Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Christianity, Infinity, The Sacred, Relations vs. Objects | John Vervaeke

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

The deepest dive into John Vervaeke's mind, with Curt Jaimungal. Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

All right, how's it going, John? It's good. I'm busy, but it's good busy. Both public and professional interest in my work continues to increase quantitatively and qualitatively. And I'm very, very happy about that. And I'm enjoying everything I'm doing. And the foundation, the Revaki Foundation is doing well and thriving and we've built a platform we're very proud of, the Awakening to Meaning,

which is a whole ecology of practices and courses being taught and things like this. So very, very happy actually. Tell us about the foundation. So the Verveki Foundation is, it's got sort of two mandates. One mandate is to help promote the work that I do, not just the theoretical work, but also the development of practices, contemplative practices, meditative practices, dialogical practices, et cetera. And then the other, which is explicit and constantly

reinforces to help me to remain virtuous as possible through all of this, to not give into the many temptations that are available when people get more attention and more influence and so forth. In particular? Well, there's a temptation to, what we call it, gurification, to become a guru and to start feeling that one is entitled to comment beyond one's areas of legitimated expertise and experience, that people can form a parasocial relationship

where they need you, that's already happening. And I have people that are in parasocial relationships and we're trying to keep that as minimal as possible. How? Well, for example, we have just made a major decision to sort of rein in parts of the Revaki Foundation and have certain parts of it become autonomous within a year, like the Awakened to Meaning platform,

and also to pivot from sort of just getting more people interested. So a pivot from a quantitative emphasis to a qualitative emphasis. Really try to zero in on high quality arguments, high quality work. How do you do the autonomous part and still have it be called a verveki? I assume what you mean is you want to remove yourself from it. Pete Slauson So, the Verveki Foundation is, right now, sort of owns the Awakened to Meaning platform with its ecology. But the idea is we would like Taylor Barrett, who's running it, to eventually be able to run it autonomously, obviously in a good faith partnership with us. But the idea behind that is the

Verveki Foundation would stop managing it in a top-down fashion, and I would just participate in some of the teaching and some of the events. There's this phrase that you've said, which is the advent of the sacred. In other words, the sacred is coming back. That implies the sacred has gone. So where did the sacred go and what is the sacred? Well, maybe I'll answer the second question first, because it'll make it easier to explain where it went, if we know what we're talking about. So I've been very influenced by the Canadian philosopher, and I'll promote

Canadians as much as I can, Schellingberg, and very famous philosopher in these circles. He's responsible for creating one of the new atheist arguments, the hiddenness argument and developing it, but he's not your typical atheist by any means. And he wants to get at a notion of the sacred that I think works because it's open enough for his project, which is what he calls the evolution of religion. His central thesis is that we are actually, it's very plausible that we're very spiritually immature and our grasp on ultimate reality is very tenuous and that we should not be making strong pronouncements about ultimate reality. But he thinks that the proposal that there is an ultimate reality is worth pursuing.

And so, the notion of the sacred develops from that. The sacred is what he calls the triple transcendent, and I like this definition. The sacred is what is ultimately real, so that's the first transcendent. It's transcendentally real in some fashion. Other things are real in terms of it rather than vice versa. It's ultimately transformative. It affords the most powerful transformations that human beings can undergo. And it's ultimately valuable.

It provides the ultimate kind of normative guidance for people. And that often shades into that people don't just have sort of a, um, a cold cognitive relationship to it. They, the relationship is more, they love this reality in some important way. I think that's important because when you mention that to many people who are not religious, they consider that a proposal worth investigating because you can investigate each one of those to a certain degree philosophically and empirically. But traditional religious people also like the definition.

And then what I do with that is I sort of plug in some of the machinery of the theoretical machinery I do about relevance, realization, and meaning in life, and belongingness, and connectedness, and say what sacredness is, is an experience of very significant pronounced meaning because one senses, believes, believe isn't quite the right word, one senses that one is in deep connection to something that's ultimately real. One is being afforded a really pivotal transformation. And that connection to the really real is really helping orient people and giving them sort of a north star by which they can make more specific normative judgments about what's

good, true and beautiful. You said that traditional people like this idea of the sacred. And you plug into this an idea on relevance realization. So there are three pillars and then you add a fourth or a fourth with asterisks because there's some nuance to it. Okay what do the traditionally religious people add to it? So they agree with three, what do they add? Well of course, let's be clear that we're talking about sort of the Abrahamic

tradition, because of course, the idea of the sacred is probably a universal, which means there's something important there. So, I think Schellenberg is actually helpful here too. He talks about the nature of your conception and the strength of ultimacy. So you can have a very, and he gets this notion, although I don't think he ever cites Geertz and I should write him a letter about this. A thick description, this is where you have a lot of features that are well developed about your conception of what the sacred is. You can really give a lot of specific characteristics, etc.

Versus a thin description, which is a lot, usually generally more abstract, less specific, even in that sense, vaguer. You can have a thick or a thin description, and then you can have how strong is your sense of transcendence. If you're very strong, you have the triple transcendent. As you remove these, you get a weaker transcendent. Sorry, wait, if you have all three, you have a strong transcendence? Yes. And as you remove them, you get weaker.

So he, he argues that the best alternative is a thin description of a strong transcendence. This is different from traditional theism that is a strong, that is a thick description of a strong transcendence. And then I would plug into where I think there are problems in that thick description. A lot of, this is not universally the case, but a lot of the way in which traditional theism is taken up into sort of modern, current Christianity, especially Protestant North American Christianity, although I think you can make a similar argument for Catholicism with Aquinas, is the idea of God as an Aristotelian substance. God is an existing individual thing

to which properties belong, and God is the owner and the author of properties and actions. So it's a substance metaphysics and it plugs into the idea that we get at reality with sort of the implicit logic within language, a subject predicate logic. So you have substance and properties that match onto subject and predicate, you know, and so you get God is therefore, let me make one more thing clear. Many people, when they hear the word substance, they still hear stuff. But the original idea of substance, the prototypical example for Aristotle of a substance was a person. As a person is considered to be something that is always the subject and never a predicate. So I can say, you know, John is a man or John

is tall, but I can't say, oh, the tree is John, unless I'm speaking metaphorically or something like that. Right? And so, what you're looking for is you're looking for things that are not predicates, they're not properties, they're the owners or possessors of properties, and that's what's most real. So, God is a super person, a super subject, a super actor, a super thing, a super individual, independently existing thing. And that's also sort of standard theism. I think that is a very,

very problematic notion because it doesn't sit well with the kind of ontology I think we're moving towards philosophically and scientifically, which is an ontology that is also more accommodating to the kinds of ontology that have been more developed in Asiatic philosophy, especially Zen Buddhism, Taoism. And so what I think a common thread that's emerging is this idea that reality is ultimately relational. What's ultimate about reality is relationality. So it's not that there are things between which relations emerge, there are relations out of which things emerge. Relations between what then? So it would be relations between how things can be related to themselves.

This is like Kierkegaard's notion of the self. The self is a relation that relates to itself. So if you think at the heart of the Aristotelian substance, what is the self? You're very hard pressed to point to a thing that's bounded and limited and not in relation. Like for example, we understand the self in terms of self-consciousness. The consciousness is somehow relating to itself. And by the way, notice the question you asked. I can equally ask you the other thing.

How do you get relations out of things? Have you heard of Yonita's Lemma? No. Okay. In category theory, this is the hallmark result in category theory, is that an object is specified by the totality of its relations uniquely. So that is to say, if you were to give me the relations, I can give you the object. If you give me the object, I can give you the relations. But there's a dual relationship there. So you can speak about the object or you could speak about the relations.

That's right. And this is why in category theory, you have a relation that's defined from one place to another. It's called morphisms. So whenever you're saying a relation, but you're saying, well, relations are fundamental, relations are defined in terms of their objects, but you can have objects without relations. You can? How?

So you just have an object, but you don't specify its relations. Give me an example of an object. Like a real object or an abstract object. Either one. So you just have a set. A set of things, which is an inherently relational entity. Like an empty set. An empty of things, which is an inherently relational entity. Like an empty set. An empty of things.

So you've got a relationship because emptiness is not a thing, it's pointing to a relationship between existence and a lack thereof. The point I'm going to make is every time you try and explain something, you're going to fall back into intelligibility. And then intelligibility is a system that has no relation of difference. And the point, the problem with that is you can't get relation out of that. I have two objects, okay? Where's the relation?

Does it belong to this object? Well, no, because then it could have the relation without the other object. Does it belong to this one? Well, then no. Oh, it's a relationship. It's a relationship. It's a relationship. It's a relationship.

It's a relationship. It's a relationship. It's a relationship. It's a relationship. Does it belong to this object? Well, no, because then it could have the relation without the other object. Does it belong to this one? Well, then no. Oh, it emerges between them, how? What does it emerge from? What does that mean? Do they have sort of potential relationality in them?

Well, how can that be? Because they exist independent. Like this is Filler's extended argument. You can't get relations out of objects. You always, always, always have identity and difference, intelligibility and indeterminacy bound up together. You're speaking philosophically, but I'm just speaking in terms of specifying something in a math sense. So I don't understand why you can't just say A, like the set A or the set B.

So I'm trying to get you to understand that you're acting as if there is just pure demonstrative reference there, right? Which is this. You're just pointing, right? Because if you give it any kind of category, you're putting it into relation. Is that, is that okay as an argument? So you're saying like, if I'm to talk about something, it's as if I'm tagging it with other properties.

Of course. You're noticed in even to pick it out as a there, you're putting it into relation of, of, uh, like, what did you call it? Places where it is not. it into relation of, like, what did you call it? Places where it is not. Note that the Yonita Lemma applies only in the case of something called locally small categories, meaning that for any two objects, the morphisms, or relations, can be thought of as sets. That's not ordinarily stated and I thought it should be. Like what did you call it? Places where it is not.

