The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis

¶044 Yeah. And what I'd like to do as well, as I'm doing my presentation, I'd like to show some deep lines of convergence with Iain. Iain and I have spoken before. We've often realized that there's a lot of convergence, and one of the things I'm hoping to do is in this with you, is for us to unpack that and more, because we had more limited conversations in the past.

¶045 So I'm going to start — I will get back to the history in a minute — I want to start with the present. We're in the UK. In 2019, a national survey, a very comprehensive survey, eighty percent of people found that their lives are meaningless. Interesting. Forty-three percent think that's because of financial reasons. And that goes against a lot of the data that we have, that once your finances get you out of poverty, they do not contribute very much to meaning in life.

¶046 Thirty-four percent seem to be getting a little bit closer, at least in an intuitive way, when they attribute their lack of meaning to anxiety. And let's just be very careful about this. Anxiety isn't the same thing as fear. Fear, you have a definite object, something the left hemisphere would very much, “Oh. There's the definitive thing.” I could point my attention to it and focus on it hard.

¶047 Anxiety tends to be more atmospheric. It is generally associated with the right hemisphere. And so what you've got with anxiety is you've got a nebulous sense of disconnection, and this brings with it a sense of concern, arousal, stress. And of course, horror is exactly the aesthetic of when you feel that you're losing a grip on reality. So anxiety is on the same arc as horror. Most of our horror movies are not actually horror movies. They're just startle movies where somebody, something jumps out at you and scares you. But genuine horror movies, they give you a sense of what I'm talking about. No, anxiety is low-grade horror in that sense.

¶048 So people are drifting along. And then what we can ask is, well, does that have significant consequences? And we know from the extensive literature on meaning in life — not meaning of life, which I'll make a distinction in a few minutes — but meaning in life or related psychological literature, especially the work of Kelly Allen, the sense of belonging, if you don't have meaning in life, if you don't have a sense of belonging, you're in serious trouble.

¶049 You're in serious trouble psychologically, physiologically, socially, probably predictably your overall health, probably your socioeconomic status. It's predictive of lots of stuff going bad. Of course, it's ultimately predictive of anxiety and depression, which, by the way, are flip sides of the same overall disorientation, disconnection problem.

¶050 It's predictive, of course, of suicide. Right. Although Tatjana Schnell has found evidence that people don't have to go through clinical depression, contrary to what we think. They can just experience meaninglessness and go right to suicide without going through clinical depression. So just on its own, it's predictive too.

¶051 So eighty percent of the population has this state that we have pretty comprehensive evidence is very deleterious to their health. And then you have a lot of sort of cultural sense that this is happening. So the book I did with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic on zombies, why did zombies become so prevalent? And the idea is, zombies are a myth-grab that has arisen to sort of express — not necessarily articulate or explain, but express — the meaning crisis. Well, think about them, right? That they lead, by definition, meaningless lives. They've lost intelligibility, they can't speak, they move in collectivity, but they form no communities. They drift aimlessly. Unlike other monsters, they don't have any supernatural connection. They're just us decayed, right, and perpetually decayed. They're a perversion of the Christian myth of resurrection, because they do not come back to the fuller life. They come back to the lesser life. And then they got linked to another Christian myth, the apocalypse, which was supposed to be the renewal of the world, but instead it's the ongoing, endless decadence of the world. So the zombie mythology is a cultural expression of this.

¶052 And you can also see all kinds of symptoms. Of course, we have the mental health issues. Deaths of despair in the United States, in the UK are becoming serious, serious problems. Related phenomena: the UK has set up this Orwellian thing called the Ministry of Loneliness,¹ which is like — because the number of close friends we've been having has gone down. And Eberstadt has shown in her book How the West Really Lost God is, this also has what you might call philosophical, even spiritual consequences, because there's a direct correlation between how much people live atomically and alone, and how secular the society has become, and how — or how sort of shallow people's ontology is. I'm not sure about her causal picture, but the correlation is just undeniable.

¶053 So this is having huge effects. You get it in the virtual exodus. People want to live in the virtual world rather than the real world. They express this as an explicit thing. And I think we can get a bit of insight into what's going on, what's missing in the meaning crisis, if we — what are they finding there that they're not finding here?

¶054 But let me just finish a couple more symptoms. We've got the weird political paradox that everybody feels disillusioned and disenfranchised, but the political sphere has been now reappropriated and filled with religious fervor and symbolic religious behavior. And we've given over identity in the meaning of life to our political ideologies, even though we've lost faith in all of the institutions, this weird thing.

¶055 You have positive symptoms, though. You have the mindfulness revolution. People are seeking fundamental transformation in attention, awareness. You have the rise of ancient wisdom philosophies. There are more Stoics now alive than were ever alive in the Roman Empire, right? And of course you have the ongoing thing, basically from Schopenhauer on, of the increasing investigations into Asiatic philosophies, in which philosophy and spirituality, knowledge and wisdom were not separated.

¶056 And so that whole symptomology — let's go back to — to the video game. What are they getting in a video game that they're obviously lacking in the real world? Well, what they have is they have a narrative structure. There's a narrative structure there that tells them what the story is, and what part they play in it, and orients them towards a purpose. So purpose.

¶057 They have a nomological structure. What do I mean by that? They have a sense of — that there's a set of rules — laws and rules — that make sense of that world, so they understand how that world works. This is intelligibility or coherence. Second value: purpose, coherence. Third, what else is going on in there? Well, they have a normative structure. They know how to self-transcend. They can level up. There's a way in which self-transcendence is available to them. And fourth, they get into the flow state, they get into a state where they feel dynamically coupled and connected to their environment.

¶058 So what do we have? These are the four factors for meaning in life. These are the things that you have when you have meaning in life. And contrary to what our culture says, purpose is one of them. But purpose is not the synonym for all of them, nor is it the most important of the dimensions. You need to have purpose, but it's not the same as meaning in life. Nor is it, right, sufficient for meaning in life.

¶059 The next, coherence. The world can't be absurd to people, right?

¶060 Third, you need significance. What that means is you need something that gives you a normative staircase, something that gives you a way by which you can get in touch with the really real. We've got from the psychedelic renaissance and the work in mystical experience — and I'm involved in that — that people seek out for its own sake, this relationship with the really real, the more real. And once they get it, they are willing to change their whole lives so that they are in deeper contact with that really real. And Yaden has shown their lives actually by many objective measures get better. So that matters.

