
Can mislead - ex: plane crash think probable even though low, but get into car (death machine)
But can’t do without them: adaptive.

(So this is one thing that’s important in our internet debates. Pointing out things like confirmation bias is a big part of debate. But many people treat it like a character flaw. It’s not. It’s baked into human nature. Like Vervaeke says: it’s adaptive. It has its users. But it can also lead us astray. Worth keeping in mind in your next discussion)

Judge the probability to be great - happens automatically. Imagine if had to do it all consciously -too much. Need cognition to be self-organizing.

(So in our analysis we can disrupt these biass)

32:30: Effect of judgement on you is not emotionally neutral: Anxiety
Anxiety: lose cognitive flexibility
Framing becomes very narrow, limited rigid, ability to solve problems goes down.
Make lots of mistakes and FAIL -> increases anxiety, reinforces bad events happening, then gather in mind as “I’m doomed!”, become fatalistic. Start to interpret regular events as bad.

(Oooooh boy, this hits me hard. I suffer from depression and anxiety and all of this rings REALLY true. Very helpful model.

Whole thing feeds on itself. Very things that make you so intelligently adaptive: zero in on relevant information, makes it salient, fit you to environment, all these things ALSO make you vulnerable to self-destructive/self-deceptive behaviour THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO SAY THAT ALL YOUR LIFE IS THREATENED BY DUKKHA

(BAM! This hits home. But it makes me wonder: we tend to think of anxiety/depression as a modern day problem. Was it as prevalent back in Buddha’s day or are we retrofitting?)

Not that everything do is painful and distressing, its that every process makes vulnerable to self-deceptive/self-destructive processing: Parasitic processing. (35:18)
Not just bad events. All kinds of spirals.
Depression Schema:
Parasitic processing: like a parasite: takes up life within you and it takes life away from you. Causes you to lose your agency. Causes you to suffer.
Capacity of brain to be self-organizing/heuristic using, to create complex systems has a downside. Know when you’re in one of these spirals. But knowing doesn’t do anytihng. It’s self-adapting. Can adapt and preserve itself as try to destroy it. Trying to avoid you being destroyed but words against us. Perennial threat

38:00 Mark Lewis: dynamical processing. Addiction.

Addiction: loss of agency: way diagnose them is by how dysfunctional they become.
If stops from pursuing goals want to do in life.

(Used to have bad Twitter addiction!)

loss of agency
Mark Lewis: says standard model of addiction incorrect: That have chemical dependency, leads to overwhelming need for it. Sounds common sense but false.
Can get addicted to processes that have no biochemical basis (gambling).
Most people spontaneously give up addiction in 30s. Selection bias b/c focus on those who get trapped.
Soldiers in Vietnam getting addicted to opiods, then come home and vast majority spontaneously stop using is when come back.
When in Vietnam had identity (solider) and arena (war), back home citizen, country. Relationship between agency and arena alterred.
Reciprocal Narrowing: drug use associated with particular agent/arena relationship. Co-identification: always assuming/assigning identity. Lose cognitive flexibility, number of options in the world start to decline, lose variability for agency, as get tighter, narrower, less flexible agency. Reciprocally narrow, so no options for who you can be and how the world can be. Learned, participatory leaning of loss of agency.
If there is a spiral down, must be a spiral up. Agent/arena expanding. Move towards enlightenment.

(If this is true that’s huge. It would seem to apply to depression/anxiety as well. But it sounds daunting).

Parasitical processing and reciprocal narrowing reinforcing each other.
That is Dukkha
No matter where turn, this is always threatening. Can’t run away from it.

(All of this hits home very hard. It reflects my experience. But it is SO hard to overcome. Which suggests following the 4 noble truths could help with this. But again, seems so daunting!)

That’s what the buddha meant.

46:15: How do we address this?

You should feel threatened! Then starting to enact the process to moving towards enlightenment.

(I don’t need to wonder, I’m living it!)

suffering caused by desire. Leads to all kinds of problems. Weird loops.
2nd noble truth: Desiree leads to suffering. Better way: Realise that Dukka can be understood: attachment: sense of narrowing of the world so that agency and options are lost.
3rd noble truth: sensation of suffering is attainable. Better way: realize that can recover your agency - can use the same machinery to anogically leave the cave. Can use it to reduce capacity for self-deception
Psycho-technology: practices - cultivate a counter active dynamical system that is operating for you
Keep on falling into the same cycles. But what if could create dynamical system that interacts simultaneously across the system? Didn’t just operate at level of belief but operates at level of states of consciousness and character.

(this is what I have trouble with in therapy. I easily get the intellectual points that are being made. I understand where I’m being self-destructive. But that knowledge doesn’t help avoid the patterns. The solution being presented here is to dive into all of this. Again: seems daunting, but maybe could be life-altering).

that’s what the Buddha offered: 8 fold path: counteracts parasitic processing and does reciprocal opening beyond the ego self and beyond the everyday world
Why it’s represented by an 8 spoked wheel. Self-organizing system, that rolls itself
Each part interdependent.

8 fold path:

To say there is “right” means there is incorrect. Means Right-handedness. Means getting an optimal grip.
1st 2 about cognition. Next 3 about character. Last 2 about consciousness.
Anagogic awakening.
Trying to show us that higher state of consciousness set in context of helping us do important transformations:

Remember being mode.
Get out of modal confusion.
Counteract parasitical processing and reciprocal narrowing.
Open up to self transcendence in a reliable and powerful way.

We should be encouraged (enact the courage)

Episode 14 - Epicurians, Cynics, and Stoics

Awakening experiences can alleviate:

modal confusion,
parasitic processing,
reciprocal narrowing,
all the many of the ways in which we fundamentally lose our agency in the world in a self deceptive and self-destructive manner.

Moving to after the axial revolution in the west.
Aristotle’s disciple: Alexander the Great

2:20: Alexander the Great

World conqueror. Creates empire, takes the greek way of thinking throughout known world. Reestablishes the pre-axial world. Line between being a human and a god is blurred. Creates myth as god-man.
Twisting of the world: Alexander represents return to pre-axial way of being, and a disruption to the world
World of Aristotle vs. World of Alexander

Hellenistic era: after Alexander dies, divide into 4 smaller empires.
Aristotle’s world:

Live in a polis: city-state
Know the other citizens face to face
Developing democracy
Participating in government in direct manner, live near it, know the people involved, everyone speaks your language
Polis is such a tight relationship between agent and arena, ostracization terrible punishment

Hellenistic world:

Smashes all that.
Greek culture distributed into Africa, the levant, Asia, Asia Minor, to border India
Means that people being moved and shuffled around, belong to far-flung empires.
Live far from government, don’t participate, don’t know people in it
People near you might not lived near you for that long.
Different languages and gods
Connections lost
experiencing: Domocide: destruction of home
Physical or cultural domocide.
No deep connections to one another, feel insignificant
Age of anxiety.
Art changes: more frenetic, more realisitc, organized around extremes and tragedies.
Greek culture spread and thinned. Loses its depth

11:00: change happens
Syncretism: religions that integrate several cultural deities together
Elevation of mother-goddesses: Isis, when feel a loss of home, nothing means more than mother, so look to divine mother makes feel at home

(12:00) Hellenistic Philosophy:

Hellenistic meaning crisis
Up to now main thing wisdom trying to deal with is foolishness. But that’s not enough now.
Epicurus:
“Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others”.
Therapeutic aspect of wisdom. About relieving the anxiety and suffering of the hellenistic era.

(But wasn’t Buddha ALL about that too? Why would he have such a focus on suffering if there wasn’t a lot of it going on. I suspect it was just different suffering)

New metaphor: physician of the soul: cure you of existential suffering. This becomes crucial
Many new philosophical schools (Epicurians and Stoics) try to exemplify Socrates.

Epicurians:

Represent secular alternative in midst of still very religious world
Diagnose main problem: fear

(I can identify with that!)

Paul Tillich: The courage to be: distinction between fear and anxiety

(I’d agree with that too)

Often mix up fear and anxiety.
anxiety:

distressed,
loss of agency,
nebulous sense of threat

Ok in everyday discourse but polar differences:
Fear:

Observable direct threat
I know what to do - may fail, but know

Anxiety:

Threat is nebulous: not quite sure what the threat is,
Don’t know what to do
When have existential issues often suffer anxiety

Epicureans: we suffer because we can’t manage our anxiety
18:45: we don’t control our imagination and our thinking so we suffer from anxieties that cripple our ability to get a grip on the world
Many people have anxiety about death.

Often use existence of death to say life essentially meaningless. terrifying.
We know if expose people to triggers about their mortality they become cognitively rigid. Get locked down
Can: pursue immortality: religions often this. He thinks this is a doomed strategy. Mind emergent from brain overwhelming evidence. Brain dies, conscious dies with it.

Epicureans: another strategy: rather than try to achieve immortality can you radically accept your mortality?
Not nonexistence that find terrifying. Not terrified about what happened before you existed. Is it the loss? That’s equivocal. Do mean reduction or the absence? But can’t experience total loss: “Where I am death is not”. If aware still losing then still alive - so can’t be that.
What about partial loss? Losing some of your agency. Fear of loss of capacities while dying. But do that all the time.
Epicureans say: Afraid of losing what’s good.
Pay attention to the things that give you the most meaning.
What is it that gives you most meaning?
Things lose:

Fame
Fortune
Wealth

But then say: those don’t give the most meaning in life.
Epicureans: Thing gives meaning is friendship. Meaningful relationships. To pursue wisdom and transcendence.
Any of the pain suffering from the loss of those other things manageable.
They ask: do you really want immortality?

(good question for the group)

What really afraid of is losing agency which identified with their things. But that’s not where ultimate happiness lies.
When you die, then doesn’t matter to you.
Tried to get people not be anxious about the gods.
Epicurious not quite an atheist. Said gods are irrelevant.
Shouldn’t be anxious about them and their nebulous threat.

(christianity makes it less nebulous. Real threat).

Engaged in practices where constantly train in being able to accept your mortality

Application to Us:

One of things wisdom practice should do is to help respond to our mortality.
Alternative therapy for dealing with anxiety: learning HOW to LIVE in the acceptance of your mortality.

(Interestingly, anxiety about death has little to do with my anxiety and suffering..)

Vervaeke: doesn’t think fear of mortality really is the right diagnosis

(I agree!)

They are right that period of chaos and Domocide exacerbate, making us feel more vulnerable, makes mortality more salient.
But another school gets a better understanding of what was going on with Hellenistic period.

30:15: Stoicism:

Ancestor of cognitive therapy
Cognitive therapy comes directly out of stoicism
Way WE trying to deal with issues of anxiety/depression crisis (Indeed!) putting into practice things from Stoics
Different diagnosis and prognosis
Stoics: we’re suffering from a kind of anxiety/suffering/loss of agency but they have a diff. interpretation.
history:

Socrates, Plato, Antistenes
Antisthenes asked what learned from Socrates: learned how to converse with himself.
Doesn’t mean just talking to oneself, internal voice (that’s what often goes seriously awry in anxiety/depression)
Antisthenese: learned to do with himself what Socrates did with him

(I like to think I do this kind of internal dialogue as well)

Socrates turned into systematic set of psycho-technologies, internalize into metacognition
Plato: argumentation
Antisthenes: the actual confrontation was more important.

(I’ve found this myself: I figure things out in dialogue often better than just on my own - unless I frame it in a dialogue myself. It probes me in different way. I love the socratic method)

Diogenes and the Cynics

Diogenes: epitomizes confrontation
He gets in face in a way to try and provoke you to realizations
Tries to create shock experience to challenge you to radically change life
Trying to hone in on being as provocative as possible.
Ex: Man with the lamp, wondering about. Diogenes walking into marketplace with lamp. Looking. Looking for one honest man. Everyone got pissed off with him.
Pissed because they know he’s right
Diogenes does other things: masturbated in public
Cynics: living like a dog. Diogenes lived in a barrel.
Alexander: visted Diogenes: “I can give you half the world, what do you want” - “Can you move a little to the left, you’re blocking my sunlight”
Why? What is going on? Cynics had idea that what causes us to suffer is what we set our heart on.

When we set our hearts on the wrong things, those things will fail us, that’s how suffer

Came to the conclusion that what hellenistic period showing us, many of the things take for granted not fundamentally real. No staying power. Man made. Not permanent. Historically dependent
What should we do?

Learn how to set heart on the kind of things that are not manmade, not contingent, will not be swept away by events.
1) laws of the natural world - live like an animal, wants to live as much by natural law, not man-made law. Doesn’t want to take part in cultural values, those will end. If set heart upon them, heart will be broken.

(Course, have less suffering, but may also have less joy)

Not man-made so won’t disappear
2) Moral laws: what is a proper way to be a good human being.
Try and make a distinction between moral principles that are not-culturally based and culturally based purity codes
Guilt vs. Shame;

Guilt: destress at having broken moral principle
Shame; distress at having broken cultural purity code
ex: if pants fell down feel shame, violate cultural code. But not immoral. Not wrong. No guilt, but shame
May be made to feel ashamed even if think morally right: ex: supporting blacks during civil rights movement.

Purity codes keep categorical boundaries, make a culture in a particular historical period run the way it’s running
Tied up in the power structure.
ex: drink water, no distress. What if collect saliva in mouth, spit into the cup. Gobs of it. Swirl it around, then drink it. Now think EWWW. But if mix water in mouth fine with that. If saliva comes out, repellent. Purity code: this its the boundary of john, pieces of John should not come out into the world
Bed, unmade, leaving impression behind
Often confuse purity code with moral code. Confuse disgust reaction with moral judgement that should be based on reason and evidence.
ex: don’t want to see parents having sex. EW. Not a moral argument. In a similar way, may not want to see two men having sex - but not a moral judgment on my part. Often persecute gays because confuse purity code disgust reaction with legitimate moral argument
Diogenes trying to get you to pull apart the moral code from the purity code
Alexander offers power and fame: all the things Cynics say are no good. Man-made, human defined. Heart will be broken.
Set heart on what won’t get broken.
Powerful provocative way to enact Socrates: realize what set heart on. Reflect on what doing

Zeno

Zeno influenced by Cynics, but liked Plato’s arguments
Connections between ability to reflect and reason.
Integrate rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato with provocative aspects of cynics
Would walk up and down, teaching new integration: Stoicism
Cynics: not enough on process. Too much on what attaching heart to, not the process of attachment itself.
Particular cultures in history are variable but being social isn’t.
People are inherently social
Not what set heart on, it’s how set heart.
Hallmark of rationality is learning not to focus just on the products of cognition but find valuable and pay attention to the processes

(YES!)

Process of setting heart: co-identifcation. Process by which agent arena relationship set up. Assume and assign identity. Do it unconsciously.
That process is where identity formed.
If mindlessly coidentify mar that process. Open to all kinds of distortion, self-deception, distortion.
Need to pay attention to this process. How we’re assuming and assigning identities/
Strengthen agency in the threat of domiciled.

Topics to talk about:

Difference between fear and anxiety
Role of fear/anxiety in suffering
Does the prospect of your death cause you anxiety?
Do you really want immortality?
Roie of the mother goddess.
Vervaeke’s atheism
Confrontation vs. Argument
Cynics: When we set our hearts on the wrong things, those things will fail us, that’s how suffer
Guilt vs. Shame

Episode 15 - Marcus Aurelius and Jesus

Last episode: domicide, deep lack of connectedness to one’s home. What happens is a change in the cultivation of wisdom
Wisdom takes on therapeutic dimension - cure anxiety
Epicurians: diagnosed the problem anxiety of the period as being caused by anxiety about one’s own mortality. How did they respond to that?

(didn’t do this last week: this week should go around talking about our views on accepting own mortality)

prescription: acceptance own mortality
About experiencing partial loss - remedy - focus on elements constitutive meaningful happieness, philosophically informed friendship
Cynics: confrontation and provocation - distinction between morality codes and purity codes - don’t want heart broken on man made impermanent cultural systems and values
Zeno: argumentation and confrontation: particular cultures are contingent, being social is not
Must realize how we are setting our hearts - pay attention to the process rather than the product
Epicureans trying to get insight, changing the meaning of mortality
Most of us let this process go by mindlessly - assigning identities
Stoics: bring process of co-identification, assuming roles of agency, assigning identities bring co-determination of agency/arena into our awareness

Proshoche/Procheiron:

Prohoche: pay attention: pay attention to this process
Difference between the modal meaning and the event
Core of current psychotherapy- distinguish between event and meaning give the event
Meaning isn’t part of the event at all
If keep them fused will become confused. The only way can alter the meaning is to alter the event. But can’t always do that.
Don’t have as much control as think you do
Epictus: stoic philosopher. Manual for living: core of wisdom is knowing what’s in your control and what’s not in your control. Stop pretending things that are in your control are not.
Existentially con-fused
Erich Fromm: directly influenced from Stoics
Having mode: controlling things. Have to control water, food, air, shelter. But most pertinent needs not met from exercing control, but met by enhancing meaning.

(This is a theme I’ve been seeing in this series. Vervaeke’s position seems to be that we cannot simply choose to resolve this modal confusion. We don’t have control of that. We can do things, exercise certain practices, that put us in a position of having those insights that will result in change. Insight is more than just intellectually understanding. It is grasping - which is more of a feeling I think)

We don’t let kids do certain things because they are not allowed to move in that arena. Maturity is an existential meaning.
If don’t know how to separate meaning from the events liable to be modally confused. Pursue maturity by trying to have a car, to be in love by having sex
But doesn’t work, can’t exercise as much control over the world to stabilize the meaning
Setting hearts on things and heart is going to be broken.
Anything can fall prey to this.
Have to practice bringing into awareness the distinction between events and the meaning of events.

(How about an exercise: let’s do this now. Let’s draw our attention to what we’re doing right now, having this podcast and separate the meaning from the event.)

Often act as if have no control over the meaning, then focus on trying to control the event - and have less control than realise. Pull the two apart. Recalibrate your sense of control and identity. Have more control over meaning than realize or practice, way less control over events than realize or practice.

How do you practice that? (15:00)

Prochiron: the practice: ready to hand. Remembering (Sati), remembering in a way that brings skills and activities to bear in a modally existential sense
Practice psycho-technologies to get them internalized.
Moment to moment practices:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Not meant to create beliefs for us. Writing for himself. Designed to bring into awareness the co-identifcation process and co-transform the meaning of the world as distinct from attempting to control and manipulate the world by accruing power and fame

(Meditations available from Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680)

“possible to be happy, even in a palace”
He doesn’t leave the palace
Practices:

Objective seeing: “conceive as sex as the friction of two patches of skin and the production of a sticky fluid”
Realize the event of sex as distinct from all the meaning we pour into it.

Stoics: Get a cup you really like, very familiar, then smash it. Then remmeber the distinction between the meaning and the thing. Practice it with little things. Then can do it with larger things.

Premeditation:

When kissing your child tonight. Tell yourself, I may lose him to death tonight. Have tremendous control of the meaning you and so making together. Little control over his mortality.
We have entire genres that distort and refuse to gather the meaning and the event; romantic comedies: teach us that the narrative meaning that we assign to things is aligned with the way the world is unfolding.
Tragedies to compensate for that.
But that’s not how it works.
Beyond Fate: Margaret Viser: lost the meaning of a word.

(Beyond Fate: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2002-cbc-massey-lectures-beyond-fate-1.2946868)

Lost the meaning of fate. Associate with mortality. But the root of the word. Talking about the way things are fated to happen through own causal necessity
When fuse meaning and event together become subject to the fatality of all things. If forget it suffer when it comes apart.
Fate - death - that’s where meaning and events come apart.

The view from above: (26:45)

Solomon effect: moving from first person perspective to third person perspective. Viewing some situation and immeshed in it.

(I should go back through all the notes and start putting together a checklist of the practices he talks about to start employing them more regularly)

Situated the event within toronto, within all of canada, within the whole world, within the whole world in all of time. What happens when do that.

(We could do this exercise)

alters the arena. Sense of self being radically transformed. Can become more flexible, rational, etc.
Control level theory: bunch of practices designed to get you to bring into awareness this process of meaning making and to give discernment to pull apart the meaning from the event.
Most therapy is about getting people to see this. Change sense of self so move off of so much trying to change events can’t control to cognitively reframing the meaning. The identity, participatory meaning, existential mode.
Takes practice

Internalizing Socrates: 29:45

Trying to do with yourself what Socrates did. Get people to stop and be Socratic with themselves.
Ex: depression. Not talking about rumination. “Everything I do is a failure”, they say: “Everything?” What do you mean?
Often don’t have the internal Socrates: oh wow, you're making such powerful claims, you must know and understand. But it’s not what actually mean. May believe.
Can keep on challenging what we mean. Ask ourselves questions.
Bullshitting ourselves. Motivation and arousal way ahead of understanding. The meaning and event are confused together.
By doing this transform capacity to interact with the world.

Alter sense of identity: (33:30)

What if alter sense of mortality.
What would do? Do all the things want to do? How long? Then what do? More meaningful things. Then what? Then What?
Would get bored
Stoic idea: as long as formulating identity horizontally, unending duration to life. Going to fail. But even if gave it to you going to fail.
What want is Vertical depth of life. Live life as fully as possible.
Marcus Aurelius: Everyone dies but not everyone has lived: Not about gusto. Not the having mode, self-transcendence, being mode.
What do identify with? Vertical or Horizontal. If identify with vertical and get sense of fulness of being.
Even if it lasts a moment that;’s enough.
Not about duration but quality.
If can achieve that in this moment, right here right now, then I’m done.
Stoic’s answer:

We can come to realize that I can realize more control over meaning making. One thing that is always good to have: wisdom: have identity in the depths, not historical identity. Would be fulfilled life.

Vervaeke: personal:

at physiological level avoids death. Do not want to live forever.

(I agree. Would be eventually unbearable)

In some ways, tired of life. Tired of ways in which been foolish. Immoral. Let myself and others down. Letting that bear through eternity don’t want that.
But: have I seen glimpses of depth? Yes. He has.
When people get that depth, lose fear of mortality.
We do not have to look to asian history for the psycho-technologies of self-transcendence - western heritage has it too
Can do it within a scientific worldview

End of the Hellenistic Period: (43:15)

Hellenistic period comes to an end with return to a world empire. Going to be informed by axial revolution but return to pre-axial world. Man can be a god because wield so much power.
Within that empire, all these philosophies find home. Even the emperor himself exemplar of legacy of axial revolution.

Ancient israel: (44:30)

Israel conquered by Roman Empire
Christianity informed by the axial legal of ancient Israel moving from land of slavery to promised land. Real world is the future. God is the open creator. Participatory knowing, involvement in the course of histotry. Sometimes trespass, fall off course, have to be redeemed, brought back on course, speak God’s attempt to get back on track with making the future. Co-creating with God. The open future, to bring about a promised land of human beings.

(brilliant!)

Jesus:

jewish man. Millions believe he was literally God.
He disagrees but is respectful of this fact. Not trying to give final version of this. But to try and explain what Jesus did to that Israelite axial legacy.
Battles of who Jesus was and did not something going to try and resolve here.
Kairos: perspectival participatory knowing, knowing exactly the right time to shift the course of events.
Ex: romantic relationship: kiss: if get timing right course of relationship alterred. Your and her identity changed.
Israelite: whole nation, God intervene Kairodically at certain moments in history.
Christianity: propose radical idea that God’s creative Logos - the Word he speaks through the prophets. Same Word he speaks things into existence. Word makes Kairos possible for us. Formative principle. Underlying structure.
God’s capacity for producing Kairos through Logos, been incarnated in a particular individual. Jesus is the ultimate Kairos.

(So from this perspective Jesus is Kairos whether or not he’s actually the Son of God - because he certainly was an intervention that caused a radical shift in identity)

Ultimate turning point. Represents is personally. Because he is a person, you can identify with him and that Kairos can take place in you personally. Similar to Socrates personalizing axial revolution.
You too can experience a profound Kairos.
Radical Metanoia: radical shifting. Close to awakening.
Meta - beyond - Noia: awareness.
Radical transformation of what it’s like to be you.
Jesus incarnates the principle by which can intervene in own personal history such that will have a new mind, new heart, new modal existence. Born again.

(Brilliant!)

What could so radically transform my salience landscape? Love
We use one word to refer to so many things: I love peanut butter, I love my son, I love a good game. Are they the same?
We think that love is an emotion. NO! Modal way of being.
Loving someone can be expressed by being sad when gone, happy when there, jealous.
Modal way of being. Agent/Arena relationship.

(That makes sense. It is an agent/arena relationship that produces a whole host of emotions)

Jesus seems to incarnate as a Kairos to change the hisotory of world, and your own: different kind of love: Agape:
Eros: love seeks to be one with something. One with nature, or one with a cookie by eating it. Having sex.
Philia: love satisfied through consummation. Seeks cooperation. Reciprocity. Love friends because in reciprocity with them.

(That’s the love I push!)

Agape: love of parent for child. Don’t try and consume child. Not friendship.
You love it, not because can consume or be one with it, or reciprocity. Love it because turn a non-person into a person.
Depend on Agape. Because people loved you as a person that you became the person you are.
Jesus: offering that love for all. Why Christianity will take Roman Empire culturally.
Agape: can take all the non-persons, we will turn you into persons. Persons that belong to the kingdom of God.

Episode 16 - Christianity and Agape

(I’ve been working this past week on exercise of separating meaning from event: swimming)

Jesus: How what he did contributed to our understanding of wisdom and meaning.

(The point is that religious or not we can appreciate the role these religions have played in providing a sense of meaning. This no doubt contributed to their staying power and highlights that we would benefit from secular institutions that provide similar roles)

Kairos: turning point in the course of history.
Israelites: psycho-technology of understanding history as a cosmic narrative in which crucial turning point.
Jesus saw himself as a source of Kairos.
Seems he had sense of himself as deeply participating in how God influencing course of history.
Exodus God creates in an open future. People identify, loving it, participating in its flow. Jesus felt especially deep participation.
Reciprocal revelation: participate in culture, language, history, know this by way in which self is fundamentally transformed
Love: deeply transforms who we are
Love:

Eros: love of being one with something - drinking water, sex, consumptive
Philia: love of cooperation, work together
Agape: love of creation, love God demonstrates to humanity, God is creating the future, makes people possible. Agape creates persons. Parent loves a child. By loving that non-person, you create a person. God-like ability
Agape: radical transformation: metanoia: radical turning. Salience landscaping. Fundamentally turning, altering whole orientation. My personal Kairos.
Jesus teaching this and exemplifying it.

Before, we are receivers of Agape, transformed into a person.
Gain our sense of self, and ability to reflect on oneself through how reflected in other people
Born out of an agapic love
From the child’s perspective, they are consuming the love that the adult giving them. Becoming one with it. Egocentric.
Freud: our relationship to our parent in that sense is erotic, consuming them. Becoming one with them. Don’t think it’s sexual ,but insight there.
From parents perspective, not egocentric.
Good parent: no longer the centre of salience landscape. Child is. Absolutely dependent on you.
Turning from egocentric to being centred on someone else.
Jesus offering a teaching so that all people could experience this, in terms of a relationship with God. We become vessels through which Agape creates other human beings.
John: understand capacity for radically transforming people, so they are conduits of God-like process. Agape is God.
Participate in Agape, in so far as you help other people come to person-hood through you.
Radical idea: psychotechnology, grammar for how to transform, allow to conquer Roman Empire. Offer all the non-persons a process by which they become persons: women, widows, sick, poor, weak, non-male roman citizens. All receive the opportunity of a radical transformation.

Sacrifice and Forgiveness: (15:00)

Agape has a sacrificial element. Give yourself before the person earns.
I’m giving up, making myself an affordance for your transformation from non-person to person
Forgiveness: central
Forgive other people - experience agape from God to the extent we forgive other people
We have trivialized it. Not just saying sorry. Doesn’t depend on contrition.
All agape love is forgiving love, because given before earned it.
Individuals can redirect their own history, experience their own Kairos
Born again: radical transformation of entire orientation, entire way of being

Death:

Death of Jesus profound effect on some christian movements
Death exemplifies the sacrificial forgiveness at the core of Agape
Enables people to internalize sacrificial love, empowers them to transform other human beings
Resistance to Jesus movement and to Jesus: may have been angering and upsetting a lot of people
Saul

Saul (21:15)

Jew and Roman citizen
Had been wars between romans and jews. Tense relationship.
Integrated these two aspects of his personality together through commitment to law.
Sees the followers (initially called the followers of the Way): Jesus is the way in which can experience the Kairos of Metanoia and be forgiving and for giving agape to others.
Saul sees these people as threatening to Jewish heritage and Roman order. Persecutes early Christians
There when Steven, first Christian martyred. Stone him.
Gets a writ to travel to Damascus, to round up Christians for prosecution.
On the road: transformative experience. Myth: presenting a profound pattern.
Struck by bright light (metaphor enlightenment). Radical super salience. Struck to the ground. Voice says: Saul why do you persecute me. Says “who are you lord?” Sense confronting something more real than himself. Voice said I am Jesus.
He’s blinded by light. Plato - blinded by the light.
Engenders in Saul deep inner conflict. How can it be that he’s had this awakening experience, from the very being he was persecuting? How reconcile.
Travels to Antioch. Taken in by the people was going to persecute. Forgiveness.
His sight is restored.
He’s at war with Agape itself, and we all are.
Tough to acknowledge reality of Agape.

We like to create person fables of how we are:

self-made,
self-directed
self secure
self sustaining

Agape challenges that.

(Andrew:

He’s correct on agape: CS Lewis, 4 loves, Motherlove, Agape, empathic love have for children. Motherly empathetic love, things would be unable to do. Love have for infant, not exactly agape but analogical to it. Creativity and grace, fully articulated. Humans can par-

- human nature sacred transcendent, important to do.

agape expression of creative flowing through of grace, being, in addition empathic bond, more instinctual - similar to.
Storge. 3 types of love oriented to persons- Love of creation itself.

Goes into desert to reflect. Comes out gone through radical transformative experience. Changed his name to Paul.
Message: presents Agape as: 1 Cor 13

And now I will show you the most excellent Way.
Not going to make an argument like Plato. Present from framework as participatory knowing.
“If I” his identity being transformed into Agape “speak in the tongues of man and angels but have not love I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith that can move mountains but not have love I am nothing.”
Participatory language. Language by identifying.
“If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but I have not love I gain nothing”
“Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy it does not boast.” Not romantic love, “It is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, Always trusts. Always hopes. Always perseveres”
Those are features need to help and afford someone into personhood.
“Love never fails” Romantic love fails. That love does fail. What he means is Agape can’t fail. We are always born from and always have to give birth to agape or personhood disappears.
“when I was a child, thought like a child, when became a man, put childish ways behind me”.
When kid, have particular identity, things matter to you in a certain way. When become adult. World radically reoriented. What is salient, change.
No longer super saliency of candy and toys, and playing. Then not growing up as an adult.
“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror. Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part then I shall know fully even as I am fully known and now these three remain faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love”
Like seeing a reflection. Not in touch with reality. Like Plato’s cave. With Agape will come to know as we are knowing. Participatory love.
Gnosis: way of knowing that is bound up in Agape.

Not advocating for Christianity: trying to get us to understand how profound an expression of meaning is on offer here.

Dark Side: (39:30)

Danger here: of misunderstanding.
When I know someone, participatory agapic relationship. Knowing them and knowing myself deeply bound together. Jesus and God are one. Paul: Christ who lives in me.
Deep bonding of identity.
Know by transforming yourself.
Danger: any aspect of yourself that do not properly understand that has not come into knowledge can get projected onto what you love
Danger in romantic relationship, so bound to them, a lot of what is unconscious in your identity can be projected into that person
Should have commitment to self-discovery in Socratic sense when enter into a relationship
Happening in Paul: inner conflict in Paul profound.
We know what we should do and do the opposite.
Almost like being pulled to do something else. Like in the midst of civil war.
Comes up with a narrative for understanding this conflict: comes from personalization of notion of movement from liberation from old place, moving to new place. Exodus.
Experiences old Saul, wants to follow the way of the law but feels guilty and angry. Then the new Paul, the Paul of love, who feels connected. New man being born from old me.
He understands his inner conflict as reflecting an inner conflict with God: danger
Radical idea: have to understand Paul to understand Augustine, and Luther.
Idea that God has two aspects:

1) Law and justice and order. We stand in judgment. We have failed. Not lived up to moral perfection that morality demands of us. None of us can meet that standard.
Paul sees God as perfectly just, we fail to meet that standard so legally we are condemned to death.
2) Agapic parent who loves us.
Jesus sacrificed himself to satisfy God’s demand for justice so that God could fully love us.
Relevant to our purposes: within this message also an attempt to project the idea that somehow the course of reality itself is enmeshed in a conflict between justice and agape

What that’s going to mean is that people who experience deep inner conflict will find a home in Christianity. Sense of personal failure, not living up to what can and should be, that their personhood is thwarted, that not come into the fulness of perfection, completeness of personhood going to be attracted to Christian message

(hmmm, that’s me but I’m not attracted to Christianity)

Relevance to meaning crisis: how do we tap into all of this power of Agape, participatory gnosis, own sense of not living up to fulness of personhood without the machinery of Christianiity.
Despair
Price we pay for the gifts that Christianity given us. Given us expectation of love and transformation and relief of inner conflict, expectations that not well met in post-christian worldview
Carry the grammar of God, but many no longer believe
Want to trace how Christianity, starts to intersect with axial revolution coming out of greece.
Paul quotes Stoicism.
Come into confluence with neo-platonism, gnosticism.

Episode 17 - Gnosis and Existential Inertia.

Contributions meaning and wisdom from Christianity.
Jesus: exemplification his participatory knowing in God’s Agapic creativity, for-giving personhood to others.
John: God is Agape.
Paul’s radical personalization of this. Metanoia of his own transformation. Carried with it dark side where elements of his identity get projected into history. Reflects his own inner conflict. Gnosis/participatory knowing bound up with how our agency can be fractured, be at war with ourselves -> suffer
Agency can be undermined. Central idea Gnostics.
More a way of thinking like existentialism. Way of orienting oneself. Not belonging to a particular community.
Sense of inner conflict. Losing agency. All made central to this movement.

Gnosis:

Lot of conspiracy theories about them.
Important because they are the axial revolution within the axial revolution. Bring it to its rational culmination.
worldview: when you have a deeply integrated way of seeing yourself and the arena - integrated. Dynamically coupled. Bidirectional modelling. Mutual conformity. Reciprocal revelation.
Happened to him: reading philosopher, then come to follow the arguments, and inferences, even come to believe some of the conclusions. Lot of beliefs. Then something else happens sometimes: like a change. Go from seeing what spinoza saying to seeing things the way Spinoza says

(I see this as the difference between understanding and grasping)

See the world spinozistically. Lens by which seeing the world and myself. Now living the world as if Spinoza was an adverb. Perspective what it is like to see the world the way spinoza does. Advent of the viability.

(I think this is how I see the world in my #USvsTHEM paradigm.)

Livability of worldview.

(He’s not talking about metaphysical worldview. More agent/arena I think).

Difference between believing things and it being a live option.
Agent/arena relationship conformed to what Spinoza had, not just what he said. Who and what he was, become available to him.
Viability: able to enter into particular agent/arena configuration helps take the next step forward.
Sensibility Transcendence:

John Wright
Based on Iris Murdoch: The Sovereignty of the Good
Trying to get to the viability of morality.
Pay attention in such a way such that we do the good. Salience landscape.
Ex: mother in law: son married to woman. Doesn’t like her. Coarse. Loud. Beneath her son. At some point, insight. Not a normal insight. Bidirectional insight. Reframing how she sees the world and herself. Participatory change. Agent/arena co-changed together. Not a reframing: Transframing. Transformation of whole framing process.
See her not as coarse - but spontaneous. Not uncouth but sincere. Simultaneously realizing that the way she has framed things habitually has been wrong. Systematic insight.
Whole system of errors transforming.
Sensibility transcendence: daughter in law can be someone she could be before, and mother in law becoming someone wasn’t before.
Both things going through transcendence.
Go through a process like this and enter into a worldview.

Now think of the opposite: Inability to enter into or make viable to yourself a new way of being.

The Unthinkable: !6:30

Unthinkable: although can make thoughts, images, propositions, run inferences, can’t make it viable.
Can’t go through the sensibility transcendence that would bring you into living that worldview.
Ex: Son lives with him while building his carrier. Can think I should kick him out. But can’t make this a viable alternative to me. Love for son doesn’t mean can’t run thoughts, but can’t bring myself to live in that world.

(Hmm, this is interesting. Something to play around with)

Not viable, unlivable to me. Good thing. Doing that think of kicking him out is not viable to me.
But can be twisted. Negative of it: What if you’re stuck. Stuck in a worldview don’t want to be in. But you can’t go through the sensibility transcendence that make that worldview viable to you.
Can go through all the thoughts, inferences, affirmations, logic. Won’t get you there. You’re stuck. Can’t go through that change. Existential inertia.

(This state I know well!)

Therapy for this reason: can state who want to be and what kind of world want to be in. Can deeply want to be there, but don’t get there. Stay stuck.
Ex: want to stop getting in bad relationships, can see myself, but can’t get there. Every time try to get there, end up back here again.
Don’t know how to bring about sensibility transcendence to make that world viable to me.
How do I stop suffering?
Can lose agency (that’s what suffering means) losing any sense of how to get to that other worldview, self. Radical existential inertia.
Jung: primary thing people try to get to in therapy is because feel stuck.
Don’t have the participatory perspective of knowing. They don’t know how to get there.
Therapy has an agapic aspect to it. Affording the transformation.
L.A. Paul: Transformative Experience: way in which these TEs render us stupified, they have us confront an existential ignorance.
Ex: someone offers to taste a new fruit: can say so unlike anything ever tasted: love it or hate it. Don’t know which going to have until bite the fruit. So do you bite it?
May say nothing significantly at risk if eat the fruit. But shows there is a type of knowing based on state of being. No way of knowing beforehand.
Epistemic transformation.
But sometimes something deeper - agent arena radically changed.
Transformative experience: undergo that change in perspective off knowing and that change in participatory knowing
Thought experiment: imagine friends reveal a secret, evidence that they can turn you into a vampire. Do you do it? Can’t make inferences about this. Don’t know what it’s like to be a vampire, or who going to be. Face: I don’t know what I’m going to lose. Once go through the change, will have lost a way of being, will be unthinkable to me. But also don’t know what I’m missing. So don ’t know what going to lose or what missing. Can’t do the calculations.
Can’t reason way through it. Everything at risk. Agent and arena at risk.
You confront these at multiple times.
Ex: should you have a child? same. Should I enter into romantic relationship with them. Don’t know who you’re going to be until on the other side.
We face irreversible change. No way to reason our way through it.
Going from child to adult: don’t know what going to lose when become an adult, also don’t know what missing when become an adult.
People face so many difficulties because of this
Can be stupefied as face the need for radical transformation.
Don’t know how to transform, also don’t know if they should.
Aspect disguise: very thing trying to change, is the very thing don’t want to let go of.
Same thing have negative and positive aspects
inertia, indecision, then existentially trapped.
Modal confusion, parasitic processing.

