[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Episode 50: Tillich and Barfield

Then I pointed to somebody whose work, also deriving from Heidegger, integrates aspects of all of these together in kind of a profound way. Tillich is deeply influenced and aware of what he calls 'depth psychology', the kind of psychology in Jung, he of course is deeply aware of Heidegger. I don't think that Tillich was aware of Corbin, but he is deeply aware of the symbol in an imaginal instead of a merely imaginary way.

Tillich takes the meaning crisis seriously, he writes perhaps his most well-known (and I think it's a masterpiece) book, The Courage to Be, as a response to the meaning crisis. Like Jung and Corbin, and for very related reasons, he's deeply critical of literalism and fundamentalism throughout, but he takes it deeper. As I mentioned, he really deepens it in terms of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology and he comes critical of literalism and fundamentalism as forms of idolatry in which we are attempting to have rather than become.

So there's some excellent books on the relationship between Jung and Tillich, a series of ongoing work by John Dourley; I recommend two books to you, The Psyche as Sacrament which I tweeted about in my book recommendations, I would also recommend his later book, Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion, but make no mistake, Dourley is not talking about a recovery in a nostalgic sense. He writes another book called A Strategy for a Loss of Faith where he is trying to get beyond classical theism. So I recommend Dourley's work as a comprehensive way of bringing about a deep dialog and a kind of integration between Jung and Tillich.

Tillich sees the main response to the meaning crisis, and here's how Tillich is not just theorizing: he is trying to give us guidance on how to live. Let's remember that this really matters, because you know, the way Tillich resisted the Nazis. What Tillich talks about in The Courage to Be is *courage*, now he's careful to note that this is a kind of existential courage that ultimately allows us to confront and overcome meaninglessness in its depth, but also to more practically respond to perverted response to the meaning crisis itself, like Nazism and its gnostic nightmare.

This process of encouragement--now, he is like Aristotle, he's not talking about something as simple as just bravery (facing danger) or fortitude (the ability to endure), no, for Tillich courage is a virture. There's something of wisdom in courage. Courage involves within it that central feature of wisdom, which is seeing through illusion into reality. The brave person face danger, but that's all we can say about them. The person with fortitude endures difficulty, but that's all we can say about them. The courageous person sees through the illusion and the distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good and acts accordingly.

They made full transcripts with notes here: All Transcripts - Meaning Crisis Collection

Episode 7: Aristotle's World View and Erich Fromm

So last time we took a look at the second half of Aristotle and his further developments of the Axial Age's understanding of meaning and wisdom. We took a look more at the world side of things and we took a look at his worldview, with two components: his conformity theory, which is an important alternative understanding of knowledge--it's a contact epistemology, an intimate knowing and being with something--and how plausible that contact epistemology actually is, and then we also looked at a plausible (turned out to be false, but a plausible) model of the world that is very consonant and consistent with that conformity theory: this is a geocentric world that is moved by natural motion. It's a cosmos.

Then we use that to discuss how the theory of the world and the theory of how we know the world and be within the world are intimately connected and mutually supporting, and you get worldview attunement, and how that creates existential modes in which we are co-identifying the agent and the arena and creating the meta-meaning, the relationship that makes all individual acts and events and situations and places meaningful for us, and how important that consonance is between our existential mode and our intellectual understanding. Aristotle is so prominent because of his capacity to create a worldview that lasts for a millennium, and because it's so well-attuned a worldview.

We then paused from our discussion of the Axial Age in Greece and we moved to the Axial Age in India for the explicit purpose of trying to discuss the impact of the Mindfulness Revolution. Part of the thesis of the series is the mindfulness revolution is in response to the meaning crisis in the West and growing confluence between Buddhism and cognitive science is an attempt to address and provide solutions to the meaning crisis in the West. We started by looking at the figure who epitomizes the Axial Revolution within ancient India and that's Siddhartha Gautama. We began by looking at his myth--his mythological biography if you want to put it that way--and I remind you again how I am using the world 'myth'.

We began by taking a look at his early life within the palace. We stepped aside and examined the palace as a mythological representation of a particular existential mode. We talked about two different existential modes, following the work of Fromm; it's also convergent of work from Buber, and other important thinkers (Stephen Batchelor is going to make use of this distinction, etc.).

Fromm talks about two modes:

1. The having mode that's organized around meeting our 'having needs' in which we perceive the world categorically. We want to manipulate it and solve our problems and control it. 
2. The being mode which is organized around our 'being needs'. These are needs that are met by becoming something: mature, virtuous, love.

We then talked about the possibility of modal confusion: being locked in the having mode in trying to meet your being needs within the having mode. So trying to meet your need for maturity by having a car, or meeting your need for being in love by having lots of sex. We talked about the fact that you can become enmeshed in modal confusion and how that becomes a vicious cycle because as your being needs are frustrated you pursue evermore the misframed projects that the modal confusion is giving you. You try more to have things as opposed to more and more become what you need to become.

Then I suggested to you that being in the palace is a mythological representation of this kind of modal confusion in which we are stuck in the having mode and of course this also had one important cultural point--I did say at the beginning we would talk about about that--we would develop a way of talking about the connection between the meaning crisis and other crises we are facing, so issues about a market economy and a commodification of everything and everyone by inducing modal confusion it is possible to sell you more. As your identity becomes more and more a political and economic thing and commodity that should be categorically understood and manipulated, the more and more I can sell you things and sell you ideas and manipulate you accordingly. So this has important ramifications for us now. That's why it's a myth; because it has important ramifications for us right now.

Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution

Last time we were talking about what was going on in shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic transition. We talked a lot about the flow experience and how it integrates altered states of consciousness, on a continuum with mystical experiences and meaning making, enhanced insight and intuition, and how this resulted in an enhanced capacity for metaphorical cognition which greatly expands human cognition, makes it much more creative, much more capable of generating all of those fantastic connection in meaning that drove the Upper Paleolithic transition's explosion in culture and technology. 

Then we moved to consider some other intervening revolutions that also had an impact. We briefly talked about the Neolithic revolution and the beginning of agriculture and then the rise of civilizations. We got into the Bronze Age civilization and then that led us into the revolution we're concentrating on now, which is the Axial Revolution, a period around between 800 BCE and 300 BCE following the Bronze Age Collapse.

The Bronze Age Collapse was one of the greatest if not the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever seen. That facilitated much more experimentation in smaller scale societies and that experimentation resulted in the creation of new psychotechnologies. One was alphabetic literacy happening in the area of Canaan, and it's eventually going to be taken up very quickly by the Hebrews and then taken up by the Phoenicians and taken to the Greeks.

The Greeks further improved it; we talked about how that psychotechnology, alphabetic literacy, makes literacy more effective, more efficiently learned, more powerful. Its operation greatly expands the number of people that can be literate, enhances the distributed cognition and how that psychotechnology gets internalized into our metacognition and produces second-order thought. We get an enhanced awareness of our own cognition, both its power and its peril. We get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We also get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-deception.

We talked about the invention of coinage to help deal with the mobile armies of this time and how that trains you in abstract symbolic thought and more rigorous mathematical reasoning and that also gets internalized. It gets exapted right into second order thinking and people start to become aware of themselves in a different way. They start to become much more aware of the meaning-making nature of their cognition, its capacity to generate illusion and self-deception and also its capacity to break out of illusion and self-deception and to come into contact with a more real world.

This leads to some fundamental changes; people start to become more aware of their responsibility for the violence and the chaos and the suffering in their own lives and they start to become aware of how much the transformation of mind and heart (in the Axial age, often referred to in a singular manner) is the way to alleviate suffering. 

Episode 1: Introduction

So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try to get a clearer picture of what it is. Today I'd like to continue on with what we were talking about: the connections between meaning-making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom.

We were talking about that in connection with the upper Paleolithic transition, in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were using their cognition. We talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaption and psychotechnology and we talked about how the upper paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psychotechnologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exapt the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating. 

We talked about the way the shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality, because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptability / our ability to find patterns but it as how we can get locked in / how we misframe reality and how we are in need of insight. When we talked about that in connection to the nine dot problem, that led us to realize that there's kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs. There's knowings about knowing how to do something, what it's like to have a particular perspective, and what it's like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it. 

I was starting to show you how the shaman's altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning-making, affording insight, and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting and health case, two things that would radically improve survival. 

Episode 16: Christianity and Agape

Last time we something somewhat pretentious, I hope it was still valuable. We endeavored to discuss the contributions to the notions of meaning and wisdom that were made by the advent of Christianity. In particular we looked at Jesus of Nazareth and the exemplification of this participatory knowing in God's agapic creativity, this forgiving of personhood to others.

John's radical idea that God is in fact this agape that is actually what we've always been talking about when we didn't go talking about God, and then Paul's radical personalization of this and how the metanoia of his own transformation is seen by him as a powerful instance of this gnosis agape, but how that also carried with it a potential dark side in which elements of his identity get projected onto cosmic history and the idea of inner conflict within history / within God as being reflected of and reflected in his own inner conflict between the old Saul and the new Paul, and how much this gnosis / participatory knowing is bound up with an exploration and an understanding of how our agency can be fractured, how we can be at war with ourselves, how we can suffer.

Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus

So last time we had begun to take a look at the transformation that was occuring in the eastern Mediterranean around the time of the advent of what was going to become Christianity. Of course, this figures upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a very controversial figure to say the least. As I said, I'm not going to endeavor to claim to give the absolute or exhaustive account of this extraordinary individual, but instead I'm going to try to do what I've done before, which is to show how what he did contributed to our understanding of meaning and wisdom and how that eventually pushed forward the history that has led to the meaning crisis.

So we were talking about one of the core messages of Jesus. Jesus seems to have understood himself, or at least those around him understood him, as Kairos. If you remember, that's a turning point in the course of history, because as we spoke before the Israelites and by this time they were known as the Jews had developed the psychotechnology of understanding history as a cosmic narrative in which there are crucial turning points.

Jesus saw himself as such a Kairos. Whether or not he saw himself as the Kairos that was known as the Jewish Messiash is again controversial, I don't need that for the purposes of my argument. It seems though that he had a sense of himself as deeply participating in the way in which God was directing and involving himself in the course of history. If you remember the model of God we talked about when we talked about the ancient Israelites, the God of the Exodus is a God who is creating into an open future. Human beings participate in that creation by identifying with a particular course, loving it, being shaped by it, as well as shaping / participating in its flow.

Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as having an especially deep participation such that he felt himself to be at one with this God who is capable of altering the course of history and redeeming human beings. He seems to have understood this Kairos as having something to do with a profound way of understanding the participation in God. This participatory knowing is a process in which you're coupled; you're neither making it nor being made by it, but it's this reciprocal revelation in which you are making it and it is making you. The way you participate in your culture, the way you participate in your language, the way you participate in your history. You know this not by gathering beliefs but the way in which your self is fundamentally transformed.

Jesus understood his participation in God as the disclosing of this profound kind of love. We began talked about the kinds of love that human beings experience, and how love is something that deeply transforms who we are and our salience landscape / our character. We talked about how the Greeks have three terms, and it's helpful because by this time the New Testament is being written in Greek. It's helpful to understand these Greek terms:

1. Eros, which is the love of being one with something. It can be just, you know, drinking water so I become one with it. Of course it could become what has become more commonly known as "becoming one with someone" through sexual union. Erotic love.
2. Philia, that's at the core of philosophy. This is the love that is borne of right cooperation. So eros is consumptive, making one with, philia is cooperation, work together. A lot of how we succeed as human being is by the way we work together.
3. Jesus starts to emphasize a new kind of love: agape. This is not the love of consumption or cooperation; this is the love of creation. It's the love that God is demonstrating towards humanity in the way God is an ongoing creation of the open future. So God is creating the future, is creating the historical process and course of that history that makes people possible.

See, agape is the kind of love that creates persons. So the main metaphor for agape is the way a parent love a child. You don't love a child because you want to consume it in some way (that's hideous and vicious!), you don't love your child when you bring it home from the hospital because it's a great friend to you (it can't cooperate! It can't do that at all; in fact isn't not even a person. It's not a morally rationally reflective agent; in fact it's exactly the opposite), you love it precisely because by loving that non-person you turn it into a person. This is a powerful, creative, god-like ability that we have: by participating through love in another being we can transform that being from a non-person into a person; a person that could enter into a community of persons and find meaning, fellowship, belonging. 

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

Last time we were continuing our exploration of sacredness. I talked about that, in contrast to but also in concert with Geertz's notion of sacredness as 'homing us against horror', we have the proposal from Otto that sacredness puts us into contact with the numinous, which basically exposes us to what is horrifying (at least, the limits of us), because it has an aspect of awe, with a little bit more, which is to remind us. Humiliation, in the original sense of the word: to keep us humble, to give us humility, to remember that as we are feeling that sense of expansiveness with awe that we are precisely ultimately limited creatures. 

