John Vervaeke on Wisdom and Consciousness

Tim Ferriss

Ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short because I would like to get into the meat and potatoes of this conversation that I've been looking forward to. My guest today is John Verveke on Twitter. You can find him at Verveke underscore John. He is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on cognitive development, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom. Verveke is the director of U Toronto's Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its cognitive science program, where he teaches introduction to cognitive science and the Cognitive science of consciousness, emphasizing the 4E model, which I'm sure we will get into, which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded, enacted, And extended beyond the brain. Verveke has taught courses on Buddhism and cognitive science in the Buddhism, psychology, and mental health program for 15 years. He is the author and presenter of the outstanding, that's what I'm adding, YouTube series I highly recommend, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and his brand new series, After Socrates. You can find all things John Verveke at johnverveke.com. That is spelled V-E johnverveke.com. John, thank you so much for taking the time today. A great pleasure to be here, Tim. Great pleasure indeed. Could you please elaborate on the four ways of knowing?

John Vervaeke

So the idea about a taxonomy that has to be principled, and so what it is, is every one of these kinds of knowing has a particular vehicle, a particular result, a particular standard, A particular kind of memory. I'm

John Vervaeke

You'll do is you'll remember a particular perspective you had on a particular situation and your state of mind in that situation. That's your episodic memory. Now, below that, and this gets to what we were talking about earlier, is participatory knowing. This is knowing by being. This is the kind of knowing that results from how you and reality have been co-shaped to fit together to generate those affordances. So, for example, the water bottle and I have both been shaped by gravity. We've both been shaped by electromagnetism so that we can, there's an affordance there. We've both been shaped by a biological history, which is niche construction. My ancestors evolved. They made tools that shaped the environment that shaped my ancestors, right? And culture has shaped me in this. Technology made this and taught me how to drink out of a water bottle. So there's been all this co-shaping of me and parts of the environment so we fit together. We're niched together. We belong together. Affordances are available to me. And then that's carried in this very weird sense of memory that you probably don't even recognize. It's your sense of self. The sense of all of the identities you've taken up and how they're somehow historically, narratively linked together to certain narrative histories of certain situations. So here's the proposal. You have participatory knowing, it's laying out affordances, and when that's missing, you know it. Culture shock, or when you're homesick, or when you're lonely. Could you just define affordances? The affordances are real relations for how you can interact with the object and how the inter-object, how that object is available to

John Vervaeke

Sense. Okay. So the affordances are here, and then the perspectival knowing makes certain affordances salient to me, grabbing my attention, arousing my metabolism. The floor is walkable for me right now, but I don't need to walk right now. So it's not something that I'm paying attention to, right? But I bring it into my situational awareness with the perspectival knowing. That situational awareness tells me which skills I should activate, which procedural knowing. And then the procedural knowing puts me into the causal relationships with the world that give me the evidence for my beliefs. So that's all the kinds of knowing. And the point is, outside of the propositional, these other kinds of knowing are built on the way you are coupled to the environment, dynamically coupled to the environment.

Tim Ferriss

And therefore, they hearken back to that participation, that contact we were talking about. Right. And I suppose it's this coupling and interaction with the environment on a few different levels in the sense that you have your sort of skin-encapsulated ego and its interaction with What we perceive as external elements. And then you have perhaps those who think of mind and body in this Cartesian dualistic way. You have the interaction of the body with the mind, which in some respects is the entire reason for which the brain evolved in some respects. Let me just come back to semantic memory. Could you give just another example of semantic memory?

John Vervaeke

Because I don't think I grasped that. Like if I ask you, are dogs fishes? And what do you say to me? I say no. That's semantic memory. Did anybody ever sit you down? Do you remember it? Do you have an episodic memory? I remember when I learned that dogs weren't fishes,

Tim Ferriss

I've said this, and I mean this deeply, and I don't mean it as a trivial commodification.