¶061 The third one, the flow state. The flow state is a very powerful — and Csikszentmihalyi has done a lot of work on that, we could perhaps talk about that — the flow state is a very powerful version of the fourth factor, which is mattering. People need to feel that they are connected to something that has a reality and a value beyond their own individual existence. So you define this, you ask somebody, What do you want to exist even if you don't, and how much of a difference do you make to it now?

¶062 You could grab all of these things together and they all fold into this connectedness in sensemaking. We're connected to the world, we’re ordered to the world. The world makes fundamental sense to us. We are fitted to the world. We belong in the world of belonging — sense of belonging, sense of meaning in life. My proposal is that that can ultimately be understood as reflecting sort of the core of human cognition.

¶063 I talk about the core four. I think we’ve split them up for analytic reasons, right? Which is attention, consciousness, working memory, and fluid general intelligence — but I think they’re all just four different dimensions of an underlying core thing, and there's good functional evidence, behavioral evidence and anatomical evidence, for that claim. I won’t review all of that, but I'll just take it that that could be agreed without much controversy.

¶064 What I think that those, that general ability, that general intelligence reflects, is it reflects two meta-problems that you have to solve whenever you're solving any problem you're trying to solve in the world. And I understand there's two kinds of problems. There's problems that are solved by having something, controlling it, and there are problems that are solved by becoming something, Fromm’s distinction, which maps on a lot closer to the left and right in many ways.

¶065 And we'll get back to that. But what I think these two major problems are, are — and think about your intuition. We tend to attribute intelligence to a creature the more we can see reliable evidence that it can anticipate its world, because, of course, an ounce of prevention, right. The more you can anticipate the world, the more powerful your causal intervention. If I can avoid the tiger, that's way less costly than fighting the tiger, just to put — right? And so the thing is, as you push out sort of the light cone of your anticipation of the world, what you get is you get an explosion of the amount of information, all the possible alternative pathways to get into your goal. This just explodes in possibility.

¶066 So even to take a very limited case, here's my initial state. I'm starting a game of chess. I'm trying to get to the end. All the number of alternative pathways outnumbers the number of atomic particles in the universe. And this is one of the core problems, going back to Newell and Simon that is at the heart of the AGI project. Right. And so this is what you can't do. You can't check all that — like, think about all the things I could pay attention to. It's overwhelming. Think about all the things I could remember. Think about all the different combinations of sequences, of sounds and movements and gestures. It's overwhelming. And yet what we're all doing is, we’re zeroing in on it right now.

¶067 And what that means is, it's not that you check everything. You can't. That would take the rest of life, so somehow — and this is really important — you ignore most of what's relevant — Sorry, you ignore most of what's irrelevant. You ignore it, and you zero in on what's relevant.

¶068 Now that, that's not cold calculation. And this is, this is a matter of care. We're different from AGI, still — for how long is something we could perhaps — we care about the information we’re processing; computers don't. We care about whether or not it's true; computers don't, right? So it's not just that relevance is not just a calculation. It's a matter of caring. It's a matter of commitment. Because whenever I'm doing this, I'm taking a chance. I have to commit to this because when I'm paying attention to Iain, I'm not paying attention to what's behind me.

¶069 There's a cost. There's always a cost. I’m always — So there's an existential risk that whenever I’m doing — so there's caring, committed connectedness. And notice relevance is a connecting relation. It's like biological fittedness, right? Relevance isn't in the object; it isn't in the subject. Relevance is that that would bind the subjective and the objective together. I call it “transjective,” right? And that — so the name for all of that I use is this religio — the sense of binding that carries with it a sense of profound meaning. And I put it to you that when people have access to profound meaning in all of these dimensions, they get a sense of the sacred, an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that is not just an intellectual affair, but this connected living affair.

¶070 But here's the problem: The very processes that make you intelligently adaptive make you perpetually prone to self-deception. This is my reinterpretation of the first knowable truth, right? Because the very process that gets me to be adaptive by focusing in and binding myself — and that I take, I mean this seriously, this is normative for me — I'm bound. This is what I should do. I should be paying attention to Iain. It means I'm ignoring so much. And very often what we ignore can turn out to be the relevant information that we actually need to solve whatever problems we're facing.

¶071 So we are perpetually prone to self-deception. And I want to talk just a little bit about, this is at multiple levels, but what that means is — and this is a trade-off relationship — whenever you try and solve one way in which you're being deceived, you open yourself up to an alternative way with which you can be, right? So I should pay attention to — no, no, no. And then I'll lose the — I'm always in a trade-off between, what should I foreground, what should I background? Right?

¶072 And so it's this very complex process. It's very complex; it's very dynamic; it's co-created by the world and me, and also me and other people: very complex, very dynamic, very adaptive, very prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, both individually and collectively. So cultures across the world have had to deal with this really tricky problem: How do we ameliorate this self-deception without undermining the adaptive connectedness?

¶073 Because we can’t just shut it off, and we have all these trade-offs. We can't just pursue simple panaceas that will — “Just do this!” So we have to get this complex — I call it an ecology of practices: practices that intervene in our cognition, our attention, our awareness in multiple places. You know, checks and balances, very — like, think about the eightfold path of Buddhism. It's this complex set of practices and they're represented by a spoked wheel because they all interconnect and they're all self-organizing.

¶074 And when you do that, you need to set that within a community that homes you, because you need people who have been practicing it. Because this is not a matter just a theory; this is a matter of transformation. And they need to be able to guide you along the way. And then that community has to be set in a worldview that legitimates it — a worldview that legitimates it.

¶075 So another way of understanding the meaning crisis, is that unlike most cultures, we don't know where to go to cultivate wisdom. We don't know where to go to ameliorate that self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, foolishness. We don't know where to go to enhance the connectedness, the religio, so it gets us into deep connection. And we used to have a worldview that gave us both of that: this is how you connect deeper and this is how you overcome your fallenness — I’ll use the metaphor — and that was the sacred, the sacred canopy. The religious frameworks were the places that gave us worldviews, traditions and ecologies of practices for addressing this.

¶076 And because of the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution — actually, I would even start it in medieval Nominalism —

¶077 Thank you, and a lot of things. And then this has just been put on methamphetamine, basically, since the advent of some of the hyper-technologies. We are in a position where we don't have a sacred canopy. We don't have a — I asked my students, Where do you go for information? They have their phones. Where do you go for science? They’re sort of hesitant, postmodern-concerned, “Oh yes, I go to science for knowledge,” right? That's originally what the word scientia actually just meant was knowledge. Then I ask them where they go for wisdom, and they don't have an answer. And they know that without wisdom, meaning in life is tremendously at risk.