So I propose to you that these two opponent aspects of sacredness can be seen very readily within the light of the machinery of relevance realization, where the worldview attunement is a form of meta-meaning and therefore meta-assimilation (ultimately compression, integration, things fitting together). We get an opposite which is the meta-accommodation afforded by confronting the numinous in awe and, potentially, horror. We talked about how horror is about exactly the confrontation with that which demands from us unanswerable, unachievable accommodation.

So I propose to you that what sacredness is is to play with (seriously play with!) the machinery of relevance realization as found within the primordial aspects of religio, and that doing this would be deeply advantageous to us because it is so foundational to our agency, to the world as an arena for our action, to our capacities for self-transcendence, and so forth. But caught up with that, when I invoked music as an example of this, was the idea that we often do this serious play by engaging in symbolic behavior. So I'm putting 'the symbol' here as something that has the capacity to function both ways: it can bring us into meta-accommodation but of course it can also bring meta-assimilation. It can bridge between these two and it can go in both directions.

Episode 28: Convergence to Relevance Realization

So last time I went through with you a series of arguments trying to show you the centrality of the issue of relevance realization. I want to review that with you and then try to begin with an account of how we might come up with a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and then build that into an overall plausibility argument about using that notion of relevance realization to explain many of the features that we consider central to human spirituality, meaning-making, self-transcendence, altered states of consciousness, and wisdom.

Before I begin that I want to remind everybody of how much the work I'm talking about now has been done in collaboration with other people, especially the work with Tim Lillicrap and Blake Richards in 2012, the article we published in the journal of logic and computation with Leo Ferraro in 2013, some current work with Leo Ferraro, Anderson Todd, and Richard Wu, current work I'm doing with Christopher Mastropietro, and some past work with Zachary Irving and Leo Ferraro on the nature of intelligence.

We did a series of argument that pointed towards how central relevance realization is. We did arguments around the nature of problem-solving, and remember we saw the idea there of search space as proposed by Newell and Simon and we faced a couple of important issues there. We faced issues of combinatorial explosion, and what we need is problem formulation or problem framing that allows us to avoid combinatorial explosion by zeroing in on relevant information. I also propose to you (and I'll return to this later) that problem-solving is our best way of trying to understand what we mean by intelligence: your capacity as being a general problem-solver. 

Also we noted the problem of ill-definedness, very often a problem formulation is needed in order to determine what the relevant information is and what the relevant structure of the information is so that again points us into relevance. These two together also pointed towards a phenomena we have already talked about (insight) and the fact that you often have to solve a problem by altering your problem formulation and re-determining what you consider relevant.

We then took a look at categorization (I'll come back to this again in another way a little bit later in this lecture), how it ultimately depends on judgments of similarity and we can get into an equivocation there. We can equivocate between a purely logical notion of similarity in which case any two objects are indefinitely similar or dissimilar to each other and if we mean instead of logical similarity (which would not help us to categorize) psychological similarity then we're talking about making a comparison of two things in terms of the relevant features of comparison, the relevant aspects. So we're into relevance and we're also introducing an important idea I want you to remember, this notion of an 'aspect', a set of relevant features that cohere together and are relevant to us, especially in projects like categorization.

Doing good cog-sci, I do a convergence argument to get a trustworthy problem or construct and then I basically do a divergence argument to show how it has the potential to explain many important phenomena and establish a relevant balance between them, and so that's what I'm building you. Right now we're on this side, how all things are converging on relevance realization and then we can use this to explain many of the features that seem to be central to human spirituality, meaning-making, self-transcendence, altered states of consciousness, and wisdom.

We took a look at communication, and we saw the issue here is that the fact you have to convey more than you can say and then that led us into the work of Grice and a series of maxims that make conversational implicature possible. All of the maxims collapsed to the maxim of being relevant.

We took a look at robotics, the actual interaction with the environment. Here's the idea of being an agent. We saw the robot was trying to pull the battery that's also on the wagon and that wagon also has the bomb on it and what we saw is the problem of the proliferation of side effects. You can't ignore all the side effects or you'll be grotesquely stupid, you can't check all side effects or you'll be grotesquely incapable, and so therefore you have to zoom in on their relevant side effects. So again and again and again everything is centering on this.

Episode 27: Problem Formulation

So we have been looking at the cognitive science of intelligence, and we've been looking at the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and we've seen how they are trying to create a plausible construct of intelligence to drive many different ideas together into this idea of 'intelligence as the capacity to be a general problem solve' and then they're doing a fantastic job of applying the naturalistic imperative which helps us avoid the homuncular fallacy, because we're trying to analyze, formalize, and mechanize our explanation of intelligence, explaining the mind ultimately in a non-circular fashion by explaining it in non-mental terms.

This will also hopefully give us a way of resituating the mind within the scientific worldview. We saw that at the core of their construct was the realization via the formalization and attempted mechanization of the combinatorial explosive nature of the problem space and how crucial relevance realization is and how somehow you zero in on the relevant information. They proposed a solution to this that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of meaning cultivation and of rationality; they propose the distinction between heuristic and algorithmic processing and the fact that most of our processing has to be heuristic in nature.

It can't pursue certainty, it can't be algorithmic, it can't be Cartesian in that fashion, and that also means that our cognition is susceptible to bias. The very processes that make us intelligently adaptive help us to ignore the combinatorial explosive amount of options and information available to us are the ones that also prejudice us and bias us so that we can become self-deceptively misled. 

They deserve to be seminal figures and they exemplify how we should be trying to do cognitive science and the exemplify the power of the naturalistic imperative, but there were serious shortcomings in Newell and Simon's work. They themselves (and this is something we should remember, even as scientists: the scientific method is a psychotechnology designed to try to help us deal with our proclivities towards self-deception) fell prey to a cognitive heuristic that biased them. They were making use of the essentialist heuristic, which is crucial to our adaptive intelligence. It helps us find those classes that do share an essence and therefore allow us to make powerful predictions and generalizations. 

Of course the problem with essentialism is precisely it is a heuristic, it is adaptive; we are tempted to overuse it and that will make us mis-see many categories do not possess an essence, like Wittgenstein famously pointed out the category of 'game' or 'chair' or 'table'. Newell and Simon thought that all problems were essentially the same, and because of that how you formulate a problem is a rather trivial matter. Because of that, they were blinded to the fact that all problems are not essentially the same, that there are essential differences between types of problems, and therefore problem formulation is actually very important.

This is the distinction between well-defined problems and ill-defined problems. I made the point that most real-world problems are ill-defined problems; what's missing in an ill-defined problem is precisely the relevance realization that you get through a good problem formulation. We then went into work in which Simon himself participated, the work of Kaplan and Simon to show that this self-same relevance realization through problem formulation is at work at addressing combinatorial explosion. We took a look at the problem of the mutilated chessboard, and that if you formulate it as a covering strategy you will get into a combinatorial explosive search whereas if you formulate it as a parity strategy, if you make salient the fact that the two removed pieces are the same color, then the solution becomes obvious to you and very simple to do. Problem formulation helps you avoid combinatorial explosion and helps you deal with ill-definedness and this process by which you move from a poor problem formulation to a good problem formulation is the process of insight. 

This is why we have seen throughout that insight is so crucial to you being a rational cognitive agent and that means that in addition to logic being essential for our rationality those psychotechnologies that enhance our capacity for insight are also crucially important (indispensable!).

Episode 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom

Last time we talked about how the Axial Revolution came into Greece. We first reviewed Pythagoras and then we concentrated especially on the figure of Socrates and the Socratic revolution. We saw again how issues of meaning, wisdom, and self-transcendence are so tightly bound up together. We took a look at Socrates and how he has a particular conception of wisdom in which what we find salient or relevant is closely coupled to what we find true or real.

Those two concerns--what is transformative of us and what is true of the world--are meant to be held together and this was pivotal in Socrates's method of trying to get people to realize how much they (all of us!) are so prone to having those two come uncoupled from each other.

We become subject to bullshit and to self-deception. A life that is beset by self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior is not a life that's worth living. The way to afford human flourishing is by developing the skills/the wisdom to keep those two tightly coupled together.

Socrates was so convinced of how important this was to making a life meaningful that he was prepared to die for it. As I mentioned, there was somebody who was a follower of him who was at his trial, not present at his death, but was deeply traumatized and affected by his death and this of course is Plato.

Meta discussion about how to do this:

(This is the sort of place to complain that 5 lectures a week is too many, or to propose that we have a weekly discussion event in the Walled Garden, or so on.)

Meta discussion about why to do this:

(This is the sort of place to complain that this is off-topic for LW, or to say that you're participating, or to talk about why participating makes sense or doesn't.)

Episode 38: Agape and 4E Cognitive Science

So last time I was making a proposal to you of how we could address the perennial problems, and I gave you a systematic set of things that could be cultivated in an integrated fashion for addressing perennial problems and then we saw how our attempts to ameliorate and alleviate the perennial problems interact with the historical forces and that we get the fundamental undermining of meaning in life and that problem set by Wolf and then I propose to you that there was a response to that in terms of the notion of Agape. Then I moved into directly addressing the historical forces, looking about for something like what the three orders did for us, and then I proposed to you that if we took a look at 4E cognitive science, third generation cogsci, and in particular some of the insights afforded by 4E cognitive science that were pointed out by Varela in his article, we can see a way in which we can get a worldview that strongly situates our meaning-making processes within it (legitimates it). 

We talked about how we can recover something like the nomological order and the normative order and how we can move to something post-narrative, an open-ended optimization that is seeking for a depth of realization rather than a historical combination. I proposed to you bringing with that whole project of responding to the historical forces a new notion from Goodenough's work on 'transcendence into' rather than 'transcendence above or beyond', and how that is resonant and consonant with the picture that we've been working on together. A couple things remain that are central; one of course is to give a cognitive scientific account of wisdom.

Episode 30: Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory

So last time we were taking a look at trying to progress in an attempt to give at least a plausible suggestion of a scientific theory of how we could explain relevance realization. One of the things we examined was the distinction between a theory of relevance and a theory of relevance realization. I made the argument that we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance precisely because of a lack of systematic import, but can have a theory of relevance realization. Then I gave you the analogy of that (which I'm building towards something stronger than an analogy of) Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and that which Darwin proposed a virtual engine that regulates the reproductive cycle so that the system constantly evolves the biological fitness of organisms to a constantly changing environment and then the analogy is: there is a virtual engine in the embodied, embedded brain (and why it's embodied will become clear in this lecture).

There is a virtual engine that regulates the sensory-motor loop so that my cognitive interactional fittedness is constantly being shaped, it's constantly evolving to deal with a constantly changing environment and what I in fact need is a system of constraints because I'm trying to balance between selective and enabling constraints to limit and zero in on relevant information. Then I was trying to argue that the way in which that operates, we saw what needs to be related to an autopoetic system and then the way the self-organization I suggested operates in terms of a design that you see many scales and we need a member of multi-scaleular theory in terms of your biological and cognitive organization. That's in terms of opponent processing.

We took a look at the opponent processing within the autonomous nervous system that is constantly (by the strong analogy) evolving your level of arousal to the environment: opposing goals but interrelated function.

Then I proposed to you that we could look for the kinds of properties that we're going to be talking about, the level at which we're going to be pitching a theory of relevance realization, which is the theory of bioeconomic properties that are operating not according to normativity of truth or validity, not logical normativity but logistical normativity. The two most important logistical norms I would propose to you are efficiency and resiliency, and then I made an argument that they would be susceptible to opponent processing precisely because they are in a trade-off relationship with each other and the if we could get a cognitive virtual engine that regulates the senosorimotor loop by systematically playing off selective logistical economic constraints on efficiency and enabling economic constraints on resiliency then we could give an explanation / a theory deeply analogous to Darwin's theory of evolution where cross individuals of biological fittedness we could give an account of the cognitive evolution within individuals cognition of their cognitive interactional fittedness, the way they are shaping the problem space so as to adaptively be well-fitted to achieving their interactional goals with the environment.

Episode 25: The Clash

Last time we took a look at what's happening in Germany in the period after Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. We took a look at the rise of pseudo-religious ideologies and of the various other cultural undercurrents and threads and processes of transformation that were gathered together in Germany and then exacerbated and ignited (if you'll allow me a volatile metaphor) by Germany's terrific defeat in the terror that was World War One, and the impact this had on Germany and how all of this, all of these features that we saw at work in Germany and in the meaning crisis get spun in Hitler's autodidactic myopia into a gnostic nightmare, a titanic pseudo-religious ideology.

