Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation - 5

In this episode we move to directly address the normative dimension of transformation. John problematizes the is/ought distinction made famous by Hume, and then we wrestle with the postmodern predicament of the blurring of the fact/value distinction.
This is part of my series Voices with Vervaeke: Science, Spirituality, and the Meaning Crisis. You can support my work on Patreon, with the proceeds going into the research I do at the University of Toronto on the Meaning Crisis and the cultivation of wisdom here: / johnvervaeke
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[@annemariesegeat9397]

You guys are so fun and each of you always brings a texture, a nuance to enrich the conversation. Without losing the different strands. That is a kind of virtuosity right there. Just like some music are soothing, as much as that kind of conversation is. To me. It has a kind of resonating field… I have to pause sometimes as I let that unfold and move inside me. Here’s an inner rambling of what I can extract, that you are inspiring. I am not an academic, so please bear with me! The Real presuppose everything else, So true! And so good...if a common perception and expression of that leads us all into more of the being--ness and communion-ness! That intuition that it needs to be universally accepted in order to flourish, as opposed to collapse into further and further meaning crisis and perspectival crystallization. It is like saying that the society processes would acknowledge its own propensity at crystallizing the mind and body of its members, Ummm! And how possible would it be to implement a ‘’non’’ changing descriptive and meta framing’’ that would yet prevent it from doing so in this time between world, and for the next generation as well. Meta-stability and meta-openess dancing together. And a meta framing relating both which enables that to remain alive...and true. And good. Because we would have agreed upon what is real. I see it also as creating an outer strand that would reach all layers of the community. Something like a remembrance strategy to always keep the channels open…Like a universal song of reality? That would act as a universal tuner...Yes! How can we even universally play in harmony without a universal tuner? After all, even evolution shows that our vocal chords were devlopped and were producing sounds and songs, before the development of the language brain’s region… sounds are primordial to language… The Tibetan monks have known that for a long time...with their 96 primordial sounds. A society that continues to learn...A system of education not just of children, but to insufflate and keep the nurtured flow of human and community to learn, alive and passed down to the next generation. Because there is something, like a force in the electrostatic defense of the ego that goes against learning new things again and again, that prevents to move toward them (desire) and to embody them (being mode) and that force is not only ‘’not learning’’, not taking chances, it is actively ‘’working’’ at preventing an evolution of what is ought to be now than one person would be at the edge of transformation, as to uncondition its mind and its body. I liked the example of Zak and that someone being a competitive prick continues to be one because that someone thinks it is ought to be in our society… To recognize that identification with the social conditionings was the first act toward transformation for me. Is it like that for most people? It was not transformation yet, just like catharsis is not mediation yet, but still a ‘’clearing’’ precursor of some sort, a preparing ground…. but that breaking from what is to what’s ought that happen often in the twenties is such a first existential relief...a painful yet necessary break. Why does it hurt so much at first to become more real?

[@icekan733]

These awesome conversations turn into a book! I think all of them are a great synthesis of all these arguments.

[@philipmirkin9935]

Teachers are deeply embedded in the space between what is and what could/should be. Discussing that position with their students in philosophical terms in each moment would drive the students crazy, so the task of the teacher is to have integrated the dynamics into a living-in-moment responsiveness... Got to love the intuitive rationality of relevant, 'good' teaching :)

[@jeffbarney3584]

@1:00:00 Waldorf education is rooted deeply (in the sense that you all are treating the trifold subject) in Truth Goodness and Beauty by engaging in soundness of the inherent value in human nature starting with an education of the Will (goodness) and Then moving into an education of feeling (beauty) so that the discovery of the ontological ground of value is discoverable novelly as truth for each individual. The idea is that that there is a thinking that is arising in the design wisdom of the building up of the body that after about 7 years becomes available for a building up of the soul and then a soul and body are a robust foundation for the discovery of the spiritual as a sense of purpose via aspiration and then intention and then intuitional decision making. Good stuff @John Vervaeke.

[@badoedipus2551]

I was really struck by the clarity.. I don't know anything about analytic philosophy except I think I've been exposed to it.. and kinda thought my way through it in a similar way.. but was more a fumbling in the dark sorta way.. and then to bring it back to the problem of transformation.. that blew me away.. because, you know, I'm struggling with transforming myself and it's like I'm in a sense inhabiting the space of this conversation.. and it's sorta like "oh, hey look, I'm not crazy for my crazy take on it" like here's this super clear thing.. clarifying the problem.. and what I'm thinking totally maps with it.. and.. yeah, super helpful. I sorta felt like how you think about salience landscapes in the context of this.. could use a little development.. and.. like in practice, trying to transform myself.. there's a real sense where.. because of the analytic philosophy problems.. like I'm not sure that.. being able to confirm you're going in the right direction is always entirely possible.. and there's a place in here where really you probably need to take some leaps of faith.. and how hard this is kinda depends on your risk management situation.. etc, but yeah.. great stuff.

[@Wingedmagician]

For all the content I consume this is the only one I haven’t listened to on 2x the speed. Not because I can’t understand it fast but because I want mental space to think and learn. Thank you so much.

