The Blind Spot in Perception: Evan Thompson on Cognitive Science, Asian Philosophy, and Mystical Insight

Welcome everyone. I've been really looking forward to this particular voices with Reveiki. You're no doubt looking at somebody who you've heard, many of you've heard me mention multiple times and sight has worked and has influenced our repeatedly huge impact on me and somebody I've got I've gotten to know on a somewhat more personal level. We were colleagues. I taught his son at one point. Well, multiple points I think and he's just a fantastic and I think important thinker in the field of cognitive science. I think he's probably one of the most premier of not the the premier person representing what's called for e-cogs eye and that I think is very pertinent to questions that we're wrestling with around the nature of meaning etc. So I'm going to just turn things over to my friend Evan Thompson and ask him to give us a little bit more of the background that he thinks might be relevant and then we'll move to the issue at hand. Yeah, so I am first and foremost a philosopher. That's my academic training and I work in the areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science both theoretical cognitive science and collaborating with experimental scientists. I also have a strong interest in Asian philosophy. My undergraduate training was in Asian studies Chinese language and history and I got drawn into philosophy really through studying Chinese philosophy. So I sort of went the reverse path from the path that sometimes people take from from west to east you know from east to west in my case academically but I have a continuing interest in the conversation between Asian philosophical traditions and western philosophy and I also have a strong interest in phenomenology the tradition coming from Edmund Husserl and that plays a strong role. The phenomenological tradition plays a strong role in the most recent book of the blind spot which is what we're going to turn to and Evan just referred to it and this is it. I want to strongly recommend this book especially for people who are interested in the meaning crisis and it is a central topic of this book it is called the crisis in meaning the meaning crisis the blind spot the blind spot is a particular account and explanation of the meaning crisis. This book is written with Adam Frank, Marcelo Glycer or Glycer is it Glycer? Glycer Marcelo Glycer and Evan Thompson is the third author and so when I got this book I opened it and I was like whoa things that are near and dear to my heart and to my work and my besetting obsessions the meaning crisis was there and and and there's this notion of the blind spot which will unpack in a minute and I turn to chapter nine on cognition as I often do in any book because that's my steck and the blind spot in cognition was explicitly named as relevance realization something else near and dear to my heart and so as soon as I saw that I hadn't read any more of the book I just read about 10 pages here and looked at the chapter and I went oh wow and I showed my partner the book and I was like so excited about it so I reached out to Evan right away and I said you got to come on we got to talk about this your work and my work really talk to each other really deeply at this point the book just just some basic things the book is wonderful I'm talking now sort of rhetorically it's clearly written it's accessible it it I wouldn't say it's like a beach read like you're just going to sit there and write you have to put thought into it it demands it provokes and demands reflection and consideration but it is also not pitched to the academic Hoy Palloy or anything like that is it is really written as I think it should be given the topic to a general educated audience of people who are concerned with the meaning crisis and how we get here and what it is and what is this meaning we're talking about and how can we all merely read it so first of all book is really really wonderfully written very clear now the thing I want to actually very quickly about and unpack this a little bit before we get into the the the meat of it like this what this book has a very single voice to it sometimes you know when you're reading books by multiple authors you hear this you get the sense of a carcophony and it's you know but like and you you know you use we throughout and everything you reminding the reader constantly as you should but the voice has I find the clear integrated voice like how did that come about and how did you make that happen well I'm glad that that it reads that way obviously that was you know that was a challenge in writing a a book with with three authors and I would say that the the responsibility for really doing the the overall smoothing as we called it and kind of unifying of tone and narrative that that was really part of my role as the writer each chapter was written in a first draft initially by one of the three of us so Adam Frank you know took the lead on the quantum mechanics chapter Marcelo Glycer took the lead on the cosmology chapter I took the lead on you know the cognition consciousness and the introduction chapters but then we each you know wrote over each other's drafts and then when we felt that we all were sort of on the same page with regard to what we were saying then it was really my job to to smooth it out and just give it a a unified voice and tone which I'm happy to hear you say you think it you think it works because you know when you're doing something like that you you don't want to remove the the particular you know the special things that each author has in the way they articulate something the way they write something you don't you don't want to just remove that and flatten things but in the other hand you can't have really very different styles in the same chapter let alone the same book so so that definitely took some work but um but I enjoyed that work actually I found it very satisfying and it enabled me to to really deeply think through each chapter with materials that you know I'm not an expert on you know quantum mechanics cosmology uh the physics of time I mean these are not my areas of expertise I have an interest in them from philosophy of science angle but that's not you know to be a scientist in those areas so I learned a lot from doing that well that's interesting and I won't open this up in a as a rabbit hole although maybe we'll return to it I mean I've been doing a lot of work right now on on dialogical reason as opposed to monological reason and a lot of the emerging evidence about how it has a lot of capacities to overcome bias and to be more uh clear and complex at the same time that you get with monological so I welcome that the fact that this was sort of dialogically produced so in order to flesh that out a little bit more can you tell me a little bit more about Adam and Michello? Yeah so Adam Frank is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester he works on a number of different things in science and he's he's written a number of more general audience books on Marcelo Glycer is a theoretical physicist and he's also you know done a number of different things in the scientific domains as well as having written a number of popular books so the way that we um the way that we wound up writing this book is that Marcelo directed for I think about five or six years at Dartmouth College where he's based an institute for cross disciplinary engagement ice and he invited you know fellows each year to come and be there for a couple weeks and give some talks and just interact with the community there and um he invited Adam and me I think it would have been 2016 or 2017 I don't remember so we were both there together and we just started talking and at one point in our conversations about you know science and experience this term the blind spot sort of popped into our conversation and um and then we just kept sort of working on it the three of us and eventually it became clear that you know we we had something that we wanted to write so so we really came out of conversations our our collaboration uh as a result of Marcelo's having this kind of special intellectual setting where he was inviting scientists and philosophers and historians and and and uh religious teachers spiritual teachers as well also to the to the center and um so their background is really coming out of physics and history of science and um and then the conversation between us was what launched the book that's excellent uh so there there's a good representation