00:00
welcome everybody to 52 living ideas um so firstly let me give you an
introduction here okay we're going to be talking about
thomas aquinas cogitative sense and mark parker is actually writing a book
about it so it's one of the best people we could have here to talk about it now
i'm telling you this is going to be very tough okay because a lot has happened
since aquinas did his work okay aquinas is is like in a genius class
for me because what he did was that he took aristotle
okay all of aristotle his corpus every part of philosophy of his and
managed to integrate it into christianity i mean it is a feat of
tremendous proportions but it's been a while and a lot has happened since
and what we're trying to understand is something very simple we're trying to

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understand what a human being is that's it okay but
we have the idea of what a human being is has transformed so much since aquinas
wrote that there are so many layers and layers and layers
of ideas about what a human being is that you hold that you may not even know of
but you take for granted and in order to understand somebody like
aristotle somebody like aquinas you kind of have to keep that aside
for some time and actually here at least give a hearing to what aquinas
has to say about human beings and then you can decide you have
a very powerful technology it's very recent but it's very very powerful and i
strongly recommend it you really need it okay

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i know some of you are not that high tech but this was this was discovered
about 5000 years ago okay pen and paper it's extremely powerful what it does
what the writing does is that it allows you to take your thoughts which are in
here and put it out here so make detailed notes make keep track of what
is it that you agree with what is it that you have questions about try to
prepare try to understand what is being said
about the human being formulate all of it you will have a chance to ask
all the questions that you have but the only way you're going to be able to
process this is to keep track of it externally external memory as we heard from
uh marilyn donald external memory or julian james
external memory is very very powerful and
only way to process something like this so i urge you to do that again you have

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to understand it in your own terms so please uh take everything in
give it a hearing and then ask all the questions
that you have okay so with that let me get started
again welcome everybody to 52 living ideas i am
honored to have dr mark barker here he's writing a book on the cognitive
sense of thomas aquinas and he's going to be talking just about that
today so welcome welcome mark well thank you wonderful so
um so tell me a little bit about yourself you you grew up in new york
that's right yes wonderful i'm i'm i'm a new yorker so this is where i'm
this is very close to my heart how long did you spend uh in new york
i i until i went to college so so yes i wish we could all be up there together
someplace but you know this is second best yes i i
think all good people need to be in new york i'm i'm very biased but uh the um

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so when did you get interested in uh thomas aquinas work
um about 20 years ago i guess give or take 25 years ago
okay now tell me um you know what is the difference if you want to
give like a 30 000 foot view how does thomas aquinas or aristotle
look at human beings and how does modern psychology look at human beings
what's the difference so what so the terminology that i would use or
most anybody would use i guess is um so you have anthropology but you
have philosophical anthropology so what you're talking about
we're talking about is philosophical anthropology so we're familiar with
you know scientific anthropology scientific use in the sense of you know
studying different cultures and from aristotle's point of view which

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thomas aquinas shares i just call him thomas those culture is important
and we certainly don't want to deny the important role the culture plays but
there's this great split between thomas and aristotle and the moderns is
regarding the idea of nature so for thomas and aristotle there's a
human nature that endures that's basically no matter where you are in the
world right now whether you're an eskimo whether you're in kenya whether you're
in a you know our society cutting edge technology or whether
you're in the wilds of amazonia where they don't even know maybe
the technology exists there's still a fundamental human nature that's
what they would say is universal and and the uh that's so that's what we're
interested in then is is that and so that's kind of the difference
i hate to be critical but so early on but unfortunately

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please please feel free to be critical or praising of anybody or anything that
you want go ahead okay yeah so i hate to be critical but
so we talk about modern science and in some respect
so what does that mean right in some respects modern is good
right it's good that we have modern science we um we have great progress and
knowledge of the world around us so right as soon as you pick up thomas this
is the the the kind of problem you might run into it is he's
for example he says there's four elements right fire earth air and water
but then actually that's obsolete so there's
obsolete science in thomas in aristotle and really anyone before
1750 or even anyone before 1900 depending on what you're talking about
or 1920 or right i mean it keeps advancing
but so so that's that's good it's good that modern science
has those discoveries but the negative side about modernity
is that it's also beholden to philosophies

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so beginning with galileo francis bacon descartes even before them montane that
deny the idea of a human nature and so um
so that's so there's there's a the kind of glory of modern
science with with all of its wonderful discoveries but then there's the
the downside the detriment the the negative of
of the modernity which is that denial of um
one universal human nature that we all share and so that would be maybe the
fundamental difference and you see that playing itself out in our society
on a daily basis um so so yeah so that would be
let me just emphasize uh this point because i think this is a huge point of
i think you put it very crisply it's nature and culture so aristotle and aquinas
say pay attention to nature that is fundamental that is metaphysical
that's just what is whereas a lot of modern thinking

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most of the modern thinking about human beings does not
give that it can give that it's due and in a sense culture they would also agree
that there is culture but they would say culture sits on the top of nature you
know you can't really understand culture without understanding
nature so there is a hierarchy of relationship between that whereas the moderns
seem to kind of just look at culture and kind of look at almost
i mean to put it in an extreme way they they prime by looking at
culture as a primary and denying that there is a nature
they would say that human being is infinitely malleable because it's like
it's you you can make it whatever it wants wants to be
and whatever you can be whatever you feel feel like
right and so that's where um you get into so you know y'all yo
i'm speaking like a southerner now um those of you who are involved in the

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center for digital research right you're interested in the impact of technology
on on this question of human nature and right claims about transhumanism that we
can somehow transcend our humanity i could live on in a computer i could
have an interface from my brain to a computer and so so exactly because
there is no human nature we're just kind of machines that are like you said
infinitely malleable and uh but in contrast to that view
i think just in putting the original interview in my own words would be
that um or actually i'll use thomas here so
tom is just sometimes thomas just makes very passing comments that are
extremely brilliant because as you said he is kind of that genius class
and he just a passing comment somewhere in one of his works
actually i think that they potentially have the book on the power of god but
but he's not talking about the power of god there but what he says is that
he says um the only thing he says the most powerful thing well he he does

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okay he says the most powerful thing is god god's independence
but he says in creation the most powerful thing is nature
and that's a pretty striking statement he says there's nothing more powerful
than nature and and really modern science or contemporary science you know
isn't aware of that i mean there are these natural laws that are just applied
right like you can't get around the law of gravity you can't get around the
gravitational field if you if you're on the earth's surface it applies to you
and you could think that i could tell myself
well you know it doesn't apply to me but when i jump i still come down like my
reality it's all the other thing about aristotle is realism right the reality
is prior to whatever goes on in my mind and i the truth is conformity of my mind
with reality so i'm either in conformity with it or in disconformity so
if i deny that gravity exists i can jump up but it still applies to me it's just
there there's nothing i can do about that like you said the metaphysical
um you know question or the metaphysical issue just what exists

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so so that's um but yeah so that anyway okay the realism is
a big part of the picture as well okay so let's do let's do this
um let's just dive into aristotle and aquinas and paint out what
they think is human nature right you know
how how would you right so that's that's where you get into so
i unless you unless you've read thomas you're
you're not gonna know about the codes dude now now maybe a qualifier there is um
there's this thing called the mystic institute so fortunately people are
trying to bring thomas back kind of into people's
awareness because there's really a desperate need in our culture for
realist philosophy and and aristotelian anthropology or
recently autonomous anthropology so the domestic institute
they're putting out all these videos and they have a video about you know thomas
on the soul and and there's the coaching power so they're not going to leave it
out and they'll mention it in 30 seconds just

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so people you know that they're not going to leave that out which is i
applaud them for that because some thomas
um did leave it out in in the basically the
mystic revival was in the mid-1800s and so sometimes left out to consider power
they said oh that's obsolete so that's the question but so the way
that thomas is going to send human nature that
is going to be in terms of powers right so we have well first of all that we're
soul body composite so right plato had said well basically the
let's go the pre-socratics the people the first philosophers in in the western
world um in ancient greece by and large were
materialists so before plato you could call them the pre-platonics
if you want but traditionally they're called pre-socratics
so some of them democrats for example was a materialistic
most of them were materialists so for them i'm just a i'm just
matter and democracy talk about atoms so for democritus as
many of my students are surprised to hear that but atomism dates back to

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um you know 450 bc so so democracy says we're just i'm just a bunch of atoms
and then he says i have a soul but he says the souls just fire atoms
so when he says he has the so nowadays we wouldn't even use that word we'd say
oh my consciousness relies on my neurons
so so there's my consciousness really is my neurons it's not something
more than matter uh there's various ways they would
parse that out but for simplicity's sake so so you had materialism
with the pre-pre-socratics and then um socrates says well we have a soul and
socrates says that you know his soul is going to be judged after he dies and
he'll be happy after he dies or unhappy depending how he lived
so socrates is defending a um there's a not just a body but a soul as well and
living in right most of us we have some idea of
what the soul means right that it's immaterial and so on
and so plato is plato's view on human nature is that
i'm just the soul so my my body isn't really me
so that's called dualism because i'm two separate things

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i'm really a a body i'm sorry i'm really
a soul but then it's somehow attached to a body
so i'm two separate things but the goal is to free myself from the body
so that aristotle comes along he's at 17 age 17 he enters plato's academy
he stays there for 20 years so until he's 37
and then he finally left the academy but so he knew plato's writings has thought
extremely well and he comes up with an a different view a really
contrasting viewpoint which is that we're both soul and body
so that i'm um i'm both a soul antibody so that's called holomorphism because
hulei in greek means matter and morphine means form so
the soul is my form and the body is my matter but these are analogical terms so
they're not just it's not like the form like the shape of a circle
it's something different than that it's something it's
it's also matter represents potency and form represents act is the way that
you really i think can best understand it act meaning here like actualization

