Silk Road Seminar: John Vervaeke with Edward Slingerland

33:28Basically, these guys who just never had experience of having to raise a kid or take care of old parents.

33:38It's this strange individualism that sees us as not having inherent connections to others. And I think the concept of way is a corrective in that sense, because the only way you can get absorbed, you can do these individualist things like Csikszentmihalyi talks about, you can get into rock climbing or something where it is just about you and the environment. But again, most of our flow experiences are social. It's we're playing with our grandchild or we're catching up with our family at the end of the day over a meal. So yeah, I think that this is, again, where I think Uwe is a more helpful concept.

34:26It's not that Csikszentmihalyi was wrong. It's just that he was focusing on a particularly narrow set of experiences. Level of construal, I would say, yes. So. I mean, I consider myself part of the 4E COGSI camp. Evan Thompson at your university is a third figure. We were colleagues here. He's a friend. And so I agree with that caricature, but I would add to it that also they're not only misogynist Puritan bachelors, they're also static spectators of their world rather than moving and participating in their world in a really deep and rich fashion. So I think that tends to go along with the individualism tends to go along with this representational model of knowledge where there's a little homunculus sitting in our head and it's getting data about the world through these portholes in our skull.

35:33And then it crunches the data and makes a decision and issues the order to our body. And that's just not how it actually works at all. It's like not even close. um so um i i talk about and and it shows up in your book i i've had a couple publications i have another one in revision about different kinds of knowing um there is the one that's dominant in the west which is propositional tyranny knowing that uh stored in semantic memory sense of conviction there's something you talk about in the book uh directly explicitly there's procedural know how, knowing how to do something. And that's not about truth.

36:17That's more about power, being able to generate causal pathways in the world rather than, you know, nomological principles or something like that. But that skill ability, and you do point this also, I think, I don't, you don't use this language, but use something like it. It also requires perspectival knowing, knowing what it's like, uh, knowing what it's like, uh, to, uh, you know, if it, let's just talk about a skill, I have to know what it's like to ride a bike. Cause I need a phenomenal logical touchstone that tells me, um, if I'm doing it or not. Um, and if, uh, and if I get that, it, it, it affords me orienting and noticing the way I should, it's intrinsically involved with consciousness, um, and the kind of knowing through consciousness.

37:06And then there's this deeper one that you also point to, which is the way I know the world, precisely because what we were talking about earlier, of how I'm in the world and I'm from the world and I'm participating in the world. I'm coupled to the world. You talk about a lot of this, the way that, like the body sort of connects us. I heard Marloponte, I don't know if he's influenced you or not, there, right? A little bit, yeah. I read some in grad school. It was circulating around, but yeah. So I would also suggest to you that one of the things you're also talking about is also not just a different kind of experience, but you're trying to point towards non-propositional ways of knowing, of knowing oneself, knowing others, knowing the world that seem to also really matter to us.

37:58They're kind of doing a lot of the heavy lifting of giving us that sense of connectedness. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, in my first monograph that China tries based on, I do one of the framings I have is this kind of emphasis in early China on knowing how, as opposed to knowing that. and just kind of procedural asset know-how which is more recently I've been like in my recent monograph I just finished I'm setting up as a contrast between virtue ethical models of the self and these kind of the rationalist models of ethics that have dominated Western philosophy for the last few hundred years so you know, deontology, utilitarianism.

38:50Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I get it. Um, so my, my book's called learning to the new book is called learning to see. Oh, it's about how perception is a moral, really crucial moral problem. Um, whereas for deontologists or utilitarian, they kind of, they skip over the perception stage cause it's kind of trivially, they don't even think of it as, as fraud anyway. So you, again, little homunculus sitting there in the head. It gets the data, reads the data off the world in an obvious way. There's nothing challenging about that. It uses its rationality to apply a maxim or calculate utility, and then it issues an order to the self.

39:36You see this, the cartoonishness of this is obvious in when you look at like these trolley problems and stuff. You know, it's like life is not, you know, you don't like show up and there's five people on this track, one person on this track, you know, exactly, you know, that the switch will switch the train and that everyone's anonymous. All the relevant facts are given to you. It's life is not like that, right? Life is about, do you notice that you said something insensitive to your colleague and they're upset about it? That's real life. You were short with your wife because you were annoyed about this other thing and that's put her in a bad mood.

