Episode 334: Let's Get Metaphysical

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. What the fuck is this? Whose ass didn't I kiss? I'm waiting!

[00:00:26] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, as we record, the New York Knicks are one win away from the NBA championship after coming back last night from a 29 point second half deficit.

[00:01:26] I'm going to ask you the question that every sports talk show is talking about today. Was that a great Knicks comeback or a horrific Spurs choke, just a total collapse? Like, worst choke I've ever seen. Yes, I agree. It's incredible. I mean, the Knicks were great, like they have grit, they deserve credit, but like, it's like, if you ever taught a class that's so easy, you think it would have to be hard to get an F in it. Yeah. Like, that's what they were doing! No, I haven't, but I know what you're talking about. Oh yeah, you haven't. Yeah.

[00:01:56] It's like, they wrote down all of the things that you should never do, and they did it. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Like, they just were just launching threes for no reason. And then just so many boneheaded plays at the end. Yeah. Do you know what happened? I have a theory. Yeah. This is the youngest team, you know, in the playoffs. Incredibly young, yeah. They were like Gen Zers. Yeah.

[00:02:18] They got bored. Like, they got bored and they didn't know how to focus. This is what screen time has done. Jonathan Haidt must be right about something. Like, they were just like, well, we're already winning. And they just sort of stopped paying attention. They were like, chat GBT, like, how do we actually, like, run an offense? You know what? The San Antonio Spurs were simps.

[00:02:40] Yeah, I don't know. Okay, I'll accept it. I don't know if it's not going in the Segway Hall of Fame, but you know, like, we needed to transition. So. So. That's right. Yeah. So my terrible Segway was indicating an opening segment. It was pointing, pointing with some broken fingers. To this paper called The Simple, but like, simp is in parentheses, simple. Right.

[00:03:05] Truth about excessive and obsessive romantic behaviors in men. So it's about simps and simping behavior. Yeah. Yeah. I have an issue with the title and this is, you know, not my biggest issue with the, with this article and the study, but like the simp being in parentheses makes it seem like the LE could stand on its own. You know what I mean? Like normally when you put parentheses. The le truth. But we're adding simp. But like, that doesn't work. Yeah. Oh.

[00:03:35] You know what I mean? Yeah. Absolutely right. Yeah. I hadn't noticed that now. Now I'm with you. Like I'm aesthetically offended. That bugged me. Yeah. Yeah. But the rest of the paper is really good, I thought. I knew you'd like it.

[00:03:48] In the main segment, before we turn to this, we remembered, I believe that because we recorded this a while back, that we are going to be talking about a very good paper, I think overall called The Mystic and the Metaphysician by Miri Al-Bahari.

[00:04:07] And it seeks to just kind of open the door for mystical research, I guess, and especially kind of first personal meditations as a legitimate form of metaphysical inquiry. So that's what we talk about in the second segment. But first, this is a paper that is in the Journal of Personality. Yeah. Is that a good journal? Yeah, it's decent. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:36] All right. So do you want to give an overview of the paper? Sure. So this is a paper from some researchers at Singapore Management University. They're all, I believe, social psychologists. I'm just owning them. On simps and simping behavior, where they present three studies to investigate, I guess, the cause of simping behavior in men. They have like an evolutionary account for why.

[00:05:04] The puzzle is, why do men engage in these kinds of excessive or obsessive behaviors, like doing ridiculous things for unrequited romantic attachment reasons? I guess I'll ask you now, like, when do you first remember hearing the term simp as used like this? I mean, this is one of the funny things about this paper is like they talk about simping behavior as if it's like empathy or like anger or resentment or something.

[00:05:28] And honestly, I've never heard this term before if I had to guess at the earliest three years ago. Okay. But you know, the way years are running back together, maybe it's four years. Yeah, maybe it's ten. I don't think it's ten though. I definitely feel like it's post-COVID. Like I associate simping with post-COVID or during COVID at the earliest. What about you? Well, so this is the thing.

[00:05:52] Like I've known the word and I feel like we may have talked about this word before, but I've known the word since the late 80s just because it's... Yeah, it's a word that has meant this or something like this since at least the mid 80s. I know it at least from West Coast rappers, Bay Area rappers specifically, like Too Short, where the term was used to denigrate men who are the opposite of a pimp.

[00:06:21] And so they used the like existing word simp, which has been used in English for a long time as slang for simple or like simpleton, like a fool. And they just took that word and used it as the opposite, like an antonym for pimp. So like you are the hoe for the girl. You don't have any of the control in the relationship. Yeah. And so it was used by these very like pimp heavy rappers, like Too Short, E40, those guys. I don't know.

[00:06:47] I actually did a little bit of research trying to figure out when the earliest version of this way of saying it is. And the best I could find is a Too Short album from 1985. But it's probably was in like the black community. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if like you go back to like pimp of the year contest and I'm going to get you sucker. Remember? I don't know if you remember that. I did. Like that's the kind of like blaxploitation. But it did. I'm not crazy. Right.

[00:07:16] Like all of a sudden. No, no, no. Internet slang. Yeah. Or, or riz or something like that. Just like maybe it's a little less fully Gen Z and below coded.

[00:07:41] Like it's more like late millennial, like, or early millennial, or I don't even know how to describe that. But you know what I mean? Yeah. It's like late twenties instead of like late teens. For me, it's like a Tik Toki era word. Yeah. It's spread. Like a lot of the Gen Z slang is just black slang from before. So, so now I guess like people just understand it as the, let's see, what's their definition?

[00:08:06] Simps are individuals is from their abstract, primarily men who engage in costly or extravagant gestures toward a romantic interest without receiving reciprocation. As its first empirical validation, the current study newly operationalizes simping behaviors as well as the motivating factors predicting simping.

[00:08:24] We argue that the construct of simping encompasses a theoretically meaningful level of specificity in terms of mate initiation behaviors that are distinct from, quote, nice guys or UPBs. UPBs are unwanted pursuit behaviors. So I guess like stalking. Anyway, see Longrichson Rowling et al. If you want to learn more about UPB. This is a great reification paper.

[00:08:54] Yeah. But you know, I'm convinced that kind of behavior doesn't need a term for it to have been, you know, we all have known guys like, I don't know what you said when you were young when you had a friend who was like buying a girl flowers when it was obvious he didn't want. Like we used to say you're going out like a sucker or something like that. Yeah. We would say whipped. Yeah. Whipped. But you can be whipped in a relationship too. Yeah. But you can be a simp in a relationship. I don't think so. I think it has to be unrequited. Oh, do we need to do a conceptual analysis? This is why.

[00:09:24] So yeah, let's dive right into what they did because that's what they did in study one. What they did was just ask a bunch of people to give sort of just a list of traits that they would consider that of a simp or simping behavior. And they did, you know, these like what's basically like a data reduction technique. You get a whole bunch of answers all that are slightly different, but some of them are more similar to others.

[00:09:48] So you put them in these buckets and you do some math and what you get is factor loadings, basically like a little mini family of related concepts. And so they got, what did they get? Eleven. Was it eleven items? Yeah. In factor one, like this grouping, it says a simp is someone who is often unreciprocated for their romantic efforts. A simp is someone who is obsessive and fixated. A simp is someone who idolizes their partner or romantic interest. I guess partner there.