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and uh what you call entertainment act so
it's it's not like me moving around that kind of act it's an actualization of
something so we could talk more about that later
if you want but um but that's like the core of hilomorphism of aristotle which
thomas then builds on so so we're i'm a unified
mark let me can you can you repeat about holomorphism because this is a huge
point if people get at least some direction of this just
can you repeat it just one more time right so
so aristotle's i mean it kind of takes you back to arizona so aristotle says
that take an i he says it i without vision
right he says the i is an organ but then the power of vision
isn't you i can't put the i can i can uh do experiments on my eye but i can't
do experiments on my power vision as such
i mean it's not it's either it's either operating or it's not but that's a
potency that i can't put in the test tube and so
the same way he says that my he says the i without the power of vision isn't

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really an eye so let's say that someone dies and then
you know you have their eye i mean when i was at when i was in high school
i remember they gave us a sheep eye and i was just looking at it well
aristotle would say that's not really an i
it has the matter of an i but the soul is not present there so it can't
it can't function as an i and therefore it's not truly an
eye that this isn't a deonoma and he says this so the same way that you have
matter and then you have a power the greek word is dunamis if you
can translate it as power capability capacity potentiality all those different
different ways of translating the dunamis idea which is where we get our
word dynamic in english um so that's that's the potency and then
the act is in greek is energia that's where we get our word energy so even
our the english language and the language of science kind of enshrines
some of these aristotelian distinctions so so on some level they are familiar to
us there's things in potential in kinetic energy that that goes back to

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aristotle you don't have that in plato or in the pre-socratics so that's
his contribution so that would be maybe an easy way to understand it and
um so so so the same we have the eye and then and like the
sheep by the way i was holding in my hand the thing to meditate on or reflect on
is how is that different from that a living sheep i
in the living sheep that's seeing you know seeing things
and there's something different there and for
aristotle it's the difference between um act and or
form and matter or i should say informed matter and just
mere matter the eye you know that i was holding my hand that's just mere matter
without the form of the soul which actualizes it makes it alive
in the same way the cadaver has all the structures and all the molecules and all
the it's all there the instant after someone dies right
all the matter is there um however many cells how much water the hair
and yet there's something missing right and that's the soul so the same way the

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eye that i was holding my hand he says it's not really an
eye the cadaver is not really a human being that is beautifully put i think i
think this is a great way of of uh you know it's aristotle so it's not me
yes um so the thing is they're not it's like i am
one thing i'm not plato has two things i'm a soul which is like an angel and
then there's this body that i'm stuck i'm stuck to and i want to get free from
and aristotle's thing is no i'm one thing i'm one entity but i have two kind
of aspects i have my body and my soul but
when i when you see me you see an insult body or you see an embodied soul
you're not in a sense i'm not just a body i'm i'm
i'm a composite i'm a combination of these two
well there he doesn't call them things that they're two um
aspects excellent excellent okay so now let's look at the shall we

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look at the human being do you want to go along the line of aristotle or
whichever way you want to explain it go ahead yeah so so then
so now we've established you know at least i've presented maybe
um higher morphism so now which is right aristotelian
optimistic and so now the question is what powers do we have
so um we share many powers with plants and animals with
animals and plants share what our so-called nutritive powers which are
and thomas calls them vegetative but so growth reproduction and then nutrition
so those are the vegetative powers and then the animal soul
adds on to that um powers of sensation and
and then appetite in a broad sense the term
so we share those those powers with like a gorilla for example
and uh the quotative is one of the sensory powers
and then above the sensory powers we have our intellect and our will

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which animals lack so animals don't have free will and i mean it is observable
you can you can deny it if you want but commonsensically we see that animals
don't have free will that's to be another conversation but
and that they don't have intellect the most obvious sign of their lack of
intellect or maybe the two most obvious signs are um
lack of language and lack of absence of mathematical ability and any kind of
beyond very rudimentary and even that isn't people often misrepresent what's the
achievements the actual achievements that brood animals are capable of
so so that's the the panoply of the powers
of they're called the powers of soul i mean they're really powers of the soul
and the body um as i said right the power of vision
is without my eye there could be you know no vision so it's both the soul
and the body um so that's the outline of the powers of the soul
okay now uh aquinas takes it quite a bit further in terms of kind of seeing

00:21
how things are put together you know we went through this essay by
peg hair which is a you know great kind of summary of uh thomas's views
uh so he talks about the inner senses i talks about the common sense the
imagination memory cognitive science so can we talk about how thomas
looks at the ecology of inner senses right so um so what thomas is so so the
the triad the aristotelian triad is the common sense the um they have
external senses which are obvious right sight uh hearing smell taste touch
the common sense unites it allows me to um sense something as a unified sensory
object so when i have more than one sense operating regarding the same thing
this common sense is how i'm aware that it's the same thing

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um so that's what the common sense does among other things and then
so let's say the apple right so i i the smell the taste the texture
the appearance and i guess the sound of an apple when i draw when i drop it it
makes it kind of thud or i bite it it's kind of like this
crackly sound so that's there's technical terminology called the phantasm so
that's all incorporated into the phantasm
right my common sense is how i know it's the same thing that
what i'm biting is what i'm tasting the same which
i know that seems obvious but a lot of what philosophers do is explain
at least every cell in philosophy it explains what would seem obvious and
other philosophers are going to deny that it's obvious so
it's important to do that so that's incorporated into the phantasm which is
the greek word for image so you could call an image the problem
calling images that when we think of an image we think of a picture but the
phantasm of the apple is not just the picture it's also the
texture the taste the smell so that's all incorporated
and that's retained in the imagination for aristotle and then

00:23
memory for him is how i'm aware that i i uh you know i perceive something in
the past so that's the triad right of common sense imagination and memory and um
that that was worked pretty well for over a thousand years um so it's
aristotle in 322 i'd say and and then uh that the arab speaking philosophers
are the ones who um were working on aristotle let's say starting in
800-ish about a year 800. so you had the whole greek
commentatorial tradition that went on for you know up until let's say 500
so what is that not quite a millennium and then that segued into
um the arabic tradition because uh right islam spread and it kind of
created an arabic speaking empire over a large portion of the world so that

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took over the christian parts and so the um the arabs started a
translation movement translating arsenal to arabic because
for them right through islam arabic is this you know special sacred language
so they're translating aristotle and then they started commenting on
aristotle themselves and um really i mean avicenna is the one
that we have to thank for the quesadilla so his name is evan sinha
in arabic so his major work in the year 1021 he was writing his
ashifa which means the cure so this is really not going to
be familiar to almost anyone most people heard it played in aristotle and um
he so he's familiar with the threefold division
that's in aristotle's book on the soul and aristotle has a lot to say about
imagination and aristotle writes in a very extremely encapsulated way

00:25
and so i think um so aristotle writes incredibly
incredibly terse that's part of why you had 800 years of commentary on him and
really the commentary continued up until
the 1700s so i really have 2000 years of commenting on aristotle and people are
still coming in ourselves so i guess 2 300 years of commenting on ours
because his his riot thing lends itself to that because it's so
terse and even in the greek there's so much that's he's it's like a puzzle that
he wants you to figure out that he's leaving you to figure out
so i think avacena realized that it would be helpful to kind of
break a resistant imagination up into several
functions and therefore several powers and so what he did was he had a
five-fold division of the internal senses and he's the first
one to regularize the in the receiving committee world tradition to regularize
the um term in internal sentences it's my arabic unfortunately it's not very
good but it's hobas albatino however you say that in arabic so that's

00:26
his term to call me internal senses so he keeps the common sense and then
what he does is he i think he was interested in
animal what's going with the animal soul and so he introduces so you have you
still have the imagine the common sense imagination of memory but he's going to
change the functions of the ladder too and he makes this fundamental
distinction and this is i'll just explain it people would always
ask me about it later but um between a phantasm let's call it or
an image and then what he calls an idea the word is
in in arabic and uh people have written books about that word it's very
complex word but you could translate it as meaning or idea
so the image and the meaning depending how you want to translate that word
and so he says that animals can kind of they have an idea of something being
harmful or they see the meaning of it as being
harmful let's say so his example is the sheep and the wolf
so it's one thing right the visual imprint or the visual impression of the

00:27
wolf right but then the the fact there's an
awareness sheep that that's the threat on some level there's an awareness of a
threat and so that classifying or perceiving the wolf as a threat
he calls that this meaning or idea it applies or it sees it as a threat
that's so that's different from the image and so that the power that
perceives threats is called the estimated power
so he introduced estimated power and i think he was right to do that and so it's
interesting it's impressive because for well he wrote in 10 21 so for 1300 years
people just come to an aristotle debate about it most people accepted that triad
as i said but he sees the reason he's willing to add a new power which is pretty
exceptional and then um he adds another power
called the cogitative which is actually which literally kind of means the

00:28
judging power and so what he says that does is it combines
images and it combines images and ideas and um
he says that it's this is you really have to read the article to keep those
trackables in your head but i'm just telling you what he says
so welcome to philosophy i never said it'd be simple
no please this is this is this is very clear as clear as it can get
yeah yeah the article is linked down here so if you're
if you're not able to follow it just read the article and come back again
go ahead you have to so you have to kind of i mean what can i say this is
medieval philosophy but i think it has a lot to offer us in the
in the modern post-modern world so so you have the common sense then you
have um the imagination which is what um receives and stores images
then you have the estimative which makes a judgment about harm or benefit then
you have the memorative which retains the the notion of harm or benefits so
retains the idea his example is like i think he gives example of a dog and the