The two great pseudo-religious ideologies of Nazism and Marxism (at least the Stalinist version in the Soviet Union) come to titanic blows in the Eastern Front at the Battle of Kursk. Then I pointed out that this, and then the political ideological battles of the Cold War and thereafter have left us deeply traumatized. We place no faith in pseudo-religious ideologies, utopian visions to solve the meaning crisis; at least, many of us don't. We do not see ourselves as capable of the nostalgic return to religion, somehow pretending that all of this history, all the science can be ignored in a kind of fundamentalism (and please not that I'm not equating all religion with fundamentalism!). Instead we find ourselves in the middle in between these and we're trapped; we can't go back, and we can't do a secular alternative to religion, and yet we need something that will systematically create psychotechnologies that transform consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that religions have if we're going to address the meaning crisis, and in fact the meta-crisis that we're confronting right now in the world today.

So we're caught in this situation and we pursue either various radicalisms (and I critiqued the idea that the meaning crisis should be understood, or we should attempt to solve it by the means of the clash of political ideologies; that is to fundamentally misframe it, because if you remember Kierkegaard and Marx and Schopenhauer all in their different ways and in ways that we can criticize are nevertheless pointing to the fact that the participatory, perspectival knowing that is so crucial to responding to losses of meaning and regenerating meaning has been ignored by Hegel). So we can't do this politically; it doesn't mean the politics is irrelevant but it means that framing and formulating the problem at the political level is to radically misframe it and misformulate it.

Then I proposed to you that instead we turn to an alternative way of trying to reformulate the problem: that we try to get a scientific understanding, as best as we can, of the meaning machinery, this machinery that we perspectivally participate within. I'll often say 'meaning-making' but as I'll argue we don't make meaning the way the Romantics said, neither do we just receive meaning from the world the way the empiricists and the Enlightenment argued; we're going to see that it's neither one of those. That's another dichotomy that we have to transcend.

Nevertheless, let's look at this machinery, the machinery of meaning realization. What are the cognitive processes at work within it? I propose that we do that from a scientific worldview precisely because, at least from a scientific point of view, precisely because we need that to complement the historical analysis and because the scientific worldview is part of the problem of the meaning crisis itself. So I propose that we take a look at the science of cognition and that means that we take a look at cognitive science.

(The last third of this episode is warming up the transition from history to science, and so I extended a bit from the recap to the introduction of episode 26, in a way that mirrors episode 25's structure.)

Episode 24: Hegel

Last time we took a look at important develops that are centered upon the figure of Hegel. I can't give a comprehensive analysis of Hegel's thought; it's too complex and sophisticated. I was trying to do the best I could to capture that within Hegel's thought which is directly relevant to our understanding the genealogy of the meaning crisis. 

We saw how Hegel proposes how to move beyond Kant and the Romantics by rejecting Kant's notion of 'the thing in itself' and saying: "look, reality is just the patterns of intelligibility, there is nothing above and beyond that," a form of idealism. As our ideas are being realized, as patterns of intelligibility are being developed, reality is also simultaneously being developed. We took a look at this notion of a quasi-living system of these patterns of intelligibility in development called Geist. Hegel proposed that that development can be understood as a process that he called dialectic, echoing Plato but I think severing the notion of dialectic from anagoge (which features in some criticisms of Hegel that we looked at towards the end).

This dialectic is a process in which ideas (again, not just things in the head; these are patterns of intelligibility, patterns in the way reality is realized in both the sense of being known and being actual) articulate and differentiate from each other. One idea is opposed by another, contrasted to, distinguished from, and then it is taken up in a higher order integration and then that serves as a new idea that can be contrasted with other ideas. This dialectical process complexifies the pattern of intelligibility.  It emerges and develops and becomes more and more. The irrationality, the failure to understand, is being slowly transmuted, actualized into deeper patterns of understanding, deeper aspects of being, and then the idea is that this reaches a state in which a system of ideas emerges that grasps the dialectical process itself (as found exemplified, Hegel believed, in his own philosophy) and this is the culmination of the state of absolute Geist.

For Hegel, the real is the rational, the rational is the real; what we get then is that this development of the rationality and intelligibility of reality is also the development of reality itself. So this codevelopment of meaning and being is absolute spirit, absolute mind; this is Hegel's version of God; a secularized, non-religious God.

Hegel understood his philosophy in religious terms, but he was always pursuing that understanding by translating religious terms and religious experience into philosophical conceptual structure. He advocates for a new mythology; a mythology that is integrated with philosophy, a mythology of Reason which will be the last and greatest work of mankind, the culmination of all of history.

I took you through an example of how understanding the ability to make sense passes into this moment of self-realization in reason as mythology passes into philosophy. We did an example of that showing how Hegel secularized the Trinity in a historical process of the self-realization of rationality. In that sense, Hegel is the Thomas Aquinas of Protestantism; he was proposing this grand synthesis, this grand secularization of the whole Hebraic Christian idea of God at work in history and God working through human beings and the Agapic processes to co-create the real future, the utopic but real future.

We took a look at the main criticisms of Hegel; we reminded ourselves of the criticisms made by Schopenhauer about the will to live was missing, and then how Nietzsche takes this up in the will to power, and the centrality of the will. I took a look at the other great existential Kierkegaard and his criticism, basically using some of the terms we've developed, that Hegel has reduced everything to propositional conceptual knowing. He has left out the perspectival participatory knowing, he has left out the anagoge, he's given us only epistemic transcendence, he hasn't given us existential ethical self-transcendence, personal transformation, and transformative experience that are necessary for returning to / making deeper contact with reality.

We noted this is also consonant with the work of L. A. Paul about how we can't reason our way out of transformative experiences that are so central to the cultivation of wisdom. We then looked at another person who emphasized this lack of will and participation in Hegel's system, and this is the work of Karl Marx. Marx's great proposal--great and terrifying proposal--is that history is not driven by reason (the man in Plato's system) but by the monster. Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach and Feuerbach's critique of religion as the projection of our own humanity, and that religion is not the arena in which spirituality is working itself out, religion is the projective distortion that distracts us from how we are the authors of spirituality in history. It is a vehicle of self-alienation. So Marx takes the Feuerbachian critique and he rejects the theistic resonances within Hegel (the idealistic) and he says 'no, the dialectic is not a dialectic of ideas that's playing itself out religiously. It is a dialectic of economic forces that is playing itself out politically.' 

The dialectic is not between ideas that are in contrast but between socioeconomic ways of life, classes that are in political conflict with each other but are nevertheless systematically related. As that historical process of class conflict unfolds, this dialectic will work out all the self-contradictions in our socioeconomic system (our current one being capitalism for example) until the contradictions are resolved in a socioeconomic state in which peace and freedom have been achieved because all of the internal contradictions that drive the violence will be resolved. This is a completely secularized version of the Judeo-Christian model of God working himself out in history to bring us to the promised land. Marx offers the participatory knowing that is missing in Hegel by proposing how we identify with our class, we identify with the struggle, and we participate in the Kairos, the turning of history, by engaging in revolution and so the totalizing, the totalitarian kind of ideology that Hegel is proposing is being wedded to the idea of violent political change within revolution. So this is a very, very powerful pseudoreligious ideology.

Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing

Last time we finished our look at the Axial Revolution in India. We took a look at what was going on in the Buddha's state of enlightenment. We took a look at some of the cognitive science in such awakening experiences and then we moved to interpret some of the Buddha's pronouncements, following the sage advice of Batchelor, trying to get beyond interpreting his pronouncements as propositions to be believed and instead understand them as provocations so that we may enact enlightenment.

That means enacting the threat that we are facing, and then enacting the psychotechnologies that can respond to it. We took a look at this in terms of ideas of parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, addiction (the opposite of anagogic acceleration!), and creating a counter-active dynamical system, the Eightfold Path, for successfully dealing with parasitic processing.

So we saw that these higher states of consciousness can bring about transformations that alleviate modal confusion, parasitic processing, reciprocal narrowing, many of the ways in which we fundamentally lose our agency in the world in a self-deception and self-destructive manner.

Episode 10: Consciousness

Last time we were discussing the Axial Age within ancient India and we were focusing in on a pivotal figure of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) and we had been talking about his particular story. We talked about the two modes of being that were being represented in his story of leaving the palace: the having mode and the being mode. We talked about modal confusion and about overcoming it.

We followed him to where he's sitting under the Bodhi tree and he achieves a deep kind of realization, a deep state of enlightenment. Along the way, we had discussed what mindfulness is, how mindfulness operates through attentional scaling and how it can increase your cognitive flexibility, your capacity for insight, and then we were trying to draw this all together with some cognitive science discussion of what it is to experience enlightenment.

Now I'm not offering right now a complete account or anything like a comprehensive theory of enlightenment; we're gonna be slowly working towards that as we move through this lecture series, but I do want to get into and can continue the discussion of these higher states of consciousness.

So if you remember they're very problematic, but that they're at the core of many of the Axial Age world religions and foundational philosophies. This is the idea that people have an alternative state of consciousness that they regard as somehow more real than their everyday state of consciousness, and that's problematic precisely because we tend to judge realness by how well we get an overall coherence in our intelligibility (how we're making sense of things) but in these altered states that are very different from our everyday consciousness and therefore do not cohere with it, people do the alternative. Instead of rejecting it the way we reject dreaming (for example) because it doesn't cohere with our everyday experience, people reject the everyday experience as illusory and they say that this state of consciousness somehow gives them an improved access to reality. As you remember, as we've been going through the Axial Age Revolution and the sense of wisdom and meaning that is attended upon it, this ability to transcend through illusion and get connected to what is more real is central to what wisdom means and having some deep sense of connectedness to reality is also central to what it is to regard one's life as authentically meaningful in some fashion.

Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution

So last time we began out discussion of Aristotle and how he has contributed significantly to our understanding of meaning and wisdom. We talked about how Aristotle was centrally concerned with something that he thought Plato didn't give an adequate enough account of: change. Importantly, Aristotle's term for change is properly understood in terms of growth and development.

We talked about how much your sense of growth and development is constitutive of finding your life to be meaningful. Aristotle understood that development in terms of making use of Plato's ideas of eidos--form, the structural functional organization--and then what's happening in change and in development is that something is being informed. In particular, something like wood, which has the potential to be a table or chair, and when it has the correct structural functional organization then the wood starts to act like a table or starts to act like a chair. When you inform some potential, it gets actualized into a particular thing, and so change is the actualizing of potential via information.

In order to better understand that, we leapt ahead to look at a current account of growth and development that was directly inspired by Aristotle: Alicia Juarrero's work. We went through the discussion of what a dynamical system is and how we can use it to understand growth and development in terms of the idea of a virtual engine.

We then returned and used that language to better understand Aristotle's idea about wisdom as the cultivation of character, where wisdom is to create a virtual engine and there's a deep connection between being a virtual engine and the cultivation of virtues. Wisdom is the cultivation of a virtual engine, a character that regulates your self-development, in fact your self-making, so that you can actualize your potential. You can live up to your potential. What does living up to that potential mean?

It means moving through that hierarchy that we talked about last time; the hierarchy of actualization from the mere plant to the animate thing to the mental thing to the rational thing. So to be wise--to live up to your potential--is to cultivate a character that most helps you realize your capacity for rational self-reflection, your capacity to appropriate and take charge of your ability to engage in self-actualization, self-realization, and to do so in a way that fulfills the potential of your humanity. That you most realize, reveal, actualize the characteristics that make us uniquely human. 

Foolishness is to have not properly cultivated your character so even when you have the correct set of beliefs--you believe that you should not do something, you will still fall prey to akrasia because you have not cultivated adequate enough character.

Then I challenged you in two ways: I challenged you to try to reanimate and deepen these terms that we use everyday to talk about how meaningful our lives are--terms of growth and development, actualizing ourselves, and living up to our potential--to deeper those terms by returning and reflecting upon them using Aristotle but also a Socratic challenge via Aristotle: what are you doing to cultivate your character? How much time are you dedicating to it? Since it now reasonable given this argument that it plays a significant role in how meaningful your life is, how much time have you devoted? How much time do you regularly devote to it?

Episode 49: Corbin and Jung

So last time we looked in depth at Corbin and Jung and tried to draw very deeply the notion of the relationship to the sacred second self. I launched into a sort of mutual criticism between Corbin and Jung and brought in some Buber along the way.

The summary at the beginning of the next episode pretty quickly shifts to new material, so here's the key quote according to me:

Freud has a Newtonian machine hydraulic model of the psyche. Jung ultimately rejects that; Jung replaces the hydraulic metaphor with an organic metaphor. He sees the psyche as a self-organizing dynamical system, ultimately as an autopoetic being, so he sees the psyche as going through a complex process of self-organization, and that you have to understand individuation as this kind of organic self-organizing process that you neither make nor receive but you participate in.

