Lecture Notes of ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’

Please ignore any hyperlinks, I’m still editing this.

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These lectures notes were copied from YouTube comments, they were all made by the user Matteo. He likely did them for his own study, but thankfully made it public by posting it in the comments for others. The notes are excellent, and they deserve to be all compiled together in a way that’s easy to access. This is what this page is for.

While unrelated to Matteo’s work, there are a couple of other links and sources that might interest you:

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis: The YouTube playlist of the lecture series.

Books list: All the books Vervaeke has mentioned during the lecture series.

MeaningCrisis.co Transcripts: Transcripts of the lectures, including graphics.

Ellora Lecture Summaries: Lecture summaries of each episode.

MeaningCrisis.co is currently at episode 35, and Ellora’s summaries are at episode 11. But both might have released more episodes by the time you read this.

Below is the Index of all the episodes, with the topics that Matteo has categorized for each lesson. You can click on them to be re-directed towards that lecture.

Index

Episode 1: Introduction

A Confluence of Positive Factors in Contemporary Society
A Convergence of Dark Factors in Western Culture
What is Meaning? Why do we hunger for it? How do we realize it?
Foolishness, Absurdity, and Despair
Knowing and Meaning
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
The Upper Paleolithic Transition
Projectile Weaponry and Intelligence
Socio-Cognitive Response to Disaster
Trade Rituals and Initiation Rituals
Cognitive Exaptation
Psychotechnology
The Shaman
Cognitive Exaptation of Psychotechnologies in Shamanism
The Nine-Dot Problem

Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution

Flow
Video Games as Flow Induction Machines
The Universality of Flow
Cognitive Mechanisms of the Flow State
Implicit Learning Experiments
Intuition and Implicit Learning
Science, Implicit Learning, and Flow
Flow and Shamanism
Metaphor
Metaphor in Shamanism
Soul Flight
The Neolithic Revolution
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Axial Revolution
Alphabetic Literacy and Second-Order Thinking
Coinage and Second-Order Thinking
Axial Age Self-Understanding

Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar

Myth
Continuous Cosmos
The Great Disembedding of the Axial Age
Embedded/Disembedded Wisdom
Foreshadowing the Meaning Crisis
Biblical Grammar
Time as a Cosmic Narrative
Ancient Israel’s God
Kairos, Da’ath and Faith
Sin
Old Testament Prophets
Cognitive Fluency
Ancient Greek Psychotechnologies
Pythagoras
Self-Transcendence of Pythagoras

Episode 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom

The Oracle at Delphi
Confirmation Porn
Socrates’ Personal Dilemma
The Quest for Wisdom
Thales and Natural Philosophy
All is the Moist
The Loadstone has Psyche
Everything is Filled with Gods
Socrates’ View of Natural Philosophy
The Sophists and Rhetoric
Bullshit
Socratic Revolution
What Socrates Knew
The Trial of Socrates
Shamanic Features of Socrates

Episode 5: Plato and the Cave

Sacred Plato
Inner Conflict of the Tripartite Soul
Man and Monster
Lion
Hyperbolic Temporal Discounting
Inner Harmony and Connection to Reality
Myth of the Cave
Eidos and Logos

Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution

Influences on Aristotle
Analogy of Artifacts
Newtonian Account of Change
Kant and Living Things
Cause and Constraint
Dynamical Systems Theory
Aristotle and Character Development
Akrasia
Living Up to Your Potential
Hierarchy of Living Things

Episode 7: Aristotle’s World View and Erich Fromm

Rationality
Conformity Theory/Contact Epistemology
Aristotelian Reality Check
Geocentric Worldview
Worldview Attunement
The Nomological Order
Importing Axial Age India
Siddhartha and the Palace Myth
Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

Episode 8: The Buddha and “Mindfulness”

Myth of Leaving the Palace
Disillusionment
The Renouncers
The Middle Path
Sati (Modal Re-membering)
Mindfulness, Language of Training and Explaining
Memory Method of Location (Method of Loci)
Science of Mindfulness
Being Present and Soft Vigilance | Ellen Langer
Attending (Paying Attention) as Cognitive Unison

Episode 9: Insight

Insight
Awareness/Attention Exercise: Object and Probe
Transparency-Opacity Shifting | Michael Polanyi
Feature-Gestalt Shifting
Observational Analysis in Meditation
Inductive Leaping and Contemplation
Pure Consciousness Event | Robert Forman
Resonant At-Onement and Non-Duality, Prajna
Siddhartha Gautama the Awakened One
Insight, Waking Up

Episode 10: Consciousness

Global Workspace Theory | Bernard Baars, Murray Shanahan
Integrated Information Theory | Giulio Tononi
Sizing Up and Affordances | Matson, Merleau-Ponty, Gibson
Systematic Insight | Jean Piaget, Juensung Kim
The Problem of Ontonormativity
Solving the Problem of Ontonormativity

Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1

Experience of the World in Higher States of Consciousness
Experience of the Self in Higher States of Consciousness
Experience of Self-World Relation in Higher States
Disruptive Strategies
Decentering
Processing Fluency Spiking | Sascha Topolinski, Rolf Reber
The Continuity Hypothesis | Andrew Newberg, Mark Waldman
Optimal Grip | Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Merleau-Ponty
Mind-Wandering and Deautomatization | Zach Irving
The Notice Invariants Heuristic | Kaplan and Simon 1990

Episode 12: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2

The Solomon Effect | Igor Grossmann, Berlin Wisdom Paradigm
Egocentric Entombment
Knowing by Loving
Self-Glue | Glyn Humphreys, Jie Sui
Neural Networks Analogy to Human Psychology | Woodward
Metastability | Kelso, Tognoli, Newberg
Plausibility | Rescher, Kyle, Milgram, and others
Higher States of Consciousness
Plausibility in Science

Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing

Interpretation Crisis of Religious Traditions | Stephen Batchelor
The Four Noble Truths as Four Ennobling Provocations
All is Suffering, Dukkha
Representativeness & Availability Heuristics, Encoding Specificity
Confirmation Bias
Parasitic Processing
Addiction and Reciprocal Narrowing | Marc Lewis
Anagogic Awakening

Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics

Alexander the Great
The Polis
Cultural Domicide in the Hellenistic World
Hellenistic Age of Anxiety
Epicurus and Epicureanism
Fear and Anxiety | Paul Tillich
Death Anxiety
Acceptance of Mortality for Epicureans
Antisthenes and Diogenes
The Cynic Philosophy
Moral Laws and Purity Codes
Zeno of Citium and Stoicism

Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus

Prosoche and Procheiron
Marcus Aurelius, Objective Seeing, Premeditatio | Pierre Hadot
Fatality | Margaret Visser
Stoicism and The View from Above
Therapy and the Inner Socrates
Axis of Fortune, Axis of Transcendence
Jesus as Ultimate Kairos
Love: Eros, Philia, Agape

Episode 16: Christianity and Agape

Agape Love
Agape and Forgiveness
Saul and the Followers of the Way
Paul’s Awakening Experience
The Most Excellent Way of Paul
Inner Conflict and Projection

Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia

Live Options/Worldview Viability
Sensibility Transcendence | John Wright
The Unthinkable | Harry Frankfurt
Existential Inertia, Being Stuck
Being Stupefied by Possible Transformation
Aspect Disguising
Bleed and Play
Enactive Analogy
Enactive Anagoge
Gnosis

Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism

Gnosticism
The Demiurge
Desacralizing the Gods
Gnostic Remix of Christianity
Some Gnostic Movie Myths
Dark Side of Gnosticism
Modern Gnostic Thinkers: Tillich, Jung, Corbin
Plotinus
The One

Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas

Decline of the Ancient World and Manicheanism
Augustine’s Suffering and the Pear Tree
Mystical Falling
Love and Reason
The Normative Order
The Orders of Meaning: Nomological, Normative, Narrative
Coherence, Significance and Purpose | Samantha Heintzelman
1054: The Sacred Canopy and the Great Schism
Lectio Divina
From Avicenna to Averroes
Intensive Self, In Your Head | F. Edward Cranz
Aristotle as a Problem for Christianity
Thomas Aquinas’ Task
The Divorce of Heaven and Earth

Episode 20: Death of the Universe

Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics’ Spirituality
William of Ockham, God’s Will and Nominalism
The Black Death
Commercial Incorporation and the Secular State
The Copernican Revolution
Galileo and Inertial Motion
Galileo’s Scientific Method and Worldview

Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes

Martin Luther and Salvation
Luther’s Cultural Individualism and Narcissism
Sapiential Obsolescence
Priesthood of All Believers
Protestant Work Ethic, Unconscious Prosperity Gospel
The Protestant Reformation and the Withdrawal of God
Psychotechnology of Cartesian Graphing
The Quest for Certainty
Thomas Hobbes, Cognition is Computation

Episode 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes

Descartes vs. Hobbes on Meaning and Rationality
Objective Matter and Subjective Qualia
Cogito Ergo Sum
Strong AI/AGI and Weak AI | John Searle
Existential Cost of Mind/Body Dualism
Blaise Pascal and the Spirit of Finesse

Episode 23: Romanticism

Immanuel Kant and Filter-Framing
Romanticism and Imagination and Romantic Love
Romantic Pseudo-Religious Ideology
Arthur Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Will to Live
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Will to Power

Episode 24: Hegel

The Real is the Rational, the Rational is the Real
Hegel’s Dialectic
Secularizing Ideology of German Idealism
Kierkegaard’s Existential Critique of Hegel
Marx’s Communist Manifesto

Episode 25: The Clash

Germany and Nationalism
World War I and the Weimar Republic
Adolf Hitler’s Struggle and Nazism
World War II and the Clash
The Meaning Crisis, Our Dilemma
Scientific Study of Mind

Episode 26: Cognitive Science

Equivocation
Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration
Aptness of Metaphors
Convergence/Elegance, Deepity, Motte and Bailey | Daniel Dennett
Practical Induction, Meaning Cultivation | Elijah Millgram, Heidegger
Intelligence | Simon1 & Binet, Newell & Simon2

Episode 27: Problem Formulation

Combinatorial Explosion of the Problem Space | Keith Holyoak
Algorithms and Rationality | Newell and Simon, Polya
Heuristics and Bias | Newell and Simon, Polya
The Naturalistic Imperative in Cognitive Science
Essentialism Heuristic
Problem Formulation, Ill-Defined Problems | Kaplan and Simon

Episode 28: Convergence To Relevance Realization

Psychological Similarity and Categories | Goodman, Barsalou
Frame Problem Robot, Behavioral Side Effects | Dennett, Shanahan
Implicature | H. P. Grice
Maxims of Communication | H. P. Grice, Sperber and Wilson
Convergence to Relevance Realization
The Awakening Project

Episode 29: Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization

Aspectual Representations | John Searle
Fingers of Instantiation/Demonstrative Reference | Zenon Pylyshyn
Implication, Inference, Cognitive Commitment | Fodor, Cherniak
Rules, Judgment, Situational Awareness | Harold Brown, Wittgenstein
Constitutive Goals and Autopoietic Systems
Episode 30: Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory
Systematic Import and Essences | Mill, Quine, Wittgenstein, Searle
Dynamical Systems Theory of Cognitive Interactional Fittedness
Bioeconomic Norms and Opponent Processing

Episode 31: Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI

Transjectivity and Embodied-Embedded Relevance Realization
Efficiency/Resiliency Constraints, Cost Functions for Dynamic-Developmental Virtual Engines
General Intelligence as Relevance Realization | Spearman, Ferraro
Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
Self-Organizing Criticality of the Brain | Per Bak
Psychometrics of GI and Self-Organizing Criticality | Thatcher et al.
Small-World Networks | Milgram, Brede, Langer et al., Hilger et al.
Structural-Functional Organization of RR/GI/Consciousness
Salience Landscaping and Layers of Construal | Matson
Aspectuality, Centrality, and Temporality of Consciousness
Relevance realization as the basis of the A.C.T. of consciousness is always an aspect of caring

Episode 33: The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness

Phenomenology of Religio and Spirituality
A Secular Wonder | Paolo Costa
Wonder and Awe, Curiosity | Robert Fuller, Fredrickson
Mystery and Insight, ‘I’ vs ‘Me’ | Gabriel Marcel, William James
The Sacred, Sacredness, and Religio | Friedrich Schleiermacher
Meta-Meaning Systems and Domicide | Clifford Geertz, Brian Walsh

Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol

The Numinous and Horror | Rudolf Otto
Intercategorical Monsters | Mary Douglas, Jonathan Pageau
Sacredness as Higher-Order Relevance Realization
Music and Sacredness
Symbols and Signs | Black, Ortony
Metaphorical Cognition | Lakoff & Johnson, Kennedy & Vervaeke
Symbols and the Self-Exaptation Machine | Michael Anderson

Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

Examples of Participatory Symbols, Symbolic Resonance
Ecstatic, Participatory, Integrative-Anagogic, Complex Symbols
Mythos, Religio, and Sacredness
The Sacred

Episode 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Eng. Enlightenment

Indispensable Mythos
Perennial Problems and Ecologies of Practices
Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
The Perennial Problems of Meaning-Making
The Reflectiveness Gap | J. David Velleman, Harry Frankfurt
The Absurd | Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, Monty Python

Episode 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment: Part 2

Schematic of Enlightenment
The Parable of the Goldsmith | The Buddha
Scientia Intuitiva | Baruch Spinoza
Inner Dialogue with the Sage | Antisthenes, Michael Polanyi
Communitas, Authentic Relating | Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner

Episode 38: Agape and 4E Cognitive Science

Subjective Attraction and Objective Attractiveness | Susan Wolf
Meaning in Life and Agape
4E Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended
Emergence of the Mind and Self-Transcendence
Emotions
Positive Psychology and Excellence
The Sacred Depths | Ursula Goodenough
The Narrative Order Repurposed as Open-Ended Optimization

Episode 39: The Religion of No Religion

Religio vs. Credo
Signal Detection and Setting the Criterion
Cognitively Informed Mythos (Unconscious, Conscious, Cultural)
Structural Features of a Religion of No Religion | Jordan Hall Open-Ended Credo Wiki | Konstantinos Xanthios
Reflective Equilibrium on Wisdom | McKee & Barber 1999

Episode 40: Wisdom and Rationality

Wisdom vs. Knowledge | McKee & Barber, Stanovich, John Kekes
Rationality and Expertise | Keith Stanovich
Irrationality Experiments | Keith Stanovich and others
The Rationality Debate, Normative Standards | L. Jonathan Cohen

Episode 41: What is Rationality?

Systematic Error | Piaget, Chomsky, Stanovich and West 2000
The Finitary Predicament | Christopher Cherniak, Herbert Simon
Computational Limitations, Rationality vs. Intelligence
Fallacy and Misunderstanding | Jan Smedslund 1970
Normativity on Construal, Cognitive Styles | Stanovich and West Active Open-Mindedness | Jonathan Baron, Keith Stanovich

Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom

Psychotechnology
Problem Finding | Patricia Arlin 1990
Affectivity of Need for Cognition
Dual-Processing Theory | Stanovich & Evans, Baker-Sennett & Ceci
Active Open-Mindedness and Mindfulness
Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom
Growth Mindset | Carol Dweck

Episode 43: Wisdom and Virtue

Wisdom as the Meta-Virtue | Schwartz and Sharpe
Phronesis and Sophia
Berlin Wisdom Paradigm | Baltes and Staudinger
Episode 44: Theories of Wisdom
Wise People, Interpretive Knowledge | Monika Ardelt, John Kekes
Balance Theory of Wisdom | Robert Sternberg 1998

Episode 45: The Nature of Wisdom

Integrative Internalization | John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro 2013
Sophrosyne
Understanding | De Regt and Gijsbers 2017
Profound Understanding
Aspiration and Proleptic Rationality | Agnes Callard
What is Wisdom?

Episode 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis

Wise Cultivation of Enlightenment
Prophets of the Meaning Crisis Roadmap
Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology
Heidegger’s Criticisms of Husserl’s Phenomenology
Dasein

Episode 47: Heidegger

On the Essence of Truth
The Ontological Project, Philia Sophia
The Thing Beyond Itself
Truth as Aletheia and the Frame Problem
Aletheia and Gnosis
The Independence of Being

Episode 48: Corbin and the Divine Double

The Rose
The Tao
The Imaginal
Features of Imaginal Symbols
The Angel
Liberation

Episode 49: Corbin and Jung

Self-Creation
The Divine Double
The Sacred Second Self and the Archetypes

Episode 50: Tillich and Barfield

The Courage to Be and Faith as Ultimate Concern
God
The Method of Correlation and Ekstasis
Living Symbols
The Response to Faith
Epektasis and Theonomy
The God Beyond the God of Theism
Poiesis
Original Participation and the Meaning of Words
Final Participation

Episode 1: Introduction

A Confluence of Positive Factors in Contemporary Society (0:55 to 5:13)

A growing confluence of people interested in Buddhism and in cognitive science. The Mindfulness Revolution: mindfulness is spoken of everywhere. Wisdom is popular in psych. and cog. sci. (e.g. The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom) Popular wisdom books based on Hellenistic philosophy (e.g. How to be a Stoic) Increasing academic and public interest in psychedelic experiences. (e.g. Transformative Experiences) Psychedelics boost recovery rate for PTSD from 20% to 80%. Huge public and academic interest in happiness, well-being and meaning in life. (e.g. Meaning in Life and Why it Matters) There is a unifying account for why all of these things are happening right now.

A Convergence of Dark Factors in Western Culture (5:14 to 10:13)

CDC data shows we are going through a mental health crisis: suicide is spiking. People are losing touch with reality; nihilism, cynicism, frustration and futility, bullshit. (see On Bullshit, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis) Abandonment of trust in any public institutions (politics, judicial system, religion) Connection between virtual/social media usage and increased depression and loneliness. Zombies and superheroes are so big right now because they are mythological forms expressing a cultural sense that we’re “stuck” somehow. Pervasive use of language in society of crisis, collapse and apocalypse. This was once considered a science-fiction type of event, but is now becoming a background sense. This is all indicative of a meaning crisis that is interacting with other crises we’re facing.

What is Meaning? Why do we hunger for it? How do we realize it? (10:14 to 15:05)

Wisdom is ultimately about realizing meaning in life in a profound way. Realizing meaning in life is about both becoming aware of it and making it real. This course will cover the meaning of wisdom both theoretically and practically. What role do mindfulness practices play within the cultivation of wisdom? What is Meaning? Why do we hunger for it? How do we cultivate wisdom to realize it? Self-transcendence is a core need for humans, and is bound up with wisdom and meaning. Caledonian crows roll down roofs to become dizzy and alter their state of consciousness. Humans develop processes for generating, harnessing, and interpreting altered states. Research shows that human lives get better after having an awakening experience. We may be able to develop a cognitive, scientific account of what enlightenment is.

Foolishness, Absurdity, and Despair (15:06 to 17:47)

A profound connection between meaning-making, and self-deception/self-destruction. Bullshit is a perennial threat to us, and there’s a reason why we’re so awash in bullshit. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge; foolishness is a lack of wisdom. Foolishness is when a capacity to engage your agency and pursue your goals is undermined and threatened by self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. The very same machinery that makes you so adaptively intelligent is the same machinery that makes you susceptible to foolishness. (meaning-making and self-deception) Existential experience of meaning crisis includes absurdity, alienation, futility, horror, and meaninglessness as a state of despair. From the historical origin of the meaning crisis, to a cognitive-scientific study of meaning.

Knowing and Meaning (17:47 to 21:09)

The word “meaning” is a metaphor. Something in life is analogous to the meaning of a sentence: the pieces fit together, impact your cognition, and connect you to the world. What does the metaphor of “meaning” point to? Why are some of the most meaningful experiences we have completely ineffable to us? Some kinds of knowing have fallen off our cultural radar, because of the meaning crisis. Due to the meaning crisis, our culture reduced knowing to having justified, true beliefs; therefore, we are very belief-centric and fixated upon ideologies. Knowing-how to catch a baseball, experiential knowing, participating in a relationship. In therapy the patient tries to recover these other types of insights in order to cause a transformation in their sense of self and sense of realness.

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (21:09 to 24:20)

We will make the structural-functional account and the historical account of meaning talk to each other. They will inform, constrain, and enable each other. From that dialogue, I propose a real response to the meaning crisis, not in an ideological fashion, but in a profound, transformative and existential manner. The meaning crisis is not a problem for which there are simplistic answers. I will build an argument to show how we can awaken from the meaning crisis, and how it interacts with the mental health, environmental and socio-economic crises. Rigorous, rational argumentation; proper scholastic credit to others; jargon and technicalities kept to a minimum; why I think my viewpoint is highly plausible. I’m not (and nobody should be) claiming to offer you the absolute, uncontested truth.

The Upper Paleolithic Transition (24:20 to 27:48)

The deep connections between meaning-making and cognition is a continuum question, going back into our evolutionary heritage, way before our humanity. The Upper Paleolithic Transition (about 40,000 B.C.E.) is not an absolute starting point. It marks the beginning of what we would recognize as the kind of people we are today, as meaning-makers, although our biological species has existed since 200,000 B.C.E. There is a radical change where human beings are starting to make representational art, such as sculptures, cave paintings, and there is evidence of making music. We have the first use of calendars, not with numbers and dates but with a symbolic representation of the phases of the moon and the passage of days. Humans are keeping track of time across abstract patterns to enhance their hunting ability.

Projectile Weaponry and Intelligence (27:48 to 30:08)

Intrinsic to our humanity is our development of projectile weapons. The Neanderthals, who are contemporaneous with Homo Sapiens, didn’t have projectile weaponry. Their spears are thick-shafted with heavy stone, used as thrusting tools. The Homo Sapiens develop very thin spears, not with stone tips but bone tips. Bone is much harder to use, but is more light-weight and very good for projectile weapons. The spear-thrower required increased development of your frontal lobe area, which is important for the enhancement of intelligence. You talk about how you have a project you’re working on; project means “throwing.” An object is over there; object means “thrown against.” Subject means “thrown under.” Throwing at moving targets is very complex; a difficult problem for artificial intelligence.

Socio-Cognitive Response to Disaster (30:09 to 35:00)

Before the UPT, between 30,000 and 60,000 B.C.E., humankind nearly went extinct; may have been due to the last ice age in Africa, and a supervolcano eruption 70,000 years ago. A tremendous pressure is put on human beings; they move to the coasts to survive. Humans respond not by a technological response, but a socio-cognitive one. They create social trading networks so they are not as subject to localized environmental variation. This opens up the scale at which human cognition must operate; ritual practices develop. A radical change in human cognition during UPT makes art, music, time and space more “meaningful.” (e.g. Supernatural Selection, “Did Meditating Make Us Human?”) Culture networks brains together, providing our most powerful problem-solving abilities. Civilization means being with many strangers; we have to relate to people who aren’t kin.

Trade Rituals and Initiation Rituals (35:00 to 39:14)

Trade rituals enhance our ability to come into relationships of trust for individuals we don’t personally know. A handshake or “How are you?” gives us intuitive information. Trade rituals require the skill of knowing how the other person feels, going from a first-person perspective to a third person perspective really well. (e.g. Mindsight) As you increase your ability to pick up on other’s mental states, you also increase the ability to pick up on your own mental states; meta-cognition and mindfulness. But, as you interact with all of these people, loyalty to your group is more in question. “Temptation from the stranger” is now part of all of our myths. Initiation rituals often require risk, threat, and sacrifice; regulation of emotions; a non-egocentric perspective where you are in the hands of other people.

Cognitive Exaptation (39:14 to 49:41)

Exaptation, in biological terms, is an evolutionary mechanism; we use the same tube for breathing and for food. Evolution is not an intelligent designer. Tongues did not evolve for speech but to flexibly move food in your mouth and to detect poisons in a highly sensitive manner. The tongue was then exapted into a new purpose. The brain will also develop a “mechanism” or set of cognitive processes for doing one thing, and then it will learn how to reuse that to do something entirely different. (see Michael Anderson’s After Phrenology) Enhanced mental abilities from the trade and initiation rituals are exapted into shamanic rituals. Becoming aware of the mind, controlling the mind and emotions are being trained. Humans, because they’re intelligent creatures, seek out altered states of consciousness.

Psychotechnology (39:14 to 42:29)

Technology means the systematic use of a tool. Your brain has evolved across several species to use tools. You will quickly model a tool as part of your body (parking a car). You have evolved to be integrated with machines. You are a Natural-Born Cyborg. Your brain’s ability to attach to a tool can be exapted, moving off of a physical thing and onto a cognitive thing. Physical tools fit your biology, while psychotechnologies fit your brain and enhance the software of your cognitive machinery and how it operates. Literacy is a set of tools that standardize how you process information. You can write things down and link your brain to iterations of its thinking over time. You can also share your thoughts with other people to improve the ability to solve problems.

The Shaman (42:30 to 49:41)

Shaman means “one who knows,” “one who sees,” “one who has insight.” Shamanic figures are pervasive historical figures in hunter-gatherer groups, reducing discord and enhancing hunting abilities of the group. (Michael Winkelman) The shaman has become an archetypal figure for us. (Wise Old Man, Yoda, Merlin) Shamans try to get into a certain state by sleep deprivation; long hours of singing, dancing and chanting; imitation of animals; social isolation in the wilderness; use of psychedelics. The shaman is like a super rock star, therapist and artist, all in one individual who would come to you when you are sick. They even aid in triggering your own placebo efffect. Shamanism is a set of attentional practices that disrupt every-day framing in order to get enhanced insight into patterns in the world, transforming the sense of self and reality.

Cognitive Exaptation of Psychotechnologies in Shamanism (49:41 to 58:38)

Shamanism includes a cultivated practice for altering states of consciousness, exapting enhanced mindsight and the ability to control mental and emotional states. The shaman brings an altered state by manipulating the meaning of things; this is not the same thing as being a charlatan. If you don’t recognize supernatural abilities or spirits, then an alternative explanation must be sought for why shamans are so effective, and central to the UPT. The advent of shamanism helps to explain the sudden explosion of cognition among humans; not a “hardware change” of the brain as much as a “software change.” There is a connection between meaning-making, altered states of consciousness, and enhanced capacity to be in touch with the world.

The Nine-Dot Problem (51:22 to 54:56)

The way you find patterns is very profound. This problem requires you to join all nine dots of a 3×3 grid, with four straight lines. When people see the solution, they get angry and say you cheated by leaving the grid. Normally you’re not supposed to make a non-dot turn, but in this problem, you have to. You projected a pattern onto the problem, and unconsciously used the skills you have; you got “locked” into a pattern and “blocked” from the solution. In order to get an insight, you have to disrupt your framing. Giving people the belief that they have to “think outside the box” does not help them to solve this problem. Don’t reduce all your sense of knowing to believing. Here you have to know-how to solve the problem; how to alter attention, what is salient and relevant, what is important and real.

[Go back to the index]

Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution

Flow (2:53 to 11:15)

Flow was made famous in the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1990, called Flow. The flow state is when the demands of a situation just slightly exceed your skill abilities. When your skill is just enough to meet the demands, then you move to the flow channel. If skills exceed demands, you get bored. If demands exceed skills, you get anxious. Humans learn in new situations quickly. To stay in flow the challenges must rise as well. Flow is a universal for humans; meaning in life; cascade of insights; implicit learning. Enhanced sense of connectedness; spontaneity; it just flows out of you; at-one-ment; it takes effort, but feels effortless; sense of self is altered; time is passing differently; the world seems more intense; autobiography, image management and rumination disappear. Many regard the flow state as where they do their best work that they want to excel in.

Video Games as Flow Induction Machines (4:56 to 6:18)

In our culture we’ve created flow induction machines. These machines enable a situation where both your skills and the environmental demands are constantly improving. Important properties of these machines includes: a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds; you get very clear information; failure matters, at least symbolically, because you can “die.” Video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people. Video games are now considered a bonafide addiction by the World Health Organization, and part of the reason they are addictive is precisely because they engender the flow state. Addictions run off of machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive; that’s why it’s compelling. The flow state is not about physical pleasure, but is more connected to meaning in life.

The Universality of Flow (6:18 to 8:07)

The flow state is deeply positive for people. The flow state is not about physical pleasure, but is more connected to meaning in life. To get in flow, people do things like playing jazz, doing martial arts, playing video games, and rock climbing. If rock climbing didn’t get you in flow it would be torture. The more often you get in flow, the more likely you are to rate your life as meaningful, and with a sense of well-being. The flow state is a universal. People across cultures, socio-economic groups, genders, languages, environments, age groups, report being able to get into the flow state. People describe the experience of flow in detail almost exactly the same way. Universals are important in cog. sci.; they give profound insight into the machinery.

Cognitive Mechanisms of the Flow State (11:16 to 15:57)

John Vervaeke, Leo Ferraro, and Arianne Herrera-Bennett’s research Csikzentmihalyi tells the environmental conditions needed for flow: skills and demand match; tight coupling between you and environment; clear information; failure matters. Csikzentmihalyi tells the training to get in flow; more mindfulness, easier to reach flow. Unified explanation of the phenomenology of flow and why it improves our cognition. You frame and find patterns for knowing-how to make sense: break frames, restructure, change what patterns you find relevant and salient, change yourself to fit the new frame. Whereas an “aha moment” is a flash of insights, flow involves a cascade of insights. Flow involves training ability for insight in direct interaction with the environment, and it also has to do with your capacity for implicit learning.

Implicit Learning Experiments (15:57 to 21:02)

Reber’s experiment: create arbitrary sets of rules for linking strings of letters and numbers together; show people 8- or 9-letter strings (long enough not to be held in working memory) based on the rules, and show these to people; mix two lists that do & don’t follow the rules. People score well above chance on sorting these strings consistently but can’t say the rules. (see Reber’s Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge) Being stared at experiment: blindfolded people in a room reliably reported that someone was there. But they got feedback from researchers; they implicitly learned a pattern. Researchers thought they introduced starers to the room randomly, but they were wrong. A lot of what looks like psychic abilities are your ability to pick up on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it, or of how you’ve done that.

Intuition and Implicit Learning (21:04 to 25:23)

Hogarth claims what we call intuition is a result of implicit learning; not magical. Dreyfus: knowing-how far, what angle, in what contexts, to stand from somebody, but not being able to put it into words. When people don’t know-how to do it, it creeps you out. (see Hogarth’s Educating Intuition, Schear’s Mind, Reason, and Being-In-The-World) Intuition for when implicit learning is going well; bias and prejudice for when it’s not. Example: the bigot has intuitions about races that are wrong. Implicit learning picks up on patterns in the environment, but sometimes differentiates between the causal and correlative patterns improperly. Example: Correlation between how large a wedding is and how long the marriage lasts. Many patterns in the world are illusory because they’re only correlational and not causal.

Science, Implicit Learning, and Flow (25:23 to 28:49)

Implicit learning should pick up on real causal patterns, not illusory correlational ones. Explicit learning can’t replace implicit learning; it works so well because it is implicit. We can adjust contextual and environmental factors so that the implicit learning machine tends to grab onto causal patterns rather than correlational patterns (good/bad intuition). For Hogarth, science is a way of setting up to distinguish causal/correlational patterns: everything is measured with clear information; tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds; error matters, disconfirmation has to be possible. Vervaeke et al. argue that these criteria for turning intuition into good implicit learning are the exact conditions for flow. In the context of flow, there is a greater chance implicit learning machinery picks up on the causal patterns rather than the correlational ones.

Flow and Shamanism (2:14 to 31:24)

Shamanism, meaning-making, wisdom, altered states of consciousness are all interrelated. The shaman’s practices produce changes in attention and operation of the brain. Tremendous metabolic energy at work in chanting and dancing; telling stories, altering people’s sense of self; probably a set of practices for training getting in the flow state. (Insight cascade and enhanced implicit learning into complex patterns in the real world) In the flow state is something almost like a mystical experience. Altered states of consciousness enhance and alter meaning-making, afford insight, and improve hunting ability and healing, thereby also improving survival. This is all intuitive and the shaman doesn’t know how they are doing it. An expert at getting into the flow state, the shaman is important to have around.

Metaphor (31:24 to 35:42)

The word metaphor is itself a metaphor, meaning “to bridge” or “to carry over.” Your thought and language are “filled” with metaphor, and cognition functions through metaphorical enhancement (see Metaphors We Live By). Metaphorical cognition is how you make creative connections between ideas; it is at the heart of both science and art. Cognition, meaning and altered states of consciousness come together in the embodied mind generating metaphor in order to make insightful and intuitive connections. There’s a deep connection between how insightful a problem solver you are and your capacity for metaphorical thought. We tell someone to use an analogy to solve a problem, or to think of a metaphor to re-frame the problem. You take this ability for granted, thinking metaphor is just a normal part of your cognition.

Metaphor in Shamanism (35:42 to 37:33)

Shamans enhance the ability of their cognitive machinery to use metaphors, connecting areas of the brain that normally don’t talk to each other. The shaman develops psychotechnologies for altering their consciousness to get in flow. The flow state makes them more insightful and intuitive, as well as enhancing metaphor. Shamans provide people with the forms of thought that allow them to connect ideas and literally make more meaning; inscriptions on a piece of bone can track the moon. Shamans weave [ideas?] together, improving our capacity to make sense of the world. A hunter-gatherer group that has a shaman will out-compete groups that don’t. There’s a reason why shamanism and flow are universal, this exapts some of our most basic machinery and enhances it in a powerful way.

Soul Flight (37:34 to 39:31)

Shamans go through a transformation, experiencing what is called “soul flight.” It is as if they’ve gone to another world and they’re flying through it and above our world. This is the origin of our phrase “getting high.” The shaman gets a much more comprehensive grasp of more complex patterns, but they are experiencing it mostly metaphorically and intuitively. Why would the brain generate this? They get a bigger picture of things, or an intuitive, insightful grasp. We explain this as someone having “oversight” or “supervision.” Nowadays this refers to someone in charge. Whispers of shamanic flight, expressions of a deeper connection to the world.

The Neolithic Revolution (39:31 to 41:13)

The UPT was when meaning-making, altered states, self-transcendence and cultivation of wisdom are all associated with a lot of things we consider “spiritual” and “religious.” Around 10,000 B.C.E. the Neolithic Revolution gives the invention of agriculture. This is important because it adds to the meaning-making machinery. People start to form complex societies, living with large groups of strangers. For the first time, people stay in one place for a significant amount of time. Their relationship to the environment, to each other and themselves changes. After a very long period of development, this world then becomes the ancient world. As stone gives way to metal, we reach the Bronze Age with the first great civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The Bronze Age Collapse (40:36 to 47:56)

As stone gives way to metal, we reach the Bronze Age with the first great civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Sumerians are also extremely important and long-lasting. People have developed rituals into very sophisticated and complex systems, and they use altered states of consciousness. The Bronze Age ends with the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever known. The fall of the Roman Empire is nowhere near as devastating as this. More cities die out at this time than any other in recorded human history; the greatest loss of literacy and collapse of trade, this is the closest the world has actually come to the end. Cultures that lasted for millennia disappear. After the Bronze Age is a dark age. (see The End of the Bronze Age; 1177 B.C.)

The Axial Revolution (40:36 to 47:56)

After the dinosaur-like empires of the Bronze Age pass away, a lot of little, small-scale societies barely hanging on start to evolve. Heavy demand is made on cognition to adapt. This is another bottleneck kind of event like the UPT, where people are more willing to experiment; they try new forms of social organization and invent new psychotechnologies. This could have been a one-shot event or a continuum event; not necessary to determine. Karen Armstrong has made famous Karl Jasper’s talk of the Axial Age in a recent book. Something happened during the Axial Revolution (800 B.C.E. to 300 B.C.E.) that is formative of human beings in Western civilization, or even world civilization. The AR has impacted what we find relevant from the past: the Bible, Plato, the Buddha or Confucius are more relevant to us than the Epic of Gilgamesh or Egyptian mythology.