00:29
stick so when the dog the master picks up the stick the dog
remembers that that's something harmful and it reacts immediately
um he doesn't have to hit it again in order for it to know that it's something
dangerous all right i like to think of when i was a kid we had a cat
and when i take out the uh the uh tuna fish
as soon as i took out the tuna fish the cat would run up so there's no smell of
tuna fish coming from that can but it remembered that that was
something good and so it's making a connection there so that's
higher level than just remembering an image
it's kind of a higher order so so that common sense that the imag
imagination which retains images then you have the estimate of power which he
says is the ruling power in animals so he's going more into animal
psychology than aristotle did then you have the power that can form
new images and he says in animals that's called the imaginative
power and in humans it's called the creosote of power
so it can do something more in humans than it can do in animals because it's

00:30
in continuity of intellect and then fifth you have the memorative power which is
um what retains the uh associations or those
like i said that the stick is is harmful or that the tuna fish can is something
beneficial even though right now the cat is not smelling or tasting
or seeing tuna so that's what happens this is all abyssinia this is brilliant
right so it's it's interesting because i mean most people
have never heard of avicenna but um and and so what's in
so what's interesting is that thomas right avicenna was transited into latin
in spain because in spain i was part of under islam at the time
and um there we know the names of the people a lot of people who did that
so there was a canon a priest in toledo who
um remember the details correctly who um who translated with i think the help of
a rabbi who spoke arabic so they translated arabic from
they translated episode from arabic to latin and so that's how the latin west

00:31
uh got received the five-fold division of internal census and it was quite
popular so a lot of them accepted it the
translator did because he wrote he wrote a book on the soul
and um because it it's less you can say it's more fine-tuned
than what you had in aristotle so it's not rejecting aerosol it's not denying
aristotle at all it's just allows you i think you can do a better
job when you have those five-fold division than just with ourselves three-fold
so um yeah this is this is wonderful this is wonderful i i mean the thing is
i did not know that all of this is done by everything i thought some of it was
uh you know thomas uh doing this so no what is okay go ahead uh so that's why i
ended up working that's part of why this book has taken me i guess i'm going for
i'm going for a record the longest time to write a book at this point
um i think it's a new kind of record it's very valuable to kind of see how
these ideas develop because you understand them much better when you see that

00:32
prestigious yeah in a sense to do philosophy
is that for thomas is also to do the history of philosophy because if you
don't know the history of philosophy you're just condemned to reinventing the
wheel like you're going to come up with things that you
know like atomism oh well atomism democracy talked about that in 450
bc so so even out of like we all talk about atoms well that's several thousand
years old so so if right it's important to know the
history of philosophy not just pretend that that's all
irrelevant because to understand these ideas i mean amazon
had thought about these things and i consider him a genius too
so um he had a real contribution which you know
influenced the aquinas adopted to a considerable degree
wonderful so what did aquinas uh do with what he got from well do you want
to hear about averages do you want me to skip please
are you you you tell me you tell me all right and so far
everything that you've said has been completely to them
please tell me and for a penny and for a pound right i guess i'll tell you about

00:33
her because it's not really they're not too so this is this is i mean this and i
have all this stuff this is the latin translation of various rarities were three
commentaries so on each of aristotle's works major works so it's kind of
um so avicenna right like i said he was writing about the
year thousand and he died pretty young i think in his 50s and he was in um
i think like modern day he was from like uzbekistan and he was
from the eastern part of the islamic area
in the western part you had um in spain actually the the court
from in cordoba and cordoba uh you had the philosopher of heroes so
you know he's one of the big the big three arabs arabic speaking would be
avicenna are very recent that al ghazali and um average in that order actually

00:34
chronologically and uh averroes is a wrote commentaries as i said
so he has on the dianama for example on the soul he has a short a middle and a
long commentary the long commentary is you know
whatever is quite long as his name would would
imply so he and he changed his views um in each of those but the long
commentary his mature account right so a lot of times philosophers
you don't really know what they're not you don't get their definitive until
maybe they're you know in that case he was probably in his 60s
so coming back to it for the third time and um of course even though he's
commenting on aristotle of course he's conversant right with the
arabic tradition so he wants to disagree with uh uh so he's like well what is
this novelty you know aristotle's the philosopher right
aristotle's the who can compare with ourselves all right so
so he he disagrees he says we don't need this estimate of power or you know
aerosol doesn't have it so i'm getting rid of it

00:35
so so see how it already in within a hundred years i guess of um
of avasana's death uh veroise in la in arabic his name is evan rushed but
he he rejects the um the estimative and he says well the
animal imagination can handle that it just remembers that you know this tick
is painful there's no need to invoke these
uh this idea of you know threat and so on um so he of course gives the common
sense of course he gets the triad right that's straight from aristotle so that's
only to be expected because after all he's his whole way of
perceiving philosophy is that the best thing you could do is to comment on
aristotle but perhaps a little bit maybe i don't know if it's surprising he
he keeps the consultative power so he he for him there's four internal senses
so he has the common sense imagination then
the co-stated power and then uh memory and he keeps that so for humans he does
keep the idea of something and i well this this

00:36
is some notion that's that's higher than an image but lower than an intellectual
concept and so for for individuals for example so um
like an individual like socrates he says you have you can't have a universal
concept for them but you have this individual idea
and he says that's in the coaches of power so he keeps it goes into power
but he rejects it so he keeps it for humans but gets rid of it for animals
um and then uh so that's a virus and so availabies is also translated
and like i said the precise details you know
like there was it was in spain i mean that much i'm positive about
um so he was also transit in the 1100s but not long after he died because he
i think he died around 11 10 or something like that he made it to the
eleven hundreds and then he's translated so now you have both avicenna in latin
and you have so you'll say the latin epicenter and latin of arabic
and then you'll have so we have text right um
you know we have text from people like an anonymous some anonymous teacher

00:37
in paris in 1250 right that's still in the library someplace and someone will
edit it so you might have some anonymous teacher
who goes with average there's four internal sentences you might have
another one who goes through the epicenter there's five and then
another one just goes straight aristotle and there's three you even have people
just say oh we don't even need three let's just say there's one
so that's the situation where thomas comes in all right
so what does thomas what does thomas do with all of this
so basically and this is in the summit theological right which you can find
online in a microsecond and then in another couple of seconds you can
find it it's the prima par it's question 78 article 4. so that's the only
ex-professor treatment of the internal senses in this whole corpus
that's the only the only time you ever ask the questions you know what are the
internal senses and what he says is that so basically he
kind of compromises between a variety to have a set
up so he agrees with the variability that there's only four so he doesn't
there's five but he agrees with that vicente that we
should keep the estimated power so he kind of

00:38
compromises and what that gives you then is uh the four-fold internal senses the
common sense um imagination which thomas usually calls imaginative
power uh then in the shoot animals the estimate of power and human
decoders hit a power and then the memorative power which retains
doesn't retain my pictures or sensations at all it retains
um those associations of harm or benefit on
an animal level which is where it gets interesting for contemporary psychology
like freud or jung and then it retains uh like socrates
individual identities of people so every person that you know that's
routine every every human being that you can name or you can't recognize
that's all routine in your memory of power can you
repeat how he uh integrates the four and the five again
what does he do with uh so remember average is like oh what is this novelty

00:39
estimate of power that's not aristotle and it's true was it i mean
did aristotle kind of talk about that but he certainly there's no
the arabic term is wachem w-a-h-m or wamiya so that's avacyn avicenna's
contribution um and so thomas wants to he keeps that
even though he's on aerosol so he's willing to view the tradition as a
living tradition and that's a that's a weird part of that's what this dianetic
and what a con journal right we're trying to keep that tradition alive
because it has wisdom and when wisdom is lost right society
kind of veers off its bearings and if we don't have wisdom in our lives we kind
of can go astray so so thomas keeps the he takes the living
tradition approach and and keeps the estimated power
um but he he does narrow it down to four instead of five
so where um avicenna kind of split the imagination in two he said you have the
retentive imagination which retains like images like the phantasm of the apple

00:40
like i talked about and then you have what he called the
imaginative power so the examining power is what we would call creative
imagination so creative imagination like amazon's example is a gold mount
right i take the image of gold and i stick
put that with the image of mountain and now i have a gold mountain
so um thomas just says oh that's just all imagination we don't need to slip
that into two different powers so that's how he ends up with instead of
five four got it so now i mean the the big one is the question of power so now
i want to see how to approach it um do you want to kind of quickly now
let's talk only about thomas now okay so we'll take keep everything as a
background you know we built everything very beautifully
so now can you crisply summarize the powers
other than the competitive power well right so
remember the codes of an estimator are the same power for thomas
the difference is so in animals is called the estimative

00:41
but because we have an intellect our soul the powers of our soul are
my internal senses are in continuity with my intellect
so therefore he says in 1784 um that the the essence of power receives a new
name in humans it's called the consecutive power because in us
it's in continuity with intellect which episode had said too
um so so what the so what i do is in in this article and really all the
way back in my dissertation because the article is
somewhat based on my dissertation and the book is based on registration
um and so i divide it into two two the estimate of acts or the human
estimate of acts so thomas basically he used that idea even though
he doesn't use precise that terminology um but there are certain scholars that
had kind of pointed that out so i'm um you know kind of building on they kind
of mentioned in passing and then i one of that's how a lot of scholarship
works right they mentioned in passing and then i decided to like make a big

