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[Music] the stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere in dialogue about what matters most at the knife's
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edge of what's happening now welcome to the stoa i'm peter limberg the steward of the stowa and the stoa is a place for us to cohere and dialogue about what matters most
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at the knife's edge of this moment and today we have james karcz author of finite infinite game amongst other amazing books and uh john verveiki um who created the awakening from the
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meaning crisis and he's spearheading the deal logos project that i'm sure everyone here is aware of uh so these men need uh no further introduction i'm sure everyone here knows them so how today's gonna work uh john and
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james are gonna have a conversation for about an hour we're gonna just like geek out and listen and then we're gonna have a 30 minute kind of q a at the end so if you have any questions for for john
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or james uh put in the chat box make sure you have a big queue question because i think the chat box is going to be lit today um so that will kind of flag it for me so that being said um i'm going to
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allow jon to unmute himself uh and james you gotta unmute yourself again there you go yeah right so i'm gonna mute myself and then take john in and then you guys can uh go
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jam all right um so i guess uh where i'd like to start james is uh we we did uh have the pleasure of uh meeting each other at a conference uh which we were talking about just before
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and um uh i would like to sort of pick up maybe from that as a common point and uh just quickly review where i'm coming from and where i'm coming at and
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um how i've come to your work and um what role i see with it within my my work and then maybe turn things over to you so maybe give me like 10 minutes to sort of riff for a bit
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yeah i'd love i'd love to hear it so uh the work i do as a sort of science i do as a cognitive scientist is to work on a very core problem uh which is a
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a a a problem that needs to be solved because i think it's at the core of cognition i think there's a process that is at the core of our ability to categorize to communicate to solve problems
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um to perform inferences i won't repeat those arguments they're available at length and you you saw a version of them that the central process is the process that i call relevance realization which is the right the ability to zero
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in on relevant information and you're doing that in a way that avoids either an algorithmic search of all possible information which is combinatorial explosive and impossible or just merely being arbitrary and just randomly
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picking so somehow we we steer between the skill and charybdis of algorithmic totality and arbitrary you know finitude you know just a finite
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arbitrary partiality is a better way of putting it and somehow we we reliably zero in on relevant information and then some of that relevant information enters our conscious experience and becomes salient to us
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etc and i think this is very central to uh uh to um cognition and then the argument is that the way we sort of do relevance realization
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is deeply analogous um to the way evolution works in that evolution is a process by which um there's variation and then there's selection put on it and
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that sort of reconfigures things from which new variation is generated selection is put on it and you you get this sort of accordion and then a self-organizing system revolves with change or it evolves and
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then the idea is your brain is doing exactly that your brain is constantly introducing variation to maintain more options for itself it doesn't want to get locked down into having no
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options so it opens up variations but it also wants to be efficient in its in its use of its resources so it's constantly doing this and so it's constantly evolving it's fittedness to the environment and i
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use that analogy analogous to biological the biological fittedness of an organism and then the and the idea here is that there is no definition of fittedness in the sense
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that there is no essential features shared by all all creatures that are fit you know uh some are big some are small some are tall some are short some are hard servers etc right all that all the only thing that's required is that they
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keep the they keep the process of life going itself and so there is no definition uh to bitterness and one of one of the part of the genius of darwin is
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he gave up the attempt of the naturalists um you know the the the in the sense of the uh the clergymen who were going out trying to determine the definition of the perfection of things so they could know
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the mind of god instead he gave up trying to find such an essence and instead proposed a universal process by which fittedness is constantly redefining itself and restructuring itself and i think
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what's relevant is similarly evolving and constantly redefining and restructuring itself so there is no essence to relevance also i mean what you find relevant
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one minute will not be relevant the next minute um of all the there's not no property that all the things you find relevant share other than you find them relevant etc and so i think there is in that sense no
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essence and therefore no perfectability or and i use this term deliberately final solution to relevance there isn't a way of saying it now we're done it's finished now why this matters existentially and here's when
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i'm taking off my hat as a cognitive scientist and putting on a different hat is that i think for various historical and structural reasons and there's i think very ample evidence for it our current
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culture is going through what i've called the meeting crisis that people are this is not a dearth of semantic meaning that's not what i mean i'm talking about the kind of meaning that psychologists talk about when they
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talk about meaning in life uh meaning in life is the sense that your life is worth living that there is a sense of connectedness to oneself
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and to each other and to the world that makes the suffering worthwhile in some fashion and what's interesting about the research about that
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is that meaning in life in fact is not primarily about possession or even a sense of contentedness in fact subjective well-being are measures of
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contentedness and meaning in life can go in different directions my primary and good example of this is having a child when you have a child all the measures of subjective well-being go down you're frustrated you're tired you're hungry
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you're uncertain about the blah blah blah but why do people have children then well because their meeting in life goes up well what is it about that well it turns out that it's that sense of connectedness
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especially the sense of mattering the sense of being connected to something that is beyond one's egocentrically specific concerns and what how i put these two together is
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the argument that meaning in life is about is about the phenomenological sense of the connectedness that is actually what is being constantly
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produced by relevance realization i so i use the bridging term religio to cover that religious sense of being connected and we know why we want to be connected we want to be connected because if we aren't connected if we aren't
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doing relevance realization and creating affordances we're not any kind of cognitive agent we're going to we're going to suffer a combinatorial explosion or we're going to suffer the death of arbitrary chaotic
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cognition and so i think that human beings have created ways of engaging in what i call serious play which might put two of you turns uh in opposition but maybe we can negotiate that
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what i mean by that is play that they are willing to deeply commit themselves to uh precisely because what they want to do is play with and play in that evolution of the connectedness
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precisely because there is no way to finish it finalize it uh perfect it and so i think uh humans have created many things that whose sole purpose
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is to draw into awareness to give us access and to accentuate um our sense of connectedness and to play with it so that we may enhance it
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you know poetry and music are ways of just playing with our relevance realization machinery but i do think that what has been lost in our culture
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are ways in which human beings have been guided in how they play so i'll make one final point and then i'll turn things over to you the the that very process by which we
