This is going to be a relatively simple presentation. Easy to say at least, perhaps hard to do. Anyway, this will address part of the working hypothesis... I realize some of you are already deeply involved in exploring this with Piet in the Qwaq lab, whereas others of you are fairly sure you don't even want to hear about it, but I'm not really going to talk about the hypothesis per se, so don't worry. I'm just going to discuss one aspect of its content, which is to say, this notion of "completeness". My very modest purpose here is to put that notion in the perspective of the way ancient thinkers in Greek and Roman and Indian philosophical circles saw the issue. So the title is "completeness, happiness and virtue", the point being that these three things are linked.

So the talk is about one aspect of the working hypothesis background. I can't tell you what the working hypothesis means, that's frankly not my job. I'm only trying to explain a little bit concerning its background, and that in turn may help you decide what you think it means and how you want to proceed with it. So a fragment of the hypothesis is that "all that is, is already complete". This is a way of saying that everything is already complete. What does this really mean, though?

This issue of completeness bears on what to the ordinary mind are many distinct issues. So it comes down to one word --- completeness --- but there are probably a half a dozen different angles, at least for the ordinary mind, that are involved in this word. Here I'm only going to address one of them, and perhaps in subsequent talks I'll address some of the others.

So, two related facets of one meaning of the word "completeness" are happiness and the notion of a right way to be, the right way to live. Many ancient thinkers in what I call East and West, by which I mean classical Indian, Greek and Roman cultures called this notion of a right way to be, "virtue". And indeed, for the working hypothesis, virtue and happiness are linked notions. They are linked both to each other, and to the notion of completeness. There is a very ancient controversy concerning the extent to which the completeness idea is linked to the notion of virtue. And for the working hypothesis, the link is clear and maximally tight. Happiness, real happiness, is inseparable from virtue, and here I'll paraphrase the latter word by "being real". That's a way of summing up what for many ancients the word virtue meant ... being true to the reality contemplated by a philosophically trained mind. So we have the notion of virtue as being real, the notion of happiness as in some way linked to that, to various degrees, and the notion of completeness.

The equation then is, being right or real = happiness = completeness.

This is a very ancient formula, understood somewhat differently by different people, but still the basic relationships and terms figure very prominently in many different views. Now many ancient contemplatives and philosophers held that virtue, what I am calling being real or being true, true to reality, was sufficient for happiness. Aristotle, in a typically "sensible" maneuver for him, agreed that contemplation of reality and living in accord with that which was contemplated, was indeed the primary factor (for happiness). But he also observed that without a minimum level of benign conditions, lucky circumstances etc., happiness was precluded. So for Aristotle at least, not all that is, is complete.

This is a quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics:

“{the happy person}” needs the goods of the body and external goods, i.e. those of fortune ... in order that he may not be impeded ... Those who say that the victim on the rack or the man who falls into great misfortunes is happy if he is good are, whether they mean to or not, talking nonsense.” (Bk VII, Chap 13)

Those who think you can be happy under those unfortunate circumstances, are talking nonsense according to Aristotle. Others, especially some Stoics and later Platonists and neoplatonists, who practiced concerted tempering of the mind and emotions, were absolutely appalled by this (apparently very reasonable) position. I will actually try to defend Aristotle's position in another talk later in this series. But for now, let's look at the other point of view... this is Atticus, a 2nd Century AD Platonist:

“Aristotle's works on this ... have ideas about virtue which are petty and grovelling and vulgar ... they dare to grab from virtue the diadem and royal sceptre which she holds inalienably from Zeus. They do not permit her to make us happy, but put her on a level with money, status, ... health and other things which are common to {both} virtue and vice.”

So their bottom line was that virtue is the necessary and the sufficient condition for happiness! The working hypothesis agrees. So the issue is, what do you think, as a 21st-century explorer of things like this working hypothesis?

For the moment, forget the theory and the classical references and abstract thinking... what do you feel in your heart of hearts, but do you really believe --- not what you would tend to say --- I'm not even asking you now to state a position, but just being honest with yourself, what do you really think? How do you really live? How do you meet adverse circumstances like pain, poverty, loss of status etc.? Are they in fact part of a completeness for you, in practice? If so, how? And for that matter, what do you really think happiness is? How would you get or maintain happiness in the face of adversity? And even more generally, what different sorts of answers to that last question can you see?