00:42
deal on her so um so the human estimated does the same thing as
the brute estimators those there are two acts that it has and
this is my dissertation goes into this which is on online on my
website the codeuserpower.blogspot if you want to you know read a couple
hundred pages at some point it's um so so the human estimated does
it it perceives those notions of harm or benefit
like the sheep and the wolf which can also take place in humans right we have
instinctive reactions as well so the example that thomas gives is
the infant and like nursing so the infant doesn't have to be taught
to seek its mother's uh breast it doesn't have to be taught to nurse it
just knows that so that would be like the estimate of
recognizing that as beneficial without any prior experience right

00:43
and then um the other one is individual ideas or notions
and so that's like socrates and so on so notions of individuals so
um because certainly like even your pet right you can tell that your pet can
tell you from maybe your wife from your son that pets
animals can distinguish individuals and that's obvious i think
so those are the two acts of the human estimative
and then so what i do is just kind of right as a scholar i'm i'm reading thomas
but i i don't want to just parrot thomas because then you could just read him
yourself i could just give you a list of excerpts from thomas
so i'm trying to think of something you know that's may be helpful so
so the code has three different names which is another reason that
um the scholarship scholarship on it has kind of gotten left by the wayside and
it tends to get forgotten and overlooked not infrequently because he does he
actually as often as not he doesn't call it the cruiser power he calls it either

00:44
the particular reason or he calls it passive intellect
both of which terms are from aristotle all right so thomas is still very much
i was saying he's not really you know he's using avicenna's contributions and
have everybody's contribution to some degree but he's really you know
it's all under the aegis of aristotle so because aristotle had talked about a
passive intellect he calls it that he calls a particular reason and that that
is definitely i think generated a certain amount of
confusion because when people hear passive intellect they're like oh that's
my intellect but no it's not your intellect
and but i mean you can't really blame thomas because aristotle himself called
it that so so that's just uh you know aristotle was writing really fast
like i said it's very dense but um so so what i do is i just call it
particular reason so i say okay there's a human estimate
and then let's talk about particular reason for the other four acts
and um those acts well uh so it forms the minor in a practical syllogism so i
watched a little bit of the videos of y'all had you guys had conversations

00:45
about this before that you guys recorded so i watched a
little bit of those and i saw you know you were talking about that the practical
syllogism so it forms the minor practical syllogism um
it plays a role in reflection so it's basically the interface between my
intellect and my my imagination um then i'm trying to think
i'm just doing it offhand here uh then it plays well any kind of particular
reasoning so not just a practical syllogism but i would argue
even um any kind of syllogism that a syllogism is a reasoning process in
your mind any reasoning process in your mind that involves a single a singular
entity a singular just means like a particular individual
and we could maybe talk about that more later but
but the code here is required for that so yeah so that's okay that it does
that's particular reason absolutely so let's go into details of
this because this is really the heart of the whole thing

00:46
because the way i i see it you know again i'm very new to this
so when i read you know the beggar's paper and learned about
because you know about the ecology of inner senses i said
the lynch pin is the question if you understand the quantitative you have
everything because everything else is kind of either feeds into it
or you know right product of it that's it's like the center of of our our
kind of uh our faculties in our faculties
um so let us spend a little bit of time on it so
um so one of the things that i've really found fascinating is that
it kind of takes in stuff from the senses and the imagination which has combined
those things and it is able to kind of form patterns
you know use kind of pattern in order to connect them to abstractions

00:47
so it's like it's like a top-down as a bottom-up kind of a process going on
at the same time it is taking general principles
and general concepts and it is seeing its applications to particulars it's
also taking kind of it's also at the same time
a moral faculties on so on one hand it is epistemological it's doing a lot of
epistemological work of uh you know kind of taking things uh almost like
is is involved in the inductive process it's also involved in the deductive
process at a psychological level it's also involved at
in the moral right you know it is taking all the moral principles and it is
applying so it is like it is like that like combination it
is keeping track of all the metaphysics which is guiding it
so it is using it is the way in which we are actually
living using the philosophy that we have

00:48
i don't know but that's that's that's my sense of it
it's a huge thing if you understand that we understand a lot
right right yeah that's you put it very well exactly
and um so so that's why right there's a lot
that one could say about it and it so the thing is it tends to get forgotten
so after aquinas so albert also his terminology is different
but without worrying about that so his terminology is completed from thomas is
he basically it's much more like avocados but that being said um
albert the great was thomas aquinas teacher and he also had a kind of
rich you know account of the internal senses
and then after aquinas they kind of the estimate of codes they have kind of
disappeared rather quickly so the dominicans will still talk about them
so followers of thomas um there's a whole tradition right to mystic tradition

00:49
but other than that they really kind of they pretty much disappear
an estimated and people go back to either common sense imagination of
memory like in aristotle or they they just sometimes they'll say well
there's just imagination and that does everything it's my memory and it's
my common sense so for example um the big three latin
medievals are aquinas dunscodus and occam
scotus mentions the estimated in passing once or twice um
but he doesn't really have anything to say about it as far as i know
and then occam just gets rid of it entirely so occam gets rid of the
smoothie of entirely and he's one who just says i just haven't you just have
an imagination you don't need a common sense you don't
need a memory that's all just imagination
so and then that sets things up for the moderns you know where
the cosmetic messengers just are gone and so what happens in outcome
is the intellect takes over all that so a big issue here in terms of right
epistemology is the question of whether the intellect can know individuals

00:50
so for thomas following he reads aristotle and i think he's
basically right about this i mean he says the intellect object is universal
so like the nature of a human right human nature
the word human the word cow dog those are universals
but then socrates are vital those are individuals and so for aristotle it was my
imagination that recognizes those things and for thomas my um my co-detains what
recognized individuals and then alkam says that um my intellect can know
individuals directly so the franciscan tradition um right
alchemin scottish dublin uh franciscans skoda says and scotus is born
i mean scotus is writing like only 30 years after aquinas
done scotus right obviously from scotland right
and scotus says that my intellect can directly know individuals
and then so he still mentions the estimate if he never mentions the
question i'm sure he got rid of it but what what purpose would it serve the

00:51
cozy stated because my intellect can know individuals directly
so therefore there's no need for the coach to either and then alchem but he's
still meant to estimate it for like a sheep like that the standard sheep and
wolf example and then alchem just says that um only
my intellect can form judgments so like the judgment that you know
socrates is is human you know and he says that's my intellect that
does that so there's no need for any coaches to power at all and then that's
it it never came back after that so so that's what happened to it so
someone who wanted to disagree with thomas they'd say oh well this is
unnecessarily complicated why not just get rid of it
and i would say the reason you can't not to get rid of it is because
it just it's gonna lead to a kind of dualistic anthropology so
occam's anthropology is that we have two souls
i have an intellectual soul and i have a sensory soul
so hopefully it doesn't take too much imagination but this is dualistic right

00:52
i have two souls that are really distinct not just like
mentally because big thing of the medieval is you know you have different
distinction real distinction mental distinction and so on
but he says these are two really distinct souls
and he says that i can only know i have an intellectual soul by faith i can't
know that by reason so the whole optimistic edifice of this kind of like
a huge cathedral where everything fits and faith and reason all fits together
oligum starts to kind of demolish that so i can only know that i have an
intellectual soul by reason um by by faith by reason i would think i
just have a sensory soul just like an animal i would think that when i die
i don't there's no afterlife so that's kind of a step
in the direction of protestantism where you know the intellect the human reason
it can't really discover truth anymore without at least about god and soul
without faith so you used to be seeing the lead up
to thomas and albert and then the aftermath
is um scotus rejecting the code because your intellect can know
individuals just fine and then outcome rejecting

00:53
really for him there's just one internal sense which is your imagination
and any judgment that you make is just has to be your intellect
so your imagination is just like the words and the pictures but
um so so that's where and then the moderns
you know they tend to be very de facto they're following outcome
whether or not they know that so um so that's why it disappeared and that's why
if you if you any of you who are listening you
know if you've never heard this before until maybe
if you watch the timeless music institute little videos you'll hear of it
like what's that well i had the same reaction because outcome is in the 1300s
so 700 years ago i can you know founded a school and scotus rejected it so
the three medieval schools in like the 1400s were optimistic
scotistic and alchemist so pretty much every major
european university had a chair in each of those schools with like
those three competing views you know and um
and so the thomas you would have heard about it but not from the others and

00:54
then in modernity you know they're following occam so
mark this is exceptionally clear picture thank you that you painted
because the thing that i really like about it is kind of linking it back to
duality versus you know aristotle versus plato
that's that's what it comes down to right i mean it's kind of separation
of the intellect completely from from from the census and so i think the
so the again putting it from okay why cogitative faculty quantitative faculty
is the thing that is making it one right right it keeps us from being a
ghost in a machine uh gilbert ryle famously used that expression to caricature
um cartesian dualism and that's the tendency is for a lot of philosophers
you're either materialist or there's a spirit that's somehow attached to the
machine which is descartes viewpoint and the code sort of allows you to avoid

00:55
that um because you know it's so so if i format
a sentence or if i say socrates is human it's a joint activity of my co-stated
power that my memorative supplies my notion of socrates
my quote my quotative is forms that sentence
that that judgment so it's not my both my code
and amma intellect can judge against alca who said only my intellect can judge
what my intellect provides for thomas is the is the meaning of the word human
because that's a universal concept remember we're talking about human nature
but only my intellect can grasp human nature but for thomas only my
quotation can can deal with singulars so um so there's it's basically a joint
activity which of two things at once yeah wonderful powers
so i want to do two things now i want to go through this list that you have of
six quantitative functions in enough detail so people can grasp
what each of those are because i what i want to do is