40:24That's what real life is about, perceiving the world the right way. And that's what I think virtue ethics gets right, that they really put moral perception, embodied moral perception and developing these kind of know-how, passive ways of navigating the world. That's at the center of virtue ethics. It's much more psychologically realistic, I think. Yes, I agree. I'm currently exploring the connection between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Would you extend perception the way, like, so I'm thinking here of Iris Murdoch and the idea that attention is the most, you know, and Simone Weil, right?

41:06This is where most of the important ethical and moral heavy lifting actually take, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the book was inspired by Murdoch. The whole thing that kicked the book off was a grad student in our department started a reading group to read those three essays that are in that volume, Sovereign Tree of the Good. I love that book. No, I hadn't read it since I think I was an undergrad when I read it the first time. And I ended up not being able to join the reading group, but that made me think, oh, I should reread that book. And I did. And I was like, oh, this is amazing. and it kind of fit with the stuff I was doing in Confucian virtue ethics.

41:45So yeah, the book is basically applying Iris Murdoch to early Confucianism and also bringing in, as I do now, just I can't help but bringing in modern cognitive science and science of perception. So yeah, it's about proper attention. Being a good person is seeing the world the right way. Right. And and then once you as Murdoch puts it. You know, when perception is right, action follows naturally, you don't have to force it or. That's right. Make any effort. Just when you see the world the right way, you do the right thing. So this reminds me. Well, let me preface this by saying one of the problems with Orientalism is it's bidirectional.

42:35you're not only you know characterizing the east you're also flattening the west flattening the west yeah it only works when you caricature both sides right yeah so because you know in the platonic dialogues and Ruchnik makes this appearance in the art of wisdom Plato will constantly well Socrates We'll constantly sort of challenge a definition by going to a techne. But then we'll get eventually, no, but wisdom isn't a techne. And then we generally move into noesis, noetic, this kind of knowing and noticing way of knowing. And why I bring that up is because there seems to be a corresponding shift when you make that move from techne to noesis and eventually in later traditions into Gnosis.

43:34Right. There's a there's a corresponding shift between an kratia in which I'm doing this and I'm constraining myself to sofresen, which I sometimes describe it as. Imagine you are being tempted by the good, that you're constantly being tempted by the good. I give I give the example of like what my salience landscape has been matured so that I'm reliably different from my son. He's grown up now. But when he was a little kid, he had a toy tower with, you know, figurines from the from Marvel and DC. And, you know, he would just love to play with those and like getting him to stop. He had to really like, but for me, and this goes back to the caring to some degree, you know, I come in, I loved playing with him with those toys, but I wasn't, I wasn't tempted by them.

44:30the part of maturation is we at least we hope this is what john rusin arguments is that we're more and more tempted when it's virtuous maturation we're more and more tempted by what's real what's true what's good what's beautiful um so would would you consider sofferson as perhaps an analog of ue then uh because sofferson is one of the cardinal virtues and yet it seems to be doing very similar work within the Platonic tradition. Yeah, if it's engaging you with the world. That's basically what Uwe is, right? The way Zhuang's a Taoist thinker describes it is you're being, he uses a lot of metaphors of being drawn along.

45:19Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're being pulled by the world or you're literally going with the flow. Shun, one of these words Chinese means going with the flow of a river. I mean, part of one of the arguments I made in my monograph about this, my first book, is that Wu Wei is really just the most general metaphor and a whole set of families of metaphors that all have to do with either forgetting, kind of lack of awareness, lack of conscious kind of processing, or being feeling at home. So feeling at home or at rest or being kind of pulled by the world. So, and because I was, this is where Lakoff and Johnson completely changed my book because I, in the original version, the dissertation, I'm going through these thinkers and I'm arguing that they all have as an ideal, but some of them like mentions don't use a way.

46:27And so I kind of bugged me. I had this theoretical problem where how do I show that these are real, this is really way, if they don't use the term. And I didn't have a solution in the dissertation. I was, I would just kind of put these stories next to each other and go, So, eh, they kind of look alike. And then I had a grad student at my first job gave me Lakoff and Johnson's philosophy in the flesh. It had just come out and they were like, you should read this. I think you'd like it. And it blew my mind. I was like, oh, I'm changing everything because conceptual metaphor theory. I suddenly saw that the reason these stories in the mentions seemed like these stories in the Analects and like these stories in the Zhuangzi is because they all shared a very small set of metaphors.