So, without even getting into some of the complexities I just raised, let's stick with just the issue of happiness. For the working hypothesis, I think it's clear that we need to distinguish between happiness as an affect or mood, emotion, state, a condition --- all of those on the one hand, versus Happiness (where I deliberately capitalize the word) as something more to do with reality itself. Something fundamental and continuous, unbroken across time, across events. That kind of Happiness would obtain even when you are not happy in in the ordinary sense. It's not a way of saying you need to be happy in the ordinary sense all the time, it rather means that you don't need to do that! It's just that whatever your ordinary feeling is, there is also this more fundamental Happiness as central.

So the working hypothesis bears on a kind of completeness that's tantamount to being real, in an active sense, which in turn is equal to participating in this kind of fundamental Happiness. How may this Happiness be appreciated? Well the stoic way of maintaining happiness, which involves disciplining our reactions to circumstances, is more conservative than the view held by the working hypothesis, which I've started to describe. For the working hypothesis, we do not need to maintain happiness in the face of adverse circumstances, which is the stoic answer. We don't need to try to hold onto some sort of happy frame of mind when life deals us a bad hand. All circumstances, when taken in what I call their "full dimensionality", are Happiness! This kind of point was not represented in the Greek and Roman stoical thinking, or perhaps even the Neoplatonists' understanding, or any other position that I'm aware of in those cultures. But it was prominent in the contemplative teachings of other traditions. And now we are updating it to take a place in our working hypothesis.

How exactly to do this, should follow investigating whether we even really want it or not... what I mean to say is that the question of how to do this, is in a sense a secondary question. The primary question should be "do you even really want to be like that?". Do you really want that for your life? Are you really willing to open up to such a possibility? This is an issue that you have to take rather seriously. So see for yourself what your position is, be explicit about the fact that that is your view.

Ironically, grasping a desirable circumstances and avoiding others, the undesirable ones like torture on the rack, is actually what keeps us "on the rack"! This is a basic point of the contemplative traditions that we are drawing from here, and one of the main reasons why they think a right way of being that's more awake to a more fundamental dimension of reality also equals Happiness.

Normally we hold back from that possibility, and in the process we end up unhappy. Even though we are trying to be happy, we are going about it in the wrong way.

So, where does this leave us? What would a scientific assessment or a modern view, for instance, of this working hypothesis orientation conclude? Does it seem at all reasonable? Does it seem possible? Or totally impossible, precluded by something we think we already know in a scientific sense?

The stoic approach is clearly feasible, even as judged by a modern scientifically-informed mind. But the working hypothesis view is so much more radical, it requires a new ontology and a new view of what "knowing" might be. Can science cope with that kind of possibility? Can it accept it? To begin your own personal approach to cultivating this "wh-completeness", he really should make friends with what I call your ordinary preference-mongering mind. The mind that doesn't want that kind of completeness, that wants to grasp for some things and avoid other things --- you need to come to good terms with that mind, see it more clearly and directly, and accept it! And then do the same thing with the adverse circumstances themselves. You have to go back through the basics of your relationship to life. More can be seen in both of these domains than is common. This special kind of seeing equals completeness, virtue and happiness.

So I have not answered a lot of the questions that I've raised, I've just raised them. The issue now is "what do you think?". And what would you like to discuss?

Zenon: thanks Steven. Can I ask you to review again the difference between happiness and Happiness?

Steven: well actually, as you know very well, I'm skimming over many different positions that were discussed for centuries in Greek and Roman thought, and also in the Middle Ages and other times. But the basic point is... happiness comes from "happ", which refers to being lucky with circumstances. So our whole notion of happiness is usually a matter of contingency, dependency on being lucky, having circumstances or conditions in life work out in a way that we prefer. So ordinary happiness is basically a mood or can affect that is a typical response to preferred conditions. Another kind of Happiness which is very important to the kinds of things that Piet and I are discussing, but not as familiar to many people, is one that doesn't depend on the luck of the draw. So as a result, it's not a mood or an affect, it's something else. The only way I can really say what this Happiness is, is to invite you to become more familiar with the ordinary kind of happiness, which is very much a mood in response to a preferred circumstance. If one can see more clearly the way the mind works, not so much by studying in the way a scientist would perhaps, but just as a living being... to see the mind that has preferences and that is happy when one's preferences are met... to see that mind move and to see how conditional it is, how constructed it is, and to gradually in a friendly sort of way not always emphasize the reliance on that kind of mind in meeting life, exposes this other kind of Happiness. We become able to make or see the distinction for ourselves. But I can't define it, I can only say what it isn't and point you in the direction where the difference can become visible. So that may or may not be some kind of answer to your question, or it may just lead us back to your question. Have I responded even slightly to what you were asking?