¶092 Well, there might have been something, maybe, because let me try. Maybe this is wrong. One of the things I was trying to emphasize, and one of the things that a recovery of Neoplatonism — especially given Filler's work on it — can give us is a re-emphasis on the polarity rather than the poles. And I was talking about this. I try to use the Greek word tonos rather than tension —

¶093 — because the English word “tension” is almost purely negative now for us.

¶094 Tonos like Heraclitus, the tautness of the bow.

¶098 I was just trying to, yeah, I was trying to indicate that the phenomenology tends to be much more atmospheric, in both of those, depression and anxiety. Rather than narrow-focused, it's wide-focused and ambiguous rather than, yeah.

¶104 So I don't want to exclude Daniel from the conversation, but I feel called to respond. But I want to make a place for you.

¶106 So yeah, I mean, that distinction that you made — and this is just to provide convergence — like, it's well established in the lit. Amabile talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and then the intrinsic motivation is much more predictive of creativity and insight than extrinsic. But you actually need a bit — optimal creativity is to have a mixture of the two, because you need the extrinsic when you're painting the Sistine Chapel, you're painting the blue of the sky and you just got to keep going, right? So you need — and it also gives you corrective feedback, because if you’re just intrinsic, you don't have external judges and things like that. But I — yes, I think that's important.

¶107 And I think that brings out an important difference. I think the things that we think are intrinsically motivating are precisely the ones that get us into that state of connectedness: religio — optimal intrinsic motivation being realized as the flow state. You do the flow state to be in the flow state; you don't do it for any other reason, right? And in that sense of it, one met that sense of super salience. That's the beginning of the taste of the sacred as well. And so I think the sacred is, how does reality disclose itself to us where we're in that mode of, not work, but serious play that we're doing for its own sake, because all we're doing — like, playing music or going to a play — we're playing with relevance-realization, in this serious sense. We're playing with it, and we're playing with salience and we're saying, “If I play with this, what kind of world is available to me?”

¶108 And I agree. I think, especially given the work of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard in Aspiration, that we need to bring back the aspirational dimension, that we are bound, right? And we have to bind ourselves to the future in the right way. And what's come out of this — and this, it allows me to make another point, and I know we have different language about this, but I think we converge, and it's interesting. Part of what's come out of — the way to do this is to quickly describe an experiment.

¶109 Okay, so you go in to a bunch of academics, and you say — you give them all the evidence, all the arguments that they should start saving for retirement right now. You take any challenges, any questions. You come back in six months, none of them are saving. And then that’s to do with what's called hyperbolic discounting and the way our evolutionary machinery makes distant, things in the distance much less salient to us than current. That's why you procrastinate. It's why you eat the chocolate cake when you're trying to lose weight, right? And it's very adaptive, because if you don't get that, you're just overwhelmed by possibilities, right?

¶110 But now you come back to them, and you say, “Okay, what I want you to do is I want you to practice this every day.” Notice it’s a practice, not just a belief. “I want you to practice every day. I want you to practice, like, imagining.” And we should talk about two kinds of imagination at some point. “But I want to imagine your future self as a beloved family member that you've always cared for. And you need to continue caring for them and you have a lot of compassion, a love for them. And I want you to do that every day.” And you come back in six months and you find two things: now they're saving, and the ones that do the practice more regularly and more vividly and imagine it save more.

¶111 You see what this is showing: that the imaginal augmentation of the aspiration to do something actually is a constitutive part of being rational. Descartes reduced logos, sensemaking, rationality, to computation, and we lost the fact — No, no, no. If I’m actually — and this is Agnes Callard's argument. If I'm trying to become more rational, that's an aspirational project. That's me trying to become somebody other than whom I am. I have to bind myself to my future self. This is religio again, I have to get religio with my future, and that's not something that I can do just inferentially. I have to do this using imagination. I have to use this with connect — So I agree with you profoundly that even the attempts to be more rational require an aspir… so aspiration, rationality have to be rebound together.

¶112 One thing I'd want to push back on, but just because I know you've got — I'm hesitant around the word “value,” because the notion of value comes up basically in the Enlightenment and it's part of the is–ought distinction made and things like that. Okay. Do you want to challenge that? Because you don't have — you don't have this notion sort of predating the idea that value is — right?

¶115 I don't call those values.

¶117 No, no, no. What I mean is …

¶119 Well, I do, and I don't. And this is — but I want to do what you did with one of my terms. I think most people don't hear … see … Plato doesn't think we value them. Plato thinks we love the transcendentals, right? And value is a statement of — right? — of choice and preference. This is how Locke introduces it and makes — and you can actually see him change from “We are called by the world” to “We choose.”

¶120 And he introduces the notion there. And why I want to say that is because I want to make the argument again — and this is part of the overall — that love is not a purely subjective matter either. Love is not a feeling. Love is not an emotion, right? When I love somebody, that can make me happy, it can make me, say — I miss my partner right now because I love her so deeply. It can make me angry, frustrated, joy. Love isn't an emotion. It's a way of binding myself to another person. And I think when most people hear the word “value,” because of its Enlightenment history, they hear choice and preference and what they want. And I don't think, if we think we can choose the true and the good and the beautiful …

¶122 Yes. Yes. We don't understand that — we don't choose them. We are called by them, and we are called by them to us to aspire. Now, I understand you're not using the word that way, but I think most people, when they hear “value” are using it, they'll …

¶124 But I would say that, what I want to bring in that people don't usually hear when they hear “value” is, like, Murdoch's point, like in The Sovereignty of Good, right? Love is the painful recognition that something other than yourself is real. There's a connectedness to realness that's important if you're actually loving something. You want it — yes.

¶126 Yeah. Yes, yeah. But I think this was valuable because I think we took a lot of sort of the common language of modernity and even of postmodernity with subjectivity, objectivity, all this stuff, and we've sort of …

¶127 … put pressure on it and shown that with the presupposition that this is just the natural way thought unfolds, it needs to be challenged.

¶168 So much. Yeah. So the — I mean, I think the — I agree with — first of all, what you did was brilliant and I really appreciate it. I’m liking it and am in very significant agreement with it. John Keats made a distinction between goals and ideals and the word “purpose” equivocates between them. A goal is an end state that everything else is in the service to, and it's the utilitarian, where an ideal is not. An ideal is something that is part of the grammar by which you interpret and make sense of yourself in your life.