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are adaptively intelligent that self-organizing that that self-organizing dynamical coupling is also the very same process by which
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human beings fall into self-deception so the very relevance realization that prevents us from having to check all the information can also misfire and bias us
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and prejudice us in in important and self-destructive ways so cultures have perennially come up with practices that are designed to try and address and alleviate that
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self-deception on one hand and enhance the religio on another in some kind of coordinated fashion and then i think and i've done work on this we published a consensus paper on
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it in psych inquiry i think the the most common term across cultures and time for that is wisdom and i think wisdom is very different from knowledge i think wisdom is a way to enhance religio enhance relevance
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realization by ameliorating self-deception and by affording enhanced senses of meaning in life what we've lost historically is we've lost
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a world view and a tradition and a set of institutions and guides and practices for the cultivation of wisdom so i often do this with people in groups i'll say where do you go for information
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they have a ready answer the internet uh where do you go for knowledge they'll still pretty much say science and then when i say where do you go for wisdom and there's a deafening silence and because of that what's happening is
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people often feel very bereft about how to deal with these perennial problems that undermine religio
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and undermine their capacity for relevance realization and cognitive agency and one of the dangers that has come in our society and you'll see another connection to your work here
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is that we have confused we've confused propositions and belief systems with the very like we've we've reduced all knowing to merely propositional
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knowing we've lost a sense of these dynamic processes of participation and coupling and involvement that are actually the home
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of meaning making and so what we've tried to do is we've tried to create ideological replacements uh for that i think um and i i saw something very analogous to
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the critique i'm now making in your book the religious case against belief that what we try to do is create these structures that totalize perfect and complete um when when what we in fact
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what religion is doing is constantly trying to keep moving um our response to mystery the the fact that we can't complete this it's open-ended
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etc and so i think another aspect of the meeting crisis and this is what peter does a lot of work on is that people try to create sort of pseudo-religious ideologies and political structures
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that attempt to capture religio in sets of statements that are designed to bring about conclusion what i think is need and what and so the
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primary form of discourse is out of adversarial debate because the point and here's again your finite indefinitive games the point is to defeat the other side so that there you're now entitled to be
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unchallenged and not have to take up ever again the problem um i'm trying to work into and work with many other people peter included this environment included
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towards a way of interaction that gives prominence to religio rather than credo and that is designed to get people to come into right
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relationship with religio and continually evolve their capacities for relevance realization cultivate wisdom as opposed to trying to come to some final conclusion and so that's where i see your work on
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infinite and finite games uh directly relevant um if we could the game of discourse and so i'm thinking of habermas here i think is a clear example of what you mean we often pretend that it's something
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that's a necessity but we're always it's always been constructed by mutual agreement and the thing is do we want the game of gift discourse to be finite games that seek perfection and completion and talk in propositional closure
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or do we want forms of discourse that afford that right that continuing evolution uh so they they promote a continuity of
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contact with a constantly changing environment that are constantly to use your language moving the horizon of intelligibility and so that's how i sorry that was me
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trying to compress a lot of my thinking into a very short time and try to show you connections i see between my work and your work john this is a very rich material
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you're thinking wait a minute you're not giving me you're only giving me an hour not a semester if you would take a whole term to uh to get into this stuff i mean it's lovely beautiful i love it i
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i i've been doing some work lately um believe it or not on economic theory but one of the things i wanted to do in that was go back and look at the
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intellectual roots of our thinking about the way we think about uh money in society and and that that kind of thing and so i've been reading i i went back to uh plato and aristotle
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and and um the uh i you know of course i read them thoroughly in graduate school uh some of them in greek even that was a bit of a job but
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you know i did yeah but then um and then uh read them on and off over the years but but now more recently looking at them you know any anytime i go back to the greeks i'm
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always surprised by finding something i didn't realize was quite there yeah you're talking i'm thinking uh when you talk you talk about uh engagement and discussion disc
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you use the word discourse um i i was surprised to read in a commentary that plato invented discourse you wouldn't think that right but but i
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invented the dialogue a dialogue never occurred in uh in in human literature uh before uh before plato and what happens in a dialogue is really interesting and very
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relevant to what you're talking about yes i used the word dialectically but but and but usually translated dialogue but i'm going to use the word dielectric because it it does
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it's a slightly different um it gives it a little more gravity i think yep i agree um but the but what happens if you you talk you you make the the distinction between wisdom and knowledge
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in uh in the uh dialogue called uh theaters socrates runs into this young a mathematician actually he's a geometer and uh someone introduces him
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and then socrates looks at the young man he's a young guy and he sees that he has an ugly face he's a very ugly young man but socrates was hugely ugly in himself
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famously ugly and so he said i see we share something in common he said the young man he starts off that way and he said i want to see if we share anything else in common so let's
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talk he said what do you do the man said i'm a g i do geometry he said now tell me i i don't know the difference between wisdom and knowledge socrates said
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and the young man he said can you tell me what knowledge is and he said oh yes we we learn this we learn how to do that a plumber has a certain degree of knowledge and so on and socrates says now wait a minute
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you're talking about the use of knowledge i want to know what knowledge itself is and that becomes much more difficult and of course unanswerable and then then we begin to see that the dealer
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then actually then he he makes it really surprising it's a great uh dialogue by by the way theater fun to go back and read again and he says you probably have heard
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socrates said that i was born by way of a midwife and uh the young man said no i didn't know that and he and then socrates makes this
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amazing remark i have taken up the art of midwifery myself intellectual midwifery he said i help people bring ideas into
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birth if they're not well conceived they need someone to help them on the other hand i can't do it myself i'm sterile i need you to bring my wisdom and my knowledge into uh into
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birth and so what he does is establish in the dialectically the dialectic an ongoing discussion and we find out at the end by the way that this is this is the
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the last dialogue socrates has before he goes at the end of the dialogue he goes right into the jury in athens who condemn him to death about an hour later after he finishes his dialogue
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and um but but that but the dialogue never ends that's right and and so what you're so what you're getting at is this open-ended conversation that that goes on and then i want to add something to that