both from the history and the philosophy of science going into this book uh yeah so I want you to unpack the core argument now and and people do this to me all the time can you summarize the awakening from the meeting crisis yeah um um so you know and we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll give you time and space but like um when you do that though can you talk a little bit about how uh at least these these figures show up in the introduction they show up sort of throughout but you know Nishita and uh whitehead um and and and and then cartwright um three full you know three philosophers at least that's yeah maybe the best category they all belong to playing a pivotal role. Cartwright I'm unfamiliar with. I've just purchased a couple of her books because of the blind spot, which so thank you for that. And now Whitehead and Nishita, I'm doing a lot of work on and I've been doing this on and off for several years, but I mean they have a notion about this idea that in some way I'll use Whitehead's idea here. We've gotten into kind of a performative contradictions where we're making statements about reality. And then I'll use Nishita from a standpoint that doesn't, isn't consistent with those statements. So many people on watching my channel, I've made this argument about scientists, making pronouncements about everything above the level of the quantum being an illusion. And then it's like, but then you're basing those statements on all these illusory machines and gauges and illusory conferences and conference like, what how are you drawing deep conclusions about the ultimate nature of reality from all this illusory material and there's a performative contradiction. And I don't know if this is the actual source, but I credit Whitehead was sort of the first person to just like really put his finger on that performative contradiction, although I see Nishita doing something very similar, especially when he gets to basho when he's talking about basho. What is the argument and why the term the blind spot, which I found really helpful as an enacted, you know, almost an enacted metaphor for this. So maybe we'll start with the metaphor of the blind spot. So the blind spot in the way that we're using the term is is a metaphor from the blind spot in the individual field that we have that that all mammals have actually. And it's the area of the retina with the optic nerve leaves and and projects inward into the into the brain. And because there are no light sensitive receptor cells, where that bundle of nerve fibers enters into the brain, we don't see anything in the blind spot. There's no, there's no possibility of visual sensitivity to what's in the blind spot. But we also don't see that we have a blind spot because it's. It's the situation is the eyes are constantly darting about and the blind spots of the two eyes are different. And so we as it, as it is said, we sort of fill in across the blind spot. We have a blind spot in area in which an area within the visual field in which we don't see and we don't see that we don't see. So this is a metaphor for the idea that in our scientific world view, there is something that makes science possible. It's the, you could say the source of science, but we don't see it and we don't see that we don't see it and what it is. And now we could use different words for this what it is is lived experience direct experience immediate intuition. Sure awareness, you know, these terms that, that thinkers like William James and guitar and Nishida and also, you know, figures in literature in the 19th turn of the 20th century or interested in stream of consciousness, all of these thinkers as modern sciences is, you know, becoming this tremendously powerful epistemic accomplishment. All of these thinkers are whitehead, who's role the phenomenologist, they're all grappling with this recognition that there is an experiential source to our knowledge that we systematically occlude when we think about the nature of that knowledge and the way that we do that, it takes different forms, but the way that we do that. In how we think about science is that we, we step back, we look for, um, invariance across perspectives, we look for things that we can, um, that we can objectify and quantify across a community of observers, forgetting that those things actually depend on and arise out of a background of lived experience, and then we objectify them in a way where we take them to be more fundamental. Then the experience that underpins them and that's the, that's the sort of crucial move in the, in what we call the blind spot is this treatment of what comes about through a certain method that's called a method of objectification, which is a very powerful and very useful method, we're not arguing against the method as such, but when you forget that it's a method and you take it for the being of what you're studying in a way that makes that being more fundamental. Being more fundamental than the experience that's animating the method, then you, what you've done is, and here we really rely on, on Hustle in the crisis of European science, you substitute a method for being, which is like a category here, and Hustle calls this the surreptitious substitution. To a method that you've arrived at, Hustle identifies it as arising really most powerfully in Galileo, where Galileo, you know, imagines the world with no sentient creatures, he then treats nature as, as in terms of mathematical properties, where the mathematical properties, the method for him is geometry, the mathematical properties that then taken to be the actual being and reality of the universe from, you know, a sort of God's eye. Point of view that sees the language in which nature is written so that that move of substituting a method for being that's the surreptitious substitution that's that's built into the blind spot and the connection to whitehead is that whitehead. There's sort of two concepts in whitehead that are important for us, and for whiteheadians out there, I would say that we're really working here from, from what is sometimes called whitehead's middle period, so the concept of nature is a really important book for us, and also science in the modern world, which is a little bit later, so whitehead says there's in the epistemology that gets attached to modern science, or to natural philosophy, you could say there's a bifurcation of nature. Where we say as Galileo did what's, you know, objective and fundamentally real are the mathematical properties and the qualities the lived experience that's subjective. And in a way it gets kicked outside of nature that's the bifurcation gets kicked outside because if nature is that which is mathematical and those qualities have to be removed in order to mathematical nature, then what are you going to do with those qualities that are, you know, residing as it were in the mind. Well, the mind then gets excised from nature and whitehead is, you know, insistent on saying, you know, even from the standpoint of natural philosophy, you cannot do that because the lived sensuous qualities belong to nature. And so the task is to create a system of relations that treats them on the same sort of level playing field and integrates them. And to think that the abstractions, the mathematical abstractions are what nature really is, whitehead calls that the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Because you got an abstraction that you concretize and know what's concrete is in whitehead's terms, it's the sensuous experience or the sense awareness in which nature is given to us in terms of passage and duration and flow out of which we abstract things like, you know, space time continuum and so on. So that's sort of what we set up in the beginning of the book, where the blind spot, just to, you know, maybe succinctly summarize it, the blind spot is the inability to see or to recognize or to acknowledge that lived experiences, the source of science. And so if you undercut the source of science by including lived experience, this is central to our argument, you're actually damaging science because you're removing the epistemic footing that it needs to be the kind of, you know, powerful investigative method it is. And what happens is you get this symptomatic of the meaning crisis and our culture, you get this oscillation between the extreme of science triumphalism, which is science is the greatest method ever, and the world is what science tells us it is on the one hand. And then you get science denial on the other hand, because