47:17There's like 20 of them and they have similar themes. And so once I understood kind of the metaphorical structure of the concept of Wu Wei in early China, I could then rigorously show that, look, you see these same metaphors appearing in these different stories. And that's what ties them together. And the dominant metaphor family is this kind of following or getting pulled or engaged by the world. That makes sense. So that's interesting. Let's pick up the conceptual metaphor. I've also done work on that and published on that. So our interests align in a lot of ways. One of the things I've been interested in is the potential connection between conceptual metaphor theory and the work, I guess, spearheaded most by people like Michael Anderson, but increasingly more and more people.

48:11Don't worry about it. the idea is something like this. In earlier work, I criticized sort of the mapping procedure within conceptual metaphor theory because I thought it was actually it got into all kinds of circles. It's the wrong metaphor. Well, I think the blending model seems more accurate to me. So Mark Turner or Jeuval Koning, blending theory. Well, I don't want to get into the semantics theory. Yeah, because there's issues around blending and how do you distinguish vagueness and conflation from blending. But let's put that aside because there's another connection that for me, I think, is very interesting.

49:03Conceptual metaphor seems to fit itself into a larger family like gesture. This is the work of Susan Golden Meadow. Fictive language, like the road runs all the way up the hill. Roads don't run, of course. They make running possible. And a host of other things. And the fact that, by the way, we also seem to find them naturally belonging together. All of these things will gesture as we do the fictive language, as we invoke a conceptual metaphor. Okay, so the fact that we have a broader set and they seem to form a manifold, I'm proposing on the basis of that we can make a connection to Michael Anderson's work and other people's work.

49:48And this is the idea of circuit reuse or cognitive acceptation, where the brain actually takes machinery that either evolved or it can be phylogenic or ontogenic, right, or that was learned in the sensory motor world, sensory motor orientation and navigation. This is Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and it gets repurposed for conceptual orientation, cognitive movement. It gets repurposed. And then one of the things that comes out of that is a potential kind of cycle where you zap up, you play with this, but you might exhaust it to a certain degree. And then you have to drop back down into the sensory motor engagement with the world, enrich that again, and then drop back up into conceptual thought.

50:45So there's this sort of this exact, exactive cycle that's at work. And if that seems at least initially plausible to you, is that, could that, I'm not claiming your other conditions aren't the case, but could that also be a reason why we seem to get these oscillations around the central paradox that's at the heart of your book, the trying and then the not trying, and the trying and then they're forgetting and then try, but don't try too hard or try to, right? Like there's a degree to which we have to cultivate the machinery, but we also have to let it go because it has to be replanted within the richer soil of our sensory motor life to drop back up again.

51:31Either one of these will be deleterious. If I just stay down here, this is a platonic proposal, I'll be impulsive. This is Velman in the way of the wanton, right? Like, I don't want to be impulsive, but I don't want to be Hamlet either. Right. I don't want to get I need to constantly to and fro between those because I need the engagement. But I also need the flexibility that comes from reflection. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but I was trying to make an argument. OK, yeah. The issue in the trying to try paradox may be orthogonal to this. I think this idea of exacting, I mean, this is like often Johnson's original argument that you're exacting the source domains, interacting with a box or walking down a path.

52:21And you're taking the entailments you get from that, projecting them onto this abstract thing. And there's good data that that's actually really how it's happening. So actually, my wife's a neuroscientist, and she earlier did a study showing that we're reusing the machinery we use to calculate distance. So an object being close to us or far away from us gets exacted for social cognition when we're thinking about close friends and distant friends. So that's pretty clear. Yeah. In a paper I did on blending, where I looked at the benches and kind of analyzed some of the debates using blending theory, I made the argument that you can project from a source domain into a blend.

53:17And that blend has an emergent structure because it's pulling a little bit from this domain, a little bit from this domain. That can then become an input to another blend. so I'm arguing that for instance the concept of qi in early China is a blend it's drawing from kind of plant metaphors and water and air but then it becomes once it gets entrenched it becomes a source domain of its own a culturally unique source domain that then can be used as an input for new blends but I argue in the book we probably can only do that twice Maybe three times, but you start to get too far away from the grounding sensory motor experience and it isn't comprehensible anymore.