How do you get out? 37:30

Considering if to have a child: some get a pet. Do bizarre behaviour with dog. Take pictures, give bed and toys. Doing something that’s kind of like having a child
Should go into romantic relationship: suggestion go on a trip with them.
Role playing games. Bleeds: line between the game and the reality bleeds, so can play with the possibilities.
People engage in play. Puts in between
Play is not a frivolous thing. Play can be fun, but it’s not the only thing.
Tai chi: play tai chi.
Enactive Analogy: takes a lot of skill. Can feel it, start to get participatory knowing but can pull out if need to. Has to be relatively similar to world want to go to and the world I am in.

(I used to many years ago on a forum I was on suggest an exercise where each side switched and played the role of the other side, trying to make the best case for the other side’s argument. I guess I still do this today by my effort to put myself in the shoes of the other person. And there is a transformative effect, I become that other person to an extent. I can see the world from their eyes. Though important caveat: I can think I see the world from their eyes, I may be mistaken. But it’s not my perspective at least)

Real martial arts: also path of wisdom.
Jeep form.
Try to find an apt metaphor that can play with: ah, that’s what it would be like, but I still know who I am. Can feel the two together.
We have to recover play
One of the important things that religion was is play.

(Ok, I just got it. This whole thing has been about the value of ritual. That a big part of what ritual is is this play aspect of seeking participatory knowing. Really interesting. Another practical benefit of religion. What religion is “doing” apart from the theological. This series is a must watch for anti-theists. This will have to be the topic of a video on my upcoming YouTube channel).

Serious playing: put themselves in a liminal play: normal world and the sacred world they want to dwell in. See how if they want to go through the change that religion is demanding and affording.
To make a world-view viable to me have to go through this self-world sensibility transcendence.
This is Anagoge: to set things up so that as this is transcending, getting in contact with what is real, affords me transforming.
Need inactive analogy, also enacting Anagoge:
Religious ritual used to do for us was a way of playing with enactive analogies, so can compare, so can overcome the ignorance. I can see/be these two worlds (grasp)
Giving the skills to know HOW to get unstuck, how to go through sensibility transcendence.
Pretend mom there, talking to her: play but not fun. That’s how get out of being existentially trapped. Ritual behaviour
He does Tai Chi; enactive analogy: enact what it would be like to be in a fight sittuation, but also anagogic, radically transforming, how experiencing myself and the world
Two eyes: how I look at myself and the world
Ritual = serious play
Hungry for ways of dealing with being existentially trapped
Close to saying what Gnosis is.

Gnosis: (51:00)

Trying to bring about an altered state of consciousness:

Flow state
Possibility of higher state of consciousness
Mystical experience that’s transformative
Setting it in a ritual context
Viewing an enactive analogy and serious play
Enactive anagoge

This is why psychedelics can improve therapy so much
To get free from existential entrapment
Gnosis: is to have a set of psycho-technologies that create a ritual context - like Jeep form- like martial arts, like therapy, that allows us to overcome the existentially stuck/stupified. Powered by altered state of consciousness, induced by chanting, sleep deprivation psychedelics.
Gnosis frees me from being existentially trapped.
Sense of a greater reality we want to live in. Heals us from fractured suffering, fragmented agency, our broken world
Next time: how gnosis taken up in a movement same time as Christianity

Episode 18 - Plotiinus and Neoplatonism

Gnostics not their own group, more like fundamentalism: a style, way of being.
Pervasive during early Christianity
How to interpret Gnosticism: axial revolution within the axial revolution
People existentially trapped - existentially stuck, don’t know how to engage the anagoge in order to make a worldview viable to them. Existentially indecisive, facing deep transformative experience, don’t know how to reason through it. Can fragment world, tear apart agency.
What is needed is recovery of serious play through ritual behaviour, enactive analogy, get into liminal state, so perspectival and participatory manner bridge in an apt way btw world and the self that are now ,and the world and the self want to become
Enactive ritual should afford anagoge: transframe the reciprocal anagogic process by which self and world are transformed, such that we can go through the sensibility transcendence to make a worldview viable to us,
Altered states of conscious helps this
Increased realness of the world trying to move into.
Dangers: when putting ourselves and our world at risk, chance fall prey to parasitic processing, bullshitting ourselves, deceiving ourselves -> important build a community, shared mythology, network to provide feedback, guidance, correction, feedback
Higher state of consciousness set within ritual framing set within central and supportive community

(he really doesn’t want us doing this on our own)

gnosticism: deeply transformative, deep participatory knowing. Ritually enframed, embedded sapiential informative community
Project addressing domicide going on
Christianity and gnostics both a response
Gnostics saw themselves as christian - Jesus brought them gnosis
Important not to believe in Jesus but to become like Jesus
For our purposes: gnosticism and christianity deeply talking to one another and informing one another, along with neoplatonism
Gnosis is the kind of thing need to bring about release from existential entrapment
Like an acid trip, their stuff so bizarre - but main themes of mythology its a scaffolding to bring about gnosis
Book: the gnostic new age:

Movies have gnostic theme.
Mythology of movie is where we go to play with our mythology.

Mythology Plato:

Everyday world like the shadows and the echoes. Images, participate in the forms. Patterns of intelligibility and realness
E=MC2 not an event, how do the forms express themselves in the things that are changing
craftsman: Demiurge: rational agent shapes things in space and time to make the world of the coming have some reality to it
Mythological point: understand mythologically the relationship between eternity and time

Gnostics:

Took this, seeing all this suffering, feeling trapped
Evidence that whoever created this world was stupid, evil or both
In Plato the demiurge is benificent, here evil overlord
Trying to articulate the sense of being trapped, sociopolitical structures thwarting them
Maybe that’s a mythological way to talk about existential entrapment, look at the patterns of culture, don’t feel like they are shaping a world to alleviate entrapment, rather, stupid evil

(I like this way of looking at myth. Stories we tell to emphasize patterns)

People view their myths not as helping them but as thwarting their efforts to be free from existential entrapment.

(hmm, this ties into #USvsTHEM. We craft myths (strawmen) and paint the other side as “stupid and evil” - more importantly its the other who is attempting to thwart our efforts to alleviate suffering. Each side crafts similar myths about the other. )

socio-political, socio-cultural patterns that designed to further that entrapment, further our self-deception, further out self-destruction, keep us enmeshed in modal confusion, parasitic processing, stuck and stupefied

Gnostic Myths:

Identified all the existing gods, saw them as basically guards of our prison
They see what people saw as sacred as imprisoning us.
Radical idea: something common to all of these gods that must now be challenged.
Up to now: servitude and slavery to the gods
Gnostics want to invert that
Don’t worship them, idealism them, give in to these patterns, to serve and fit into them -> transcend them all
They are not divine, they are our prison guards.
Something in us - carry us above, to the god beyond all gods
God of OT: evil, jealous, vindictive, genocide, favouritism for no moral reason
God of the NT: God of agape, god of light and love (hell?)
Does not want our worship, wants us to reunite with him or her
They challenged gender roles: women just as capable
We have the power to sense that we don’t belong here, we belong somewhere else, know something fundamentally wrong here
God of all gods sends us into suffering to get gnosis: transformative knowledge to set us free
Teachings of Jesus more important: brings us the way of knowing agape to free ourselves from this
Gnostics see christianity to give us mythology to free us from existential suffering
Gnostics keep churning out new gospels, new myths: it’s about having engaged in the process of creating the enactive analogies, enacted anagoge, that’s what matters.

(Again highlighting the usefulness of myth - not important as literal, but very important in terms of experiencing these patterns, taking them in, feeling them, understanding them, knowing them. We should therefore be open to developing new myths. My question is did they do this consciously or unconsciously?)

this idea that spirituality is about transcending the gods pertinent to us today, and radical for its time
Core of spirituality is not worship but self-transcendence. Healing and freeing people from existential entrapment and mythology and practices should be about reuniting us with who we are.

(I think many Christians will hate this idea)

We love this story today.

Platonic elements: people trapped in cave, bound, get secret knowledge frees them, return to see the light, then come back to the cave spread the message
gnostics: has that platonism, Christianity - Jesus - as embodiment of gnosis rather than as a sacrifice in which we should have faith
Jesus teacher who provides us something like what the shaman did.

(I think it would be interesting to read the NT with this filter. See if I get more out of it)

Provides the keys to unlock all the ways in which these patterns, ways of thinking and being, exacerbate our suffering. Existential entrapment.

Movies:

Modern portrayals of gnosticism:
Matrix: entrapped in world of illusion, evil overlords, don’t discover who really are, know splinter in mind something wrong.
Truman Show: Tue-man. World with overlord, keep him from getting his agency. He needs the knowledge to get beyond this god.
We keep telling this story because its a myth - keeps pointing to patterns that are pervasive, profound and powerful - we can’t quite articulate them, can’t quite know them, but the myth gives a moment of narrative and symbolic recognition of our suffering.
Star Wars
(Lego Movie)

Dark Side to gnosticism:

It can lead to conspiracy theory
Behind all the chaos and suffering there actually is an evil overlord.
Ultimate conspiracy theory.
God of the old testament = evil overlord -> jews worship god of OT: Jews part of conspiracy to keep us from realizing our true heritage. Very dangerous, and bloodthirsty idea.
Nazism: is a twisted gnostic response to the meaning crisis magnified Weimar Republic
We should have an ambivalent attitude to it. How we can extricate gnosis from gnosticism>
How can we salvage Agape from Christianity
How can we salvage wisdom from the anicient nomological order.

(there it is: the secular extraction of meaning from all these traditions)

Orthodox Church - worship Jesus and faith crucial persecuted gnostic form of Christianity, drove it underground. Enmeshed with other groups who challenged social order

Tillich: great theologians:

The Courage to Be: way of discovering the gnosis of the god beyond theism.
Have to discover the God as the meaning crisis destroys the theistic mythology of God, can we rediscover sacredness in a way that liberates us from our existential suffering. Tillich thought christianity can play a role in that.

Jung:

Deeply gnostic. Transformation into psychotherapeutic context the gnostic mythology
Scaffolding to give us enactive anagoge, central to therapeutic processes

Corbyn:

Recover this kind of knowing
Concern we had lost this kind of knowing. Lost this kind of capacity for this kind of transformation. Trapped in these historical patterns.

(So our goal should be to accurately assess the patterns. Not in a conspiratorial way.)

Not advocating an attempt to resurrect gnosticism.
Tillich: opposed Nazis.
Can we salvage from Gnosticism: Gnosis? Radical message of how we can have a non theistic, non supernaturalistic understanding of sacredness?
Avoid the conspiratorial thinking that has been so damaging.
Has been damaging; gnosticism can ally into the utopian, enticing, ideologies, great conspiracy theory, tell you you belong to the chosen class or race, the system is evil and must be destroyed.
Chris Hedges: American Fascists: Fundamentalist Christianity
I believe in Atheists: also New Atheists represent utopic perfectionism that sanctions violence
Hitchens, Harris, nuclei first strike against islamic world
Ambivalent attitude towards Gnosticsm.
Historical picture:

Emerging Christianity
Interacting with Gnosticms
Platonism - neoplatonism

Triangle necessary to understand final piece of grammar of meaning.

Neo-platonism and Plotinus:

Matrix: Neo often called the One, the One is the central thing in Neo-platonism
Reason these patterns keep being so attractive to us.
Analogy: integration QM and relativity, if success will have grand unified theory.
Plotinus: grand unified field theory of ancient Spirituality

Plato’s spirituality - Anagoge.
Aristotle’s theory: worldview, theory of knowing.
Takes from Stoics: therapeutic project
Integrates them together in powerful way:
Can start with any one of these and get to the other two.
When reading him, undergoing spiritual exercise, transform state of consciousness and cognition
Aristotle’s conformity theory:
know something by sharing same structural, organizational function with it. Plotinus says: also levels of being. Potential to Actual. Levels of reality. Levels of realness.
As we know (participatory) as we make these levels of reality viable to us, livable to us, we conform to them and we change.

(this is what I mean when I understand something intellectually but don’t grasp it. I think I mean I don’t have a participatory knowing to it. I’m getting more what he means by participatory knowing.)

As we conform to make this level of reality real to us, moving to a higher level of the self
As wee conform also altering what level self is at (Anagoge of Plato)
More capable of living in that higher level of reality.
Helps us deeply remember the being mode.

What makes something real?

How much time have put into that?
If we are driven by a pursuit of realness and don’t understand what it is, that’s the gap of bullshit.
For Plotiunus: how do we sense what is real, and how it’s organized: is how One it is. How integrated it is. How structurally functionally organized it is.

(hmmm, my gut feeling is there is a problem with this. But maybe it only works for abstract concepts?)

How One it is. How integrated it is. How much it is structurally, functionally organized.
We treat the object as more than the shadows because it is more structurally functionally organized.

(but the shadow is still real.)

What is it to understand something. Bunch of things and when understand it they are all one. I understand how they are integrated together.

(I agree with this. But that’s talking about understanding what is real. It’s critically important but I don’t know.. something not jiving with me here. Have to sit with it.)

The more integrated, more real.

(or more real to me. More salient).

Things are more real to us as more integrated together. And more real as things as they are integrated together.

(Ok, yes, this I get. A thing is a collection of things. So what makes a thing real is how it is integrated. That makes sense. That doesn’t mean the parts are less real though.)

As we try and find the deeper more underlying principles that integrate things together, we become more integrative together and we become more real.

(the pull of conspiracy theory - the danger - is just so real here!)

We become more integrated together. We are realized, more actualized. Become more real
Plato’s anagoge: inner conflict reduced. Become more real as I’m becoming more integrated and that is allowing me to make viable and real those more integrated deeper levels of reality.

(I’m just uncomfortable with the use of the word “real” here. It seems like it means better functioning. But every level is real. )

Move from where things are only potential to having the greatest structural functional organization they can.
Change in existential mode, becoming more real.
But what is down there? What’s the deepest level? The principle that makes everything else real. That integrates everything else together. Plotinus calls this the one.
That by which reality is realized and our mind realizes reality.
The one is not anything we can ever know. It is that by which everything is known.
So how do you reunite with it. Not thought because thought breaks everything apart. Can’t know it or have it. Can only be it. Can only have gnosis of the one by being One. Higher state of consciousness, awakening experience.
Integrated with the best science and psychotherapy of the time. No division between spirituality, science and therapy. All integrated together.

Episode 19 - Augustine and Aquinas

https://youtu.be/mRh4lwtgfVE

Plotinus integrates mystical experiences and rational argumentation
Plotinus: 270 AD. After that Roman Empire going into decline.
Augustine brings triangle of Christianity, Neo-platonism and gnosticism together.

Augustine:

Roman
Attracted to Manicanism (sp?)

Gnostic religion
Picked up on a lot of the same kinds of ideas, machinery in which we are emeshed as creatures of light.
Promises to address Augustine’s own personal loss of agency
World that is darkening around them

Ideas of evil and evil powers and structures very salient to Augustine
Suffers personally:

Inner conflict
Sex addict: “I was always licking the open sore of lust”
Self-loathing, loss of agency
Struggles to find a way to get free from his own personal inner conflict and degradation
Wants an answer to evil in the world

The Confessions:

story: when young broke into courtyard and stole some fruit. Didn’t even want the fruit. Simply because it was the wrong thing to do. Something in him dragging him down.

Teaches rhetoric, philosophy
Reads Plotinus: very high opinion of him
Plato, and Plotinus: Augustine sees a different world view, gets it.
Mystical experience while reading Plotinus: ascent up to the one. Rises through levels of reality, but can’t hold it, can’t stay there.
Darkness grabs him, pulls him back down. Wants something to pull him up. The evil within him too strong.
Hole in being, sucking the light away
Rebound effect of despair
Now the place you’re in is so much worse because been in the light and know incapable of staying there.
Mother is a Christian. Hears a child’s voice say “take up and read”, sees bible and reads Paul
Affinity to Paul, sees same inner conflict, sees a worldview that makes sense of that inner conflict.
Insight: Plato and Plotinus saying driven by love of becoming one, within, and becoming one with what is most real: Love
Love for what real, good and beautiful
At heart of reason is Love: his capacity to love is damaged

(What does this really mean?)

That’s why he thinks he has his sexual addiction.
Needs something that can heal.
Love within reason that can help grow beyond reason
How do we grow in love? Agape: participating in Agape
Grow in the love driving us to become persons
Neoplatonism needs Christianity: healing that gnosticism looking for found within Christianity
Perspectival and participatory way: auto-biography. Existential manual.
What we have in Augustine:

Nomological Order: Aristotilian worldview: geoconformity, geocentric worldview, the two things in attunement
Plotinus: normative order: how can move in coordinated fashion from what is less real to what is more real.
Less real: has less oneness, less integration, makes less sense.
When destroy something take away its structural functional organization
As go downward things are fragmenting. Less Eidos, less form, less intelligible, more pure chaos
Losing truth, losing goodness, losing beauty, losing what makes things to be sensible and intelligible: that’s evil

(Hmmm, I mean, particles on their own are evil?)

Can also move up to what is more true, more good, more real
Plotinus knows this is driven by love: love of knowing what is real, and becoming more real.
Augustine: called it the good.
Nomological talks about how things are structure, normative order tells how you can become better, deal with evil, increase realness, meaning in life
Augustine: everything is moving in away from evil towards goodness.

(entropy?)

The world is moving on purpose, purpose to afford realization, cognitive and in the world
Driven by love; and the transformation that happens in me, gnosis agape: that’s the narrative of christianity
Moving towards a final consummation, the promised land.
Agape: isn’t just a historical force, it’s a normative force in me. Leading me upwards towards the good.
Christianity, for Augustine, can put all these things together.
All of us can self-transcend.

Cognitive Science: 3 components of meaning:

1) Coherence

The more coherent, the more intelligible, the more things fit together, the more real they are the more meaningful find your life
That’s the nomological order, how things fit together and make sense in a coherent fashion
Augustine: Aristotelian world order and I can give a Christian explanation of that

2) Significance

How valuable, how deep in reality, how good are the elements of your life
Normative order
Want things to be significant, satisfy the anagogic drives of inner peace and contact with reality
Augustine: I can tell you that, can tell you how to put reason and Agape together in Christianity

3) Sense of purpose

Does your life have a direction, is it moving in a course?
Narrative order
Augustine: Christianity ultimate story

Augustine puts it all together
Laying the foundations for the medieval worldview
What can we take from this? Long and powerful history, tells us how our culture has articulated the axial revolution
System for interpreting and inhabiting a world-view in which meaning and wisdom have been developed and have been articulated in a sophisticated and compelling fashion
Meaning is to have a nomological order that connects us to what is real, a normative order connects us existentially to what is good so we can become better, narrative order that tells us how we can move forward through history
Not 3 separate things: like axes of space.
Powerful and enriching vision
What if could offer a worldview that was viable: deepest scientific legitimacy. Integrated with spirituality, no antagonism, conjoined with personal project of therapy, therapeutic change and healing, self transcendence, in community with self, world and people. Would want this?
Why don’t you have it?
Is it irredeemably lost?
Vervaeke says: No.
Need to understand the problem. Getting to understand history of it. Why does it fall apart?
Need a better understanding of the genealogy of the crisis. Need to understand the process of loss.
Traumatic loss cities, literacy, trade, commerce with fall of Roman Empire, not recovered again until 1750 in London England
Augustine serves as a home for people throughout turmoil

1054 AD

Great schism, christianity splits between eastern orthodox and catholic
Weakens Christianity
Loses some of its deeper connections to neo-platonic mystical theology becomes more Aristotelian
Change in psycho-technology: shift in me. How people read.
Before schism reading is done largely aloud. Read the bible mostly, Augustine, church fathers. Reading is often done communally, - reciting.
Think of difference between reading and reciting a poem.
Different between reading a poem silently and reading it aloud.
When recite a poem appeals not just propositionally, have to bring in know how of communication, more paying attention, what does it feel like to be in this space with these people uttering these words: so more participatory
Know the poems because of the way in which they have been changed by them
Lectio Divina: way of reading a text in which you let the text speak to you. Engage the text in a meditative mindful fashion. Reading and reciting in a way to have the text speak to you.
This is how people were reading: as if god speaking through the text
Designed to heal you and transform you.
Helping you in your reading remember the being mode. Not just have beliefs and propositions.

(so how to do this?)

People start to read differently.
Averos: aristotelean, shift to giving exclusive priority to definitions (eidos: essence) and propositions. Start to read silently, to themselves, give priority to coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves and the world
Old model of thought: thought is conforming to the world. Gnosis, and anagoge and self-transformation, knowing which is a way of being/becoming
New model of thought: knowing is to have coherent propositional language.
Thinking is to have coherent set of propositions in your head.
Intensive self: self is inside my head, inside my beliefs, talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositional language.
Think primary way to know things is to have as much coherence to our internal language rather than conformity to existential modes
Why the shift? World starting to open up again. Interest in knowing the world scientifically
Move toward: value of having logically coherent well organized propositional theories. Power of this being discovered.
Empowers argumentative skills, but losing reading as a psychotechology of psycho-spiritual existential transformation
Aristotle being rediscovered.
Problem for chiristianity. Doesn’t have a lot of the Christian mythology attached to it
Can’t be ignored but also not just assimilated

Thomas Aquinas:

How do we salvage both the Christian worldview and the new science of Aristotle
Goes to the fundamental grammar: real world and the illusionary world
platonic: everyday world, then the real world
Aquinas changes that: says both worlds are real. This world is real too. There is real knowledge of this world possible.
Reason and science discover this world and can discover real truths about it. The other world is still somehow more real.
Natural world. Supernatural world. The world above the natural world, can’t be studied by science or reason.
Only accessible through faith
Notion of faith going to be change.
Reason at the bottom, Love at the top. Aquinas says love moves the will.
Loves moves the will to assert things that can’t know through reason. Faith now becomes the act of willful assertion. Will driven by the love of God.
Love and reason being pulled apart.
Faith moving from participation in the flow of history to the the assertion of propositions, giving a creed, science and spirituality being divorced from each other
Aquinas trying to save the axial worldview by reformulating the fundamental grammar
Danger: as it becomes more and more successful, less and less find our assertions being driven by love, the supernatural world becomes less and less real to us
If there is no supernatural world, if no longer viable/livable, then the whole axial world mythology now threatened to fall apart.

Episode 20 - Death of the Universe

https://youtu.be/lWrqdUo5W4Q

Augustine: nomological, narrative, and normative orders
While this addresses the fundamental axes of meaning, historical legacy starts to come under threat, changing the way of reading. Silent consumptive model of reading
Accelerating rediscovery of Aristotle and best science of ancient world. How to incorporate this into the worldview of Augustine
Aquinas does this by returning to two worlds mythology, reconfiguring it into two real worlds. Natural world understood by reason and supernatural world understood by faith. Faith now understood as how love transforms the will. Will is how assert certain propositions to be true.
As supernatural world becomes non-viable, lose the axial revolution heritage, separate love from reason
Marc Tayler: After God.
Meister Eckhart, William of Ockham
Dig at “skeptards” misusing Ocham’s Razor

Eckhart:

German, represents a group called Rhineland Mystics: bring about a transformation in the understanding of human spirituality. Change in the normative order.
Now there’s a chasm between love and reason
Different meaning of spirituality emphasized:
Cathars: gnostic revival
New understanding of normative order: self-transcendence disappears, and connection between spirituality and wisdom where wisdom is seen as educating in self-transcendence to improve your meaning in life
Now what happens, instead of an ascent upward there’s more God’s descent downward into you
RM: descent spirituality, what love is: way in which the will moves. (not love moves the will)
When the will negatives itself, that’s love
Pick up on the sacrificial aspect of love
How is the will moving in order to be loving? The will is negating itself. When the will is egocentric, that’s the opposite of Agape: so have to negate wilful self-assertion, to make a space so God can dwell within me
God’s will is this agape love, we are resisting that, we have to stop resisting, negate the way we are expressing ourselves and let god in.
Makes self-negation essential to spirituality.
I have to be in perpetual conflict with myself, negating myself. Emptying out
He likes parts of Eckhart but this model of spirituality being a battle of wills, becomes a central idea for what’s going on in the spirituality of the time
New emerging worldview:

Ockham:

Sees god’s will as his primary faculty
Have to understand how God grammar develops, woven its way into the very grammar of our culture and tradition. Regardless of if believe in God.
Sown this language into our heritage.
Ockham: unlike for Augustine not God’s reason that’s his source of being, it’s his will
Aquinas made will the faculty of access to supernatural, central to spirituality and to God
Ockham sees God’s will as his source of ability. An act of assertion. He asserts the world when he creates it.
Your model of God has an influence on how you understand yourself
God’s will supersedes his reason
God is not bound by rationality
Not bound by how things cohere in a rational fashion.
Reason not central to God.
Assent to reason is gone.
Any order that we find in existence is arbitrarily imposed upon it by God’s will.
Just raw power and fiat
Ockham concludes we are like God: whatever order or pattern we find we making it by how we speak about it: nominalism
Books aren’t actually there. There’s nothing in reality that groups these together, only my mind which groups these together. But no universal bookness.
I’m speaking, using language, all that is out there is raw individuals
Reading in head, whatever order is in the head
Nothing out there in the world.
World is absurd not in itself intelligible only intelligible as I speak about it or God speaks it into existence.
The supernatural world is now not a source of reason and rational order.

(I get where he’s coming from but that view takes it too far. Sure there is no universal bookness but there is a general pattern of bookness that we can group and recognize. There are real relationships between the particles that make up the book and our perception of them. It’s not just noise).

Black Death

Disaster, kills 1/3 Europe’s pop
Bible: 4 horsemen seems to be happening: plague: pestilence, famine, 100 year war, crusades, battle against cathars, inquisition
Villages going out of existence, social order radically disrupted
People’s confidence and worldview born into being radically undermined, think it’s the end of the world
People move around. Similar to bronze age collapse, end of roman empire, engage in experimentation.
Labour shortage
People start to be able to sell their labour for more money
Change their status through their own efforts - before locked into rigid feudal social structure
By my willpower can change my status
God a source of arbitrary power
Opens up new social experimentation
More entrepreneurial - rise of commercialism

Commercialism

Really powerful- make use of disparity in demand to accrue wealth
Aristocracy: in the way. Middle class going to challenge
Ships sink
banks, lending money, insurance companies
Spread out risk. Incorporate - make one body, share the risk
Put pressure on government to not just be working for church and aristocracy, state start to protect contracts. Emergence of corporate capitalism and corporate state
Norms that have nothing to do with church or aristocracy: secular alternative
Supernatural world largely irrelevant to these secular practices
Now have to develop pscyho-technology: replace roman numerals with hindu arabic numerals
Algebra - variables
zero, ability to use negative numbers
Improve celestial navigation

Copernican Revolution

Retrograde of Mars: Aristotelian propositional way of thinking, people start to consider how chaotic heavens actually are.
Try to fiddle with the system: Copernicus: math is better if put sun at the centre
Ex: morning, we all watch the sun rise in the east pass overhead, sink in the west, all come to agreement, and we’re all wrong.
It’s an illusion.
If that’s an illusion, what else isn’t an illusion? How do you know any of this is real?
All we have is our mind and senses.
Most of sense of realness based on that.
But that can all be satisfied and it’s still not real, because math says it’s not.
Could mean all of this experience isn’t real.
Conformity with the world is gone.
The world is out there, then our mind, and in between a barrier: sense experience
Sense experience not putting me in touch with the world but is a veil between me and the world. Math only thing cuts through the illusion.
All the sudden you are mostly out of touch with the world: Terrifying.
How do you know this table is here, or that you mother actually loved you?
Really have to go back. We accept earth around the sun but we don’t experience it perspectively
Becoming radically disconnected from the world.

Galileo:

Says spoken language, and sense experience can’t trust but mathematics is the language of the universe - that’s what’s real
New way of thinking about math in practice
Starts using geometry in abstract fashion. Sense experience can’t be trusted. Doesn’t have to be sensual/experiential similarity between my thoughts and the world
triangle: distance and time gives speed. Nothing triangular about speed: using geometry to represent abstract relations. No conformity with world and experience
Math in abstract symbolic way
Makes observations: rolling balls down incline planes
Galileo kills the universe: realizes is inertial motion. Things don’t move because of inner purpose, they move because hit by random external force
Before Galileo everything alive, getting to where belongs. After Galileo everything is dead. No inner life to matter. Nothing moving on purpose.
Before Galileo you were like everything else. After you are an island of purpose in vast desert of purposelessness
Universe indifferent machine
Inertia: inert - dead, lifeless - pay attention to the words you’re using.
In old world matter was potential for information, now matter goes to being what matter resists. Resists my will.
Willless resistant machinery of the universe
By making matter an actual substance rather than the potential for information, he removes basis for evil
before: evil was the hole in being, pure chaos: now its just resistant inert stuff.
We’ve lost something, don’t have a way of talking about evil
We think of it as excessive immorality. But what is it?

Scientific Method

Galileo gives us the scientific method: legacy of axial revolution, way of overcoming wilful generation of illusion and self-deception.
While point of SM to get the resistance of the world to show us how we are deceiving ourselves
Huge priority to SM and to the math
Galileo says math reveals what is real. In the object: objective. Real. Measurable
Where are the other properties that can’t measure mathematically: how sweet honey is, meaningful words are: not in the world. Must be inside the mind. Internal chamber that manipulates language and proposition. In the Mind is where beauty, value, and meaning. Subjective. Only in the mind. We experience the illusion of it being in the world.
The orders are breaking down.
One of the great strengths of Aristotelian world is that view of knowledge and view of the world mutually supported one another but if one starts to break down so does the rest
Disconnected from the world, trapped inside our heads, lost participatory knowing self transcendence, all the meaning and Beauty all gone and trapped inside our heads
All out there is purposeless inert chaotic certainty, in me is inner conflict and battle of wills with other human beings.
Leads to trauma
We’re not immune, we just don’t think about it much anymore
Are we just a complex pattern of atoms, that’s all that’s there, everything else is just an illusion. Everything else not real. Universe inert and indifferent to me

Protestant Reformation

Occurs in Germany
Luther going to exacerbate collapse of axes of meaning.

Tyler:

I cannot define an apple without also defining it’s negative space. Negative space = other things that are not apple. When make a thing also make it’s anti-things.

Draw a square, what is possible in that square, at first it’s infinite, when I put a ball, collapse so many possibilities.

Fundamental constraints to which reality can unfold. Any action taken at all constrains all possibilities. Defines the nature of reality.

From John Buck to Everyone: (12:24 AM)

Descartes: Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing.

I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God.

Therefore, God exists.

p1: I can conceptualize reaility, via my will and intention.

p2: The concepts I create can be proven false.

p3: p2 indicates the basis to concepts are not dependent upon my conceptualizations.

p4: To conceptualize is a product of will and intention.

p5: The only reason p2 can occur is due to some greater-reality than myself.

p6: Any reality without will and intent, cannot contain concepts.

Therefore,

Episode 21 - Martin Luther and Descartes

https://youtu.be/x90XKjhcu4w

Scientific Revolution: Scientific description of reality had effect that most of sensory experience is illusory in nature
Galileo; math as the language of reality. Discovery of inertial motion.
We become odd islands of meaning and purpose in a vast ocean of meaningless purposeless motion
Aristotlean idea that structure of experience and reality conform has been ruptured. Trapped behind veils of illusion, disconnected from the world
God become more a matter of will.

Martin Luther

Influenced by tradition of self as radically self negating, inner conflict at the core of spirituality
Influenced by Augustine’s ideas of self-depravity and our inability to achieve mystical union with God unaided
Paul’s ideas about our inner conflict parallel inner conflict of God’s love and anger towards us
Luther terrified of God’s wrath
As the self is enfolded and obsessed with itself cut off from God and reality
Self-destructive process that he sees as the essence of the self
Pride and rebellion against God: we are intrinsically self-obsessed in self-aggrandizing and self-destructive obsession
ex: we have patterns of behaviour that are self-destructive

(Oh yes!)

Step back, make an effort to change, break the pattern, then against your will, caught in the same destructive pattern again.
Deep truth in Luther - unconscious cognition can be beset by these parasitic processes that have a life of their own and can consume us.
Luther convinced can’t do anything to save himself.
Leads to interpretation of Paul at odds with Catholic church:

Not saved by faith alone. Faith becomes complete acceptance of God’s saving grace
Sense of participatory knowing gone - sense of what it is like to be you , your sense of self is illusionary, reduced to the acceptance of a proposition. Not based on argument because that would be mind participating in your salvation
Means that what have to radically accept is nothing you can do
From God’s side: God’s act of saving you is arbitrary: nothing you do.
Look at debate between Luther and Erasmus. Erasmus proposed synergy. Luther rejects that. God’s saving is completely arbitrary
God’s will supersedes his reason
Arbitrary act of will that saves us.
Irony: Luther trying to rescue us from fact that we are obsessed with ourselves, source of deep suffering. In his endeavours to deal with that leads to we are inherently worthless
Arbitrary unearned regard.
Leads to Narcissism.
Being trained to see ourselves as wretched, only solution is unearned positive regard
See it in our social media.

Luther protests against the Catholic church. Different doctrine of salvation
Church thinks it’s tradition matters for human salvation
Luther: history and tradition don’t matter. He is trapped by his own mind. All that matters is individual conscience: (knowing yourself)
One thing we know is ourselves
Luther refuses to recant vaporizes individual conscience as final authority spiritual life
Cult of authenticity, being true to yourself is the ultimate authority. The connection to reality has been superseded by being true to yourself. Cultural grammar training us in narcissism
Says monasteries should be shut down
Institutions: Knowledge: Universities. Wisdom: monasteries
Monastery places premium on self transcendent: that’s the grand illusion for Luther
Sin of pride.
If lose the participatory sense of faith, then idea of self-transcendence disappears. Monasteries being shut down
Universities now need something else - transform people’s lives: State

(really?)

Knowledge not linked to wisdom but politics.
Bacon: knowledge is power
Loss of all the psychotechnologies of wisdom
Don’t know where to go for wisdom: Sapiential obsolescence of our knowledge
Knowledge being bound to the machinery of state and politics
Hard to distinguish politics from knowledge.

Protestant Reformation

Priesthood of all believers. No mediator between you and god.
Luther argues everyone has equal spiritual authority
Rejects hierarchical structure
Proposes democracy in the church
But thinks no democracy outside of church
Peasant revolt in Germany, sides with the Princes
Outside the church don’t know who saved and not saved. That’s where God’s wrath. Have to keep in check. Dark aspect of Luther
Beginning of separation of church and state
Further drives secularization of the culture
Problem is nothing can do to know that you’re saved. Leads to anxiety
Can work hard to do well in the world. If succeeding in the world sign God approves: Protestant Work Ethic.
Don’t use wealth to promote myself - that would be a sign of pride.
Advent of capitalism.
He thought everyone would read bible the same way
What shocked Luther is that Protestantism quickly fragments. When give people no authority other than on conscience, separate from tradition, idea that they will all agree is a ridiculous idea
What happens, and what continues to happen today, is ongoing fragmentation of Protestantism
Narcissism of small difference
Have to find that piece of evidence that shows you are unique. That shows God chosen you, unearned specialness
God withdrawing. God become more an arbitrary will in a world that is a battle of will
Shakespeare: Plumbing the depths of the Human psyche - how absent God is from that world
Supernatural absurd and thwarts human activity
Protestant reformation is fundamental for grammar of how we understand ourselves.
We still carry that grammar around. Have to work hard. If we don’t work hard will be revealed how worthless we are. We hunger for that unearned positive regard. That mark of uniqueness that shows we are chosen from the damned. Adored for simply who we are.
Scientific revolution, advent of capitalism, Protestant reformation all mutually reinforcing one another. Science cutting off from the world, PR orphaning from history, YOU have to bear it all, all while being told don’t have the resources or capacity to do it.
You’re a nothing that has to bear it all.
Time of a lot of existential dread.

Pascal:

Mathematical genius
Looks out at the cosmos: those infinite spaces terrify me.

Descartes:

Wants to take this grammar of the scientific recvolution, math as the marker of reality, wants to come up with on his own, solution to this emerging meaning crisis
Invents a new psychotechnology, powerful, internalized to our cognition
Lying in bed, looking at the tiles, fly around the room. Notes that if he counts the number of tiles can come up with three numbers plot wherever fly is in the room: invents cartesian graphing: x,y,z
Takes algebra and invents graphing
Standardized strategy for information processing
Graphing is epitome of science. One of the most powerful and pervasive psychotechonolgies
Analytical geometry, any geometric shape can be converted into an algebraic equation
Equations capture reality.
Radical idea: we can grasp the world with equations
E=mc2 captures something deep about the world.
Enormous power at our fingertips
Seems to suggest puts us in touch with fibre of reality - but not from experience, not participatory : propositional, abstract, symbolic
Brings radical idea: thinks this is how I can understand the meaning crisis.
Meaning crisis for D is a lack of, search for certainty
Confomity in the Aristotlean sense, parspectival conformity replaced by propositional certainty
Math gives certainty, cuts through all the illusions
Descartes thinks the answer to the crisis is to transform our minds into machines of certainty. Minds that will only work mathematically and logically in terms of equations
Turn myself into a machine that represents the world through abstract symbolic propositions, and manipulate those propositions
Address the anxiety of the age to adopt a method that turns us into computer.
Reasoning reduced to computation
If can make our minds into computational machines will give us certainty
Cartesian grammar: we seek certainty, we won’t believe anything until it’s certain.
Luther: we must accept it without any evidence or reason
Both pathological: if remove people’s agency with how they come to their beliefs you undermine any meaning in life they might possess
Pursuit of certainty: science can’t provide certainty
Descartes method results in increased sense of disconnectedness.
Failure of the project of certainty

Hobbes

What this means is that cognition is computation
Ratiocination
Takes a new idea: matter is a substance. It resists my will.
Matter is inert, resistant, really there. Push on it.
Matter is real: what if built a material machine that did computation
If can make such a machine will have made a mind: he’s proposing artificial intelligence.
Hobbes kills the soul

Episode 22 - Descartes vs. Hobbes

https://youtu.be/T-e2Z49n2h8

Two different elements in our grammar in tension with one another. Share and overlap in the isolated individual mind.
Luther puts emphasis on conscience, Descartes emphasizes consciousness
Luther: accept without evidence, Descartes accept only if have certainty.
Descartes proposes a new method that is similar to PR, cut off from tradition and institution
These two grammars are at war in our current culture war. Faith as radical acceptance, truth as logically derived certainty - mutual influence, shared commitment to the isolated individual self
Hobbes: if cognition is computation and matter is real, should be able to make cognition
Killing the human soul. Exacerbates cultural narcism - uniqueness becomes paradoxical and problematic.
If don’t have a soul what is it to be true to your true self and what is it that makes you really unique and special from the rest of the purposeless meaningless cosmos?