a very natural reaction to science triumphalism is to say, well, that's not how I experience the world, regardless of what you say, and in a world of rapid transmission of information and misinformation and willful, you know, misleading of people, that oscillation between science triumphalism and science denial becomes particularly problematic and prodigious. So that's sort of the setup of the book at the very beginning. That was great. Yeah, and that, I mean, that oscillation is, I mean, it also comes to the four in some ways in some, it, it, I don't know if it's the same, but it resonates with the oscillation, we have an instability in our sense of realness, we have these two, right, we have the mathematical sense of realness and, and Descartes played with both to no resolution, or we have this, you know, the core of where consciousness is present to itself as what is most real. And we, and we also vacillate between those, and I don't know if they are identical, but at least they seem to be tracking also between. science triumphalism and science denialism. I thought that was beautiful. So it sounds like you're and this is a bit of Nashita and you're picking up on that the blind spot, we're not only you know unaware of it, but it is also simultaneously the source of our ability to see. Yeah, that's right. Right, right? Because the optic, you know, and Nishitani builds on this, it's you know, it's the not the thing that makes it accessible to us and that sort of thing. So that move is really interesting to me. This idea of rounding and you use that term a couple of times in source, you use that term a lot. So what would you say to somebody who says, well, what do you mean? I mean, is there a difference between the epistemological order of how I come to knowledge and the ontological order of what that knowledge discloses? Yeah, I have to start in sense experience and et cetera, et cetera, but that doesn't mean that that ordering of my epistemological endeavors the same as the order of reality or how it's unfolds. I know you're ready for this, but I want to hear what you have to say about that. Sure, sure. Well, this depends on what ordering means. So I mean, at one level, you know, it certainly is something that needs to be recognized that the the procedure by which we disclose something is one thing and that which is disclosed is another thing. The ordering though, if it's a hierarchical ordering in terms of fundamentality goes beyond just that recognition because it says what's ontologically fundamental is, let's say, the, you know, the the mathematizable, the properties as mathematical. And the experience is derivative. The problem with that ordering is that the mathematizable properties exist at a different level of intelligibility from the concrete phenomena. And they are, if you will, the map and the territory is the concrete phenomena. And if you assume that the territory just is the particular map in the way that you're able to render it using, you know, the tools of objectification and mathematics, that's that's actually to not see that. So let me give a concrete illustration because this is a very abstract way of putting it. So one of the things we talk about is time. And so we had the idea that, you know, from a from the standpoint of physics clock, you know, time is what clocks measure. That's fine as a method. But if you then say, well, what time is is what a clock measures, you've forgotten that there needs to be clock readers. And they exist in some window of duration that's that's a continuous flow that disappears if you if you re try to reconstruct it in terms of, you know, point like instance and clock readings. So yeah, so I want to make sure I'm tracking. You're saying something like there's a kind of time in clock reading that is presupposed in measuring time with a clock. Exactly. Is that okay? Yeah. So yeah. So so there was just a review of the blind spot in L.A. review of books by Robert Creece who's a philosopher of physics. Also rates, you know, general books about about science. And he had a wonderful statement that I that I wish we had actually thought of. And let me see if I can if I can if I can get it exactly. So he he says describing our view. No one pulls out a clock to know what time is. They pull out a clock to know what time it is. So that's basically the idea, right? You already have to have some experience of time. And you might say sort of to use a use a a phenomenological term, a kind of, you know, pre-understanding of time in order to be able to recognize a clock as at all relevant to, you know, to the to the subject. Phenomenon that you're immersed in. So the ordering so the epit just to go back to the ordering point. So the ordering is is is what we object to is the sort of hierarchical ordering in terms of fund of mentality where we say experience is not fundamental or what's disclosed to us of the world in how we experience it is derivative not fundamental. And what's fundamental is what we what we're able to reveal through through say mathematical models. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveiki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses, practices, workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Okay, so there's two moves here and I like both of them because I've advocated for both of them. So I hope I hope this isn't just two members of the choir performing in front of the minister or something like that. That's okay too. Because I've talked about, you know, even a naturalist should be committed not only to what is derivable from your science, but what is besupposed by the practice of your science. Exactly. And that's exactly what you seem to be saying. You're like, great, Greg and Rikus and I talk about that as extended naturalism. Right. And then the next one is, and then this one may be maybe maybe more controversial, but it sort of follows from the first, there's an implicit judgment of realness. And I think, well, I hope you agree. I take real as a comparative adjective, right? When you know, Marlapond, people from Plato to Marlapond, you know, Whitehead have said, you only judge one thing as an illusion by judging something else as real. It's always comparative and vice versa. And so what I was hearing something like fundamental, implying something like more real, and the idea is, I'm not happy with this terms, and we'll play with them a little bit later, but the concrete is more real than the abstract because of something like, and you say this multiple times, too, there's a richness. There's an inexhaustibleness to that that, and this is the point about the map territory kind of. There's the territory is way richer has an inexhaustible. It overflows any particular map, even a globe, even a earth science globe, et cetera, et cetera. Is that? Yeah. And that's very, that's very, you know, so for the, for me, just as we're sort of putting cards on the table, that's the influence of Polania on me. He was proposing that as the mark of what he calls contact with reality. And as Esther, like, kept me and talked about that in her book of the same title, this inexhaustibleness, but it's not a carcophonist, inexhaustible, and we'll play with that a little bit. It's kind of like an inexhaustible, prountive intelligibility, right? Right. And so is that, is that, is that? Yeah. Yeah. So that's very much it. I mean, another way that I think of it is that our, our being always is more than or overflows are knowing because knowing, you know, happens through certain means, through certain methods, through certain sensory systems, through certain forms of intelligibility, and our being is always larger than that. It always overflows that. Yeah. So that would, that's wonderful, Evan. I've got to slow down. I'm very enthusiastic. So that, that means that, well, let me suppose it's a question. Is it possible that one, because I've made an argument that one of the contributors to the meaning crisis is we've reduced many kinds of knowing that have many different kinds of a memory attached to them, procedural, episodic, auto-noetic, have different criteria of realness to them, skillless power, you know, perspective, knowing is sort of like noticing, getting that sense of, you know, getting deeper into things, more present to them, and then the participatory knowing is the sense of sort of belonging, fittedness to your environment. And what I mean by that is part of, I hear you saying this, but I want to say, like our, our, our practice, we've reduced what, what knowing is, and