54:05Yeah, it becomes impoverished. Yes. It becomes impoverished or just incomprehensible. So I think that like string theory and physics is getting up there where it's just we don't we can't. Strings, but they're not really strings. It just we can't comprehend it because we've gone too many steps out of embodied experience. And so so I do think there's a limit to kind of how far metaphors can pull us away from our real embodied experience in the world. But this tension of trying to try is a slightly different one. And so I didn't really have a story in the dissertation or the academic book about why it's a paradox.

54:51And I had some critics, including my former advisor, who wrote a very scathing review of it called the paradox of a question mark. and he's arguing that it's just kind of a verbal paradox, but it's not a real paradox. But in Try Not to Try, I now had some new tools because I was learning about cognitive science and structure of the mind. And I argue in Try Not to Try that it's a real paradox that falls out of just the nature of the human mind, which is that if I tell you to relax, I see you're being you're too uptight and you're about to go on a date and I say you're too wound up, just relax, be yourself.

55:40The part of your brain that I'm activating is actually the part I want to shut down. So it's like Dan Wegner's work on perverse cognition. I tell you, don't think of a white bear. You think of a white bear. I've just activated the concept. And so this is directly why the The paradox of the way is a real paradox is because when we're trying not to try, we're activating prefrontal, roughly speaking, the prefrontal cortex. We're activating the part of the brain we actually want to shut down. And so it is directly paradoxical to try not to try. And I think what the early Chinese thinkers I look at end up doing then is trying to come up with either behavioral strategies or conceptual strategies, physical practices that trick us into being spontaneous.

56:38You can't do it directly. It's like counting sheep. If you have insomnia and you try to will yourself to fall asleep, it's not going to work. But counting sheep might because it gives you something to do that's distracting and maybe if you start doing that, you forget about the fact that you're trying to fall asleep and you will really fall asleep. And so I think that whatever the Confucians give you these rituals to do that engage your mind and body and hopefully reshape you in ways that you don't notice happening. And the Taoists, it's a little less clear what they're doing, but there are hints of breathing practices and meditation practices that are using the body as a tool to get around this conceptual paradox or brain structure paradox that you're activating this part you want to deactivate.

57:37So I think that there's the kind of relationship of metaphor to the physical world and the paradox of the way are not directly connected. Well, let me see. Let me try. Okay. because this strikes me as at least structurally analogous to a similar thing that goes on in insight uh uh so you i don't know if you've ever seen the nine dot problem and you have nine dots you have to correct uh connecting with four straight lines and people right right now if you say to be divergent creativity tasks or something or well that that yeah it's it's but I want to talk about a seminal paper from Weisberg and Alba in 1981 where they found, you know, saying to people, think outside the box.

58:25That's where it came from, by the way. It doesn't help them solve that problem at all. It doesn't help them solve that problem. Right. And so what comes out of it after a lot of literature is these two different things you have to do. You have to break whatever frame you're in. You have to relax constraints. Right. You have to break up chunks. You have to deautomatize your cognition. And that. Right. And that's breaking a frame. And then you have to open yourself up to make a new frame. You have to make information relevant that you've previously ignored as irrelevant. You have to do like a figure ground reversal often.

59:01And now if you have only one of these, if I just do this, the breaking frame, I'll induce choking. So if all I do is practice that, you'll choke. And you reference the one guy in the, I forget his name, but I did the guy, I can't remember his name either. the guy in the gulf who got the yips yeah yeah yeah yeah right um but if you just do this right then then then you you get like you get fixation you leap to things uh that haven't been uh properly corrected or reflected upon and so what what seems to work for people is the these are like you have an opponent processing this is how the body solves these kinds of problems.

59:45So for example, your autonomic nervous system is actually opponent processing between your sympathetic system that tries to activate you and your parasympathetic system that's trying to relax you. And they're both terrifically biased. The sympathetic system is biased to see everything as an opportunity or threat. And the parasympathetic is biased to see everything as a situation for rest and relaxation. And they're like this. They're constantly pulling against each other. There's an opponent processing going on. And we seem to see the same thing in insight between the left and the right hemispheres.