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um i i i would love to i could spend hours on this stuff you'll have to slow me down maybe but but aristotle aristotle's interesting and he's different than uh socrates and plato in
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a number of ways but in one one important way he sees like in the way you're talking about it he sees our involvement as human beings as profoundly social that is we we are
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engaged as human beings so that that our well-being is always a well like you use the uh the example of the family so you you you can't be happy as an
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individual aristotle's famous uh remark is that the purpose of life is is is to become happy you you die monia he called it uh actually that's a very bad translation
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of eudaimonia but it means something more like well-being the way you talked about it yeah and but the the basic insight in aristotle is that we are social beings our primary
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relationship is to those around us and therefore all of our knowledge our wisdom and so on is is a wisdom is a communal wisdom knowledge is something we have with each other not something i have
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myself and and with wisdom uh as well of course it's interesting that the discussion about what wisdom is really has never been answered it still goes on right i mean
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plato plato didn't get an answer and we don't have one either exactly except what you're getting at is an ongoing yes uh the the the the con
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wittgenstein uh said that the meaning of language is not what it stands for but what comes of it and i i want to i want to say the meaning of
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a word is what comes of it and a meaningful life is one that something comes of with others i i that's that's my uh my own personal view and that that i
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think is is is buried in what i've tried to say in finite and infinite games that we've got we've got a we are competitive with each other
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but together we are we are in a deeper kind of ongoing uh dialectic dialogue community and and uh and and so on so i'm i'm i'm very
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much uh taken by your your thinking on this i love the idea of of um that was a very good distinction by the way about uh on the one hand you've got the algorithm on the other
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uh you've got this wide open field and uh you've either got chaos or you've got you've got stifling order and there's some you want to get somewhere up in the in the middle of that balanced and so on and uh that's that's
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very good that's very very nice thinking i'm i'm very grateful to have that distinction well thank you james i'm very you've afforded me lots um so i want to respond both to your aristotelian point and to your socratic
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point i'll respond first to the aristotelian point uh so part of that of the the argument that's coming out now from what's called 4e cognitive science the idea that cognition is inherently
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embodied embedded extended and enacted um and the work particularly of my friend greg enriquez um and the work of dan sperber and mercier and others is is this idea of
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distributed cognition that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals um and ed hutchins made this uh did the uh the famous case study of this
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he talked about how a ship is navigated and you have a bunch of people and you also have all their instruments and no one person navigates the ship the the networking of the descriptive cognition right the
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people and the tools right yeah what actually navigates the ship and you can also think of like you can extend that metaphorically to the ship and state et cetera and then the the
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idea there is what the research is now showing is reasoning let me be clear about how i want to use this term um i take rationality to be much more than the logical management of
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inference i take rationality to be any systematic and reliable process or procedure uh for addressing the ways in which we fall into self-deception so i think that just like argumentation
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can make you rational there's important ways in which mindfulness practices can make your irrational in an intentional in a in an attentional way so
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what is coming out of this is if we if we if we if we take that sense of rationality that more comprehensive and more ancient sense i would argue also what we have increasing evidence for is that not
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only is most of our cognition done in distributed cognition most of it should be done in distributed cognition because that's where we that's where we optimally achieve sort of overcoming self-deception
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it's not perfect it can't be that would be algorithmic but it's much more reliably better um so if i'm on my own i'm liable to fall into confirmation bias but if i'm talking with you as i am
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now uh that confirmation bias is liable to be challenged because if i'm if i'm a tall empathetic in the conversation i will take your perspective and that will get me out of being not
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locked in to my own perspective right right so i i think that um the fact that cognition i often use the metaphor that long before the internet networked compute
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computers together culture networked brains together embodied brains people together uh within distributed cognition and so i think that's part of the reason why i think aristotle said that i think part
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of the reason why people are seeking out these biological practices now to respond to your socrates point um you'd be pleased to know that i'm actually working on a series called
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after socrates that is about trying to uh recover the ancient tradition of dialectic from socrates you know through the stoics and through the neoplatonus
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and try to unpack what that meant as a project and what i want to do is after sort of unpacking that as much as i can historically i want to put it into forgive the pun i want to put it into
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dialogue with all these emerging communities like this one here where people are trying to enter into dialectical relationship again as a way of understanding it and so one of the things that
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comes out and you said uh theaters and i'm i'm reading many books around this topic right now but one is an excellent book i don't know if you've read it by gonzalez called uh dialectic and dialogue and he talks
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about how what plato's doing in the dialogue and he'll he shows that socrates often is like if you if you read it too superficially it looks like socrates is just refuting people
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but actually there's two types of things he's constantly steering between he's steering between the person who just offers sort of first-person intuition right right but he's also
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he's also refuting people who often who offer third person perspective technical definitions so that you know uh when he when you know they're pursuing courage they got the two generals and one gives his intuition and socrates
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destroys it of course and then the other gives his technical definition he's learned from the sofas and then socrates destroys that and then as you pointed out the dialogue looks like it ends in emporia but what gonzalez points out is
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that things like courage actually and this is where i think it links up to what i said about relevance realization can't be given any final definition uh a virtue is ver and this is aristotle's point as well right virtue is about
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steering between the algorithmic and the arbitrary in an ongoing developmental fashion and so what what gonzales argues is that socrates can't demonstrate with definition the virtue
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but he often exemplifies it in the actual process of the dialectic and so he's so gonzales points out something that people often miss at the end of that dialogue uh both generals are sort of pissed off
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of course because they right but they both say they want their sons to come and spend time with socrates oh yeah right right because right because courage is something in
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that sense you have to catch in dialectic you can't define it and you can't resolve it through debate and so part of what i'm interested in right is this is this interconnection
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between dialectic uh i think you agree it's a kind of infinite game steering the virtuous steering between arbitrary and algorithmic
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and this ability to also steer between you know first-person immediacy and third-person you know objectivity both as sort of authorities that shut down conversation in a profound way
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and so that and i'm trying to figure out okay what does that look like what how does that work and and so very much i'm trying to figure out um i i i'm not trying to be socrates