[@Juhziz]

00:00 Recap. Ontology and normativity. 02:30 Natural Ethical Facts by William Casebeer 2:50 Is/Ought distinction. Hume. 11:35 Concepts: bachelor example. 17:17 What is relevance? 31:10 True, Good, Real and interpenetration between these terms. 37:50 Nature of lived beings, lived experience. Investment value system. 55:14 Differentiation and reintegration on higher order. 57:10 People want reality, but also don't like reality and prefer fantasies. 1:04:01 Transformation, education and ontoepistemic relation are deeply interwoven. 1:10:35 Realness bound to intelligibility, integrity, independence (3 IN's). 1:13:35 Depressive realism. Dark night of the soul precedes glorious sunrise. 1:23:10 Monastic traditions. Retreats. 1:24:12 Strategic/transactional/contractual relationships and loneliness.

[@fracta1organism]

the issue of the unity between the factual and the normative can be approached similarly to how gravity and the quantum are unified at a high energy state, but at lower energy states their symmetry is broken and they become separate forces. so it would depend on the conditions in which the two are interacting (at a low or high energy state) that would decide when they were inseparable and when they must be analytically distinct. same goes with the electroweak force representing the unity of phenomenal and systemic issues. the symmetry is broken at lower energy states, or when less is at stake in their unity, typically at greater levels of complexity where differentiation is the lower energy-state attractor.

[@qlementin]

Loving this series, thank you!

[@Ac-ip5hd]

Wow. That point of needing to reclaim the child’s ability to differentiate good vs bad at a higher order that integrates our empirical differentiation is a serious point. Thinking of Jung’s statement that to just discard our advances is to *remain children* rather than become *as children*, and be barred from the kingdom of heaven. I feel I got a bit of what is and ought to be from teachers who could set aside space outside the curriculum and make us actually engage in what we thought, and debate with us. I had a history teacher who would do this, and even if he agreed with us, would play devils advocate for the contrary position, and could admit problems in the curriculum. This allowed for what Ficino called counter learning, but it was nested in the greater structure of school, and he would say “Ok. Time to get back to work, we have to follow the schedule.” Even though I still thought school IS a factory of BS, I thought he could admit what it ought to be, and actually in actually trying to do it, I actually respected him, and for at least one period left my anti social, punk attitude at the door. I felt like there was a reason to actually learn there, and it always involved a complicated exploration of moral, right versus wrong spaces. I simply thought our system was full of it, along with the other teachers who could not tell us why we need to learn these things. In fact, I thought it was all BS, and even though I didn’t trust the US government and seen the way they ran our previous wars, joined the Marines as an infantry man for a distorted desire to at least be in contact with “something *really real*” in 2002. I think, similar to those seeking parkour, or ice climbing our meaning crisis exacerbates our desire for transformation in war, and for people to live it vicariously from the couch. I also noted that with the rampant PTSD (I count 14 suicides in our battalion from the two Iraq deployments I was on, to include our Captain, who was an Andrew B Stockdale type Stoic, one month after attending the funeral for a junior marine’s suicide.) One of the biggest problems we have here, is a clear right vs wrong failure of the cultural simulation at the highest order. There are clearly higher rates of suicide, divorce, criminality, and misconduct with wars like the war on terror, Vietnam, and WWI, versus WWII. Very little PTSD was seen in the Vietnamese because they feel their sacrifice was for a purpose, and carry less moral injury. When there is a clear mishandling and dishonesty in the system, a very clear good vs bad judgement is made, just as when an undermanned fighting force engages in nation building to be over by Christmas and continually has civilian KIA and casualties. And the way the system covered it’s ass showed a very clear understanding of what OUGHT to be by disingenuously pretending to uphold it. Jonathan Shay has a great book called Achilles In Vietnam addressing these issues, and references Nuasbaum’s works on Greek tragedy and justice. They make a clear case that when there is a betrayal of Themis (justice) by the culture and those in power, without the consent of the group, that people turn into animals. This is a major factor that Achilles can’t let go of Agamemnon’s taking of Breseus, because she was a cultural award equivalent to a Medal of Honor, and he was right in getting Agamemnon to do right by Apollo, stopping the plague among the men. Combined with the death of a good and gentle companion, he then goes berserk and rejects the human community, unlike Diomedes, who still refuses to fight the gods, and has an exchange of armor with a family friend on the other side, upholding a proper moral compass in the most high stakes, morally ambiguous IS/OUGHT space. I’d say the Greeks, and most of human culture was already running a type of complicated exploration of high stakes moral experiments and it recording the results, be it here, or in the section in Deuteronomy that is like an ancient Geneva convention, or an axial age glimmer in Homer’s portrayal of Hector with his wife and child. And I think we got results in people like Plato, Aeschylus, Socrates, or David, who all had explored the most serious of play. I do agree with Anderson Todd’s point against Peterson on the total of shadow work, and that the is an area of “golden shadows” outside moral absolutism, that removes unevessary tension, can be met with mindfulness and self love, BUT I do think that Dr. Peterson’s case to read history as a perpetrator, and think of how you could be an Auschwitz guard is a serious way to explore moral spaces that cannot be recreated, and we have a vested interest in understanding so as not to recreate those mistakes again at world threatening scale.