we forgot by when we do that, we've, we've, we've forgot the ultimate responsibility of knowing to being, like particularly our being, but also being in general. Like, we forgot that there are ways of knowing that are more, or are, are closer, metaphor to our being in the world than these mathematical abstractions. Is that also tracking? Oh, definitely. Yeah, no, definitely. I think there are different kinds of knowing. They're, they're, they're different modes of knowing, I suppose you might say. Different ways of, of delineating those, of course, too. And it's, it's a, because science is so transformatively powerful, in its outward, you know, obvious manifestations, we have defaulted to thinking, and I mean, you see this explicitly in Descartes, right? We've defaulted to thinking that knowing is a matter of having a method. And that's true, for some methods of knowing. But even the application of a method presupposes something that you can't, you know, state in terms of a method, right? I mean, this is a familiar kind of thing for philosophers. So yeah, no, that's right. There's a kind of acquaintance. You could say that we have with our being that is not a matter of having a method. It's just not on problematic, of course. I mean, all sorts of questions arise in relation to that, you know, normative questions, existential questions, philosophical questions, ethical, political, of course. But it's, it's the background for the application of any method, exactly. Well, I was smiling because I know you're aware of this because you tweeted about it. With Johannes Jager, and Anna Riedell, and Aldrich Dadevik, and Dennis Walsh, we're trying to get a paper published on how you can't ultimately, you can't capture relevance realization and computation for exactly that reason that the process of formalization of translating things into a formal system is always an ill-defined problem that requires relevance realization. And that's sort of, I mean, there's a lot more to that paper, but that's the core kind of. Yeah, no, I love that paper, and I completely, completely agree and sympathize with the argument, yeah. Now, what's interesting, I excellent answer to that question. So I'm going to throw out these like devil's advocate things, and then you do this wonderful thing, and we get into some nice discussion. Somebody will say, bifurcation, come on, we've, we've always bifurcated because we, we have to, and we do even in our lived experience readily and reliably make distinguishing distinctions between appearance and reality, fraud and reality, illusion and reality, delusion and reality, hallucination and reality, right. And yeah, maybe we cut it up as the subjective and objective, but the ancient world cut it up into the problem of the one in the mini, we're always building these worldviews trying to somehow give us a normative guide for how we discern, you know, reality from appearance. And so is it a bifurcation and inevitable thing, therefore. Yeah, so, of course, we always live in a, in a world where we have to make distinctions between, you know, the appearance of something. And as we say how it really is, but if we think about how that works, the test, the criterion, the standard for how something really is is disclosed in and through another experience. So it's not that we step outside of experience and we have some absolute standard or metric by which we can say, this is real and that isn't real. It's rather that we continually open up new vistas, new horizons and experience where the relationship between appearance and reality shifts within the sphere of experience itself. So that's not really bifurcation in whitehead sense. That's that's a sort of progressive changing of appearances, perspectives, you know, profiles, aspects of things where what we take to be true or real is something disclosed again through experience where whitehead when he uses the term bifurcation of nature really means you kick experience out of the frame. Of the framework of scientific, the framework of the scientific representation of nature and then, and we know this very well today in terms of the hard problem of consciousness, then you face a very, very fundamentally difficult problem of how to recover. Consciousness, awareness, the mind, and the hard problem is that problem. It's a problem that that derives in a way from the bifurcation of nature in the way that we state the problem today, which is, you know, how is consciousness possible in a purely physical world where we conceive the purely physical in terms of this bifurcation of, you know, a mathematizable quantitative nature that then somehow we have to find a room for the quality, the qualitative properties, the phenomenality, the appearances, and then we either we do that by either trying to, you know, be reductionist and say, well, it just really is physicality in the face of the obvious sort of problem of conceptual intelligibility there. Where we say, well, it actually is an illusion itself, we sort of go the illusionist route, and then we strain at the intelligibility of the concept of an illusion, or we, you know, or we go pan-psychist and we say, well, there's a sense in which consciousness and some minimal, fundamental sense is sort of an ingredient everywhere at all levels, so we sort of like having sucked the consciousness out, we then sort of like spray it back into the universe as it were everywhere, and that doesn't really work either. So that's the bifurcation. So yes, of course, we have to make distinctions between appearance and reality, genuine counterfeit, but we always do that within a framework of the test of experience. So that's the key move, and I like that. That was a great answer. And there was a moment in the book, sorry, I don't mean to indicate it was the only moment in the book. There was one moment in the book, one among many, where I was, I was looking at this, and I said, oh, I never put those two together. I, you know, I talk obviously about, you know, the relationship to God and the two worlds mythology, but you did this, you made this move where you said, you know, the thing about the idea of this, I don't know what to call it, you know, the monarchical God or something like that God, even when that God disappeared, we represerved the placeholder function of the view from nowhere, right in there. And so what I hear you critiquing is that view from nowhere possibility. It's like, yes, yes, there's reality, illusion, reality distinctions, but you never are in the place from nowhere, no when to make that distinction. Is that is, yeah, that's right. That's right. Exactly. I mean, if you read, if you read Newton or Galileo, you have this, this conception, a particular kind of conception of God as, as able to, you know, behold everything at all times, from all possible perspectives, you know, Newton says that, you know, space is God's sensorium. So there's a sense of God can, can contemplate. You know, every, every possible perspective of a thing in space, you, you have a, you have a conception of the outside view and science, you know, is it may never achieve that, but that's, it's, it's ideal in a way. And so that is very much what we're, what we're criticizing is, no, that that's, that's not how science works. And it's not how knowledge works. It's not how experience works. So, so that's really good. And I want to, I want to, I want to shift back into a Neshita just for a sec. I forget what's in a sheet of, but Carter talks about it in his beautiful book, the nothingness beyond God, he talks about Neshita's distinction between the transcendent transcendent and the imminent transcendent. Right. Right. Right. Right. Because you, well, you qualified something. And I think it was good that you did, because some of my people listening to this, you're not the village atheist or something like that. That's not what's being argued for here. And so, and I hear you're saying, well, that conception, the transcendent transcendent, that, that is probably given this argument, a performative contradiction of some kind of like it's, it's ultimately not conceivable to us, not just because we're limited or finite, but because it is inherently, it's severed itself from the very sources of meaning and understanding, is that, is that, is that, that's what that is. Whereas there's something like the notion of the imminent transcendence, which you get, of course, in, in whitehead, right, you have the, the emergence, right, you, you have, and we can talk about whether or not you still like this