[00:10:16] A simp is someone who is defensive of someone they are romantically interested in. So those four stick together. I forget the label they gave those. And then the next three are a simp is someone who displays excessive affection and care. A simp is someone who spends excessive amounts of money on a romantic interest. And a simp is someone who expresses flattery frequently. So you don't think it's possible conceptually for them to be in a relationship? It's just one person is doing all the romantic work pretty much.

[00:10:44] And maybe the other one is not that into it, but they're in the relationship. No, I guess it can be. Yeah. I guess it just requires like a huge power difference. I mean, and they say in one of the items that says it's built into it, a simp is someone who idolizes their partner or romantic interest. So I guess people do see it that way. See, this is why we need science. You know, like you can have the wrong idea about like this platonic category of simp. You laugh, but in an argument, you could have used this to tell me, no, look, people do believe that you can be partnered up.

[00:11:15] So there you go. That is what I'm saying. Touche. Touche. You've used science against me. Yeah. No, that's exactly what I'm saying. Like, this is why we need science.

[00:11:23] But it is like this feels like a kind of paradigmatic paper, maybe on the extreme end of like taking some new thing that was, you know, like rediscovered for the TikTok generation and making it like a category that you can then measure and that you can like figure out what the cause is and then relate to like evolutionary forces as to why we have this psychology or why some people might have it.

[00:11:52] This seems pretty instructive. Like this goes through all of the steps. It seems like. It's true. It actually is clear in that way. Yeah. It's grounded. I think is what you're saying. Grounded in a deep understanding of evolutionary theory. Yep. In fact, when you understand evolution, it's unclear why we didn't have this like already, you know, like years ago. Why didn't Darwin like have this theory of simping? He might have been a simp. He might have like been a little too blinded to the harsh truth.

[00:12:22] If you look at Darwin's like journals, I think you do see a little tendency towards simping behavior. Probably every scientist's journals at some point. So there's three studies and I'm just going to give the lay person's impression of the three studies. The first tries to operationalize simping, which I don't think had been done before this paper, right? No. Yeah. Surprisingly.

[00:12:46] And it does that through like, you know, like not something I would be so against, just kind of asking people like what they associate with it. Right. Yeah. Study two. Study two, like developed the scale from the findings of study one. And then they gave a bunch of, you know, what you're all always asking for, discriminant validity. Yeah. So from study one, they got those seven things that I read out.

[00:13:09] They create this scale where they rate participants rate the extent to which they themselves engaged in each behavior in their own romantic pursuits. One meaning to a small extent and seven to a great extent. We should have taken this scale. Are you often unreciprocated for your romantic efforts? Are you obsessive and fixated? Do you idolize? I've always known you as idolizing your romantic partner. Yeah. It's all, it's completely unreciprocated. It's all idolizing. And frankly, I'm fed up.

[00:13:40] And you can leave this in, Eliza. You got to finally turn to a pimp. Yeah. I'm ready to go from simp to pimp. All right. So, so the seven item scale, you might be wondering what was the Crombex alpha on that? It's 0.84. Can you explain what Crombex alpha is? Yeah. The easy way of saying it is taking the average correlations between all of the items. So if two items can be correlated with each other by just looking at it, when one goes up, does the other one go up?

[00:14:09] That's the most simple form of correlation you can get. It's like a Pearson's R that's from zero to one. If they're identically going up, it's one. If they're not related at all, zero. If they're negatively related, negative one. So you take the average of all of the correlations between all of those items and you get this like overall score. So it's like, how much are they all correlated with each other? How much do they all stick together with each other? So that's the simplest kind of like reliability.

[00:14:36] All I can tell you is that it's assessing a single thing. I mean, it can't even tell you that, but it's evidence that it is measuring a singular thing. So like if your Crombex alpha were really low, usually there's like conventions for how much a scale has to have if you're saying the scale measures one thing. So like if it were at 0.5 or 0.6, people would say, oh, it's a really shitty scale. That's probably measuring more things than just the one thing. So this is them trying to show all these items seem to be getting at something that's like the items are similar to each other. They seem to all.

[00:15:06] But that's obviously not enough, but we didn't go into this, but they have a theory of what makes somebody engage in this behavior. They go through some possibilities and they say, well, we think evolutionarily like what's going on is that maybe it's just men who are really afraid to be alone. Men who maybe feel like they're lower in mate value or lower in social status. And so they give the simping scale. They give this like scale, I guess, of mate value. I don't know these scales, most of them.

[00:15:35] A scale of social status, a scale of social dominance, a scale of social competence, a scale of mating success. These have been previously validated, all of these scales. Of course, you could see. Fear of being single, which is an already existing scale. I know. And then relationship status, satisfaction. Then they're given like the big five, social desirability.

[00:15:59] And so what they find here is that like the biggest correlation is simps are people who are afraid of being alone. Like when you give all of those scales the chance to predict simping, the best one is fear of being alone. Yeah. And that's their major hypothesis. That's their prediction. And that is vindicated in studies two and three in different ways. Yeah. Yeah. And so in study three, they're like, OK, well, we just showed that this correlates, but let's do an experiment. Yeah. The gold standard. Of course.

[00:16:28] And so what they do is they give people a hypothetical scenario of imagine you're attending a friend's wedding. And then half of the people, randomly assigned, of course, they're given a scenario where like imagine you're attending your friend's wedding. You see the couple, they're in love after the ceremony. You're talking with your friends about your lives and your interests and all that. And you reflect on your own activities, whatever, whatever. You go home to a quiet apartment. Oh, by the way, these are all single men.

[00:16:56] In the condition where they manipulate fear of being single, you are also told, imagine you're attending a close friend's wedding. But you notice that most of your friends are either married or in serious relationships, sharing special moments and laughing together. After the ceremony, you attend the reception where you're seated at a table with people you don't know well. They'll talk about their future plans and their partners, leaving you feeling left out. Someone asks if you're seeing anyone and you reply no.

[00:17:21] So as you observe couples sharing intimate moments, you reflect on your own weekend spent mostly alone. You think about your life now making decisions without a partner's support and how daunting it feels to navigate the future alone. The thought of going home to an empty apartment after such a joyful celebration deepens your sense of isolation. This is cruel. It's so horrible. And it says take a moment to write down why you might be unhappy or uncomfortable about this at this current time.

[00:17:49] And so then they have to write this essay about why this makes them feel sad, hypothetically. And then they complete the simping scale because that's part of the experiment. And then they're debriefed and remunerated. It says remunerated. But I suppose they're remunerated with one dollar. Like, what the fuck? Who's doing this for one dollar?

[00:18:17] They're like literally like looking at their lives and feeling the emptiness of their own existence. And they have to like write an essay about that. And then they get a dollar. It's like trading places, you know, like where there's like our usual bet, one dollar. And they bring out the one dollar bill. Do they like, like that's crazy. Yeah. And this is Singapore. It's a wealthy country, you know. By the way, remunerated is the right word. Is it? Yeah. Well, that's my bad.