¶169 And I agree. And we even did that with the sacred. We took sort of transcendent–immanent, and then we made this world — this is the Nietzschean critique — it only had a utilitarian value for that world. And then when we stopped believing in the upper world, this world seems to have no value. That whole framework, I think, has to be rejected, which is not a rejection of the sacred. I just want to make that very, very clear.

¶170 And so why I'm sort of on that is because I think that this is part of the answer. You can break game theoretic circumstances in which, right, you get people to remember certain things. So you can get some very core ones. Like, you go in a situation: “Will you take twenty dollars?” “Well, sure, sure.” A situation: “Will you take twenty dollars, but here's two people and I've got to give that person forty.” So there’s sixty and they get forty, and you get twenty. “Will you take it?” And if you don't take it, nobody gets it. “No, I won't take it!” So people — there's a symbolic thing that they're oriented towards, and it's something like they want to belong to a world that is a just world, and that is more important to them than their own individual, immediate gain.

¶171 That's the first thing.

¶172 So there's a symbolic aspect to it. Robert Nozick made a good point about this, that we didn't put that into a lot of — for good reasons — we didn't put it into a lot of the game theoretic modeling, because it messes up all that modeling in a lot of ways. And then that connects to — we don't actually super-value — this is the sociopath, right — we will significantly undermine subjective well-being if we have a reasonable belief that we will get enhanced meaning in life.

¶173 This is part of our evolutionary heritage as mammals. We're also primates. We're also socio-cultural. And the prototypical instance we do this is, have a kid. When you have a kid, all of the measures of subjective well-being go down. Your health goes down, your sleeping goes down, your finances go down, your social connections go down, the amount of sleep you're getting is going down. You're sick all the time. Your partner doesn't like you anymore, and you're in a constant stress situation. And you ask people, “Well, why do — ” like, you couldn't pay most people. “Well, why are you doing this?” “Because it's making my life more meaningful.” Because they're connected to something, again, that has a reality beyond themselves, and — right? I’ll use your term: a value beyond themselves.

¶176 And this is another thing to remember: that the arrow of relevance for us does not point to just, how are things relevant to me?

¶177 Yes, we do have to feel connected to ourselves, because if we don't, we’re dissociated, our agency is undermined. But as Iain said, we have to feel fundamentally — not, how are you relevant to me, but, how am I relevant to you? How am I relevant to us, and how are we relevant to the world? And yes, how are we and the world relevant to something that grounds that world, that Plato would call the good, right?

¶178 And so, I think that if we can get people to remember, this is what I would want to say. I don't I don't even like the word “remember.” I want people to be able to fall in love with all of these dimensions of being again, because — and this was Spinoza's big insight, right? The way you overcome a powerful motivation is with another powerful motivation. If we can get people to fall in love again with being — within, between, and beyond — we can break the game-theoretic.

¶179 This is what Christianity did in the Roman Empire. Christianity went out and it didn't — unlike Stoicism, it tried. I'm not saying you shouldn't try and get the government, but — and it had some success too. But Christianity went and said, “There's a new way for you to love yourself. You are not the nonperson the Roman Empire says you are. Here is a new way. Agape is a way in which you can love yourself. And it's not a hedonistic, egocentric power. Here's how we can love each other, and here's how we can love God.”

¶180 And it captured the world, and it captured a world that was one of the epitomes of a world driven by power, competition, the lust for glory.

¶181 So we have historical examples of, if you give people, if you can get them out of meaning-starvation, so they're not in a scarcity mental — when you’re in a scarcity mentality, you drop into left-hemispheric — I think Iain’s right about this — short term, utilitarian, right? “What do I need?” Right, because this is emergency mode. But if you can get people out of a scarcity mentality and get them to fall in love with being again, connectedness to themselves and other, then you can call — this is something that gets them to remember that they actually do value — trying to use your language, right — connectedness more than success.

¶186 Yes, but I did want — when I was using scarcity there, I was talking about meaning-scarcity.

¶187 Not economic.

¶189 And one of the things that happens, for example, as people go up they — this is an experiment — as people go up a corporate structure — and corporate structures tend to favor people who have sociopathic tendencies — what you also see is a measurable decrease in the ability of them to take the perspective of other individuals. The ability to take the perspective of other individuals is strongly predictive of how many deep connections you can form in your life.

¶190 So they are actually suffering a very profound kind of scarcity as they go up. They’re a bit — if you'll allow me to coin a phrase — their suffering’s a connectedness-scarcity in a profound way. And what I've been fascinated with is the number — and I’m sure this has happened to both of you — the number of people who are in these positions, in positions of power, who have reached out to me and said, “I feel disconnected.”

¶191 And there's that element of almost of horror and absurdity. “I feel disconnected, and I want to be … and I don’t want … ” And the people I’ve talked to in Silicon Valley: “I don't want my kids to go through this. I don't want my kids to go through.” And this is what I mean.

¶192 There is alternative motivations too. And I think they have also an evolutionary provenance to the game theoretic motivations. And I don't think the game-theoretic motivations are metaphysically necessary. I think there are other ones that have an equal power to motivate. And because we have historical evidence, we have current evidence that we can tap into those. But I think there's two poles to this: for us to fall in love with being again, that's the agent pole. But the world as an arena in which we can act, but it has to be sacred to us. Sacred is how the world is to us when we are falling in love with it.

¶203 So I want to pick up on what you said there.

¶204 Because I think that distinction is very important that you made, and here there's an ambiguity in taking a perspective. You can take a perspective in that calculative way.

¶205 That's different from taking up a perspective in which you care, and you try to see the world from that perspective.

¶215 Right. Okay. So first of all, agreed. But I want to say, well, the notion of restraint. Christianity was successful in pretty much keeping it as part of the cultural cognitive grammar that people other than the male citizens were actually persons. It was successful at turning infanticide [from] an accepted practice, into something we find horrific.

¶216 So, yes, I'm not saying that, you know, the power structures came in, but there were, there was also enough — I mean, we didn't — we are running on the fumes of the Christian sacred canopy. And it's been what has been still keeping some restraints on this otherwise Molochian machine that's running. And I want to — what I'm trying to say is — I want to give us a sense of hope about this — that it's not, the sacred emerges, and then it gets consumed. The sacred emerges, there is the pull to push back, there's the reframing, there's the power consumption.