Alphabetic Literacy and Second-Order Thinking (47:56 to 52:48)

In a place hit hardest by the Bronze Age collapse (modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, what had been called the Land of Canaan), a new form of literacy is invented. Egyptians had hieroglyphics, Sumerians had Cuneiform, etc, but these forms of literacy are very difficult to learn; some people even had the job of being literate, called scribes. The Canaanite alphabet merges imperceptibly into archaic Hebrew, and is then taken up by the Hebrews. The Greeks will receive the alphabet from the Phoenecians. Alphabetic literacy is much more learnable, effective and efficient as a psychotechnology. By writing things down I can reflect on my thoughts later, becoming more aware of them. Because of alphabetic literacy, there is an increased capacity for what Robert Bellah calls second-order thinking; people internalize psychotechnologies into their metacognition.

Coinage and Second-Order Thinking (52:27 to 55:38)

Empires like that of the Assyrians in the Middle East are being rebuilt in the Axial Age. Mobile armies are afforded by the invention of coinage. Money is in one sense a physical technology, although less so today. Abstract, logically rigorous thought is being trained for practical purposes in money. The second-order thinking used to handle money (and in literacy) is ready for exaptation. People start to have a very clear sense of how much they can correct their cognition and transcend themselves, as well as their awareness of how self-deceptive they are. People recognize how there is a lot of error in their cognition. Previously people couldn’t be aware of this, but now with second-order thinking, with literacy, abstract symbolic thought and numeracy, they can become aware of this.

Axial Age Self-Understanding (55:38 to 57:16)

Because of second-order thinking, people start to realize their capacity for self-correction, and their capacity for self-deception. People realize a more personal sense of responsibility; changes in moral thinking. Before the AR, people thought of chaos, warfare and violence as part of the natural order. After the AR, they think they are responsible for chaos in how their mind makes meaning. The Dhammapada begins, “The mind is the chief thing.” It also says, “There is no enemy greater than your own mind, but there is no ally greater than your own mind.” Undisciplined, cognition leads to violence through self-deception and illusion. Disciplined, through self-correction and self-transcendence, cognition leads to wisdom and the ability to reduce the violence and suffering.

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Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar

Myth (3:40 to 10:35)

The way Vervaeke uses the word “myth” is influenced by Jung (Man and His Symbols), Tillich, and Victor Turner. By myth we tend to mean a false story about the ancient past that is widely believed. Myths are symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always with us. A lot of what myth does is an attempt to take these intuitive, implicitly learned patterns and put them into some form that is shareable with ourselves and with each other. During the Axial Revolution, the mythological framework, and the way people are framing themselves and their world, changes. The Axial Age is marked by a mythology of the transformation of mind/heart. Mythology isn’t about a literal scientific thing, nor is it merely what we call metaphorical.

Continuous Cosmos (5:20 to 9:40)

Charles Taylor referred to Bronze Age human experience as the Continuous Cosmos. There is a sense of connectedness, pervasive even back in the Shamanic world. Human beings experience themselves in a radical and deep continuity between the natural world and the cultural world, and between the cultural world and the world of the gods. The differences between these worlds are not so much differences in kind as in power. It’s not odd that animals might talk, or for a pharaoh to think themselves godlike. Reality is primarily about power; the gods are more glorious than us, not moral exemplars. Time unfolds in large, repeating cycles through eternity; you want to fit into the pattern. You want to tap into the creative power of the creation of the universe, through rituals. Nostalgia for the past: changing the future can undermine the past. You want harmony.

The Great Disembedding of the Axial Age (9:40 to 16:42)

Charles Taylor’s term for the transition between CC and AA. After the AA, some of our thinking is still like the mythology of CC. But, a totally different mythology of the relationship between self and world is layered on top of it. There are two worlds in the mythology of the AA, the everyday world and the real world. The everyday world is the world of the untrained mind, beset by self-deception, self-destruction, illusion, violence and chaos, where we are out of touch with reality. The real world (not necessarily a literally separate world) is how the trained mind, the wise mind, sees the world. You sense how things really are, reducing suffering/violence. We are somehow strangers in the world, pilgrims who don’t belong “here,” but “there.” The shamanic abilities are cognitively exapted into this new mythological framework.

Embedded/Disembedded Wisdom (12:00 to 15:36)

In the CC, wisdom is power-oriented. Energy keeps being put into the system, and it cycles all around. A wise person taps into the power imbued at creation into the cycles. What you want is long life, prosperity, freedom from conflict, and security for your offspring (“Live long and prosper” from Star Trek). Wisdom of CC is related to our word prudence: knowing-how to fit into power structures. In the AA, wisdom changes. You don’t want to fit into a world of suffering and violence, where you’re out of touch with what’s real (this is one of your most powerful drives). You want to be transformed out of this world, as the shaman is in soul flight. AA wisdom emphasizes how you can self-transcend, and “grow as a person.” We want to be around people who are growing up, maturing, getting in touch with reality.

Foreshadowing the Meaning Crisis (16:42 to 22:05)

Ancient Greece and Israel are the two foundational world mythologies of the West, and are deeply constitutive of how we are still in certain respects Axial in our minds. Each of the Axial hotspots developed psychotechnologies that have been internalized, as well as the Axial technologies of literacy and coinage. A lot of what seems natural to you is actually generated historically and culturally. But the Axial mythology is failing for us now; science is leveling the world and returning us to a one-world (evolution, mind-body relation; Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein) People claim to believe in the mythology of two-worlds, but can this still be practiced? For most of us, we can’t live this anymore. We still talk this way! But we can’t live it. How do we salvage the Axial wisdom and meaning when we can’t use its mythology?

Biblical Grammar (22:05 to 23:59)

Biblical illiteracy is rising. This is problematic because the 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, even atheists. The grammar of your cognition is not primarily about what you say, but how you think. This is what Nietzsche meant when he said, “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” (Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ) We still talk this way! We are still filled with the God grammar of the Bible. In movies you watch the person who “falls” somehow, and is “redeemed” somehow. Our sense of self and world is shaped by this Biblical grammar; these psychotechnologies have become part of the grammar not only of your cognition, but your existential being.

Time as a Cosmic Narrative (23:59 to 27:15)

Understanding time as a cosmic narrative or story is its own psychotechnology. All cultures tell stories, even if they view time as a series of cycles as in the CC. A story has a beginning, leads up to a crucial climax or turning point; then the resolution. In a story there’s a direction and purpose to it. The idea of cosmic history comes from using our skills for story to explain how the cosmos is unfolding through time. Cultures in the CC, with cyclical time, are condemned to repeat. This is onerous, horrible. India: you want Moksha/freedom, Nirvana/cessation, release from the purposeless cycles. Israel: the future is open. You can participate with God in this story to create the future. There isn’t a creation all-at-once in the beginning, there’s ongoing creation with history. This story operates in terms of meaning and morality; your moral choices affect history.

Ancient Israel’s god (27:15 to 31:31)

Pre-axial gods are attached to a place with a certain function, with not much moral arc. Ancient Israel’s god is not bound to time and place. (The story of Exodus in OT) God liberates the Israelites from the epitome of the Bronze Age world, Egypt, and sets them on a journey towards the Promised Land. This god moves through time and space. The OT god is the god of the open future. For the longest time, he has no name, because to name something is to locate it, specify it, to tie it down; becomes more axial through OT. Moses challenges the OT god to reveal his name; often badly translated I Am That I Am; in the actual Hebrew his name is, I Will Be What I Will Be; the god of Progress. You can participate with God to bring about a resolution, or cause things to go off course. You know the real world is not like a movie, yet you love participating in its structure.

Kairos, Da’ath and Faith (31:31 to 34:57)

The technical term kairos was developed by Tillich (Systematic Theology, vol. I); kairos is the crucial turning point, the right place and right time to turn things back on course. Da’ath is a participatory sense of knowing. There’s a course of things you’re participating in; you don’t know it just from the outside just having beliefs about it, or having skills. You know it by identifying with it: you change it while it’s changing you, immersed in it, like a stream, a course of a river. When you make love with someone, you are participating in them, identifying with them, empathizing with them, resonating with them. You change them as they change you, and it rises to a climax, turning point, and resolution. Faith was your sense of Da’ath, being involved and knowing what to do or who you need to change into when you reach a turning point.

Sin (34:57 to 37:46)

You can think you’re on course when you’re dramatically off course. In older biblical language, you’re trespassing, walking off the path. This is the basis for the word sin. Increasingly we can’t use this word sin anymore due to our biblical illiteracy. Many people treat this like a comical word. Sinning isn’t just doing something immoral. In the NT the word that translates this is like when you’re shooting a bow and arrow. You can’t shoot for where your eye tells you to look because then you’d actually miss. You need a kind of faith to sense where you should shoot, so you don’t “miss the mark.” Human beings sin. They are self-deceptive and go off course. To go from the false world to the real world, you start now and move towards the Promised Land, moving historically. God has to intervene periodically to redeem us, wake us up, and help us get back on course.

Old Testament Prophets (37:23 to 41:56)

The sense that people sin and have to get back on course leads to the prophets of the OT. A prophet is not somebody who tells the future, like some sort of psychic. Prophecy isn’t about telling you what’s going to be happening two or three hundred years from now. Prophecy means a “telling forth.” The job of the prophet is to wake you up right now to how you are off course, like the therapist who helps you realize failings in relationships. With the prophets there’s an increasing emphasis on morality of human decision making, waking people up to their moral responsibility to strive for the Promised Land. There is this idea of justice and righteousness. You think of yourself as on a journey, trying to make the right decisions, for your own life and your own culture to progress. People become increasingly committed to cultivating wisdom to deeply remember God.

Cognitive Fluency (42:56 to 45:43)

We have increasing experimental evidence for the basic fact that, when you increase the ease at which people can process information, regardless of what that information is, they come to believe it is more real and have more confidence in it and say it’s true. This could be as simple as changing the font contrast between the letters and the page. The fluency of your processing increases your sense of how real the picture it’s giving you is. It has to do with how well your brain is accessing and applying information. Enhanced cognitive fluency gives your brain an enhanced sense of being in touch. Your brain is using a good policy by using the fluency of its own processing as a measure of how much it’s in touch with reality. With a lot of cognitive fluency, you’re going to get into the flow state.

Ancient Greek Psychotechnologies (45:43 to 48:48)

Alphabetic literacy is taken to the Greeks, but they add vowels to the alphabet. This increases their cognitive fluency; this helps to explain differences of Hebrews and Greeks. The Greeks standardize reading left-to-right; the Hebrews read the opposite way. The Greeks don’t have a unified nation-state, but city-states that compete with each other. In Athens (the main hotbed of AR in ancient Greece), direct democracy starts to emerge, putting a premium on things like rational argumentation and debate. This speeds up the AR in Greece, enhancing the effects of alphabetic literacy and the use of reason and reflection. They invent mathematics and geometry, creating abstract symbol systems for its own sake. Explicit training of rational argumentation is a core psychotechnology in ancient Greece.

Pythagoras (48:48 to 51:40)

Pythagoras, along with Socrates, represents the epitome of Axial Revolution in Greece. Kornfield argues Pythagoras belongs to a group of individuals that are just coming out of the dark age around 600 B.C.E., called the Divine Men. They represent a rediscovery of shamanic psychotechnologies; capacities for healing, flying through the air, etc. This is legendary and mythological, not literal. The legend of Pythagoras points towards these important aspects: he engaged in the Thunderstone Ceremony, which involved isolation in a cave and a radical transformation; experienced soul flight; talked about liberation of the psyche from the body; discovered the octave and mathematical proportions in the world; dressed like a god.

Self-Transcendence of Pythagoras (51:16 to 54:00)

Pythagoras takes the idea of realizing abstract patterns through music and math, and links them to the shamanic project of engaging in self-transcendence. Pythagoras comes up with the idea that we’re somehow trapped in this world, but we can learn to fly freely above it, like the shaman. He allies this explicitly to the axial project of getting in touch with the rationally realized patterns, because that is what will liberate, change and transform us. Pythagoras invents the word cosmos to describe the universe (one-verse). He has the idea that we can use music and mathematical thinking and practices that engage in altered states of consciousness, integrating these somehow. By doing this we can transcend, and see the world as radically beautiful (cosmos is related to “cosmetics”).

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Episode 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom

The Oracle at Delphi (5:13 to 9:33)

Many in ancient Greece believed they could speak to the gods through oracles. The site of Delphi itself is very transformative of sense of self and the world. A woman sits in a cave on a tripod; intoxicating gases, Eucalyptus leaves. Cross-culturally, people thought to access gods by entering altered/trance states. The Pythia speaks on behalf of the gods; some males would interpret her sayings. Supernatural foresight is impossible, so an oracle won’t usually give clear answers. People can reinterpret the meaning of any event after the fact to fit the cryptic or obscure things the oracle told them. “The snow melts farther in the south.” Some of Socrates’ friends asked the Pythia, “Is there anyone wiser than Socrates?” Her response was surprising. “No. There’s no human being wiser than Socrates.”

Confirmation Porn (8:13 to 12:25)

If some sacred authority said we were very wise, most of us would be self-congratulating. Yet, this is one of the most persistent biases we have: people believe they are above average intelligence, but most people must have average intelligence (also wisdom). According to Leo Ferraro, we are entering the age of confirmation porn. People are continuously seeking confirmation for their beliefs. Our culture, through factors endemic to the meaning crisis, is exacerbating our propensity for falling into the confirmation bias. Social media technology enhances this capacity. If pornography is the gratuitous and not morally justified satisfaction of desire, then we are living in the age of confirmation porn. Socrates’ immediate response to the word of the gods, of his wisdom, is to challenge it.

Socrates’ Personal Dilemma (11:34 to 16:41)

Socrates and Plato transform the Greek gods into moral exemplars: so, it is axiomatic that the gods are disclosers of truth and can’t lie. The standard Greek myths are inaccurate. Moral exemplarism is part of the AR: the gods represent ways we self-transcend. The Greeks wed divinity and reality. Truth and sacredness bound together, unlike for us. The gods say Socrates is the wisest man; but Socrates has significant self-knowledge. “Know Thyself” is less of an autobiography as much as an owner’s manual. Socrates thought that this self-knowledge, critical awareness and sense of responsibility for your own cognition was central. Neither of this existential self-knowledge and disclosure from reality is given a greater authority. So how can it be that the wisest human being knows that he is not wise?

The Quest for Wisdom (16:28 to 19:36)

How can it be that Socrates is the wisest human being when he knows he is not wise? Socrates embarks on a quest to determine how both of these things can be true. His quest evolved naturally into the way he interacted with others. Socrates would go to purportedly wise people (including the natural philosophers and the sophists) and ask them questions. Elenchus, or the Socratic method, is a way of asking questions to draw somebody out. Socratic notions of wisdom and self-knowledge are deeply bound up with meaning in life. Pythagoras had invented the word philosophy: friendship-love of wisdom. He created a community to interact with other people in order to try and pursue wisdom (sophia). Socrates revolutionized philosophy, and differed from natural philosophers and sophists.

Thales and Natural Philosophy (19:36 to 23:55)

Natural philosophers follow the dark age; the result of a fundamental change in cognition. Pay attention to how what Thales says reveals the kind of thinking he’s creating. ALL IS THE MOIST THE LOADSTONE HAS PSYCHE EVERYTHING IS FILLED WITH GODS There is controversy over what Thales’ philosophy means; it is fragmentary and old. Aristotle interpreted the first line as meaning that everything is made of water. Although Thales’ idea is false, it’s highly rational, using reason and observation to come up with a plausible explanation of what the underlying substance is behind everything. Thales does not rely on narrative or divine agents, but is inventing scientific thinking.

All is the Moist (21:21 to 22:42)

There is controversy over what Thales’ philosophy means; it is fragmentary and old. Aristotle interpreted this first line as meaning that everything is made of water. Everything isn’t made out of water. Not just scientifically false, it’s metaphysically false. If everything was made out of water, we wouldn’t be able to identify water on its own. But look at how Thales is using reason and observation to explain the substance that underlies everything. Water surrounds ancient Greece; if you dig into the ground, you’ll hit water; water falls from the sky; everything needs water in order to live; water takes the shape of any container you put it in. Although Thales’ idea is false, it’s highly plausible and rational.

The Loadstone has Psyche (23:56 to 25:41)

The loadstone is a natural form of magnet. Magnets can move themselves and move other things around them. Psyche originally means “breath” or “wind,” but came to refer to anything that’s living, in the sense that it’s self-moving: it can move itself, and thereby cause other things to move. The magnet can move by itself, and it can make other things move. I am aware of psyche within me. I see the magnet doing something similar, and so I conclude the magnet and I both share psyche. Psyche becomes the word for mind (“psychology”). The mind is what you can move most. The mind is where your capacity to move other things starts. The possibility of a science of the psyche starts with Thales; getting at the underlying force.

Everything is Filled with Gods (25:42 to 28:14)

Despite the mention of gods, this third line from Thales isn’t a throwback to mythology. Ontology is the study of being, the structure of reality. Ontological analysis is when you use reasoning to get at the underlying structure of reality by looking at the substances and forces at work in it. This is what scientists still do today: get at the underlying stuff and forces; they try to see the depths of reality with the mind by engaging in an ontological depth perception. Thales gets an access to the depths of reality, and there he finds the gods. By this Thales is saying that this provokes awe and wonder, a sense of connecting to what is most real. Ontology is what helps Thales to make the most sense of things; this making sense of things is what it is to experience something as sacred.

Socrates’ View of Natural Philosophy (28:14 to 31:05)

Socrates was influenced particularly by the natural philosopher Anaxagoras, who was in Athens just before Socrates, and declared the sun was not a god but a hot rock. Socrates was impressed by the natural philosophers’ commitment to getting at the truth. Ultimately Socrates rejects natural philosophy, not because he rejects reason or rational analysis or argumentation; he will engage in these things multiple times. The natural philosophers don’t help Socrates with his Axial project; they give you truth of facts and knowledge, but without existential relevance, wisdom or self-transcendence. Even today, people will say (in clear or unclear ways) that our scientific worldview does not train us to become better people. Socrates’ language and tone is of disappointment; expecting more, and finding less.

The Sophists and Rhetoric (30:44 to 36:16)

There is a direct democracy (Athenian adult males) in Athens due to the AR; so your capacity for debate and argumentation is a route to power. Rhetoric forms as a psychotechnology, of ways of noticing how language and cognition interact; the Athenians cultivate standardized skills for influencing and persuading others. The Sophists separate the skills of rhetoric from any kind of moral commitment; they would teach people with opposing views how to win arguments, they didn’t care which. The Sophist is basically picking up on the fact that when we are communicating, we are being driven by what we find salient and relevant, not just what we find true or believe. Rhetoric is apparent in how modern-day advertising can manipulate you by how you make associations. You believe the ad isn’t true, but the ad makes you uninterested in truth.

Bullshit (36:16 to 43:45)

Harry Frankfurt (see On Bullshit) is interested in the difference between a bullshit artist and a liar. These are two different categories, but can overlap. A liar depends on people’s general commitment to truth and being in touch with reality. He tries to convince you something true/false is false/true, to influence your behavior. Bullshit, unlike lying, works by making you disinterested with whether what is being said is true. A bullshit artist works in terms of rhetoric, catchiness, and attention-grabbing. You associate and identify with certain things, so you get swept up and caught up in it. Meaning crisis and increasing bullshit; we separate relevance and salience from truth. You can’t lie to yourself (make-believe), but you can bullshit yourself (self-deception). Two sides to attention: you can direct your attention, but your attention can be caught.

Socratic Revolution (42:40 to 49:55)

Natural philosophers give truth without relevance; Sophists give relevance without truth. Socrates wanted both. Wants people to know how to pay attention in such a way that what is salient helps to find truth, and that the truths that are found helped to train attention. Socrates would question people and frustrate them in dialogue, leading to a state called aporia. It’s like being stunned by a stingray, you don’t know what happened. Socrates is not just a skeptic that shows nobody has any wisdom, but he is incarnating the Axial Revolution by getting each of us to realize we’re bullshitting ourselves all the time. People either don’t want to be shown these things about themselves, or they realize that they need to transform themselves and find a way to keep relevance and truth together. Socrates knew what he did not know; this is the answer to his dilemma given by the gods.

What Socrates Knew (49:55 to 53:51)

Socrates does claim to know things. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” A life in which there is no effort to put together relevance and truth would be beset by self-deception and self-destructive behavior. Socrates claimed to know ta erotika. For most of us this sounds sexual, but in ancient Greece it’s a much broader term. Socrates means he knows how to love well; not romantic love, but knowing what to care about. He compared himself to a midwife, taking the sense of what makes life meaningful and drawing people out to give birth to their better self. For Socrates, separating reason and love is one of modern culture’s greatest follies. (see Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love)

The Trial of Socrates (50:15 to 55:39)

Socrates provokes a reaction in people, either insight and transformation, or anger. So he’s put on trial. In ancient Athens you are put on trial when one citizen accuses you. The accuser and defender present their cases to a jury of 500 men, then they vote on it. Socrates was accused of atheism (teaching strange gods) and corrupting the youth. They will let him go if he agrees to stop practicing philosophy. Then he says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates is narrowly found guilty due to politics and association with corrupt people. The accusers propose that Socrates be killed, but he says continuing philosophy would be the worst penalty. So in a much greater vote, Socrates is condemned to death. Socrates is so convinced he has the right self-knowledge, that he is willing to die for it.

Shamanic Features of Socrates (55:39 to 56:41)

Socrates could stand in one place for 24 or even 48 hours meditating on his own thoughts. He was capable of controlling his body’s physiological reactions. He could drink a lot without getting drunk. Socrates could go into battle in winter without any shoes on his feet. He was famously brave. Socrates had a divine voice that, whenever he was about to do something wrong, he would hear this voice tell him not to do it. The shamanic has been carried into the Socratic in important ways. Socrates is willing to die for the kind of self-knowledge that he has to know how he works, so that he cares well and reduces his capacity for self-deception.

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Episode 5: Plato and the Cave

Sacred Plato (0:15 to 5:53)

Plato did not witness Socrates’ death, but attended his trial; was traumatized by his death. Hundreds of books are written about Plato every year; even more controversial than S. We come back to Plato’s writing periodically as a culture and it always transforms us. JV suggests the sacred is an inexhaustible fount of insight and intelligibility, transforming. Many people in the ancient world read Plato as such a sacred fount of insight/wisdom. Versluis argues that Platonism/Neoplatonism is the bedrock of Western spirituality. Plato’s dilemma: How could the Athens he loved kill the Socrates he deeply admired? Influenced by the natural philosophers, Plato gives a scientific solution to the two-worlds mythology of illusion/reality, creating the first psychological/cog. sci. theory in history. Trained with Pythagorean community // Meaning, wisdom, transcendence, altered states.

Inner Conflict of the Tripartite Soul (5:53 to 20:28)

Plato develops a theory for human foolishness, related to the experience of inner conflict. Inner conflict is when you have two strong motives working against each other. Often we are most anxious, “stuck,” and egocentric when we’re divided against ourselves. It makes rational sense to you to lose weight, yet the sweets and chocolates draw you in. You know you shouldn’t procrastinate. But you are torn, often too easily. Plato has the insight of a deep connection between inner conflict and self-d self-d. We take for granted Plato’s theory of different centers in the psyche. Each center has a different cognitive relationship to the world, and motivates us differently. Man represents reason, cares about truth/falsity, long-term planning; Monster represents appetites, cares about immediate pleasure/pain; Lion is intermediate, honor/shame, social.

Man and Monster (9:03 to 14:40)

In Plato’s tripartite soul, the Man is located in your head and represents reason/theory. The Man is motivated by what is true or false, and forms abstract thought and symbols. Opposed to the Man is a Monster, located in your stomach/genitals, representing appetite. The Monster works according to pleasure and pain, a different set of norms than the Man. Plato doesn’t think the appetites are evil. If you can’t use them, you’re dead. The Monster pursues immediate goals with a superficial appraisal. This would be appropriate in life/death situations, but the Monster often races ahead of what we know. The scope of the Man can go into very long-term goals, dealing with abstract entities like your health, or an essay. // Man can override the Monster, but only very minimally. Plato is explaining our perpetual vulnerability to salience exceeding understanding.

Lion (14:06 to 19:17)

The Lion is located in the chest, representing social motivations. Thymos is our best term. Plato’s tripartite soul explains how salience often exceeds understanding. To improve how they’re framing things, people join a group. Not just biological, but cultural creatures. The Lion is our powerful socio-cultural motivation, associated with honor/shame. Honor is to be respected by those you consider your peers; shame when you aren’t. Guilt is different from shame; you feel that you failed to meet your ideal of who to be. The Lion pursues an intermediate scope of socially agreed upon and shared goals; not short-term, nor abstract and theoretical. It works on the culturally shared meaning, not the superficial or abstract meaning. Your connection to distributed cognition increases your cognitive power over the world.

Hyperbolic Temporal Discounting (20:28 to 29:09)

Ainslie and others found that this hyperbolic discounting is universal in many species, so it is a deeply adaptive mechanism. It is more universal than the flow state. Discounting is how much you reduce salience of a stimulus, so you notice it less. The Monster can override the Man because potential future events are discounted at an exponentially higher degree than the events in the present moment. If you didn’t screen off low-chance events, you would get overwhelmed and anxious. This could explain generalized anxiety disorder. They find low-chance things too relevant. There is a problem with this (or any) adaptive machine: it blinds you to each low-chance event, thereby blinding you to what the share in common, in the abstract. The adaptive machinery makes you prone to self-d self-d behavior; must be regulated.

Inner Harmony and Connection to Reality (29:09 to 40:20)

For Plato, we use the Man to train the Lion, and then together they can tame the Monster. Socrates took reason into the social arena. Social interaction is wed to rational reflection, and people are inspired to overcome self-deception. This is why Plato wrote dialogues. Wisdom is inner justice within the psyche, so that the Man, Lion and Monster get along. For Plato, this mutuality of the most existence is to experience a fullness of being, inner harmony and peace and a reduction of inner conflict. This is one of your metadrives. If this metadrive is strong within you, then it can be appealed to Socratically. This Platonic model connects you to reality more as you reduce inner conflict and become less egocentric and self-deception goes down. Connection to reality is another metadrive. These two metadrives feed into each other; more real patterns of self-knowledge…

Myth of the Cave (40:20 to 50:27)

A pathway comes down from the surface to a cavern. People are chained to look at the back of the cave, away from a campfire. Others walk in front of the fire and cast shadows. People take echoes and shadows to be reality, they are caught up in them. An individual gets free, turns and sees the fire. They notice the real patterns, and a taste for reality develops. They journey upwards, and get blinded by the light. Their eyes have to adjust, and they step closer again to the light. They come to the surface and look for the source of light which affords the real patterns. This Sun is the source of the life of things. A glance fills them with awe. They can’t see in darkness anymore, or talk to the trapped. This is a myth of enlightenment, a way of talking about the feedback cycle of inner harmony and connection to reality. It requires participatory knowing; anagoge/ascent.

Eidos and Logos (50:27 to 56:24)

Plato uses the term eidos, which gets translated into the word form, or idea. People hear “shape” when they hear form, and idea evokes a mental concept. Plato didn’t mean these. When Plato uses eidos it’s much closer to our word paradigm, the real patterns discovered. These patterns are the affordance of our access and pathway to understanding something, as well as what makes something to be what it is in reality. You conform to it somehow. More important than a feature list of something is the structural-functional organization, the way all its features hang together in a structure as a whole. Not just a sum of its parts. This is the logos or gestalt. Research shows that people have an intuitive grasp of this, but can’t explain the logos of something when asked. You pick up many patterns implicitly. The logos is form, like formula; how the thing is integrated together, and with your mind.

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Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution

Influences on Aristotle (0:18 to 4:13)

Studies with Plato for about twenty years. “While I love Plato, I love the truth more.” Gerson and others argue that Aristotle remains a Platonist in some important senses. Aristotle was influenced by Plato’s account of what made something real for us, but this did not explain change/growth very well. Aristotle invents some important concepts related to meaningful connection to reality. He is influenced by his father, who is a physician. Plato was more prone to using mathematical analogies, while Aristotle will be more given to biological analogies. Aristotle was interested in how living things grow and develop; this is part of what we mean when we talk about a meaningful life: it grows, develops, and improves in wisdom.

Analogy of Artifacts (4:13 to 9:47)

Aristotle picks up on Plato’s notion of eidos, which forms something and lets us know it. But, he wants to account for growth and the role that form had in growth/development for living things, and to do this he employs an analogy of artifacts (man-made things). What makes a block of wood behave like a chair as opposed to a table or a ship? There is an important change from the block to the product; the block is actualized as a chair by being informed by its eidos. The wood itself is potentially a chair, table or ship. The form (eidos, not shape) of a chair makes a block of wood act like the actual chair. In this analogy, a living thing is like a chair that is making itself. Imagine a chair could impose a structural-functional organization on wood so that it started to turn itself into a chair. That’s what a living thing does, informing food intake with DNA code to grow with.

Newtonian Account of Change (10:10 to 14:51)

We have inherited a model for change from the Scientific Revolution and Newton. According to this model change occurs because of causal impact. An object that was pushed moves be-cause it was pushed. This seems obvious and noncontroversial. All change and development consists of prior events causing new events to occur. Immanuel Kant was interested in why Newton’s model rapidly overtook Aristotle’s model. This gives us a simple, linear account of how we ought to explain things. It prevents a vacuous infinite regression that can occur in circular explanations (see the homuncular fallacy). Yet this view, like many, is actually a historical creation. With this arises the question of what started the whole causal order. Perhaps it is God, but Kant argues against this.

Kant and Living Things (14:15 to 19:17)

For Kant the Newtonian account of change protects us against circular fallacies. It’s not a coincidence that Newtonian causality, which supplanted Aristotle’s emphasis on formal/final cause, has trouble with growth in living things. Kant observes a tree, and this is problematic for him. He asks what makes the tree. Sunlight gets in through a tree’s leaves. But, it’s the tree that is making the leaves; so, in some sense, the tree is making itself. Kant coins the term self-organizing for this. Living things make use of feedback cycles, so that the output of the system is fed back in the system and informs its continued development. But, with feedback cycles, we fall into circular explanations, and so Kant concludes biology must be impossible. But if science of life is possible, linear causality is wrong or incomplete somehow.

Cause and Constraint (18:33 to 26:00)

Alicia Juarrero uses Aristotle to distinguish between causes and constraints. Newtonian grammar tells us an object moves be-cause it was pushed by prior causes. In order for the object to move there must also be relatively empty space in front of it; there has to be a particular shape to it, and to the surface it is on. These are constraints. Causes are events that make actuality; constraints are conditions that make potentiality. Potential means possibilities are shaped by constraints so some events are more probable. We are fixated on causes, but Platonic Aristotle considers constraint more important. A living thing has many events happening inside it; a structural-functional organization creates an internal environment in which the probability of events is dramatically altered. This is not a circular explanation since actuality and potentiality are two different things.

Dynamical Systems Theory (26:00 to 33:12)

Alicia Juarrero points out two kinds of constraints: enabling and selective constraints. These two kinds of constraints increase or decrease variation and options for a system. Juarrero uses this to talk about the theory of natural selection, development of species. Evolution is a cycle, constantly changing to be better fitted to the environment (revolve). Juarrero describes a virtual governor that shapes and limits possibilities of a system. Vervaeke, Leo Ferraro, Anderson Todd, and Richard Wu think she should continue the metaphor: enabling constraints constitute a virtual generator for a self-organizing system. When a virtual governor and virtual generator are systematically put together so that it is regulating a feedback cycle, the whole thing is a virtual engine. This is Aristotelian. Enabling and selective constraints put together means growth isn’t random or chaotic.

Aristotle and Character Development (32:47 to 41:18)

Aristotle adds something missing from both the Socratic notion of wisdom (overcoming self-deception) and Plato’s structural theory of the psyche (explaining becoming wise). Your character isn’t your personality; strictly speaking you are born with personality. Character is that aspect of you that you can cultivate, either unconsciously or explicitly. There is a connection between virtue and the virtual engine, this is not a coincidence. Aristotle’s golden mean is a way of setting up conditions for cultivating character growth. Courage is the golden mean (not a simple average) between cowardice and foolhardiness. Character growth requires practices to address a lack of enabling or selective constraints, and slowly create a virtual engine. Are you just letting this engine run unsupervised? Wisdom is regulating self-organization so that your potential is fully actualized.

Akrasia (41:18 to 43:21)

Aristotle points out there’s a deep form of foolishness that comes from a lack of character, which he calls akrasia. We poorly translate akrasia as weakness of the will, because we’re all post-Protestants and we think the will is our central thing. There’s increasing scientific evidence that the notion of will or willpower is a defunct idea. Akrasia is when you know what the right thing to do is, but you don’t do the right thing. Plato gives a story that we have to structure the psyche, but Aristotle gives us a much more penetrating analysis of what that structural-functional organization is. Not just ignorance, but foolishness. Although you have the right beliefs (this is impotent), you don’t have sufficient character: skills, sensitivities, a virtual engine regulating growth such that you will live up to your potential, actualize yourself and do the right thing.

Living Up to Your Potential (43:21 to 47:02)

There is a developmental aspect to meaning. What is it to live up to your potential? Something is well-made when it has a structural-functional organization that allows it to fulfill its purpose. A knife’s potential is structured the right way so it can cut very well. Human beings are self-making. Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson call this autopoietic. A tornado is self-organizing, but it will move into conditions that will destroy it. Your structural-functional organization is such that you seek out conditions that protect and promote your own self-organization. You are self-making. Eric Perl in Thinking Being brings out the idea that your purpose and function is to enhance your own structural-functional organization. For Aristotle this means paying attention to how you are a rational and reflective creature.

Hierarchy of Living Things (46:02 to 52:34)

Your purpose and function is to enhance your structural-functional organization. For Aristotle this means paying attention to how you are a rational and reflective creature. There is a hierarchy of living things, starting with inorganic matter. This is informed and made into a living thing, such as a plant. Living things can get a more complex structure that makes them self-moving animals; some things have a structural-functional organization that more actualize it, making psyche for mental things such as humans. According to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, this mental capacity found in humans can be optimized so they become rational things, by deliberately cultivating character rationally. Someone who only lived as a plant would be a debauched, failed, degraded human being. We understand ourselves in contrast to animals. Your purpose is becoming fully human.

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Episode 7: Aristotle’s World View and Erich Fromm

Rationality (5:06 to 7:41)

Aristotle thought rationality was the way of defining human beings. His understanding is Axial, with this second-order thinking where you step back and reflect on the ways in which you are self-deceptive, with a capacity for self-correction. We tend to reduce rationality to the idea of being logical, but that is not its core idea. The core idea of rationality is your capacity for reflectively realizing your capacities for self-deception and delusion, and for self-correction and self-transcendence. For Aristotle, self-correction is realizing your potential through cultivation of character. The core motivation of rationality is the desire to come into as deep a contact with reality as possible, by those means that are as reliable as possible. This brought Aristotle to discuss a conformity theory of knowing and being.

Conformity Theory/Contact Epistemology (7:41 to 15:08)

We often conceive of knowing as the ability to accurately describe something. Many say that someone who only describes a chair doesn’t get its essence (Aristotelian). If you could cause a chair to be (be-cause) then you deeply grasp what a chair is. For Aristotle the chairmaker has the eidos/structural-functional organization in their mind, and they can use it to actualize the potential of wood to make the chair. When I know something, I conform to it (share in my mind the same form as the thing). The modern view of knowing makes me independent from what I know, and vice versa. Knowing by conformity enables causal interaction in a more intimate and complex way. Aristotle’s conformity theory has no distinction, as we do, between knowing and being. I am actually changing not just my beliefs and knowledge but my very structure and being.