[00:18:49] It's their English major. Is that right? I guess. I guess. Because remunerated would be like numbering. Fine. I mean, it's shocking how many people online do, you know, because this study probably took 15 minutes. And it was done by AI. Maybe 10 minutes. Mostly in like. 10 minutes. Yeah. I mean, that's. Yeah. That's the way. There's a whole episode to be had there. Yeah.

[00:19:12] So people are doing these like a gajillion of these a day while they're at work and like some shitty office job probably just to make extra money. But then like, you know, it's crazy to think that this is a representative sample and that like their feelings as they're doing this plus probably like nine other things on different tabs on their computer. Nine other like experiments. If they're really doing this to make money, like that that would be representative of like how people would actually feel. Right. You mean generalizable. Yeah.

[00:19:41] So there's no attempt at representativeness in the sample because it's they're just randomly assigning people who are obviously not representative. No representative of like a true simp. Yeah. I mean, like, I guess not. Although just reading that made me sad, even though I'm with somebody. You can be sad by it without actually being an accurate representation of how someone who actually was like this, whether they would be tempted to be a simp. Right. Right. But like that's kind of what they're testing. Right.

[00:20:11] So like if you get a bunch of men who say they're single and you ask them if they're like interested in anybody and then you give them this, you ask them like, how sad did you feel? The people who read the like the sadder ones say they're sadder. And then they also score higher on the simping scale. Like that. I think that's what they just would say is evidence that like it worked.

[00:20:32] Even in this group of people, the sample of people who are doing this for a dollar while probably doing like a hundred other of them in the same week. Like just because how else would you explain that correlation? Yeah. Yeah. Their effect came out. They're like, oh, look, they report being sadder. They actually report simping more. So, I mean, you could say, well, it's a fluke. But, you know, I think they would just say, well, why is it a fluke? Like, why do you think people aren't reading this and feeling things?

[00:21:02] Surely you have feelings. But I don't think feeling things is enough, right? Like you're supposed to trust that this manipulation is actually making people fear being single more and therefore motivated to because this isn't about like what you're going to fill out on a survey. This is about how you actually behave in real life.

[00:21:26] And so like that that's going to accurately represent how you would behave now towards a relationship that you currently don't have. That you don't know. But what they do know is that people who were in the like negative condition do report greater fear of being single after doing that. And then they do report greater simping behavior. Like if they're just self predicting how they would behave. Yeah. That's all you know. You don't know if that would predict real life romantic behavior.

[00:21:52] So like you might want to do, you know, this kid, I looked him up. It's his master's project. So, you know. Simping? Yeah. That's great. God bless him. It was kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you could do like you could go to weddings and actually like freak people out in person. Yeah. You could just say, oh, are you here with someone? To a guy that you knew was single, you know. It's like, no. Or what we could do.

[00:22:21] Like, what do you think about this? We all know people who are kind of simps. Yes. Like that's just easier than like having me give my definition of simp. Just like point me to the simps and just like do some interviews with them. Like this is my new strategy. This is the Richard situation. Exactly. I want like, just give me like six months with a bunch of simps. You will come up with a better thing than, oh, they're scared of being single. Because that's the other thing ultimately about this. It's like, well, yeah, obviously. Right?

[00:22:49] Like, sure, if you're afraid of being single, you're going to overcompensate and like try to do your best, even if it's counterproductive. Yeah. And by the way, there are other hypotheses that they explicitly stated like that men lower in mate value or in like their own perception of their mate value, I think was one of them. And then, okay, fear of being single, lower perceived, self-perceived attractiveness, social status and mate value. Those weren't supported at all. Yeah.

[00:23:17] So like two out of the three words. Which I think is kind of interesting and I wouldn't have predicted. So. Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted. One of the things like in the general discussion that I thought was illustrative, like it's a really good example just in a simple sentence of some of the issues that these kinds of studies have. So here's the money quote.

[00:24:02] And the reason I think that's so illustrative is like, you know, you have these things that are just made into something real. A mating compensatory perspective. Dispositionally or situationally more fearful of remaining single is that's like a trait, you know, that's like a property of a person. And then obviously likely to engage in simping as a strategy to increase their chances of forming a relationship.

[00:24:30] Like these are just things that are just made solid by words. Like they're not, you know, like you don't have to think of human beings in this way. But they it feels like the way they approach it, like almost guarantees that they will through a lot of these statistical models. I mean, it is reification, but I will say through the statistics and through like the evolutionary theorizing.

[00:24:56] Like my concerns with this study are like, I guess, slightly different, although I do worry about all the stuff you were saying. Say this is a dumb strategy, like that these are like maybe they are people who don't think of themselves as very attractive or like they've never had good luck with the opposite sex or they're bad at reading social cues. And so they're the ones who are more likely to like keep buying someone, you know, things or like, you know, send them like whatever. That's just something that happens.

[00:25:25] And it's just I feel like as a result of all kinds of things, like including just whatever culture like we're in, some weird quirks of certain people, the people that they're like, you're not a simp if it's requited. Like if they're like, oh, I love that you bought me flowers. You didn't simp if that happens. Right. And so to like try to make it into this sort of like, oh, the puzzle is an evolutionary mating strategy. It's like our ancestors weren't worried about this shit. Like this isn't evolved.

[00:25:53] Like they just probably went and like fucked whoever they wanted and had babies or like, you know, it was arranged. I mean, they say something about it being arranged. Like it's not why make it something that's like some sort of crazy modular mating strategy that is deployed. And it's a mystery because usually it doesn't work. Well, one, you've defined simping as like the kind of stuff that doesn't work. Like Jeff Bezos buying tons of shit for his like girlfriend is not simping because he gets to fuck.

[00:26:20] Like so it's reification of like the worst variety. And this is not just them. I don't it's not. This is just a nice way of demonstrating. It is a really nice. And one of the ways it's nice is because it's really clearly laid out in a way that some of them are a little cagey or about like what they're doing with this. And that's right. And that it's kind of original that nobody's really done this. And that it's a concept that we know is kind of new and like been coined fairly recently. Which is especially funny to bring evolution into it. I know.

[00:26:49] Because you can't like simping is something that like how are you going to simp if you're in the fucking Pleistocene era like in wandering tribes? Ooh, I brought you this special cut of this wild boar. Like what are you talking about? This third woolly mammoth coat he bring her. Simp. I carve you picture of your beautiful hair. And then there's the like I carve you picture of my penis.

[00:27:21] That's like the dick pic. And there'd be like an evolutionary analysis. Oh, yeah. The unrequited dick pic. Yeah. Yeah. And then you really got to take into account the requited dick pics, you know? Yeah. I mean, so that part is silly, but it is just it seems like it's just accepted. Like if you're in this in the same way, like if you're in epistemology, you're going to start talking about certain, you know, whatever things related to knowledge or doxastic, whatever.

[00:27:51] It's just like you don't question it like you're in it. Yeah. So why are you swimming? Like at least some of these people are from this sort of like evolutionary relationship stuff. So like everything is seen from this light. Well, at least it's interesting. Yeah. And like it's like a lot of these papers, like we could have done this segment just on the topic of simping and like what. Totally. Yeah. They should interview the guy who wrote that philosophy paper on possible girlfriends. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:20] Having a possible girlfriend. What was the that presents an evolutionary puzzle because you can't leave offspring from a possible girlfriend, only an actual girlfriend. So why? There is a nearby world in which you had offspring. So does that count as a successful strategy? How nearby the world is? It's funny, like evolutionary psychology used to be about something that you could actually ask, like, why are there gay people from an evolutionary perspective?