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that would be ridiculously hubristic but i'm trying to understand is there a way in which we can bring that system of constraints into how we're interacting like right now for example
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yeah well i i i hope i do hope i i think that's that's uh really um uh you know that's the most fundamental element of our humanity
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yes the the ability you know socrates said or actually plato said it but i think socrates voiced it i'm not sure which dialogue uh he pointed out that dialect
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dealecticae is the most unnatural thing we have it's it is strictly human yes it's exactly what defines us as human beings as opposed to animals
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yeah and and and then the other thing is and you you've been applying this all along and in fact you've said it pretty directly um it doesn't have a goal it doesn't have an ending
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it doesn't have a resolution it keeps going and that that means that uh we we have we have not only an open history but an open interpretation of what our
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history has been yes and where it should be going and so we have to look forward and backward at the same time at the same kind of dialectical
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analysis and uh so uh i'm i'm really uh right with you on this uh on this uh uh on this exercise by the way one other thing i loved about i i always
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liked about aristotle he can never decide anything he gets to the you know the end he kind of fudges the ending of everything he never is he's never absolutely that
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makes him infuriating to read but but uh but on the other hand he keeps that openness right at the end no he's not a third person to use your your election yes i i think that's
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correct um so so james can i ask you a question then that sort of points to what we're talking about in your first book i'm sorry and you're sorry i don't know it's your second book but the second book by you i've read back to the first book i read by you the
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one that really got me introduced to you and actually that's what influenced me to influence casa to invite you to the conference i should tell you a quick story about this um so i have my son jason he's my
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older son he's living with me right now and i'm trying to get him like out of sort of a cartesian pursuit of certainty and you know we have all these ongoing dialogues and he's doing all these practices with me
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uh etc but the thing i did the thing i did that really sort of loosened him up and set him in motion and not totally pleasantly for him it's been also disruptive but in a really healthy way
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as i gave him your book and he came away from that and this is what he said and and take it let me finish it because i think it's really high praise he said this is a really great book it's so disturbing um because it really
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really um really shook him up and which one the leaf book the yeah the religious case against belief because i think and i think this is a proper way to put it in the language we're crafting here together it had a really huge socratic impact on
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him it really you know you know socrates wisdom begins in wonder if that that ability to you know open things up and call things into question to set them into motion but here's here's the question i want to
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ask because it's a question that i'm also exploring in this project and with other people um it's a one one critique i have of plato it's interesting i criticized sort of
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plato's specific content on this but plato exemplifies the opposite so let me talk about the second thing and you mentioned it too and that's why i want to start there for me plato is sacred
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in the way you just described i can go back to plato right i'll get an insight i'll it'll transform my life transform my life i'll live a certain way things will unfold i go back to plato and i see something i didn't see before
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and then this reciprocal opening just keeps happening again and again and again and plato's sacred for me in that sense because he's a he's an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility right that doesn't mean that i don't question him
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it doesn't mean that i think he's it's everything's there i don't think it's complete but it's this sense of sacredness as a reciprocal opening into the inexhaustible now that's what plato exemplifies for me but one of my
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problems with plato is he seems to have a notion of the sacred as the perfect as the unchanging yeah right yeah yeah and that the point is to come to
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right and so and i think that that has been woven into our culture in a fashion sorry sorry that has been woven into our culture in
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a fashion that has been very deleterious to us i think that notion of sacredness as completion as perfection as unchangeability
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has really in some sense cut us off from religio very much like the naturalists before darwin we're trying to find the defining definition right of the perfection of of design and
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that that was a doomed project from the beginning i think that platonic notion of perfection has been sown into our culture in a way that's been very detrimental to our experience of religio and that part of what i see happening
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also in this these so i do a lot of participant observation i go to these groups like like peter pops me sorry i got it don't worry about it it's okay
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there hopefully that'll open it okay so what i see happening in these dialogical practices is so peter carr uh no not what's his last his first name peter anyway carrie in his book on
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augustine's uh invention [Music] sorry about this hello it's 601 sorry somebody trying to deliver something
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i'm sitting next to my phone i'll get a call too probably well i only have it turned off but that's something that's being delivered for my son so i need to leave and of course it's being delivered right now so anyways yeah go ahead so i'm doing a
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lot of participant observation in a lot of these biological practices and also reading a lot about them and talking to a lot of the inventors and practitioners and promoters and one of the things that i see happening is not only
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this rediscovery what we're talking about here but i see uh so carrie in his book uh says he talks about he it's titled augustine's invention of the inner self but he says that the
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word he wants to use isn't the english word invention he wants to use the latin word inventio that means both to discover and to make right both are just to make oh yeah and so what i see people doing in these practices these
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dialogical practices i see them in ventio or perhaps reinventio sacredness they're transforming sacredness not from perfection completion lack of change
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but instead this sense of coming into you know the fount of you know inexhaustible fount of ongoing intelligibility right and so that's why the idea
00:37:55
of emergence is so central now that the point of the dialogue is to get emergent meaning rather than to solidify positions and so i i'll often uh a a a criterion
00:38:09
not a definition that i've come up for dialectic is that you and i together get to a place we couldn't get to individually and that that has a taste of sacredness to it because it gives us an
00:38:20
active sense of the inexhaustible right so do you think that right you see i'm making a connection between your first and second book that one motive why infinite game play
00:38:34
is becoming more both since both more needed and more practice is precisely because it's a way of people reinventio this uh what what what sacredness means and breaking us out of that aspect of plato that i think has
00:38:47
been detrimental uh to our our understanding what do you think of that as a proposal well let's hope that's the case i i very much i very much agree with that uh actually
00:38:59
the the uh my own view of plato is that the only way you can read plato is to have read the neo-platonists first yes wow james i totally believe that
00:39:11
my gosh that's totally convergent totally that is yes yes yes yes so uh and the reason i say that yeah you know very well what the
00:39:24
what the neoplaton has said is to look at that that that platonic idea of the good the perfect the whole the truth the light or whatever the hell you want to call it lots of different names
00:39:38
uh is that essentially uh to realize you're not gonna get there it's it's beyond you uh or as one of the uh one of the jewish uh uh the mystics said the only way you can know god is to be
00:39:51
god yeah and uh and we we're a long way from that and and as a result everything we're doing is is essentially wrong i mean we're not there we don't have the
00:40:04
truth the truth is is uh elusive it's beyond us it's it's still to be reached and so on and that's a very important that's why um it's the the uh that's why plato's republic
00:40:18
is so interesting because in the republic yeah uh if you remember in the uh in the announce the uh metaphor of the cave of course the anagogic consent totally