language, but you know, you have the eternal and the emergent and they're constantly resonating with each other, but they're always bound together. The whitehead says, you know, God transcends the world to the same degree that the world transcends God, and God is imminent in the world to the same degree, the world is imminent in God, and I think that's very aligned with what Nishita is trying to get it. Now, so, you aren't responsible to every possible audience, I get that, but a lot of people come to this, and I think this is a fair point around the meaning crisis, and they come to this around the issue of sacredness, because they say, yes, you're talking about reality. And you're talking about things can be more real, I can be closer, I can be more in conformity to it, I can live a perhaps a fuller life, a more responsible life, and there's a sense that that could even be sacred, it could afford transforming me, making me a better person, and you know, both whitehead has has a God and Nishita talks a lot about God, and he certainly has a sacred in it. So, I know you're not a theologian, and I'm not trying to bend you into something, but I think this is a fair question, because these questions around the meaning crisis bring up issues around, you know, about sacredness and altimacy, and what would you say about that, would you say that? Yeah, because there's a parallel, this is all final proposal before I shut up and let you answer the question, there's a parallel with religious denial and religious triumphalism, I think, in a certain way, and maybe, you know, know, and you're trying to get out of the one. And I, I agree with you on that, that what the science and you're trying, and I'm, I've been trying to get out of the other. And I'm wondering if you see relationship between them, particularly because we're, and I want to get into this with you at some point. I think this meaning, the, what psychologists call meaning in life, not semantic meaning, but this sense of connectedness to reality is what's behind, you know, our judgments of what is, you know, most real and most sacred, it's important for us, et cetera. Do you think those two problems talk to each other? I know you don't, I mean, I haven't read a book, maybe you talk about it in other places in the book, but do you think, yeah, no, those are really interesting thoughts and questions. That definitely goes beyond what we talk about in the book. So we don't, I mean, I'm happy to talk about it here, but just, just, uh, to be clear about the book, it's not, we don't really enter into issues about, um, you might say larger issues about meaning that connect to, to religion or to the sacred or to spirituality. Um, you know, we may be allude to certain aspects of them here and there, but they're not, they're not a really dominant theme in the book. The, you know, the book is really circumscribed by the, by the effort to, um, you know, help us get clear about what science is and how science works. But that, of course, immediately raises the question, uh, from, you know, a larger perspective of how to think about science and relationship to philosophy or religion or to, um, issues about, about the sacred, um, this is difficult, you know, in a way, to know exactly how to enter because, you know, the word, the word sacred can mean different things, the word, you know, the word God can mean different things like whitehead has a very idiosyn, idiosyncratic, uh, conception of God. I mean, it's been generative for process theology, but, but it's, it's, it's, it's an outlying conception, uh, even within the realm of theology. Um, so how I'm using it and maybe, and see if that's good enough. Um, and I'm deeply influenced here by a fellow Canadian, a Schellenberg, um, and his idea of the triple transcendent, uh, the sacred is that which is, in some sense, ultimately real for us. Um, it is ultimately transformative for us. It has a pseudo-rological function. It's not just an intellectual ascent. And then it has an axiological, it serves as kind of an, uh, an ultimate normative guide for us in some way and making our ethical and aesthetic, um, even epistemological judgments. And, and, and, and, and, and other people like Bracken and the divine matrix seem to be arguing that I'm not, I'm not saying this is going to satisfy everybody, but maybe it's enough of a core so that we got something to work with in answering the question I'm posing to you. Yeah. I guess the way that I have been thinking about that recently. So that this isn't really worked out for me in a thorough way, but, but, um, but I have thought about these things, you know, more in actually in relation to the writings that I've done about Buddhism, um, and religion and science in my, in my earlier book, why I'm not a Buddhist. So there's an issue I would say about, um, and you're going to come on my show and talk to me about that book when I get to that book. I've had that book on my shelf for a while and I apologize for that book. Yeah, no worries. Yeah. Yeah. No, that would be fun. Um, so we might, we might use Tilex idea of, you know, faith as ultimate concern, like, not to say that it has to stop there, but we can take that idea as an entry point. I like telling a lot as you know, he's big. Yeah. Yeah. So ultimate concern, or, you know, we could, we could use a word sacred to mean ultimate concern as well. So, so, you know, faith sacred ultimate concern. For me, um, one issue really has to do with a juxtaposition between, uh, what Martin Hogman called secular faith. So this is the idea of, um, faith and our, in our being as faith and our finitude, faith and the life we share together as finite beings, you know, under the, under the horizon of death or within the, you know, the limit of the horizon of death, the kind of existential secular conception of ultimate concern or ultimate concern really has to be grounded in, in this life and, and this world that we, that we share with each other. Good. Good. Whereas the notion of transcendence can be used in a way that would, that would, that would be juxtaposed to that where transcendence would mean something like, um, a state, either of liberation or freedom or release that takes us beyond or outside this life. Transcendence doesn't have to be used that way because you could have a transcendence in immanence again within this, you know, within this life. But when used, um, that way, which I think is, is one fundamental sense of transcendence we see running through, uh, lots of different religious traditions, then I don't see, it's not that I want to deny that because I think for many people, that's important and meaningful. But it wouldn't be how I would articulate the sacred or ultimate concern. Right. And so there's a dish. I mean, I, and what I've realized I've made an error sometimes in making this a hard and fast distinction is more of a continuum. But there is a distinction to be made between something being indispensable to somebody and somebody claiming it's sort of metaphysically necessary in some fashion. Um, the example I use is, I'm, I'm monolingual so English is indispensable to my cognitive agency. That doesn't mean it's metaphysically necessary. Um, and so I, I think I, I think that's how I sort of parse what you're doing. I, and I agree with you, uh, the sacred does not obligate us to any kind of escapism because behind the escapism is a two worlds mythology. And then we have the problem of the bifurcation and then we're getting into it back to the very place we're trying to get from. And, and I agree with that. That's a mistake. But here's here, like, so for example, the meaning and life literature, you want to ask people if they have meaning in life, you can ask them these three questions and, and, like, and, like, what do you want to exist, even if you don't? Sorry. Say that question again. Uh, what do you want to exist, even if you don't? Uh, great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. How real is it? And sometimes you, you put in the qualifier, how really real is it? Because simply what do you mean? Right? Right. And then, and then how much of a difference do you make to it right now? If you got, if you got something, you don't have to be an object, obviously, if you have something that, you know, this is Susan Wolf's, this is trying to, you know, break out into a questionnaire, Susan Wolf's idea of being connected to something larger than yourself, right? What that metaphor means is, well, people want this thing, it might, like, they want it to be in