Descarte’s Response to Hobbes

Important to make clear how we should treat Descartes
Fashionable to blame Descartes for mistakes but his mistakes are brilliant
He rejects Hobbes’ proposal of AI
Some claim he rejects Hobbe’s materialism because he is catholic. Inuendo that he’s operating in bad faith. This misrepresents and is a disservice to Descartes.

(I’ll admit that’s what I had the impression of back when I read him in philosophy 101 - at least re: his use of God in his Cogito)

Descartes responds to Hobbes not out of religious faith, but out of fundamental machinery of central claims of scientific revolution.
Hobbes proposes idea of artificial intelligence. Descartes says wrong:

Central claims of SR: matter is real, and reality is mathematically measured, meaning and value of things is not in the things themselves
Says if Hobbes is engaging in reasoning not just computation - actually care, have a goal, held to a standard, a truth
When reasoning acting to the goal of truth which means acting on purpose
Truth depends on meaning.
Reasoning acts on purpose in terms of meaning and it cares about standards or goals (normative standard) of how we ought to behave.
This is at the heart of reasoning.

Lot of useless time spent in the current culture wars on discussions about rationality
Vervaeke studies rationality. Often surprising how little of the science of rationality advocates of rationality makes use of
Difficult to integrate notions of rationality and a materialistic framework
he’s not anti-materialistic. But people who advocate a model of rationality that is ultimately Cartesian (Sam Harris): rationality is about behaving purely logically in an effort to get certainty are not paying attention to criticisms of that model by Descartes himself.
Do not advocate one side of a phenomena without paying attention to central criticisms made by its progenitor
Descartes saying look what’s central to reasoning:

normativity: how things ought to be
Meaning and purpose

We have descartes letters to hobbes:

You can’t have a material reasoner
Saying that matter is inert, no purpose, no meaning in matter

(what if that’s wrong?)

Acts in terms of ought to be not in terms of how things are: science works in terms of how things actually are. Has no values
Science is teaching us that the universe is purposeless.

(does it intrinsically do that?)

Matter lacks meaning, purpose, normatively
How can get all those things out of matter?
If you’re a reasoner care about truth. Truth depends on meaning, purpose and pursuit of truth which is not in matter.

(though maybe it is!)

Hobbes responds:

Can have abacus and automated, pieces of paper on them, and if manipulated right way get a sentence makes sense
Descartes: we have different languages, both thinking of same thing but using different words. No intrinsic meaning to words.
Says your view of matter makes your view of rationality deeply problematic

We should invoke rationality as the standard but question that rationality is just the logical manipulation of propositions
Descartes: rationality is caring about the truth on purpose according to normative standards and values and none of that machinery can be found in the scientific model of matter

(will he bring in IIT? Different approach to this concept of matter. Still scientific)

Vervaeke not advocating irrationality, but against the advocation of it as if philosophically unproblematic.

(I agree with this. Just yesterday I was saying to someone on twitter that I don’t much like bothering arguing over what is “rational” - I’d rather approach the arguments and assess them on their merits. )

Hobbes says Galileo has a problem:

Mathematics language of reality (platonic idea)
Two kinds of properties:

Measurable by math: primary properties/qualities - properties in the object regardless of people paying attention to them - objective - in the object
Many qualities of experience not mathematically describable - how beautiful something is, sweet honey tastes - secondary qualities
Don’t exist in the object, only exist in the mind. Subjective - in the subject
Qualia central to consciousness

Descartes: said to Hobbes, Matter does not possess properties, qualia, no way to manipulate matter to generate quail

(though that’s not likely true is it?)

Possibility AI not have meaning or purpose, normative values, conscious awarenes

Cogito

Slow withdrawal into the mind. I want to doubt everything - find something I cannot doubt
Makes a mistake about certainty:

Logical notion of certainty: absolute deductive validity
Psychological certainty: inability to doubt
Not identical
Radical bigot: cannot doubt certain things - superiority of white race. Due to depth of their ignorance and bigotry. No logical connection between logical and psychological certainty
Descartes thought if you push it far enough they’d come together

Thinks that the thing that connects two together he can’t doubt he exists. If subject to illusion mind must still exist
Cogito ergo sum: says it’s not a logical argument. It is a statement where psych certainty indistinguishable logical certainty

(there is a logical argument there though: For something to think, it must exist. I think. Therefore I exist)

Used to have the mind in touch with the world. Then the mind in touch with the math. Now only have this: only thing mind touches is itself.
I know I’m conscious by being conscious
Descartes saying that aspect the touchstone of reality, the mind touching itself is nothing that matter has.

(unless IIT is correct)

Devastating problems.
Weak AI - project of making machines to do things that intelligent animals can do: laptop is weak AI - we depend on it, really important, profoundly altered our lives
Weal AI does not really advance our scientific understanding
Strong AI: Artificial general intelligence: to make a computer conscious - instance of mind. Make a mind
How know if really succeeded: if can give an answer of how Descartes is wrong - given how machine is built and operates here’s how can get purpose meaning consciousness contact with realness. A lot harder
Still wrestling with this now
Descartes arguing that mind and matter are essentially separate, share no common properties
mind:

Moves on purpose
According to values
Meaning
Qualia
Cares about and pursues the truth
Contact with itself

matter:

Extended in space and time
Displays force
Transfers energy

(what’s the link between the two? Information)

problem: if mind and matter share no properties how do they casually interact?
Think about drinking water and drink, or hit hand on table matter result in pain mind
Mind matter intimately interacting in a bi-directional manner.

(maybe because they are two sides of the same coin)

Descartes’ whole position makes it impossible that they can interact
Gap undermines whole existence. Means you are radically cut off from yourself.
Taste of water is absurd
Get what’s going on in someone’s mind by how their physical body moves, and moves air for words - but if no connection no way to figure that out.
Problem of other minds: how do know rest of you not just zombies?
Descartes: Math tells us what’s real - objective, mind touching itself in consciousness is the touchstone of reality is subjective - two standards of realness
Subjective consciousness and objective math
Society goes back and forth between them
Get a lot of insults and ad hom arguments, then invoke rationality, then what mean by rationality, how does it fit into that mathematical world
Then swing the other way. What’s ultimately real is pure subjective experience. But how is that to be in touch with the world? Leads me totally disconnected
Descartes gives us an unstable grammar of realness
Loss of participatory knowing, loss of contact with the world. Loss of contact with tradition and history. Say at least contact with own mind. At least have that. But do you? Have to be really consistent: if going to be cartesian and logical: can’t invoke historical cultural notions of the self
Descartes says I exist - what’s this I?

(but Cogito doesn’t require knowing this)

Can’t be anything introspective: a lot of that is wrong. Based on memories? My memory capable of making all kinds of mistakes, history: what access do I have to that history, no mathematical way of gaining access to my past
All that have contact with is this moment of self-awareness right now. Isolated atomic moment.
isolated, contactless, then place it in Pascal’s infinite spaces that terrify
That’s how get into the meaning crisis

(interesting how Vervaeke attributes the religious movements to be as much a contribution to the meaning crisis as the secular ones.)

Pascal

Pascal aware of this. As aware of this as Descartes, recreates all of euclidean geometry. Invents the barometer measure air pressure.
Part of the scientific revolution
Has a transformative experience. Convince him that certainty not possible.
Makes a distinction between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse
His fear is that lost the spirit of finesse.
Lost perspectival knowing: knowing what it’s like
Lost participatory knowing, knowing that is part and parcel how we are bound up with something or someone else in a process of mutual transformation
Finesse: is like jazz, an element in there can’t capture in terms of mathematical proposition, about knowing the right timing, placement. Ex: kissing someone, know the right time, knowing you and the other party, mutual revelation about each other.

(mutual revelation key to my communication method)

He has a religion transformative experience
He is on to something that the loss of the spirit of finesse has left us bereft of the capacity for transformative truth, transformative knowing
Now have scientific knowledge but doesn’t lead necessarily to self-transcendence, wisdom
Don’t have to go through personal transformation to come into contact with ultimate reality
The thing that used to do that was religion, but we’ve lost religion.
Tried secular or pseudo religious alternatives and they drenched the world in blood.

Episode 23 - Romanticism

https://youtu.be/Noc1OH0CUBc

Descartes: radical disconnection between mind and other minds.
Radical disconnection between mind and other matter.
Cogito Ergo Sum: all that’s left with contact with reality is the mind touching itself
Even connection to self undermined because Cartesian project is so disconnected all that is guaranteed to exist is this moment of self-awareness.
Pascal’s response: we have lost all these other ways of knowing. All have left is spirit of geometry.
After Descartes: face these crises: ecological, socio-economic, political, mental health - all interlocking, profound and complex that need a fundamental transformation in consciousness, cognition, character, community in order to really restructure our sense of who and what we are in our relationship to the world
Increasing secularization of the world - bifurcated: also increasing attempt to nostalgically retreat in fundamentalism
Many return to religion in order to provide the multi-level, multivariate complex transformation that is needed to meet the crises we’re facing - but many post-religious
Not getting what we need. Either way want to turn, religious option not viable.

Secular Solutions

Secular solution for many people also no longer seems viable
Vervaeke: argues we face the hard problem of needing a religion that is no religion but cannot be fully secular but we don’t want to be religious and filled with this paradoxical tension and contradiction that is the hallmark of the Cartesian legacy
Responses to the meaning crisis that comes after Descartes, traumatized by our interest and bewitchment by these ideologies - led to warfare and bloodshed.
Not willing to return to a nostalgic and therefore impotent religious framework - so trapped

Kant

Trying to deal with fracturing of realness that Descartes has left
Kant brings up important question: how is it that math is so good at describing reality?
How do get the two sides of Descartes together: that math gives access to reality but all I really have is access to own mind
Radical proposal: Copernican revolution: these patterns of intelligibility aren’t actually there
Occam’s Razor: all these patterns of intelligibility that think are in the world are in your mind
Kant: ways of measuring world mathematically aren’t the features of the world, they are the way in which experience has to be organized in order to make sense to the mind
Have to filter the world so that it can fit my eye and brain to make sense of it: Kant: structures in the mind that act as filtering frames - impose a structure of intelligibility on experience
Pattern is being imposed on the information coming in so that it will fit my mind, and make sense to my mind.
That’s the basis for capacity to reason about the world: I have filtered the world in such a way that mind can process it in terms of its own internal grammar.
Mind imposing a structure on the world.
Mind making sense of things.
V: deep way in which Kant is right.
Invesion of Plato. Math is about how the mind imposes structure on reality so it can reason about it.
What does this mean? Now the mind is imprisoned, all that can get in here must pass through filtering frame. So we can never know the thing in itself, the world as it is.

(Yes, I think that’s right. We can get an approximation, a filtered interpretation. Still pretty good).

Mind now no contact with the world, it’s isolated and trapped within itself.

(Wait: the information still comes in from outside the mind. The mind is in contact with that information.)

Math works so well because that’s the grammar of how our minds operate. Not really giving us access to the structure of the world it’s creating a structure in the world of experience that makes sense to us
That’s a big price to pay: get the two sides both inside the mind.
People are upset with this.
Idea implicit in Kant: information coming in from the world. Raw information from the thing in itself, then processed, then structure being imposed on it (most prevalent model in cognitive science.

Bottom up processing vs. Top down.

Bottom up: starts in perception moves to cognition
Top down: starts in cognition - moves to perception

The cat - use the knowledge of the word to disambiguate the letters and use the knowledge of the letters to construct the word
Same here: mind imposing a structure, and filtering and framing and structuring the information coming in from the world
Very powerful way of looking at things.
But as move into the mind, cognition becomes more rational, more mathematically, logically intelligible
But getting farther and farther away from contact with the world
Opposite of plato. Moving away from being in contact with reality
Makes Freud and Jung possible
Jung = Kant + gnosticism
If open mind up to more irrational, less fully processed cognition, move into the imaginary, dreamlike aspects of cognition, lose rationality, but gaining contact with the world

(I don’t get this)

Romanticism

This is the main idea of Romanticism: the idea that we can recapture contact with reality by moving away from the rational layers of cognition and into the irrational layers
Trying to get back to gnosis and participatory knowing.
Quintessential form of participatory knowing is love
Idea of love as an irrational force
Faculty that stands between perception and reason - imagination
imagination: mind initially imposes that order on raw data of experience
Distinction between imagination and fantasme (moving images in the mind)
imagination: how the mind imposes structure on raw date so it becomes available to reason
Imagination the place in which we can get closer outside of reason to access reality
Music and art: Access through the imagination to what’s real - they seem to impose order in which meaning made
Locke: mind is an empty canvas, sense experience comes in and writes on it: empiricism. World impresses itself on the mind.
Romantics: we don’t even know what the world is in itself, the world is an empty canvas on which imagination expresses, presses itself out
Expression: to press out
Projecting onto the world.

(this seems to mix it up a bit. The fact that we don’t have unfiltered access to the world doesn’t mean that it’s blank. We just can’t experience it as it is. We have to pass through our filter).

Both are wrong:
Mind as blank slate overwhelmingly wrong. So is world as blank slate.
People swept up in romanticism. Pan-european: Bethovan, poetry (blake, woodsworth), religion (Shlurmaker)
It appears to do what religion used to do: integrates: music, art, literature - give whole framework of how to regain contact with reality. Move into the world of imagination.
Irrationally take into contact with reality.
Romanticism: godfather of all the pseudo-religious ideologies
Massive transformation on culture and consciousness
But there’s a big price: so much bullshit: romantic movies. Trapped where Luther and Descartes left us: trapped inside our mind, only thing left with is to behave irrationally.
Making machinery of imagination carry all the weight of tradition, religion, philosophy - no human relationship can bear that burden
Romantic relationships: unreachable expectations.
Look for romance for most meaning, but causes the most suffering
Attempt to get into words, propositions, ideological ways of thinking everything that religions used to do for us.
Get that language can’t do it all, so turn to poetry
Try to use imagery to point to transformative experience.
BUT if don’t have sapiential traditions, spiritual exercises, psycho-technologies, regular and reliable methods for these transformative experiences all you have are the words
When read the poem, not capable of getting much from it, because reduced to the words.
Romantics didn’t give us anything else. Didn’t give us institutions or practices. Pseudo-religious ideology.

(boy does he hate Romanticism!)

Spiritual junk food, tasty but not nutritious
Gets translated into nastier forms.
Rise of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
Romantics attracted to Napoleon
By force of will, Napoleon pressing a structure on the world, painting his picture onto the world
Isolated self pressing itself out onto the world. Imagining the world into another shape and existence.

Response to failure of Romanticism

Romanticism fails, not the replacement of Christianity. But doesn’t go away
We live with decadent romanticism: Romantic comedies
Attempts to understand the irrational aspects of the psyche and world-making capacity
Priority of the will

Schopenhauer

godfather of nihilism
Up-down model. Rational part and irrational part.
Zeroes in on will: arbitrary will. The will to live. The raw, drive
What drives you, what structures, what filters and frames

Relentless and pointless because not-rational
The will like a huge man and ego sitting on shoulders. Rational is in service of irrational
Schopenhauer: sex is the cruel joke that the species plays on the individual. Sex = will to live, filters and frames all experiences, promises meaning and fulfilment then have it and none of that accrues to you
What’s the difference between you doing it for 40 years and a fly doing it for a day
All machines. All just replicator machines: Richard Dawkins
Nihilism and pessimism: once remove connection between meaning making and rationality pay a devastating price for it.
What do you you have there? Meaningless existence. Shaped not by contact with reality, shaped by irrational will to live, then you die
What was it all for?
In art and music can quiet the will to Iive enough for momentary breaks from will to live
Romanticism and nihilism become inextricably linked together. Intertwined

(Is contact with reality equivalent to meaning?)

Nietzsche

Godfather of post-modernism
Disciple of Schopenhauer and Wagner.
Wagner breaks music down. Opens untethers music to its tradition. Vicious anti-semite
Why Germany anti-semitic. Gnosticism has a history. Connection back to Luther:
Luther: “we are at fault in not slaying [the Jews]” burning their books, synagogues, homes, drafting them into forced labor or exiling them.
Jews in Luther’s mind are followers of the law, people who follow the law are people trying to earn their salvation. Jews reject Jesus, Reject salvation, so are evil.
Nietzsche:

Keeps the notion of will. Keeps that it’s faming the world, filtering. But rejects a lot of Kantian stuff. Platonic stuff.
Will to power
Everything has a will to power. Everything pressing itself out. Feature of reality.
Will to power, pre-Christian power to extend, to create, to master oneself in the world.
Sees way of getting back self-transcendence
Will to power as the desire to transcend oneself, go above oneself
Create beyond oneself
Lutheran interpretation of Christianity - repressed this, but if remove it will to Iive lets us get back the meaning that was lost in the meaning crisis

Dangerous way to start thinking.
Nietzsche understand how self-deceptive we are, but can’t do anything about it, because reason is a logical framing thing, lost something. Self-transcendence without machinery of dealing with self-deception.
Rationality is the set of pscyho-technologies that afford self-transcendence by training you to skillfully overcome self-deception.
He’s aware of self-deception - he wants self-transcendence but can’t provide machinery to over-come self-deception other than endless critique, satire, undermining himself
honest, but not capable of the rationality that is the core of addressing self-deception.
One sided model of self-transcendence emeshed in a will to power - dangerous

Episode 24 - Hegel

https://youtu.be/6pwBgL0BbJ0

Line from Kant to Hegel
Kant: reality was the thing in itself. We can’t interact with it we can only interact with our experience.

(although we ARE interacting with it. We can only experience parts of it, but we’re still making contact)

The thing in itself is nothing we can come into rational contact with.
Romanticism: reestablish contact with reality through irrational states

Hegel

titanic, complex, difficult thinker. Vervaeke trying to cut through the material that is relevant to understanding the genealogy of meaning crisis
Says the thing in itself is completely unknowable. Hegel says that is indistinguishable from it being non-existant
If there is nothing that can be known about it, stop thinking about it as something that exists.
If remove the thing in itself then we get idealism: reality is found only in the mind.
“the real is the rational”
Reality is the rational
Important derivation from the original insight Parmenides/Plato that there’s a deep connection between our sensing something as real, and how intelligible it is to us, how knowable it is to us.
What’s going on is that the mind is making the structure of reality itself.

(This seems so skin deep, there must be more to it. The fact that we can’t know anything about a thing may make it indistinguishable from not-existing, but not ontologically. It just means we can’t tell. And what is his definition of knowing. Must be 100% certainty. Which is unreasonable. It seems fallacious to argue that because we cannot know X, then X does not exist. Now, we may say if we can’t know anything about X then we can act as if X does not exist but then the question is can we actually know things, or at least imperfectly know things to a high confidence level)

Hegel understands the irrational aspects of the mind not as us moving toward the contact with the unknowable thing in itself - rather, they are the potential within the mind for rationality
Rational, intelligible experience has not be self-actualized
Thinking of mind in extended sense. Patterns of intelligibility that are at work in humanity
ex: this room, mind structuring this experience, idea that this is all in a deep metaphysical sense are patterns of intelligibility

(but the invisible can still kill us)

Patterns of intelligibility and reality is the mind in an extended sense.
Form a living system. They are developing. Irrational elements are constantly being transformed into more rational intelligible elements.
Geist: Mind and spirit: the living systems of patterns of intelligibility by which we ultimately makes sense.
Given this argument against an unknowable reality being a reality - the patterns by making sense are identical to the patterns by which reality is intelligibly structured
Absolute Idealism: system of self-realization not just an individual mind.

(He’s trying to explain this by I think there’s too much missing)

How do you study this living system?
Study history. (influence of Christianity/Ancient Israel): understand history understanding reality as co-founding together.
Looking at patterns of history

Patterns systematically made sense
Ways in which we’ve made grammars by which we make sense of world and ourselves
Patterns we realize: something we experience, but also the way things are made real.

(Ok: yes the pattern of things is what makes the thing “real” because it gives it it’s functional structure. It may be a construct to think of it as a thing, but that’s just our mental grouping. It’s not the thing itself. What is a pattern? A pattern of what?)

Look at history to discover the development of this grammar of:

Human thinking
Human being
Human living
Human wording - creating worlds of intelligible patterns in which we can act in a meaningful manner
Understand ourselves, the world and each other

Hegel: look at this history, not static.
Two opposing movements or forces:

Process of differentiation: when making sense have to grasp the differences between things. Clarify, contrast - articulation
Find the division points between things
Process of integration: gathering things together so we have systematic connections being realized.
Be aware of them but constituting them as participants.

Understanding = creation of a system. Systematization.

(yes, I agree. The issue here is our understanding though, not ontology)

Analogy: children have ways of making sense of the world, that way of making sense works for them - as go through stages of development, system becomes improved. Things that were confused together get differentiated apart and get reintegrated.

Thesis / antithesis / Synthesis

Hegel thought saw internal development of Geist like a living thing
See in history that an idea is proposed, gets contrasted, clarified, distinguished from counter idea. The two ideas drawn together in a higher integration
Thesis / antithesis / Synthesis
This serves as new idea to start whole process over again.
Increasing articulation and integration of patterns of intelligibility (which are the patterns of realness) complixification.
Dialectic
ex: what is reality: Reality is changeless, others, No: the whole capacity for understanding experience of reality, that things are changing, there is no content of experience. Argue the opposite: reality is pure change. Plato integrates together: eternal patterns, structurally organize changing processes.
Can see this in science: eternal patterns (Laws), interact with forces: science is a systhesis
Patterns science discovers are also the patterns of reality - analogous to how Hegel thinking of Geist
Process of self-transcendence on Geist’s part.

(Is this because we build on past thoughts. We don’t start from scratch, and we don’t stop looking for patterns)

Hegel: we can get to a stage where the system of realization becomes aware of itself
One of the ideas that emerges this idea itself - the system
Absolute Geist: goal in this process.
All of history moving to this point - Absolute idealism.
Rationality is seen as systematic process in the self-development of Geist
Moved from Understanding to Reason
Principles of rationally making sense, living system of principles moves from understanding things, to understanding everything systematically, and that systematic understanding is self-reflective. It includes and refers and grasps itself.
Rationality has realized itself
If this is a process by which rationality realizes itself and the real is the rational this is also a process by which reality realizes itself = God
Hegel taken this Hebrew/Christian idea that God is that process by which we make sense and develop and create the world with god, created a philosophical understanding of that. Secularized and rationalized God
Hegel understood his project in religious terms, but rationalized them.
Must have a new mythology

(I’ve had that thought several times throughout this lecture series)

But new mythology must be in the service of the ideas. Must be a mythology of Reason.
Enlightened and unenlightened must clasp hands
Mythology must become philosophy to make people rational, and philosophy must become mythological to make philosophers sensible
Lead to a higher spirit, sent from heaven, found a new religion among: last and greatest work of mankind. Final utopia. Final stage in which Geist generated systematic self-understanding. Grasp all of our previous cultural and intellectual history.
ex: understanding -> reason, mythology -> philosophy. Christianity.

Myth: Father and the trinity:

Father = undifferentiated understanding, unactualized, undifferentiated
Son: incarnation: starts to get differentiated understanding - differentiated into particular things
Son is the counter of the father
reconciliation: Son sacrificed, reconciles with father. Higher integration, new kind of identify. Realization of identity and difference of father and son
Father and son both different and one
Understanding is realization of differentiation and integration
Holy Spirit: God is Agape. Identical to the process by which we are making each other into persons.
Hoy Spirit = Geist, dwelling within its self-awareness
God is dwelling within the development of the community.

Grand synthesis: Hegel felt his system exemplified what it was talking about Total explanation of mind being, God, religion, philosophy
German idealism massively influential
Powerful attempt to save the meaning making machinery, salvage axial legacy, still develop increasing contact with reality that is spiritual and rational at the same time
Conceptual vocabulary - theoretical principles to structure that vocabulary to respond to meaning crisis
Spreads across Europe
But many consider it to have collapsed

Response to Hegel

Pattern of secularizing religion into systems of ideas that attempt to give total explanation and guide
Godfather of totalitarian ideologies
Three avenues of response:

Schopenhauer: understands the relationship in terms of will/Nietzsche will to power
Kirkegard: Hegel made a system then sat down beside it. Impersonalism. Lack of perspectival and participatory knowing. Rendered into a system of ideas.
Marx:

Kirkegard:

Our attempt to make contact with what’s real has been severed from personal transformation and self-transcendence. Don’t have to undergo any radical change. Mystical experience. Socratic challenge. Just rational self-reflection.
Lost process by which we become radically different. When we move through those transformative experiences go through leap of faith. Not something can reason your way through
Pointing out that this system for all its grandeur: profound truths that have no existential, transformative relevance. No wisdom, just theoretical structure to interpret history

Marx:

History not driven by reason, by the man, but by the monster. By our socio-economic activity, as we try to provide for our material existence
Influenced by Feuerbach:

Proposal: religion not the arena in which Geist unfolding itself, it’s the projection an ideal model of my own humanity. Distorts and distracts us. Alienates us from our own role in historic practices

Marx: religion noxious projection of how they are the authors of history
Once we get rid of religious distortion to the material monster we see the dialectic. Dialectical materialism not idealism
Clash is political struggle. Conflict between the classes. But systematically related. Interdependent.
Process of political struggle and violence will work out the self-contradictions in our socio-economic activity until we achieve a political state of peace and freedom
Always the attempt to find the promised land.
Bringing to a logical conclusion the secularization of Hegel
Sees himself supplying the missing particpation: this is how you participate: a call to arms! Communists want to change the world
Dialectic and participation come together in political socio-economic revolution
Violent totalizing ideologies. Promise secular utopia.
Deep politicization of the process by which people supposed to try and have faith. The kairos christianity has become the revolution

All share a sense that Hegel’s totalizing ideology has not captured the core of human meaning making.

Episode 25 - The Clash

https://youtu.be/Z0i7qrOJALw

Hegel

Hegel: proposes how to move beyond Kant/Romantics rejecting the notion of the thing in itself: reality is just patterns of intelligibility, there is nothing above and beyond that
As ideas being developed, reality being developed
Geist: quasi living system of patterns of intelligibility
Understood as a process of dialectic
Dialectic: process by which ideas/patterns by which reality is known and actual
Pattern in which ideas articulate and differentiate from one another. One idea opposed by another, distinguished from and then taken up in a higher order of integration, serves as new idea...etc.
Emerges and develops, becomes more and more into deeper patterns of understanding/being
Reaches a state in which a system of ideas emerges that grasps the dialectical process itself -> culmination state of absolute Geist
Real is the rational: development of rationality and intelligibility of reality is also reality itself: absolute spirit/mind = God
Secularized, non-religious God
Advocates for a new mythology of reason: last and greatest work of mankind.
Main critiques Hegel:

Schopenhauer: will to live missing.
Nietsche: will to power missing
Kirkergard: Hegel reduced everything to propositional knowing, left out perspectival knowing/anagoge - given us epistemic transcendence not existential ethical self transcendence
Personal transformation and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to making deeper contact with reality left out
L.A. Paul: can’t reason our way through transformative experiences central to cultivation of wisdom

Marx

Proposal: history not driven by reason but by the monster
Influenced by Feuerbach: religion as projection of our humanity, projected distortion that distracts us
Marx rejects theistic resonance of Hegel: dialectic not of ideas, playing themselves out religious, but of economic forces playing themselves out politically
Not by ideas in contrast but by socio-economic classes in political conflict
Dialectic will work out contradictions until they are resolved -> peace and freedom achieved because resolved conflicts
Secularized version of God working himself out in history to the promised land
We identify with our class, with our struggle, participate in the Kairos by engaging in revolution - violent political change
Powerful pseudo-religious ideology

Nationalism

Nationalism: nation-state can take the role that God has taken in the past:

Patriotic devotion to the nation state
Sacrifice for it
Participation in its history and will follow you upon your death

19th century fierce nationalism
Nationalism when understood as will wedded to emerging scientific/industrial revolution, imperialism
Ways in which people have secular pseudo-religious ideologies to fill the gap left by erosion of Christian framework

Germany

Germany: Nietsche, Shcopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Lurther
Fragmented as a nation for centuries, united Bismark 1870
Nationalism fierce in Germany because finally political entity with tremendous economic and industrial power/scientific production
Sees itself in competition, lagging behind other countries, France, England in creation of world empire. Nationalism/imperialism paramount.
Disaster: WWI: all this machinery that was supposed to bring us to utopia, dreches Europe in tidal wave of blood and destruction. Generation decimated.
Germany especially traumatized - defeated.
Victors: France and England especially treat Germany poorly, weaken it economically, cripple it militarily
Tainted by Luther’s horrible antisemitism
Rhineland mystics: neoplatonic, gnostic
Critiques by positivism of German idealism: wedded to the success of scientific materialism
Marxism real threat in Germany
Goethe: romantic tradition: romanticism becoming decadent in Germany
Fragmentation of protestant reformation
Will to power
Philosophical vacuum
Racist interpretation of history to try and replace Hegel’s idealistic interpretation of history, or Marx’s economic interpretation

Hitler

All come together in Hitler’s auto-didactic mind
Dangers of auto-didactic approach to meaning crisis.

(This is where some of his fear of auto-didacticism comes in)

Meaning crisis comes to fever pitch
Mein Kumpf: verges on incoherence due to Hitler’s attempt to articulate all of this personally
Hitler like Luther: sees his own personal struggle as representative of all of germany and western civilization. Exemplifies this chaos and articulates weird mythology
More than just facism and racism: in service of a gnostic nightmare

(How is it that the gnostics got so much right in terms of participatory knowing but so dangerous an ideology. Seems there is a great danger to participatory knowing which can be subject to serious bias. Is the risk worth it? Can we divorce the good from the bad here?)

True self in our blood - decadent romanticism
Here we are, we are a master race trapped within a worldwide conspiracy keeping us from our divine heritage, only by opposing and trying to thwart the evil overlords can we come to our true divine heritage as the master race that is in our blood and in the soil of our nation
The ones who worship the demiurge are the Jews
Hitler crafting something between a religious totalitarian ideology and a personal mythology that he exemplifies

Not just a political movement: pseudo-religious ideology. Totalitarian proposal confuses and distorts mythicism, nationalism, infused with decadent romanticism and gnostic ideology, will to power
Triumph of the WIll: propaganda Nazi film
Tsunami of bullshit: all of these currents that are emerging out of the collapse of the three orders, spun by Hitler to give people a powerful response to the exigent intensity of the meaning crisis
Intensified by socio-economic collapse of the great depression. Seems to vindicate gnostic nightmare.

World War II: Battle of Kursk

Nazism vs. Maxism meet in titanic struggle on Eastern front in WWII
Battle of Kursk: 1943 - nothing like it anywhere else in world history. Biggest battle ever.
Millions of men. Thousands of tanks and airplanes. Brutal and vicious.
Russian victory: beginning of end of Nazi, ascendence of Soviets
Literally beyond comprehension in terms of size and scope and death, shear amount of technology and material - impact on genealogy of meaning crisis
Tremendous struggle symptomatic of meaning crisis
Both sides fixated on belief, totalitarian ideologies, secularized religion
Ideas supposed to explain history, reality, how to achieve utopia, recapture axial legacy
Politicization of the quest for meaning. Mythology confused with politics
Perspectival knowing reduced to political viewpoint, participatory knowing reduced to political identification
Titanic struggle of wills

Meta Crisis

Legacy: soviet union also collapses

Secularized political process of pseudo religious ideologies both symptomatic and and contributes to the meaning crisis - feedback loop
Meta-crisis: Thomas Bjorkman: intertwining crises:

Ecological
Socio-economic
spiritual

To address this require comprehensive change in:

consciousness,
cognition,
Character
Culture

Only thing in the past that create systematic sets of psycho-technologies that transform cognition, culture, character in interdependent ways was religion
In the 19th and 20th centuries tried to create alternatives
Need to respond to the meta-crisis, but traumatized by the pseudo-religious ideologies
Some people trying nostalgic return to religion: fundamentalism (including some atheists)
Can interact with politicization: get potential for terrorism.
So doubtful of all this as a response: post religious
Fragmented, auto-didactic
Dangerous interactions
Seem to need a religion that isn’t a religion
To see meaning crisis is a struggle between political ideologies, using violence or argument to change belief is to misrepresent the meaning crisis - there is no political solution
Need a God beyond all gods.
For many this is a dilemma
The clash locks us into this dilemma - the aspect of the meaning crisis where we need a religion that is not a religion
Moby-Dick: is about this dilemma - could make a good case for this
Zombie mythology could be an articulation of this

Cognitive Scientific Analysis of the Machinery of Meaning Making

Time to move onto a cognitive scientific analysis of the machinery of meaning making
Use it to build a theoretical structure for recovering and salvaging what we can of the axial legacy
Hopefully afford the engineering of new psycho-technologies
Affording people the means to begin the process of individually and collectively creating systematic sets of psycho-technologies, bring back sapiential (relating to wisdom) pursuit of self-transcendence

What is Cognitive Science?

Recent discipline, late 70s
Idea: we have multiple disciplines studying minds:

Brain:

Try to understand the mind by studying the brain. Patterns of neural activities
Neuroscience: FMRs, EEGs, etc.

Information Processing:

programs, algorithms, ways in which can make artificial intelligence
Computer science -> AI -> AGI
Try to make machines that actually are cognitive agents

Behaviour:

Psychology
Trying to understand behaviour, working memory, long term memory
Experiment on human beings

Language:

Linguistics: Important way in which mind operates and communicates
Talk about tree structures, transformational grammar, test judgments about if grammar makes sense

Culture:

Anthropology: uses participant observation. Culture something need to know in participatory fashion

Philosophy:

Looks at how to bridge those vocabularies

Mind is not clear. Science is fragmenting what mind means, fragmenting you: who and what you are
Need to capture the causal interaction between the levels, want to get them all talking to each other. Theoretical integration
Cognitive Science brings it all together.

Episode 26 - Cognitive Science

https://youtu.be/pqsUDNkBt-Q

Different levels of the reality of mind with different disciplines, vocabularies, argumentation, measurement, ways of gathering evidence.
Levels of reality and disciplines
Fragments us

Helps to formulate and specialize people - its a good thing, but it is problematic: fragments us: mind becomes equivocal
Equivocation: when fall into confusion because don’t keep track of meaning of your terms. Same word but not the same thing.

Nothing is better than long life and happiness
A peanut butter sandwich is better than nothing
Therefore a PBS is better than long life and happiness

The various levels of reality influence one another but the disciplines don’t capture that.
That’s why creating hybrids like psycho-linguistics
How to study the relationship between the levels? Has to be an astute practice. Can’t just equivocate.
Philosophy is the discipline that has us take conceptual care to bridge between these different vocabularies and methodologies
The discipline that tries to come up with a philosophically astute integration between these disciplines so that we can avoid equivocation is cognitive science
CS already addressing one of the ways in which the meaning crisis in which scientific worldview fragmenting us falling into ignorance about who and what we are.
Addressing meaning generation process.
Different ways to practice CS - he’s not neutral - presenting what he thinks is the best way
Some have “interfaith dialogue” with other disciplines.
Problem is that not really capturing why people are drawn to creating bridges: it’s either too weak or too strong.
Best vision of CS is “synoptic integration”

We need to build something between the disciplines that addresses the equivocations, deals with the fragmentation and fills in the ignorance: tells us about how the levels are all casually interacting and constraning each other

Not saying the same thing, but not saying different things either: need bridging vocabulary

Metaphors

Metaphor: The difference gets me outside of my framing, step back through the difference, look through the identity - allows to see and understand the other in a different way
Want a metaphor that balances these well - apt
Metaphors provoke insight

(seems like a similar role to myth)

Allows to keep the differences but find relevant identities in an insightful way
Step back from behaviour into linguistics, look - keep distance, what can see in psychology through the lens of linguistics
Multi-aptness: trying to bridge the gap between multiple domains
Start to create an overarching integration.
Plausibility:

1) high probability (not the one mean)
2) reasonable, making good sense, deserving to be taken seriously

When say theory is elegant saying it is multi-apt
Also want them produced in a certain way: many convergent independent lines of investigation
Convergence: We prefer information that comes in multiple senses: ex: seeing and hearing better than just hearing - multiple channels, less chance not a distortion -> bias reduction
Convergence gives bias reduction
Trustworthiness
Conspiracy theories: if have just elegance but not produced in trustworthymanner

(this is part of the problem I have with taking the religious texts as history, or believing in God. There is some elegance there - which theists bring up all the time - it seems to “explain” things, but I don’t consider the evidence reliable - or trustworthy - enough to reach a confident conclusion on it. The psycho-technology aspect of religion provides a more plausible reason for its longevity)

Opposite: have tremendous convergence, but little insight or integration: trivial
Doesn’t mean false, but no transformative power, makes no difference, affords no insight
Can equivocate on these.
Daniel Dennett: deepity
Also can say something that seems deep, then challenged and say no I meant this trivial thing
Can lead to bullshitting ourselves
Abuse suggests how we can improve it
Want high convergence and high elegance = profound
Profound =/ true: means very reasonable and should be taken very seriously
Cognitive Science trying to bring about profound synoptic integration, create constructs that bridge between the disciplines that addresses equivocation, fragmentation, and ignorance

The Science of Cognition: Intelligence

Faculty in us for core meaning capacity = intelligence, makes you a cognitive agent. Working with meaning
Test for intelligence: general problem solver
If try and make intelligence try to make a problem solver
Cup holding water very limited in problem solving capacity
We are capable of solving a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of ways
Newell and Simon: general problem solver
Intelligence =/ rational
We should care not about intelligence but about how rational we can become
Want intelligence separate from knowledge
Want to ask what is it to solve a problem
Hallmark of rationality is valuing the process, not just fixating on the conclusion
Newell and Simon: deeply influencial:
4 basic features for a problem:

1) Difference from the state you are in (initial state) and goal state (goal state)
System has to represent the initial state and goal state.
2) actions/operations: change the state I’m in initially to another state

3) path constraints:

Don’t want to just find any solution. One way to make lunch for self is to burn down house. Will cook my food. Don’t want to solve this problem in a way that causes other problems

Solving a problem is to have a sequence of operations that will transform the initial state into the goal state while obeying the path constraints

Episode 27 - Problem Formulation

https://youtu.be/9j5O-tnaFzE

Combinatorial Explosion

Diagram is misleading because by God’s eye view, but in life we’re not out there, we’re at the initial state - ignorant
Problem solving method is any method finding the sequence while obeying the path constraints
Diagram not complete
Can calculate number of pathways by calculating F^D

F = number of operators I’m applying at any stage
D = number of stages

Ex: chess:

on any turn number of operations is 30 on any turn
On average 60 turns
Combinatorial explosion
Vast number 4.29 X 10^88
Incomprehensibly large
Have about 10^10 neurons
Have 5 x 10^15 neuronal paths
Greater than the number of particles estimated to exist in the universe
So can’t search the whole space

Since can’t search the whole space - what we do is zero in on a small subspace, and often find a solution. Zero in on the relevant information.
How do we do that?
Issue of avoiding combinatorial explosion is a central way of understanding intelligence
Experience in two ways:

1) generation of obviousness: what we have to explain
2) how things are salient to us, how they stand out to us, grab our attention

That process isn’t static, sometimes one is more than the other
Dynamically self-organize what we find relevant and salient
Newell and Simon realized have to deal with combinatorial explosion

Proposed: heuristic and algorithm

Algorithm

Problem solving technique guaranteed to find a solution or prove one can’t be found
Standard of certainty
So have to search the whole problem space to guarantee certainty
Cognitive suicide if want certainty because space is combinatorially explosive
That’s why Descartes doomed
Deductive logic is certainty
Logic and math operate algorithmically - we can’t be comprehensively logical
Therefore rationalinity =/ being logical

Rationality

Being rational means knowing when, where, how much, and what degree to be logical in order to overcome self-deception and optimally achieve the goals that we want to achieve
Not just logic or consistency

Heuristic

Problem solving method not guaranteed to find a solution, reliable for increasing chances of achieving your goal
Can’t play chess algorithmically, can play chess heuristically

Get queen out early
Control board
castle

Try to pre-spcifiy where you should search for the relevant info: limits the space searching
Prejudge what is going to be relevant
Heuristic = bias
Bias where we’re paying attention
No free lunch: have to use heuristics to avoid combinatorial explosion, price you pay is you fall prey to bias.