John Vervaeke

Taoism is the religion philosophy of flow. And I've been practicing Taoist practices, Tai Chi Chuan, Jian Zhang, Yi Chuan, Qigong. I got professional training and practiced for 10 years as a Shiatsu therapist. I've done it all. Not at all. That's pretentious, but I've done a lot. Okay, that's fair, right? And what those things do, and this is something I want to talk to you about at some point, they get me into a flow state, but in a particular way that I think is really important. And this goes to a story I've told. I was in grad school and I'd been doing Tai Chi Chuan for about three or four years. I was doing it really religiously, both in the sense of devotedly, and I was doing it like two or three hours a day, going to the dojo three or four times a week kind of thing. And some of my fellow students came up to me and said, what's going on with you? What are you doing differently? I'm like, oh, you're worried in grad school that people are going to find you. And so I said, I'm doing Tai Chi Chuan. And I said, well, why are you saying that? And they said, well, because you're just more, like in conversations, you're much more flowing and you're much more flexible and you're much more balanced and you're much more receptive. And it was like, oh, oh, the flow state that I'm getting into in Tai Chi is permeating many different domains of my life and many different levels of my mind. And I thought, ah, and this is a question that has become a question to me. What are the contexts that generate flow that transfers like that powerfully? I'm glad you think it's a great question, because even if you get a good question, then you're a good scientist. Then

John Vervaeke

So if it does that, then it even shows up in the metaphors. We talk about balancing equations and justice being the balancing of things and scales. And so you want to find a set of skills that has that inbuilt potential. And then what I would want to say is the degree to which there has been a framework built around the situation, a ritual philosophical framework that helps to afford the translation. So around the Tai Chi Chuan, you have Taoism, which gives you this way of framing reality as yin and yang that you can see instantiated in the Tai Chi, but you can also see it prevalent in The world. You set up the possibility with this framework for the resonance. So people who get trapped, and I'm not saying that all video games trap people, but the ones that suffer from video game addiction, they get the problem that they flow in a world that does Not have a framework around it, does not tap into those generally transferable skills. And so they find the external world depressing because of its absence of flow potential that drives them into the game where they flow, and then you get the vicious cycle that gets you Into the addiction. So I think there's something about, are the kinds of skills that are being brought into the flow

John Vervaeke

What enhances it? Because you take, let's just grab an example out of the air, Harvard Business School.

Tim Ferriss

They have these case study methods, and there is ostensibly supposed to be a fair amount of interplay between lecturer and student. But I would imagine that not all professors or grad students or whoever is doing the teaching at the time would say they achieve a flow state, even if they've experienced it in other places Like surfing. So what have you found to be things that enhance that for yourself and for the students?

John Vervaeke

Part of this, I'm going to declare a bias because I have a published theory about what I think the flow state is. I think it's an insight cascade and the enhancement of implicit learning. So in Enhance, we cultivate better insight capacities, we cultivate better intuition in an integrated manner. So I'm stating the bias up front, but I think it's a good theory and I think it's well-argued and well-evidenced. So what I mean by that is more and more I crafted giving priority to the emergence of insight or intuition in me as I was lecturing and not sticking to the script so strongly, but willing To bend. So I use the jazz analogy. I may have the script of the lecture, but I can riff on it and I look and I hunger and sensitize myself for

John Vervaeke

Part of this, I'm going to declare a bias because I have a published theory about what I think the flow state is. I think it's an insight cascade and the enhancement of implicit learning. So in Enhance, we cultivate better insight capacities, we cultivate better intuition in an integrated manner. So I'm stating the bias up front, but I think it's a good theory and I think it's well-argued and well-evidenced. So what I mean by that is more and more I crafted giving priority to the emergence of insight or intuition in me as I was lecturing and not sticking to the script so strongly, but willing To bend. So I use the jazz analogy. I may have the script of the lecture, but I can riff on it and I look and I hunger and sensitize myself for that. When the students start to even demonstrate sort of proto-insight, I will really call that out, I mean, in a positive manner and draw it out and they start priming each other with insights And they start priming me, and I start priming them. It's an easy thing to state, and it's a hard thing to do, because when you're lecturing, and when I teach people how to lecture, I actually try to say, I try to get them to make space for the Jazz. Because what you do when you're anxious, and one of the things that really kills it a lot is PowerPoint, right? Because what you want is, I need to say all of these things, and I need to be clear, and I need to have everything follow. You

Tim Ferriss

Wanted to invoke a word you mentioned in passing with respect to flow states in lectures, which was intuition. And so I wanted to loop that in to ask, well, we could pick and choose. This is an interviewee's choice. So one would be, how do you think about intuition versus logic when it comes to problem solving or searching for meaning or finding meaning. Alternative question would be what kinds of problems is logic poorly suited to solving?