1:00:31You start your problem here because it's a familiar problem. And then you go over to the right hemisphere when you impasse. and that opens you up to new possibilities. But then you don't just grab, like you put selective, it's almost like evolution. Here's more variation. And then I put selective pressure on it to come back and I kind of evolve the insight. And so that's what I was trying to get towards. I was trying to get towards this idea that the paradox may be pointing towards these sort of opponent processing kinds of things that are going on. And the reason I bring this up is I don't want to pin you to the age, like the age of the book.

1:01:14It's 2014. I get that. So, so, so dual processing theory is coming into some very hard times right now. You know, the idea that there were systems got abandoned because you couldn't peg them down. The idea that there were styles, you couldn't peg them down, even mapping it onto conscious and unconscious doesn't work. And what, you know, what what Evans and Stanovich came to is what we're really measuring is a continuum of how much a task is putting demands on working memory. OK. Right. And so and very often what you're trying to do, think about working memory and chunking is you're trying to do it.

1:02:01you have to break up chunks but you have to make allow new ones to take shape you have to break and allow new ones to take shape break and allow new ones to take shape um that's what i wanted to try and say that the body when we drop down into the body i'm not just doing conceptual metaphor we're dropping down into all this layered opponent processing that we have even the hemispheric opponent processing between left and right that we can then re-engage with um in a powerful way okay yeah i can see that um yeah one of my my most recent trade book um it's called drunk oh the role of alcohol yeah human history and culture and um one of the arguments i make there is it's um when you have these kind of insight problems that you can't power your way through just through the way you do your taxes right there's no formula there's no algorithm You need to see it a new way.

1:03:04Relaxing the brain a bit, you know, getting the prefrontal cortex to stop being in charge so much and letting brain regions talk to each other that don't normally talk to each other. That seems to be important. It's a very good strategy. Psychedelics do the same thing in a much more radical way. So I think basically, what's his name, who wrote the book about psychedelics recently? Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan. Yep. He compares psychedelics. He says psychedelics are to cultural evolution what mutagens are to genetic evolution. Yeah. They shake up the snow globe. um and i think he's right um but you know they're they're like a really powerful mutagen that is maybe if it gives you something useful is going to be really novel which is great but 99 of what you're going to get is garbage nonsense um and whereas alcohol is a is a mild mutagen it's relaxing brain a little bit but you're still in touch with the things you care about You still know who you are.

1:04:17You still know what the problem at work is that you have to solve. And so maybe the degree of creativity is a little bit lower, but the hit rate's a lot higher. You're more likely to come up with something that's actually useful or meaningful. And that's why cultures have both. There's a reason they haven't displaced each other. Yeah, that makes good sense. so that that that i mean the literature i do work on psychedelics um i'm going to be speaking at the international conference for psychedelic research so so it's coming more that these states are uh pivotal mental states they are states of epistemic vulnerability and a theory that's emerging patrick mcnamara patrick mcnamara and others are talking about it um is this idea that what these states are, are there evolutionary markers?

1:05:11They basically tell your brain, you need to learn a lot very broadly, like mass, you need to do a massive quick reboot of your system, which is important in volatile environments. So this parallels the biological, the movements happening in biology right now, where they're not only talking about evolution of traits, but evolution of evolvability where you evolve your volvability because you're in a particularly volatile environment um and and you're constantly trading between those depending on um how your environment is changing now that says to me that right because this is one of the things i i wouldn't say i worried about it uh what am i looking for well there's a concern that emerged in me um you know and i've had this concern because you know i bump up against this in in the taoist world at least the tai chi world right which is a kind of um

1:06:15they relax into these epistemically vulnerable states and they come out of them with rabbit hole metaphysical claims okay yeah yeah um i mean i in the book i talk about a trip I took on mushrooms as a graduate student where I was convinced I was going to just, they were going to give me, Stanford was just going to give me my PhD and a full professorship because I had just solved all these problems and wrote it all down in my notebook. And the central thesis was that truth is the color blue. And I had diagrams, I had mathematical formulas. and it's just, you know, it was complete. I woke up the next morning.

1:07:01I was like, oh boy, yeah, I'm probably not going to publish that. So you can, you know, it can, it can take you to a new cognitive place that you need to get to, to solve a problem. But it could also take you down some weird rabbit hole. And that's why, you know, it's, you've got to check it against reality when you come back. And that's what sometimes doesn't happen in certain types of religious experience or psychedelic experience, for that matter. Could that be another function of the social community you were talking about in the book? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's me meaning. I mean, so my wife now has pivoted to working on social cognition and just how.