(This makes a point that I’ve made a lot: bias is not inherently bad. It is part of the human condition. It is often useful.there’s just too much information to take into account. But it has limits and can lead us astray.)

Bias is adaptive: very thing that makes us adaptive makes us prone to self-deception
Ex: representative and availability heuristics: can’t calculate exactly so how many plane crashes can I remember

Newell and Simon

V respects NandS:
What makes us intelligent is our ability to use heuristics
Necessary part: powerful work. Add one more dimension to what it is to do good cognitive science.
All the great changes that make the scientific way possible is exemplified by them:

Analyzing, taking complex phenomena breaking it down
Like Descartes trying to formalize it: graphical mathematical
Trying to mechanize: I’ve got this right if I can make a machine to carry out my formal analysis

Trying to explain the mind often fall into a particular fallacy:

See a triangle, light comes off of it, goes into eye. Into the space (working memory), projected inner screen, homunculus (little man) says triangle
Sounds like giving mechanical explanation but how does the little man see - well inside his head, etc.
Gets an infinite regress. Doesn’t explain anything
Using vision to explain vision
Circular
N+S taking a mental term trying to formalize using non-mental terms.

Naturalistic imperative: try to explain things naturalistically

Doing this to try and avoid circular explanations of intelligence
Scientific revolution seems to explain everything except for how I generate scientific explanations - consciousness
Hole in the naturalistic worldview that’s why many zero in on our capacity to make meaning have consciousness as the thing that’s not being explained
Right to do that, but wrong to conclude it legitimates other worldviews
Need to show this project is failing, that not making progress on it.
Can’t defeat a scientific program by showing problems - what have to do is point to fact that not making any progress in coming up with explanation
Hard to say we’re not making progress in explaining intelligence by trying to analyze, formalize, mechanize it

Critique:

N+S notion of heuristic while necessary is insufficient.
Didn’t pay attention to other ways we constrain the problem space and zero in on relevant information
Didn’t notice that they had an assumption in their attempt to come up with a theoretical construct for problem solving. Assumed all problem solving the sam
Heuristic of essentialism:

Essentialism: when group a bunch of things with a term, they must all share some core property (essence)
Some things fall into that (ex: triangles), but not all
Not everything we group together has an essence
Ex: call many things games: what set of necessary conditions meet all games - won’t find a definition that meets all and only games
Science discovers things that have an essence
Treat any category as if has an essence (heuristic), but many categories don’t have essences

We look for essences because it allows us to generalize. We can overgeneralize, but also undergeneralize - also a mistake
N+S thought that problems had an essence, that all problems essentially the same, so to make a general problem solver need one essential problem solving strategy
essentialism is not a bad thing, we need it
Fundamentally different kinds of problems:

Well defined vs. ill defined problems

Well-defined problem: good meaning and effective guiding representation of the initial state and goal state
Psycho-technologies make well-defined problems for us

(how has this been scientifically established?)

Can get blinded that that’s how most problems are like
Most problems ill-defined: don’t know what the relevant information about the initial stat or goal state are, or relevant operators, or even path constraints
Problem: take good notes.

Initial state;Don’t have good notes
Pay attention to relevant information
But how? How make a machine to do that?
Operations: write stuff down: do you? What stuff write down? Everyone’s notes look different
What does the goal state look like? What do good notes look like?

What’s missing in an ill-defined problem is how to formulate the problem: Zero in on the relevant information constrain the problem to solve it
Good problem formulation
If they had noted this, they would have realized that the important work being done by problem formulation
Following a conversation is an ill-defined problem, go on a successful first date
Need to be able to deal with ill-defined problems to be considered intelligent

Mutilated Chessboard Problems

If have dominos, covers 2 squares, need 32
Now mutilate chessboard, remove a couple squares

Now, can cover without overlap
Many find it a hard problem because formulate it as a covering problem. Trying to imagine the chessboard and possible configurations of dominos
Covering strategy, try and imagine it.
Combinatorially explosive
Two squares taken off are the same colour, but not standing out in a way that makes the solution obvious.
If put piece down always covering one black and one white, no way to put it on the board without covering a black and white square. To cover the whole board need an equal number of - there isn’t an equal number of black and white squares
Can prove that it is impossible.
Parity strategy - now solution is obvious, covering strategy combinatorially impossible
This is why flow and higher states of consciousness so relevant. Capacity to come up with good problem solving formulation - that’s insight
Insight in addition to logic is central to rationality
In addition to logical techniques to improve inference, need to have other kinds of psycho-technologies to improve capacity for insight.

(Bam! Brought it home!)

Involves mindfulness - gives ability to restructure your salience landscape
Starting to see how problem formulation and relevance realization central to being a real world problem solver, avoiding combinatorial explosions, avoiding ill definedness

Episode 28 - Convergence to Relevance Realization

https://youtu.be/Yp6F80Nx0lc

Insight

Problem formulation helps avoid combinatorial explosion and helps deal with ill-definedness and process from which move from poor problem formulation and good problem formation is insight
Insight is crucial to being a rational cognitive agent
In addition to logic, psycho-technologies to improve insight are crucially important/indispensable
Insight: relevance realization is recursively self-organizing, restructuring itself in a dynamic fashion
Insight Important both for:

Changing ill-definedness
Avoid combinatorial explosion
Self-corrective: overcome the way in which relevance realization machinery making things salient and obvious to you

Categorization

Ability to categorize things massively increases ability to deal with the world
Otherwise would have to deal with everything as raw individuals
If can categorize together can make predictions about how any one will behave
Allows to communicate with common nouns
Central to ability to be intelligent
Category: set of things that belong together
Not necessarily because they share an essence
Nelson Goodman:

We’re often equivocating between logical/psychological sense when we invoke similarity
Logical sense: similarity is partial identity: share properties, more share more similar you are
Problem: any two objects logically overwhelmingly similar. Bison/lawnmower: just have to pick properties share in common:

Both in northamerica
Both can kill you
Both have an order
Both weigh less than a ton
Indefinitely large number of similarities

But those aren’t the important properties, picking the trivial, not the relevant - obvious ones that stand out as salient
Psychological similarity: relevant comparisons

Context matters
Logical doesn’t change but context makes the category

Difficulty of making a robot to do this.
Agency: can determine the consequences of behaviour and change behaviour accordingly.
Build a machine that can do that.
Give it basic problem: wagon, handle with a battery

Robot try and take food to a safe place and consume it
On the wagon is a lit bomb
Robot: pulls the handle, consequence of pulling the handle is to bring the battery along - intended effect
Bomb goes off.
Made the robot only look at intended effects of behaviour, didn’t look at side effects of its own behaviour
So give it more computational power,
This time it doesn’t do anything
Trying to determine all the side effects: even trivial ones- combinatorially explosive
Come up with definition of relevance (can’t do he’ll argue later):

Which side effects are relevant or not
Goes up to wagon still sits there calculating
Making two lists - one irrelevant the other relevant, list keeps going

Have to ignore the information, not even check it
Relevance realization is intelligently ignoring irrelevance and zeroing in making the relevant stuff salient

Communication

Communication: central to being a good problem solver
Linguistic communication
When use language to communicate problem is that always conveying beyond what you’re saying. Always has to be.
Communication depends on being able to convey more than say. Have to depend on you to draw implications in order for me to convey above and beyond what saying
Ex: shout “excuse me”, I’m out of gas - there’s the gas station

Hoping that anyone who hears assumes it’s me, and by saying excuse me requesting your attention, for a minimal amount of time, for not too onerous problem
I am the person making the noises
I don’t mean I’m out of gas, mean the vehicle, asking to help find gasoline for the car
Know that assume the car isn’t completely out of gas but can go nearby
Other person says “Oh” indicates going to give you a bit of attention, make a statement seemingly out of the blue “there’s a gas station at the corner”, you will figure out nearby, can get there, still open, can buy it, etc.
Essential that both understand or else will be humorous or angry
Each one of those sentences, would be combinatorialy explosive. Can’t say everything want to convey - rely on reading between the lines.

(hmm, so this is important in understanding the big problem in communication of reading too much in. We have to read in some things, but we can go too far. Often we go way too far and just get it wrong, leading to anger.)

We follow maxims:

Assume people following some maxims
Ex: ask someone how many kids they have, I have 1 kid, tells someone else has 2 - well if have 2 must have 1
Didn’t give the information needed to try and pick up on what I was conveying
4 maxims:

Assume trying to convey the truth
Assume trying to convey the right amount of information
Manner: put it in the format most helpful to us
Relevance information

(bias can come in and alter these maxims when we’re dealing with the outgroup:

Assume not trying to convey the truth. Assume trying to cherry-pick information. Putting it in a manner intended to be vague or misleading. Deliberately ignoring relevant information. It is crucial to recognize when one is doing this in order to have a productive discussion.)

All reduce to the one maxim: be relevant
Don’t demand people speak the truth, asking people to be honest or sincere: saying what believe to be true
Don’t mean tell me everything that’s in your mind, mean, convey what is relevant to the conversation in context
Key to ability to communicate is the ability to convey relevant information
Key to intelligence is capacity for relevance realization
Selective attention, decide how to hold in working memory what’s important to you.
Dealing with combinatorial explosion in the problem space, interacting with the proliferation of side effects
How do I organize it?
All feedback
Relevance problem:

That’s the problem of trying to determine what’s relevant, core of what makes you intelligent
Deep and profound - relevance realization at the core of what it means to be intelligent

Convergence to Relevance Realization

Going to use this construct to show how it can be used for meaning
RR crucial to insight, insight is central to wisdom
RR crucial to consciousness and attention, altering state of consciousness crucial to wisdom and meaning making
What makes someone wise is ability to zero in on relevant
Meaning: proposal: nomological, narrative and normative were connections that afforded wisdom, self-transcendence
Saw relationship to salience and truth, connects up to reality
Connects us together in the optimal way
What if when we use metaphor of meaning we’re talking about we find things relevant to us, to each other, parts of ourselves relevant to each other, how we’re relevant to the world, the world relevant to us
All this language of connection, language of establishing relations of relevance between things.
Maybe there’s a deep reason why manipulating RR affords self-transcendence, wisdom, insight, because RR is the ability to make connections at the core of meaning, at threat from meaning crisis
Create new psycho-technologies, reappropriate older ones, coordinate them systematically to regenerate these fraying connections, relegitimate and afford the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence, connectedness to each other and the world

Episode 29 - Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization

https://youtu.be/A6Q_B7z6gLc

Centrality of Relevance Realization
Want to come up with a naturalistic explanation of it
Use it to explain many of the features essential to human spirituality/meaning making/wisdom
Series of arguments point to centrality of RR:

Problem solving: search space, combinatorial explosion -> problem framing -> zero in on relevant information
Problem solving key to intelligence
Ill-definedness problem -> relevance -> insight, often solve a problem by altering problem formulation, re-determining what is relevant
Categorization: depends on judgment of similarity -> logical similarity vs. psychological similarity (comparison in terms of relevant features) -> aspect: set of relevant features cohere together, relevant to us
Convergence argument, divergence argument - balance between them
Communication: have to convey more than you can say
Robotics: interaction with environment, being an agent, proliferation of side effects - have to zoom in on relevant side effects
Convergence argument: function of consciousness, doing relevance realization
Working memory: relevance filter, screen off irrelevant information
Powerful convergence argument, centrality of relevance realization as:

Constituative of intelligence/cognitive agency
Contributory to existence as conscious being

RR: may explain fundamental aspect of meaning lost in the meaning crisis, sense of connectedness
Relevance is that sense of connectedness
Deep connection between relevance and agency and meaning/agent arena relationship

Theories of Relevance

Mistakes for theory of relevance is when we argue in a circle: whatever process or entity using to explain relevance should not require relevance.
X -> relevance, X cannot presuppose relevance for its function
Want to explain intelligence in terms of processes that are not intelligent.
Candidates:

Representations: Things in the mind, ideas, pictures, that stand for, represent the world in some way.
Computations
Modularity: specific area of the brain dedicated to processing relevance

Each of those inadequate
If RR is so central to meaning making, cognition, etc. we should garner lessons about how we should think about human spirituality

Representational Level

Mental entity that stands for, directs us towards an object in the world
Representations are aspectual:

Hold up a pen, form a representation of it
When form a representation don’t grasp all the true properties of the object (combinatorially explosive)
Pick a subset of relevant properties: structural functional organization
Aspect: Set of features relevant to each other and set of features structurally functionally organized so they are relevant to me.
Pen could be a weapon. Change aspect
Can think of how many different ways to use the same object
Language: zeroing in on relevance, and how SFO relevant to us

Aspectuality deeply presupposes relevance realization
Means that representations can’t ultimately be the causal origin of relevance
So if meaning and spirituality is what is bound to RR then don’t look at level of representational cognition
Not to say they don’t contribute or affect what we consider relevant, they just aren’t the source.
Pylyshyn: multiple object tracking

Give people bunch of objects on a computer screen, have them move around.
Ex: ask where’s the red X, blue circle, green square.
We can track about 8 objects reliably
More objects we track, less and less objects can attribute to each object
If tracking red X, may not notice the red X becomes a blue square
Content properties get lost: just tracking the hereness and nowneess of it.
Finsting: fingers of instantiation. Here and now are indexical
Mind can keep in touch with something, but that’s all it’s doing.
When touch it makes the here now salient to me
THIS doesn’t refer to a specific thing, pics out some here and nowness salient to me
THIS; demonstrative reference. They do salience tagging
Enactive demonstrative reference: need before can categorize
If want to categorize, need to group them together. This, this and this. Salience tag and bind them together.
Concepts are categorical, but categories depend on pre-concepts
Fundamental connection to reality, like the mind being in contact with the world

So need to look at something that is sub-represeentational, sub-semantic, sub-categorical, sub-conceptual
When people have the most profound sense of meaning, it is reported as ineffable, use the language of hereness and nowness, fully present
So not a bizarre claim to consider. We habitually identify with the way in which we are running represntations in our mind.

Computational level

Syntactic level
Syntax about how terms coordinated together in a system
Ex; grammatical rules in English = syntax
Fodor: Cognition is computation (goes back to Hobbes)
To think is to do computation
Have to make a distinction between implication and inference

Implication: logical relationship based on syntactic structures and rules, a logical relationship between propositions
Inference: when using an implication relation to change beliefs

Beliefs have content
Changing beliefs brings up what beliefs should I be changing?
proposition: defined in terms of logical syntactic structure by all its implication relations
Number of implications is combinatorially explosive
Cannot ever make use of all the implications of any proposition, can’t be completely logical ever.
Cognitive commitment: What we do is decide, select, which are going to be used in an inference. Which of the implications are you going to commit to?
Cannot afford to spend commitment on all possible implications/inferences, or irrelevant ones.
Which beliefs do I need to change in this context.
Cherniak: what makes one intelligent is that select relevant implications
Inference massively pre-supposes RR
Brown: Rationality:

Rules are propositions that tell where to commit your resources
Every rule requires interpretation, a specification in application
Ex: rule: be kind: in a situation use inferences to derive actions and changes of belief that results in being kind to others
Rule tells which implications to pay attention to
Issue: way I’m kind to my son, should I use that in how trying to be kind to my partner? No. Context matters

Can’t specify all the applications of the rule in the rule: combinatorially explosive
Could have a higher order rule? Same problem
Ability to follow rules based on something else: the skill of judgment
Skill of RR -> so computational level not going to do it

Situational Awareness

Wittgenstein: propositional depends on the procedural.
Even if lions spoke we wouldn’t understand them
Situational awareness: don’t just have skills

When exercising a skill it depends on SA
Perspectival knowing. Salience landscaping
How is my salience landscaping foregrounding what is most relevant to the task? Is it backgrounding what is irrelevant
Procedural knowing depends on perspectival

Perspectival knowing depends on how well the agent/arena fit together and generate affordances of action/intelligibility
agent/arena need to be in conformity relationship, be well-fitted together for salience landscaping to function appropriately
Arrow of dependence: Propositional -> procedural -> perspectival -> participatory, each depends on the next

Giving us a way to connect and think about the 4 kinds of knowing

Modularity

mind/brain -> central executive, maybe it is responsible for RR?
Not an answer: if it’s right its homuncular: haven’t explained it, just pointed to a place
RR can’t be in any one place, has to be simultaneous - always going from feature to gestalt
RR has to be happening both at feature and gestalt level in interactive fashion
RR happens at multiple levels of cognition

Drawing it all Together

Account of RR has to be completely internal
Has to work in terms of goals that at least initially are internal to the brain.
Goals have to be constitutive: goals that a system or process have that help to constitute it for being what it is
Autopoietic systems: living things are self-organizing - have the constitutive goal of preserving their own self-organization
To be alive = to be the goal of preserving the self-organization that gives rise to us
Protect and promote their own self-organization
RR has to work in terms of autopoietic systems, goals completely internal.
Deep connection between RR and being a living thing

(being a living thing or a conscious agent?)

RR theory has to be scale invariant.
Has to be capable of insight, self-correction
RR has to be self-organizing in nature.
Problem: can’t identify relevance and relevance realization

Argue that can’t have a scientific theory of relevance
Argue that this tells us something deep about nature of relevance/meaning
But that’s no reason for despair, b/c doesn’t preclude us from having theory of RR, gives us a good idea of what a theory of RR is
All we ever needed is a theory of RR

Episode 30 - Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory

https://youtu.be/Wex12GhUFqE

Theory of Relevance vs. Theory of Relevance Realization

Argues can’t be a scientific Theory of Relevance
How science works:generate inductive generalization
Powerful way of reliably predicting the world
JS Mill: systematic import: science has to form categories, same type of thing, that support powerful inductive generalizations
Important properties for that category: Homogeneous
Wittgenstein: many categories don’t have essences

Some say no categories have essences, but that’s not true: ex: triangle

Quine: things like triangles are deductive essences, but science discovers inductive generalizations
Essentialism isn’t bad for things that have essences
Possible to do a science when we categorize things in a way that we have the essential properties of a thing
Reverse: we can’t have a scientific explanation of everything IF:

The category is not homogeneous
Does not support powerful inductive generalizations
Does not have an inductive essence

Doesn't mean they don’t exist, just that can’t scientifically investigate them
Ex: can’t have a science of white things. Study white thing, what do I learn about it other than it is white?
No metaphysical implications
Ex: horses:

Seem to have an essence: if learn a lot about this horse will generalize to other horses -> veterinary medicine
Category stable
Properties must be intrinsic/internal/inherent: many objects have properties not intrinsic to object but rather object’s relationship to us (attributive properties): ex: money is money because we treat it as such, can’t do that with gold
Calling a bottle a bottle is attributive otherwise an object of a particular mass
Doesn’t mean that it’s false, just that can’t do science

Ex: Tuesday events
Relevance:

Does not have systematic import: like Tuesday events
Things that I find relevant, other than I find them relevant what do they have in common?
Class is not homogeneous
Not stable: not forever relevant
Internal or intrinsic to object? If there never been human beings could have relevance? Doesn’t seem so
Relevant seems to be relevant to someone or something
Relevance has to be relevant to an autopoietic thing (system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself)
Relevance not something for which can have a scientific theory, not intrinsic to something, no essence to relevance

Theory of RR can’t be a theory of relevance detection. Don’t detect relevance in the object

Analogy: Theory of Evolution

Before Darwin, people thought if studied the natural world could discover essence of how things were designed
Darwin: things don’t have an essential design
Evolutionary fitness: capacity to survive long enough to propagate species.
Fittedness: what is it about the organism that allows it to reproduce: no essential design.
But don’t need such a theory: need a theory about what is relevant, how an organism is fitted, constantly being designed, redefined by a dynamic process
Fittedness always redefining itself, constantly in a process of self-organization, no essence
Constantly adapting to the way the world is changing
Have a theory of the evolution of fittedness
Fittedness and the evolution of fittedness are the same thing
Darwin proposed dynamic systems theory of how fittedness evolves
Relevance analogous to biological fittedness.
Relevance = cognitive interactional fittedness
Need a theory of how it evolves
What if ability to:

Formulate problems
Form categories
Pick up on conveyance
Make inferences
Constrain the search space

Regulate a feedback loop. Sensory motor feedback loop -> sensing, integral to moving
Interact with the world, changes how sense it -> loop

Theory of Relevance Realization

What if there is a virtual engine regulating that sensory motor loop so that it is constantly evolving it’s cognitive interactional fittedness to its environment
Doesn’t have to come to any final essential way of framing the environment. Constantly evolving its cognitive fittedness to the environment.
So need a theory of relevance realizastion
Dynamical system for the self-organizing evolution of cognitive interactional fittedness
Would be:

Not humunculour
Consonant and continuous with how the organ (embodied brain) evolved

Need:

Set of properties are sub-semantic
Sub-syntactic
Have to ground out in establishing the agent-arena participation
Self-organizing processes
Multi-scale
Originally be ground out in autopoietic system

Bio-economical properties: think of biology as economic

Economy = self-organizing system constantly dealing with distribution of goods and serves, allocation and use of resources
Body is a bio-economy
We are organized so that the distribution of resources serves the contituative goal or preserving the bio-economy itself
So not semantic or syntactic
Multi-scale: simultaneous and top down

What kind of norms at work in a bio-economy:

Subsemantic: truth
Subanalytic: validity
Bio-economy: not dealing with logical, semantic norms, economies regulated by logistical norms
Logistics: study of proper disposition and use of resources

Logistical norms:

Efficiency
Resiliency: long term broadly applying efficiency

What if RR is this ongoing evolution of our cognitive interactional fittedness, virtual engine regulating sensory motor loop, and regulating it by regulating bioeconomy in terms of logistical norms like efficiency and resilience
Can describe all that scientifically
Multiscalular way in which bio-economy is organized to function:

Ex: autonomic nervous system, responsible for level of arousal: how much of metabolic resources converted to possibility of action
There is no final perfect design of level of arousal
Sympathetic system: biased, interprets world in a way to raise level of arousal
Para-sympathetic system: biased other way - looking for evidence to reduce arousal
Opposed in their goal, but interdependent in their function
Symnathetic always trying to arouse, para always trying to bring down. As environment changes, tug-of-war shifts around level of arousal
Opponent processing: level of arousal constantly evolving to fit the environment
Can’t be perfect

Vervaeke will argue that the embodied embedded braian uses opponent processing in a multi-scalar way in order to regulate bioeconomy so that it constantly optimizing your cognitive interactional fittedness to the environment
Efficiency and Resiliency:

In an opponent relationship: efficiency is a selective restraint, but if cut to the bone, all the efficiencies without remembering opponent relationship to resiliency, if one person sick no one to pick up slack, if unexpected change to the environment, noone can take it on
Need to be able to repair, restructure, redesign
If no redundancy, error floods the system
If too efficient, lose resiliency

What if have a virtual engine in the brain that makes use of the selective restraints of efficiency and the enabling restraints of resiliency and it bio-economically logistically shapes the sensory motor loop.

Episode 31 - Embodied/Embedded Relevance Realization as Dynamical-Development General Intelligence

https://youtu.be/gfKcVbNd7Xc

Embodied/Embedded

Embodied:

Trying to argue there is a deep dependency between cognitive agency as an intelligent general problem solver and fact brain exists within a bio-economy.
Body is not Cartesian-clay that we drag around and shape into the desires of our self-enclosed immaterial minds, not a useless appendage
Body is an auto-poeitic bioeconomy that makes cognition possible
Without it don’t have the machinery necessary for ongoing evolution of relevance realization
Body is constitutive of cognitive agency

Embedded:

Biological fittedness of a creature not a property of the creature per-se. It’s a real relation between the creature and the environment
Adaptivity not a property intrinsic to it per se. It’s an affordance between it and the environment
Relevance not a property in the object, not a property of subjectivity of the mind nor of objectivity
Property that is co-created by how environment and embodied brain fitted together in a dynamic evolving fashion
We don’t subjectively project relevance
We don’t detect it either empirically

Transjective: a real relationship between the organism and the environment

Relevance is realized.
Objective sense to realization: to make real.
Subjective sense: coming into awareness

Anti-cartesian: connection mind and body is one of dependence, mind needs the body.

(this is also the case in Integrated Information Theory which posits that information integration must be in 3d space. Embodied)

The world and the organism are co-creating, co-determining the fittedness
Need to transcend the objective and subjective - changes how we interpret spirituality: functional sense of connectedness that affords wisdom, self-transcendence, etc.

Efficiency-Resiliency Tradeoffs

Initially the machinery of RR has to be internal to an embodied embedded system of adaptivity
Want a way to optimize efficiency/resilience tradeoffs
Logistical norms (constraints) can be realized in particular virtual engines
Internal Bioeconomic Properties:
External Interactional Properties:

Eventually give rise to goals in the world as opposed to constitutive goals in the system.

Go back and forth
If want to be adaptive, a general problem solver - two kinds of machines can be:

General Purpose Machine:

Ex: hand: can be used in many contexts and many tasks.
Jack of all trades, master of none
Not as good as a hammer or screwdriver
Use the same thing over and over again
More efficient

Special Purpose Machine:

Outperform GPM in some contexts
More resilient

Sometimes you’re adaptive by being a GPM, other times by being SPM
Want to be able to move between these.

Want to be able to use the same set of functions over and over again. SPM don’t use as often, gets inefficient - carry it around but not using it. But makes me resilient. When a lot of new things that GPM can’t handle ready for it to deal with SPM
Want to constantly trade between them.

Information Processing

How would you make information processing more efficient?
Want functions using to be as generalizable as possible - use the same functions in many places
Relevance Realization in the Emerging Cognitive Science: paper
People who are trying to make AI already implementing these strategies

Data Compression (Application)

In science, take two variables, scatterplot w line of best fit
Line may touch none of data points. Allows to interpolate and extrapolate. Go beyond the data. But taking a chance.
Popper: all good science takes good chances
Allows to make predictions, generalize the function
Data compression
Trying to pick up on what’s invariant. Information always contains noise want to pick up on what’s invariant and extend that.
If the data compression lets me generalize my function, feeding through the sensory-motor loop, protecting and promoting auto-poeitic goals will be reinforced

Particularization (Scope)

Trying to create a function that overfits with the data
Emphasize pick up on variations
Make the system more context sensitive

Make the organism adaptive going back and forth. Though skewed one way or the other. Some are more biased to overfitting/particularizing, others to generalizing/compressing

If get scope going the right way will get coupled to this pattern of interaction that will fit you well to pattern of change/stability in the environment

Exploiting vs. Exploration

Deals with timing. Should stay here get as much as can (exploiting) or move and try and find new things. Trade off.
Different strategies being considered.

Reward when system doesn’t make an error, punish when makes an error. Makes it more curious and conscientious
Reward error reduction, punish error increase

Cognitive tempering vs. Projectibility of processing.

Not claiming these are exhaustive. Exemplary of ways in which can trade efficiency/resiliency and create virtual engines that will adapt through system of constraints
Exploitation efficient: don’t have to expend much, can just stay here. But things have to stay the same.
Exploration: have to expend a lot of energy but only rewarding if significant difference.
Sometimes what makes something relevant is how its the same, sometimes it’s what makes something different
Have to constantly shift between them because that’s what reality is doing
There are many of these trade-offs. All regulated by the opponent processing of efficiency/resiliency
Bioeconomics: cost of processing
Might also need to trade between scope/temporary and applicability/projectability

Flexible gambling: Have to be flexible in how gamble. May decide to hedge bets and activate as many functions as can, or go for the big thing and give priority to just this function
Sometimes focusing, sometimes diversifying
All of it can be represented mathematically

Scope, temporing, prioritizing between them
RR is always taking place in this space.
Moving around in a state space.
Developmental
Data compression - integrate information vs. differentiation
Can argue that these map onto two fundamental processes that Piaget said drive development: Assimilation
Assimilation: have a cognitive schema (set of constraints) - integrate assimilate new information - compression.
Opposite: accomodation: opens you up. Causes you to change structure, schemas.
If we just assimilate machinery gets brittle and distortive
RR is inherently dynamic and developmental - it develops by functioning and by functioning it develops
Complexification: simultaneously integrating and differentiating
If highly differentiated can do many different things but if not integrated fly apart
As systems complexify they self-transcend - go through qualitative development
Ex: start out life as zygote, initially cells just reproduce, then get cellular differentiation, also integrate, self-organize into heart, eye, etc. Biological complexification
Give emergent abilities: transcend yourself as a system
If we are RR we are inherently:

Dynamical
Self-organizing
Autopoeitic
Developmental
Self-transcending

RR as a Unified Phenomena

Spierman: general factor of intelligence

How kids doing in math predictive of how doing in english and sports
Strong positive manifold: interpredictability in different tasks.
Underwrites being a general problem solver

When testing intelligence often testing for general intelligence
Test:

When trace these back:

All the places need RR
RR is actually the underlying ability of general intelligence
RR is a good candidate for general intelligence.
GI is a unified thing. Keeps getting replicated.
If had to know one thing about you to predict: one thing that tells more than anything else. GI crushes how well do in an interview in predicting if get a job
So therefore RR is a unified thing. RR = GI.
GI is a dynamic developmental evolution of your sensory motor fittedness, regulated by virtual engines regulated by the logistical normativity of the opponent processing between efficiency and resiliency
Spending so much time on this because this is the lynchpin argument on the cognitive science side of the whole series. Everything leads to RR. Naturalistic explanation.
Argue: how RR embedded in procedural, perspectival participatory knowing, embedded in transjected dynamic coupling to the environment and the affordance of the agent/arena relationship, mind/body, central to mind/consciousness
Allows to explain so much at the center for human spirituality
How we can integrate cognitive science and human spirituality.

Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness

https://youtu.be/IZyWuD9UqI4

Centrality of processes central to intelligence/consciousness require RR
Many things feed into this, at fundamental level unified phenomena
Need to try and give naturalistic account of this. Can then use it in an elegant manner to explain certain features of human spirituality.
RR as the ongoing evolving fittedness of sensory motor loop to its environment under the virtual engineering of the bio-economic logistical constraints of efficiency that compress, integrate, assimilate, and resiliency that particularize and differentiate
Leads to complexity that leads to self-transcendence.
Can’t do this comprehensively. Too technical here.
Give an exemplary argument of a plausible naturalistic account of RR
We have this worked out in terms of information processing processes. But can see it worked out in the brain?

The Brain

Not arguing we’re nothing but our brains, too simplistic.
But have to appreciate how complex, dynamic, self-creating, plastic, capable of qualitative development brain is
Suggestive - he’s not attempting to prove.
Arguing it is plausible to empirically explain RR
Increasing evidence that when neurons fire in synch something like compression
Evidence that when people cooperate, their brains patterns of synchronicity
Scale invariant: see this process over many levels
RR has to be happening locally and globally
Suggestive that this can be implementing RR
At many levels of analysis, what have is a pattern where neurons fire in synchrony, then asynchronous, rapidly oscillating manner: self organizing criticality

Self-Organizing Criticality

Particular kind of self-organizing
Ex: grains of sand falling, sand grains self-organize, no little elf shapes the sand into a mold, it self-organizes into a mound.
At some point enters critical phase, system close to breaking down.
Order: as mound takes shape. Position of anyone one grain gives information about where the other grains will be.
Criticality get avalanche: collapse, general system failure
Sand can spread out due to avalanche, introduces variation, important changes in the structural functional organization of the sand mound
New mound forms that can go much higher than the previous one. Emergent property.
Cycles like this
Brain cycles in this manner.
Neurons cycle together, then neural avalanche, reconfigure into a new synchronicity
Doing data compression, does a neural avalanche, introduces variability into the system which allows a new structure to reconfigure, momentarily fitted to the situation
Evolving fittedness, complexifying
Constantly evolving its sensory-motor fittedness to the environment he would argue
Happening at a myriad of levels, through the whole structure of the brain. Highly recursive, highly complex, dynamic
Implies RR
Evidence:

Thatcher et al: 2008-2009
If RR is GI then should see measurable relationship between the two
Found that strong relationship between measures of self-organization and how intelligent you are.
More flexibility, more intelligent
Not conclusive: lots of controversy

If this is right has important implications. May be able to move from psychometric measures of intelligence to direct measures of intelligence
May help develop AI
Naturalistic account of RR in terms of neuron firing patterns

Brain Wiring

Network theory: new way of looking at it
Three kinds of networks:

Regular network: all the connections are short distance connections. Lot of redundancy. Everything double connected
random/chaotic: mix of short and long connections
Small world

Broad families of networks.
Regular network lot of redundancy. Important because resilient. Can do a lot of damage and still connected. But price: inefficient. Mean path distance: lot of steps.
Random: so messy, but efficient. So many long distance connections. Low mean path distance. But not resilient.
Networks are being constrained in their functionality by the trade-offs in the bio-economics of efficiency and resiliency
Small-world: optimal amount of efficiency and resilience
If brain is doing RR by trading between eff/res. Should see small world networks and SWN should be associated with highest functionality in the brain.
Increasing evidence this is the case
(g) - RR - SWN. More brain wired like this more intelligent. Controversial
But finding that these kinds of patterns of organization make sense
Suggestive evidence that working memory like this. Salience network.
As brain is moving to SWN in the salience network become more intelligent. Salient is what stands out
This research is from the last 2 years. Controversy. Ongoing, progressive
Plausible that will be able to increasingly explain RR in terms of firing/wiring
The more a system firing in self-organizing fashion will tend to SWN
More it wires like SWN more likely will fire in that pattern - mutually reinforcing
Strongly suggestive that this is going to be given a completely naturistic explanation
May give naturalistic account of the phenomenology of Consciousness
Plausible possibility of natural explanation

Consciousness

Should all hang together such that machinery of intelligence and functionality of intelligence should be integrated in terms of RR
Relationship between consciousness and self-organizing criticality
Experiment:

Two images, different visual fields, compete with each other. Experientially switch back and forth.
Cube that flips:

See it both ways
When see one one part of the brain goes into synch. Then when switches another part goes into synch.
Suggestive of relationship between C and SOC

Functionality of consciousness to do RR associated with SOC - convergent
Experiment:

Monte et al. 2013
Give people general anaesthetic. Observe brain as pass in and out of C
As pass out loses SWN breaks down into more local networks
C seems to be associated with degree to which brain wiring as SWN

Machinery of Insight

Stephen and Dickson: found way to measure how much entropy in processing while trying to solve the insight problem
Found entropy goes down (behaviour becomes more organized) right before insight
Links insight to SOC
Study links insight to SWN
When have an insight, people’s info organized like a regular network. Get a long distance connection that forms. Lose some resiliency, but gain a masssive spike in efficiency.
Insight is when a regular network is converted into a SWN: optimization
Ex: metaphor: take two domains, Sam is a pig. Connection between it.
What happens in insight is SOC, breaks up a regular network converts it into a SMN
Sudden enhancement, increased optimization of RR, accompanied with a flash of salience (flow experience extends it)
In specifics this will turn out to be false probably, but project is progressing. So much is converging.

RR and Salience Landscape

RR happening at multiple levels
Featurization feeding up and back into foregrounding feeds up into figuration (figuring me out, aspectualized)

Dynamic and textured salience landscape
Core machinery of perspectival knowing.
RR is core machinery of participatory knowing feeds back to salience landscaping/perspectival knowing - gives dynamic situational awareness which opens up an affordance landscape - affordances become obvious to you.
Giving affordance obviation: certain affordances being selected and made obvious to you - basis of procedural knowing: knowing how to interact
Propositional knowing putting aside for now

Perspectival knowing grounded in participatory knowing
Situational awareness obviates affordances is what need to train skills
C is about doing higher order RR that affords you solving your problems
All of this is salience landscape
Salience landscape has 3 dimensions:

Aspectuality: SL aspectualizes things. Features being foregrounded and framed. Ex: look at a marker. Capture aspects
Centrality: way RR works: RR grounded in how things are relevant to you. How they are imported to you. Vectored onto me.
Temporality: small differences in time make huge differences. Kairos central. Small variations can have major changes. Central relevance in their timing.

SL is unfolding of these three dimensions: ACT
C giving perspectival knowing, grounded in participatory knowing, that affords procedural training, that has SL with ACT.
Centrality is the hereness: C is here. Indexed on me. Nowness. Togetherness (unity how everything fits together - oneness).

(all seems consistent with IIT)

A lot of the phenemenology of C explained with functionality
Not complete. But a lot of it.
He argues is this gives us an account for why altering states of consciousness can have such a profound effect:

Down to identity
Up to agency
Linked to profound sense of insight
Feel like dramatic coupling to environment

All hangs together well. Looks like have the machinery need to talk about it

Caring

RR is not cold calculation: always about how your body is making risky affect laden choices what to do with its precious, limited, cognitive and metabolic resources
RR always aspect of caring
Always affect. Thinge are salient, catching arousal
Creating affect. Moving, emotion. Moving towards action.
At the guts of conscious intelligence there is caring.
Heidegger: at core of our being in the world is a foundational kind of caring.

