Gregg Henriques

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

My journey on this starts I'm a professor of psychology a clinical and theoretical psychologist and I start in the normal modern institution that's of psychology in the mid nineteen nineties. And I'm learning science. I'm also getting exposed to the postmodern frame of reference of, wait a minute. There's science, but then there's hegemony and control and dominance and oppression and marginalization, and all that was salient to me during that time. And it was also the case, for whatever combination or reasons of my constitution and orientation, that I knew, saw, felt the the need to create and include and transcend whole picture and was situated in the context of both the science of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy. And my story is that as I backed into that, not with intent, but just basic constitution, dispositions, I was oriented towards what we might call, coherence as a frame of knowledge. I wanted to actually put it bluntly, shit to make sense. And it turns out that actually doesn't. It just doesn't. So that's part of my story, is to be very clear. And it's not new, but I want everyone to understand just how profound it is. This stuff doesn't make sense. And what I mean by that is when you zoom out and ask for the puzzle pieces to be framed I'm not saying things need to make sense so that we know everything about everything. That's absurd.

But, things need to be basic sense. Okay? And I would argue that things make basic sense in physics and chemistry and biology. But then in my discipline, I didn't realize this, they don't make basic sense. The Internet I make is certainly not positioned in a scientific framework, basic sense out of my discipline, and that's amazing to me. And I call that the problem of psychology, and I part of my story is telling everybody that there's a thing out there that my discipline is had as its history. It's called a crisis in its history. And everyone's freaked out about it when they realize the crisis. 1899. There's a crisis. And then it realized in the nineteen twenties and thirties. And then my discipline brushes it over. I mean, there's a story here. My discipline's saying, well, it's really wishful thinking. We really should be not asking how to make sense. Just go apply the methods of science, if you're a scientist, to whatever you call your topic of interest. And then you just say you're interested in some sort of mental process and study it by measuring behavior. But actually, that's not if you can agree right off the front, we actually don't know what we mean by mental process, and there's 6,000,000 different definitions, and you decide what your definition is, Folks, that's a real problem. And especially, we don't even know what we mean by mental process relative to the behaviors we're gonna measure. So anyway, people who know me know that my life's obsession, John Dravaky, one of the individuals who brings us here through his own wisdom and vision, will tell you, from his own cognitive science, we don't know what we mean by mind. I'll say, we don't know what we mean by behavior, and we don't know what we mean by the sign what the science of psychology is about.

I didn't start with the idea that we should try to solve this problem. I backed into it and then realized that I had been briefly exposed to it and then brushed it over. And then what is it and why is it there? I also had a couple of insights that enabled me to get a grip on it in a different way.

And when you get a grip on it in a different way, what emerges ultimately is a fundamentally different grammar. So what the Enlightenment gave us, really, and I call it the Enlightenment Gap, they gave us a set of knowledge that actually physics emerges as a pretty damn good way to get knowledge of material objects in the world. Okay? So Galileo into Newton gave us for two hundred years, gives us a material mechanical model that actually you measure how shit behaves when you drop it. And there's a mathematical force times acceleration. Force equals mass times acceleration relation, and there are these laws of behavior or laws of action or whatever. And that grips us. And then, of course, there's the in physics, the twentieth century revolution, both in quantum mechanics and general relativity, and we get modern physics. But the fact of the matter is is that we have a science for energy matter across space time, behavior energy matter and space time scales that's that's pretty good. It's got problems. And on top of that, we have biology, which then is okay. The life world somehow gets kick started to evolve and then evolves as a tree of life into the various kingdoms and we'll be discovering probably recently another whole kingdom, I don't know, or a potential kingdom is on the horizon. But anyway, we have a basic framework for that. And then all of a sudden we're here as humans experiencing I'm an experience I'm not a zombie. You don't know that, but I'll tell you that and you can trust me. I'm not I am this experience of being in the world. And doing a science of my particular experience of being in the world is actually really tricky. Part of my story is that I backed into a way of thinking about that. And ultimately, what that is that I figured out a way first to carve out us as cultured persons from minded primates. Okay? I use those words in a somewhat weird way, but I'll just say them again. I realized what it was that took us from from minded primates and turned us into cultured persons. What do you mean by that? I'm talking to you and justifying what it is that I'm doing, and justification through human language. Other animals have particular kinds of language, but they don't have this human language thing, which forgive me if I don't define, but it's a network of propositions, we'll just call it that, that are linked together in systems of justification.