[00:28:50] And like that would actually make sense at least. But like why are there simps is just like the string has played out. You know what I mean? Yeah. At least they didn't say like surprisingly to date. Nobody has. No. I know. I was looking for that. Incredibly. After searching through the database, we find very few articles exploring the phenomenon of simping.

[00:29:20] You know, it's funny. I was like, oh, I wonder if there's work on cucks. But like cuckoldry just is an evolutionary psych phenomenon. That's a huge one. The word, right, is because of the cuckoo. It's from cuckoldry. Yeah. It's from like, yeah, exactly. That's right. See, things used to be grounded. What the hell? Although you gave a much better grounding than I would have thought. Like the opposite of pimp. Like I didn't know that. I've learned something today. Thank too short, baby. I guess I should ask.

[00:29:49] Any other things to say about simps and simping behavior? No. I'm just glad I'm not single or that paragraph would have really affected me. Yeah. Do you think you had simping behavior in you even? Maybe, you know, maybe like my freshman year in high school, maybe. But I don't think so. It's just there's like a part of pride swallowing. Like I saw friends who just they were a good negative example for me. Yeah. So, yeah. What about you? Same.

[00:30:17] Like even in my lowest mate value periods. In moments. Like I just didn't have it in me. Like I think it also, yeah, it's a pride thing. And like I had pride. This is maybe the more general thing. When you seem like you want something eagerly. Yeah. Like it's just not a good strategy to convince other human beings. It's like the same as like walking into a car dealer and being like, I'm going to buy a car today.

[00:30:45] You just don't do that. Yeah. It's not an evolutionary puzzle as much as it is like just a social puzzle. It's like everybody knows that. Like play the game. Like it's like the first thing you learn in that domain. I mean, I remember an evolutionary, like a good evolutionary psych person that I know. She does like brain like development across species. So she was like she hated some of this stuff.

[00:31:11] And she would say, you know, you can look around the world and see that in every culture an umbrella was invented. That doesn't mean there's fucking module for umbrellas in our brains. It just means that it's a good idea to come up with a solution to not getting wet. Yeah. All right. On that note, we will be back to talk about a really good paper called The Mystic and the Metaphysician. We'll be right back.

[00:32:40] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the podcast where we like to take a moment and thank everyone for reaching out to us, getting in touch with us in all the different ways that you do. If you would like to email us, you can email us at verybadwizards at gmail.com. You can tweet at us at peas at Tamler at verybadwizards. You can follow us on Instagram. You can like us on Facebook. You can join the verybadwizards subreddit.

[00:33:06] One of the best ways to help us out that is completely free for you is to give us a five-star review on the podcast platform that you listen to, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever. That helps other people find the podcast and it helps us grow and sustain.

[00:33:25] And then as a personal thing, if you'd like to follow me on Letterboxd, I have started writing little tiny capsule reviews of all the movies that I see. If you'd like to support us in more tangible ways, you can go to our support page where you'll find some swag. There's some new stuff there. VBW Water Bottle. That's our featured item for this promo segment. But the main thing you can do is join our Patreon.

[00:33:55] That is where all of our income pretty much comes from right now since we stopped doing ads. And there's lots of different levels. At $2 and up per month, you will get all of Dave's beats. There are nine volumes of Dave's excellent beats.

[00:34:12] $5 and up per month, you get access to our entire archive of bonus episodes, including all the different bonus series, Noir Summer, The Ambulators, The Reintegrators with Paul Bloom, and of course now The Lotus Eaters. The Lotus Eaters, which is our deep dive into the Odyssey. We'll be releasing our latest episode next week, and that's on books 20 through 22. So finally, we're going to get to the battle with the suitors.

[00:34:42] And then we will record our last episode of that series in Ithaca, in Ithaca, New York. I am going up there to see David's house for the first time ever, actually, and meet his family. So that should be fun. At $10 and up, you get access to our Brothers Karamazov series. You get to vote in the VBW Madness tournament.

[00:35:06] And of course, at $20 a month, you can ask us a question every month, and we will answer it in video form for you and audio form for all of our bonus tier listeners. We enjoy doing that. The last one ran very long. Thank you so much for all your support. We truly appreciate it. It's a real honor doing this podcast. And let's get to the main segment. All right, let's get to our main segment. And that is Miri al-Bahari's The Mystic and the Metaphysician,

[00:35:35] Clarifying the Role of Meditation in the Search for Ultimate Reality. Yeah, so this is a paper that I guess you might call it meta-metaphysics. It is trying to determine what approaches are we going to allow in this shared quest to determine the nature, the true nature of reality, of fundamental reality.

[00:35:59] And she starts out by noting that if you're a modern analytic metaphysician or a scientist, a physicist, you typically think that the way of going about this is some combination of empirical or a posteriori investigation combined with some a priori claims or assumptions that you're holding as well.

[00:36:24] But they agree that the experience of the seeker, like the metaphysician or the scientist, is irrelevant to the approach. Like that you can't take whatever experiences that they are having or claim to have as something that is legitimate value or insight into the nature of fundamental reality.

[00:36:48] And on the flip side, you have mystics, Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, and especially Advaita Vedanta mystics and Buddhist meditators. You still find this strange convergence of reported experience coming from meditation. It gets called different things in different traditions.

[00:37:11] It can be called Brahman or Atman or, you know, in Buddhist terms, it can often awake awareness or pure consciousness. But it seems to have this strange convergence on this kind of fundamental, pure, unitary experience at the bottom, you know, as the kind of substratum of reality.

[00:37:36] And everything that we see, including our own selves or what we take to be ourselves arises out of that. But fundamentally, everything is that. You know, one of the famous in the Advaita traditions, one of the most famous books, I think written by Maharaj, but I'm not sure. But it's just I am that.

[00:37:56] And so what she wants to argue is that we need to also take seriously in this investigation the experiences of people who are meditating on the nature of reality. And I think especially because you find this convergence from totally different mystical traditions.

[00:38:17] So in requesting just that we're allowed to take these things into account and that a metaphysician should be open to that, both, I guess, as a meditator themselves or at least reports from other meditators.

[00:38:31] She responds to four different skeptical challenges to that view and arrives at the view, not that this is the only way through meditation and other forms of mystical investigation to arrive at the nature of reality. But it's as good a candidate as just doing it from science or a priori reasoning. Yeah. So what did you think of this paper? I have no idea what you thought. I like it when we don't talk about it at all. Yeah. I really liked it.

[00:39:01] I went into it, not sure, like maybe even just like a little skeptical because, you know, I wasn't sure how she was going to get well and where she was even going. And maybe just like, oh, is meditation really like going to do much work here? But like, I got to say, she is one, a good writer. Yes. Very clear writer. Very clear. Two, like not making any like large leaps.

[00:39:29] Like she's very, very clear about what her task is and it's to sort of counter these objections. Like I certainly don't agree with everything she says, but that gives us something to talk about. But I really like this kind of philosophy where she's doing analytic philosophy, obviously, but she's also doing like comparative religion. Yeah. You know, like comparative scholarship across these mystic traditions. And so it's like philosophy of mind, metaphysics, comparative religious scholarship.

