‘There is no such thing as a baby … if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone.’

, a fundamentally unitary conception of self and other.

Save Share Tweet EmailJames Barnesis a psychotherapist, lecturer and writer with a background in psychoanalysis and philosophy. He has a psychotherapy practice in Exeter, UK, and sees clients remotely.Edited by Christian JarrettSyndicate this idea Save Share Tweet EmailFor Donald Winnicott, your psyche isn’t just in your head – it emerges from your relationships with others and the world

professor John on Beatty will always say 00:14:07 I am because we are since we are therefore I am so my being is not just my being alone and being the richest in the world and 00:14:19 owning everybody my property has no meaning my wealth has no meaning if it's not of service to the community so if you come to my Village and many other villages in the African continent and someone says is a wealthy person but 00:14:33 is not bringing his wealth to Advanced education Advanced roads and infrastructure train people support agriculture people don't care he's not respected but once you bring your wealth and no matter how poor you are that you 00:14:47 are contributing to the society you are considered great so these are the values we think we can start discussing in the International Community

I think this is also part of  our sense of who we are as humans, as ourselves,   and the idea of the self, the individual, and  even the humans as this individual species,   these divisions are arbitrary.

the overarching paradigm that underlies the global system, however useful it might have been, is not only obsolete, but actively pushing us toward self-annihilation. This paradigm reduces human existence to competition between disconnected, materially-defined units whose primary imperative is individual material self-maximisation and accumulation. Yet it is precisely this way of being that is eroding our mental health and destroying planetary life-support systems. Our inherently relational nature, the fact that our well-being is tied up with our connections to others – that we are fundamentally interconnected – is obfuscated.Moving through the global phase-shift, then, requires us to completely reorient ourselves into a new way of being in the world, rooted in new ways of understanding our relationship with the world that actually connect with reality.

At the same time, the vision of a good life for all integrates our in-dividual pursuit of this goal with an immediate concern for others.In other words, we can enjoy and exercise freedoms only to the extentthat doing so does not impinge on others. Achieving this vision under-lines both the crucial role of freedom but also the necessity of limitsfor this freedom to exist. Thereby, pursuing the vision of a good lifefor all has the potential of bridging current political divides, as it is avision that all people can adhere to.

The social sciences remain normally silent about what mental platform is initially there thatthe personware is ‘installed’ on. The humanity of humans can be hardly conceived apart from theirparticipation in and entanglement with social systems, since it is only by virtue of their interactionswith the social system and its corresponding personware that they start making use of language andother symbolic systems. When considered apart from that, humans are alinguistic and asymbolicanimals [20 ].

31:15 - The importance of trust and empathy for human societies and self-constraint

by the way this um uh this is talking to me at the at a more 00:32:02 large level or more personal level uh because it does change my my sense of being in the world and one way in which it does is uh um 00:32:15 is is precisely because it it uh it changes my understanding of myself of the self and and and and the relational aspect between what i am and and the rest of the world and what i am and and 00:32:28 the other beings living beings sentient beings around around me somehow um uh 00:32:38 it it suddenly uh takes away a little bit of the anguish that change impermanence causes 00:32:54 or produces by um by making me think that there is no permanent me 00:33:07 who is a threatened by impermanence um and it uh it pushes uh myself and interpreting myself as as 00:33:20 a part of a network in which i am produced by the interaction with the others and it resonates with my larger uh uh pre-existing western 00:33:34 uh political uh ideas that any uh interpretation of our human and social life in terms of uh 00:33:45 you know competition and maximizing our own good of the good of our own nation or the good of our own people um against the other uh it's badly misleading for ourselves 00:33:59 and for for everybody at a number of a number of levels so there is a interdependence of of the reading of social human relations which goes 00:34:14 together with this deep interdependence separated but it's it's a it it resonates i want to say that because i must say i'm not totally deaf to 00:34:26 the compassion side and the larger side of the story