00:40:29
yes so he's got these these people locked up in a cave and one of them gets out and goes out and sees the uh the truth but what's really
00:40:41
interesting is the fellow comes back and tries to get the others to follow but they won't [Laughter] and they were right not to in a way in a way although
00:40:53
my view is that they should have at least gone out to the forecourt of the of the cave or something you know yeah but anyway uh that's right no it is a danger that that that the possibility of the
00:41:06
absolute yeah and and uh and we see it you know it what's interesting also is that that's one of the ways of misunderstanding the dialectic
00:41:18
because um the way hegel conceived was that it had a direction it ends up somewhere and it ends up right in plato's idea of the you know basically the
00:41:32
absolute and uh and then and marx bought into that at the the directionality of the dialectic and i think that was one of um his tragic uh flaws anyway uh
00:41:46
the you're right to uh bring that out as a danger i'm uh right i'm i agree with that totally well i just i mean one of the projects i've been engaging is to try and
00:42:00
um make uh neoplatonism viable again i mean i have i've got words of platinus tattooed on my leg because i i like it platinus how you have simultaneous you have this you know a beautiful synthesis of
00:42:14
argumentation and what pierre hado called spiritual exercise the actual process of trying to you know no you're not just informing people with argumentation you're trying to transform their state of consciousness right now i'm actually and this is i'm
00:42:27
meeting the person at the end of the tradition i'm reading uh demacias you know uh problems in solutions confirming first principles and how he you know he calls he calls he calls his first principle the ineffable and
00:42:39
that he places it even beyond uh yeah yeah yeah and so um and i mean there's lots of good work being done about this which brings me again to a point that was
00:42:54
at the core of uh the religious case against belief which is and this reminds me of uber it reminds me of from which is there's a big difference between you know
00:43:06
being curious and having a problem to solve and experiencing wonder in which you call things into questions so you can confront mystery and those are two very different experience those are two very different things
00:43:18
both projects are needed for human beings all right i'm not i'm not right there's a sense in which you can read plato as trying to turn wonder into awe
00:43:30
make it almost reverential um and that's clearly i mean when you read plato's seventh letter that sense of mystery right is so so profound so i'm wondering then again
00:43:42
if right if what part of what you could be interpreted as saying is that the reinvention of this sacred as the
00:43:56
as the inexhaustible kind of intelligibility requires a corresponding remembrance i'm using remembrance here in the sense of sati like mindfulness a deep remembrance of what from calls the being mode that
00:44:09
mode in which we're trying to enter into right relationship with mystery rather than trying to resolve a problem and bring it to conclusion that and that that we have to a large degree
00:44:20
we have forgotten how to do that in a reliable way in our culture uh we are locked almost perpetually in the having mode the problem-solving mode and what i think i see you doing in both your books
00:44:32
tell me if this is a fair interpretation is a kind of deep existential getting us to deeply existentially remember that being mode that mode of coming into right relationship with mystery and that
00:44:46
and what it takes to do that that i mean it i i would argue that it takes practice it takes a community of practice in order to do that oh oh oh yeah yeah no you're absolutely right right on
00:44:59
that one no kidding yes you know good we're what can i say but hurrah to them [Laughter] well i mean that's it's actually really
00:45:14
wonderful to be able to talk to you in person directly like this james because i mean i teach your work in you know in my videos and in my courses and so it's nice to be able to make sure
00:45:26
that i'm treating you fairly and appropriately listen uh you you are for sure yeah so far uh you you know as i said
00:45:37
um there's uh there you know there are glacier loads of of thinking and knowledge and and so on behind all these ideas and uh
00:45:51
and it's it's it's it's really worth an adventure out there to explore that stuff and that's that's really what i was uh was thinking when uh when i brought up plato and aristotle
00:46:04
yeah uh totally i mean just just rich very much stuff so anyway um yeah this is good now the the i'm i'm assuming when you use the
00:46:16
word religio you mean it in the sense of binding right of yes yes very very often that word is is interpretable as yoga
00:46:27
as a yes as it bringing together as a yoking of different things uh connecting but at the same time not resolving not making a complete
00:46:42
circle out of it but uh but but in other words not not completely algorithmic and not completely wide open yep but very nicely right up the uh
00:46:55
right up the middle as uh yeah yeah another another element that um that i found i i find missing in both plato and aristotle
00:47:09
but but his really ingredient in the idea of the dialectic is that is the place of history now now i mean it this way uh that most of us think of our history as
00:47:21
in in what i what i would like to call calendric terms a calendar i was born on a certain day i went to school there i did this i did that and that's my story that's not my story
00:47:34
my story is the civilization i was born into and and the reason it's my story is that i'm living the civilization it's not something that's descended on me it's something i'm
00:47:47
taking up and uh one of the ways one of the very vivid ways uh we we've been forced to see it is in racism i mean we are for example as a nation
00:47:59
historically speaking you know i'm talking big history capital h history speaking not not calendrical yeah uh we are still a slave owning nation
00:48:11
enslaving nation and we we never freed ourselves we not only did we not free ourselves from uh you know not only free the slaves we haven't freed ourselves from that
00:48:23
that mentality of uh of the slave owner having a working class uh people you can store away in a ghetto or a slum or a prison or uh you know off the map in a
00:48:37
in a reservation somewhere in a desperate desert location so um i i i want to say that the dialectic brings with it a sense of of history in the
00:48:50
sense not only that we have a past but we're a pet we're living a past yeah and the living living the past is also a way of living a future and um because we are we're
00:49:03
participating we're either continuing it as it was which is probably impossible but but we're we're also transforming it as we go along yes and it gives us uh it it gives the
00:49:15
sense of meaning a much greater reach in a way it's not just that i have a meaningful life uh with you know within my
00:49:25
calendrical years but but that that my the meaningfulness of my life continues through my children through my students through my friends through my through my country through my countrymen and through my
00:49:40
fellow human beings on and on uh so i would i would just introduce that into the uh into the discussion as uh not not as a not as a uh critique or no no
00:49:52
no but as but as a continuous uh contiguous idea i i think that point is actually confident with the previous point i think it was plato's commitment to perfection and unchanging ability
00:50:04
that made him disregard and i think and i also have critiques of the person i'm going to introduce now but i think history in the sense that you're talking about is very analogous to like in the sense that heidegger is often talking about it
00:50:17
um he's talking about it as i i i often use this metaphor and you can see how i'm bridging between heidegger and victoria in this metaphor that history is the story of our cultural cognitive grammar
00:50:30
and how right um our cultural cognitive grammar what's thinkable for us and what's doable for us uh uh has you know it has a history to it there is a line of progression um and like you say uh we may make
00:50:45
certain political changes in in the in the um modern sense of politics not an aristotle sense we can make political changes but that doesn't mean that we've changed the cultural grammar the cultural cognitive grammar by which
00:50:57
we think and behave and so uh you know we're still we still think you know heidegger's notion that we treat everything as a standing reserve and things are largely objects to be manipulated
00:51:08
et cetera et cetera and i i agree and so part of what i did in my series awakening from the meeting crisis was try to trace out the history of that cultural cognitive grammar and how how much
00:51:20
it is so embedded in us and i think of your notion of availing it is so embedded into us that it's invisible to us because it's transparent like the lenses of my glasses are transparent because precisely because i'm seeing through them and by means of
00:51:34
them i don't see them and there's you know there's a difficult philosophical task of learning to do this step back and look at it rather than automatically unquestionably no very important
00:51:46
yeah no that's that's absolutely critical yeah i think um you know that my uh one of the things i argue in this the book i've i've finished and still kind of fiddling with is that the first
00:52:00
the first challenge of a teacher is to get his or her students to know what they know and they know a lot more than they think they do and when i've what i've tried in this
00:52:13
book the reason i went back to plato and aristotle is that we see the tracks of their thinking all over our brains yes yeah they talk you know we see them all through our
00:52:26
head you know they thought this stuff up and we're still thinking it yeah so so uh the the point is we're we're thinking the language of the dead we've been giving
00:52:38
we've been given this language we didn't make it up this language has been around for a hell of a long time and this way of thinking and these these ideas these concepts even the grammar we speak and so on it's
00:52:51
very very important to take those glasses off and look at it at it look at what you look at what's going on in your head yeah you don't realize it but and then and then and then plato has this interesting thing