And I'm here to share my narrative, my story, and much of our lives are organized by justification narratives. The narratives gives us a beginning, a potential end, key moments, formative archetypes. Look at Jung and the themes that we have that draw us. And I got drawn into this very interesting story where all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh. I I've I've twisted and shaped a perspective on the institution of psychology. It says, oh my god. They went the wrong way. And I'm in the darkness out here, and I'm on the cutting edge, and fighting dragons, to use a Jordan Peterson reference, in the darkness and trying to bring home the goods in relation. And I actually think I slayed the dragon, and figured out a way to bring home a grammar of understanding. And that grammar of understanding takes what the Enlightenment did in terms of saying, hey, we got matter, and the Enlightenment gap is what I'll give you it if you forgive my French how do you get mind back into matter? Okay? How do we do that ontologically? What do we mean by mind? And how do we do it epistemologically? And what is the ontological and epistemological relationship between mind and matter? And that's what we're confused about, folks. And everyone out there should be like, yeah, we're confused about that. I mean, we are. That's not a debate. People propose different things, but we have no shared collective frame of understanding, epistemologically and ontologically, the right relationship between matter and mind, mind body problem.

And yet here we are. Here we are Developing a digital global technological society that is amazingly beautiful and horribly tragic simultaneously. Okay? In the sense that we were, what, four hundred years ago, we're basically living in mud huts. K? So now over the industrial revolution, we're now I can fly here and we can zoom to each other, and we're on the cusp of an entirely new dimension of existence. Okay? The digital globalization process where we're developing a novel communication information network that we've never seen before, and all of us should be both excited and scared. See, being on a planet, okay, that is getting exhausted, as far as I can tell, that is heating up and engaged in a bio depletion extinction whereby we're basically turning it into human technology, the Anthropocene. To the extent that we continue to invest in chewing up mother nature and spitting out plastics and also building atomic bombs and potentially genetic weapons that would turn us into seething viruses pretty quickly, we find ourselves in a pretty vulnerable spot. Add to that the fact that we sit on an knowledge crisis, what John beautifully identifies as the meaning crisis, where we don't know what is true and good collectively. Look at the Enlightenment, science grows, and it can't put mind into the picture. Ontologically and epistologica. And I'm a clinical psychologist. Okay? I get into this because I like talking to people about their problems and I wonder about human suffering. And I'm somebody that wants to know human suffering and I want to honor the real suffering that's there, what I might call first order suffering because believe me you're gonna get injured and die. And when you get injured and die, that should hurt. And when your loved ones die, that hurts. And when and suffering at the first order level makes sense. But then there's neurotic suffering. Okay? And indeed, we put it in Buddhist language, you get pain times resistance that then leads to sort of unnecessary, unhelpful suffering. And part of my story is the fact that we're seeing a kind of neurotic suffering pervade the planet in what can be called the mental health crisis, and in a way it's just painfully tragic.