[00:39:58] And that kind of integrative approach is just kind of refreshing to see. Yeah. And I agree. And I thought you would like it because, A, it's not overstepping, I think, in its claims. And often your objections come to like some sort of methodological paradigm shift, which is not something that she is asking for. I think she's asking for a different paradigm to be incorporated into the current paradigm. Yeah.

[00:40:26] And to take seriously that there are these thousands of year old traditions that describe human experience in uncannily similar ways. Yeah. So how can you ignore that if you believe that they're uncannily similar? Yeah. So and like we've talked about this just because we're often surprised to see some of the convergences when we've tackled certain works over the years. And, you know, I would add to the list.

[00:40:54] So she talks about the Sufi traditions where Allah is kind of ultimately the thing that you come home to and you find within yourself you are just another manifestation of Allah. Everything is Allah. And then in Hindu traditions, it's Brahman or Atman. And then I would add, you know, like Plato's metaphysics in the Republic, too, in the form of the good. There's a lot of overlap.

[00:41:20] The form of the good is this thing that's at least illuminating everything and also inseparable from everything because everything depends on it. So, you know, from just traditions of all different kinds, you get this as everything else is shifting and changing and arising and passing away. There's something that isn't coming and going and constantly changing. And they all kind of arrive at that.

[00:41:46] And they arrive at the same view of the obstacle for discovering that, for understanding that, for knowing that is the self. A self in particular that imagines that the self is distinct from all these other objects in the world. Even just that dualism, I am different from what I see. Once you start doing that, you are in the land of illusion and samsara.

[00:42:16] And the key to appreciating who we really are and what everything actually is, is to get rid of that illusion. And that's what a lot of the meditative practices are designed to try to do through all different kinds of methods. I find it all completely fascinating. And as a meditator, I will just add, you start over time, gradually, to understand things that you didn't understand before.

[00:42:44] Through the practice and not just through reading about it. Which would be the equivalent of Mary's color science knowledge. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Do you want to go through the skeptical challenges? Yeah, yeah, sure. I don't know when to... Like, there are a couple of big things that I worry about. But I think I'll save those for our discussion. But I, in general, realized, reading this paper, that I'm skeptical of all metaphysics.

[00:43:13] Like, it's a funny category to me of philosophy. And I'm surprised myself at my reactance against metaphysics that is trying to shed light on the ultimate form of reality. Because, like, I think I fundamentally... This is something you would say, so I'm surprised. Is it that I just don't think we can get to the fundamental nature of reality no matter what we do? That's something that doesn't surprise me that you're saying. Yeah. Because I feel like you've said it certainly when it comes to consciousness.

[00:43:41] But even maybe when it comes to, you know, final metaphysics. It might just be like a dog trying to understand calculus. We are not beings that are equipped to be able to do that. There are certain maybe insurmountable challenges that we'll always be using our own experience and or instruments or, you know... This whack brain of ours. Yeah. So, I actually don't think, you know, that's the kind of beginner's mind that a lot of traditions want you going into the practice with.

[00:44:10] Thanks for calling my deeply well-thought-out beliefs the beginner. No, it's a compliment, though, in these practices is to come in with just absolutely, you know, like... Because you think that, you know, you're not dogmatically attached to any particular way that you have an openness that I think a lot of these traditions think is absolutely essential to discover. You know, you might be right. There's no way a dog can understand calculus. It doesn't matter what they do. It doesn't matter how well they're trained.

[00:44:39] They're not going to understand calculus. So, it could be like that, but it could also not be like that. So, then the question is, like, how far can we get? And can we somehow, in ways we don't understand right now, overcome the challenge that you're raising? Right. Yeah. So, like, as we dive into it, like, I'd like to first read a couple of these quotes from the mystics because they're so cool. And I think in your wokeness, you didn't even mention the Christian tradition. Christian mystics. Yes. Maybe. Go back to the tape.

[00:45:10] A VAR. We need VAR for our podcast. So, from the Upanishad, beyond the senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression is the pure unitary consciousness where an awareness of the world and of multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. From Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic, absolute and free from all names and all forms, just as God is free and absolute in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, higher than grace. For in these there is still distinction.

[00:45:39] And he says, the eye with which I see God is the same as that with which he sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love. Yeah. Very Borgesian, I thought. From the Sufis, the prophet means he who kills his selfhood. That is, he who knows himself, sees that all his existence is Allah's existence. He sees no change in his inmost nature or in his attributes.

[00:46:06] He sees no necessity for his attributes becoming Allah's, for he has understood that he was not himself the existence of his own inmost nature and that he was ignorant of his selfhood and of his fundamental being. From the Vedanta tradition, understand that it is not the individual which has consciousness. It is the consciousness which assumes innumerable forms. So, you know, you have to, I know we'll talk about the objection that these might be, we might be reading similarity into it. Yeah.

[00:46:34] But I think that it's pretty clear that there is a common strand. And then she says that while both the mystic and the standard metaphysician thus proclaim to seek truths about fundamental reality, the content and modes of access to their respective realities diverge widely. Many analytic metaphysicians will accordingly balk at the prospect of mystical data being taken as evidence for a metaphysical position unto itself. But aside from an incredulous stare, which I've always loved that phrase, what reasons might they have for being skeptical?

[00:47:04] And then she introduces her for. David Lewis originated a remark about. Exactly. Like that's a modal realism. Yeah, exactly. It was about modal realism. Which I still have the incredulous stare to like the multiple. And it seems sufficient, but. Yeah. In that case, it was fine. I guess that's the point, you know. But yeah, no, I think she considers four, you know, strong objections to this view. Actually, before we get to the four objections, I had a question for you. Yeah.

[00:47:31] Because it seems to me that there are two claims being made by the mystics and by Al-Bahari here. One is that there is no self, that the self is illusory, that this thing that we believe to be like separate from the rest of the universe is actually not really separate.

[00:47:52] The other thing is that consciousness is at the ultimate, like that is the thing that reality is, that there is like a unitary monistic consciousness. And that second one, I think, like I'm on board with the first one more easily, I guess, than I am with the second one. But more importantly, I think that there are two claims. Yeah.

[00:48:13] And in fact, some people would argue that the early Buddhist Theravada traditions only endorsed the first claim, the no self claim. Right. She addresses. But the basic idea is you do have this difference or at least apparent difference where the Buddha, all the works that are attributed to him, he is very focused on the deconstruction of the self and to realize that everything is constantly changing. Everything is impermanent.

[00:48:41] And, you know, the big kind of insight is emptiness. But here's her direct quote. The Buddha never explicitly proclaimed our abiding nature to be identical with a unitary, unconditioned and fundamental consciousness. It's not that there is this one unitary monistic consciousness at the bottom of everything.

[00:49:01] It's just that everything is fundamentally empty and interdependent and constantly changing and that not seeing that is the cause of all suffering. But I think she makes some interesting arguments that even if when you go back to those traditions, you can find some element of this just in their understanding of emptiness. But it's more inferred than discussed.