1:07:52basically other people keep us sane. They keep us normative. Our models need to get checked against other people's models all the time. And that's why if you don't do that, if you're a shut in or if you get put in solitary confinement, or if you see this frequently in the real world with older married couples where one of the couple dies. Yeah. And the other one just completely is unmoored from reality within a few months because they got used to using each other to keep each other sane. So, yeah, so this is where, you know, you come back and you tell your friend, yeah, this thing on Truth is color blue.

1:08:35And he's like, yeah, dude, stick that in a drawer somewhere. But you're not publishing that. And, you know, I found with my experience of psychedelics, when I get good insights, it's often because I talk them out with people afterwards. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I was thinking this. And they say, well, maybe it's related to this. other people keep you kind of, you know, bumper car, your bumper car away from the edges, keep you, um, keep you normative in your cognition in a way that, um, you need the non-normativity. You need these psychedelic experiences or mystics who go off into the wilderness for a week and don't talk to anyone.

1:09:23Um, but that stuff needs to get reintegrated into the community in a way that's coherent um that's that's one of the things that other people do for us that's helpful edward uh that leads into maybe my last big question before we sort of turn outward and take some questions from any any of our people who have been following this um because you have i mean it's not a harsh critique or anything like that it's not a maga critique or anything but you you have a critique in liberal and of liberalism small all-ell liberalism, even though you identify as a liberal. Because you point out it's not very good at giving us shared meaning.

1:10:05It atomizes us. It emphasizes individuality. We get, I don't know, a buffet of potential values and value systems. Because liberalism largely just gives us this anemic do not do not do not do not do not and not very much um and so is there a sense in in which um in which modernity has uh i'm not i'm not again i'm i'm not a romantic okay i'm not i'm not a post-modernist i'm maybe i'm a counter i'm a counter-modernist in that we've already talked about a lot of the transpositions that it's inflicted on us that have made it increasingly more difficult for us to get into uh way um and here's another one um and again i i don't want to give up my individual rights and i don't want to give up liberal democracy but there seems to be a problem right that directly undermines the affordance of way with within this kind of modernist framework we're living in.

1:11:14No, absolutely. It's interesting. I just reviewed an article for a journal that was about, and the reason I agreed to, I'm crazy busy, but I was like, oh, I do have to look at this one because it was about Iris Murdoch. Oh, yeah. Her visit to China, which I didn't, I had no idea she'd ever gone to China. I didn't know that either. She was part of a delegation that went to China in like the 70s. so it was it ended up being a little disappointing because there was a lot of information about the visit itself I got the sense it was kind of extracted from a book length thing where we got more details about that but one of the interesting tensions this author pointed out was that she saw in China the kind of communitarian holistic solution to the problem of alienation that she thought had been created in western thought that she blamed on Plato or who, you know, she doesn't fill us up the story about where he came from.

1:12:13But she also kind of, she also saw that people's thoughts were in control, like people were not allowed to express and she kind of wasn't cool. So when she got to ask Deng Xiaoping, who was the premier at the time, a question she asked about kind of freedom of speech and, you know, wouldn't it be better to let intellectuals say what's on their mind and have debate? And there's a tension there because, so I'm a liberal. I don't want anyone telling me what I can write about. I don't want anyone censoring the press or suppressing research they don't like. but my own research has led me to see that that is not how humans have led their lives for most of history and around the world and it does create problems and I just don't I really don't know what the answer is though because I don't want I don't want the catholic church in charge again I don't want to hand control over to a bunch of nutty evangelical christians who are going to, um, I don't, you know, I don't want that, but what do I want?