00:56
i think we have established what the cogetative faculty is but i want people
because it is so foreign to people today okay
i want to take time to kind of talk about this six function
and then we will close with something on kind of you know
taking it to the modern conversation and see kind of
different modern things and how to what extent they capture or don't capture
what we've been talking about and then we'll open it up to questions so folks
if you have questions keep track of questions uh ask your best question okay so
we're coming to question answers soon all right so what are these six cognitive
functions of the quantitative faculty so the first
one perceives the notions of horror benefits so that's the famous sheep and
wolf example right it's why does it run away right there's a brown
furry uh object i mean if you if you describe it strictly in terms of the visual
impression of the visual field why does it react to that right um and

00:57
the answer is for for alexander and aquinas that
it's it's able to perceive um either innately right um so an example of that is
if you have mice that mouse that's never been exposed to a cat and smells a cat
it will seek shelter so that's innate right it's just born that way but
it it doesn't just smell it it associates danger with that
so the association of danger that's that's the first one
um it could be a nate required as i talked about before
that perceiving individual notions like socrates or in the case of an animal
distinguishing different um you know members of the family or other animals
in a non-linguistic fashion and then particular reason prepares a
fantastic attraction well like you were saying right
good it's patterns that that would be a good way to put it you know
um in order to prepare for like you don't just
leap into knowledge of human nature recognition of different
um natural kinds there's a gradual process
in uh infancy and even for us as adults there can be

00:58
especially with something like metaphysics like the notion of substance
and accident there can be a gradual process so you're you're coaching is at work
trying to to put things together in a way that makes sense which is also why
it's it's fatiguing right intellectual work
well it's also your code i guess not to gently
um so then the fourth one instrumental role in
knowledge of the singular so so remember i said that
for thomas there's no direct intellectual knowledge of the singular
but there is indirect knowledge of the singular so
if i know socrates i can i have my intellect has indirect knowledge of
that by reflecting on my image of socrates
so it reflects on that um and so it kind of knows
indirectly which would be kind of a whole nother topic conversation but
but the point is that my it's not like my intellect is completely unaware of
singularities because then that would be a kind of dualism or duality
right within the human person and we would look more like outcome with the two

00:59
souls right so there's a continuity between insects
and the quotative and the intellect reflects on um on the lower
uh knowledge and then so so that sense i mean has to do with my
my consciousness right my conscience of myself
and so on um that forms the minor of the the practical syllogism so you know the
example comes from aristotle right uh if all sons should honor their
fathers this this man is my father therefore i shall honor him so
um the first the the major premise of any of you
one begins ideal one begins the study of philosophy with logic
the major premise is universal because right it has the word all in it
and then uh the minor premises are singular because they're dealing with
singular they have singular terms and so that's the code
that forms both of those and that that does tend to get overlooked a lot um
not always maybe less so in recent years by scholars

01:00
and lastly reasons from one single thing to another so i think that's just
broadening it out to whether it's because i just gave example of a
practical syllogism the conclusion of which is something that i should do
right an action i should take in the world as opposed to all humans or language
users socrates is human they're for soccer as a language user
like you said that's a deduction and the code is there would be responsible for
the second two steps okay wonderful wonderful all right now what i want to do uh
is let's see we are about an hour into this
so i want to give a chance for people to ask questions
because there's some really incredible people here uh and i want to make sure
that we have we get them involved too um and
i don't you know we'll we'll figure out how to proceed from there uh we will
have time for breakout rooms afterwards so folks it's time for uh questions uh
we have four rules as always go ahead and type exclamation mark if
you want to ask a question or raise your hand and zoom
number two keep on topic number three be brief and number four

01:01
speak your mind feel free to disagree with any uh
on anything with anybody and do so courteously
uh first up is uh give me just a second let me go ahead and enable this
um first up is mark mark go ahead afrikaan thank you so much uh for
inviting uh mark barker good to see you again
uh mark i was actually recounting to some people today that when you and i
first met in 2016 that was a real milestone uh in my of early education
uh on these topics i learned a lot from you in huntington
and i'll i'll always be very grateful for that thank you very much
and also thank you for agreeing to uh to send along to us uh your uh your essay
so we could publish it um in diane wedecon my question for you is neuroscience

01:02
um as i understand it um the inner senses or internal or interior depending on
who's speaking we like to call it the inner senses the inner senses
are material they are expressed in brain tissues
and in general these are going to be uh as you may have uh
enjoyed i don't know if you'd seen ruth harvey's
presentation at warburg before we published it but um there's a long history
of trying to locate in the neuroanatomy um not in the in the neocortex
but in all the various uh structures and uh ventricles
uh beneath that there's a long history of trying to locate these uh inner senses

01:03
so my question for you is are you aware of anyone uh or uh if you're not uh
what do you think we need to do to get some modern neuroscientists
to look at these questions um i believe that uh uh daniel de haan
at uh uh oxford has taken a look at some of this
uh we've recently been in conversation and i don't feel father uh ezra sullivan
at the angelicum uh he is a dominican uh who is looking very seriously at
these things but i have yet to find anybody who is
uh actively involved in neuroscience um and engaged with with these uh questions
um have you heard of any of that and if not what can we do to
accelerate it well um so uh in my dissertation i i
there's one article by magda b arnold who i know you know about and
um you had told me about some of her books that i wasn't aware about but i
had just seen that one article and then her co-author on that article

01:04
um the internet is called the internal sentences functions are powers and it's
in two parts and that would be kind of a seminal i
guess article because to my knowledge that's the first person to really try to
tackle that question um head on and and take the codes
seriously and us seriously but still look at the
neuroscience uh is neurophysiology right what brain centers are responsible
um so that would be that's what i know of and then um
beyond that right you'd have to have a kind of cooperation there between
someone who knows what um it's what these powers are and then which
brain centers are responsible for them um
and uh i mean honestly i i don't know if it would be too hard to figure out
but um yeah i'm not really that's not really what i've worked on so
so yeah i don't know but i i know dan did han has has maybe worked on that
a bit more so maybe you could yeah ask him or someone else but and i
haven't heard of this other dominican you talked about so that's good if some

01:05
people are working on it as you as you also probably know um
there's an enormous conversation about these topics in spanish um primarily
being conducted by opus dei and and so that's another avenue for
this but i'm just indicating that the next step for the
center for the study of digital life in terms of looking at this will
probably be to try to encourage some neuroscientific examinations
thank you very much for your presentation sir wonderful thank you both
marks next up is brian peter and franklin brian yes um
i'm fascinated by this uh anytime i hear the word dualism
because i'm not formally trained in philosophy but it seems to me
that dualism is at the heart of a lot of key philosophical debates when it comes

01:06
to mind and humanity's attempt to understand what mind is
uh certainly since um uh uh the the classical greeks so so you said something
uh uh cognitive allows us to avoid dualism so i'm curious if you could just uh
briefly uh explain uh what that means i give you an example or two
sure so um so what you tend to have is an over
well from thomas's perspective and over emphasis on intellect so that the
intellect just does everything so if you're stunned scotus
is to take right people after thomas um who's
you know the medievals are extremely sophisticated in their epistemology and
anthropology and so for scotus my intellect does all that so there's no
need for the codes there anymore but then it's it's um it's minimizing um
kind of the body's role so the causative is an embodied power
right so like mark stone was saying it's a it's localized i use the word

01:07
localized not located it's localized in your brain so all the
inner senses are and um so we're giving a lot of
importance to like what your brain does in your cognition
and it means like after we die our intellectual soul lives on but we don't
really know what that will be like because we won't have an imagination
anymore and we won't have code anymore so it will think in a very different way
whereas for um someone like scotus well my brain already my
can mindset my intellect already knows individuals and then you just kind of
see the end point of that dualism with uh falcon will go so far say i have two
soul two different really different or distinct souls
so i mean it's almost like at that point well then are there two
me's or am i two persons or am i one person um so it's it's a more holistic
holistic approach right where um it's it's a both and equation that like i
said before if i'm when i as i make my way through the world right um

01:08
existentialists speak about that kind of thing people like heidegger
heidegger was trying to go back to things themselves right following
husserl and the sense that's what the code said it was doing
the quotation of is is um it's talking about how i make my way
through the world because the world is filled with
concrete individual things and entities not just abstractions
so it's it's kind of giving the due to to the concrete if you will
which is a kind of move that you had in the post-modern period
um with like i said heidegger and the existentialist sartre
the whole bunch of them that whole movement so it in that sense it
it the code matches up with um kind of anti-intellectualist features of uh the
existentialists and so that's uh in that sense it's
it can has something to contribute to contemporary conversation
in a way that intellectualists don't because because existentialists are

01:09
rejecting cartesian you know rationalism and their their def
heidegger is definitely rejecting any kind of intellectualism and
he wants to focus on kind of our experience of the world around us and
how do we actually experience the world which is so far removed from the whole
rationalist or modern approach um so so that's how right it kind of plays out um
the holistic approach would play out wonderful uh thank you next up is going
to be peter franklin laura and kevin peter go ahead
uh hello uh thank you so much for your presentation i
think this may be the first time we've met even uh digitally although maybe i'm
mistaken but uh yeah i i i'm just so so happy that there is somewhere on
youtube now where uh this this has really been
elaborated at the level that it really needs to be