Aristotelian Reality Check (15:08 to 20:25)

A conformity theory of knowledge doesn’t mean whatever you think is just true. What Aristotle means by this contact/participatory knowing bringing about an intimate connection between the mind and reality is that, after all the Axial Age second-order thinking, Socratic/Platonic argument and discussion, rational reflection, once we get to the eidos, we can be confident that this structural-functional organization matches reality. When we’ve made sense of things, the pattern in our mind is the same as the pattern in the world. You do these three tests all the time: you make sure that the relevant organ of cognition, attention and memory was functioning normally; you make sure the environment isn’t creating distorting conditions; then, you look for inter-subjective agreement. (confidence)

Geocentric Worldview (20:25 to 26:31)

Aristotle basically asks: What is the structure of reality, what can we all agree on? We’re at the center; this is how our perceptual cognitive systems seem to operate. Everything is made of basic elements: earth, water, air, fire. Earthen things want to move to where earth naturally is, the center; water on the surface, air is above, and fire rises up. Everything moves by a process of natural motion, has an internal drive; just like you do. Everything is purposefully trying to get to where it belongs, everything has a natural place. You are doing things to get to where you belong; when you are there, that’s the fulfillment of your goals, it makes your life meaningful in a beautiful and ordered cosmos. Until ideas of universal gravitation and inertial motion, non-geocentric views of a rotating Earth don’t make as much sense of the phenomena.

Worldview Attunement (26:31 to 37:37)

An account of the world and how you know it have strong bonds of plausibility; it makes sense of your actions, organized according to a similar meaningful structure in the world. The external world is an arena (JV & Mastropietro & Miscevic), organized such that you know how you can act in it, where things belong, appropriate actions, how to improve. You conform to the situation of an arena very powerfully as an agent (football/tennis). Within a worldview, agent and arena are coupled together, involved in a process of co-identification, determining and being determined by the other. Your existential mode has you assuming an identity and assigning an identity to an arena. Without a coherent meta-meaning relation, unfolding in worldview attunement (Geertz), none of your actions have meaning; people would say they feel existence is absurd.

The Nomological Order (37:37 to 41:04)

Aristotle gave us a way to connect intellectual understanding of the world with our existential projects of trying to feel like we fit in and belong in a meaningful fashion. Many complain the scientific worldview gives us no meaningful or existential guidance. When you have a worldview that affords ongoing worldview attunement and existential modes of agent-arena relationships, of intellectual sense-making and existential belonging, of meaning and fittedness, that is called a nomological order (nomos). This makes the universe law-like not just scientific laws, but as a cosmos that is for us; a deep convergence between our best attempts to scientifically explain the world, and our deepest efforts to existentially dwell within it. This is part of the Axial legacy. As the nomological order breaks down, we lose a sense of how we fit in and belong.

Importing Axial Age India (41:04 to 44:19)

Along with ancient Greece and Israel, India is an important locus of the Axial Revolution, and it is having a significant impact on the West with the Mindfulness Revolution. The particular form the Axial Revolution took that is impacting the West in the meaning crisis is in the generation of Buddhism and the set of practices around it. Enlightenment is largely a project of trying to deal with threats of meaning in one’s life. The Axial Age in India was driven by similar kinds of processes as in the West (coinage, alphabetic literacy, etc.), but the psychotechnologies that came to the fore are different. Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation teases out historical and cultural factors. Letting the myth and history of Siddhartha hang together is precisely how they are making an impact on the West.

Siddhartha and the Palace Myth (44:19 to 47:10)

Trying to talk about the history of the Axial Age figures is a quixotic endeavor; trying to peel away and separate them from their legacy can only be done to a certain extent. Letting the myth and history of Siddhartha hang together is precisely how they are making an impact on the West. Siddhartha was foretold to become either a great king or a really important religious figure. His father, the king, wanted his son to become a great king. In order to bring this about, he tried to prevent any trigger to a religious life devoted to Axial ideals by giving all the benefits of the pre-Axial world: power and prosperity. Marcus Aurelius’ famous quote shows how the Axial Revolution is antithetical to palace life: “It is possible to be happy, even in a palace.” This evokes an existential mode.

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (46:48 to 55:41)

Fromm talks about two existential modes we all face, organized around different kinds of needs: having needs and being needs. (similar to Martin Buber’s I-It and I-Thou) The having mode makes sense of yourself and the world, in co-identification, by making categories to efficiently and effectively control things; necessary to stay alive. Being needs are met by becoming something, ex. to become mature or virtuous. These are developmental needs, having to do with the meanings you create for your existence. Collingwood says you relate to things not categorically, but expressively, in being mode. The being mode is connected to love and anagoge; mutual, reciprocal realization. To live in the palace is to try to live everything from the having mode; this is how market is organized to induce modal confusion; cars and maturity; making love vs. having sex.

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Episode 8: The Buddha and “Mindfulness”

Myth of Leaving the Palace (5:48 to 11:28)

Siddhartha does not stay in the palace, his curiosity is too great. He goes out with his charioteer Channa. They see a sick person, old person and a funeral. Siddhartha comes into confrontation with sickness, old age and death as the way of things. The having mode (represented by the palace) has been completely undermined, and so Siddhartha is experiencing a crisis at the level of his existential mode. He orders Channa to return him to the palace in haste (to fold back into the having mode). On the way he meets a mendicant, one of the renouncers of the world of luxuries; there is a deep peace in the man’s eyes, and Siddhartha feels the contrast on an existential level. The mendicant is a confrontation with the being mode, wisdom, peace and connectedness. Siddhartha cannot find the kind of peace he wants anymore; can’t go back to the palace.

Disillusionment (11:18 to 14:42)

Siddhartha left his boyhood palace, and he can’t return anymore even though he wants to. He has become disillusioned. There are two senses to this word “disillusionment.” When we describe someone as disillusioned, we usually mean they are in a state perhaps moving towards despair; they’re sad, experienced loss; this is a negative state. But, at the heart of the word is the loss of illusion. This is an Axial Age thing. Siddhartha loses the illusion of modal confusion and the sense of belonging in the palace. Why is it after people have these awakening experiences, they feel they need to transform their whole lives, that they can’t go back, that there’s something irreversible about it? He makes a hard choice in leaving the palace, abandoning his wife and child. Fulfilling these moral responsibilities is ultimately meaningless if you’ve lost meaning.

The Renouncers (14:42 to 17:28)

Siddhartha decides to leave the palace and follow the path of the Renouncers. He is trying to cultivate a solution to the fear and turmoil still reverberating within him. Although he has left the palace, he hasn’t left the having mode, he still carries confusion. Siddhartha is pursuing asceticism, trying to subject the body to tremendous trial and pain, to bring it into complete submission. He’s practicing self-denial to avoid self-indulgence. We often do these swings between self-indulgence and self-denial. Siddhartha’s starving himself and denying any indulgences, but none of this is working. Trying to annihilate the self is still thinking about having a self, still in the having mode. He’s transferred focus from trying to having bodily things to trying to have his own self. Self-denial is merely the negation of self-indulgence, not its transcendence. (same frame)

The Middle Path (17:28 to 20:20)

Siddhartha sits on the banks of a river, fatigued. He hears a barge going down the river, and a musician is telling his apprentice, “Strings can’t be too tight or too loose!” Similarity with Aristotle’s golden mean — not a compromising, middling solution, or a middle point or average, but a radical re-formation. (optimization strategies) The Middle Path transcends the having mode by rejecting self-indulgence and self-denial. In flow you’re not trying to maximize, but optimize; getting the right connectedness. The being mode is all about being connected in the right way, and optimizing cognition. As Siddhartha realizes all this, he tumbles into the river and starts drowning. A little girl saves his life. Culturally, it’s extremely demeaning for a man who was once a prince to be saved by a little girl; points to how radical this is for him. (Bodhi Day)

Sati (Modal Re-membering) (20:03 to 24:56)

The word sati means to remember, to remind. But it’s not just remembering a fact, it’s bringing it to mind. This is a modal memory, remembering a lost mode of being. Sati is a deep restructuring of your being, not simply remembering or reminding yourself. This is like when you go back to a place you haven’t been for a while, and you start to recover and remember an identity you used to have there. It brings to mind a mode/way. Sati, participatory knowing, re-membering, belonging; translated as “mindfulness.” Siddhartha transforms psychotechnologies of mindfulness to recover the being mode, his agency and the way that the world is realized in conjunction and co-identification with it. Sati re-membering metaphorized as waking up, enlightenment, child becoming an adult. His title is the Buddha, the Awakened One. (see Stephen Batchelor’s Alone With Others)

Mindfulness, Language of Training and Explaining (24:56 to 37:26)

People say mindfulness is about “being present,” and paying attention non-judgmentally. This standard understanding does not pick up much on the notion of sati re-membering. Just as we avoid modal confusion by distinguishing the having and being modes, we can get confused on mindfulness if we forget language of training vs. language of explaining. Language of training is useful when imitation, involvement and presence are available. But, the language by which we train mindfulness should not be imported uncritically into our scientific attempts to explain it and understand it. What’s the present moment? Is it right here right now? The word “present” doesn’t have a particular meaning. It’s called an indexical, relative to what you’re considering. We need to reformulate mindfulness, so it can explain how people are awakened.

Memory Method of Location (Method of Loci) (29:04 to 35:31)

TV Sherlock Holmes uses the method of loci with his mind palace in Bangkok. Memorize a set of rooms so you can visualize them in your mind, and leave images there. This way you can unfold images/info out of the Plato room, or next to the Socrates statue. All of the images become tightly associated with each other, making memory powerful. The orators of the ancient world could use method of loci to memorize 6 hr long speeches. The method of location is powerful language of training for your memory, but this does not mean that this is how memory is really organized (the spatial metaphor of memory). Your memory does not work how a computer does memory addressing. (homunculus) Red, blue, shoe, new. Red and shoe live nearby because they’re both related to blue? What’s Meryl Streep’s phone number? Instantly you don’t know. (see Eysenck and Keane)

Science of Mindfulness (37:02 to 44:16)

We need to reformulate mindfulness so it can explain how people are awakened. Plato showed a bird is not just feathers, wings and beak (feature list) but also its eidos, the structural-functional organization. This is more of a feature schema than a feature list. Even science articles of mindfulness only give some kind of feature list for it, including being present, not judging, giving insight and reduced reactivity (equanimity). Feature list is missing the eidos that shows how these go together; distinguish features to afford a feature schema: states of being present and judging, traits of insight+equanimity. With this feature schema we can ask about causal and constitutive relations between them. How does being present cause insight? Is being present part of non-judging, some whole? And then, we answer these questions with language of _______, affording feature schema.

Being Present and Soft Vigilance | Ellen Langer (44:16 to 50:41)

What is mindfulness? People explain being present as something like concentration. But the Buddha pointed out there is right concentration (therefore wrong concentration). Some say this is “paying attention.” Here, they are probably using “spotlight” metaphor. “Spotlight” picks up on optimizing salience, but not how optimization relates to insight. Concentrate on my finger. Concentrate! Hey, listen! Pay attention! Wake up! Concentrate! Here you’re making your mind into a tunnel, and trying to stick it onto something. I want you to notice my finger is bent a little bit, thicker at the bottom, several sections… Langer calls this soft vigilance; not externally hardening your mind, but renewing interest. “Interest” comes from inter-esse, “to be within” something (Aristotle’s conformity). There is a musicality of intelligibility to this soft vigilance; not too tight, not too loose.

Attending (Paying Attention) as Cognitive Unison (50:41 to 53:30)

Attention isn’t something that you directly do. I can directly ask you to walk. Start walking, stop walking, start walking again. Practice! Come on! Practice. Start practicing now! “…practice what?” To practice chess is to optimize how you play chess; you aren’t doing two distinct actions. Christopher Mole points out you don’t directly pay attention; this isn’t obvious to us, due to prevalence of the metaphor “paying attention,” and how skilled you are at doing it. Paying attention could mean optimizing seeing so it becomes looking and watching, so hearing becomes listening; so that looking and listening are coordinated well together. Mole: cognitive unison as optimizing/coordinating process to share the same goal. This is related to Plato’s idea of getting various different systems to work well together.

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Episode 9: Insight

Awareness/Attention Exercise: Object and Probe (6:22 to 9:12)

Find some object to put on a desk in front of you or hold in your hand. Get something to use as a probe, like a pencil or pen. Close your eyes. Tap on the object continually with the probe as if you were blind. Try to figure out what the object is, and its shape, structure, weight, and density. You should be forming an image of the object in your mind, you are focally aware of it. Keep tapping, and shift your awareness into your probe, the way that it is moving around. Shift awareness into your fingers, how they are shifting and moving. Try to pick up on the individual feelings that are occurring in your fingers. Now go back. Feel how your fingers and thumb move; feel the probe move; feel the object.

Transparency-Opacity Shifting | Michael Polanyi (9:12 to 15:25)

Consider tapping on an object (cup) with a probe (pen); indwelling the probe, inter-esse. Initially you are aware of the cup, but your awareness can move into the pen, into your fingers, into your feelings/sensations. This inward attentional shift can also be reversed. When you are aware of the cup, you aren’t completely unaware of the pen, but you are aware through your pen of the cup. The pen is more transparent, the cup is more opaque. Metaphor of eyeglasses enframing your vision; you can redirect your attention to look at your glasses rather than through them. That is a transparency-to-opacity shift. (“in-out”) You have both a subsidiary or implicit awareness, and a focal or explicit awareness. Polanyi’s point is that attention is this structuring phenomena; it is always paying attention “from-to”; attention through subsidiary awareness into focal awareness. Watzl, prioritizing

Feature-Gestalt Shifting (15:25 to 21:18)

TAE CHT. The middle letters of each word are the same, but people can see “the cat.” They say the letter fits as an H in the first word and as an A in the second word. To read the words you read each letter; to disambiguate the letters you read whole word. Attention moves up and down simultaneously, between the features and the gestalt, in order to read the words. But a word is also a feature in a sentence; nothing is inherently a feature. It’s relative. Feature-gestalt shifting works in dynamic integrated way with transp-opacity shifting. Often as you move to a gestalt, you use bigger pattern to look deeply in the world. F=ma As you step back and look at your mind, awareness processes within attention, you’re also often breaking up gestalts into features; breaking an object up into moments of contact.

Observational Analysis in Meditation (21:18 to 32:39)

The word “meditation” means moving towards the center (scaling down of attention) Train people by telling them to pay attention to their breath; paying attention not to the world, but stepping back, attending to feelings and sensations of abdomen from breathing. They try to renew interest and constantly make salient their inhaling and exhaling. Is like looking at the way your mind is framing things. // Less representational/inferential Normally we don’t pay attention so much to our embodied sensations, but through our sensations to the world. Meditation involves observational analysis. (“sensations”) An observational analysis: breaking up the gestalt into separate experiences, features. De-automatizing cognition; chunk decomposition and constraint relaxation. (Knoblich) Choking: the inability to make another frame for problem solving after breaking a bad one.

Inductive Leaping and Contemplation (24:00 to 33:16)

The West oversimplifies in treating contemplation and meditation as synonymous. Wrong. From the Latin etymology, at the center of contemplation is “temple.” This comes from part of the sky you look up to to see the signs from the gods, looking up at the divine. Latin term contemplatio was a translation of Greek word theoria, seeing more deeply into reality; theoria is not just about theories. // Widening your field of awareness. Meditation moves inwards while contemplation moves outwards. // Opponent processing Ability to complete patterns in a kind of leaping. Stephen Ceci & Jacquelyn Baker-Sennett When people can scale up better, they’re better at solving insight problems. // 9-dot Scaling up can also cause you to leap into an inappropriate frame, be locked in fixation. Not static but dynamic, flowing attentional engagement, fitted to the world. // 8-fold path

Pure Consciousness Event | Robert Forman (33:16 to 37:12)

The pure consciousness event (PCE) is a mystical experience from mindfulness practices. This can occur when someone practices scaling down attention in meditative practice. When you’re practicing meditation, you try and step back to look at the lens of your mind. This is hard to maintain because of deeply ingrained habits of attending to the outer world. “I’ve gotta do my laundry, this and that.” Recenter your attention back to looking at your mind rather than through it. This is challenging, like doing reps. That’s what meditation is. You move attention to your probe, your fingers, your sensations; people who have done mindfulness practices do this more easily. Then you start looking at more subsidiary layers of your mind, the deeper layers by which you were looking at the upper layers. At a certain point you aren’t conscious of anything; just fully present as consciousness.

Resonant At-Onement and Non-Duality, Prajna (37:12 to 41:28)

By scaling up attention you can reach a view associated with Buddhism, that everything is interconnected, everything is flowing and impermanent. Involves creation of an overarching gestalt that includes and encompasses yourself. Resonant at-onement is like a “super flow state,” you are deeply at one with everything. Contemplative practices bring about an empathetic, participatory flowing. The mystical state of non-duality includes and transcends PCE and resonant at-onement. A practice: as you inhale you try to scale up, and as you exhale you try to scale down. This is one way among several of trying to reach non-dual state. Your awareness is to the deep depths of consciousness and to the deep depths of reality. This brings about a fundamental insight into existential mode of being. (Prajna, sati)

Siddhartha Gautama the Awakened One (40:40 to 44:16)

Siddhartha practiced Viapassana meditation and Metta contemplation. It seems his innovation was to conjoin the two practices, bringing radical transformation. Awakening and enlightenment. People walked down the road and got caught up in the flowing visage of his face. Grace, energy, musicality of intelligibility playing across the Buddha’s face. Gestures and motions, so beautiful, graceful, power, charismatic. Not a god, not an angelic messenger or being, not a prophet, not just a man. “I am awake.” He moves from talking about an identity he could have to a fundamental way of being. Siddhartha has fully, deeply, remembered the being mode (sati), in a fundamental insight, systematic insight, into what it is to be a human being; triggers transformative experience.

Insight, Waking Up (44:16 to 55:17)

Normally when you have an altered state of consciousness (ASC), like dreaming, you think that that world is real, but when you wake up you say “that was just a dream, this is real.” Sometimes people have certain kinds of experiences in ASC where the opposite happens. After coming out of an ASC they say, “that was really real, and this here is less real.” This sort of thing is a recapitulation of the Axial Revolution; similar to Plato’s cave myth. People want to live in greater contact with that “really real,” so they transform their whole lives and whole selves to recapture it (sati); restructuring of agent-arena relationship. Most world religions from AR are predicated on higher states encouraging transformation. Universal to human beings, 30–40% experience these events; quantum change and meaning. Often ineffable content, but optimized capacity for making sense inwardly and outwardly.

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Episode 10: Consciousness

Global Workspace Theory | Bernard Baars, Murray Shanahan (6:49 to 13:16)

A best account for functioning of consciousness: like how you use a desktop computer. You can activate a file and bring it onto the desktop where the pieces of information can interact. Any changes to files in working memory can be written back in stored memory. Similarly, you retrieve from unconscious processing in the brain into working memory. You don’t want all your “files” active at the same time, that’s a disaster. (intelligence) You have to select pieces of information for relevance, bring them together, transform them in a way that’s relevant, and then broadcast the changes back that are needed. GWT is gaining empirical evidence that this is what consciousness is functioning to do. This architecture helps us to solve the frame problem, finding the relevant information in the overwhelming saturation of information and integrations always available to us.

Integrated Information Theory | Giulio Tononi (13:16 to 17:09)

The more tight the integration of information, the more powerful is conscious processing. Information is causally dependent and affecting other pieces of information in the brain. It is this complexification of information that affords consciousness/dynamic integration. Tononi test for consciousness: give a system anomalous pictures and figure out if it makes good sense of the pictures, the degree to which it can track the complexity of the world. Are pieces of information relevant to each other? Are they relevant to you? Consciousness seems to be a way in which you coordinate attention and other related abilities to optimize how insightfully you can make sense of your world. (altered states) You need consciousness for complex situations and problems with novelty and challenge. If a problem has become very well-defined for you, then it doesn’t require much insight.

Sizing Up and Affordances | Matson, Merleau-Ponty, Gibson (17:09 to 28:21)

Consciousness makes a salience landscape by prioritizing information. (cognitive fluency) Pick out a limited set features (featurization) and prioritize some of them (foregrounding). The featurization and foregrounding works both ways (transparency-opacity shifting). Foregrounded features can be “figured out” and configured (feature-gestalt shifting). Figuration leads to the framing of problems; dynamism of consciousness gives rise to movements to reach the position of an “optimal grip” on the problem. (looking through/at) “Grip” is a metaphor for interactional contact and co-identification, creating affordances. Affordance networks coordinate constrainers so they can interact. (presence landscape) Primarily you see not colors and shapes, but affordances. (walkable, movable, graspable) Your brain is trying to figure out correlational and causal patterns. (depth landscape)

Systematic Insight | Jean Piaget, Juensung Kim (26:23 to 37:26)

It is not just an insight in consciousness, but of consciousness. // Aristotle & development Wisdom is like growing up: as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Piaget and childhood developmental psychology: of two otherwise similar rows of candy, children reliably choose the row that is spaced out to take up more space. This mistake is related to a whole system of other mistakes they’re making. (dev. stages) Where others threw away errors in IQ testing, Piaget looked for a pattern in the errors. If the errors are systematic and not random, then there are constraints at work in cognition. Development in terms of shifting constraints, shaping the kids’ sensory motor interaction. The super-salience of candy taking more space makes them prey to irrelevant information. Sizing things up and systematic tracking of presence in depth is the significance landscape.

The Problem of Ontonormativity (35:24 to 47:40)

Altered states of consciousness have the potential to provide a significance landscape. Most ASC are rejected as illusory/delusional. But with certain HSC it starts to make sense of it all, seeing through the everyday world and into the “really real” in a new way. (Plato) Higher states are prescriptive, demanding change and tapping into Platonic metadrives. Ontology has to do with structure of reality, normativity has to do with your improvement. From Griffis lab: a subset of psychedelic experiences are mystical experiences. The experience justifies, explains and motivates the changes that someone undergoes. The dream seems real when you’re in it. Out of the dream, it doesn’t cohere with your life. HSC transforms without any intelligible content; traditionally ineffable and trans-rational. At the heart of AR is this problem of ontonormativity. People’s lives do get better. (Yaden)

Solving the Problem of Ontonormativity (47:40 to 55:30)

Requires the integration of a descriptive explanation and a prescriptive account. We need a descriptive account of the underlying cognitive brain processes that explain the phenomenological, experiential nature of these states of consciousness. Why do people feel it being more real, that it justifies, empowers and motivates them to undergo transformative experience? What are the mechanisms and processes? Cognitive-scientific approach relying largely on psychology, AI and machine learning, and a neuroscientific account of brain activity and mechanisms. We need a prescriptive account that shows whether higher states of consciousness are actually a legitimate thing. Do they provide the rational justification for transformations? HSC aren’t about acquiring new evidence, nor should they challenge science. // Wisdom

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Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1

Experience of the World in Higher States of Consciousness (4:51 to 9:12)

People report a tremendous perceptual and cognitive sense of clarity. The world seems extremely clear to them and makes sense to them in a way that it hasn’t before. Perceptual clarity often experienced as bright, things are shining. (glory, the Bible, God) People also report this perceptual clarity in the flow experience: vivid, bright and intense. They describe expansion of vision, very comprehensive; aware of the whole of the world. William Blake sees the whole world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower; holds infinity in the palm of his hand, and spends eternity in an hour. Mindfulness expands attentional scaling and capacity for reframing; fundamental insight. Increased sense-making: the world is intricate and shining, it’s deeply beautiful. It’s alive. Scarry // There’s an underlying oneness to everything, a profound integration and unity.

Experience of the Self in Higher States of Consciousness (9:12 to 12:17)

People report a profound sense of peace; this is not just an empty lack of conflict. All the various components of your personality and your cognition are mutually, and optimally working together in concert. (inner harmony, anagoge, Plato) This sense of peace reportedly resonates with enhanced connectedness to reality. People are joyful. Not simply enjoyment, fun or pleasure, but the experience of goodness. The egocentric, autobiographical sense of self has disappeared, similar to flow states. They say “I remember my true self, I remember who I really am.” (sati, re-membering) A profound connection to the inward core machinery of the self, which is at one with a sense of connecting to the underlying pattern that governs and makes intelligible reality. People have tremendous energy and vitality to them, and insight and understanding. (flow)

Experience of Self-World Relation in Higher States (12:17 to 14:35)

A deep connection and connectedness, deep at-one-ment; even more so than flow states. People feel more at one with their reality, so that they feel they are participating in it. People share their identity with the world. (co-identification, conformity theory, Aristotle) This participatory knowing is so transforming that inevitably it is considered ineffable. These experiences that have no articulable declarative content are nevertheless considered so capable of bearing the signature of ultimate reality or realness for people. We do need a descriptive theory of how world, self, and their relation is experienced. There is deep continuity of higher states of consciousness with flow and with insight. People who have these HSC are also proposing profound, ineffable insight. Our insights commonly are ineffable.

Disruptive Strategies (14:35 to 17:14)

Higher states of consciousness are often preceded by disruptive strategies. They are disruptive of normal cognitive functioning and alter your state of consciousness. Long-term strategy of mindfulness practices. (meditation, contemplation, Siddhartha) These bring about an incremental disruption in your normal state of cognition. Short-term disruptive strategies include fasting and sexual and sleep deprivation. Shamans use these strategies to induce the shamanic state; drumming, and chanting. People will make use of psychedelics precisely as a disruptive strategy. We have good initial evidence that combinations of these strategies can be very good. Griffis lab 2018: mindfulness together with psychedelics can be more effective. Disruptive strategies are central to setting up insight; need to break a frame to remake it.

Decentering (17:14 to 20:34)

Ontonormative HSC predict significant improvement in family life, health, sense of purpose, spirituality, and a release from the anxiety and fear of death. (Yaden et. al 2017) When people describe their experience of the ontonormativity of HSC, they shift from a first-person, egocentric orientation to a more allocentric, third-person one. It is allocentric to describe motion relative to the North Pole rather than relative to me. Because of the intensified experience of reality in HSC people become much more allocentrically oriented. // Nirvana is to blow out, extinguish; Moksha is release. It’s like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego, and for a moment at least, or for several moments, we get release… do you not sometimes wish to be free from the prison cell of the super-salience of your own ego?

Processing Fluency Spiking | Sascha Topolinski, Rolf Reber (20:34 to 29:01)

The act of making sense/finding coherence enhances meaning in life. (Heintzelman) If you get enhanced meaning in life and a sense of understanding that actually guides you in improving your life, that will build confidence of a path towards wisdom/transcendence. Fluency is a general property of all your cognitive processes; not just ease of processing, because just repeating a stimulus doesn’t trigger this sense of fluency. Fluency is a matter of how accessible and applicable information is, how well your system is able to zero in relevant information. Format information to aid relevance realization. Insight is a fluency spike so that you process information very efficiently; aha moment. In our evolutionary heritage we have used a fluency heuristic to pick up on real patterns. Flow and HSC bring greater fluency, insight cascade, and patterns both implicit and causal.

The Continuity Hypothesis | Andrew Newberg, Mark Waldman (29:01 to 32:58)

Newberg made a version of the continuity hypothesis independently from Vervaeke. Fluency is enhanced in insight, and insight is enhanced in flow. The hypothesis is that flow experiences can be enhanced into mystical experiences, and then there are mystical experiences that can bring about a transformative experience. Transformative experiences are the HSC where people are willing to transform. The same machinery is being used for all these, but is exapted to more and more powerful processing. This affords a rationally justifiable guidance into the kinds of transformation that we are seeking when we want to cultivate wisdom and enhance meaning in life. Newberg argues if you have a lot of little enlightenment experiences, or regular insights, this will eventually produce this connectedness/anagoge. This is a priming hypothesis.

Optimal Grip | Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, Merleau-Ponty (32:58 to 45:38)

In HSC there is a fundamental kind of flowing, an expertise of everyday experience. Dreyfus and others use the term “optimal grip,” which harkens back to conformity theory. We want to fulfill a trade-off between seeing the details of a cup as well as its gestalt, so we move around to get the best optimization for our needs. It is a dynamic balancing act. Tiger Eyes in Tai Chi: don’t hard-focus on the person’s face, or their weapon; you want to flow over the person, not in a blurry fashion but to get a sense of their whole body while being able to zero in on any relevant details. // Portrait sketches // Eleanor Rosch Your stance should give you an optimal overall sense of your own body and its details. You default to the basic level when describing it as a dog, not a mammal or dachshund. You’re always making these trade-offs, and you have to do this for all domains.

Mind-Wandering and Deautomatization | Zach Irving (45:00 to 49:35)

A continuity between HSC and flow/insight explains why disruptive strategies are helpful. You can use different long-term or short-term disruptive strategies to break poor framing, but you are also naturally disposed to disruptions with mind-wandering. Many of us find mind-wandering annoying, but it’s so hard-wired into us. (Zach Irving) Mind-wandering enhances capacity for insight by distracting you from a fixated frame, and then allowing you to return to it and break it up. “Go sleep on it,” “go for a walk,” etc. Left-right brain hemisphere shifting occurs in insight, an internal disruptive strategy. In the nine-dot problem you automatically, unconsciously, saw the problem as a square. This automatic framing blocks you from solving the problem; to get out of this, you have to deautomatize your cognition. Disruptive strategies can help you do this.

The Notice Invariants Heuristic | Kaplan and Simon 1990 (49:35 to 56:50)

Disruptive strategies increase the variation of your processing by introducing noise and entropy into what you’re paying attention to and what processes your brain activates. By increasing variation in processing, you can get more awareness of what’s invariant. Lots of things are varying as you move around spatially, but there is constancy to objects. Good invariance lets you pick up on bigger, more real patterns. (deep learning networks) Bad invariance happens when you’re trying to solve the nine-dot problem: you keep trying to solve it and keep failing. It could be a system of errors; 4-year-olds and siriation. The Notice Invariants Heuristic: very often what you’re not changing is precisely what you need to change. Increasing variation allows you to apply the heuristic better. (wisdom) To break your bad framing requires the humility to attend to, to remember, your failures.

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Episode 12: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2

The Solomon Effect | Igor Grossmann, Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (7:06 to 10:38)

Decentering is central to flow, mystical experiences, HSC; relevant for wisdom. Find a problem that’s very messy, problematic, and that somebody is stuck in. This will usually be an interpersonal problem since people are endlessly complex. In describing the problem people will be stuck in their egocentric perspective. Get the person to redescribe their problem from a third-person perspective. By decentering, they will often break frame, realize the way they have been blocked, systematically locked and unable to solve their problem. (central insight) Egocentrism locked them in a systematic error, like being asleep. In HSC and awakening experiences there is a systematic change of consciousness, enabling transformation, seeing through illusion; can be traumatic and terrifying.

Egocentric Entombment (10:06 to 14:00)

Pursuing HSC as an autodidact (completely self-taught) is very, very dangerous. Autodidacts tend to fall into echo chambers, vicious circles of entrapment. The Buddha’s parable of the monkey: highly salient object of attention increasingly robs your agency, then you become vulnerable to threats that could destroy you. Decentering strategies can alleviate egocentric entombment, but as an isolated individual, you are unskilled, untutored and ill-prepared to handle transformations. It is a very poor idea for people to take psychedelics outside a wisdom tradition and a committed community that can offer wise advice, and decenter you from outside. Siddhartha’s enlightenment as an individual is an anomaly. The Sangha is necessary for cultivating transformation. // A contemporary lack of wisdom institutions.

Knowing by Loving (14:00 to 16:05)

A radical decentering affords wisdom not just by a perspectival change in your salience landscaping, but also alters the machinery of the self; participatory change. Participatory knowing is knowing by conformity; radical at-one-ness. World is beautiful because of profound self-world coupling; reciprocal revelation. As the world reveals itself more deeply, more depths of yourself are being revealed in a coupled fashion. Well, that’s love. Love is mutually accelerating disclosure. Two people are mutually disclosing from each other in a coupled fashion. I honestly disclose something about myself, and then you disclose in response. We get a reciprocal, enhanced, mutual conforming, which engenders love. You know love by participating in it, like your culture and your language.

Self-Glue | Glyn Humphreys, Jie Sui (16:05 to 21:21)

One of the functions of your self (not the same as your mind), is to act as glue. By making things relevant to myself, I can make them relevant to each other. I’m simultaneously gluing things together as I’m gluing myself together. The self is a powerful set of functions for integrating, complexifying, processing. This integrating system of functions is powerful machinery central to agency. What if you exapted your self-integrating gluing and turned it onto the world? What was self-focused integrates the world to reveal deeper underlying patterns. Phenomenological evidence from mystical experiencers corroborates world-focus. Radical decentering is exapting ego structures to disclose the world; radical sense of moving into the being mode, re-membering who and what we really are. [?]

Neural Networks Analogy to Human Psychology | Woodward (21:21 to 29:04)

Neural networks are a form of AI that mimics how brains work in important ways. Introducing random noise is an “essential aspect” of the self-optimization process. All statistics is basically the problem of patterns in your sample, vs. in the world. Neural networks often overfit to the data, picking up on a pattern that does not generalize to the rest of the world. Line of best fit is a data compression for this. Disruption of processing (noise or node reductions) allows for data compression. Compression helps find the real invariants that generalize across various contexts. Underfitting isn’t picking up on any patterns at all. These systems have to toggle between disruptive variation and compression, which is like making and breaking frames that we see in disruptive strategies in HSCs.

Metastability | Kelso, Tognoli, Newberg (29:04 to 34:06)

Initial increase of activity in frontal and parietal areas of the brain in HSCs; this hyperactivity, associated with general intelligence, is followed by a hypoactivity. During this shifting there is enhanced activity in the thalamus, which integrates. The greater the disruptive shift, the more powerful the awakening experience. This experience is just like the processes of framing and reframing in insight. Normally your brain is integrating or segregating/differentiating things, but in metastability, the brain is doing both simultaneously. It’s complexifying your info. Psilocybin increases metastability in the brain, thereby yielding emergent abilities. You grow and self-transcend as a system by complexifying. You can do more differentiated things, but you don’t fall apart because you’re integrated together.

Plausibility | Rescher, Kyle, Milgram, and others (34:06 to 43:28)

Plausibility is not just “highly probable,” but it involves trustworthiness. (Rescher) Plausibility “makes good sense,” “stands to reason,” “should be taken seriously.” We regard some proposal or construct as trustworthy if it’s been produced by many independent but converging lines of evidence; this abates a sense of self-deception. We are also looking forward to what we can do with this new evidence. We want our models to be multi-apt and open up new domains for us. (martial arts stances) The quick adaptability is what people mean by a theory or model being elegant. To be plausible your model should also be internalizable and ready-to-hand for use, and be balanced between convergence and elegance; trivialities and the far-fetched. Our backward and forward commitments should map. (Milgram) // Profundity

Higher States of Consciousness (43:03 to 53:30)

In HSCs the brain is performing an evaluation of the plausibility of its processing. We also see deautomization of cognition and decentering strategies employed to reduce bias in a fluency of processing. This is a state of flowing, optimal grip. The brain is optimizing for processing, finding a nexus of systematic error for a personal development, complexification of processing and new emergent functions. There is the exaptation of insight and self machineries into new abilities. Your brain gets information saying this processing is deeply trustworthy, deeply powerful, deeply fluent, and therefore profoundly plausible. HSC are indispensable because they run in terms of your plausibility machinery. This isn’t about propositional knowing, this is about participatory transformation. Ultimately we need to put wisdom of HSCs into rational discourse with an independently established metaphysics, by science and philosophy.

Plausibility in Science (45:33 to 50:03)

“science will give me certainty” Pay attention to the history of science. Almost all proposed theories in science are false in an important or significant way. Science is not believed in for bare facts, but for self-correcting plausibility. You reject and don’t bother with hypotheses that are implausible. During a science experiment you must control for alternative explanations. We put explanations in competition and always infer to the best one. (Peter Lipton) In order to make this deductively certain you would have to test every explanation. But you can’t; your explanation’s worth is relative to the alternatives it beats. Science depends on plausibility when we have the data and must interpret it. Before, during and after a science experiment, you are relying on plausibility.

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Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing

Interpretation Crisis of Religious Traditions | Stephen Batchelor (2:54 to 13:57)

Some say you must interpret Buddhism within a tradition. You must transform your perspectival and participatory knowing. (Agent-Arena, existential modes) But there are many traditions/contexts, so this is myopic, narrow-minded and often parochial, claiming propositions as fundamental which are often very contingent. Religious studies departments say seeing from within is too close to it, and biased. Reminiscent of Socrates’ disappointment with both nat. philosophers and Sophists. Buddhism is about both of these, trying to find transformatively relevant truths. We are too used to the post-Christian equation of traditions with sets of creeds. Breaking out of meaning-as-creeds is needed to address our meaning crisis. Ideologies attempt to create meaning, but fail for never rising above mere beliefs.