1:13:24Um, I don't, I don't know. So I think that modern intellectual, I see myself as part of a group of intellectuals who see the limitations of modern Western liberalism and how it can be alienating and kind of corrosive to things that make us human, you know, our sense of community and our sense of, so I'm kind of a communitarian in that sense. Um, but I also don't want people telling me what to do. So, you know, I don't want, I don't want to live in a communitarian society in some way. So it's a weird tension. Um, and I don't, I personally don't know how to solve it. Um, except, you know, in my own life, I try to create community and, um, um and meaning and connection to things that i care about but you know i think a traditional someone from a traditional society would look at the way i live and see me as a kind of unrooted cosmopolitan yeah you know crazy alienated you know my happy place is california but i don't have a job there um you know i fly there in an airplane and spend time which seems inauthentic right so it's I don't yeah I don't really I think it's a super deep problem and I don't know what the answer is yeah well thank you for sharing that I think an increasing number of people well I think there's categories I think there's increasing number of people that recognize that tension I think there's an even larger number of people that implicitly suffer it without ever bringing it into a reflective awareness um i talk about that in my work on the meaning crisis um in modernity um but uh the first of all uh edward uh we're gonna we're gonna turn to ben and see if we got any questions coming from yeah but first of all i wanted to thank you this i found this very rich um yes it's a lot of fun yeah um very very powerful um so um ben uh do we have any questions from the chat or ready okay speaking of ethos did you ever come across the three eternities virtue achievement philosophy as for example exemplified by the ming time literatus when we official yeah yeah uh relevance is so edward i think that's more in your wheelhouse than mine yeah i'm not familiar with the the first bit of that i mean i'm familiar with wang yung ming um and he was this neo-confucian thinker who uh basically was saying hey if uh mencius is the true follower of confucius we need to be an internalist like mencius and have confidence and our intuitions.

1:16:27And one of his most famous doctrines was the unity of knowledge and action that to know is to do essentially. So moral action for him is like his favorite analogy is like smelling a bad smell. If you smell a bad smell, you don't then say that's a bad smell. Therefore, I'll move away from it. You just move away from it. And he thought proper moral action is like that. It's there's a unity of knowing that something is the right thing to do and doing it. So, I mean, he's very he's a classic kind of internalist way thinker in the style of Menchus, I think. But interestingly, my former advisor, P.J.

1:17:16Ivanhoe, did a lot of work on Wang Ming and showed that he has a different model of self-cultivation than Menchus. for mentions it's the sprouts right you've got these potentialities of virtue and you need to grow them and um whereas wang yung ming and ivanhoe's argument is that it's because of the intervening exposure to buddhism that you have in china um is really working with a so mentions is a developmental model you're kind of developing these incipient tendencies and then you can be Wu Wei Wang Yangming's got a discovery model so he thinks you've got the full-blown virtues there but they're obscured and it's kind of they have to be uncovered they're obscured by selfishness and if you kind of eliminate selfishness they'll come out in full force so in a way a much more radical view and he's correspondingly more radical about the tradition so mencius is kind of like yeah rituals you could do them they're awful but it's not his real central focus and he's he has one mencius has one passage where he says yeah if you read something in the book history and it doesn't sound right throw it out so you know he's an internalist like you are the locus of moral authority um but long and main takes it much further he says you know um all the classics are just footnotes to my mind.

1:18:51So he really developed this Confucian internalism to its logical conclusion. So interesting thinker, related to a way, but I don't know the specific doctrines that were mentioned in that question, sorry. Fair enough. I have a question along those lines, at least one place, but maybe a couple. You sort of claim that this isn't verbatim, but something like Zen is much more Taoist than it's Buddhist. And, you know, David Hinton has the China Root book where he's making this argument at great length and great detail. So do you still think that's like a very plausible case? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sometimes call Zen Buddhism or Chan as it's pronounced in Mandarin, Zhuangzun Buddhist drag.

1:19:45It's kind of dry. Because, you know, so what happened was these, you know, the sutras, Buddhist monks come, Indian monks come to China and try to bring Buddhism. And Chinese people are like, okay, what do you have to say? And tell me in Chinese because I'm not going to learn Sanskrit. So, you know, as now, you know, they weren't thrilled about it. They felt like China is the center of the universe. and tell it to me in a human language, not this gibberish that you speak. So typically, Buddhist converts in China didn't learn to read Sanskrit and didn't read the sutras in their original. They had to get translated into Chinese, classical Chinese.

1:20:30And so then you have the problem of how you translate certain key terms. And they make moves like translating nirvana. as one way they translated is way which kind of makes sense it's kind of unconditioned yeah you know making but but i'm a literate chinese person and i read that the buddha is in the state of way and i'm going to understand that the way i under i've always understood way of course um so it becomes in the process of getting cinephide buddhism becomes adopts the terminology and a lot of the kind of embodiedness of pre-Buddhist China. And I think you see that very much in Chan or Zen Buddhism.