the universe, even if they're not. It's not, it's not an anyway bound to their egocentric preferences, right? Right? And then the next one is, right? It can't be fraudulent. It can't be mere appearance. It can't be superficial. It has to have significance and depth. And, and then, and then the next is, but we have to be connected to it. We have to make a difference to it. Um, and so, so remember, I agree with everything you said, and I sort of ran through that, the argument with you about it. But how do you, I'm going to express sympathy. I can express, and let me buttress this. Okay. So you're, you're in the axial revolution. Uh, you've got Bella's second order thinking your, your meta cognition has been massively improved by numeracy with the, what the Greeks are doing with alphabetic literacy. You've got insipient democracy. So debate is everywhere, hyper justification. And you've got a shared culture, but many different, uh, polices. So you have all the six social experimentation. And this is really blowing your meta cognitive abilities out, right? And so you're getting just a tremendous awareness of your capacities for self deception. And then you're, you're liable to think, oh, you know, and you can see this in Plato. You can, you can even see it outside of Greece. You can see it like in the down a pad, about, you know, right? And things like this, that, you know, this realization about how much of our suffering and violence is due to this self deceptive proclivity of the mind. And then you could start to conceive of a world that, um, how the world would be if you weren't looking at it through that torture of self deception and self destruction. And then you could plug into this, this other thing we said, you've got, that's, it's being connected to that is deeply meaningful to you. And you somehow have a sense of it being beyond your life, right? And beyond your egocentric concerns. And so I'm not justifying. I'm trying to play with an explanation with you. It's very tempting to give into a tool's mythology. That is just such a wonderful way of explaining all, all of that and drawing it together. Sure. Yeah. No, that's right. And I think, um, uh, you know, they're, they're different cultural forms that that that takes. So, um, you know, say in India, where in the, you know, the Vedas, we don't really see the, the idea of rebirth or, or, you know, reincarnation as we sometimes say, we, we, we have a cosmology in which, um, you know, there may be, you know, higher, more divine kind of transformative states or possibilities after death that have have to do with with divinities and the sort of sacred order of the cosmos. And then we have this idea that we have this sort of ethosization of action where the idea is if you act in a good way, then the possibility of a more refined transformative after death state is open to you. If you act in a bad way, then it's gonna go worse for you after death. And so we have this sort of, you could say kind of too world if we slice it in terms of life here and what happens after death. And then we have the idea that of karma, that we see really first in the Upanishads, where it's because of desire, you're actually thrown back from that other world into this world. And then it goes round and round and round. And that becomes an existential problem that has to be solved. And then we get the different solutions to it on the part of Buddhism and the Buddha's teachings or what later come to be called Hindu teachings. So that's all part of this axial transformation in our consciousness, in our medical cognition, in our cosmology, in our ethics, definitely. And. - Well, let me phrase the question. Since we've landed on sort of a, I like the way you broaden it 'cause I want the cross contextual cross historical, right? Given that something like that, let's like that. How do we preserve the recognizable gains? There's a change in the notion of wisdom, too, too. Like you said, this kind of liberation may be escape, but transformation from maybe a Bronze Age. Taylor talks about the continuous cosmos and you're trying to fit in and harmonize, right? It's a very different notion of wisdom. How do we preserve what was gained by us? And you know, I'm gonna obviously ask the same thing when we come to the scientific revolution. How do we preserve what was gained by the axial revolution? Well, can we preserve that? Let's say we agree, we want to preserve it. I'm presuming here, but let's say we want to preserve a lot of what was gained by that. All the metacognitive enhancements, all the sense of individual responsibility, right, et cetera. The realization of self-deception, the possibility of self-correction. How do we maintain all of that? Or can we, I'll phrase it a question, better question. Can we maintain all of that? And I don't know, tear it free, and I'm trying to use a somewhat violent metaphor from the two worlds mythology. I mean, it's almost, and part of this also plugs into even our conceptual metaphors and our embodiment, realism or op, less real is down. And like I'm peeling up today and you're looking down and all this kind of language and we abstract, and the abstract is above and the concrete is, it's so woven culturally and even into, plugs into our embodiment in a powerful way. I think we can, but I want to hear what you, do you perceive the difficulty of the problem? - Oh, certainly, I mean, that is a huge question. You might say a part of the big historical question for our times and the crisis of meaning that we face as you've talked about it. And I see it, it's hard not to sort of go hagelian here, but I mean, I'm gonna give in to the temptation. I see it in a way as, that was a hugely transformative revolution, let's call it, the Axial Revolution. And we might also think that things were lost in that. So we might think that a certain relationship to the natural world was lost. And we're now especially conscious of the need to restore some viable, I'll even say sustainable, though it's become a buzzword. Some viable, sustainable relationship between the human and the rest of the biosphere that requires, I think, an affirmation of the specialness of our Earth environment. Yes, there are, so Marcelo Glycer's book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe is about this. It's, yes, there are, inordinately many planets out there that might be able to support life. But a critical examination also suggests that there might actually be very, very few that have life. And if life is a special thing that's happened here, at least in the way that it's happened here, then the sacred and ultimate concern has to involve our being in relationship to the biosphere. And we have to do it in a way that involves all of the ethical cognitive gains that we made as we're from the Axial Revolution, telescoping huge historical time here. But we also have to do it in a way that recovers kind of sensibility and relationship to the natural world that there would have been pre-agricultural, at least according to some historical, the new narratives. We don't, we can't go back to that, of course. That's absurd. But we need to recover something of that in a new, so the way this is hagelian, is it's like a higher turn of the spiral, be how my dad would have put it, actually, is that you have this recorse of history and you never repeat the same thing, but there are patterns where at a certain turning of the spiral, you actually can look down and see the Axial turn, the turn that would have been or the curve that would have been before the Axial. And from that perspective, you need to recover things that were lost because there's always something lost as well when you have a gain. And the amazing thing about science, just to bring it back to the book for a moment, is that with things like the Gaia Theory and Earth System Science, we've opened up a whole new appreciation of that we don't live on the planet, we live in the planet that were embedded at so many levels in the very fabric of life on the planet. And that is, to really, to really be with that in an ethical way requires a kind of profound, I think, change in our sensibility, that science gives us some of the tools for, not all of them, but some of them. And the other things are going to need to come from larger perspectives of ethics and the sacred, religion and spirituality, art. I mean, the world is a lot bigger than science, right? The human, cultural world. Yeah. - Well, that brings up two things. One is, of course, I assume you're making a similar argument