[00:49:25] And as she points out in this paper, she thinks the Buddha is more focused on the practical elements of this investigation. He's not trying to come up with a metaphysics. Right. But, you know, and all that, I agree, is super interesting. But it's still not addressing that I think there are two claims that need to be defended. Yeah. Right? Like whether the Buddha believed it or not, I mean, it's sort of a different take. But why is there a problem that there's two different claims being made? Oh, just because she treats them as one.

[00:49:52] And I think that the Buddha could have believed that there is nothing shows that, like, you can have a no-self view that doesn't also come along with this sort of monistic one consciousness view. Right. But the defense of this is sort of lumping together both of those things.

[00:50:08] So then in that sense, I think her, I forget which one it is, is it the third skeptical challenge that there's not as much convergence on what happens when you meditate or contemplate as she's claiming? Right. And I think I'll get to why that distinction matters to me and when we go through it a bit more. Okay. Yes. Should we go through the four objections? Yeah.

[00:50:32] So the first one is that there is like an inherent circularity that is at the heart of meditative approaches or contemplative approaches since meditation can only reveal things about conscious experience because that is what we're manipulating. And so whatever the reality is outside of experience, it can't reveal that because we are fundamentally trapped within that experience.

[00:51:01] I mean, this relates, I think, to your just objection to metaphysics broadly, right? Is that we are trapped with the lens that we have. And so she says, should fundamental reality lie outside of the scope of human experience as metaphysicians and scientists standardly claim, then meditation will not be the right route to understand the fundamentals. Yes.

[00:51:19] And her response to this, she's basically saying that analytic metaphysicians and scientists are in the same boat, you know, that they are also using a set of tools and a set of methods that arises out of the tools and perspectives that we have. We are always working within a paradigm. And the goal of metaphysics ultimately is to get beyond all paradigms at what's actually real and go beyond all models into the truth.

[00:51:48] So it doesn't seem like the mystic is in a worse place than the metaphysician in this case, but it could just be that that project dooms both of them or that objection dooms both of them. Right. So she says, you know, OK, you know, one of the things that people point to is that science has like this great track record in describing reality sort of, you know, this mind independent physical material world.

[00:52:15] So we have a lot of reason to think that it is a good method to arrive at some sort of reality. And so why not think that that's the method by which we should proceed? And then she says, look, we have not made any real headway into the hard problem of consciousness by using that method. So that seems like one big failure of that approach.

[00:52:37] There is an explanatory gap in the way scientists and metaphysicians are approaching the problem of consciousness. Therefore, there's going to be some kind of circularity or seemingly unbridgeable gap either way is how I took her. And then also kind of pointing out, I think correctly, but, you know, I'm probably biased, but the landscape has changed now.

[00:53:04] And that I think people are more convinced that there are some perhaps irresolvable problems with trying to understand something like consciousness from a purely scientific perspective. Never mind from, you know, analytic metaphysics. So perhaps this is made for, I don't know, more openness. So she says such considerations do not show, of course, that any mystic-based metaphysic will be viable.

[00:53:29] But they do suggest that when it comes to opposing directions in the metaphysics of mind, the naturalist no longer has automatic right of way. Then that's the thing it used to, like I would say. Exactly. I would say in the last 20 years, it's changed. And thanks to people like Chalmers and Nagel and, you know. Yeah. And she points out that like the sort of this pressure on materialism has led to the rise in things like panpsychism and idealism being taken seriously.

[00:53:55] Yeah. And along with a lot of like continental philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Their idealism. Well, yeah, their phenomenology. Like you see that being taken a lot more seriously in spaces that they were just like dismissed out of hand before. Yeah. Now I did have like, this is probably the section that I had like the most like resistance to, but not super strong.

[00:54:21] Because I think, again, I think it would be a mistake to think that science can get the fundamental nature of reality. I'm on board with that. But there's two things. So as to the circularity problem, it may be that these strands of mysticism have all sort of independently arrived at these truths.

[00:54:38] But it's also the case that, you know, even as you were describing the meditative practice, that these traditions train you to reach that as the like fundamental truth. So like they train you into this no self view or they train you into thinking of everything as one.

[00:54:56] And so I feel like these traditions are baking in some, you know, nobody's really going into meditation blind without being given some tradition to tell them what the goal is. There's some convergence also in like the methods of practice, but there's also a lot of variety in them. But I take this to be challenge four, that it could just be that what these methods are doing are causing us to hallucinate in similar ways.

[00:55:25] No matter where we're from. But that doesn't get us to reality. That just gets us to another different kind of illusion that meditation can get you to experience. Yeah. I'm more though concerned in this case about the fact that like anybody going into a meditative practice is going to be told that the goal is no self. And so it's not really an insight that they're going to arrive at.

[00:55:49] But so one way of saying it in a silly way is if I told you that the ultimate goal of meditation was to think of yourself as a banana, like you might arrive at that conclusion through your meditative practice because you're constantly focused on being a banana. Yeah. But number one, I don't think necessarily people always go into meditation with no self as their primary thing that they're trying to realize.

[00:56:13] You know, often people go into meditation just for stress relief or for some kind of deconstruction just to be able to be more mindful. You know, and then maybe in the back of their mind, they know this view of no self, which they don't even understand what that could possibly mean. But you're right. It might be a little biased. If those people arrived at it, like if they were just like, oh, this is just a cool method to like relax after a hard day's work.

[00:56:37] If they had never heard of the no self view, but they got there after doing meditation, then that would be like sort of like a counter argument for me. I just think that we can't ignore that often the very people who conclude some of these metaphysical views were people who were sort of trained in these traditions. But that's just one. Yeah. I mean, and also, and I don't know if you'll find this compelling, but, you know, people have these experiences without meditating at all.

[00:57:05] You know, they can just have it some sort of transcendental experience. Like psychedelics too. Yeah. And then you have psychedelics, I was just about to say, which they then when they go into practice, recognize that feeling, but before had absolutely no. Yeah. So if you believe that these insights can happen spontaneously and what meditation is training you to do is to be more open to it, then that could possibly respond to that.

[00:57:31] Yeah. And then the other thing in this that I was not sure about was like, it's true that the materialist worldview, we've seemingly reached some impasses. But if you have consciousness as like, again, if you don't separate the two claims, like even if you do, but you include this idea that consciousness is some fundamental aspect of the universe of ultimate reality.

[00:57:53] That seems odd to me only because certainly there was a fundamental reality that existed before any conscious being came to be. Right. Well, no, I think a lot of people would deny that and they would say, what reason do you have to think that like conscious being as you describe it?

[00:58:12] But, you know, ultimately the distinction between you and I as beings is unreal. But I think these views think the ultimate source of this stuff has been around as long as anything has been around. Yeah. And so it's not consciousness where, you know, you have to be like at least a grasshopper to be a conscious being in this sense. Like everything is fundamentally consciousness, according to a lot of these views. Well, then I guess, yeah, because if you go into like panpsychism or idealism, then you would object to what I'm saying.

[00:58:42] But it just seems like if you don't believe atoms are conscious, I think you still have to believe that at some point in the history of the universe, only atoms existed. I don't know. I don't think you do have to. Or we've just gotten things terribly wrong. Not terribly wrong. Just using that model, you are going to come up. That's going to be an inevitable outcome of, you know, the materialist inquiry or the physicalist inquiry into the world.