¶217 But some of the underlying cultural cognitive grammar has been fundamentally changed. We haven't gone back to the Bronze Age. We're still post-Axial. We haven't gone back to the pre-Christian age. We're — right? That's not what happened. And so, I'm saying — I'm not denying that, right? I'm not denying that there's the threat. But what I'm saying is, that if we could be more clear about what gets preserved across the — I don't know what to call it — the re-entrenchment of the power dynamics, and could we more better this time focus our attentions there, focus our cultural and even our political commitments. We could perhaps do it better this time.

¶238 There's three things I want to respond to. One is, I'm hearing — we've been talking a lot about the master versus the emissary, but it seems to me that we're in a weird problematic here, and I know this isn't an accurate representation of your thought, but I want to pose it. But I wanted to also state all three things, because they belong together.

¶239 One is, yeah, but that also requires that the left hemisphere has some reverence for the right hemisphere, but reverence is properly a property of the right hemisphere. And so you've got this weird catch-22 thing going on. And then I think part of how we have done this — and this is why bringing up the educator is important — is we've done this by saying, “Oh, but there's another variable in here,” which is there's not only individual cognition; there's the collective intelligence of distributed cognition.

¶240 There's something that comes out in a “we” like what's here, right, that is doesn't belong to you or to you or to me, right? But it takes on a life of its own. And of course, this is the whole tradition of the ecclesia and the tradition of the geist to the tradition of the logos and, right?

¶241 And the Socratic dialogue, we follow the logos wherever it goes. And what that does is that — this is Plato's pivot problem, right? Because with the example you're talking about is exactly the problem that Plato was wrestling with with Socrates and Alcibiades.

¶242 Here you have the most attractive — not physically — but the most attractive, right, representation of wisdom. And here you have this, you know, glorious figure who's attracted to Socrates, but is ultimately properly, you know, a psychopath. Alcibiades is willing to screw anybody over for his own personal — and betray everybody. And Plato really is vexed about how, why doesn't he turn? What makes somebody pivot towards that? And then Plato wrestles with this and he has sort of two answers.

¶243 One is, there's a sort of seduction — and I hate to use that term in our charged atmosphere — but there's a seduction, which is, you basically get sort of the left hemisphere really involved with the kind of stuff it likes to do: running arguments and discussions. But as it's doing that, you use that as a way of getting it to pay attention to the non-propositional, right, in very, very powerful ways. And this is why Plato writes dialogues, because the drama and the character development are as important as the argument. We did a great disservice when we just took the arguments and stuck them over, just, “Aw, you know, alright.” But if you do that, that's part of the answer. And then in that, what part of the seduction is — and it's not — like, if you try to make somebody follow the sacred, it's not sacred, right? But the seduction is like, again, how we fall in love, right, is if you put people into these circumstances where they can catch the fire of the logos, then they will often feel called to reorient themselves. They will do the Plato's pivot. It’s not an algorithm, because if it was an algorithm, it wouldn't be the thing we need.

¶244 We can't make it an algorithm. If we were looking for something algorithmic, we're fundamentally misapprehending the ontology that has to be at its basis. But I've seen this when we do these dialogical practices. People say — and this is regardless of where they come from, religious or secular — they say, “This is a kind of intimacy I've always been looking for, but I didn't realize.” It sounds like Platonic anamnesis, right? And then if they go longer, right, they start to move beyond the intimacy between. They say, “Oh, there's the ‘we’ space, or the geist, or the logos,” and they start to feel intimate with it. And then they're called to that. And then some people are called beyond that. They're called to: “Through all of that, I get a sense of intimacy with being itself” and they get the possibility of falling in love again.

¶245 But I can't argue them into that. I can put them into a place where there's argumentation going on, where there's conceptual reflection going on, but distinct — we have to structure it with a lot of finesse, so it takes on a life of its own and can draw us in so we can get people to do the Platonic pivot. That's how I would address what you're saying.

¶249 Okay. But I want to pick up on the seduction. I agree with what you're saying, but what I want to say is, can we get — I'm trying to use your language because I want to play with it still. Can we get the left hemisphere involved with speech and logic? And it likes to play this “This is what happened.” But it gets drawn into something that is beyond itself.

¶255 Okay. And I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I want to say something that overlaps with Daniel, what he said, because one of the things that the Enlightenment, why it takes off, I would argue, is it gets a way of really clarifying the difference between authority and power. And this is one of the — you know, so you've got Kant, right, and then I want to correct it with Hegel, but Kant is basically saying, Authority is when I recognize you as being able to say something that I will fundamentally be persuaded of as true. So I recognize that you are — you know, this is the Kantian model, his language is dangerous, but just let me to use it for now — I recognize you as a rational being, and therefore I should acknowledge that what you say, I should take it seriously and allow it to possibly persuade me. And then when I do something because you have persuaded me, I do it because I have recognized you, and you have recognized me.

¶256 And then Hegel said, Oh, but this reciprocal recognition, which is what you get in the student and the teacher that you don't get in the — because the master–slave and, this is Hegel, you don't have reciprocal recognition in that, right? But in this …

¶258 Exactly, exactly.

¶259 And this is — exactly. So one of the things why the Enlightenment takes off is because it brought this tremendous liberating clarification of “Wait, wait, wait. We want all the governance, even my self-governance, to be based on authority, which is based on a reciprocal recognition.” And Hegel says, not only moment to moment, but all of the people before you and all the people that are going to come after you, the biggest possible distributed cognition machine you have. You want to be, like, listening to them and you want to be trying to get the future to listen to you, and you get this tremendous model of authority. And I think that was tremendously liberating.

¶260 Now, and then what I see happening is that some of the things that came along with that is how the right hemisphere started to cede power or not realize that power’s getting ceded. Because once you give, right, this priority to this, right, then you start to give — it's very easy to get into the idea: Oh, but all that the reasoning is, all that the rationality is, it's not a way of being, it's just a way of calculating. Hobbes proposes this, right?

¶261 So, the Enlightenment gives us something that is tremendously of value. And I don't think you want to go back and give that back again. We don't go back to master–slave.

¶262 Right? And so we have to get to that point where: no, no, no. Reason isn't about calculation, it's about being with each other in a way that we are reciprocally responsible to each other, so we are governed by authority rather than by power. That's how I'm trying to answer you: that that is possible for us.

¶263 It was two things in the Enlightenment that got inappropriately bound together. I think the very legitimate understanding of the difference between authority and power, and then the illegitimate reduction of rationality, not as a way of being with each other, but as a way of calculating each other's behavior.