Episode 33 - The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness

https://youtu.be/_zkLevmQe90

Phenomenology of RR in terms of Meaning Making/Spirituality

Relevance Realization fed from:

Problem Solving
Insight
Categorization
Demonstrative Reference
Consciousness/Working Memory/g
Inference
Communication

RR -> Self-organizing Criticality/SMN
Optimizing of connectedness/fittedness
Complexification -> capacity for self-transcendence, produce emergent functions
Overcoming self-deception endemic to meaning making machinery, also capacity to bullshit yourself
Connectedness to something greater/other than them, but to whom identity coupled
Perspectival knowing/Participatory knowing, procedural knowing
Creating of affordances: obviation of transjective relationship in which capacity to solve problems can be developed
Caring: something we care about, bind ourselves to, commit ourselves to
Can help explain what’s going on in altered states of consciousness - get change in salience landscape, altering optimal grip
Helps explain higher states of consciousness

Other aspects of RR understood as Spiritual in Nature

Fundamental Framing of Reality

We are inside the framing, participating in it
At the level of the agent/arena

Preconceptual: At the level below propositional processing, pre-propositional
Belief: assertion of propositions so RR taking place deeper than belief.

(sure, it’s at the level of experience. But leads to beliefs)

Belief is an effect of RR
RR is pre-inferential, pre-communicative
Learning pre-supposes it.
Pre-experiential:

meaningfully structured experience (level of common-sense obviousness) is a result of it.
Not generated by it.
Not generated by the level of common sense obvious meaningful world.
That world is generated out of RR coupled to the environment.

(hmm, I just said it was at the level of experience. How do we realize any relevance without first having an experience to find relevant? It may be pre-meaningful experience of the world but is it pre-experience?^[c] The experience seems to me has to come first)

Pre-egoic:

Your agency and the world as an arena in which you have a narratively structured ego emerge out of RR
By the time you have you in a common-sensically obviated world of meaningful objects and situations RR has already done a lot of work

Pre-normative:

Primordial normativity: before you can assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you
Before you can assess beauty, things have to be aspectualized
Before can assess goodness have to have agency/arena
RR makes possible judgements about what is true, good and beautiful

Spirituality

Points to aspects of human spirituality:

Complexification -> Self-transcendence
Self-deception - Foolishness
Connectedness
perspectival/participatory knowing -> procedural knowing
co-emergence/creation agent/arena
Binding of agency, caring, cognition
Altered states/higher states consciousness
Deep metaphors
Deeper than ego, etc.

The way that can be spoken of is not the way
Pre-experiential. Fundamental grounding of being and being connected. He says these are the same.

(I’m not sure he’s quite made this case. Or at least have to explore this more. It can’t be pre-experience. One can experience without any kind of relevance realization. Consciousness is more fundamental. But he says: fundamental “grounding”. What does this mean?

It may be fundamental to being connected. But to being? How can they be the same? What does he mean by “being” here. I can exist without RR. Is he stretching or am I not getting it.)

A lot of what is captured by spirituality is captured by way this machinery unfolds
Religio: to bind together, to connect
Right side of the board:

Using religio in spiritual sense as in: pre-egoic, binding, that simultaneously grounds the self and its world
The Joys of Secularism: Paul Acosta: A Secular Wonder:

Wonder: fact that things always “matter” in some way to us, cannot help but be affected by things as if we were immersed in a bubble of meaningfulness
Atmosphere of significance
Import that we do not create from scratch, but absorbed by
A living being must atune or adjust
Bubble of significance: the experience of having a world, has roots not in a focal object, but in the emergence of a bubble of significance plays the same role as the atmosphere to the earth: you participate in the atmosphere.
Creates special conditions of life where existentially crucial distinctions between inside and outside are drawn
Primordial ground makes possible distinctions between inner and outer
Transjectivity deeper than subjectivity and objectivity which require all of this machinery
Because not aware of atmosphere in a perceptually focalized object, similarly bubble of meaning, don’t experience it directly but through wonder/awe, absurdity/horror
Wonder is the state in which we become aware in a participatory and perspectival way of the significance and our involvement, participation of RR
St. Paul: God is whom we live and move and have our being.
Not saying RR = God, but wonder and awe disclose the RR and it’s spiritual significance to us, the way in which we live and move and have our being

Robert Fuller: Wonder:

Also argues how central wonder is
Wonder responsible for some of our deepest spiritual experience
Wonder/awe = being mode. Curiosity/problem solving = having mode
Curiosity is problem solving - has a focal object
Wonder is - Ahhh - opening up, perspective and participatory sense of Oh Ah
Fuller argues this emotion point of wonder, participate in the gestalt, how does it all fit together. Awe pushes to an opening, an ongoing accommodation, sense of the inexhaustible, the combinatorially explosive nature of reality and the ongoing evolving adaptability of RR to that explosive potential within reality itself
Not about solving a problem, but remembering, putting you in touch with religio

Wonder gives something like participating, emerging from, co-creating with the ongoing course of your world

(is it co-creating or experiencing?)

Not with a story though, grounded in something deeper
Awe - accommodation, opening up - come to know, I am transformed, knowing how I’ve changed and the disclosure of how it is is bound together.
awe= being mode (remembering SATI)
Confronting the mystery
Frame problem as a box, then insight, opening wider box, then what starts to happen is opening up, and insight goes from reframing to a transframing:

Trajectory of transframing: doesn’t stabilize. Doesn’t land on a focal object, Exposes the machinery of Religio
Find it deeply meaningful to a point, though if pushed too far in a negative sense: horror

The Mystery of Religio

Difference between something being a phenomenological mystery and it being something can’t explain
Ex: phenomenologically impossible for me to perspectivally know what it is like to be dead - can’t get a framing of my own non-existence. That’s not proof I’m immortal
Mystery: need an additional argument to go from phenomenological mystery to claim theoretical inexplicability
Can never make a focal object of my framing my capacity for RR perspectivally
Whenever thinking or doing anything it’s always framed. What I’m thinking of is inside the frame. But what’s not inside the frame is the framing process -> mysterious
I vs. Me: can never see the I, but by means of the I. But doesn’t mean unaware of it, always have a subsidiary awareness. Always aware through the I. Not inaccessible. But can’t focalize it.
The machinery of RR is a deep phen. mystery
Can’t use the objects of subjects and objects to talk about RR in the sense of exemplifying it - transjective
But not a theoretical inexplicability
The mystery opens up an affordance of trajectory of transframing that allows us to participate in, perspectivally, that kind of wonder and awe of religio
Can get into a transjective trajectory flow state - celebrating in flow our participation in religio.
To make significant, to reflect upon, to celebrate and enact religio is to fundamentally enhance our agency, the disclosure of the world and our connectedness to it.
What else could be more valuable to us?

The Sacred vs. Sacredness

What’s missing in religio but found in religion is to confront the sacred
The sacred: when we want some account of the metaphysics of what grounds our experience of sacredness - metaphysical proposal - supernatural
Sacredness: psycho-existential proposal: what it’s like to experience it
Existential:

Modal
Being mode
Transjectivity
Primordiality

Psycho:

Cognitive processing
Knowing
Embodiedness, embeddedness

Religio is psycho-existential as well
Sacredness within a psycho-existential sense, ground it in RR, then make proposal about what it tells us about metaphysics.
Sacredness:

Agent-arena relationship
Domocide: disastrous. Deep loneliness, deep cultural shock
Part of sacredness is to hone the world: (Goetz)
We hone the world and the world hones around us
One of the functions of sacredness is a meta-meaning level
Goetz: religion not a system of meaning but meta-meaning.
If agent-arena relationship doesn’t hold, none of the other systems of meaning can work - won’t make sense
Religion he argues if you don’t have religion none of individual systems work.
Religion: experience, cultural and individual experience of sacredness gives us meta-meaning system that protects from domocide
One of the functions of sacredness is the meta-meaning process of homing us against horror
Horror overwhelmed by loneliness, alienation, anxiety, etc.
When we go into a sacred setting, we have pscyho-technologies that allow us to do the serious play with sacredness so we are homed against horror
research shows one way to improve capacity to make way in the world is to be committed to a spiritual community and a spiritual path (with a history behind it), institutions to make it more prototypically like a religion
He’s not looking for a nostalgic return but looking at the functionality
Worldview attunement: homing against horror
Criticize goetz: mistake if think sacredness can be reduced to or identified solely with the machinery of worldview attunement and homing against horror
It is necessary, but not sufficient feature of sacredness
Ex: gnosticism as a response to domicide. Gnosticism a way of trying to awaken us to the primordiality and mystery of religio - also transjectory of transframing is transgressive: trying to overturn the grammar of a worldview.
Points to something else the sacred does for us.
Otto: influenced by Kant:

Holy: related to wholeness and completeness, health
Typically think of it as righteousness and glory
Numinous - the fundamental experience
The experience of the numinous is to experience the transgressive side of the sacredness, how it opens us up in wonder and awe, and takes us to the horizon of horror

Episode 34 - Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol

https://youtu.be/KoqibFwvQJ4

The Numinous

Otto: Numinous
Before had moral interpretation of holiness there was a pre-moral view of sacredness (or at least an aspect of it)
Numinous: close to glorious. God is shiny and overwhelming and powerful. But glory doesn’t have a moral sense.
Otto describes numinous as:

Mystery: trajectory of transframing

Fascinating: compels: supersalient, really grabbing attention, can’t pull away
Horror: terrifying, horrifying. Horror =/ deeply startled with fear. Horror is when sense of contact with reality is being challenged, slipping away. Associated with insanity or madness

Monster: we often find intercaterogical as horrific. Don’t fit into normal categories. Challenge our grip on the world.
Douglas: leviticus, unclean animals are all weird. Argues, ways in which people categorize things, have a certain pattern, when broken, they challenge our grip on the world. Should have interconnection between creatures: shape, locality, locomotion.
Ex: we are grossed out if spit in bottle.
Violate our core categorical ways of evaluating the world.
Often just see it as yucky, but if see it as threatening evokes horror for us
Ex: wolfman inter-categorical, vampire ghost inter-categorical

Can create significant horror without startle and puncture.
Ex: The Shining, realised don’t know what’s going on, suddenly participating in his madness, losing grip on the situation, forces that don’t understand. That’s horror

Numinous is super-salient: something like a flow-state, drawn to it. Aspects of horror, shakes structure of our worldview
Ex: brush up against the numinous:

Driving home, been an accident on the highway. People slowing down. Very dangerous. People feel compelled to slow down. Fascinated by it. Hope to see something horrifying. Hoping to see death. Somehow get a confrontation with this. Can’t look away, but horrified.
But something missing. Can’t see death. Can see the fact of death. But won’t actually give them a grip on the mystery of death.
Wonder and Awe open us to mystery, but if the mystery is overwhelming, causes us to lose sense or insight understanding. Horror: so fast, overwhelmed so fast, culture shock.

Start with something like flow, super-salient, but not in the fact that deeply coupled, but seeking to be deeply coupled. Machinery going faster and faster but not actually getting a grip.
There are passages in the bible like this. Getting drawn in. Trying to get what it can’t get - a stable relationship. If its too much can pass into horror.
Supposed to have awe for God.
Sense that sacredness supposed to take us to the very horizon of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world. Hope to not take us into horror, but to the boundary between awe and horror -> confrontation -> demand to change who and what we are.
Realization that we are ultimately limited, no matter how much we grow we can’t grow enough to encompass the mysteries that we are confronting.
Always being a being caught up in relevance realization
This is the ultimate framebraking. Trans-frame breaking. Breaking your capacity for framing or at least taking it to the limits. Forced into a trajectory of transframing that’s also acknowledging you are ultimately insufficient.
Humiliates you. Humility is the function of horror. Bring you to that state of maximal accommodation, while reminding you that you can never become anything beyond a finite being. Never assume you are more than you can ultimately be.
Numinous puts you into contact/confrontation with something much greater than yourself. And that has an existence independent of me and therefore can threaten me.
Sacredness ->

Worldview attunement -> homes us against horror -> meta assimilation (agent/arena fit together)
Numinous -> exposes us, fascinates us with horror -> meta-accomodation
Opponent processes

Sacredness doing a very powerful higher order RR, pushing the machinery of RR down through all the levels of knowing, existential modes, and then blowing it apart with opponent processing doing powerful higher order RR
Seriously playing with machinery of RR -> pushing it to greater and greater development, optimizing it, enhancing it.
Deep functionality of sacredness is playing with machinery of RR - trying to create states of mind, states of body, the world, optimizes the machinery of RR. Connectedness.
Ex: music is associated with sacredness. It’s not “about” anything. But playing with the machinery of salience landscaping. Flow state. Pivotal way to try and convey and represent the sacred.
We have trivialized music. Severed it from its connection to the sacred.
Can use something symbolic like music to play with this machinery in a powerfully transformative manner

Religions, rich in symbolic machinery

Symbols and Sacredness

Symbol original meant: to put two things together.
Sign: refers - look through it at something else.
Heart is a sign for love.
Symbols refer but exemplify. Get you to participate in that to which you refer. Participatory knowing.
Ex: kissing someone: not just think of love, but actively participate - serious play with the machinery of the agent/arena relationship to participate in a reciprocal relationship with another human being.
Symbols have at their core a metaphor: look through this thing to look at that thing. Sam is a pig. See sam differently. Get an insight into Sam. Act of looking through and seeing this in an important way
Metaphor: pervasive and profound
Lakeoff/Johnson:

don’t realize how much of our cognition being structured by metaphor. Ex: half way through this lecture - as if moving through a space
More naturally poetic than we realize
Constantly trying to look through one thing at another
Criticism: embodied process gets projected up into abstract thought. One of their examples: he attacked my argument. But think that notion of projection is too simplistic: attacking castle and argument aren’t quite the same.Near-synonym doesn’t translate: assault/criticize
Not quite projecting, we clearly have a sense of where pointing

Why is this important: points to a different way of understanding what the metaphor is doing.
Symbols tap into deeper metaphors. More profound metaphors that structure our cognition. Have a bottom up emergence and top down emanation going on in them.
Sense in which both sides are interacting in a powerful way
Metaphor: hold in mind

Ex: justice: we care about justice
Need to be able to reflect on it, think about it, contemplate it
How do you hold it in mind? What are you doing? May think of a prototypical instance. But when want to reflect on it often evoke a symbol: ex: scales of justice
Metaphor: notion of balance. Sword deciding.
Allows us to hold justice in mind.

Exaptation: Michael Anderson: idea that brain is a self-exaptation machine. Within and without. Ex: tongue exapted for speech, but also has all kinds of side-effects. Can tap into them.
A lot of what we see in cognition is circuit re-use.
Ex: cerebellum used for balance, but exapted for deeper coordination any area of the brain.

Episode 35 - The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

https://youtu.be/rpivf1SoEdc

Sacred: Gertz: homing against horror, Otto: puts in contact with the numinous- exposes us to what is horrifying. Awe with a little more (humiliation) to give us humility. As we feel that sense of expansiveness with awe that we are limited creatures
These two aspects of sacredness can be seen within the machinery of RR:

Worldview attunement: form of meta meaning/meta assimilation -> compression integration
Confronting the numinous in awe/horror. Horror is about the confrontation which demands unanswerable, unachievable, accommodation

Sacredness is to play with the machinery or RR as found within the primordial aspects of religio: advantageous to us b/c foundational to our agency, to the world, as an arena for our action, capacity for self-transcendence, etc.
We often do this serious play by engaging in symbolic behaviour

Symbols

Symbol: bridge between

Meta accommodation
Metta assimilation

Symbol has a participatory aspect to it as opposed to signs
Metaphor: profound -> pervasive in our cognition and highly functional

Participatory relationship: able to play with exaptation (acquire functions not originally evolved)
Symbol allows to hold in mind something that normally can’t hold in mind
Can activate the machinery, go back through it: have a symbol of a scale for justice: can just think that, or perspectivally engage in balancing. My capacity for balance has been exapted to find complex contingency relationships between any areas of my brain
Neuroscience: cerebellum about balance, but also cognitive functions. Cerebellum picks up on areas of the brain that are correlated together, find patterns of contingency and dependency between them.
Can activate my cerebellum, that machinery to practice the skills of being more just - that allows to participate in the processing that will ablee to cultivate the skills that will make me just and will ground my conception of justice
Allows me to deeply participate in justice through the symbol

Quickly without thinking, which one is booba and which one is kiki? - experiments overwhelmingly star one is kiki, other is booba

(I put the star one as booba - but mostly because I heard it the first time as “boomba” which reminded me of an explosion, and it looks more like an explosion)

Do a whole bunch of associations - this is sharp looking so feels more like kiki
This playful but can activate this machinery for purpose. Have to participate in it, live with the symbols. Savour it.
Jonathan Pageot: work on the symbolic world, remember the symbolic aspect of our existence, get us to savour the symbolic
Symbols have a capacity to put ourselves in a relationship with something. Symbol is transforming me in a powerful way. Reconfiguring my machinery so I am capable of interacting with the world. Look through the symbol, realize, and make more justice.
Ex: meditating, following breath

Focusing on breath helps to scale down my attention
What can happen, is can become sensitized to how much in process my mind is
I think of my mind as a thing, container with thoughts, etc. when practice watching breath start to realize that’s not it, mind is a fine-grained process. Pain isn’t a thing. There is “paining”. Different layers, all these things happening. More a verb than a noun. Participate in it, more than have it.
Breath becomes participatory symbol of the impermanence of things. How much they are interconnected and flowing.
That can have an impact on sense of self. That maybe I am more impermanent and interconnected.
Can also scale up. See how all of reality is impermanent and interconnected

Polanyi:

Ex: patriot looking at flag.
When looking at flag, all the subsidiary awareness being integrated into focal awareness
Look at the flag, not because interested in the using the flag, using it symbolically. Integrated different parts of myself together
Focusing attention on flag, but actually interested in playing with the process
Contemplating the flag, bringing up emotions, associations, and integrating them together - becoming more patriotic, participating in patriotism

Breath:

Looking at breath, but point is to integrate all my processing together
Breath can also suddenly disclose reality to me. Reveal an aspect of reality
Inherent interest: subsidiary elements; integrating them together.
Can get an insight. Suddenly reveals impermanence, interconnectedness, now interested in the breath
Can resonate between these, move more deeply
As see more deeply into the object, draws me in, more powerful integration, which coordinates cognition so that can see more deeply

Symbols are capable of affording anagoge, capacity where have inner optimization, see more deeply into the thing, which leads to more deeper optimization
Activate all this machinery then look through it.
See things didn’t see before. That the scales are never stable. Scales are off. Justice is a process, not a thing.
Like when the mother has the bidirectional insight, transframing about daughter in law
Music:

Listening to music. Focusing on it but not trying to get behind it. Way integrated onto the music is crucial. But aspects of music disclosed to you, which changes how can understand and experience the music

Mystery and Symbols

Symbols put in confrontation with what is mysterious
Frame - then have frame you aspire to. Need something to reach in the frame, but can’t be entirely captured by the frame. Drives to expand the frame. Both activate and draw beyond yourself.

Symbol has to reach into your worldview, but want to be in another worldview, find it viable, something transgressive, shakes things up, puts you into all this machinery move to an become capable of dwelling within that more expansive worldview
Symbols are

Ecstatic:

Helps you stand beyond yourself. My world is being opened up, and I’m being transformed to fit that expanding world

Participatory
Integrative: integrating you together, new world together, integrating both together in an integrative fashion

Ex: Christians see the cross: start to become a different person, and disclose to us parts of reality that wouldn’t normally have in mind, like suffering. Can draw us in, integrates more powerfully.
If willing to seriously play with the symbol I will start to be transformed in a coupled fashion to my world that perhaps Christiantiy becomes viable to me.

Complex:

Multifaceted.
Radically reconfiguring salience landscape, connecting things don’t normally connect together

Symbol trying to set you in motion. To do this:

Trying to do something epic

Transjective: between two worlds. The world you’re in, the framing you’re in, and the world you’re aspiring to
Transgressive:
Trigger transframing
Transformative

How does this relate to Sacredness?

Sacredness

Mythos:

Always deeply connected to ritual
Ritual: enactive analogy, enactive anagoge. Process by which try and activate the machinery of transformation
Patterns of interaction
Symbols -> story (perspectival participatory knowing. Story connects to ritual so can enact it

When have a mythos about religio such that can activate religio and seriously play with it, to enhance its capacity: that’s sacredness
Can use mythos for other patterns that we care about
When we want to activate, accentuate, articulate religio itself we rely on mythos to do it: our relationship to religio is one that can only be born symbolically, b/c of the primordial participatory nature of religio
Mythos -> Religio -> RR
RR is intrinsically interested in itself:

Self-organising, self-transcending, self-correcting process
Part of its structural design
Can use mytho to activate religio, and find that deeply interesting to do - going to find it all deeply meaningful

Have a way of talking about a lot of the aspects of sacredness
The essence of sacredness is in the sacred

The Sacred

The sacred takes us back to the metaphysical proposal: what ultimately generates the experience of sacredness is something that has an absolute value because it has a particular metaphysical status - super naturalSupernatural: above nature, aboveness makes it inherently valuable to us, therefore find it sacred because of its absolute value
Carries with it a particular way of understanding the process of meaning making. To claim that ultimately there are things that are always of relevance to us.
Claim that there is an essence to relevance

(this can’t be true. RR is intelligence, what is relev

ant to us depends on intelligence)

He says this is ultimately a mistake. Because there is no essence of relevance.

(Bam!)

There is only the ongoing process of RR
Nothing other than itself that is intrinsically interesting to RR
Salience machinery can lead you to kill yourself, own existence no longer salient to you. Not absolute
Notion of sacredness seems to be a category mistake. That there is something, someone, some place that essentially, absolutely, is relevant. That is to misunderstand the nature of relevance
Confuse the products of RR with the process of RR
That is a hallmark of the way we make mistakes. We focus on the product not the process

(think of spiritual experiences.)

Gnostics: constantly inventing new myths in the mythos sense. They saw the relationship to sacredness as an evolving one, supposed to be always launching into transframing
Suggests another way of understanding sacredness without needing the supernatural as a category?
Maybe it means a significant transformation of what supernatural means
There’s an inexhaustibleness to this process. Sense in which reality can continue to disclose itself to us. Combinatorially explosive.
The process is constantly evolving, RR
What if sacredness is not about finding the completion but an experience of the inexhaustibleness of reality, and the inexhaustibleness of the RR machinery and its response to reality

(This clicks with me to some extent. I’ve always been more interested in method than what we finally land on for our beliefs. It’s about the journey not the destination. )

Ex: for hm Plato is sacred

Doesn’t mean he has unquestionable authority
What happens is he reads Plato gets insight, has impact on him, then go out in the world, then that understanding transforms me. I engage and become.
Then return to Plato. See in plato what didn’t see before. Reached deep into him.

(this is similar to how I don’t mind retreading old ground in discussions. I think, so long as we are open, that we continue to see new things when we engage in these discussions (though can’t just be spouting talking points - have to be really engaging with the other side)

(Isn’t this a way that theists and nontheists can come together to read these holy books?)

Gnosss: constantly finding Plato to be an inexhaustible fount of transframing, ongoing, filled with developmental wonder.
But he’s not supernatural, or absolute
Don’t think he can give a final definition of what is relevant.
Again and again see through it and the world reaches back to me
Even Nietsche if stare long enough into the abyss, stares back into you (though problematic grammar of inverting Christanity)
Trying to suggest that the idea proposed about what sacredness is can be connected to an alternative proposal to what the Sacred is:
Sacred is the transjective relationship between the combinatorially explosive nature of reality
The reality is ultimately a no-thingness. No-thing that can frame. Will always transcend your framing - linked to the no-thingness of yourself. The “I” that can never be captured. The ongoing never ending process of RR
Deep non-logical identity between these two.

Deeply coupled at the primordial levels of religio
The inexhaustible that powers the experience of sacredness in a deeply profoundly participatory fashion.

Episode 36 - Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Engineering Enlightenment

https://youtu.be/48Ch2x3DrfM

Symbols are a participatory act, that participation has a connection to activation of profound kind of metaphor, reaching back through our exaptation and reactivating that material so we can re-exact our cognitive process, re-understand some aspect of reality
Deeply participatory, transformative thing that we do
Symbol: hold something in mind so we can see more deeply into it, be more in contact with it
I am transformed so I can see through the symbol to reality, and that reality speak through the symbol to me to get an anagogic flow
Becoming deeply integrated, world becoming disclosed, that mutual reciprocal realization feels like love coupling to reality
Symbols are designed to get me into a trajectory of transframing, open up the world, and grow me so can be in that larger world
Symbols are ecstatic, participatory, integrative, disclose the complexity of the world in a coordinated, complex fashion
Symbols as mythos: symbol and story together, ritual, mythos enacted
Can use mythos to activate, accelerate, appreciate religio
Religio is inherently valuable because it is constitutive of our ability to value anything else or interact with anything we consider valuable
RR is at the heart of religio, and is structured to function by being interested in itself, correcting itself.
Proposed that when using the symbol to get us to play with the machinery of sacredness/the higher order RR in sacredness
Proposed that the Sacred - is not supernatural,
Proposed something wrong about trying to essentialize sacredness in the sacred, that it is essentially relevant to us.
RR is not about detecting something that is inherently relevant in the sense that it absolutely commands our attention. Relevance has no essence
Relevance functions by evolving
Idea of sacredness as the inexhaustible aspects of this reality
Turning kant on its head.
This reality is always a source of wonder, not because there is an object that has a claim on me as the source of wonder, every object, everything is combinatorially explosive. There is a no-thingness to reality because everything is combinatorially explosive to what it is.
My processing has a no-thingness to it to - the “I”
The process of RR is ongoing, inexhaustible, can’t stop
Vast-emptiness
So can return again and again and again to the world. There is the real potential in the world of sacredness

Indispensable Mythos

Why is it that we might get this way?
Particular mythos/symbols indispensable for people, to activate, appreciate, accelerate my religio
Because of way in which RR machinery is evolving, because of the kairos that is always a part of my ongoing religio - even saying “my” is wrong. Don’t possess it.

(Seems to be suggesting that any mythos will do. The good news about this is that it lets us focus on what the mythos is doing and not on whether it represents the “truth”. Can any mythos help us participate and evolve?)

May say only through this mythos do I get the access I need to articulate my religio
Think that’s a plausible hypothesis.
Makes sense to say that given how this person’s evolved fittedness unfolded and the particular timing, the historical context, that only this mythos gives them the access they need.

(seems to be saying that some people may just gel with one mythos (ie: a religion). And that’s ok. Doesn’t entail other mythos’ aren’t as valid.)

Maybe it’s a Christian/Hindu mythos. That mythos is indispensable to them.
We shouldn’t confuse indispensable to an individual/group, psycho-cultural indispensability with metaphysical necessity.

(yep! That’s what I thought he’d say. Well - not using those words! )

Ex: english is indispensable to me. Can’t get along without it. Doesn’t mean that english is metaphysically necessary. Not some final complete absolute version.

(great analogy!)

Continually evolving as a language to stay in touch with the world.
Sacred =/ Supernatural

Shouldn’t imply it adheres to a supernatural entity or thing
Reasonable alternative to understanding sacredness
If we could give up the confusion of confusing indispensability with metaphysical necessity, identifying the sacred as supernatural, we would not have to be committed to a two worlds mythology.
This is the first step in the response to the meaning crisis: understand the machinery of connectedness, and understand it in a way that allows us to disconnect it from a metaphysical essentialism/supernatural, and two-worlds mythology, instead understand it in a fashion that is completely integrated with science.

(but what about the people who do believe in the supernatural? Has he established this as the exit from the meaning crisis?

This account situates us within scientific world-view, while also giving us a way:

Of talking about experiencing sacredness
Deep connectedness
Deep self-transcendence
Deep transformation

Still needs to do a lot more work: needs to show this model of RR does address the historical issues.

(heh, he answered the question - he hasn’t established it yet)

Historical Factors

Need to respond to these historical factors, rearticulate worldview, get back that sense of deep connectedness, sacredness, deep connectedness that affords satisfaction of our sense of being in contact with the world, affords self-transcendence, affords meaning and life in a profound way
Structural functional analysis of meaning making disclosing that machinery of meaning making, also is the machinery that is going awry when people are experiencing a sense of meaninglessness
Machinery that makes you adaptive is the machinery that makes vulnerable to self-deception/self-destructive

Perennial Problems

Machinery of RR that makes all the deep connectedness possible for us, can also go horribly wrong.
Argues that all cultures/all people as participants in their culture, across time/place/history are prone to perennial problems: ways in which the machinery of RR can drive them into meaninglessness and despair
Inherent in adaptive machinery are inescapable vulnerability that can deeply undermine our religio (the agent/arena relationship) such that we experience meaninglessness, absurdity, alienation, etc.
Perennial because inherent in the machinery
Cultures developed psycho-technologies to help alleviate the suffering from the perennial problems.
Ex: buddhism
Practices for cultivating wisdom and pursuing enlightenment/salvation
Meaning crisis emerges when historical factors have undermined a world-view/tradition, ecology of practices, psycho-technologies, cognitive cultural grammar that people have created in order to respond to the perennial problems
We need to do two things:

Use that machinery to give a response to the historical factors
Take the machinery of RR, religio, sacredness use it to talk about how we can address the perennial problems

Want to reverse engineer enlightenment:

What are the perennial problems?
What are the processes we can use to address the perennial problems

Enlightenment is the set of practices that ameliorate the perennial problems and alleviate us from the distress and the suffering that they inflict upon us
To awaken from the meaning crisis not just to have a theory, but to have an understanding that helps afford and facilitate the process of transformation that we need to undergo to awaken from the meaning crisis
Goal to present way we can respond to how the PP might be gnawing away at the fabric of meaning in our lives
Take that and situate it into the account of sacredness and RR and show how fits into our scientific worldview
Then we have a way of awakening from the meaning crisis. Not as an absolute answer but to get the process started

Functional Structural Developmental aspects of RR/Religio Going Awry

Functional aspects:

RR: goes awry:

Self organizing -> Parasitic processing. Complex patterns of self-deception and self-destruction
Self identification -> modal confusion
Self-reflection ->

Frankfurtz: wanton: being that acts completely impulsively, lose agency, because instincts in conflict. Have to step back and reflect. Coordinate and integrate
Reflection reduces wantonness
Ex: when thirsty, see the world thirstily. Can do a transparency/opacity shift. Can focus on thirst. Now not driven just by thirst but perhaps by curiosity. Start to gain some relief from the compulsion, immediacy of my thirst
If don’t do any self-transcendence awash in impulsiveness, as move up, self-transcend, regain agency
Reflectiveness gap. If keep opening it up don’t keep gaining agency, get to problem of Hamlet: always reflecting, reflecting on his reflection, always stepping back and looking at - becomes incapable of acting. Tremendous powers of reflection, becomes disconnected from motivational machinery of connection to the world. Loses agency
Gain agency but if push too far, then lose it.
How much need to be is contextual
How do I optimize this? Get the emersion of the wanton, the flexibility and self-corrective capacity of Hamlet.
Trade-off between stepping back and looking at cognition to monitor it, and stepping through to intervene in the world

(Yeah, I can get stuck in the Hamlet problem.)

Structural:

Meta-meaning of agent arena relationship:

Absurdity: when connectedness between you and the world is lost (can be pushed into horror)
Anxiety: when connectedness between you and yourself is lost
Alienation: connected between you and other people is lost
All of those show up in domocide (loss of agent-arena relationship)

Developmental:

Existential inertia: trapped in a worldview and can’t get out of it.

When you need to move between worldviews, make a worldview viable that you’re not currently in. Need for anagoge.

Existential ignorance: indecisive, don’t know what going to lose if go through with transformation.
Gnostics: existential entrapment

Absurdity

Thomas Nagel: the Absurd

Absurdity is at the level of perspectival participatory knowing
We behave as if absurd is a result of our inferential processing
Ex: what I do now doesn’t matter, because won’t make a difference to people a million years from now. Doesn’t work: if what’s happening now is irrelevant a million years from now, their opinion of me is irrelevant to me.
If I make no difference to them they should make no difference to me
If existed for millions of years would make it more meaningful? Or more absurd
If smallness in reality makes feel absurd, would life be more meaningful if blew up to the size of a galacy?

Susan Wolf:

sense of being bigger is a metaphor to being connected to something larger than oneself, and that’s a metaphor for being connected to something that has value independent of my valuing it (core of sacredness)

Absurdity: Nagel: the arguments are after the fact expressions of absurdity not before the fact generators of absurdity
Arguments are ultimately invalid so not generating absurdity
RR is below propositional knowing
Nagel:

Ex: everyday absurdity: T on the phone, nervous going to tell S that he loves her, anxious about it, might lose friendship, might gain a lover. Dials, hears phone picked up. Says don’t say anything:I love you! Then hears the machine come on. Leave a message at the tone.
Funny and sad.
Humor can overlap with absurdity. Play with perspective
Clash of perspectives: T’s perspective, within his perspective his action is deeply meaningful, but machine gives an impersonal mechanical perspective where his actions make no sense. Have no meaning
Absurdity is a clash of perspectives. Perspectival clash may not be resolved with humor, raw clash of perspectives, experience just the incoherency, loss of connectedness
Can become horror, this perspective that I’m looking at from the perspective of all of time and history, what I’m looking at here can be undermined

What do we need to do?

Can see how all of this machinery is ways in which the adaptive nature of religio/RR is also making us prey to vulnerability, to losing our agency, suffering distress, to experience horror, meaninglessness, absurdity being trapped. Deeply confused. Overwhelmed by parasitic processing.
These are perennial problems.
Can’t jump over our own shadows.

Next time, can we use the same machinery and see how we can engineer a comprehensive response to all of these PPs.
Any developmental change, development of our perspectival participatory and procedural knowing, that affords a response that ameliorates and alleviates the PPs is a good candidate for enlightenment
Instead of making enlightenment this unachievable superlative that only super human beings in the distant past can achieve - what’s the use of that?
Let’s make enlightenment is the developmental process that gives us reliable amelioration and alleviations of the PPs

Episode 37 - Reverse Engineering Enlightenment Part 2

https://youtu.be/2kQooMZzR7w

Proposal: that we can understand that which causes the experience of sacredness in terms of a a transjective inexhaustibility, deep anagoge between the no-thingness of the ever evolving RR and it’s mysterious depths and the nothingness of reality that is combinatorial explosive and dynamically changing itself
Can acknowledge the role of the symbolic - helps engage and activate the primordial aspects of religio
As open up the world open up ourselves
Don’t confuse indispensability with metaphysical necessity or absolute essence.
Larger critique that relevance can’t have an ultimate essence
Proposed part of what we saw the experience of sacredness doing was the higher order RR, homing us against domocide, the meta-assimilation, helping us confront the meta-accommodation, the numinous
Look at how the sacred helps us address perennial problems
Two components to meaning crisis:

Historical factors
Perennial problems

Experience of sacredness, attempt to articulate, appreciate, religio should address the PPs
PPs are perennial because the machinery of religio makes us adaptive but also susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive tendencies
Most cultures create psycho-technologies in the form of religion for addressing the perennial problems. Has to be fit into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview
The psycho-technologies have to be integrated with sacredness
We don’t have a worldview that legimates or encourages:

Project of meaning making
Self-transcendence
Cultivation of wisdom
Affordance of higher states of consciousness
Realization of gnosis

People turn to cobble together in dangerous auto-didactic fashion their own personal responses to PP without traditions, guidance communities, well-worked out set of practices, well-vetted, well-developed
So often bereft when face the PPs
Responding to meaning crisis two components:

Response to re-articulate a new world view in which the project of enhancing religio is validated
Set of practices to address the PPs

He proposes the scientific account of relevance realization and Religio will give us a way of articulating a worldview in which we can resuscitate meaning-making project
At core of meaning-making is RR - with a naturalistic explanation that hopefully does justice to the experience of sacredness
Looked at functional, structural, developmental aspects of religio
Cognition is inherently developmental. Functions by developing.

Capacity for self-transcendence, increase in what you know and the kinds of things you can know
Process of optimization
Developmental trajectory

He rehashes from last week, not writing out again: functional structural developments
Analytic: theoretical purposes. Often the case that these things are interacting and exacerbating each other. Can be overthinking things, getting stuck, contributing to modal confusion. Etc.
Hubristic element here: trying to get a balance between respecting where we are and respecting the historical heritage
Asking for patience

Ways to deal with the Perennial Problems:

Functional: ways to deal with:

parasitic processing is want to cultivate a counter-active dynamical system

Need to internalize, an active dynamical system in us. That is how to respond to the dynamical systems in parasitic processing
Ex: cultivation of the eight-fold path

Modal confusion; SATI, practices designed to invoke deep remembrance of being mode
Reflectiveness gap: combination dynamic integration of immersion and creative flexibility (flow state)

Structural: ways to deal with:

Clash of perspectives: Prajna: state of getting deep penetration of the perspectives: ateva/prajna: can scale down/up, get state of non-duality scaling up and scaling down at same time
Anxiety: inner dialogue: internalize the sage: as the adult is to the child is to the adult, the sage is to the adult, internalize buddha nature, Socrates, Jesus
Alienation: cultivate communitas: sense of connectedness to other, try to
recover what had in platonic dialogue, authentic discourse

Developmental:

Existential entrapment: gnosis and higher states of consciousness

Need an overall framing of these things: all within a wisdom framing

What can we now think about wisdom

Have to have a cognitive style in which the amelioration of self-deception and the affordance of self-optimization are paramount.
Going to go through each in more detail.
Concern about hubris: proposal to reverse-engineer enlightenment: instead of keeping enlightenment surrounded by mystique and nostalgia, need an account that recognizes what that mystique pointed to but exagerates whcih is the difficulty of enlightenment
If we have a kind of being, an ecology of psycho-technology that allows us to systematically alleviate and address the PPs, suggest we call that enlightenment

(is he kiind of doing what jesus did, bring enlightenment to the masses?)

If enlightenment is more than that then what is it’s value?
Insofar as we can give an account of this in terms that are naturalistic and open to scientific investigation, will have a scientific theory of enlightenment.

Parasitic Processing

Set of practices (ex: eight-fold path)
Enhances fitedness.
Set of practices interdependent with each other, mutually supportive, self-roling
If have a set of practices that can take on a life of its own, start to implicitly interact, becomes a counteractive dynamical system in me
Buddha: the goldsmith, gold is inherently valuable, mind is inherently valuable, if just do meditation without reflection, nothing happens. Has to be reshaped. If just do one thing don’t accomplish goal. Need to look, and notice, balance with heat, and hammering, creating a higher order skill of being a smith. Set of practices, fitted together, do something overall that each skill on own can’t do.
Cultivating an ecology of practices, that have complementary relationships to each other, organizing them together
Constellations of lower order skills and techniques,to build higher order
Operate in many ways and many levels
Cultivate a counter-active dynamical system. Overarching thing.