[00:59:11] I don't think that they have to accept that. I think they can't accept it ultimately, because then there would be two things at least, right? There would be the consciousness and consciousness's objects, which existed prior to consciousness. And they just, you know, the mystical traditions don't believe that. You know, Meister Eckhart, your boy, doesn't believe it. Right. So that's why I was saying, like, I think that under that view, the no self part makes total sense.

[00:59:39] Like you could just say, like, look, we're all made of the same shit. Like this is all an illusion or the boundaries between me and you, Tamla, are illusory. But to believe that, like, somehow consciousness is required for reality seems like a separate step. And I get that some people just take that. They just say that. No, that just is.

[00:59:59] Well, you want to be a Humean no-selfer, I think. You want to be a materialist and you think no self is actually a consequence of materialist. So, you know, in the same way Hume just thought it's all just a tumble of successive impressions. But I think they would agree with that aspect of it. But they do think there's this fundamentally unifying consciousness that's the source of everything, that's at the bottom of everything.

[01:00:29] Like one analogy that's sometimes helpful, there's a couple that I like. But one is like you can imagine a screen, like you see my TV screen, which is totally black right now. And then at times the screen is lit and there's all sorts of different kinds of things on the screen at the same time. You know, let's think we watch Sicario. There's a hundred different things going on on the screen. But it's still the screen. And ultimately that's the fundamental thing that it is, is a screen.

[01:00:55] But that doesn't mean that there aren't all these other things that also come on to it every so often. But it doesn't stop being the screen. You can't have those images without the screen. And maybe if you want to say like, you know, Big Bang, whatever, you could say for, you know, billions of years, there was just the black screen. And, you know, that's what you're calling before conscious experience arises.

[01:01:20] And they would probably agree with that. I mean, they think this whole thing is beyond space and time anyway, ultimately. Yeah. Yeah. I guess then it's just like, what is the screen? Exactly. I guess like in a universe, in a brand new universe where all you have is hydrogen gas. Like, I don't know what work that's doing, but sure. So yeah, those are just the two, probably the most critical thoughts I had about the objections. Yeah. You know, maybe relating it.

[01:01:46] So she then looks at objections saying that there's not as much convergence as you would think. So the way she says, the more inconsistencies there are between the reports of mystics, the less likely they are to be correct. And the more likely they are to reflect a brain induced and or culturally moderated fabrication.

[01:02:09] And so she quotes this guy Katz who says, Meister Eckhart speaks of being at one with God, but then the Sufi talks of unification with Allah. Upanishads talk of realizing one's nature as self, like capital S or Brahmin. And Maharaj speaks of the ultimate as consciousness. So they all use like different words. You know, it's not a great objection to say one says Allah and the other says God.

[01:02:35] Like, you know, that's pretty easy to account for, right? The question is, is there merely a terminological difference? Like you can call it consciousness, you can call it Brahmin, you can call it self-capital S, you can call it Allah, you can call it God. Whatever it is, like it's the same thing when they're describing what this thing is.

[01:02:54] Yeah, here's where she, I think, wants to say that, yes, although, of course, the traditions they come out of are going to color the different language and concepts that they use, terms that they use. But ultimately, they are arriving at the same idea. Yeah, I like this. She says, It says,

[01:03:45] Nature is a-perspectival beyond space and time and universal somehow granting all that we take to be the world. Yeah. And so the boundaries between you and everything dissolve and the boundaries between like other objects that you take to be distinct dissolve. Yeah. I think she's treading carefully here in the right way because you can be a kind of scholar that's insensitive to the details of these accounts and find commonality because you want to find commonality. And I don't think that she's doing that.

[01:04:15] I think that she's taking seriously that this is a possibility. You know, and it could be that a Sufi mystic says you're blasphemous to think that it's another god or whatever. But the core insights, I think, are there, right? Yeah. And, you know, there is a difference between your mystic and your ordinary just believer, right? And I think the ordinary believer is much more likely to get caught up in feuds as to who's right about this than the mystic. Yeah, right.

[01:04:43] I was sort of shocked that Sufi mystics could get away with saying that they were the same with Allah, you know? Even from like the Christian perspective, Jesus himself almost gets stoned in the New Testament because he says that he and the Father are like the same. And, you know, he's pointing to this view that we could all have this divineness in us. But that almost got him stoned. Yeah.

[01:05:10] The last challenge is, I don't know, like we've kind of talked about this, but it's interesting that she compares it to the failed introspective psychology programs in the early 1900s, like William James, I think, late William James. And that you're always going to have these subjective cultural biases that warp or possibly distort, certainly shape your understanding of, you know, quote unquote reality when you engage with them.

[01:05:39] What do you make of her response to this? I was curious what you would make of it because she's turning to like data about like meditation and the brain and stuff. And she says that like when you look at the data, like some people have argued that it's more pluralistic than you would expect, like that there are a variety of different kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have argued that there is nothing that can be described as like the ultimate or pure consciousness or the non-dual awareness.

[01:06:09] But rather, it seems as if there's lots of different things. And I take it that she's using this thought experiment to say like you don't really need those data. Like just think about what you would have if you eliminated all of these aspects of normal consciousness. It's like an analytical argument kind of. She says,

[01:07:04] Yeah, it's interesting. Like that you would just get to this. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem so compelling to me. I mean, it's. Yeah, yeah. Me neither. I agree that it's conceivable. And I guess that makes a point. Yeah.

[01:07:28] And then she also says that people who undergo these practices, you know, and these are some studies that I would probably find pretty shady, but that they show reduced affective bias. Which she never defines. I was unclear to me what that meant. Yeah. Maybe more alertness, more aliveness. Look, the circularity problem can't go away.

[01:07:51] So, you know, I think that that doesn't mean that we can't actually pierce the veil and know it directly. But I don't think you can be confident of that going in because of this exact problem. And this is a problem that might doom the whole project of trying to understand the nature of reality as limited beings.

[01:08:14] I think this objection applies to mystical traditions, even though I think you find convergence across cultures and across history, across time. They're still ultimately homo sapiens. You know, they're human beings whose brains are wired up in very similar ways and with sharing all the DNA. Like, that's just true. Like, and there's no getting out of that. I think that affects scientific and metaphysical inquiry as well.

[01:08:42] But I think she just wants this to be taken seriously. She's not trying to say that we should abandon these other methods, but just to take these reports and this form of investigation as legitimate. And I think she effectively does that. Yeah, let me read this part because I think, again, she's fair. She says, of course, none of this will by itself win the argument for mysticism insofar as it shows consciousness to actually be the unconditioned fundament that it purports to be.

[01:09:10] The most that any appeal to contemplative data can show is that it is possible to have a culturally transcendent experience of a perspectival objectless consciousness that, in the genuine absence of sensory mental cues, will appear fundamental and unstructured by space and time. This would help win the debate against those who regard all experiences mediated by cultural conditioning or temporal structure, a vital step towards proving the viability of the mystical hypothesis. Yeah.

[01:09:36] However, it does not yet win the debate against those such as the naturalists who are metaphysically opposed to the mystic. Yeah, it could still be the case that the experience of pure and non-dual consciousness insofar as it purports to be a fundament that transcends space and time is a brain-induced hallucination. As already mentioned, further arguments will need to be recruited for either side to make headway.