Episode 48: Corbin and the Divine Double

So last time we followed Heidegger into the depths, where we encountered Eckhart and this non-teleological relatiosnhip to the play of being. That led us very directly into Corbin, and Corbin's core argument that gnosis (as we've been using it), the ability to engage in this serious play, relates centrally to the imagination. 

But Corbin is making use of this term in a new way; he makes a distinction between the imaginary (which is how we typically use the word "the imagination" and mental images in my head that are only subjection and have no objective reality) and the imaginal (which mediates between the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensible world, and transjects between the subjective and the objective). All this mediation is not done statically, but a mutual affordance is done, and an ongoing transformative transframing, and that the symbol captures all of this.

Then I wanted to bring out Corbin's core symbol, and it's a core symbol that relates directly to gnosis. Because in gnosis (transformative participatory knowing), and this goes to the heart of Heidegger's notion of design, the being whose being is in question. We have to see self-knowledge and knowledge of the world as inextricably bound up together in order to do that; we are purusing Corbin's central symbol, the angel.

Which, of course, is immediately off-putting to many people including myself. But I've been trying to get a way of articulating how Corbin is incorporating both Heidegger and Persian Sufism, Neoplatonic Sufism into this understanding of the symbol, and I recommend that we take a look at the historical work showing how throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and up and through the Hellenistic period and beyond, up until about the 5th century of the common era, there's the pursuit of the divine double. The idea is one that is deeply transgressive of our cultural cognitive grammar of decadent Romanticism, where we are born with our true self that merely needs to express itself (a la Rousseau), and that the core virtue is authenticity, which is being true to the true self that you have, that you possess. Rather than, for example, a Socratic model in which the true self is something towards which you are constantly aspiring.

The transgressive mythology is that the self that I have now is not my true self. My true self is my divine double; this is something that is superlative to me, it is bound to me, it is my double. It is bound to me but is is superlative to me; it is both me and not me. It's me as I'm meant to be, as I should be, and that the existential project is not one of expressing a self that you have but of transcending to become a self that is ecstatically ahead of you in an important way.

Then I pointed out that for many of you this would still be "okay, I get the transgression, but I still find this notion of a divine double unpalatable." Maybe for some of you you don't, but nevertheless I think there's something important to asking the question "why did so many people for so long believe in this aspirational process?". This takes us back into work that was core to the discussion I made about gnosis, and it has a resounding impact at various places throughout this series, which is L.A. Paul's work on transformative experience, and then somebody who's from the same school, influenced by Paul while having a different view as Paul, her transformations are more like insight: Agnes Callard's notion of aspiration is much more developmental, but I argue they can be (I think) readily reconciled together if you see development as a linked sequence of insights to bring about qualitative change in your competence.

Episode 47: Heidegger

So last time we were trying to understand Heidegger's work as a prophet (in the Old Testament sense) of the meaning crisis. We took a look at this notion of "the thing beyond itself" and "realness" as simultaneously the shining into our framing and the withdrawing beyond our framing in a deeply interpenetrating manner. We took a look at this deeper notion of truth--not truth as correctness, but truth as aletheia, that which grounds the agent-arena relationship in attunement and allows us the potential to remember being by getting into an attunement with its simultaneous disclosure and withdrawal.

But we can forget that; we can get into a profound kind of modal confusion and this is the history of metaphysics as the emergence of nihilism. We can forget the being mode, we can get trapped into the having mode in which the metaphysics is a propositional project of trying to just use truth as correctness, and we misunderstand being as a particular being. We try to capture the unlimitedness aspect of being, but we only do it at the limit (which Heidegger is deeply critical of). So we understand being in terms of a Supreme Being, a being at the limit, and beyond the limit. This is ontotheology; we understand God as the Supreme Being and this is deeply enmeshed (for Heidegger) with nihilism, because this ontotheology, this version of theology from classical traditional theism, this way of understanding being gets us into the deep forgetfulness and modal confusion that is the hallmark of nihilism.

Of course, we could perhaps remember the being mode, and this is what Corbin (following Heidegger) talks about as gnosis.

Episode 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis

Last time I finished the discussion of wisdom and connected it to enlightenment and argued for the wise cultivation of enlightenment as our deepest kind of existential response to the meaning crisis, a way in which we can awaken from the meaning crisis. I then wanted to put that scientific model of spirituality (for lack of a better phrase) into discourse with some of the central prophets of the meaning crisis. I'm using the word prophet as it's used in the Old Testament; I'm talking about individuals who were crucial for articulating the advent and helping to propose or promise a response to the meaning crisis. I put a diagram on the board in which Heidegger played a central role; there's many connections in there that I'll point out that I will not be able to fully address, because the people are there insofar as they help us articulate the response, not to be examined for their own sake.

I mentioned the work of Nishida and Nishitani in the Kyoto School; I will talk briefly about Nishitani here but I won't be able to go into that in depth. I do intend to pursue this later in another series I'm putting together (I'm putting together a couple of series to follow this one) and I would like to do a series that will include work on the Kyoto School that I've entitled The God Beyond God, in which we look at all of these great non-theistic thinkers within both Eastern and Western traditions, and things like the Kyoto School that tried to bridge between them. So I will have to neglect (to some degree) the Kyoto School in this series but I promise to follow it up more deeply in another series.

The first 45 lectures have been, to some extent, "how did we get here, and where is here anyway?", and these remaining five lectures are something like "what do other people think about being here?" This episode mostly touches on Husserl (who doesn't really make it into the summary at the beginning of the next episode).

Episode 45: The Nature of Wisdom

So last time I tried to draw together all the other theories (I don't just mean the psychological theories, although they're the most salient right now, but also the philosophical theories) into an account of wisdom. I presented a model to you, a theory of wisdom developed by myself and Leo Ferraro from 2013, in which we are enhancing inferential processing through active open-mindedness, enhancing insightful processing through mindfulness, we're enhancing the capacity for internalization by internalizing the sage, and cultivating sophrosyne by our salience landscape naturally organizing away from self-deception and tempts us towards the truth (or at least what's true, good, and perhaps beautiful; that's perhaps a better way of putting it).

That coordinates the propositional knowing associated with inference, the procedural knowing associated with insight, the perspectival knowing associated with internalization together. That is directed towards realizing sophrosyne and that can help cultivate a more moral existence, the connection to virtue, mastery (in the sense of coping and caring), and meaning in life.

Of course, one of the criticisms I made was that the notion of meaning in life there was too simplistic, and it needs to be integrated with a much more developed account that's already in the literature. I'm contributing to that by work I'm doing with others on meaning in life; I pointed out that the Vervaeke-Ferraro model is missing participatory knowing, it's missing (or at least I think it misrepresents /misaligns) the relationship between the kinds of knowing. Understanding is missing, transformative experiences are missing, aspiration is missing, gnosis is missing, so all of these things need to be deeply integrated together.

I tried to suggest the beginnings of an account of how we turn basic understanding, which is to grasp the relevance of our knowledge, into profound understanding by integrating the account of understanding with the account of possibilities, so that profound understanding is the generation of plausibility by having convergence onto a contextually sensitive optimal grip that is transformatively transferrable in a highly effective manner in many different problem finding, formulating, and solving in many different domains.

I also brought out the idea that in addition to inspiration (this is a term I'm giving for more sudden insight-laden transformative experience), you can have what Callard calls aspiration, that's more incremental, it still can't be solved in an inferential decision-theoretic fashion (she agrees with Paul on that). She does argue though (and I agree with this argument) that aspiration must be considered a form of rationality which she calls 'proleptic rationality' because you're going to get into a performative contradiction: if my aspiration for rationality and my love of wisdom are not themselves rational processes, I'm kind of in trouble in my model of rationality.

Given all of that philosophy, what's missing (as I argued) is an extensive psychology of aspiration. I know one of my colleagues Juensung Kim is working on exactly that problem, and he's of course doing it in connection with a psychology of wisdom. I did suggest to you that we could see one of Callard's ideas of how we do this: we create something that's double-faced (I argued, ultimately symbolic, having aspects of gnosis in it) that allows us to make the leap, even if it's an incremental one, from who we are now and what we value now to the place where I've acquired some new thing that I value for its own sake. We used the example of music appreciation.

I think the 'summary' portion of the next lecture goes out to about 8 minutes, but I'm cutting it off at about 5, in part because there's a lot of tying together / elaborating / concluding to it.

Episode 44: Theories of Wisdom

Last time we finished up looking at Baltes and Saudinger and made some criticisms that led into important criticisms made by Monica Ardelt. Then we looked into Ardelt's theory and the way it brought in an important distinction about not just having a good theory of wisdom, but the process of becoming a wise person, and then the emphasis on 'what are the features of a wise person?' as opposed to 'what are some of the central claims made by a theory of wisdom?'. Then we talked about how Monika insightfully brings together the cognitive, the reflective, and the affective.

I pointed out how we've got relevance realization grasping the significance (at least the cognitive directly because of the invocation of Kekes). I would also point out that I think that's at least implicit in the reflective machinery, and there's deep potential connection there with both perspectival knowing and the cultivation of rationality (at least perspectival rationality), and the affective ties to agape (which I've already argued has very important connections to relevance realization). That afford Ardelt's theory a powerful way of connecting wisdom to meaning in life as something different from connecting wisdom to virtue, and that's a very important thing to do.

We still noted some criticisms, largely it's still a product theory, it doesn't have an independent account of foolishness and a processing theory of how one becomes wise. In that sense it's not picking up as well as it could the philosophical heritage given to us by people like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius and so on.

We then took a look at the theory of Sternberg, just an extremely pivotal figure in the cognitive science of wisdom. I pointed out his ideas about adopting, shaping, and selecting are clearly ideas about relevance realization; he invokes implicit processing, tacit knowledge you know in order to bring understanding in that intuitive grasping of the significance of information (I think that's what he's implying). We talked about how he involves a balancing of interests, and there's the intrapersonal (how you're connected to yourself), the interpersonal (how you're connected to other people), and the extrapersonal (how you're connected to the world). So that's (at least implicitly) important connections to meaning in life in the way we've been talking about throughout this course. He invokes balance throughout, and I tried to make a good case that you should see that as optimization and directly relevant therefore to accounts of optimization of processing that we discussed with connection to relevance realization.

There were some issues I had with Sternberg; the idea that all wise people, all of this machinery is directed towards the common good, that strikes me as anachronistic. I think a less contentious claim would be that it's directed towards virtue and meaning in life for oneself and others in some unspecified way. There was also the invocation of values as affecting or constraining the whole process; again it was unclear to me what this is. There's an ambiguity here, it could be the relatively trivial claim that the wise person is being regulated by normativity--you know, by considerations what's true and good and beautiful--and that would be definitional (and therefore relatively trivial) because wisdom is a normative term or it could be that specific values are being invoked here, but if that's the case they should be specifically stated and justified for why those ones are chosen, and explicitly explain how those specific values make an impact on specific aspects of the machinery. So that's all sort of missing and needs to be addressed. It's ultimately a product theory, not a process theory. Sternberg does have a theory of foolishness, but it's not independently generated and it doesn't really pick up on the centrality of seeing through illusion and into reality.

Episode 43: Wisdom and Virtue

So last time we took a look at the theory of Schwartz and Sharpe, which was an important theory for linking wisdom to virtue and positive psychology. We saw the deep connections between wisdom and the cultivation and practice of virtue. We made some criticisms of Schwartz and Sharpe; I argued that they should include sophia and not just phronesis (if you remember those, they were invoking Aristotle's two notions of wisdom and giving priority to phronesis; I think you need, as Aristotle argued, both sophia and phronesis in order to be virtuous).

I also argued that I thought their attempt to explain phronesis with expertise was confused, and we should put that aside. We took from that some ideas about the developmental aspect (that's of course central to Aristotle; remember he brought the developmental dimension to wisdom, how much wisdom is becoming a virtuous person). I think other things are lacking in the theory, and we'll come back to that.

There wasn't much discussion about the connection between wisdom and meaning in life but we then passed to taking a look at a theory that took very seriously the connection between wisdom and virtue, and this is the seminal theory work of Baltes and Staudinger. We took a look at the idea of the meta-heuristics pragmatic for orchestrating mind and virtue in excellence. They talked about the fundamental pragmatics of life; I pointed out to you that a way of making sense conjointly of the invocation of meta-heuristics and both senses of pragmatics is the idea that this capacity for relevance realization (obviously, improved in some fundamental way). I think there's integral connections between wisdom and intelligence via the notion of rationality that we've already been developing together. 

Then we took a look at the five criteria: there were clear indications of propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, the contextualism I argued can best be seen as perspectival knowing, I argued against their notion of relativism and argued instead for humility and fallibilism (sorry, that was maybe too harsh; I think it's pretty clear that many of the seminal figures of wisdom, figures from the past, were not moral relativist or relativists in any way, so I strongly recommend replacing relativism with fallibilism and humility), and then finally the fifth criteria is that wisdom is applicable to domains in which there is uncertainty. Of course as I've already argued, a huge aspect of our life and our cognition (because of ill-definedness, combinatorial explosion, etc.) is strongly presupposing relevance realization.

Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom

So last time we took a look at the work of Stanovich and ideas coming out of the rationality debate. I tried to explicate the notion of 'need for cognition', talked a little bit more about problem finding and the generation of a problem nexus, and then also the affective component of that: wonder and curiosity and sort of balancing them off together.

Then we looked more specifically at Stanovich's theory of foolishness, which he calls dysrationalia. We looked at the idea of dual processing (S1 and S2) and the idea that what makes you foolish is S1's functioning (that makes you leap to conclusions) interferes with the inferential processing of S2. You leap to conclusions inappropriately, and that's what causes you to be biased in your processing, self-deceptive, foolish, etc., and then what active open-mindedness does is it foregrounds S2 and protects it from undue interference from S1.

That's all very good in a theoretical context, but we took a look at the work of Jacobs and Teasdale and said: but in a therapeutic context the opposite is the case! What you need is you need that machinery of leaping to work well, and we took a look at the work of Baker-Sennett and Ceci showing that cognitive leaping is actually very powerfully predictive of insight and that's what you need in therapy. You need powerful kinds of insight to break you out of the ways in which you're confronting existential entrapment, inertia, and ignorance. You cannot infer your way through transformative, qualitative change.

So I proposed (and Teasdale has also independently proposed this) that we need a cognitive style that foregrounds S1 (puts us into a state for triggering insight) and tends to background and constraint S2's processing, and that's mindfulness. We have evidence that mindfulness facilitates insight and mindfulness is also increasingly being incorporated into therapeutic settings precisely for its capacity to generate cognitive flexibility and afford insight. So we're noticing is that because the relationship between S1 and S2 is opponent instead of adversarial, we're going to need some higher-order way of coordinating these two cognitive styles, active open-mindedness and mindfulness, so that we can optimize the enhancement in rationality of the relevance realization that is at the core of our intelligence.

Note this idea: that how you are relating to your intelligence and applying your intelligence to itself, the degree to which you problematize your own intelligence and try to improve it, we can see that as rationality. Then I suggested to you that when I do this, when I recursively and reflectively use my rationality to enhance and optimize my rationality, perhaps by enhancing the relationship between the component styles of mindfulness and active open-mindedness, then I'm moving towards wisdom.

We took a look at that and in connection with this we took a look at the work of Dweck, and again making the argument that the way you relate to your higher cognitive processes (your meaning-making problem-solving capacity, not just the intellectual or information processing) is deeply existential. We saw the work on mindset and that the way you identify with your intelligence, the way you're framing how you're identifying with your intelligence, has a tremendous impact on your need for cognition, your problem-solving, your behavior, your proclivity towards deception, self-deception, etc.

Episode 41: What is Rationality?

So last time we were taking an in-depth look at the work of Stanovich and rationality because we are building towards an account of wisdom, because that is deeply intertwined with the cultivation of enlightenment and (of course) with the cultivation of meaning. 

We noted that rationality is an existential issue. It's not just a matter of how we're processing information, it's something that's constitutive of our identity in important ways and our mode of being in the world (we'll come back to that again).

One of the core things we saw as we took a look at the rationality debate (in which Stanovich's work was situated) is that debate showed us a couple of important things: it showed us that rationality does not equal logicality and it does not equal intelligence, that debate also showed us that we need multiple competencies when we're talking about rationality. We need an inferential competency and we need an independent competency of control and then I propose to you how we could understand what that competency is, and what the normative theory is acting upon it: namely, insight / good problem formulation.

We then moved into what Stanovich saw as the missing pieces. If intelligence doesn't give us rationality, what's the missing pieces?  Two missing pieces, they overlap in some important ways: one is the notion he calls mindware (what I've called psychotechnology), the other is a cognitive style that he talked about, active open-mindedness (which he gets from Jonathan Baron [LW · GW]) and this is the idea that what you should do is cultivate a sensitivity and an ongoing awareness of the presence and effect of cognitive biases in your cognitive behavior / your cognitive life, and to actively counteract them.

I pointed out that, unlike Stanovich who doesn't emphasize this as much, Jonathan Baron (who's the originator of this idea as a constitutive feature of rationality) points out that you can't do that too much, because if you try to override too many of your cognitive biases you of course will also be overriding them in their functioning as heuristics that help you avoid combinatorial explosions. So getting an optimal form of active open-mindedness rather than a maximal form of it is crucial to rationality. 

I want to just briefly stop here and be a little bit more precise about how I want to use this term. I've been using it throughout and I basically defined it by example and then through exemplification but I want to be a little bit clearer about it because it's going to be relevant as we go forward and talk about wisdom. So here's the definition I want to offer to try to clarify what I mean and how I'm using the term psychotechnology. As I said, I don't claim to be the originator of this idea but I am claiming that this is the particular slant I'm taking on the idea of psychotechnology. "The psychotechnology is a socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that's readily internalizable into human cognition and that can be applied in a domain-general manner." That's crucial--it must extend and empower cognition in some reliable and extensive manner and be highly generalizable among people. Prototypical instances are literacy, numeracy, and graphing. So I just want to make it very clear that it's not just anything we use mentally will count as a psychotechnology, so the cognitive style of active open-mindedness will probably make use of psychotechnologies in order to help track bias but obviously Stanovich means something much more comprehensive; he means a set of skills, psychotechnologies, sensibilities, and sensitivities that will help you in a domain-general manner; note and actively respond to the presence of cognitive bias.

We can then ask what is it about people that, if intelligence is insufficient for this, what is it about people that is predictive of them acquiring [active open-mindedness]? Now, this is learnable, and we talked about the need for cognition as being an important predictor. So this is the degree to which you are motivated to go out and look for problems, you're trying to find, formulate, and solve problems. So in that sense you are generating your own instances of learning and problem-solving in a quite directed and comprehensive manner.

Episode 40: Wisdom and Rationality

So we are pursuing the cognitive science of wisdom because wisdom has always been associated with meaning from the Axial Revolution onward. Wisdom is also important for the cultivation of enlightenment (the response to the perennial problems), it's also playing a central role in being able to interpret our scientific worldview in a way that allows us to respond to the historical forces, and so wisdom is very important.

We took a look (and continue to look at) McKee and Barber, and we saw their convergence argument that at the core of wisdom is the systematic seeing through of illusion and into what's real, and this is very much like "as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage", and then two other important aspects of it: that wisdom is much more with 'how you know' than 'what you know', which means how you come to know it and also how you interpret the knowledge, and that wisdom is therefore, in a related fashion, deeply perspectival and participatory, and that's why wisdom can be associated with an important form of pragmatic self-contradiction.

We then noted the connection with overcoming self-deception in a systematic fashion, and the emphasis of wisdom on the process rather than the products of knowing, and that both of those took us into the work of Stanovich. Because he famously argues that one of the hallmarks of rationality is valuing the process in addition to valuing the products of our cognition, and that took us also into the discussion of rationality.

Stanovich is a good bridge because for him, the notions of rationality and ameliorating foolishness overlap very strongly, and we got into this notion (which I've been sort of comprehensively arguing throughout this course) that rationality has to do with the reliable and systematic overcoming of self-deception and the potential affording of flourishing by some process of optimization of achieving our goals, with the caveat that as we try to optimize we often change the goals that we are pursuing, one reason being that we come to more and more appreciate the value of the process as opposed to just the end result of the process. So in order to pursue that and to deepen our notion of rationality and thereby deepen our notion of wisdom (and of course wisdom has been associated with rationality from the beginning, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle), we took a look at the rationality debate.

I gave you three examples of many possible examples, experimental results that seem to show reliably: that people acknowledge and accept the authority of certain standards, principles of how they should reason, and yet they reliably fail to meet those standards. So one possible interpretation of that (not the only interpretation) is that most people are irrational in nature. As I pointed out, because rationality is existential and not just sort of abstractly theoretical, concluding that people are irrational has important implications for their moral status, their political status, their legal status, even their developmental status. So this is what I keep meaning when I am saying rationality is deeply existential; it is not just theoretical.

Episode 39: The Religion of No Religion

So last time I tried to make some tentative suggestions as to what this religion that's not a religion would look like, and how it can make use of an be integrated with an ecology of psychotechnologies for addressing the perennial problems and a cognitive-scientific worldview that can legitimate and situate the ecology of practices. Then I made some suggestions as to the relationship between credo and religio in our determination of our mythos and the issue of criterion-setting made again another argument for open-ended (in that sense gnostic) mythos, talked about a mythos that always puts the credo in service of the religio, and that is always directed towards the propositional being ultimately grounded in the participatory, and also affording the emergence up out of the participatory through the perspectival and procedural into the propositional.

I suggest some ways in which we might set up a way of engineering credo, something analogous to a wiki, and create a structure that is a distributed co-op structure facilitated by things like the internet. Again, I remind you I was not trying to offer anything definitive or set myself up in any kind of way; that is not what I want to do. I want to try to help facilitate the people who are already doing this so that they have ways of talking to each other, coordinating with each other, and facilitating each other's development and growth.

I then turned towards one of the culminating things we need to do taking up one of the deepest relationships that meaning has, the relationship between meaning and wisdom. We need wisdom because it's the meta-virtue for the virtues, and we need that in order to give the individual pole for the relationship with the collective creation and cultivation of the meta-psychotechnology for creating the ecology of psychotechnology. We also of course need wisdom before, during, and after the quest for enlightenment; the quest for a systematic and reliable response to the perennial problems.

I then proposed to look at the cognitive science of wisdom, and we did that by taking note of an important article that comes out after the first decade and a half of the resurgence of scientific interest in wisdom, and that's the article of McKee and Barber. They're doing something consonant with what we've been trying to do in this series; they're trying to (in a sense) salvage what we can from the philosophical theories, the legacy of the Axial Age of wisdom, and the psychological theories that were emerging at that time and then they set them into dialogue with each other, a process of reflective equilibrium trying to get a convergence between them. They argue that all of these theories (the philosophical and psychological theories) convergence on a central feature of wisdom, and then following work that I did with Leo Ferraro in 2013 we can sort of expand beyond the explicit thing to what we've also set alongside of their phrase.

So a central feature of wisdom is the systematic seeing through illusion and into reality (at least comparatively). So this, of course, is insight; a fundamental / systemic insight not just into a particular problem but into a family of problems. 

Episode 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment, Part 2

So last time we were taking a look at the perennial problems that are endemic to us precisely because of the functioning and structuring and development of our adaptive religio. The very processes that make us intelligently adaptive also make us vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, and I propose to you that:

• we can address parasitic processing with a counteractive dynamical system
• we can address modal confusion by the cultivation of sati
• we can address the reflectiveness gap by the the cultivation of flow
• we can address absurdity by cultivating prajna
• we can address anxiety by cultivating inner dialogue by internalizing the sage through a process of internalization and indwelling that allows us to identify with the sage
• we can address the process of alienation through the cultivation of communitas

I mentioned to you some new sets of communal psychotechnologies that are emerging and people who are trying to develop thinking about how to make use of authentic relating, circling, or trying to break through our current cultural grammar to a form of authentic discourse and relating. So that's on offer.

We can respond to existential entrapment by the cultivation of gnosis, we can be empowered by a core capacity for realizing higher states of consciousness, so what you have is basically a higher state of consciousness that is empowering gnosis. That is of course sat within gnosis; as you remember I argued it has to be set within a proper ritual context. This is being used to cultivate and is being reflectively transformed by a counteractive dynamical system that is going to get you sets of practices for cultivating sati, cultivating flow, cultivating prajna, cultivating communitas, cultivating inner dialogue, etc.; when this is set in a wisdom framing so that comprehensively that person is developing interlocking sets of virtues for addressing self-deception and for affording self-optimization. This results in a reliable response, amelioration and alleviation of the perennial problems. 

I would say that's enlightenment, at least, you know, an enlightenment that I'm trying to reverse-engineer; the components can each ultimately be explained and understood by our best cognitive science. I believe I've given you reasons that we can rationally hope that what needs to be done is to still try to articulate wisdom from a scientific perspective, and of course that is one of the most exciting things that's happening right now, something that I am privileged to participate in.

Episode 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Engineering Enlightenment

So last time we were taking a look at a proposal that we could understand that which causes the experience of sacredness in terms of a transjective inexhaustibility, a kind of deep anagoge between the 'no-thing-ness' of your ever evolving relevance realization and its mysterious depths and the 'no-thing-ness' of a reality that is ultimately combinatorially explosive and dynamically changing itself.