00:53:03
you probably know his theory of enemiesis which is uh the collective knowledge that is we we there's a there's a knowledge we all have we just have to be reminded of it in in a
00:53:16
sense and and i i that's no one really buys into that completely but but on the other hand what he's getting at i think is that there is a there's a kind of fundamental of
00:53:29
of knowledge in us that we that comes through our culture and uh and we don't we don't see we see through it we see with it and uh rather than see
00:53:43
it and so one of the great jobs of a teacher i think as a writer too is to get that it out there so you look at it exactly see what you're doing so there's a couple of thinkers that converged on a
00:53:56
way of talking about that after and metzinger and others uh they call it a transparency opacity shift the ability to go from something being transparent to being opaque and then uh you you also need to do the other you need to
00:54:08
sometimes stop looking at certain things and learn remember how to look through them again yeah yeah right right and so you know and so i i i sometimes extend the analogy i say you know i step
00:54:20
back and i look and see if it's distorting and i do this right to sort of transform my lenses but how do i know that i've actually cleaned them well i have to put them back on and look through them and see if i can see differently again right because and so you have to
00:54:33
constantly go back and forth between the two oh oh there's no final cleaning we're filthy to the end you know we're all we're all fake in a way yes so uh
00:54:48
but but uh but but there's they're are different qualities of fake fakery after all but but anyway that i'm glad you brought that up very nice point well uh
00:55:02
so i don't know when peter wants to go either yeah if you want you can open it yeah absolutely we've been going on here for an hour so perfect i'm going to say that the time flew by uh james it just grew by it was it it
00:55:15
did didn't it yeah yeah now this is great fun yeah yeah so yes perfect timing we're exactly at the hour uh we have a bunch of great questions in the chat um let's go with okay i gotta let
00:55:28
everyone unmute themselves so everyone can unmute themselves now so use it wisely um nicholas if you can be first and james you'll have to unmute yourself again okay
00:55:42
nicholas benjamin hi everybody um let me find my actually i'll just i'll just rip it i like that we got you okay great cool um so first thank you somewhere
00:55:56
go ahead okay thank you both uh for this fantastic talk um your your excitement is infectious so my my question is what what changes might be needed in our educational
00:56:09
system in order to popularize i don't want to use that word but i'm using that word um dialectic whoa um go ahead john
00:56:21
the reason i ask this is because it's very difficult to engage in dialectic with anybody i know um yeah it's just so i mean this is where the neoplatonic tradition is very helpful
00:56:34
uh as james argued neil uh dialectic is the capstone practice you you you don't you know it's a practice that um often we get the sense even in plato you get a sense this is all kinds of
00:56:47
training and plato says you can't even start this until you're 30 years old because you have to do all this this training um initially so i i think that one of the things i'm trying to do with peter and and with guy senstalk
00:57:00
and um elizabeth the bold and thomas steiniger and all of these amazing people is to try to figure out is there a way in which we can set what i often call an ecology of practice a sequence uh practices
00:57:14
that will help take people into this uh can we use something um you know like you know uh leher's work on philosophical companionship to just get people into uh starting to talk to each other in the being mode
00:57:26
and then could we could we take them into circling and or peter's anti-debate and then could we and then could we put on top of that right um also you know individual and
00:57:37
collective mindfulness practices to do what james and i are just talking about learning to step back and look at and learn be learning just you know to to look through and then i think you might have
00:57:50
the proper educational program for introducing dialectic proper in and so in fact the neoplatonus even had a sequence by which you read the dialogues that was supposed to take you through
00:58:04
this sort of progression um um into something like uh dialectic proper i would also point out the work of my uh at least i'm i'm on a stereo right now
00:58:18
on a on a stereo uh podcast i'll call you tomorrow seven o'clock so i would want to point to so now we both got to do it james that's great yeah
00:58:32
i point to the work of my friend and colleague zack stein who talks about you know education in a time between two worlds about uh so i think he has he's very and i've had dia logos with zach on several occasions
00:58:44
thanks to andrew sweeney and i think he's very much in concert with what james and i are talking about and trying to reconfigure uh education and make it more in the service of
00:58:56
the normativity of culture and less in the service of the normativity of the market and to try and build in this kind of progressive program where you lead people into this capacity by building up a scaffolding of skills
00:59:10
that enable it and make it possible you you've got it john that's actually the angle that i'm coming from is that zack stein's book education and time between worlds there you go well there you go so that's not a coincidence i think but i'm interested to hear what james has to say
00:59:23
well uh the th this opens the door to one of my big critiques of the university which is that uh it's become dominated by uh
00:59:37
by money by yeah yeah by huge amounts of money and and what's happened i you know this sounds very dramatic but i'll because we don't have much time i'm going to make it sound extreme
00:59:51
that is uh essentially what's what's been happening is as as the as wealthy donors and corporations and major industries contribute to the university
01:00:04
uh to a higher education and to the to the learned institutes what we have is a is is people who are being paid actually what they're doing is buying knowledge
01:00:18
and and what's happening in the uh in the they determine what kind of research is being done what's going to be studied and what's going to be known uh now that's that's extremely limiting
01:00:30
and and uh and then on the other hand the faculty and i'm really quite critical of my of my colleagues uh they're also a bit too much for sale they're willing to sell their
01:00:43
their own careers for uh you know for chairs and for uh extra funds and so on for high salaries and that's that's that's a great tragedy and i i
01:00:55
want to i'm rethinking a whole lot about the way the university could be restructured and i'm questioning a number of things i'm questioning for example
01:01:05
just the the phenomenon of the semester why why would education be just eight semesters long a college education it should last a lifetime
01:01:17
it should start back in childhood and continue all the way to the end and uh and i'm i'm i'm worried about the tuition problem where um essentially what you do when you pay
01:01:31
tuition is buying knowledge you're buying you're buying you're paying someone to teach you and the more money you have the more they'll be able to teach you and that's it's a profound unfairness and then the third
01:01:42
the third thing is uh admissions to to colleges um it's become so uh uh how should i say it's so selective what we're really doing is now is
01:01:55
creating a kind of intellectual elite that that basically gives a damn about the dialectic uh they're they're they know they don't care at all about it they're not dialectical thinkers and um they're actually what they're
01:02:08
really learning is not dialogue they're learning artisanship uh how to raise how to how to build a corporation how to raise money how to invest
01:02:18
and so on and those are those are really very i think very very destructive of the uh of the university of higher education uh all together which
01:02:30
which in fact the university in my view is is the is the west's uh greatest achievement to create the university and and now we're we're watching it uh
01:02:43
fall apart under the impact of uh corporate interests basically that's simplistic but it's it's uh it's on the way to i mean i i have a much broader critique
01:02:55
but but that's basically the core of it so james i don't know if you've read him i i met him at another conference and we we we we hit it off and had quite a bit of discussion in exchange nicholas
01:03:08
maxwell's book from knowledge to wisdom which is exactly is a critique about the university along those lines that you've just made yeah and it's it's quite a good book um no thank you i haven't read it i'll
01:03:22
look it up for sure yeah right right but uh it it begins in the classroom necklace thank you both guy you're up next
01:03:42
hello hey how are you great to see you man i'm good i wouldn't miss this one hi james i'm guy thanks doc nice to meet you um i first read your book when i was a
01:03:54
a uh soft sophomore in high school um and i think yeah oh yeah it opened i think it opened me in ways that i'm realizing in this moment how deeply of an influence it's
01:04:08
had on me um so i really appreciate what you're what you're up to um and how much your body you're embodying what you're saying um my question has to do with
01:04:20
actually a moment that you guys had and it was that moment where john you were talking about um reading the the the neoplatonics and john just like his toenails like went through
01:04:34
his eyes and then there was this kind of that's john in essence absolutely um and i what what it looked like to me was a just a profound affinity that you guys had for each
01:04:56
other in that moment that had been growing through the dialogue that started to feel like generative of the actual insights in the dialogue yeah um and so i'm just curious about
01:05:10
about the connection between what you think the connection is between um the personal the personal aspect of of what people often only experience in
01:05:23
in like intimate conversations right like um personal intimacy and the the corollary i don't know what's the correlation between though that experience the
01:05:35
connection that experience and the experience of of of intimacy one experiences in a philosophical dialogue um i just i'm fat i'm really