John Vervaeke

Yeah, we'll do that and then I'll tell you what I think intuition is and what the powers and perils of it are. Great. So the search space, right? The search space from very, very many problems, like the chess example, is combinatorially explosive. It's computationally intractable. This is the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and then Simon and his notion of bounded rationality. And this is the idea that you can't be comprehensively logical. Logic and math are algorithmic. They work in terms of certainty. Certainty requires that you search sometimes all or at least most of the space, and

John Vervaeke

You have to cultivate these virtues for when you use logic. So that's what rationality is. And that's a much harder problem. When should I be logical? And so you have to ask yourself, if I formulate the problem such that the search space could be searched in a relatively exhaustive fashion. And there are algorithms that work that. How many people are present in this conversation? There's an algorithm counting, two, one, two, we're done. There, that worked. There was nothing wrong with doing that, right? But if you try to say, I want to count all the numbers of possible conversations we could have, and thereby try to figure out invariant principles about through all conversations. It's like, well, what's a conversation? And I've been in many ones and you know, there's good ones and there's bad ones, but the good ones, they're sort of the same. They're similar to each other. And the problem with similarity, and this is now the main argument, is if you try to be logical about similarity, you're doomed. What do you mean by logical about similarity? This is an argument made by Nelson Goodman. What a great name for a philosopher, Nelson Goodman. Outstanding. 1972. And the argument goes like this. So identity is to share all properties. Similarity is to share a lot of properties, but not share all properties.

John Vervaeke

Don't want to in any way try to convey that I don't fall prey to this. How have I tried to address it is how I'll frame the question you're answering. Perfect. Okay. And so first of all, that issue that we were talking about earlier, how pervasively does your practice transfer to multiple domains and to multiple levels of your psyche? How much does it engage the non-propositional kinds of knowing? How much is it engaging the ability to metacognitively shift between perspectives, etc., for exactly that reason? Secondly, it's not the questions you answer, it's practices you do at length for a considerable amount of time. I practice, first of all, I practiced it very explicitly for like two or three years, and you know, and this overlaps significantly with stoicism, right? I practice active open-mindedness. I'm a cognitive scientist. Learn about the biases, and this is how you get into it. Learn about the biases and first spot them in other people. You'll be astonishingly good at that. Oh, confirmation bias, my side bias, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're really good at fundamental attribution error. You're really good at it with other people, right? And get sort of like, allow yourself to be sort of overconfident

Tim Ferriss

Am I getting that right? Well, actually, the practice is a variation on it called philosophical fellowship. Okay, perfect. So could you walk us through these and just give an example of an exercise, what that might look like in each of those? Sure.

John Vervaeke

So, I mean, first of all, the distinction between meditation and contemplation. So I know this is audio only, so I wear glasses.

Tim Ferriss

And we'll probably also use the video, but just for those people who only have the audio, it's always helpful to tell them what's going on. Yes.

John Vervaeke

You know, I've been talking throughout about how you frame situations, what you make salient, what you background and what you ignore. So think about that, like the lens and the frame of my glasses, right? And I'm not aware of my lenses or my frame because I'm aware through them, beyond them and by means of them. So they're transparent to me. Now, sometimes, and what I'm doing right now, I'm taking my glasses off because there might be something on my lenses. And now they're not transparent to me. I'm not looking through them, I'm looking at them. That's what meditation is. It's about trying to become aware, step back and look at your mental framing. So what you do is, for example, you try to get people to look at something they're normally looking through, like their sensations. So

John Vervaeke

Non-theist says, I reject all of those presuppositions. I don't think of ultimate reality as a thing. I don't think of it as a being. I think of it as the ground of being, and being is a no-thingness. It is not a thing. It is that in which all things come to be. Being isn't a being. Isn't something you can just get to. It's very Taoist. It's very Taoist. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao, right? And the naming is the myriad way, and the emptiness of the cup is what makes the cup function. All of these non-thingness metaphors, it's like water, they're all trying to get you to understand that being, the really real, isn't a thing. It's a no-thingness, which is not the same thing as nothingness, and that we can enter into a profound relationship with that no-thingness. Let me give you an analogy. I love my partner. She's an amazing woman, and I'm fortunate to be with her. I do not think I will ever completely grasp or understand her because there is something about her that always is transcending herself and transcending my understanding of her. There is something in that sense properly mysterious about her. Any frame I put around her, she shines into it, but she also withdraws from it further into the mystery that she is. And

John Vervaeke

Right, fantastic.