We can acknowledge the important role of the symbolic, the way it helps us to engage and activate the primordial aspects of religio and go through processes of re-exaptation, housing new emergent abilities so that as we're opening up the world we are also opening up ourselves in response to that. But I cautioned against confusing (your own or, at times, our collective) indispensability with any claims of metaphysical necessity or an absolute essence. That was part of a larger critique that relevance can't have an absolute essence, and therefore we shouldn't think of the sacred ultimately as a supernaturally endowed absolutely essential form of relevance.

So I then proposed to you that part of what we saw the experience of sacredness doing was helping to facilitate the higher order relevance realization, the meta-realization between homing us against domicide (the meta-assimilation) but also causing us to confront the numinous (the meta-accomodation) and the sacred is doing that.

I also propose that we needed to look at this more deeply; we needed to look at how the sacred helps us address perennial problems. That took us into opening up and becoming a little bit more analytic about the meaning crisis. There's two components to the meaning crisis: there are the historical factors which we traced in detail at the beginning of the first half of the series and an issue that we now need to focus on: the perennial problems. In some sense the experience of sacredness, the attempt to activate, accentuate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate religio should address our perennial problems.

The perennial problems are of course perennial because the very machinery of religio that makes us adaptive also makes us perpetually vulnerable to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. Most cultures cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies, typically in the form of a religion, for addressing the perennial problems but that set of psychotechnologies has to be fitted into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview. In some sense, the psychotechnologies have to be integrated with sacredness.

Of course, what's happening for us is (and we'll come back to this in more detail) the historical factors have undermined the possibility for us, undermined the experience of sacredness, all of the ways in which we can cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies for enhancing religio because we do not have a worldview within which the project of meaning-making, its self-transcendence, the cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of higher states of consciousness, the realization of gnosis: we do not have a worldview that legitimates or encourages that, and so people are forced (as I said) to cobble together in a dangerously autodidactic fashion their own personal responses to perennial problems without traditions, guidance, communities, well worked out / vetted / developed sets of practices. So that means they're often bereft when they face the perennial problems.

So responding to the meaning crisis has two components to it and that's why I call it awakening from the meaning crisis, because it has not only the response of trying to rearticulate a new worldview in which the projects of enhancing religio again gets validation, is properly situated, encouraged, faciliated, legitimated, etc. but also we need to understand what the set of practices, the ecology of psychotechnology would look like that would allow us to address the perennial problems. I'm proposing that the scientific account of relevance realization and religio (that I've already tried to give you some allusions to that, we're going to come back to it full-force) will give us a way of articulating a worldview in which we can resituate meaning-making and of course the linchpin of that argument is the idea that at the core of the meaning-making is relevance realization and relevance realization can be given a naturalistic explanation; one that hopefully still does full justice to the experience of sacredness.

Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred

So last time we were continuing our examination of the experience of sacredness (the Schirrmacher side of things) and I was trying to develop an account of what symbols are; at least, symbols insofar as they are distinct from signs. This is a way of trying to understand the role that symbols have in our understanding of sacredness.

So I was presenting to you the view that symbols are a participatory act, and that participation has a connection to the activation of a profound kind of metaphor. By activating that metaphor, we are reaching backwards through our exaptation and reactivating that material so that we can re-exapt our cognitive processes and re-experience, re-appreciate, re-see, re-understand some aspect of reality, and that re-exaptation makes the use of a symbol, a deeply participatory transformative thing that we do and that with a symbol we're activating all that reexaptive machinery in order to hold something in mind so that we can see more deeply into it, be more in contact with it.

Then I argued the point of that is ultimately to set up an anagogic expressway by which I am transformed so I can see through the symbol into reality, and so that reality can speak through the symbol to me, and that we get an angogic flow happening and I'm becoming deeply integrated, the world is become disclosed, and that mutual reciprocal realizing (feels deeply sort of like love), coupling to reality in a profound way. So symbols are in that sense designed to get me into a trajectory of transframing; they're designed to open up the world (in wonder) and also grow me so that I can be in that larger world.

That points to how symbols are ecstatic; they're participatory, they're integrative, they're complex, because they help to complexify me and disclose the complexity of the world in a coordinated fashion. Then I suggested to you that we understand symbols as mythos, that it's always a symbol and a story together and that the story points to the ritual and the ritual is also there because the mythos is always enacted if it's going to bring about the transformations that it wants to bring about (or that we want to use it to bring about). 

I think both of those are right--we can use mythos to activate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate religio. Religio is inherently valuable to us so even that alone is going to be very valuable to us. In addition to the act of seriously playing, not only is it development of what we are, what we find intrinsically valuable (because it's constitutive of our ability to value anything else or anything we consider valuable because it's primordial), but relevance realization (which is at the heart of religio and I'm giving you an argument for that) is constituted to it, it is structured to function by being interested in itself, correcting itself, transcending itself, developing itself. So that's why we love the flow state; not only is it optimal in that it's getting us to be our best, we also find it to be an optimal experience because we're seriously playing with this intrinsically valuable machinery in a way that is constitutively intrinsically significant to us.

I propose that when we are using the symbol to get us to play with the machinery, the meta-assimilation the meta-accommodation of sacredness or at least the meta-assimilation, the meta-accommodation of the higher order relevance realization within sacredness, and that's what we deeply mean by the experience of sacredness.

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

So last time I tried to develop with you the side of the plausibility argument I'm making and tried to give an account of central features of human spirituality and to try not to use that term therefore in a vague indefinite way. I made an argument for how relevance realization can explain many of the facets that are found within the normal attribution of human spirituality and I proposed a term 'religio' to cover all of those aspects of spirituality that can be explained by the machinery of relevance realization.

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

Last time, I suppose I probably taxes your attention quite a bit; I tried to keep it as accessible and jargon-free as possible but we got into some of the nitty-gritty of how we could potentially give a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and see it potentially being implemented in terms of self-organizing criticality and small world network formation in the brain, and that that in turn could help us to understand general intelligence, insight, and a lot of the functionality (and I'm even arguing a lot of the phenomenological aspects) of consciousness.

That gives us reason to believe that we may be able to use this machinery to elegantly explain a lot of the central features of human spirituality. We've already seen that this relevance realization is transjective, it's about our fundamental connectedness: connectedness to the world, connectedness of mind and body together, connectedness to other people (we'll have to come back to that); that relevance realization is always deeply affective, that at the core of relevance realization is a caring that is integral to your cognitive commitment of your precious cognitive metabolic and temporal resources; that we can see a lot of the stuff that Heidegger was talking about when he was trying to get us back to this primordial sense of meaning in the transjectivity of relevance realization, and that that interpretation of Heidegger via Dreyfus and our being in the world.

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

So last time we were taking a look at the centrality of relevance realization: how many processes central to our intelligence, possibly also to the functionality of our consciousness, presuppose / require / are dependent upon relevance realization. So we had gotten to a point where we saw how many things fed into this and then I made the argument that it is probably at some fundamental level a unified phenomena because it comports well with the phenomena of general intelligence which is a very robust and reliable finding about human beings and then I propose to you that what we need to do is two things: we need to try to give a naturalistic account of this and then show if we have naturalized this, can we then use it in an elegant manner to explain a lot of the central features of human spirituality?

I already indicated in the last lecture how some of that was already being strongly suggested. We got an account of self-transcendence that comes out of dynamic emergence that is being created by the ongoing complexification and this has to do with the very nature of relevance realization as this ongoing evolving fittedness of your sensorimotor loop to its environment under the virtual engineering of bioeconomic logistical constraints of efficiency that tend to compress and integrate and assimilate and resiliency that tend to particularize and differentiate. When those are happening in such a dynamically coupled and integrated fashion within an ongoing opponent processing, then you get complexification that produces self-transcendence. Of course, much more is needed.

Episode 29: Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization

So last time we decided to dig into the central issue of realizing what's relevant, and we are following a methodological principle of not using or presupposing a capacity to realize relevance in any purported cognitive process or brain process that we're going to use to try to explain that ability.

I gave you a series of arguments that we can't use representations to explain relevance because representations crucially presuppose it and then we took a look at some very interesting empirical evidence that really comports very well with that: the evidence surrounding FINSTing and your ability to do enactive demonstrative reference / salience tagging (just making stand out the hereness and nowness of something).

We drew a few conclusions about the meaning that we're talking about in life, that connectedness is ultimately not generated by representations. I'm not denying that representations and belief and that level can't alter or transform what we find relevant, we're talking about the explanation of the phenomena [of relevance] not how it's causally affected by other aspects of cognition.

We then took a look at a syntactic level, the computational level, and saw arguments that neither inference nor rules can be used to explain the generation of relevance precisely because they also presuppose it. We looked at trying to deal with relevance in terms of some sort of internal module dedicated to it and that won't work. It's homuncular and relevance realization needs to be scale invariant, or at least multiscaleular. It has to be happening simultaneously in a local and global way, and that again points towards something else we noted about any theory: it has to account for the self-organization of relevance that is demonstrated in the phenomena of insight.

So we then saw that a theory has to use explanatory ideas that point to processes that are (at least in the originary sense) internal to their relevance realization / the relevance realizing system. I tried to get clear about how not to misunderstand that what I meant was the goals that govern relevance realization initially have to be constitutive goals, they cannot be goals built upon representing the environment in a particular way. Instead they have to be the constitutive goals that are part of an autopoietic system, a system that is self-organized because it has the goal of preserving and protecting and promoting its own self-organization that draws deep connections between relevance realization and life and relevance realization and being an autopoietic thing.

Episode 26: Cognitive Science

So last time we took a look at the nature of cognitive science and argued for synoptic integration that addresses equivocation and fragmentation and the ignorance of the causal relation between these different levels which we talked about. It does that by trying to create plausible and potentially profound constructs.

I'm pretty sure that's the entire summary at the start of the next lecture? So I suppose I'll try to summarize some bits of it:

• "Cognitive science is born out of a particular way in which the scientific study of mind has unfolded. ... Mind refers to different levels of the reality of mind, with different disciplines that use different vocabularies, different theoretical styles of argumentation, different means of measuring phenomena, different ways of gathering evidence."
• Neuroscience talks about the brain, using patterns of neuroactivity using fMRI etc.
• AGI / machine learning talks about the information processing of the brain; algorithms, heuristics, etc.
• Psychologists talk about behavior, working memory, problem solving, decision-making.
• There are lots of bridges between things; psycholinguistics bridges between linguistics and psychology to try to figure out how the physical brain communicates, which relies touching both the study of the physical brain and the study of communication.
• Equivocation (question substitution / using a concept from one level to work in another leve) is the main thing to watch out for here, as it leads to bullshitting yourself. "No integration through equivocation!" Philosophy is useful mostly because it's about conceptual crispness / noticing and counteracting this equivocation while bridging between levels.
• His main sketch of a way out of the meaning crisis is that we need to develop the cognitive science of meaning cultivation. [My commentary is that this seems like the right sort of meta-process; like, rather than having 'a philosopher' you have 'philosophy' or something, and so error-correction seems much easier. You lose out on the unifying vision of one creative genius, but that's the price you pay for avoiding blind spots.]

Episode 23: Romanticism

Last time we were talking about the historical developments that happened around Kant. We took a look at Kant and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I present Nietzsche as one of the great prophets (I'm using that in the Old Testament sense of a prophet) of the meaning crisis. We talked about a way of understanding what Nietzsche is saying, how it's not just simply atheism. We also took a look at a way in which Nietzsche doesn't really adequately give us a response to the meaning crisis although he indicates that an important project within the response to the meaning crisis is: how do we reappropriate from the Axial legacy the idea of radical self-transcendence within a secular scientific worldview?

Episode 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes

So last time we took a look at three pivotal figures; two of them are in dialogue with the central figure, Rene Descartes. We took a look at the debate between Descartes and Hobbes, and how that is so current and relevant to us today in the debate around the possible creation of strong AI and what that means both scientifically and existentially to us, and we then took a look at what comes out of Descartes's response to Hobbes.

Descartes builds a defense against Hobbes's proposal for a completely materialistic artificial intelligence / computer model of the mind in terms that are drawn very strictly and I think rigorously from the central insights of the Scientific Revolution, and that seems to save the human soul from the Hobbesian onslaught, but we pay a really, really devastating price for the Cartesian defense. We have a radical disconnection between mind and body, which is radical because of how embodied your experience of yourself and your world is. A radical disconnection between mind and other minds, because you only have access to other minds through bodies! If there is no possible connection between mind and body, there's no way you can read other people's mental states off of their bodily behavior. Then we have the radical disconnection between mind and reality, because Descartes gives us two competing models of how we get in touch with what's real: one is we track the mathematical (that of course was picked up by Positivism and people who advocate for science as our main access to reality) and then the other is the 'cogito ergo sum': all that's left of the contact with reality is the moment where the mind touches itself, and we get a purely subjective notion of realness (that's picked up by the Romantic tradition and is also prevalent in our world today).