And salience is a relation. It is how things stand out against a background. Would you say that there's a possible world of a single electron? So right now we assume there's more than one electron. I mean, you could have the same, it's actually the same electron going back and forth, but whatever. For the sake of this, we think there's multiple electrons here, multiple protons. Would you say that as a thought experiment, would you be willing to concede there could be a universe with a single electron? Well, it wouldn't be a universe. It would be nothing other than the electron. And of

course, there'd be no way of knowing it as an electron. Yeah, there'd be no way of us knowing it as an electron. I agree, because we're not a part of that. There would be no way of anything knowing it in principle. So how can I conceive of something that is in principle unknowable? You would say that that's not a possible world. I think what you're doing is you're imagining relations of time and space in which there's a single thing floating around.

Sure. But that's not what you're positing. You're positing something that bears no temporal, spatial. Okay, no, let's say no, you need space and time to specify the electron. Then you've got that the electron, is it what it is totally and completely when it's in one space and place, or is it determined? It can move around. Okay, now it's inherently relational. This is step one.

Now let's remove the electron and just talk about space and time. Right. Can there be a universe, and just talk about space and time. Right. Can there be a universe, a possible universe of space and time? Empty. Do you think space and time are objects? I'm asking you. I don't, okay, fair enough. I wouldn't even use the word object because then we'd have to define object.

I think time and space are exactly fundamental realities that are fundamentally relational that we get into endless paradox when we try to capture them in subject predicate logic. And we try to think of them as if they are substances that bear properties. And that's how we get into all we get Zeno's paradoxes and we get all these other paradoxes because they are inherently relational. Okay. Please help me understand what relation is. Relation what, so there's a sense in which I can't specify it in terms of anything other

than relation if my, without falling into performative contradiction, because I'm arguing that it's, it's the ultimate thing, thing, right? But what I mean is that by which you can find something intelligible. So objects and relations are not dual to one another. Objects depend on relations in a way that relations don't depend on objects? I think it's the case that objects are dependent on relations, but that doesn't mean that they don't.

They, if you think of objects as a way in which relations are altering how they are related to themselves, which is getting into tricky language, then it's the case that objects are a way in which relations are transformed or changed, but the objects still ultimately depend on the relations, yes. Do you believe reductionists conflate existence, fundamentality and realness, or just realness and fundamentality? realness or just realness and fundamentality or neither?

I think there's a conflation in reductionism between, I think there's a performative contradiction in reductionism in that there's an implicit presupposition of the binding of explicit presupposition of the binding of the irremovable relation, the non-logical binding and identity between intelligibility and realness without including intelligibility in the definition or the understanding of realness. And so you get a notion of fundamental mentality, which is supposed to ultimately give you a sense of it serves as an explanatory base for everything else, but you haven't properly included intelligibility in your model of reality. And that is how you get into a deep performative contradiction.

Please explain to me what intelligibility is. So intelligibility is how you can understand things such that knowledge about them is possible. So for example, one of the things that's wrong with a lot of reductionism is it uses what I call standard naturalism, which is we derive our ontology from our scientific frameworks. So our ontology has to be what is derivable from our fundamental physics. Perhaps you loosen that up a bit on fundamental physics and chemistry and biology or whatever. There's variations on that, but that's not relevant to my argument. But notice what's not being accounted for there, but which is being presupposed. Well, you know what is being presupposed?

Scientists doing science. And what do the scientists need to do science? Well, there has to be real information. There has to be real patterns. There has to be real measurement. There has to be real debate. There has to be real criticism. There has to be real meaning.

There has to be real truth. There has to be real rationality. And then where is that in your fundamental ontology? It's not. But if you don't have those things, you can't actually explain how you have the knowledge you have. The knowledge is hanging out here in some nebulous non-ontological space, or sometimes you just put it dualistically into the mind and then you have a horrible ontology.

It's just there. And this would be the case even for an instrumentalist or a pragmatist? In what way? You'd be a little bit more clear what you mean by that. I mean, it's the case that if they think they're not talking about anything real, their ontology is not going to be reductionist, right? Their ontology is going to be reducible just to the level at which they are doing. What they may say is that, what is this real that you're talking about?

All I know is that when I do so-and-so, so-and-so seems to happen. And we have some correlations or some patterns and it helps us get by. So what is this real? Like we can talk about maybe we're getting closer to the truth, whatever that means, but that would be the closest we can get to even speaking about what is because to say what is, we'd have to presume some definition of realness. A tremendous performative contradiction, right? Because what they're saying is, oh, I'm not making use of real. Why are they doing what they're doing? Why are they doing what they're doing?

Because they think there's a better explanation. Even if it stays within the domain of, I don't know what to call it, everyday experience. Well, they could be doing what they're doing because they want to have sex and ultimately somehow it leads to bed. It has what? Actual causal changes to their ability to interact. There's always a crypto measure of how I'm judging that things are real, that I'm getting a better explanation, that I'm getting more control over my environment. I can more reliably achieve the goals I want.

But you're always standing back and saying, but how do you know any of that? How do you know that that's the case? Oh well, because I do this and this and this, and when I don't do that, I might be deceived, or it might be mere appearance, but when I do these things, I can have more confidence. Soon as you're making any kind of epistemic choice

where you're placing more confidence in one thing rather than another and choosing one thing over another, you have an implicit criterion of realness. Firstly, I'm not an instrumentalist nor pragmatist. Are you defining real? Do you have a definition of real in your mind that you're- Real is a comparative term, right? So, like it's like- So and so is more real than something.

Right. And, and, and also vice versa. If I say that is an, an error or that's an illusion or that's a delusion, I only can do it in contrast and comparison to something I point at and say, this is not a delusion, this is not an error, this is true, this is how things are. Even the instrumentalists can't believe that the experience of looking at their instruments is fundamentally an illusion.

What are they basing their instrumentalism on? Well, I don't think the instrumentalist would say that what they're doing is even knowledge. They may just say, what are you talking about? What is this talk of real and knowledge? This just happens to happen. This is correlated with so-and-so. I get to work. Did they know that before they did their practice that there was a correlation?

Are they right about that? Could they be wrong about it? Their claim that they're not making any knowledge claim is duplicitous because of course somebody can come along and say, hey, you're actually wrong about that correlation. We did a bigger study. It turns out that correlation isn't there. So they could be wrong, they can be right, and they claim to know something. They claim to know the correlation.

They're not getting out of this. The claim about real being relational X is real only in relation to Y or more real. Is that itself a relational claim? Yes. Exactly. So real is like tall, right? You're always doing, you're drawing, you're making. It's not unintelligible to say that's tall.

It's unintelligible to say imagine a universe in which there's one thing and it's tall. Okay, well, in this case, it would be like saying so-and-so is taller. Okay, Adam is taller than Sarah. Right. But me saying that is taller than so-and-so. Like you saying X is more real than Y.

Is there a reality to that statement such that that statement alone can be in comparison to something else? So is there, what do you mean by reality? Does it really refer or like does it refer to something that exists independent of the statement what do you mean okay if you have that this microphone here is more real than then our idea of the microphone let's just say that okay this microphone here is more real than what we think of as the microphone yes okay that statement would you ascribe reality to that statement? To the statement about that you can compare between two objects, some relation that says that they're real, this one's more real than this one.

Is that itself subject to that comparison? Of course it is. Because notice, is this something that, do you know that you made that statement? Is that statement connected and does it explain other things that you do? Is it explainable by other beliefs you have? Of course, to the degree to which it unpacks intelligibility, you attribute realness to it. The trouble is though, I'm sure you know naive realism, which says that what's real is independent

of our minds. Sure. Okay. Automatically, you're saying that's not even, that doesn't even count as real. So the problem with the question is it presupposes the substance metaphysics I'm rejecting, right? It's saying that there's things that exist and they exist as they do, completely independent of how we know them. And I don't know what that means.

But that's not the same thing as saying, I'm an idealist and saying, oh, well, you know, there's no difference between that because that also removes the relation. It's like, no, no, there's a real relationship between my knowing the thing and the thing. They're bound together in the knowledge, in the truth. I don't know what it would mean to say that the thing is either completely independent of how I know it. What would that mean? Could it be? So what I mean to say is, I know that you're saying, I don't know. Okay, in that sentence alone, I don't know.

I as the subject cannot know so-and-so. Maybe you're already removing this distinction. Yeah. Okay. But I'm saying that embedded in that sentence already rejects the independent notion of realism because you're saying, I don't know it. But there's a, but just because you don't know it doesn't mean it couldn't be. Now I'm Now of course

there could be unicorns. There could be so and so. I'm just saying, what would be the consequence of something... So in physics there's magnets and they have a polarity and there's no such thing as a magnetic monopole. There's no such thing as you can't just find one north. Turns out if you did, there would be drastic effects for all the rest of physics, like electric charge would be quantized, which it actually is, and that may be one of the explanations. But just the fact of one single monopole has implications for physics.