01:10
so uh first off i just want to thank you uh and again srikant for for hosting
this um the the question that i have um is sort of a bit of a historical
one um i was curious how you see um you know how so we talked about the
development of the cognitive power as it came from the arabic world into
the latin world via spain and then eventually at the
university of paris where it was housed in all these schools um
you know i i wanted to mention that historically uh
there's a you know bishop nemesis in syria
uh wrote a book called on the nature of man
where uh to bring the neurology in he he talks about these ventricles
as far as i can tell for the first time in these terms he uses the word
excaditiva uh instead of cogitative but um this premise of there being uh

01:11
ventricles in the brain that are assigned these various powers
um with all the implications i suppose of
humoral action of wetness and dryness um why do you think it is that in the
15th and 16th century uh these became um sort of not even on the table uh to be
debated rather than being on one side or the
other how do you think it disappeared altogether
well so so you're right to bring in nemesis and um
wolfson harry wolfson harry a wilson has an article
that's another kind of classic read article on this
and he mentions on the mesius and he goes much much more into the history
than i did that's kind of the thumbnail sketch
i'm in the book i do talk more about the history um and so i do
mention the mises is very important and all that um but uh

01:12
um so as far as i mean as far as it so remember i mean for for the descartes
still accepts three internal senses so he does accept um so suarez for example
said there's just one internal sense um and just the imagination usually people
just say it's just the imagination and then he
views the other internal sentences all subfunctions of imagination
so descartes was familiar with that and yet he's still in a sense he's more of a
statillian on this because he uh he accepts three internal senses the
common sense imagination of memory so he accepts the resilient triad
and he views that as having different brain centers so so he
they're still talking about um they're still talking about the internal senses
like the hume all the models talk about the internal senses
the difference is how they conceive of them so
for like hobbes for hobbs he'll talk about your imagination and your memory
right there different but they're j they're all they are is

01:13
he's a materialist so in in a materialist setting
the internal senses become nothing but organs
and or they become functions of organs we should say you know
with functionalism so that's all they are as a function of an organ and then
people will read that back into aristotle
which in the book i'm actually trying to do a lot of work to disagree with that
as best i can um so so if you're a materialist they're just organs
and um although alcohol kind of makes them move in that way because occam says
that so occam says do your two eyes have one power vision or do they have two
his answer is that each eye has its own power of vision
each ear has its own power of hearing well thomas never says that
if anything thomas really doesn't say that
and so already with occam um it's kind of like the the soul's powers and the
soul itself are just being subsumed back into the body like they're not the
sensory soul doesn't transcend the body he says it's co-extensive with the body
he says that if if i cut off my finger i lose a part

01:14
of my sensory soul so my sensory soul is like almost quantified in my body
so that if if you cut off a piece of my body you caught a piece of my soul well
if you know aristotle that's not how it works
if you lose your hand your hand is not sold anymore but you don't lose part of
your soul so the way that occam talks about the soul is and the power is
already kind of veering off into materialism so
so they also have the language of internal senses and like hobbs
but now they're just functions of powers a part of me of organs and then for
descartes in a sense it's the same thing because um the uh
common sense imagination and memory are they're not
powers of this of the mind they're powers of the body
so they're just part of the machine uh maybe kind of like the computer you know
they're like the computer side of us and then our intellect is the the
spiritual side of us so so even though the language of
internal senses remains in the moderns it's whether you're a part of me whether

01:15
you're a materialist or a dualist they just become part of the body machine
and then with the um the post-modern i basically think of the trends the first
postmodern like nietzsche at that point he just completely gets rid of power as
a soul entirely including the internal census so then
in post-modernity let's say i think of 1831 is the stock endpoint of modernity
because that's when hegel died so anything after 1831 you could pretty
safely call postmodern or contemporary philosophy and they're
getting rid of the powers of the soul entirely as just there are no powers of
the soul at all um so so it's really that's why i guess it is still
you keep coming back to that problem of mechanistic materialism because even
descartes even though he's a dualist as far as the body is concerned he's a
mechanist and so that's such an i would say an impoverished anthropology um
and um yeah anyway thank you uh next up is going to be franklin laura

01:16
kevin and mark franklin yes thank you uh a great great topic
uh probably over my head but i'm i have the impression that there was something
like the eighth council of constantinople when pope theodosius
uh established the aristotelian dualistic metaphysic as as catechism and
in the process sidelined the soul the imagination
that the imagination was no longer an essential part of a three-part universe
and and with that we we we get the we begin to lose the soul of the world
which you know is like we're like a little drop of the ocean
of the soul of the world we have the ocean in us we're like the soul of the
world but we're only a piece of it but with this dualistic metaphysic

01:17
the soul is lost or begins to fade away okay um so any comments on that or yes
please i wish you would and does this ring any bells there's
pope theodosius and the uh council of constantinople i don't know
unfortunately it doesn't now the world soul does so that that's platonic
um and so certainly plato and the neoclateness are going to have that and
i mean neoplatonism is all through the middle ages that's a
major trend and if anything it reversalism was in the minority
um some people will use the word dualism for aristotle so they'll say well
because he says there's a soul in the body
there's a dualism there i prefer to re reserve it for platonism because
the soul and body are one thing so um so therefore they're one thing with two
aspects so i prefer to call it hylomorphism and um yeah i mean aristotle doesn't
really directly address the world soul any place

01:18
um so i guess what we i would say is that in terms of
he does say that the soul intellectual soul comes from
god in the book on generation of animals i think it's book two chapter one
thereabouts but he does have a different perspective i
the world soul makes me think more of failies i mean a lot of my
work has been from failies up to aristotle and
and then the you know aquinas and the arabs um but so for for aristotle
he has a kind of clear picture of a transcendent um divinity whereas in thales
thales had said all things are full of gods all things are full of soul
so i think that when um plato introduces the world soul in the timaeus i think
he's kind of integrating or synthesizing that idea from thales that
you know everything has a soul and uh certainly he's successful that with the
the kind of you know use of the the world soul but

01:19
that's definitely a major divide between neoplatonism plato
and and aristotle which is healing those two traditions
uh thank you uh next up uh laura what's your question
laura you need to unmute yourself go ahead this may be hitting at a
pedestrian level of some degree but you were talking about
um areas where these things lie and i was thinking about how we often talk about
people having um either they're a a artistic um or logical thinkers you know the
areas of the brain where they reside um and so
i started thinking about that with respect to what you're talking about
and is that the case i mean do we take it down to that level

01:20
where we're either a or b or d okay um so i mean um is there anything else you
wanted to add to that or no that she's just asking whether you
know this distinction that many people think in terms of you know okay
we are artistic versus scientific uh temperament uh do you have any comments
about that um so i guess i mean on some degree you know each of
us as thinkers right we're uh i think we're the product of our influences
and um so i mean i'm i'm but i definitely am kind of i hate to label myself but
it'd be hard to say that i'm not it's a mystic versatilian because i think that
would just be not accurate but i did do my master's degree
on heidegger so i have i spent a lot of time with an existentialist

01:21
so so certainly heidegger is um trying to get away from an over
emphasis on logic because in the 20th century philosophy you had this logical
positivism and so the current division of philosophy is
you have analytic philosophy which is extremely logical
for the most part and then you have continental philosophy right which is
existentialist or postmodern which is kind of
basically the opposite i mean heidegger never uses the syllogism i mean he's
he'll quote a poet before he'll quote um you know a logician so you have that
kind of divide and 21st century philosophy that's as strong as ever and
every once in a while there'll be a book about an article about it about that
divide and how to try to bridge it and that's this like
in 2021 that's the division within philosophy where
the analytics will say that the continentals aren't doing philosophy at
all and then the continentals think the same about the analytics so
it's a quite a i don't know if there's ever been quite that strong of a division
within amongst professional philosophers and just philosophy in general

01:22
so there are artistic versus logical thinkers and
um i think the quotation can apply to both because as i said
if i wa like i've been speaking as a reception
and thomas here i'm focusing on the logical aspect i suppose
but um heidegger is doesn't work that way and my master's station was called
heidegger's criticism the four causes but
basically the priest who helped me with this because i was having a hard time
with heidegger which if you read him i think you'll be able to relate
and and i said what is he getting at here and this preset to me well he's
rediscovering the internal senses and and that
made a lot of sense because like that's why i was talking about the concrete
so even though you know the tendency might be to think well like
you know i know um mark stallman's big fan of uh marshall
mcluhan and mcclellan is more on the literary side of things less on the
logical side of things and i think we have we have things to

01:23
learn from both people you know um the logicians shouldn't dismiss
people the more literary types the literary types shouldn't dismiss the
logicians which is what naturally tends to happen
but i'm certainly you know um the quotative can apply in either case because
you know i think uh you were quoting the
um the peg air the last paragraph of the big air in one of the previous videos
where he's he brings that in the kind of cogitative as applying to
srikant you were reading that paragraph from one of the other videos
where he uh pegare says like this is the faculty of artists because artists are
dealing with the concrete so so that's where there's a lot of
interesting thought about the quotative and
thomas doesn't talk about that at all right because really thomas doesn't have
a lot to say about i mean that's maybe another reason that i'm going to
get the award for the world's slowest writer because he has so little
to say about it that i end up my book ends up going into a lot of