Zenon: well I'm having a hard time understanding this "capital H" sense of Happiness, but when you talk about exploring the ordinary sense of happiness or preferences, it does remind me that there is a considerable amount of social science data showing that people, regardless of how bad their circumstances are, can be very happy. So the median happiness among people who are severely disadvantaged and those who are rich and have everything they want, is about the same.

Steven: yes, there's quite a bit of literature about that nowadays, including economic studies, some of which I actually quoted briefly in an article I wrote for the WoK website. But the point I was making is not falsified by the studies that you're mentioning. The point is still this: we need a basic minimum of health and reasonable circumstances to be happy in the ordinary sense, and this is part of the point that Aristotle was making in his "reasonable" presentation. But as you point out, we don't need much more than that, and even people who are in very difficult circumstances can still be happy. It doesn't contradict the contemplative-level point I was making, it just means they have settled for a certain basic situation and within that, after an acclimatization process, there are still things that they like and enjoy... certain conditions that they can like and enjoy, and they do... and there are others that they don't. So their sense of happiness is still contingent on circumstances. That hasn't changed, it's just a matter of accommodating themselves to specific difficulties.

The other kind of Happiness that I am talking about, is not so much a mood or response we have too some circumstances as opposed to others, it's something in the circumstances... what I call the "full dimensionality"... of the circumstances themselves. It's like an extra dimension that is carried or an extra kind signal, if you will, that's carried in all arising of all phenomena. So the point of what I'm talking about here today is not to try to make that kind of Happiness easy to understand, but to simply raise the issue of a difference, and to aim people back at what they themselves are doing in the ordinary case. To see it more clearly.

Zenon: I was actually citing that evidence in support of what you were saying, because in answering my question "what's the difference between the lower case everyday happiness and the capital-H happiness?", you said that the only way you could find out about the reality-Happiness, is to investigate the conditions under which you find your other happiness. The range of conditions and things that you're after. That's what I was suggesting.

Steven: oh, yes, right. So you think these people you are mentioning have done that?

Zenon: I don't know if they've done it, but one of the ways that we can try to understand capital-H Happiness is to look at the ways people have assimilated the lowercase-“happinesses” under very different circumstances.

Steven: I see, yes. That could well be relevant to a number of different answers to the question of how we can be happy in difficult circumstances. One of the questions I asked a few slides back in this presentation was "how would you personally try to maintain or be happy in the midst of adversity?", and then another question was "what kinds of different strategies or possibilities can you see as being out there in the circumstances?". One would be to try to maintain a happy mood even though things are not going our way, another would be to try to look on the bright side of things, have a different perspective in some sense... there are various possibilities. The Stoics themselves developed a whole philosophy around this issue, and the Epicureans another, etc. In any case, right now I'm doing this presentation as a way of simply raising some issues and hoping that people will look at them in a fresh light. And I'm delighted if recent research contributes to that "checking".

Maria: so one can be upset, complaining, frustrated, negative, and still be happy? This doesn't seem right, as any negative emotion is a resistance to what is real.

Steven: yes, that's true, any negative emotion is a resistance to the rest we are talking about regarding this working hypothesis. But that just means it's a factor, one that we have to contend with. It doesn't totally preclude a kind of higher appreciation of what is always with us, it just means it's something we have to deal with. If we don't deal with it, then it's an outright showstopper, as you suggest. this is one of the reasons why I say that the best way to cultivate Happiness and completeness is to make friends with the ordinary preference-mongering mind. Making friends with it means coming to terms with it more. It's not so much that we have to control it or override it, we just have to see it clearly and see "what else is true", this phrase that I have used so often over the years. What else is true? What else is there? This is a study that is just as meticulous and critically-minded and exacting as a scientific study. It's just done in a more direct way, using the basics of your human existence and capacities. And there are undoubtedly scientific positions about some of what I am saying, that work for or against it, and either way I would be happy to learn about them.

Jan: Steven, in how far is what you have just said about Happiness related to the other formulation of the working hypothesis, "freedom from identification"?