So what I'm saying is, is there some implication in your ontology that if there was something real that was independent of minds, there would be some consequence? Yes, of course. Maybe you don't observe this consequence, but what would that consequence be? And is it desirable? What, like, how do you feel about that consequence? What is it? Well, first of all, I want to point out what you just did. You made an implicit judgment about the, how real that fact, let's call it about,

uh, the monopole would be. And notice that you said, well, that makes it very important because it would, has the potential and you're moving towards notice if it's a nexus of a tremendous amount of intelligibility, it, you know, a lot of reality is wrapped up in it. Okay. So the fact that things could exist independent of any sentient being, is that the gist of your question or just me? Because I'm, I'm

independent of John. No, no, no. So sentience means, means subject or consciousness or pain and pleasure or what? Let's make it a little bit better. There's a capacity for some sense making that affords some kind of basic agency. Yeah. Sure. So, one of the things that would be the case, presumably, if I admit that things can exist without there being sentient beings, which I do, is that I might be able to discover

properties in those non-sentient things that could help me explain how sentient things emerged or came to be. You care ultimately about sentience. If it didn't, you wouldn't care about it or? Well I couldn't. I'd be in a, how could I? If I didn't have sentience, how could I? Oh no, no. What I meant is, oh, this is getting quite abstract if it wasn't abstract already. But this outside fact that we're saying we're going to pause it perhaps exists, perhaps, independent of minds, independent of sentience. And you're saying, okay well I care about that to the degree that it influences sentience. And I'm saying, well let me

let you finish your thought, I apologize. So I wanted to say it is possible within sentience, and we could play with that, to draw conclusions about what is beyond sentience, but they only are understood within sentience. Right? That's not naive realism. Naive realism says, no, it's only the way my experience and the way it is are just one and the same. It's like, no, no, I've got to do a lot of things precisely become a, I'm a realist. Well, what does that mean? I believe error is real. I believe that although I can't ever leap out of sentience, leap out of

sense making and a view from nowhere state what the truth is, I don't think that makes any sense whatsoever. It's nevertheless the case that I can be wrong because how I'm talking about the world will show up within, you know, propositional or performative contradictions, which is what we're wrestling with right now, right? Within how things make sense to me or other people. I don't think there's a contradiction there. So that's what I mean. If you think that it's, I don't think the question is,

can things exist outside of sentience? Because that presupposes the possibility of a standpoint that you can take. The question is, can we learn about things that are not themselves dependent on our sentience? Yes, of course we can. Because if there were no such things, there'd be no error within our sense making.

Do you admit that there's a non-identity between error and truth? Yeah. Okay, so there's a, I'll use your metaphors, although I'm saying, I keep saying I'm uncomfortable with them, there's something out there and it impacts and I get an error, right? Now that doesn't mean I've got the absolute Sorry, what do you mean? There's something out there and it impacts and you get an error

What do you mean? I make a prediction of my experiment and the prediction is disconfirmed Even though everything has made sense. My hypothesis makes great sense. It all fits together. Here's all the lit review I've done all this. Oh crap. It's false. Error doesn't work. Okay. Now have I leapt out of intelligence and sense making and intelligibility?

No, I'm still bound with that. That's how I recognize the error, but it tells me that that's that I, what I'm in is not a substance. It's not self-sufficient. It's in relationship. It's, it's inherently in relationship to something other than itself. We keep wanting knowledge to do an impossible thing. We keep wanting it to take us out of intelligibility while making sense to us.

And I, as long as we pose questions like that, we are doomed to fail because that's a, that's a performative contradiction. Why do we keep wanting it? I think, I mean, Evan Thompson and is in the new book, the blind spot in which he makes an argument convergent with this argument that I've been making. We recently recorded a conversation that'll be released on my channel.

John Rovecki, search it on YouTube and the link is in the description. It's on screen right now. And just so you know, I'm just telling you what occurs to me. I'm not a believer in- Am I doing anything to indicate that that's not how I'm taking it? No, I just want you to know. I'm enjoying this. This is, this is exactly it. Um,

so, okay. You made a statement that we want knowledge. We want to somehow get to use Nagel's famous phrase. We want to, we want to get to the view from nowhere. Um, and that is because, and Evan makes a very good, well, Evan and his co-authors, and I forget their names, forgive me for that. Um, it's because we have, we adopted a substantialist theism in which there was a super agent, a super person, a super observer, a super knower

that was somehow outside of it all and could see it all from the smallest to the greatest from nowhere. And we bound our notion of knowledge and realness to that ideal. And even for people, this is, this is a weird irony, right? knowledge and realness to that ideal. And even for people, this is, this is a weird irony, right? Many physicists who of course would reject the theistic God, they're still running with that functionality. That that's the, that's the measure. That's what we want.

We want to somehow get the God's eye point of view on things, because only that will count as real. Everything else is merely subjective. And that is just a tortured, convoluted way of thinking. Not only is it epistemologically problematic for all the reasons we've talked about, what is it, how could you step outside of it and yet it makes sense within, right? And it's also theologically, like where the heck is God and how does he have this relation? And you have to invoke constant miracles, which is like, and I'm not besmirching religion, you know I respect religion, but like that can't be your sort of fundamental standpoint

for making your, having your ultimate model of how you decide what is ultimately real. It just strikes me as just absurd, actually. You can't make sense of it. I can't make sense of it because, well, again, when you point out that there's a contradiction for God, right? Well, how does God know it if He's separate from it? Well, God knows it because He's omnipotent and He has the power to remain separate while still being in connection.

It's like, okay. Matthew 5 You don't think contradictions can exist? Dr. Seifert I didn't say that. I mean, I think contradictions can exist in, if you mean, are there paradoxes that point to unavoidable trade-off relationships in reality? I think that's a genuine reference. What I mean is, let's take the view from nowhere and let's pretend, see that fireplace in front of us, which you all can't see, but they're different colored bricks.

The world has facts and then those facts are colored with either true or false, just for the sake of this. In this case right now, this only true or false, because there's no brick there that's both brown and black in this case. We look in the corner, we see one that's actually colored brown and black simultaneously. So that's a fact about the world that's contradictory. So what I'm saying is, do you think there can be facts about the world that are actually contradictory? Not it's contradictory because we're just limited

beings and from our point of view, it's red and blue at the same time, but when you look closer from a different angle, oh, they separate or oh, it's pointing to something else. It's giving us clues. And I'm saying, do you believe there are facts in the world that are contradictory? And they don't explode, meaning that when you have one contradictory fact, it doesn't then make everything else rendered to be the case. Yeah. So that, let me make sure we're agreeing. If I understand you, you're saying that there would be sort of islands of intelligibility

that are incommensurable with each other. Well intelligibility is... You can make sense of this fact and you can make sense of this fact, but you can't make sense of the two facts together. Okay. So you're not saying, you're not saying these are two different people who have different... No, no, no. We're talking about the things we're referring to, not the agents doing the referring. So it's like, here's, this is what I hear you say. I'm saying there's a contradiction

in fact, not a contradiction between my beliefs. There's a contradiction in fact. You kept saying the word facts. And so that means there's a fact here, which means a fact is, well, what do we mean by a fact? Well, we mean an intelligible reality. That's what a fact is. Because a fact isn't like, you know, a piece of wood or it's an intelligible reality. So here's an intelligible reality. Here's another intelligible reality, but there's no intelligible relation between them. No, I'm saying that this intelligible reality is both the case and not the case. What do you mean both the case and not the case. What do you mean both the case and not the case?

So it's both true and not true. So this is why I wouldn't use the word intelligible reality. I would just say fact. And I understand that you would have objections to the word fact. So that's why I'm saying, can you jump back to verveci 20 years ago? Okay. And understand whatever naive verveci. This is why is verveki on the mountain. Okay? There's naïve verveki from 20 years ago. Okay, that guy, I'm sure you still have some connection

to that guy. You could still somewhat model that guy. Go back, model that guy. That guy had an idea about facts and the world and the correspondence theory of truth. Okay. So let's just imagine something like that's correct. Okay. Is that person, now that person looks at the whole canvas of potential facts. They're either call it in the classical sense. That's what I'm saying. This is such a thought experiment. In the classical sense, it's every fact is either true or false. Fine. We can put question marks on some facts that are ill-defined. Fine. Okay. I'm asking, this person sees a fact that is red and blue. Okay. Well, first of all, those aren't contradictions. Those are contraries, right? It would have

to be blue and not blue. That's a contradiction. So, contraries are not contradictions. There's no problem with things having contraries. I color true and not true with the red and blue. Yeah. So it would, it would, it would be the accurate description to be, it would be blue and not blue. And yeah, I think, I think that's impossible. Okay.

And, and the reason I think it's impossible is because I don't think there are islands of intelligibility. Uh, and this is a Spinoza'sinoza's argument because you could not bring them together such to see that they were incommensurable because you'd have to bring them into some relationship by which you could understand them together and then you're already undermining the very thing you're claiming. Like it would be, did that make sense? It's- Like, it would be, did that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just, look, I'm not saying there exists contradictory facts, but there are logics,

like para-consistent logic I'm sure you know of. Of course, and priest work is important, but priest doesn't talk about, like, he talks about when, but he doesn't, he's not promiscuous. He doesn't say like everywhere. He says, well, where you get into paradox, where you are in these trade-off relationships where you can't stabilize, right? So let's use one of his examples. Is the boundary a part of a thing or not? Well, if it's part of a thing, then you need a boundary that includes the boundary.

Oh, well, then it's not part of a thing. But if it's not part of the thing, how does it bound the thing? He gives those kind of examples. They're like Nicholas of Cusa, an infinite circle is also a straight line, right? And what you get is, yeah, there seems to be elements of trade-off relationships. And maybe the trade-off relationship,

maybe some of them have to do with Godelian things. You can't get a formal description that is simultaneously consistent and complete, or it could be that there is a continual trade-off between bias and variance. There's all these fundamental trade-off relationships. That's what my work on relevant realization says. If you're saying, do we get these tensions in our sense making that point to there are trade off relationships, probably in reality? I think that's true.

Yes. But that's why I didn't have any problem with contraries. But when you were saying contradiction, that's where I was getting locked. I spoke to priest and I went through his work, some of his work, not his whole, yeah, oeuvre, but some of his work and I spoke to him for a few hours. He never once used the word trade-off. He used the word contradiction. Mm hmm. Yeah, he does. Well, that's why I was careful to say not explodes. So that is that the presence of

a single contradiction doesn't explode the rest, doesn't then poison the well. Right. And he also was willing to use the word paradox, which he also uses. I guess I'm objecting. I guess I want to posit a distinction between contradiction, which we just simply regard as impossible. And paradox is where we say, no, no, what happens is we're trading between true truths, not a truth and a falsity like you were doing, which I didn't, right? But we're trading between true truths and we can't ultimately reconcile them. And that I think is because we're sort of bottoming out on the sort of fundamental principles

we're using to try and make sense of it. Some paradoxes eventually get resolved, right? Because people are able to step outside of the implicit system intelligibility they're using. So the Greeks had a problem with change. How could anything possibly change? Cause it has to come out of non-existence and go into existence or go in from existence into

non-existence, then that's parmenides. And then what happened is you had to make a shift between existence and non-existence, and Aristotle introduced actuality and potentiality, which broadened the notion of existence in a way in which things can be moving between actuality and potentiality and removes the paradox. So, the problem we have with these paradoxes, and by the way, I think very highly of Prius' work, is it's hard to know whether or not

we're epistemically bound permanently, like they represent that's just the way reality is binding us, or that we're just bound culturally historically. And so it's always difficult, you have to be very, very wary when you hit these things about saying this paradox is like irremovable and therefore there's something important.