Tim Ferriss

Thank you. And, you know, funny enough, I was listening to Coltrane for this conversation, which maybe was a good warmup for the conversation. And I have a new collection of translations. I want to get the name of the author correct. So it is a new translation of Rumi poetry. Oh, yes. And it is by, I'm not going to pronounce this correctly, but Haleliza Gafuri. And as a Persian or Persian-American, I mean, her knowledge of the language so enriches how she is able to convey passages that could be real stumbling blocks for anyone who is basing Their translation off of another translation or who is a non-native speaker. It's very hard to translate, period, but it's even harder to translate poetry. It's like, do you choose the cadence? Do you choose to try to match the alliteration or what the equivalent of alliteration would be? It's such a formidable task. I was very impressed by the book. I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if you're open to a few more questions. I'm I'm enjoying this. Let's keep going. Wonderful. 4E. I think this is important for us to discuss. What are the 4Es? So I think we should have 6Es, but I'll tell you what the standard 4Es are.

John Vervaeke

And then the bonus too. I'm into it. So this is the idea that cognition is inherently embodied, first E, embedded, coupled to the environment, second E, enacted. Cognition is

Tim Ferriss

I think we should have 6Es, but I'll tell you what the standard 4Es are.

John Vervaeke

And then the bonus too. I'm into it. So this is the idea that cognition is inherently embodied, first E, embedded, coupled to the environment, second E, enacted. Cognition is something that you are doing. It's not something you have. It's between you and the world, not within you. And then extended. Most of our cognition is not done inside of us. It's done through the world. This includes other people. So, for example, you and I are having a conversation right now. We're solving a problem, and this is depending on people building computers, setting up the internet, setting up Zoom or Riverside. Neither one of us invented the English language, etc. And all of these things, and even literacy, literacy is not natural, but we internalize it, but it allows us to link our cognition in profound ways. And so most of our problem solving is done in an extended way. I guess the classic book by this is Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins, where he talks about the fact that nobody, no person navigates a ship. There's a whole bunch of different people doing different roles and a whole bunch of equipment, and they form a dynamical system that is actually responsible for navigating the ship. Myself and one of my dear friends and great co-authors, Dan Schiappe, we've published three papers on NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars, and how do they form this distributed Cognition, especially with that huge time gap, right, the time delay, and how do they make it work? And how does that distributed cognition work? And because they get very powerful sense of an emergent kind of we agency that's above and beyond just adding the parts.

John Vervaeke

A whole bunch of different people doing different roles and a whole bunch of equipment, and they form a dynamical system that is actually responsible for navigating the ship. Myself and one of my dear friends and great co-authors, Dan Schiappe, we've published three papers on NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars, and how do they form this distributed Cognition, especially with that huge time gap, right, the time delay, and how do they make it work? And how does that distributed cognition work? And because they get very powerful sense of an emergent kind of we agency that's above and beyond just adding the parts. So that's the extended. So embodied. Embodied means, like I said, you don't have a body. You are a body. And your mind and your body are not separate things. They're different aspects of what you are. And people may say, what do you mean by that? What do I mean by that? Well, remember I said earlier, you have this problem you're facing, which is, what do I pay attention to? What do I focus my attention to? What do I ignore? And this is not cold calculation. It's also your affect. It means what do you care about and what do you not care about? Reid Montague, the neuroscientist, put it really well. He said, the difference between us and computers is we care about information and they don't. Right? And that's our great strength and our great weakness. Now, the thing is, why do you care about information? You

Tim Ferriss

This is very ineptly what I was trying to convey very early in the conversation, predominantly, and I encourage people to find this, it's not going to be immediately coming to the tip Of my tongue, but Steve Jurbitson, who's a very technical investor. I think he did electrical engineering and mechanical engineering degree in three years at Stanford or something like that. I'm probably getting some of the specifics wrong, but he's been on the podcast before. And he had this very long Facebook post discussing why it would be difficult, if not impossible to experience anything as a human, if we were just brains in a jar. Yes. Brain in a vat problem. Yes. Yeah. Brain in a vat problem. And I found it very compelling and sort of embarrassing that it wasn't self-evident to me right off the bat. It's like without these appendages and this multifaceted organism to interface with an environment, what we experience as consciousness doesn't seem at least offhand to me possible, Which makes it very precious that we have this experience. Being

Tim Ferriss

Even a person who's colorblind, right, has different qualia.