And so I'm deeply interested in trying to figure out and now I'm part of a story and have a line in that story that says, there is a way to bridge the enlightenment gap. It's not mind versus matter. That's the wrong grammar. It's energy, matter, life, mind, culture. Okay? In fact, it's energy information. That's the shit of the Big Bang and quantum field. And that have this thing called coherence and then they quote unquote decohere into classical material objects that Newton studied. That's the matter dimension. Then we can trail our growing complexification into life, where we get this biochemistry, molecular biology, and then cells. First prokaryotic cells, and then a miracle happens, really, but there's a joining, and you get what's called eukaryotic cells, and they give rise to plants and fungi. They also give rise to animals with the Cambrian explosion, and that gives rise to another explosion. So we go from material objects into living organisms. Then from living organisms, we get the sensory motor looping structures. That's the story of what I call minded animals. And one of the big stories that I have to tell you is Rene Descartes is wrong about the mind being I think, therefore I am. The insects that crawl on your shoulder are minded. They have sensory motor loops or complex active bodies. We've misplaced mind in the world and that's different than plants, which are living and have plant intelligence, but they don't get up and walk around. It's the getting up and walking around, what B. F. Skinner called behavior, which is actually he didn't tell you what kind. Plants behave, B. F. Okay? They behave. It's a minded animal. The kind of behavior B. O. Skinner is interested in, the behavior is interested in are minded. The kind of behavior that cognitive four four e cognitive science says when it's embodied and embedded and enacted means that you're not in the damn nervous system. It's in the whole complex adaptive system. It's minded. So, my frame, Unified Theory of Knowledge says, hey, it's minded behavior animals. And then, finally, cultured persons. The grammar we should have been taught isn't, oh, there's the material physical world and then there's your mental world and then consciousness over here and matter over here. It's just wrong. We should have been taught there is energy information. Okay? There are material objects. There are living organisms. There are minded animals, and there are cultured persons. Okay? Energy matter, like mind, culture.

Not only is that important for the story of who we are, it's important for the story we're about to become.

And the reason it's important for the story we're about to become is because it says something. When we go from matter to life, what happened is the emergence of a new information processing communication network, genes into cells. When you go from living organisms to minded animals, it's an emergence of a novel information processing network and communication network. Brain brains inside of animals doing information processing and animal communication. When we go from minded animals to cultured persons, it's a novel information processing communication network talking. Well, folks, let's tell the story. Is there another emerging information processing communication network? Well, we laid that shit down in the twentieth century and now we're talking to it with LLMs. Chatbots are now interfacing with our systems of justification. We've generated the digital globalization network. We've laid it down. What gains control over that?

Say it again. What gains control over that? How that manifests in terms of a controlled complex adaptive system is the great question of twenty first century as I'm concerned. Okay?

And how does that organization connect to what I call the wisdom stack beneath it? How does this digital globalization connect to our human lives, our lovers, and our families, and the way we live in the world? This culture, persons, minded, animals, living organisms on this planet? How? This is what's called the fifth joint point in my system. And my life in many ways is a story of the fifth joint point as I live it. In other words, energy to matter, joint point one. Matter to life, joint point two. Life to mind, joint point three. Mind to culture, joint point four, culture to digital. Twenty first century. The kairos of the moment that we find ourselves in. And this is why I think I'm here in the Respond Network. Because there's a felt sense that there's a Kairos of the moment that says the old shit that we were doing isn't up to the task. And the reason, both because of the industrial revolution does to the planet and the emergence then of an information digital technologies is changing everything. We need a reorganization fundamentally, and we need to do it wisely. We need to bridge a wisdom stack of embodied understanding and to orient it and connect it with the emerging technology and to do so that's sustainable and oriented towards value. And I don't think we're doing that. In fact, I think the powers that be are basically eating through the tree that we live off of and are gonna kill us all if we don't change course. At least that's a very reasonable conclusion. I'm not sometimes apocalyptic. And the natural course is, Hey, there's a good chance this whole goddamn thing's coming down and that doesn't feel good. So that's how I live my life. And I wanna respond to that. I wanna connect with other people who are in the process of waking up consciously and who, in their own language, sense the fifth joint point and recognize we need a new conscious evolution and we need to connect together and we need to figure out a way to become aware of the pre modern and traditional modern, post modern, I meant meta modern cultural consciousness that wisely allows us to develop not in some sort of totalitarian white male way, obviously, with a post modern sensibilities is no, but with a way that says, yes, there is a such a thing as wisdom, and not just social identity politics, but there's a fundamental way to connect to the wisdom of the ages through the science that we have that enables us a Sophia, a love of knowledge oriented toward phronesis living wisely in a collective.

And I'd like to think that my little baton of energy information is now weaving together with other batons of energy information in a respond network here in Birciak that enables us to build a larger network that is then one part of another webbing system that hopefully is part of a conscious evolving system that allows us to be good ancestors in the back half of the twenty first century.

And that is my narrative.