about the scientific revolution that there was a lot lost. I mean, that's what the book is saying in some ways. But you're not proposing nostalgia. I get that. And so, the thing you said about that met that, so it's not only a looking back through the eyes of history, it's also looking around through eyes other than the eyes of science, art, ritual, all different ways of knowing, different ways of being together, of being in the world, looking from within, not looking at, but looking from within nature, Ursula good enough, notion of transcendence into nature, things like that. And so Whitehead had this idea that we need to recover, almost in Tolkien's sense of recover. We need to recover art and ritual and art, all of this, and somehow bring it back into having a proper role within our epistemological and ontological endeavors. That's clearly sort of a thing that Whitehead is arguing. Does that land for you, too? - Oh, yes, that's it. - Yeah, that's it. - Okay, okay. And here's where we're maybe trespassing on mats, where it mats a gal, especially in the most recent book. But, you know, and this where I'm influenced somewhat by Habermost, right? You know, Kant basically severs the true and the good and the beautiful from each other and really powerful ways with the three critiques and the autonomy arguments for each one of those. And, you know, Kant is sort of looming in places in the book here and there. 'Cause you're rejecting both a kind of old plateenism and a simple Kantianism about things like math. We'll probably get into that in the next conversation. I don't know if we'll get to it now. But I'm trying to get at what would, at least in a preliminary fashion, and I'm not trying to pin you here. You know, I'm your friend. I want to talk to you about this. How would you address? I mean, that's a hard problem. It's a hard problem. I mean, Habermost has been wrestling with it, he wrestled with it, sorry, right? To, you know, overcoming those arguments that give us the autonomy of the truth of good and beautiful. We have a sense, you know, David Schendler has been arguing about how they're actually convertible and all that sort of stuff. But, well, how would you, where would you go to like, I'm trying to make, I'm trying to make Kant the impediment that you have to address right now. But not all of his work, but just, just this move about, right? With the, you know, the, the, the separation and making autonomous, including making the individual autonomous with each one of the, within each one of these autonomies of, you know, because of the three critiques. And that seems to me like a really powerful thing to be trying to wrestle with. philosophically in the book has a philosophical edge to it, you represent that. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I hadn't quite thought of it in those Kantian terms. I suppose my, you know, my philosophical sensibility is so informed by phenomenology in the sort of sense coming from from from personal and it doesn't, there's a way of talking about truth where it's very easy to think of truth as different from the beautiful say. And that's because we think of truth in terms of the correctness of propositions and we have right, we have an idea of of correctness really or of correspondence. But from a phenomenological perspective, that actually is a secondary sense of truth and the primary sense of truth is, is disclosure or presence or the to be, you know, technical in the way that Husserl uses the terminology, the you know, the evidencing of something. So, evidencing is the, you know, we use evidence as a noun in English. We think here's a piece of evidence, but in other languages, evidencing has this verbal sense where you you disclose something, you uncover it, you reveal it, it comes to presence, you know, Heidegger tries to talk about this in terms of his his sort of etymological reconstruction of the, you know, the Greek sense of unconcealment of Aletheia, you know, Lathia is the concealment, the alpha-privative Aletheia is the unconcealment. So, there's this opening, this, this space of unconcealment and openness. And it's within that space that you can then say in terms of a proposition, you might assert that you put in quotation marks, oh, that proposition that you just said is correct. That happens against this other sense of truth, which is, you know, unconcealment, presence, openness, evidence, disclosure, you know, however you want to, however you want to put it. So, within that context, it's very difficult to make a separation between the, the, the, the, the sense of truth as unconcealment and say, the beautiful or, or other aesthetic, aesthetic properties for that matter, or the just. And so, if we think of it that way, we are in a sense going back before Kant. You might say, well, that's going back before the critical philosophy of Kant and, yeah, and thinking in, you know, a more Greek way. That's fine. As long as we do it, having taken, you know, the knowledge and the message, if we want to simplify things, of Kant on board, you know, it's like, we're not going back in some nostalgic way, in the way that Heidegger often writes, in a way that I find actually very distasteful, this kind of nostalgic, artificial German, German romantic sort of projection back into the ancient world. No, we're not doing that. We're, we're taking what we've learned from Kant, but we're moving forward in the way that, say, phenomenologists have taught us to, taught us to do, where, again, the, the, the, the, let's say that the horizon of experience as, as, as presence is the, is the, is the context within which we're, we're going to be talking, where those distinctions don't, can't, they can't be made hard and fast in the way that they might have been done. Right. In, for the, for the Kantian purposes. I want to play with that a little bit. I like that because I've done similar play, you know, a, recruit talks about the harmonics of suspicion, and, and I've made the argument that the harmony of suspicion is parasitic on what I call the harmonics of beauty. The harmonics of suspicion is appearances are distorting, misleading, they, they conceal deception, blah, blah, but the harmonics of beauty, at least, um, ways some people are talking about beauty is, well, no, but there have to be situations in which appearance is disclose reality that appearance is, is not a veil, right? The, where, that's an enlightenment ideal, but, and that beauty is when we're getting a sense, and this, and, and, and, and scurry does this in her book on beauty, that it's what we're getting a sense of, oh, oh, it's, and it's, it's bound up with almost like that insight moment where you realize, oh, I haven't been seeing this as, as, as, as it is. And then, so that's beauty, but then that you're already also in, like, the truth, but you're also getting into this other thing, this sort of, and you get this research from people who have, um, because the Griffith Lab and other, I know you're familiar with this research, and they have the experience, the poetic experience of the really real, and it seems to have a kind of normativity to them, right? Right? That, that, and, and it's just, it's just in the fact that it's real, that it, it's normatively binding on them, like, and they, they, they transform their lives and their relationships, and they're, and they're not guided by at least a Kantian sense of being more moral, and they're not, right? But they're guided, but nevertheless, by this sense of, a goodness, I call it, onto normativity, just to give a name to it. Somehow, there's a goodness to reality that, and, and, and, and you're nodding, or maybe you might be just being polite, but is that sort of the kind of thing you're talking about where you start to unpack these kind of things, and you start to say, well, no, you know, there's a sense of beauty as appearances disclosing something underneath them, which relates to truth as disclosure, and then there's a sense of goodness as, you know, this contact with the really real as something that's sort of an normativity for us. Is that? Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think, you know, in addition to beauty, I would, I would invoke awe and wonder, of course, I think that it's impossible to, to, to separate those things phenomenologically in, in those kinds of experiences and situations that, that people have, including, including science, right? Yeah, I mean, you read, you read Einstein, you know, writing about the, the, the, the, the world view that he has as a scientist, and, and some of his own, you know, experiences in, in thinking about his scientific work, you, you read historical, you know, scientific figures throughout, throughout history, and, and they all, you know, express, or many of them express this, this sense of, you know, awe and, and, and wonder, an amazement and, and, and a, you know, a feeling of the good, um, transformative insight. And I think there's a deep connection, so I'm, I'm really going to lay my cards on the table, because I, I know I can do that with you. Um, yes, but I mean, for me, I, I, I, I'm very much drawn to mysticism in, as a mode of understanding what's happening there. I think of, you know, science and mysticism as, as deeply linked throughout history and, in, in, in philosophical cultural and, and, you know, personality ways in terms of individual scientists, where, you know, mysticism is this, I think of mysticism almost as a kind of epistemic humility. It's that, yeah, you know, the world is, is vast. It's unfathomable and that there are modes of knowing is not even the right word. There are modes of being in which there is a felt oneness or unity that can be expressed in innumably different ways in, you know, in, in science, in art, in philosophy, and, and mysticism, you know, so, so going back to the sacred, I think of it as a kind of, you know, the need for kind of imminent mysticism, a mysticism of, you know, here and now in this planet, you know, with, with, with the needs that, that face us as a species, and as a, as a civilization, as a scientific civilization. So I see that mystic is really almost the, the, you know, the guardian, the remind, the reminder, the, the sort of watch person for that sensibility, yeah. Well, I think you know that I agree with that quite deeply. A lot of my work is about trying to get these two to speak together. And in your own book, The Blind Spot, I, I was noting the many places where you explained why this was chosen by the scientists, especially in the history chapter, because it was elegant, because it was beautiful, because it was simple. I mean, there's a problem with the notion of simple. We act as if it's a, a, a, clearly, cleanly determinable thing, but it's not, right? And stuff like that. But there, yeah, there was this tremendous sense of how much that is, how that is, you know, driving, motivating, and justifying the moves that these scientists are making historically. Yeah. And even, you know, as people have written about, um, um, just, you know, just to balance things, that, that can sometimes lead us astray, you know, we can get caught up in the beauty of the mathematical constructions in a way where we lose, we lose contact with how the world actually is talking back to us. And we, you know, we depart from any real possibility of experiential grounding or confirmation or, or support. I mean, this happens, um, you know, so I'm, I'm, you know, Marcelo and Adam could talk much more particularly about this, but you know, this happens in, in areas of physics, you know, in string theory, or, you know, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and, and how people just are willing to run with its metaphysical implications in this sort of profligated and discriminant way. So that's sort of the flip side is you can get, you can get fascinated by constructions that have a kind of beauty, but that are, but that are misleading in certain ways. For sure, for sure. And, um, it's interesting. maybe we'll leave to when they're present to talk about this more in depth, but you can see sort of both of these impulses, right? Yeah, you can get the rabbit holding that goes on with strings theory and multiple worlds and it's just one electron moving all through time and space and countering itself and like, what? How could you possibly determine that or given pure content of that claim? And then, but the other like there is something and I hear that maybe I'll be poetic, the whisper of the mystic in this drive to unify the very, very bottom with the very, very top, the cosmol relativity with quantum and it's like, you know, if there was ever a falsification of popper, there's a falsification, we've had the best minds and the best technique and they keep making this hypothesis and it keeps getting reliably just confirmed and they not doesn't matter. They just keep going and they just keep going and I think that's powerful. Yeah, I wouldn't want to, I'm very, I try to make a distinction between the wisdom that mysticism can give us and any particular ontological or epistemological knowledge claims that are made. And the first, I think, I take very seriously the second I agree with quite a bit of suspicion and I think that's important. Well, I just want to, I want to wrap up for today and I think this was great. We're really unpacking things really nicely, very dialogically the way I like, I want to talk to you next time, just a four warn. I want to talk to you around about these issues about abstraction and you make a wonderful correction or at least amendment camera is at the end of chapter one or chapter two, you talk about, well, you say actually we mean more or less abstract or more or less concrete because the terms are actually relative and comparative, right? You know, the dog is more abstract than the cocker span, you know, but the mammals more abstract than the dog and right and all that sort of thing and I want to unpack that a little bit more. And how does that plug into this notion of more, more real as you're more closer to the inexhaustible fountain intelligibility. And then there's this other one about you know, direct experience immediate pure experience and you know, and then you're familiar with this, no doubt, these criticisms made by others against people like Nishita in the Kyoto schools, you know, hey, Williams would make this argument. What, what do you mean? There's no, there's all experiences mediated. That's the gain from the Kantian revolution. That's the thing you're doing where you're trying to go back before Kant, you're giving up the realization that everything is mediated in some fashion. And there's no such thing as immediate experience or direct experience, right? Does that sound like a fecund area to go into it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, immediate immediate is like abstract concrete. It's, you know, there's, yeah, yeah, exactly. There's a contextual issue there as to what, what immediate versus immediate means just as there is for abstract concrete. But yeah, no, those are all important things to talk about. Definitely. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Evan, first of all, I'm going to thank you. This has been just fantastic. I had great expectations and it exceeded them. I really enjoyed myself a lot. I hope you did. Yeah, definitely lots of fun. And I definitely want you back. Let's have the next one just be you and I again. Okay. And then maybe we could reach out to your co authors and we could set up maybe a third and fourth with all of us together. We might be a little bit more time for those episodes just to give more space for more people to be able to chime in. But I always like to give my, you know, this from when you were on the philosophy of meditation, we like to give the people here, the last word, it can be provocative, it can be summative, it can be mysteriously evocative. I don't know if I have a, if I have a last word of that of that nature to other than just to say it's always lots of fun to talk with you and, and yeah, you know, I've really enjoyed the conversation. All right, so then I'll give the last word. I'm going to plug the book again. Okay, really, this book, if you are interested in the meeting crisis, if you're interested in, well, relevance realization, that's in the book too. If you're interested in all of these issues, we're talking about the sacred about, you know, the fact that somehow we need to be put back into the scientific world view, but that means changing what we mean by a scientific world view. And you should be interested if you're watching this video because I've been talking about those things for five years, at least in this space and, I don't know, 20 years at the university. So, you should definitely buy the book again. Very clearly written accessible without being a dumbing down. It's a nice stepping down without being a dumbing down. I highly recommend the book go out and get it. It's not expensive. It's a great read. And thank you very much again, Evan. Just great pleasure. Thank you.