John Vervaeke

Or as Thomas Nagel famously argued, bats who use echolocation have qualia that we don't have. Okay, so that's what that means. And that's the hard problem, because there doesn't seem to be any way of explaining their nature. But I think if you get into, and this is work I'm doing with a whole bunch of other people, so I don't want to take sole credit, but I think if you make use of functionality and you make use Of the four kinds of knowing and things like this, I think you can give an integrated answer. There is a consensus emerging, and I've published on this and talked about this, around what consciousness does, what's it for. And then I think once you get that and you open up that functionality, you actually get a phenomenology. You get an explanation of the experience out of that. So the converging thing is that what consciousness is for, it overlaps with attention and working memory and fluid intelligence, think about when you're driving on the highway, when Do you come back to it? If there's something unexpected happens, or there's a really complex situation suddenly emerging, or there's an ill-defined problem that you're not quite sure how to formulate And frame. That's what you need consciousness for. So what is consciousness? It's this higher order relevance realization. It's about re-realizing what's relevant and important so that you can deal with the added challenge of zeroing in on relevant information that is given to you by novelty, complexity, And ill-definedness. That's what consciousness is for. It's this enhanced relevance realization. That's why it overlaps with working memory and things like that.

Tim Ferriss

Now, that does sound like a consciousness that would extend to animals other than humans. Totally.

John Vervaeke

It helps to explain our intuition about this. Generally, when people are willing to extend the attribution of consciousness,

John Vervaeke

Get an explanation of the experience out of that. So the converging thing is that what consciousness is for, it overlaps with attention and working memory and fluid intelligence, think about when you're driving on the highway, when Do you come back to it? If there's something unexpected happens, or there's a really complex situation suddenly emerging, or there's an ill-defined problem that you're not quite sure how to formulate And frame. That's what you need consciousness for. So what is consciousness? It's this higher order relevance realization. It's about re-realizing what's relevant and important so that you can deal with the added challenge of zeroing in on relevant information that is given to you by novelty, complexity, And ill-definedness. That's what consciousness is for. It's this enhanced relevance realization. That's why it overlaps with working memory and things like that.

Tim Ferriss

Now, that does sound like a consciousness that would extend to animals other than humans. Totally.

John Vervaeke

It helps to explain our intuition about this. Generally, when people are willing to extend the attribution of consciousness, they actually do it in a way without realizing that tracks how much fluid intelligence do they think

Tim Ferriss

I had Jordan on this podcast, and it was incredible to see how strongly binary, not just the responses were— He's a polarizing guy. But also the expectations of me were all in, are you all in or are you all out? And there was part of me that wanted to say, this is the kind of identity politics morass that we have as such an issue to have any kind of reconciliation and civil debate. It can't be, well, I'm making a strong statement, but it shouldn't have to be that black or white. I think there are many areas- I want to strengthen your argument for you. I want to strengthen your argument. Please, I need someone to do this with me more regularly.

John Vervaeke

This has to do with adaptivity. This has to do with intelligence. Let's just give you an example of relevance realization right now, right here, right now. You have two attentional systems, probably more, but at least these two. You have

John Vervaeke

Has to do with adaptivity. This has to do with intelligence. Let's just give you an example of relevance realization right now, right here, right now. You have two attentional systems, probably more, but at least these two. You have the task focus that is trying to keep you focused on what is John saying with his multi-syllabic complex sentences. And then there's a part of you, the default mode network, that's mind-wandering. And I'm not accusing you of anything. It's drifting away. It's thinking about other things. They're locked together. Like evolution, the mind wandering introduces variation. The tax network kills most of it off, but some of it survives and helps reproduce the conversation and keep it going. Opponent processing, your autonomic nervous system about arousal, sympathetic is biased to arousing you. Parasympathetic is biased to getting you to calm down. And they're locked together in opponent processing. You find this all through adaptive systems, opponent processing. Democracy, I argued this when I gave a talk in the International Symposium on Democracy in Prague in September, right? Democracy should be opponent processing. The best way for me to correct my perspectival bias is to have you be in opponent processing with me. You take a different bias, but we agree that we are each other's best means of self-correction. That's how democracy should work. And we

Tim Ferriss

Was meaning, and I will now ask about After Socrates. So you have this very popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Why create After Socrates?