01:05:48
i'm i'm really struck by by whatever that is because it seems it just seems very very um generative of of of the whole project
01:06:01
well my i don't know yeah john john could answer this too but my own view is they should be continuous it is the uh the personal and the intellectual uh
01:06:14
you don't stop one to start the other uh you you should uh being being intellectual is not a solitary activity it's it's it's it's a participatory activity
01:06:28
and that's that's uh that's why there's a kind of sociality there's a companionship uh that goes with well with with genuine intellectuality it's not being right or wrong it's about
01:06:42
finding ways of continuing the conversation and uh that's that can that always involves uh a person a deeply personal elements
01:06:55
so i i would agree with that especially the the continuity hypothesis of the invocation of sort of participatory knowing which is something some of you know and guy you know i talk about at length um
01:07:07
and i think i think those that affinity i think there's a way in which these are all interpenetrating and into affording each other i think my participatory knowing of myself and my participatory knowing of others
01:07:20
are not separable things i think and this is part of what christopher moore actually argues in his book on socrates socratic south knowledge socrates claimed that only by examining others did he actually
01:07:33
properly examine himself and the unexamined life is not worth living um as he famously said at his uh at his apology so i think my participant nor knowing of
01:07:45
myself and my participatory knowing of the other uh the other person my community those are bound together but i think they're also bound together with the third which is uh
01:07:56
we equally participate in uh distributed cognition uh and we've talked about that already that networking together and i think the way we i participated myself i
01:08:09
participate with my other and then i participate in the culture of the just the distributed cognition i think those are all interpenetrating and inter-affording and then the final thing
01:08:20
all of that all of that interpenetrating recursive thing going on that is has a participatory relationship with the environment right especially the natural world
01:08:33
and the intelligibility of things the fact that the world is an inexhaustible horizon and source of new intelligibility and and we are constantly in participation with that so we
01:08:45
participate in our ecology in our culture in each other in ourselves and all of those participatory knowings are deeply interpenetrating and intra-forwarding and part of what dialectic is about is
01:08:57
about getting that affinity or you know uh accessed and accentuated more and more for people yeah very good you know i'm glad you brought in the uh
01:09:09
ecological element always yeah that's part of 40 cognitive science yeah thanks god so i i mean there's much more about this and you and i have continual deal logos
01:09:22
about it but that's that that's at least the the seed of my answer to that really profound question oh great oh
01:09:35
david collins you're up next hi uh first just thanks this is a joy and um want to push um somewhat unfairly
01:09:47
to hear more about potential downsides in relevance realization john is there a potential for leaving things out to go for
01:10:01
relevance to salient what we just focus on and somewhat analogously uh james with a kind of future oriented vector or a growth vector in infinite games
01:10:13
is there any risk of forgetting where we start from i'm reminded playfully in the timaeus um yeah much of learning is about recovering what we already know or where we oh yeah
01:10:27
started from thank you so i guess you mentioned me first so i'll answer first on this one um yeah i mean in fact that's always the case it's always the case that we're leaving
01:10:39
something out um that's what i mean about the and and that's why we have the experience of insight insight is it's the experience of that uh our relevance realization framing has
01:10:52
has realized that something has been left out and that it has to restructure itself and it self organizes that's so insight is a powerful developmental engine of the evolution of
01:11:04
our relevance realization that's why i study insight so extensively uh as a cognitive scientist so i think that's that's exactly right uh i i guess the the the point there
01:11:18
is can we cultivate the proper set of virtues that stir us between arbitrary and algorithmic such that we are always open to that self-correction because we will always be in need of it
01:11:32
um and so i was trying to gesture towards that when i talked about you know socrates's notion and i think this does go back to socrates that wisdom begins in wonder and then what plato does is try
01:11:43
and uh uh he tries to bring wonder into awe and then i'm i'm thinking of woodruff's notion of reverence as the as the virtue that uh that we cultivate uh for awe
01:11:58
for wonder and all reverence is the virtue uh that keeps us open not just representationally but in a participatory fashion to um uh to self-correction precisely because
01:12:12
we what ah and wonder do is put us in a place where we are motivated to call into question our most comprehensive sense of self and world and i think
01:12:23
that uh and i agree with woodruff that the virtue of reverence uh maybe because it got associated with uh you know adherence to particular creeds or dogmatics but the virtue of
01:12:35
of reverence is a lost virtue in our culture we we complement people by saying that they're irreverent which is actually a kind of odd thing to do right an irreverent person somebody who's never capable of
01:12:47
reverence is deeply somebody who can't call their view into question uh via wonder and awe that they are not trying to matter to something greater than themselves
01:12:58
and therefore uh given sort of our best understanding right now uh they're condemning themselves to a relatively unexamined life with very little meaning in life within it um and so i think virtues are not
01:13:12
final solutions but virtues are our best way of committing to maintaining a participatory openness to the ongoing need for self-correction that's how i would answer that david i
01:13:27
can't improve on that that's lovely thanks john well thank you jim james i think it's really it's very it's very encouraging uh it's
01:13:38
like to i mean we did meet before but it was very brief but to to you've been in my thoughts for a very long time and it's very nice to find such affinity and consonants with him i i it's it's very philia for me i'm
01:13:51
very very much enjoying oh good good yeah me too so yeah time for about two more questions uh joe uh you had a question
01:14:05
about ai yeah so it was kind of a broad question but i was just wondering if either of you could riff on what it would look like or mean for ai to play
01:14:20
the infinite game well i mean maybe james will let me go first on that because that is my wheelhouse as a cognitive scientist i do a lot of work on ai especially artificial general intelligence
01:14:32
um so here's a brief answer but it it actually encompasses every i i think in a very at least at a stems to encompass everything james and i've been talking about i think for an ai to be able to play an infinite
01:14:47
game and to also be generally artificially general intelligence is it has to be capable of relevance realization in the way i've been talking about it and that is precisely the thing that we are having so much
01:14:59
difficulty in giving our our artificial intelligence we can now we're starting to make some progress on it precisely because we are starting to if you look at you know hinton way back to 96 and the wake sleep algorithm and all the
01:15:12
work building on that what we're seeing is and and they they sort of fell into this is that what you have is you have you know a dynamically self-organizing system right like implemented on a neural
01:15:25
network and what it does is it sort of implements exactly what i'm talking about it introduces variation and then puts selection on it and then varies from that and so it's constantly evolving it's fittedness now i'm not saying the
01:15:37
wake sleep algorithm is the the the answer but the reason why deep learning is precisely so successful and we've had this amazing burst of work in ai is precisely
01:15:49
because i think they are now turning to and this was dreifus's critique way back when on what computers can't do they're turning to the problem of relevance and they're making it central and they're seeing that a dynamical
01:16:02
evolution of sort of ongoing constraint on the problem space is exactly what's needed to make something general intelligent and i think if we give it that ability um then we will have
01:16:16
ai that can play infinite games as opposed to just finite games yeah i more or less agree i'm i i i'm a kind of hold out on on ai i'm not
01:16:31
first place i i'm not that familiar with the literature but but um but i have such a respect for uh how shall i say this the
01:16:44
uh the kind of uh i'm looking for a word that the kind of fungibility of language that that it it it so easily falls apart
01:16:57
and and evolves and changes and that the edges the edges get mushy and so on and this happens in a in a social context that that probably will never be
01:17:11
predictable uh in in any way so that that even though it's extremely useful and and and uh can do uh extraordinary things i mean i've seen it
01:17:23
i've seen it do amazing stuff um i'm i'm holding out on it's its absolute relevance in the end i could be convinced but i'm still um
01:17:38
i i would say that um i think the pro maybe this will i don't think it'll completely close the gap between us but i've argued that the project of just trying to create artificial intelligence is a misplaced project
01:17:50
because the degree and this is already happening the degree to which we make these things capable of a self-organized evolving fittedness is the degree to which like us they become subject to self-deceptive
01:18:02
uh behavior and so we also need artificial uh uh to give them artificial rationality that's sort of going up but also going down um so far a cognitive science says that you know you
01:18:15
only have the kind of mind you have because you have the kind of body you have the living body you have this is an aristotelian argument which is now come back into prominence and so i think that artificial
01:18:26