t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

what is our purpose so so so over on the right there i just want to reemphasize we are anticipatory we are cognitive we are problem solvers 01:25:44 we are a we and then i have below that i am a we you know like i i am i can i am i'm intimately connected with this i'm i'm everyone in that sense you know 01:25:57 yep yeah the whitman um you know i contain multitudes and also gilbert at all i have a paper called um we were never individuals kind of on that wavelength that you were talking about with the sort of distributed systems all the way down 01:26:09 approach and also dennis noble no privilege level of biological causality similar uh basically realization that multi-scale perspective complexity science basically entails 01:26:22 either the choice of a priori level like saying it is multi-scale and humans are the best scale or gaia is the scale or quantum is the right scale that's a claim as well as it being a claim 01:26:35 actually there's no privileged level of causality so that's the sort of table as it's said right right right right right and you know what it's not that really 01:26:46 this this entire project you could say in like a sentence you could say this whole project is to help us be who we are more be more uh honestly who we are more real 01:27:01 to who we are right it's not the it's not to to have people behave in some unusual way or some altruistic way or anything like that it is it is to have 01:27:12 it is to be more more ourselves more fully ourselves more completely ourselves and then all of these pages all these things we're talking about is who that self is who who are we really and it's about the 01:27:25 adjacent possible for who we are who we are is not an essence that is uh there's uh seven seals and it's being unlocked it's actually something that's being drawn out through 01:27:36 inactive realization in the niche through niche modification through stigma through becoming and and then the adjacent possible is where the imagination and the planning comes into play and if people are hesitant to talk about 01:27:49 the adjacent possible for who we could be just think about chess it's the adjacent possible with the strategy on the board and we're talking about the adjacent strategy possible for who we could be in terms of our strategy 01:28:02 for you know all these recursive layers our strategy for how we think of ourselves and all these other things you're talking about absolutely absolutely and then and then ultimately serving the 01:28:13 serving the kind of fitness purpose of you know if we take action a is that going to reduce our uncertainty about those things that we that really matter you know that are that are the the 01:28:27 the key variables

what is our worldview what do we value and what is our purpose and then we've come to this question then okay so who the heck are we then you know we're we're and it and not only who are we but 01:22:42 who are we building these systems for you know what what what is what should societal system serve who or what should societal systems serve and the only reasonable answer that you 01:22:55 can come up with is that societal systems should serve the the extended self like not just the body not just the family not just the 01:23:07 you know the thousand people in a society or the ten thousand or a million or whatever but their environment the the society next door that they're engaged with and cooperating with and coordinating with 01:23:18 the society across the planet that they're sharing information with and learning together with and so it's the whole that we are metrics as we as leaders who 01:23:30 come to metrics those metrics have to represent both the cognitive process how good how are we cogniting how well are we cogniting are we functionally cogniting and are we 01:23:43 achieving through that cognition are we achieving the kinds of aims that is serving the whole is the environment improving is the you know quality of air improving is the quality of life 01:23:56 improving for individuals right um yes so uh we are so this in a nutshell we this is the world view in a way we are in intimate with our greater world we are individuals but of the nested overlapping variety 01:24:12 individual cells bodies groups communities ecologies nations and all of civilization we're not separate in any absolute sense and there's no privileged level or scale to any of that nor are we passive bystanders in this 01:24:25 unfolding this is not this evolution is not it's just a chance thing like by chance somebody does this one day and then evolution goes on another another avenue no there there are 01:24:38 there are opportunities in the environment uh that we can react to that lend themselves to to to providing 01:24:50 information or providing gain of benefit of some kind and and you know we are driven we are are we are consciously creating and you know 01:25:03 even a really great societal system that integrated societal systems would be consciously creating acting cognitive acting cognitive and consciously creating and it towards some 01:25:15 towards some goal and that goal then has to be you know the maintaining of vitality being the in the for the extended sel

maybe i should say having a having a checkoff list like you know there should be this level of education there should be this level of 00:52:40 [Music] health people should live this long and so we have our fitness and we're gonna uh we've decided in advance even before the system is running we've 00:52:53 now have a list of things we're gonna check off we're gonna score each one we're gonna come up with some kind of integrated fitness score from that and that's how we're going to move forward we're always going to refer to this fit this you know this fitness model and 00:53:07 the fitness vector and these and these kind of hard-coded values for what's good and what's bad so so in the world of artificial intelligence and in the world of active inference you know that 00:53:19 really doesn't go very far that doesn't work that doesn't work very well because what happens is we didn't you didn't think ahead you like you some something happens tomorrow and whoever came up with that list of 00:53:32 uh you know those values or that model didn't really include the fact that maybe spaceships from mars were gonna land and cause a new disruption and then we have to deal with that problem now too before we deal with 00:53:45 anything else so that wasn't in the you know that wasn't in the plan and now what do we do you know so there's right so so this is you know this is really where active inference plays into 00:53:58 that's one way that active inference plays into this is how do you evaluate and act in a world that is full of uncertainties right 00:54:10 the unknown unknown the unknown unknown is the temperature dynamics but you know it's going to be temperature and so how can you plan for what you know it will be in a distributional sense 00:54:23 right and make stabilization on that awesome right right so so yeah so you so you realize you know already you realize maybe that this is not a proposal to build a say like a model of uh of uh you know 00:54:37 like how society makes decisions you know that's that's not that's not it it is what is the process by which society cognates 00:54:50 and you know what kind of what kind of infrastructure and tools and and and you know mechanics can we use that would facilitate that but it's not to build a thing 00:55:01 it's to build it's to realize that we are in we are engaged moment to moment in a cognitive process society as individuals are and how can we 00:55:14 do that together as a society so that we're you know we we balance exploration with exploitation um you know so that we we learn about our environment we grow we learn 00:55:27 we explore we we make good decisions based on available evidence and based on knowledge based on cultural knowledge you know like all those things right so so this is a this is 00:55:39 the the the you know i think organisms are a process they're not a thing anyway right cognition is a process and societal decision making is a process 00:55:54 and really society is a process you know there's there's not too many things in this world there's mostly processes living processes intelligent processes so that's that's the that's the hope 00:56:05 that's where this is trying to go is to like with that in mind with that with that broad understanding or broad concept in mind how do we uh how do we 00:56:16 think about you know how we how we come together as society how we cooperate how we coordinate how we make decisions how we how we learn how we explore what do we what do we monitor what kind 00:56:29 of information do we seek you know what kind of experiments do we do all that kind of stuff great