¶266 Right. So my language for that — and I don't think it's in any way different — I talk about the ancient notion of logos. And with Descartes you get it reduced to logic, and then we reduce reason to just logical calculation of propositions, and we lose all the other. We lose the perspectival and the participatory notions.

¶269 Sure, but that’s the Socratic project. That's what Socrates does. Almost all of the dialogues end in aporia for that reason.

¶271 Exactly, or koans in Zen.

¶274 So again, evolutionary provenance for this, right? I think one way I would say of Iain's historiography, right, is like the — what should be properly opponent processing — and I'll explain what I mean by that — has become adversarial processing. And this is also the problem at the level of our distributed cognition.

¶275 If you look throughout our biology, you have opponent-processing going on. Opponent-processing is when you have two systems that have complementary biases, and then you lock them together so that each is the best corrector of the other. So, noncontroversial example is the autonomic nervous system. You have the sympathetic system biased in one way. It views everything as a threat or an opportunity. The parasympathetic is, everything is — and they're like this. And so your level of arousal is constantly evolving, and there's doesn't have to be any king or emperor over this because it is a self-correcting system.

¶276 Your attentional system, the task focus, the default: you’re constantly moving between focusing your attention and varying it: opponent processing, opponent processing between foregrounding and backgrounding.

¶277 And I can go on and on. Why does nature keep coming to this? Because it is how you solve the No Free Lunch Theorem. Every heuristic has a complementary bias. This is a mathematical theorem and a proof. But — and this is one of the things I put in my original 2012 paper — but if you put two complementary heuristics together, they can toggle between each other, and you don't fall prey to the No Free Lunch. You can escape the trap that you have to constantly fall into the bias from your heuristic.

¶278 Nature figured this out, and I think I would put it to you, if we understand it the way I've explained it to you, that the proper relationship between the hemispheres could be opponent-processing rather than adversarial processing, if each hemisphere could come to see the other hemisphere as a valuable source of self-correction. Because, as you say, they solve different sets of problems: well-defined problems, left hemisphere; very ill-defined, gestalt-ish problems in the right hemisphere.

¶279 But this is also something not at the individual level. Democracy has to — democracy requires this commitment, which is not game-theoretic, but it has evolutionary provenance. You are the best possible entity for me overcoming my self-deceptive bias, because you have alternative biases, and I am the best for you. And if we both commit to the Geist, the logos between us, we can get the best self-correcting system, which is what democracy’s supposed to be. But not just for individual cognition, it's supposed to be for distributed cognition. But again, I’m trying to offer you for — the theme you have and I keep wanting to answer is, there's evolutionary provenance for the alternatives that are being discussed here that can be tapped into.

¶283 I think we get a big bump in the Upper Paleolithic transition. And that's my response to you, which is, we get a big bump in the Upper Paleolithic transition, in which we seem to get the advent of the appreciation of the sacred that goes along. It is sown into some of our biggest cognitive advancements.

¶284 So you have the technology, like you said, is like this, right? And then we get this bump, and we get projectile weapons, we get calendars, but we also get music. We also get representational art. We've seen — if …

¶294 Well, here's my challenge, back to you. Because you've made this argument before, and I find it compelling, but I also find it frustrating because the argument is set up that it basically says, we have no examples from the past we can rely on, and then asks us to imagine the future, where, how can we possibly imagine a future without relying on the past examples? It's a request to do — and I know you're not trying to do that. Do you see what I'm saying?

¶298 So to my ear, this just sounds like an exaptive proposal. Can we take stuff that's been working one way and repurpose it in some — like the way the tongue has been repurposed for speech. Am I understanding you correctly? Because sometimes I've heard …

¶300 Right. Okay. So it is …

¶304 Yeah. Right. Okay, excellent.

¶305 Now that's a good reframing because the other question is, how much hope can we place in the sapiential, the wise-oriented exaptations compared to, let's call them the power-dynamic exaptations, the technological power-dynamic exaptations? And it's difficult to know where we — I’m not trying to be difficult. I'm just trying to say, for me it's like, where would we stand to ask that question? What would be the place in which you see us being able to — where are we standing such that we can look at these two and say, I can make a sort of — I don't want to want to say objective, but a relatively neutral evaluation of these two and say, here's how we can place hope here. Because you're not just asking people to place hope. I hear you saying, can you give me good reason to place hope? Is that fair?

¶309 So then this is great. This is helpful. I think Iain and I have been trying to point out what some of those underlying generative dynamics are …

¶310 … and then propose — and, Iain, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, so if I say something inappropriate, please intervene — but I would propose, you know, these ideas of wisdom, correct intracerebral, intrapsychic relation, correct distributed cognition, replacing adversarial with opponent, bringing back love of virtue, love of the transcendentals, pointing out that those aren't just airy fairy, they have an evolutionary provenance, so we can depend on deep motivations to empower them. But I sense that you’re still sensing an inadequacy in this.

¶313 Well, I’ve offered an answer to that I thought.

¶314 But my proposal is, we need to basically co-opt and exapt the machinery of religion, because religions have been able to do — they've shown that they are proper distributed cognition, collective intelligence machines that can fundamentally reorient at a civilizational level. They have a — they can do that, for good or for ill, right?

¶315 And that what we need is something like that. And I'm not proposing that I'm going to start a religion, because that's a ridiculous proposal. But that — so I'm saying, we have done this in the past, and of course, nobody makes a religion. There's an algorithm. There's a way in which — and I'm sort of Heideggerian about this — the sacred has to somehow break through the way the complicated has failed in the face of the complexity of reality and speaks in a new way. And something is called to that. And then we have something like — but it can't be like the Axial religions. It has to be as different to the Axial religions as the Axial religions were to the Bronze Age religions. This is the proposal I’m making.

¶319 So I really want to be really clear that I am not proposing the founding of a religion or anything ridiculous like this, because relevance is not subjective. It has to be co-created by reality, and thus religio has to be co-created by reality. There's a sense in which reality has to disclose something to us. So I just want to reiterate that contextualization.

¶320 Now, within that, what I have been trying to do are two related projects. One is to try and look for what can be exapted from the past — and I want to use that language very carefully — and see some of the central things that come out of that. One is — sorry, these are both very long arguments, so I’ll just be very, but I’ll be very compressed. One is, you take a look at what becomes pretty much the spiritual backbone of the West — and Arthur Versluis argued this very well, which is something like Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism has this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Judaism, with Christianity, with Islam, with science.