Like for example, what does it mean when you say, let's say you take it, no, Godot, that's really, really the case. And then you get this, okay, so we get this thing that, well, we can't actually get any formal system that's gonna get us what we want. And then the idea is you can either regard that as a paradox or you can say, well, maybe we have to open up reality

and conceive of reality not being fully capturable by any possible formal system. And that could be a way out of what seems like an irremovable paradox. The reason for saying that is because you do get into this situation like this. Any, any fundamental principle of intelligibility is not something you can itself understand. What are you going to use to understand it? You can't get anything beneath it or behind it in terms of which you understand it.

You understand everything else in terms of it, but you can't get anything beneath it or behind it in terms of which you understand it. You understand everything else in terms of it, but you can't actually understand it. Have you heard of Munchausen's trilemma? No. So Munchausen has a syndrome. Yes. Okay. He also has a trilemma.

Very tortured life, you must have heard. Apparently I should read the story because apparently bootstrapping also comes from. Yes, it does. I know that. Yeah. So the trilemma is for any explanation, there are actually three ways out. So one is to say you have some brute fact you have to accept as an article of faith or dogma and then you build up from there.

Yeah. But there are two other routes. So one is infinite regress. Yes. Which is people just say no to it. They don't even think of that as a possibility because they've said no to it so much. They don't even think of that as a possibility because they've said no to it so much. They don't even notice that it's there. The other is circularity. But there may also be a fourth of just coherence.

Like it locally makes sense and you don't have an idea of it globally and you update this doesn't fit over here and then you're just constantly moving along like a spider on a web adjusting. Yeah, yeah, that's Quine's model. Yeah. And what follows from that? You were saying that we can't understand our understanding because what would you use to understand that? Let's say there's some like whatever it is that makes understanding possible. There's some, I'll just use a very vague, there's, there's a principle to

reality that makes it intelligible, right? And it can very vague, there's a principle to reality that makes it intelligible, right? And it can't be just in reality, it has to be in our mind or we have some horrible solipsism or skepticism. So we have this comprehensive, beyond the subjective objective divide principle that makes intelligibility possible. What could we use to understand that? There's nothing because we can't, we're back to the view from over.

We're trying to step out and look at the very thing that makes us capable of looking at things. And we can't do it. This is an old Neil Platonic argument in fact, now, but you can't abandon the principle because you're presupposing that there is such a thing because you're presupposing that there's an integrated system of intelligibility. So there has to be something that accounts for the integration, but it can't be accounted for within the system of intelligibility.

This is also a conclusion that you get in several Asiatic philosophies, which I find really important because you got what look like historically distinct convergences on this same sort of realization. In the West, it's quite straightforward and socially acceptable to critique the Abrahamic religions. Yes. Yes. Yep. Such an enlightened person.

But there's so much hush hush around Eastern religions. So when I say Eastern, I mean... Well, no, they should be critiqued too. Okay. So let's... What are your issues with... Like, there's so many Eastern religions. Well, I didn't claim to be exhaustive.

I named a few that I've studied. Yes, yeah. Let's say that it goes Abraham versus Vedic. Now, is that correct? Would Daoism fall into historical into Vedism? So I know, I mean, I think that the, for me, and the one where there's already existing scholarship in the Kyoto school is Zen over here and the Abrahamic religion is here. Zen is an integration of Taoism and Buddhism and elements of Shinto. And so, right, so it's got, it's a very rich. So where do you see they have it as incomplete or incorrect? The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao.

That's the beginning of the Tao Te Ching. That which makes everything understandable can't be spoken because you can't get outside of it and use something to speak about it. But that sounds like what you were saying, no? That's what exactly that's my point. Yeah, that's exactly I'm saying that there's this realization that the fundamental principle of intelligibility that by which you understand things can't it can't itself be understood because there is nothing by means of which you can make it intelligible to yourself. There's nothing that you can bring it into relationship with, because it is that that makes all such relationships possible.

There's an analogy that's used and don't push it because you've got a background in physics, but it's like the idea that you don't actually see light. You, you see how you see everything in terms of light. Light is itself invisible, but you, you see everything in terms of how things are reflected in light. And the idea is intelligibility. The of how things are reflected in light. The idea is intelligibility, the ground of intelligibility is like light and then how things are visible to us is intelligibility itself.

I want to tell you about myself. Okay. A personal fact. I enjoy, like terribly enjoy theories that are not just unexpected, but are opposite of what you think. So not just they're creative, but they take something that most people believe and they say, no, not only is it wrong, it's maximally wrong. To some degree, I'm doing that with you right now. I'm going to ask you about that.

So I'll give you an example. One would be recently I went to this conference called MindFest about artificial intelligence and consciousness. And Hartmut Neven, who runs the Google AI lab, I think he's the CTO of Google's AI lab. So he's the chief technology officer, he's the head guy. He said, you know how Hameroff believes, firstly, quite a wild belief in the field of, it's not, there's no consensus on it, that consciousness is formed when the superposition collapses. He's like, no, no, no, actually, I think consciousness is formed when you form a single narrative

of the world, and so it happens when you join to, so when you form a superposition. I just like that in spirit. Not that I believe him, but I just like that in spirit. Not that I believe him, but I just like, I never thought about that, that actually it's when a superposition is formed rather than collapsed. Well, can I observe something back to you then? And this also goes to what I was trying to argue. We actually have two different phenomenological senses of real. And you're actually doing both of them right here. So it's, is the, when we use these, like these

words, like confirmation and it's the sense of everything starts, everything gels and hangs together. And then we also have the sense of, Oh, that, that completely surprised me. Therefore it must be real because it's outside all of my biases and all my subjectivity. And these two, that they, like we, we, we, we say real and yet they're not logically

identical to each other, right? They, they point to two different aspects. They point to, right. Well, there is a coming together of things that's intelligibility, but there's something, we always know there's something deeper beyond that from which that intelligibility is coming, which is always surprising. Now the thing is you can't bottom out the surprise. This is, this is what I'm proposing to you.

Reality, one of the most reliable features of reality is it seems to be inexhaustible and inexhaustible fount of intelligibility, which is how we frequently distinguish the real from the merely illusory. And this is Polanyi's argument. I didn't come up with it. This is his view.

It's like, well, you know, it's a dream object because you can sort of investigate it and it bottoms out. There's no more properties there. But you find a real thing and you can explore it for the rest of the history of the universe and unpack properties and relations and potentials that you never conceived of. Well, I'm not even sure about that because some people,

it's unfortunate if you get to this case where you're just continually psychoanalyzing the same dream over and over because you're hung up on something. And there seems to be a richness to some dreams. Well, but that's not in the phenomenology of the dream object. That's in terms of right the... Afterward integrating it with yourself. Yeah, yeah.

And it's how it fits into people's lives and then how it fits into people's world. And that's starting to get real. I'm going to, in the interest of time, combine two of my questions. One about the oppositeness this which another example because you Mentioned light which made me think about it. We used to think light was the most pure. Yeah, the Newton came along and said No, it's actually the maximal mutt the most that's it's mixed creates white. So what's an example of Something you now believe the complete opposite of than perhaps 20 years ago old Vervecky. And furthermore, I want it to have come from Jonathan Pageau.

I believe because of Jonathan Pageau. Is that what you're asking me? Okay. It could also be Paul Van der Klee. Well, I can point to something that where they really, I took a, I think I took a very deep criticism they both made of my work. I took it very seriously. So I don't even have to go back 20 years. I can go back John Vervicki 2018 before I made Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. And this has been extremely fruitful. It explodes.

Okay. I did everything in that series from an individualistic, monological framework. And Jonathan and Paul immediately said, but what? But most of what's going on requires a group, a community, an ecclesia. And it was like, what? And I realized, oh no, I still had this cartoon. So I've been criticizing all these other aspects of Descartes and I still have one of his fundamental assumptions that, right, that, right, that cognition, even reason is done individualistically in a monological fashion.

Didn't you reference Damasio and, and Hugo in the series itself? That's about emotionality, but I'm talking about distributed cognition. And although I talked about extended mind, I didn't draw any implication for the science, right? The attempt to understand our understanding. Let me make it more specific. This is now part of my work. There's increasing evidence that we actually reason best by sort of standard experimental measures of reasoning when we do it dialogically rather than monologically.