1:21:16It's very continuous with, for instance, Zhuangzian thought. Thank you. Thank you, Edward. Ben, do we have another question we could tackle?

1:21:39well and we'll make just to respect edward's time edward we'll make this the last question okay yeah because i've got to go yep yep so they can't hear ben um we're just waiting while ben is uh actually sort of here it is what if I'm always in flow state unless I shut it out? I do think that myself is the same or I with my inner self or true self. I'm not quite clear what the question is. I do think that myself is the same or I with my inner self or true self. So it's, I don't, one thing this could mean, which is very interesting actually given what you just said, And Stephen Batchelor in his book on Buddhism, along with others, one of his books on Buddhism, actually argued that the Buddha's enlightenment was just that he was in a perpetual flow state.

1:22:41He knew how to adapt and adjust. And so for me, that makes it at least conceivable that people could get at least in if we broaden it the way we did, you know, flow, resonance way. right then and I think that is very really possible I'm not quite sure what you meant by the inner self or true self do you mean did you mean when you're not shutting it off you feel connected to your inner self or your true self that's again something that is talked about in this literature that people discover that, even think about the flow state, the flow state shows you that the egos claim that it is the author of agency is false, right?

1:23:34And so people get this sense of a deeper self, but that self isn't, it's more between them and the world than sort of a personal private possession. It bleeds. It's porous, the way William Desmond talks about it. That's how I would address that. Edward, do you want to take a stab at it? Yeah, I mean, there's a similar thing in early China where, for instance, in, let's say, the Confucius of the Analects were kind of meant to believe that he was in a way state all the time, at least by the time he was 70, where he could follow his heart's desire and never transgress the bounds. So the ideal for the early Taoists and Confucians does seem to be to be in a way or flow state all the time.

1:24:33I just don't know if humans are built that way because the non-Uwe states have a function as well. Sure. they allow us to in an effortful and sometimes really unpleasant way but necessary way

1:24:55rejig our hot cognition or our habitual behavior and that's why we've got this big expensive referral cortex it allows us to stop automatic processes and bring them into consciousness so they can be modified so I think you know there's this religious ideal of being in a way all the time and maybe it could correspond to kind of some sense of feeling blessed or saved like maybe you're in the presence of something important even when you're working on something difficult but I think in practice humans also need to break flow and re-shift their behavior because we need to learn and we need to adapt and what's optimal, and even just like one life stage may not be at another life stage.

1:25:50Yeah, you want to be trading between those two. Ed, what do you think? What about the second part? I might have misinterpreted it, but, you know, that when people are in these states, they often discover a different sense of self, not just a different idea of self. And they often attribute more realness to it. I mean, that shows up in quite a bit of context. Does that land for you as? Yeah, we seem to feel a stronger sense of agency when our behavior is fluent, right? And when there's a good match with the environment. We're getting feedback from the environment that what we're doing is effective.

1:26:35I mean, the issue of what's the true self. I mean, I don't, I'm a physicalist, so I don't think there is a truth. You know, I think there's just, we're a body brain system and self is this kind of regulatory concept. But I do think we, our sense of self, the strength of our sense of agency is often enhanced when we're in a flow state because it's fluent and because we're getting positive feedback from the environment that matches their expectations. So, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, great. All right. Well, I always give my interlocutors the last word, but so I'll give you my last word, which is this has been great.

1:27:16Thank you very much. I think.

1:27:23Well, I'm going to end by encouraging people to read this book. It was behind a lot of this discussion and a lot of what Edward brought out is in the book. So thank you very much, Edward. What what any final words you would like to leave with our listeners? No, I think this was a really enjoyable discussion. I hope. I mean, I don't I feel bad that I don't have conclusions on some of these topics. The tension between liberalism and communitarianism. But, you know, I think if nothing and the same thing with in trying to try. it was originally marketed as a self-help book. And I said, don't do that because it's going to piss people off because there's no answer, right?

1:28:11No, no. It's a real paradox. And so there aren't easy answers to these questions, but I think that it's helpful to at least formulate the questions and see that there's a tension there. um i think doing that itself is helpful for us so the book doesn't have any kind of 10 steps to being a daoist age um guidelines but um it does i think help us see how um you know the role that spontaneity does play in our lives even if we don't always notice it um and be the way it should should help should play more of a role in our lives excellent