We swing between the Positivistic and Romantic notions of how we decide what's real in a completely unstable fashion. We then noted that even your connection to yourself has been undermined because the Cartesian project is so radical in its withdrawal; it's so radical in its disconnection from mind, body, world, tradition, history, cultural, that all that's in the cogito, all that is guaranteed to exist is this moment of self-awareness. What you end up with is this completely atomic, completely autobiographically empty self adrift in the terrifying infinite spaces that Pascal talked about.

We talked about Pascal's response to Descartes, and how Pascal was convinced that Descartes's attempts (and Pascal was right about this!) to try to deal with the anxiety of the Scientific Revolution by promoting a methodology of searching for certainty would ultimately come to ruin. And of course they have come to ruin. Instead what Pascal pointed out is that we have lost all these other ways of knowing that were so central to the Axial Revolution; all we have left is a spirit of geometry, we have lost the spirit of finesse. We have lost the procedural knowing, the perspectival knowing, and the participatory knowing that are so integral to the transformative experiences that have been central to our discussion of the Axial Age's legacy. Of course Pascal himself had such a transformative experience, and found the Cartesian framework incapable of addressing or articulating it.

Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes

Last time we took a look at Martin Luther and the deep impact in our cultural grammar made by the Protestant Reformation. We talked about things like cultural training for narcissism, sapiential obsolescence, the division of church and state which furthers secularism, and the rise of the Protestant work ethic and how that's got integrated with emergent corporate capitalism. 

We then took a look at some initial responses by Pascal to this change and the loss of the cosmos, being replaced by the infinite spaces that terrify. We looked at an individual who tried to respond to that, a brilliant genius from the heart of the Scientific Revolution: that's Rene Descartes. He creates a new psychotechnology, the psychotechnology that is at the core of the scientific enterprise as understood today: that's Cartesian graphing. The whole proposal is that we could render everything into equations and that if we mathematically manipulate those abstract symbolic propositions we can compute reality.

Descartes saw in that a method for how we could achieve certainty, and he understood the anxiety of his time as being provoked by a lack of certainty, and the search for it, and this method of making the mind computational in nature, would alleviate the anxiety that was prevalent at the time. So I noted that we had two different elements in our grammar that are in significant tension with each other: they both share, and that's who so interesting about them, I think they share, they overlap significantly in the idea of the isolated individual mind. Whereas Luther's going to put an emphasis on conscience, well, Descartes is going to put an emphasis on what I will now call consciousness. Of course these two words are highly related in nature, but on one side we have the grammar from Luther telling us that we need to accept without question, without evidence, without argumentation, and then Descartes is we should only accept that when we have certainty. 

Neither one of those is viable for us! They're both pathological in a very deep way, but we saw that Descartes nevertheless proposes this new method. It's similar in so many ways to essential features of the Protestant Reformation. A method cut off from tradition, a method cut off from institution, a method that relies just on the individual mind in relationship to itself. So although in one sense these grammars, the Lutheran grammar and the Cartesian grammar seems so opposed in our culture, and these grammars are at war in our current culture war, the war between an understanding of faith as a radical acceptance and knowledge as the pursuit of logically derived certainty, although they are that, that grammatical tension is at the core of a lot of our cultural wars.

Nevertheless these two views are so deeply bound together because of their mutual influence and shared commitment to the isolated individual self. Descartes has a couple of contemporaries, as I mentioned Pascal (we'll come back to Pascal in a bit), but we also talked about Hobbes. Hobbes comes up with the radical proposal, following on Descartes, if cognition is computation and if matter is real then we can build a material computer and we could artificially make cognition. Artificial intelligence is a product of the Scientific Revolution and is part and parcel of the advent of the meaning crisis in modernity.

Episode 20: Death of the Universe

Last time we took a look at the advent of the Scientific Revolution. We looked at the work of Copernicus and how the important advent of a scientific description of reality had with it the consequence that most of our experience--our sensory experience--was questionable as illusory in nature. Galileo also developed the idea of math as the language of reality, and used that with the new experimental method (a method also born out of the idea that most of our cognition is deceptive and biasing in nature) and he used that to discover inertial motion and change the notion of matter into something that exists and resists our will, but that had the effect of killing the universe and making it purposeless in nature.

Thus we become odd islands of meaning and purpose and in a vast ocean of meaningless, purposeless material motion. So all of that is going to have an impact on people's self understanding, the meaning that they're using to make sense of their existence. Look what's happening here: that Aristotelian idea that the structure of your experience and the structure of reality conform has been radically undermined. Now you are trapped within your own mind behind the veils of illusion disconnected from the world and God has become progressively more and more a matter of will.

Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas

So last time we took a look at how Augustine drew all of this development, this very complex sophisticated articulation of the Axial Revolution, drew it all together into a nomological order that brought with it the best of Aristotelian science, a normative order that brought with it the best of Platonic spirituality, a narrative order that brought with it the best of the Christian process of moving through history, and of course along the ride comes some of the best psychotherapeutic techniques available from the ancient world. All of this was integrated together; these three orders that articulate the space of how we're connected to ourselves, to each other, and to the world; the nomological, the normative, and the narrative.

We saw, however, that while this does address the fundamental axes of meaning even as it's understood by our best current cognitive science, this historical legacy starts to come under threat. Initially, it comes under threat in a way that doesn't seem very threatening, people are changing how they're using the psychotechnology of reading. They're going from Lectio Divina, a participatory perspectival transformative form of recitation into a silent consumptive model where I'm trying to consume information and knowledge is an inner coherence between my propositions, rather than a transformative conformity to the world. That of course is born out of a slowly at first and then an accelerating rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus and the best science of the ancient world. There's the threat of "how do we incorporate this authoritative figure into the worldview that was bequeathed to us by Augustine?" and that challenge is taken up by Aquinas.

Aquinas does this, and it's hard to see how else it could have been done, by returning to the fundamental grammar of the Axial Revolution--the two worlds mythology--and reconfiguring it into two real worlds, a natural world understood by reason and a supernatural world understood by faith. Faith is now understood as how love transforms the will, and the will is primarily how I assert certain propositions to be true. As I mentioned, that separation, while that solves the problem at the time, brings with it the threat that as the supernatural world becomes nonviable to us, that we will lose the Axial Revolution's heritage. We will separate love from reason and spirituality from science in a particularly pernicious and dangerous fashion.

Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism

Last time we were talking about this interaction and confluence between nascent Christianity, the transformation that's undergoing the Platonic tradition in Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism. We had ended up by talking about Plotinus, and how he brings about this grand unification of the best science of the time (Aristotle), the best therapy of the time (Stoicism), and the best spirituality of the time (Platonism). This is done all in a way that powerfully integrates mystical experience, achieving higher states of consciousness, and rational argumentation. Things that we now experience as diametrically opposed: science and spirituality, reason and tranformation, therapy and realness, all of these things were not; they were instead powerfully mutually supportive.

Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia

So last time we were taking a look at a group of people: the Gnostics. They shouldn't be understood as forming a community or group, although there might have been some Gnostic churches; we should think of them more like we think of existentialism or fundamentalism. You can be a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Jew etc.; it's more about a style, a way of being, a way of understanding and interpreting. It was pervasive during the same period as early Christianity and the two are interacting with each other. In fact, as we will see, many Gnostics thought of themselves as Christians.

So we were taking a look at how to go about interpreting Gnosticism. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because I'm presenting the Gnostic movement as the Axial Revolution within the Axial Revolution. It's taking the revolution to its culmination in many important ways that I think have direct relevance for us today. In order to do that I'm presenting to you something like the cognitive science of what gnosis actually is, and in order to do that we've been making use of some important work by Harry Frankfurt and L. A. Paul. The basic idea is that we can talk about people being existentially trapped and that that is a result of them being existentially stuck, they have inertia, they do not know how to engage the anagoge in order to make a worldview viable to them.

They are existentially indecisive. They are existentially stupefied because they're facing deep transformative experience and they don't know how to reason their way through it. They don't know if they should do it and that existential entrapment can be very, very damaging. It can fragment your world and tear apart your agency and so people can suffer from this in a profound way, which means Gnosticism as Hans Jonas and other people have seen is directly related to a lot of the modern confrontation with meaninglessness and nihilism, because in the meaning crisis people also similarly feel deeply existentially trapped.

So what is needed is a recovery of serious play through the engagement in ritual behavior. This ritual play affords an individual to engage in enactive analogy, so that they can get into that liminal state in which they can, in a perspectival and participatory manner, bridge in a way apt way between 'the world and the self that they are now' and 'the world and the self that want to viably become'. That enacted ritual should also afford anagoge. It should afford the transframing, the reciprocal anagogic process by which self and world are transformed such that we can go through the sensibility transcendence which will make a worldview viable to us.

That ritual combination--that enacted analogy and enactive anagoge--is empowered by the cognitive flexibility brought on by an altered state of consciousness. Hopefully a higher state of consciousness that gives us a sense of the increased realness of the world that we are trying to move into. So that higher state of consciousness motivates us to go through this radical transformative experience. 

Now, of course, there are dangers associated with all of this. When we are engaging in these kinds of radical transformation of our salience landscape, when we are putting ourselves and our world at risk, when we are inducing altered states of consciousness, there is a significant chance that we will fall prey to parasitic processing, to bullshitting ourselves, to deceiving ourselves, and therefore it is very important, and this is also part of what was going on with Gnosticism, to build up a community shared mythology, a shared set of psychotechnological practices, a shared social network of distributed cognition to provide sapiential feedback, guidance, correction, and encouragement for people when they are endeavoring to go through the kind of transformation that will release them from this existential entrapment. So you have some higher state of consciousness (hopefully) that has some aspects of being a higher state of consciousness and that is going to be set within a ritual framing that I've been talking about, and then you want that in turn set within an important sapiential and supportive community that is teaching you all kinds of the relevant skills by which one can bring wisdom, the ability to overcome self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, to bear upon this transformation. When all of that is the case, this is what gnosis is. It's this kind of deeply transformative, deeply respectable participatory knowing that is ritually enframed and embedded within a sapiential and supportive community.

Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics

So last time we finished up our look at what was going on in Buddhism and then we moved back to the West and we started to take a look at what was coming after the Axial Revolution. We saw that Aristotle's disciple Alexander ushered in a period of turmoil and cultural anxiety, a period when many people were expecting or were experiencing domicide, a very deep and profound sense of loss of home. Not of having a house or dwelling, but that connectedness, that rootedness to one's culture, one's place, one's history, one's language group, one's religion, one's community, etc.

We saw what happens is a change in the cultivation of wisdom. Notice again the deep connection between the cultivation of wisdom and the attempt to enhance meaning in response to a meaning crisis. What happens is a change in the notion of wisdom, and wisdom now takes on a therapeutic dimension in which the philosopher is the physician of the soul and has to learn to hear anxiety.

Then we learned how the Epicureans responded to this, how they diagnosed the problem like a physician and prescribed a response. They diagnosed the anxiety of the period of the Hellenistic Domicide as being caused by an anxiety about one's own mortality, and we look at how they responded to that. They advocated giving up (I would argue) the quixotic attempt to achieve immortality and instead trying to come to a lived acceptance of one's mortality. They did that by slowly getting you to realize getting clear about your nebulous anxiety, that is not about non-existence and not about experiencing total loss, it's about experiencing partial loss.

Then there's a remedy to experiencing partial loss, which is to set yourself upon those things that are actually constitutive of meaningful happiness, and then deeply realizing and structuring your lives so that you will have those up until the moment of your death, which is philosophically informed friendship, meaningful relationships in which we are afforded the cultivation of wisdom and self-transcendence.

Now, while I think mortality salience is definitely a part of the Hellenistic crisis, I don't think the Epicureans have a comprehensive understanding, and to get a more comprehensive understanding and diagnosis we turn to the Stoics. But in order to understand the Stoics, we have to understand the group they developed out of: those were the Cynics.

The Cynics were not as impressed by Socrates as argumentation as Plato was. They were much more impressed by Socrates's capacity for confrontation and provocatively inducing [aporia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia) in people. They started to practice this and in doing so they started to force people to realize the distinction between moral codes and purity codes, and to thereby pay more careful attention to what they're actually setting their hearts upon so that their hearts would not be broken by being set on man-made impermanent cultural systems and values.

Zeno (the Cynic) was deeply impressed by this but he was also impressed by Plato's argumentation. He wanted to integrate the two together and he also had the fundamental insight that although particular cultures and historical institutions are contingent, being social is not. We are inherently social in the depths of our humanity, so leaving the polis was not actually an option according to Zeno. Instead what we have to do is realize our issue isn't what we're setting our hearts upon, but how we're setting our hearts. Pay much more attention to the process than the product.