[01:09:57] But I hope I have clarified the role of meditation in this project of exploring the mystical hypothesis such that it is seen as a viable option with a rich potential for research. Yeah. And it's a modest conclusion in some sense. It's also, like, wildly ambitious in another sense. But, yeah, I think it's just well-argued for. And I think the fact that you are as on board as you are shows that. Yeah. It's interesting.

[01:10:26] You know, the introspectionist school in early psychology that you were alluding to earlier that started really, you know, it was like some of the earliest, like, empirical psychology with these, like, Germans like Wilhelm Wundt and then his student Titchener who came to Cornell. And we have his brain on a shelf. We literally have his brain. In a vat. In a jar on display. Exactly. All we need to do is spark it with electricity.

[01:10:52] Like, they would bring people in and ask them these detailed questions about their mental experience. And they would even train people, right? Because they were, like, they weren't ignorant of the problem of just having people, you know, willy-nilly describe what they're thinking. They would try to give them some discipline in their, like, reporting of their experience. Like, and they're just constrain them from wild, crazy shit. But everybody kind of agrees that that was not the best to understand the mind.

[01:11:20] But I've always sneakily thought that, like, there's still something to be discovered about the similarities of phenomenal experience. And, you know, language is a big limit. Like, we don't know, you know, it is weird to bring someone in and ask them what their experience of read is or what their experience of time is. Because what can their language give you?

[01:11:40] But if you have this method that's, like, thousands of years across cultural traditions of, like, using some method of getting people to experience, like, a really, really basic state of consciousness, that it might tell you something is not a crazy thing. Like, now, whether it tells you something about metaphysics, I'm not sure.

[01:12:01] But that it can tell you something, like, I think we have good enough evidence that it seems to have told people across these thousands of years very similar things. And then, like, if you want to use that as input into your metaphysics, why not? Yeah.

[01:12:16] And, you know, one of our listeners, Fareed, who is as skeptical as I am and you are, you know, you're kind of getting there yourself in terms of some of the quantitative methods that are currently used to try to understand the mind in psychology. I'm 53% there. Yeah. But we were talking about this with Schwader and how you wanted to bring back interviews and, like, really, like, talking to people for a long time.

[01:12:45] Like, just dismissing all of that out of hand because it doesn't get you a testable hypothesis right away that you can run an experiment on in the lab. Like, that's misguided, too. And so I take that introspective program to be more in the family of qualitative research of all kinds. Yeah. Yeah. It was a weird—it was like a kind of a false start. It was like an attempt at, like, maybe if people just tell us what it's like to remember things, then we'll be able to say, like, how the mind works.

[01:13:14] And I honestly don't know enough about it to speak with too much authority. But from what I do know, it just seems like maybe they could have gotten interesting information, just not what they seemed to be wanting. Yeah. They might be interested in the wrong things. And I think William James was more on the self-interest back then. Right. He did nitrous oxide and wrote an essay on it, remember? Yeah. That's right. So, yeah.

[01:13:37] And I think the psychedelic stuff, it's not my favorite new popular branch of, you know, mystical inquiry. But it is a big deal these days. And it would be kind of interesting if you can get similar experiences from that without the practice, you know, because then it's like that's a different kind of convergence. Yeah. One drug-induced and one practice-induced that give you the same experience of this kind of direct knowing.

[01:14:06] Hey, when's the last time you did mushrooms? I did like the ones you can get now fairly recently, but like the really good ones and the like I haven't done. Like I keep meaning to. There's definitely some people that would offer me to do one of these psilocybin kind of deals. And I've wanted to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a matter of getting there and when. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very curious. I'm not going to do it. You should. I'm very curious as to whether. I don't want.

[01:14:37] This would be like a violent destruction of my mind. I'm very curious as to whether your experience on like a serious psychedelic would be changed given the sort of new discipline of mind that you might have through meditation. Yeah, I'm curious about that too. Like would it, you know, there are certain kinds of very strong edibles that can give me that same but heightened kind of experience.

[01:14:59] And it really undermines the solidity of everything, you know, in a way that also happens in meditation. But yeah, I think I find all this stuff fascinating. I like her approach. I think, you know, let both these flowers bloom is the right attitude. Yeah. I think part of your resistance here, let me just psychoanalyze you as a form of conclusion.

[01:15:25] I think one of the reasons you are more resistant to this than your other kind of thoughts and things you say would suggest is because you're scared that if you took like one further step in that direction, you might go the whole way. And you might just become like a monk chasing like ultimate reality, non-dual consciousness. Like you could get there.

[01:15:51] You have a dormant mystic waiting to burst inside of you or be awakened. I reject your psychoanalysis and I find it extraordinarily condescending to try to find the psychological reasons for my belief. My core objection phenomenologically is that, you know, like there is a mind independent reality.

[01:16:15] Like I think we risk being kind of not anthropocentric but consciousness centric. Like I think that it's like it's scary to believe in the cold universe of nothing but, you know, atomic gases and matter in motion. Fusion and stars matter in motion. Like that's not comforting. It's nice to think we are, you know, like the Buddhist hot dog, one with everything. That's a nice thought. But what's funny is that's not a motivation for me at all.

[01:16:44] Like I don't find it cold to think of like a materialistic universe before any conscious beings, you know, as you define them arose. Like that's fine. If that's true, that's fine. Yeah, that was never my motivation. But I think it is for some people. They find the void terrifying, you know. It's like the absurd universe. They get the nausea, the anguish and all of that. And I was never like that. Yeah. I buy that.

[01:17:10] I am compelled by the thought that the universe, cold and non-conscious, according to my dogma, might have created conscious beings and unwittingly observed itself. You know, it's like crazy to think of the universe as creating beings that have phenomenological experiences. You can there's like kind of a cool thought that the universe arrived at beings that would allow it to perceive itself. Yeah.

[01:17:40] Think of a universe in which is composed of consciousness, out of which arises beings that take themselves to be separate from consciousness, but that have the ability to recognize that ultimately they are just non-dual awareness and empty. Yeah. But have to work to get there. And this is where I also like the sort of notion of a demiurge that trapped us in this mode of being.

[01:18:07] Also, what these mystical traditions share is this – because there is this misconception of meditation as work and discipline and a lot of effort. And yet, when you get to these and especially these traditions, it all seems like, no, effort is the problem. Trying to control is the problem. And that the way you appreciate and recognize these truths is to relax and fall back into it.

[01:18:35] And some people think the mindful techniques that people are most familiar with, following your breath, counting your breath, that that's just reinforcing both your effort and your discipline and getting you to think, oh, I've got to change myself to be this way. And that the key is, no, you're trying to see what's there absent all effort. You have to not do work to get there. But we're always doing work. That's what the self does. The universe is whispering. Yes.

[01:19:02] The universe is whispering into your ears saying, shh, just let it happen. Surrender. Yes. Totally. I mean, it is. It wants to penetrate you. The universe wants to penetrate you. Let it. Oh, God. That seems like a blasphemous note to end on something that is actually so beautiful. Repugnant. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. I'm waiting.

[01:20:11] Just a very bad.