I don't talk about that anywhere in this series, but I should have. That's an important realization. And what that then meant for me is, oh, I need to be talking, developing, finding, investigating, engineering with other people, dialogical practices. In part though, because the SFI has a great saying, which is that what you need to be is a madman who's alone on the mountain and then come back to people and have your ideas tested. Yeah, but you see that doesn't even work because the madman, and we've got evidence from Grossman,

the Solomon effect, we've got Baltes and Stalinger. You reason better even when you're the madman on the mountain when you imagine talking to other people other than yourself. Sure. Yeah. You're inherently dialogical. Yeah. on the mountain when you imagine talking to other people other than yourself. Sure. Yeah. You're inherently dialogical. Yeah. And those are reliable effects too. In fact, you can even do that with somebody who's, this is your grossman's work. Somebody is facing a really difficult problem and they can't get out

of it. And you say, we describe that same problem from the third person perspective of a friend of yours, from that, their perspective, and the person will almost always get an insight. So I pivoted and started doing a deep investigation into the, the dialogical self, the importance of dialogical practices. And that made me see things in Plato that John Ravichy all the way back to 1980, taking a class on Plato had not seen. Why the dialogue is not just an artistic ornament. It is absolutely indispensable for Plato's philosophy. Now in math, sure you can have these insights, but you also then need to sit down and think

alone, like hard with spinning 10 plates. And if you were to talk to one person, you can get insights, but you also need to then verify. And I know from practice, I know in my bones, it's extremely difficult to do almost any deep work when someone else is around. Like just even- Well, wait. Yeah. So there are periods when you're talking and I'm silent, right? And there's periods where I'm talking and you're silent. And so it doesn't mean that we're always in each other's presence talking to each other. But when you're verifying, right, are you verifying just what possibly Kurt wants to

see? Or are you thinking about potential criticisms that other people might be asking? Yeah, it's plenty of that, but it's also, it's just, it's not even quite clear what I'm thinking. Right. And so notice that you're actually doing something that is really intriguing. And this is, there's actually some interesting work emerging around this. You're usually talking to yourself and it helps.

And it's something like, somehow when I talk to myself, I get answers that I didn't know before I talked to myself. Yes. And that means that even at these most silent, most introspective moments, we are inherently dialogical in nature. But, but, but you're do and I am grateful for it. Is this okay that he's

Bernardo, it's always on Bernardo's lap. Bernardo Castro. So, uh, this is speedy. He's eponymously named. So you're, you're doing the very thing and I appreciate it. So I'm not criticizing, I'm observing, right? You are, you're, you're, you're sort of giving voice as you should to the intuition of the monadic, monological

self. But as we go into the most inner recesses, we keep finding it being inherently dialogical, which is part of another broader argument that the prototypical example of a substance, which is a self, is inherently relational because it's inherently dialogical in nature. Well, to quibble with that, please wouldn't be that you've demonstrated that the self is inherently dialogical. You've argued that internal dialogue helps.

Right. So to say that the self was inherently dialogical, it was to say that, I mean. It subserves. And by the way, I don't think even the former, waken from the meaning crisis of Verveki would have denied the amounts that internal dialogue aids. Oh, but that wasn't your question to me, to be fair. You asked me something that I didn't know or didn't believe, and that's something I didn't know or didn't believe. I wouldn't have denied it. They didn't deny it. Yeah, the dialogical and the inherent.

With an other person. Yeah, yeah, and even within. So when I did the next series after Socrates, I had a whole episode around what I called the Socratic shift, was this shift towards what I thought Plato was actually representing that I had not seen before. Even though I had been a devoted disciple of Socrates, I hadn't seen this inherently dialogical nature. Going back to naive realism, I was watching a talk of yours, which is, I think, and this came from me from Matthew Widen, the most dense recapitulation of your world view, your Veltan showing, if I may, of any of the lectures that I've seen and it's one on neoplatonism and it's you with

Greg Henrichs, but yes, but he's not actually speaking until the end. And I'll leave a link in the description, it's on screen right now. And in it you mentioned, okay, there's the measurement problem and Wolfgang Smith says so- so and then you like what Wolfgang Smith said about so and so, about the measurement problem. Now here's an issue that I have, not with you, but just in general with anyone, is that Wolfgang Smith has a Weltanschauung of proposition A to proposition Z. Sure, sure. I understand it's not supposed to be thought of like that, it's not propositional, no,

I get it. I get it Okay, whatever he has perspectival Z and Participatory H but he sees and almost everyone sees their own worldview as all of these a to Z's propositions perspective whatever as tying in together and inter relating and you can't just pluck one out and then if you were to accept proposition J, it would lead you to L and K if you truly thought about proposition A and so on. But then I see other people like Jonathan Pajol, like yourself, like anyone on the internet,

they'll say, I like what this person is saying. I think this is correct. And let me take that. Well, be fair to me. I don't just remove the proposition. I bring the argument for the proposition along. So then... Because that's a different thing.

Yeah, let me finish. Let me finish. That's some dilettante. Let me finish. So Wolfgang Smith is a self-reported naive realist and he ties his naive realism to God. He's a Catholic, I think. Wolf reported naive realists and he ties his naive realism to God. Mm-hmm. He's a Catholic, I think. You were taking one of the arguments from him saying that, look, we're at a different

ontological level as the measurement device. We are measureers and what's being measured is different. He gets to that from a different place. That's right. Okay. So do you just believe, and this isn't a criticism of you, it's criticism of myself, it's criticism of everyone, but do you believe then Wolfgang is just mistaken? Jonathan Peugeot is mistaken.

Are you willing to go that far to say that? It's okay. I think almost by definition, whatever we think, we believe it's correct, even in us saying that we may be wrong. We believe we're correct and that we may be wrong. We believe we're correct in that we may be wrong. Yeah. And I would say that I think they're mistaken on the understanding that they should be saying the same back to me. Right?

And look, if dialogue is, I don't even like the English word because it sounds like something people do at cafes. If dialogos is really possible, I can't have to adopt your entire worldview to make sense of what you're saying. And I have to be in it, but, and in fact, and I can't just, right. I can't, I, it, I can't just entertain it. If there's going to be any genuine dialogical reasoning between us, I have to let it impact my cognition. So there has to be the possibility that I can take some of what you say and take it

seriously at the same time. That's what the dialogical rationality, I think fundamentally presupposes. And so I think, yeah, I would say this is an argument from Wolfgang that I think is very good. I think this argument could be equally made from another set of contexts. And so it has a cross contextual value. And we sort of believe that about arguments or we're kind of communication isn't really going to be possible, right? Because if it's like, if it has to be your particular context, then I can never reach

you and you can never reach me. And so I would be willing to say I am doing a service to them in the spirit of genuine dialogos, because I am your best capacity for correction. And you're my best capacity for correction. And the only way we do that is by presupposing that I can take your argument and I don't have to adopt everything you believe. And I can take it seriously, even though I don't adopt everything you believe. Do you pray? In a fashion, yes. I don't do what's, I mean, this gets us into a long discussion about

the imaginal and the imaginal dialogical. Sounds like this is a long way of saying no. long discussion about the imaginal and the imaginal dialogical. Um, sounds like this is a long way of saying no. No, it's not. Uh, so let me try and point something out to you, uh, how the imaginal is different from the imaginary. So I can ask you to do this in your head, 34 times, uh, 33, and you can, you can do that now that space that you went into, is that a literal physical space?

No. You can do that. Now that space that you went into, is that a literal physical space? No, but it's not a mere falsity because that space actually gives you real access to your own cognitive machinery. It affords metacognition, which is a presupposition of rationality. So if we say that there's nothing real about that space, then we're saying, oh, well, there's nothing real about rationality because So if we say that there's nothing real about that space, then we're saying, oh, well, there's nothing real about rationality because this is an essential component

to rationality. So it's neither literally real, but it's not merely fictional. It's imaginal. There are certain aspects of reality we can only get access to by looking through particular images and they have become so natural to us that we forget that that's what we're doing. So the imaginal belongs in the category of non-physical? That's one of the things it can point to. It belongs to thing, I used a larger, I was saying non-physical and I changed it to non-literal. Yeah. So the imaginal can be physical? I used a larger, I was saying non-physical and I changed it to non-literal. Yeah.

So the imaginal can be physical? Like it can be physically helped. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Psychedelics, there you go. Well, no, no, no, no. Let me give you a better example. A different example that might not be best set in its own controversy. So the NASA scientists who are moving the rovers around on Mars, this goes to the three papers I published.

This is your lobster. This is my lobster? I go to this a lot. People should have ties with the Mars rover for the Reiki references. Right, right. But the point there is they get these black... So they're looking for people who have a sense of being on Mars and being the rover on Mars and all the perspectival participatory knowing.

But what they do, this is to just go to your point, they get the black and white pictures and they physically mark them with colored markers. So that's a physical thing. But by doing that, which is actually falsifying the pictures, because there's no literal markers on the end mark. But when they do that, that allows them to see the depth. It makes the topology of the environment pop out for them. And so they see through the colors into the depths

that the black and white pictures don't capture. But the environment really does have the third dimension. And so it's not false But the topography or the topology sorry the topology you get you get you get they they'll do things like this. They'll say oh That's an incline. That's topography though. No. Yes. That's what I meant. I apologize. No, no, no, it's okay It's okay. But the point is they get that. They get, right? The third dimension is now intelligible to them in a way it wasn't before. So there's something physical, right? The colors, but they don't look at those colors. They look through them.

Does that make sense? Yes. And so in the same way, you're looking through a spatial image at your cognition. So the four P's, which for those who don't know, do you mind quickly outlining? Yep. I mean, briefly, because I have a question about them. Sorry. Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case. It gives us beliefs and it's stored in semantic memory. Procedural knowledge gives us skills that are powerful or not, and it's stored in semantic memory. Procedural knowledge gives us skills that are powerful or not and it's stored in procedural memory. Perspectival knowing is knowing by noticing.

It's how we're salience landscaping. It's how we're taking a perspective and it gives us a sense of presence and it's stored in episodic memory. And then we have participatory knowing. This is knowing by flowing with reality, by your identity and the identity of things mutually shaping each other. So knowing by flowing, and this is stored in that very strange sense of memory you call yourself.

Is that the same as the four Ps of truth? Could you use the word truth? Yes. As substitute for knowledge. No, sorry, not as a substitute for knowledge, but are there truths associated with those four Ps? When we say it's true, when we say it is true and we have that sense of conviction, we're talking about propositional.

When you say something like your aim is true, you're talking procedural. When you say, you know, it's true, like when you're saying you're being true to something, you're really being present and trying to be- So that's like faith? Like be faithful to this person, be true to that person? Yeah. Well, that's where it shades into the participatory. That's trough, which we don't use very much.