So you can see how the Stoics are even picking up on something that's implicit in the Epicureans. The Epicureans aren't trying to change the world and eradicate death by bringing about immortality, the Epicureans are trying to get you to reframe, have an insight, not just an intellectual insight but an existential insight that changes the meaning of your mortality. This was the core of the Stoic insight: pay attention to how that existential meaning is being made. Pay attention to how that process of co-identification (the way we're assuming and assigning identities is occurring), because that's where your self and your identity and your agency are being forged.

The problem is most of us let that process by mindlessly, automatically, and reactively, and so we MAR this process. We make it susceptible to distortion and that will affect the very machinery of our self, of our being in the world.

Episode 12: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2

So last time we finished up a cognitive scientific exploration of higher states of consciousness, awakening experiences, these kinds of mystical experiences that bring about massive transformation. We saw how we can give a psychologically active description of these processes that explain both the experiential profile that people are having and some of the features that they find therein. We were also able to talk about this at the level of machine learning and information processing, and at the brain level. What comes out of this is a picture of a state of consciousness in which we are getting a flow state that is improving our optimal grip on the world, optimizing our performance for making sense of things and enhancing our overall capacity for learning and problem-solving.

We saw that in fact provides a very good justification for the states being the guidance for the transformation of life and that what they do is they give a brain state that is highly optimized, processing things in a way that gives us a tremendous sense of a plausible grip on the world, and that is making use of processing that is absolutely indispensable and foundational for us. It has a kind of important priority in of our processing and what I suggested from this is that while it doesn't give us any good theories in a sense of propositional claims about the metaphysical structure of reality, these states do justify their claim to give us guidance. So although they are not rational in the sense of providing good argument and evidence for beliefs they are rational in the sense of wisdom, in that they optimize some of our core processing for being in contact with reality in a way that is coupled optimally to our own processes of self transcendence and the cultivation of wisdom.

Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1

So we have been engaged in a very long discussion because we're talking about a topic that is central--the possibility of enlightenment--to try to make that something plausibly accessible to us rather than something wrapped and shrouded in mesmeric mystique. Instead we've been trying to understand this from a cognitive science perspective that could tell us why these higher states of consciousness might in fact provide a means for the radical self-transformation, self-transcendence, enhanced inner peace, and connectedness to reality that are the central legacy of the Axial Age Revolution and that are still needed today, even if we no longer believe in the mythology of the Axial Age religions and philosophies.

How do we find a place to vouchsafe the precious value that these states can confer on lives in terms of meaning and transcendence when we no longer can understand and articulate and legitimate that in terms of a two world mythology?

So we had been discussing the properties of these higher states of consciousness. We had discussed what the world is like: it's bright, both comprehensive and detailed, intricate and interesting, the world in a grain of sand. It's highly intelligible, it's beautiful, and behind it is a pervasive sense of oneness. The self that is resonating with that world in the higher state of consciousness is a self deeply at peace, like in Plato's description of anagoge. It's experiencing joy, it's experience a kind of deep remembrance (sati) of the being mode, its true and authentic self. It is losing its ego-centrism.

We talked about the connectedness between the self in the world as one so intimate, so flowing, so anagogic that the sense of participation and conformity is achieving a sense of identity, deep and profound being at one with the oneness. But it is so profound that it is almost always described as ineffable.

We then took a look at what might be going on in these states because we're trying to give a descriptively adequate and prescriptively adequate account. We took a look at the continuity hypothesis: that they're the same machinery that's at work in our everyday experience of the fluency of reading into the moments of insight into the insight cascades of flow, and then being exapted even more into mystical experience, and then some of those mystical experiences bring about a quantum change. They bring about a deep transformative experience. 

I proposed to you that what's going on in these higher states of consciousness is something like a state of flow but that the skill, the expertise that is flowing is not this particular skill, of rock climbing or being a martial artist or playing jazz, it's the domain-general skill of getting an optimal grip on the world. So what's happening is people are getting a flow state in their ability to optimally grip on the world. 

This connection to the machinery of insight helps to explain why disruptive strategies are used in order to try to bring about the higher states of consciousness, because disruptive strategies are so central to trying to create insight. They're both naturally disruptive strategies and you can acquire them through mindfulness psychotechnologies. 

We were examining what these disruptive strategies do: they massively increase variation in your processing and that reveals invariants--both good invariants (you get to see more of the real patterns that are remaining unchanged through all the variation, that's what science does across all their variations. We try to find the real patterns that are invariant and what science does is increase the variation, we run experiments. We do all kinds of manipulations and increase variations to try to find what remains invariant because we take that to point out to us what is more real. That's what you're doing!), but it's opening up the invariants of the world, and you're using the flow state's capacity for enhanced implicit processing / implicit learning of complex patterns / tracking of causal patterns to do that, it's also picking up on the bad invariants. 

It's helping to reveal all the ways in which you are systematically misframing. Like a child going through a developmental stage (and I would point you to the work of my former student, friend, colleague Jenson Kim for this idea of development as a systematic form of insight, something he and I are working on together). Like a child going through a developmental stage, realizing not just this error or that error but a systematicity in the way that they're misframing reality and finding a nexus, a point where the insight is not just an intervention in this problem but in a whole class and type of problems. That developmental change of seeing through illusion and into reality that is so central to wisdom is also being afforded by these higher states of consciousness.

Episode 9: Insight

Last time we were talking more about mindfulness and trying to get an account of how mindfulness can bring about an insight. Not just a single insight into a single problem, but a modal insight, a systemic insight that is fully transformative of the agent-arena relationship and brings about the alleviation of existential distress and the affordance of enhanced meaning. We took a look at that by getting into the machinery of attention and seeing that attention involves two kinds of attentional scaling: attention involves an ability to engage in a transparency-opacity shift and also breaking up gestalt into features / scaling down / the kind of thing we can enhance in meditation, but it also involves an ability to scale up / to move from features to gestalt / and to go from looking at something to looking more deeply into reality.

In mindfulness and meditation we're practicing the scaling down to break inappropriate framing and scaling up to train making better framing. If we can optimize by learning how to fluently flow between the two, bringing in an aspect of fluency and flow that we've already talked about, then we could optimize our capacity for much more comprehensive insight. If we could take it to the depths of our self, like we do in the pure consciousness event, and the depths of reality and the resonant at-one-ment, and we could integrate those, optimize between them, we could bring about Prajna, a kind of non-duality that would be potentially transformative of the whole agent-arena relationship, dissipate modal confusion, enhance meaning in life by bringing about one of the most powerful kinds of mystical experience, give people a sense of enhanced realness that will challenge, encourage, and empower them to transform all of their existence and bring about a tremendous increase in meaning in life.

We talked about some recent cognitive science, including some of my own theoretical and experimental work that seems to be supporting the claim that these higher states of consciousness can bring about these quantum changes, these radical kinds of transformative experience.

Incidentally, when he first introduces 'quantum change' he says "This is known as quantum change. Bad name, bad name. Good theory."

Episode 8: The Buddha and "Mindfulness"

So last time we continued looking through the myth of Siddhartha's awakening. We talked about him leaving the palace--the having mode--his attempt to rediscover / recover the being mode, and the difficulty he faced in pursuing self-denial as passionately as he pursued self-indulgence and why this ultimately failed because it's still working within the same operation of trying to have a self. Then we looked at Siddhartha's commitment to the middle path: an attempt to overcome that through the cultivation of mindfulness.

Then we began our exploration of mindfulness. We first looked at what it meant: sati, and remember it's this deep remembering / this recovering of the being mode that leads to a fundamental transformation and alleviates the existential anxiety and distress that Siddhartha was experiencing, and potentially is on offer for us. 

Then we started to take a look at the practice of mindfulness and its attempt to address at least an individual or personal experience of a meaning crisis, and we were doing that because we were trying to investigate more broadly the mindfulness revolution and how that is a response to the meaning crisis within the West. 

We began by noting that the scientific study of mindfulness is misleading in some ways because it begins with a feature list, and as we've noted multiple times feature lists leave out the edios--the structural functional organization--in order to do that we brought out four central characteristics in the feature list: being present, not judging, insightfulness, and reduced reactivity or increased equanimity. Then we noted that what we need to do is to make distinctions between the types of features: between those that are states that we can engage in, actions we can perform, and traits we can cultivate. Once we did we opened up the possibility of asking causal questions: for example, how can the practice of being present produce the trait of insightfulness? Then we could also ask constitutive questions: for example, what's the part-whole relationship between being present and not judging? 

That being said, we then also noted that we have to replace the language of training with the language of explaining. They operate according to different principles and for different goals. We began that by starting to ask "what does it mean to be present?" and then we talked about concentration and we talked about different senses of that and the kind of soft vigilance that's actually conducive of insight discussed by Allen Langer and others. This kind of involvement is very much about conforming to, or being deeply interested in / connected to the structural functional organization of something.

We noted that that took us into a discussion of paying attention and all the while remembering this idea that we got from Siddhartha Gautama: the story about tuning, getting the right tuning optimization. We started to talk about attention and I made the argument that attention is not very well served by the spotlight metaphor. While the metaphor does give us the idea of attention altering salience the metaphor misses a lot of what attention is doing. We began to investigate what's missing by making use of Christopher Mall's idea that attention is not a direct action you perform but it's something you do by modifying something else by optimizing something else. That's why you can successfully pay attention by doing many disparate and different kinds of things. You can pay attention by optimizing your seeing into looking, by optimizing your hearing into listening, by optimizing your seeing and listening into a coordinated tracking of what somebody is saying like you're doing right now. So what we needed was an understanding of attention that could capture the way it's an optimization strategy which lines up with this tuning idea and how such optimization might be linked to a response to existential modal confusion and the alleviation of the suffering found therein.

Episode 5: Plato and the Cave

So last time we discussed the important and foundational work of Plato. The grammar of Western Civilization is basically made up of the Bible and Plato. We will keep coming back to both of those repeatedly in certain ways. 

We talked about Plato's notion of wisdom and how it involved this process of aligning the psyche so as to reduce inner conflict and reduce self-deception (by bullshitting ourselves). That enabled us to achieve one of our meta-desires: the desire for inner peace. We could also align that reduction in self-deception with getting more in contact with what's real and that as we practice tracking real patterns in the world we could then reflectively internalize that back on ourselves.

There was an intimate connection between how we knew the world and knew ourselves. As we increased our ability to pick up on real patterns we could increase our self-knowledge, reduce our self-deception, increase our contact with reality, and that would flow in the process of anagoge, and that would bring about the satisfaction of our second meta-desire to be in contact with realness. So Plato has this idea of wisdom as this anagogic process and we talked about that in connection with his great parable: the parable of the cave.

Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar

So last time we discussed the Axial Revolution and in particular how it moved into ancient Israel. We talked about the advent of the psychotechnology of time as cosmic history: as a narrative in which there's an open future and your actions (the moral quality of your actions) can determine that future. You participate along with God in the creation of that future.

This brings with it the idea of moral progress: the increase in justice. This is how we move from the less real world to the more real world. For the ancient Israelites it's understood as a journey through time and space historically. We talked about the kind of God that the God of the Bible is: how he is in fact the god of this open future and particularly he intervenes at moments of Kairos; turning points where he tries to bring people back on course.

We talked about the sense of faith as the sense of being on course, being able to sense how history is flowing and unfolding, how you are participating in that story, how you are shaping it and being shaped by it in a tightly reciprocal manner and that sin is the deviation from that. What is needed is to wake us back up, to bring us back on course; we talked about how the prophets represented that and they represent increasingly that Axial vision of the moral redemption of history.

We then turned to look at how the Axial Revolution was coming into ancient Greece and in particular two figures. We're looking at two figures: Pythagoras and Socrates. Last time we talked about Pythagoras and how he represents an exaptation of that shamanic behavior of altering the state of consciousness, entering into something like a soul flight, but how for Pythagoras that had been allied with the psychotechnology that was being emphasized in Greece: rational argumentation, the discovery of rational patterns in the world. 

Pythagoras of course is famous for discovering that music can be expressed mathematically; he at least associated his school with things like the Pythagorean theorem, this idea that we can enhance our capacity to pick up on the real patterns in the world even if those are not readily apparent to us. By coming into a direct awareness of those patterns through our rational insight and faculties we can transform ourselves, and Pythagoras changes the shamanic soul flight into a release, a freedom from imprisonment in the body, and we fly free. So soul flight has been turned into a radical kind of self-transcendence in which we are liberating ourselves from the illusory world as we more and more conform to the rational patterns that dictate the structure of reality.

I'm curious if you can summarize the relevance to embedded agency. This many hours of listening seems like quite a commitment, even at 2x. Is it really worth it? (Sometimes I have a commute or other time when it's great to have something to listen to, but this isn't currently true.)