The Four Noble Truths as Four Ennobling Provocations (13:13 to 16:51)

A lot of meaning-making machinery isn’t at the level of propositional knowledge. For Stephen Batchelor, we need to look at Buddhism ultimately existentially. (A-A) Buddhism is about remembering the being mode, as opposed to just being mired in the having mode. (Alone with Others) The Four Noble Truths are usually presented in the West as claims to be believed. Not that people don’t believe things within Buddhism, but that these processes are enabling transformation of participatory knowing and the machinery of the self. Not to believe these truths, but to help you reenact the Buddha’s enlightenment. Therefore Batchelor calls these the Four Ennobling truths; for Vervaeke, these are mainly for provoking people to change, so we shouldn’t even call them truths.

All is Suffering, Dukkha (17:25 to 24:21)

Suffering isn’t “pain” or “distress.” To suffer is to undergo loss of agency. (dukkha) “Dukkha” involves a wheel that is off-center on its axis; an arm that is out of joint. All your life is existentially threatened by self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. You can suffer joy, or suffer pleasure, so that you’ve lost control of yourself. Pain is a powerful way of losing agency: highly disruptive, can involve damage. The Buddha is not saying everything is painful; then nothing would be painful also. Parable of the monkey grabbing the pitch and then tries to free itself, and is killed. The Buddha doesn’t describe enlightenment in terms of relief. No matter where you dip into my teaching it has one taste, the taste of freedom. Realize that all your life is threatened with a loss of freedom, a loss of agency.

Representativeness & Availability Heuristics, Encoding Specificity (24:27 to 29:43)

The very processes that make you adaptively intelligent also make you vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. We use adaptive heuristic shortcuts to zero in to the relevant/crucial information. After a bad event, your brain immediately tries to anticipate future events like it. Representativeness heuristic: judge chance of an event by how prototypical it is. Availability heuristic: judge chance of events by how easy it is to imagine them. Encoding specificity: memory doesn’t just store facts, it stores all the perspectival and participatory knowing, and the state you’re in. (retracing your drunken steps) Your brain always tries to fit you to the environment, so it stores your fittedness. Bad states make bad things memorable; judge chance of bad things as increasing.

Confirmation Bias (29:20 to 32:27)

The confirmation bias is an adaptive strategy you use where you tend to only look for information that supports your current belief, to confirm forming judgments. Disconfirmation often takes too long and is very difficult and complex. All of your heuristic machinery can go awry and mislead you; representativeness heuristic has you misjudge the probability of events. For example, the news represents airplane crashes as more of a tragedy than car crashes, so we judge plane crashes as more probable, even though they aren’t. Just like hyperbolic discounting, we can’t do away with heuristics, they’re adaptive. Most of this happens automatically in a self-organizing fashion… imagine if you had to do everything fully consciously; rather, it’s both bottom-up and top-down.

Parasitic Processing (32:27 to 37:16)

Judging the chance of a bad event to be great has emotional valence of anxiousness. This leads to a loss of cognitive flexibility, and a narrow, limited and rigid framing. That in turn reduces problem solving ability, so you start to make lots of mistakes. This increases anxiety, reinforcing that bad things are happening. (fatalism) All of this feeds on itself. The same things making you intelligently adaptive, able to zero in on relevant information, complexifying and organizing itself, fitting you to the environment, makes you vulnerable to self-d self-d behavior. (down spiral) This is like a parasite that takes up life within you, and takes life away from you. Parasite is self-organizing; uses how you adapt to preserve itself, and destroy you. Knowing-that you are in one of these spirals does not in itself move you beyond it.

Addiction and Reciprocal Narrowing | Marc Lewis (37:16 to 44:05)

Addiction is a perspectival and particpatory learning of a loss of agency, which brings a loss of cognitive flexibility; your options in the world decline. (A-A) A video game addict plays video games to the point that they cannot pursue their goals, establish desired relationships, or cultivate the character they aspire to. Models of addiction as biophysical, chemical dependency are wrong. You can be addicted to processes with no biochemical basis, like gambling. Overwhelming compulsion model doesn’t explain how most people give up their addiction in their thirties. Our focus tends to be on those who remain addicted. Vietnam soldiers addicted to heroin take on a new identity in the States, as citizens. Parasitic processing within reinforces your reciprocal narrowing without. (dukkha)

Anagogic Awakening (43:03 to 52:55)

There must be opposing dukkha a spiral up, where the agency and available world are expanding. This is the move towards enlightenment. (anagoge) You need to realize that you can recover your agency. You can ascend out of the cave and towards the sun of enlightenment. The complex, dynamical machinery of cognition can be exapted to reduce your capacity for self-deception. Create a counteractive dynamical system operating at the states of consciousness to work for you rather than against you. The Eightfold Path: right understanding, right thinking/aspiration (cognition); right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort (character); right mindfulness and right concentration (consciousness).

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Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics

Alexander the Great (1:51 to 7:55)

Whereas Socrates’ great disciple was Plato, Aristotle’s was Alexander the Great. Alexander creates an empire, and returns the known world to a pre-Axial state. As a god-man, Alexander represents a fundamental disruption to the world. After he dies at 33, his major generals carve up the empire in war for ~300 years. This time period is known as the Hellenistic era. During Aristotle’s time, most in the Greek culture would have lived in a polis. The polis was an embedded existence for them, their identity was enmeshed in it. Alexander comes and smashes all of that. // Bactria in modern-day Afghanistan. Greek culture now distributed to Africa, the Levant, Asia Minor; borders of India. In this era, people are being shuffled around, belonging to far-flung empires.

The Polis (3:46 to 6:27)

Those in the Greek culture in Aristotle’s time likely would have lived in a polis. It’s not just a city, but a city-state, like Athens and the surrounding agricultural environment which supports it. // democracy // polis and “cosmopolitan” You know the other citizens face-to-face, and you participate in your government in a more direct manner. You’d personally know those involved in the government. Everyone around you speaks your language; has ancestors who lived in this place, stretching back beyond memory. Everyone has the same religion you do. Everybody has basically the same allegiances to this place. A polis is a tight agent-arena relationship, an embedded existence. (identity) Many would rather die or be imprisoned than be ostracized and exiled from polis.

Cultural Domicide in the Hellenistic World (6:27 to 9:32)

In the Hellenistic era, people are shuffled around, and belong to far-flung empires. Most do not participate in government or personally know anyone involved in it. You and the people around you might not have lived there very long. (uprooted) People around you speak different languages and worship different gods. The connections are all being lost; no polis, no shared linguistic group, history, ancestry, religion. Douglas Porteous, Sandra Smith, Brian Walsh call this domicide. Domicide is the destruction of home. This can occur with physical destruction of your house, but also when you only have a dwelling space that is not your “home.” People in the Hellenistic period feel insignificant. One day you could be part of the Ptolemaic Empire, and the next you could be part of the Seleucid Empire.

Hellenistic Age of Anxiety (9:08 to 13:12)

Greece suffers the Peloponnesian War; overwhelmed by Macedonia, Alexander. The artwork changes, becoming much more frenetic, realistic, and organized around extremes and tragedy. The confidence from the time of Socrates is gone. There’s a lot of syncretism in the religions. People try to create religions that integrate different cultural deities together. (Serapis, a Greco-Egyptian god) Mother goddesses are elevated to pan-cultural importance. (Isis) When you feel domicide, nothing means home to you more than mother. If you don’t have that with your physical mother, then you want some divine mother that can make you feel at home no matter where you are in a fractured world. Philosophy not just for dealing with foolishness anymore, but alleviating suffering.

Epicurus and Epicureanism (12:00 to 29:25)

The philosopher Epicurus evolves the Axial legacy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, transforming it in the face of the Hellenistic meaning crisis. // a secular alternative The sage, someone like Socrates, leads you out of the cave; but a new metaphor emerges now, that the philosopher is the physician of the soul. Epicurus: Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. The Epicureans diagnosed that our main problem is anxiety. (The Courage to Be) 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. If you expose people to triggers about their mortality, they get rigid/locked down. What you fear losing isn’t your life, but meaningful relationships. (philosophia)

Fear and Anxiety | Paul Tillich (15:12 to 18:37)

Paul Tillich’s masterpiece, The Courage to Be. // Kierkegaard, Heidegger Often the words “fear” and “anxiety” are used interchangeably. We also mix up the word “anxious” with “eager.” You shouldn’t be anxious to meet someone. Fear and anxiety overlap in some ways, but there’s polar differences between them. Fear is when you have a direct, observable threat. (there’s a tiger in the room) With fear, you at least know on some level what you need to do. Anxiety is when the threat is nebulous. You don’t know what it is, and you’re not sure what you need to do. Often the preferred term for existential issues is anxiety. For the Epicureans, we suffer because can’t manage our anxiety. We don’t control our imagination and thinking, so that cripples our ability to get a grip on the world.

Death Anxiety (18:37 to 21:49)

Many people are anxious about death. People often use the existence of death to talk about their life being meaningless. “I’m gonna die anyway, so what does it matter? I’m gonna die… afraid of death.” If you expose people to triggers about their mortality, they get cognitively rigid, going into parasitic processing and getting locked down. One response is to pursue immortality. Ancient and modern-day religions offer this. But that is a doomed strategy. The evidence that your mind and your consciousness are completely dependent and emergent from your brain is overwhelming. This confuses something that’s phenomenologically mysterious to you with making a conclusion. Instead… could you radically accept your mortality?

Acceptance of Mortality for Epicureans (20:43 to 29:25)

You are going to die. Can you come to terms with your death? Can you embrace it? Realize that you can’t possibly be anxious about your death. What about birth? It’s not loss [of life] that makes you anxious. You can’t ever experience total loss. “Where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not.” If you’re anxious about a partial loss of life, you’re actually afraid of losing agency, reduction of your capacities as you are dying. But, you lose agency all the time. You are actually afraid of losing what is good, a kind of pleasure you get from what gives you the most meaning in life. Not the gods, but meaningful relationships and the pursuit of wisdom and self-transcendence (philosophia) are what is crucial. We are not caught by the usual framing of either an afterlife or meaninglessness.

Antisthenes and Diogenes (32:16 to 37:51)

Plato wrote dialogues because he wanted us to internalize the Socratic elenchus. Antisthenes states that from Socrates, he learned how to converse with himself. This doesn’t mean your internal rumination, prone to parasitic processing spirals. He means he was able to really internalize what Socrates could do with him. For Antisthenes, confrontation with Socrates is more important than argumentation. Socrates argues with you, but also confronts you. He slams the AR in your face. Antisthenes has a follower, Diogenes, who epitomizes this kind of provocation. Diogenes tries to create aporia in you, shock you to radically transform your life. A hermit walks around the marketplace with a lamp, looking and searching. What is it, what are you looking for? I’m looking for one honest man.

The Cynic Philosophy (36:07 to 43:28)

Nobody at the marketplace wants to realize how they’re lying and cheating. Diogenes the Cynic famously masturbates in the center of the marketplace. “Cynic” means living like a dog. Diogenes lived outside Athens in a barrel. Here comes future god-emperor Alexander and his entourage, to visit Diogenes. “Could you move a little to the left? You’re blocking my sunlight.” We can set our hearts on many things. What causes us to suffer is what we are setting our hearts on; not just our own life like Epicureans thought, but anything. Many things we take for granted as part of the structure of reality are actually only man-made and historically/culturally dependent. Our hearts can get torn from us. You must set your heart on natural laws and moral laws, rather than purity codes.

Moral Laws and Purity Codes (42:35 to 50:20)

Purity codes are culturally, historically based, but moral principles are not. Guilt is your distress at having realized you’ve broken a moral principle. Shame is your distress at having violated a purity code. Those that supported blacks in the civil rights movement felt ashamed, not guilty. Purity codes keep categorical boundaries that make a culture in a historical period run the way it’s running; tied up with invested power structures. We often confuse our disgust reactions with reasoned moral judgment. You may not want to watch homosexual intercourse, but that’s not in itself making any moral arguments for or against the act. // Diogenes pulls the two apart; many were doing immoral things in the marketplace that were culturally accepted.

Zeno of Citium and Stoicism (29:25 to 34:43, 50:20 to 55:23)

Stoicism is a direct and explicit ancestor to current psychotherapies. (Aaron Beck) It is almost a religion that is trying to internalize psychotechnologies of Socrates. Zeno wanted to integrate the rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato with the provocative aspects of the Cynics. He walked up and down the stoa to teach this. Zeno’s insight was that the Cynics concentrated too much on what we’re attaching our heart to, rather than the very process of attachment itself. (Keith Stanovich) Yes, cultures in history are variable, but being social isn’t; so we shouldn’t leave the polis. Socrates and Diogenes had to enter the polis to practice their philosophy. Pay attention to the process of co-identification, setting up the A-A relationship. You will MAR this process if you co-identify mindlessly, automatically, reactively.

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Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus

Prosoche and Procheiron (5:24 to 16:10)

Pay attention to how you’re judging things and forming your identity and agency. Most of us let this process go by mindlessly, automatically, and reactively. (MAR) Learn to see that there is a difference between the existential, modal meaning of an event, and the event itself. (the core of all our current cognitive psychotherapies) We’re almost always unconsciously framing events. (meaning, events, con-fusion) Epictetus: the core of wisdom is knowing what’s in your control and what’s not. Stop pretending that things are in your control that aren’t. You don’t have enough control over the world to stabilize the meaning. (modal confusion) [?] You have way more control over meaning, and way less of events, than you realize. Re-member (sati) skills, sensitivities, and sensibilities so they’re ready-to-hand.

Marcus Aurelius, Objective Seeing, Premeditatio | Pierre Hadot (15:51 to 24:30)

“It is possible to be happy, even in a palace.” He doesn’t shirk his responsibilities. The challenge he faced was not getting enmeshed in power and fame, since these are things that fuse meaning with event. (compare with the Buddha, the Cynics) His Meditations is written to himself; he is practicing psychotechnologies to bring into awareness the co-identification process that transforms meaning of self/world. Objective seeing: the event of sex is distinct from all the meaning we pour into it. Use a cup on a daily basis so that you really like it and it’s familiar, then smash it. Premeditatio: kiss your children goodnight, and remind yourself of their mortality. Romantic comedies teach us that our narrative meaning aligns with world events. The iced-over staircase and railings at work don’t care about your dinner plans.

Fatality | Margaret Visser (24:30 to 26:30)

The Stoics’ diagnosis is that it’s fatality, not mortality, that makes us anxious. The root of the word fatality is fate, not death; not about a supernatural force but the way that things are just rolling from their own causal necessity. (Beyond Fate) When we fuse our meanings and events, we are subject to the fatality of all things. Everything is fatal, in that the meaning and the thing are not identical; if we forget that, we will suffer when the two come apart. Death is “fatal” because death is where your all meanings come apart. All your narrative and identity are radically unglued from the events of the universe. Death reveals to you, in the ultimate loss of agency, that meaning and event are not identical.

Stoicism and The View from Above (26:30 to 28:28)

Altering your level of construal has powerful effects on cognition and sense of self. You’re enmeshed in your view of things; but then you view it from higher up, both in space and in time. You visualize an event within larger ones, up to the cosmos. Marcus Aurelius does this in his Meditations. (the Solomon Effect) The agent-arena relationship is being altered in this; all of this machinery is coming into your awareness; your sense of self, of what matters, what’s important, and the meaning of things, is being radically transformed. You are more liable to pursue more long-term goals; you become more flexible, more capable of rational reflection and self-transformation. This is all evidenced by construal level theory.

Therapy and the Inner Socrates (28:28 to 34:10)

Most therapy is about getting people to have a change in perspectival knowing and sense of control, giving discernment to pull apart meaning from event, reframing. Marcus Aurelius, and especially Epictetus, practice internalizing Socrates. This is a matter of doing with yourself what Socrates had done with you. (identity) In modern cognitive behavioral practices, people become Socratic with themselves. “Oh wow, you’re making such powerful claims. You must know and understand.” Everything is bullshit, really? What do you mean when you say things like that? You have all these things salient in your mind, and you’re running them around and around, but you don’t really understand the meaning. You’re bullshitting yourself. Motivation and arousal run ahead of understanding, con-fusing meaning and event.

Axis of Fortune, Axis of Transcendence (33:12 to 41:17)

The point of heaven isn’t to live out immortality, it is to make you accept death. A Stoic idea is, as long as you are formulating your identity horizontally in terms of a narrative, of achieving an unending duration to your life — even if you had it, it would fail. You want not a length of life, but a fullness, a depth. (having/being) Marcus Aurelius says, “Everybody dies, but not everybody has lived.” If you practice procheiron and prosoche, you can get what Plato promised, fullness. You could come to a complete fullness. Even if it lasts a moment, that’s enough. When people have awakening experiences, they lose fear and anxiety of mortality. If I can only achieve that in this moment, right here, right now, then I’m done. Then I’m done.

Jesus as Ultimate Kairos (45:54 to 52:32)

Kairos, the turning point, the right timing for the course of events. (spirit of finesse) The Israelites had it that God intervened kairotically in history for the whole nation. Christianity proposes that God’s creative logos, his word by which things are spoken into existence, the formative principle, is identified with an individual. Gospel of John: en arche en logos, “in the beginning was the logos” (Stoicism?) That individual is Jesus of Nazareth. God’s capacity for producing kairos through logos has been incarnated within this ultimate kairos. Because he is a person, you can identify with him, and kairos can take place in you (a new mind, a new heart) Jesus uses the metaphor of being “born again.” This is a metanoia, radical shifting. Jesus says he incarnates the principle by which there is intervention in your history.

Love: Eros, Philia, Agape (52:32 to 58:17)

How does one’s personal kairos transform their salience landscape, sense of self, processes of co-identification? The Christian answer is love. (Kingdom of God) The word “love” has been trivialized in modern times. We think love is an emotion. Love isn’t a feeling, it isn’t an emotion, it is a modal way of being. (A-A) Jesus as a kairos incarnated a different kind of love, agape, and changed the world. Eros love seeks to be one with something. It is satisfied through consummation. Socrates knew ta erotica: not just sex, but he knew what to care about. Philia seeks cooperation; experienced in reciprocity with others, in friendships. Agape is the love a parent has for a child. You love because by loving them, you help turn a non-person animal into a moral agent person. We’ve depended on this.

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Episode 16: Christianity and Agape

Agape Love (3:16 to 15:10)

Jesus emphasizes agape love; not about consumption or cooperation, but creation. God demonstrates agape towards humanity in ongoing creation of the open future. The historical process and course of history God creates makes people possible. Agape is the love a parent has for a child, to turn them into a moral agent person and entering a community of persons, and find meaning, fellowship and belonging. It provokes metanoia, a radical turning to a higher/deeper field of consciousness. For a long time we are receivers of agape. We’re born out of an agapic love that precedes us; we internalize how others are aware of us, gain reflective rationality. Nothing transforms adults more than having a child; recentered from ego to agape. We become vessels/conduits through which God/agape creates other human beings.

Agape and Forgiveness (15:10 to 21:03)

Agape love carries with it a sacrificial element. You give before the person earns. In agape you become an affordance for others’ transformations into personhood. Jesus does not present himself in the gospels as the means to forgiveness from God; when asked how to obtain this, his consistent message is by fore-giving others. We tend to think of forgiveness as telling someone who feels sorry that it’s okay. The core idea of forgiveness doesn’t depend on your contrition. By sacrificing towards growing someone into their personhood, that is already forgiveness. Some forgiveness is when someone has slighted us; we need agape to re-establish. All agapic love is fore-giving love, because it is giving before, before the person that is receiving can in any way be said to have earned it. (born again, Jesus’ death)

Saul and the Followers of the Way (21:03 to 24:20)

Saul is both a Jew and Roman citizen at a time when the two antagonize each other. The tension between these groups is reflected in the tension within Saul. Saul integrates these aspects of his identity around a commitment to law, organized rules of behavior, and conduct. Jesus’ followers were initially called the Followers of the Way. (not just a method) Jesus is the way in which we can experience the kairos of metanoia, and become fore-giving individuals who are constantly forgiving agapically to others. Around the time that Saul starts persecuting Jesus’ followers, they start being called Christians as an insult. Saul is there when the first Christian martyr, Stephen, is stoned to death.

Paul’s Awakening Experience (23:06 to 29:48)

Saul gets a writ to travel to Damascus and bring in the Christians for prosecution. On the road to Damascus he has a transformative experience. (Acts 9) He is struck by a bright light, and struck to the ground. (super-salience) A voice speaks to him and says, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Jesus) The experience has an ontonormativity, the sense that this is more real than himself. Saul has a profoundly deep inner conflict. Whereas Plato develops a scientific theory of inner conflict, Saul undergoes a transformative experience because of it. Saul goes to Antioch, and is taken in by the very people he was going to persecute. He’s at war with agape; we all are. Agape challenges our story of being self-made. Saul goes to the desert to reflect (mythology), and comes back anew as Paul.

The Most Excellent Way of Paul (29:48 to 39:19)

Paul doesn’t make an argument, but talks about how his very identity is informed and transformed by its conformity to agapic love. (1 Corinthians 12: 31, 13: 1–13) 1 Cor. 13: 1–2 // This is participatory language, of knowing by identifying. 1 Cor. 13: 3–4 // This is radical language. Romantic love does involve envy. 1 Cor. 13: 4–7 // These are the features needed to help someone reach personhood. 1 Cor. 13: 8 // Not romantic love here, that love does fail. Instead, agape love. We are always born from and always have to give birth to agape, or personhood itself will disappear. // God is agape; we forgive and are forgiven by agape. 1 Cor. 13: 8–11 // Perfection here means completion; salience and identity changes. 1 Cor. 13: 12–13 // Through participatory love, we know as we are known. (gnosis)

Inner Conflict and Projection (39:19 to 49:25)

There is a dark side, a danger of misunderstanding, in participatory knowing, metanoic transformations, and gnosis-agape. When you know someone this way, your knowing of them and of yourself are inseparably bound together. (identity) Jesus: I and the Father are one; Paul: It’s not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Any aspect of yourself you do not understand can be projected on what you love. You have to commit yourself to a Socratic process of self-knowledge. // akrasia Paul has a narrative for his inner conflict. He experiences the Exodus personally. Saul follows the way of the law, but the new Paul feels connected with God/love. He projects this as reflecting inner conflict within God. Reality is enmeshed in a conflict between justice and agape. Jesus dies to satisfy God’s demand for justice.

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Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia

Live Options/Worldview Viability (6:12 to 10:02)

Reading a novel or the work of an important philosopher (e.g. Spinoza), you spend a lot of time trying to follow the arguments, and even come to believe some of the conclusions. You can have a lot of beliefs (inchoate or systematic), but there is this change where you go from seeing what Spinoza is saying to seeing things the way Spinoza says. It’s the lens by which I’m both seeing the world and seeing myself, with the perspective of what it’s like to participate in that worldview. This is the advent of the viability or livability of a worldview. William James talks about the difference between believing things and it actually being a live option for you; the agent-arena relationship, perspectival and participatory knowing, are now conformed to not just what Spinoza said, but who he was and what his world was.

Sensibility Transcendence | John Wright (10:02 to 16:06)

Your life will be less if you have not read Iris Murdoch’s Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch was trying to get beyond the rules and reasons for morality, to its viability, the way in which our salience landscape and A-A is trying to transform us to do the good. Mother-in-law finds her daughter-in-law coarse, loud, uncouth, beneath dignity of her son. Think about agape and fore-giving here. At some point, the mother-in-law has an insight into not only reframing how she sees her daughter-in-law but also how she sees herself. This happens in a completely interfused way with a transframing, a transformation of the whole framing process on both ends of agent-arena relationship. (metanoia) She sees her now as spontaneous, sincere, and having authenticity. This is a reciprocal revelation, mutually accelerating disclosure, knowing by loving.

The Unthinkable | Harry Frankfurt (15:24 to 19:22)

Although you can make thoughts, images, and propositions, and you can run inferences, you can’t actually make the unthinkable viable for you. You can’t go through the sensibility transcendence that would bring you into living that worldview. You can have the thought of harming someone you genuinely care about, but you can’t make this viable for yourself, it’s unthinkable to you. It’s unlivable for you. Because of your sensibility transcendence, it takes no effort to avoid the unthinkable. There may be certain advantages that you could imagine if you did the unthinkable, but you wouldn’t bring these about. It can be thought of, but it’s unthinkable. A worldview that you would rather inhabit may actually be unthinkable/not viable to you.

Existential Inertia, Being Stuck (18:18 to 24:20)

You might be stuck in a worldview that you actually don’t want to be in. Can’t go through sensibility transcendence to make the other worldview viable for you. Inferences in your head, imagined scenes, propositional statements, and affirmations of belief won’t get you there. You’re stuck. You experience a kind of existential inertia. People often enter therapy for this reason: they know who they want to be, what kind of world they want to be in, what it would be like, deeply wanting to be there, but they can’t. How do I care about things, participate in myself and the world, to get there? How do I stop suffering (losing my agency)? Everything’s going well, why am I thwarted like this? I feel like I should be moving forward, but I don’t know how. How can I participate in things, what perspective should I take? How do I transframe my self and the world?

Being Stupefied by Possible Transformation (24:20 to 34:48)

L. A. Paul’s Transformative Experience, a best book in philosophy in the last 20 years. People face a problem when they are seeking and needing significant transformation. The possibility of transformative experience renders us stupefied; they have us confront our existential ignorance, which is endemic to these experiences. You don’t know what your perspectival knowing will be like after trying a fruit, after becoming a vampire, after entering a relationship with someone, or after having a child. There’s no way to know ahead of time how you and your world will be transframed. What we are confronting may be an epistemic transformation (fruit), or it may be what is called a personal transformation (having a child). How do I transform, and should I? You don’t know what you’re going to lose, or alternatively, what you’re going to miss.

Aspect Disguising (34:48 to 37:37)

Core features of someone’s identity can be disguised to themselves. The very same identifying feature is what somebody feels they need to let go of, and what they feel they should hold onto. This aspect disguising shows when stupefication and existential inertia are working together; this inertia and indecision traps us existentially (parasitic processing). Can’t imagine how to make another worldview significant, or how to rationally decide. A therapist might find someone who at one time considers themselves too stubborn and rigid, but then say they most like of themselves that they are persistent and don’t give up. They talk about the same core feature under both a negative and a positive aspect, and they don’t realize it.

Bleed and Play (37:22 to 42:19)

People act like a dog is a human child to play with the idea of actually having a child. People go on long trips with others to decide on a long-term relationship with them. In Jeepform, a “movie director” of sorts helps people enact emotionally difficult situations. The Jeepform director messes with your processes of transframing in the act of roleplay. They are after the phenomenon of “bleed,” bleeding between this psychodrama and reality. With bleed, people are playing with possible transformations. Play puts you in between the world you’re actually in, and the world you want to be in, in this liminal zone. One of the disasters of our culture is we think of play as only about fun. Fun is not what people are after in Jeepform. You could be playing Mahler. You don’t do Tai Chi, you play Tai Chi. It’s about a deep engagement with processes of transformation.

Enactive Analogy (42:19 to 45:49)

Confronting the possibility of transformative experience affords an enactive analogy. The analogy is not of word or thought; that won’t work, this is about perspectival and participatory change. This is an analogy you enact, going through the motions/actions. It takes a lot of skill to create an enactive analogy. You gotta get it just right. The analogy has to be similar and relevant enough both to the other self-world, and to this self-world. You want to put yourself in a place where you can “play” with the two and compare them. Skillful creation of an apt metaphor you can play within is what you’re doing in therapy. As part of addressing the meaning crisis, we have to recover play; one of the important things religion was, was serious play between normal world and sacred world. They are playing there to see how and if they should undergo changes the religion affords/demands.

Enactive Anagoge (45:49 to 50:53)

To make a worldview viable, one must go through self-world sensibility transcendence. Anagoge is precisely to set things up so that as you’re coming more into contact with what is real, getting below the illusion (Paul seeing in the mirror, shadows on the cave for Plato), as this opens up, this affords your self-transformation. So, sensibility transcendence is just anagoge. It is how you make a worldview viable. You need not only an enactive analogy, but a way of enacting anagoge. This is what religious ritual used to do for us, it was a way of playing with these enactive analogies, so you can compare and overcome ignorance and transform your character. You can “see-be” these two worlds/ways of being/persons within those worlds. The anagogic, enactive analogies are how you transframe and escape existential inertia.

Gnosis (50:20 to 54:09)

Altered states of consciousness (ASC) put you into the flow state, and have the possibility of giving you a higher state of consciousness, a mystical state that is transformative. You’re doing this within a ritual context, where you’re doing enactive analogy, and enactive anagoge. You’re doing serious play. Psychedelics can be part of this, affording cognitive flexibility and possible higher states. Gnosis is to have a set of psychotechnologies that create a ritual context that allows us to overcome being existentially stuck and stupefied. This is being powered by ASC that are induced by chanting, sleep deprivation and psychedelics. Gnosis frees us from existential entrapment, integrating psychotechnologies, giving us a sense of a greater reality, and healing our fragmented agency and our broken world.

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Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism

Gnosticism (0:14 to 7:44)

Gnosticism not as a community, but as a way of being, understanding, and interpreting. Many Gnostics thought of themselves as Christians; inter-meshed with Neoplatonism. The Gnostic movement is basically “the Axial Revolution within the Axial Revolution.” Hans Jonas sees Gnosticism as directly relevant to modern nihilism/existential entrapment. Need a recovery of serious play through engagement in ritual behavior; enactive analogy. Gnosis is a deeply transformative, perspectival/participatory knowing, ritually enframed and embedded within a sapiential and supportive community. Gnosticism was addressing the domicide still persisting from the Hellenistic era, and it is prevalent in many of our movies in modern period (DeConick’s The Gnostic New Age). The everyday world is not fully real, just images participating in the Forms.

The Demiurge (8:52 to 16:50)

Gnostics follow Plato in saying the everyday world is just images participating in Forms. How do the eternal Forms express themselves in the temporal, changing world? Plato proposes the myth of the Demiurge/Craftsman. He becomes aware of these Forms because he’s a rational agent; he shapes space and time to bring some reality to things. Not [literally] true, but Plato is giving imagery and story for relation of eternity and time. But the Gnostics said the temporal, everyday world was one of very significant suffering. They feel deeply, existentially trapped in this world; this is clear evidence that whoever created this world and its structures was either stupid, or evil, or both. Demiurge not as a beneficent being as in Plato, but for Gnostics it is often an evil overlord. A sense that socio-economic and socio-cultural structures are thwarting them; modernity.

Desacralizing the Gods (14:41 to 19:46)

The radical Gnostic move was to identify all the existing gods, whether the god of the Jews or of the Romans, not as divine beings, but as basically the guards of our prison. Even Paul was talking about this in the Bible; he talks about powers and principalities that keep us imprisoned. Up until now, the relationship between us and the gods was one of servitude, often one bordering on notions of slavery. We were the slaves or servants of the gods. Instead of idealizing these gods, we should see these gods as patterns that are pervasive and profound in the way they entrap us. Instead of thinking of how to serve the gods and fit into them (Axial Revolution), we must realize there is something in us, a divine spark; it carries us to the God beyond all gods.

Gnostic Remix of Christianity (17:56 to 27:15)

Orthodox Christians would see the Gnostics as perverting their mythology, while Gnostics would see themselves as disclosing, by transformation, what’s actually available in it. The evil Demiurge is the god of Old Testament: evil, jealous, vindictive. (Exodus 20:1–6) The OT god is compared against the New Testament god of agape, of light and love. Gnostics: the NT God beyond all gods doesn’t want our worship, but reunion/participation. Our capacity for agapic love means we are not at home here, we have a Gnostic potential. The God beyond all gods sends individuals down to our world of suffering to bring us the gnosis, transformative knowledge that sets us free; Gnostic Christians say this is Jesus. Jesus embodies gnosis and offers teachings; he’s not the sacrifice in whom to have faith. Christianity is about freeing us from suffering/slavery, and enacting analogy/anagoge.

Some Gnostic Movie Myths (26:31 to 29:55)

Socio-cultural, political, economic patterns, ways of thinking and being, are permeated in the layers of our psyche; it just exacerbates suffering, fragmenting our world and agency. Jesus, like the shaman or therapist, gives us the keys to unlocking ourselves from this. DeConick shows that several movies are modern portrayals of the Gnostic mythology. The Matrix: you are entrapped in a world of illusion, evil overlords are trying to keep you trapped so you don’t discover who you really are. But, you know you don’t belong here. The Truman Show (the True Man): manufactured world keeps him from agency, true love. He has to get the knowledge in order to get beyond this god. Star Wars: Trapped in the Empire, need knowledge of the Force that sets you free. Points to profound and powerful patterns; a narrative, symbolic recognition of suffering.

Dark Side of Gnosticism (29:55 to 40:11)

Some Gnostic writers make this evil Demiurge concept into a grand conspiracy theory. There is a whole system keeping you from the truth and what you belong to, and the evil overlord behind it is the god of the Old Testament. Who worships the OT god? The Jews. Nazism is not primarily a political or even socio-economic movement, it is a twisted Gnostic response to the meaning crisis, amplified in the Weimar Republic of Germany. The history from Gnosticism to Nazism involves the Orthodox church, thought Jesus should be worshipped, and persecuted Gnostic forms of Christianity; it went underground. Gnosticism can quickly evolve into a utopian ideology that gives you a conspiracy theory, and say you belong to the chosen few/race/class. The system is evil and must be destroyed. Due to this dark side, we should have an ambivalent attitude towards Gnosticism.

Modern Gnostic Thinkers: Tillich, Jung, Corbin (34:16 to 37:18)

Tillich talks about meaning crisis in The Courage To Be, and how the response to that is a way of discovering gnosis (clear in how he talks about symbols and transformation). As the meaning crisis destroys theistic mythology of God, can we rediscover sacredness in a way that liberates us from our existential suffering? // Tillich opposed Nazis early on. Tillich thought Christianity could play a significant role in this; it may transform. Jung is to Gnosticism what cognitive behavioral therapy is to Stoicism. Jung is basically a puts Gnostic mythology in a psychotherapeutic context. It gives a scaffolding for enactive analogy, enactive anagoge, central to therapeutic processes. Corbin was about trying to recover this lost kind of knowing. He was concerned we lost a capacity for transformation and liberation; trapped in historical patterns, fragmenting us.

Plotinus (40:11 to 46:14)

Plotinus’ philosophy is like the grand unified field theory of ancient spirituality. He integrates Plato’s spirituality, the whole idea of anagoge; Aristotle’s conformity theory of knowing/being, of the structure of the world; and, the Stoics’ therapeutic project. You can start with any of these features in Plotinus’ writing and get to the other two. When you read his work it’s not just an argument, but a spiritual exercise transforming the state of consciousness and cognition. Plotinus has Gnostic students, and is aware of gnosis; he is also critical of the Gnostics. He takes Aristotle’s levels of being (pure potentiality to pure actuality); as these levels of reality become viable to us, we conform to them and we change. As we do this, we are going through anagoge, helping us to remember the being mode, who we really are.

The One (46:14 to 53:07)

How much time have you put into [understanding?] what it is that makes something real? For Plotinus it’s also an issue of, how do we also sense it as real, so it that it is both what structurally-functionally organizes reality, and also makes us able to sense reality. When I understand something, I understand how all of its parts are integrated together, integrating what’s underneath into the whole; makes them more real in reality, and to us. As we find deeper principles that integrate things, we are more integrated and more real. The principle that makes everything else real and integrates everything is the One. Just as light is invisible and makes everything visible, we can never know the One; it is that by which all else is, beyond thought. You can’t have the One, you can only be it. Awakening; integration of spirituality, science and therapy; epitome of Greek Axial Age.

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Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas

Decline of the Ancient World and Manicheanism (0:14 to 3:48)

Plotinus unified science of Aristotle, therapy of Stoicism and spirituality of Plato. Neoplatonism was in deep contact with the early Christianity and with Gnosticism. After the time of Plotinus (270 CE), the Roman empire starts to decline. Augustine lived during the final stages of the Roman empire, in fourth and fifth centuries. The impending collapse brings a very dark vision of the world; this attracts Augustine to the Gnostic-like religion of Manicheanism, started by Mani of Persia. Manicheanism has ideas about us being creatures of light, enmeshed in machinery, and we have to be liberated by a special kind of gnosis. The Gnostic components of Manicheanism address the personal loss of agency, and the salience for the people of Augustine’s time of a world darkening all around them.