Modal Confusion

Help us to remember sati. Not as a belief but as an existential mode that we can reliably reactivate and re-enter into a viable and enriching manner

Reflectiveness Gap and Flow

If just speak the lecture wantonly it’ll become chaotic, but if constantly stepping back and reflecting will choke
Try to get into a flow state: flow state
Try to set up practices that afford and wisely cultivate flow.
Try and get into flow state that keep immersed and engaged with the material but flexible insightful where needed

Absurdity

Because of the way attention works, attention is both bottom up from the features, and top down from the gestalt
Attention the way you are related to the world is one in which the world and you can be co-creating
Spinoza talks about this in the Ethics

Idea that when reading an argument, knowing, have to see the world as Spinoza did, study and practice the ethics
Realized ethics designed to do this. Logical structure trying to lead to deeply intuitive knowing
Have this tremendous argument, up to the largest scale of reality, but premises along the way
Argument of arguments: meta-argument: premises go up into argument, which go into argument of arguments
Attention multiply layered
If practice the ethics you see the whole of the mata-argument in each premise and see how each argument fits into the whole
Get a cosmic perspective that is interpenetrating with the perspective of your individual moment of thought

Buddhist talk about something similar: Prajna: Self-liberating state of wisdom

Simultaneously looking in as deeply as can and as out as deeply as can
What you get is you practice scaling down as deeply as possibly can to the pure consciousness event, and scale up to profound at one-ment of everything
Eventually get non-duality, get both deeply down and in and as out and up as can be
At maximal breaking frame and maximal making frame, dynamically integrated.
That state is a place that addresses absurdity. Though doesn’t address the arguments of absurdity but that’s the point.
What drives absurdity is perspectival clash. If can reliably realize a state in which you overcome perspectival clash (ex. Lower order do this with humour), can have something like that, overcoming of the clash with this state of non-duality, deep intuitive knowing.

(kind of have the feeling of being disciples here, hearing revelation)

Anxiety

Sense that something is wrong, connected to inner conflict
Christianity: inner conflict of Paul, Plato - inner conflict, different goals, and we suffer
No specific target, anxiety the threat is endemic to you - no matter where you go feel the threat but there’s nothing threat can attach onto because has to do with your inner war within yourself
Idea of internalizing the sage: create an inner dialogue to coordinate the centers.
Cognitive science gives tremendous help. Lot of increase in knowledge of different centers of the brain.
What need is an internalized representation - a model, a role model, for how we can engage in dialogue.
Proposal: if I can internalize my capacity to interact with the sage eventually I get that ability I get only with the sage with myself, within myself. Becomes part of my meta-cognitive machinery. Dialogue with myself, get the various aspects of myself to various centers to dialogue with each other.
Jung: active imagination to create inner dialogue
lectio Divina: reading the text but trying to get the text to speak to me.
A lot we can do
Process of identification, identify with the sage, internalize the perspective of the other, and the capacity for indwelling - perceiving through.
Not just internalize the sage, but indwel with it
What is it like to see things the way the sage does: without pretense or arrogance or inflation
Practice indwelling the sage: what would Jesus do, Socrates do.
Practice indwelling then internalizing
Start to afford the internalization of the sage, to converse with yourself, platonic dialogue with yourself.

Alienation

Communautas: shared spirit (ex: Raptors)
A way of getting collective flow going
Also collective flow in which we feel like there is real communication and communion - shared identity of some kind
Careful look at the way in which our practices of communication have been so undermined by bullshitting and modal confusion
What’s been happening:

(what we’re doing in the podcast is part of this)

Jordan Hall: trying to free communication from the cultrual grammar that’s got us to where we are. Also trying to reaccess these other kinds of knowing. Not just propositional exchange, underlying procedural knowing and underlying perspectival knowing
Dependent on participatory process of our ongoing evolving attunement from which the agent and the arena co-emerge.
Most of our problem solving done in concert with other peopl
State called coherence, marshalling distributed cognition and collective intelligence, freeing us from the ways in which we are boxed in by our historical cultural cognitive grammar
Access other kinds of knowing
Cohering the integral We space: book

Circling practice. He’s not an expert in it
Communal practice in which we engage in something like a mindfulness practice, collective flow state. Dynamical system that gives people resources that address their capacity for being in touch with themselves and each other
Trying to get insight rather than victory in debating

Beginning of a whole set of practices for bringing about authentic discourse to really address issues of alienation

Existential Entrapment

Gnosis
Gnosis seems to need that open-ended mythos that the Gnostics talked about.
Transgressive, open-ended ongoing symbol

Episode 38 - Agape and 4E Cognitive Science

https://youtu.be/xRjPy8c44vI

Higher state of consciousness empowers gnosis. Set within a proper ritual context, and that this is being used to cultivate and being reflectively transformed by a counteractive dynamical system - get you sets of practices for cultivating sati, flow, Prajna, communitas, inner dialogue
When set within a wisdom framing, person developing interlocking sets of virtues for addressing self-deception and for affording self-optimization. Results in a reliable response of amelioration and alleviation of the perennial problems = enlightenment

The components can each be explained and understood by our best cognitive science
Still need to articulate wisdom from a scientific perspective
Need to also talk about way in which this whole project can be undermined if these whole sets of practices can’t be situated within an encompassing and welcoming worldview
Having an ecology of psycho-technology is necessary but not sufficient to respond to meaning crisis
Raif Kelly: trying to bring together aspects of parcourt, martial arts.
Michael Nathan: training of wisdom within martial arts
People are already doing this.

Integration with Historical Forces

Talking about what he sees emerging. He’s not trying to found. Can we get religion that’s not a religion
Loss of the three orders

Nomological: deep sense of coherence and connectedness
Normative: sense of significance and depth through self-transcendence
Narrative: gives a sense of purpose or direction

As we lose this have a worldview in which we don’t belong.
Exacerbates perennial problems
Susan Wolf: Meaning in Life:

Meaning in life is about a kind of deep connectedness that we want
To something larger than ourselves
Metaphors: symbolic expressions.
What people really saying is that they want subjective attraction (to find salience) to objective attractiveness.
Because of loss of three orders we know there is no such thing as objective attractiveness
There is nothing that is objectively attractive
No meaning or relevance in this thing in itself
Wolf leaves it there. Alludes to ways in which we can BS ourselves, pretend we have objective attraction by finding group of people who agree.

Vervaeke’s work:

Is there a way of addressing this problem using cognitive science to address this issue?

Do we need things to be objectively valuable?

Could think the set of characteristics that need to exist in order for meaning to be created
It’s the transjectivity of the relationship that we need rather than objective attractiveness
Relevance Realization is inherently interested in itself because it is constitutive of it being self-optimizing, self-developing, evolving process
RR not in me or the world but in the affordances between the world and myself. Bi-directional
What need to be connected to those conditions that afford RR itself
Conditions that satisfy my inherent valuing of the RR process itself.
I ultimately want to care about the conditions that afford meaning-making itself
Those conditions are universal
When we care to create the conditions of meaning-making because we find them inherently valuable what we’re actually engaging in is Agape: to love for its own sake the process of meaning-making. The process of being a person ultimately.

(Hmmm, I’m not sure if I’m convinced here. Has he made the case that this should be seen as Agape?)

That’s why the things that contributes most to meaning in life is our sense of being connected to other people agapically
Cultivation, realization, appreciation of agape

Meeaning making is transjective
To agapically love people is not just to be directed at that body and mind, it’s to be directed at their conditions of community, environment, development, education

(Is he just secularizing the Christian notion of God is love?)

Agape precedes permeates and follows us
Part of what enlightenment has to be for us, whatever machinery we craft together, has to be integrated into an agapic way of being.
Being-mode, I thou relationship
We have to care about the conditions that make any caring possible
Think we should see Agape as our deepest appreciation for the caring that is intrinsic and constitutive to the relevance realization that makes both the agent and the arena possible.

(this just seems like a strange definition for Agape. Why redefine it this way? Why link RR to it? RR seems independent of Agape. Is it just saying we should love RR?)

Pointing to caring about something that is inherently transjective and has a value independent of my valuing of it because my valuing of it does not constitute it into existence - I emerge from it and participate in it. I am not the source or maker of it

(it’s like he’s saying we should care about having the ability to care. We should love the ability to have things be salient to us. I get it, we should, but it seems strange to associate it with agape. Is this a stretch? Trying to hard to fit it into a system Christians will recognize? Can you really “agape” a process?)

4Es and Cognitive Science

We can make use of what’s happening in third-generation cognitive science (4E cognitive science) with the theoretical machinery developing on the cognitive scientific side of things to address the historical factors
Varela: one of the founding figures of 4E cog. Science
Evan Thompson Mind in Life
Steps towards a science of interbeing
Insights of cognitive science, saying things consonant with Dharma (buddhism)
Embodiment: we are deeply embodied:

mind is not programmed, software, or rule-bound manipulation of symbols. Mind arises with immediate coping with the world
Intelligence is our coping with the world
Deal with the problems at hand that directly afford our interaction with the world at large.
Coping:

Enactment
Embeddedness
Enactive
Extended - cognition not in our heads, extended through our interactions with the world through our psycho-technologies
Embodiment about the idea that there is a deep continuity among most abstract cognitive abilities and our most embodied sensory-motor action.
Cognition grounded in RR which is grounded in our bio-economy
Bio not some clay that we drag around. It is a bio-economy that enacts logistical norms of efficiency and resiliency that constrain our cognition, evolve fittedness to the world
Biology is deeply embedded.
Continual niche construction - Organism shaping the environment and the environment shaping the organism - Transjective evolving loop
Embodiment leads to embeddedness - deep continuity, deeply embedded
Undermining way Descartes severed everything

Can respond to D that mind and body not disconnected, deep continuity.
Mind and the world also

Emergence:

Idea that a system can produce properties as a system that the component parts don’t possess
Mind emerges out of the embodied, embedded brain coupled with a living environment
Emergence reflected in spirituality by capacity for self-transcendence
Complexification inherent in RR machinery/religio
Getting a vertical dimension to our ontology
Self-organizing -> evolution -> self-making (auto-poeitic)
Unlike a tornado I am a self-organizing thing, I seek out those conditions that protect and promote my agency
More than self-making, becomes self-identifying thing - reflective
Become aware of, self-appreciate of self-making, inherently developmental and then can interact with that

Normative order being given a metaphysical backing
Emotion:

Deep divide between emotion and reason
Battle between empiricists and romantics
Damassio: showing that people without emotion means these people incapacitated as cognitive agents. Without emotion, without caring that is integral to RR, we have to take care of ourself, when don’t have that face combinatorial explosion
Deep interconnection between being embodied, RR, and having emotions
Having emotions: way in which RR is brought up into the level of your salience landscaping and shape and sculpt the salience landscape so that agent arena relationship becomes obvious and apparent to you
When angry, assume a particular role, assign identities, obvious what should be doing.
Prediction: as we move towards making artificial general intelligence, going to have to give them something analogous to emotion
Religio: always have caring/coping - core of cognitive agency
Emotion carries up to the attachment relationship between individuals, create persons - create persons within communities of persons, shape themselves and their community

Excellence:

Connections between dynamical systems, and positive psychology
standard psych way is to see how things break down and fall apart - by studying how it breaks down we can analyze it understand its parts and how they might be working together
Positive psych: shouldn’t study the mind only in terms of how it breaks down, also study the mind in how it excels beyond the norm.
How do all the pieces fit together in a way, transcend itself - excel
Study individuals who have optimized their cognition better than the norm
Only understand in terms of the whole in terms of how it excels
Studies: happiness, meaning in life, wisdom
Wisdom = excellent in cognitive capacity for coping and caring, responding to issues of self-deception, helping people deal with perennial problems of human existence

Deep continuity and emergence, and development give us back nomological order. See how we fit in and belong
We see a normative order, what it is to self-transcend, how we can cultivate enlightenment, respond to perennial problems
How we can bring about the best internal optimization, best external reciprocal realization, anagoge
Transcendence:

Goodenough: trying to recover sacred depths of awe and wonder to cultivate wisdom
Trying to challenge fundamental grammar
New sense of transcendence: instead of transcendence above, she talks about new sense: transcendence into the depths of nature
Transcendence into the depths of the psyche
Reciprocal opening up, experienced as a type of love

Narrative order:

Points to a telos, cosmic telos: evolution and RR are non-teleological - open ended
If looking to find something to bring back narrative order, can’t find it.
Think differently about narrative order. More to do with gnosis: open-ended optimization
May have need for symbols and stories to afford this, but we don’t have to think of them as existing independently in the structure of reality.
Don’t want to get back into utopic/nostalgic visions. Source of suffering and distress
Is it possible to move to a post narrative way of being. In which concerned not with historical narrative, but concerned with the depths to which we are capable of living.
What we need is not a narrative of a grand purpose connected to a history of the cosmos. Instead, we can move to getting beyond a narrative way of conforming to reality - post-narrative
Higher states of consciousness, narrative drops away but see themselves as deeply connected, deeply at one with themselves and reality
Cognitive continuum- fluency - insight - flow - mystical experiences - HSC

Episode 39 - The Religion of No Religion

https://youtu.be/440NV0eer00

Need to give an account of wisdom - wisdom framing needed for cultivation of responses to meaning crisis, and use of, interpretation of the cognitive scientific framework
Need to talk about notion of getting something that is a religion that’s not a religion.

Religion That’s Not a Religion

Tentative, not trying to found a movement.
Books about this idea:

James Carse: the Religious Case Against Belief
Roberto Unger: the Future of Religion
Alain de Botton: Religion for Atheists

People trying to play with what this might look like.
Dawkins: should cultivate poetic ability to wonder and awe of scientific worldview
Trying to get some conceptual vocabulary.
V not offering something definitive.

For many nones, returning to organized religion not a viable option
Utopic visions not viable due to trauma of 20th century, drenched the world with blood
Propose that we need to do something like what religion used to do:

Comprehensive set of psycho-technologies set within a community of practices
Allow for comprehensive transformation of consciousness, cognition, character and culture
In a way that is analogous to religion

That kind of transformation is needed today to address the mata-crisis of all the crises we are facing, in an accelerating fashion.

Acknowledge centrality of Religio
Important role for indispensable mythos in the activation, accentuation, acceleration, appreciation of religio

(Ok: so we were worried he’s getting rid of narrative. Doesn’t seem so)

Religio vs. Credo

Idea of open-ended mythos analogous to the transgressive mythology of the Gnostics
Credo = I believe
Paradigmatic set of propositions that state the essence of a religion is, in terms of truth content that is to be believed.
What has happened is as propositional knowing come into ascendant and having mode come into ascendance the having of propositions that are asserted (wilful assertion) has become dominant
We speak of religions as belief systems.
Propositional knowing, having the propositions, have them by asserting them in a wilful fashion -> credo dominance
Not derived from reason but asserted
There is an important role for Credo.
Post-modern critique: this is enmeshed with power, dominance, control, creating purity codes, boundaries of identity Us/THEM
Wants to try and take out a function for Credo
Can think of people having paradigmatic statements and pictures that this might be indispensable to them
Plausible that there is a mythos that is indispensable given the contextual sensitivity, the dynamic coupling of religio, set of symbols and stories and celebrations, and shows, associated with mythos
Gets sacredness out of religio
Try to be deeply respectful to religious creeds: even though criticisms are legit, also a legit thing
Problem is to confuse indispensability with metaphysical necessity

(So not getting rid of mythos, but getting rid of closed mythos).

Can talk about an indispensable functionality -> signal detection theory

We’re always facing perennial problems when we are doing information processing
There are aspects where there is both too much and inadequate information
Often info is ambiguous: unaclear if is the info you need.
Signal: information I want or need
Noise: information don’t want - distracting, misleading, etc.
Always a significant overlap of signal and noise
Can be confused with signal

Gazelle, hear a noise in the bush.
Could be an important signal, information that you want, telling you a leopard is near
Or could just be the rustling of leaves caused by the wind - irrelevant
Signal or noise is a matter of Relevance Realization
Caught here: if you’re the gazelle experiencing the overlap zone. Don’t know what it is.
Could get more information, but also diminishing return, any new info will also have same problem
The more regress, and try and get signal about signal, the more time. Can be costly
Idea that every act is risky. It’s a gamble.

Trading off between various contingencies:

Have to set the criteria
Decision line, include everything to the left as signal, exclude everything to the right. Problem with that is that opening up to different kinds of errors

If set criterion too high, get get noise, but miss a lot of valuable signal
Where do you set the criteria? No algorithm for that.
Different kinds of erra lot of noise as signal
If set it too low, don’t ors are differentially relevant depending on the context

Missing signal in some contexts can be much worse than mistaking noise for signal
Ex: miss the leopard, willing to make a lot of mistakes so don’t make misses
Other situations where reverse: mistake more costly than a miss
What you need is to be flexibly setting criteria that are deeply situationally aware. Perspectival knowing - situational awareness.
What is the context and how to set the criteria
Point is that what Credo is:

Setting the criterion for religio
Trying to determine what behaviours are putting me into contact with religio

We have to set the criterion: one way to do this is in an absolutist way. There is a final way, and absolute place to set the criteria - but that is perilous. The open endedness of RR undermines this
If we can acknowledge this, we can acknowledge that we will set the criterion with our mythos, but should never try and set it in an absolute manner (credo-dominance). Misunderstand the functionality of setting the criterion.
Continually reset the criterion optimally
Religion that’s not a religion would always have credo in service of religio
Many would say creeds are historically interpreted, right in practice, but a lot of conflict about this
Should always be thinking of making credo clearly and comprehensively in the service of religio
Helped by being linked to a notion of sacredness being grounded in an inexhaustible open-ended optimization rather than in some absolute state of perfection
Always understand the mythos beholden to three levels:

Unconscious level:

level that RR is taking place - don’t have introspective access to.
Grounding of participatory knowing
Level where connections being made.

Consciousness level:

level of salience landscaping - perspectival knowing (grounded in participatory).
With situational awareness makes possible procedural knowing.
Where consciously directing actions tp appropriate affordances given to me at this level, and appropriating those affordances by cultivating skills.
Coping turns into skilful interaction.
Coping-caring becomes skilful action and apt sensibility.
Level where connections being sensed, internalized

Cultural Level:

distributed cognition.
Level where trying to communicate.
Level where connections being shared.
Machinery of mythos
Propositional knowing, but also points down towards the others
Credo in the service of religio

Any mythos is going to understand itself in service of religio, but also directed downwards to the other types of knowing.
Should be a mythos that is explicitly committed to both of those, directed towards accessing, activating, appreciating types of knowing
Once have this programatic framework in mind, should be cultivating an ecology of pscyho-technologies

Ecology of Psycho-Technologies

Ecology designed to be top-down - reaches from the propositional down to the participatory, but also open and allows bottom up emergence from the participatory up through the perspectival through the procedural and into the propositional
Should be setting up sets of practices and cognitive styles that:

Have complimentary relationships to each other
Sets of corresponding checks and balances
Strengths and weaknesses
Dynamical system that is reliably complexifying in a reliably self-correcting manner

Need to do something important: need a meta pscyho-technology, designed to move us out of the intuitive psycho-technologies, and explicitly cultivating an ecology of more explictly engineered psycho-technology
Should give people ways of cultivating the meta-PT
To address the perennial problems, coherent with worldview attunement
Connection between capacity for collectively creating the meta-PT, and the individual meta-virtue of wisdom
More that people are individually cultivating wisdom in order to collectively pursue meta-PT, allow us to engineer individual PT
Very tentative. At an organizational level:

Have something like it in the emergence of the cyber-technologies that are being integrated: Wikipedia
Interesting in the way it is generated. Collective, cooperative fashion. Reliable stability, but also reliable evolution.
In one of his courses got former-students to create wikl of some of the main ideas of the course, get involved in a participatory fashion
Gets people more interactional and evolving content
Could create a credo analogous to that: a credo wiki by which groups of people interested in creating an ecology of practices and PT can communicate with each other for how to adaptively set the criterion and how to constantly re-engineer the creation of the meta-PT that will help, promote bottom-up and top-down functionality of this PT.
Could be set in a co-op structure, co-op together to create a shared curriculum, credo, shared vocab - not imposed as an ideology, allow insights and discourse

Not a utopic vision: people are already doing this, already trying to create this ecology of practices, setting the criterion, making use of internet
Whether or not it functions or takes root not up to him. Just trying to help.

Cognitive Science of Wisdom

Wisdom is a meta-virtue
Resonant with the communitas
Also needed for the project of enlightenment
Satisfying deep connectedness to one’s self, the world, others that make for a meaningful life
1990s: Robert Sternberg: Wisdom, A Handbook of Wisdom
1999 article McKee and Barber:

Wanted to try and link all of a priori theories of wisdom/philosophical theories, and pscychological theories
Philosophical ones are top-down, psychological bottom-up
Trying to set up an equilibrium between them.
Argue that what all these theories converge on is seeing through illusion.
Core of wisdom is the ability to see through illusion.
Cognitive and existential illusion caused by self-deception
Systematically, not just this or that self-deception but systematic seeing through self-deception
Seeing through illusion and into some sense of reality - or at least what is more real
Very profound meaning (deep) and pervasive (across many different instances) kind of insight. Systematic insight
Find across many areas where misframing problems to see them as systematically related such that can come up with insight that intervenes not just on this problem but in all of these problems in a systematic fashion

Episode 40 - Wisdom and Rationality

https://youtu.be/udlkps-81JM

Wisdom is a meta-virtue for the virtues
Individual pull pole for the relationship with the collective creation and cultivation of the meta psycho-technology for creating the ecology of psycho-technology
Need it before, during and after quest for enlightenment, systematic response to the perennial problems

Science of Wisdom

Science identifies wisdom as the systematic seeing through illusion and into reality, at least comparatively so -> insight

(I think of it as seeing the patterns that are useful to us as opposed to not seeing the pattern. Is not seeing the pattern the same as seeing an illusion? Hope he defines illusion here)

Systematic insight, not just into a particular problem but into a family of problems

(why does it need to be a family? If one picks up on a particularly insightful insight on a particular problem do we not call that wise? Are there different degrees of wisdom?)

Piaget:

systematic errors in the way that children see the world,
systematic errors, systematic way in which kids overstrain their cognition
eventually get systematic insight, not just into this or that instance, but insight into failures of conservation as a kind of error
insight not just at the level of framing, but transframing, systematic insight.
Gives sensibility transcendence.
As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage
Automatically connected to the problem of enlightenment

McGee and Barber

Wisdom not about what you know but about how you know it
What’s the process involved?
Rationality: not just on the product, pay attention to and find value in the process of cognition
Kekes: descriptive knowledge vs. interpretative knowledge

Descriptive is grasping the facts
Interpretative is understanding the facts: grasp the significance of what you know (relevance realization)

perspectival/participatory aspect to wisdom

Pragmatic self-contradiction - contradiction in the perspective in which make the statement and the identity you have in making the statement
Ex: “I am asleep” - nothing logically wrong with that, pragmatic self-contradiction, because have to be awake to say it. Not just pointing out a fact, pointing to myself with it. (not lucid dreaming)
“I am wise” carries with it a sense of pragmatic contradiction, to state that seems to be an indication that in a perspective, and you have the identity of not being wise
Ex; Socrates I know what I don’t know
Awe: this two faced thing between horror and wonder

Wisdom has perspectival/participatory, not about having true beliefs, it’s about what perspective can you take, what identity do you have
Seeing through a misframing, transframing, world opening up, I in a coordinated manner and opening up to and through it

At the core of wisdom is overcoming self-deception
Stannovich:

Systematically overcome self-deception = rationality

Rationality

Rational cannot be equated to a facility with syllogstic reasoning

(though of course, that can be a part of it)

Cannot be reduced to logic
Broaden the notion of rationality: capacity to overcome self-deception in a reliable manner
Affording flourishing -> optimization of cognitive processing
Reliable: not perfection or certainty: but high probability of functioning successfully

(I put it as “Low chance or bias/error”)

Systematically: not operational just in one domain.
Ex: rationality vs. expertise. Become an expert in tennis. Not expert in being good at. Studied it. Acquired a high proficiency in the set of skills, should be considered an authority
Expertise: find a domain, bounded domain, that has a reliable set that has complex, difficult, well-definable set of patterns and problems - doesn’t transfer, will interfere with other domains
Have to pay attention to way we can BS ourselves. Often confuse people’s expertise.

Ex: expert in physics, have expertise there, about knowledge, getting at what’s real, seems to be similar to philosophy, so presumably someone can transfer their expertise to philosophy? Or saying philosophy is dead or useless (self-contradictory), fail to see that the similarity between the two may entail they should not be listened to because their expertise may be interfering

Expertise is not systematic, limited in its domain
Rationality applies within each domain, apply across many domains
Someone is rational if they can note self-deception when doing their daily life
Rationality is domain general notion vs. context specific notion
Continuum - the more systematic the more rational they can be.
Optimize set of procedures to achieve the goal you want - as optimize your cognition, can shift and change the goals

Cognitive Science of Rationality

Bunch of experimental results seemed to show people are irrational
Stannovich
Ex: give people certain problems to solve.
Pond of water, lilypads growing on it. Every day pads double. On day 20, the entire surface of the pond was covered. On what day was the pond half covered?.

(Paused before hearing the answer: day 19)

People assume 10th day. But it’s day 19 (BAM!)
Machinery like insight machinery - jump to a conclusion that’s incorrect

(I did have that jump automatically but paused as I thought the problem was probably expecting that. Then thought through it and got to right answer)

Machinery that causes to have an insight leads to wrong answer
People reliably fail on that kind of task
Ex: give test find proposition that strongly agree or disagree with

Give them two situations: good, logically valid argument that leads to not-B
Give them bad, poorly constructed argument that leads to B
Ask them which one of them is a good argument
Find reliably is that many people will pick the bad argument - fail at critical detachment

When we see the answer, we acknowledge it but don’t reliably apply the right reasoning procedure
If can’t independently evaluate the argument independent from conclusion can’t apply reason to the conclusion
Ex: Have some evidence that is the basis for the belief. If the evidence is undermined should change belief.

Problem with testing that experimentally beliefs are based on all kinds of things
They tried to create a belief just in the experimental situation
Brought people in, told them about this important skill to see if they possessed, ability to detect authentic suicide notes, give a bunch of notes, tell which is authentic or fraudulent
Give a bunch of notes, they make their judgements, give feedback
What happens is, later reveal - people were randomly assigned to group A told good at task, group B told good at task
Group A come to believe they are good, B that they are bad
Debrief them. Show them they were only getting feedback randomnly, all notes are all fake
Belief that good or bad should be completely undermined
Give them a bunch or distractor tasks. Then ask how do you think would do in real life. Group A thought would be good, B - bad
Belief perseverance - continue with belief even though only evidence for it has been undermined

Suffer from systematic illusion, systematic self-deception
Some philosophers psychologists conclude human beings are just irrational
Our political/legal systems based on people being fundamentally rational. Problematic
Morality depends on rationality can only be held moral if can be deemed rational. If do the right thing due to luck or coercion don’t consider it moral

(Hmm, have to think about this. I do think we can apply reason to morality, it’s the basis of my objective morality system, that said, we tend to drill morality into people, starting from childhood.)

rationality isn’t just a thing out in the world, like the earth is round, it is deeply tied to perspectival and participatory knowing, goes deeply to who and what I am, implications for what kind of political citizenship I can have and what kind of moral status can have, legal status, whether mature or not
Rationality is a deeply existential thing
Why are we doing this?

Showing deep connection between wisdom and rationality
Existential and political and moral import of rationality
Consider expanding and revising notion of rationality in a way that allows us to understand and deepen our understanding of wisdom
We are trying to understand wisdom because it is deeply needed for project of enlightenment and addressing perennial problems and addressing historical forces that have driven the meaning crisis

Rationality Debate

Debate arose in science: how should we interpret these experiments that are robust and reliable.
Should we interpret them to mean that human beings are fundamentally irrational?
Cautions against taking thee self--proclaimed promoters of rationality on Youtube to be clear examples of what is rational - pay more attention to the scientific evidence and the debate
Cohen:

Problem with holding that people are fundamentally irrational
To be irrational is to acknowledge and follow a set of standards and fail to meet them
Where do we get these standards? How do we come up with our normative theory?
Deep sense in which reason has to be autonomous
Let’s say standards given from a divine being, commanded -> if follow them just because commanded to do so, not a rational act, just giving into authority, give into fear
If we follow the standards because we acknowledge they are good and right, then we already possess them (Euthyphro)
Reason is ultimately autonomous, not as a God, but it has to be the source of the norms that constitute and govern reason. We have to be the standard.
Ought implies can: if lay a standard on you that you ought to do it, implies have the competence to do it
Mistake to lay a standard that is impossible, or don’t have the competence
We are the source of the standards: but then say “Right, but the experiments show people acknowledge the standards but fail to satisfy them”
Cohen: People make two kinds of mistakes:

Competence: what you’re capable of doing
Performance: what actually done
Have the competence to do more than actually done
In between competence and performance are implementation processes
Ex: if tired have trouble speaking English, but don’t think don’t have the competence. But if get in a car accident and can’t speak - then lost English

We have to be the source of it and can apply it

Look at our performance and try and subtract errors due to implementation - performance errors
What does my competence look like free of performance errors
Take our performance, put through a process of idealization, subtract performance errors, get a purified account of our competence
That is the standard to which we hold ourselves, come up with a normative theory of which we are the source and are capable, but still fail to meet it

Cohen argues all the errors have to be performance errors - we must have at the level of competence all the rational standards. So we must be rational beings. Which means we are rational
Next time look at what’s right and wrong about this argument
Human rationality is more comprehensive than facility with syllogistic logic, it’s the reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception, has to do with us existentially, deeply overlaps with and is a component of what it means to be a wise person. To be able to systematically see through self-deception and into reality in such a way that we can afford meaning in life

Episode 41 - What is Rationality?

https://youtu.be/IZRqZX5JJqM

Stannovich: rationality reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception, and the potential affording of flourishing by optimizing process of achieving our goals
Caveat: as try to optimize often change the goals we are pursuing, appreciate the value of the process not just the end result of the process
Rationality debate: experiments seem to reliably show:

That people acquiesce acknowledge authority of how should reason
Reliably fail to meet those standards

One interpretation is that most people are irrational in nature. But this has important implications for moral, legal, political, developmental status -> rationality is deeply existential
Cohen: human beings aren’t comprehensively irrational, because standards of rationality come from them

(theist would say the standards come from God)

Cohen and Stannovich

Cohen:

At the level of my competence, my competence contains all the standards.
Can reflect, and get at the underlying competence.
What I’m doing when propose normative theory, giving an account of the competence they possess and demand they do their best to reduce the performance errors and meet that confidence
At the level of our competence we are fundamentally rational. According to Cohen
Cohen says dismiss these experimental results because we have the competence

Stannovich and West reply:

If Cohen right, errors are all performance errors: competence performance distinction
Ex: child, competence not sufficiently developed, why do we think it’s about competence -> errors that reflect defect in competence are systematic errors (Piaget), across different contexts
Performance errors not systematic - circumstantially driven
How do we see if errors are systematic: If make error X, highly predictive of other errors
We can see if make a failure in critical detachment does that mean I’ll also tend to show belief for severence, or tend to leap to the wrong conclusion?
Answer is yes: the errors we make are systematic
Errors at the level of competence.

Multiple Competencies

But there’s something right about Cohen’s argument. Stannovich acknowledges it. We have to be the source of our standards, but the conclusion that performance errors is wrong. How put this together?
Step back and look at assumption of Cohen’s argument. Cohen assuming:

that it’s a single competence
That it’s static
That it’s individualistic

Platonic idea: what if have two competencies both working to achieve my goal, but may conflict with each other
That would mean I’m the source of all the standards, but at the level of competence can be in error because in conflict with each other
We don’t have a single competency
That’s why should not assume and uncritically assume that can reduce rationality and identify it with the single competence of syllogistic reasoning - that’s wrong, doesn’t follow the science
Cohen assuming competence full blown, static, done -> not always fully developed.

(in other words: rationality is a skill to be developed and practiced)

This way Stannovich can say Cohen’s argument fundamentally right, though wrong on the hidden premise that the competence is single and static, we have multiple competencies that are ongoing and developing

Cherniak

Different approach: ought implies can
Are we applying the right normative theory to these experiments when judging them to be irrational
We cannot consider all of our assumptions, combinatorially explosive.
We can’t be algorithmic, can’t work in terms of certainty/complete -> if tried to be comprehensively deductive combinatorially explosive, cognitive suicide, undermines any attempt to achieve goals
But don’t just arbitrarily choose -> pick the relevant implications, relevant contradictions, etc.
Stannovich agrees with that
In the experiments using formal logic, formal probability theory -> scientist in the experiment using formal theories that can only be applied in very limited contexts.If tried to apply them comprehensively in my life, doomed to fail - ought that can’t possibly meet
Wrong normative theory
Doesn’t mean can ignore logic, it’s about when where and to what degree should use logic in a formal manner
Stannovich and West reply:

Say it’s right but not about rationality. Computational limitations is actually not about rationality, it’s about intelligence.
Show us that there is a deep difference between being intelligent and rational
Foolishness can be from being highly intelligent and irrational
Test of computational limitations is test of intelligence
Intelligence: capacity to deal with computational limitations/capacity to do relevance realization
Have a way of measuring capacity to do computational limitations (g)
All of the reasoning tasks also form a strong positive manifold (gr): general factor of reasoning.
If Cherniak is right rationality and intelligence would be equal and would be a relationship between how intelligent you are and how well do on these experiments -> doesn’t happen, at best 0.3
Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for being rational
Just being intelligent, just being able to use logic not enough for rationality
Very processes that make one intelligent can make one irrational

What’s the missing piece for rationality?

Smedslud

Pointed out something that Stannovich takes seriously
Difficulty of interpreting the experiments
Rely on distinction between a fallacy and a misunderstanding
Two ways can give the wrong answer:

Fallacy: Interpret the problem correctly, but reason incorrectly -> wrong answer
Misunderstanding: reason correctly, but understood the problem incorrectly
One have the incorrect interpretation nothing wrong with reasoning

If want to conclude people are irrational have to conclude fallacious cognition, not some kind of distortion in the communication
But this is difficult - they aren’t independent enough to cleanly interpret the results
Preliminary account of understanding:

To understand X, we ask them to give us something identical to X
Ask to give something that contradicts X
Give something that X implies
Something that is relevant to X
What is X relevant to

Problem: puts aside relevant to X, looks at first three. Someone understands us if they reason the way that we do. Scientists assuming the participants have understood the problem correctly, and reasoned correctly.
If they’ve understood the problem correctly then they reason the way the scientist does, but they reason in way scientists doesn’t when try and solve problem
Fact that consistently getting wrong answer may be evidence they are misunderstanding the question
Or maybe miscommunicated the problem -more problematic
Stannovich:

need a normativity construal: normative on how people interpret, make sense of size up, how they formulate the problem - has to be independent of inferential norms
Means there’s a noninferential aspect to rationality, deals with understanding - relevance
Relevance is pre-inferential
We have standards on what good problem formulation is, vs. bad -> insight problem-solving. Bad = puts you into combinatory explosive search space, not paying attention to how salience is misleading you.
Insight is crucial to being rational.

Propose that we need to understand both the role of insight and inference in rationality - much more problematic
Rationality and wisdom starting to overlap more and more
Give up on rationality being like Mr/. Spock, or just being really smart, start getting into the problematic notion of rationality, get into multiple-competencies, normativity on construal, the generation of insight, not on the generation of inference
Constual doesn’t play a significacnt role Stannovich
Missing piece for Stannovich:

Intelligence not equal rationality: 0.3
What accounts for most of the variance
Argues for a cognitive style, bad mindware, psychotechnology
Psychotech using: can have poor mind-ware (like software)
Appropriate cognitive style: something you can learn, learn a set of sensitivities and skills
Cognitive style most predictive of doing well on reasoning test is: active open-mindedness -> to train yourself to look for these patterns of self-deception, look for biases

(Oooh! This is my jam!)

Biases:

Confirmation bias - look for info that confirms beliefs
Essentialism bias - treat any category as pointing to an essence shared by all the members
Misusing the availability heuristic - judge somethings probability by how easy can remember it
Bias = misusing a heuristic

Can learn about these and sensitise myself to looking for these biases in my day-to-day cognition, then I actively counteract them.

(OOOH! Again, this is my whole jam!)

I can ask you to help me overcome my confirmation bias

(Ok, is he copying from me now! I say this all the time!)

Practice with you, can start to internalize you and get better at finding my instances

Baron: but don’t overdo this, will choke on the combinatory explosion. Do to the right degree. Becomes more nebulous - wisdom
Need for cognition predicts active open-mindedness

(Ding ding)

Add: curiosity, want to solve problems, not just gather facts.
Also: wonder. How much it opens you up. Entire worldview
Rationality existential issue

(this episode was quite validating!)

Episode 42 - Intelligence, Rationality and Wisdom

https://youtu.be/H1yDgjQdRHw

Rationality is an existential issue, not just about processing information, but constitutive of our identity in important ways, and our mode of being in the world
Rationality debate: showed us:

Rationality =/ intelligence or logicality
We need multiple competencies: inferential and independant competency of construal -> insight and good problem formulation

Stannovich: missing piece:

mindware/pscyho-technology
Cognitive style: active open-mindedness -> cultivate sensitivity, ongoing awareness of cognitive biases in behaviour and actively counteract them
Not too much though, if try to override too many of them, override their function as heuristics to avoid combinatorial explosion
Getting an optimal form of active open mindedness crucial, not maximal

Active Open-mindedness

Definition psycho-technology:

socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating and enhancing information processing
Readily internalizable into human cognition
Can be applied in a domain-general manner
Must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner
Be highly generalizable among people

Active-openmindedness

Set of skills, psycho-technologies, sensibilities and sensitivities, that will help you in a domain-general manner, note and actively respond to presence of cognitive bias.