intelligence has to have conjoined with it both artificial relevance sorry artificial rationality as the ability to deal with self-deception and artificial life
01:18:37
the thing the the the the the machine well it won't be a machine anymore in some senses the machine has to be like what we are it has to things have to be matter to it precisely because it's it has to take care of itself um it it
01:18:51
constantly has to be making itself the way we are um the way living things are and i mean reid montague says you know the difference between us and computers is they don't care about the information they're processing
01:19:03
and we do and i would argue that we care about it precisely because we're always every moment to moment taking care of ourselves and each other and i think if we don't give that as a fundamental
01:19:15
uh you know cons constitutive structure of these machines that they will never approach our kind of cognitive agency amen yeah all right so we'll sneak in this last
01:19:29
question from michael uh about lifelong uh learning if you can unmute yourself mike yes hello my question was what is the next step of lifelong learning if we can't use
01:19:42
turn to universities in their current form i know you've been talking to tomasz bjorkman and here in sweden and i'm going to be a big fan of you both and a friend of thomas erin what is like the wisdom gym you're doing
01:19:55
here at the store is one part of it but but how do you scale that up what what is the conversation in your parts james and john on lifelong learning how do we actually go to a society that can that can transcend the current system in
01:20:08
learning like is it how are we going to talk for 10 more years are there any projects or experiments going on right now that's that uh it's a tough question um
01:20:21
you um i i would put it very simply this way start one rather than look for one begin to engage your friends talk to them
01:20:34
uh in in a in a way bring bring the dialectic into uh your your social and and personal in in personal life and i you know you know what i think you
01:20:47
if you did and you probably do anyway i can tell from the way you you framed your question if you if you did you'd find there are all kinds of of co compatible social as
01:20:59
compatible human beings uh around you uh and and uh i i just think it needs to be sort of consciously pursued uh by
01:21:12
by individuals uh i i i wish i had a a better solution for it but uh but you you know it's it's actually it's the reason i went in i
01:21:26
became a teacher i i wanted to engage in dialogue with uh with uh my fellow human beings and i found teaching a way to do that you
01:21:38
don't have to be a teacher but but uh that's one one way of doing it so james oh sorry james go ahead you're good no well i agree with james and i've
01:21:50
actually been trying to do that i've been i i so uh as some of you know i have an online uh meditation and contemplation cultivation of wisdom uh uh thing i do every morning live
01:22:02
stream 9 30 right and a sangha has grown up around that and then that senior is situated within a discord server which so you get the nesting of communities um so i i've i've been doing the what
01:22:14
james said um uh building helping to build one of those or cultivate maybe is a better word helping to cultivate one of those and also be a teacher within it uh but what i've also been doing um is
01:22:27
i've been trying to meet up and do participant observation and to have deep discussion with other such communities uh the emer these immunitarian communities of practices
01:22:38
that seem to be doing dialectic around religio if you'll allow me a bit of a slogan and there's a lot of them and i was just at the movement summit a couple weeks ago with rafe kelly and i was just impressed
01:22:49
by all all of these you know growing communities of ecologies of practices that are responsible responding to the meeting crisis by
01:23:00
very much by doing that you know uh and and what's also impressive is the degree to which they're uh talking to each other um and not in the sense of trying to crush or
01:23:14
conquer but much more in a sense of creating something like a wiki or a co-op uh structure between them and so i often talk about um that
01:23:27
what's happening is in these movements is a blurring of the line between michael between education and enculturation um and i used to be quite pessimistic
01:23:39
this is why i ended up doing something like awakening from the meeting crisis uh because i i i saw the the a lot of the cultural machinery as uh frustrating and crushing people's
01:23:52
projects of trying to enhance uh meaning in life and cultivate wisdom but i'm more optimistic i i think there's that's why i did that slogan a few times a few weeks ago in the store with akira the dawn of about uh
01:24:05
you know stealing the culture in the sense of not trying to create some sort of political revolution but do something like what happened in the axo revolution or you know or or or the rise of christianity within
01:24:18
um the the roman empire or or james's uh model of the renaissance in in infinite games right it's not it's not political at least in the posterity sense it's a way of basically
01:24:31
opening up and recreating and reconnecting culture in a way that is subversive of the way in which our culture is locking us into
01:24:43
a kind of finite mode finite game having mode and a and and a binding of education to the normativity of the market as this exclusive uh normativity so i
01:24:55
see um you can you can definitely create a community you can join a community and you can also help facilitate the community the the growth of the community of communities
01:25:08
uh that makes a a new culture come into existence um now are we gonna do it in our lifetime well i hope we do enough of it in our lifetime that we can save the planet uh because that's very urgent but will
01:25:22
we well i mean this this kind of project is is it's like the medieval project of building a cathedral you commit to something that is going to be cross-generational not just uh within your own life so i hope we do
01:25:34
enough now that we uh we we we avoid extinction not only of ourselves but of many species uh but i also ask people to
01:25:48
be willing once again to commit to the long-term project of culture the way they have in the past yeah yes so i just wanna quickly mention that there is a project in trondheim city
01:26:07
that we're working on called lifelong the learning society project that is actually a couple to four u.n organizations that we just started this year [Music] anyone want to connect with me about
01:26:19
that you're welcome as well oh oh good i i would like to know about that thank you so we reached our any any final words from uh you gentlemen before we close out for the day
01:26:31
oh thank you thank you and thanks thanks john i i really enjoyed it yeah good yeah me too james i i really enjoyed this
01:26:43
um and it's um it's always i always feel welcome here at the stoa and so thank you for that peter and uh um if you would like to james i would be
01:26:56
happy to do this again at some point in the future i found this very very beneficial and nourishing and so i'd be happy to do it again yeah i would too excellent okay so i'll make some uh closing
01:27:09
announcements related announcements to the talk that just happened here uh before i do that uh on behalf of the whole stoa family in the store village that's for me here john james infinite gratitude and and thanks uh your way
01:27:21
for that wonderful talk which will be on youtube i'll probably post it uh tomorrow so um before i talk about upcoming events we have one in an hour uh sign up to the sub stack and go to a support uh store on patreon if you like
01:27:33
talks like this and we also have a discord now everyone was asking for it so there it is um so in an hour uh our very own tyson wagner is interviewing another tyson that's very very relevant to what
01:27:45
was spoken about today um tyson could you plug that event yes thank you tyson yonkoporta author of sand talk how indigenous thinking can save the world speaking of saving the planet
01:27:57
he will be here at 8 30 eastern time um giving a talk and doing a q a and i know that at least like seven or so people i know personally from this community uh read the book um it's an incredible
01:28:12
book and so i look forward to seeing some of you there and also here at the stoa i am procuring a space for joyful play on mondays called flowing with unknowingness where we get to explore
01:28:24
freestyle self-expression and dialogue through rap in the spoken word and next week that will be at 8 45 immediately following daniel schmuckenberger's event on monday so i'll see you all soon thank
01:28:37
you and thank you tyson and john if you want an experimental way to get into communitas definitely visit the freestyle rap that tyson hosts here this though it's freaking incredible um you can rcp
01:28:48
there the links are in the chat uh david collins you have an event this thursday would you like to speak on that sure um looking forward to especially after tonight um adam robert over the side of you and
01:29:03
i will be having a discussion uh focusing on ways in which socrates practice is a kind of example of an inspiration for um
01:29:14
contemplative practice tonight we talked a bit about understanding plato through the neoplateness i come through the zen tradition and the western uh apophatics the cloud of unknowing in order to understand the neoplatonists
01:29:27
in order to understand plato and and socrates kind of got it started with his claim not to know and invitation to uh have us examine what means most to us
01:29:39
david is that going to be recorded um i'll send you the article too john uh his article is really good i would really like that i would really like that thank you very much and uh the last event it's tomorrow at
01:29:54
that i'll plug it's at 6 30 p.m uh as john mentioned a sort of authentic dialogue wii space type movement uh donna rodriguez who's the kind of the resident stoa space practitioner
01:30:06
she's uh having a session called intersubjective partner meditation that's at 6 30 pm eastern time i think you'd really like this one john it's a different sort of modality that i don't think you've uh experimented with yet but donna's really really knows what she's doing
01:30:18
so that could be found uh right here um so yeah there's there's so many freaking events at the store i can list them all but uh check out the website and uh yeah thank you so much for everyone
01:30:29
coming up today you
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