01:24
other things like anthropology because he yeah he he's quite terse about it
but so that would be um the artistic aspect of the code the logical he calls
it particular reason so he's certainly that's obvious i mean right
um that it applies in logic but the artistic i don't
really know of any place no place comes to mind where he mentions that so that'd
be the kind of thing that there's still work to be done and
there's still thoughts to be had about or conversations that he had about they
could bring in the quotative so the artistic
one would be one of those conversations thank you our next up is going to be
kevin followed by mark and then we're going to do
breakout rooms for 20 minutes so we can talk about these ideas amongst ourselves
and then we'll come back to talk about our takeaways uh kevin
what's your question yes thank you uh i understand dear limbs
the one corner of two side it's they co-exist one side is so

01:25
another side is the body so my question is can uh duralism
be compared to yin and yang thank you okay yeah um i don't know much about the
oriental tradition of the the eastern tradition um but i do
know i mean i've read the the dow de chang you know that's not
and i think there's a lot of wisdom in it it's actually
very similar the yin and yang and the dao de ching is
actually similar to um some of the pre-socratics it was written about the
same time if any of you've heard of the axial age which i forget
casser ernst kasser and she said you have an actual age how it's fascinating
how at the same time the greek philosophy was developing you had buddhism
in india and you had the dow diching in china
so it is i think that's a valuable idea how there was this great kind of leap
forward simultaneously um although there was some cross

01:26
fertilization there and there's a book on that i mean
he's buying books i mean i'm not i'm not saying i agree with beckwith but
he's a skeptic but he has a book called the greek buddha where he actually um
talks about how the greek skeptics because alexander the great had gone to india
they they met some of these um indian philosophers
who were skeptics so there's actually is a direct connection
um with eastern western skepticism where um western skepticism goes back
so certainly in the east you do have a lot of skepticism with buddhism
and i think right there can be more of a dualism
and and that's why i think aristotle has a lot to offer to the east
as well and of course they have their own beautiful culture
and traditions but i know i think it was mark stallman who might have told me
that that um they were translating thomas's uh suma
they they translated the sum into chinese for the first time

01:27
so that that's all one would hope that you know thomas would catch on in china
next up is mark mark go ahead oh yes yeah uh uh mark barker is correct
the chinese have gone crazy over the classics east and west
five years ago uh maybe a little longer than that
they began teaching all of their top cadres
in the central party school in beijing the chinese classics they had actually
gone to the university of chicago and met with the people who were
teaching great books to try to get some ideas about how to
teach that i have actually met professors at pku beijing university
one of their jobs is to teach the polit borough which is the equivalent

01:28
of the senate and the standing committee of the borough which is the equivalent
of the cabinet they are being taught these are these are obviously
older people um live through a mao era where none of this was talked about
they're being taught um yi jing uh all the way up to the top but in
addition to that my understanding is that all across china
classics departments western classics departments
are opening up and so this recent translation
there may have been earlier translations but indeed there's a new
uh complete translation um from the ground up
of of aristotle and i presume others it is working its way into this so that
the chinese fascination with these topics east and west is uh quite remarkable

01:29
just imagine a situation where you could not be elected a senator in the united
states if you hadn't passed the test on arizona
wonderful my question for you though mark is uh so so uh we're in agreement
uh of the importance of these relationships amongst these senses and as is
often the case when something interesting and
elaborate and historical presented like that like this
the question becomes well that's wonderful what could go wrong
uh and and so i'm wondering if in your book or in your other readings
you run across people who focused on that subject
so once we have an architecture of the sort that you're describing here
there's a number of ways that that could break down

01:30
and in particular it is the view as you know the center the television
uh completely over emphasizes the um imaginary part of this
eliminating any of memorative components of this so you wind up with a
population that is more or less running on fantasy
and whether uh non-functional tokens uh count as an example
uh whether um uh invading the capital on january the sixth counts as an example
but there's a there's a lot of wacky things going on uh
fantasy type things going on so uh and and as you know it's our view
that digital technology because of the architecture of digital technology
inherently shifts the balance of the inner senses
from fantasy to memory and i'm not saying that that either of those
are uh categorically good or bad but it does seem to us at least that the

01:31
what could go wrong is now in some sort of transition
um and so i'm i'm curious as a scholar of all of this
uh what aristotle have ever imagined that we would sit down for hours a day
watching a blinking light puppet show or mikey had said because his teacher
plato had his teacher socrates um i believe uh murdered uh for his
opposition to the election mysteries and you wind up in the republic with the
parable of the cave which is clearly in greek terms that there was no other
festival where people sat around watching a blazing fire
that's the alassanian mysteries and socrates is the guy
who escapes and then is murdered from all of that
i'm just wondering if if uh given that what we have are aristotle's class notes
and he didn't sit down and write a extensive treatment of all of these things um

01:32
but did anybody did that akham or anybody else who you studied
did they try to list out how this whole thing could go sideways how this
arrangement we have here could wind up with some really
uh serious problems right so so that's um that's a good question
there's there's a tradition of i think it's a dominican tradition
i'm not sure where else it would be from but
that's we need a you need a dead master and a living master
so aristotle aquinas are dead masters right they have we can read
their writings but they can't explain them to us and
we can't ask them how to make sense of television
or the information revolution or the industrial revolution or any i don't know
the stirrup i mean there's so much that's happened since the
so like we're saying at the beginning the beauty is that what thomas what they

01:33
say about human nature is still i think as valid as it was as today as
it was back then and that's why we should look at it but it is up to us
to to make those application developments so i'm glad that
you know you all are doing that um because that's what we need to do
because uh i totally agree with the thomas doesn't talk about it but
20th century thomas we'll talk about the judgment of existence existential
judgment and and that's one thing i've been working
on and i i need to write something about at some point
you know maybe 30 years from now but um but the existential judgment is missing
in a like just when i'm sitting in front of a screen all day so
so we have a realist epistemology and so right you're we're right to bring
in the the cave allegory that in a sense we're like those people trapped in a
cave staring at a screen like it's kind of prophetic there's these strange
prophetic things in plato remember plato says in the republic he
says well if someone would be really really good

01:34
if someone would be the most just person they would capture and crucify well he
wrote that in 400 bc or 380 bc like and so some of the fathers of the
church said that he was there's a kind of prophetic
quality to plato and um i mean without speaking as a philosopher
regarding the cave allegory if nothing else he's
it's there's something so brilliant about these greek philosophers that that
there are still provincial applications of their ideas so yes and
and tom i'm sorry aristotle and thomas are realists so i mean they
their epistemology is that see in a sense for
it is that we're encountering reality for the moderns i can't get past the
veil of perception so for the moderns they're called richard ward's term is
representational so everything i experience
for kant or for descartes for the count everything i experience is all just like
it is like a tv screen i can never get behind the screen
so the pro in some sense the technology has taken

01:35
kant's error and made it reality and then we have i think a
huge you know political social etc crisis on some level because of that and i
agree about the non-possible tokens thing i i've come across that and
it's i guess it's just it's just the logic of modernity playing itself out
where reality doesn't matter anymore and everything becomes digital and
and we don't want to be luddites and just reject technology out of hand like
right now we're meeting on zoom which we couldn't do
but the problem is right it um mcluhan was right about that you know that
it it ends up having effects that people aren't aware of
and i think the last year we've seen that on a lot of ways so
um so as far as going wrong yeah and um and that's where precisely
that's where it's up to us to make those applications because
yeah there's nothing like that and and thomas and aristotle really i mean
um yeah that kind of analysis that we could provide in the 21st century

01:36
so wonderful um so folks uh now it's time to discuss these ideas
uh in small groups uh for 20 minutes and then we'll come back here to talk about
our takeaways and maybe we'll have a little bit of time for the questions
all right it's time for takeaways and questions further questions
um let's try to keep it brief so we can get to as many as possible again the
same rules uh type exclamation mark to provide your takeaway or a question
uh number that's number one number two keep on topic number three be brief
number four speak your mind feel free to disagree with anything on any uh you
know with anybody and do so courteously barry what's your take away our question
uh barry you need to unmute yourself okay there you go um my takeaway was
when i was a teenager i was into science fiction i wrote read a book by a.e van

01:37
bark and it was called the world of nalay uh anybody familiar with that book uh
barry you need to be brief you know we have we yeah the next
step is coming up soon go ahead well yeah i'm being brief uh and so the the
question i have is uh is the world of malay
a mechanistic world where you see humans as machines
and i i guess the other thing i have a question of
is there is a book written by edith hall called the aristotle way are you
familiar with that book and it's treats aristotle philosophy as a
self-improvement philosophy and if you would comment on
that i would be real interested um okay um so yeah the first book
unfortunately i haven't heard of that book so i can't really speak to that
um as far as the other book yeah i think that's right that

01:38
self-improvement is a a good way to describe his his worldview and um so
i mean that gets a bit more into his ethics
and here we're focused on his kind of philosophical psychology and and the way
it developed um so um so yeah i mean i i guess i would grab
but since i don't know the book i can't really
i guess i can't say too much beyond that okay next up is donna
so in our breakup room we um started this question about artificial intelligence
and um ethics comes into question i'm curious
to know it's going to be wild to see what do we do with self-driving cars
the trolley experiment who who's going to die and who's going to live
i mean that's going to be the real challenge we haven't even gotten to the

01:39
challenges of artificial intelligence it really will be quite wild
okay um yeah that's a good point right the famous trolley
you know if it's headed for five people do you put on the track to kill the two
people who are also it's gonna kill um that's that's kind of utilitarian way
um i mean i guess yeah i think that at first i was i was a skeptic about
self-driving cars and then i just saw that chipotle and you know and then
chipotle said that there's some it's called nu the new car and it's sort
of driving around i actually have a friend who uh is working on
that technology and he was asking about it he was asking me if the coach data
had something to offer because he he's aware right the pattern
recognition idea and he was asking to help him [Laughter]
um and i guess uh yeah it's it's that's programming and um
i guess that's the order of efficiency right like we have such an efficient