What is predictive of acquiring AoM
Need for cognition: degree to which you are motivated to go out and look for problems, generating your own instances of learning and problem-solving
Curiosity and wisdom
Need for cognition:

Connection with need for problem finding
Arland: problem finders are good at finding problems, connect them in ways that others don’t
Central to wisdom: capacity to find problems that other people haven’t found

What makes a good problem finder:

Not just find new problems, find a problem that if solved would make a significant impact on other problems - problem nexus

Also wonder and curiosity
Curiosity - having mode, wonder being mode
Socrates: Wisdom begins in wonder

Plato:

point of philosophy to develop and extend that sense of wonder,
deepen wonder into awe,
awe has the greatest capacity for transforming us,
anagogic ascent.
Quest of anagoge
meta accommodation

Aristotle:

more in line with curiosity,
trying to figure things out.
Trying to shape wonder into curiosity,
resolve the curiosity in answer to some question.
Formulate questions that you answer
Meta-assimilation

Stannovich:

Respond to many of defenders of rationality by noting that we have to challenge Cohen’s assumptions, we do not have a single competence, to cherniak that giving a theory of rationality but intelligence, and to Smedland that we need independent normativity on construal, good problem formulation and insight

Stannovich’s Account of Rationality

Dual processing theory: S1 and S2

Different ways in which process information
S1: intuitive, highly associational, implicit processing, very fast (ex: ability to cope) - operating a lot of the time in the background, automatic
S2: more deliberate, engaging in reflection, aware of it, intentionally directly, inferential, argumentation - explicit, slow, relies on working memory
Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow

Think of different states that we’re in.
Ex: grocery shopping, ringing in at the cashier, cashier says $1,000 - say “what?!” - where did that come from, quickly, have intuitive associations, call cashier into question with S1 processing. Cashier, has to deliberately go through each one, slowly show that it matches, etc. S2
Trade-off relationship: S2 puts high demand on resources. Can’t rely on it for most of behaviour - get into combinatorial explosion, get overwhelmed. But it is there to override S1
Opponent relationship
Stannovich sees S2 as having a corrective function for S1
Foolishness: dysrationalia
S1 makes you leap to conclusions. Ex: lilypad problem
S2 overrides how leap to conclusions
Active-openmindedness teaching you to protect S2 from being overridden by S1
Foolish if haven’t trained S2 to be protected from interference of S1
Insufficient account of rationality (vervaeke)
Is leaping always a bad thing?
Baker: inductive leaping - cognitive leaping

Give various patterns, then stop and ask what it’s going to be: ex: dots filled into a sofa
Operationalize the ineffability of insight
You’re a good leaper if you can use fewer cues and accurately say what the final pattern is going to be.

(heh, I think I’m a good leaper. In fact, i piss people off because I tend to interrupt once I get where they are going. This has caused me problems!)

Skill with pattern detection/completion
Predictive of insight
Better you are at leaping, better at insight - so if shutting off leaping too much, shutting off machinery that makes us insightful.
Have to give up simplistic notions of rationality
Sometimes leap to conclusions which leads to mistakes, so need Active open-mindedness to moderate. But i want to leap to insight -
S2 good for theorizing
If need a radical reconstrual of the issue - therapy for example, S1 - existentially trapped, need transformative insight, can’t infer way through it. Often what need is to try and shut S2 down, prevent it from interfering with S1, bring S1 to the foreground

(during meditation I’ll have S1 insights)

What’s a cognitive style that does this? Mindfulness

(I just said that!)

Mindfulness opponent to active-open mindedness
S2 great for planning, S1 great for coping

When planning is epistemic especially S2
What’s missing from Stannovich is a broader account of our competences, how they are tradeoffs
Need cultivation of both active open-mindedness and mindfulness
Intelligence used to learn the psycho-tech, can use intelligence to improve how I’m using my intelligence, improve how the competencies are optimizing, enhance capacity for relevance realization -> think of that as rationality
Something emerging: may be able to use our rationality to improve our rationality -> crucial to wisdom
Rationality: the reliable and systematic ability to overcome self-deception, and afford the enhancement of development and meaning in life

Existential Aspect of Rationality

Degree to which we identify with our higher cognitive processes
Dwek: Mindset: experiment

Brought in school kids, three groups
Two ways that can set mind
Way in which identifying with, that embodying the trait
Can have fixed view of intelligence

Think fixed at birth, locked in
Not much can do about it

Malleable

Can change

Behaviour different if think intelligence fixed:

Attitude towards error - error will reveal that have defect in non-changeable trait - turns error into permanent revelation
Malleable view: error points towards the skills I’m using, need better skills and effort. Can do things to change it.

Fixed view focuses on product, malleable on the process
Experiment try to trigger mode with praise using trait language
Can praise the trait or the process
All groups solved the problems, Group A praised for trait, B for process, C neutral
Ask the kids who wants to take on more challenging problems: Group A says no: don’t want to - may generate error recognition less intelligent
Process people say yes - need for cognition
C neutral
Give them harder problems. A don’t enjoy, B enjoy, C neutral
Now give them set of problems equal in difficulty to first set of problems, C does same, B better, A worse
Ask kids to write to student in germany report how doing. 40% group A lie about performance, B and C tell truth

(this experiment is terrifying about how malleable people are!)

Way you frame yourself, way you identify your processing, huge impact on problem solving ability, proclivity for self-deception, and need for cognition
Rationality is an existential thing not just informational thing
But is intelligence fixed or malleable

Evidence not clear
Evidence is clear that there are things can do to modify intelligence - long-term mindfulness practice, enhancing attention and working memory
But by in large intelligence is fixed, not malleable
There is a way in which intelligence is terrifically malleable - the way in which intelligence recursively relates to itself is malleable
Rationality is highly malleable
Care too much for intelligence, not enough of rationality

Rationality how identifying with own cognitive processing, and the way in which that identification process can impede how you’re applying and using intelligence, or enhance it
Can cultivate the right kind of cognitive styles and can get clear path for becoming more rational -> wise

Episode 43 - Wisdom and Virtue

https://youtu.be/EUcFqb-DxOA

S1: makes foolish when leap to conclusions, interferes with inferential processing of S2, leap to conclusions inappropriately -> causes bias, self-deception
Active open-mindedness, foregrounds S2 protects it from undue interference from S1
In a therapeutic context, need the machinery of leaping to work well. Powerfully predictive of insight - that’s what you need in therapy
Need a cognitive style that foregrounds S1 - mindfulness, facilitates insight. Cognitive flexibility
Need a way to coordinate active open-mindedness and mindfulness so that we can optimize the enhancement in rationality of the relevance realization that is at the core of our intelligence
How you relate to your intelligence and applying it to itself. Problematizing your intelligence and try to improve = rationality
When recursively and reflectively use my rationality to enhance/optimize my rationality (ex: by enhancing relationship between the component styles of mindfulness and active open mindedness)
The way you relate to your higher cognitive processes, meaning-making, problem solving capacity not just intellectual of information processing but deeply existential
Mindsetting: way identify with your intelligence has impact

Theories of Wisdom

Shwartz and Sharp

Practical Wisdom, Aristotle meets positive psychology
Positive psychology: study the mind how it excels, system as a whole
Peterson and Zelligman: Virtue as form of human excellence
SandS note difficulty with virtues (honest, courageous).
Presentation of virtues implies they are logically independent of one another.
Feature list of virtues, without way they interrelate to one another.
We should look for a feature schema (structural functional organization) of how virtue works.
If just maximize virtues can run into trouble. If maximize honesty will lead to cruelty at times, given up on kindness
Core argument: we should talk about the relationship between the virtues
Situations where see virtues in conflict with each other:

Ex: bridesmaid, time running out, with the bride, trying on dresses

Caught between being honest, kind and helpful.
How do you balance them all?

Ex: grading an assignment for a student. Made great progress, from a low C to a high B.

If grade as objectively as possibly can, feedback can keep student at B
Am I marking what they’ve done? Or can I push them. If give them an A can that push them to be an A student
Is my duty to be brutally honest or to push them to be the best they can be

Shows virtues not independent. Trying to optimize between them
Start to see important things about our relationship to the virtues
Real-life situations don’t come with the related virtues attached - the problem of relevance
Often represent virtues with rules: “be kind” doesn’t specify conditions of application: not the same to be kind to my kid, a stranger, etc. Can’t capture in a rule
Rule application depends on relevance realization
Problem of conflict is determining which is more important
Problem of specification also a problem of determining relevance
Relevance, conflict, specificity
Vervaeke would add: need to develop a virtue I don’t have: aspirational Need to cultivate a virtue I don’t have: development
Developmental process dependent on capacity for insight and qualitative transformative experience
Need a higher order ability that deals with relevance:

Conflict
Specification
Development

They argue that’s wisdom.
Given they are not logically independent, need wisdom in order to be virtuous
Each virtue is just how to be most wise in each situation
Deep connection between cultivation and pursuit of virtuous way of life and cultivation of wisdom
Aristotle’s distinction:

Sophia: theoretical wisdom
Phronesis: practical wisdom

SandS argue that Phronesis is what need for virtue: ability to be contextually sensitive, to know what to do in each situation
Related to procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something) and perspectival knowing (situational awareness/what is most appropriate)
Resist trying to understand phronesis as having rules. Can lead to trying to legislate everything - it’s impossible.
Can get into the illusion that can somehow replace people becoming wise with people having laws
Not proposing anarchy - but to step back and realize should have a balance between proposing legislation and cultivating wisdom
Ask will this legislation reduce harm, also ask will this legislation make it less likely that people cultivate wisdom?
They leave out sophia because they associate it too much with having rules.
Rules are proposing, see sophia laregly as propositional, but this may be unfair to sophia. Sophia more like the awareness of principles. Getting into a process.
Cross contextual sensitivity: generalizable across contexts
Sophia like deep ontological depth perception
Need to know how to put principles into processes. Need to know how to put processes into principles.
Need both Sophia and Phronesis
Want an opponent relationship between them: discover powerful principles and put them into effective practice, so that can regulate practices with well-justified principles
Language of expertise

Expert doesn’t necessarily possess best theory, they have the best know-how
Not thinking of perspectival knowing -> mistake

Vervaeke: sometimes mean expertise to mean good, in psychology it’s a domain-specific thing. Know-how rises to an authority, but doesn’t give special authority in other areas and may interfere
Expertise very domain-specific
Domain-specificity of expertise not what need here. Being context-sensitive not the same thing as having expertise
Phronesis not like having expertise in tennis, it is my ability to be sensitive in this context, and that context, and that context
What we need is a domain general ability - not a contradiction
Have to be able to be context sensitive in many different domains
Need an ability to be context sensitive in domain-general way
Ability to realize relevance and intelligence better ways of understanding phronesis than expertise - domain-general ability to be contextually sensitive.
We’re not foolish in domain-specific say
Phronesis much more like intelligence, rationality, RR - apply across multiple domains, general problem solver, capacity for foolishness

Balts and Staudenger: Berlin Wisdom Paradigm

Seminal theory of wisdom
Article: Wisdom a Meta-Heuristic (Pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue towards excellence
Accepted the deep connection between virtue and wisdom
Meta-heuristic: tells us RR playing a significant role in this theory - heuristic for managing your heuristics
Pragmatic:

Pragmatic syntax of language: always conveying more than saying
Pragmatism:

James: what it is to live a good life
You should evaluate your knowledge claims in terms of their efficaciously - how they can be used in your life to adapt you to the world
Propositional claims ultimately have to be grounded in your procedural abilities which has to be grounded in perspectival and participatory

Problem with pragmatism: potential confusion between truth and relevance
Pragmatism tries to situate intellectual claims into lived experience, viable ability to fit your world to develop your connectedness to develop yourself

They are invoking ideas and making use of them that presuppose the ability for relevance realization
5 criteria to judge someone wise:

Rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life

Like Sophia
Deep grasp of the facts, principles of the fundamental pragmatics of life

Rich procedural knowledge of the fundamental pragmatics of life

Knowing how to put these principles into practice
Propositional and procedural, but going to need participatory (explain how we go through traumatic developmental change), perspectival (connects procedural to specific contexts)

Lifespan contextualism

Kind of perspectival knowing
Way in which take the big picture, zoom out, then zoom in as needed
Crucial, lot to do with our capacity for self-regulation

Relativism of values and priorities

Vervaeke: critique. If they are using this term carefully, don’t think many of the people think of as wise were moral reletivists (Socrates, Buddha, Jesus)
Arguing against tying the notion of wisdom to liberal values
They may be talking about capacity for tolerance - rather than relativism: fallibilism (don’t assert certainty), humility (recognition of limits, status, etc).

Recognition and management of uncertainty

We cannot pursue certainty, have to act the best we can with unavoidable uncertainty

Dripping in the machinery of relevance realization
Meta-heuristic: coordinates between heuristics: ex: trade-off between compression and particularization
They focus on expertise, but misleading, overfocus on important procedural knowledge to the exclusion of perspectival/participatory, confuses context-sensitivity with being domain-specific
What they tend to be arguing for is a comprehensive cognitive flexibility and adaptability
Started to generate some empirical work

Train independent judges to evaluate people’s behaviour
Put people into various situations, get them to relate how they would deal with these difficult situations
Do they answer in a way that exemplifies these 5 criteria
Attempt to empirically measure wisdom

Cognitive styles important for being wise

Judicial style, good at making judgments. Don’t have time to get into this in-depth
Shows is how important the capacity for good judgement is for wisdom

Ex: gave experimental task to solve problems. 3 conditions

1.Discuss with someone else
2. Imagine an internal dialogue
3. More time to think.
1 and 2 outperformed group 3
Wiser if talk to others, then why do we carry around the BS mythology of complete individualism
No important difference between group 1 and 2 - talking to someone and imagining talking to someone just as good
Grossman: Solomon Effect: if I describe a problem to you from 1st person perspective, tend to be locked in. Framing off transparent, can’t see through it. If re-describe from third person perspective, often have an insight, notice something didn’t notice before. Moving outside and looking back through someone’s eyes can enhance capacity for wisdom tasks -> perspectival knowing

Episode 44 - Theories of Wisdom

https://youtu.be/cK5Npv-OdAE

Wisdom has to do with generativity, flexibility and efficiency
Takes place within the frame of bounded rationality - rationality that takes place within the constraints of ill-definedness and combinatorial explosion
Highly complex sets of information about the meaning and conduct of life - reduced quickly to their essentials without being lost in the neverending process of information search that were to occur if wisdom was treated as a case of unbounded rationality
Invoking machinery of relevance realization
Stoic idea of imagining the sage more effective than thinking on your own
Move to take the perspective of other people enhances one’s ability to overcome the bias induction of one’s own perspective
Can learn to dialogue with oneself

Balk and Staudenger Criticisms

Argue that there is a mistake of omission. We’re getting here a product theory of wisdom. Come up with an account of what wisdom is. Legitimate to do, but omits something important
Socrates, Plato, Stoics, Buddha -> centrality of transformational change is lost
Need process theory: what is foolishness, what is flourishing, how do I avoid foolishness and flourish, by doing that find what wisdom is
Look at what wisdom is by looking at how to become wise
Seeing through illusion and into reality
Process theory gives an account of what self-deception is and how to see through it so can flourish
Should be developing a process theory, what foolishness is, how to overcome it, what flourishing is, how to afford it
Bring in the developmental and transformative aspects of wisdom

Monica Ardelt

Critique of Balts and Staudenger
Confuse having theoretical knowledge about wisdom with being a wise person
Modal confusion - have knowledge of wisdom but doesn’t make me wise
Vervaeke puts himself in that as well - has a lot of theoretical knowledge of wisdom but doesn’t equate that with the claim of being a wise person

(heh, he’s not saying he doesn’t consider himself wise, just that he doesn’t apply that statement to it!)

Knowledge might be necessary but not sufficient
She’s pointing to the fact that a wise person must realize these theoretical truths within a process of self-transformation
People who are wise have gone through a process of self-transformation, achieved a significant kind of self-transcendence that allows them to embody and enact these truths rather than just having them in a propositional fashion

(is there an inconsistency in being wise because one knows what one should do in a given situation even if one does not enact it? Could one have the perspectival and participatory knowing to put themselves in that situation and know what the best move is even if something stops them from doing it?)

Pointing to something missing, the importance of the process of development
Wisdom is a process of becoming a particular kind of person, living in a particular kind of world - so directly pointing towards participatory knowing

(what if they participate in their head - imaginative play. “Seeing it” “Knowing what should be done.” even if falling short of enacting it. Do we say they are simply less wise though still some-wise? Socrates and Jesus both ended up dead.)

Kekes: moral wisdom vis a vis virtue

Distinction between descriptive knowledge and interpretive knowledge
Wisdom more to do with interpretative knowledge
description knowledge more to do with “the cat is a mammal”
Interpretative knowledge is your ability to grasp the significance of your descriptive knowledge
Theories of understanding and how it differs from knowledge
Centrality of understanding to wisdom, grasping the significance has to do with construal and relevance

Personality characteristics in the wise person

Cognitive:

Ability to have comprehension of significance and meaning of information
Not just theoretically, for your development, for undergoing a process of self-transcendence

Reflective:

A person who has been cultivating wisdom is multi-perspectival
Capable of self-examination, self-awareness, self-insight
Reflection has an existential import

Affective:

Compassion
Agape
Helps to overcome ego-centrism
Way in which caring about the world, directed to flourishing of other persons
Agape gives a way of talking of meaning in life, get that kind of connectedness and caring, grounds meaning in life - have to be transjectively coupled to those things we find inherently valuable because of their connection to meaning making coherence and caring

(not sure I understand this)

Allows Ardelt to connect meaning in life in a more direct fashion
Can’t reduce meaning in life to morality
By bringing in affective component, that we are becoming wise, she is doing more to connect wisdom to meaning in life

Critique of Ardelt:

Evokes transformational processes but doesn’t really incorporate a theory of transformative experience or an account of it
Doesn’t give us a processing theory, points to the need for one.
Doesn’t have an independent account of foolishness. Need that for good process theory of wisdom
Untapped potential of connecting wisdom to meaning in life

Sternberg

Pivotal work: Wisdom: its Nature, Origins, and development, and others
Connects psychology of wisdom to pedagogy: Link between wisdom and teaching
1998: balanced theory of wisdom
Talks about Sophia, Phronesis, Epistimi
Tacit knowledge: procedural abilities, experience intuitively, implicit learning, intuition
Tacit understanding
Trying to get at the machinery by which we grasp the significance of our knowledge and use it to directly and intuitively cope with the world is a significant component of understanding
Tacit understanding is pregnant with aspects of relevance realization
Understanding guiding our ability to adapt to situations, to shape them, construe them, and select environments
Ability to deal with practical problems
Practical problems unformulated or in need of reformulation
Reformulation and insight
See the RR machinery being invoked
Views wisdom as inherent in the interaction between an individual and a situational context
Transjective - about fitting. Depends on the fit of a wise solution to its context
Optimization (ie: RR)
Tacit understanding -> balance interests (what you’re interested in: interpersonal, intrapersonal, extrapersonal
Connected to yourself, to other people and the world
Trying to connect implicitly wisdom to meaning in life
Arrows should go both ways, feedback.
Feed to the adapting, shaping and selecting
Triangles indicate balance.

Balance about optimization
Balance of response to the environmental context, balancing interests, response
Directed towards the common good (at the top) -> Vervaeke: agree that within a liberal democratic framework that the common good is an overarching value, not sure if that is universally shared with all people who are deemed wise individuals
V thinks what we’re dealing with is virtue and meaning in life
Running along side of this is values.

Not clear what those value are. Is it meaning in life and the virtues? Perhaps
Might be something as basic as the wise person is working normatively, trying to get the best -> wisdom is a normative notion so this is almost definitional
If wise person has a specific set of values that has to be defended
Balance used to adapt, shape and select environments,
Balance between coping with novelty and produralization
deep connections to meaning in life. Important possible connections between this and virtue and meaning in life.
Still a product theory. Not a process theory. Avoids equating wisdom with expertise but could be trivial or much more controversial claim
Sternberg needs an independent theory of foolishness. He has a theory of it but not independent.
Need one that takes in hand the centrality in seeing through illusion
What want to do is try and draw all of these together. Next lecture

Episode 45 - The Nature of Wisdom

Theory of Wisdom

Proposal by Vervaeke and Ferraro. 2013
Two competencies:

Inferential: propositional knowing -> enhanced and protected from undue influence from S1 processing by active open-mindedness.
Insight competence: construal (procedural) - mindfulness foregrounds it

How are these coordinated together?

One possibility: opponent processing, self-organizing, potentially viable
V argued that inferential giving priority to propositional knowledge, insight to do with procedural - cultivating skills of attention
Active open mindedness and propositional knowing give knowledge of facts
Processes give you knowledge of events
Fact: cross contextual patterns
Events or processes are things that are unfolding idiosyncratically in time and space
Inferential - grasping of principles
Insight - grasping of processes
Inferential - sophia, insight - phronesis (may not be that clean a mapping)
Perspectival: internalization - how do you learn to adopt and take other people’s perspectives and internalize them within own processing so they became metacognitively effective
Helps to put principles into process and have processes govern by principles
A perspective puts theories and skills together.
But more that:

propositional knowledge is grounded in but affected by procedural knowledge (your skills, knowing how to interact)
your ability to cultivate skills and apply them to propositional knowledge is grounded in perspectival knowing -> gives situational awareness that you need to cultivate the skills and apply knowledge of principles
This is ultimately grounded in your participatory knowing the agent arena attunement that affords your being in the world and ability to go through modal transformation existential change

Without an account of participatory knowing it can’t incorporate into it’s account of becoming wise - need to connect participatory knowing to this overarching schema or the connection between wisdom, transformative experience, altered states of consciousness will be missing from the theory
This needs important development
They argued perspectival is set within a cognitive style that will give higher-order way of regulating active open-mindedness and mindfulness
Took directly from the philosophical tradition of internalizing the sage
Inferential overcoming fallacious reasoning
Insight overcoming misframing/misconstrual, perceptual helps overcome egocentrism in powerful way
What does internalizing the sage do?

Sophrosyne: translated as temperance, moderation but doesn’t capture it
Everything in moderation - not quite right. Connected to something like the golden mean, virtual engine that generates enough options so don’t suffer vices of deficit but also generates enough governance there’s enough selective constraints so that also thwarts vices of excess - optimization

They argue better way to understand this in enkratia - kratia = exercising power over oneself - enkratia = self-restraint, self-control
Can practice a virtue in an enkratic manner
Ex: Tom trying to become honest, sees the potential to lie and the benefit that will accrue, exercises self-control and doesn’t lie. Susan sees the opportunity to lie, sees the advantage to lie, but that’s it - but not a viable option to her, can’t get into the existential mode so that draws on her. It is unthinkable to her. She’s not tempted to lie. Many would say Susan is more honest than Tom, because honesty second nature to her
Ex: Paul and agape, now show you the most excellent way, when I was a child thought like a child, when became a man put childish things behind me. Toys don’t tempt me. Sage has a salience landscape where they are not tempted to self deception in the way we often are.
Sage’s salience landscape less oriented to our prevalent and pervasive self deception
If wise naturally self-organize towards seeing through illusion zeroing in on what’s relevant.
Argue deep connection that needs to be explored between wisdom and Sophrosyne
Sophrosyne: optimization of perspectival knowing, so it’s always in service of my agent/arena relationship and how it is being developed so I can go through the transformations needed to become a wise person
Sophrosyne directed to:

Morality: knowing the rules and capacity being virtuous
Realizing the meaning in life - self determination theory, needs to be revised
Mastery: terrific capacity for coping and caring with reality, sets of skills, psychotechnologies, roles can take. Propositional knowing gives rules, procedural knowing gives routines, perspectival knowing gives roles, being able to use routines and roles with mastery, always guided by Sophrosyne

Sports psychology analogy: internalize the coach.
Process theory: Cultivate:

Active open-mindedness
mindfulness
Internalize the sage
Guided overall by trying to become Sophrosynic

Absent: transformational experience, participatory knowing missing, gnosis
Relationship between different kinds of knowing not well developed
All of this about enhancing relevance realization, optimize cognition
RR is central in the explicit psychological theories we’ve examined
Wisdom has to do with gaining knowledge in the best way.
Wise person knows how to believe well.
Overcoming egocentrism
Pauline recommendation best form of Sophrosyne is Agape
What’s missing is theory of understanding

Theory of understanding

V working on this, not complete
Distinguish understanding from knowledge, beyond possessing an explanation
Kekes: grasping the significance - construal and RR
Grasping the significance of the knowledge - many converging on this idea
Construal: understood in terms of problem formulation
V argues that what talking about is really good construal
Notion of “optimal grip”

Structural functional organization
Sized up the situation well
Know the feature/gestalt get the tight degree of transparency opacity
What it does is afford me to grasp what’s relevant in the situation, \
affords good problem formulation
Connection to good problem finding

Standard of effectiveness:

Can’t say understanding = grasping the truth, because most things believe are false so would have to say no one’s ever understood something
Tie understanding to rationality - use the best methods for getting out the truth
We use things that aren’t true to understand things: ex: drawing of atom is false
Helps zero in on the relevant information in the right way. Most scientific diagrams not aimed at truth but at relevant implications and connections
Understand means can apply knowledge, open up new domains, areas of research
Capacity for problem finding - good understanding can motivate need for good cognition

Contextually sensitive, context relative
Argue that one more thing needed: convergence so construct trustworthy
If basic understanding is to grasp the significance, profound understanding when basic understanding generates plausibility (?)
Profound understanding also aligns and optimizes relationship propositional knowing, procedural, perspectival, participatory
Knowing through transformation, transformative experience - can be sudden, so has important features of insight.
Agnes Callard: Aspiration: argued also instances where people go through transformative knowing that are more incremental

Join music appreciation class
Goal to come to value music for its own sake
If good student would appreciate music for own sake but then wouldn’t need the class
Process of trying to acquire: aspiration
Sudden insight - inspiration
Proleptic rationality: trying to encourage people to cultivate certain values
Person who is trying to become someone other than they are, to go through transformational experience, wouldn’t say it’s irrational. Don’t say it’s irrational to aspire to rationality
Loving of wisdom cannot itself be irrational, must be rational
V argues also should include inspiration in rationality
Process of identity change, transformative experience, participatory knowing - but doesn’t give much to a psychology of aspiration
Need to get a value that will get me currently engaged, but will be able to give up that value when achieve goal
I may go to the music class because I have the value of making myself do things I find difficult, do that with the understanding that is temporary, try to get me to a liminal place, start to play with what it’s like to value music for its own sake
Gnosis bound up with aspiration
She doesn’t talk about wonder
Wonder gets you to question your worldview, sense of self, motivates you to go through aspirational change

Account of wisdom: wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies, styles, that dynamically and reciprocally constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall optimization enhancement of relevance realization, within inference, within insight and into intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspiration
Wisdom is an ecology of psycho technologies and cognitive styles that dynamically enhance RR in inference insight and intuition, internatilization,understanding and gnosis transformation and aspiration and that sense what’s happening is something overlapping with machinery of enlightenment. Dynamical system. Counteractive to the machinery of self-deception and that helps to afford the self-organized transformation into the life of flourishing, a life that is deeply meaningful

Episode 46 - Conclusion

https://youtu.be/POY3p9TpdD0

Model Theory Wisdom by V and Leo Ferrera

Enhancing inferential processing through active open mindedness
Enhancing insightful processing through mindfulness
Enhancing capacity for internalization by internalizing the sage and cultivating Sophrosyne
Salience landscape organizes away from self-deception toward the truth - what’s true good and beautiful
Coordinates propositional knowing associated with inference
Coordinates procedural knowing associated with insight
Coordinates perspectival knowing associated with internalization
Directed towards:

realizing Sophrosyne
Cultivate more moral existence by connection to virtue
mastery in the sense of coping and caring
Meaning in life: needs to be integrated with greater work

Missing participatory knowing, understanding, transformative experience, gnosis, aspiration, all must be integrated
Tried to suggest beginning of account how we turn basic understanding (grasps the relevance of our knowledge) into profound understanding by integrating the account of understanding with the account of possibilities
Profound understanding: generation of plausibility by having convergence onto a contextually sensitive optimal grip that is transformatively transferable in a highly effective manner in problem finding in many different problem finding formulating and solving in many different domains

Aspiration:

In addition to inspiration can have aspiration- more incremental. But can’t be solved in an inferential decision-theoretic fashion - proleptic rationality
What’s missing is a psychology of aspiration. Callard’s idea to do this: create something that’s double-faced/symbolic having aspects of gnosis in it, allows us to make leap even if its incremental from who we are now and what we value now to the place where acquired some new thing that value for its own sake
Ex: Music appreciation class
V sees this relying on symbolic capacity - gnosis - serious play
Aspiration has affective component - wonder

All of this needs to be integrated into an account of wisdom
Wisdom is an ecology of psycho-technologies/cognitive styles that dynamically (reciprocal optimization) enhances:

RR central to inference
Insight
Intuition
Internalizing the sage
Understanding
Gnosis
Relevance realization at work within transformative experience
Aspiration

Dynamic system overlapping with the account of enlightenment - counteractive dynamical system that counteracts parasitic processing
Wisdom: kind of dynamical system that is kind of counteractive for overcoming self-deception, parasitic processing and foolishness
Wisdom enhancing religio -> sacredness and meaning in life - all connected
Plausible to argue that shown connection wisdom, enlightenment, enhancement of religio, sacredness

Wise cultivation of enlightenment

Wise cultivation of enlightenment
Situated in:

a worldview that affords worldview attunement:

V’s account consistent with a scientific worldview by running it all off machinery of relevance realization that can be given a naturalistic explanation

A Coop network of communities of practice:

A reflective equilibrium, dynamic, with a wisdom wiki, has both top-down researchers on wisdom, and practitioners, bottom-up-top-down relationship
Wisdom wiki takes on credo function, but in service of religio, created by communities of practice

This is how think can awaken from the meaning crisis

(but missing narrative - how can we just get rid of it? What about staying power - will the wiki really replace narrative?)

Draw all the machinery together for overcoming the perennial problems dealing with the historical issues, to connect wisdom and enlightenment together in a comprehensive fashion, to connect that with enhancing and meaning in life and overcoming self-deception, situating it within kind of socio-cultural framework
Not hostile to religion, but not dependent on religion nor dependent on political ideology
Some are developing this right now

Prophets of the Meaning Crisis

Want a constructive dialogue with other responders to the meaning crisis - prophets in the OT sense telling forth the meaning crisis trying to awaken us to it, trying to galvanize us in response to it
Put all of this in constructive dialogue with the prophets
Can’t do everyone. Not going to talk much about Wittgenstein
Whitehead: trying to understand him, not confident yet about him
Heidegger, Husserl
Gnosis - Eckert -> Heidegger
Descartes - Kant - Heidegger
Tillich - prophetic announcement of meaning crisis - need to get to the god beyond the god of theism
Corbin -> Jung (directly influenced by gnostics and kant)
Dourley - shows similarities of Tillich and Jung
Romantics -> Barfield - notion of participation

Postmodernism: we should more carefully look at individual thinkers - Derrida, Graham Harmon (Speculative realism - Object-oriented-ontology)
Han

Should have a more nuanced response to post-modernism
James, and Buddhism - the Kyoto School - Nishida, Nishitani (Religion and Nothingness)

Husserl

Phenomenology
Sokolowski: Introduction to Phenomenology, Experimental Phenomenology Idhe
Phenomenology attempt to get us back to contact epistemology
Phen. not just introspecting. Not the commonsense introspection.
More disciplined - pahy reflective and experimental attention, probative attention to the way we are in contact with the world
Husserl emphasized intentionality
Intentionality = any mental directedness

Perception OF the bottle
thinking ABOUT Paris
actions TOWARD the book

World is disclosed - meaningfully structured environment (arena)
Mental agency, mental directedness,
Noesis -> noema
Attention on the transjective relationship
Phenomenology = Reflective attention paid to perspectival knowing of the transjective relationship
Going to come back to criticize this

Heidegger

Criticism of Husserl - work didn’t really give us contact. V: didn’t give account participatory knowing
Modal relationship of agent and arena.
Participatory knowing needed to be set within an ontology
How does the transjective relationship sit within an overall account of being itself
Out of touch with our being and through our being of being itself
Husserl is cartesian - Heidegger sees that cuts us off from the world. Trapped within our subjectivity
How do we open up participatory knowing, situate it within an ontology and break free restrictions of cartesian cultural cognitive grammar
Need to phenomenologically direct towards our being - who and what we are
Will lead to a phenomenological realization that we are the beings who beat, whose being is in question
Talking about what grounds this Husserlian framework in a participatory knowing
As persons, humans who and what we are, our essence, our being, that has been in question. I existed before who and what I am has come into being
Existentialism - your existence precedes your essence
We are in question to ourselves: what am I?
What is the meaning of my life, what makes it meaningful to me?
Heidegger trying to get you to remember the being mode
Stepping back and confronting mystery, process of development, of becoming, transformative experience
Trying to wake you up phenomenologically - Dasein: being
I exist, being there, thrown into being, my being is in question
My participatory knowing, my way in which I try to connect to how I’m situated in being has an operatic element to it, I realize that central to me is that my being is in question
My being = my participatory knowing. That’s how to link participatory knowing to ontology itself - my self knowledge will also get me into my knowledge of ontology
I can frame an ontological question of \putting being itself into question
I know myself as a being whose being is in question, and knowing myself that way is also to put being into question
Deep participation in the codetermining mysteries of who I am and what being is
Can come into contact with our being mode
We are self-defining, self-meaning things
Come into contact with our own modal existence and the mystery of being itself
Heidegger going to argue the history of metaphysics is the history of nihilism

Episode 47 - Heidegger

https://youtu.be/qrkqopjEceU

Wise cultivation of enlightenment our deepest existential response to the meaning crisis and way in which we can awaken from the meaning crisis
Scientific model of spirituality in discourse with the prophets of the meaning crisis
Prophet in the OT way: articulating the advent, to propose or promise a response
Heidegger played an important role in this
Another series he’s planning: The God beyond God
Background to Heidegger: Husserl, loss of contact epistemology. Wants to get contact back through reflective experiential attention paid to the structures and processes within our experience:

Intentional mental directedness - noesis
World disclosure - noema
Deep correlation between them
Perspectival knowing

Heiddeger criticism of this: work didn’t give back the missing contact, participatory knowing
Participatory knowing not set within an ontology, not set within a deeper understanding of being and how we come into contact with being, being = realness
Phenomenology: goal of returning to the things. But can never return to the things, locked into an idealism, what is really needing to get into being is to pay attention to the independence of being from our experience of it

Heidegger

Still within phenomenology but trying to get it towards ontology, get back in touch with the world
Questioning: not in the having mode, trying to get an answer but in the being mode, experienced as wonder - not questioning but questing
Not trying to have a propositional answer but trying to engage a participatory transformation
Dasein: being there
Paying attention, wondering into our being, questing into our being, we will get a deeper understanding of being itself
Our being is the being whose being is in question: we question who and what we are in a way that makes a difference to who and what we are
Existentialism: we are fundamentally without an essence, our essence is to have no essence, so continually defining ourselves
By phenomenologically exploring our that being (our dosein)m we can come into contact with our modal existence, come into being mode, come into contact with the mystery of being.
History of metaphysics, philosophical, existential, religious responses to dosein, the kind of being we have -> history of nihilism
H sees that whole project as misconstrued, misframing of our relationship to being, results in loss of contact with our being. That’s the meaning crisis for H
For H metaphysics is a pejorative term
For H the ontology project = project of understanding our being, understanding our relationship to being and understanding being itself
By constantly being announcing deep mysteries and how difficult it is to think about them, also building a mystique around himself.
On the Essence of Truth:

“A statement is invested with it’s correctness by the openness of comportment, for only through the latter can what is opened up really become the standard for the presentative correspondence.”
Correctness = that statement is true
Openness of comportment: how you are comported towards things
Truth as correspondence: statement is correct when it corresponds to reality in some way
H saying that debate about correspondence has missed something. Missed that corresponding relationship grounded on a deeper relationship
“Open comportment must let itself be assigned the standard - the lower relationship is an affordance of an ability to set up correspondence between statements and reality such that we find them true”
In making the statement the person is directed and connected, the statement is picking up on some aspect of reality that it’s disclosed
“This means that it must take over a pre given standard for all presentation. This belongs to the openness of comportment.”
The normative standard, what we call truth, is grounded, dependant on how this deeper relationship affords and makes possible connecting the statement to reality
Agent and arena have to be shaped to each other so that what the agent says or makes meaningful in the arena
Agent arena relationship makes possible and affords this correctness. But what grounds this agenet arena relationship (V: process of relevance realization). H talks about attunement.
“Being attuned can never be understood as experience and feeling because it is thereby simply deprived of its essence”
He is rejecting subjective interpretation of attunement
You have lost the essence of attunement if you understand it subjectively. It is not an experience, it is something that makes meaningful experience possible.
Being attuned = ek-sistant - standing out, being exposed. “Exposedness to being as a whole can be experienced and felt only because the man who experiences, without being aware of the essence of attunement is always engaged in being intune in a way that discloses being as a whole”
Attunement is not subjective but rather subjective feeling or experience of it is grounded in the attuning relationship that precedes and grounds our cognitive appraisal or appropriation within the agent arena relationship

Because get locked up in the propositional level have forgotten the attunement relationship - for H it is the essence of truth. Makes correctness of statements possible for us
“Because of this forgetfulness man clings to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned”
Get trapped into the having of propositions, having mode, what is readily available
Deep modal confusion at the deep existential level
Forgetting the grounding of attunement traps us with impropositional processing and traps us in the having mode, having correct propositions
Plato: distinction between love of wisdom (Philia sophia) and love of victory (Philia nikia)- the having of the correct answer that defeats the opponent, looks like reasoning, but really manipulating propositions, forgetting wisdom, transformative existential process
V criticises people as if doing wisdom but often doing the other. The people trying to just debunk, demolish and debate to the point of victory over their opponent. They can’t get out of the being mode. Can’t listen.
You know someone’s listening when they say “I didn’t know that, I just learned something”, Or “I was wrong, mistaken about this”.
Heidegger sees history of metaphysics becoming more and more bound up in Philea nikea - the pursuit of victory
People present themselves as doing philia sophia but really doing philea nikea
Cannot remember the being mode because can’t listen
H trying to get us to remember philia sophia

(I think this is what my project is geared at as well.)