Steven: the identification with the ordinary sort of self --- and this is a subject that is receiving a fair amount of study in cognitive science circles and other areas of scientific psychology and the more neurologically-based studies that map out the way the "self" is neurologically implemented --- to identify with that "self" is exactly to identify with a self that is tied up with preferences and habits and limited ability to open up more. It's to buy into a host of habits, reactions, preferences which basically rule out or obscure the rest of the dimensionality that I'm talking about. So it's very easy to make a connection between what I'm discussing here and the issue of freedom from identification. That doesn't mean that you stop knowing who you are or that you're confused about your identity. It just means that there are factors involved in identification, and they are capable of being studied. In Buddhist philosophy there are lineages that spent many generations just itemizing --- literally making lists --- all of the factors that arise that contribute to the identification with a certain sense of self, and the consolidation of a sense of self, and the way that affects perception and other cognitive functions like memory, for instance. So there's a very detailed study of this. And if you come to terms with those factors, either in a traditional way, or in more free-form modern way that Piet is talking about, then in a sense you're no longer just those factors. It's precisely by studying them and seeing what the full set looks like and what else is true, that you are no longer limited to that view and those typical reactions. He said in answer to your question?

Jan: yes, it it makes a lot of sense to me.

Steven: we're talking about a study that was conducted by the smartest people, not just of their time but of basically several millennia of time. So approaching it the way they did, perhaps the work has already been done, or maybe all the work we need. But meanwhile, science, cognitive science, et cetera, are also studying what the self is, and also the kinds of cognitive operations and preconscious operations etc. that contribute to consciousness and our contingencies or relationships to physical functions and limits. So that's another way of studying the self. And that could give you another angle on this which might be very complementary... I doubt if it would totally replace the other kind of knowledge, but it might complement it. And then there's the working hypothesis itself, which is very economical in statement and doesn't explicitly ask that we go through these exhaustive kinds of studies, but just tries to take a very quick route to the main issue. That might just dip minimally into these other sorts of studies and then just find a way to skip right to some glimmer of an insight which could then be pulled out and made the mainstay of your existence. There are many possibilities here. But whichever route you take, this issue Piet calls "freedom from identification" is pretty important. It doesn't mean that that self has to disappear, it can still fully function... just as I was saying that you could be Happy even when you were unhappy in the ordinary sense. The self could be there in the usual way, and that could still be (or be included in) the "freedom from identification". That would be a totally standard way of following these ancient suggestions and insights, in fact. Otherwise, we would have a preference --- the preference for the self to go away.

Bob: Steven, could you connect this with the concept of suffering? Usually one seems to be the inverse of the other, but maybe I'm just thinking about this in simple terms.

Steven: well that's usually our picture, of course. And there's a great deal written about that, including most of the world's great literature. But the kind of thing I'm calling Happiness is related to the observation that it's the pursuit of happiness that equals suffering... the ordinary way of pursuing happiness. Now there are various things that this could mean, and Sean has pointed out that we want to be careful to respect humanity, and that includes the ordinary organismic and evolved aspects of our nature and the ordinary preferences and orientations, which definitely are seeking things. Wanting or yearning for certain things, driven to achieve and acquire things, et cetera. I'm not saying anything about those parts of our nature necessarily. But there is another deep-seated grasping tendency which should be perhaps distinguished from those things, which is just an obsession with getting what we want or avoiding what we don't want. The traditional explanation is that we are always trying to get what we think we don't have, or trying to hold on what we think we do have, or to avoid meeting people and situations that we fear, or to hold on to people and situations that we love them -- those are the four cases mentioned traditionally. These preoccupations constitute a kind of disease, and spiritually and existentially crippling. If a mind fueled by those preoccupations is running, then that is suffering... even if there is nothing in us that hurts in any basic way and we have all the essential conditions needed to be happy. We are still (unhappy). This is what is called "dukha" in Buddhist terms, unsatisfactoriness or absence of fulfillment. Things still seem in some fundamental way flawed or limited or lacking, even though we can't quite figure out why. So there are a lot of sides to this, and the questions you've brought up so far raise very interesting angles that would have to be taken more into account for me to be entirely clear, but the relationship between suffering, in the sense of feeling unsatisfied, and Happiness, is very direct. As soon as you deal with this "dis-ease" of chasing or approaching life in a way that's fundamentally unsatisfiable, then we end up facing reality in a much more direct and open way. And that is real Happiness. A Happiness that doesn't mind if circumstances go against us. I mean, obviously pain still hurts, and misfortune is still regrettable etc., but that's no longer the primary issue. So again, I'll come back to you --- have I even started to address your question?