¶321 It does this at the beginning of the scientific — so it has this tremendous thing. And I think Filler in his wonderful book in his series of essays has made a very clear case, a very good case, that what Neoplatonism is trying to get us to do is give up a substance-based ontology, and I mean substance not just in the Cartesian sense, but the Aristotelian sense, like, that we think of the world — the most real things are physio — you know, spatial, temporal, physical things to which properties bind, and that relations emerge out of these things; and that what Neoplatonism is and is trying to say is, No, reality is ultimately about intelligibility.

¶322 Or we can use something analogous from our modern thinking — we have to play with it though — information — and this is inherently relational: intelligibility, information, right? — are inherently relational, and so reality is fundamentally primarily relational, but it takes a lot of transformation in individuals for it to get them into seeing the Ground of Being as that the relations have ontological — don't think about this temporally, because that's a mistake — but they have ontological priority over the relata: the things that are bound in to the relations.

¶323 And that way you can ground intelligibility and information as fundamental — well, I don't — see, any word I use is going to be inappropriate, but fundamental features of reality; even that word is inappropriate — then what you see — and it's this sort of grand unifying field theory of Western spirituality — then you see Zen gathering together elements of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Shintoism, and also coming to, you know, a very convergent kind of: no, no underneath it, right, is it, right? It's actually the interconnectedness and the interconnectedness and time — relationality is the deepest ground.

¶324 And you have a philosopher in the West, like Heidegger, trying to open us back up to that. And then you have the Kyoto School in Japan trying to bridge between this, and then what that brings up is the possibility of what I call the philosophical Silk Road. The Silk Road belonged to no one, and it allowed people to commerce, not only a commerce of things, but a commerce of ideas. But they needed a lingua franca, and it was sort of Neoplatonism from the West and Zen from the East. And there also seems to be interactions with Vedanta and other things.

¶325 And what it gives you is it gives you — nobody owns this, just like nobody owns English — but it gives people a grammar, a deep grammar by which they can enter into these large-scale re-creations of fundamental understanding of human Being in the world. And so I think that's a real possibility for us.

¶326 By the way, there's a long history of trying to bridge between — there's, like, forty years of history in the West of what's called Zen Christianity, where people would not be considered — this is something that people are — now, I'm not saying that the religion of the future is Zen Neoplatonism. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is these two could be brought into — because they have important differences — they could be brought into a profound opponent-processing that could be that from which the exaptation can occur.

¶327 That's that side of the project. The other side of the project is, can we build ecologies of practices, can we build networks of communities like what happens in the early Christian church? And can we get them integrated with our best understanding of meaning-making, of religio? Can we build these communities? Can we build these ecologies of practices? Can we network them together? And I'm invested and involved in creating that, and trying to get, can we get this and this going together? And the hope is, out of that can emerge the possible exaptation, and it has to be as different from the Axial religions as the Axial religions were from the Bronze Age religions. That's the proposal. It's a project even.

¶328 Now, notice what I'm not saying. I'm not saying I'm going to make this. What I’m going to say is, can I get the very best of what drew everything together, draw it together, put it into a living community, living ecologies of practices so that there's a possibility that the sacred could speak to us again? That's what I'm proposing.

¶348 Should I reply? Or do you want to reply?

¶349 First of all, I share that vision in a lot of ways. As I mentioned, Kabbalah comes out of the intersection of Neoplatonism with Judaic thought, but what I would like to try and afford and not make — and there's a big difference. You don't make wisdom; you cultivate it. You don't do nothing; you cultivate the conditions and it has to take root and it has to flower, right?

¶350 I would like to afford something that could work at the global level that needs to be addressed here, given the novelty of the global level of the problems that Daniel has — so I'm trying to find something that is properly pluralistic, so running through Whitehead and running through Kabbalah and running through Sufism is this Neoplatonic framework and then running through many things in, for lack of a better word, I don't like the word, but the East, right, is a Zen sensibility. And then there's ways in which really helpfully they converge, but they differ. So proper opponent processing between them is possible. And then the idea is this could take on a life of its own such that something could, well, exapt out of it, emerge out of it. That's what I'm proposing. And so I think that's needed, because we need something where, like the Silk Road, everybody can participate in it, but the Christian can go on the Silk Road and then return with their Christianity enriched. The Buddhist can go on the Silk Road and return, and their Buddhism is enriched. But there's also something that's alive, like, at a global level that is also affording something new to be born. That's the proposal I'm making.

¶355 Well, there's two things about that. One is, yes, there's empirical evidence supporting this, that the thing that is singularly most predictive of people aspiring and carrying out an aspirational project — properly aspirational, not utilitarian, but “I should be better than I am,” is the degree to which they have internalized the sage, internalized the role model. That's the thing.

¶356 And that's the perspectival.

¶357 And then the second thing is, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh said, the next Buddha is the Sangha. I think there's a way in which the role model doesn't have to necessarily be an individual; it can be a community in a powerful and new way that is also something

¶367 Difference. Difference has to be as real as sameness, and that's the fundamental challenge to reductionism. Reductionism says, only what things have in share as the same counts as real.

¶388 Well, I’d like to reply to that and reply to both of you. And again, the argument I was making at the Consilience Conference is that intelligibility is actually the complete togetherness of the integration and the differentiation. If you have …

¶389 Yeah. Like, there has to be both for there to be intelligibility.

¶390 Right. And the Neoplatonistists were very much on about that, the One is ‘that’. It is not the one of the numerical sequence, they're only using that word because — so they go on and on about this is not the numerical one, this is not — we're talking about the Oneness of integration and differentiation which are very hard — there is no logical oneness between them. There's the deeper Oneness of intelligibility upon which logic rests. Logic presupposes that deeper thing, and therefore, we're called to it.

¶391 And then what they get to — see, we're Cartesian and we think the appearance–reality distinction is just the inner–outer, the subjective–objective. The ancient world had a different way of understanding the appearance–reality distinction. It was the one–many, which is the problem we're talking about. And what it did is it said, this deep reflection in Neoplatonism on intelligibility and the one and the many — the emergence up, the emanation down, they’re completely inter-penetrating, right? What it came to in, like, the coincidence of the opposites is this idea, right, that scientia intuitiva, right, that you have to be able to see the whole in every part and the part as properly participating in all of the whole.