H: Have to wake up. In a state of deep modal confusion and forgetfulness. Texts are Socratic, trying to undermine that cognitive cultural grammar we bring to things.
“Whenever the concealment of being as a whole is conceded only as a limit that occasionally announces itself, concealing as a fundamental occurrence has sunk into forgetfulness”
If only acknowledge way beings transcend our framing at the limit, H says when only acknowledge it as a limit you’ve forgotten it.
The relationship to the combinatorial explosive nature of things has to be an ongoing feature of your thinking
V version of this within the RR framework, in terms of sacredness - enacted, participatory resonance to the moreness, inexhaustibleness of reality

Harmon: Object-Oriented Ontology

Object oriented ontology - speculative realism
Exciting work in ontology - pay attention to the new work on ontology
One thread: core not the Kantian picture of the thing in itself veiled by subjectivity - making it inaccessible
Harmon picking up on transjective attunement makes both the subject and object possible in phenomenological experience
Instead of kantian thing in itself veiled - think about two things happening simultaneously :

The thing shining into subjectivity but interpenetrated with, withdrawing from my framing - always beyond my framing. Not in my phenomenology but contributes to the realness of my phenomenological experience
In virtual reality, if get sense world closed, loses its realness, but only if there’s a realness, the way in which the world withdraws from you continuously
As long as it withdraws as it also shines into your experience then it is real to you
The moreness is not something in your experience, it’s notan object of your experience. It’s a feature. The withdrawal is as much a contributor to the realness of things as they’re shining into your subjectivity
Profound way explicated Heidegger’s idea

V argues: our framing, transjective in nature, about attunements, simultaneously discloses and conceals.
V wants to replace the kantian term “Thing in itself” with another term: the thing beyond itself. Everything is both shining into our subjectivity and withdrawing beyond our framing of it. Interaffording. Co contribute to the realness of the object.

(but this withdrawing isn’t literal right? The thing is not literally withdrawing, it’s just that we are limited in what information we can process and therefore experience. Also, distinction between “what is real” and “what is real to me”. Not necessarily the same thing. Something can be real and yet not real to me.)

Can take from speculative realism this term: the thing beyond itself
Takes us to a new understanding of truth. How do we get an attunement that discloses things beyond themselves that a simul. Shingin into our subjectivity and also withdrawing into their objectivity where this no longer means an object of thought, it means a depth beyond our framing, an independence beyond our experience and how those are tranjectively penetrating for us in the sense of realism.
Heidegger’s notion of truth aletheia - deep remembering Sati, and deep disclosure, have to modally remember, have to remember the being mode, this discloses this aspect of realty. Both shining and withdrawing.
Attuning to the mutual disclosure, fitedness, mystery of being - attuned to things, deeply remembering things, existential memory, to be in contact with them when you’re attuned to how they are simul. appearing, shining and withdrawing

Dryfus and 4E Cog-Sci

Dryfus tried to formulate important aspects of 4E Cog-Sci to articulate importance of Heidegger for understanding nature of mind, consciousness
Dryfus Nature of the World:

“Facts and rules are by themselves meaninglessness, to capture what Heidegger calls meaninglessness to capture what Heidegger calls significance or involvement they must be “assigned relevance” but the predicates that must be added to define relevance are just more meaningless facts, you can’t capture it with the definition. And paradoxically the more facts the computers are given the harder it is to compute what is relevant to the current situation.:”
You get into combinatorial explosion if you stay at the propositional computational level and lose your ability to fit yourself to the current situation to cope with the current situation
Dryfus, one of the founding critics of a purely computational cartesian approach to cogn. Science, AI
Shouldn’t see the mind only in computational propositional terms
Notion of optimal grip: process doing this relevance realization, deeper than propositional knowing

V connecting H to the RR machinery. Framework we’ve built allows us to enter into dialogue with the prophets of the meaning crisis, in a way that insightfully discloses aspects of their own theorizing, and affords potentially synoptically integrating them together into a more comprehensive response to the meaning crisis. It’s the final part of the argument he’s making.

Avens

Book: The new Gnosis
Links Heiddegger to Corbin and Jung.
“A questioning that involves the questioner in the matter of thought so deeply he becomes in a sense one with it. At this point knowing is no longer divorced from being. We know the way we are, and we are the way we know. In the Platonic tradition this can be expressed in the axiom ‘like can only be known by like’.”
Pointing to how H bringing back neo-platonic idea of participatory knowing as a deep con-forming between you and the world
Dynamic coupling - reality is dynamic and you have to be dynamically coupled to it
Corbin: calls this participatory knowing gnosis
Gnosis is a “salvational redemptive knowledge because it has the virtue of bringing about the inner transformation of man. It is knowing that changes and transforms the knowing subject”.
Dynamical coupling, in which you know by being coupled to something, participatory knowing in so far as you are changed and your knowing of yourself and your iknowing of the object are coupled together
That is what you need to respond to dosein. You are the being whose being is in question and by questing into that you quest into being. Only going to get a response to that quest when you add something that simultaneously in an inter-penetrative interaffording fashion is both knowing yourself (not-autobiographical knowing, knowing the depths of your being) and knowing the world, coupled together - corbin calls this gnosis.

(but what does this really entail? How do we identify it? What is “knowing the depths of my being”? )

Heidegger -> Dryfus -> RR -> non-propositional, non-computational (computation the inferential manipulation of propositions to draw out the implication relations)
Heidegger -> Corbin -> Gnosis (participatory, mutually self and world transformative kind of knowing). Redemptive, saves us. Machinery is a way of responding, awakening from the meaning crisis

Forgetfulness

What is this forgetfulness
Being mode and having mode
Being mode: Transformative participation in the mystery of being -> Alethea:

Attunement - points to relevance
independence of being -

independent of the correlation between us and being - being always transcends how it is being known and being experienced by us -
the moreness, the withdrawal that is simultaneously with the presence of the shining. Gives things an important pole of their realness that we’ve neglected.
Don’t want to disconnect relevance from truth or realness. Relevance must always open to the moreness, the inexhaustiblenes of the thing beyond itself.

Having mode: now think of an object in terms of how it can be manipulated by us, not just physically but conceptually. Can grasp it, manipulate it, use it
What can happen when focus on having mode but forget the being mode - we can misunderstand in a modal sense being as a particular Being. We’ll put it to the limit, we’ll understand being as the Supreme Being, the highest Being, the highest subject, person, force, thing
For Heidgger this is the ultimate modal confusion, this is to turn being into a problem that can be solved by the conceptual manipulation of a propositional defined object - ie: classical theism’s traditional presentation of God
H is right that long standing tradition in which God understood in the having mode - supreme being, that grounds and makes all other beings. This is a fundamental mistake - Problem of onto-theology. Try to understand being ontologically in terms of a Supreme Being

(Ooof! Is he putting the concept of God at the heart of the meaning crisis here? Wow. Not sure if this is V’s view.)

Notes that H joins the Nazi party.

Episode 48 - Corbin and the Divine Double

https://youtu.be/mrnpZhWqdcA

The thing beyond itself
Realness as simultaneously the shining into our framing and the withdrawing beyond our framing in a deeply interfording interpenetrating manner
Truth as Alefea (sp?) that which grounds the agent arena relationship in atunement, allows us to remember being, getting into attunement with its simultaneous disclosure and withdrawal
Can forget the being mode, get trapped in the having mode, project of using truth as correctness, misunderstand being as a particular Being, try to capture the unlimitedness aspect of being but only do it at the limit, only understand being as a Supreme Being
Understand God as the Supreme Being - ontottheology
Ontotheology: way of understanding being gets us into the deep forgetfulness and modal confusion that is the hallmark of nihilism
Corbin: gnosis: what would it be like to remember the being mode

Heidegger and Physis

Heidegger’s commentary on poetry Selucius (sp?), put into poetry work of Meister Eckart
Eckart: experiencing this as a form of sacredness, appropriate to religious context
Poem:

The rose is without why,
It blooms because it blooms
It cares not for itself
Asks not if it is seen.

Physis: blossoming forth from itself: greek core of the word physics, trying to get back to a re-experience of the physical as an important way of remembering being mode
H not rejecting the physical but showing how it can moredeeply be remembered.
H: the blossoming of the rose is grounded in itself, pure emerging out of itself
Get a sense of the depth of the rose in its physis: as it shines, shines in a way that its shining out of itself, it withdraws as it presents itself to our phenomenological experience
Maxim: live without why, live without a why
Is the quest for the grand culminating purpose coming from the having mode, not the being mode

Narrative and Teleology

H proposing a non-teleological way of being: there’s no narrative to the rose, it’s above and beyond the narrative
V: perhaps we can’t get back to a narrative in the sense of a teleological aspect
Perhaps the universe is like the rose: maybe it’s blooming from itself, grounded in itself, shining from itself while always withdrawing.

(Nick wanted V’s metaphysics! Here it is!)

Ever expanding universe, coming out of the big bang but grounded in the quantum
We get better at being connected to its Physis if we drop the axial age requirement that there be a teleological narrative to it all
Narrative gives us important practice in something - gives cognitive existential practice in non-logical identity
Relationship it has to symbol: frame then transframe, nonlogical identity between the word inside the frame and the world outside the frame, and a non-logical identity between you and you there

Narrative is a way of representing through time, symbolically, represents how have a non-logical identity to yourself
V was born in Hamilton, he’s not that kid anymore, but in another sense its him.
Narrative is a way of tracing out and training us in non-logical identity, work with this fundamental transformation

Think Eckart pointing to that we can exact that ability for non-logical identity, we can exact that symbolic identity and instead think of it as unfolding across time
Stoics: stop pursuing fame and glory and wealth and power
Instead of horizontal narrative we can do the vertical ontology in which connecting the depths of ourselves to the depths of being in a non-teleology being mode.

(Argh! Does this mean something? This seems like something that can only be grasped through a psycho-technology exercise. I don’t know what it means. Can’t grock it)

V thinks this is what Heidegger and Eckart pointing to
Pure shining - phenomenon - experience -> RR
RR = shining: the salience landscaping into intelligibility

(But before RR = intelligence, how can it also equal this “shinning” - I’m not sure I’ve grasped the metaphor for shining.)

Pure withdrawal - the independent, inexhaustibleness of a combinatorially explosive reality, we cannot drink it dry, the things beyond themselves

(is inexhaustible a feature of reality or our relationship to reality?)

V thinks we can draw these two together

A trajectory of transframing that is always closing upon the relevant while always opening to the moreness
When we recognize that, remember it aletheia from the being mode, accentuate it, celebrate it, that’s what he argues sacredness is
Seems to line up with Eckart, H more reticent to talk in terms of sacredness, Tillich isn’t
We can think of realness as a tonos - this creative tension between, confirmation, coherence and moreness
If the virtual reality just has the confirmation and coherence it falls flat if it can’t provoke a sense of open wonder, if there’s no element of surprise, if it’s all a simulation and no accommodation (experience of awe and wonder), if just the foreclosure and never just the opening, if its just the homing and never the numinous then it’s not real, it’s not experienced as real.

(Ok! Again: he seems to be confounding what is real and the experience of what is real. Realness cannot be based on our experience, though we can use our experience to help determine what is real. I don’t know why the experience of wonder has to come in or something isn’t real. I can’t tell if he’s on to something here but I’m having real problems with this conception of realness. I get it as sacredness. But why mix the two. It seems to be an unnecessary and unhelpful redefinition of what is real. But it may be very useful in terms of sacredness)

Daoism: yin the confirming, drawing down, the yang the opening up, both interpenetrate. Discloses the inexhaustibleness of the Dao
Daoism is about the serious play of being
That’s how Corbin describes it: gnosis: the play of being

Corbin and Persian Sufism

Corbin focusses on Neoplatonism within persian sufism (mystical branch of islam)
Corbin helps us remember persian philosophy, overcome our ethnocentrism
Persia central role between the Arab, European, India, Chinese worlds
Persian suffism: Iran today islamic totatlitarian regime, but not a monolith, Persia made muslim by an arab invasion, Persians reemember this deeply to this day
Persians attracted to sufism, because trying to find a form of liberation from an oppressive arab empire
Important that it is Persian sufism
Reading thee poetry of ancient and since the Arab invasion, re-remember
Corbin read this stuff deeply
Corbin misunderstands some of this literature
C draws in Heidegger and neo-platonism, impact on sufism, trying to explain this gnosis and how it can be redemptive in the face of the meaning crisis

Corbin, Gnosis and the Imaginal

Corbin: the recovery of Gnosis is abound up in imagination
Corbin not using the term in the normal way. Makes the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal
Imaginal: bound up with gnosis
Imaginary: what we typically mean, the subjective experience of generating inner mental imagery which we know is not real, completely in our control, play with it as we wish - not what Corbin is talking about
Two ways we represent, come into cognitive contact with reality

Abstract representations, the intelligible world, grasp reality through mathematical formula, through intellect
Concrete: sensible world

Imaginal: mediates between the abstract and concrete, bridges between them, allows them to come together in meaningfully structured experience
In my phenomenological experience there is intelligible order that I can extract intellectually but also I come into sensual contact concretely with things.

Abstract - world of mind, concrete world of matter - cartesian division, Corbin argues lost the imaginal that bridges between the mind and material
Imaginal always bridges between the purely subjective and objective - imaginal is transjective in nature

Then whole thing in motion. Imaginal not constant. It’s in constant transformative transframing
It is vibrant and vital in that way.
Because of the centrality of the imaginal to Corbin, he was deeply opposed to fundamentalism and literalism -> they make this static, they put things into either abstract or concrete or just subjectivity or objectivity, lose the nexus of the imaginal
Corbin: if lose the imaginal, lose the capacity for gnosis, and then lose capacity for waking up within the bing mode through aletheia and the ground of being and sacredness
This is something going to keep seeing. Deep opponent to fundamentalism and literalism
Seeing a potential way of seeing Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology: we have the Supreme Being and we have our propositions about this ultimate being, we can think the way in which we should be is to have these propositions in a fundamentalist, literalist fashion then lose all of this
Will hear symbolic as a dismissive term, no real relevance. Corbin arguing that if do that have lost capacity for gnosis, lost capacity to overcome the forgetfulness of being
Jonathan Pageau exemplifying this, should not be dismissive of the symbol, not interpret it as merely subjective or reject it because can’t make it clearly objective for us

Imaginal and Symbolism

To connect imaginal to dasein (your being in the world) - self knowledge and participatory knowing of being are interpenetrating and knowing together - have to bring out something of Corbin easy to misread, pushes buttons in way V doeesn’t like, but sense that pushed in a way that need to be pushed in order to wear free from them

(this is the sense I get from a lot of V’s stuff in these lectures. There’s stuff I don’t quite get but I suspect there is something there that will help me break free from my own self-imposed chains. But I haven’t quite grasped it yet.)

Corbin really does pick up on the sense of sacredness goes on in the imaginal
Symbol: look at it and through it, symbol is translucent - can put those two in an important dialogue - that is how the symbol can help capture the nonlogical identity between the agent arena now in this frame and the agent arena in a more comprehensive encompassing frame
Symbols: transjective: trying to make them either subjective or objective is having mode dismissal of how the symbol trying to challenge you to transcend it
If you are not transcending in response to a symbol you really aren’t understanding it

(I’m still pretty uncertain of what “transcending” entails)

If treat it as an allegory that you can replace with other literal terms then you haven’t really remembered through the symbol - there has been no Aletheia
In the pursuit of the correctness of truth then you have forgotten the aletheia
Symbol: trajective: putting you on a trajectory
Symbol: transformative: transformative of the inner man, of you at a fundamental level
Symbol: transspatial: movement between worlds, ontological movement between smaller frame and large frame, ontological shift, not movement through time
Alafaya: through the symbol, that’s how you do gnosis

The Symbol of the Angel and the Divine Double

The Angel: most important symbol for Corbin
Standard rolling of the eyes at this represents the imaginary understanding of the angel
Corbin using this term because it fills the Persian sufism literature
V proposing alternative way of understanding this
Stang, Our Divine Double
Becomes prevalent through mediterarian spirituality through the hellenistic and post hellenistic period
Decadent romantic way of thinking: born with true self, have to be true to your true self, and have express it, that’s what it means to be authentic, pervasive in our culture
In the mediteranian: I’m here and I have a self right now, soul, spirit, it is bound to the divine double, there is a double of me that is archetypically more important than me, true self is my DD, path is to reunite myself with my double
Realization of their interdependence culminates in a mystical union
Gnostic: transgressive, break the grammar of thinking your true self as something you have, is in you, have to express it, true self beyond you, aspire to it. Not something you have, something you realize through being mode, not the having mode of inner possession
DD pervasive mythos
Corbin’s use of Angel as symbolic was of referring to DD
Aspirational process central to our mythos of how we are going to normatively improve ourselves
In one sense DD is a crazy idea, if see it as part of two-world mythology
But maybe not crazy idea if ask should I believe that, first ask why did so many people believe it, what was going on there, what was it doing?
LA Paul: transformative experience
Agnes Collard; Aspiration: arguing for neglected form of rationality, best described as aspiration. Rationality means any systematically reliable internalized psychotechnology that reliably and systematically affords you overcoming self-deception and affords you cultivating enhanced connectivenss enhanced meaning in life
This version of rationality points to the cultivation of wisdom
Self before and Self after

With any genuine qualitative development (why I am so different in kind from that kid born) what I can know, can be, not how much) - non-logical identity
Not an identity relationship that can be captured by A = A
Cannot reason our way or infer our way through this
What is the nature of the relation? Collard thinks its aspirational, involves aspiration
If you don’t include aspiration as part of rationality going to get into a self-refuting position. My relationship to rationality and my relationship to wisdom are aspirational
I am aspiring to become rational, because I am not currently that rational - if aspiration isn’t rational get into a weird kind of self-refutation
Getting back to the platonic idea of the deep interpenetration between love and reason
Same with wisdom
Liberal education is gnosis, don’t know what its going to be life
This is the relationship between the existing self and the divine double, the DD is the symbol that allows you to move from yourself then to yourself now - to the better self
Corbin’s talk about the angel is way of him invoking and bringing into activity all of the stuff about symbolism, integrate it with this process of aspirational rationality that is central to self-transcendence and central to us becoming more rational and more wise

Episode 49 - The Sacred Second Self - Corbin and Jung

https://youtu.be/kkykBqApP4A

Non-teleological relationship to the play of being
Corbin: gnosis (ability to engage in serious play) relates to the imagination. Imaginal: mediates between the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensisble world, transjectively mediates between the subjective and objective, all done dynamically - all this mediation and mutual affordance done in an on-going transformative transframing
Symbol: captures all of this
Corbin’s core symbol: Angel -> relates directly to gnosis (transformative participatory knowing), we have to see self knowledge and knowledge of the world as inextricably bound up together
Pursuit of the Divine Double: transgressive of our cultural cognitive grammar, we are born of our true self that needs to express itself (Rousseau), core virtue is authenticity, rather than the socratic model, true self is something to which aspiring -> transgressive mythology is that the self that I have now is not my true self, my true self is my divine double - something bound to me but superlative to me, me as I’m meant to be
Goal to transcend to become a self that is ecstatically ahead of me in some way\
By asking the question why did so many believe in this so deeply, the aspirational process
Zeroing in on this relationship of aspiration, deep connection between aspiration and rationality, rationality is an aspirational process
Education: liberal education deeply aspirational process, part of what makes us rational
Argument: if we do not understand a kind of proleptic rationality (aspiration), the rationality that emerges in education, the cultivation of rationality, pursuit of education will lead to self-contradiction.
Rejoining of love and reason
Non-logical identity between Self 1 and Self 2

The Problem of Non-Logical Identity

S1 -> S2
Two sides of aspiration:

I deeply understand it
I’m deeply grateful for it/value it

S1: I don’t appreciate classical music, I don’t have a taste for it, I don’t get it
S2: I want to be somebody who appreciates it
If I want to do it because I want to impress my friends then I’m not actually aspiring, because S2 doesn’t appreciate classical music because it impresses their friends, or helps in their dating life, they appreciate it for a perspectival and participatory knowing that S1 doesn’t have.
The appreciation of that S2 has is bound to perspectival and participatory knowing of which S1 is ignorant
Looks like a fundamental discontinuity here
Callard shows this is problematic:

Strawson: talks about paradox of self-creation
For self-creation to be truly an instance of self and creation need:

Continuity requirement: something deeply continuous between S1 and S2. Must be the same self (S1 = S2). If S1 gets in accident, brain damage, acts differently, that’s not self creation, S1 must be responsible for S2
Real novelty between them or no creation involved. Developing a skill already have not real novelty, improving a skill is not creative (S1 =/ S2)

Strawson points out that self-creation is paradoxical, self-contradictory
In order to get the real novelty of S2 have to introduce something that’s outside the logic of S1, the logic of its values and beliefs, but if it comes from outside of S1 then it’s not an act of self-creation. Can’t infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic, can’t infer S2 from S1

Callard says Strawson mistaken, the relationship of S1 and S2 is one of non-logical identity
We practice this by engaging in narrative by making ourselves into temporarily extended selves that have a non-logical identity through time and through development
The romantic expressionism, and the empiricist writing on a blank slate don’t capture what’s happening between S1 and S2 -> not that S1 is changed randomly into S2 from outside, nor that S1 makes S2
Neither pure passivity or pure activity
Better way to describe is that S1 does not receive nor make S2 but participates in S2’s emergence. S2 emerges out of S1 to the point that S1 disappears into S2 - we participate in an emergence
Aspiration is Collard’s name by which S1 participates in the emergence of S2 out of S1

(why shouldn’t this apply to improving existing skills?)

Problem: S1 in an important sense causes S2 - my actions now are necessary and sufficient to result in a course that results in S2, but though S1 is temporily before S2, the opposite is the case S2 normatively. S1 depends on S2 - S1’s actions only make sense once S2 comes into existence. Only S2 appreciates it. S1 causes S2 but S1 is normatively dependent on S2
Everything S1 is doing only makes sense once S2 comes into existence

(really? The journey doesn’t make sense unless you get to the end? S1 is looking ahead, that’s why they are doing this. It’s not reverse causation)

It’s only after the aspirational transformation can S1s behaviour be justified, made sense of, be understood

(this doesn’t make sense. If S1 can’t predict that they will become S2 through this process, why do it? What turns on this?)

S2 is where we find the justification, legitimation, aspiration
That’s weird for us, because normally the thing that is temporarily prior and causes is also the thing that is the source of justification and explanation

The mythos of the divine double

Mythos of the divine double: preexists, fully formed, drawing me out teleologically until become S2
But the teleological explanations often thwarting us.
Want to say S1 has the causal power, but S2 has the normative authority
When I’m S1 when I’m aspiring to be more rational, how do I relate to S2 which doesn’t exist but has authority over me?

I’m relating to this aspired foreself - the self I aspire to, there’s a non-logical identity between that myself now and myself then
Self I’m aspiring to not logically accessible to me, can’t infer my way to it
My representation of my future self, has to afford me this non-logical process and that representation has to afford this transformation of me into the aspired to self. It has to actually help me become a more rational person now
What kind of thing does this for me? A symbol. Puts these two together in the right way.

My representation of the aspired to self is a symbolic self that I can internalize into my current self anagogically.
we transcend ourselves by internalizing how other people’s perspectives are being directed on us. Ex: Stoic aspirant interalizes socrates so he becomes more socratic
The symbolic self has to be internalized. The internalized self is something other than you yet it becomes something that is completely identified as you
Becomes part of your metacognitive, reflective rationality in the case of internalizing Socrates
Becomes part of the very guts of the machinery of yourself
Anagogically: reordering psyche to so see different ways of being in the world and as I inhabit those new ways of being in the world they allow me to then re-internalize
I internalize Socrates, then I indwell the world in a more Socratic fashion which allows me to more internalize Socrates, which allows…
Not something that is passively happening to you, something that transcends receiving and making, it is participating
Symbolic self that internalizes other people’s perspectives, make viable to you the self you aspire to, as you internalize them, as you transform the world is transformed also
The divine double is a mythos way of trying to capture this dynamic process, represents this process in a linear narrative, simplifies it into a simple kind of teleology, but not capturing the participatory nature
The divine double, people trying to say, that it’s an imaginal symbol, that affords the dynamic coupling of anagoge that allows you to participate in the act of self creation/aspiration
The divine double is you but not you, its the advanced others you have internalized into you but eventually become you, a way of being becomes viable to you
The self you will be, but not the self you are, but there if no inkling in your current self won’t be part of the aspirational process
Start from frame 1, want to move to frame 2
Divine double allows you to internalize from the more encompassing frame to your current frame
Shinning in through the divine double, shinning into your frame, which affords you moving towards indwelling the more expanded frame

The agent and the arena are simultaneously transformed
The divine double shines the greater frame into the current frame but it also draws you out, withdraws into the more encompassing frame
Sense of closing into your relevance, but opening into your greater self -> gnosis
Divine Double allows you to conform to the very play of being itself. The way being is shining but also withdrawing, affords radical transcendence which is always a process of becoming a greater or better self
Suggesting: Divine Double is a central example of the imaginal. Represented in the mythos of angels.
Divine double transjective, transframing, integrating the abstract form or a concept of the better self, integrating that with my concrete - concrete causal actions of myself, deeply symbolic in nature and in action
Symbol but not just imaginary, imaginal in nature, it makes, affords, the true development, affords the core of the being mode. Not about having things, about becoming someone
Corbin: everything has an angel, not only the agent that’s being transformed, it’s also the arena, the world opening up.

Every object is shining and withdrawing into its mystery
Everything is a thing beyond itself
Coupled process

The Sacred Second Self

Deep connections being gnosis and the divine double, but unhappy with the term “divine double” seems to bind us too much to the mythos and the teleological structure, notion of divine seems to bind this to theism which is problematic
Buddha nature similar to divine double
This way of talking about aspiration can be seen clearly in non-theistic religions, seen clearly in gnosticism which should not be interpreted theistically, neoplatonism, plotinus
Not going to use the term divine double, call the symbolic self the sacred second self
Have an inkling of its value.
Notion of sacred second self notion of bringing back the soul, the soul you are becoming. Allow us to make a bridge to Jung

Jung and Individuation

Sacred second self central to Jung’s work
Jung’s Modern Man in Search of A Soul

Modern man lost his soul
Loss of real relationship to the SSS that is needed for responding to the meaning crisis

We can move between Corbin and Jung by picking up on your relationship to your SSS
Notion of developsystemicment and self-transformation and how to respond to the meaning crisis: individuation
Jung picking up on psychology, the processes within the psyche that are conducive to responding to the meaning crisis
Psychological for Jung: contrast to Freud

Freud: hydraulic model of the psyche, newtonian machine, things under pressure have to be relieved
Jung: rejects that, organic metaphor, sees psyche as a self-organizing dynamical , auto-poeitic being, complex process of self-organization
Individuation; self-organizing process that neither make nor receive but participate in

Jung gives a psychological analogue to Plato’s forms - archetype - formative founding patterns of the psyche, structural functional organization by which the self organizes
Archetype not images, you have to take the images and treat them in an imaginal fashion, imaginal things that are leading you into the aspirational process of individuation
Systems of constraints. Virtual engines that regulate the self organization of what is salient to us
Ex: if the Hero archetype is active in me, doesn’t me i have image in head of the hero, but an imaginal relationship in which I’m analogically interacting with the world, undergoing aspirational transformation so I’m becoming more and more heroic
Archetype is more adverbal than adjectival. How coming to be, not something you possess and reflect upon
Auto-poietic: have a life to them. The way the psyche makes itself as a living organism
Ego -> self

Ego: archetype of conscious mind: virtual engine that regulates the self organization of the conscious mind
Self: archetype of the archetypes, the virtual engine regulating the organization of the psyche as a whole, the principle of auto-poeisis itself
Virtual engine that constellates all the other virtual engines so that the psyche can continue its process of autopoietic self-organization

When a system is self-organizing its function and development is completely merged
Can set up an interaction between these imaginal symbolic entities, the archetype, that can be internalized into the way the ego self-organizes, that can be part of the dialogue between the ego and the self
As I dialogue through the archetypes with the self, the egos perspectival knowing and participatory being being fundamentally altered
individuation of the ego through its dialogue with the sacred second self
Jung’s deep criticism of literalism and fundamentalism - reduces the imaginal nature of the archetypes into being imaginary, lose the being mode
V’s criticism of Jung:

For most of his writing, Jung understands all of this as subjectively, all happening within the mind. Archetypes understood subjectively rather than transjectively
Jung misses the existential modes - having and being
Corbin: Jung seems to be reducing the imaginal to the imaginary
In fairness to Jung, what’s missing from Corbin is the psychology, haven't told how the internalizing looks like

V argues can integrate the three together: Jung, Corbin, Buber, something better -> Tillich

Episode 50 - Tillich and Barfield

https://youtu.be/iu9fa4TkWE0

Tillich

Tillich: deeply aware of the symbol in the imaginal
Takes the meaning crisis seriously: The Courage to Be
Critical of literalism and fundamentalism as forms of idolatry: having mode not becoming
Main response to meaning crisis
Tillich resisted the Nazis -> courage
En-couragement - not just bravery or fortitude - there is wisdom in courage, central feature of wisdom seeing through illusion into reality - the courageous person sees through the illusion and distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good and acts accordingly
Seeing to the depths: faith
Faith for Tillich:

Hearkening back to ancient israelites notion of da-ath (sp?)
Add that participatory knowing in a course of being is an aspirational process
Faith as ultimate concern - that which concerns us ultimately
Idolatry: to treat something that could be a symbolic icon through which you expect and develop your ultimate concern, transform into an idol, an object, to have and possess, control and manipulate. Should be machinery for ultimate concern but using it for something not ultimate
When concerned about something care about it, coping with it, committed to it, involved in it , encompasses you in an through it. Deeply perspectival and participatory
open-ended points at the inexhaustibless of being

Tillich’s notion of God

Transgressive of classical theism, though not atheism
God understood as an icon, an imaginal symbol for the ground of being
God is no kind of being, no-thingness to God
Any attempt to see God as a thing is a form of idolatry
Meaning <-> reality - God grounds all of that

If we participate in an aspirational trajectory motivated by ultimate concern, puts us into a resonant relationship - Tillich’s method of correlation
Method of correlation - always this tonos (polar tension) between existential questioning/questing and revelation (the way the depths of reality reveal themselves)
Ongoing mutual fitting togetherness
Method been misunderstood as propositional theology, propositional proposals, get propositions from sacred texts, but propositions theology to concord with sacred texts
Different way of understanding that picks up on the Tonos takes us towards God as the ground of being.
Depth of reason - platonic notion, that which makes reasoning possible, relevance realization machinery (V argues), recursive machinery of rationality, aspirational rationality,
Tillich: ecstatic relationship with grounded depths of our rationality
The symbol to the depths of reality
In the psyche the depths of reason are experienced as extasis - self transcendence, moving beyond myself
Depths of reality: miracle and mystery
Miracle as the shinning, mystery as the withdrawal into the moreness, combinationarial explosive depths of reality - interaffording
Method of correlation the anagoge of the extasis as we resonate with the depths, the grounding, formative depths of reason are resonating with the depths, grounding of reality and anagogically cycling together

(what does this mean?????)

For Tillich symbol much more than a sign. Particpatory, opens up levels of reality otherwise closed to us. Opens levels of ourselves otherwise closed to us - mutually affording, resonant fashion
Symbols not made by us - self-organizing - grow out of the unconscious in us and the unconscious without us

(huh? Does it mean they must be identified? Resonate with us but we can’t make them do that?)

Symbols have a life, they can die, can be born.
Tillich worries that symbols of Christianity dying, fundamentalism and literalism inappropriate way of keeping them alive
Should afford the newbirth of a new symbol that brings back the resonant relationship that the old symbol possessed
Symbols: surplus of meaning, if not rosnating with moreness they aren’t symbols
Symbols are deeply transformative
This is why correlation not just propositional theology, if not undergoing a profound transformation you’re not doing tillich’s method

How is it realized by you?

Taken into your frame, actualized into reality
Relationship between the existential self and the essential self -> relationship of the current self to the sacred second self
The essential self is the self in the fulness of being - capable of recognizing through conformity with the world
Relationship is aspiration
Essential self is ahead - normatively ahead
Constantly tempting the existential self to a better way of being
For Tillich, bound up with Paul - when I was a kid acted like a kid
Aspirational journey of encouragement gets us to confront seriously meaninglessness
Meaninglessness confronted within ourselves as guilt in protestant reformation
Now experiencing it as despair - existentialism (50s), we can talk about postmodernism
Trajectory leads to a position response to faith (da-ath)
The no-thingness of God coming to really encounter it is central, the no-thingness of God takes into the nothingness of meaninglessness and overcomes it
Aspect identity shift - come to see the no-thingness of God as the inexhaustible creation of meaning, an inexhaustible fount of meaning cultivation
Ground of meaning, intelligibility, and the relationship between them
Ground is an inexhaustible source of meaning cultivation that cannot be drained dry by our despair
When stop trying to push away the nothingness, but have an imaginal relationship to it and move through it, anagogically, in an iimaginal fashion with the nothingness of God then we overcome meaninglessness

(this seems to almost mean something, but it’s just beyond my grasp. I can’t tell. Also, where is the scientific backing for this? Maybe I get it, he’s already explained the science he’s trying to match up his view of the science with these guys non-scientific proposals- that’s the dialogue)

If you stare long enough into the abyss it begins to stare back into you
Fundamental aspect shift in which nothingness of despair is transformed into the revelation of no-thingness as inexhaustible being, meaning

Mystical tradition: notion of epic-tasis - idea teleological model of salvation where I’m moving towards the promised land in which I’ll see God and rest in the promised land, realized goal, ended. Gregory of nissa - Epictasis: not trying to rest in God, no resting, constant disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being
Tillich argues the symbol joins together the subjective and the objective
One of the ways in which Tillich different than Jung: sees the process of individuation, similar to Jung, but always puts that into creative tension with participation, participation in being
Theonomous: ongoing epictasis of the inexhaustible, ongoing transframing
Transjectivity, sacred second self, anagogic descent joining reason and revelation together, fundamental aspect shift, criticism fundamentalism and literalism - something deeply about gnosis
Connection to gnosticism explicit in Tillich
Tillich qualifies the whole process as a realization of the God beyond the God of Theism - sees God as that which is the demiurge entrapping us within existential entrapment of the meaning crisis

Non-theism

Non-theism of Tillich - position that tries to transcend theism and atheism
Non-theism correct way to talk about religions like Buddhism and Daoism
4 shared presuppositions between classical theist and the atheist

God is the Supreme Being - Both accept that as the proposition they are debating about. Non-theist rejects that.
God is accessed primarily/solely by belief: both agree they just disagree as to whether there is access to be found. Non-theist rejects both
Thelogy/anti-theology do not require transformative anagoge - all need to have is possession of the proposition and be able to infer the correct implications, thereby losing everything we’ve been talking about last 4 episodes. They agree on that, the non-theist rejects it
Sacrednesss is personal or impersonal, theist/atheist disagrees as to which to pick, non-theist rejects that Rather, argues sacredness transjective, partcipatory, aspirational

V’s main critique of Tillich, while more practical than Heidegger, doesn’t offer practices of transformation, Jung created active imagination, to allow images to self-oragnize in auto-poetic manner
Tillich gives a way to live, courage/faith deeply reinterpreted but no processes
Notion of deep symbolic particpation that’s translated into practices found in Owen Barfield’s work

xBarfield

Inklings: Part of the ongoing discussion and fellowship between Tolken and CS Lewis
The Fellowship: literary lives of the inklings. Owen Barfield: philosophy poetry
Barfierld influenced by Gnosticism, neoplatonism
Early romantics emphasized the infinity of reality - non-finiteness, of reality, this is the inexhaustible moreness is that which continually draws us, affords us into self-transcendence
Schlegel: the finite longing for the infinite
Eduction - to draw out (became education) that discloses or reveals the sacredness
Our always finite, framed, longing for transframing that discloses but not completely the combinatorially explosive more-ness of reality and simultaneously discloses the ongoing capacity of relevance realization to adapt to that in a coupled manner
We experience and participate this in creativity - in flow state
This isn’t to find the contact and realness in some irrational locus in the psyche, but instead to find sacredness in the flow of self-transcendence within creativity - poesis
Barfied: picks up on poiesis: transformative experience, felt change in consciousness, self after both continuous and discontinuous from the self before
Extasis in creativity found within poetry and the poetical aspects of everyday language that can reawaken us to this kind of connectedness, to the inexhaustibleness connected to sacredness
Barfield looks at the etymology of words:

Peuma - spiritus - can mean both wind or spirit, the self-moving aspects of the psyche
Divide it into spirit/wind, division replicates the objective world of wind and the subjective of psyche
When go back, the terms are used and treated as if have an identity - non-logical identity, interpenetrate and afford each other even though anti-thetical and disjunctive - form of participation,
V argues these people have a more transjective anagogic resonance with reality so that the wind is imaginal to them, discloses the self-moving aspects of reality and themselves in a highly resonant fashion
Not quite sure about Barfield’s evolutionary hypothesis.
We use language in this fashion, in way that is pervasive in our cognition and speech, words have dual meaning.

Ex: attack: mean physical destruction, also mean critical argumentation
We don’t feel that they are identical but don’t feel them as radically disjunctive from each other
Ex: See: visual experience, or to understand, to stand under or conceptual understanding, weird synonomy between understand and see
Something pervasive in our culture now, doesn’t point to the evolution across generations but to the psychological development of individuals. Start with motor seeing, moves too conceptual

V argues that the model too simplistic, there should be a top-down aspect not just bottom up, stuff coming up from sensory, abstract and sensory meet in the imaginal
I see what you’re saying that’s imaginal bringing of abstract not yet speakable sense of understanding
Can evoke balance to talk about justice, imaginal statue of lady justice, using the phsycial balance machinery and using that machinery to give a structural functional organization to this ineffable sense of justice, recycling that whole process, introducing new function. Poesis in deepest sense
Translucency of the symbol
We can forget justice and focus just on having balance, only look at the concrete

Barfield: talks about original participation: what we need to do is move towards final participation: recovery of participation, integrated within the gains of the rational sciences.
Recovery of the perspectival and participatory. V: also means a science of meaning cultivation how does that participatory perspectival participation fit into our scientific processes
Both sides have to be involved in this marriage or it will fail.
That’s what he’s tried to do with relevance realization theory and then put it into discourse with spirituality, symbolism, sacredness
Barfield’s followers, needs to be more understanding of sacredness of poiesis participation of the inexhaustible. Can’t just import him into classical theism.
Notion from Eckart: Galesnheit: let it be, Heidegger responds by complete passivity, let it be, very lutheran, something deeply right about that aspect, but forgets breakthrough- about attentional framing, breaking through the old frame making the new frame
His notion of creativity as participatory is not to be passively receptive
Poiesis is synergistic - God plays the leading role, but we contribute, we participate in history, working with God in its making.
Is Barfied a non-theist? I don’t know. Can’t make the argument the same as for Heidegger, Jung, Corbin, Tillich
What have I tried to show: tried to show you that the vocabulary, grammar, the framework of relevance realization and how it can be developed to talk about spirituality and sacredness can be put into deep dialogue with Heidegger, Corbin, Jung, Tillich, Barfield and afford deep dialogue between them afford synoptic integration
All of this is what V means by awakening from the meaning crisis

[a]Typo sb Altered

[b]Sb will

[c]I think pre-meaningful is indeed what Vervaeke was talking about (so pre-meaningful-experiential), rather than pre-sensory-experiential