Trough. Like in betrothed. Uh-huh. It's a common etymological origin, I believe, for trust and truth. Okay, wait, which P was that associated with? That's participatory. Okay. So that's how you ultimately have this trough, this sense of connectedness such that you

trust there's a reality. And then there's now, I'm being sort of true to you, not in the skill sense, but I'm being really present. I'm staying connected to you, prospectively. Okay. Did that work? Yes. Is there a fifth P? Do you imagine there could be a fifth P?

So that is- I mean, it doesn't have to be P. Sorry. Who knows? Just by coincidence, it happens to be a P. But is there a fifth P? Do you imagine there could be a fifth P? So that is- I mean, it doesn't have to be P. Sorry. Like, who knows? Just by coincidence, it happens to be a P. But is there a fifth? I think, I mean, in one sense, in a sense that's maybe, well, not trivial, but not particularly insightful. I think there are kinds of knowings that describe relations and interactions between these. There are ways in which we bridge between

procedural and a propositional and perspectival. We call that narrative and, and was there a narrative way of knowing? Yeah, that's, but it's ultimately explained in terms of relations of the four P's. If there's something that's at that same fundamental level, right? Um, I don't have a deductive argument that there's

no such thing, but I've just got an abductive argument. I've tried to think of one and I've let people make proposals to me. How would you identify it if it was to fall in your lap? How would you know it when you saw it? It would have the things that the taxonomy had. I would be able to say, oh, there's an autonomous distinct kind of memory that it's stored in. It has its own criteria of realness.

Sorry, okay. Let's just take this slowly. Its own distinct memory associated with it. Remember how I did that propositional is in semantic and procedurals and procedural and perspectival is in episodic? You would say, oh, and there's this, let's X. Where's participatory, sorry? That's in this very weird form of memory you call yourself.

What name does that have? Sometimes people call it, this isn't quite right because this has to do with the, they sometimes call it autonoetic or autobiographical memory, but it's not quite right because it's not, well, this is the point. You participate in it. It's not, it's not just a memory of that. You are it. You see, that's what I mean. Yeah. And that's what you would expect for participatory knowing. Right. So you'd need, you can say, we've got independent psychological evidence for that memory. We have, we can make clear conceptual arguments for its own normative standard.

Right. Right. We can point to the vehicle by which it's carried. Propos, you know, propositional knowledge carries by propositions, procedural knowledge is carried by sensory motor behavior. Perspectival knowledge is carried by consciousness and participatory knowledge is, is constituted, carried by sensory motor behavior. Perspectival knowledge is carried by consciousness and participatory knowledge is constituted, carried by your identity systems, et cetera. If I could find something that would meet all those demands,

then I would acknowledge it. And, and, and, and, and the reverse is the case. People will, people have been doing this from the beginning. Well, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, no, no, no. What you've described is a new domain for which there can be knowledge. They'll say, but poetry, no, no, no. There's no knowledge about poetry, right?

And maybe there's a poetic way of knowing, and that's probably a mixture of the perspectival and the propositional, right? The imaginal, right? Okay. Now let's get some insights into how John works. There are these ideas like the four piece of knowledge, relevance, realization, reciprocal opening and narrowing. What core insight, what one or two core insights are what allowed you to come up with these insights?

are what allowed you to come up with these insights. To step back and look at the standpoint from which a claim was being made rather than immediately diving into whether or not the claim is true or false. And I got that ultimately from Socrates, right? It's like, I realized that people were wrestling with, you know, what is memory? I kept bumping into the fact that people kept doing a homuncular presupposition of relevance realization whenever they were trying to explain how categorization worked or communication

worked or problem solving worked or reconstructive memory worked. And I got to the idea, no, no, I want to step back and look at what keeps being presupposed because I think this is more fundamentally real for all the arguments we've already reviewed, because it will help me explain all of these things in an integrated fashion. And so that became one of my fundamental ways. Like it wasn't, obviously in that instance, it was a particular content insight. It was an insight about, I would claim about cognition, but it became much more also a methodological insight.

Oh, step back and step back and try and look at what's being presupposed. What is actually needs to be explained in order to generate these questions, these problems. And is there anything problematic about it? Do you believe infinity exists? Yes. In, in the sense that I think reality is

inexhaustible. We, there is no, we have never been successfully able to posit something that binds reality in a self-enclosed system that is complete. And we now have good arguments why we could never do that in principle. And so there's, we've got the, I think the deep conclusion that although we've kept, we've kept trying to do that and we now not only have failed, we've got the, I think the deep conclusion that although we've kept trying to do that and we now not only have failed, we sort of have the beginnings of what look like a prior arguments that we can never do this. I think reality is inexhaustible.

And in that sense, it's not finite. We can't ultimately delimit it. Well, that's a bit different than infinity. That's like saying it's a heuristic for et cetera. Like that's too many for me to count. So I'm going to call that too many equal. I'm arguing that it's inexhaustible in principle. So it's not just that, um, I'm saying that a cognitive agent who had unlimited time could never exhaust it.

And that, that sounds similar to the kind of infinity people are usually talking about when they're talking about like the number series being infinite or something like that. Nobody claims to be able to grok infinity, quad infinity. They only grok it in it like through a trajectory, right? Okay. Let's get to the prayer question, which I believe we've now laid the groundwork for you to answer that.

So I think that there are what prayer does for me. It gives me a dialogically enacted imaginal that allows me to simultaneously and in coordinated fashion access deep parts of the psyche and open myself up to deep disclosure from reality. But that is not praying to a traditional theistic God. Like a deity. Not a deity as a super substance, yes. What about supernatural?

Do I think that there is such a thing as a supernatural? What, what do I think that there is such a thing as a supernatural? In the same way that we can say there's the physical and then some people are willing to say there's something non-physical. Some people say there's natural. Yes. Is natural all there is.

So if you give me what I argued for in that talk, extended naturalism, not only what is derivable from our natural sciences, but what has, what must be presupposed by them. And we've been talking about, if you, if you give me extended naturalism and if you give me that our knowing isn't fundamentally propositional representational, but a conformity kind of knowing.

And, and I give a lot of arguments for why that's the case in that talk as well, making use of Catherine Pickstock and other people like that. Then there's also a possibility of genuine, what I call strong transcendence, namely, there are real levels to reality. I can genuinely conform to them so I can transcend myself in a way that's not just psychological, it has real epistemological and ontological consequences. So if you give me an extended naturalism that affords transcendence and therefore

has a proper place for the kind of experiences that people have when they have mystical experiences, things like that, yeah, then there's nothing beyond the natural. like that. Yeah. Then there's nothing beyond the natural. But if you mean standard naturalism, which is just what's derivable from our physics, I think that's, well, I've already argued that's a performative contradiction. So I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't believe in that. How do you know there's nothing beyond extended naturalism? I don't know it in the same way that I know that Africa is a continent.

Because it's, I mean, again, I want to avoid a performative contradiction of saying, I know something, I can know that there's something beyond what I can possibly know. So is your question more like, is there a way of knowing that is non-native, non-native I can know that there's something beyond what I can possibly know. So is your question more like, is there a way of knowing that is non-naturalistic? Would you accept that as a reformulation of your question? Sure. I don't know what that means without invoking some deep Cartesian dualism. And I think that is an absolutely philosophically bankrupt position.

So insofar as supernaturalism, and I think there is a direct, but I wanted to do this socratically with you, I think there's a deep interweaving between supernaturalism and a Cartesian dualism and I think Cartesian dualism is absolutely bankrupt. That is why I do not think the supernatural is a viable category. Does supernaturalism necessarily lead to Cartesian dualism? It seems to require that if there's this reality that is in some sense able to enter into... And by the way, for people who are watching, when I'm saying supernaturalism, I'm not arguing for ghosts, I'm not arguing for the paranormal,

I'm just saying supernaturalism in the same way we're saying non-physical. I could also be saying non-extended naturalism because John Vervecky has his asterisk on naturalism and I'll put a lecture on screen. It's the same lecture from before and in the lecture notes. Excellent, excellent. And I thank you for doing that. I wasn't presupposing you were just. I know that you would know what I'm referring to, but if someone just skipped forward, the hero is talking about supernatural. So we can say non-natural, doesn't matter, a natural, whatever prefix we want to give it.

Right. So the idea is it's somehow knowable or at least communicable to me. And so that means I can enter into relationship with it. And that, but how do my purely natural cognitive processes enter into this causal relationship? Well, they must have some non natural capacity to enter into a relationship with this non natural reality. And that gets you into a kind of dualism because

what you're saying is there's an aspect of. And that gets you into a kind of dualism, because what you're saying is there's an aspect of the mind that is, does not share any of the properties or powers of everything else that we know about the mind in terms of our scientific endeavors, which sounds like a dualism to me. Well, a dualism is different than Cartesian dualism. I think it's Cartesian dualism in that I think Descartes ultimately thought that

the, the, the, what he called the soul was fundamentally immaterial and non-extended. And since that was sort of the sufficient conditions for physical reality, it was a non-physical thing for him. Yes. Non-natural. So often when I'm speaking to people or when I hear different people commenting on other people's theories, they'll bottom out at, I'll say, okay, to Jonathan Peugeot, do you believe God doesn't exist? Like, does God not exist? He would say, I don't even know what that means. People will say

that intellectuals tend to say that as a triumphant statement. Like, I don't even know what that means. People will say that intellectuals tend to say that as a triumphant statement, like I don't even know what that means, checkmate. And I say that when I say I don't know what that means, I tend to say tentatively like I need to do my homework. So when someone says, I don't even know what it means, it doesn't fit my framework, I don't know what Cartesian dualism means. To me, I'm like, figure it out. Get yourself to the point where it makes sense.

Sure. And so I typically will, I will reserve, I don't know what that means when I think there's a propositional or a performative contradiction, because that means I can't make sense of it and I don't see how in principle you can. But if it's what you're talking about where I don't know what that means, I'll frequently ask instead, well, what do you mean by? And that's what I frequently do. I'll say, well, what do you mean by this? Do you mean this? Do you mean that? I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't like the, I don't know what that means. You notice that as well?