first is that uh a society of any scale and and i don't mean society is in bill millions or billions of people i mean society as in a thousand people you know like a sub 00:47:23 sub city a community that is not even a whole city just a a group of like-minded people uh who are willing to give this a give this you know 00:47:35 a field trial ago a society of any scale can be viewed as a super organism so that's kind of fundamental everything really really works from there we are together we 00:47:49 are not just individuals connected we are a whole society is a whole and it's a and it's a whole with the environment and it's wider you know 00:48:03 sphere so as we'll talk about today you know this even the idea of an individual is it's okay to talk about individuals it's fine but it's kind of like an arbitrary thing an 00:48:15 individual could be an individual cell or an individual person or an individual uh species or an individual ecosystem but it's all with all deeply embedded and enmeshed 00:48:28 entwined with the whole so uh uh a society can be viewed as a super organism

A love triangle in the making of heartfelt experienceAt the seat of all knowingIn the wisdom of not knowingThe natural inclusion of being in becomingThe in-breath in out-breathIn common passion

This is why becoming aware of natural inclusion matters:- http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion/index.asp?pageid=701959Core Values & Principles of Natural Inclusion(ality) — the mutual inclusion of intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in all material forms (Watercolour on paper by Alan Rayner, 30/11/2021)See this simple illustration:- https://youtu.be/3Xu0lg0vz5c

For a change of career

The experts were asked to independently provide a comprehensive list of levers and leverage points for global sustainability, based on the potential for disproportionate effects to address and reverse the deterioration of nature while meeting societal needs. They were asked to consider actions by the full range of possible actors, and both top-down and bottom-up effects across various sectors. The collection of all responses became our initial set of levers and leverage points. Ensuing processes were then informed by five linked conceptualizations of transformative change identified by the experts (Chan et al., 2019): ● Complexity theory and leverage points of transformation (Levin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2007; Meadows, 2009); ● Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003; Folke et al., 2010); ● A multi-level perspective for transformative change (Geels, 2002); ● System innovations and their dynamics (Smits, Kuhlmann, & Teubal, 2010; OECD, 2015) and ● Learning sustainability through ‘real-world experiments’ (Geels, Berkhout, & van Vuuren, 2016; Gross & Krohn, 2005; Hajer, 2011).

one of the best ways to diversify complexify your search space your assumptions is through experience and one of the great ways to 00:01:18 do that is actually through technology so we think about technology and most of our technologies are good technologies but what defines a great technology what is a transformative technology 00:01:30 the good technologies are the ones that enable us to do what we can already do faster easier more efficient and that's because so much of our society focuses on efficiency it's about maximizing performance right 00:01:42 we're great engineers but we're crap philosophers right we're very good at making things more efficient but that's only one side of innovation we also need the other side of innovation which is creativity 00:01:55 right and so the best technologies are the ones in my view that make the invisible visible they enable us to see things that we can never have seen before 00:02:06 they create assumptions they expand our space of assumptions

not all of us are going to have super 00:37:28 high need for self-expression you know most of us are probably like me i'm more of a people pleaser than i would even want to be

the inter-connectedness of the crises we face climate pollution biodiversity and 00:07:54 inequality require our change require a change in our exploitative relationship to our planet to a more holistic and caring one but that can only happen with a change in our behavior

What are the biggest barriers to action – for countries or communities or individuals – on climate change? And how do we get past those?It’s psychological distance and solution aversion. We don’t think it matters to us. We think it’s a problem distant in space or time or relevance. And we don’t think there’s anything viable or practical we can do at the scale required.

I am frequently shamed for not doing enough. Some of that comes from the right side of the [political] spectrum, but increasingly a larger share of that shaming comes from people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are so worried and anxious about climate impacts that their response is to find anyone who isn’t doing precisely what they think they should be doing and shame them.