01:40
world and it seems to me sometimes right like our world is going nowhere fast
like we've lost what is the meaning of life right
aristotle tells us what the meaning of life is
right we want to be virtuous he says that god is the one
everything came from god and that basically we should try to serve god
but the moderns don't have a clear vision of that so i mean
the danger is with all this technology we're able to
process so much information and share so much information but the quality of the
information is what really matters and and you know having wisdom and um
so i think both aristotle and aquinas have a you know a special place
in that with regards to that so so even as the i guess there's things
you can make between the order of efficiency and the order of um fecundity so
as the order of efficiency increases and this goes back really to francis bacon
who went about the year 1600 is saying well you know he's

01:41
saying we need to get rid of all this aristotle stuff of there being purposes
in nature there's no purpose to nature there's no forms in nature there's just
matter and that's the the modern um world view of nature right as nature is just
atoms it's just there's there's no purposes in it whereas for aristotle
each kind of animal had its own purpose each organ had its own purpose
which i think is self-evidently true or obviously true on some level and then
what ethics flows from that how should we live our lives based on that
so um yeah i guess i'm glad that the there's people other than you know just
a couple of scholars talking about the coget data because
um you know if we want to get back to holomorphism that kind of sophisticated
automorphism that people just won't dismiss the coaching that does have a
role to play there and a complete recovery or retrieval of
um pylomorphism you know not just uh meaning kind of how more than at its

01:42
best in some ways which is includes thomas because um pico de la merandola
you might have heard him he wrote the original dignity of man he's another
renaissance philosopher and um he himself was more of a new
playedness we talked about the world so he was more of a near platonist but
but he did say that um cena toma aristotle which means without thomas aristotle
wouldn't you so he was a kind another genius he died
very young i think he and he there is evidence that he was poisoned but um
even he who was not even really an aristotelian per se um he said that you
need aquinas to help you understand aristotle
and i think uh there's a lot to be said for that so
so so yeah so um hopefully we can you know help spread some of that return to
realism and everything ethics uh thank you uh folks if you want to share your
takeaways or ask questions you can go ahead and type exclamation mark next up
is mark stallman uh thank you srikant um uh this is fascinating that a friend of

01:43
yours is working on on self-driving cars and had the presence of mind
to recognize that the cognitive power implied pattern recognition well
remember this is someone who i taught for several years so
you know he's gonna um he's gonna know about that and and um yeah i mean
he didn't use the language pattern recognition
i'm using that's that's i'm getting that more from you mark
that precise terminology but he was explaining to me how
he was saying how the car has the car you know
the car the computer program has a very hard time telling
one thing from another and he's trying to write a computer program
and he was like they're having a really hard time and he was saying well
you work on the qualitative right how can you help me with that and i was
saying well not really because i mean i guess i i
guess i've never thought about from that angle and
ultimately i'm more interested in ethics i feel like the order of efficiency

01:44
we're like the problem is we sometimes i feel like
we have we have space age technology and stone age philosophy
in our society that would be a simple way to put it that's a beautiful
beautifully put i i i love that as to um uh add a little bit to this um it turns
out that the current field of artificial intelligence is focused on the problem
that they describe as the common sense that that is the the big holy grail
today for artificial intelligence recognizing that a three-year-old child knows
whether an elephant can fit through a door or not but it but an ai uh does not
right that's that's what he said too about he said how do they tell that that
there's a drunk pedestrian because most pedestrians are not a threat but a
drunk pedestrian could you know be a threat a threat that there
being an accident and so he says how do you how do we

01:45
teach it that that's a drunk pedestrian as opposed to one that's not
and right as a human i mean i it's there's all kinds of
cues that i would rely on for that i mean and so exactly yeah
so that my point here is just that ai is struggling
with what they are calling common sense but they of course haven't got that
elaborated understanding of the inner senses so
the problem they're actually dealing with is is cognitive power here
without knowing that's what they're dealing with but there's a
tens of millions of dollars being spent at the allen institute in san fran
and seattle and others trying to solve the common sense problem here
and and just in case i don't speak again for those who
here may have some interest or understanding of in particular
uh chinese approach to all of this i have had an opportunity to speak with

01:46
the president of university in beijing whose uh goal is to try to
train an ai to do the ijing the iching is a is a very sophisticated
quantitative power test he doesn't have the language he doesn't
know what the arrangement is here but i'm quite confident inevitably
in the next five plus years we will hear about people trying to build artificial
souls and in the process they will be coming to mark barker and others
to try to figure out what a what an actual soul
is like we're inevitably heading in that direction at the same time
the other side of that coin if you will is the
human beings finally coming to recognize that this whole
robotic exercise really has to be brought under control
and building artificial souls may be the tripping point on that
thank you mark uh next up is going to be kevin followed by

01:47
peter kevin yes i tried to be quick uh we just mentioned the theoretical uh
what's the current problem we use monument or binaries rhythm it's a kind of
illustrated world binary the movie maybe even have an active meaning what's
the problem like a current uh thinking society thank you i don't know
whether i got the terms or what two things are you talking about kevin
uh monizer monism yeah and the binary rhythm okay talk about that thank you
yeah so well that's that's his basic terminology so um so i mentioned thales
right daley's the first philosopher slash scientist in the western world that
that um that's where it begins i mean there could have been people before him
but that's where it begins as far as we know about 585 bc
and he was a monist so so the question of you know what is everything made of

01:48
he just says everything is water so he takes one there's four elements and he
picks one he says it must all be water so it's a starting point right at least
he's asking the question why like and what what the
why and what questions of philosophy and to some degree science
so he's a monist because everything is one thing everything is just water
and even the soul is is water and if there's gods they're water
so so that's that's monism and then we don't use the word binaryism
um we would use the word dualism so monism is that everything is one thing
dualism is everything is two things so normally spirit and matter like plato
and then you finally have pluralism so pluralism is everything is more than two
things so uh in terms of pre-socratics that would be ambidoculese who said that
they're all they're all four elements are ultimate um so
that that's how that would apply in terms of philosopher nature

01:49
um and uh so yeah anyway well uh peter hi yes thank you uh so uh
just first quick a comment on the uh drunk pedestrian how do you how do you
know it's drunk my guess is that um google's robots with recaptcha
every time that you try and log in instead of clicking
what's a crosswalk you you might find is this a drunk person
check check all the drunk people so uh i look forward to that in the coming
months but no uh i i just uh my takeaway uh i don't necessarily have a question
is um i i just want to say uh since we were in the breakout room together
um in this to the group i'm i'm just absolutely blown away
that you got to this topic um not just of the interior senses and
their importance but of particularly st thomas's understanding
of the cogitate of power um how you got to that from a question
about heidegger's attempt to make any of this clear uh and that your

01:50
your priest uh mentor helped you get to that point i thought that's amazing
and um something i just want to repeat here is that i mentioned in the breakout
room is i think um who knows what sparks will fly
when uh that question is asked about romano guardini
who was heidegger's senior peer at freiburg
and actually did become a priest unlike heidegger who abandoned his theology
training uh what happens when the inner senses are brought to bear on
guardini's thought which has not even begun to be uh discussed in english so
uh thanks again uh to you dr mark barker and uh to shri khan again so thank you
uh thanks peter um so mark i think this was very remarkable okay this is
uh so firstly um i mean not just so one part of it is just your scholarship
which is incredible uh you know being able to show very clearly

01:51
you know you know aristotle the arabic philosophers and aquinas to present day
with kind of the obstacles in between uh you were able to do that uh
secondly you are actually able to communicate that in a fairly clear term to
pretty much anybody who wants to know okay so i am now i want your book out
soon and i don't think the world needs to wait for your book
out because you are what you already have both in terms of knowledge and
ability to communicate it is at a level where
today you know for example this video that people are watching
people can get the essence of it and maybe we can do more of these to get
the word out which will not only help uh you know
help the world but it will also help your book whenever it comes out so
i don't want to push you on the book but i would love to have you talk

01:52
you know more about this because this is something which is
really critical yeah and that's that's kind of why i did it because i'm
usually very research oriented as you probably are able to see but um
i've just found myself listening to things on youtube lately i i guess
um like you were talking about nfts and and technology i try to keep up on that
a little bit and and um i'll just listen to it i don't
even necessarily have to watch it so i realized like so much of
that there's really an oral culture now it's kind of funny
because we're such a written culture you know where knowledge was really by
the written word so much but i think so many people now like podcasts and things
they'll just maybe they don't have any time to look at a book at all
but maybe when they're driving to work they'll listen so maybe if someone hears
about the codes of power and they youtube it and they could listen to this
when they're driving to work you know so that's why i thought let's
get some of this out i wanted to cooperate in getting some of this
out there in an oral spoken form so that that's why i

01:53
did it wonderfully because usually i'm pretty strict about
about just keeping research oriented because that's the nature of my work but
but so i i agree and i appreciate the opportunity and the conversation
yeah no the other thing i would say is that one remarkable thing i noticed that
the way you answered questions where you commented on things
even when you were not you did not know much about things you were able to kind
of give people historical context so that you they could use that to
figure it out so i think you're able to not only you know stuff you're able to
communicate as a presenter but also able to interact with people uh
where they are and relate the knowledge that you have which is actually
from a long time ago to what they are thinking so it's these are all these are
tremendous assets mark so thank you very much
tremendous it is just incredible honor as well as just share delight
thanks thanks a lot