Bob: I think that's a good start.

Steven: I'm sorry we are just checking in to huge areas of discussion very quickly. And you, as a doctor, are constantly having to deal with this kind of issue with your own patients, I suppose. So I should probably just let you talk more about this.

Bob: well, I suppose that... it seems to me that suffering and the alleviation of suffering are behind so much of our yearning and our aspirations that it's not strictly a cognitive issue why science develops, there's something else behind it, and somehow it seems to me that the alleviation of suffering is part of that. Maybe I'm so influenced by what I do that I missing something, but it seems to me that that's a big motivation.

Steven: yes, there's a lot to discuss here, and we would have to be much more careful with our terms... I've disclosed over several thousand years of history of several different cultures, using about four words! (Laughs.) So obviously I'm cheating.

Doug: Steven, that leads me to a question I had in mind regarding the difference between the Greek word for happiness and the "happiness" term, which I think is the 17th or 18th century word. And as I understand it, the Greek word …

Steven: eudaimonia, yes--

Doug: refers to the "good spirit", the internal quality, whereas "happiness" refers to circumstances, the external side. So I find myself puzzled at that point how to bring these into congruence...

Steven: well the situation was not that straightforward in Greek thought, because they are the ones who spent 600 years arguing about this. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics and Epicureans had different positions. For them there was a huge controversy over the question of what it would take to be happy, how to be happy etc. The issue of the contingent nature of happiness was important for them. We could look at the etymological side of the terms, but that won't eliminate the tension and need to clarify what's at issue. It was quite a big issue, partly because it tied in with this notion of virtue --- how to live well and the extent to which that was sufficient. That was the key point. So in my talk, I've been trying to explain... the working hypothesis is basically pointing you at a way of living well. A way of "being real". This exposes both what things are and the "happiness" that is present in all presentations.

Doug: yes, that's really helpful. Each of us has our own influences, and for me the word "happiness"... my understanding is that it comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment and philosophers like Ferguson, who talked about happiness as a result of having many "happenings" in your life --- it's basically the number of social roles that you play, so you have more of your talents engaged in reality and therefore were happy her. I know for Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" he thought of happiness is an actual metric --- it could be measured, by the number of social roles that one play. And that's what he meant by this reference "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". I find this interesting, because in a way in a way scratched at the Greek view, as I'm understanding it now, from what you've said, is how circumstances create our inner state, and for the Jeffersonian and Ferguson view it's more how the external creates the further circumstance of our participation, as an active concept, in society. Of course, there is an emotional state that goes along with that, that has a seemingly internal quality, but the focus seems to be different. It's much more on participation in reality rather than being the effect of reality.

Steven: you're raising a very important point. On the one hand, we have cultures... and I for one --- I think I'm in an extreme minority at this point in time -- but I really think that people in these older cultures actually saw something. And don't think that their knowledge or their insight in many ways has been replaced by what we've learned more recently with our more scientific orientation. But in any case, they were different cultures, as you point out. And so we now have the unique advantage of getting the benefit of all those different perspectives... and I don't think, just staying with the issue of the cultural view shared by various Greek thinkers for a moment, I think they were keenly attuned to the issue of social participation and responsibility. At least some of them literally and explicitly thought that you could not be happy if you did not a role as a good citizen, doing all the things that would be expected of a civilized person. You had to be engaged. And you had to have a life where you were performing actions along those lines and that life, that active dimension, is part of what constitutes your happiness. It's not that it engenders a mood of satisfaction, an "internal" state of satisfaction, that allows you to rest happy, it's that in some sense it was part of your happiness. The active participation in society was the happiness. So it's a very different perspective, it's not just a psychologistic state-based thing, it's a whole different way of looking at the human being. This gets into a lot of complications though and I'll have to drop it for now. Suffice it to say that the larger point I wanted to make is that with something like the working hypothesis, these terms like "completeness" are referring to something that is not just a cultural perspective -- we are talking about something that may be hinted at by the wisdom of various cultures, but it resides in its own sphere, which is the sphere of what we can find directly. It's not something that we get by some circumambulatory pass through the past, or through another point of view or opinion. So we have to choose judiciously, benefit from all of this knowledge that's laying around now and accessible to us, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we must just sort of "go for it" directly. It's a rather tricky business deciding what you need in a given case, but this is not just a matter of adopting a "cultural perspective" in the sense this phrase is ordinarily used. It is echoed in some cultural orientations and controversies, which is what I've tried to indicate in my slideshow here today.