I've noticed that. And I don't mean to John Peugeot. I've just said your name so many times to the audiences overlap and it's the easiest reference. He's, and, and he's a close friend and I value him. Um. That's not what he said to me after, by the way. Um, yeah, I don't like that move. I think it equivocates between two separate things. One is I'm accusing somebody in, in the philosophical sense that there's a propositional or a

performative contradiction. And that has to be resolved by them. And I, right. And a propositional or a performative contradiction and that has to be resolved by them. And I've done that a few times with you and I think I'll stand by it. Or I don't know what it means and then we should be doing exactly what you say. Well, we should unpack it. And what it does is it hangs between those two. And I don't think people should equivocate to give you a really clear crisp answer.

I don't think people should equivocate when they're being asked honest questions. Many times when people reason, they think they're reasoning forward from some axioms and then they just apply some rules of deduction and then that's how I got to my conclusion. But often what happens is they have something that they're afraid of letting go, like frightened of letting go and something may lead to that. So they reject this something. What do you hold with such value that the cost of letting it go would be too much? The reality is intelligible. Horror, which is not fear or terror, which is the terror is the star and puncture. I'm going to be biologically put out of order.

And so a lot of horror movies aren't horror. They're just terror movies. There's a pun here. They're preying on our fear of predation. Right. And, and I don't, I, I find those movies boring by the way. Horror is when you get that aesthetic sense that I'm totally involved in this and, but I don't know what's going on.

And you're, you're, you, it's more like you feel your sanity sort of like, right. And so horror is the sense that reality might ultimately not be intelligible. And I find that proposal horrific. And I trust, what an odd sentence I'm about to utter. I trust my horror. I trust my horror and telling me, no, that is horrifying. And that I should do my best to challenge it.

What's a what if scenario that you're not willing to entertain? That's a good question. Can I have a moment on that? Cause that's a really good question. What if, huh? Hmm. What if.

Yeah. I'm really not willing to entertain a kind of what if, uh, radical Cartesian doubt because it's horrific and there's ultimately no defense against it. But it's also completely self consuming. It literally rips away any real at all. Have you had experiences of that? I had experiences as an undergrad where you had the graduate student that had the skill and would do that kind of whenever you tried to propose something, they would call it into

doubt. And when you're doing an undergraduate philosophy course, that's part of the game. Every discipline has its initiation boot camp rituals, right? And that was that. But I took it very deeply because I had come out of fundamentalism, which was the opposite, which there's so much that can't be called into question. And so I tended to view this world as the deep alternative. And then when, so I was willing to really give myself

to it far more, I took it way more seriously than I think it was being proposed to me as something for the cultivation of skills, of criticism and reflection is like, no, no, what if, like you just asked me and I took it and it was like, oh, this ends in something as equally bad as the world I was in when I was in fundamentalism. As you know, as an academic or as an intellectual, you're considered, it's a virtue to entertain any scenario.

You have to be open. The opposite is being closed and that's a no-no. Rene Descartes had this quote, which is, I feel as if I've been tumbled in a deep whirlpool such that I can't see to the bottom nor swim to the top. And then he said, but nevertheless, I endeavor the same activity I did yesterday, today, something like that. Yeah. And that's, well, I've had experiences of that where you just interminably doubt the

sustentation, the land that you're on. It's not a pleasant feeling. Yeah, it's not a pleasant feeling and it's towards no end. Nothing comes from it. There's no transformative insight. There's no transformation of, you can't sort of take it into who and what you are as an agent because it undermines the very possibility

of any kind of agency, any kind of reflection, any kind of claim, any kind of knowing. So why can't the skeptic just say, look, I'm a radical skeptic and it's not a performative contradiction. Why? Because I can walk about, but I can claim that I'm not justified. Like, to be a skeptic, you're just, you're not critiquing the claim, you're critiquing that you're justified in believing the claim, which is different. So why can't they just say, look, I am a radical skeptic and I'm not

in any performative contradiction. No, because you believe that there's one kind of knowing and that knowing is inherently something done individually and in a, a monological fashion. And those are completely unjustifiable assumptions. What if they say they don't believe that? Then how are they walking about? They're just doing so. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, they're not.

They're agents. They're not behaving the way a rock behaves. They are changing their behavior in order to alter the consequences of their behavior, which means they have skills. This sounds like an argument for free will. And I'm sure it's. No, it's like an argument for free will. And I'm sure it's. No, it's not an argument for free will, but it's

an argument for the fact that they, uh, I think. Yeah. I, I guess I'll put my cards on the table. I am accusing them of a performative contradiction in that they are claiming that there's no knowing while relying on procedural and prospectival and participatory knowing in order to be able to do the things they're doing and make the claims they're making.

What claim are they making? That they can walk around the world. You just made that claim for them. I'm saying they're just, they're just doing it. They're not making claims to doing it. The doing it is the exercise of a skill. Okay. And so you're right. I misspoke.

They're not uttering propositions. They are enacting knowing, and I misspoke by calling that a claim. They are enacting knowing how to walk about. They are enacting how to do, they are enacting what it is to foreground and background and perspectival. No, they don't have to be justified in it. They are not facing unmitigated combinatorially explosive dimensions of reality.

So they're doing lots of stuff in order to be a cognitive agent. Have you explored combinatorial collapse? So I often hear combinatorial explosions. So you just keep generating. I over-extend that. Not everything that I'm talking about is, is combinatorially explosive. commonatorial collapse. So I often hear commonatorial explosions. So you just keep generating. I over extend that. Not everything that I'm talking about is commonatorially explosive. It's also explosive for

other reasons. But I use that just as a catchphrase. Yes. Because one of the projects that I'm working on is if you take an article, some article of science, it cites 50 other articles. And then you can question, they often will make some proposition and say it's supported by these 50, something like that. But it's difficult to then go parse through the 50 and find out did they actually claim what you're saying and then did for those 50 which claim another 60 each. Okay, but you can get an LLM to do that.

So at some point you can actually have a pruning of science to tighten it up to winnow science. Okay, but anyhow, the reason is that I first I thought it'd be combinatorial explosive, but then you find that there's some collapsing because there's some, there's single papers that have large influences. So as you're coming downwards, you often collapse. Right. And so, yeah, so everything, it's not just a simple sort of exponential explosion. There's, there's things that many things that, um, they're, they show us, if I understand you

correctly, they, they show like a small network, uh, small world network organization, and then you can do certain things. Um, yeah. And I, I think, I think this tracks for me. I've made that argument. I made it extended in an extended fashion in awakening for the meeting crisis. That's what we're doing in our plausibility judgments.

And human beings do that already. They say, oh, look, here's all these different things. They converge on that. Therefore this is trustworthy and look, it promises to do all of these things. And therefore it binds all of them together in terms of the promise. And it's, oh, and the construct itself has a nice structural functional organization. It rules out alternatives and it rules in models and there's a nice balance between the convergence and the elegance.

And that gives us plausibility, which is not probability and not certainty. Plausibility means it makes good sense. It stands to reason. Uh, it deserves to be taken seriously. I think we do that. And I, and in fact, I would be stronger. I think that any attempt to establish certainty or probability, let's do probability. I'm going to do an empirical investigation, an experiment before I can set up the experiment.

I have to make a plausibility judgment about which hypotheses I'm going to test. Right. And then when I'm running it, I have to make a plausibility judgment about which hypotheses I'm going to test, right? And then when I'm running it, I have to make a plausibility judgment about which alternative explanations I'm going to control for. And then when I get the data, I have to make a plausibility judgment as to which of all the logical implications I'm going to take seriously, pay attention to. And then finally, I have to make a plausibility judgment about what theoretical debates I'm

going to enter into. So plausibility judgments are before, during, after, and beyond when we're attempting to establish probabilities. So they're indispensable. We can't remove them. So I think we do do something like that on a reliable basis. In the lecture that I watched, there was this term leveling up and leveling down. And I was unclear as to why that's used, to me it sounds like an extremely complicated space. And if I was to make some analogy, the real number line

just R1, you know, RN is like, so R1 is the only one that has an orientation. So you can say one number is greater than another. As soon as you have R2 and greater, you can't pick two points and say this point is greater than this point So to me when you were describing what reality may be and what transcendence is and you say well, it's leveling up Yeah, how can you even say up? Well, and and that's exactly right And I don't know if I said that in this talk or I said it in the transcendent naturalism series that Greg and I did later is ultimately I'm talking about what the later Neil Platon is are ultimately, I'm talking about what the later Neoplatonists are talking

about. I'm talking about, you know, a complete continuum, no, sorry, something that should be understood as a continuum without gaps. I don't want to say complete because I don't want to- A continuum without gaps. Yeah, in the sense that it's emanation all the way down and it's emergence all the way up. And the up and down are imaginal.

They are not literally up and down, but we have to rely on exapting our sensory motor navigation systems to move around conceptual space. We can't escape that imaginal. So in other words, the level up and level down itself is some- They're imaginal. They're imaginal. They're imaginal for the fact that we can relate to

different places and notice what I'm doing here on the continuum that have a real transformative impact on us. And, and we can point to like Greg does, we can point to sort of pivot points in our ontology that seem to make, sorry, that we have good reason to believe make differences in kind, like the difference between the inanimate and the animate and between the animate and the rational things like that. A great phrase from, I think it's from Jonathan Peugeot

again, apologies, Peugeot, you're on my mind, is I don't believe in the God that you don't believe in. I think he said something like that. In other words, you new atheist 14 year old kid. I think he's right, I agree with him and here's why. And I think, I made use of James filler's argument and other people's argument, Catherine Pickstock.