Augustine’s Suffering and the Pear Tree (3:48 to 7:21)

The decline of the ancient world makes ideas of evil and evil powers and structures in the world very salient to Augustine and the people of his time. Augustine is a sex addict. He laments: “I was always licking the open sore of lust.” This was a compelling desire, yet disgusting and degrading, and exacerbating his affliction. He suffers tremendous self-loathing and personal loss of agency. Augustine struggles to break free from inner conflict and degradation, and simultaneously provide an answer to the evil he sees in the world. // He writes the first autobiography. In the Confessions he tells of a traumatizing experience; in his youth he stole a fruit, but did not desire it at all. He stole the fruit simply because it was the wrong thing to do. The dark side within him was dragging him down; desire, anger and destruction. (Mani)

Mystical Falling (6:31 to 11:34)

Augustine travels the world, teaches rhetoric, and is eventually familiar with philosophy. He reads the work of Plotinus, had a high opinion of him. “In Plotinus, Plato lived again.” Augustine really truly “gets” (gnosis) the way offered by Plato, Platonists, and Plotinus, ascending levels of reality and levels of his self in mystical experience. But, he can’t hold this ascent to the One and stay there. The darkness in him has too much weight and pulls him down to the world of lust and addiction (reciprocal narrowing, evil). A hole in Being that sucks the light away… he rebounds from mystical state to despair. This makes the state of despair so much worse; you imagine what you can’t get back to. Augustine is at Monica’s house when he hears the child’s voice: “Take up and read.” He learns his deep affinity with Paul, his tortured inner conflict and the worldview for it.

Love and Reason (10:37 to 14:31)

For Augustine, Plato and Plotinus are ultimately saying we’re driven by two loves: the love of becoming one within, and the love of becoming one with what is most real. What’s driving all of our reason is love, a love for what’s true, good and beautiful. At the heart of reason is love. What’s damaged in me is capacity to love, not to reason. Augustine’s capacity for love was thwarted and twisted by his sexual addiction. What is needed is something that can heal (gnosis and healing), I need to be healed. There’s a love that is within reason that can help you grow beyond reason, to what reason always sought. We grow in the love that drives us to become fully realized persons. Augustine says, Neoplatonism needs Christianity; the healing and response to evil that Gnosticism was looking for can actually be found in Christianity. (take up and read)

The Normative Order (14:31 to 17:43)

Plotinus gave us an account of how we can move in a coordinated fashion up the levels of reality, levels of consciousness, levels of the self, from what is less real to more real. What’s less real has less “oneness,” less integration, and it makes less sense. When you destroy something, you take away its structural-functional organization and make it more disordered. // The normative order is how we can be better, deal with evil. As you go down the Great Chain of Being, things are fragmenting, having less form/eidos. The lower things are less intelligible/understandable/sensible; pure chaos; moving in this direction is to lose truth, goodness and beauty. This is Evil, the tear in Being. But we can move up to what is more True, Good, Beautiful, and Real. Plotinus knew this movement is driven by a love of knowing what is real and becoming what is more real.

The Orders of Meaning: Nomological, Normative, Narrative (17:43 to 20:23)

For Aristotle everything was moving on purpose to get where it belongs, and that’s it. For Augustine everything moves to move us away from Evil and towards the Good. Christianity puts together the nomological and normative orders, and with narrative order. The world moves to afford realization. This is driven by love, and a transformation that happens within me, the “gnosis agape.” This is the narrative order of Christianity. The great story about the course of history, moving to consummation in Promised Land. Agape isn’t just a historical narrative force, it also leads me upward towards the Good. The world is organized in such a way to move through history so that we self-transcend. Components of meaning people talk about are: coherence, significance, and purpose. From cog. sci. these are what contribute to meaning in life (see Samantha Heintzelman).

Coherence, Significance and Purpose | Samantha Heintzelman (19:29 to 22:23)

From current cognitive science we know the three components of meaning people talk about that contribute to meaning in life are a sense of coherence, significance and purpose. The more coherent, the more intelligible, the more things fit together for you, the more real they are, the more meaningful you find your life. (The Nomological Order) For this Augustine offers a Christian explanation of the Aristotelian world order. Significance is how valuable, how deep in reality, and how good the elements in your life are. (The Normative Order; anagogic drives of inner peace and contact with reality) Augustine offers a way that reason and agape can be put together through Christianity. Purpose: does your life have a direction? Is it moving in a course? (The Narrative Order) Christianity offers the ultimate story. Augustine lays the foundations of medieval world.

1054: The Sacred Canopy and the Great Schism (21:10 to 32:22)

A worldview with deep scientific legitimacy, profound spirituality, a project of therapy. A worldview with therapeutic change and healing, sapiential education, cultivation of genuine wisdom and self-transcendence; community with self, world, culture and others. The heritage from Augustine is so powerful, it is a home for people through the turmoil. Some things start to happen to pull it apart. Cultural, historical, and socio-economic differences in how Christianity was understood leads to the East-West split, between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church. // Ivan Illich, Cheetham, Kranz (sp?) This weakens Christianity, and it loses some of its deeper connections to the Neoplatonic mystical theology. The West becomes less and less Platonic, more and more Aristotelian. This has to do with a transition in how people read after this Great Schism takes place.

Lectio Divina (31:22 to 37:20)

A difference between reading a poem and reciting a poem (Gabriel and Muhammad). There’s such a difference between reading a poem silently and reading it aloud, because the intonations and the sharing it with others makes it very different; a change in identity. When somebody is singing a song or poem, it is appealing to you not just trying to create beliefs in you; not just propositional knowing, but participatory and perspectival knowing. You have to bring in know-how of communication, sharing, paying attention; embodied. Lectio Divina engages a text in a meditative and mindful fashion, opening yourself up to the possibility of transformation. It’s analogous to listening to music, preparing yourself to be receptive to a profound aesthetic experience. God is present in the text, speaking to you. Ontologically remedial healing, transformation; activate, educate, remember being mode.

From Avicenna to Averroes (37:20 to 40:27)

Shortly after the Great Schism people start to read silently. The Persian philosopher Avicenna was the dominant interpreter of the Augustinian worldview, and he gave always tried to keep the Neoplatonic and Gnostic elements of spirituality alive. (Henry Corbin) Averroes is more purely Aristotelian. This amounts to a shift to giving exclusive priority to definitions and propositions. Aristotle tried to understand the eidos as essences, and essences as definitions; that’s problematic because many things don’t have definitions. Because of this shift, people now start to read silently to themselves, giving priority to coherence within a language, rather than transformation within themselves and the world. What matters is how various propositional terms and logical connectives fit together. The new model of knowing is not a way of being, but a coherent propositional language.

Intensive Self, In Your Head | F. Edward Cranz (39:07 to 43:23)

After the Great Schism people give priority to coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves and the world. So, a new model for thought emerges. The old model was conforming to the world in a process of gnosis and anagoge. This was not only a model of knowing but also a way of being. This was starting to be taken away. Cranz talks about the shift from an extensive self transjectively connected to world, to an intensive self inside your head and inside your beliefs. My self is primarily the way I talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositions. Coherence within our inner language, instead of conformity in our outer existential modes. Reading now becomes a consumption of propositions and logically coherent structures. This reorientation towards the external world is being driven by Aristotle’s rediscovery.

Aristotle as a Problem for Christianity (43:23 to 45:52)

Aristotle was rediscovered for western Europe because of the Crusades, and he starts to come into prominence again. This drives a reorientation towards the external world. The problem for Christianity is that Aristotle was part of that whole ancient world that Augustine gave us; Aristotle was the author of the nomological order of meaning. Aristotle can’t be ignored, but he describes a world that does not have a lot of Christian mythology attached to it. Christianity makes no attempt to explain the things that he does. Aristotle offered clear definitions, clear syllogistic inferences, and this is enmeshed with the new way of reading texts, experiencing knowing, being in your head and language. Aristotle can’t be ignored, but he can’t simply be assimilated into a Christian worldview. More and more people are starting to emulate the Aristotelian science, causing a crisis.

Thomas Aquinas’ Task (45:36 to 53:04)

Aquinas sees the looming threat posed by the changes caused by Aristotelian thinking. He sees both the change in psychotech of reading, and in how people look at the world. Thomas takes up this pivotal task; controversy of how Platonic/Aristotelian he was. To salvage both the Christian worldview and the newly discovered Aristotelian science, he goes back to the fundamental grammar of all of this, the mythology of the two worlds. Aquinas changes everything. He says the everyday world of Axial mythology is real too! Real knowledge of this world is possible through reason and science. But, somehow, the other world, the supernatural world, is more real than natural world. The supernatural world cannot be studied by science or reason, only accessed by faith. He fundamentally divorces spirituality from science.

The Divorce of Heaven and Earth (47:22 to 53:40)

In Aquinas, the two worlds have been made fundamentally two separate kinds of worlds. There is no longer a continuum between them, no way of moving through them by love and reason united together. (Matthew 6:9–13) Love and reason are being pulled apart. In Plotinus and Augustine, love moves reason. But for Aquinas, love moves the will to assert things that it can’t know through reason. Faith is not participation in the flow of the course of history, faith is now the act of willful assertion, assent to a creed. // Romanticism As scientific study of the everyday world becomes more successful, and we find less and less our assertions and will being driven by love, but just by willpower alone, the supernatural world becomes less and less real to us, less viable and livable for us. The grammar that gives meaning, wisdom, self-transcendence, is threatened to fall apart.

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Episode 20: Death of the Universe

Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics’ Spirituality (5:08 to 12:03)

Since in Aquinas, love can’t lift reason up to the higher of two worlds, a different kind of spirituality tends to be emphasized in the Rhineland mystics. (nomological) There had been a huge Gnostic revival (the Cathars), and a Neoplatonic tradition. They take Aquinas’ new nomological order and bring a change in normative order. Rather than the Neoplatonic anagoge/ascent in self-transcendence, that disappears and is replaced by God’s descent into you. (a precedent for this in theurgy) It’s no longer that love moves the will, love is now a way in which the will moves. They pick up on the sacrificial aspect of yourself: you sacrifice your willful self-assertion to become a conduit for agape, and for God to dwell within you. Inner conflict (Paul or Augustine) is now valorized; spirituality is a battle of wills.

William of Ockham, God’s Will and Nominalism (12:03 to 18:00)

Your model of God influences how you understand yourself and reality. Aquinas made the will the way to access to the supernatural, central to spirituality. For Ockham it is not God’s reason and intelligibility that is the source of his being, but it is his will; God’s will is the source of his creativity, not agapic love. God’s will supersedes his reason, he is not bound by rationality. Ascent to God through reason is gone. Any order we find in existence is arbitrary, and God speaks in an act of will by raw power and fiat. We approach the world the way God does. Any patterns we find in nature is just imposed on it by your mind. The only thing that’s real is individuals, particulars. The world is not inherently intelligible anymore, it is in a sense absurd.

The Black Death (18:00 to 23:21)

There is a disaster, thought to be the Bubonic Plague, which kills a third of Europe. The plague brings massive pestilence, and crops die from the extended wet period. Hundred Years’ War; inquisition against the Cathars, the Church’s secret police. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have arrived: Death, War, Pestilence, Famine. Like the Hellenistic domicide: their worldview undermined, mistrust of authorities. The feudal structure is under strain, people are free to move around geographically. Due to the labor shortage, more entrepreneurship and experimentation is possible. This forms a consistency with the emerging worldview of primacy of will. The order of the world is given by God; we can impose an order like God does, and we can change our own status and make ourselves into something different.

Commercial Incorporation and the Secular State (23:21 to 29:56)

After the Black Plague people become more entrepreneurial and sell their labor. People start to make use of disparity and demand to accrue wealth apart from the Church, the aristocracy, or from farming the land. (the emerging middle class) People start to create banks and insurance companies to support their expeditions. Corporations form out of a body of members (like the Church is the body of Christ) People have shares in the risks and have dividends when there is a profit. The corporations and financial institutions start putting pressure on the government to be working not just for the Church and the aristocracy. A secular alternative to change your life and seek power and prestige is formed. Psychotechnogies of info processing become relevant. (Arabic numerals, algebra)

The Copernican Revolution (29:56 to 37:43)

People are commercially motivated to improve ship navigation with the new math and Aristotelian inferential thinking; they discover there is chaos in the heavens. They try to adjust the Aristotelian model by adding complex systems of epicycles. Copernicus says: “The math is better if you put the Sun at the center.” He did not need to answer the challenges people had to Aristarchus before him, because people are already committed now to the new mathematical psychotechnologies. Copernicus demonstrates that Aristotle’s conditions for reality can all be satisfied, and it can still be not real, it’s insufficient. Conformity theory has been undermined. The only thing that cuts through the illusion of sense experience is math. Our experiences are just something we talk about. This radically disconnects us.

Galileo and Inertial Motion (37:43 to 45:04)

For Galileo, mathematics is the language of the universe. He puts Aristotelian logic and the new math together with careful observation. Galileo doesn’t trust sense experiences, but takes abstract mathematical entities to to be what is real. The way you’re thinking of things doesn’t have to look like what it’s representing in the world. Now math is not just geometry, but also arithmetic. Galileo rolls balls down inclined planes and realizes the inertial motion of things. Things don’t have an inner drive to get where they belong; that’s a purposeful, narrative way of understanding the world. They move by purely random, arbitrary, external forces. Everything is dead, there’s no inner life to matter. You’re isolated in a battle with other wills. Matter is substance, not potential. (beyond good and evil)

Galileo’s Scientific Method and Worldview (45:04 to 51:34)

Galileo gives us the scientific method, which is a legacy from the Axial Revolution. It is a way for overcoming willful generation of illusion and self-deception. The point of the scientific method is to get the resistance of the inert, purposeless world to resist our purposes in our will, show us how we are deceiving ourselves. This gives huge priority to the method and the math. The measurable, mathematical properties are the real ones. It’s objective. Things like how sweet this honey is, how beautiful the sunset is, how meaningful these words are, are non-mathematical. All that meaning is trapped in your mind, an internal chamber that manipulates language and propositions. It’s subjective. Chairs, tables and cups are constructs that your mind willfully asserts on the world.

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Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes

Martin Luther and Salvation (2:03 to 10:36)

Luther inherits valorized self-negation/loathing and inner conflict from the mystics (Tauler), and Augustine’s inability for mystical union unaided, self-depravity. Luther is impressed with Paul’s parallel of our inner conflict with that of God. He is terrified by the wrath of God’s justice. He experiences the self as folded into itself, cut off from God and reality. It is self-aggrandizing and destructive. (pride) Psychodynamics makes much of the fact that, even in our conscious efforts to change our behavior, we keep unconsciously repeating the self-destructive patterns. Luther is convinced that he can’t do anything to save himself. (wretchedness) Sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria. He rejects Erasmus’ synergism. God’s salvation is entirely arbitrary, no reason to it.

Luther’s Cultural Individualism and Narcissism (10:36 to 16:49)

Martin Luther sincerely wants to rescue us from our idolatrous self-obsession. He infuses our cultural grammar with our inherent worthlessness, an inner life of self-loathing; the only solution is unearned, arbitrary, amoral, positive regard. The irony is that in doing this, Luther provides the grammar for cultural narcissism. Humans don’t participate in salvation; therefore Church tradition is worthless. History, tradition and institution don’t matter. They have no authority for faith. Luther is trapped in his own mind. All that matters in the spiritual life is your individual conscience. Meaning withdraws to isolated individuals. Adorno talked about the cult of authenticity; being true to yourself is the ultimate authority by which to judge and evaluate your life. This is Lutheran.

Sapiential Obsolescence (16:26 to 21:55)

For a long time the West had the university paired with the monastery. The university was a knowledge institution where you got a universal education; it was a response to Aristotelian science, and then Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo. The monastery was a wisdom institution where you seek self-transcendence; you go through transformation to acquire wisdom. (the Axial Revolution) Luther was a monk, but he saw transcendence as a delusion stemming from pride. If faith has no perspectival, participatory sense, but is just an assertion born out of a radical acceptance, the possibility of self-transcendence becomes unthinkable. Monasteries are shut down; universities attach onto politics and the state instead. Today it is getting difficult to distinguish political assertions and actual knowledge.

Priesthood of All Believers (21:55 to 27:04)

Luther attacks tradition and institution, insisting there is no mediator between you and God; no church or priest separates you from a direct, personal relationship. Also, each individual has an equal spiritual authority since processes of growth and self-transformation are unimportant or invalidated. Only salvation by God matters. Everything should be decided democratically in the Church organizational context. This emphasis on individuals will have an impact on peasant revolts in Germany. But Luther sides with the established authority over the peasants; democracy is fine in the Church because those are the saved, outside it we don’t know who is saved. This brings with it the separation of Church and state. (God’s love, God’s wrath) This further drives the secularization of culture. The sacred is private and secluded.

Protestant Work Ethic, Unconscious Prosperity Gospel (27:04 to 29:55)

The problem with Luther’s model is, there’s nothing you can do to know you’re saved. You play no causal role, which means there’s no causal evidence. This provokes tremendous anxiety. Luther tells you to rely on your individual conscience, but he tells you the inner world is one of overwhelming self-deception. You can’t do anything with this anxiety officially, you can only work hard to make your life good. Socioeconomic success surely is a sign that God loves you. So you work hard, but you don’t use your wealth to promote yourself in any way; any conspicuous consumption would be a sign of pride. Therefore, you push your money and wealth back into your business. // Max Weber This aligns with the emerging commercial corporate class; the advent of capitalism.

The Protestant Reformation and the Withdrawal of God (29:55 to 38:27)

God has become an arbitrary will in a world that is a battle between wills. Luther is the great writer of German, Shakespeare the great writer of English. In Shakespeare there are witches in Macbeth, ghosts in Hamlet, but God is absent. The supernatural is absurd and arbitrary, an agent of chaos, a destiny that thwarts. We still have the grammar of the protestant work ethic, that if we don’t work hard, it will be revealed how worthless we really are. // Narcissism of small difference We have to try to find that marker of uniqueness showing that we are chosen ones from all of the damned masses, that we will be adored simply for who we are. As the scientific revolution cuts you off from the world, the Protestant Reformation orphans you from the mother Church. You have to bear it all now, yet you can’t.

Psychotechnology of Cartesian Graphing (38:27 to 44:03)

Rene Descartes wants to use the grammar of the scientific revolution, with math as the marker for reality, and from his individual conscience, solve the meaning crisis. He develops psychotech of Cartesian graphing (x,y,z), internalized in our culture. Descartes realizes he can count the tiles in his room to come up with three numbers and plot the location of a fly buzzing around in the room along three different axes. In doing this he pushes Galileo’s new algebra further with analytic geometry: any geometrical shape can be rendered into algebra. Equations capture reality. Even though the equations are nothing like what they represent, they cut through the illusion of sense experience. This purely propositional, abstract, symbolic kind of knowledge empowers us to grasp the world, and annihilate it if we choose.

The Quest for Certainty (44:03 to 50:49)

Descartes sees the meaning crisis of his time as a lack of the search for certainty. Perspectival, participatory conformity from the Aristotelian/Neoplatonic framework has been replaced by propositional certainty. That’s why the new math is important. Descartes thinks the answer to the anxiety of the age is for us to adopt a method to turn ourselves into computers; nothing to do with spiritual transformation. Human reasoning is reduced to computation because, if we can make our minds into purely computational machines, then we will achieve certainty in our beliefs. We are beset on the one hand with the cultural grammar of Martin Luther, and its narcissism and self-doubt; on the other hand we have this Cartesian grammar. We vacillate between accepting without evidence or reason, or only what is certain.

Thomas Hobbes, Cognition is Computation (50:49 to 55:31)

Hobbes challenges Descartes’ quest for certainty by suggesting it would imply that ratiocination, or cognition, is computation. // Brian Cantwell Smith, metaphysics Hobbes employs the new idea from Galileo that matter is a substance, rather than the Aristotelian idea that matter is pure potential. The only thing left of conformity is that the inert mass resists my will and thereby helps me overcome biases. Matter is real. Hobbes asks, what if we take this material and use it to build a machine that can do computations? If cognition is just computational, and we can build machines that do computations, then we can make instances of cognition, minds, artificial intelligence. So if Copernicus kills sense experience, Galileo kills the universe, Hobbes the soul.

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Episode 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes

Descartes vs. Hobbes on Meaning and Rationality (4:54 to 18:15)

Hobbes thinks if matter is manipulating propositions in a meaningful and logical manner, this will mean that this matter is an instance of rationality. Descartes rejects Hobbes’ proposal for artificial intelligence, responding not out of his religious faith, but the fundamental machinery of the scientific revolution. Descartes argues if you engage in reasoning rather than just computation, you have a goal of finding truth, and actually care; you are held to a normative standard. Truth depends on meaning, you have to grasp the meaning to know if it is true. This scientific model teaches that the world is purposeless, matter is meaningless, no normativity. If true, then there can’t be a material reasoner, no strong AI or AGI. Popular advocates of Cartesian rationality often don’t attend to his own criticisms.

Objective Matter and Subjective Qualia (18:15 to 23:11)

Galileo had the Platonic idea that mathematics is the language of reality. After Descartes’ time, the properties of something that are measurable by math are taken to be primary qualities. It’s in the object, it’s objective. Objective comes from “to object,” throw against. Objective matter resists me. But many qualities of experience are not describable in math: beauty, smells, tastes. Galileo following on Copernicus considers these secondary qualities, which only exist in our mind and not in the object itself. These are subjective, in the subject. Subjective comes from “to subject,” throw under. I can dominate these qualia. Somehow qualia are central to consciousness; if they don’t come from matter, then any AI will never have conscious awareness of its cognition, no meaning.

Cogito Ergo Sum (23:11 to 28:20)

Descartes sees that everything is withdrawing from the world into the mind, so that the mind is getting isolated and trapped inside of itself. He wants to try to doubt everything, to find what cannot be doubted. But logical certainty (absolute, deductive validity) is not the same as psychological certainty (an inability to doubt at all). Example: bigotry that comes from ignorance. Descartes thinks the two eventually become identical somehow… (but it never does) He brings even mathematics under his doubt, to avoid any evil demon’s tricks; but no matter how illusory everything may be, Descartes still knows his mind is there. The mind used to be in touch with the world, or even math. Now the mind is only left with consciousness. The mind touching itself is the touchstone of reality.

Strong AI/AGI and Weak AI | John Searle (27:42 to 33:43)

Vervaeke warns us that artificial intelligence will change the world politically, culturally, socioeconomically; it will affect our self-understanding; meaning crisis. Weak AI is the project of making machines to do what intelligent animals can do. The computer revolution was “weak” AI. Basically everyone depends on it now. But weak AI does not advance scientific understanding in the way that matters. Strong AI is to have made a computer that not only does intelligent things, or does modeling of what mind does, but is actually itself an instance of mind. (Hobbes) But to know that you’ve succeeded in Hobbes’ project, you must answer Descartes’ objections with scientific explanation for normativity, purpose, and consciousness. People who are invested in AGI are a lot more cautious about predicting if/when.

Existential Cost of Mind/Body Dualism (33:43 to 46:03)

Religiously-minded may want to accept mind-body dualism to save notion of soul. Mind works in terms of meaning/qualia; matter is extended in space and time. But if mind & body share no fundamental properties, can they causally interact? How can mind energize our bodies to act? Do inert masses feel pain in collisions? We experience mind and matter as intimately involved in a bidirectional manner. The way Descartes responds to Hobbes makes it impossible for them to interact. This gap radically cuts you off from yourself. The taste of water becomes utterly unrelated to the physical water. It’s become absurd, a mystery. We get an unstable grammar of realness of empiricism/positivism vs romanticism, and we get a totally empty self, adrift in Pascal’s empty, infinite spaces that terrify.

Blaise Pascal and the Spirit of Finesse (44:51 to 51:09)

Pascal is part of the scientific revolution, a mathematical genius and an inventor. He has a transformative experience that convinces him that what Descartes was trying to achieve, certainty, is not possible, and that the meaning crisis is powerful. Pascal distinguishes the spirit of geometry/math/method from the spirit of finesse. We lost the importance of procedural knowledge, knowing-how to do things. We lost perspectival knowing, knowing what it’s like, and we’ve lost participatory knowing, which binds together in mutual transformation/reciprocal revelation. To do a Tai Chi move with finesse, there’s an element which can’t be captured in mathematical propositions. It’s knowing-how, the right timing, the right placement, the right sensitivity to the context, what it’s like to be you, to be the other. (kiss)

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Episode 23: Romanticism

Immanuel Kant and Filter-Framing (8:23 to 20:59)

Descartes left us with a fractured reality: subjective inner mind, objective math. Why does math describe reality so well? It’s so unlike spatio-temporal materiality. The Neoplatonic answer is that reality is grounded in intelligible form. (eidos) Kant basically makes use of Ockham’s Razor to insert the patterns of intelligibility of mathematics in the subjective mind, and effect his “Copernican revolution.” Patterns aren’t features of the world, they are how experience must be structured by the mind to “make sense.” The world is very blurry, we have to filter it/frame it. This inverts Plato’s model. Patterns aren’t discovered, but imposed on information. But this leaves us imprisoned in the mind, unable to discover the thing-in-itself. Rationality distances you from reality now. // Levels of processing: TAE CHT

Romanticism and Imagination and Romantic Love (19:32 to 26:43)

Kant’s filter-framing rationality removes us from being in contact with reality. The Romantics want to reclaim participatory contact, so they pursue irrationality. This makes Freud and Jung possible. Jung is a Neokantian with Gnostic mythology. If you open up your mind to the more irrational, less fully processed parts of cognition, at the boundary of conscious and unconscious aspects of experience, you’re going to lose rationality, but you’re gaining that lost contact with the world. The Romantics are trying to get back to gnosis and participatory knowing from the Neoplatonic tradition; quintessential form for this is love, now an irrational force. Imagination (not just fancy, moving mental images in your head), imposes order on raw data to mediate reason and perception. // Music and art that we reflect upon.

Romantic Pseudo-Religious Ideology (26:43 to 39:03)

Empiricists like John Locke had it that the mind is a blank slate; sense impressions. The Romantics opposed them. We don’t know the thing-in-itself, the world, but it’s like an empty canvas on which imagination expresses, presses itself out. Jung and Freud get the notion of projecting onto the world from the Romantics. Both the empiricists and the Romantics are wrong, too much evidence against. A pan-European movement integrates music, art, literature, meaning-making frames how to regain contact with reality. It fails, but doesn’t go away. (decadence) They make machinery of imagination carry all the Neoplatonic weight of religion. They know language alone can’t effect transformation, yet all they have is poetry. Sapiential traditions and systematic sets of psychotechnologies are needed.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s Pessimism and the Will to Live (39:03 to 46:30)

The priority of will passes through German history to Schopenhauer, who was the godfather of nihilism. Nihilism arises out of the Romanticism, they go together. The Romantics saw the irrational, imaginative part which gets us in contact with reality as happening spontaneously; for Schopenhauer it’s the arbitrary will to live. The raw will is what drives you, structures and filter-frames all your experience, making reasoning possible. But the will is relentless, and pointless. It does not serve your rational mind. Ego is a little machine on the shoulders of the will to live. Scho says that sex is the cruel joke that the species plays on the individual. (Freud) Meaning-making and rationality are disconnected; we need art and music to quiet the will to live long enough to get a momentary respite from it.

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Will to Power (46:30 to 56:12)

Nietzsche keeps the notion of will, that it’s filter-framing the world, but he’s in deep conflict with the Axial Revolution. He followed Wagner, who untethered music from tradition; he responds to Schopenhauer’s nihilism with will to power. Everything is pressing itself out. This is not just a feature of our minds, but of reality. It’s the pre-Christian desire to create and master oneself and the world. He says that Christianity repressed self-transcendence. He sees it in a Lutheran way, so it doesn’t capture the more Neoplatonic Christianity. // Spinoza’s conatus Nietzsche is godfather of postmodernism. Thus Sprach Zarathustra was to replace the Bible. His many voices all undermine and criticize each other. Rationality needs to also overcome self-deception, but he only critiques and satires. This is one-sided.

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Episode 24: Hegel

The Real is the Rational, the Rational is the Real (1:18 to 10:38)

Hegel is aware of Romanticism, and of Kant’s framework of the thing-in-itself. The thing in-itself makes no sense, it’s unknowable; and so, it doesn’t exist. But that means reality is ultimately constructed by the Mind. (absolute idealism) Hegel picks up on the ancients’ connection between being and being-known, between our sensing and making sense, and how intelligible/knowable it is to us. The mind doesn’t just make structures of rational experience, but of reality itself. Irrational aspects of the Mind don’t move us to the unknowable thing-in-itself; they are a developmental potential within the Mind for rationality/self-actualization. Mind here is meant in an extended sense, as the living and developing system of intelligible patterns at work in humanity. // Geist or “Mind”/“Spirit” is the Absolute

Hegel’s Dialectic (10:22 to 26:41)

History is the process of reality and understanding unfolding together. (AR, Israel) We study history to find the living system of patterns of intelligibility that structure experience and reality, affording worldview grammars. (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) Hegel says history is driven by two opposing movements or forces: to make sense we must differentiate, clarify, contrast; articulation is both speech/finding the joints. We must also integrate, gather together, and constitute systematic connections. We participate in the out-working of these patterns in our thoughts and behaviors. The process of understanding for Hegel is the creation of a system, systematization. Movement of Geist analogous to stages of development through childhood. (telos) Hegel believed his philosophy was a stage of self-awareness of Absolute Spirit.

Secularizing Ideology of German Idealism (25:09 to 41:53)

For Hegel the intelligibility of reality and reality itself are co-developing together. The blossoming of rationality in and through history is God. Hegel has created a secular, philosophical rationalization of the Hebrew participation with God. This is a kind of secular, non-religious god, not intervening through prophets, but being realized by the reflective contemplation of a philosopher, Hegel himself. “Mythology must become philosophy in order to make the people rational, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophers sensible.” It is a philosophical proposal, but also a socio-cultural program of transformation. “It will be the last and greatest work of mankind.” Culmination to the final utopia. Hegel sets up a pattern of secularizing religion into systems of total explanations.

Kierkegaard’s Existential Critique of Hegel (41:14 to 48:07)

Kierkegaard says that Hegel made a system, and then sat down beside it. This is a kind of impersonalism, a lack of perspectival and participatory knowing. Theology is completely conceptual, propositional, rational, self-reflection. Our attempt to make contact with what’s most real, to realize the divine as in Platonic dialectic and anagoge, is completely severed from personal transformation. You do not have to radically change, or have a mystical experience or higher states. You don’t have to have a Socratic encounter and challenge; just interpret history. Merold Westphal’s ethical self-transcendence: overcome egocentrism; agapic love. Moving through transformative experiences requires a kind of leap of faith. We exist before we have discovered this essence about who and what we are.

Marx’s Communist Manifesto (48:07 to 54:50)

The course of history moves as a result of socio-economic activities of materiality. History is not driven by Reason, but by the appetitive Will; not Man, but Monster. Feuerbach said that religion and God are projections of human ideals. They distract from how we are the true authors of history. A dialectical materialism is at work. The clash of history is not between ideas that are contrasting and integrating, but of a political struggle between opposing classes, ways of socio-economic life. The political classes are in conflict with one another, but they are interdependent. Self-contradiction inheres in capitalism, but political struggle and violence will work out the self-contradictions in our socio-economic activity for us. (utopianism) Kairos of Christianity is now the political revolution to reach the Promised Land.

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Episode 25: The Clash

Germany and Nationalism (9:17 to 14:36)

Pseudo-religious, secularized, political, socio-economic ideologies in conflict is the fruit of Romanticism’s understanding of Spirit and how meaning-making happens. Nationalism is the idea that the nation-state can take the role God took in the past. Your patriotic devotion, commitment, willingness to sacrifice, participation in the historical development that precedes you and follows you, is similar to religion. A fierce nationalism emerges in 19th century. It is understood in terms of will, and it is wedded to socio-economic, technological power, and then to imperialism. This is what fills the gap of the erosion of the Christian framework for meaning. Bismarck unites the Germans into a nation-state, not just a cultural leader but a political, economic, industrial power. It sees itself in competition for world empire.

World War I and the Weimar Republic (14:36 to 20:03)

The whole attempt to secularize progress in terms of technological advancement and nationalism/imperialism comes to a halt in the first world war. Everything that was to bring utopia and replace God drenches Europe in a tidal wave of blood. An entire generation is decimated. Europe, especially Germany, is traumatized. Its ambitions are thwarted; France and England treat Germany very poorly, weakening it economically and crippling it militarily. // German Idealism collapses. We see Luther’s genocidal antisemitism (The Jews and Their Lies); the Rhineland Mystics and Boehme’s Neoplatonic/Gnostic mythology; critiques of idealism from the positivism and scientific materialism; the rise of Marxism in Germany; Goethe, Romantic decadence; Protestant fragmentation; will to power as self-transcendence.

Adolf Hitler’s Struggle and Nazism (20:03 to 26:59)

Nationalism and antisemitism integrate with a racist interpretation of history to try and replace Hegel’s idealistic or Marx’s socio-economic interpretation of history. This is drawn together in the autodidactic, Romantic, willful and decadent vortex of Hitler’s mind. The morally abhorrent Mein Kampf verges on incoherence. He sees his struggle as emblematic and symbolic of all of Germany and the West. Nazism is not only a fascist political system and racism, but these are in service of a “Gnostic nightmare”: Our master race is trapped from our divine heritage, and only by opposing the (((evil overlords))) can we return to the soil of our nation. Hitler crafts something between a religion, totalitarian ideology, and personal myth; it is fused with decadent Romanticism and the will to power. (Triumph of the Will)

World War II and the Clash (26:59 to 33:06)

We have two great, totalitarian, pseudo-religious ideologies: Marxism, and Nazism. Hitler asserts the history of race, and the Communists assert the history of class. They each are infused with mythologies of grasping and driving the kairos of history towards the utopia of the Promised Land; Tomas Bjorkman’s meta-crisis. Both sides fixate on belief systems, a total politicization of the quest for meaning. These two historical, socio-political and socio-economic forces meet in the most “titanic struggle” at the Battle of Kursk of WWII on the Eastern Front in 1943. It involves millions of men, vast amounts of equipment, from horizon to horizon. Individual acts of brutality, set within a technological machine of mass destruction. A Russian victory spells the end of Nazi regime and ascendance of Soviet Union.

The Meaning Crisis, Our Dilemma (33:06 to 45:59)

We are facing what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis: the intertwining of ecological, socio-economic, spiritual, existential, mental health crises of our time. To address this will require comprehensive change in our consciousness, cognition, character (cultivating virtue, wisdom, compassion, self-transcendence), and culture. The only structure of distributed cognition of systematic sets of psychotechnologies that transformed in an interdependent way was religion. // Melville’s Moby Dick We tried pseudo-religious ideologies, but those have drenched our world in blood. Many doubt or reject a nostalgic return to religious/anti-religious fundamentalisms. The post-religious find themselves fragmented and autodidactic. We seem to need a religion that cannot be any kind of religion at all. We need a God beyond all gods.

Scientific Study of Mind (43:23 to 58:29)

Cognitive science emerges in the 70s so that disciplines which study mind interact. Different levels of analysis of mind are fragmenting our sense of identity and self. Neuroscience studies the brain, patterns of neural activity; neurons, fMRIs, EEGs. Information processing studies programs, algorithms, neural networks, AI, AGI. Psychology studies your behavior, working memory, long-term memory, and draws on experimentation on human beings, and statistical and demographic data. Linguistics discusses language, tree structures, and transformational grammar. Anthropology participates in a culture to make observations and ethnographies. Philosophy bridges between different ontologies, methods, and ways of theorizing. Cognitive science doesn’t want equivocation on ‘mind’, but the causal interactions.