Doug: I appreciate that. It brings me back to the need to appreciate what the Greek achievement was.

Steven: well I thought your question raised very interesting points. I don't pretend to have done anything like justice to any of the territories that are exposed by your questions. All I'm doing here is skipping through some issues very lightly.

Doug: well I'd guess that's what a conversation is, so...

Steven: yes, exactly (laughs).

Zenon: I notice when Douglas cited Jefferson, Jefferson said that we are entitled to liberty, but he didn't say we were entitled to happiness... only to the pursuit of it.

Steven: yes, that's interesting isn't it? We'll have to look that up... I'm curious about that now that you mention it.

Doug: the reference for me was Gary Wills book Inventing America, which is his analysis of Jefferson's language in the Declaration, so there's a whole chapter in there on happiness.

Steven: I would assume that the point is to some degree that Jefferson and the other Founders were trying to set up a society where people regardless their "class" could pursue happiness, rather than being bound into a particular social niche that afforded no mobility or chance at anything further. So I assume he was referring to people being free to do , within the limits of the law, what fits their aspirations. But I admit this is not my area and there's probably much more involved here.

Doug: well I think what you just said is right.

Steven: the working hypothesis is pointing out something really radical, it's saying that fulfillment --- this word "completeness", as I say, means a lot of things --- in this talk today I'm only concentrating on the way in which completeness is tied to happiness. On other occasions we can explore the way the term is tied to things, but its connection to happiness is that nothing blocks Happiness. And so, if you find yourself thinking otherwise, even if only unconsciously --- if you find yourself buying into a point of view that suggests that you "should" be unhappy, then I'll say you should be suspicious. Because the working hypothesis says that that can never really be true. Nothing blocks the fundamental kind of Happiness. This is a wild notion, and one of the questions I asked in the slideshow was "do we even want to think in such a radical way?". Maybe we don't. We are attached to a more hobbit-like, comfy little local perspective... but it bites us in the end. One thing we haven't been talking about so far, is the science angle on this... probably because I didn't introduce it very slowly, but there are a lot of interesting questions related to that that we could explore on another occasion.

Zenon: One way of exploring this in a very concrete way for me, is just to observe my complaining mind.

Steven: yes.

Zenon: complaining is so prevalent (laughs), it gives me insight into what you are talking about.

Steven: yes, that's 100% what I had in mind here. In a sense, what we don't usually understand, and I think what our culture hasn't understood for a very long time, going back to the Greeks and the classical ancient Greek philosophy, is that there is more to be seen than we realize... Greeks started with questions that are or should be with us to this very day, questions about how we should make choices --- for them it was "should we choose the Good or the Pleasant?", for instance. That was a classic question for them. To answer that question, they noticed that there are different things in us, some gravitate toward the Good and some toward the Pleasant. It's like we are each a kind of little community of perspectives, and some of our responses and sensibilities are interested in doing the right thing, and others have other interests -- instant gratification etc. So they observed that there is this little colony of different points of view, and having observed that, they immediately launched into a multigenerational investigation of analyzing those distinctions --- the distinctions between those different perspectives. What they never realized is that they could have spent more time at step one, which was just to notice them more clearly... to observe them with increasing clarity and refinement. That was not an idea that occurred to them, and as a result we to this day are stuck with the limitations of that point of departure. We have very limited notions of what that kind of investigation would be like, and the ordinary notions of introspection, for instance, are a classic case in point --- that's an extremely limited kind of exploration compared to what we are talking about in these WoK and VR meetings. So it's a shame in a way, but still the possibility is with us just as much as ever. And science might be able to aid it, if we could find the right way to allow that to happen.

Sean: this is great, I think there is a lot more room to go on this topic.

Steven: yes, and a lot of it hinges on your own thinking in this area, as you know from a private conversation I had with you, I would like very much to spend more time clarifying these cases... and also the possibilities for us, as science-minded people and as living beings. There is for instance the evolutionary perspective, and many others: nobody else in history ever had this wealth of perspectives and opportunities.