And if you take a look at the Neoplatonic argument and I think James filler's book, Heidegger, Neoplatonism and the history of being relation is ultimate ground is, I think it's a brilliant, brilliant text. And he argues that Eastern Orthodoxy did not adopt as Aquinas did, although Aquinas is a really complex case because he's so neoplatonic in so many ways. But let's say not the way sort of standard traditional theism, Eastern Orthodoxy didn't, at least Filler argues, making use

of the Cappadocian fathers and Dionysus and Maximus, they didn't adopt a substance ontology at all. They have a pure relationality ontology and they take the Trinity to actually be the claim, the symbolic claim that ultimate reality is ultimately relational, not substantial in nature. And I've asked Eastern Orthodox people this and they've said, yeah, that's right. And Jonathan is, I think, correctly saying the new atheists are rejecting a rather cartoonish version of a traditional substance theistic notion of God, and he does too, as he should

if he's a good Eastern Orthodox Christian. So I don't think there's anything that I would sort of haul him on the carpet for. I think he's saying something very clear with good argument behind it. Jordan Hull, if I'm not mistaken, recently converted to Christianity. You're not mistaken. He was baptized, so it's like official, yes. How do you feel about that? So I mean, Jordan is an important friend and for the long time, I regarded him as my most

solid companion on this cutting edge of trying to get beyond a traditional religious framework in order to respond to the advent of the sacred. And so, and this is not anything I haven't said to Jordan. When I heard that news, I initially felt, and I don't mean maliciously, uh, but I felt abandoned. Uh, not betrayed. Not betrayed because I love Jordan enough to see the change in him. I've said this to him personally, Jordan is warmer than I've ever known him. Now.

Yep. Warmer, just warmer and just juicier. What does that say to you? What that says to me is that Jordan found what he was looking for. He found in Christianity and ecology of practices that was situated in a community that invited him to belong. I don't think we're ultimately persuaded in a metanoetic fashion by arguments. I think arguments are important, they're necessary, but they're never sufficient.

And this is a platonic proposal. This is why the dialogues are not just an argument, because we're ultimately persuaded by confronting being present with existentially encountering another person living a life, a way of life, a form of life, alternative to ours that we find attractive in a way that isn't superficial, but that goes to the depths of what we have been looking for. It has an intimacy to us.

And Jordan found that in that community. And I think that steered him. Now you may say, well, why can't you find that? Well, part of it is the point you've made. And Jordan admits this. Jordan didn't come from a fundamentalist Christianity. I'm happy for him. And I've been very happy that it's very clear that our ongoing work, our, our shared commitment

to following the logos in genuine, uh, dialogos is that he's now showing me, not just assured me with words, but showing me indeed, as we say, that that commitment is. Know them by their works. Yep. Yep. Or know them by their fruit. Something like Yep. Or know them by their fruit.

Something like that. Yes, that is definitely the case. Uh, but that, that doesn't mean, um, that. That relation, that encounter with Jordan and a genuinely brotherly encounter and how impressed I was and how close I got to many of the people who were self-declared Christians at the gospel seminar had this effect on me. And I don't mean this in any kind of, you know, cynical jujitsu, I mean, I finally got a peace, Kurt, in me that I have never had. I've always envied the Christians. I've always thought, maybe, maybe. You know, at the end of

the great Gatsby where he says, and maybe one fine day we'll reach out and there's that reaching at the end of that longing, that longing is it passed away from me just when, when I was at the gospel seminar and I came home and it was one of the first thing I was told, Sarah, I said, Sarah, I, I, I, there's a kind of peace in me. And that peace is alloyed with my relationship to the philosophical Silk Road is not as a project or an intellectual endeavor. I'm going through some purification preparation process for a personal pilgrimage. And any persuasion it's going to bring is going to be as much from the existential spiritual

transformation that occurs in me than any propositional arguments I make. And that is my calling. That is my vocation. And that gives me joy. And those two are alloyed together. And that's been my response. And it is, I really want people to hear it is not because of any disrespect of any of these people that were at the gospel seminar or John Hall. It's exactly the opposite.

Why would it be disrespect? Because it might sound like I'm being dismissive. Well, you said after when you felt peace. That's right. And you're taking it the way I want it to be taken. I'm worried that some people saying that there's a crypto contempt in me. It's like after I had talked to them, I realized how silly they were, and that finally gave me peace. Oh, oh, okay.

And by the way, you've used this word crypto twice. It's not blockchain related, so please explain. Oh, so crypto means where it's secret or like in a crypt. It's, it's, it's, it's, you're keeping it hidden, but it's at work in some way. Okay. So I,'t know what's going to come. In fact, given what I just said, I'm not trying to know what I'm going to be like after I go on this pilgrimage.

I didn't know that you envied some Christians. I'm sure you don't envy all Christians. Very well said. I've, I envied people who I respect deeply, who have turned to a form of Christianity that is clearly affording them cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And you also see it, if you were honest, as clearly incorrect in some way. Yes. In the same way that I can look at some people who go into the mountain. And I would say that equally of Buddhism and Taoism. Right? The closest thing to describing how I would describe myself is that I'm a Zen Neoplatonist.

Well, now what I mean by that is I have opponent processing built into the very fundamental structure of sort of my religious, spiritual identity. You've got this system that goes from intelligibility to nothing, and then you have this opposite system that's always trying to undercut the propositional. And this isn't unique to me. They have been talking to each other along the Silk Road and specifically in the fruition of the Kyoto School. That's why I'm going to Kyoto as part of the pilgrimage, even though it wasn't part of the actual Silk Road, because the Kyoto school has been just representative. But there are people who call themselves Zen Catholics. And what they do is they plug into the neoplatonism within Catholicism

and integrate that with Zen. So this isn't just unique to me, but that's how I would describe myself. Those more bespoke religions of the Zen Catholics that you mentioned, and even when you said you spoke to some of your Eastern Orthodox friends and they agreed about God is not a substance and so on. I would imagine we'd be the more scholarly friends because I have a friend whose grandmother is Eastern Orthodox and you ask her, I think he said, I asked her this so here say no, because I'm saying he said that she said, he asked her about some, some metaphysical

question and then she said, whatever the church says, you know, I'd say whatever the church says, whatever the fathers say, like she doesn't care. Most of the Eastern Orthodox people, if you were to bring up all these, you know, there's property dualism, substance dualism. What are you talking about? No, I'm talking about Bishop Maximus. I'm talking about all the monks I met at Aetna.

I said to them, and I'll still say it now, if I were to be a Christian, I'd be an Eastern Orthodox. I saw good people leading good lives and good faith, pursuing good reason in the Socratic Platonic sense. Yeah, I mean those people. But I can say the same thing about people's attitudes towards science and technology. How many people actually know how a cell phone works, right? So, yeah, or toilet, right, right, exactly. So, I don't think that criticism is specific to religion in any way. So when some people would say, John, you've got to be a Christian. I don't recall who, but I remember hearing someone say this.

People say that to me all the time. Okay, okay. Maybe Venter Klee. Let's say it's Venter Klee. Do you feel like there's an internal resistance, more so than the intellectual resistance, an internal resistance of fighting against the fundamental of your childhood and you're allergic to it. Okay.

So I think pretending that that second factor isn't there is, is bullshit pretense. Yes. Um, however, I do not think that is a sufficient explanation. I do- You've thought about this. A lot. I was invited by Jordan Peterson to take place in the Gospel Seminar, the follow-up to the

Exodus Seminar, and I came to a point where I said, you know, I can sincerely, authentically say I have deeply committed myself to following the logos. And then they said, well, then why aren't you a Christian? Because of course, Christianity makes the claim that Jesus is the Logos. And I said, because I actually respect Christianity too much. There are things that Christianity claims that I don't agree with, I don't believe. And so I think those are genuine. And I think the things, the way I follow the logos is affording, supportive of that I have loyalties other than to Jesus of Nazareth. I have loyalties to that respect for Christianity are as effectively real as my resistance to my fundamentalism.

I don't deny it, but I don't think it's the exclusive reason. I think it is reasonable for me to claim that if that could be a fully removed, and I don't know if it can, I still wouldn't be a Christian. Although I'm not sure because I have to give space for, I don't completely know how much that takes in, how much that's affecting me. What drives you? I have a fundamental desire to enter into the deepest possible relationship to the deepest possible reality in a way that will most deeply transform me towards being a virtuous and wise person. That drives me.

That drives me profoundly. When I, I feel my deepest guilt, when I feel I've strayed from that. I feel my profoundest virtuous pride when I feel I have lived up to that. When I have maintained a commitment to my finitude and my transcendence, like Plato says, I hold them. I don't give into just this, my finitude and give into despair. I don't just identify with my transcendence and fall prey to hubris. I hold them together in opponent processing and I keep following the logos

deeper into reality and allowing it to penetrate more deeply, correctively into me. That is what drives me. That is my understanding after three decades, four decades, five decades, well, four and a half of the unexamined life is not worth living. Thank you, John. Thank you, Kurt. This has always been a treat to talk to you because it always goes in, it's, it's, it's de-logos.

It goes in ways that I can't predict. And I think you can't predict and it takes on a life of its own and it sparks things and it goes from the personal to the impersonal in a really responsible and responsive fashion. I really love it. I think what you do is excellent. I think it's a very good explanation for why your channel is thriving.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. The job is easy when I have someone like you that I could just, my job is to just throw you a ball and then it's up to you to hit it out of the park. There's no pressure on me. So I appreciate that. Well, but yeah, I don't think it's you throwing a ball. I think it's more like we're, we're doing a Tai Chi sparring and, and, uh, you're calling me to my very best game. And I really appreciate it. I enjoy that. Socrates said, you know, that doing this is the best kind of life, uh, for human beings.

And I really believe that I think if they're, if they're, if the gods exist, this is what they're doing all the time. Mm-hmm. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymongle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like.

That's just part of the terms of service. Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means

that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking or even on Reddit, etc. it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description

Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify It's on all of the audio platforms All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it personally I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comments that hey toe listeners also gained from replaying So how about instead you read listen on those platforms those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. And finally, if you'd like to support more conversations like this, more content like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and donating with whatever

you like. There's also PayPal, there's also crypto, there's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind, it's support from, there's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video, it's audio in the case of Patreon, video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think.

Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much.