John Vervaeke

I listened to the criticism of other people. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis has a couple of main criticisms that people made. One was a lot of people asked at the end, yeah, but what do I do now? What do I do now? You've convinced me about the meaning crisis and this problem and blah, blah, and how cognitive, but what do I do now? And then secondly, you did this totally individualistically, but how does this work with other people? So after Socrates is not extensive, it's intensive. It's trying to trace the entire tradition from Socrates, right? Spending a lot of time there about all of these kinds of reverse engineer. I'm not claiming this is exactly what Socrates did. Who could claim that? I'm trying to reverse engineer as best I can this dialectic into dialogos, these kinds of practices we've been talking about, so that people can undertake a pedagogical program. Every episode is, I give an argument and they build on each other like awakening from the meaning crisis, but I also give points of reflection that are designed to

Tim Ferriss

Thank you, John. Thank you for being such a great jazz player on the stage. And I really, really enjoyed it. I took tons of notes. So I have quite a lot of reading and investigating and practicing ahead of me. And to everybody listening, as per usual, we all have links to everything. I may need to do some work on my spelling of various names, but we'll figure it out in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, please be just a bit kinder than is necessary. That includes to yourself, but certainly to other people. And remember, it's not just what you believe, it is what you practice. So get to practicing, folks. And as always, thanks for tuning in. And I thought we would start with a sandbox that I like to play in. And I think you are a black belt where I am still a middling white belt. And that's a discussion of language and words. And specifically, I was hoping you could perhaps give us some examples of words that we use commonly that frame the way we think about life or relate to life in the West, if that is perhaps A container that works for the question.

John Vervaeke

Yeah, I think it's a good container. I think there are words that are signpost benchmarks for a kind of cultural cognitive grammar, giving us some sort of our basic conceptual vocabulary. So

John Vervaeke

Been critiques of that framework, which we got from Descartes, the Cartesian framework, for about the last 200 years, even in the history of Western philosophy. So the fact that we have these terms, we bandy them about, we think that that's all there is, it's complete and exhaustive, and they're divided, and they're really radically incommensurable With each other, it just shows how, well, how well this has insinuated itself into the very way we see ourselves, see the world, experience ourselves, and it's very powerful and very Interesting. And part of my work is to try to undermine that dichotomy and try and get us to think more profoundly about that there must be something deeper than the subjective and objective that fundamentally Makes it possible for them to be related together. Because if not, we are really doomed in a kind of radical skepticism and solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that the only thing that's really real is your own mind kind of thing. So that would be one clear example. Another one along those lines that we haven't paid attention to how much it's changed is the word matter. We now take matter as actual stuff, but if you go before the scientific revolution, matter in the Aristotelian framework means exactly the opposite. It means pure potentiality, that which is awaiting to be informed and actualized. So

Tim Ferriss

How has your relating to, and I apologize if the wording on this is clumsy, but your relating to your experienced reality changed as you've studied cognitive science and philosophy And these different labels and frameworks that despite our perhaps underlying subconscious belief that it is they're almost completely transparent to us. Always been this way, in the case of, say, subjective objective, how has your own relating to life's experience changed?

John Vervaeke

I coined a term, the transjective, to mean that which binds the two together, that which binds the inner life of the organism to the outer world of the environment kind of thing. And there I was influenced by a teacher of mine, John Kennedy, who was a protege of J.J. Gibson. Let me give you an example. I've become aware of things. So Gibson had a notion of an affordance. So this water bottle is graspable. Now, the graspability isn't in my hand.

John Vervaeke

Oh, sorry. Sorry, everybody. Right, so, yeah. Thanks for that. So who actually knows this better? Somebody who could describe it or somebody who could make it? Well, generally people say, well, somebody who could actually make it, who could actually bring about the structural functional organization. So what does the maker have in their head? Well, they have the structural functional organization, and they just have to put it into that. So the thing that makes this act the way it does is identical to something in your mind, and you're both sharing in that. So this is called a contact epistemology. You're mutually participating, and so the relatedness and the connectedness is more primordial. And that's sort of an idea running through the whole Neoplatonic tradition, which I would argue following Arthur v. Lewis, is really the spiritual grammar of the West, is the Neoplatonic tradition. So in that sense, it's old. In another sense, it's very new because what's coming out of 4E cognitive science is exactly this kind of thing. And this has to do with ways of knowing. I talk about, because of the work I do in 4E COGSI, four kinds of knowing. Maybe we can get into that. But the point is that three of those four kinds of knowing are about this kind of connectedness and mutual participation. And I find this very interesting. The sort of cutting-edge cog-sci is arguing that this is, even to use the metaphor, your mind is not in your head. It's between your embodied brain and the world. That's where the mind is, and that's how you should think of the mind. And that's really cutting edge and important. And there's a lot of important work being done about it. But in a lot of ways, it harkens back to that ancient Neoplatonic tradition. So