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Episode 26: Cognitive Science

Equivocation (9:50 to 17:27)

Equivocation is confusion from failing to keep track of the meaning of your terms. ‘Nothing’s better than long life and happiness.’ ‘A sandwich is better than nothing.’ ‘Therefore a sandwich is better than long life and happiness.’ It is a ridiculous argument because it relies on equivocating on the term ‘nothing.’ Although the same word is used, you didn’t mean the same thing by it each time. ‘Nothing’ first means no thing from the set of things that make life worth living. Then, ‘nothing’ means no thing from the set of things you should eat. But these two are not equivalent sets, so there’s not an equivalent reference. This is a disastrous way to try to reason about anything. (bullshit) // the term ‘mind’ Therefore it’s important to pay attention to the history of the meaning of terms.

Cognitive Science as Synoptic Integration (17:27 to 23:31)

Some people talk about the ‘cognitive sciences,’ just a generic nominalism. The different disciplines just belong under this header, this grouping or genus. This doesn’t give any purchase on addressing ignorance between different levels. Some understand ‘cognitive science’ as a kind of inter-disciplinary eclecticism, so that disciplines are aware of each other but do not radically transform each other. That doesn’t capture the tendencies to attempt to ‘bridge’ between the different disciplines (e.g. psycholinguistics), so it tends to degenerate. // metaphor Synoptic integration says that we need to build something between the disciplines to describe how the different levels are causally interacting and constraining each other. Cognitive science would address ignorance, equivocation and fragmentation.

Aptness of Metaphors (23:31 to 29:33)

‘Sam is a pig.’ This looks like an identity claim, but it’s not. This is a metaphor. It refers to how Sam is gluttonous or sexually selfish, etc. For the metaphor to work, it must maintain both their difference and identity well. The difference nudges you out of your usual framing of Sam, while also giving you a lens to look through and gain insight about Sam. These are your “pig-lenses.” ‘Bees are hornets.’ If identity is too strong, there isn’t enough distance for insightful transformation of your understanding. ‘Arguments are chairs.’ If difference is too much, too far from each other, you lose sight, and the lens is unclear and vague. A metaphor is apt when there is an appropriate balance of identity and difference. Cognitive science creates constructs between multiple domains; multi-aptness.

Convergence/Elegance, Deepity, Motte and Bailey | Daniel Dennett (29:33 to 43:22)

We want constructs to have many independent, converging lines of investigation. Numbers afford convergence, boosting trustworthiness; they tend to reduce the distortions and bias from any one channel. (you can see, hear, and touch ‘3’) Elegance or multi-aptness not produced in a trustworthy manner would yield conspiracy theories: just give me this one thing, and I can give synoptic integration. Convergence without elegance is triviality. (academic science/philosophy journals) ‘Love is a four letter word.’ At the level of the word ‘love’, it is a trivial thing. The statement equivocates the word with love itself; pretends to give multi-aptness, but in fact only gives triviality. This kind of bullshit is called deepity by Dennett. Motte and bailey strategy equivocates to mask attempted aptness with triviality.

Practical Induction, Meaning Cultivation | Elijah Millgram, Heidegger (42:12 to 48:18)

Practical induction is related to convergence and elegance in Millgram’s work. It is not induction about how you change your beliefs, but how to rationally change your desires and what you care for. (Socrates) Cognitive science exemplifies convergence/elegance in its synoptic integration, bridging between disciplines to address fragmentation of ‘mind’ and meaning. Cognitive science is relevant to the meaning crisis; propensity for bullshit/self-d. Meaning isn’t willfully imposed on the world, nor simply found in the world. Meaning is something between us and the world, like how you cultivate a plant. You do things with the plant, but you also allow the plant to unfold. This is the way that third generation cognitive science discusses meaning-making.

Intelligence | Simon1 & Binet, Newell & Simon2 (48:18 to 58:34)

The notion of intelligence goes back to our Greek heritage. It is our core cognitive capacity for meaning cultivation and responding adaptively to the world; learning. Intelligence makes you a cognitive agent, one that works with meaning, rather than simply responding like a (still yet complex) plant would to its environment. We try to test/make intelligence by testing/making general problem solvers. Intelligence can’t mean possessing knowledge; not the product, but the process. A problem is a difference between initial state and goal state. // search space For the difference to go away, things in the world and in you have to be changed. Operators transform current state; obeying path constraints preserves agent/arena. You have to represent initial state, goal state, operators, and path constraints well.

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Episode 27: Problem Formulation

Combinatorial Explosion of the Problem Space | Keith Holyoak (4:59 to 13:16)

To have a problem is precisely to be in the initial state, and not know which of all the operators and pathways take you to the goal state and obey the path constraints. Analyzing and formalizing the problem in terms of a problem space reveals that its size is calculable by F^D. F is the # of operators, D is the # of stages to operate on. A chess game has 30 legal moves and about 60 turns, so ~4.24 × 10⁸⁸ pathways. This is known as combinatorial explosion. There are only about 5 × 10¹⁵ synaptic connections in the brain, so it can’t possibly track each pathway of a chess game. You don’t have the time, the machinery, or the resources to search the whole space. You must zero in on relevant information without having to check all of it. This is central to intelligence: the dynamic generation of both obviousness and salience.

Algorithms and Rationality | Newell and Simon, Polya (13:16 to 20:34)

An algorithm is a problem-solving technique guaranteed to either find a solution, or prove (not merely give evidence) that a solution can’t be found. (ex. multiplication) An argument is valid if it is impossible for premises to be true and conclusion false. Algorithmic processing is held to the standard of certainty. Even after some a priori considerations are accounted for, you must still search the whole problem space. To try to be a deductive machine like Spock or Data is cognitive suicide. Equating rationality (ratio, rationing) with being logical is absurd, contra Descartes. To be rational is to know when, where, how much, and what degree to be logical. Rationality is not just the psychotechnology of logic or consistency, but how to use logic in order to overcome self-deception and optimally achieve our desired goals.

Heuristics and Bias | Newell and Simon, Polya (20:18 to 23:51)

A heuristic is a problem-solving method not guaranteed to find a solution, but is only reliable for increasing your chances of achieving your goal. Even the best computer programs for chess play it heuristically, not algorithmically: get your queen out early, control the center board, castle your king. It is possible to employ the best heuristics, and nevertheless not achieve your goal. Heuristics try to pre-specify, pre-judge, where to search for relevant information, thereby limiting the space you’re searching. Therefore they are sources of bias. Someone who is good at chess can notice how you are fixated on the center board, and they can keep you focused there while playing a peripheral game to defeat you. No Free Lunch Theorem: it is unavoidable to use heuristics and be prone to bias.

The Naturalistic Imperative in Cognitive Science (23:51 to 33:29)

Cog. sci. involves analyzing complex phenomena down into its basic components, and get at underlying substances/forces, an ontological depth perception. (Thales) Cog. sci involves formalizing phenomena into graphical representation. (Descartes) It also involves mechanizing, making a machine to carry out the formal analysis. That means that you haven’t snuck anything in. We often fall into the homuncular fallacy, explaining vision circularly with vision. Newell and Simon seek to explain mental terms by non-mental ones, through analysis, formalization, and mechanization, thereby avoiding circularity. Critics of naturalism point to meaning-making and consciousness as needing an explanation; but it is increasingly difficult to point to a lack of progress. (Lakatos)

Essentialism Heuristic (33:29 to 39:51)

The idea of essentialism is that when you group a bunch of things together with a term, they must all share some core properties, an essence. (Aristotle) The essence of a thing is the set of necessary conditions for it being that thing. Science discovers the groupings that have an essence, like gold and its properties. But Wittgenstein shows that not everything we group together has an essence. You won’t find a definition for the term ‘game’ that includes all and only games. Ockham points to how we come up with a heuristic to treat any category as if it has an essence, though many don’t. This helps us to generalize and make predictions. It is possible to overgeneralize, but under-generalizing is also a mistake. While the essentialism heuristic is adaptive, it cannot be applied algorithmically.

Problem Formulation, Ill-Defined Problems | Kaplan and Simon (38:11 to 53:46)

In well-defined problems, you have an effective guiding representation of the initial state, the goal state, and the operators, so that you can solve the problem. There is a relationship between it being well-defined, and algorithmic in nature. Much of your education was about using psychotechnologies to make whole sets of problems well-defined for you. But, because of their prevalence, we tend to get blinded and think that’s what most problems are like. Most of them aren’t like this. When a problem is ill-defined, you don’t know what the relevant information is about initial state, goal state, operators, or path constraints. (mutilated chessboard) What’s missing in ill-defined problems is how they are to be formulated. You need relevance realization within problem formulation. (In Search of Insight)

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Episode 28: Convergence To Relevance Realization

Psychological Similarity and Categories | Goodman, Barsalou (10:12 to 19:27)

Categorization yields predictive power, allows you to abstract relevant information and to communicate. Items don’t have to be treated individually, naming each one. A category is a set of things which, crucially, seem to meaningfully belong together. We often equivocate when we invoke similarity and how “obvious” something is, between a psychological and a logical sense of similarity. Two things are logically similar, “kinda the same,” combinatorially explosively. They share an indefinitely large number of properties. But, truth and relevance are not the same thing. The impulse is to consider many properties as trivial/irrelevant. When that happens you move from logical similarity to psychological similarity. An instability in finding relevant comparisons for psychological similarity. (Fire!)

Frame Problem Robot, Behavioral Side Effects | Dennett, Shanahan (19:05 to 30:22)

We want to program a mobile robot to have agency and pursue Darwinian survival. An agent makes decisions based on the consequences of his/her/its behavior. Our robot should pull a load of batteries on its cart back to its feeding grounds. The problem is that there’s an armed time bomb on the cart. The robot intends to bring batteries back home to share with its comrades; the side effect is the bomb. We change our robot to account for side effects; now it’s stuck checking them all. To account for this combinatorial explosion, we make the robot verify relevance of each effect with a recipe book definition. But, our robot’s CPU is still overloading. The proliferation of behavioral side effects is the frame problem. A computational aspect to this is manageable, but the problem of relevance remains. (consciousness)

Implicature | H. P. Grice (30:13 to 36:57)

Most of your intelligence is the ability to coordinate your behavior, and with others. There is a relationship (not algorithmic) between how intelligent an individual is, and how social the species is. Communication is crucial to cognitive agency, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be linguistic. Grice points out that you are always conveying much beyond what you’re saying. When you communicate, we depend on you so that we can derive the implications. “Excuse me! I’m out of gas!” To have to make explicit the implied meaning would yield a new, even larger set of statements that, in turn, also must be unpacked. You can’t say everything you want to convey, this is combinatorially explosive. People have to read in between the lines. (etymology of intelligence, inter-ledger)

Maxims of Communication | H. P. Grice, Sperber and Wilson (36:57 to 42:26)

Our communication is facilitated by a basic level of communicative cooperation. Grice says we follow four maxims: truth (quality), quantity, manner, and relevance. I said I have one kid, but I have two. If I hAvE tWo KiDs ThEn I dO hAvE oNe! That is logical, but in a sense untruthful. It doesn’t give the requested information. The maxim of quantity has to do with giving the right amount of information. The manner of communication should be in a format most helpful for us to get at what is conveyed beyond what is said; the information should also be relevant. Sperber & Wilson propose relevance as not just linguistic but cognitive phenomena. They argue that all the maxims reduce to the one maxim of relevance: you present information in a relevant manner, with the relevant amount, honestly and sincerely.

Convergence to Relevance Realization (9:00 to 10:12, 42:26 to 46:32)

Again and again, at the core of intelligence is the capacity for relevance realization. All the information available in the environment is combinatorially overwhelming. Your selective attention is realizing relevance; you have to decide what to hold in working memory, what’s going to be important/relevant to you. (Lynn Hasher) Working memory is used in problem-solving for the combinatorial problem space. This interacts with the proliferation of side effects of your actions and behaviors. Long-term memory organization/categorization depends on getting at relevance. All of these things are interacting, and that is the relevance problem that we face. We know this isn’t just cold calculations, it has to do with salience, obviousness, what motivates you, arouses your energy, attracts your attention. Deeply involving.

The Awakening Project (46:10 to 54:04)

We’ve seen the convergence to RR. We need to now see how to analyze, formalize, and mechanize it, so as to coordinate consciousness, attention, long-term memory. We want to make use of the complex, dynamic self-organization of RR and insight. Once we’ve seen how RR might be grounded in synoptic integration across levels, we want to use RR to explain wisdom, self-transcendence, spirituality, meaning. RR is crucial to consciousness/attention; ASC can be crucial to meaning-making. We will repair the connections lost in the meaning crisis, between mind and body, between mind and world, between a mind and other minds, and of the mind itself. ‘Meaning’ is language of establishing relations of relevance between things. If we grasp RR, we can systematically coordinate old and new psychotechnologies.

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Episode 29: Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization

To try to give a theory of relevance while avoiding the homuncular fallacy. (10:05)

Aspectual Representations | John Searle (14:53 to 19:31)

When you form a representation in mind, you don’t grasp all its true properties. You pick out a subset of relevant properties to avoid combinatorial explosion. The features are structurally-functionally organized so that they share co-relevance. That’s what an aspect is. Old textbooks can be exapted to use as bludgeoning tools. We check for creativity by the different aspects people can get from categorization. Aspectuality deeply presupposes your ability to do relevance realization (RR). The representations themselves aren’t the causal progenitors of relevance, although they can feed back into our salience landscaping; that’s why we use representations. If meaning and spirituality are bound to RR, then the place to look for the source of meaning is not in representational cognition (ideas, propositions, images, etc).

Fingers of Instantiation/Demonstrative Reference | Zenon Pylyshyn (19:31 to 26:11)

Pylyshyn tested people’s multiple object tracking by showing them moving objects on a computer screen, each with its own set of features (colors, shapes, etc). The more objects you try to track at once, the less features you attribute for each. So primarily you are tracking the hereness and nowness of the objects; all of the content properties get lost and only the context properties remain. (FINST) Instantiating the fingers is basically salience tagging. The word ‘this’ provokes raw demonstrative reference, while a word like ‘cat’ refers to a specified thing. ‘This’ this (this) is a linguistic analogy for something you enact; we need to have enactive demonstrative reference before we can do any categorization. (contact) This, this, and this are tagged, mentally grouped together, and the group is tagged.

Don’t confuse properties of the theory with properties of what the theory is about! (26:11)

We have to go sub-representational, sub-semantic, sub-categorial, sub-conceptual. Eternal hereness and nowness, ineffability in higher states of consciousness. (28:15)

Implication, Inference, Cognitive Commitment | Fodor, Cherniak (30:04 to 38:16)

At the computational level we think about relationships between symbols. (syntax) Implication is a logical relation between propositions, based on syntactic structures. If A implies B and A is true, B is true. The truth of B is derived from the truth of A. Inference is when a cognitive agent uses implication relations to alter their beliefs. This issue of which beliefs need to be altered is raised by the nature of inference. The number of implications of any proposition is combinatorially explosive. You can’t ever be completely logical. You have to decide which implications you’ll use in your inferences, what cognitive commitments you are willing to make. Cognitive commitments affect how you use your limited resources of attention, time, and metabolic energy. So, realize which beliefs are relevant to your context.

Rules, Judgment, Situational Awareness | Harold Brown, Wittgenstein (38:16 to 47:46)

Rules are propositions that tell you where to commit your resources. But, every rule requires an interpretation, a specification as to its application. How do you be kind? In a situation you use inferences to derive actions and changes of belief. We cannot specify all the conditions of application of a rule, whether inside or outside of the rule. Any rule would become unusable, combinatorially explosive. You can’t explain how you follow rules in terms of just the rules. (propositional) Your ability to follow rules depends on your skill of judgment. (procedural) A different form of life: “Even if lions could talk, we would not understand them.” Situational awareness: salience landscaping, problem formulation. (perspectival) Situational awareness is grounded in conformity of agent and arena. (participatory)

Constitutive Goals and Autopoietic Systems (47:46 to 53:48)

Some may think that the central executive in the brain is a module for RR. This would be homuncular, it doesn’t explain what the capacity for RR actually is. Feature-gestalt shifting of attention means RR occurs at multiple levels of cognition simultaneously in a self-organizing way. That’s why it can lead to insight. // conatus RR works in terms of goals internal to the brain, emerging developmentally from it. The goals that are the source of RR have to be internal to the process of doing RR. Constitutive goals are goals that a system has that helps to make it be what it is. Living things are self-organizing because of their constitutive goal of preserving their own self-organization. To be alive is to have this end of self-preservation. Deep connection between RR and autopoiesis; a RR theory must be scale-invariant.

The fact that we can’t have a theory of relevance doesn’t preclude us from having a theory of relevance realization. (53:48)

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Episode 30: Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory

(4:33) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, D. L. Chiappe and A. Kukla

Systematic Import and Essences | Mill, Quine, Wittgenstein, Searle (4:33 to 24:08)

Science works by using reliable inductive generalizations, as broad as possible. This means we need systematic import and forming of homogeneous categories. Many categories do not have essences, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Mathematical categories like triangles are deductive essences, they can be deduced. From inductive generalizations, the scientific process can afford inductive essences, which are homogeneous sets that are able to generalize. Gold is an example of this. Essentialism is the mistake of treating a category as if it has an essence. If it doesn’t have an inductive essence, we can’t have a science about it. But, it still may be real. Category membership must be stable to avoid equivocation. (gravity: grave/heavy) For science, the properties have to be intrinsic/inherent in them, not just attributed.

(24:08) Relevance does not have systematic import. The class of things we find relevant is not homogeneous. Other than us finding them relevant, there is nothing that they share. Relevant one minute, irrelevant the next. Relevance always seems to be relevant to someone or something, ultimately to an autopoietic thing. Relevance is not something for which we can have a scientific theory. Nothing is essentially relevant.

(28:10) Our theory of relevance realization can’t be a theory of relevance detection (empiricism); nor is relevance something we merely project onto the world (romanticism).

Dynamical Systems Theory of Cognitive Interactional Fittedness (29:34 to 40:29)

Darwin realized there is no essential design on fittedness. Organisms fill niches in a complex and dynamic environment to promote their autopoeisis. Therefore we don’t need a theory of fittedness itself, only the realization of fittedness. (evolution) There’s a feedback cycle of reproduction, a virtual engine of selection/variation. Fittedness evolves out of and is constantly evolving towards other fittednesses. This is a non-homuncular account of the generation of intelligence by evolution. A theory for RR is one of how relevance evolves: formulating problems/categories, picking up on conveyance, making inferences, constraining the search space, etc. A virtual engine regulates your sensorimotor loop (sensing and acting in the world). This is a non-homuncular account of RR in concordance with biological evolution.

Bioeconomic Norms and Opponent Processing (40:29 to 57:57)

We need a set of sub-semantic, sub-syntactic properties, which are self-organizing and multi-scalular, for the establishment of agent-arena participation. (autopoiesis) An economy is a self-organizing system that allocates resources, often in order to preserve and develop itself. They are multi-scale, both bottom-up and top-down. Your body is a bioeconomy for time, metabolic energy, and processing power. A virtual engine regulates your bioeconomy to regulate your sensorimotor loop, in terms not of logical but logistical norms. (efficiency/selecting, resiliency/enabling) The autonomic nervous system is responsible for your level of arousal, how much your metabolic resources are converted into action. Sympathetic/parasympathetic components are opposing heuristics, coordinated for optimization of fittedness.

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Episode 31: Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI

Transjectivity and Embodied-Embedded Relevance Realization (2:59 to 13:10)

There is a deep dependency, running from propositional to participatory knowing, between cognitive agency as a general problem solver and the brain in bioeconomy. The body is not Cartesian clay or a vehicle for a self-enclosed or immaterial mind, it is an autopoietic bioeconomy that makes cognition possible for evolution of RR. Biological fittedness/adaptivity is a real relation between creature and environment. Similarly, relevance isn’t a property of objectivity or subjectivity, but transjectivity. Propositions that relevance inheres in subject or object are reifying essentialisms. Instead, it is co-created by the fit between the environment and embodied brain. Relevance is realized both in how it is made real, and how you become aware of it. Impact on interpreting spirituality, self-transcendence, connectedness, wisdom.

(13:10) You want to get a way of optimizing in the trade-off between efficiency and resiliency, constantly recalibrating between the two. Markus Brede demonstrates this mathematically using neural networks. This points to the interlocking between relevance realization, autopoiesis, and adaptivity.

(22:59) Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science, John Vervaeke, Tim Lillicrap, and Blake Richards

Efficiency/Resiliency Constraints, Cost Functions for Dynamic-Developmental Virtual Engines (15:17 to 46:50)

Internal bioeconomic properties make constitutive goals, external interactional properties give goals in the world. A general-purpose machine applies to many contexts and tasks. (efficiency) // SELF-TRANSCENDENCE \\ Special-purpose machines work well in more specific applications. (resiliency) // RELEVANCE REALIZATION \\ You want to be able to move between opposing constraints very well. (wake-sleep algorithm, Geoffrey Hinton) A line of best fit of a scatterplot interpolates and extrapolates from data from an information processing function. Data compression generalizes the function to pick up on what is invariant and ignore the noise. If it feeds through the sensorimotor loop so as to promote autopoietic goals, it will be reinforced. (integration, assimilation) 💣 Data particularization makes information processing more context-sensitive. (differentiation, accommodation) To create a virtual engine we engineer sets of constraints on internal properties so they oscillate in the right way, and optimize external properties. // Once cognitive scope follows the bioeconomic logistical norms, it results in evolution of sensorimotor interaction, making an organism adaptive w.r.t. general/special purposes. (applicability) Different species or organisms can be biologically skewed one way or the other; certain psychopathologies might be understood in terms of bias towards overfitting/particularizing, or underfitting/compressing/generalizing. Exploitation-exploration pair has to do with searching the environment for rewards and timing. (projectability) There is a trade-off between temporal displacement learning and inhibition on return. (cognitive tempering) Each of these cost functions can also be played against each other in the virtual engine. (cognitive prioritization) Your function is assimilating new in-formation while accomodating to variation. (complexification, development)

General Intelligence as Relevance Realization | Spearman, Ferraro (46:50 to 54:21, 49:50)

There is a strong positive manifold and interpredictability between how you do in math and how you do in English, even how you do in sports, etc. (Wechsler’s test) This relates to the general factor of intelligence (g-factor); general problem solvers. GI explains problem formulation (comprehension), similarity judgments and eduction of latent information from experience (similarities and picture concepts), and adaptation to unpredictable environments and solving ill-defined problems (complex g-loaded workspaces). All these tests are situations where RR is needed. The g-factor is the most powerfully predictive factor you could know of somebody. GI is dynamic/developmental evolution of sensorimotor fittedness, regulated by virtual engines’ logistical normativity of opp. processing. (efficiency/resiliency)

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Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness

Self-Organizing Criticality of the Brain | Per Bak (2:27 to 12:18)

The brain’s structural-functional organization, dynamical plasticity, and capacities for qualitative development, must be accounted for; and humans aren’t just brains. There is increasing evidence that when neurons “fire” in synchrony together, they are doing compression, as in joint attention/activity, in distributed cognition. In an “aha!” moment the brain is observed to move from asynchrony to synchrony. In the cortex this process happens at many levels of analysis. (scale-invariance) Rapid oscillation of neural patterns in asynchrony/synchrony could implement RR. Individual grains self-organize into a mound according to variation and constraints. In a critical phase, entropic forces cause a neural avalanche, evolving fittedness. There’s no telos to this. Either the system will collapse, or else gain a larger base.

Psychometrics of GI and Self-Organizing Criticality | Thatcher et al. (11:24 to 16:47)

SOC does fittedness at multiple levels, from the whole brain down to neurons, in a highly recursive, complex, dynamic, evolving way. (JV argues it implements RR) If relevance realization is your general intelligence, then we should see measurable relationships between the g-factor and self-organizing criticality. Thatcher et. al. found a strong relationship between self-organization and GI. The more flexibility there is in synchrony/asynchrony, the more intelligent you are. This is not conclusive, there is controversy around this. // (Hesse and Gross 2014, Self-organized criticality as a fundamental property of neural systems) If SOC and GI are related, we may be able to move from psychometric measures to more direct measures in the brain; this may feed back to artificial intelligence.

Small-World Networks | Milgram, Brede, Langer et al., Hilger et al. (16:47 to 27:49)

Neurons are “wiring” together and forming different nodal connections of the brain. Network theory is applicable not just to the brain, but the Internet, airlines, etc. Three basic networks of graph/network theory: regular, small-world, and random. Regular networks have a lot of redundancy, making them resilient but inefficient. Efficiency of a network is calculated from mean path distance, based on # of nodes. Random networks have many long-distance connections, making any given path on average a shorter distance. So they are highly efficient, but much less resilient. The small-world network is optimal because it sort of gets the best of both worlds. Research increasingly shows that the brain tends to generate SWNs; when demands on working memory increase, it organizes in SWNs. // efficient hubs, salience nets

Structural-Functional Organization of RR/GI/Consciousness (27:49 to 40:18)

We are increasingly able to explain relevance realization as like firing/wiring. The more a system fires in self-organizing criticality, the more it wires using small- world networks, and vice versa. They are scale-invariant and mutually recursive. Functionality of working memory is highly correlated with measures of GI. And, working memory is doing RR (Hasher) and we know consciousness does RR. Cosmelli et al. did the binocular rivalry experiment (Necker cube), showing that different areas of the brain are moving in and out of synchrony. (RR and SOC) Monti et al. gave an anesthetic, observed that as the brain passes out of and into consciousness, the brain loses and regains the small-world structure. (disruption) Schilling’s math model links insight to a move from regular nets to SWN by SOC.

Salience Landscaping and Layers of Construal | Matson (40:18 to 45:41)

Multiple object tracking picks up features, and feeds into foregrounding some. Those are configured and figured out in SF-organization and aspectualization. This feeds into problem framing/formulation. The layers all interact to create a dynamically textured salience landscape at the nexus of RR and affordance obv. Relevance realization is the core machinery of participatory knowing, how you are getting coupled to the world so co-evolution and reciprocal realization can occur. Salience landscaping is your perspectival knowing: dynamic, situational awareness. It opens up an affordance landscape for you, how things are made obvious to you, which is the basis of procedural knowing and skills development. It helps you get an optimal grip on a field of affordances. (possible link to RR via implicit learning)

Aspectuality, Centrality, and Temporality of Consciousness (45:41 to 51:28)

Your salience landscape aspectualizes things. When you represent and categorize something, you don’t pick up all of its properties, just certain aspects of it. Relevance realization is grounded in how things are relevant and important, how central it is for you. It has a valence and is vectored onto you. (centrality) Temporality is due to this being a dynamic process of ongoing evolution; this is not just a matter of time, but of timing. Small variations can have huge effects. (kairos) Your salience landscape unfolds across these dimensions in enacted, perspectival knowing. There is a oneness to consciousness: hereness, nowness, togetherness. This in part accounts for the effect of ASCs/HSCs on identity, agency, and that it can be linked to a profound sense of insight and coupling to the world. (flow)

Relevance realization as the basis of the A.C.T. of consciousness is always an aspect of caring (50:30)

We are in the predicament of finitude, so we care about our information processing. Read Montague argues this is what makes us fundamentally different from computers (Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect). Salience affects arousal such that information is constantly creating affect, motivation, and e-motion, moving you towards action. Dreyfus was influenced by Heidegger, and he points to the other kinds of knowing than just propositional knowing, talking about optimal gripping and invoking relevance when he talks about caring. Dasein is inherently transjective, co-emerging with the intelligible world.

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Episode 33: The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness

Phenomenology of Religio and Spirituality (2:32 to 19:32)

Religio, “to bind together,” evokes the primordial, pre-egoic and post-egoic framing of RR/meaning-making which simultaneously grounds the self and world. Complexification accounts for self-transcendence, self-deception/bullshit, insight. Connectedness, commitment to something “greater.” Deep caring, significance. Procedural knowing grounded in perspectival and participatory knowing, creating affordances and obviousness for the reliable training and development of skills. Altered states of the machinery of RR can alter your optimal gripping. (HSCs) We experience this from within, and it is prior to concepts, propositions, inferences, communication, experience, and normative judgment of truth, goodness or beauty. The fundamental grounding of your being, and your being connected, are the same.

A Secular Wonder | Paolo Costa (19:32 to 26:21)

Wonder points to the sense of opening up in insight, and to connectedness and caring, and it can merge with awe in altered states and potentially in higher states. Things always “matter” to us. We can not help but be affected by things, immersed in a bubble of meaningfulness; an atmosphere of significance and import that we do not create from scratch… a container, a rhythm of breathing, and refraction of light. RR is constitutive, we’re immersed in it. Breathing, compression/particularization, assimilation/accommodation, are the lifeblood of our “spirit.” (transjectivity) RR structures intelligibility, to which “a living being must attune or adjust herself.” Having your world is not just I-It relating… you emerge from it, can contribute to it. Within RR we live, move, and have our being. We disclose RR in wonder and awe.

Wonder and Awe, Curiosity | Robert Fuller, Fredrickson (26:21 to 32:32)

Wonder is responsible for some of our deepest “spiritual experiences” of religio. Although the terms curiosity and wonder often overlap in everyday usage, curiosity tends to sit within the having mode. It involves problem-solving, has a focal object. Wonder is non-focal, a kind of perspectival and participatory opening up; awe. Curiosity directs you to features; with wonder you participate in the gestalt/whole. Awe pushes you towards an opening, ongoing accommodation, giving a sense of the inexhaustible nature of reality and your evolving adaptability to its potential. Wonder is about re-membering (sati) your being, being deeply in touch with religio. Wonder gives the sense of da’ath… not grounded in a story or ego, but a mystery. Awe as accommodation involves the participatory self-transformation, like in love.

Mystery and Insight, ‘I’ vs ‘Me’ | Gabriel Marcel, William James (32:11 to 41:04)

Wonder and awe are not about solving problems, but about confronting a mystery. Your RR machinery leads you to the framing of problems. But, you can get insights that show how your framing was problematic; you reframe to encompass more. At a certain point your insights do not just reframe problems or the world, but starts to transframe your style of framing. This trajectory of transframing never stabilizes. All that’s being disclosed in this transframing is the machinery of religio. Yet like flow, you find this deeply meaningful… but if pushed too far leads you to horror. The phenomenological mystery about death does not mean death is inexplicable. This is because propositional knowing and perspectival knowing are not identical. You can see yourself, never your self that sees you… this is an explainable mystery.

The Sacred, Sacredness, and Religio | Friedrich Schleiermacher (41:04 to 48:36)

There is a phenomenological mystery affording a trajectory+flow of transframing. It helps us participate in, celebrate perspectivally, the wonder and awe of religio. Making significant and enacting religio enhances our agency, world disclosure, and our connectedness to it. What else could be more valuable to us? An objection to religio is, it seems to lack religion’s confrontation with the sacred. The sacred is what grounds the psycho-existential experience of sacredness; it is a metaphysical proposal which is often considered supernatural in some sense. Religio has to do with your primordial, transjective, existential mode, as well as cognitive processing, embodiment and embeddedness, and it is grounded in RR. If religio forms a basis for sacredness, then that reflects on constraints of the sacred.

Meta-Meaning Systems and Domicide | Clifford Geertz, Brian Walsh (48:36 to 54:55)

A very central feature of sacredness, the psycho-existential experience, is to make a home for us, to “home” the world for us; connected to agent-arena machinery. Domicide is deep homesickness, loneliness, alienation; culture shock, confinement. For Geertz religion is a meta-meaning system. This enables all our other meaning systems: legal system, moral system, entertainment, fashion, landscaping, etc. All these systems depend on the primordiality of the transjectivity of A-A relation. If you go to another culture but don’t go through participatory transformation, you will experience culture shock, domicide, absurdity, alienation, anxiety, and tragedy. In a sacred setting we have psychotechnologies to seriously play with sacredness, attune our worldview. Committing to a spiritual community bolsters our resilience.

(54:55) Sacredness is not just worldview attunement and homing communities against horror, there is also a Gnostic element that wants to awaken us to the primordiality and mystery of religio. DeConick emphasized that the trajectory of transframing is ultimately to be understood as transgressive, trying to overturn the grammar of a worldview.

(56:55) Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy could be better translated as “The Experience of the Numinous.” The notion of ‘holy’ is very clouded for us; probably related to notions of wholeness and completeness, also to health; but we also now associate this with moral righteousness. It is also associated with ‘glory’, the most often used descriptor of God in the Old Testament. Otto created the term ‘numinous’, which involves experiencing the primordial and transgressive side of sacredness, opening us up to wonder and awe and taking us to the horizon of horror.

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Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol

The Numinous and Horror | Rudolf Otto (2:52 to 25:05)

The numinous is an aspect of what is meant by sacredness. It is closely related to glory, the shining and overwhelming aspect of God in the Old Testament. (awful) This kind of glory is associated with a pre-moral concept of holiness. (book of Job) The numinous is transgressive; bordering on horror and demanding transformation. It is a mystery giving us sensibility transcendence on a trajectory of transframing. The mystery fascinates us, it is compelling and supersalient. It draws us in like a flow state, but also shakes at the structure of our worldview. (fact/mystery of death) Horror is not being startled, or fear as a survival instinct. Your grip of reality slips away, it outpaces your accommodation and overwhelms you. (the shadow of flow) Horror is more like insanity or madness than fear or ‘terror’. // humbling HSCs

Intercategorical Monsters | Mary Douglas, Jonathan Pageau (6:42 to 22:04)

Intercategorical things often are considered weird or unclean because they don’t fit in our ready-made categories, challenging our grip on things. (book of Leviticus) There is not an essence to what is found unclean, it just deviates from our framing. We have the idea that there should be an interconnection between a creature’s morphology, its means of locomotion, and where it lives. For example, fish swim in the sea, the sea is a place for swimmers; but shellfish crawl, so they were unclean. We have our own system of categorization which gets thwarted in other ways. (spit) If a central feature of our categories is thwarted, it can horrify us. The wolf-man is bestial and personal; the ghost is living and dead; the vampire consumes but does not produce; zombies lack awareness but crave intelligibility.

Sacredness as Higher-Order Relevance Realization (25:05 to 33:40)

The experience of sacredness takes us to the horizon of our intelligibility. Sacredness draws us towards experiencing the boundary between awe and horror, and forces us into confrontation with the demand to transform ourselves. (HSCs) We have to accommodate to the numinous and expand our capacity for framing. Horror is transframe-breaking, revealing insufficiency in the face of mystery. (sati) Sacredness involves worldview attunement that is a meta-assimilation bringing it all together and homes us against horror. It also involves meta-accommodation, and confronting this horror. This happens at the existential level of being-in-the-world. Sacredness is in opponent processing, seriously playing with RR machinery to try to optimize states of mind, body, and interaction/connectedness with the world.

Music and Sacredness (32:25 to 35:52)

Music isn’t about anything in any conceptual or referential sense. We play with the machinery of salience landscaping in music, just for its own sake. (flow) This is why music is pivotal for conveying and representing the sacred. It strikes us at the level of perspectival and participatory knowing. We don’t just think about it, music insinuates its way into our perspective; we embody the rhythms, co-identify. Music is deeply transforms the structuring of agency and world disclosure as arena. Our culture has trivialized music, it has been severed from any explicit or conscious connection to the sacred. Many are still deeply dependent on music during times of transformation because it helps them, however dimly, intuit the machinery by which they seriously play with the higher-order RR machinery of sacredness.

Symbols and Signs | Black, Ortony (35:52 to 41:14)

Symbol originally means ‘to put two things together’. This is central to semiotics. We can use the term either as abstract symbolic thought or as religious symbols. A sign refers; by looking at it we can look through it to see something else. A heart is a sign for love, but doesn’t itself exemplify love. It just helps you think of it. Symbols get you to participate in that to which they refer, getting at the agent-arena machinery and participatory knowing. Kissing is serious play that enables us to participate in reciprocal realization with another and remember the being mode. Symbols do this by having a metaphor at their core. A metaphor is looked through to look at something else: “Sam is a pig.” This alters the salience topography of Sam for us. It is a reconfiguration yielding salience imbalance, a new perspective.