¶392 You get the same thing in the Zen — not the same thing, sorry, wrong word, that's a logic word — you get something convergent from the Zen tradition in Indra's net, how everything is the center of everything else, and that it's a different way of framing things. And I would also say the transcendent and immanent have to be completely inter-penetrating and you see late Neoplatonists like Nicolas of Cusa and like Eriugena proposing this.

¶393 I’m worried about our category of animism, because for me it sounds like us trying to capture this transjectivity and this transjectivity and then stick it into substantial things, which I think is — I'm worried about that.

¶394 For example, I don't think life is a property of an organism. I think it's a property of an organism in relationship to its environment in a profound way. And so, again, I think we're agreeing, and I'm just trying to say that I think that if we can teach people sets of practices that get them to realize this as a deep ontological truth, then they will be called to new ways — and we can't say what they're going to be …

¶395 … but they can be called to new ways of bringing the small and the large — I’m not happy with even though those words, the immanent and the transcendent — they'll be called to new ways beyond our current grammar for how to bring them into relation. That would be for me evidence that the new religion is emerging.

¶398 I expect it to be so.

¶403 The inner and the outer, yes.

¶406 You almost sung that, and it was beautiful. That's it. Yes. Sorry, I got enthusiastic.

¶412 He uses it positively.

¶417 It's like “re-” in the respect, looking at it properly, right? That's how I was getting it. And you're nodding, so I think that's landing. So …

¶422 Yeah, but that's that's how proper pluralism differs from relativism. Think about — let's use a biological analogy. There are universal principles of evolution, but evolution doesn't say that all the creatures are going to be the same. It in fact tells you that all the creatures are going to be very different and contextually sensitive, not only spatially, but temporally, right? So there can be universal principles that predict why you must be contextually sensitive.

¶423 And I think that's the kind of thing I'm trying to point us towards. And then what you can do with — I mean, I think Iain has said this off camera and me too — I get a lot of people that come to me and say, “You've given me a language so that I can go back and rehome myself in the religion I was brought up in.” And then you can think about that homing process as a much deeper kind of education than what we now have. It's closer to what Zak is talking about when he's talking about education as ensoulment, et cetera.

¶424 So let's talk about that kind of education, and then we could properly empower people. Let’s do a concrete example. Okay, let's say the proposal I've been making — not just me, people like Filler, a whole bunch of people, Carse, all these people are wrapping into this in part — but Filler makes this argument in one of his recent books, that to really try to get — really, really try to get that the Trinity within Christianity is saying that relationality is primordial. Really get it. Don't think of this as three guys stuck together; think about them completely interpenetrating, interconnected, relationality, intelligibility, the “logos,” the reality, the indwelling in people, the spirit.

¶425 See, all of that is deeply profoundly relational. Go back and start to practice your practices that way, live that way, and then people are going to find different things relevant and salient in the world and their relationship to the world. And it could open up the, like, you could switch people from the having mode to the being mode. It could make a difference in, right, in their relationship to their spouses, but also in relationship to economic systems. And you understand.

¶427 See, so this is where I think it’s different from Zak. I think we have to create enough ecologies of practices within the community before a reformation of education becomes possible, because unless the lived normativity of the culture changes, attempts to change the education will just be co-opted by the current machinery. I've been inside of education long enough to see how that works, right?

¶435 But Polanyi's argument was that you can — and this is Plato's argument too. You can't make people wise. You can — properly, again — seduce them so that they can come to love wisdom.

¶439 Okay, so I have a proposal to specifically, practically about this, which is — first of all, I’ll put a pin in something. The problem we face, of course, is that bureaucracy has wrapped itself around a pseudo-religious ideology that justifies its existence tremendously.

¶440 And so that's problematic.

¶442 Yes, very much. And what I would want to say is, I don't think we should have teachers in any one institution. So if you look — I'll just take the West, but there's parallel things elsewhere — you had the university, you had the monastery, and you had the church, and they were all interrelated. And one is a knowledge institution, but it has reverence for the wisdom institution. That's the monastery. And then you have the church, but the church is like. “Oh, but all of these ideas and all of these philosophies have to transfer to real lives.” Right?

¶444 Yes, yes, yes. And what I think we need is, we need to have teachers in multiple kinds of institutions that are acting again in this opponent processing with each other, not adversarial. Part of the problem is, you know, and then the Protestant Reformation comes in and splits them from each other.

¶445 And we get all that, all that. But the proposal is, because what we have is, we have this idea that teachers are only legitimate if they're in this one institution, and if we have anybody out — I face this, with the stuff I do outside of the university, it's like, why are you doing that? Right? And I know lots of excellent teachers that can't find a home in the university because they want to do the kind of stuff that the universities aren’t …

¶447 Right. And so I think we need to think of a living system of teaching institutions where you've got people sort of — but they're bound together in a field again, where the relationality is important. This is the pole of knowledge, this is the pole of wisdom, and this is the pole of life. And they have to all — and we have that. And I think that's also something that we need to think about bringing back in terms of institutional structures that could actually transform society in the way we're talking.

¶451 Could I respond to just that one thing? So because this is dear to my heart, because I represent the discipline that is all about the synoptic integration across the disciplines: cognitive science.

¶452 And trying to create the lingua franca between neuroscience and information processing, machine learning, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy — trying to do that. And there has been a turning, an increasing recognition by some about the value of this, because the specialization went into psychology, in which we incentivized people to innovate something that nobody else had discovered before, finding the effect, the new effect, right? And this is one of the driving motivations of the replication crisis, because if you don't pursue synoptic integration, you don't work out your theoretical grammar well. Your conceptual vocabulary is vague and equivocal, and then the fact that you get empirical data is almost irrelevant, because if you get a vague enough construct that isn't bound or responsible to anybody else's work, of course you can find empirical verification.

¶453 And so the replication crisis has basically started to put up a flag. Some people are recognizing it, that we need the synoptic integrators as much as we need the specialists. So that. I just want to put that out.

¶466 I would want people to hear that the love of wisdom and the love of being are real possibilities, that there are already people of good faith and good talent doing this individually and collectively, and that that opens up a possibility for a kind of transformation, so that as you fall in love with being again, instead of the reciprocal narrowing that we've just been talking about and how we get addicted, because that's what addiction is, a reciprocal narrowing — a reciprocal opening is equally possible. This is what Plato proposed with anagoge, and that that is still actual, and there are people and communities and practices that you can go to, to actualize that, to realize that. And there is nothing stopping you from doing that right now.

¶469 Yeah, I'm not proposing cognitive closure. I want continuity of contact.