[@dezatron]

Thank you for this clear and insightful dialogos on such a slippery topic.

[@DavidConnerCodeaholic]

“The biggest question in meta-ethics” 🤯 I was just using a similar line of questioning to validate the confidence in & practicality of using force to “help” people, esp those who cannot help themselves according to our normative assumptions . Also, a good way to visualize knowledge structures is by using the image of a tree. All natural trees have root systems, which themselves are a reflection of the tree up top. A tree with an underdeveloped root system cannot support a broad set of branches.

[@meinking22]

These guys are smarter than I am. 😊

[@leedufour]

Thanks Gregg, Zack and John!

[@johnvervaeke]

Thanks Lee.

[@evanblackie7510]

Thanks so much to all.

[@playswithbricks]

40minutes in and the Is & Oughts sounds like Earth and Heaven Christianity that integrated Plato and Aristotle. I’m sure I’m ignorant to a distinction but it’s funny to have so many years of academic experience in a room to hear “there’s a Heaven and an Earth and humans are a tree” 😆

[@martinzarathustra8604]

Great talk! Best one yet! For me without getting this one right we can swim a long way up the creek without a paddle. However, I am not sure you are right John about realness being the same as the good.. I don't think realness is necessarily goodness. For example, if I was in the Matrix, would it still be good for me to torture you? I mean it is not "real" torture is it? There is something real about my experience, but we have foggy lines about the ethics of things that we do not consider real. Do we make moral decisions when we dream? Should we feel guilty about a "bad" moral descion we make when we dream? Although they are not real, we still feel the weight of these moral dilemmas, even if we absolve ourselves of the moral judgment. Perhaps being immoral in our dreams prevents us from acting out immoral actions in our waking life? Is it good to fantasize evil so we don't become evil? Your argument about the is/ought is compelling only as far as you accept that all language is ethical at some level. I don't think value in-of-itself is the same as goodness. Things have value, for example, for particular ends that we aren't even always cognizant of, and yet we do not know if this end is good or not until we know the context of its use. Food is good to eat if you are hungry. It is not good if you eat too much of it. The thing itself is valuable (intrinsically good), but its goodness is dependent on the context we derive about it in larger cavass of wellbeing (ultimate goodness rephrased?) of the person, or humanity at large. We get down to things like "it is good because it is good" which seems circular, but might not actually be, we might be talking about different forms of ontological good? This has led me to consider that there might actually be different categories of ethical goodness ontologically. The main one that concerns me is that there might be different ontological forms of goodness for the context of individuals versus the context of groups. This is what Machiavelli intuited early on, "the ends justify the means" and "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is a kind of large scale community based ethic of leaders and it is almost directly at odds with the personal ethics of the individual actors. These are different starting points, with vastly different sorts of behavioral ought's, but with the same root goal of goodness. OR are they??? This is a complex subject... I have many thoughts....

[@michaelnesbit6447]

I'm sure you cover this more succinctly, but it seems like the distinction is merely one of manner of expression. Ought implies action/behavior, whereas Is implies mere description of a condition. So one is active and the other passive. We sense it at a basic level that these are different ways of looking at the world, but the error is in seeing one way as better or "more real" than the other, when it's actually both.

[@domenicmolinaro6580]

Could VR be a good dynamic arena for moral development?

[@cooperating.systems]

Could it be that David K. Lewis in his Counterfactual logic shows how is and ought come together? He does that by creating a distance relation (based on resemblance) between possibilities. Some are closer to others. This is perhaps most obvious with time. What is, is what is now. What could come to be, depends on what I or others do next, as well as on the world. What should be done, depends on what we think the best possible future is - which we can access by imagination. Is, is where we are, ought is where we want to go.

[@cooperating.systems]

Btw. I thought I should mention that David Lewis was one of Quine's most famous students along with Donald Davidson. The interesting thing about Lewis is that his analysis places the is/ought distinction in a meta-physical space, that is as a relation between possibilities: the relation between what is and what is desireable to a community of users who try to imagine ideal worlds.

[@cooperating.systems]

Note that in Counterfactuals there is a short discussion of the logic of "ought". There he also shows how the same logic of closeness can be used to help explain relevance phenomena.

[@allenwarren1269]

Who is Moore? SirThomas?

[@_ARCATEC_]

30:28 ambiguity on the Intended meaning of the word mishandled .

[@bradrandel1408]

Truth is subjective…?🦋🕊

[@_ARCATEC_]

31:00 👍 💓

[@Nonconceptuality]

PART 5?!? No answer yet? No conclusion? Systems of thought, and all that thought has created, are all mechanisms through which to create thought. How can transformation take place through doing the same thing over and over? Sounds like something other than transformation... (What is that Einstein quote?) I know the direct path to True Transformation. Unfortunately you guys are not on that path.