Metaphorical Cognition | Lakoff & Johnson, Kennedy & Vervaeke (41:14 to 47:55)

This is really ‘hard’ to ‘understand’. ‘Unterstand’ meant ‘to stand within’, but we changed it to ‘to stand under’. ‘Interest’ comes from ‘inter-esse’, ‘to be within’. We are constantly looking through one thing at another thing. Lakoff and Johnson thought that embodied practice just gets projected up to abstract thought, as in the example “He attacked my argument!” But, “He assaulted my argument!” and “He criticized the castle!” seem unusual and invalid. Rather, ‘assault’ points up towards ‘attack’, and ‘attack’ points up towards ‘criticize’. Also: ‘get’, ‘see’, ‘grasp’, and ‘understand’ all converge on making intelligible. The meaning of ‘intelligibility’ constrains which of our embodied existence fits it. So metaphoric meaning emerges from embodiment, but also emanates from above.

Symbols and the Self-Exaptation Machine | Michael Anderson (47:55 to 58:08)

Metaphors are not just ornaments of language, in fact the more profound metaphors structure our cognition in a bottom-up emergence and top-down emanation. Symbols are metaphors of meaning-making and participation. They also function to be readily held in mind. How do you fix your mind on justice? Either by way of a prototypical instance of justice, or a symbol: blindfolded woman with the scales. This symbol is only metaphorical, not literal. But, unless justice can be held in mind, we can’t relate to it in a participatory way. // The cerebellum evolved to keep physical balance, coordinating vision and the body. Brain circuits have been reused to exapt balance for the management of complex contingencies between variables. The just can retrace through exaptation and reactivate core machinery of balance.

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Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

Examples of Participatory Symbols, Symbolic Resonance (7:15 to 25:45)

Ramachandra et al. Bouba (‘o’) and Kiki (‘x’). Cerebellar coordination between the different sense modalities. // You have to live with the symbol and savor it. Jonathan Pageau’s The Symbolic World. Symbols are functional and active in us. The symbol of justice as the woman holding the balanced scales. It reactivates and reconfigures machinery of balance so you use it to see and interact with the world. Following the breath in meditation scales your attention and starts to increase your sensitivity to impermanence and interconnectedness, both within and without. A flag lets a patriot integrate subsidiary emotions and associations into identity. Inherent interest integrates on focal awareness, which then discloses interests anew. Aspects of music are disclosed to you, altering how you listen to the whole piece.

Ecstatic, Participatory, Integrative-Anagogic, Complex Symbols (25:45 to 33:39)

‘Ek-stasis’ means that the symbol helps you to stand beyond yourself; transframing. The symbol has to be transgressive inside your current framing, but also make viable dwelling in a more comprehensive worldview frame, which you aspire to. Symbols are often associated with wonder and awe because your world is being opened up and you’re being transformed to fit that expanding world. (transjectivity) The Christian cross is a participatory symbol making use of exaptive and perceptual machinery. The receptive person is integrated in attention on the cross. (sensibility) Aspects of reality start to be disclosed in serious play with the symbol. (anagoge) Symbols re-configure salience landscaping, enabling insights. They are “EPIC”. Meta-accommodation/meta-assimilation of dynamic, unfolding realities.

Mythos, Religio, and Sacredness (33:39 to 41:21)

Mythos involves patterns not just of representation, but of interaction. There are symbols enmeshed with narrative/story, perspectival and participatory knowing. Mythos helps the enactment of ritual/serious play and activation of religio. Because of the primordial participatory nature of religio, our relationship to religio is one that can only be realized symbolically. (relevance realization) We know from phenomena of insight and flow that RR is intrinsically interested in itself. It is a self-organizing, self-transcending, self-correcting process. Religio is deeply valuable because it is constitutive of our being-in-the-world; if we can use mythos to activate, articulate, accentuate, and celebrate religio, enhancing our meta-assimilation and meta-accommodation, that is sacredness.

The Sacred (41:21 to 55:19)

The metaphysical proposal of the sacred is that what ultimately generates the experience of sacredness is something that has an absolute status and value. This “something” is purported to always be of relevance to us, essentially relevant. Only RR is intrinsically interesting to itself; this intrinsic interest is not absolute, your salience machinery could lead you to find your own RR irrelevant to you. We should not confuse and fixate on the products of RR with the process of RR. The Gnostics continually reinvented new mythos to always be in transframing. Reality is combinatorially explosive, a no-thingness that cannot be fully enframed; the self has an inexhaustibleness and no-thingness. The sacred is what enables the non-logical identity and symbolic resonance between self and reality. (mysticism)

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Episode 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Eng. Enlightenment

(6:12) “Nothing holy, vast emptiness…” Bodhidharma to Emperor Wu

Indispensable Mythos (12:02 to 21:52)

Given the personal way RR has evolved to your current here-nowness, certain symbols may be indispensable to engage with, enhance and enjoy your religio. The mythos and its symbols have become needed for a functional A-A fittedness. But cognitive-cultural indispensability of a mythos is not metaphysical necessity. The inexhaustible source of all intelligibility, the sacred, does not inhere in any object or final absolute. (supernaturalism, metaphysical essentialism) The nature of a shark is indispensable to its capacity for survival, but the shark is not the final, finished, absolute form of evolutionary fittedness. It is inexhaustible. Disconnecting the machinery of connectedness and self-transcendence from a two-worlds mythology is the first step of responding to the meaning crisis.

Perennial Problems and Ecologies of Practices (21:52 to 29:03)

That which makes worldview attunement, self-transcendence, and meaning in life possible, RR, also makes us prone to self-d self-d processing and meaninglessness, absurdity, alienation, despair. This is inherent in our meaning-making machinery. All cultures and peoples in all times and places must face these perennial problems. Communities at multiple scales have developed sets of psychotechnologies in order to alleviate the suffering of perpetual existential issues. These have been described as affording (or making possible the pursuit of) wisdom, enlightenment, salvation. Ex. In India there is the rise of Buddhism to deal with dukkha and modal confusion. Historical factors have led to the undermining of the cognitive-cultural grammar that legitimized worldviews, traditions of ecologies of practices. (meaning crisis)

Reverse Engineering Enlightenment (29:03 to 33:18)

The 4E cognitive scientific account of RR as our meaning-making machinery, and religio as a higher-order form of RR, is useful not only to understand sacredness, and the historical factors leading to the meaning crisis; it can also be used to reverse engineer enlightenment in order to address our perennial problems. // HSC To awaken from the meaning crisis requires more than scientific theory and history; we need to understand how to facilitate transformation, how enlightenment works. Enlightenment consists of a set of practices that ameliorate the perennial problems. By situating enlightenment into the scientific worldview by the account of RR and sacredness, the process of awakening from the meaning crisis might be kickstarted. The goal here is not of how to reach an absolute, final answer, but a mode of being.

The Perennial Problems of Meaning-Making (33:18 to 54:10)

Religio has functional, structural, and developmental aspects to it. The functional aspect is ultimately RR, it has features (and perennial problems) of self-organization (parasitic processing, self-d self-d complexes), self-identification (modal confusion, being/having modes), and self-reflection (the reflectiveness gap). The structural aspect has to do with the meta-meaning of the A-A relationship, and it carries with it the problems of alienation, absurdity, and anxiety. (domicide) Alienation is a loss of connection between you and other people; absurdity or horror, between you and the world; anxiety, disconnection from yourself. The developmental aspect involves existential inertia (can’t change worldviews), and existential ignorance (should you make the change?). (existential entrapment)

The Reflectiveness Gap | J. David Velleman, Harry Frankfurt (34:50 to 41:55)

A wanton acts completely impulsively, they have a dearth of reflective activity. This leads to the loss of agency because impulses tend to be in conflict with and undermining each other. (inner conflict of the soul for Plato) By stepping back and reflecting you can become aware of the motivational dimension of your salience landscape, and you thereby do a transparency-opacity shift to take a different perspective. This can help regain agency, up to a highly context-sensitive point. Too much reflection opens up a reflectiveness gap and leads to a loss in agency, a lack of ability to intervene in the world. You want an optimization between the wanton’s involvement and immersion, and the flexibility and self-correction of a Hamlet. (opponent processing)

The Absurd | Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, Monty Python (44:08 to 53:14)

Absurdity happens at the level of perspectival and participatory knowing. Yet, we behave as if the absurd is a result of inferential processing, and we try to rationalize and give arguments for the conclusion of absurdity. If you are irrelevant to people of the distant future, they should be irrelevant to you. Human life is small and brief. But would living for millions of years make it more meaningful? What would being blown up to the size of a galaxy do for you? For Susan Wolf this is a metaphor for being connected to something larger than yourself, and thereby a metaphor for connecting to what objectively has value. Absurdity overlaps with humor where a shift in perspective (‘punchline’) can be made sense of. Horror is an incoherent clash of perspectives, loss of connectedness.

(54:10) What’s the use of enlightenment as this unachievable super-human feat, which only those of the distant past can achieve? Let’s make enlightenment any developmental change of perspectival, participatory and procedural knowings that can afford a reliable response and amelioration of our perennial problems.

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Episode 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment: Part 2

Schematic of Enlightenment (5:15 to 57:18)

Religio: Functional (s-organization, s-identification, s-reflection), Structural (s-world, s-self, s-others)

Developmental (s-transcendence, optimizing functioning thru qualitative development, develop by functioning) F \ s-o: opponent processing with s-organizing criticality, compression/particularization; parasitic processing; (10:14, 19:59, 28:42) cultivate a set of mutually supporting practices to create a counter-active dynamical system. (the Eightfold Path)

F \ s-i: the process of creating identities; modal confusion between being/having modes, or I-Thou/I-It relating; (11:00, 21:28, 33:07) do mindfulness practices to invoke remembrance (sati) of the being mode. (View from Above, objective seeing)

F \ s-r: ability to step back, reflect on your own cognition, second-order thinking in AR; the reflectiveness gap; (11:22, 21:40, 33:37) wisely develop a dynamic integration of immersion and creative flexibility. (the flow state, yin and yang, insight)

S \ s-w: the world side of A-A; experience of absurdity, clash of perspectives, after-the-fact propositions; (12:05, 22:06, 35:50) simultaneously scale up and down to get a non-dual interpenetration of perspectives. (scientia intuitiva, prajna)

S \ s-s: the agent side of A-A; anxiety, inner conflict, susceptibility to self-deception and bullshitting; (14:16, 23:08, 43:10) cultivate an inner dialogue with ‘the sage,’ an indwelling and internalization. (active imagination, Lectio Divina)

S \ s-o: the ability to connect with other people; alienation, loneliness, social media; cultivate the sense of (14:51, 23:54, 48:24) connectedness to Other by recovering communitas. (Platonic dialogue, Circling/authentic relating, We Space)

D \ s-t: existential inertia and ignorance, existential entrapment; ritualize an integrated set of psychotech for a (15:27, 24:42, 56:24) trajectory of transframing to HSC within a transgressive, open-ended and ongoing mythos. (gnosis, anagoge) *These must be set within a wisdom framing devoted to amelioration of s-deception and affording s-optimization

(17:01) The perennial problems are often interacting and exacerbating each other in a complex manner. All of these are being distinguished from each other schematically for analytic and theoretical purposes.

(18:18) We can salvage so many psychotechnologies for addressing the meaning crisis. But, we need to balance respecting the heritage and legacy of these psychotech with also respecting the reality of our current situation.

(26:10) We need an account of enlightenment not obscured by mystique and nostalgia, one that recognizes the difficulty of enlightenment without exaggeration. It is not clear what the value of enlightenment could be apart from addressing the perennial problems. Insofar as we are able to use the theoretical tools of relevance realization, mindfulness, flow, etc. in a fully naturalistic account, we will have a scientific theory of enlightenment.

The Parable of the Goldsmith | The Buddha (30:16 to 33:07)

Gold (an analogy for the mind) is an inherently valuable thing. If the goldsmith is just looking at the gold, no change will be brought about. (If you are just meditating and reflecting, you will only be able to notice the imperfections) The goldsmith must heat the gold. Right energy must be used. (right effort, flow) But, if the goldsmith just heats the gold, it will melt and go away. (There has to be cultivation of new skills, new abilities, new virtues) The goldsmith must hammer it. But if the goldsmith only hammers the gold it’ll be smashed apart. // fluid ecology Noticing the gold’s flaws must be integrated with heating and hammering them out. This constellation of lower skills creates the higher-order skill of being a smith. Fitting complementary practices together extends your capacity. (wieldly)

Scientia Intuitiva | Baruch Spinoza (35:50 to 43:10)

The Ethics talks about how your experience is co-created by the body and world; it attempts to bring blessedness and sacredness to a Cartesian, scientific worldview. You have to let The Ethics soak into you, doing a kind of Lectio Divina with it, studying and practicing The Ethics. What’s it like to see the world as Spinoza did? The tight logical structure is trying to afford a deeply intuitive kind of knowing. Its tremendous argument is composed of individual premises, which are like letters composing the words and sentences giving a picture of the largest scales of reality. You see the whole argument in each meta-argument, in each premise. // prajna A cosmic perspective interpenetrates that of your individual moment of thought; there is a complete interleaving of the perspectival knowing. // humor, insight, joy

Inner Dialogue with the Sage | Antisthenes, Michael Polanyi (43:10 to 48:24)

Across various traditions there is the idea of internalizing the sage, and this can help you coordinate the various centers of the psyche and converse with yourself. We need an internal representation, a role model, for how to engage in dialogue. The Platonic/Stoic proposal is the sage can become part of your meta-cognitive machinery, the way aspects of yourself can dialogue. (Jung and active imagination) Inner dialogue is afforded in Lectio Divina, reading the text so it can speak to you. Identifying with the sage makes use of the capacity for internalizing perspectives of others, but also indwelling, seriously playing at it without pretense or arrogance. Wisdom and discernment is important for proper internalization and indwelling, so that a Platonic dialogue with yourself happens aright. WWSD, WWAD, WWJD

Communitas, Authentic Relating | Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner (48:24 to 56:24)

Everyone is gathered together, having shared attention, attuned to the same focal point and getting in sync with each other. // Verbal Judo, Verbal Aikido The sense of communing and communicating with all others in a shared spirit. Communitas is a way of getting collective flow going, with real communication, and participation in a shared identity, communing together. (Integral We Space) Our practices of communing have been undermined by bullshitting and modal confusion, as well as an adversarial political culture. (Limberg’s ‘anti-debate’) Jordan Hall is trying to create what he calls ‘coherence’, engaging the collective intelligence of distributed cognition; most problem solving is done in concert. What emerges is a collective dynamical system not possible individually.

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Episode 38: Agape and 4E Cognitive Science

Subjective Attraction and Objective Attractiveness | Susan Wolf (8:40 to 16:05)

We carry metaphors of wanting deep connection to what is larger than ourselves. These are symbolic expressions for wanting what we are subjectively attracted to and find salient to connect with and conform to objective attractiveness. The old nomological order of meaning gave this connectedness and coherence. But, according to Susan Wolf, the historical forces, scientific revolution, have undermined any possibility of objective attractiveness, there is no such thing. We might pretend to have objective attractiveness by surrounding ourselves with others who confirm what we are subjectively attracted to. But, it does not exist. Meaning instead can be found in the transjectivity between those two, where there is deep connection, deep caring, deep involvement and participation. (RR)

Meaning in Life and Agape (14:49 to 23:34)

Relevance realization is inherently interested in itself because that constitutes its self-organizing, self-optimizing, evolving nature. RR is not located in agent or in arena, but it emerges in the affordances co-created by the world and the self. Then, meaning in life is about connecting to conditions that afford meaning-making itself, and which satisfy the inherent valuing of the process of RR itself. // religio When we care to create such conditions, we are engaging in agape, because agape means loving for its own sake. It is the process of meaning-making, being a person. It’s not objective, but not arbitrary; not just directed at people but at their conditions for development, community; caring for the conditions that make caring possible. Agape has value independent of us; it precedes, permeates and follows us. // I-Thou

(23:34) There is a deep continuity hypothesis which resituates us into the order of the principles of cognition, biology, and down to the principles of dynamical self-organizing physical systems. A year 2000 article “Steps to a Science of Inter-being: Unfolding the Dharma Implicit in Modern Cognitive Science.” by Francisco Varela, giving insights of third-generation cognitive science. Varela says that as he was articulating the central insights of cognitive science, he saw it as consonant with the Dharma, the central teachings of Buddhism.

4E Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended (28:07 to 36:28)

Mind is not a program, software or rule-bound manipulation of symbols. Instead, the mind arises through immediate coping with the world. (extended, A-A relation) Intelligence is understood as how we evolve the sensorimotor loop to deal with the problems at hand; to be an intelligent cognitive agent is to have an ongoing, evolving fittedness and coping with your immediate interaction with the world. Embodiment means a deep continuity between the most abstract cognitive abilities, and the most embodied sensorimotor action. // Cognition is ultimately dependent on relevance realization, and RR is grounded in your bioeconomic body which enacts logistical norms of efficiency/resiliency. // The organism and environment shape and select each other. (transjective niche construction, Denis Walsh)

Emergence of the Mind and Self-Transcendence (36:28 to 41:07)

A system, especially one that is self-organizing, can give rise to properties that the component parts can’t possess on their own. The mind in this way emerges out of the embodied-embedded brain coupled to a living environment. Certain kinds of self-organizing systems, like evolution, can produce self-making things which are autopoietic systems seeking to promote their own agency. From autopoietic systems emerges self-identifying things which can understand and appreciate their inherently developmental nature. (normative order of meaning) Emergence is reflected in spirituality by the capacity for self-transcendence, understood as involving complexification of RR machinery thru religio. This restores a vertical dimension to our ontology, one that is not of two worlds.

Emotions (41:07 to 46:35)

Our cognitive-cultural grammar enshrines a split between emotions and reason. Damasio in Descartes’ Error shows that people without emotion are incapacitated as cognitive agents. Caring is integral to RR and to embodied existence. (A-A) If you can’t care about your information then you face combinatorial explosion. Emotions are the way RR is brought to the level of salience landscaping, shaping and sculpting the salient landscaping so an agent-arena relationship is revealed. In making artificial general intelligence, we will have to give them something analogous to attention; something analogous to emotion plausibly could be needed. Within religio there is always “caring-coping” at the core of your cognitive agency. Emotions coordinate attachments, making persons and distributing cognition.

Positive Psychology and Excellence (46:35 to 51:11)

Psychology ordinarily looks at how things break down in order that we can make therapeutic or pedagogical interventions, to fix or repair. Most in positive psychology are not trying to dismiss this but instead to point to how the mind might excel beyond the norm. The brain is a machine of machines which makes itself into a new kind of machine. How does the brain-body sensorimotor loop “mind” transcend itself? Positive psych studies happiness and meaning in life, as well as wisdom. The term wisdom is given to those who are excellent in the cognitive capacities of coping and caring, responding to self-deception, and helping others to deal with the perennial problems of human existence.

The Sacred Depths | Ursula Goodenough (51:11 to 54:20)

The deep continuity of cognition with biology and self-organizing physical systems occurring in a process of emergence and development gives us a nomological order. As a scientist Goodenough wants to recover sacredness, awe and wonder, in such a way as to help her to cultivate wisdom. Transcendence is integral to this. She is trying to challenge the fundamental grammar, the two-worlds mythology, that was handed to us from the Axial Age. Not in some other world, but in this one. A new sense of transcendence would be into the depths of nature, and into the depths of the psyche, such that those two are coordinated in reciprocal realization. The mutual disclosure of the depths of nature and the psyche afford a reciprocal opening up and anagoge, which would be experienced as a kind of love.

The Narrative Order Repurposed as Open-Ended Optimization (54:20 to 57:59)

The narrative order of meaning must remain unconnected for us because it pointed to a cosmic telos, whereas the processes of evolution and relevance realization are inherently non-teleological. This avoids utopic and nostalgic visions of the world. The narrative order can now be thought of as an open-ended optimization of the depths to which we are capable of living, having to do with gnosis. We may have indispensable need for symbols and stories to afford optimization, but they no longer have to be thought of as existing independently in reality itself. In Stoicism, Buddhism, and Daoism, we see a post-narrative way of being, where the concern is not for our historical/horizontal identity or grand purpose. That drops away in HSCs; the concern is for exapting cognition for transformative experience.

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Episode 39: The Religion of No Religion

Religio vs. Credo (5:28 to 14:24)

In the midst of our metacrisis, the religious ‘nones’ find they are spiritually hungry. Yet a mythos is important for activating and appreciating religio. This might be indispensable given contextual sensitivity (symbols, stories, celebrations, shows) for accessing sacredness within religio in response to the perennial problems. Credo, “I believe,” is a paradigmatic set of propositions stating the essence of a religion in terms what to believe. // indispensability vs. metaphysical necessity As propositional knowing and the having mode have predominated what’s considered relevant, willful assertion of beliefs has come to the fore. (power) Credo should serve religio by setting criteria using perspectival and situational awareness in open-ended mythos so we can optimize and reset criteria responsively.

Signal Detection and Setting the Criterion (14:24 to 28:24)

Whenever we process information, there is both too much and inadequate info. It is often ambiguous whether it is needed or just similar in ways irrelevant to you. There’s always significant overlap of signal and noise; discriminating involves RR. More information can help but ultimately certainty is unachievable. It can also take up a lot of time to get more signal about your signal about your signal. So you have to set a criterion, a de-cision line, for which info is signal or noise. The optimal point to set the criterion is highly sensitive to the context. It’s a trade-off between how much signal to collect and how much noise you will end up mistaking for signal. The criterion must be set flexibly and tentatively to an extent so as to remain sensitive to context, and situationally aware. (consciousness)

(27:15) Many religious people would say that their creeds are constantly being reinterpreted historically, so that credo is in service of religio. But there has often been conflict between de facto and de jure in the history or religious discussions around orthodoxy and creed. Arthur Versluis’ work (The New Inquisitions) details the West’s history of pursuing and persecuting heretics (people who do not set the criterion as we do), and how it has trained the West for totalitarian regimes and ideologies.

Cognitively Informed Mythos (Unconscious, Conscious, Cultural) (30:12 to 35:10)

The religion that’s not a religion should organize its mythos according to the unconscious, conscious, and cultural levels, and in a top-down and bottom-up way. Most of your relevance realization is inaccessible to you, it is unconscious. This is your participatory knowing; from it emerges ego and the world as unfolding arena. The conscious layer is the level of situational awareness and apt sensibility (perspectival) and appropriation of affordances for skillful interaction (procedural). The cultural level involves distributed cognition, communication (propositional). Connections are made (unconscious, RR), sensed and internalized (consciousness), and shared (culture). Any mythos for a religion of no religion should have its statements of belief and imagery in service of the more primordial knowings.

Structural Features of a Religion of No Religion | Jordan Hall (35:10 to 39:22)

The religion should cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies which have complementary relationships and corresponding checks and balances such that a dynamical system can reliably complexify and self-correct. It should work both top-down and bottom-up, between all the kinds of knowing. It should be engineered collectively and explicitly via a meta-psychotechnology, to afford worldview attunement and to address the perennial problems. The more people are individually cultivating the meta-virtue of wisdom so that they can coordinate their individual virtues, the more people can collectively pursue the creation and ongoing cultivation of a meta-psychotechnology which can afford an ecology of psychotech to comprehensively reach all the levels of knowing.

Open-Ended Credo Wiki | Konstantinos Xanthios (39:22 to 45:32)

The cyber technologies are being increasingly integrated with psychotechnologies. Wikipedia is generated, maintained, and revised in a collective, cooperative fashion with both a reliable stability and a reliable evolution. A wiki allows for participatory involvement with the “credo” of the material, the paradigmatic ideas, main themes, and main arguments. There is much more interactional, dynamic and evolving content to collectively work with. Such a wiki could be a way by which wisdom institutions might collaborate in the setting of criteria and engineering of a meta-psychotechnology to foster ecologies of practices. The communities may set up a co-op, a shared curriculum, credo and vocabulary and afford synoptic integration and bridging of insights and discourse.

Reflective Equilibrium on Wisdom | McKee & Barber 1999 (45:32 to 55:59)

McKee and Barber wanted to look at the “a priori” theories of wisdom, which are more conceptually driven and top-down philosophical theories, and try to find a convergent theme with the more empirically driven psychological theories. Can we arrive at a reflective equilibrium through a coordinated investigation? They found that all the theories converge on the concept of seeing through illusion. Illusion here is a cognitive and existential illusion caused by self-deception. The goal is a systematic seeing through of self-deception, a systematic insight. (HSC) Leo Ferraro and John Vervaeke in 2013 argued that there is an implication of seeing into reality, or what is more real. You can only know that you’re seeing through illusion if you come to something you regard as being less illusory in nature.

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Episode 40: Wisdom and Rationality

Wisdom vs. Knowledge | McKee & Barber, Stanovich, John Kekes (4:55 to 16:08)

Wisdom is not about what you know (product), it has to do with how you know it. How have you come to know what you know, what was the processing involved? According to Stanovich a rational person does not just fixate on the products of their cognition, but they value and pay attention to the processing of cognition. For Kekes descriptive knowledge grasps the facts, whereas interpretive knowledge has to do with understanding, grasping the significance of something. There is a perspectival, participatory feature of wisdom as inculcation of humility. Satisfaction with “I am wise” reflects pragmatic self-contradiction. (Socrates) Wisdom involves an ability to take perspectives, and assume and assign identities. All these features of wisdom are tied to systematically transframing realization.

Rationality and Expertise | Keith Stanovich (16:08 to 25:21)

Rationality cannot be reduced to logic, to a facility with syllogistic reasoning; it has to do with the capacity to reliably and systematically overcome self-deception. Rationality affords flourishing by a process of optimizing cognitive processing. It can’t operate on the basis of a standard of perfection, completion, and certainty, and it must be operational across many domains, not just expertise in one domain. Expertise is set within a bounded domain, and it has made patterns and problems within that context reliably well-defined. Skill does not transfer to other domains, and may in fact interfere with relevantly similar but distinct areas of competence. As self-deception is being systematically overcome, our goals for optimization of functioning will tend to come under revision. (aspirational rationality)

Irrationality Experiments | Keith Stanovich and others (25:21 to 37:12)

The adaptive machinery of insight will have you leap into a misframing. People will say of a daily doubling set of lily pads that day 10 has half that of day 20. People will fixate on the products of cognition, failing at critical detachment. Of an argument that agrees with their belief, they’ll find that one to be the good argument. People will retain belief after its justification is undermined. (belief perseverance) Ex. You are told you are good/bad at detecting suicide notes, but only arbitrarily. (see the conjunction fallacy, confirmation bias, and the Wason selection task) Even when people acknowledge principles of reasoning, they likely won’t reliably apply them practically in their life. The evidence shows that people reliably suffer from systematic illusion and self-deception.

The Rationality Debate, Normative Standards | L. Jonathan Cohen (37:12 to 53:47)

Due to experiments demonstrating human irrationality a lot of psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers concluded that humans are irrational beings. Aristotle was wrong, we are not the rational animals. Therefore it is hard to justify rule by the many. We also probably can’t hold anyone accountable for their actions. Rationality is tied deeply to perspectival/participatory knowing. (maturity, wisdom) For Cohen irrationality is about acknowledging a standard and failing to meet it. An object cannot acknowledge the authority of any rational standard. (arational) If we follow divine commands out of fear, not by an autonomous conclusion from reasoning, we act arbitrarily. We must possess the standards. (Euthyphro, Kant) An ‘ought’ implies a ‘can’; competence, implementation, performance. (Chomsky)

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Episode 41: What is Rationality?

Systematic Error | Piaget, Chomsky, Stanovich and West 2000 (4:59 to 17:50)

Whereas a drunkard might make performance errors that are circumstantial, a child’s errors stem from deficits in competence that are systematic in nature. Someone who suffered from brain damage would be prone to systematic errors. Systematic errors correlate with other errors of a certain kind across different tasks. There is overwhelming evidence that behaviors such as belief perseverance, errors in critical detachment, leaping to conclusions, etc., are systematically related. So even though we must be the source of normative standards for rationality, irrationality can’t just be about performance as Cohen thought. // cognitive styles Stanovich and West point out Cohen’s assumption that competence is singular, and that it is static, non-developmental. He also assumes individualism in competence.

(7:15) Stanovich and West 2000 in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a gold standard of how to do cognitive science, integrating philosophical and psychological argumentation.

The Finitary Predicament | Christopher Cherniak, Herbert Simon (17:50 to 23:26)

We cannot derive all the implications and consider all of our assumption and all the ways that we’ve represented something. That would be combinatorially explosive. (But we also can’t just arbitrarily choose whichever implications we want.) If you try to be comprehensively deductively logical, you will get hung up in a combinatorial explosion and commit cognitive suicide. (bounded rationality) So completely logical consistency can’t be a normative standard of rationality. You have to pick the relevant implications and contradictions, and which aspects of your representation that you consider relevant. (relevance realization) For Cherniak then the algorithmic, formal logic and probability theory scientists use in experiments should only be applied in limited contexts, not the whole of life.

Computational Limitations, Rationality vs. Intelligence (23:26 to 30:25)

A term Cherniak uses, ‘computational limitation’ (CL), is described negatively rather than positively as in relevance realization. RR is inter-defined with CL. Stanovich and West think dealing with CL is not about rationality, but intelligence. Stanovich argues being foolish means being intelligent and yet irrational. The ability to zero in on relevant information involves ability to deal with CL well, or in other words the ability to realize relevance. This is what intelligence (g) is. Experiments show that various reasoning tasks form a strong positive manifold, which point to a general factor of reasoning (gr). If rationality is about dealing with CL, then (gr) should approach parity with (g) such that rationality is intelligence. But, they are correlated at best at 0.3. Intelligence is insufficient for rationality.

Fallacy and Misunderstanding | Jan Smedslund 1970 (30:25 to 40:50)

You may interpret a problem correctly, understanding it, but then you reason incorrectly with a fallacy; or you may reason correctly, meeting the normative standard, but still come to a wrong answer due to misinterpreting the problem. No amount of experimentation can remove need of interpretation for experiments. We must attribute fallacious cognition to people, not just a miscommunication or misunderstanding, if we are to conclude that they are by their very nature irrational. To understand something requires us to be able to give its identity, contradictions, implications, and what it is relevant to. Scientists that found humans to be irrational assumed participants consistently understood the problem, and then used fallacies. But the attribution of fallacy or of misunderstanding are not cleanly independent.

Normativity on Construal, Cognitive Styles | Stanovich and West (40:50 to 51:19)

We need to have standards, a normativity, for what good problem formulation is. This is studied in psychology in insight problem-solving: bad problem formulation puts you into a combinatorially explosive search space; it fails to turn ill-defined problems into well-defined problems; it doesn’t pay attention to how salience can mislead you. By understanding the role of both insight and inference in rationality, rationality and understanding can be further integrated in an account with wisdom. Stanovich did not account for the non-inferential nature of construal/insight, but he develops the notion of a cognitive style (equivocal in psychology), and ‘mindware’. A cognitive style applies sensitivities and skills (procedural, perspectival knowing). According to Stanovich, cognitive styles account for variance between (g) and (gr).

Active Open-Mindedness | Jonathan Baron, Keith Stanovich (50:20 to 55:52)

This is the cognitive style most predictive of doing well on the reasoning tests. Active open-mindedness overlaps and converges with cognitive behavioral therapy, which was derived from Stoicism. This cognitive style is to train yourself to look for patterns of self-deception and cognitive biases (which are misused heuristics). You have to sensitize yourself to look for biases in your day-to-day cognition, and then actively work to counteract them. (What disconfirms your beliefs?) You shouldn’t overdo this because that would open you to combinatorial explosion. Others may more easily see your cognitive biases, you can internalize their insight. This style is associated with need for cognition, a curiosity that looks for problems, frames them, tries to learn about and solve them. (wonder, worldview, identity)

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Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom

Psychotechnology (3:18 to 5:22)

A socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating and enhancing information processing. It is readily internalizable into human cognition and can be applied in a domain-general manner. It extends and empowers cognition in a reliable and extensive manner, and is highly generalizable among people. Prototypical instances include literacy, numeracy, and graphing.

Problem Finding | Patricia Arlin 1990 (4:45 to 10:45)

Problem finders connect things together in ways that others have not previously. This ability is crucial both to creativity and to wisdom. Problem finding is a factor in need for cognition, the degree of motivation to find, frame and solve problems. We don’t typically find problems in a vacuum, there’s always a background of existing issues we and others in our culture are dealing with. // Hubert Dreyfus A good problem finder does not just add more problems, but finds problems that if solved would impact significantly sets of existing problems in domain spaces. This skill of generating a problem nexus is interacting with some of the best theories on the nature of understanding having to do with how effectively we are relating to knowledge. // Problems in cognition are centered on core ability of RR.

Affectivity of Need for Cognition (10:45 to 15:28)

“Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates. Wonder is a motivational component. For Plato the point of philosophy is to develop and extend that sense of wonder, to deepen wonder into awe. He feels that this awe has the greatest capacity of getting us involved in the anagogic ascent, and to transform us. Philosophy is a quest. Aristotle also thinks philosophy begins in wonder, but he sees this more in line with curiosity, the goal of trying to figure things out. Wonder is shaped into curiosity in order to resolve it by getting an answer to some question. (being and having modes) So Plato is pushing more for meta-accommodation (the numinous, encountering mystery, questioning worldview/identity), and Aristotle is pushing more for meta- assimilation (the homing aspect of sacredness, manipulating and controlling).

Dual-Processing Theory | Stanovich & Evans, Baker-Sennett & Ceci (15:28 to 24:47)

There is a lot of convergence in psychology that we have multiple competencies that operate in dual-processing. (not systems or styles, but maybe a continuum) S1 works intuitively, associationally and automatically; ability of coping in the environment using implicit learning; how we are caring and involving; salience. S2 works more deliberately, reflecting and being aware and intentionally directed. It works more inferentially, with explicit argumentation and working memory. S2 is meant to override S1 to a degree, as a corrective function to interference of heuristics/biases due to cognitive leaping. But there is an ineffability to insight involving this leap. Sometimes S1 should override S2 to protect metacognitive transformation, as in the therapeutic context. (Freud, Gregg Jacobs, John Teasdale)

Active Open-Mindedness and Mindfulness (24:47 to 39:57)

Rationality is very complex and involves complicated trade-off relationships and optimizations that need to be trained. Active open-mindedness is supposed to protect us against making detrimental errors due to interference by leaping too much to conclusions. It functions to moderate and ameliorate this leaping we do so that we can better facilitate scientific or historical theorizing and planning. But, we want and need to be able to leap to insight, for good construal and being rational problem-solvers. Sometimes what you need is a transformative insight, a radical reconstrual of the problem to break you out of poor framing. (Gregg Jacobs) In meditation you are shutting down inferential processing of S2 to open up S1 and improve your caring and coping. This is a more practical aspect to rationality.

Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom (39:57 to 42:21)

Using intelligence to improve the use of intelligence, using psychotechnologies and cognitive styles to enhance optimization of competences and overall capacity for relevance realization, is rationality. Perhaps we are able to use rationality to improve our rationality, making more reliable the systematic overcoming of self-deception and enhancement of meaning in life. This would be crucial to wisdom.

Growth Mindset | Carol Dweck (42:21 to 54:40)

There are two basic ways you can set your mind towards your traits of intelligence. You can have a fixed view that there is not much you can do about it. (like height) You can have a malleable view that it is variable and can be changed. (like weight) Mindsets are not just beliefs, but ways you can identify with and embody the traits. Your mindset affects your behavior towards errors. The fixed mindset turns errors into risk for potential disclosure of limitation, and focuses on products of cognition. The growth mindset directs you to improve your skills or put in more effort. In this way it is focusing more on the process of cognition, which is a key of rationality. Rationality is an existential thing. Even though measures of general intelligence are mostly fixed, we should care more about rationality because that is very malleable.

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Episode 43: Wisdom and Virtue

Wisdom as the Meta-Virtue | Schwartz and Sharpe (4:53 to 20:43)

Peterson and Seligman give a feature list of the virtues, implying they are independent and without any SF-organization, and that we should maximize them. But for example, honesty may be to the detriment of kindness. They can conflict. “Real life situations do not come labeled with the needed virtues or strengths attached. There is, thus, the problem of relevance…” We often represent virtues with rules like “Be kind.” But any rule can’t specify its conditions for application. JV tells a fourth problem, to realize your need to aspire to a virtue you don’t have. Ancient Greeks saw the virtues either as a highly interdependent system in which they all constrain each other, or as different versions of a core ability (wisdom). Either way wisdom is needed to be virtuous and be able to apply the virtues well.

Phronesis and Sophia (20:43 to 28:34)

Phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom. It is the general ability to be contextually sensitive and exercise good judgment. It involves the know-how of procedural knowing as well as the situational awareness of perspectival knowing. Schwartz and Sharpe criticize the Kantian view of virtues as a set of moral rules to be legislated into laws… how can law not only reduce harm but make us wise? Sophia is often translated as theoretical wisdom. Unfortunately it’s been associated with mere propositional knowing and rules. Sophia is about awareness of deep underlying principles from perspectival knowing; an ontological depth perception. For Aristotle our principles and practices should be regulating each other. You need to be able to pick up on cross-contextual invariance, and be sensitive to contexts.

(28:34) Schwartz and Sharpe use language of expertise to talk about phronesis, since expertise is a kind of excellence in know-how. But psychologically, expertise is a domain-specific thing in which skill in one area could interfere with skill in a closely related area (misapplication). Phronesis is sensitive to contexts, but this is a general ability, to be sensitive in very many contexts. Foolishness would be an insensitivity to very many contexts. Relevance realization has this context-sensitive component to it that expertise would not have.

Berlin Wisdom Paradigm | Baltes and Staudinger (35:29 to 53:49)

At least five empirically measurable criteria are needed to judge someone wise. A rich factual knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life (Sophia), as well as rich procedural knowledge about the fundamental pragmatics of life (Phronesis). (Baltes and Staudinger are ultimately relying on the perspectival knowing that can connect procedural knowing to situational awareness of different contexts, and participatory knowing to explain how we undergo dramatic developmental change) Lifespan contextualism, ability to get the big picture, and zoom in; self-regulation. Relativism of values and priorities…?! Or instead, moral fallibilism, and humility. Recognition and management of uncertainty. // Comprehensive cognitive flexibility These are evaluated by testing behavior/speech in response to moral dilemmas.

(37:07) “Wisdom. A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.” An article from Baltes and Staudinger. The term ‘pragmatic’ has to do here with conversational implicature (Grice), as well as pragmatism, situating your intellectual claims in your lived experience and worldview viability. William James’ pragmatism points to the grounding of the kinds of knowing; propositions should be evaluated in terms of their efficaciousness for adapting you to the world. (But, pragmatism can have the problem of being prone to confusing between truth and relevance.) Wisdom is a metaheuristic, a heuristic for managing your heuristics. (relevance realization)

(53:49) Baltes and Staudinger gave an experiment in which the participant has to solve a moral issue. Some were allowed to discuss the problem with a significant other before responding; some could imagine a virtual or internal dialogue (like the Stoics internalizing Socrates); and some were just given more time to think. The first two groups outperformed the third group. Therefore in discussion with others we can arrive at a level of wisdom that we can’t get to on our own. (Platonic dialogue) But internalizing other people was just as effective as conversations with others; this is a metacognitive ability to overcome biases. [second-person perspective?] Comparable to the Solomon effect, moving to a third-person perspective, described by Igor Grossmann.

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Episode 44: Theories of Wisdom

(3:15) Baltes and Staudinger found generativity, flexibility and efficiency in the application of wisdom, and rationality taking place within a framing, within the constraints of combinatorial explosion, working with ill-definedness (Simon’s bounded rationality, and relevance realization).

(7:49) We should not just have a product theory of wisdom but a process theory. Ancient theories of wisdom gave an independent account of foolishness and the process of affording better flourishing. Transformational change was central to wisdom.

Wise People, Interpretive Knowledge | Monika Ardelt, John Kekes (12:13 to 27:17)

For Ardelt theoretical knowledge is insufficient to attribute wisdom to somebody; it must be realized, embodied and enacted within a process of self-transformation. Wisdom is a project of becoming a particular kind of person living in a particular kind of world. This would involve gaining a certain kind of participatory knowing. Wisdom has more to do with interpretive than descriptive knowledge, the ability to grasp (construal) the significance (relevance) of knowledge. (understanding) So we should also look for personal characteristics/virtues to judge one as wise: Cognitive ability to comprehend significance and meaning of information pertinent to self-development; reflective capacity for multiple perspectives, self-examination; affectivity and caring, compassion/agape, overcoming egocentrism, meaning in life.

(27:17) Ardelt’s work points to the need for a processing theory and account of transformative experience, but does not offer those, nor an account of foolishness and how to overcome it.

Balance Theory of Wisdom | Robert Sternberg 1998 (30:07 to 49:22)

Episteme (propositional) is not as relevant to wisdom as sophia or phronesis. Sternberg should add techne for his pedagogical psychotech, and integrate S1/S2. The balance theory gets at understanding involving interpretive knowledge guiding our ability to adapt to situations, formulate problems, explore/exploit environments. “Wisdom depends on the fit of a wise solution to its context.” (transjectivity) Tacit knowledge/implicit learning tries to balance interests (inter-esse) and salience of intrapersonal, interpersonal and extrapersonal dimensions of connectedness. These feed into the balancing response to interest: adapting, shaping and selecting. Dynamic optimization is invoked by the notion of a balance between coping with novelty and proceduralization (Piaget’s equilibration, assimilation/accommodation)

(42:30) For Sternberg the adapting, shaping and selecting response to interests in self, world and others is directed towards the common good. But JV is worried we are assuming our concept of the common good is universally applicable to all wise people and not just culturally conditioned by our Christian and liberal democratic heritage. It is unclear how Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom is being constrained by values. Is a wise person guided by normativity simply in the fact of striving for wisdom, or is there some specific set of values that Sternberg is trying to put forth and defend?

(49:22) In the end Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom is still a product theory. A process theory would get clearer about the nature of tacit, implicit learning, optimization, relevance realization and its connection to meaning life. Sternberg has a theory of foolishness, but it is not independent of wisdom, it is just a lack of wisdom by way of an imbalance in interests and response. The theory of foolishness must account for how it is that we’re self-deceptive, self-destructive, and how that operates and unfolds.

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Episode 45: The Nature of Wisdom

Integrative Internalization | John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro 2013 (5:11 to 15:14)

Our cognition involves inferential (propositional, S2, active open-mindedness) and insight (attention/construal, procedural/perspectival, S1, mindfulness) competences. S2 yields facts as cross-contextual patterns; S1 affords knowing events/processes; or instead, that S2 grasps principles (sophia) and S1 grasps processes (phronesis). Learning to take other people’s perspectives (the sage), adopting and internalizing them, coordinates the theories and skills; processes are governed by principles. The 2013 model did not connect to participatory knowing, ASC, or transformative experience; it is only a product theory, not a process theory. The process of identity creation (participatory knowing), was smuggled into perspectival knowing. S2 overcomes fallacies; S1 overcomes misconstrual; internalization, egocentrism.

(10:17) Vervaeke now sees the relationship of the kinds of knowing as inferential ability being grounded in interactional know-how and cultivation of skills, and that grounded in situational awareness to apply knowledge of principles, and that in agent-arena attunement and capability for modal and existential transformation.

Sophrosyne (15:14 to 26:02)

Moderation makes it sound like settling for an average; and it is not enkratia, over-powering yourself in self-restraint/self-control. Needing that is less virtuous. Connected to Aristotle’s golden mean and creation of a virtual engine that generates enough options for you so you don’t suffer vices of deficit, but also enough selective constraints so vices of excess are thwarted. (perspectival knowing) A sage has a salience landscape which does not self-organize to self-deception, but rather one in which they are tempted to the good. (agape, the most excellent way) Sophrosyne is always in service of A-A, reciprocal realization and transformations needed to become wise; directed towards morality, meaning in life, and mastery. Augustine says to love God, and then do what you want. But you have to love God.

(26:02) Sports psychology (internalizing the coach) and developmental psychology (Vygotsky) were used by Vervaeke and Ferraro to get at wisdom as a cultivation of active open-mindedness, mindfulness, internalization of the sage, as well as a cultivation of sophrosyne. The argument was that wisdom is a comprehensive optimization of cognition and enhancement of relevance realization. This was a processing theory, however it did not account for transformational experience and development, altered states of consciousness, participatory knowing, and the connection of gnosis to wisdom. It could also be extended for optimization of consciousness, character, and culture.

(28:58) Wisdom is about seeing through illusion (McKee and Barber 1999) and into reality (Vervaeke and Ferraro 2013). So wisdom should have to do with insight, and gaining knowledge in the best way, whether theoretical knowledge and believing well, or procedural knowledge, or overcoming egocentrism and internalizing the sage. The wisdom traditions point towards sophrosyne/agape as the most excellent way.

Understanding | De Regt and Gijsbers 2017 (30:29 to 42:16)

Understanding is distinguished from possession of an explanation. It is invoked in the idea of grasping significance of knowledge. Construal plays a role in relations of relevance, and can be understood in terms of problem formulation. This affords one to have an optimal grip on the situation. // There is a standard of effectiveness for understanding, rather than a criteria of grasping the truth. It is tied to something more like rationality, using the best methods to get at the truth. Something that aids understanding is helping you draw the right implications, make good connections. Somebody who understands can apply their knowledge, find new domains, and can motivate and facilitate a need for cognition by finding a problem nexus. (RR) So it is both context sensitive (optimal grip) and context general (problem finding).

(31:53) John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro’s theory of the cognitive style for tapping into participatory knowing and how that would relate to enhanced understanding is not complete, it is a work in progress. But, we have seen many theories converging on relevance realization, intelligence, rationality, different kinds of knowing and their integration and optimization, and how out of relevance realization come many aspects of human spirituality, including a plausible naturalistic account of what wisdom is.

Profound Understanding (42:16 to 46:54)

Your cognitive commitments need to be backed by a lot of convergence. Basic understanding grasps the relevant implications, but generation of plausibility is necessary for it to become profound. This horizontal dimension of profound understanding brings different domains together in good construal, and applies them to different domains. (compression/optimal grip, variation/problem finding) Profound understanding also aligns and optimizes propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory forms of knowing such that they are interconnected and mutually facilitating each other; this is part of its vertical dimension. Transformational experience (both sudden and incremental) and gnosis must also be aligned, and these are to be integrated in an account of wisdom.

Aspiration and Proleptic Rationality | Agnes Callard (46:54 to 57:34)

People can not only go through transformations of knowing that are sudden, like L. A. Paul’s transformative experience (inspiration), but also incremental. This process of trying to have new sensibilities is aspiration; you can’t infer through it. There is a paradox of aspiration. If you would be a good student of a music appreciation class, then you would appreciate music for its own sake; but if you do already appreciate music in that way, the class is not needed. // Meno’s paradox Someone trying to become rational (perspectival/participatory changes) cannot decide on it inferentially; but we can’t call aspiration to rationality irrational, or else we fall into a performative contradiction. // A symbol connects your future way of life to your current one. (liminality, wonder, aporia, gnosis, philosophia)

What is Wisdom? (57:34 to 1:00:04)

Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically constrain each other to enhance relevance realization in inference, insight and intuition, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspiration. (enlightenment) Wisdom is a dynamical system that is counter-active to the machinery of self-deception, and helps afford self-organized transformation to flourishing/meaning.

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Episode 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis

Wise Cultivation of Enlightenment (6:04 to 15:05)

Where wisdom overlaps with enlightenment, it is enhancing meaning in life by enhancing religio. (agape, wonder, awe, sacredness) // 4E cognitive science The WCE must be situated within a worldview that affords worldview attunement, like a scientific worldview via a naturalistic account of relevance realization. This should also be enabling and encouraging, both top-down and bottom-up dynamics. There should be an ongoing reflective equilibrium in which researchers of wisdom develop a wisdom wiki with a creedal function, but always in the service of religio; and in which co-op networks of communities of practice inform its development. Drawing together machinery for overcoming perennial problems and the historical issues into a socio-cultural framework is how to awaken from the meaning crisis.

(15:05) Ludwig Wittgenstein (cultural-cognitive grammar), Alfred North Whitehead (process theology)

Prophets of the Meaning Crisis Roadmap (17:16 to 29:37)

Martin Heidegger (Descartes and Kant, Husserl/phenomenology; Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics, German gnosticism of the twentieth century) Paul Tillich (gnosis, Eckhart, Heidegger; the God beyond the god of theism) Henry Corbin (Jung; Cheetham; transjectivity, symbolism, meaning crisis) Carl Jung (the Gnostics, Kant; Dourley, The Psyche as Sacrament; non-theism, symbols and the spiritual life) Owen Barfield (Kant, early German Romantics, Schlegel, Coleridge; participation) Postmodernism (Heidegger; Derrida, deconstruction; speculative realism and object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, Timothy Morton; Byung-Chul Han) The Kyoto School (Heidegger, James, Buddhism; Nishida, Nishitani, Masao Abe)

Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology (29:37 to 36:22)

Phenomenology attempts to recover a contact epistemology. (Dreyfus and Taylor) Husserl argued we had gotten so abstracted and removed that we had lost contact with the world. We need to get back to the things. // existentialism, Heidegger The phenomenological attitude is not everyday introspection, it is a disciplined way of paying reflective, experimental, exploratory probative attention to contact. Intentionality is not purposeful action, but more broadly any mental directedness. In reciprocal relationship with disclosure of a world, a meaningfully structured environment, there is a core kind of agency. (noesis/noema, transjectivity) Sparrow argues that phenomenology fails as a form of realism, and is an idealism, because it is thwarted by the setup of noesis/noema, intentionality/world disclosure.

Heidegger’s Criticisms of Husserl’s Phenomenology (36:22 to 42:47)

For Heidegger, Husserl had not really given contact with the world, it did not account for participatory knowing so the perspectival relationship could unfold. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment and embeddedness try to recover this. He pointed out that the modal relationship between agent and arena was missing. Participatory knowing is our fundamental way in which we’re in contact w/ Being. Noesis/noema needs to be set within an ontology. How does the transjective relationship sit within an overall account of the structure of Being itself? So Husserl was still trapped within the Cartesian cultural-cognitive grammar, and Heidegger sees that this radically cuts us off from the world. In this grammar we are trapped within our subjectivity, and this is a kind of idealism. (Sparrow)

Dasein (42:02 to 51:34)

We need to phenomenologically (within participatory knowing) direct our attention towards our own being in such a way to open up perspectival knowing. The phenomenological realization becomes the existential realization that we are the beings whose being is in question. // What grounds noesis/noema is our being. For a gazelle its identity is set. But insofar as we are persons, who and what we are, our being, and its meaning, and life’s meaning, has been called into question. Heidegger is trying to get us to a state of aporia, to remember the being mode, to confront mystery, so that we are engaged in a process of transformation. Dasein means ‘being-there’. (thrownness) We are self-making, and self-defining. We do this in contact with our modal existence, and the mystery of Being itself.

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Episode 47: Heidegger

(7:47) A kind of questioning questing is undergone not in the having mode, but the being mode, not to get a propositional answer but to engage in participatory transformation and wonder. Heidegger’s notion of Dasein inherits from the Christian notion of being in the image of God. We are fundamentally without an essence, and we are continually redefining ourselves by how we are question our being.

On the Essence of Truth (12:37 to 21:57)

Truth as correspondence considers a statement to be correct because it corresponds in some important way to reality. For Heidegger this misses its dependence on a deeper relationship. Agent and arena must be shaped to each other for actions to be meaningful, and this is grounded in the process of RR. This attunement process is not an experience, it cannot be understood subjectively. Ek-sistent, ‘standing-out’ or salient, exposedness to Being as a whole can be felt because we always tune into things in such a way that they are disclosed as a whole. Because we got locked into the propositional truth as correspondence, we have forgotten the attunement relationship which is the essence of truth. Because of this, “man clings to what is readily available and controllable, even where ultimate matters are concerned.”

The Ontological Project, Philia Sophia (9:52 to 12:37, 21:25 to 25:41)

For Heidegger the history of metaphysics, the philosophical, existential, or religious responses to Dasein, is the history of nihilism; a misframing of Being that produces the loss of contact with our being and Being itself. Ontology is the project of understanding our being and our relation to Being to understand Being itself. Plato distinguishes philia sophia (love of wisdom) and philia nikia (love of victory). Philia nikia is the deepest kind of bullshitting because it appears to be reasoning, but it is only the manipulation of propositions trying to assert correctness. It forgets the attunement, the pursuit of wisdom and the transformative, existential project. The capability to say “I was wrong, I was mistaken,” is a marker of philia sophia. Concealment of Being is a fundamental occurring, not just an occasional limit.

The Thing Beyond Itself (24:37 to 31:49)

Sacredness is an enacted, participatory resonance to the inexhaustibleness of reality. Instead of Kant’s thing-in-itself, veiled by subjectivity in such a way that it remains inaccessible to us, OOO picks up on transjective attunement and makes both the subject and object possible in phenomenological (‘to shine forth’) experience. The thing shines into your subjectivity, and simultaneously withdraws from your framing, being beyond your framing; these co-contribute to its sense of realness. This beyondness or horizon of experience is not itself experienced as either an object or a subject, but inter-affords both in shining and withdrawal. It is the withdrawing, according to Harman, that phenomenology was missing, because it was still bound within a Cartesian, subjective framework.

Truth as Aletheia and the Frame Problem (31:49 to 39:52)

The word ‘lethe’ means ‘to cover’ or ‘to forget’. Aletheia is a negation of this, as a deep modal remembering (sati) of the being mode that discloses the aspect of reality that is both shining and withdrawing. So truth is attuning to the mutual disclosure and fittedness within the mystery of Being; using existential memory. Dreyfus says: “Facts and rules are by themselves meaningless. To capture what Heidegger calls significance, or involvement, they must be assigned relevance.” This can’t be captured with a definition. “…the more facts the computer is given, the harder it is to compute what is relevant to the current situation.” (optimal grip) If you stay at the propositional, computational level you lose your ability to fit yourself to the current situation and cope with it. (What Computers Can’t Do)

Aletheia and Gnosis (39:52 to 46:04)

Avens: “A questioning then 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 is expressed in the axiom ‘like can only be known by like’.” Since reality is dynamic we must be dynamically coupled to it. Corbin calls this participatory knowing ‘gnosis’, a “salvational, redemptive knowledge because it has the virtue of bringing about the inner transformation of man.” Insofar as you are changed, your knowing of yourself and your knowing of the object are coupled together. The being whose being is in question quests into this question to quest into Being. This is how to respond to the forgetfulness of Being. (modal confusion)

The Independence of Being (46:04 to 55:36)

Being is independent of the correlation between us and Being, it always transcends how it is being known and being experienced by us. The independence or moreness of Being, the withdrawal of Being that is simultaneously with the presence of the shining, is an important part of any thing’s realness, which we have neglected. The relevance underlying transjective attunement must always be open to, as an ongoing constraint, a connectedness to the moreness and inexhaustibleness of the thing beyond itself. In the having mode we misunderstand Being as a being, as the supreme being, the highest person or force. This turns Being into a problem to be solved. God is understood in a limit sense. This problem of onto-theology, and its connection to nihilism, is at the heart of the meaning crisis. (Tillich, idolatry)

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Episode 48: Corbin and the Divine Double

The Rose (2:35 to 14:17)

Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without a why. It blooms because it blooms. It cares not for itself, asks not if it is seen.” Heidegger discusses the rose in connection with the Greek word ‘physis’, where we get our ‘physics’ from. “The blossoming of the rose is grounded in itself,” writes Heidegger. “The blossoming is a pure emerging out of itself, pure shining.” It is implicit that this shining is also a withdrawing. The rose shines out of its depths, out of that into which it withdraws as it presents itself. Meister Eckhart says, “Live without why.” Or, “Live without a why.” The quest for a grand culminating purpose is coming from the having mode, not the being mode. Narrative gives cognitive, existential practice in non-logical identity, transframing. But there is no narrative to physis. We connect to it better if we give up on a telos.

The Tao (12:55 to 18:39)

The shining of reality into phenomenological experience is salience landscaping into our intelligibility, while pure withdrawal is an independent inexhaustibleness of a combinatorially explosive reality. The Tao is a well that is never used up. We can experience this from within the being mode as a trajectory of transframing that is always closing upon the relevant while also always opening to the moreness. When we recognize this within the being mode (aletheia) so that we accentuate it, and celebrate it, that is what sacredness is. Realness is a tonos, a creative polar tension (Barfield) between cohering and opening, the homing and the numinous. Yin and Yang are interleaved together, within each other. Daoism is about serious play with the serious play of Being. This converges with Corbin’s notion of gnosis.

(18:39) The work of Martin Heidegger is important for Henry Corbin. So is Neoplatonism, but particularly the Neoplatonism within Persian Sufism. Persian philosophy is central to the history of philosophy in the world, having a transformative influence upon the Arab world, European world, and the Asiatic world. The monolithic representation of Iran as an Islamic fundamentalist, totalitarian regime should be challenged. The Persians are attracted to a mystical interpretation of Islam (Rumi) precisely to find a form of liberation from an oppressive empire. Corbin brings this together to talk about gnosis as a transformative, salvic, participatory knowing, at-one-ment. His works have to be recited and repeated.

The Imaginal (24:10 to 36:23)

Corbin distinguishes between the imaginary and the imaginal. We typically think of imagination as the imaginary, purely subjective experience generating inner mental imagery, that we know isn’t real and is within our control to do as we wish with it. We come into contact with reality via both the abstract, formal order perceived with the intellect, and the concrete, sensible world. (abstract/concrete are relative terms) The imaginal bridges between these two in your phenomenological experience; it also bridges between the purely subjective and purely objective, it is transjective. This is a dynamic relation, not static one; a constant transformative transframing. Descartes, fundamentalism and literalism reify the imaginal, freezing and fracturing it into polar opposites so as to destroy the capacity for gnosis, aletheia, sacredness.

Features of Imaginal Symbols (36:23 to 40:36)

Symbols are translucent. You look at a symbol, but you also look through it and by means of it. The ways you look at and through symbols can be put into a dialogue with each other. That is how the symbol helps you capture the non-logical identity between your A-A now in this frame, and A-A in a more comprehensive frame. Symbols are transjective. To make them subjective or objective is aligned with a having mode dismissal of how it is challenging you to transcendence. (aletheia) Symbols are trajective, putting you on a trajectory of fundamental transformation. Symbols are trans-spatiotemporal, having to do with a movement between worlds. This is not a narrative/temporal or spatial movement, but an ontological shifting to a more encompassing frame. Aletheia through the symbol is how you do gnosis.

The Angel (40:15 to 49:45)

During the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period within Mediterranean spirituality and Manicheaism, and Neoplatonism, there is a notion of the divine double. (Stang) This is not the decadent Romantic notion of Rousseau, of being true to yourself and being authentic by expressing your true self. Instead, your psuche is bound to a double that is archetypically more important than you. Your true self in fact is this divine double, and the spiritual path involves reuniting with this self, realizing an interdependence between them and bringing them together in a mystical union. This is gnostic in how it breaks apart the thinking of your true self or your identity as something that you can possess. Your true self is beyond you, you aspire to it and realize it in the being mode, in self-transcendence. (transformative experience)

Liberation (48:48 to 59:31)

Rationality is not just logical management of arguments, but any systematically reliable, internalized psychotechnology that affords overcoming self-deception and the cultivation of enhanced connectedness and meaning in life. (self-transcendence) Qualitative development points to a non-logical identity before and after any transformations. Because of this we can’t deliberate on these changes inferentially. So aspiration is necessarily a rational undertaking, and recovers a Platonic idea that there is a deep interpenetration between love and reason. A liberal education should liberate you from existential entrapment, make you a better self. (wisdom, gnosis) Such a thing seems useless to those who want only to manipulate and control us. To appreciate something, acquire a taste, requires an inkling of a better self-world.

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Episode 49: Corbin and Jung

Self-Creation (8:34 to 18:49)

You can’t create a stronger logic from a weaker logic. Axioms from outside of this paradigm must be introduced. (Gödel, Fodor) There is no way to infer from your current self to a more complex self. A leap of faith is needed for qualitative change. But for Strawson self-creation is self-contradictory. For it to be true, there has to be continuity between any two selves S1 and S2, before and after. If they are not the same self, then it can’t be creation by a self. But there also must be real novelty in the shift from S1 to S2. If there isn’t any novelty then no creation can be spoken of. You either have to view yourself as being a blank slate, or make the world a canvas. S1 does not receive or make S2, but participates in the emergence of S2, and disappears into it. Not passive receptivity, or active making. (aspiration, Callard)

The Divine Double (18:49 to 30:37)

The temporally prior self S1 is normatively dependent on the latter self S2. It is only after the aspirational transformation that S1’s behavior can be made sense of and justified. Usually the source of justification and explanation of something is the same as its causation. So, there is a teleological temptation with the divine double, that it pre-exists us and draws us towards it causally. Instead we relate to it as an imaginal symbol that affords a non-logical identity which is anagogically internalized into our current self. Something other than you becomes completely identified as your meta-cognitive reflective rationality and allows you to participate in the act of self-creation, or aspiration. This mythos tries to capture the dynamic process but oversimplifies into teleology, and overemphasizes passive receptivity.

(30:37) The divine double shines a greater frame into your current frame (internalization), but draws you out by how it withdraws into the more encompassing frame (indwelling). It allows you to conform to the play of Being itself and self-transcend. (gnosis) It is often represented in the mythos of angels. For Corbin, every thing has an angel. It is not just the agent that is transformed, but also the arena. There is an angelic order to Being. The imaginal, the divine double, gnosis, and the being mode are all interconnected.

(35:08) The notion of the ‘divine double’, given the use of ‘divine’, seems to bind us too much to a certain mythos and teleological narrative structure, as well as to theism in general. It has deep connections to the Gnostics, and non-theistic religions have something equivalent: the Buddha nature in Buddhism, and the identity between Atman and Brahman in Vedanta. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dinoysius have this sort of notion.

The Sacred Second Self and the Archetypes (36:47 to 51:03)

A soul is not something that you have. Your sacred second self is the soul you are becoming, the soul you are aspiring through and to. We had lost connection to the SSS, and thereby the notion of self-transformation. (organic psyche, not hydraulic) The psyche is a complex self-organizing dynamical system, an autopoietic being. The archetypes are the formative, founding (arche) patterns (typos) of the psyche, very much like psychological versions of the Platonic forms. Images themselves are not archetypes. They have to be treated in an imaginal way, leading you into the aspirational process of individuation. Archetypes are living systems of constraints, virtual engines regulating self-organization of the salience landscape. The ego is the archetype of the conscious mind, the Self is the archetype of archetypes. (dialogue)

(38:00) Carl Jung represents the meaning crisis in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and links it to his psychology.

(41:26) Freud came up with the idea of the unconscious, and that development is the result of an interaction between nature and nurture. He effectively has a hydraulic model of the psyche, like a Newtonian machine or steam engine. Things are under pressure, and the pressure has to be relieved. The psyche drives and pushes various processes into operation. (see Paul Ricoeur’s book on Freud) Jung rejects Freud’s hydraulic metaphor and replaces it with an organic metaphor. (see Storr on Jung) The psyche is a complex, self-organizing dynamical system, an autopoietic being. Individuation is understood organically as something that you participate in.

(49:37) An archetype, being imaginal, is between the ego and the Self and can be internalized into the way the ego self-organizes. An archetype mediates between the two (axis mundi), establishing an anagogic dialogue that individuates the ego, altering its perspectival knowing and participatory being. Jung criticizes literalism and fundamentalism because they reduce imaginal archetypes to being imaginary. The being mode is lost, and rather than engage in the process of individuation, only the having of subjective representations remains. The ego pretends to be sufficient unto itself, tries to take on the role of the Self.

(52:32) Corbin and Buber criticize how Jung, in most of his writing, sees the archetypes subjectively, and as happening primarily in the psyche, rather than transjectively. Therefore according to Buber, Jung misses out on the existential modes that he talks about (being mode and having mode, I-It and I-Thou relating). Corbin sees Jung as himself reducing the imaginal to the imaginary. The mystical should disclose the depths of both the psyche and the world in an integrated, coordinated fashion. Corbin is Neoplatonic, while Jung is Kantian. However, Jung provides a psychological dimension (internalization) to the existential and ontological dimensions provided by Buber and Corbin (indwelling).

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Episode 50: Tillich and Barfield

The Courage to Be and Faith as Ultimate Concern (0:00 to 6:20)

The main response to the meaning crisis for Tillich is a kind of existential courage that empowers us to confront meaninglessness, and overcome it, while at the same time responding to perverted responses, like the gnostic nightmare of Nazism, or idolatrous fundamentalism and literalism. Courage is not just bravery, facing danger, and it’s not just fortitude, enduring hardship. Courage is a virtue, it involves the wisdom to see through fear or distress to what is truly good and act accordingly. Faith as ultimate concern is an aspirational, open-ended participatory process. You are caring-coping with it and are committed to it. Symbols/icons should articulate and develop ultimate concern and point to the inexhaustible ground of Being. Idols are symbols treated as objects to be possessed, to be manipulated and controlled.

God (5:04 to 8:51)

God is an icon, an imaginal symbol for the Ground of Being. God is not any kind of being. There is a no-thingness to God. God is the ground of reality, of meaning-making, and of the relationship between. Any attempt to reify God and think of God as a thing, is a form of idolatry. Any attempt to limit God to meaning, or to reality, or to the relationship between meaning and reality, is to make God into an idol.

The Method of Correlation and Ekstasis (8:51 to 14:55)

There is a tonos, a polar tension and resonant relationship, between existential questioning/questing and what Tillich calls revelation, the way the depths of reality reveal themselves. The two are correlated together. (anagoge) This method is not about getting scriptural and theological propositions to fit, but existential depths. Tillich talks about the depths of reason which make reasoning possible, like the machinery of RR and proleptic rationality. We have an ekstatic relationship when in the grounding depths of our psyche and rationality we stand beyond ourselves. The relationship is to through an imaginal symbol, to the sacred depths of reality. The miracle of the sacred depths is its shining; the mystery of the sacred depths is its withdrawal into the moreness. The two are inter-affording our sense of realness.

Living Symbols (14:55 to 19:58)

A symbol is more than a sign, it is participatory. Symbols open up levels of reality and of ourselves, which are otherwise closed to us. This happens in a mutually affording and resonant way. Symbols are not made by us they are self-organizing. Symbols grow out of the unconscious within us, and the unconscious without us. They have a life about them. They can be born, they can live, and they can die. For Tillich many of the symbols of Christianity are dying, and fundamentalism and literalism are inappropriately clinging to them rather than generating new symbols. Symbols resonate with moreness and a numinous quality that invites transformation of mind and reality in a transjective and translucent manner, via the relationship between the existential self and the essential self (SSS). (fullness, sophrosyne)

The Response to Faith (19:58 to 26:07)

The aspirational, transformative journey to beckon towards the sacred second self is a journey of encouragement that has us seriously confront meaninglessness. In the ancient world the Stoics responded to the finitude of our being. In the Protestant Reformation the meaningless is confronted as a self-awareness of guilt. The existentialists in modern times confronted the meaningless as despair. Tillich wants a position that can respond to all three, which he calls the response to faith. Encountering the no-thingness of God is central to faith. The nothingness of God is experienced as the inexhaustible creation of meaning. When we stop trying to push away the nothingness of God, but instead have an imaginal relationship to it, and move through it, then we overcome meaninglessness. (“aspect-identity shift”)

Epektasis and Theonomy (26:07 to 31:27)

For Gregory of Nyssa and Eriugena salvation is not about moving towards a final destination, a Promised Land. It’s not about realizing the purpose or goal of finally resting in God. Instead, pursuit of God is never-ending because it’s about infinite self-transcendence into the infinity of God. There is no resting, only the constant disclosure of the inexhaustibleness of the Ground of Being. It is continual, ongoing transframing that is transjective in nature. The symbol joins together and grounds the objective and subjective. There is a process of individuation similar to Jung, but it is always in a tonos, creative tension, with participation in Being. So it results in neither an autonomy of reason (Enlightenment rationalism), nor the heteronomy or demonic imposition of authority from without, but a theonomy, God-governed.

The God Beyond the God of Theism (31:27 to 36:42)

Tillich makes use of transjectivity; the sacred second self; an anagogic ascent that integrates reason and revelation; aspect-identity shift; criticism of fundamentalism and literalism; a response to the meaning crisis; and gnosis in the notion of what he calls the God beyond the God of theism. The theistic god is seen as a demiurge that is existentially entrapping us within the meaning crisis. // anatheism Theists and atheists take God to be the supreme being, the highest of beings. Theists and atheists consider God to be accessed primarily or solely through belief. Theists and atheists do not require transformative anagoge as part of theology. Theists and atheists take sacredness to be either personal or impersonal. Non-theism is a position that tries to transcend theism and atheism, and Descartes.

(36:42) Though Tillich gives guidance on how to cultivate courage and faith, he does not offer practices of transformation. Jung created an intrapsychic practice for enacting and cultivating the imaginal called active imagination. This is not calling up images or conceptually think about things, but to allow images to self-organize in an autopoietic manner so the Self and the ego can talk to each other, and the depths of the psyche are revealed. He also creates a practice of dream interpretation.

(37:54) Owen Barfield was one of the Inklings, a group which also included J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. He was influenced by the gnosticism of Rudolf Steiner and the neoplatonism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was himself influenced by the post-Kantian early Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel. For the early Romantics the in-finity of reality means not only that it isn’t countable, but crucially that it is unbounded and can’t be fully enframed. Schlegel describes how the inexhaustible draws us out to self-transcendence as the finite longing for the infinite. This is a disclosure of the moreness of reality and the ongoing capacity of relevance realization to adapt to it. (‘eduction’)

Poiesis (43:11 to 45:18, 51:40 to 55:19)

We translate poiesis as poetry. It involves a creative ekstasis, the way that we stand beyond ourselves in creativity. Barfield notes this is a transformative experience, with a “felt change” in consciousness. The self before is both continuous and discontinuous with the self after, involving both inspiration and aspiration. (SSS) Poetry and the poetical aspects of everyday language can reawaken us to a kind of connectedness that experiences inexhaustibleness as sacredness. Poiesis involves an enacted imaginal symbol that exapts cognitive machinery to give a SF-organization to an abstract, ineffable sense of an icon (like Lady Justice). We can both see a symbol and see through it. But we have a temptation to literalism and idolatry, we can focus on the cognitive machinery and lose the abstract, the iconic seeing.

Original Participation and the Meaning of Words (45:18 to 55:52)

Barfield looked at the etymology of words. He found that in ancient times words had multiple meanings, sharing a non-logical identity, inter-affording each other. ‘Pneuma’ is both ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’. For Barfield this was a more transjective, anagogic resonance they had with reality. Wind would be experienced imaginally. Words have an inner (subjective) and outer (objective) meaning.These are not disjunctive, but separate from each other in the modern era. (meaning crisis) For Lakoff and Johnson it’s not an evolutionary change, but sensorimotor ways of understanding are taken up conceptually. This is linked to exaptation of our cognitive machinery via enacted metaphor and symbolism. There is also top-down constraint of intellectual form connecting to the sensorimotor instances. (poiesis)

Final Participation (55:19 to 1:00:49)

In the meaning crisis there is a two-worlds mythology, subject-object split, and the separation of the inner and outer meaning of words. We need a recovery of the perspectival and participatory that can integrate with the gains of the rational sciences. Barfield emphasizes that. But we also need to have a science of meaning cultivation, a scientific account of this integration. That is what the theory of RR, put into dialogue with spirituality, symbolism, and sacredness, is meant to do. Barfield was indebted to Coleridge and Schlegel in understanding sacredness as a poiesis participation in the inexhaustible within transformative creativity. This can’t simply be imported back into classical theism. Poiesis is synergistic. “God” plays the leading role, but we participate in history. (da’ath, Gelassenheit, Durchbruch)

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